On Dec. 10, I hastily convened the first public forum in the area on the events in Syria, “The Fall of the House of Assad,” hosted by the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, and the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego, to discuss the dramatic demise in Damascus of Bashar Assad’s presidency. As a Catholic university, on that very stage in 2013, I asked, as a Muslim, for the audience to grant a moment of silence for Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian priest who ran the Deir Mar Musa Monastery, an interfaith Syrian site for both Muslims and Christian. Dall’Oglio mysteriously disappeared in 2013. After more than a decade his fate may finally be known.

The Kroc School had invited me in 2013 to speak about America’s plan to bomb Syrian military sites after Assad’s chemical weapons attack outside of Damascus. I argued then that the U.S. would be dragged into another forever war in the Middle East. In 2024, on that same stage, I told students that American aircrafts were bombing Islamic State of Iraq and Syria sites, indicating that there was no end in sight to this war.

Besides geopolitics, I talked about the last decade of war, of Syrians who came to and from Southern California. They included Syrian Armenian power gangs from the streets of Glendale, who travelled as foreign fighters to the frontlines of Aleppo, filming themselves on social media in front of a destroyed home, fighting for the Assad regime to retake the rebel-held city.

In the other direction, after Yusra Mardini’s family home in Syria was destroyed, they fled as refugees, saving a drowning dinghy and all its passengers in the waters of the Aegean. It turned out she came from a family of Olympic swimmers. She enrolled at USC to study visual arts, the same subject I teach at UC San Diego, where, alas, she could have studied with me about herself in my “Art and the Middle East” course, as I show the harrowing and inspiring Netflix movie about her life, “The Swimmers.”

Nonetheless, I did have a student, Mohammad, who had also witnessed his house being destroyed back in Syria. He was 7 years-old. In February 2017, as a professor, I sat on a kindergarten floor at a grade school in City Heights next to him, part of an increasing number of adults volunteering to help refugees adapt to school in the U.S., resisting Trump’s “Muslim ban” that year.

“Joy in Damascus,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The staff told me not to speak to him in Arabic, so that he could learn English, but I ignored them. Together, we built a house from toy bricks, whereupon he said, “Let’s destroy it like my house in Syria.” I replied, “Nothing will happen to your new house.” During the cleanup, I asked the volunteer staff if we could leave his house standing until we left the classroom. I took the boy to his father, waiting at the entrance, who informed me that Mohammad would be meeting his new brother, born just an hour ago, a life made possible because the U.S. had let in a refugee family.

In 2013, the Syrians in the audience seemed despondent. This month, I recounted Mohammed’s story to a USD audience and two female students approached me, optimistic about the country’s future, as Mohammed must be, who should be 13 or 14 now.

Syria is at a critical juncture, as it forms a transitional government, either bringing stability or following the fate of Libya and Yemen, overthrowing a dictator only to witness the victorious rebels fight amongst themselves, not only preventing refugees from returning, but creating more of them. Mohammed’s story is also intended for America promising “mass deportations.”

As one tragedy hopefully comes to an end, President-elect Donald Trump should not follow the legacy of President Bashar Assad of further causing the dispersion of the desperate.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from the San Diego Union Tribune

A former aircraft carrier is the perfect location, as in not too distant waters, the San Diego-based aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln deployed to the Gulf of Oman, off the coast of Iran, in July 2024. In 2019, it was the same carrier strike group then-President Donald Trump deployed to deter Iran.

The conversation with Stone on the Midway will examine how America’s relationship with war, both before and after Vietnam, have informed and influenced his work over the past 40 years, most notably beginning with “Platoon” in 1986. He will discuss how those wars have influenced U.S. foreign policy and American society, how they provoked Americans to think about concepts and consequences of empire and military power overseas, and how they ultimately helped establish the framework for the “forever wars” in which the United States now participates.

One of the forever wars continues more than a year after violence that began on Oct. 7, 2023, between Israel and Hamas, making the Mediterranean Sea a combat theater. American forces are still deployed off the coast of Lebanon to deter Hamas’ ally Hezbollah, even though it is mostly on the defensive after Israel began its offensive, and to withdraw American citizens from there, despite that the U.S. left some behind.

Normally, the Lincoln is the flagship of a carrier strike group deployed in the Pacific, but its mission to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman was extended even further in September to deter Iran.

Furthermore, over the last year the U.S. and Israel have expanded their war to the Red Sea to attack the Yemeni Houthi militia for targeting international shipping in solidarity with Hamas, bringing war to the three seas in the region.

Over the last year the U.S. has mobilized local personnel and military assets, from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Naval Base Coronado and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar (otherwise known as “Top Gun”). The Lincoln’s aircraft includes an  F-35C strike aircraft squadron from Miramar, (the planes often seen flying over Interstates 15 and 805), and two helicopter squadrons from Coronado’s Naval Air Station North Island.

