A whole year has passed since the Israeli war on Gaza, during which Israel has crossed all humanitarian, political and military lines.

It does not seem that the Israeli Prime Minister has any clear strategy other than remaining in power for as long as possible. After Israel assassinated Hezbollah Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, Netanyahu’s popularity seems to be on the rise, which boosts his ability to remain in power today. It is also not unlikely that he will seek to prolong the war for another reason, which is his unwillingness to give Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, any part in stopping the war and he prefers to wait for the results of the US elections to see whether Trump wins, as Trump will deal with him better than the Democrats, even with Biden’s blatant support for Israel and providing it with all the weapons it needs to sustain the war.

The war will end one way or another at some point. Post-war Jordan will face a major dilemma in terms of its approach to the future relationship with Israel. Official Jordan used a justification that seemed convincing in the past in the context of it promoting the signing of a peace treaty with Israel to its citizens. This justification was that signing the treaty forced Israel to recognise the Jordanian state and the Jordanian borders, which would kill the notion of an alternative homeland, which practically means emptying the Palestinian land of its population and claiming the existence of a Palestinian state in Jordan rather than on Palestinian soil. Jordan even insisted on including an explicit text in the treaty against any attempt at mass displacement of the population (i.e. from the Palestinian territories to Jordan).

In addition, after Netanyahu and the extreme right came to power, the official Jordanian position was that Israel’s stubborn position on the peace process was not the end of the road, and that Netanyahu would leave power at some point, and that Jordan should wait until a more flexible and balanced Israeli prime minister comes to power, allowing for the resumption of talks with Israel about ways to end the Occupation and establish a Palestinian State.

Image of Amman by Heike Hartmann from Pixabay

The Israeli war on Gaza has greatly weakened these two justifications. It has become clear that one of Israel’s main goals of the war is to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible in Gaza, either by directly killing them or by making Gaza an uninhabitable place after Israel destroyed all the needs of life in the Strip, including road, electricity and water networks, schools, hospitals and places of worship. Moreover, Israeli settlers in the West Bank continue to attack Palestinian population centres, with the support of the Israeli army, in blatant attempts to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, in preparation for creating or taking advantage of conditions that would allow for their displacement.

The second argument, which was the hope for an Israeli prime minister with whom Jordan could reach an understanding regarding the establishment of a Palestinian State coming to power, has also collapsed, especially after the Israeli Knesset passed a law last July, with the approval of all major Israeli parties, including the opposition, against the establishment of a Palestinian State.

The current division in Israel is only between those who support Netanyahu and those against Netanyahu, but with regards to the Palestinian issue, there is almost an Israeli consensus on rejecting the Palestinian State. This stubborn Israeli popular and official position is not expected to change, as Israeli society has been increasingly radicalised in the past twenty years, and there is no significant Israeli popular critical mass calling for peace, neither now nor in the foreseeable future.

Hence, Jordan faces a real dilemma in the post-war period. Resuming economic and security cooperation with Israel will expose the government to a direct confrontation with an angry and rejecting public opinion and will give Israel the impression that Jordan is not serious in its opposition to Israeli policies. However, continuing with the current Jordanian position, which is ahead of other Arab countries in terms of its harsh criticism of Israel, will expose it to serious pressure from the US and others.

Therefore, the outcome of the Jordanian elections is extremely important. Rather than just being a stark expression of where the Jordanian public opinion stands, the Jordanian decision-maker can use these results to resist any external pressures that Jordan may be exposed to.

The crossroads that Jordan will face is of great importance, and it calls for a serious national dialogue about the future of the Jordanian-Israeli relationship. While cancelling the peace treaty may not be on the table for several reasons, examining the remaining options and choosing the best of them is a national need because it is clear that returning to the status quo between Jordan and Israel before 7 October is neither possible nor acceptable.

This article appeared in Arabic in Al Quds on 7 October, 2024.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Marwan Muasher is vice president for studies at Carnegie, where he oversees research in Washington and Beirut on the Middle East. Muasher served as foreign minister (2002–2004) and deputy prime minister (2004–2005) of Jordan, and his career has spanned the areas of diplomacy, development, civil society, and communications.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

I’m reprinting here my most recent Tomdispatch essay for The Nation Institute, on the possible emergence of a centrist Sunni bloc that aims to offset Israeli power in the region. Check out, as well, Tom Engelhardt’s essential introduction, here.

At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: the Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a “rules-based” international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

Breathtaking Hypocrisy

Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians. This summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law and, in response, the U.S. and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the global South have joined in its attempt to ostracize Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor forms of political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt, daggers long drawn over their differing views of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012-2013, have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.

