Saturday, May 15, 2021
#IsraelPalestine - Did IDF deception lead to massive aerial assault on Hamas’s ‘Metro’?
By YAAKOV KATZ
After Years of Quiet, #Israeli-#Palestinian Conflict Exploded. Why Now?
By Patrick KingsleyA little-noticed police action in Jerusalem last month was one of several incidents that led to the current crisis.
Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets. It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out. The incident was confirmed by six mosque officials, three of whom witnessed it; the Israeli police declined to comment. In the outside world, it barely registered. But in hindsight, the police raid on the mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, was one of several actions that led, less than a month later, to the sudden resumption of war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, and the outbreak of civil unrest between Arabs and Jews across Israel itself.
That deterioration has been far more devastating, far-reaching and fast-paced than anyone imagined. It has led to the worst violence between Israelis and Palestinians in years — not only in the conflict with Hamas, which has killed at least 139 people in Gaza and eight in Israel, but in a wave of mob attacks in mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel. It has spawned unrest in cities across the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces killed 11 Palestinians on Friday. And it has resulted in the firing of rockets toward Israel from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, prompted Jordanians to march toward Israel in protest, and led Lebanese protesters to briefly cross their southern border with Israel.The crisis came as the Israeli government was struggling for its survival; as Hamas — which Israel views as a terrorist group — was seeking to expand its role within the Palestinian movement; and as a new generation of Palestinians was asserting its own values and goals. And it was the outgrowth of years of blockades and restrictions in Gaza, decades of occupation in the West Bank, and decades more of discrimination against Arabs within the state of Israel, said Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Parliament and former chairman of the World Zionist Organization. “All the enriched uranium was already in place,” he said. “But you needed a trigger. And the trigger was the Aqsa Mosque.” It had been seven years since the last significant conflict with Hamas, and 16 since the last major Palestinian uprising, or intifada. There was no major unrest in Jerusalem when President Donald J. Trump recognized the city as Israel’s capital and nominally moved the United States Embassy there. There were no mass protests after four Arab countries normalized relations with Israel, abandoning a long-held consensus that they would never do so until the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had been resolved. Two months ago, few in the Israeli military establishment were expecting anything like this. In private briefings, military officials said the biggest threat to Israel was 1,000 miles away in Iran, or across the northern border in Lebanon. When diplomats met in March with the two generals who oversee administrative aspects of Israeli military affairs in Gaza and the West Bank, they found the pair relaxed about the possibility of significant violence and celebrating an extended period of relative quiet, according to a senior foreign diplomat who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. Gaza was struggling to overcome a wave of coronavirus infections. Most major Palestinian political factions, including Hamas, were looking toward Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for March, the first in 15 years. And in Gaza, where the Israeli blockade has contributed to an unemployment rate of about 50 percent, Hamas’s popularity was dwindling as Palestinians spoke increasingly of the need to prioritize the economy over war. The mood began to shift in April. The prayers at Aqsa for the first night of Ramadan on April 13 occurred as the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, was making his speech nearby. The mosque leadership, which is overseen by the Jordanian government, had rejected an Israeli request to avoid broadcasting prayers during the speech, viewing the request as disrespectful, a public affairs officer at the mosque said. So that night, the police raided the mosque and disconnected the speakers. “Without a doubt,” said Sheikh Sabri, “it was clear to us that the Israeli police wanted to desecrate the Aqsa Mosque and the holy month of Ramadan.” A spokesman for the president denied that the speakers had been turned off, but later said they would double-check. In another year, the episode might have been quickly forgotten. But last month, several factors suddenly and unexpectedly aligned that allowed this slight to snowball into a major showdown. A resurgent sense of national identity among young Palestinians found expression not only in resistance to a series of raids on Al Aqsa, but also in protesting the plight of six Palestinian families facing expulsion from their homes. The perceived need to placate an increasingly assertive far right gave Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s caretaker prime minister, little incentive to calm the waters. A sudden Palestinian political vacuum, and a grass-roots protest that it could adopt, gave Hamas an opportunity to flex its muscles. These shifts in the Palestinian dynamics caught Israel unawares. Israelis had been complacent, nurtured by more than a decade of far-right governments that treated Palestinian demands for equality and statehood as a problem to be contained, not resolved. “We have to wake up,” said Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet. “We have to change the way we understand all this, starting with the concept that the status quo is stable.” The loudspeaker incident was followed almost immediately by a police decision to close off a popular plaza outside the Damascus Gate, one of the main entrances to the Old City of Jerusalem. Young Palestinians typically gather there at night during Ramadan. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said the plaza was closed to prevent dangerously large crowds from forming there, and to head off the possibility of violence.To Palestinians, it was another insult. It led to protests, which led to nightly clashes between the police and young men trying to reclaim the space.“This was the turning point,” said Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. “Their actions would cause the situation to deteriorate.”