The Lincoln is escorted by the San Diego-based destroyer USS O’Kane, which carries long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, costing $2 million each, Washington’s preferred weapon to strike the Houthis.

“Carrier,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

Just the deployment of those two vessels represents 6,500 personnel. Carrier group deployments are routine, and the Lincoln will return to San Diego in mid-November, only to be replaced with more B-52s and destroyers. The possibility of American forces being targeted or lost has increased exponentially, just as a Houthi missile almost hit the USS Eisenhower last June, demonstrating that American strikes have not degraded their ability to attack vessels in the Red Sea.

If American forces were lost in combat, Washington would escalate its presence in the region, rather than withdrawing from the conflict, succumbing to “mission creep.” In these three naval conflict theaters there is no articulated end goal as to when “mission accomplished” can be declared.

The presidential election will not change the number of forces deployed to these theaters, which are likely to be maintained or even increase.

During Trump’s first presidency, he routinely deployed B-52 bombers and the Lincoln off the coast of Iran to deter the Islamic Republic in 2019, almost going to war in January 2020 after the U.S. assassinated one of Iran’s generals.

The U.S. left Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan 2021. It seemed the forever wars had ended. Yet they continued to shape San Diego County, with veterans making it home after serving multiple tours in both places. The wars also sent a whole generation of Afghan and Iraqi refugees fleeing those conflicts to San Diego.

Finally, the 2023 war has led to another sort of mobilization: protests in San Diego, on its campuses, even in front of the Midway itself, on the anniversary of Oct. 7. The war that began in October 2023 has the potential to serve as the third forever war of the 21^st century, ironically giving Stone further material for his next film.

Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at Cal State San Marcos and a visiting scholar at University of San Diego and San Diego State University, and lives in Encinitas.

Reprinted from The San Diego Union-Tribune with the author’s permission.

From a military perspective, both the Iraqi and Iranian attacks failed to achieve any immediate military objectives. Yet both attacks may have achieved a symbolic victory in the long term.

The events that brought the decades-long shadow war between Iran and Israel out into the open occurred in March. Until then, both states had mostly fought each other through proxy wars and assassinations.

Seven months ago, however, Israel killed a general belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran’s diplomatic facility in Damascus. That provocation was enough for Tehran to retaliate the following month when it fired 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles. Israel then responded by conducting a long-distance air raid against a military base in Isfahan that same month, marking its first ever direct attack on Iran.

Both states claimed victory. Iran demonstrated for the first time that it has weapons that can reach Israel, even if most were intercepted. Israel had to rely on American and British aircraft to intercept these projectiles, further elevating Iran’s status as a Middle Eastern actor that provoked all three powers to react. Israel’s retaliation, meanwhile, was a message to Iran that it can conduct long-distance air raids to hit its nuclear facilities in the future.

That episode appeared to have ended, giving each state the chance to claim that they had established deterrence against the other. It appeared to be a repeat of the crisis of January 2020, when then US president Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the IRGC general Qassem Suleimani. Iran retaliated with 22 ballistic missiles launched at US forces in Iraq. No Americans were killed, and the episode ended for both sides.

What upset a similar balance between Iran and Israel came in late July, when Israel conducted a more significant long-range aerial attack that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. At the time, Israel struck Iran’s capital, violating not only its sovereignty but also its reputation of protecting its guests. Yet Iran did not retaliate.

This begs the question as to why Tehran chose to attack Israel last night. After all, its April salvo was intercepted, and it appears even weaker now given that no missiles were able to hit significant targets yesterday either.

There are two explanations for this. Having failed to retaliate for Haniyeh’s death, Tehran would have appeared particularly weak had it not responded to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week. Going farther back, Saddam Hussein’s strike against Israel in 1991 might shed important light, too.

“Mulla-Rocket,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam launched close to 40 Scud ballistic missiles towards Israel, aimed at Tel Aviv and its nuclear facility in Dimona, the same facility that Iran targeted in April.

Saddam had sought to disrupt the large international coalition that the US had assembled, and which had included Egypt and Syria, by attempting to force Israel to strike back and thereby dividing the Arab world. The attacks killed 13 people, but with Washington having restrained Israel from its longstanding policy of swift retaliation, Saddam’s ruse appeared to have failed at the time.

In 1999, just eight years after those events, I got into a taxi in Jerusalem that was being driven by a Palestinian. When he enquired about my origins after I spoke Arabic to him, I responded by saying “Asli Iraqi”. He then praised Saddam with a by-now familiar refrain: “Saddam was the only leader who fought for the Palestinians,” regardless of facts on the ground. Relations between Iraq and Palestinian leaders have, of course, historically been strong. But that’s when I realised that while Saddam had lost the Gulf War, he had won the war for Palestinian memory.

