Middle East Eye – October 2023
Israel-Palestine war live:
Israel kills 400 Palestinian children, wounds 1,500 more
Israeli air force says 6,000 bombs dropped in Gaza hitting 3,600 'targets' as bombardment continues
KEY POINTS
Rights groups condemn 'collective punishment' of Palestinians
1500 Palestinians, 1300 Israeli killed
14 medical facilities destroyed in Israeli bombing
Egyptian President Sisi calls on Palestinians to 'remain on their land'
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has called on Palestinians in Gaza to "remain on their land" and not flee southwards into northern Sinai.
There have been repeated calls for Egypt to allow the passage of Palestinians from the besieged enclave in the wake of the Israeli bombardment.
However, speaking at a military ceremony on Thursday, Sisi said while his government maintained a "firm position" of ensuring Palestinians' "legitimate rights" the residents of Gaza must "stay steadfast and remain on their land".
He added that Egypt was already hosting "nine million guests, as I call them, from many countries who came to Egypt for security and safety".
However, he said the influx of people from Gaza would be "different" because it would mean "the elimination of the (Palestinian) cause".
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-gaza-war-live
Democracy Now – October 12, 2023
Turkish President Condemns Israeli Massacre in Gaza
In Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned Israel’s blockade of Gaza and its relentless bombing campaign as a “massacre.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: “Cutting off a city’s water, electricity, entry and exits, collapsing its infrastructure, destroying all of its centers of worship, from mosques to churches, as well as their schools, preventing people from getting the most fundamental needs, and bombing housing units where civilians reside — in other words, managing a conflict using every sort of embarrassing method — this is not a war, it is a massacre.”
The Middle East Eye – October 12, 2023
The blood of Gaza is on the West’s hands as much as Israel’s
By Jonathan Cook
The bloodiest hand in the current slaughter of Palestinians and Israelis belongs not to Hamas or the Netanyahu government, but to the West.
Yes, Palestinian fighters carried out a brutal attack at the weekend on Israeli settlements on the edge of the Gaza Strip. But this attack did not emerge from nowhere, or without warning. It was not “unprovoked”, as Israel would like us to believe.
In fact, western capitals know exactly how much the Palestinians of Gaza have been provoked, because those same governments have been complicit for decades in supporting Israel as it has ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their homeland and imprisoned the remnants of the population in ghettoes across their homeland.
For the past 16 years, western backing for Israel has not wavered, even as Israel has turned the coastal enclave of Gaza from the world’s largest open-air prison into a gruesome torture chamber, where Palestinians are experimented on.
Their food and power have been rationed, essentials of life denied to them, their access to drinkable water slowly removed, and their hospitals prevented from receiving medical supplies and equipment.
The problem is not ignorance. Western governments have been informed in real-time of the crimes Israel is committing: in confidential cables from their own embassy officials, and in endless reports from human rights groups documenting Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians.
And yet western politicians have time and again done nothing to intervene, done nothing to exert meaningful pressure. Worse, they have rewarded Israel with endless military, financial and diplomatic support.
‘Human animals’
The West is no less responsible now as Israel steps up its barbaric treatment of Gaza. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant decided this week to deepen the siege on Gaza by stopping all food and power – a crime against humanity.
He has referred to the enclave’s caged Palestinian population – men, women and children – as “human animals”.
How has the West responded?
President Joe Biden has declared – approvingly – that a “long war” is ahead between Israel and Hamas. Washington seems to relish long wars, which always prove a boon to its arms industries and a distraction from domestic troubles.
A US aircraft carrier is on its way. Officials are already preparing to send missiles and bombs that will be used once again to kill Palestinian civilians from the air, as well as ammunition for Israel’s troops to strafe Palestinian communities during the coming ground invasion.
And, of course, there will be plenty of extra funding for Israel – money that can never be found when it is needed by the most vulnerable US citizens.
Those funds will be on top of the nearly $4bn Washington currently sends each year to an Israeli government of self-declared fascists and ethnic supremacists whose express aim is to annex the last remaining fragments of Palestinian territory – as soon as they can get the green light from Washington.
