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Ed Webb

Are the Abraham accords over? - 0 views

www.economist.com/...are-the-abraham-accords-over

Israel Palestine israelpalestine war conflict Gaza Hamas GCC KSA Saudi Qatar UAE analysis economy

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Gulf states had hoped this would be a year of de-escalation in the region. They wanted calm to focus on ambitious plans to diversify their economies. Now the region’s oldest conflict has roared back to life. For one Gulf monarchy, Qatar, which has supported Hamas, the immediate goal is self-preservation. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, however, want to weaken Hamas, forestall a wider confrontation with Iran and somehow keep alive their vision of an autocratic but more peaceful and prosperous region. It is a delicate and dangerous balancing act.
  • Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned news channel, aired a tough interview with Khaled Meshaal, the former head of Hamas. Rasha Nabil, the presenter, asked him repeatedly how Hamas could expect support from other Arab countries after it made a unilateral decision to go to war, pressed him to condemn the murder of Israeli civilians and needled him on whether Iran’s help had “lived up to your expectations”. It was an interview the likes of which Hamas officials are almost never subjected to on Arabic-language channels. Mr Meshaal seemed rattled. Clips of the interview were widely shared on social media and even on Israeli television.
  • Muhammad bin Salman (pictured), the Saudi crown prince and the country’s de facto ruler has called for the creation of a Palestinian state along the region’s pre-1967 borders. Talks with Israel will continue, albeit more quietly than before, but the price for Israel will now be higher
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  • as the civilian death toll rises the Gulf states will come under growing pressure at home and across the Arab world to condemn Israel and sever ties. Still one thing the Gulf leaders can all agree on: they want the war to end. The financiers gathering in Riyadh this week want to talk about billion-dollar ideas for travel, trade and tourism. None of them is likely to come to fruition if there is a risk of missiles flying overhead
Ed Webb

In Jenin, Israel is unveiling the next phase of apartheid - 0 views

www.972mag.com/israel-apartheid-jenin-gaza

Palestine Israel israelpalestine WestBank occupation violence IDF analysis apartheid

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Dec 23 - Cached
  • June 30, 2023
  • aerial assaults reveal a dangerous phase in the evolution of Israel’s occupation. The air strikes are reportedly the first in the West Bank in two decades, awakening the nightmares of many Palestinians who ran for cover or suffered wounds from helicopter attacks during the Second Intifada. In that time, though, aerial warfare became the modus operandi in the Gaza Strip, accelerated by Israel’s withdrawal of its settlements in 2005 and the total blockade of the territory following Hamas’ takeover.
  • reconfiguration of military rule has intentionally produced a physical and psychological separation between the West Bank and Gaza, abetted by the fratricidal rivalry between Fatah and Hamas. As that distance normalized, the two territories became regarded as disconnected and incomparable. Even well-meaning advocates — in their heavy focus on settlements and annexation — often fell into the trap of forgetting Gaza outside the scope of wartime, deeming it an anomaly in the context of the “one-state reality.” But as many activists, scholars, and experts have warned, the structures used to confine and suppress Gaza are not a deviation from Israel’s methodology, but a natural continuation of it. And that was made clear over the skies of Jenin last week.
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  • Like Gaza, Jenin has long been a center of Palestinian social life and political resistance — and as such, a target of vicious repression
  • The bombardment of a populated urban area, together with the city’s collective punishment, is further justified by the demonization of Jenin as a “cesspool of terrorism” requiring constant intervention — in essence, the same doctrine of “mowing the lawn” that is applied in the blockaded strip a few kilometers away.
  • Gaza is hardly an exception to the rule of Israeli apartheid. Rather, it is the ultimate bantustan — the model for controlling and weakening a native population in a besieged space, using modern weapons and technology, with local rulers to handle their basic needs, at minimal cost to the settler society surrounding them
  • If the expulsion of Palestinians won’t be possible, Gazafication will be their future.
  • The army may feign distress over settlers committing “nationalist terrorism,” but it openly commands its soldiers to do the same, so long as it is done in uniform
Ed Webb

