He pledged, “There will be no imposition of the hijab on the Christian community or any other group because these matters are not a point of contention, and people are free.” It is not sure what he meant by “any other group.” If he meant “any other non-Sunni minority group,” then mandatory veiling could still be imposed on women of Sunni Muslim heritage.

When the fundamentalist, Salafi HTS was ruling the northern Syria province of Idlib earlier this year before they took over the whole country, it promulgated a law on public behavior that required all girls older than twelve to wear a veil in public, forbade public performance of music, demanded gender segregation, and established a morals police of the sort that used to patrol Saudi Arabia and still does police behavior in Afghanistan. It seems a little unlikely that its leaders have changed their minds about the desirability of any of these measures, though they also are not as strong in big cities like Aleppo and Damascus as they had been in small, rural Idlib.

Asked about whether women would be allowed to continue to serve as judges, as they did in secular, Baathist Syria, he replied that they would be allowed to go to law school, but maybe not to preside over courts: “”Women certainly have the right to learn and receive education in any field of life, whether in teaching, law, judiciary, or others. However, for women to assume judicial authority, this could be a subject for research and study by specialists, and it is too early to discuss this aspect.”

Women were 13% of judges in Baathist Syria, and had double that representation in the capital of Damascus.

Women comprised 46% of university students in the old regime, though they tended to major in fields such as education and literature and were underrepresented in medicine, economics, and engineering, according to Freedom House.

Arnaut hinted broadly that universities would be gender-segregated under the new government: “Syrian universities already exhibit many positive ways of proceeding, but these need to be reinforced to enhance the educational process and produce better outcomes than before. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen these ways of proceeding in a way that allows male and female students to focus their minds more fully on the educational process.”

Juan Cole, “Obeida Arnaout,” 2024.

Studies have shown that gender segregation in higher education harms women students and faculty. If they have to go to a separate all-women medicine or law school, and there are few women students in those fields, then they will suffer lack of resources. They will also be viewed as second-class citizens by the male portion of the university.

Then came the big issue, of women in politics. The one-party Baathist state was sectarian and dictatorial, not to mention genocidal, and so women’s participation does not tell us much (except that they were tainted by the atrocities committed by the government). But for what it is worth, 11 percent of the members of the phony “parliament” were women, and in recent years 3 of 31 cabinet members were women.

Arnaut was asked about whether women would be able to continue in these roles: “As for women’s representation in ministerial and parliamentary roles, we believe that this matter is premature and should be left to legal and constitutional experts who will work on rethinking the structure of the new Syrian state. Women are an important and honored component, so tasks must align with roles that women can perform. There will be no concerns regarding women’s issues.”

In other words, no, HTS does not envisage women being allowed to serve in parliament or on the cabinet or as prime minister.

That was bad enough. He went on to make a fool of himself by saying women are biologically unsuited to leadership roles: “There is no doubt that women have their biological and psychological nature, as well as their specific characteristics and composition, which must align with particular tasks. For example, it is not appropriate to suggest that women use weapons or be placed in roles that do not suit their abilities, composition, or nature.”

I read that the anchor interviewing him pointed out that hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled the Old Regime to safety in Germany, and that the leader who allowed them into the country and gave them safety was Angela Merkel, a female chancellor.

Al-Quds al-`Arabi quoted a reaction from Professor Milena Zain Al-Din from Damascus University: “We, the young women and women of Syria, are activists, politicians, human rights advocates, journalists, economists, academics, workers, and homemakers. We are revolutionaries, detainees, and fighters, and above all, we are Syrian citizens. Obeida Arnaout’s rhetoric is unacceptable. The Syrian woman, who has struggled and endured alongside millions of Syrian women, is not waiting for you to choose a place or role for her that aligns with your mindset for building our nation.”

The paper also quoted women who pointed to the countless modern Syrian women who have fulfilled roles as “politicians, judges, fighters, doctors, activists, and working mothers,” advising Arnaout to catch up on his reading about them.

Some women on social media demanded that Arnaout retract his remarks and resign.

At its most violent, Chido had winds of 150 miles per hour, and was still going nearly 140 miles an hour when it hit Mayotte. Huts, tin shanties, and bungalows offered no shelter at all from this juggernaut.

The Grantham Institute at Britain’s Imperial College estimated that human-caused climate change has made it 40% more likely that a tropical cyclone such as Chido would move from a Category 3 (11–129 miles per hour) to a Category 4 (130–156 miles per hour) on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. That is, the average global surface temperature is now 2.34º F. (1.3º C.) higher than in the late 1700s before the Industrial Revolution put all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal (and later petroleum and fossil gas). That extra heat makes the Indian Ocean hotter, and hot ocean waters create and turbocharge cyclones (called “hurricanes” in the Atlantic). Hot waters also put more moisture into the atmosphere, causing massive downpours of the sort that struck Mayotte. The scientists at the Grantham institute warn that if we heat the world up by 4.68º F. (2.6º C.) above the average of the late 1700s, cyclones like Chido will be 66% more likely to move from a Cat 3 to a Cat 4.