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak does not want to be outdone, as Israel inflicts collective punishment on Gaza’s Palestinians and begins to slaughter them every bit as indiscriminately as Hamas did Israeli partygoers at the weekend.
A giant, illuminated Israeli flag was emblazoned on the facade of the best-known home in Britain: 10 Downing Street, Sunak’s official residence. The prime minister has offered “military assistance” and “intelligence”, presumably to help Israel bomb Gaza’s caged population.
Suffer in silence
The truth is that this moment of catastrophe could never have been reached without western powers indulging, subsidising and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinian people, decade after decade.
Without such unstinting support, and without a complicit western media refashioning the land thefts by settlers and the oppression by soldiers as some kind of “humanitarian crisis”, Israel could never have gotten away with its crimes.
It would have been forced to reach a proper accommodation with the Palestinians – not the bogus Oslo accords that were intended only to ensnare the ﾓgoodﾔ Palestinian leadership into colluding in their own people’s subjugation.
Israel would also have been forced to genuinely normalise with its Arab neighbours, not browbeat them into accepting a Pax Americana in the Middle East.
Instead, Israel has been free to pursue a policy of relentless escalation, sold by the western media as “calm” or “quiet” – until Palestinians try to hit back at their tormentors.
Only then is the term “escalation” used. It is always Palestinians “escalating tensions”. The permanent state of oppression inflicted by Israel can then be safely acknowledged and relabelled as “retaliation”.
Palestinians are expected to suffer in silence. Because when they make a noise, it risks reminding western publics of how bogus, how self-serving western leaders’ appeals to the “rules-based order” truly are.
‘Back to the Stone Age’
Where does this endless indulgence from the West ultimately lead?
Already, Israel is emboldened to make much more explicit its policy towards Gaza’s two million inhabitants. There is a word for that policy, one we are not supposed to use to avoid causing offence to those implementing it, as well as those who quietly support its implementation.
Whether by design or outcome, Israel’s starving of civilians, leaving them with no power, depriving them of clean water, and preventing hospitals from treating the sick and wounded – from treating those Israel has bombed – is a genocidal policy.
Western governments know this too. Because Israeli leaders have made no secret of what they are doing.
Fifteen years ago, shortly after Israel instituted its stifling siege on Gaza by land, sea and air, the then deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, averred that Israel was ready to carry out a ﾓShoahﾔ – the Hebrew word for Holocaust – on Gaza. If the Palestinians were to avoid this fate, he said, they must keep quiet at their internment.
Six years later, Ayelet Shaked, who would soon be appointed a senior Israeli minister, declared all Palestinians in Gaza to be “the enemy”, and included “its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure”.
She called on Israel to kill the mothers of Palestinian fighters resisting the occupation so they could not give birth to more “little snakes” – Palestinian children.
During the 2019 general election, Benny Gantz, then leader of the opposition and soon-to-be defence minister, campaigned with a video celebrating his time as head of the Israeli military, when “parts of Gaza were sent back to the Stone Age”.
In 2016, another general, Yair Golan, who at the time was the Israeli military’s second in command, described developments in Israel as echoing the period in Germany leading up to the Holocaust.
When asked to comment on Golan’s remark during an interview this year, retired general Amiram Levin agreed that Israel was becoming more like Nazi Germany. “It hurts, it’s not nice, but that’s the reality.”
Blood of Gaza
Western leaders watched through all this: as Palestinian civilians – half the enclave’s population are children – were kept hungry, were denied drinkable water, were refused electricity, were denied proper medical care, and were repeatedly subjected to horrifying bombardments.
From one side of its mouth, the West pretended to agonise about the legal niceties of “proportionality”. From the other side of its mouth, it cheered Israel on. It spoke of “unbreakable bonds”, of “unquestionable rights”, of “self-defence”.
It echoed figures like Gallant. The Palestinians weren’t humans with agency. They weren’t people striving for their freedom and dignity.
They weren’t a people resisting their occupation and dispossession, as they were fully entitled to do under international law – a right the world celebrates when it comes to Ukrainians.