AIPAC Is Endorsing Candidates, But Progressives Should Turn Them Down | Teen Vogue - 0 views

www.teenvogue.com/...aipac-endorsing-candidates-pac

opinion Israel israelpalestine Palestine AIPAC USA US politics

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 22 - No Cached
  • When I served as president of Bears for Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s affiliate group at UC Berkeley from 2017-to 2019, I thought I was playing my part to promote peace. But in the past several years, I’ve come to see that AIPAC — alongside an alliance of hawkish U.S. politicians, Christian Zionists, and defense contractors — contributes to the cycle of violence by demanding or benefiting from unconditional support for the Israeli government no matter the cost.
  • I decided to study Arabic in college and worked in humanitarian aid in Greece, where I befriended Syrian-Palestinian refugees. I developed deep relationships with Palestinians through academic programming and made friendships with Palestinian-Americans at school and as a staffer working on Democratic campaigns. My relationships across differences stood in direct contrast to the echo chamber I grew up in, where I was taught that the only option for sustained Jewish safety in a post-Holocaust world was separating ourselves from non-Jews in a militaristic state of our own.
  • there can’t be safety for some at the expense of another and that our Jewish community must reject the idea that our freedom is synonymous with retaining power over others. We must understand that Palestinian and Jewish safety are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact intertwined.
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  • our government has the ability to meaningfully push Israeli policy toward peace by leveraging military aid — and has done so under presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. So long as the status quo remains unchecked, violence will continue.
  • In a telling sign of AIPAC’s willingness to prioritize unconditional support for the Israeli government over all else, its first-ever slate of endorsements this year includes over 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. They have raised millions of dollars to make sure those insurrectionists keep their jobs. In addition to AIPAC endorsing Republicans who are trying to undermine our democracy, they also endorsed dozens of Democrats, including 44 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).
  • Progressive Democrats should not accept support from AIPAC, full stop. Do members of the CPC want to be connected to an organization that also endorses insurrectionists?
Ed Webb

The Many Myths of the Term 'Crusader' | History | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...of-the-term-crusader-180979107