Seriously, I don’t know how people expect to have civilization if we do that, i.e. if we don’t stop burning gasoline and coal right now. France is able to establish an emergency airlift of food and supplies to Mayotte from Réunion off the coast of Madagascar, without which there would be mass starvation within 4 days. But what if hurricanes even more powerful than Chido hit Réunion and Mayotte at the same time? Repeatedly?

I lived in the Horn of Africa when I was a teenager, and it gave me an interest in the region. If you come down the coast of West Africa, Kenya gives way to Tanzania below Mombasa. And then just south of Mtwara you come to the border with Malawi. And if you got on a ship there and went out a little southeast, you’d come to the Comoros islands (in Arabic, jaza’ir al-qamar or Islands of the Moon). Comoros is an independent country now, consisting of three islands. It is a former French colony that became independent in 1975 and is a member of the Arab League.

But a fourth island, Mayotte, might have become part of Comoros in the age of decolonization in the 1970s. The people there instead voted to remain part of France, and they are now recognized as an overseas département. When you’re part of France, you’re part of France, no matter if you are out on the edge of Africa facing the Indian Ocean. They have a deputy in the French National Assembly and two senators. Puerto Rico should be so lucky.

French President Emmanuel Macron even came for a visit on Thursday.

The 320,000 people there are mostly Sunni Muslims of Bantu heritage and their language descends from Swahili (Arabic for the “coastal language”). There are a few Roman Catholics. About 20% of the population has good French, essential for getting a government job. There may be 100,000 undocumented migrants — people come from the Comoros to Mayotte hoping it will be a launching pad for getting into France.

It is tempting to see what happened to Mayotte as a fluke, and to see the suffering there as that of a distant and exotic people. But islands and coastal areas being flattened by hurricanes is going to become more and more common, and future storms will be even more destructive. This cosmopolitan member of the Islands of the Moon is trying to tell us something. We should listen.

—–

Bonus Video:

French Mayotte cyclone’s toll still unclear as authorities ramp up response • FRANCE 24 English

He nevertheless had the gall to accuse the Prime Minister of Ireland of being a bigot, closing the Israeli embassy in Dublin on the grounds that he views virtually all Irish people as racists. Hmm. There must be a word for when you negatively stereotype an entire people…

Likely the move came in response to Ireland’s recent decision to join in South Africa’s complaint against Israel for genocide with the International Court of Justice. Even more dangerous for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Gideon Saar, Ireland is seeking a more practicable definition of genocide. Current international legislation puts too much emphasis on intent and sets the bar for finding genocide so high it is almost impossible to meet.

Deputy Prime Minister Micheál Martin complained, “a very narrow interpretation of what constitutes genocide leads to a culture of impunity in which the protection of civilians is minimised.” He said the Irish view of the genocide convention is “broader” and prioritizes “the protection of civilian life.”

Some things about Saar should be remembered. In his youth he was a member of the far right Tehiya Party and he actively protested the 1982 Israeli withdrawal from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as a result of the Camp David peace accords. In other words, Saar has all his life held anti-Arab views and he wants to occupy and colonize the lands of his neighbors. The United Nations Charter, to which Israel is a signatory, forbids acquiring the territory of neighbors through aggressive war, but that was what Israel did in 1967 when it launched an invasion of Egypt, which had not militarily attacked it.

As Interior Minister, Saar rounded up African migrants in Israel and put them in a detention camp. He defended it and wanted to expand it. The camp was just for Africans. Hmm. There must be a word for when you target a particular racial group for collective punishment …

Saar opposed then President Trump’s “Deal of the Century” because it implied some form of a Palestinian state. Saar says Israel must remain the only state “from the river to the sea” (alert American university presidents, who seem to think this diction is racist). He firmly rejects any state for a Palestinian, insisting that they must remain stateless and under Israeli control forever. He says there can never be “two states for two peoples.” He wants to annex much of the Palestinian West Bank, a violation of international law. He considers Hebron (al-Khalil), a major Palestinian city in the Palestinian West Bank, to be part of Israel.

He said that Gaza “must be smaller” after the war, another advocacy of a war crime.

Let’s just imagine an American politician who wanted to occupy Manitoba or Tijuana militarily, who rounded up migrants and put them in camps, and who declared that there can be only one sovereign country in North America and it must be White. Those would be the US equivalents of Saar’s politics. Those politics, in our context, would be forthrightly characterized by everyone as racist.

It is one of the great ironies of our time that a man with these views can have the temerity to brand Irish President Michael D Higgins and Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Simon Harris racist bigots who are prejudiced against Jews.

Higgins gave as good as he got, saying “I think it’s very important to express, as president of Ireland, to say that the Irish people are antisemitic is a deep slander. To suggest because one criticises Prime Minister Netanyahu that one is antisemitic is such a gross defamation and slander.”

Juan Cole, “Pot’o’Gold,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024

Higgins came to the same realization as everyone else who has been gaslighted by right-wing Zionists with their phony (and cynical) charges of Jew-hatred whenever anyone objects to Israeli war crimes:

“Originally… I put it down to lack of experience but I saw later that it was part of a pattern to damage Ireland.”