Israel may have intercepted Iran’s missiles last night, but it is painfully clear to every Israeli that Tehran has the ability to target their country on a consistent basis. Further, it has been widely reported that many Gazans mourned the death of Nasrallah, even though it was met largely with indifference in the rest of the Arab world. Many Gazans also reportedly cheered Iran’s overnight attack on Israel, if only because it had forced Israel’s government to divert some of its attention away from the beleaguered enclave.

Palestinians are not going to forget what they have endured since October 7, for generations to come. Many are just as likely to remember Iran’s strikes on Israel, regardless of their merit, as a show of solidarity with Gaza.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

The October 7 attacks led by Hamas proved to be a conundrum for Hezbollah. Before that, the group had been challenged by Lebanese protesters, including by members of the Shiite community, since 2019, for controlling a corrupt Parliament and allowing Iran to violate Lebanon’s sovereignty.

The war in Gaza allowed Hezbollah to deflect attention from its domestic woes, by launching rockets against Israel, in solidarity with Hamas, but not doing enough to risk immediate Israeli retaliation. It forced Israel to keep some military forces in the north and the evacuation of civilians from there.

Nasrallah’s death will most likely lead to a significant proportion of the Lebanese public rallying behind Hezbollah. The protests in 2019 were a domestic matter. With the assassination having been carried out by a foreign state, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may end up uniting the Lebanese people in a way that has been elusive since the end of the nation’s civil war in 1991.

In 1992, the year after the civil war ended, Israeli helicopters killed Hezbollah’s then secretary general, Abbas Al Musawi, as well as his wife and six-year-old son in a motorcade. In Ronen Bergman’s book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, he documents how some Israeli military figures had opposed the killing as “Hezbollah was not a one-man show, and [Al] Musawi was not the most extreme man in its leadership”. Indeed, they warned, he “would be replaced, perhaps by someone more radical”.

Al Musawi was succeeded by Nasrallah, who proved to be more charismatic and eloquent. At the time, Hezbollah was a small militia, employing suicide bombs as its most powerful weapon. When Nasrallah emerged, he put a military commander, Fouad Shukr, who was killed in July in a similar strike, in charge of stepping up sophisticated guerrilla attacks on Israeli forces in the south of Lebanon. These attacks, as well as rocket launches, compelled them to withdraw in 2000, marking a rare and significant Israeli loss to an Arab military force.

In this respect, history is a study of irony, of unintended consequences, as Israel’s assassination scored a vendetta, only to witness a replacement who proved to be a more adept leader – a possibility that exists with Nasrallah’s successor.

The group has a top-down, military-style bureaucracy, while at the same time maintaining a diffuse and decentralised military command structure to operate if higher-level commanders are killed during battle. Its bureaucracy, with clear chains of command, will enable it to select a new leader. It has routinised its leadership succession, whereby the secretary general is appointed by a council, so that the legitimacy of the successor derives from the position and not the individual.

Hezbollah adheres to the “Axis of Resistance” ideology, along with Iran, the Houthis of Yemen and Hamas in Palestine, based on resistance to Israel and the US. However, the group also blends Lebanese nationalism, as well as a southern Lebanese identity, invoking how the region has suffered from Israeli actions since its first invasion in 1978. The ideology does not depend on a leader for its articulation or propagation. As a set of ideas, it existed before Nasrallah became the leader in 1992.

Hezbollah earned credit for driving Israeli troops out of Lebanon as 2000. One of the factors behind this success was the willingness of the group’s members and followers to sacrifice their lives for their cause. Their propaganda focuses on seeking inspiration from the success of Iran’s revolution in 1979.

This dynamic contributes to the third factor Hezbollah enjoyed: popular support within certain communities. The group’s presence in the south of Lebanon is enabled by a network of sympathetic Arab villages, that goes beyond just its Shiite Muslim base, including some members of the Christian community.

There is an argument to be made that, instead of waging war against Hezbollah, Israel could have declared a ceasefire in Gaza as the one-year anniversary of the conflict approaches. This would have done far more damage to Hezbollah by depriving it of the rhetorical oxygen it has often used to justify its rocket attacks, which the group said it would have ceased once the fighting in Gaza ended.

As a tactic, Israeli assassinations do not address the underlying problems of conflict in the region. Strategically they backfire, as assassinations might lead to unpredictable outcomes, like in 1992.

In the long term, Israel’s tactical military strikes are no panacea for political violence compared to multilateral peace and development strategies. Both the US and France, permanent members of the UN Security Council, had pushed for implementing the 2006 Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers to monitor the area south of Lebanon on the border with Israel, creating a buffer zone.

A cessation of hostilities in Gaza and Lebanon would have been the best long-term solution, achieving a more sustainable security than continued conflict that only creates a new generation of Lebanese and Palestinians seeking atonement from Israel. As the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza is upon us, it appears that Mr Netanyahu is seeking another year of conflict to maintain his hold on power.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Hezbollah ‘prepared’ for Israel’s ground incursion: Hezbollah deputy chief”

( The National ) – A series of pager explosions across Lebanon, and secondary attacks on walkie-talkies the following day, have killed and maimed a number of Hezbollah operatives, as well as many civilians, including children. The attacks have also injured thousands, including Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

Israel normally does not claim responsibility for attacks on foreign soil – and it did not do so in this case either – but Defence Minister Yoav Gallant gave strong indications in a speech on Wednesday of Mossad’s role in the sabotage.

