MENA, MENA, Tekel, Parsin (Middle East, North Africa & other Geopolitical Hotspots) 2018

At least 28 killed by snipers now.

Madness.

Up to 37, including one paramedic treating the wounded.

Not sure the censure from European politicians is going to be any less ambiguous than last month but shooting eight journalists probably won’t go down well with sections of the press.

Also note the very passive "die" in the headline. Palestinians haven't died en masse, they've been shot and killed pic.twitter.com/PwHJrliSQ7

— Josie Ensor (@Josiensor) May 14, 2018

What a bonehead move from the US, because if and when the embassy is attacked, who are we going to war with? So short sighted. They should have opened up the Israeli embassy in Iran or something.

Trumpies are convinced it will be short-term anger and then blow over, and a long-term win for the right-wing. Ugh.

Thoughts on this? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/14/cleric-moqtadr-al-sadr-who-fought-us-takes-surprise-lead-in-iraq-elections

Huh. Had not been following Iraqi politics, this was news to me:

He portrays himself as an Iraqi nationalist and last year met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is staunchly opposed to Iran.

So is he actually getting Saudi support? "Met" is an ambiguous word there.

Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk are at the embassy opening for some fucking reason

Plus:

Romney criticised the choice of a man who has said all Jews will go to hell to deliver a blessing in Israel. Jeffress is the leader of a Dallas-area Baptist church and a spiritual adviser to Trump. He has been criticised for calling Islam and Mormonism “heresy from the pit of hell” and saying Jews “can’t be saved”. As reported by dallasnews.com, he also said Islam is “a religion that promotes paedophilia”.

Romney, a Mormon, wrote on Twitter on Sunday: “Robert Jeffress says ‘you can’t be saved by being a Jew’ and ‘Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell’. He has said the same about Islam. Such a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States embassy in Jerusalem.”

from the Guardian

x-post, for what it's worth , Juan Cole on Al-Sadr back in 2017

Inasmuch as he is a hard line Shiite and heads his own hard line militia, the “Peace Brigades,” he might not have come first to mind if you were thinking about Iraqis that the militantly fundamentalist Wahhabi monarchy in Saudi Arabia might invite to the kingdom.

In fact, despite his Shiite fundamentalism, al-Sadr is politically even-handed in ways that might appeal to Riyadh. Although Western analysts have repeatedly pegged him wrongly as a cat’s paw of Iran, in fact al-Sadr is an Iraqi nativist whose movement resents the influence of Iran on Iraqi Shiism.

Al-Sadr has all right relations with Iran and did flee there for studies in 2007 when Gen. David Petraeus tried to have him arrested as a sectarian religious leader responsible for deaths of Sunnis. But he has tended to maintain his independence from Tehran’s ayatollahs.

Al-Sadr opposes the tendency to see the Shiite militias in Iraq as a stand alone force, sort of a National Guard (a line pushed by Iran) and rather wants them absorbed into the regular army.

Al-Sadr opposes Iranian intervention in Syria (and, indeed, all foreign intervention in Syria, including that of Russia).

Last March, al-Sadr called for formal peace talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran, since those two countries are on all but a war footing. Al-Sadr argues that some face to face summits among leaders of the two countries could tamp down sectarian tensions and lead to a new era of good feeling in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia has lost its struggle with Iran over the past 15 years. Iraq went from a Saudi asset under Saddam Hussein to an Iranian asset after the Shiites won the parliamentary elections in 2005 and after.

https://www.juancole.com/2017/07/saudis-looking-channel.html

52 dead, 2400 wounded. A great day.

Maybe they'll get a memorial plaque.

made even more awful by how normalised it is. BDS seems somewhat dubious to me but I get the sense of helplessness that partly fuels it

52 dead, 2400 wounded. A great day.