The persistence of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in pressing Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. security partner, to recognize Israel at a moment when the Arab public is boiling with anger over what they see as a campaign of genocide in Gaza, is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman the pitiful plea that he fears being assassinated were he to normalize relations with Tel Aviv now. And consider that ironic given his own past role in ordering the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In short, the ongoing inside-the-Beltway ambition to secure further Arab recognition of Israel amid the annihilation of Gaza has America’s security partners wondering if Washington is trying to get them killed — anything but a promising basis for a long-term alliance.

Global Delegitimization

The science-fiction-style nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East is starkly revealed when you consider the position of Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel. In early September, its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned that any attempt by the Israeli military or its squatter-settlers to expel indigenous West Bank Palestinians to Jordan would be considered an “act of war.” While such anxieties might once have seemed overblown, the recent stunning (and stunningly destructive) Israeli military campaign on the Palestinian West Bank, including bombings of populated areas by fighter jets, has already begun to resemble the campaign in Gaza in its tactics. And keep in mind that, as August ended, Foreign Minister Israel Katz even urged the Israeli army to compel Palestinians to engage in a “voluntary evacuation” of the northern West Bank.

Not only is the expulsion of Palestinians from there now the stated policy of cabinet members like Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir; it’s the preference of 65% of Israelis polled. And mind you, when Israel and Jordan begin talking war you know something serious is going on, since the last time those two countries actively fought was in the 1973 October War during the administration of President Richard Nixon.

In short, Netanyahu and his extremist companions are in the process of undoing all the diplomatic progress their country achieved in the past half-century. Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, warned in August that the brutal policies the extremists in the government were pursuing are “a stain on Judaism” and will lead to “global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies.”

Turkey, a NATO ally with which the U.S. has mutual defense obligations, has become vociferous in its discontent with President Biden’s Middle Eastern policy. Although Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party interactions had grown rocky even before the Gaza nightmare. Still, until then their trade and military ties had survived occasional shouting matches between their politicians. The Gaza genocide, however, has changed all that. Erdogan even compared Netanyahu to Hitler, and then went further still, claiming that, in the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza in May, “Netanyahu has reached a level with his genocidal methods that would make Hitler jealous.”

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Worse yet, the Turkish president, referred to by friend and foe as the “sultan” because of his vast power, has now gone beyond angry words. Since last October, he’s used Turkey’s position in NATO to prohibit that organization from cooperating in any way with Israel on the grounds that it’s violating the NATO principle that harm to civilians in war must be carefully minimized. The Justice and Development Party leader also imposed an economic boycott on Israel, interrupting bilateral trade that had reached $7 billion a year and sending the price of fruits and vegetables in Israel soaring, while leading to a shortage of automobiles in the Israeli market.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents the country’s small towns and rural areas and its Muslim businesses and entrepreneurs, constituencies that care deeply about the fate of Muslim Palestinians in Gaza. And while Erdogan’s high dudgeon has undoubtedly been sincere, he’s also pleasing his party’s stalwarts in the face of an increasing domestic challenge from the secular Republican People’s Party. In addition, he’s long played to a larger Arab public, which is apoplectic over the unending carnage in Gaza.

The Alliance of Muslim Countries

Although it was undoubtedly mere bluster, Erdogan even threatened a direct intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians. In early August, he said, “Just as we intervened in Karabakh [disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia], just as we intervened in Libya, we will do the same to them.” In early September, the Turkish president called for an Islamic alliance in the region to counter what he characterized as Israeli expansionism:

“Yesterday, one of our own children, [Turkish-American human rights advocate] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was vilely slaughtered [on the West Bank]. Israel will not stop in Gaza. After occupying Ramallah [the de facto capital of that territory], they will look around elsewhere. They’ll fix their eyes on our homeland. They openly proclaim it with a map. We say Hamas is resisting for the Muslims. Standing against Israel’s state terror is an issue of importance to the nation and the country. Islamic countries must wake up as soon as possible and increase their cooperation. The only step that can be taken against Israel’s genocide is the alliance of Muslim countries.”

In fact, the present nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank may indeed be changing political relationships in the region. After all, the Turkish president pointed to his rapprochement with Egypt as a building block in a new security edifice he envisions. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made his first visit to Ankara on September 4th (following a February Erdogan trip to Cairo). And those visits represented the end of a more than decade-long cold war in the Sunni Muslim world over al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against elected Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom Erdogan had backed.

