TURKISH DELIGHT

"We surveyed the jars of coloured candy, trays of marzipan and assorted sweetmeats while the stall keeper deftly wrapped the block of lokum we had just bought. The occasion was our first visit to Turkey and aided with a rudimentary tourist map we were trying to navigate a path through Istanbul's maze-like Grand Bazaar.
We stopped by the stall to ask for directions and decided to buy some "Turkish Delight" to take home with us.
I recalled the tacky lokum when I read Michael Reynolds' article - "Turkey’s foreign policy flip" posted in MESH (Middle East Strategy at Harvard). Referring to Turkey's foreign policy volte-face Reynolds quoted a popular Ottoman adage to illustrate the hitherto Turkish contempt for Arabs:
"There is a certain poetic irony to the Turkish dream of exporting food throughout the Middle East via Syria. Damascus’ Ottoman-era fame for its sweets gave rise to a Turkish saying that aptly summarised official Turkish attitudes from the 1920s through the end of the century toward all things Arab: Ne Şam’ın şekeri, ne Arabın yüzü, literally ‘Neither sweets from Damascus nor an Arab’s face,” which can be roughly translated as, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Arabs, even if they do have tasty sweets."

At this juncture, I’ll add a margin note to avoid confusion:

I vaguely recalled our first visit to Turkey in 2009 while paging back over older posts searching for something suitable to use to describe the present dilemma Israeli tourists are facing in Istanbul. The post I found was aptly called “Turkish Delight”, though as I recall we experienced a culture shock when we viewed the landscape from the top of the Galata Tower in the Taksim neighbourhood of Istanbul. The vast expanse of mosques spread out across the skyline was awe-inspiring. Admittedly, in 1974 we spent a few days in Tehran en route to Australia, but that was before the era of the Ayatollahs.

Back to the main text and the present day.

When Israelis were first advised to cancel their planned Istanbul holidays, many tended to ignore official warnings or were afraid they would lose their money if they cancelled their holiday bookings. While some returned home, incoming flights brought more Israelis to Istanbul eager to tour regardless of the danger.

 Israel's National Security Council issued a severe travel warning late last month urging Israelis to avoid travelling to Turkey and several other destinations bordering Iran, fearing Iranian revenge for a number of high-profile deaths that have struck the Islamic Republic in recent weeks, which Tehran blames Israel for.

Israel’s intelligence and security agencies have made a concerted effort to identify and locate Israelis who have chosen to ignore the warnings against travel to Turkey. It transpires that half of them fly to Istanbul for a connecting flight and do not leave the airport. The air terminal and its facilities are well protected, so there is less concern for the safety of passengers in transit. However, Israelis go to Turkey for various medical treatments, including hair transplants and other kinds of cosmetic surgical procedures. Since the procedures are booked and paid for in advance, they are loath to forgo them.  Consequently, they are willing to risk life and limb for the sake of acquiring a healthy head of hair, or a pair of perky boobs. Still, the warning has made an impact. The medical tourists may fly to Istanbul, but they rush back to their hotel after their treatment and forgo the opportunity to tour the city sights.

Another facet of the heightened tension in Istanbul is the game of wits being played out between Israel and Iran. This includes the decision to reveal the identity of the Iranian mastermind plotting the attacks: The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit, Hossein Taib, a Muslim cleric who has a long record of terrorist activity and intimidation both in Iran and abroad.

The people tracking him speak of a vicious commander with a tendency to risk everything in order to attain his goal. In this instance it’s hunting Israeli tourists in Turkey

Veteran journalist and defence analyst Yoav Limor claims Taib has been known to security forces in Israel and the West for years. “The decision to mark him publicly as the figure behind the current threat also puts a bullseye on his back. It goes without saying that he will now look over his shoulder whenever he leaves his home or sees a passing motorcycle in the street. In an instant, he has moved from the nameless and faceless pursuer to the pursued.”

Defence Minister Benny Gantz’s explicit warning that Israel “is preparing to respond with force in the face of any threat to Israeli citizens everywhere” is also aimed at making the threat personal so that Taib and his colleagues in Tehran know that they are in the crosshairs.

Turkey’s security and intelligence authorities are worried that its tourist industry as a whole will be adversely affected by this turn of events.

No matter how this plays out, Iran will continue to seek revenge and Israel will continue to attack in Syria and Iran (according to foreign news sources) There is no final volley, or check-mate in this battle of wits. Yet some observers envisage two possible outcomes: Either the repressive Iranian regime achieves its ultimate goal and wipes Israel off the map, or a popular uprising in Iran ousts the current regime, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and all. At present both goals are no more than wishful thinking.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni                                                                            24th of June, 2022. 