Mr Gallant also said that Israel, which has been battling Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, was opening a new phase in the war. “The centre of gravity is shifting northward, meaning that we are increasingly diverting forces, resources and energy towards the north,” he added.

The Lebanon attacks demonstrate Israel’s ability to strike from a distance, establishing a form of deterrence, while claiming plausible deniability, and avoiding a US rebuke at a time when Washington is pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the Lebanese group does have the ability to weaponise the digital, raising the possibility of violent non-state actors retaliating against their adversaries and taking digital warfare into the realm of AI across the Middle East.

Notwithstanding the vague allusions to the attacks over the past couple of days, historical precedent does demonstrate that weaponising communications is a modus operandi of the Israeli state.

In 1972, in retaliation for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad operatives detonated an explosive in the phone of the Palestinian official Mahmoud Hamshari in his Paris apartment. While that telephone was an analogue device, the digital revolution made long-distance assassinations easier for Israel. Another telephone was weaponised in 1996, when Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, targeted the Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash’s Motorola Alpha mobile phone. Working with a Palestinian collaborator, Shin Bet placed 50 grams of explosives in the device, enough to kill him when he held the phone to his ear.

The recent deaths in Lebanon are the epitome of the postmodern, a product of the digital culture of the easy-edit, a time when science and technology allow us to change and manipulate information easily through code, making distances relatively obsolete.

The book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weaponrefers to Israel’s ability to destroy parts of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010 with a malicious digital code known as Stuxnet. This code, sneaked into a USB drive, caused nuclear centrifuges to accelerate to the point that they destroyed themselves.

In 1981, by contrast, Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft had to fly long distances, refuel in mid-air and drop bombs on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility to destroy it, with some even missing their target. Israeli pilots risked being shot down or even crashing, which almost happened when the planes narrowly missed telephone wires on the way to their target outside Baghdad.

Stuxnet did not put any Israeli operatives at risk when they sought to target Iran’s nuclear facility. The code, unlike a conventional bomb, could be easily edited, put onto a USB drive, travel a far distance, achieve its objective, and give Israeli deniability.

“Cyberwar,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Notwithstanding the technological sophistication and difficulty to tamper with thousands of communications devices, Israel over the past two days was able to strike targets all over Lebanon, even in neighbouring Syria, with relative ease, in that none of its operatives had to be present to target individuals. It was assassination by remote control.

Establishing deterrence is based on signalling and demonstrating the ability to inflict hurt on an adversary. While the death toll is relatively low, Israel has been able to warn Hezbollah that its members are not safe anywhere in their country, without having to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon.

Tragically, it has also had another effect, in that it has disrupted the civilians’ ontological security, meaning the mental state derived from a sense of order and continuity, even banality of everyday life. Even medical workers in the country use pagers due to electrical outages, and every citizen is bound to be left wondering if their mobile phone has been weaponised.

Deterrence cannot be measured, however, and instead of Israel having deterred Hezbollah, the group will be under pressure to save face by striking back. Israel should have learnt a lesson from when it introduced drone technology to the region in the 1970s, which only led to its proliferation among its adversaries, including the Houthis, who struck Israel directly with a long-distance drone in July.

Israel was the first to use drones in the Middle East in 1973 and had a monopoly on them in the region. But as Rami Khouri, the American University of Beirut professor, once told Peter W Singer, the world’s foremost expert on drones: “The response to drones is to get your own drones. They are just tools of war. Every tool generates a counterreaction.” Indeed, by 2024, Hezbollah released videos of its drones having violated Israel’s sovereignty, having reached the city of Haifa.

While it is uncertain if AI-enabled drones have ever been used, Israel did use an AI programme named Gospel to generate targets for its military campaign in Gaza.

With the digital domain having been weaponised, Hezbollah will feel the need to retaliate. The retaliation, however, is unlikely to be a brute rocket or missile strike that Israel can intercept. The group might play the long game of scoring its own digital victory, perhaps pursuing its own weaponisation of AI to achieve this goal.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an international norm for states to prevent genocide, mass atrocities, and war crimes, in response to the failure to do so in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The US airdropped food to trapped refugees on nearby Mount Sinjar, but sat on the sidelines as the massacre ensued in this village. Ten years later, the international community still has a Responsibility to Remember (R2R) to the Yazidis who died, to those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to the more than 2,000 who are still missing, and to the other victims of war who are only increasing in number in the 21st century – from the north of Iraq to Ukraine to Gaza. The United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) was a dedicated R2R body. Yet, its mandate will soon be terminated.