Despite its apparent embrace of democratic norms in 2012-2013, some Middle Eastern rulers charged the Brotherhood with having covert autocratic ambitions throughout the region and sought to crush it. For the moment, the Muslim Brotherhood and other forms of Sunni political Islam have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and the Persian Gulf region. Erdogan, a pragmatist despite his support for the Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, had been in the process of getting his country the best possible deal, given such a regional defeat, even before the Israelis struck Gaza.

Netanyahu’s Forever War in Gaza

For his part, Egypt’s al-Sisi is eager for greater leverage against Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a forever war in Gaza. After all, the Gaza campaign has already inflicted substantial damage on Egypt’s economy, since Yemen’s Houthis have supported the Gazans with attacks on container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea. That has, in turn, diverted traffic away from it and from the Suez Canal, whose tolls normally earn significant foreign exchange for Egypt. In the first half of 2024, however, it took in only half the canal receipts of the previous year. Although tourism has held up reasonably well, any widening of the war could devastate that industry, too.

Egyptians are also reportedly furious over Netanyahu’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of the city of Rafah in Gaza and his blithe disregard of Cairo’s prerogatives under the Camp David agreement to patrol that corridor. The al-Sisi government, which, along with Qatar’s rulers and the Biden administration, has been heavily involved in hosting (so far fruitless) peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel, seems at the end of its tether, increasingly angered at the way the Israeli prime minister has constantly tacked new conditions onto any agreements being discussed, causing the talks to fail.

For months, Cairo has also been seething over Netanyahu’s charge that Egypt allowed tunnels to be built under that corridor to supply Hamas with weaponry, insisting that the Egyptian army had diligently destroyed 1,500 such tunnels. Egypt’s position was given support recently by Nadav Argaman, a former head of Shin Bet, who said, “There is no connection between the weaponry found in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.” Of Netanyahu, he added, “He knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphi Corridor. So, we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment.”

In the Turkish capital, Ankara, Al-Sisi insisted that he wanted to work with Erdogan to address “the humanitarian tragedy that our Palestinian brothers in Gaza are facing in an unprecedented disaster that has been going on for nearly a year.” He underscored that there was no daylight between Egypt and Turkey “regarding the demand for an immediate ceasefire, the rejection of the current Israeli escalation in the West Bank, and the call to start down a path that achieves the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” He also pointed out that such positions are in accord with U.N. Security Council resolutions and pledged to work with Turkey to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza despite “the ongoing obstacles imposed by Israel.”

To sum up, the ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes and the fury of their own people could, in the end, destabilize their rule. Countries that, not so long ago, had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies. And the alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.

That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position — or lack of one — on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too). Today, all too sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.

Copyright 2024 Juan Cole

Featured Image: “Erdogan and al-Sisi,” Digital, Dream /Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint/ Clip2Comic, 2024

What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

Sot al-Iraq, an independent Baghdad daily, reported that the US counter-strike on Qaim on the border of Iraq and Syria killed two civilians and wounded 5 other people.

Although US military analysts and spokesmen will say that the US air strikes are aimed at degrading the militia’s capabilities and at deterring it from future such attacks, it isn’t very likely that either goal will be achieved in this way. Bombing guerrilla groups from 30,000 feet is as close to a futile military tactic as you can get. It is not as though these light, mobile forces were likely sitting around in their known bases and hideouts, oblivious that the US was coming for them.

In any case, the Party of God Brigades already announced that it was pausing its attacks on US forces after the Jordan operation killed three US servicemen. It makes you wonder whether they had been expecting the US to shoot down their drone and were appalled that it got through and killed servicemen. The Saudi owned, London-based daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat alleges that the militia was pressured afterwards by Iran and by Shiite political parties in the Iraqi parliament to suspend their anti-American attacks.

Iraq’s president, Abdul Latif Rashid, and the prime minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani, warned against Iraq becoming an arena of regional conflict.

Although Friday’s air strikes on the Party of God Brigades’ known facilities are unlikely to spiral into a general war, you never know about these things. People don’t usually start out trying to have a war– they often fall into it.

MSNBC Video: “‘More airstrikes and Tomahawk missiles’: How U.S. may continue targeting Iran-backed militia groups”

President Joe Biden could easily avoid the necessity of bombing Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and the good Lord knows how many other countries in the region. He just has to do three things to make US troop secure in the region.

1. He could cut Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu off from resupply of armaments and ammunition, forcing a ceasefire in Gaza. Whatever is going on there, it isn’t primarily a war on Hamas. It is a total war on Gaza civilians, hundreds of whom are likely dying of hunger daily, on top of the innocent civilians killed by air strikes and sniping. No one can understand Biden’s single-minded dedication to the killing of 27,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children.