It is sort of like if families of victims murdered by mid-twentieth-century Vegas hit man Bugsy Siegel were accused of only complaining because they didn’t like Jews.

Higgins insisted that Ireland “cannot be knocked off our principle[d] support of international law.” He pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the one who has broken international law. [The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.]

The Irish president pointed out that the Israeli government is currently violating “the sovereignty of three of his neighbours.” That would be Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. If Saar had his way it would be four, and would include Egypt.

Higgins made the remarks as he accepted the credentials of the new Palestinian ambassador to Ireland. Ireland, Spain and Norway reacted to Israel’s Gaza genocide by recognizing the state of Palestine last May.

The Irish equivalent of The Onion, WW News, made up some amusing reactions. They had one person, asked about the departure of the Israeli embassy from Dublin, say, “Is this the first time the Israeli government has actually given up property?”

Another joke: “Since the embassy will be going spare, we can probably let Palestinian refugees move in?”*

—–

*Revised.

Previous panels :

>

I will present a commentary on his observations about Syria:

Mr. President. . . With 900 troops in Syria, are you planning to withdraw when you leave office?

Trump: “We had 5,000 troops along the border, and I asked a couple of generals: So, we have an army of 250,000 in Syria, and you had an army of 400,000 — they have many more people than that. Turkey is a major force, by the way. And Erdogan — he’s somebody I got along with great — has a major military force. His military has not been worn out with war. It hasn’t been exhausted like others. He’s built a very strong and powerful army.

I am not sure, but I think Mr. Trump is saying that the former government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria had had 400,000 men in the Syrian Arab Army before the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, but that the numbers declined to 250,000 with desertions thereafter. My own guess is that when Trump was in office the numbers of Syrian troops had declined to more like 100,000.

I think he is recalling that he thought the 5,000 U.S. troops, which were there to coordinate the Kurdish and Arab militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces in fighting ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), were not necessary because Syria’s own 250,000 troops should have been able to handle ISIL.

If that is what he thought, it is incorrect. The Baath government of al-Assad relinquished the eastern Raqqa Province to ISIL and used its remaining troops to dominate the west of the country, what the French colonialists had called “Useful Syria” (la Syrie utile ). It had been the 5,000 US troops and the fighters of the SDF, mainly drawn from the leftist Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the northeast, who took Raqqa and defeated ISIL on October 17, 2017. That was on Trump’s watch. Perhaps he meant to say that by October, 2019, two years later, he felt that the US troop presence was no longer necessary to ensure that there wasn’t a resurgence of ISIL.

He is right about the Turkish army. which Global Fire Power ranks as eighth in the world. Turkey, a country a little more populous than Germany, has some 355,000 active duty military personnel and a similar number of reservists. It has 205 fighter jets and 111 attack helicopters. It has over 2,000 tanks and 1,700 or so big pulled artillery pieces. It is ranked above both Italy and France.

Trump: “So, we had 5,000 soldiers between a 5-million-person army and a 250,000-person army. I asked the general, ‘What do you think of that situation?’ He said, ‘They’ll be wiped out immediately.’ And I moved them out because I took a lot of heat. And you know what happened? Nothing. I saved a lot of lives. Now, we have 900 troops. They put some back in, but it’s still only 900.

My guess is that Trump’s mention of a 5 million-person army is a reference to the military of the Russian Federation, which actually has 3.7 million military personnel including reservists. The 250,000-man army is likely that of Syria, though I believe it is an over-estimate for 2019. Most authorities had the Syrian Arab Army at 141,400 at that time.

However, the size of the Russian and Syrian armies was a little irrelevant, since the US special operations forces supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces were fighting the remnants of ISIL and were not in active combat against the Syrian or Russian armies. Moscow and Damascus had left Syria’s far east and its ISIL problem to the US and the Kurds. The US and Russia seem to have had excellent deconfliction mechanisms in Syria.

The major battle between US forces and Russian ones was not with the regular Russian military but with Wagner group mercenaries. It took place in February 2018, when Wagner irregulars attempted to seize oil fields that the US was using to fund the Kurds.

So there wasn’t really in my view much chance that the 5,000 US troops in Syria in October 2019 would have to take on either the Russians or the Syrian Arab Army, or that they would be crushed, since they had excellent air cover.

I’m sure, on the other hand, that Russian President Vladimir Putin very much wanted the US troop presence in Syria to end.

Trump (Flash-forwards to the present:) “At this point, one of the sides has essentially been wiped out. Nobody knows who the other side is, but I do. You know who it is? Turkey. Turkey is the one behind it. He’s a very smart guy. They’ve wanted that territory for thousands of years, and he got it. Those people that went in are controlled by Turkey, and that’s okay — it’s another way to fight.

“No, I don’t think I want our soldiers killed. I don’t think that will happen now, because one side has been decimated.”

Trump’s estimation that the HTS sweep across Syria was made possible by Turkish backing is correct. The “smart guy” here is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is probably true that Turkiye exercises a certain amount of control over the new government. Using such proxies to dominate Syria and unseat the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party is indeed “another way to fight.”