― Kanye O'er Frae France? (Tom D.), Monday, May 14, 2018 11:00 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and it's nakba day tomorrow and we can probably expect more of the same

To be fair though, they'll just be killing them tomorrow, not actually humiliating them first.

seems quiet today?

https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/gaza-funerals-protests-intl/index.html

also, bump

Picking up from the other thread, what makes this situation particularly rife is essentially a state of mutual suicide. On one hand you've got a culture of martyrdom, both in terms of fundamentalism and righteous desperation, depending; obviously "suicide" has been weaponized in this region for a long time. On the other you've got Israel, whose very existence is sort of suicidal, given it exists in the midst of so many who want it gone. Which is ironic, of course, since people who wanted Jews gone is what lead to the creation of Israel. But that's what makes the situation so intractable: two sides in essence embracing different forms of catch-22 suicide/martyrdom predicated on their very existence. Israel's desire/right to exist is intrinsically suicidal. The other side's willingness to die (by suicide, murder, murder by cop, whatever) to achieve its goal is of course also self-defeating. It's so tragic and sad I can see why fundamentalist Christians put their faith in armageddon, which seems at least as plausible as peace.

But if the protest is against the existence of a nation, I'm not sure how you are supposed to respond.

That is a _hell_ of a way to sweep aside Palestinians' concerns and justify killing a bunch of them in just a few words

― Simon H., Tuesday, May 15, 2018 2:15 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry, MENA thread, etc

― Simon H., Tuesday, May 15, 2018 2:18 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not at all. Most Palestinians have totally reasonable, justifiable concerns ... as do most Israelis. I just mean it's (the existence of Israel) without question a big part of the calculation on both sides (including external proxy forces like the US and Iran, et al.).

Dr. C, I think the shooting of the protesters is/was disgusting and unnecessary. But that type of shit has been going on for so long and is so unsurprising at this point in the broader micro/macro conflict that I can't see it as uniquely beyond the pale. Rockets, bus bombings, invasions, uprisings, murders, kidnappings, war, calls for peace, calls for violence, weapons from the west, weapons from the rest, tunnels, walls, fundamentalists ... it's a big cynical self-destructive pile of zero-sum/no-sum shit.

it's a big cynical self-destructive pile of zero-sum/no-sum shit.

this is not a zero-sum game

What does victory on either side look like? Two-state solution? Who in the world thinks that is feasible in practice? At best there'd be a neutral sort of shared state with armed oversight, and yeah, that's about as likely as armageddon at this point as well.

If someone "wins," everyone loses. If no one "wins," everyone loses.

JiC I can understand feeling from a distant enough zoom that it's all so exhausting and just washes together as an equal and opposite cycle of violence situation. i think the value of taking individual incidents seriously as case studies is to cut through that, to permit views of the actual mechanisms by which violence is perpetuated and viable paths forward are refused, and by which actors and in what ways. maybe that's why your post in the other thread rankled me - it felt like it wasn't really based in the circumstances of the embassy move which is what the protesters were protesting, and that (combined w maybe some other values/assumptions) led you to what struck me as a shocking declaration that if a protester can be interpreted as refusing the legitimacy of a state (btw: as regards the occupied territories, the majority of the planet agrees that israel is not the legitimate sovereign there) then what can the state really do but shoot to kill?

but I've been reading/typing all of my shit today on a phone with a hangover so my sincere apologies if I've misread you or committed the kind of rhetorical simplification i myself am griping about.

I certainly don't see Israel's desire/right to exist as suicidal. For a start, as sleepingbag so charmingly put it, they're always winning.

xpost No, I get that. Shooting protestors is absolutely inexcusable, but it's a state of constant violence, to degrees, that will always tip one way or the other, eventually.

xpost That's what makes it such a catch-22. They're always "winning" because they can't lose. To lose means the end of Israel, which would be suicidal.

that's how it looks to the israeli right wing, but there are other definitions of israel and other definitions of "winning" and "losing," yes?

I'd love to hear them. I mean, I think there should be two states, but the idea that that would be a solution I think is naive.

I think the shooting of the protesters is/was disgusting and unnecessary. But

The first part is correct. the "But" wasn't needed here. To the extent that "both sides do it", that's a misleading dynamic you should be familiar with from the thread this conversation migrated from. The violence, human costs, and income discrepancy in this conflict have been completely lopsided.

the reason that people here react strongly against the "both sides" argument, yesterday and today, is that in the context of 50+ Palestinians getting murdered by the Israeli military, it comes across as a defense of Israel's massacre of protesters.

i do share your frustrations with the prospects of a peaceful solution in the near-future, but it wasn't that long ago that there were summits and cease fires and nobel peace prizes. it all fell apart, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. and i don't like the ramifications of believing that peace is impossible.