Murad was able to escape and arrived in Germany in 2015. She was one of the fortunate also appointed as a UN goodwill ambassador, the first to represent “Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.” Murad was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iraqi to ever receive it.

In 2016 she met the Beirut-born British barrister Amal Alamuddin Clooney, who agreed to represent Murad. Both addressed the United Nations, advocating that the ISIS campaign be designated as a genocide. Their work was essential to the Security Council agreeing to establish UNITAD in 2017.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

In the lobby of the United Nations General Assembly, a replica of Picasso’s Guernica mural hangs above the podium where international figures field questions from the media, a form of R2R for the multilateral body, as the failure of the world community to act after Guernica eventually led to World War Two. By bearing witness to Guernica, UN diplomats would work to ensure it would not happen again. Yet, Guernica did happen again: in Halabja at the end of the 20th century, and Kocho was the Guernica of the 21st century. 

UNITAD was an attempt to prevent future Guernicas. The Iraqi judicial system lacked the infrastructure to investigate and try all the members of ISIS responsible for these crimes; hence, Baghdad requested the aid of the UN in the form of UNITAD, which has been collecting evidence since 2017.

Yet, the Iraqi government sought to terminate this body’s mandate in 2024 due to conflicts with the UN team investigating the crimes. This denies justice to the survivors of ISIS atrocities. Closing such a body is not only a loss for the female survivors of gender-based violence, the Yazidis, as well as the Iraqi nation in general, it sets a tragic global precedent;  a dedicated UN body is imperative to document genocidal and gendercidal violence, and victims of war.

The genocidal rampage that ensued in Kocho in August 2014 continued for the women in captivity.  To forge homogeneity within their “Islamic” state, ISIS sought the erasure of a pre-Islamic past by destroying pre-Islamic antiquities and what it deemed as “pre-Islamic peoples,” expelling Christians from Mosul, or enslaving Yazidi women to ensure that they could not give birth to future Yazidi children, a form of genocide specifically targeted against one gender, in what can be more specifically called a gendercide. Their captivity not only led to their estrangement from other Yazidis, but any future children born out of this slavery would not be considered part of the endogenous community.

The work of lawyers or human rights investigators is like a historian, trying to collect material from the past from primary sources to construct a narrative in the present. Primary sources, in this case, include the videos and documents produced by ISIS itself documenting their genocide, as well as the testimonies of the victims.

R2R is a reminder, as well, to the damage done to the spiritual heritage of Yazidi temples and Christian churches by ISIS, in addition to forced expulsion. Both physical reconstruction and investment in mental healthcare infrastructure, which Iraq lacks, are still needed.
UNITAD sought to deliver justice. It is a body that needs to be replicated for those who suffer due to decisions made by terrorists, warlords or politicians who will never be held accountable for their actions all the way from Kocho to the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza.
 
As a historian, these deaths and victims inspired me to advocate for R2R for the victims of war. Life is one episode in this greater history of soldiers and civilians from the north of Iraq and Syria under ISIS, to Ukraine to Gaza, who have died or endured trauma and PTSD, internally displaced peoples and refugees, child soldiers, the victims of gender-based violence during conflict, the kidnapped and tortured, those maimed by landmines or IEDs and amputees, many reliant on prosthetics, landscapes poisoned by depleted uranium, to animals and domesticated pets caught up in conflicts that they had no role in creating.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Rudaw.net

The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

Both were 22-year-olds. Their deaths in 2023 serve as a reminder on International Women’s Day that the tragedies of femicide and gender-based violence (GBV) will continue into 2024. “Honor killings” need to be recognized as problems that are not only confined to the global south and developing world.

 While governments often react to direct violence, this problem will not end unless both state and society recognize endemic structural and cultural violence that enable femicide. The failure to act on these problems becomes a form of “necropolitics,” where the states allow women to succumb to the fate of femicide.

Direct Violence

Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung’s Triangle of Violence begins with “direct violence,” which often gets the most attention.

The father of Tiba Al-Ali projected direct violence against his daughter by strangling her. The last thing Tiba saw was the eyes of her father before she died.

Turetta projected direct violence against Giulia, a video camera capturing him beating her, and then later stabbing her 20 times to the neck and head. The last thing Giulia saw was the eyes of her ex-partner.

Tiba chose to defy her father.  Giulia chose to leave Filippo and she was graduating before him, which he could not accept.

Structural Violence

Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe defines “necropolitics” as how political actors allow certain demographics to die. When states fail to prevent femicide that is a form of necropolitics, or what Galtung would call “structural violence.”

Ali’s murder is part of the rise of GBV due to a revival of tribal culture that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein encouraged after the 1991 Gulf War to maintain domestic order, as his security forces were diminished. Iraq’s gendered insecurity continued unabated as the security sector collapsed after the 2003 invasion.  The US touted post-Saddam Iraq as a model state that would inspire a wave of democratization in the region. Yet Articles 41 and 409 of the Iraqi Penal Code, to this day, permits males to “punish” female members of a household. Those codes are a form of structural violence and necropolitics, enabling “honor killings.” It allows “practices of patriarchy” at the state level.