mediterranean history ideology propaganda Israel Palestine crusades

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • the international news cycle whirred to life, attaching a charged adjective—Crusader—to a potentially unrelated object. In doing so, media coverage revealed the pervasive reach of this (surprisingly) anachronistic term, which gained traction in recent centuries as a way for historians and polemicists to lump disparate medieval conflicts into an overarching battle between good and evil, Christianity and Islam, civilization and barbarism.
  • the term should never stand alone as an explanation in and of itself. Crusades were waged by Christians against Muslims, Jews and fellow Christians. They were launched in the Middle East, in the Baltic, in Italy, in France and beyond
  • The Crusades weren’t the only events happening during these two centuries in either the Middle East or Europe. Relatively few people were, in fact, Crusaders, and not everything that fell into the eastern Mediterranean Sea during this period was a Crusader artifact. The habit of referring to the “era of the Crusades,” or calling the petty kingdoms that formed, squabbled and fell in these years the “Crusader states,” as if they had some kind of unified identity, is questionable at best. Inhabitants of this part of the Middle East and North Africa were incredibly diverse, with not only Christians, Muslims and Jews but also multiple forms of each religion represented. People spoke a range of languages and claimed wildly diverse ethnic or extended family identities. These groups were not simply enclaves of fanatically religious warriors, but rather part of a long, ever-changing story of horrific violence, cultural connection and hybridity.
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  • “In calling this period ‘Crusader,’ Israeli archaeology had, in some ways, aligned itself with a European colonial narrative about the Middle East” that privileged the experience of Europeans over those of locals.
  • The term “Crusade” has always been an anachronism—a way of looking back at complex, often disconnected movements with a wide array of motivations, membership, tactics and results and organizing them into a single coherent theology or identity. As Benjamin Weber of Stockholm University explains, the phrase “opened the way to complete assimilation of wars fought against different enemies, in varied places and often for similar reasons. ... [It] took on a legitimizing function. Any contested action could be justified by dubbing it a ‘crusade.’ It, therefore, became a word used to wield power and silence denouncers.”
  • The word “Crusade” came into use late, long after medieval Christian holy wars began. The Latin word crucesignatus, or “one marked by the cross,” first appeared in the early 1200s, more than a century after Urban II’s call to action in 1095. In English, “Crusade” and “Crusader” don’t appear until around 1700; by the 1800s, the term—defined broadly as a military campaign in defense of one’s faith—had become a convenient way for Victorian historians to mark the past as a battle between what they saw as good and evil, represented respectively by Christianity and Islam
  • claims worked especially well as supposed historical justification for contemporary European colonialism, which used rhetoric like “The White Man’s Burden” to paint land grabs as civilizing crusades against “uncivilized” non-Westerners.
  • Today, the terms “Crusader” and “Crusade” latch onto a nostalgic vision of the past, one that suggests there was a millennia-long clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity (or “the West”)
  • historians must develop terminology that accurately reflects the people who inhabited the Middle East around the 12th century. A potential alternative is “Frankish,” which appears routinely in medieval Arabic sources and can be a useful “generalized term for [medieval] Europeans,” according to Mulder. It initially had pejorative connotations, being “kind of synonymous with a bunch of unwashed barbarians,” she says. “But as there come to be these more sophisticated relationships, it just becomes a term to refer to Europeans.”
  • Between the 11th and 13th centuries, “hybridity [in the region] is the norm. The fact that another kind of group [establishes itself in the same area] is just part of the story of everything. It's always someone. ... If it's not the Seljuks, it’s the Mongols, it’s the Mamluks. It’s you name it.” Mulder isn’t denying that medieval kingdoms were different, but she argues first and foremost that difference was the norm.
  • In the Middle Ages as a whole, but perhaps especially in this corner of the Mediterranean, objects, people and ideas moved across borders all the time
Ed Webb

Secret British 'black propaganda' campaign targeted cold war enemies | Cold war | The G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nformation-research-department

Africa UK Britain MENA ArabWorld Islamism propaganda ColdWar

shared by Ed Webb on 23 May 22 - No Cached
  • The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed.
  • The campaign also sought to mobilise Muslims against Moscow, promoting greater religious conservatism and radical ideas. To appear authentic, documents encouraged hatred of Israel.
  • The Information Research Department (IRD) was set up by the post-second world war Labour government to counter Soviet propaganda attacks on Britain. Its activities mirrored the CIA’s cold war propaganda operations and the extensive efforts of the USSR and its satellites.
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  • The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965 that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.
  • “The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across.”
  • “reports” sent to warn other governments, selected journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.The reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.
  • Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.
  • The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood, a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across the Middle East. One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967 war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.AdvertisementThe IRD also created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time.
  • The IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to be believers”.
  • Other material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between the two communist powers.
  • One major initiative focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an attempt to maintain white minority rule.The IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we can still save our country,”
  • In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many newspapers reacting intemperately.
  • A similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti, blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.
  • As with most such efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge. On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict. Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.
  • Though the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.“The [new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.“Liz Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used far more devious means,” Cormac said.
Ed Webb

The Gaza-ification of the West Bank | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...aza-ification-of-the-west-bank