When the conflict has been going on for literally thousands of years I am less hopeful than you are. And of course it is all tied into the Jewish identity of Israel itself, which I am usually pretty ambivalent about until, say, Iran's guy says a few days ago that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, or just a few months ago Putin blames all sorts of problems on the Jews. It's all tied together in a muddle of history, anti-Semitism, religious fundamentalism, the whole shebang.

The conflict hasn't been going on for literally thousands of years.

Conflict and war there in general.

but... "the conflict has been going on for literally thousands of years" is a complete fabrication. as a trope it has had a shockingly long life but this has been debunked a billion times. the conflict has been going on since 1948. it entered a new phase in 1967. people are alive today who were alive when the conflict began going on. many still have the deeds to theirs or their parents' homes expropriated from them in 1948. this is not some ancient intractable force in the soil or in the blood, it's a political problem, perpetuated by political actions in the present. like moving the embassy for example - nothing eternal or thousands-of-years-y about that.

There's somewhere there hasn't there been war and conflict for thousands of years?

^ Yeah, was gonna say, that's everywhere!

exactly!

xpoat No, i know. Obviously there was no israeli-palestinian conflict before there was an Israel. But forget for the moment the implication that the only way to end the conflict is to have no Israel again, that whole region has been a muddle of shifting occupation for centuries.

Anyway, not going to solve anything here, I'm going to Costco.

LOL. If only it was as simple as going to Costco.

Have you ever been to Costco!?

the other thing is that the "thousands of years" trope, and/or the "it's always been shifting around, over there in that region" trope, implicitly adopts the zionist framework, where what's at stake is an ethnic-religious right to an ancient, immutable homeland, and that homeland's boundaries are exactly coterminous with the recognized boundaries of israel plus the territories occupied since 1967. what a coincidence! again, that's the metanarrative favored by a certain ideology and certain forces which have been dominant for a long time in israeli political culture and essentially since day one in israeli military culture (but certainly since ariel sharon's rise through the ranks).

but for palestinians displaced from their homes or living under occupation, the issue isn't necessarily a religious one at all (though certainly for many it can and has come to seem that way) and certainly not a thousands-of-years one. this is something that started happening to their parents or grandparents and continues to happen to them in the present day. for non-zionist jewish israeli citizens, it can also be something other than thousands-of-years: they, personally, were born there, this is the only home they've known, etc. these are difficult things to reconcile. it's implausible that a solution would leave every person completely satisfied. but we can confront that without throwing our hands up and declaring it's impossible to reconcile and that no solution is possible because man, they've always been fighting over there. the only actors who really need that to be true are extremist factions in israel and in palestine. when those extremists are in power it would be really helpful for the american government, as israel's most crucial supporter, to recognize these distinctions, but it all tends to get washed together and the U.S. media effectively cover for this by falling back on the thousand-year framework.

fuck

WATCH: "This is me being a moralist" - @esglaude, on Gaza #MTPDaily pic.twitter.com/VwYvY3fZVb

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 14, 2018

the shocked silence after he said that - that was gripping. i guess he felt the need to fill the space with something, but he didn't need to apologize for what he said.

Nikki Haley just did her theatrical walk out when the Palestinian envoy to the UN started to speak.

god she blows

Hamas can turn anything into a weapon of terror. pic.twitter.com/7v8RmGfN4o

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) May 15, 2018

ROPE TIED TO FENCE

Just allow them to have the same weapons you have and they wouldn't need to be this 'inventive'. Level playing field an' all.

worst game of Clue ever

A Canadian doctor in Gaza who was recently shot is active on Reddit and talking about the protests, the occupation, treating bullet wounds, and a lot more

https://www.reddit.com/user/_tarek_/comments/

https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Russia-Israel-agree-to-keep-Iran-and-Hezbollah-from-border-558580

this seems like good news

in terms of preventing regional conflagration