Women’s rights in Iraq • FRANCE 24 English Video

Structural violence and state patriarchy is evident by the security sector failing to address this issue, as the police allegedly knew beforehand that Al-Ali’s life was at risk and failed to take action.

Let us turn to Europe. Surprisingly, the Italian state engages in necropolitics by not legally recognizing “femicide” as a separate crime. Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, referred to this problem when said, “Femicide is a murder committed by the state because the state doesn’t protect us.” The state’s failure in this case to prevent direct violence is itself a form of violence. In the absence of the state Elena refers to the need for Italian civil society and NGOs to step in: “We need to fund anti-violence centres and give the possibility to those who need to ask for help.”

After the murder, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would increase funds to women’s shelters and anti-violence centers. However, Meloni was also part of the problem, since her misogynistic right-wing politics and “Brothers of Italy”(Fratelli d’Italia) party enabled gendered cultural violence in Italy.   

Cultural Violence

After the murder in Iraq, a twitter user, Ali Bey, wrote that women should “behave or face the same fate as Tiba Al-Ali,” along with a series of other voices in the Iraqi cybersphere condoning, if not celebrating the murder. These outbursts are examples of cultural violence or societal patriarchy that enables such crimes.

Elena links the murder of her younger sister to the patriarchal culture of violence that pervades Italy, a form of cultural necropolitics, which normalises the toxic behaviour of men like Turetta and eventually commits femicide. She said “Turetta is often described as a monster, but he’s not a monster.”  She then addresses cultural elements: “A monster is an exception, a person who’s outside society, a person for whom society doesn’t need to take responsibility. But there’s a responsibility. Monsters aren’t sick, they’re healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture.” 

Meloni promised promised a new educational campaign in schools to eradicate “the toxic culture of violence” in the country. While Meloni had condemned sexual violence in the past, it was usually when a migrant committed GBV, to support the anti-immigrant politics of her party.

In 2023 I conducted two digital autopsies on Tiba’s YouTube account and Giulia’s Instagram account. Both were beautiful souls that made the earth a better place. Tiba’s vibrant videos described her new life in Istanbul, to pursue her education. Guilia loved her mom, had a collection of beer bottle tops, and apparently had a fear of going to the hospital alone, but overcame her fear.  That fear apparently had to do with the fact that she was taking care of her mom who eventually died of cancer.

The triangle of violence and necropolitics offers a nuanced means of analyzing the agents of patriarchy.  But a simple linguistic exercise can also achieve this goal, using patriarchy as a verb instead of an abstract noun. We must each ask ourselves “Who or what has patriarched me or others in the past, present, and future?” and “Who or what have I patriarched?” Difficult questions, yes, but by bringing them into focus we can begin to identify the active agents and institutions that have patriarched and continue to patriarch in Iraq, Italy and the world.  On this International Women’s Day, Iraq and Italy have failed to ensure gendered security.

“On 24 February 2022, while travelling to Lebanon to visit his great-aunt Maria in Lebanon, Ibrahim al-Marashi’s thoughts were with his friend Maria in Ukraine on the first day of the Russian invasion.”

By Ibrahim Al-Marashi | –

( The New Arab ) – As my plane descends into Istanbul airport, from the window I scan the horizon towards the direction of Ukraine, now a warzone. It is 24 February 2022.

While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive.

I make a nidhr, a promise to Sayyida Khawla, the deceased daughter of our revered Imam Hussein that I will visit her shrine in the neighbouring Lebanese town of Baalbek, if Ukrainian Maria survives.

The Maria I am visiting is my grandmother’s older sister, whose family were refugees after World War I, leaving Mardin, in today’s Turkey, to Lebanon. While I was on the plane moving east, I knew Maria in Kyiv was a refugee in the making, and that she would eventually flee to the west.

This tale of two Marias is one of the greater Mediterranean, the sea in the “Middle of the Earth,” flowing into the Black and Red Seas and the terrain surrounding them.

“While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive”

These lands and waters which have witnessed waves of refugees, due to conflicts which compel and coerce. A history of displacement over distance, from antiquity’s Sea Peoples to Syrian refugees.

On Thursday, 24 February 2022, both Maria Marchenko and I are preparing for trips to or away from an airport.

At 5am Maria Marchenko is jolted from her sleep. A barrage of ballistic missiles bombarded Kyiv airport, close to where she lives. Airports around the capital city were targeted that day to prevent Ukrainian planes from taking off, while Moscow sought to secure them as staging grounds for the assault on the capital.

At the same time, it is 6am in Madrid. I am packing for my trip to Lebanon in a few hours to visit Maria Shakir, delivering her the pain reliever Panadol and US dollars, both in short supply there due to an economic crisis.