2. Biden could just pull the US troops out of Syria. It is crazy that they are still there. They only total 900, spread across three small forward operating bases. The Syrian government doesn’t want them there and given the defeat of ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), their presence is no longer required for self-defense. Their presence is by now illegal in international law. They are also exposed to danger, being so few. Bring them home.

3. Biden could also withdraw the 2500 US troops from Iraq. The Iraqi parliament voted against their continued presence in January 2020, so they are there illegally, as well. They are also exposed and vulnerable.

Presto change-o, the extreme tensions and crisis that threaten to draw the US into a wider war would likely evaporate.

Or, Biden could go on the mule-headed and amoral way he is going. It is starting to cast a dark cloud over his presidential campaign. Yesterday his swing through Michigan did not include an appearance in Dearborn, which has a significant Arab and Muslim population. They are an important swing vote in the state. The Biden people tried to set up a meeting, but were rebuffed.

Ceasefire.

The Party of God Brigades were founded by Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis. The organization is not related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon, though the two have a collegial relationship. Al-Muhandis was assassinated by President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 along with the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani. Ever since, the Brigades have sought to force out of Iraq the remaining 2500 US troops there and to force out of Syria the remaining 900 US troops stationed in that country. US troops were put into those two countries by the Obama administration during the fight against the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist organization, 2014-2018. In those years, the US was often de facto allied with Shiite militias such as the PGB and with their sponsor, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. In 2018, Trump destroyed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and placed a “maximum pressure” economic siege on the Iranian economy. That and his assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis set Iran and its allies, the Shiite militias of the Middle East, on an increasingly belligerent footing.

The Party of God Brigades and other Iraqi Shiite militias have launched around 150 attacks on bases housing US troops since the Gaza conflict broke out on October 7.

Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] printed the communique it received from the God’s Party Brigades:

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

“Leave is given to those who fight because they were wronged — surely God is able to help them .” [Qur’an 22:39].

Continuing our path of resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region, and in response to the massacres of the Zionist entity against our people in Gaza, at dawn today, Sunday 1/28/2024, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked four enemy bases with unmanned aerial vehicles — three of them in Syria and they are Al-Shaddadi, al-Rukban and al-Tanf bases, and the fourth inside our occupied Palestinian lands, and it is the US Marines’ Zafulun Facility. The Islamic Resistance affirms that it will continue to destroy enemy compounds.

“Victory is only from God. God is Almighty, All-Wise.” [Qur’an 8:10].

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq
Sunday 16 Rajab 1445

God knows what Zafulun is, but apparently it is their term for the place that Tower 22 stands. It is interesting that the group views the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as part of occupied Palestine. Palestine and the Transjordan were conquered by the British army during World War I and Britain subsequently ruled the West Bank and the rest of Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate, while giving charge of the Transjordan to the family of the Sharif Hussain, the Naqib or leading noble of Mecca, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and his clan, the Banu Hashem. Hussain and his sons had supported the British against the Ottomans during WW I because the British lied to them and promised them an independent Arab state after the war. In any case, this Shiite militia appears to view the Hashemite Dynasty (King Abdullah II is a descendant of Sharif Hussain) as illegitimate.

In return, the highly capable and effective Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, is even as we speak making plans to help track down and kill the PGB cadres behind this attack on Jordanian soil. Jordan will also have some harsh words for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani, who came to power with the support of the Shiite militias and is thought to be close to them.

Aljazeera English Video: “Three US service members killed in drone attack on US post in Jordan near Syria”

The Ma`refa site says that al-Muhandis was born in 1954 or 1955 in Basra, originally named Jamal Jaafar Muhammad Ali Al Ibrahim. He married an Iranian woman. In 1973 he was in Baghdad, where he entered the Technological University in the Engineering School, being graduated with an engineering degree in 1977. While working as an engineer he did further degrees in political science. He also took off some time to study at a Shiite seminary in Basra that was part of the establishment of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, the clerical leader of Iraq’s Shiites in the 1960s.

Right from the time he was in high school in the early 1970s, he joined the Da`wa Party. Some say that Da`wa, or “the Call,” was founded in 1958 to compete with the Communists and Baathists, who were appealing to Shiite youths. Baathism is a mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism with a strong secularist cast, and it instituted an authoritarian Stalinist-style one-party state in Iraq from 1968. The Da`wa party, in contrast, theorized a Shiite state as a believers’ paradise in opposition to the Communists’ workers paradise. Its leaders made room for consultative government.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran began radicalizing Iraqi Shiites. Saddam Hussein came to power in an internal Baath Party putsch in 1979. In 1980 he outlawed the Da`wa Party, executed its clerical leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and made belonging to it a capital crime. For the past twenty years the post-Baath government has been finding mass graves in the Shiite south of Iraq, where the Baath secret police shot down suspected Da`wa members.