Trump’s isolationist instincts are sometimes salutary. I can’t imagine what good it would be for the US to get involved militarily in the new Syria, and I hope he pulls out the remaining US troops at Tanf.

The only statement here with which I would quibble is the assertion that Turkiye has wanted Syria for thousands of years.

Turkiye only came into being on October 29, 1923. It was preceded by the Ottoman Empire, which defeated the Mamluks in 1516 at Marj Dabiq and conquered Syria that year. It ruled Syria until World War I, when the Arabic-speaking population allied with Britain during the war and expelled Turkish troops from Aleppo on October 25, 1918.

The Turkic Seljuks, who ruled part of what is now Turkiye along with Iran and Iraq, held part of Syria in the eleventh through thirteenth century. The Turkic peoples only came into the Middle East from East Asia in a big way with the Seljuks in the 1000s, the same period when the Norman French conquered England.

Before that, what is now Turkiye was inhabited by Armenians, peoples who spoke Iranian languages, and Greek speakers. So “Turkey” hasn’t existed for thousands of years, to want Syria all that time.

The rulers of Asia Minor, what is now Turkiye, included the Roman Empire. Augustus took Ankara in 25 BC. The Romans had already annexed Syria in 64 BC. So in that case, it was Italians based in Syria who took what is now Turkiye rather than the other way around.

The eastern Roman Empire lost Syria to Muslim forces in the 630s. The Muslim Umayyad caliphate based in Damascus attempted on several occasions to take Asia Minor away from the Byzantines or Eastern Rome, but failed. So too did the Abbasid caliphate after it.

I mean, if you want to consider “Turkey” anyone who lived in Anatolia, then I suppose there were ancient kingdoms based there that wanted Syria. The ancient Hittite kingdom in what is now Turkiye, which spoke an Indo-European language, conquered Syria on more than one occasion in the 1600s through 1400s BC. But before the Hittites, in the 2000s BC, the Hattians ruled Anatolia and they don’t seem to have been interested in Syria.

Saying that a “people” has wanted to do anything for thousands of years is essentialist and we historians don’t approve of that sort of language. Things change. “Peoples” go in and out of existence. State ambitions change.

A reporter asked Are you concerned about more unrest in that region, or do you think it will stabilize?

Trump: “Nobody knows what the final outcome will be in the region. Nobody knows who the final victor is going to be. I believe it’s Turkey. Erdogan is very smart, and he’s very tough. Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost. I can’t say that Assad wasn’t a butcher — what he did to children. You remember, I attacked him with 58 missiles. Unbelievable missiles coming from ships 700 miles away, and every one of them hit their target.

Mr. Trump is correct that Turkiye’s Erdogan is likely the final victor by virtue of his allies now controlling Damascus. However, the likelihood that Syria will stabilize seems to me low, given the regional rivalries, internal divisions, poverty and displacement. Also, Israel has destroyed the Syrian government weapons stock with hundreds of bombing raids in the past week, which leaves the new government with no means of fighting challengers such as a resurgent ISIL.

Mr. Trump is also correct that Bashar al-Assad was a butcher responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, for thousands of prisoners tortured to death, for striking children’s playgrounds with barrel bombs. He also did use chemical weqpons, to which Trump responded with a missile barrage in 2017.

Trump: “Obama had drawn the red line in the sand, but then he refused to honor it. Assad killed many more children after that, and Obama did nothing. But I did. I hit him with a lot of missiles. I remember the night President Xi was here; we were having chocolate cake at dinner when I explained what we were doing. Those missiles were shot, and it was amazing how precise they were —- every one hit its target.

“Had Obama enforced his red line, you wouldn’t have even had Russia there. But they are there now, and I never understood why. Russia isn’t getting much out of it. Now, their time is taken up with Ukraine, and we want that to stop too. It’s Carnage.”

I do not believe that Mr. Obama’s having declined to bomb Syria over chemical weapons use in 2013 had anything to do with the continuation of the war. Mr. Obama was refused support for this move both by the British Parliament and by the Republican-controlled Congress, and was politically forestalled from launching missiles. Those missiles would not have had any affect on the civil war. Nor did Mr. Trump’s 2017 missile barrage have any material impact on the course of the last stages of the Syrian Civil War.

Jeff: You mentioned the wars. Can you tell us what you said to Prime Minister Netanyahu in your call on Saturday? And have you spoken to President Putin since your election?

Trump: “I’m not going to comment on the Putin question, but I will comment on Netanyahu. We had a very good conversation. We discussed what’s going to happen moving forward, and I made it clear that I’ll be very available starting January 20th.

“Beyond that, it was mostly a recap call. I asked him about the current situation and where things stand. Mike Waltz, by the way, is doing a fantastic job. Everyone is very happy with him, and he was very involved in the call as well. . . “

Let’s hope the remaining Israeli hostages are indeed returned within a month. However, all hell broke loose in Gaza a year ago and has been ongoing and it is difficult to see what more Trump could do to Gaza short of killing off the remaining 2 million people entirely.