Istanbul, where I am making my transit, is relatively close to the war zone and I wonder if flights might be cancelled. That would devastate Lebanese Maria. She is 98 and hasn’t seen me in 13 years.

While I’m packing my bag the morning of my flight because I am a procrastinator, Maria hadn’t packed because she did not believe that war would erupt. She thought if she did pack her bag in advance for such a scenario, war would then inevitably occur.

I had prepared my Madrid apartment for Maria, her mother and father in case they needed to flee here. I had arranged fresh linens for them, turning my apartment into a haven to accommodate three potential refugees.

During the morning of the 24th both Maria and I pack warm clothing. There is a winter storm in Zahle, in the high mountains of Lebanon. Maria will be going to a bomb shelter, well below the ground in a freezing metro station.

We collect our documents, laptops, and chargers. Maria packs something I have no need to: photos of family and friends, to preserve their memories unsure if she would see them again.

I shut the teal window blinds on my balcony. On top of the entrance to the convent in front of my house, a dove representing the Holy Spirit flies above the representation of Mary. For her namesake in Ukraine, it is not a dove that flies above her head, but rather enemy aircraft.

 

 

Driving to the airport, I dial Maria in vain. The first leg of my journey is to Istanbul, a four-hour journey where I won’t be able to make calls. At this point, I am not sure if the telecommunication lines have been hit, or even if Maria is still alive.

As I am about to board the plane and turn off my phone, she picks up. When I ask about her, she holds back her tears. Her parents live in Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region, 30 miles from the border and now the front lines. Nonetheless, she declares her wish for peace, with no malice or cynicism in her voice. I remind her that they have a home in Madrid.

I place my KN-94 mask snuggly on. And a surgical mask on top of that. I am so grateful the seat next to me is empty. I have yet to catch Covid and feared how I would fare with this virus in Lebanon, having heard stories about the abysmal conditions of health care as a result of the economic crisis. My grandfather survived a pandemic by moving to Lebanon in the late 1940s. I do not want to repeat history.

For the next four hours I will be dodging viruses. I fret that this plane will also have to dodge missiles as we approach Istanbul airport, close to the Black Sea, where warships are bombarding Ukraine with cruise missiles, according to the news.

Istanbul airport is unusually empty. I look at the screen for the gate to my connecting flight to Lebanon, noticing a list of cancelled flights that were destined for Ukraine and Russia.

I turn on my phone. No messages from Ukrainian Maria, but Lebanese Maria sends me pictures of the dishes she has prepared for my arrival via Whatsapp – hummus with olive oil and sesame seeds and falafel.

She is 98-years old yet knows how to send gifs and emojis. When I confirm I am boarding the plane, she sends a gif of a woman from the Sixties with a bra that fires sparks, like bullets. When I leave her a voice message that the flight to Lebanon is scheduled to leave on time, she sends me an animated image of Jesus Christ.

Five hours later, drenched and exhausted, I arrived at a first-floor apartment in Zahle. Maria is elated. I collapse on her sofa. She hugs me, and screams “tu’burni” or “you will bury me,” which is a term of endearment, but I dread the thought of her passing. She is so short that even sitting on the sofa our eyeline is equal.

While she prepares the food, I recline on the sofa, made out of a wooden frame, yet the cushions are made with thick grey blankets, stamped with the logo of “UNHCR,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, while a stuffed teddy bear and cheetah rest behind me.

 

I am too embarrassed to ask whether her or a resourceful furniture maker had reappropriated them from the nearby camps housing Syrian refugees.

She brings out her folded table and I eat right there.

“My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis”

While I am in the most comfortable setting, my second home, Ukrainian Maria’s second home is underneath the earth, a cold, underground bomb shelter. While I have a sumptuous Lebanese feast, Maria in Kyiv occasionally comes up for air, to find soup during the ephemeral lull of security, until the sirens call her back.

I asked Maria in Zahle to turn on the TV so I can find news about Maria in Kyiv. My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis.

On top of the TV set, on the wooden bookshelf, there are three separate depictions of the Virgin Mary and a drawn image of Jesus holding his hand to his heart, while what seems like laser rays of red and blue are coming out of his chest.

During the late 1940s, my grandfather contracted tuberculosis, the Covid-19 of its time. He had to leave his home, Najaf, in the dusty Iraqi desert to recover in the clean mountain air of Zahle. He probably bemoaned his fate, but there he met my grandmother, a Christian refugee from Mardin.

If it were not for refugees and pandemics my mother would not be born, and I would not exist.

I often question why God let my grandmother die at such a young age, when my mom was barely five years old. For most of my life I did not know Maria Shakir even existed. It was only as an adult I travelled to Zahle trying to find my grandmother’s family, eventually finding Maria.

Maria and my entire grandmother’s family are Syriac Orthodox Christian. The country of Lebanon tore itself apart because its Muslims and Christians could not see what unites them, and instead focused on the narcissism of small differences, plunging the country into a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1991.

