The Israeli Kibbutz, Yesterday and Today

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

I have spent extended periods of time on two Israeli kibbutzim, the Hebrew word for collective settlements. 

The first was Kibbutz Ma’agan, on the southern shore of Sea of Galilee, in 1967, right after the Six-Day War. The second time was a decade later, on Bror Chayil, a settlement near the town of Sderot, and not far from Gaza (then still under Israeli occupation).

Ma’agan was founded in 1949 by immigrants from Hungary and Romania, while Bror Chayil was formed a year earlier and was populated mainly by Brazilian Jews.

The kibbutz movement is one of the most fascinating phenomena of modern history and one of Zionism’s greatest stories. And for decades, the kibbutz took pride of place among Israel’s most innovative accomplishments. 

Several hundred communities attempted to live the ideas of equality, freedom, and social justice by giving up private property, individualism, and the “bourgeois” family unit to create a utopia attempting to live in total equality.

Many kibbutzim had collective child rearing practices. Infants were taken away from their parents at an early age to a communal nursery in which they spent their first few years.

The first kibbutzim were founded some 40 years before the establishment of the state of Israel. Degania, on the banks of the Jordan River in Galilee, was established in 1909. 

Their founders were young Jewish pioneers, mainly from Eastern Europe, who came to forge a new way of life.

It became the inspiration for similar socialist communities, which would succeed in developing thriving collectives; they played a dominant role in the building of the country. 

Today some 275 kibbutzim, with memberships ranging from 40 to more than 1,000, are scattered throughout Israel. The number of people living in kibbutzim totals approximately 130,000, about 2.5 per cent of the country's population. 

The kibbutzim were initially entirely agricultural, but a great wave of industrialization came in the 1960s, and today only a small minority of kibbutz members work in agriculture.

Though they still provide 40 per cent of the country’s agricultural output, many specialize in high-tech manufacturing. Their factories account for 11 per cent of the country’s industrial output.

The kibbutz movement went through a considerable period of turmoil in the 1980s and 1990s. Until 1977 Israel was governed by the Labour Party. In matters such as agricultural development, its policies were very favorable to the kibbutzim. 

The election of 1977 which brought the Likud to power changed everything. The government’s policies of economic deregulation led to a financial crisis that hit Israel in the early 1980s and proved detrimental. Many kibbutzim took part in financial speculation caused by inflation. 

The banks had lent billions to the kibbutzim for industrial expansion in non-indexed loans. Kibbutzim also utilized such loans for infrastructure such as enlarging members’ houses. 

Many of them continued to act the same as they did in the era of Labour rule, being confident that the government would provide them with a safety net if necessary, as it did in the past. This time, it didn’t happen.

Complex debt arrangements were accompanied by monitoring and supervising of the conduct of the kibbutzim by the banks, 

Most kibbutzim were eventually forced to implement reforms to become commercially viable and stem decline. Now, only 74 of Israel’s kibbutzim still operate on a completely collective model, in which all members are paid the same regardless of their allotted job. 

The rest have “privatized” and pay salaries to their members, allowing for differential incomes and home ownership. 

Also, by the 1970s and 1980s, parents demanded that their children sleep at home; the last kibbutz ended communal daycare in 1991.

Other measures have included charging for meals and services, and recruiting agricultural labourers. Since the 1990s foreign workers were brought in, many from Thailand and China. These changes, necessary for survival, have sometimes been painful.

Some kibbutzim also began opening up to non-members. Empty homes, of members who had departed, were rented out to people looking for a quiet, rural lifestyle. Entire kibbutz neighborhoods were filled with people who worked in outside jobs and brought with them many of the accouterments of outside life, starting with cars.

When I was in Israel a few months ago, I saw one of them, Sdot Yam, near Caesarea. As a colleague noted wryly, it looked more like a gated community in California!

Oppressing Egypt's Copts

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

Six members of the United States Congress introduced a nonbinding resolution in the House of Representatives last Dec. 21 titled “Expressing Concern over Attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt.” 

The resolution says Christians in Egypt are second-class citizens who face discrimination in the public and private sectors, including by the government of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

In addition, it asserts, they are being targeted by the Islamic State (IS), particularly in rural Upper Egypt. The resolution called on Cairo “to enact serious and legitimate reforms to ensure Coptic Christians are given the same rights and opportunities as all other Egyptian citizens.”

A memorandum that led to the Congressional document was drafted by a U.S.-based organization called Coptic Solidarity. 

Egyptians officials consider the move as American interference in Egyptian affairs. The Egyptian parliament’s foreign affairs committee also responded, stating that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that sought to provoke sectarian conflict in Egypt. 

Tarek Radwan, its head, stated on Jan. 22 that the committee’s answer would be presented to Congress, refuting the claims made in the Coptic Solidarity memorandum.

In a rebuke presumably aimed at that organization, Rashwan noted that it was necessary to identify the bodies representing Copts to the international community, and that “the U.S. must differentiate between those who actually represent Copts and those who claim to do so.”

The response went on to identify the Muslim Brotherhood as a primary cause of sectarian strife in Egypt in recent times.

It claimed that the events that brought current President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to office were a response to religious rule that would have turned Egypt into a sectarian state.

After Mohamed Morsi was ousted as president on July 3, 2013, the Brotherhood targeted Coptic gatherings as punishment for participating in the June 30 Revolution, attacking Coptic places of worship and Christian properties, the response added.
 