Al-Muhandis, his nom de guerre, which means “the engineer,” was forced to flee to Kuwait. There, he was part of a Da`wa cell that turned radical and committed acts of terrorism against the US and French embassies, given the hostility of those countries to the Islamic Republic. He then appears to have gone to Iran, where he left the Da`wa Party for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an even more radical organization founded by Iraqi expatriates in Tehran in 1982 at the suggestion of Khomeini. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of Muhsin al-Hakim, became the head of it in 1984. Thousands of Iraqi Shiites defected to Iran during the 1980s, and SCIRI organized them. Those who remained loyal to the Da`wa Party, who mostly rejected Khomeini’s vision of a clerically ruled Muslim state, tended to make their way to London instead. The Supreme Council developed a paramilitary branch, the Badr Corps, which was trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and which carried out operations against Baath installations in Iraq. Al-Muhandis Joined the Badr Corps and rose to become one of its commanders.

The independent Shiite site al-Khanadeq in Lebanon says that the Party of God Brigades was founded by al-Muhandis in 2003 when the US, as I wrote about, invaded Iraq, with the aim of forcing the occupiers back out. He appears to have broken with the Badr Corps at that point and formed his own militia, primarily out of armed groups based in the Shiite holy city of Karbala (the Ali Akbar Brigades, the Karbala Brigades and the Abu al-Fadl Abbas Brigades). By 2007, they had begun jointly calling themselves the Party of God Brigades. They mounted some attacks on US bases. I also wrote about the role of the Shiite militias in that era

The organization became prominent in 2014 when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqi young men to rise up to defend the country from ISIL, which had taken Mosul, at a time when the Iraqi Army built by the Bush administration had collapsed. The Party of God Brigades and other Shiite militias armed themselves and went to fight, with training and support from the iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Gen. Soleimani, against ISIL in Amerli and later in Tikrit and Fallujah. They helped ensure that ISIL was defeated. The militias developed political parties which got a fair-sized bloc of seats in parliament. In 2018 parliament recognized the Shiite militias or “Popular Mobilization Forces” as a formal part of the Iraqi military — a sort of national guard.

After 2018, when ISIL was rolled up, the US kept several thousand troops in Iraq for mop-up operations and to continue to train the new Iraqi army.

Israel is accused of committing covert ops against Iraqi Shiite militias inside Iraq, blowing up a weapons depot in 2019.

In Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad initially faced a rebellion by civil society groups in 2011, but attacked the demonstrators militarily and turned the struggle into a civil war. It took on sectarian tones, since most rebels were Sunnis, while the elite of the government were Alawi Shiites. Lebanon’s Hezbollah came in on the side of Damascus, as did the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Party of God Brigades came up from Iraq along with some other Shiite militias. With help from the Russian air force, the Shiite militias defeated the Sunni rebels and drove their remnant into the far north Idlib province.

In the east of Syria, the US enlisted the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia as ground troops to defeat ISIL in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, with US air support. The US put in a small number of its own troops, embedded with the YPG. After ISIL was defeated, the US maintained a small military presence in Syria’s southeast. Again, they aimed to mop up ISIL and prevent it from reconstituting itself, and to lend continued support to the YPG in these largely Arab provinces. It is alleged that they also attempt to block Iranian activities, including shipments of weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, on behalf of Israel. Further, they may be helping the Kurds siphon off oil from fields in the southeast, denying the petroleum wealth to Damascus. If this latter charge is true, it is a war crime.

On January 3, 2020, Trump blew away al-Muhandis and Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani had just come on a civilian airliner with a diplomatic passport to negotiate better relations with Saudi Arabia via the good offices of then Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi.

The Party of God Brigades went to war with the US troops in the country, subjecting the Iraqi bases that housed them to rocket and drone strikes. The Iraqi parliament demanded that Abdul Mahdi find a way to kick US troops out of Iraq (he never did).

Since October 7, the Party of God Brigades’ secretary-general, Ahmad al-Hamidawi, has branded the US an equal partner in the Israeli war on Gaza and it and other Shiite militias have launched dozens of attacks on US bases. None had resulted in a fatality until Sunday.