====

Video:

PBS NewsHour: “WATCH LIVE: Trump speaks to reporters at Mar-a-Lago”

The officers of the new government have said various things. BBC Monitoring reports that on December 14, the new minister of defense, Col. Hasan al-Hamada, said on Telegram that the new Syria would not enjoy security until it terminated the “separatist schemes” of what he termed the “PKK” (Kurdistan Workers Party or Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan), which he said held sway over the east of the country. The PKK began as a Marxist separatist faction in the late 1970s and is still viewed as a terrorist organization by the US, Turkey and some European countries.

Since the PKK is based in Iraq and Turkey’s eastern Anatolia, al-Hamada was likely instead referring to the YPG or People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel) in northeastern Syria, the paramilitary for AANES, which denies any relationship to the more radical PKK. His words were ominous for the Kurdish regions, and reflected the desires of the patron of the ruling faction in the new Syria, Turkey, which wants to see the YPG disarmed.

In contrast, the leader of the new government, Ahmad al-Shara (nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), has been more conciliatory. BBC Monitoring reports his remarks this weekend to Istanbul-based Syria TV, which is Qatari-owned. He made a distinction between the “Kurdish community” and the “PKK organization.”

On Sunday on a Syrian Telegram channel, al-Shara said that Kurds are a fundamental component of the coming Syria. He added, “The Kurds are a part of the homeland, and were exposed to tremendous injustice, as we were. With the fading of the regime, it may be that the injustice that befell them will fade as well.” He stressed the importance of “justice and equality for all,” such as would ensure “new regulations and a new history in Syria.”

The sweep of HTS forces from Idlib to Aleppo had caused the displacement of some Kurds in the Afrin region. Al-Shara pledged, “We will seek to return our people there to their villages and regions.” If he is sincere and has the power to make this happen, it would be a significant development and would cross his Turkish patrons, who want to break up the band of Kurdish habitation along the Syrian-Turkish border in the north.

Al-Shara’s remarkable statements on Sunday were hailed by the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, head of that country’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which rules the Kurdistan Regional Government or super-province of northern Iraq.

Barzani said, “We have seen a statement by Ahmed al-Sharaa about the Kurdish people in Syria, in which he described the Kurdish people as part of the homeland and a partner in the future of Syria.” He added that “this vision of the Kurds and of the future of Syria is a source of joy and is welcome to us, and we hope that it will be the beginning of a correction of the course of history and of ending the wrong and unfair actions that were taken against the Kurdish people in Syria.”

Barzani continued that “such a perspective represents a starting point that paves the way for building a strong Syria; and the Kurds, Arabs and all other components of Syria must seize this opportunity to participate together in building a stable, free and democratic Syria.”

Barzani’s reaction is important for a number of reasons. Kurds in Iraq have had their own experience in reintegrating into a largely Arab country after the fall of a Baath regime, and have found ways to be influential in Baghdad while keeping some semi-autonomy. They are sometimes portrayed as the Quebec of Iraq.

Additionally, if the HTS were to move aggressively against the Syrian Kurds, Barzani could push back militarily. Both the KRG military force, the Peshmerga, and the thousands of PKK fighters hiding out in Iraq’s Qandil mountains could make a lot of trouble for the new Syria if it moves aggressively against the Kurds, as new Defense Minister al-Hamada seems to have envisioned. Further, Iraqi Kurds have influence in Baghdad, where Shiite leaders view al-Shara and his colleagues as little better than ISIL.

Moreover, the European Union, individual European countries and the US are watching the HTS-led government carefully to see if it takes the route of human rights, before they will consider lifting sanctions on Syria. The country desperately needs sanctions relief, and avoiding the Arab nationalist mistakes of the past with regard to the Kurds may be one of the prices Damascus has to pay. It won’t make Turkey happy, but Turkey itself would vastly benefit from a lifting of Syrian sanctions, since otherwise Ankara will have to carry the Syrian economy itself and Turkish firms could face sanctions for investing there.

The autonomous Kurdish AANES is for the most part civilly administered by the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat), which follows the left-wing cooperativist philosophy of Brooklyn thinker Murray Bookchin. It rules over roughly 2.4 million of Syria’s 24 million people.

As noted, the paramilitary of the Democratic Union Party is the YPG or People’s Protection Units. They form the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which have been backed by the US Department of Defense and which played the major role in defeating the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist group that briefly ruled parts of Syria and Iraq 2014-2018. US special operations troops embedded among them.

In 2019, President Donald J. Trump was widely blamed for giving Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the green light to invade the Kurdish regions of northern Syria and to establish a military buffer zone, which led to the displacement of tens of thousands of Kurds and the deaths of SDF fighters who had saved America’s bacon in the fight against ISIL.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces kicked the Baath Party of Bashar al-Assad out of the northeast in 2011 and in recent times had an uneasy truce with it, as long as it respected their semi-autonomy. Arab nationalist Syria had never known what to do with the country’s Kurds, who are not Arabs, and had stripped them of citizenship in 1963.