The Egyptian army has since embarked upon rebuilding and renovating as many as 83 churches across Egypt.

On the legislative front, the document notes that Egypt’s 2014 Constitution was passed to prevent the foundation of religious parties and affirm the principle of “citizenship.”

“The law on the Higher Council of the Anti-Discrimination Commission will be discussed soon to ensure that no religious minorities in Egypt face any kind of persecution or discrimination,” the response says, asserting that many Coptic and Christian public figures “now occupy leading positions in state ministries, councils and bodies.”

It concluded by quoting Coptic Pope Tawadros II, who said: “It is better to have a homeland without churches than to have churches without a homeland.” 

Hafez Abu Seada, a member of the National Council for Human Rights in Egypt, agreed with the committee’s response regarding Sisi’s support of Copts. At the same time, he believes putting the blame only on the Brotherhood weakened the response, as terrorists ideologically linked to IS and al-Qaeda are involved.

The Copts represent an indigenous tradition. Their self-identity remains nationalistic, but it focuses on Egypt as a nation which transcends differences in religion. This allows Copts to take their place in society next to their fellow-Egyptians, who are Muslims.

So they have usually been careful not to challenge this particular narrative of national unity, which formally included Copts in the Egyptian nation, but which in practice imposed a sort of public invisibility on them. 

However, a growing number of activists are seeking a public identity for Copts, a form of the “politics of recognition” outside the cross-and-crescent national unity discourse. Much of this emanates from the Coptic diaspora now living in many western countries.

India Worries About China's Expansion in South Asia

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

India’s top foreign policy priority is its neighbourhood of South Asia and the Indian Ocean. This has led to worries, as Delhi watches China make inroads in its front yard.

On the one hand, an unprecedented growth in Sino-Indian bilateral trade has taken place, with China becoming India’s largest trade partner. But Chinese policies have also made India concerned it might lose its traditional regional dominance. 

New Chinese economic initiatives in South Asia, and an expansion of Chinese influence and presence in the Indian Ocean, have greatly increased in recent years.

China has embarked on history’s most expensive foreign infrastructure plan. It has invested billions of dollars to build port facilities and plan maritime trade routes as part of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative that will span at least 68 countries to help increase its global market reach.

Announced in 2013, the plan consists of ports, railways, roads, and airfields linking China to the wider world -- a “New Silk Road” that will greatly expand China’s economic and diplomatic influence.

It will connect 65 per cent of the world’s population and 30 per cent of global GDP.

Chinese President President Xi Jinping has allocated more than $1 trillion in infrastructure investments in order to project China’s “great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.”

As well, it has loaned so much money to its neighbours that critics liken the debt to a form of imperialism. 

Sri Lanka, off India’s southern coast, owes more than $8 billion to state-controlled Chinese firms. So it handed over the strategic port of Hambantota on its southeastern coast to China on a 99-year lease. It will now be operated by China Merchants Port Holdings.

 “The price being paid for reducing the China debt could prove more costly than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,” declared N. Sathiya Moorthy, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation.

India has watched with suspicion as cranes operated by Chinese firms also began to dot the skyline in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. In reaction, it has partnered with Japan to develop a port on Sri Lanka’s eastern coastline, and has entered into talks to invest in an airport near Hambantota.

Pakistan, India’s main adversary, is home to one of China's central infrastructure schemes: a near $60 billion collection of land and sea projects known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. 

China has committed $1.15 billion to finance construction projects and development of the new Gwadar port complex in Pakistan. To be developed by the China Overseas Port Holding Company under a 43-year contract, it will provide China’s navy future access to the Indian Ocean.

Chinese money is building power plants in Pakistan. These, as well as upgrades to three major highways, are also seen as a potential threat to India.

China is courting Myanmar, which has been sharply criticised for the brutal treatment of its Rohingya minority. 

Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the architect of Myanmar’s military campaign to eject the Rohingya, visited Xi in November. Xi described Chinese-Myanmar military relations as the “best” ever.

Myanmar, too, is a state with a long coastline that offers a strategic outlet to the Indian Ocean. A consortium led by China’s Citic Group Corporation is scheduled to start building a $7.3 billion deep-sea port next year at Kyauk Pyu, a port town on the Indian Ocean. Pipelines from the port will carry gas and oil to southern China.

Bangladesh, India’s eastern neighbour, in December 2016 signed agreements worth $510 million with China Harbour Engineering Company and China State Construction Engineering Corporation to further develop the Payra deep-sea port on the Bay of Bengal.

The two companies will construct the main port infrastructure and will build housing, healthcare and education facilities in the port.

Some analysts have suggested all these ports are part of a so-called “string of pearls” strategy which would help China’s naval expansion in the region and check India’s strategic depth.

Another Indian Ocean country, Malaysia, in 2016 agreed to the first purchase of Chinese vessels for its navy, after a meeting between Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing. It was the first big purchase of Chinese arms by Kuala Lumpur.

With economic power comes military strength. China’s military budget has risen from $17 billion in 1990 to $152 billion in 2017.

Hillary Clinton's Grammys Performance was Unbecoming of Her

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I’ve never been a fan of Hillary Clinton’s, yet I was still shocked that she would stoop so low as to mock Donald Trump at the Jan. 28 Grammy Awards, no matter what we all think of him.