 THAT WAR

From an early age, I took a keen interest in the Great War, later referred to as World War 1 (WW1) and mistakenly promised as the “War to end all wars.”

It has another sobriquet, ‘The Chemists’ War,’ acknowledging it as the first conflict to unleash the insidious power of chemical weapons.

I actually knew a few people who fought in that war.  William Pears was one of them, he fought in the ranks of the British army in France towards the end of the war.

My brother and I stayed with the Pears family when we were evacuated from London to Blackpool during the German V2 missile attacks in 1944.

One of my school teachers survived a Chlorine gas attack while fighting on the Western Front, but suffered the effects of the gassing for the rest of his life.

My father told us he fought in that war, but later after his death, I discovered he was a draft dodger. Eventually, he was caught, arrested and imprisoned for three months before being sent to Belgium where he arrived just before Armistice Day in November 1918. Now that I know the true nature of his army service my keen interest in World War 1 has become an obsession.

In retrospect, I’m thankful he missed the horrors of the trenches. I’m glad he didn’t go “over the top” along with so many others charging headlong to a certain death.

That being said, it wasn’t till I read Eugene Rogan’s “The Fall of the Ottomans,” The Great War in the Middle East, that I began to realise that I lacked a really comprehensive understanding of many aspects of that war.

“The post-war partition of the Ottoman Empire was the subject of intense negotiations between the Allies that ran the length of the War. In hindsight, each of the partition agreements only makes sense within its wartime context: the Constantinople Agreement of 1915 when the Allies anticipated a quick conquest of Istanbul; the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence in 1915 and 1916 when the British needed a Muslim ally against the Ottoman jihad; the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when the British wanted to revise the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement to secure Palestine for British rule.” Rogan clarified further.” These outlandish agreements, which were only conceivable in wartime, were concluded solely to advance Britain and France’s imperial expansion. Had the European powers been concerned with establishing a stable Middle East, one can’t help but think they would have gone about drafting the boundaries in a very different way.” “Nevertheless,” Rogan concludes, “The borders of the post-war settlement have proven to be remarkably resilient- as have the conflicts the post-war boundaries have engendered” …….

“Yet the Arab-Israeli conflict, more than any other legacy of the post-war partition, has defined the Middle East as a war zone. Four major wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours- in 1948,1956, 1967 and 1973- have left the Middle East with a number of intractable problems that remain unresolved” …

Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, for The New Yorker added another facet regarding the Sykes-Picot Agreement in a piece she wrote five years ago-

“In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman Empire’s vast land mass into British and French spheres of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process—and other deals, declarations, and treaties—that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass. The new borders ultimately bore little resemblance to the original Sykes-Picot map, but their map is still viewed as the root cause of much that has happened ever since.”

Now, regarding the “Chemists’ War” two prominent Jewish chemists worked for opposing sides in the War. Chaim Weizmann and Fritz Haber.

Biochemist Chaim Weizmann is considered to be the 'father' of industrial fermentation. He developed the acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation process, which produces acetone, n-butanol and ethanol through bacterial fermentation. His acetone production method was of great importance in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants for the British war industry during World War I.

He founded the Sieff Research Institute in Rehovot, Israel (which was later renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science in his honour). He was also the first President of the State of Israel.

Fritz Haber gained a doctorate degree in chemistry from the University of Berlin in 1894. He is best known for his part in the Haber–Bosch process, an artificial nitrogen fixation process used to manufacture fertilisers and explosives.

In 1918 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. However, after the war, Haber was severely criticised and, in some cases, even ostracised for his involvement in the gas-warfare programme. As for his role in ammonia synthesis, it was argued that the cutting off of Germany’s access to natural nitrate deposits in northern Chile by the British Royal Navy would have ended the war within a few months had not the Haber process given Germany the ability to make its own nitrates and explosives. These arguments overlooked the fact that British, French, and American chemists were more than willing to develop poison-gas agents and explosives for their own governments.

Following the Nazi party’s rise to power Haber fled Germany. He wandered throughout Europe searching for an academic position. Ill and rejected he died in Switzerland in 1934.

His son Ludwig Haber became a well-known economist and historian of industrial chemistry. In 1986 he published The Poisonous Cloud, a definitive history of the use of gas warfare during World War I.

