The Edifice of Lies

Iqbal Jassat is elated (PoliticsWeb 19 Aug). As he puts it: "Netanyahu and his criminal gang of warlords have failed miserably to achieve any political or military goals apart from pulverizing civilians and the Gaza Strip as a whole." And "Haunted by the memory of the release of Yahya Sinwar thirteen years ago on October 18, 2011, along with more than a thousand Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for an IOF (sic) soldier Gilad Shalit, the corrupt war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu faces a humiliating end of his political career." And "Netanyahu faces severe embarrassment and ignominy" and "shame and obvious mortification"...and so on.

Jassat's gloating may be a bit premature but his wording does say a lot about himself and the Islamist mindset he supports. Despite its rhetoric of honour and sacrifice all it produces are broken bodies, hatred - and abundant lies.

In hard figures: about 40 000 Palestinians dead - Hamas numbers, for what they're worth, and at probably at least 17 000 active Hamas terrorists among them. This excludes the many more thousands wounded and displaced, Gaza shattered and the entire region on the brink of a disastrous regional conflict with the potential to expand globally. Hamas is totally militarily defeated and only survives for the moment, in demoralised bands hiding in its tunnels, as a result of USA political meddling.

Jassat is at pains to depict Sinwar as the new Saladin. "Far from being unfairly depicted by Israeli "hasbarists" (propagandists) as a "monster", Sinwar enjoys the iconic status of a revolutionary leader among Arab masses and many social justice activists across the world."

Putting aside his tortured grammar, Jassat is right in one respect: Sinwar does indeed enjoy 'iconic status' in certain quarters and that should disturb us greatly. David Remmick's rambling and fawning piece in the New Yorker from which Jassat quotes liberally, but very selectively, points out Sinwar started his career in large-scale political murder on his own people not Israelis:

"...he (Sinwar) had led a Hamas unit called Munazamat al-Jihad wa al-Da’wa, or the Majd—an enforcement squad that punished those who collaborated with Israel or who committed offenses against orthodox Islamic morality, including homosexuality, marital infidelity, and the possession of pornography. Sinwar was serving four life sentences in a facility (Israeli) in the Negev Desert for executing Palestinians accused of working with the enemy." (The brackets are mine)

"Executing" is a rather kind way of describing how Sinwar achieved loyalty in the ranks. Death may have been the end point but before death came torture, decapitation and burying alive in at least one instance. Sinwar, in a different context, might have been the prime enforcer in a particularly vicious drug cartel but in the Middle East he became, through sheer ruthlessness and fanaticism, head of a religious death cult intent on avenging perceived 'humiliation' by demonising and exterminating Jews.

Putting Sinwar aside, the destruction of Gaza is solely the responsibility of Hamas arising from its calculated strategy to use its own the civilian population as human shields and propaganda fodder. Hamas did not build a single bomb shelter for its people but over 500 km of tunnels, stocked them to the hilt with weapons and placed all their military assets under mosques, schools, hospitals and residential areas in order to deter and stigmatise their enemy. It's only the meticulous efforts of Israel to minimise civilian casualties which has kept the civilian/combatant ratio lower than any urban war in history, needless to say at a cost in the lives of their own soldiers.

Western perceptions of the prolonged Middle East mash-up have been built on an edifice of lies and distortions of history. Putting Mr Jassat's rant aside, we need to take a serious look at what's at issue in this conflict because it affects even those of us in the West. Democracy is an amazing but fragile plant and needs to be watered with truth to survive. Its enemies, internal and external, know this and lies are a fundamental part of the war against the West. They are the propaganda equivalent of drones: deadly and cheap.

Ironically, it is Western technological innovation which has enabled the spread of both drones and lies. Both are difficult to counter but not impossible.

Some basic history

First we need to start with a historical perspective of the current conflict as it has evolved over the past century or so. The roots go much deeper but the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920's is a reasonable starting point.

The turmoil of the first half of the 20th century spun-off two national-ideological movements, very different to one another but destined to clash over the next century.

One was the Zionist movement which had started in the late 19th century in the West when small bands of Jews sought refuge in the neglected swamps and deserts of their ancient origin in the Levant from genocidal European anti-Semitism.

The migration was a complicated story of secular democratic socialists, nationalists, religious idealists but mostly simple refugees. Many couldn't face the hardships of their new home and escaped to more hospitable climes, but as these also closed to them, and the noose in Europe tightened, the Jewish refugee influx into Palestine increased.

This was understandably resented and resisted by the dominant Arab families in the British mandate region of the fallen Ottoman Empire. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem had a small majority of mainly religious and traditional, non-political Jews but political power rested with the Ottoman Turks and a few Arab-Muslim families in the region. Palestine, as it was later called by the British, was a static, economically backward, largely feudal society in which Islam was the dominant religious and political force, but Jews were tolerated as dhimmis*.