Israel Palestine israelpalestine settlements settlers violence warcrimes

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Jan 24 - Cached
  • the West Bank, where millions of Palestinians currently live, has also seen increased violence, with more than a hundred Palestinians killed in raids conducted by Israel’s military and clashes between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli settlers—often with the support of the Army—have also kicked scores of Palestinian families off their land
  • The Israeli goal of cleansing as much of Area C as possible from Palestinian communities is not a new goal. Area C is just over sixty per cent of the West Bank—basically, all of the West Bank outside of the major Palestinian population centers and towns. All of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are in Area C. The major Palestinian population centers are like holes in Swiss cheese, where the cheese itself is Area C, engulfing everything: the Jordan Valley, the South Hebron Hills, part of the northern West Bank.
  • The Israeli state, through its settlers, is trying to take advantage of the fact that all eyes are on Gaza and is intensifying dramatically the pressure on Palestinian communities. I would assume from the Israeli perspective this has been a success. Thirteen Palestinian communities have basically fled in horror in the three weeks since October 7th.
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  • all of these various mechanisms that the state has been using, are backed by Israeli courts, and backed by the Israeli legal system. This is not some random phenomena that is happening uniquely to a single unlucky community far from the eyes of the state. On the contrary, this is part of an ongoing Israeli state project of trying to push, to cleanse, as many Palestinians out of Area C, using all available state mechanisms in order to accomplish this goal
  • What has escalated in recent weeks is that you have repeated reports of masked men showing up in the middle of the night. Armed, masked men.
  • if anyone is now shocked that Israeli soldiers are involved in this. You should have been shocked five years ago. You should have been shocked twenty years ago. Because the involvement of soldiers has been also documented for years, not only with testimonies but also with video footage.
  • Palestinians, if they try to act in self-defense, will almost always have that used as an excuse to frame them as terrorists and to use lethal force against them. It cannot be overstated how exposed the lives of Palestinians are in the West Bank under these conditions
  • When these official mechanisms fail and Palestinian communities show perseverance to stay on the land, then what you have is that other mechanism, the one that tends to make more headlines. You might catch sight of a violent settler torching a Palestinian’s field or using weapons provided to the settlers by the Army.
  • Who’s the state in the West Bank? It’s the Israeli state. So land that’s announced as state land is public land, and then cannot be used for the benefit of the Palestinian population. It’s used by the state for the purpose it wants to advance, which is Jewish settlement, right? And the regime issues building permits for Jewish settlements and issues demolition orders for Palestinian communities.
  • The uprooting of Palestinian communities all over the West Bank is not a project of the settlers, the bad ones, the good ones, or the other ones. It is a state project.
  • What we’ve been seeing since October 7th, after all these years of suffering and orchestrated bureaucratic violence, are direct threats and direct actions against these communities. It happens very quickly, but it does create international friction, and that is the balance that Israel has been playing with, trying to accomplish as much displacement of Palestinians as possible while paying the minimal international price.
  • This is an Israeli project that has been unfolding under left, right, and center governments. Each and every one of them have been doing exactly this since 1967. Let’s not be ahistorical.
  • There is almost zero media coverage in Hebrew in Israel about this. One of the only news outlet that professionally addresses this is Haaretz. Almost no one else discusses it.
  • Even right-wing governments, when they feel international pushback, would take a step back for a month or two until attention moves somewhere else.
  • This is how Israel accomplished getting more than two hundred and fifty settlements and more than seven hundred and fifty thousand settlers into the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
  • How come so many settlers thought that they could be involved in that and get away with it? That there would be no consequences? They have been enjoying this kind of impunity for decades. Not just in recent months but also under previous governments that were more internationally digestible.
  • Palestinians will be told openly by Israeli officials, by settlers, that their future is in Area A, not in Area C. Area A is twenty per cent of the West Bank—the large Palestinian population centers.
  • you can think about this process as the Gaza-ification of the West Bank. One step at a time, Israel is pushing Palestinians in that direction. There will be a number of Palestinian Bantustans, Gaza-style, all over the West Bank. And each one of these Palestinian enclaves is already surrounded and gradually will be more surrounded by this mix of measures, whether it be Israeli infrastructure such as roads or military bases or walls or fences or settlements and so on. And if one visits any one of the large Palestinian cities like Hebron, Jenin, or Ramallah, you will see this process gradually unfolding
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