Somaliland Gains a Measure of Recognition

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 2004, the late Barry Bartmann and I, professors of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island, along with an academic at the University of Western Ontario, co-edited a book on “De Facto States.” These are entities that have declared themselves sovereign but remain unrecognized by almost all other countries.

Included among others were Abkhazia, Transnistria, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and Kosovo – the last the only one that has now obtained a large measure of international legitimacy.

One chapter, written by me, dealt with Somaliland, a part of Somalia that emerged after that nation disintegrated in 1991. It has all the trappings of a country, including a working political system, regular elections, a police force and its own currency.

A semi-desert territory on the coast of the Gulf of Aden, Somaliland declared independence after the overthrow of Somali military dictator Siad Barre. The move followed a struggle during which Siad Barre’s forces killed tens of thousands of people and towns were flattened.

Over the decades Somaliland has also escaped much of the chaos and violence that have engulfed Somalia. But Somalia, which still retains international recognition, though it is in effect governed by various clan “warlords,” and is constantly attacked by the al-Shabaab Islamist militants, remains opposed to Somaliland’s nationhood. And the international community has followed suit.

Often forgotten, though, is that prior to 1960 they were two separate colonial entities, with Somaliland governed by Britain and what is now Somalia by Italy, before they merged to form the Somali Republic. This is part of Somaliland’s claim to independent statehood.

But might that now change? Since the end of the Cold War, two African states have broken away from countries they had never wanted to be part of: Eritrea separated from Ethiopia, and South Sudan split from Sudan, following lengthy liberation struggles.

Following Eritrea’s independence, Ethiopia became a landlocked country, with no outlet to the Red Sea. And this has provided an opportunity for Somaliland, which is located in the region known as the horn of Africa, where the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden meet the Indian Ocean.

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has described sea access as an existential issue for his country. With more than 100 million people, it is the most populous landlocked country in the world. Up to now Ethiopia has been using the port in neighbouring Djibouti for most of its imports and exports.

So on Jan. 1, Ethiopia took the first steps that could enable the now landlocked country to regain access to the sea. It has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the self-declared Republic of Somaliland to use one of its ports.

There were some fears that this implied trying to retake land from Eritrea. Instead, talks focused on the Somaliland port of Berbera, which has recently been significantly expanded by DP World, a port logistics company based in the United Arab Emirates.

The prime minister signed the MoU with Somaliland’s President Muse Bihi Abdi in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Abdi indicated that the agreement included a section stating that Ethiopia would recognise Somaliland as an independent country at some point in the future.

A statement later stated that, apart from commercial traffic through Berbera, the “historic agreement ensures Ethiopia’s access to the sea for their naval forces, reciprocated by formal recognition of the Republic of Somaliland.”

The Ethiopian navy would acquire 20 kilometres of sea access, leased for a period of 50 years, allowing Ethiopia to build a military base on the coast. In return, Somaliland will get a share in Ethiopia Airlines, the country’s successful national carrier.

Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, has called the deal a “violation” of its sovereignty and described the agreement as an act of aggression. Even al-Shabaab weighed in, pledging to “defend our land and sea with our blood.”

Christian-majority Ethiopia and Somalia, which is Muslim, have a long history of rivalry. In 1977-78, they fought a devastating war for control of what is now called the Somali region of Ethiopia. Somalia’s defeat began the process of its eventual dismemberment.

African Union commission chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat on Jan. 3 called for calm and mutual respect “to de-escalate the simmering tension.” Turkey and Egypt, which play a significant role in Somalia, also pledged support for it. But Somalia is really a failed state that exists only on paper, so perhaps Somaliland will finally prevail.

Iran Plays Long Game in the Middle East

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Iran has threatened to hold the United States and Great Britain “accountable” following a series of joint strikes by them in Yemen in response to recent attacks on ships carried out by the Tehran-backed Houthi militants in the Red Sea.

A coalition of eight nations, including Canada, have helped protect commercial vessels targeted by Houthis who believe they are linked to Israel. But the Houthis are part of a wider web, known as the “axis of resistance,” aimed at destroying the Jewish State.

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Iran’s state-run media broadcast parliamentarians in Tehran rising from their seats to chant “Death to Israel” and “Palestine is victorious, Israel will be destroyed.”

Iran’s former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi stated in a January 22 interview on Russia Today TV that the confrontation between Iran and Israel will continue “even if a Palestinian state is established. I am referring to the proposed two-state solution. We can never recognize the plundering Zionist entity.”