She read a chapter from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff’s recently-published savage account of the president. It was the most classless thing I’ve ever seen her do.

First of all, she’s not an entertainer, but a supposedly serious political figure. This wasn’t “Saturday Night Live,” where such people routinely make fun of the president.       
   
How would Clinton like it if Trump read part of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, a 2015 book by Peter Schweizer.

Even Al Gore, who had every right to be far more angry than Clinton – in 2000 he most probably won the presidential election, and not just by the popular vote but also the electoral vote – never did this to George W. Bush, and there were plenty of opportunities.

None of previous defeated candidates even came close to acting this way – certainly not in a public forum televised to millions of people.

Had a student written something as demeaning as the excerpt Clinton read out, they would likely have been suspended from their school. Had I done something similar to a colleague in front of a class, I’d be fired, and rightly so. It would be considered bullying.   

Clinton clearly can’t get over losing to Trump. After all, her sense of entitlement was such, and her devoted fans were so enamoured of her, that she considered winning the presidency a foregone conclusion – especially against a man who would only be getting the votes of the “deplorables ” in “flyover” country.

Trump voters probably don’t buy most of the recordings showcased at the Grammys, nor do they go to many of the movies Hollywood liberals produce. So it won't hurt those bottom lines.

But it does demonstrate to these people that the whole entertainment industry has become a machine designed to mock and belittle them. Even those who think Trump is a buffoon, and they are many, won’t forget this slight.

And here’s irony: The woman who ran as a transformational feminist in 2016 is being increasingly shunned by her party, according to numerous sources. 

Some reports have asserted that the current news of harassment reminds many of Hillary Clinton’s past as an enabler of a serial abuser, her husband.  It now has also become known that in 2008, she shielded one of her campaign advisers from accusations of sexual harassment.

And of course, Bill Clinton’s own past behaviour embodies what is considered absolutely unacceptable by current standards; he would have been chased out of office by his own Democratic Party today.

So tone-deaf is Clinton that, as an opinion piece in the Jan 30 New York Times – a paper not exactly a fan of Trump! – pointed out, she read from a book that, without any evidence, insinuates that Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador, is sleeping with the president.

So it’s not difficult to imagine how Haley might have felt when she watched the Grammys.

“A prominent Republican woman is smeared,” writes the author, Barry Weiss. “The author who does the smearing is celebrated by all the A-listers, including the most prominent Democratic woman in the country, who herself has a history of giving a pass (or worse) to men accused of sexual assault and harassment.”

Pray for the fate of the American republic!

Lake Chad's Condition Symptom of Greater Problems

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

We’ve known for a long time that the artificially-created states in the Sahel region of northern Africa are in trouble.

Their virtually undefended borders are plagued by Islamist jihadis, tribal warfare, and Christian-Muslim animosity. Governments have little control outside the few scattered metropolitan areas.

This is certainly true of Chad, named for the lake of the same name. Home to several African kingdoms in the 19^th century, France conquered the area, called it Chad, and made it part of French Equatorial Africa.

The French focussed their attention on the forced production of cotton, in a fertile part of southern Chad that they referred to as “le Tchad Utile” --Useful Chad.

At the time, Lake Chad, which was dotted with hundreds of islands, was considered an ecological wonder. But things would change.

The French left their immense holdings in west and equatorial Africa in 1960, and a number of states, including Chad, emerged.

A gigantic country of 1,284,000 square kilometres, mostly desert, it is inhabited by just 13.6 million people, divided into more than 200 distinct ethnic groups. 

Many Chadians couldn’t communicate with one another -- there were at least a hundred and twenty indigenous languages. Some people in remote areas were unaware that their villages now belonged to a state.

Libya’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, wishing to create a greater country, repeatedly invaded the country, which was propped up by French investors and advisers. Its rule hardly extended beyond the capital, N’Djamena.

Colonial administrators had drawn the boundaries of Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger right through Lake Chad, causing no end of headaches regarding fishing and water use.

For the next two decades, the entire region was stricken with drought. The rivers feeding into Lake Chad dried up and by the end of the nineties the lake, on which some 30 million people depended, had shrunk a massive 90 per cent from what its size in the 1960s.

Its surface area has decreased from a peak of 25,000 square kilometres to approximately 1,350 square kilometres. Much of the northern basin was lost to the desert. 

The lake and the Chari River, which flows out of it, constitute the most important water source in the region. The drainage basin depends on monsoon rains to replenish its water, and this rainfall has dropped dramatically since the early 1960s.

Drought, desertification, deforestation, in addition to climate change, have contributed to its drastic reduction in size.

The lake also slowly begn disappearing due to the overuse of water resources, poor enforcement of environmental legislation, and a weak capacity for water resource management by the countries bordering it. 

Running along the borders of four countries and through varying cultures and ethnic loyalties, the diminishing resources of the Lake Chad water basin have led to humanitarian crises and social conflicts in the region.

Millions of people faced an ecological disaster as once plentiful fish stocks disappeared, and people started dying of hunger.

Worse was to come. The Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram, founded in 2002, sought to establish a caliphate in northeastern Nigeria. It began spreading out along the countries bordering the lake, including Chad. 

Boko Haram began kidnapping entire villages, replenishing its military ranks and collecting new wives, children, farmers, and fishermen to sustain its campaigns.