The 19-20th century Jewish influx changed all that. The newcomers looked for land which was rejected by the Arabs as poor quality and malaria-ridden. It was the meeting of a pioneering, largely secularised, Westernised people with a caste and clan-based, traditional, Islamic people - and naturally that meant trouble.

Propagandists on both sides try to make a meal of this encounter and divide the sides into devils and angels according to their tribal loyalties. In my view that's a mistake. Friction between the two was inevitable and as global history crashed into WW2 and the Holocaust, the friction worsened. Even with the best will in the world, there was no way the international community could adjudicate between the claims of the two sides so as to satisfy both and square the moral circle. So the UN divided the small area available as best they could and left it to the parties to sort it out.

The plain fact of history is that the Jews accepted the partition but the Arabs rejected it and attacked. In the midst of this turmoil the British departed which provoked an all-out declaration of war by a coalition of Arab states which ended in their defeat. The Jews declared independence in May 1948, offered all remaining Arabs full citizenship rights and sought cooperative and peaceful relations with all their Arab neighbours.

The next 75 years of ever-increasing Arab and Islamic intransigence and openly exterminationist rhetoric has morphed into a global threat. We need to understand it if democracy is to work in the Middle East (ME), but first a diversion into demography and geography for some sense of proportion.

Middle East demography and geography

The total Muslim population of the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) is 315 mil. There are 8 mil. Jews in Israel or 2.5% of the regional Muslim population. But a map says it better (see below) with Muslim-majority countries shaded in blue. See if you can find Israel bearing in mind it's on the Mediterranean. And, by the way, about 20% of the Israeli population is Muslim (and other ethno-religious groups) with full civil rights.

There is one Jewish state in the world and about 50 or more Muslim states depending how one counts. The Muslim population of the MENA region is about 20% of the world total of around 1.90 bil. The total number of Jews globally is 15 mil. which means that Muslims outnumber Jews at least 125 to one.

The Middle East has more than 50% of the world oil reserves while Israel, unfortunately (fortunately?), has zero. But Israel has some gas amounting to 0.53% of global reserves. The 3 biggest producers of gas globally are the USA, Russia and Iran. About 50% of Israel is quite seriously arid but Israel does not suffer from a water shortage.

Middle East war

We need to mention war casualties since that is front and centre of the propaganda campaign. To begin with I looked in Wikipedia for war deaths in the MENA region since 1950 (excluding those between Israel and its Arab neighbours). To simplify a long list I only counted those with figures above 50 000 dead.

Out of the 9 wars which fulfilled the criteria the total dead was 2.6 mil. Where there was a spread of figures I took a mean and, as pointed out, ignored all those less than 50 000. Undoubtedly the death toll was very much higher than 2.6 mil. and I'm not even including those dead from famine, drought, disease and other multiple indirect factors. My guess is that Arab-Muslim wars (including those against foreigners) in the region may well have caused between 10 and 20 mil. deaths; but 5 mil. direct deaths seems reasonable while 2.6 mil. is a substantial undercount.

I also counted all conflict-related Arab deaths caused by Israelis which amounted to just under 100 000 since 1950 and conversely all Israeli deaths caused by Arabs which came to 11 314.

To sum up: Taking the Arab-Islamic population as 315 mil and the Israeli population (Jews and Arabs etc) as 10 mil. the Arabs have killed 3.5 times as many Israelis per capita than the other way around. But wars in the region not involving Israel have probably caused at least 40 to 50 times more deaths than those involving Israel. These figures give the lie to the claims of Israeli brutality nevermind the even more vicious canard of genocide.

Discussion

This is the difficult part of the article because there is a short complex story and also a very long complex story. Here is the short story further simplified as necessary.

Current Realities:

Right now much of the Arab-Muslim world in the MENA region is in a state of apparently quasi-permanent chaos. It is an impoverished battleground of local warlords in ecologically challenged, technologically underdeveloped societies trapped in cycles of poverty, violence and counter-violence. They represent both a moral challenge and a worldwide threat due to mass emigration to more functional democracies and the multiple stressors imposed on their reluctant hosts.

The Muslim communities in the region are caught between various ideological poles imposed by the clash between the two different ancient Islamic factions, Sunni and Shiite, and between Islam and modern secularised Western democracy, largely represented by Israel in the ME. Some of the oil-rich states (and others) are attempting to negotiate this ideological and cultural canyon while retaining elements of their Islamic identity. Others (notably Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood) have embraced a totalitarian fundamentalist strain of Islam focussed on redemption through conquest. This has been referred to as Islamism though the term is contentious.

The bottom line is that that the region is beset by enormous rifts - ideological, political and economic - and is correspondingly fragile. A great deal hangs on whether the Islamist faction led by Iran or the modernising faction wins out and Israel is a key factor in this complex equation.

Thus, the Oct 7 massacre many years in planning, was likely precipitated by the looming threat of Israel concluding a mutual recognition treaty with Saudi Arabia (a Sunni state), and the major regional rival to Shiite Iran. Such a rapprochement offered the possibility of a major shift in power to the forces of modernisation which forced the hand of Iran and it's proxies.