Despite some doctrinal differences, the common thread weaving together Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen is the significant funding and support each gets from Iran. 

Hamas receives an estimated $150 million annually, Hezbollah $700 million, and Islamic Jihad tens of millions. And they are only the biggest in a network of 19 armed groups that Iran has established.

In addition, the current regime in Iran fields its own militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF). It trains the proxies’ militias in Iraq and Syria. They include Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, which have launched dozens of attacks on American forces in Iraq, Jordan and Syria since mid-October.

“To counter Israel’s ability to threaten Iran, isolate Israel and, ultimately, help wipe it off the map, Tehran encircles it with a ‘ring of fire’ (as Israelis call it) by funding and arming its terrorist proxies with improved rockets, missiles, drones, and ground forces,” explained Jonathan Ruhe, Director of Foreign Policy at the JINSA Gemunder Centre for Defense and Strategy on Oct. 25.

So far Iran itself has been exempt from paying any price for all the devastation it is causing. It has not been struck at all: not the IRGC-QF bases, not the training centres, not its spy ships in the Red Sea. There have not even been any financial sanctions restored.

Yet, as Kian Tajbakhsh, a senior adviser at Global Centers Columbia University in New York, wrote in a Feb. 2 article in the Atlantic magazine, “Iran’s complicity with Hamas signals that the country has entirely broken with the West and abandoned any aspiration to seek even minimal rapprochement with the Western-led international order.” (Tajbakhsh was arrested in Iran in 2009 and spent more than a year in the notorious Evin Prison.)

Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, in a Feb. 3 article in the Middle East Quarterly agrees. The recent killings of three U.S. servicemen and the missile attacks on Iraq and Pakistan “are the actions of a regime that’s out of control, operating far from the norms of the international system,” he maintains.

Barack Obama’s administration was the promoter of the idea that a truce with Iran, prioritizing the avoidance of military conflict above everything else, could persuade Tehran to curb its destabilizing actions in the region. This hasn’t worked out. Iran has never wavered from its commitment to the anti-liberal, anti-Western goals of the 1979 Islamic revolution that put it in power.

Theocratic Iran is a very strong state, make no mistake. I have refuted many times the wishful thinking expressed by many people that the regime is doomed. I remember while on an airplane from London to Montreal in September 1978 being told by a Canadian diplomat whom I knew that the revolutionaries wouldn’t manage to overthrow the Shah’s regime – a few months before they did just that. While working in Washington in 1985, a fellow journalist assured me it wouldn’t last another five years. That was almost four decades ago.

There is no denying Iran’s proxy forces are great value for money. They are far cheaper than Iran’s own conventional military, and more useful in the region’s many conflicts. Iran’s clerics were ecstatic when allied militias defeated both the Sunni Arab jihadists and the U.S. in Iraq, and relieved when they helped to save the Assad dictatorship in Syria in 2012.

Also, as Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, maintains in a Feb. 2 article, Tehran will surely keep pushing the envelope unless the United States or Israel pushes back far harder.

“Only something shockingly different – U.S. attacks against Revolutionary Guard targets inside Iran, and the openly declared threat of insurmountable American escalation,” he writes, “has a decent chance of convincing the clerics that the past is no longer prologue.”

The Islamic Republic has scored win after win all these decades and outmaneuvered the United States into accommodating its regional ambitions and allowing it to become a threshold nuclear-weapons state. This will have consequences that Washington must eventually confront if stability, let alone peace and prosperity, are to be hoped for in the Middle East.

 

The Fraught Future of Jewish Studies in North America

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post 

By Henry Srebrnik

Between 1969, when the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) was founded by forty-seven scholars in Boston, and now, the field of Jewish studies has enjoyed a meteoric expansion. The association, as David Biale, Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis, has noted in the winter 2024 issue of the Jewish Review of Books (JRB), it has some 1,800 members, and programs or individual positions exist at virtually every major North American university.

Benefiting from the postwar diminishment of antisemitism and the assimilation of Jews to American society, the scholarly study of the Jews found homes in university departments such as history, religious studies, and comparative literature.

Could that golden age have come to an end on October 7, 2023? “The sudden explosion of anti-Israelism, with its close cousin, antisemitism, has rendered the position of Jewish studies precarious.” It is too soon to know for sure, he states, “but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that something fundamental shifted on that Black Sabbath and its aftermath, not only in Israel but here in America.”

