Weekend long read

Our weekly round-up of Middle East related background reading.

1) Writing at the Independent, our colleague Adam Levick lays out “Five reasons why Trump recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel won’t destroy peace in the Middle East”.

“Amid the cacophony of reports, comments and tweets by Middle East analysts and world leaders on the US President’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and plans to relocate the embassy to the holy city, one broad conclusion seems to be shared by most: that it will serve as a “death knell” for the peace process. The decision, so the thinking goes, not only sends a signal to the Palestinians that the US is no longer “an honest broker”, but also prevents the possibility of a compromise over Jerusalem, one of the more contentious issues within negotiations for a final peace agreement.

However, as with so much thinking within the echo chamber of the elite about “root causes” of the impasse between the two parties, the alarmist reaction to the announcement from Washington regarding the injurious impact on peace seems divorced from reality, and ignores facts which run counter to the conclusion.”

2) At the Atlantic, former MK Einat Wilf explains how the approach to Israel’s capital city was for years influenced by a notion to which the BBC still clings.

“The United States recognized the State of Israel upon its independence, so it should have been straightforward for the U.S. to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to establish its embassy there. If anything, it is the Jordanian annexation of the Old City and the way Jews were denied access that should have led to international consternation (it didn’t).

Why didn’t the U.S. and all other countries recognize residential, non-holy, west-of-the-armistice-line Jerusalem as Israel’s capital? At the time the U.S. was still attached to an idea, proposed in the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, that the vast area of greater Jerusalem (including residential neighborhoods) as well as Bethlehem should be a “Corpus Separatum,” a separate area that would be governed by the international community.

This fiction never existed anywhere but on paper. It never existed because the Arabs rejected the partition proposal and started a war to prevent it from being realized. When they lost that war, Jerusalem west of the armistice line became Israel’s, and Jerusalem east of the line came under Jordanian occupation and entered an extended period of disputed claims. So the U.S., while recognizing Israel within the armistice lines, chose a policy that held the status of Israel’s capital hostage to a fiction that never had a chance of existing.”

3) Matthew Levitt discusses the much neglected topic of Hizballah’s activities in Latin America.

“On July 19, 1994, the day after Hezbollah operatives blew up the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, the group sent a suicide bomber to take down a flight on Alas Chiricanas Airlines, a Panamanian commuter airliner carrying mostly Jewish passengers, including several Americans. The case languished for years, but the FBI appears to have recently collected new information which, together with evidence gleaned from other current investigations, is likely to serve as the basis for a variety of actions aimed at Hezbollah, the lynchpin of the ITN and Iran’s most powerful proxy group.

But Hezbollah’s more recent moves in Latin America are very much a matter of interest for investigators, too. In October, a joint FBI-NYPD investigation led to the arrest of two individuals who were allegedly acting on behalf of Hezbollah’s terrorist wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO). At the direction of their Hezbollah handlers, one person allegedly “conducted missions in Panama to locate the U.S. and Israeli Embassies and to assess the vulnerabilities of the Panama Canal and ships in the Canal,” according to a Justice Department press release. The other allegedly “conducted surveillance of potential targets in America, including military and law enforcement facilities in New York City.”” 

4) At the Tablet, Paul Berman writes about Bernard-Henri Levi’s documentary Peshmerga.

“Realism, the doctrine, affirms that, in matters of international affairs, the strong count, and the weak do not. That is because realism entertains a utopia, which is that of stability. And stability can be achieved only by a concert of the big and the powerful. It cannot be achieved by the small and the weak. Therefore realism is hostile to rebellions for freedom, hostile to small nations, hostile to invocations of morality or principle—hostile with a good conscience, on the grounds that, in the long run, the stability of the strong is better for everyone than the rebellions of the weak. Realism is, in short, an anti-Kurdish doctrine.

What good are the Kurds, anyway? From a realist standpoint, I mean. They are good for short-term interests, and not for long-term interests. Kissinger used them in the 1970s, and then tossed them away. The Reagan Administration in the next decade was content to see them gassed by Saddam Hussein. And in our own time? We needed the Kurds to fight the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and they did fight. They are the heroes of the anti-Islamic State war. They ought to be parading in triumph along the boulevards of Manhattan and Paris.” 

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