To the police, the protests were disorder to be controlled. But to many Palestinians, being pushed out of the square was a slight, beneath which were much deeper grievances.Most Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and later annexed, are not Israeli citizens by choice, because many say applying for citizenship would confer legitimacy on an occupying power. So they cannot vote.Many feel they are gradually being pushed out of Jerusalem. Restrictions on building permits force them to either leave the city or build illegal housing, which is vulnerable to demolition orders. So the decision to block Palestinians from a treasured communal space compounded the sense of discrimination that many have felt all their lives. “It made it feel as though they were trying to eliminate our presence from the city,” said Majed al-Qeimari, a 27-year-old butcher from East Jerusalem. “We felt the need to stand up in their faces and make a point that we are here.” The clashes at the Damascus Gate had repercussions. Later that week, Palestinian youths began attacking Jews. Some posted videos on TikTok, a social media site, garnering public attention. And that soon led to organized Jewish reprisals. On April 21, just a week after the police raid, a few hundred members of an extreme-right Jewish group, Lehava, marched through central Jerusalem, chanting “Death to Arabs” and attacking Palestinian passers-by. A group of Jews was filmed attacking a Palestinian home, and others assaulted drivers who were perceived to be Palestinian. Foreign diplomats and community leaders tried to persuade the Israeli government to lower the temperature in Jerusalem, at least by reopening the square outside Damascus Gate. But they found the government distracted and uninterested, said a person involved in the discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Netanyahu was in the middle of coalition negotiations after an election in March — the fourth in two years — that ended without a clear winner. To form a coalition, he needed to persuade several extreme-right lawmakers to join him. One was Itamar Ben Gvir, a former lawyer for Lehava who advocates expelling Arab citizens whom he considers disloyal to Israel, and who until recently hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, in his living room. Mr. Netanyahu was accused of pandering to the likes of Mr. Ben Gvir, and fomenting a crisis to rally Israelis around his leadership, by letting tensions rise in Jerusalem. “Netanyahu didn’t invent the tensions between Jews and Arabs,” said Anshel Pfeffer, a political commentator and biographer of the prime minister. “They’ve been here since before Israel was founded. But over his long years in power, he’s stoked and exploited these tensions for political gain time and again and has now miserably failed as a leader to put out the fires when it boiled over.” Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, rejected that analysis. “Exactly the opposite is true,” Mr. Regev said. “He has done everything he can to try to make calm prevail.” On April 25, the government relented on allowing Palestinians to gather outside the Damascus Gate. But then came a brace of developments that significantly widened the gyre. First was the looming eviction of the six families from Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. With a final court decision on their case due in the first half of May, regular protests were held throughout April — demonstrations that accelerated after Palestinians drew a connection between the events at Damascus Gate and the plight of the residents. “What you see now at Sheikh Jarrah or at Al Aqsa or at Damascus Gate is about pushing us out of Jerusalem,” said Salah Diab, a community leader in Sheikh Jarrah, whose leg was broken during a recent police raid on his house. “My neighborhood is just the beginning.” The police said they were responding to violence by demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah, but video and images showed they engaged in violence themselves. As the images began to circulate online, the neighborhood turned into a rallying point for Palestinians not just across the occupied territories and Israel, but among the diaspora. The experience of the families, who had already been displaced from what became Israel in 1948, was something “every single Palestinian in the diaspora can relate to,” said Jehan Bseiso, a Palestinian poet living in Lebanon. And it highlighted a piece of legal discrimination: Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim land in East Jerusalem that was owned by Jews before 1948. But the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled their homes that year have no legal means to reclaim their families’ land. “There’s something really triggering and cyclical about seeing people being removed from their homes all over again,” Ms. Bseiso said. “It’s very triggering and very, very relatable, even if you’re a million miles away.” On April 29, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority canceled the Palestinian elections, fearing a humiliating result. The decision made Mr. Abbas look weak. Hamas saw an opportunity, and began to reposition itself as a militant defender of Jerusalem. “Hamas thought that by doing so, they were showing that they were a more capable leadership for the Palestinians,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political expert at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. On May 4, six days before the war began, the head of the Hamas military, Muhammed Deif, issued a rare public statement. “This is our final warning,” Mr. Deif said. “If the aggression against our people in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood does not stop immediately, we will not stand idly by.” War nevertheless seemed unlikely. But then came the most dramatic escalation of all: a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque on Friday, May 7. Police officers armed with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets burst into the mosque compound shortly after 8 p.m., setting off hours of clashes with stone-throwing protesters in which hundreds were injured, medics said.