Jewish Studies programs at American (and Canadian) universities, with seed money provided by Jewish philanthropists, sprang up after the 1967 Six-Day War. And at first its faculty were “pro-Israel.” But Jewish communities never had control of these programs. And as the initial cohort of academics retired, their replacements were different – because the hiring process was, of course, largely in the hands of non-Jewish faculty in the humanities. So the successful candidates were more in line with the new zeitgeist of “interrogating” the “Zionist narrative” and giving prominence to non- or anti-Zionist perspectives among American Jews.

This was inevitable. Even the AJS has moved in this direction. (I am a member and have given papers at AJS conferences.) These programs and departments are, in the final analysis, at best “neutral” and agnostic on the Middle East and Israel.

Daniel B. Schwartz is a professor of history and Judaic studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. In that same issue of the JRB, he recounted that on Oct. 9, a statement from the Executive Committee of the AJS arrived in his inbox. The heading of the email read simply, “Statement from the AJS Executive Committee.”

The statement was about the events of the previous weekend, but the email’s content-free subject line turned out to be symptomatic of what followed. “The members of the AJS Executive Committee,” it said, “express deep sorrow for the loss of life and destruction caused by the horrific violence in Israel over the weekend. We send comfort to our members there and our members with families and friends in the region who are suffering.” In a statement by the AJS, why word “Jews” was nowhere to be found.

“That we have come to the point where the AJS has to resort to such anodyne language,” he asserted, “is truly mind-boggling to me, and frankly shameful.” Why did the half-dozen distinguished scholars who form the Executive Committee of the AJS “feel obligated to obfuscate about the terrible events to which they were ostensibly responding?”

No wonder then, as Mikhal Dekel, Professor of English and the director of the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York, remarked, “For some of my Jewish colleagues, Israel and Israelis have crossed a threshold to become objects of hatred and disgust that mountains of intellectualized and reasoned essays cannot conceal. These emotions were on display on the very day of October 7, even before a single Israeli soldier entered Gaza.” Decades of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and other anti-Israel activism “around me hadn’t prepared me for that.”

Certainly the place of Jewish and Israeli-related courses in the wider world of the humanities will decline dramatically, as “anti-Zionism” takes hold across higher education. For example, Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told us in the February issue of Fathom, a British publication, that “after nearly two decades of trying, the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting finally succeeded in putting this academic group on record opposing Israel.”

The MLA represents about twenty thousand North American literature and foreign language faculty and graduate students. “This time they were riding a wave of anti-Zionist hostility that has swept the academy since Hamas wantonly slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis and foreign visitors in the largest antisemitic murder spree since the Holocaust.”

Nelson reported that at one MLA meeting, “when a member from Haifa referenced Hamas’s sexual violence there was reportedly audible hissing among the anti-Zionist members attending. Was it unacceptable to impugn the character of Hamas terrorists? Were some MLA members on board with Hamas denials?”

A recent trend has seen Jewish academics in Jewish Studies programs at universities like Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth, Emory, Harvard and elsewhere publish widely noticed books that are, at best, “non-Zionist” and in fact sympathetic to the naqba narrative of Arab-Jewish relations during and after the formation of Israel. But why should we be surprised? They are embedded in institutions where the “woke” Diversity-Equity-Inclusion ideology now prevails.

The new book by historian Geoffrey Levin, assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University in Atlanta, “Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978,” is one such work. He writes sympathetically about an early, formative era before American Jewish institutions had unequivocally embraced Zionism.

“The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto” by Daniel Boyarin, the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” and “recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.”

“The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance” by Shaul Magid, the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, calls for “recentering” Judaism over nationalism and “challenges us to consider the price of diminishing or even erasing the exilic character of Jewish life.”

Derek Penslar, an historian at Harvard, last year published “Zionism: An Emotional State,” which described the situation in the West Bank as apartheid, even though over 90 per cent of Palestinians there are governed not by Israel but by the Palestinian Authority. The point of calling Israel an apartheid regime is to suggest that it must go the way of white-led South Africa.

They are among a spate of books dealing with the history of Jewish dissent over Israel and Zionism, including “The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism” by Marjorie N. Feld, and “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine” by Oren Kroll-Zeldin.

A cold khamsim is blowing across Jewish Studies in academia.