Hundreds of thousands of people from the basin fled the violence, eventually finding refuge in Chad’s villages and camps, as well as in Niger and Cameroon. The displaced Chadians and refugees have further strained the lake’s resources. 

To combat Boko Haram, each country bordering the lake supplied a few thousand soldiers to a Multi-National Joint Task Force. 

In late July, the Chadian Army ordered an evacuation of people living in the southern basin, warning that anyone who was still there in a week would be considered a member of Boko Haram. 

This was followed, in November, by a sweep further north. Altogether, some 165,000 people were forcibly removed. A month later, Nigerian soldiers arrested more than 400 people associated with Boko Haram hiding on islands in Lake Chad.

This year, the United Nations appealed for $121 million dollars in aid for the Chadian side of the lake, but only a third of that has been donated. 

The military operations, combined with the advancing desert, make the lake’s future more uncertain than ever.

The Embattled Hazara Minority of Afghanistan

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Afghanistan is, regardless of whatever ideological faction rules it, a Sunni Pashtun-dominated state. As a consequence, the Shia Hazaras, Afghanistan’s third largest ethnic group, have long been marginalized. 

Living primarily in the country’s centre, the Hazaras account for some 20 per cent of Afghanistan’s 30 million inhabitants.

The modern Afghan state was the creation of the Pashtun Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, who ruled the country between 1880 and 1901and was determined to foster a state around Pashtuns as the ethno-cultural core of the country.

He ruthlessly quelled many rebellions against increased centralized rule. The most protracted of these was the 1891-1893 Hazara War, following which the traditional Hazara landholding elites, known as mirs and begs, were eliminated.

Tens of thousands of Hazaras died. Some were even sold as slaves. Until recent decades, few attended university or held government positions.

However, their homeland was largely spared from Communist rule and the Soviet occupation that lasted until 1989, so the Hazaras were able to regain some of the autonomy they had lost under Rahman.

Following the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime, the political party Hezb-e Wahdat was founded in 1989 and was transformed into the ethnic party of the Hazaras, sometimes co- operating and sometimes fighting with other ethnic parties during the 1992–1996 civil war that erupted following the disintegration of the country’s Communist government. 

The Hazaras perceived the Taliban, which came to power in 1996, not just as a Sunni Islamist movement but as a Pashtun nationalist force, seeking to restore the historical Pashtun hegemony in the country.

One of the most brutal events took place in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, when thousands of Hazaras were systematically executed, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

Although Afghanistan is no longer under Taliban rule, the Hazaras have also cast a wary eye on the post-2001 reconstruction initiatives undertaken by western powers after 9/11.

These projects, funded by major donors, have been mostly concentrated in the southern and eastern Pashtun provinces and so are simply another example of Pashtun hegemony. Yet Hazara provinces have remained among the most peaceful, despite the growing Taliban insurgency.

The Hazaras have taken advantage of the post-2001 political landscape. The 2004 Afghanistan Constitution granted them equal rights, and they have adapted to the current political system. 

The political settlement following the disputed 2014 Afghanistan election averted a potential civil war through an ethnic power-sharing scheme. 

President Ashraf Ghani is a Pashtun while his Tajik rival in the election, Abdullah Abdullah, is now the Chief Executive, a newly created position.  

Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum is an Uzbek; while Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara who emerged from the Hezb-e Wahdat, serves as Deputy to the Chief Executive, another new post created after the election.

In November Mohaqiq traveled to Iran and praised Shiite warriors who had taken part in the war in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State fighters.

Of course this whole edifice may come crashing down. Ghani is deeply unpopular and the coalition remains shaky. Next year’s presidential elections promise to be, at the very least, very contentious and perhaps violent. Ghani may be challenged by the Tajik warlord Atta Muhammad Noor, the governor of Balkh Province.

Menwhile, the Shia Hazaras remain victims of extremist Sunni groups. On Oct 20, at least 57 Hazaras were killed, and 100 wounded, during a suicide blast at the Imam Zaman Mosque in the Hazara-populated Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood of Kabul.

At least 41 people died and 84 were wounded on Dec. 28 when attackers set off an explosion outside a Shia cultural centre in the same area.

In the face of rising attacks against them, President Ghani has stepped up security measures for Hazara buildings.

Turkey's Attack on Syrian Kurds

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

Turkey’s recent incursion into Kurdish-held areas along its border with Syria puts it further at odds with the other players in the Syrian civil war.

On Jan. 20, Ankara announced that a campaign, “Operation Olive Branch,” had been launched, targeting the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which make up the bulk of the American-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). 

The Turks want to prevent the Kurds from gaining control over a contiguous sliver of land in Syria they call Rojava, including the towns of Afrin in the northwest, Kobani in the centre, and Qamishli in the northeast.

The current operation is concentrating on an area of northwestern Syria under YPG control that includes the cities of Afrin and Manbij. It is intended to create a security zone about 29kilometres deep inside Syria. 

Turkey believes the YPG has links to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that operates inside Turkey, and which it considers a terrorist group. 

The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish government for decades. Abdullah Ocalan, the KPP leader imprisoned since 1999, was based in Kurdish Syria for nearly two decades.

The current offensive into Syria has been prompted by Washington’s plan to help the SDF alliance create a 30,000-strong border security force along Syria’s borders with Iraq and Turkey and prevent the return of the Islamic State (IS). 

The move is opposed by Iran, Russia, Syria, and especially Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has called the force a “terror army.”