Today Fritz Haber’s “bread from the air” process won’t help future generations.  At least according to a recent post by Laura Wellesley and Tim G Benton in Prospect Magazine. They claim a new dark age is lurking on the horizon: the age of food insecurity. Russia’s war on one of the world’s breadbaskets—Ukraine—has highlighted just how fragile our systems of food production have become. If we want to avoid a future era of global instability wrought by limited access to a healthy and stable diet, Wellesley and Benton argue that we need to change what we eat and how we produce food—from developing new methods of farming to having diets less dependent on red meat and cutting down on food waste.

 

Food for thought!

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                           16^th of June, 2022

 

SINAI

David Schenker, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy posted an op-ed in one of its publications recently.

Under the heading “Egypt’s Remilitarized Sinai Is a Future Powder Keg” Schenker complained that Egypt and Israel are undermining their peace treaty. He advised both countries to walk back the changes they had made.

Recounting how the changes had come about he said, “In early May, the Islamic State-Sinai Province killed 11 Egyptian soldiers and damaged a natural gas pipeline. Far from demonstrating the Islamic State’s power in the strategic peninsula, the attack was the first major incident in almost a year, a far cry from the full-blown jihadi insurgency that had gripped Sinai only a few years ago. The Egyptian military finally appears to be making progress in rolling back the group. Not only have there been fewer attacks, but Cairo’s funnelling of economic development funds to the peninsula has also generated some goodwill among the long-restive population. In March 2021, a coalition of Bedouin tribesmen, armed civilians, and Egyptian military killed the region’s Islamic State leader.

Egypt’s apparent success has been, in part, a result of Cairo’s shift away from a heavy-handed military approach replete with collateral destruction and civilian casualties to a nimbler counterinsurgency strategy with a heavy emphasis on checkpoints and curfews. Israeli tactical air support has also played an important, if less publicized, role. Egyptian-Israeli cooperation contributed in another even more important way: by mutually agreeing to substantial violations of their 1978 peace treaty—or, more precisely, the treaty’s security annex limiting Sinai’s militarization. Not only has Egypt allowed Israel to operate over Egyptian territory, but Israel also allowed Cairo to flood Sinai with troops and heavy equipment substantially in excess of the treaty’s limits.

While these deployments have been indispensable to Egypt’s campaign against the Islamic State, they have also changed—perhaps irrevocably—the status quo for Sinai, where an international peacekeeping force still watches over what is stipulated in the peace treaty to be a largely demilitarized buffer zone. Although the current militarization of Sinai comes at a time of excellent Egyptian-Israeli relations, history suggests that this could quickly change. After all, it has been barely a decade since the Egyptian revolution brought an openly Islamist, anti-Israeli president to power. For nearly 45 years, the treaty’s limits on military deployment in Sinai buttressed the peace. If not reversed, Egyptian violations could threaten the core provisions of the agreement and, over time, compromise the integrity of the treaty.”

As far as I know, Israeli politicians, journalists, military affairs analysts, and security experts aren’t in the least concerned about these so-called violations.

If I’m not mistaken the U.S. State Department hasn’t questioned the wisdom of these infringements.  

I think David Schenker’s concern stems from his past role as head of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration.

 The worst-case scenario cited by Schenker hasn’t been overlooked by Israel. In the event of it happening, Israel is strong enough to bring about a return to the limitations set out in the annex to the 1973 peace treaty.

I want to add a personal note to this topic. Just before David Schenker posted his op-ed our daughter Irit went to Sinai for a few days. Her vacation was quiet, undisturbed by any jihadi insurgency. She stayed at a private beach holiday facility near Dhahab on the Gulf of Aqaba. No Wi-Fi, just sea, sand and the coral reef. Communication was difficult, even WhatsApp didn’t function completely. We had to make do with texting. Anyway, we will hear all about it

when she visits us next week.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                                                               9^th of June, 2022. 

PARADES

PARADES

Despite many fears and trepidations, the Jerusalem Day flag parade went off almost without a hitch. Of course, there were a number of clashes both physical and verbal.

Some Israelis and Palestinians sustained bruises, contusions, and other minor injuries, but there were no fatalities!  

“Yes, the Palestinians are fuming, but they did not need the march to get there. In stark contrast to previous years, the Muslim world had remained mostly indifferent to the march this year - apart from Jordan's condemnation and Al-Jazeera's usual attempt to incite the region.” Wrote Ben-Dror Yamini Ynet in his weekly column.

