Scrolling through all my news and commentary feeds over the past few days it was not hard to track the outrage over what is transpiring in the Middle East, and as a reaction to it, the response in many western countries. Let’s go through it in a bit more detail and see what is going on.
Iran engages the US - a direct drone attack on a US facility in Jordan (called Tower 22) close to the Syrian border killed three US military personnel over the weekend. Of course it is important to note who is behind the attack and Joe Biden pointed to militant groups that are directly supported by Iran. The incident was given headline space as the first American casualties this year, however this is not correct given the fact that two Navy SEALs went missing in Aden earlier this month and they have now been classified as deceased.
There are attacks on Israel, attacks on international ships, but direct engagements with US troops, lethal ones at that, is taking things up a notch. It was however to be expected that sooner or later Iran would start poking the big beast and there are a few reasons for that. The obvious one is that Americans have to date taken the route of appeasement when it comes to Iran and have limited the chances of a direct conflict to a minimum. But in doing this Iran has steadily been able to become bolder, knowing that America would probably deem it to be unwise to respond in a lethal manner. And that brings us to the second reason: the election year is probably the most opportune moment to rattle a sitting US president who simply cannot afford a full out war in the Middle East. And indeed, Biden did rule out a ‘wider war’.
It begs the question: what is next? Iran’s assertiveness has to be rolled back somehow in order to avoid further deadly attacks. A measured response is most likely: hard enough to inflict pain on the aggressor, but without the impact that would result in a spiral of violence ending in full out war.
No US president has been able to resolve or neutralize the Iran issue, it has been festering since 1979. And no one should be surprised that things are about to escalate. Hope is not a strategy and it certainly has not worked when it comes to Iran.
UNRWA - you could be forgiven for being surprised when revelations came through that employees of UNRWA, the UN’s agency dealing exclusively with Palestinian refugees, were involved in the October 7th attacks. Media never took real notice of the organizations duplicity, at least not enough to get contributing governments to take action. And: create global outrage leading to call to disband UNRWA and at the same time get rid of UN Secretary-General, António Guterres.
But none of this was real news. UN corruption, sexual abuse by UN officials up to the massacre in Srebrenica (where Dutch UN troops looked the other way when real genocide was being committed), the organization of nations has an incredibly dark underbelly. The late American journalist Claudia Rosett was in 2005 one of the first to investigate and report on this, in recent years Canadian and Switzerland-based Hillel Neuer became the world’s pre-eminent UN watcher. His testimony in front of Congress yesterday is here, worth eight minutes of your time to grasp the severity of the situation while enabling you to become really outraged. Or you can laugh about it here.
Note that billions have been pumped into UNRWA, funding that has come from all of us as taxpayers. As the organization has the unique mandate for Palestinians it is thus the only one that collaborates closely with whatever entity is governing Palestinian territory. And in Gaza that happens to be Hamas. Nothing would happen without Hamas approval, Hamas involvement and most local UNRWA employees would often be Hamas members themselves. So you can see how easy it was for activities between UNRWA and Hamas to blend such that UN employees became actively involved in Hamas activity. And that for many included participating in the October 7th attack, murdering and kidnapping on essentially our dime.
In that context it is hard to believe that the highest echelons in the UN were unaware of what was going on. In all likelihood the ability of UNRWA to collaborate with Hamas was seen as essential in fulfilling its mandate and when negative side effects appeared it was relatively easy to look the other way. Until the reality of the situation went mainstream which is exactly what happened over the past few days.
The Anti-Israel Campaign - The global campaign to back-up the Hamas agenda and find a way to really damage the State of Israel and drag Jews worldwide into this abyss of hate is also not a new phenomenon. As Gary Wexler points out in this revealing article, there was never a real plan to find a peaceful way on the Palestinian side, any peace arrangement was a temporary station that would be have to be passed on the road to the eventual destruction of Israel. And there was a well-organized worldwide campaign to make that happen. The BDS effort got started as far back as 2005 and by insisting that Israel was guilty of enforcing ‘apartheid’ it sought to promote a boycott of Israel such that the country would suffer a level of economic damage that its existence would be in peril. If South Africa’s white regime could be brought down, so could Israel.
This line of thinking, often promoted by celebrities such as Susan Sarandon and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, found its way onto universities where it got incorporated into the politically correct narratives that came to dominate campuses. Jews were now all of a sudden ‘white colonialist oppressors’. For the record: the Brits departing in 1948 marked the end of colonialism in the Middle East and Israel’s ethnic and cultural diversity is second to none.
You may have been surprised by the eruptions at Harvard and many other colleges, but it was not a new at all: the intellectual and institutional framework for it had been prepared for years. It took one gruesome event for it to be activated against Israel.
So?
The simmering conflict between Iran and the West (in particular the US), the untenable situation at the organization most people think of as a benevolent mediator and relief agency, as well as the deep rooted anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments globally have been around for decades. October 7th washed away a veil and forces the world to consider the ramifications of decades of looking away from these dangerous phenomena. The genie, however, is out of the bottle. Expect more turbulence in the weeks and months ahead.