The Turkish invasion has left Washington with a dilemma.  It will have to scale back its support of the Kurds, one of the few groups that have consistently helped America in Syria and Iraq, or else risk a quarrel with a fellow NATO member.

The attack has also placed Russia in a difficult position. Moscow is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- but also wants to remain on good terms with Turkey. Perhaps for that reason, Russia has moved its ground forces and vacated the airspace to accommodate the Turkish operation.

All this comes against the backdrop of political jockeying by the countries involved in Syria’s civil war to find a political solution to end the conflict.

Moscow has been preparing to host a Syrian National Dialogue Congress, set for Jan. 30 in Sochi. It hopes to broker peace between the Syrian regime and its opposition while appeasing major stakeholders, including various Syrian groups.

Turkey claims to have received guarantees last December that the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds would not attend scheduled talks in Sochi. It protested continued American support for the YPG on Jan. 10 and seeks to pressure Washington to block their participation in the political process. 

Meanwhile, American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Jan. 17 announced that a small U.S. presence of some 2,000 troops will remain in Syria indefinitely. 

Erdogan has said that Manbij, where the U.S. stations military personnel, will soon be attacked and asked the Americans to leave the town. In turn, President Donald Trump cautioned him against the growing risk of conflict. 

This hasn’t scared the Turks. “Those who support the terrorist organisation will become a target in this battle,” Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag warned.

Erdogan declared Friday that his forces could go even further into Kurdish territory than his government had previously stated. Will two NATO allies actually come to blows?

Religious Conflicts Threaten Stability

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

When quarrels between nations become violent there is a tendency for them to become framed in terms of religion when there is a religious difference between the sides.

Peter Berger, the Boston University sociologist of religion, has termed this the “de-secularization” and “sacralisation” of conflict; such wars become infused with religious imagery by both parties. 

Wars between peoples that may begin over economic and historical grievances often come to be understood from a religious perspective as their societies are “brought under the domination of religious institutions and symbols.” 

Embedded in each nation’s culture, its myths and memories resurface and return to the public sphere. After all, some essence of religious faith exists across different societies, even if latent.

Religion is important because any threat to one’s beliefs is a threat to one’s very being. And since each religion has its fanatic fundamentalists, demagogy, rhetorical intolerance, and demonization of the “other” and “unbeliever” will typically prevail. 

Fundamentalists of any religion tend to take a Manichean view of the world – they see it as a struggle between good and evil, which makes it difficult to justify compromise. 

Such conflicts are hard to resolve by pragmatic and distributive means and become tenacious and brutal.

So, as Berger warned in his 1999 book The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion in World Politics, those who “neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.”

Today most violent conflicts contain religious elements linked up with ethno-national, inter-state, economic, territorial, cultural, and other issues.

In a world where many governments and international organizations are suffering from a legitimacy deficit, a growing impact of religious discourses on international politics seems inevitable.

“Because religion has come to occupy a more prominent role in international affairs since about the mid-1970s, gradually overtaking ideology in some regions, we logically see its different facets more vividly,” notes Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, head of the International History Department at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, Switzerland. 

He cites the end of the Cold War, the 1979 revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its related rise of transnational Islamism, 9/11 and its international imprint, and “the big regional conflict of our times, the increasingly existential opposition between Sunnis and Shiites.” 

And there is the seemingly never-ending deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians over such religious symbols as the sacred sites in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In Asia in recent years Buddhist monks have attacked churches, mosques and Hindu temples in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, with many thousands dead. In China, the Muslim Uyghurs are under increased pressure by the Han state.

Non-state actors have in various countries seized the opportunity to undermine the legitimacy and control of central governments and to promote their extreme ideologies – Hezbollah in Lebanon is a prime example. 

Conflicts that have a religious dimension are becoming more common in sub-Saharan Africa. Failed states and corrupt polities gave rise to religiously-based movements such as al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Is religion on the verge of becoming the common denominator in world politics? If so, it is all the more important to understand it correctly. 

This has been difficult for many intellectuals in western, “post-religious” countries such as Canada. They are prisoners of a liberal mind-set that understands little about the “real world” of deep religious and ethno-nationalist conflict.

Putin's Syrian Victory Seems Complete

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It looks like Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has effectively won his country’s civil war against Islamic State militants. 

The other winners? Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, for sure. But, perhaps more significant for the international order, also Vladimir Putin. 

Through military intervention and diplomatic maneuvres, Putin made his country one of the major players in the Syrian conflict. 

A Russian presence in the Middle East isn’t new. Imperial Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, both asserted interest in the region. It was not until the 1990s, during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, that Russia briefly retreated from there. 

When Putin came to power, he aimed to return Russia to the Middle East, and restore Russian influence in Syria.

In September 2015, he provided the forces that helped, along with troops from Iran, Hezbollah and Iraq, to turn the tide in the country’s civil war.

Moscow’s military engagement has paid off. The war is still not over, but the focus is increasingly on a future political settlement.

To accomplish this, Moscow has teamed up with the Turks and the Iranians. Russian-led peace talks by the three countries were launched in Astana, Kazakhstan, last January. 

On Nov. 22, the leaders of the three countries again met, in Sochi, Russia, to discuss Syria’s future.

The summit emphasized the necessity of preserving Syria’s unity and territorial integrity, without raising any preconditions for the start of a transitional period.

On Dec. 6 Putin announced that the military operation in the area was now finished, and that the focus would switch to a political process. 