The police said the stone throwers started it; several worshipers said the opposite. Whoever struck first, the sight of stun grenades and bullets inside the prayer hall of one of the holiest sites in Islam — on the last Friday of Ramadan, one of its holiest nights — was seen as a grievous insult to all Muslims.“This is about the Judaization of the city of Jerusalem,” Sheikh Omar al-Kisswani, another leader at the mosque, said in an interview hours after the raid. “It’s about deterring people from going to Al Aqsa.” That set the stage for a dramatic showdown on Monday, May 10. A final court hearing on Sheikh Jarrah was set to coincide with Jerusalem Day, when Jews celebrate the reunification of Jerusalem, by dint of the capture of East Jerusalem, in 1967. Jewish nationalists typically mark the day by marching through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and trying to visit Temple Mount, the site on which the Aqsa Mosque is built. The looming combination of that march, tensions over Al Aqsa and the possibility of an eviction order in Sheikh Jarrah seemed to be building toward something dangerous. The Israeli government scrambled to tamp down tensions. The Supreme Court hearing in the eviction case was postponed. An order barred Jews from entering the mosque compound. But the police raided the Aqsa Mosque again, early on Monday morning, after Palestinians stockpiled stones in anticipation of clashes with the police and far-right Jews. For the second time in three days, stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets were fired across the compound, in scenes that were broadcast across the world. At the last minute, the government rerouted the Jerusalem Day march away from the Muslim Quarter, after receiving an intelligence briefing about the risk of escalation if it went ahead. But that was too little, and far too late. By then, the Israeli Army had already begun to order civilians away from the Gaza perimeter. Shortly after 6 p.m. on Monday, the rocket fire from Gaza began.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/world/middleeast/israel-palestinian-gaza-war.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Sectarian strife in #Pakistan
By G Parthasarathy
Deobandi and Bareilvi alignments a challenge to governance and peace.
The two major schools of Islam, which emerged in the 19th century in the territories of present-day India, have traditionally been described as Deobandi and Bareilvi. The sects emerged from the efforts of many Muslim clerics and thinkers who fled from Delhi following their persecution by the British after the Mughal rule ended. Deobandi practices were widely adopted in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and by virtually all Pashtuns in Afghanistan. The Deobandis thus established a firm foothold amongst the Pashtun population in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Most importantly, while the Bareilvis remained content with their influence in the subcontinent, the Deobandis reached out to people in the Arabian peninsula in the 19th century. This was an initiative that has paid rich dividends through Saudi financial backing of Deobandi organisations.
Thanks to the FATF and actions by the US and its allies, Pakistan is being squeezed to end support to such groups.
The most far-reaching decision by India’s Deobandi leaders was to make common cause with the secular ideals of India, while supporting the struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi for India’s independence. The main centre for study and learning of the Deobandi school of Islam was and remains the Darul Uloom, located at Deoband in UP. While sections of the Bareilvi leadership initially shared the views of their Deobandi compatriots, those mainly living in Pakistan, eventually chose to support the Partition. On November 3, 2009, Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Hind, a group of Deobandi scholars, dedicated to the welfare of Muslims in India, met at Deoband and condemned suicide bombings and attacks targeting innocent civilians. This amounted to direct criticism of Pakistan’s propensity to use terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
The Bareilvi population in Pakistan’s Punjab province soon found that it had little political space to operate in. The military extended support to groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Afghan Taliban that worked jointly with the military establishment. While the JeM organised the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack was masterminded by the LeT. Moreover, the ISI midwifed the close relations of these groups with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Bareilvis were soon finding that despite their influence and political support in Pakistani Punjab, they were losing political relevance in Pakistan. Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Pashtuns, who are predominantly Deobandi, dominated the attention and patronage of the ISI, and, indeed, in the world. The Taliban also have what they believe to be Deobandi credentials and collaborate closely with Wahhabi-oriented groups like the LeT and the JeM.