In a historical irony, one of the reasons some Neocons around George W Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to stop it from being a danger to Israel. Over two decades later, the PGB hit a school in Eilat with a drone, and the US, having destroyed the secular Baath Party, is at war with political Shiism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Maybe the problem is US policy in the region, and maybe no number of wars and conquests are going to reshape the Middle East in ways really favorable to that policy?

The decision was a recognition that the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad had won the civil war, albeit with help from Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Russian Aerospace Forces. Although al-Assad has a great deal of blood on his hands, so do many Arab League member governments, so squeamishness about a poor human rights situation was never the issue here.

The London-based Al-`Arab reports that the move was led by Saudi Arabia and garnered support from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Although this newspaper says that the decision was made possible by a softening of the US position against Syria, I don’t see any evidence of it. Rather, I would say this initiative was undertaken in defiance of Washington.

This newspaper is right to underline, however, that this development is one result of the March 10 agreement in Beijing by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations and turn down the level of tension between the two. Iran’s backing for al-Assad and Riyadh’s for the Salafi “Army of Islam” had helped polarize the region. Now, Saudi Arabia is seeking its own, new, relationship with Damascus and no longer insists that it break with Iran. It is no accident that pro-Iran Iraq was one of the brokers of this deal.

Al-Assad’s fragile victory has left the country a basket case, a situation exacerbated by Turkish military intervention both against Syria’s Kurds and in favor of its remaining fundamentalist forces (in Idlib Province).

The foreign ministers who readmitted Syria spoke specifically of wanting to forestall any threats to Syria’s national sovereignty.

They also spoke of an Arab League role in resolving the Syrian crisis, which has left the country split into three zones: The majority of the country, ruled by al-Assad; the Kurdish northeast, which is currently autonomous; and Idlib Province, where rebels of a fundamentalist cast have gathered as refugees (among hundreds of thousands of displaced noncombatants who perhaps are not so ideological despite having taken a stand against al-Assad).

The United States protested the move and rejected it. Washington has imposed strict Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, which critics maintain are interfering with rebuilding the country and harming ordinary people more than they do the government.

The decision will be formally ratified at the full Arab League summit in Riyadh at the end of May, which a Syrian delegation is expected to attend.

Algeria had stood by al-Assad all through the Civil War. Among states that broke off relations, the move to rehabilitate al-Assad was begun by the United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammad Bin Zayed, who restored diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Damascus in 2018. Tunisia, under dictator Qais Saied, recently followed suit. Saudi Arabia is said to be on the verge of restoring diplomatic ties with Syria, as well.

Sunday’s decision had been opposed by Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco. They, however, were too few to block the League’s decision. Morocco has no love for the Syrian rebels, who gradually turned to forms of Muslim fundamentalism, some close to al-Qaeda but most rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Morocco does, however, entertain deep suspicions of Syria’s ally, Iran, and as a conservative Muslim monarchy does not think well of Baathist socialism. Kuwait and Qatar both supported the 2011 youth revolt and went on supporting the rebels once the revolution turned into a Civil War. Both countries are concerned about the fate of the four million people bottled up in Idlib Province, who had supported the overthrow of the government. Qatar says it will decline to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus until some key issues are resolved. This is likely a reference to the fate of the Qatar-backed groups in Idlib.

At the time of Damascus’ suspension, the Arab Spring governments were influential. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all had interim governments after youth street protests had overthrown their dictators, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was just three months from stepping down in favor of a national referendum on his vice president becoming president. These new governments sided with Syria’s protesters. There was an odd conjunction of these Arab Spring transitional states and some of the Gulf monarchies, which deeply disliked al-Assad’s strong alliance with Iran and his government’s intolerance of Sunni fundamentalism. Thus, Saudi Arabia wanted al-Assad gone as much as Tunisia or Egypt did.

Now, the Arab Spring is a dim memory. Dictatorships have returned in the countries that saw youth revolts. Al-Assad and his corrupt, genocidal government is not going away. Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board. Now it transpires that the Arab League states, too, are Realists.

Although Schuster doesn’t dwell on these issues, heat waves also cause more frequent wildfires, a threat to countries like Lebanon, Israel, Syria and southern Turkiye that have some forest cover. Likewise, they hurt worker productivity in jobs performed outside, such as farming and urban construction work. They have the potential to hurt restaurants and retail shopping, too. I’ve lived in places that get up to 114 F. in the shade, and even 120 F., and you get very reluctant to leave home on those days. One couple in Qatar told me that they got the summer blues there, because of being cooped up in their apartment and not wanting to venture out to receive that unrelenting blast of hot air in their faces.