He added that it was important to establish a Congress of Syrian Peoples, a proposed peace conference that Russia has offered to host, which would lead to the preparation of a new constitution and then presidential and parliamentary elections.

In a visit to Moscow’s Hmeymim air base in Syria five days later, Putin met with Assad and ordered “a significant part” of Moscow’s military contingent there to start withdrawing.

Moscow intends to retain its permanent air and naval presence in the country. Though the Kremlin has recently improved relations with Egypt, it still regards Syria as its main geopolitical and military foothold in the Middle East.

The air base and the Tartus naval facility, which is being upgraded to a regular naval base, will stay in place. 

The Syrian armed forces will continue to rely on Russian weapons and equipment, and Russian military specialists will continue to train them. 

At the same time, Moscow has no illusions about Assad’s personal loyalty or his ambitions to keep his power, despite Russian efforts for a political settlement and talks with the opposition.

But the reality is, while Russia is a principal actor, it cannot resolve the situation all alone, and Iran also will retain its influence.

Russia’s main contribution has been air strikes, but Iran-backed Shi’ite militias did much of the fighting on the ground.

Moscow is aware of Iran’s desire for a “Shi’ite corridor” stretching from Iran through Iraq and Syria, all the way to Lebanon. Russia still must determine what level of Iranian presence on the ground is acceptable. 

Also, what Russia sees as legitimate opposition forces, to be invited to attend the Congress of Syrian Peoples, may not necessarily match Iran’s viewpoint. 

In fact, during the six years of the Syrian conflict, Russia has tried to establish ties with various Syrian factions, including Kurdish groups, some of which Iran deems suspect. 

So Moscow’s attempt to centralize the political process around its own role could potentially alienate Iran down the road, thereby challenging their so-far-successful partnership in Syria.

As for the United States, Washington seems prepared to accept Assad’s continued rule, reversing repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step down as part of a peace process.

The Syrian regime now controls the majority of the country’s territory, including cities such as Damascus, Hama, Homs, Latakia, and Aleppo, that U.S. analysts refer to as “useful Syria.”

Its forces, along with Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian Revolutionary Guard contingent, have also conquered considerable swathes of the Syrian Golan.

Of course the imminent end of the conflict doesn’t mean Syrians will unite around Assad’s Shi’ite Alawite regime. 

More than six years of war has resulted in the killing and displacement of at least one-third of Syria’s Sunni Arabs, once an absolute majority in the country. They may resume the battle at some future date.

Russia Now Busy Courting Egypt

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian 

Already the major foreign power in Syria, Russia is now trying to extend its role in the Middle by courting Egypt.

Vladimir Putin on Dec. 11 travelled to Cairo for a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, resulting in the signing of contracts for the construction of the Dabaa nuclear plant in northern Egypt. 

The construction of Egypt’s first nuclear power plant, under a $30 billion contract, will be undertaken by Russia’s Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation. The Russian government has offered a $25 billion loan for the project, and Russia will supply the fuel for the plant. 

Annual trade between Russia and Egypt stands at $4 billion and Cairo is very interested in attracting new Russian investments. Putin and Sisi even discussed creating an industrial zone in Egypt with “favorable conditions for the Russian businesses.” They also spoke about trying to revive tourism, hard hit by terrorism.

Military issues were also on the table. Putin’s visit followed the Nov. 30 signing of a draft agreement, valid for five years, allowing the military aircraft of the two countries to share airspace and air bases.

Russia and Egypt also would be able to carry out joint terrorism measures in the Sinai Peninsula, where terrorist operations have been on the rise. An attack on the Al-Rawda Mosque on Nov. 24 murdered 311 worshippers.

Helping Cairo battle terrorists in Sinai, where Cairo has appeared helpless against attacks by militants, may become a pillar of Russian-Egyptian security cooperation.

Nurhan al-Sheikh, a professor of political science at Cairo University, told the Al-Monitor news agency that “It is in Egypt's best interest to cooperate with Russia when it comes to countering terrorism, especially after Russia’s unprecedented success in liberating all Syrian territories from ISIS.”

Putin also stated Moscow's readiness to resume Russian flights over Egypt; all flights had been suspended after a Russian aircraft was downed in the Sinai on Oct. 31, 2015, killing more than 200 people. 

“Egypt has done a great job in making airport security more effective,” Putin remarked. “Russian security services reported that on the whole we are ready to restore such connection between Moscow and Cairo.”

This Egyptian-Russian military rapprochement may also see Russia provide Egypt with the S-400 surface-to-air missile system. Moscow will also soon supply Egypt with MiG-29 fighter jets and has won a tender to sell Egypt Ka-52 helicopters for French-built Mistral ships.

Bases in Egypt would also be useful for Moscow in pursuing its goals in neighbouring Libya. In that chaotic post-Gadhafi country, riven by ongoing battles between rival Islamist and nationalist militias, Russia supports the Libyan National Army forces led by General Khalifa Haftar. 

Russia particularly covets the Sidi Barrani base, which is a mere 100 kilometes from Libya. Haftar is based in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border. 

Haftar met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last August and naval forces conducted maneuvres near the Libyan coast.

This suits Egypt, whose chosen partner in securing its porous western flank is General Hafter.

From Sisi’s perspective, Moscow might be useful in helping solve Egypt’s challenges in the Sinai and in Libya; both are lawless regions that harbour terrorists intent on destabilizing Egypt.