By the way, the book makes a great Christmas gift for your progressive friends and family members who agree that Christmas should mean that no one should ever be genocided.

At the Versailles Peace Conference after the war and more specifically at its San Remo satellite conference, Britain was awarded a League of Nations Mandate over Iraq and Palestine. Mandates were envisaged by the League of Nations as a temporary guardianship, such that the mandatory power had the responsibility to train up their wards for independent statehood. This plan, however paternalistic and imperialist, did give birth eventually to the new independent nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Togo, Rwanda and Tanzania. The Mandate of Palestine, however, did not lead to a state of Palestine in the same way.

In 1917, the British cabinet had been convinced by London Zionists, proponents of turning Judaism into a form of nationalism that sought to colonize a territory, to issue the Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild, saying, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” It was a ridiculous pledge, since no such home for the Jewish people (even if the British then thought about it more as a community center than a new nation-state) could have avoided injuring the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. The British rulers of hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans thought nothing about moving people around to suit their imperial interests, and even at one point considered transporting millions of Punjabis to Iraq to relieve what they saw as India’s dangerous population pressure. In 1915, two years before the tragic Balfour Declaration, 683,389 Arabic-speaking natives dwelled in the territory that the British would call Palestine, about 81,000 of them Christians and the rest Muslims. There were only 38,752 Jews, most of them recent immigrants from Russia and Europe permitted to come into these provinces by the Ottoman sultan, some as pilgrims qua retirees.[i]

The British in Palestine created a province of Gaza, separating it from the Bedouin-dominated area of Beersheba and the Negev, and permitted its notable families to administer it, though some refused to cooperate with the foreigners and others engaged in clan-based political faction-fighting. The war-time food crisis passed, probably helped more by the “highly fertile” land of Gaza than by laissez-faire British economic policies. Still, growing landlessness and poverty kept much of the population on the edge.[ii] The influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, whom the indigenous viewed as illegal aliens sponsored by an illegitimate colonialism, created tensions. People in Gaza, as in the rest of Palestine, demonstrated annually against the Balfour Declaration. The Jews who colonized Palestine (their words) established a Jewish National Fund to buy land, which it forbade ever after to be sold to a non-Jew. The Palestinian population, in a largely agricultural country, doubled from 1915 to 1947, turning many proprietors into very small farmers or landless laborers. At the same time, Jewish immigrants took six percent of the best land off the market. A riot against Jews in 1928 in Jerusalem had echoes in Gaza, where the 54 Jews were threatened by a mob. The former mayor, Said Shawa, and his clan intervened to protect the Jews. Some mayors in the 1930s, Filiu explained, undertook improvements, establishing a new hospital, a park, and a fancy neighborhood near the beach. He says that the French tourist magazine, Le Guide Bleu, in 1932 praised Gaza City’s lively markets, its antiquities such as the ancient mosque, and its good communications, since it lay on the rail link from Haifa to the Suez Canal. It put Gaza City’s population at 17,480, more than four times larger than Khan Younis. Deir al-Balah and Rafah were small.[iii]

The pledge of the Balfour Declaration took on a significance beyond the relatively small Zionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of virulent European fascist movements that made Jew-hatred a centerpiece of their projects. Polish anti-Jewish measures and the antipathy to immigration in the United States caused Jews seeking to emigrate to go to British Mandate Palestine. The Jewish population there had swelled to about 175,000 by 1931. By 1939 it had nearly tripled to over 457,000.[iv] These immigrants were refugees from an unprecedented paroxysm of murderous European racism, not for the most part committed Zionists with a program for settler colonialism. Once in Palestine, and given the horrors of the 1940s, however, some of them were available for mobilization by the ideological Zionists. This enormous influx of displaced Europeans created conflicts with indigenous Palestinians.
           

Notables and townspeople in Gaza joined in the strikes and demonstrations of 1936-1939, the “Great Revolt,” which protested British colonial rule and the policy of allowing in thousands of European Jews. The uprising was begun by Ezzeddin al-Qassam, whom the British killed late in 1935, making him a martyr. Militias proliferated among Palestinians and immigrant Jews. The British military allied with the Haganah, one of the Jewish militias, in putting down the revolt. Nevertheless, in May 1939 the Colonial Office under Malcolm MacDonald put forward a White Paper that laid out a plan to halt Jewish immigration and to create a Palestinian state by 1949 that would contain a Jewish minority.[v]

Juan Cole, Gaza Yet Stands (Ann Arbor: Informed Comment KDP, 2024). Click here to buy.