Pashtun Deobandis in Pakistan’s northwest and in southern Afghanistan became natural allies of Gen Zia-ul-Haq, after he overthrew and hanged ex-PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. General Zia brought in a new phase of ‘Islamisation’ of politics and developed close relations with radical Islamic elements in Pakistan, most notably the Jamaat-e-Islami in Punjab and Sind, and the Pashtun Deobandis in the north. The Soviet Union then made the folly of invading Afghanistan, enabling the US to join Pakistan in waging a Saudi-backed, Deobandi-oriented jihad against the Soviet forces. Wahhabi-oriented organisations in Pakistan joined this jihad. The ISI developed links with the Jamaat-e-Islami in J&K and used this Deobandi-oriented force to facilitate its jihad in J&K.
Given Bareilvi practices of virtually worshipping the Prophet, Saudi Arabia treats them as heretics. According to Najam Sethi, the Editor of Pakistan’s Friday Times, the Bareilvis in Pakistan, and particularly in the majority Punjab province, have responded to critics by actions ‘borne of the religious passion to defend and uphold the Prophet of Islam, from blasphemy by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, at home and abroad’. This led to the establishment of a politically oriented, militant organisation called the Tehriq-e-Labaik, which soon swept across towns and villages, preaching religious intolerance in Pakistan’s military-dominated Punjab.
The first victim was a Punjabi Hindu woman, Asia Noreen, popularly known as Asia Bibi, who was convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly making blasphemous comments. She was arbitrarily handed the death sentence by hanging — a verdict that was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2011. She, thereafter, immediately fled to Canada.
The Tehriq-e-Labaik attained notoriety, when one of its members, a security guard, assassinated the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, for supporting Asia Bibi. The guard was treated like a revolutionary hero by the outfit. It now has substantial political clout in the Punjab province. It virtually brought Punjab to a standstill during recent demonstrations to demand the expulsion of the French ambassador, because of alleged disrespect shown in France to the Prophet.
Thanks to the threats of sanctions by the Financial Action Task Force and strong actions by the US and its European allies, Pakistan is being squeezed to end support to such groups. Pakistan is also realising that faith alone cannot hold a nation together, especially in the face of sectarian differences. Neither the Tehriq-e-Taliban, which is now waging a low-intensity conflict within Pakistan, or even the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan has ever recognised the Durand Line as an international border.
India has done well to establish a back channel for talks with Pakistan’s military. A major result has been the signing of an agreement for a ceasefire across the LoC in J&K. Pakistan’s mercurial PM, Imran Khan, meanwhile, has rejected a proposal to import Indian agricultural products, which he had initiated and approved earlier. He certainly does not enjoy global popularity. The world has noted that it was General Bajwa who first met Crown Prince Salman in Saudi Arabia, before the Crown Prince gave an audience to Imran Khan last week. US President Biden is yet to meet or speak to Imran Khan.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/sectarian-strife-in-pakistan-252063
Did Pakistan’s top army chief just back down over Kashmir in backchannel talks with India?
- Pakistan’s most powerful army chief, Qamar Javed Bajwa, is said to be willing to drop demand that India reverse course on special status after ‘off-the-record’ meeting
- The development has upset the country’s military-led establishment, as has Bajwa’s calls for a normalisation of relations with New Delhi in pursuit of economic ties.
Pakistan and India have fought several major conflicts in Kashmir since independence in 1947. The terms of their relationship vis-à-vis Kashmir were last officially determined under the 1972 Simla Agreement, following the last all-out war between India and Pakistan. The war ended in outright victory for Indian forces which invaded Pakistan’s erstwhile eastern wing in support of a popular independence movement, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.