Farmers in Jordan’s Ghawr Valley are having to delay planting until September because of the withering temperatures that now hit in August. This delay, however, gives them a shorter growing season, since it still turns cool in December. Jordan is at a relatively high elevation and can get snow in winter. The inability to plant in the summer is hurting agricultural productivity and the farmers’ bottom line, reducing their income. Similar threats face the entire Levant, and will get many times worse in coming decades.

The climate emergency is also at least partially to blame for the extensive decline of agriculture in the environs of Iraq’s southern riverine port of Basra.

The climate crisis is not striking everywhere in the world with the same intensity. Warming is proceeding twice as rapidly in the Middle East as the global average.

A recent informal UNICEF poll (not a weighted sample) found that 44% of the young people in the Middle East are so concerned about the climate emergency that they are seriously considering not having children. Some 31% of respondents from the Middle East said that climate change had had such a severe impact on them already that they have less food to eat now than in the past. Some 34% of Middle Easterners said that their family income had been reduced by climate change. And 35% said it was harder now to get clean water.

A huge 70% of young people responding to the online poll in the Middle East said that they were considering moving to another country because of climate change.

Although the UNICEF poll is not scientific, its over-all results track with similar polls (global, not just in the Middle East) of youth conducted by respected journals such as The Lancet.

(The Conversation) – More than 2 billion people live in “water stressed” countries. These are territories where more than 25% of the available freshwater resources are withdrawn for human use each year.

Desalination – the process of removing salt from seawater – is increasingly being used to tackle water scarcity worldwide. Roughly 16,000 desalination plants now produce 35 trillion litres of freshwater annually. And Jordan, a country located north of the Red Sea, is planning a major desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba that will increase its desalination capacity from 4 billion to 350 billion litres each year.

But desalination tends to be energy intensive and produces saline wastewater called brine. On its return to the sea, brine can damage marine ecosystems. Research suggests that desalination may be making some water bodies, including the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Mediterranean, saltier.

We analysed whether current and future desalination plans present a threat to salinity levels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. For both water bodies, the increase in salinity will likely be undetectable and less than natural seasonal variations, in which case it would not harm marine life.

An important marine habitat

The Red Sea is connected to the Indian Ocean at its southern end via a narrow and shallow strait. The Gulf of Aqaba branches off its northern end and is connected to the Indian Ocean only through the Red Sea.

Neither water body has a freshwater inflow, so salinity levels are determined by evaporation and the inward and outward flow of water from the Indian Ocean. Water entering the Red Sea flows north where it evaporates and cools, raising its salinity and density. At the head of the Red Sea, this more saline water sinks and flows southwards as a deeper water layer back to the Indian Ocean.

Between where water enters the Red Sea and where salinity peaks at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, salinity rises naturally by 10% from roughly 36.8 to 40.6 practical salinity units (psu). One psu is equivalent to 1g of salt dissolved in 1000g of water. Marine life in the region has adapted to the natural salinity level of their location.

Several Unesco Natural Heritage Sites are located in the northern Red Sea, including Sanganeb and Dungonab Bay and Mukkawar Island Marine National Parks. The national parks are home to coral reefs, seagrass beds, mudflats, mangroves and beaches. These habitats hold significant scientific and conservation value as they support a diverse range of marine species, including the endangered dugong.

Most marine species can tolerate minor variations in salinity, but they cannot withstand significant and sustained change. Research reveals that rates of photosynthesis and respiration in Stylophora pistillata, a species of Red Sea coral, falls by as much as 50% when salinity levels are raised from 38 psu to 40 psu. Most colonies of this coral will die if salinity is kept at this level for a sustained period.

Making the sea even saltier

Our research used scenario analysis. This is where a number of plausible future scenarios are modelled and their consequences explored.

The most extreme scenario we developed involved high population growth, rapid economic development and falling desalination costs in the Middle East. Nearly 10 trillion litres of water could be desalinated on the Red Sea coast by 2050 and over 2.5 trillion litres along the Gulf of Aqaba in this case.

A less extreme scenario assumed limited population growth and restrained household water consumption. Nearly 2 trillion litres of water could be desalinated by the Red Sea and over 560 billion litres by the Gulf of Aqaba by 2050.

For both scenarios, salinity in the Red Sea increased by less than 0.1%. This increase would be less than the natural seasonal variation in salinity levels and would likely be undetectable.