Yet this Shi’a Muslim flew across the Mediterranean to help his Christian great-aunt, bringing her money, medicine, and his love.

 

But in Ukraine that same day, the invaders that day could only focus on hate, in their minds, dark, vacuous caverns where only enmity and evil exist, and another set of small differences. Maria in Ukraine became another victim in this cycle.

On the other wall by the TV was an image of Mar Elias Shakir III etched in silver. The Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox church. Maria’s uncle. My great-uncle. I make another nidhr to him: “If you help Maria, she is Orthodox like you, get out of Ukraine safely, I will visit your shrine in Kerala, India.”

During dinner, when I tell my great-aunt Maria about my visit to the shrine of Sayyida Khawla, she informs me that Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, is only ten minutes away from Baalbek.

She tells me this, not to pay a visit as a pilgrim. In fact, rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy.

She tells me that a woman in Bechouat has a café next to the Marian shrine and where I could eat saj, a Lebanese flat bread cooked on an open circular grill, complemented with thyme or cheese. Of course, her saj is not as good as Maria’s, she reminds me, but I should try it still since I will need to eat lunch.

On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, I arrive at the Sayyida Khawla shrine. I approach the shrine, with a gilded minaret and dome, interspersed with turquoise ceramic tiles and white Arabic calligraphy. I pass a pointed arch and enter the main hall, and look up at the dome, a pattern of the top in the shape of a star, a representation of heaven in perfect geometrical symmetry.

Not a single space is unadorned, illuminated with beams of light, with walls and ceilings made up of alternating panels of gold and silver, shimmering, shining, sparkling, with crystals glittering, glimmering, mesmerising.

“Rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy”

I approach the above ground tomb. Khawla was another person displaced by conflict, a refugee of sorts, more akin to a prisoner of war. Khawla was the daughter of Imam Hussein and great granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad. Hussein, the prophet’s son-in-law, and most of his family were massacred in Karbala, in today’s Iraq, in 681 by a political rival, Yazid, based in Damascus.

During a long and arduous journey, the few members of Hussein’s surviving family were taken as prisoners of war across the desert from what is Iraq to Damascus. Khawla died in Baalbek. Zayn al-Abidin, Hussein’s only surviving son, and Khawla’s brother, planted a small branch to mark her grave. Over the years, that branch turned into a massive cypress tree, which is in the middle of the shrine, making it 1,400-years-old.

I sit on a carpet of alternating floral designs of red, black, and white, in front of her tomb. Technically Khawla is like my Khala Maria, my great-aunt, albeit older by more than a millennium and a half.

 

I pray. For the health of my family, that my sister gives birth to a healthy baby, and that I get some message from Maria in Ukraine that she is safe.

Afterwards, I am on my way to Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, because maybe there Ukrainian Maria’s text will also appear.

The church has a bell tower, an exact resemblance to the minaret of the Shi’a shrine, but the entire complex is constructed of monochromatic, soft beige stones, in comparison with the explosion of colour in Sayyida Khawla. While the Shi’a shrine has a single tree, this complex is covered in sprawling olive trees.

It was here that in 1741, a wooden Byzantine icon of the Virgin was discovered in a cave and a church was built above it. Bechouat then became a pilgrimage site after a miracle occurred there for a paralyzed Christian man. The Marian apparition, however, occurred later, in front of the eyes of a Muslim child. Since then, I learned it has become a site of pilgrimage for both Christians and Muslims.

It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims. In the structure housing the statue, there is a painting of the Virgin Mary, standing on top of a crescent moon.

The crescent moon, along with a star, is a symbol associated with Islam. However, it was originally a Christian symbol representing the Virgin. The crescent moon had long been a symbol of fertility in the Middle East from pagan times, and the star stood in for Mary. It was only in 1453, when the Ottoman Muslims conquered Constantinople, that they appropriated the flag.

“It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims”

Within the span of a few hours in this narrow sliver of land known as the Bekaa Valley, settled by Phoenicians and Romans, known for its hashish, I visited two sites dedicated not just to Christianity and Islam, but the divine feminine: Our Lady of Baalbek, Khawla, and Our Lady of Bechouat, Mary.

The Lebanese often boast about how they can ski in the mountains and be able to go to the beach and dip into the water within the span of an hour. I was more impressed that within the span of an hour I could visit these two shrines, one Shi’a and the other Catholic.

In the span of an hour I could pray for protection, asking one holy Maria to protect both my Syriac Orthodox great-aunt Maria and my Ukrainian Orthodox Maria.

A few days later Ukrainian Maria eventually arrived in Parma, Italy, to stay with her aunt. Her parents remained in Okhtyrka, defending their home.

 

Maria was safe. And now I had to fulfil a promise before the year ended that I would travel to India, to visit the shrine of my great-uncle, and thank him for the favour.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History and The Modern History of Iraq.

Follow him on Twitter: @ialmarashi

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author’s employer, or Informed Comment.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.