Instead, the British after World War II announced that they would abruptly depart Palestine. The Zionist militias took advantage of this looming power vacuum, undertaking attacks on British and Palestinian targets in hopes of reversing the MacDonald White Paper. The Mandate fell into civil war. A shockingly unbalanced and anti-Palestinian U.N. General Assembly advisory plan for partition issued in late 1947 made things worse by raising the hopes of the ambitious Zionists that they could defy expectations that they would become a model minority in an independent Palestine and instead establish a state for themselves on a territory far greater than the 6 percent they had managed to purchase and settle. As the civil war unfolded, the commanders on the ground were emboldened and began deliberately chasing out the Palestinian population. Joel Beinin, reviewing the findings of Israeli historian Benny Morris, observed that in July of 1948 the Arab Affairs director of the leftist Zionist Mapam party, Aharon Cohen, received a copy of a report from military intelligence. It explained why 240,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled from the regions awarded to the Jews by the 1947 U.N. General Assembly partition proposal and another 150,000 left the Jerusalem region and territories suggested for the Arab state. Beinin wrote, “Cohen was upset to read the report’s conclusion that 70 percent of these Arabs had fled due to ‘direct, hostile Jewish operations against Arab settlements’ by Zionist militias, or the ‘effect of our hostile operations on nearby (Arab) settlements.’”[vi] The leftwing Mapam politicians had not wanted this ethnic cleansing, but politicians by then were not in control of events on the ground.

Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, with a little help from Iraq, came into the war, though often with relatively small forces. The sheer number of troops on each side was roughly equal. The Arabs, however, were no match for the well-organized Zionist forces some of whom had served in the anti-Nazi resistance or in the British Army, and who obtained good weaponry from Czechoslovakia. Jordan seemed mainly interested in grabbing the West Bank for itself and did not otherwise pose much of a challenge to the Zionists. The bureaucrats of the corrupt Egyptian government sold off equipment on the black market that should have gone to soldiers at the front. By the time of the 1949 Armistice, some 750,000 Palestinians had been ousted from what became Israel. In the south, some 250,000 of them were expelled to Gaza, where they swamped the 80,000 natives, becoming 70 percent of the population in what now was referred to as the Gaza “Strip,” five miles wide and 28 miles long.[vii] They never received any compensation for the property they lost or for having been made permanent refugees.

Egypt served as the caretaker for the Palestinians of Gaza for the succeeding decades. The Strip suffered from being cut off from its agricultural hinterland, which was usurped by the Israelis, and from its traditional trading markets in what became Israel and the West Bank, a separation that contained the origins of its long-term food insecurity. Egypt co-administered the territory, the population of which had been rendered stateless, with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.[viii]

During the 1967 Six Day War, which Israel’s leadership launched in hopes of vastly expanding its territory, Tel Aviv’s armies captured Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. By the 1970s, elements of the Zionist establishment in Israel had decided to attempt to colonize the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). In Gaza, Israeli economic policies, including restrictions on water use, began a process of “de-development.”[ix] While Egypt recovered the Sinai Peninsula with the 1979 Camp David Accords, the latter functioned as a separate peace. With the largest, best-armed and most capable Arab army out of the game, Israel could do as it pleased with the Palestinians in the OPT, and its hardliners pleased to colonize them and annex them. Some Israeli governments at some points, as with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 or Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, showed a willingness to compromise and to seriously consider a Palestinian state (though a very weak one that Israel could be sure to dominate). Their wiser instincts were overruled, however, by the rising Israeli right wing, embodied at first in the Likud Party but joined by new entrants as a million Russian and other immigrant Jews from the old East Bloc flooded into the country in the 1990s, many of whom were hungry for living space and resources and opposed relinquishing the West Bank and Gaza.

Inside Gaza under Israeli occupation, a hothouse atmosphere of resistance inevitably grew up. Large numbers of people gave their loyalty to the umbrella group of secular and leftist parties, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had many grassroots organizers and which sponsored institutions such as al-Azhar University (a secular school not related to the Egyptian seminary). The PLO, led by the Fatah Party, recognized Israel in 1993. Palestinians in Gaza were and are religiously and politically diverse. Hamas’s narrow victory in the 2006 elections for the Palestine Authority has created an image of fundamentalism as more hegemonic in Gaza than it is, in part because of winner-take-all electoral rules. Aaron N. Bondar observed of the 2006 elections, “there were 170,021 votes for Hamas (Change and Reform) candidates in North Gaza and 146,818 votes for Fatah candidate; a total of 390,194 votes were cast. Hamas, despite receiving only 44 percent of the vote, gained 100 percent of the seats.”[x]

The Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist organization of political Islam founded in Egypt in 1928, had established a small branch in Gaza in 1936. It was a decidedly minority taste for most Palestinians. Palestinian politics has often had a secular, nationalist or leftist overtone. Practicing Muslims among Palestinians were usually moderate traditionalists rather than fundamentalists, and Sufi orders remain active in Gaza.[xi]  The Brotherhood gradually built a following, however, by constructing a network of mosques, clinics, soup kitchens in desperately poor Gaza, supplementing the work of UNRWA and other aid groups. A group drawn from the Brotherhood formed the core of the radical Hamas organization, founded in 1987. In response to Israeli strikes on Gaza and Tel Aviv’s strangling of its economy.