India’s agreement at Simla to maintaining the status quo in Kashmir was a quid pro quo for Pakistan accepting that the future status of the territory would be decided bilaterally, rather than under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council as decided in resolutions passed in 1949 to bring an end to their first Kashmir war. The controversy revolves around the interpretation of the two articles of India’s constitution scrapped by the Modi administration in August 2019. Article 370 had previously granted Indian-administered Kashmir a unique status, while article 35-A had protected the rights of the indigenous population by barring land ownership by non-Kashmiris.News reports and video blogs by journalists and television show hosts who attended Bajwa’s off-the-record briefing cited anonymous top national security sources as saying they did not see India’s point-blank refusal to reinstate article 370 as a serious impediment to talks. Downplaying it as a mere change of the Indian government’s internal nomenclature, the sources said they were more concerned about New Delhi’s attempts to change the demography of Muslim-majority Kashmir. Since 2019, the Indian administration in Kashmir has granted domicile certificates to some two million mostly Hindu residents and ex-army personnel. This has significantly changed the demographic makeup in the region of 12.5 million people, according to the last census conducted in 2011, when Muslims accounted for 68 per cent of the population and Hindus made up 30 per cent. The sources appeared to drop Pakistan’s demand that India reverse its decision to end Kashmir’s special status and instead echoed Bajwa’s landmark speeches in February calling for the normalisation of relations with India. In those speeches, he had advocated a strategic shift away from geopolitical goals which have fuelled confrontation in Kashmir and Afghanistan for 30 years, in favour of a geoeconomic agenda built upon peaceful relations and economic connectivity with Pakistan’s hitherto adversarial neighbours.Following Bajwa’s speeches, delivered amid back channel talks in Dubai, Pakistan and India suddenly announced the restoration of a 2003 ceasefire agreement along the Line of Control in Kashmir, ending several years of heavy skirmishing. The sources were quoted as expressing optimism about Pakistan reaping a substantial economic dividend from normalised ties with New Delhi and Kabul. The media narrative that emerged after Bajwa’s off-the-record briefing earned a rare public rebuke from retired generals and ex-ambassadors whose views are widely accepted as reflecting the institutional view of Pakistan’s military-led establishment. At a videoconference hosted on May 5 by the Islamabad Policy Institute think tank, ex-secretary for defence retired Lieutenant General Asif Yasin Malik debunked Bajwa’s argument that the potential economic benefits of normalised relations with India outweighed the heavy financial cost of years of skirmishes along the Line of Control, the Kashmir boundary created under the 1972 Simla Agreement. Referring to “statements from various quarters about the economic dividends of peace with India”, Malik asked if the backchannel process would end India’s propaganda warfare against Pakistan, its adversarial role in Afghanistan and its opposition to Pakistan at international forums like the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Supported by the Group of Seven, India successfully lobbied FATF, a global anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist financing organisation, into placing Pakistan on its watch list of countries in June 2018 on account of its continued support for jihadist groups fighting Indian forces in Kashmir.India and its allies pressed for Pakistan’s “grey listing”, which carries the threat of serious financial sanctions, after a deadly jihadist attack on an Indian military camp in the Jammu region of Kashmir in February 2018. According to a press statement issued by the host think tank, Malik observed that Pakistan and India differed in their perceptions about peace and normalisation of ties. He said that compromise on Kashmir could not be the price for peace with India. “Instead of the process yielding selected dimensions of peace, wholesome comprehensive peace is required,” Malik said. Pakistan’s former ambassador to Britain, the UN and the United States, Maleeha Lodhi said she did not share the optimism being expressed in Pakistan about the Modi government’s readiness to talk about all issues.“It remains to be ascertained what that actually means when they say India is prepared to talk about all issues. Well India was always prepared to talk about all issues. It is how it wants to talk about Kashmir,” she said, speaking at the same event. “We all seek peace with honour, but not at the expense of compromising our fundamental position on Kashmir because then that kind of normalisation will neither be lasting nor would it be politically acceptable to the people of Pakistan,” Lodhi said. To show they were serious, Lodhi called on Pakistan and India to formally appoint and name their backchannel negotiators, warning that otherwise the talks would look merely tactical, rather than strategic in nature. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in a television interview late last week, fuelled the controversy by echoing Bajwa’s off-the-record reinterpretation of India’s scrapping of Kashmir’s special constitutional status as an “internal problem”, and parroting greater concern about demographic change. “How is the foreign minister calling article 370 an internal matter of India?” asked Senator Sherry Rehman of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party. “This kind of confusion must be clarified in parliament. Backchannels are not for making decisions, they are for seeking strategic clarity in conflict. From what we can see, the government is either confused or complicit in some deal,” said Rehman, a former ambassador to the US. Facing a storm of criticism, Qureshi retracted his statement. Prime Minister Khan weighed in for the first time on Tuesday, following an important visit by him and Bajwa to Saudi Arabia, which has worked with the United Arab Emirates to facilitate the backchannel talks with India. In a live public call-in programme on state television, Khan maintained his previous policy position that talks with India were conditional upon New Delhi’s restoration of Kashmir’s special constitutional status. Nonetheless, a subtle but powerful change in the official position of Pakistan’s Foreign Office on Kashmir had been enacted, journalists said in social media posts. Whereas it previously said talks with India could not take place unless it reversed its 2019 decision on Kashmir, now it says they are dependent upon India reviewing its decision.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3133523/did-pakistans-top-army-chief-just-back-down-over-kashmir