At the United Nations, Egypt has made common cause with Russia to oppose the United States on various issues. Both voted against the American decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

For Russia, this may be a first step towards a resumption of the old Egyptian-Soviet alliance, which lasted for some 25 years during the Cold War and was a centrepiece of Moscow’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

For Egypt, it involves formulating a new foreign policy that includes a nationalistic reassertion of Egypt’s freedom of maneuvre within the region.

Who Are the Palestinians?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary, Alberta] Jewish Free Press

 

In the current crisis over the status of Jerusalem, following President Donald Trump’s recognition of the city as Israel’s capital, some background is in order.

Before the First World War, “Palestine” had been a non-existent country of uncertain size, never sovereign and for centuries part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. 

After the Versailles peace settlement, it acquired a formal designation and boundaries, when in 1922 it was officially created by the League of Nations. Known as the Palestine Mandate, it came under British jurisdiction. 

In addition to direct British rule in western Palestine, which the 1917 Balfour Declaration had earmarked as the venue for a national home for the Jewish People, the Mandate also included eastern Palestine. There, in 1921, the British acknowledged the Hashemite Prince Abdullah ibn Hussein as its governor.

So, while the original Palestine Mandate was supposed to include all of what is today Jordan, in 1921 the British lopped off everything east of the Jordan River and created the puppet state of Transjordan.

Only in 1946 was it formally separated from the Mandate and declared an independent state, as the British understood that their rule over Palestine west of the Jordan was coming to a close.

It’s important to emphasize that this much smaller Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, existed for two years -- from 1946 (the birth of Transjordan) until 1948 (the birth of Israel).  

Before 1946, as a border the Jordan River had little meaning for the self-identification of most of the Arabs living on either bank. The overwhelming majority did not self-identify as Palestinian, but more often as Syrian or part of the greater Arab nation.

Indeed, the word Palestinian until 1948 was more closely associated with Jews and Zionism than with the Arabs in the area. For example, the Jerusalem Post newspaper was called the Palestine Post. The Palestine Symphony consisted entirely of Jewish musicians. 

On the other hand, the Arabs in the Mandate who fought against Jewish independence were united under the name Arab Higher Committee, which had been established in 1936.

The UN-backed partition plan of 1947 proposed partitioning western Palestine between a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State.” These two were designed as ethnic jurisdictions.

But the Arabs in Palestine, joined by the neighbouring Arab states, refused to accept the partition. And once the Jews in Palestine declared independence in 1948, war ensued.

In the conflict that followed, the British-led Arab Legion captured all of what we now call the West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem and east Jerusalem. (Egypt retained what became known as the Gaza Strip.)

The country, now renamed Jordan, in effect became a Palestinian Arab-majority state run by Bedouin tribes under Hashemite rule. No Palestinian state was created in the old Mandate.  

Between 1949 and 1967, in effect a version of the “two-state” solution – Arab rule (though not Palestinian) in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside Israel -- was in effect. 

Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964, three years prior to the Israeli occupation of those territories. Obviously, they were planning to “liberate” Israel proper.

The Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza could have had a state after 1949. Why didn

’t they cast off Egyptian and Jordanian administration and create one, with east Jerusalem as their capital? 

Indeed, when Jordan’s Arab Legion conquered the Old City, its Jewish Quarter and surrounding neighborhoods, it forced out every Jew. Before that, Jews were a large and integral part of what is now called East Jerusalem, and at times were the majority population.

So the Palestinians didn’t even need to evict Jews from the city -- yet hey allowed Jordan to govern Arab-held Jerusalem.

Doesn't it say something that they made no real effort to found a state? Wasn’t Jordan’s annexation – recognized by only three countries, Great Britain, Iraq, and Pakistan -- also an occupation? Is it because the Palestinians were content to live under Muslim Arab rule?

Instead, their focus was bent on destroying Israel because they considered the Jewish state -- remember, in its pre-1967 boundaries -- illegitimate. Openly irredentist groups like Hamas still make that explicit.

Nonetheless, every people has the right to self-definition as well as self-determination, and in any final settlement, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs would have to acknowledge each other as distinct and legitimate nationalities, were peace ever to come to this troubled land. 

It will require majority Palestinian areas to become sovereign, while concurrently on their part acknowledging the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel in its ancient homeland. 

This will doubtless require border adjustments of various sorts, perhaps even involving Jordan, and determining the thorny issue of the final status of Jerusalem. A viable Palestinian state would have to be larger than its present configuration.

Such matters can only be dealt with once a “grand bargain” between the two entities takes place at a peace conference. Otherwise, unfortunately, only one state will survive — either Israel or an Arab Palestine.

On Pakistan, a More Muscular American Foreign Policy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It’s no secret that U.S. President Donald Trump thinks Americans have for decades been taken for a ride by fair-weather friends when it comes to foreign aid.

They are glad to take the cash, but become no-shows when asked to provide help when Washington needs it.

Pakistan is among the countries he considers freeloaders. In fact, it’s worse than that. 

Pakistan has for a long time been playing a double game, assuring Washington that it was doing what it could to tackle fundamentalist militancy while at the same time turning a blind eye to the many terrorist networks in the country.

Pakistan has actively worked at cross-purposes to Washington’s own foreign policies, from giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden to providing aid, often surreptitiously, to various groups of Islamists, especially in Afghanistan and the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir.