Despite the trauma and savagery of the October attack on Israel, it offered an opportunity for Israel to inflict a severe military defeat on Hamas (and possibly even Hezbollah and Iran), shifting the balance of power and strengthening the modernising forces in the region.

Into this fraught situation stepped that clumsy colossus, the USA. In the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, Biden came forward with an unambiguous assurance of 'unwavering' support for Israel. Almost immediately, however, it became obvious that American support was anything but unwavering. Rather it was designed to inhibit Israel's military response in order to promote the dream of a 'two-state solution' and reassure Iran. This move came immediately after Hamas had demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that they, and the Palestinian leadership as a whole, were solely interested in the extermination of Israel.

None of this could possibly have come as a surprise since Hamas, and other members of the Iranian axis, had declared their intentions publicly on numerous occasions while reinforcing their rhetoric with hostile actions. Nobody with half a brain could mistake their intentions.

The military success of Israel over the last 10 months has been painstakingly accomplished against the backdrop of surreptitious USA sabotage and the barrage of lies and distortions released by Hamas and their Islamist allies, and faithfully repeated by the Western media. Since the Western population is exposed to this fake Kabuki spectacle day in and day out I will enclose a brief description of realities on the ground by Andrew Fox in The Spectator:

"There are 500 km of tunnels below Gaza, longer in distance than the entire London underground. In Rafah alone, the 162nd Division, who I’m alongside, have found ten tunnel-hidden rocket launching sites, 21 subterranean weapons production sites, and they have destroyed 200 tunnel entry shafts. Here’s the issue: each one of those tunnel shafts led to a mosque; a school; a person’s home. To destroy the tunnel system, there is inevitable damage to the buildings under which the tunnels run and to which they are connected.

Homes in Gaza, many concealing tunnel shafts, are almost all booby-trapped. The IDF has adapted to this. They now enter houses first with drones, then with dogs. Only when a house is seemingly clear do they enter, and even then only in four-man squads to minimise casualties if a bomb goes off. Hamas has cameras in each home, with cables running into the tunnels. If they see the IDF have missed an IED, they wait for troops to enter, then detonate the device.

When the IDF finds an IED, they will not enter and will simply destroy the house. They have neither the capacity nor the desire to clear every IED from Gaza. There are just too many to even try. All of this explains the damage in Rafah. Hamas has turned the whole place into one giant booby trap and the IDF’s only realistic option is to clear it explosively."

A full dissection of American thinking awaits further scholarship, but its actions threaten to turn the military defeat of Hamas, painstakingly eked out by Israel in the face of USA interference, into a strategic set-back. This in turn will encourage Iran and its proxies to persist in their long term assault on Israel through a mix of guerrilla tactics and diplomatic and propaganda warfare. The consequences for the region and for global stability are potentially devastating.

My own rather speculative interpretation is that American policy is partly dictated by its Machiavellian domestic politics and the disorientating effects of the woke, social justice movement on its elite institutions. But to this one can almost certainly add the hubris of power and distance, leftwing dislike of Netanyahu and possibly Obama's own personal animus and delusions.

An additional perspective is that the Obama cabal within the Democratic Party believes that American dominance is such it can afford to manage Iranian medieval theocrats and Israeli right-wingers till they run out of steam, and then impose a Pax Americana. Obama is known to believe in the long arc of history and that he understands how to ride it. Such grandiosity rarely goes unpunished.

Closing thoughts

Much has been left out here but I have tried to get to the core of the issues. I am not a disinterested commentator but think that both Israel and democracy are a miraculous though imperfect achievements worth preserving. Both are under very serious threat and I've tried to lay out some thoughts pertaining to the struggle in the Middle East.

There is a new barbarism loose in the ME in the form of a violent strain of Islamism. Death in the form of jihad and martyrdom in the most brutal and intimate sense is core to that movement. In this view only the extermination of Israel (read Jews) and defeat of the decadent West will pave the way for a resurgent and glorious Islam. Is democracy up to the challenge of the new geopolitical arena and its own internal excesses?

I'm encouraged by Israeli resilience and the commonsense of ordinary people. There is a time for force and a time for reconstruction. Right now it is vital that the theocrats in the ME are militarily deterred and uninformed interference by distant powers is resisted. But in the end victory must be followed by political reform which offers hope to all the people of the region if anything good is to come out of the current tragedy.

Postscript

Just after I submitted this article for publication, some adept intelligence work  and pinpoint strikes by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) took out  thousands of rocket launchers in 40 sites in Southern and Central Lebanon with apparently minimal if any casualties. Hopefully this will bring some relief to Northern Israel and some sanity, albeit temporary, to the theocratic warlords of the region. A battle won is better than a battle lost, but there is a long, long way to go before peace and democracy comes to this tortured region.

Mike Berger