The Hamas paramilitary, the Ezzeddin al-Qassam Brigades, began conducting reprisal attacks on Israel in the 1990s. The non-state organization was straightforwardly committed to violence as a form of resistance, and it made no distinction between military and civilian targets. Hamas did its part in torpedoing the 1993 Oslo Accords, which it viewed as fatal to its maximalist (and wholly unrealistic) demands for an overthrow of Israel, with a series of high-profile attacks on civilians. In response to provocations and attacks by the government of Ariel Sharon, including the de-development of the Gaza economy, it engaged in another round of terrorist operations from 2000, killing hundreds of Israelis, though Israelis killed far more Palestinians with air strikes.[xii] It was, however, capable of concluding and honoring a truce with the Israelis for a year or more at a time (sometimes it was the Israelis who violated such understandings).

Successive Israeli governments also used Hamas for their own purposes, to keep the Palestinians politically divided and to weaken the PLO, and to represent themselves as defending Israelis from (largely ineffectual) Hamas rockets. The Israeli economic boycott devasted the small Palestinian middle class in Gaza, which had the resources to resist Hamas, and some proportion of which favored the secular-minded PLO. The extended family unit of the Palestinians is the Hamulah or clan, and Hamulahs make up a republic of cousins bound by loyalty, honor, and feuding with other clans. The impoverishment of these clans made it easier for Hamas to penetrate and tame them. It has been argued that Hamas subdued the Hamulahs in part through violence and in part through mobilizing them into an informal judicial system for settling conflicts.[xiii] Where even one member of a Hamulah joined Hamas, that person’s male relatives – brothers, uncles and cousins – would feel a responsibility to declare a blood feud and take revenge if he was killed by the Israelis.

[i] B.C. Busch, Britain, India and the Arabs, 1914–21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 22; Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 12.

[ii] Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza; Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 131-133.

[iii] Filiu, Gaza, 40-43.

[iv] “Demography and the Palestine Question,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/294/demography-and-palestine-question-i

[v] R. Orzeck, “Normative geographies and the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39 (2014): 345-359.

[vi] Joel Beinin, “No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), 230 (Spring 2004), https://merip.org/2004/03/no-more-tears/; citing Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83-102.

[vii] Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2^nd edn., 2013); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: WW Norton, 2^nd edn. 2014).

[viii] Feldman, Governing Gaza, 135-140; Filiu, Gaza, 57-121.

[ix] Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995).

[x] Aaron N. Bondar, “Breaking down the 2006 Palestinian elections vote-by-vote,” ProgressME Magazine, Mar 15, 2016 https://medium.com/progressme-magazine/breaking-down-the-2006-palestinian-elections-vote-by-vote-cfc0ca2fd444

[xi] Ala’ al-Muqayyad, “Al-Tasawwuf fi Ghazzah: Tariq al-hurub min ‘din al-siyasah’ ila din al-ruh,” Raseef, June 21, 2016. https://tinyurl.com/598hynej

[xii] Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, Hamas (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010); Tarek Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of the Palestinian Resistance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018), chapters 1-3.

[xiii] Abdalhadi Alijla, “The (Semi) State’s Fragility: Hamas, Clannism, and Legitimacy,” Soc. Science, 10, no. 11 (2021): 437-455.

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Türkiye is suffering from increasing summer heat waves, especially in the western part of the country, creating dramatic increases in electricity use from ACs.

But the country has also showed that there is an alternative to this constant ratcheting up of the temperature. According to the energy think tank Ember, 2/3s of the increased demand for electricity, mostly caused by the sweltering temperatures of the summer of 2024, was met by new solar installations. Turkish energy production from solar was up 40% in the first half of 2024, year over year.

By putting in new solar installations, Türkiye in 2024 avoided 16 gigawatts of dirty electricity produced by fossil fuels. All of those fossil fuels would have been imported, since Türkiye is poor in these resources, resulting in a big import bill. That expenditure was also avoided.

“Solar Golden Horne,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 /Clip2Comic, 2024 >

Türkiye reached 16 gigawatts of installed solar capacity this summer, which is 14% of the country’s installed power capacity. It has already risen to 18.7 gigawatts in December. The government wants to increase solar capacity to 22.6 gigawatts in the next twelve months.

A little over half of the country’s electricity is produced by coal-fired and fossil gas-fired plants on a year-round basis, but the government has plans to invest heavily in renewables toward a zero-carbon electric grid over the next little over a decade. It plans 89 gigawatts of new solar and wind capacity by 2035, with plans to invest $108 billion in the transformation.

Greening the Turkish grid is made difficult not only by the extra air conditioning use in increasingly hot summers, but also by the economy’s continued expansion. It is one of the fastest-growing countries in the world economically, which creates vast additional electricity demand.

Türkiye is also going for 14.8 gigawatts of wind generation by the end of next year.

Turkish electric vehicle sales are also surging by 39% this year. The country produces the Togg, for which it is seeking increased Chinese partnerships, and plans to export it to Europe starting next year. The Togg is helping drive EV sales domestically and creating local jobs, showing how green technology can help power clean industrialization.

Türkiye, a member of NATO, is the world’s 17th largest economy, making it a member of the G20, with a projected 2024 nominal GDP of $1.3 trillion. It has a population of 87 million, just a little bit more than that of Germany.