It has also long been an open secret that its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency created the Afghanistan Taliban and that it tolerated contact between the ISI and commanders of the insurgency. 

In 2016, the then-Taliban leader Mullah Mansour was killed by a U.S. drone strike inside Pakistan. 

Washington also has charged Islamabad with supporting the Haqqani network militants, who are allied with the Afghan Taliban.

Not one to mince words, at the start of the new year Trump announced that America won’t be played for a sucker anymore. U.S. aid shouldn’t go to countries that harbor terrorists who want to harm Americans, he asserted. 

The United States has provided Pakistan with $33.4 billion in aid since 2002. Annual economic and security assistance peaked at more than $3.5 billion in 2011, but Washington has drastically cut funds to Pakistan in recent years. 

Still, the South Asian nation received $383 million in 2016, according to U.S. government data, and $742 million was earmarked for 2017.

Last August, Trump warned he would slash aid to Pakistan as punishment for giving sanctuary “to agents of chaos, violence and terror.”

These include pro-Kashmir movements that have been unofficially tolerated because of their public popularity. As well, the ISI has long been reported to abet Lashkar-e-Taiba, a radical anti-India militia accused of masterminding a terrorist siege in Mumbai in 2008. 

Organized by militant ideologue Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, it then rebranded itself as Jamaat-ud-Dawa and has recently established its first political party, the Milli Muslim League. 

“We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting,” Trump remarked, in announcing a new Afghanistan strategy. “But that will have to change.” 

He turned up the heat as 2017 was coming to a close. Trump presented a blueprint for the country’s national security policy on Dec. 18, and went out of his way to criticize Islamabad. “We make massive payments every year to Pakistan,” he stated. “They have to help.”

Vice President Mike Pence reinforced that message while visiting Afghanistan before Christmas, telling American troops that “President Trump has put Pakistan on notice.” 

So Jan. 1, 2018 arrived with one of Trump’s trademark tweets, as he lashed out at Pakistan. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif responded by laying much of the blame on the rise of terrorist elements in Pakistan in the last 20 years on the United States. That didn’t go over too well in Washington.

In a follow-up, the Trump administration announced on Jan. 4 it will suspend most security assistance to Pakistan, expanding its censure over militant safe havens.

The administration had already previously announced it will delay $255 million in military aid to Pakistan.

Analysts say ties are likely to worsen in 2018. “The trend lines have not been good, and the tweet gives an indication of the turmoil that awaits in 2018,” remarked Michael Kugelman, the senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Democratic Transition Follows Liberia’s Election

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

After almost three-quarters of a century, something new out of Liberia: a democratic political transition.

An African country founded by American Blacks in the 19th century, it had not had a smooth transfer of power from one elected president to another since 1944.

In fact, this was the first ever peaceful transfer of power in the country through universal suffrage.

On Dec. 26, George Weah, the former international soccer star, a man with little previous political experience, beat Joseph Boakai who had been Liberia’s vice-president for 12 years.

Boakai served under outgoing president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and darling of the international development community. 

She had herself defeated Weah in the presidential election run-off in 2005, and won a second term in 2011 against Winston Tubman, whose vice-presidential running mate was Weah.

In 2017, Weah and Boakai were the top two finishers of 20 candidates that contested the first round of balloting back on Oct. 10. 

Weah had come first with 38.4 per cent of the vote, compared with the 28.8 per cent won by second-place Boakai. As neither gained 50 per cent, a run-off became necessary.

Scheduled for Nov. 7, it took place after much delay, as some of the defeated candidates cried foul and insisted the election had been plagued by irregularities. 

This time, Weah won 61.5 per cent of the vote against Boakai’s 38.5 per cent. Voter turnout was low, with around 56 percent of registered voters, as many Liberians stayed home on the day after Christmas.

Weah, who was raised in a poor part of Liberia’s capital Monrovia, starred at major European soccer clubs in France, Italy and England. 

And now he will be running Liberia, a country which endured a brutal civil war for 17 years, started by Charles Taylor on Christmas Eve in 1989. The 14-year civil war left 250,000 dead and the nation’s infrastructure destroyed.

Taylor was eventually forced out amid international pressure following his indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone. He is currently serving a 50-year jail term in a British prison following his conviction. 

Weah’s vice-president will be Jewel Howard Taylor, the warlord’s ex-wife. But such is politics in this long-suffering country.

She had caused a stir early in the election campaign when she told reporters that although her ex-husband was no longer involved in Liberian politics, he still had promises that needed to be kept. She called for putting her husband’s agenda “back on the table.”

Rumors had abounded that Charles Taylor was issuing directives to Weah’s campaign from his jail cell during the first round. Weah admitted receiving at least one call from the incarcerated war criminal.

Having secured a little more than 38 per cent of the vote in the first round, Weah obviously had to make a lot of political deals with some of the other 18 first-round candidates in order to win. 

He even sought the support of a former warlord, Prince Johnson, who was taped torturing and killing former president Samuel Kayan Doe in 1990. 

Weah has his work cut out for him, in a country that, despite Johnson Sirleaf’s efforts, is still struggling with acute poverty, high unemployment, corruption and a health system recovering from the 2014 Ebola epidemic, which killed more people in Liberia than anywhere else. 

Compared to this, being a soccer star is a cakewalk.