“O course, we can’t ignore the groups of Jewish hooligans, such as “La Familia”, who come to the Jerusalem Day flag parade to provoke and cause violent clashes. However, it's not the same thing. Among the Palestinians, there are religious leaders who encourage bloodshed. Among the Jews, the bruisers and verbal abusers are mostly marginal groups.” He concluded.

“At least 60 people were detained for questioning by the police. Five Israeli police officers, three Israeli civilians, and 40 Palestinians were injured during the parade.

The procession was seen as the largest Jerusalem Day march in years, with tens of thousands of Jewish Israelis swamping downtown Jerusalem and heading to Damascus Gate.

Shortly before the flag parade, more than 2,600 Israeli Jews were allowed to visit the Temple Mount, a larger than usual number. The holy site — Judaism’s most sacred sanctuary and Islam’s third-holiest — is a deeply contested flashpoint between Jews and Muslims.

Prior to their arrival, dozens of Palestinians barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hurled rocks at security forces stationed outside.

Despite being a national holiday, Jerusalem Day, which marks Israel’s conquest of the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, is celebrated nowadays mainly by right-wing religious Jews.

On Sunday morning Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said “We have every right to fly the Israeli flag in the capital of Israel. I ask everyone in the parade to celebrate responsibly and in a respectful manner.”

“But for hours during the long, tense day, the Old City felt like a powder keg on the verge of exploding. Police deployed some 2,000 officers to secure the rally, anticipating the tensions, and plainclothes security officers dotted the Old City’s alleyways.” The Times of Israel reported.

In 1967, even before the end of the war, 300,000 Israelis flocked to Jerusalem’s old city en route to the Western Wall, not all at once, but over several days. No clashes, no Palestinians, and not so much as a pebble was thrown at the ecstatic marchers. The same quiet pervaded all the territories captured in that war. Palestinians of all stripes were in a state of shock,  a kind of post-war trauma.  

Since then, they have recovered remarkably well.  Furthermore, they enjoy the unqualified support of numerous NGOs and some leading news media outlets.

There are about 350 full-time foreign journalists stationed in Israel, a country of about 20,000 square kilometres and nine and a half million people. Only Washington, D.C., and possibly London, are home to more foreign correspondents. This makes Israel, on any ordinary day, the most newsmedia-covered country per kilometre and per capita in the world. During wartime, the number of journalists (often referred to as “parachuted” reporters) flocking to Israel typically swells to more than 1,000. 

CNN has taken the lead in maligning Israel and the IDF, especially in reports about the death of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh.

Some observers detect a whiff of antisemitism, certainly, anti-Zionism in CNN reports.

However, CNN like most of the news media today is actually more of a business-oriented operation than a news media outlet.

When most of us hear “news media” we think of unbiased fact-checked and fact-reporting news. However, today news media like CNN are businesses with shares and stock market interests at heart. In the final analysis, they need to show a profit.

Similar complaints about CNN’s anti-Israel bias were made several years ago. Today, as then, it’s mostly about business.

The week ended with yet another parade in Jerusalem. This year marks twenty years of LGBTQ+ Pride marches in Jerusalem and seven years since Shira Banki was murdered at one of them.

About 10,000 people joined the Jerusalem March for Pride and Tolerance on Thursday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, police announced that they had arrested a man from south Jerusalem who had sent anonymous death threats to the organisers of the parade and a number of other people. 

In light of the threats, Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy decided to take part in the march, marking the first time that a Knesset speaker has ever participated in the event.

"Recently, we witnessed a terrible incitement campaign against the LGBTQ+ community which peaked yesterday when death threats were sent to a number of people. I was deeply shocked by this dangerous incitement and the defamation against the gay community" Mickey Levy said.

"No one will threaten us, no one will scare us - no one will put us back in the closet!" said Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz at the march. "This year - it's not just another Pride month. This year is a year of change - this year we have moved from struggling for our rights   - to achievements."

Horowitz pointed to reforms made in surrogacy procedures to allow same-sex couples and single fathers to have children. The minister also mentioned other regulations issued for the benefit of the LGBTQ+ community

The far-right Lehava movement and other right-wing activists held a counter-protest at Bloomfield Park across from Liberty Bell Park where the march started. They carried signs reading “a father and a father is not a family,” “Jerusalem is not Sodom” and “enough with LGBT terror.”

With friends like these who needs enemies.

Chag Shavuot Sameach

 

Beni                                                    3^rd of June,2022