Weekend long read

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

1) At the Fathom Journal Einat Wilf and Shany Mor are “Celebrating the Argument“.

“Having spent more than 50 years fiercely debating the Zionist project, it was logical, if not very natural, to extend the debate to those groups who became citizens of the State of Israel, regardless of their views. The State of Israel became a fierce debate over what it means to be the Jewish state, with the debate conducted now not only among Zionist Jews but expanded to include the views of anti-Zionist Arabs and anti-Zionist Haredi Jews. The elected parliament of the State of Israel became a place where those who argued against the very existence of the State of Israel, or at the very least made it clear that they could very well do without it, were represented: something which does not exist in any other parliament in the world.”

2) Michael Totten discusses “The Case for Bombing Assad“.

“The Assad regime won’t disappear or suddenly turn into a model of good government by a couple of punishing strikes, nor will the number of Syrian dead in the future be reduced even by one. Those are not the objectives. The objective is (or at least should be) making the use of a weapon of mass destruction more costly than not using it, to demonstrate not just to Assad but also to every other would-be war criminal that the norm established in 1993 on behalf of every human being will not go down without a fight.”

3) Colonel (res) Grisha Yakubovich takes a look at the background to the ‘Great Return March’.

“The recent clashes on the Gaza border, organized by Hamas as part of the ‘March of the Return’ initiative, are merely a component in Hamas’s bigger effort to become the main Palestinian ruling entity. The incidents on the Gaza border should not be confused with the ‘main event.’

Hamas is using the march, and the ‘popular resistance’ model, as well as the violence these generate, to try and mobilize the worldwide 7.5-million strong Palestinian nation, stretched out across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and worldwide.”

4) The ITIC has published “Initial Analysis of the Identities of Gazans Killed During the “Great Return March” on March 30 and April 6, 2018“.

“During and after the events of “great return march” that began on March 20, 2018, between 32 and 34 Palestinians were killed (as of April 11, 2018). Most of them have been identified as terrorist operatives affiliated with Hamas and the other terrorist organizations operating in the Gaza Strip. Most of them were killed while rioting against IDF forces. Some were killed while carrying out terrorist attacks, attempting to cross the border security fence between Israel and the Gaza Strip, or in IDF attacks following terrorist activities carried out during the “great return march”.”

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