The Gulf of Aqaba, however, is smaller and more isolated from the Indian Ocean. Salinity in the north of the Gulf therefore varies naturally between 40.2 psu and 40.75 psu. We found that the high growth scenario could increase salinity at the head of the Gulf by 0.5%, from approximately 40.6 psu to 40.8 psu. But even this increase is close to the maximum increase in salinity caused by natural variability.

The medium growth scenario would instead produce a change less than natural seasonal variation and would again be undetectable.

Tackling water scarcity in the Middle East

Our research suggests that, if carefully managed, rising rates of desalination may not harm the region’s marine ecosystems. This is particularly important as a considerable growth in desalination is likely to occur in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia plan to construct an entire new city in the country’s north west, called Neom, to accommodate 9 million people and water intensive sectors like agriculture by 2045. The city will depend on water desalinated from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba.

NEOM | What is THE LINE?

Beyond the vicinity of each desalination plant, increased rates of desalination are unlikely to affect broader salinity levels in the region. But good plant design and strict environmental regulations will remain critical to avoid environmental harm.

Plant outfalls, through which brine is channelled towards the sea, must ensure rapid dilution by dispersing brine into the Red Sea’s deeper water layer. Ocean currents can then carry the brine out to the Indian Ocean, where it will be further diluted.

Desalination will continue to grow worldwide. If carefully implemented it can be a crucial tool to tackle water scarcity without damaging fragile marine ecosystems.

Jonathan Chenoweth, Senior Lecturer of Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey and Raya A. Al-Masri, Researcher in Resources Governance and Sustainability, University of Surrey

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Facebook treats online campaigns as “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” if they seek “to mislead people about who they are and what they are doing while relying on fake accounts”. Accounts, groups and pages “directly involved” in this activity are removed when Facebook detects them.

Orchestrated misuse of social media is very common in the Middle East – often for political or sectarian purposes – though according to the Stanford Internet Observatory this is the first time an “inauthentic” network operating in Jordan has been publicly dismantled.

Suspicious activity spiked in April, coinciding with a rift inside Jordan’s royal family. King Abdullah’s half-brother, Prince Hamza, was placed under house arrest after being accused of plotting to destabilise the country and 18 others were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the alleged plot.

The Jordanian authorities banned local news outlets and social media users from discussing the affair but the ban was accompanied by a flurry of social media activity supporting the king and the military.

A 20-page report from the Stanford Internet Observatory gives details of the campaign which included Twitter, TikTok and Instagram as well as Facebook. A widely-shared video also contained a recording from the Clubhouse audio-chat platform discussing Prince Hamza, and accused foreigners and Jordanians outside the country of using Clubhouse to foment unrest.

The Stanford report identifies several fake personas posting in support of the king and the Jordanian armed forces, and it says videos were shared mainly through two Facebook pages, “Heroes of the Arab Army” and “My Heart Loves the Army”.

These pages merged popular support for the army with support for the monarchy, and particularly the king, the report says. “Although both pages were created in 2015, they seem to have been repurposed to include a wider range of political content in 2020 and early 2021, which coincided with a rise in protests in multiple cities across the country.”

Facebook post showing King Abdullah hugging a child. “Your people love you and your throne,” it said.

Videos circulated online implied that King Abdullah cares more than Prince Hamzah about Palestine and Jerusalem. One of the Jordanian king’s official roles is as “guardian” of the Muslim and Christian religious sites in East Jerusalem, and Arabic hashtags such as “Alquds_in_exchange_for_the_throne” attacked Prince Hamza by claiming he was willing to abandon control over the sites in order to replace Abdullah as king.

“This theme was featured multiple times in different videos … at times juxtaposed against King Abdullah’s determination to protect Jerusalem at all costs,” the report says. According to Facebook, the campaign was also backed with $26,500 spent on advertising.

The Stanford researchers see these efforts as an attempt by the state in the midst of a royal crisis “to control external narratives with its own set of narratives that promote nationalism and support for the king and push conspiracy theories about external interference.” But they add: “It is unclear whether local citizens believe these claims.”

Overall, the campaign doesn’t appear to have secured much engagement from the Jordanian public. Altogether, Facebook removed 89 accounts, plus 35 individual pages, three groups, and 16 Instagram accounts. The Stanford report notes that while the most popular of the deleted pages had 317,068 followers, 14 of them had no followers at all. The largest of the deleted groups had a mere 213 followers and most of the Instagram accounts contained one post or none. The fake personas also had few followers.

“The network was novel in its use of TikTok sockpuppet accounts,” the report says, “though it appears to have made little effort to create original TikTok content or build an audience on the platform.”

Via Al-Bab.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.