No, they were either the victims or the supporters of their “terrorist” leaders. As such, they were treated by the West as though they had forfeited any right to be heard, to be valued, to be treated as human.
Western politicians and media expect the Palestinians of Gaza to stay in their torture chamber, bite their lips and suffer in silence so consciences in the West are not disturbed.
It has to be said. Gaza’s population is facing a quiet, slow path to erasure. And the ones funding it, the ones enabling it, are the US and its European allies. Their hands are the ones drenched in the blood of Gaza.
Jonathan Cook, award-winning British author and journalist reporting from Nazareth on the Middle East, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-blood-gaza-west-hands-much-israel
Information Clearing House – October 12, 2023
Get this straight, Western media: Palestinians aren’t sub-human
By Andrew Mitrovica
A young child sits on his mother’s hip as she and others flee through the streets of the Gaza Strip amid Israeli strikes on October 9, 2023 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]
Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades.
That fact may come, I suspect, as a surprise to many people whose grasp of the world is shaped by their exclusive consumption of Western media.
The deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians – prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias – have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations.
Countless lives lost and maimed in body and spirit. Land and homes stolen. Livelihoods and ancient traditions destroyed. The exhausting cycle of having to rebuild, then watching all the promise and possibility turn, in an instant, to dust. The wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim.
But, of course, much of the Western media won’t acknowledge these facts and outrages. That’s because many of the reporters and columnists now gripped by the latest eruption of murderous madness in Palestine and Israel have always interpreted events through a prism chiefly dictated by Israel – whether they are prepared to admit it or not.
In this myopic calculus, Israel is always the victim, never the perpetrator. Israel’s understanding of history matters; Palestinians’ reading not only of the past but of the present and the future too, does not count. And, perhaps most indecent of all, Israeli lives and deaths matter; Palestinian lives and deaths don’t.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, made this point in a quiet, but persuasive address he delivered on Sunday to that apparently powerless body.
“History,” he said, “begins for some media and politicians when Israelis are killed. Our people have endured one deadly year after another”.
Mansour recounted the repeated warnings he and other exasperated Palestinians have issued – time and again – of the potential “consequences of Israeli impunity and international inaction”.
He was not alone.
Human rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid – a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency.
Implicit in those dense, meticulously chronicled studies was what amounted to a blazing flare intended to seize finally the flighty attention of complicit Western governments and media. Israel’s deliberate, organised oppression is not only unsustainable, it disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed. Ultimately, violence begets violence in round after round of horrific vengeance by both sides.
Predictably, the cautions were not heeded.
Instead, many Western news outlets either dismissed outright or used the familiar vocabulary of denial to obscure the blatant truth.
Others opted for wilful malpractice, preferring to devote time and resources to the death of a celebrity dog over the documented theft, deprivations and indignities endured by Palestinians – young and old.
At the core of this blindness is a shared doctrine that holds that a Palestinian is a disposable non-entity, an expendable by-product of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.
In this perverse construct, Palestinian civilians are not considered innocent casualties of war but remain largely responsible for their own deaths and desperate fates.
The result: Western columnists will defend Israel – without so much as a hint of doubt or equivocation – despite its demonstrable record of erasing Palestinians whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for whatever reason it wants.
The sad, human evidence abounds.
Mahmoud al-Saadi, an 18-year-old student, was erased by Israel while walking to school in the Jenin refugee camp last November.
Mohammad al-Tamimi, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler was erased by Israel while he was sitting in his father’s car parked outside their home in Nabi Saleh, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, as he waited to go to a birthday party in June 2023.
Shireen Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian-American journalist was erased by Israel while she was preparing to report on yet another raid in Jenin in May 2022.
Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a 67-year-old Palestinian-Canadian physician, scholar and humanitarian, witnessed three of his daughters – Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, Aya, 13 – and a niece, Noor, 17, being erased when Israeli tank shells shattered the family home in the Gaza Strip in January 2009.
Omar Abdulmajeed Asaad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American retiree was erased by Israel while en route home to Jiljilya, a town a little northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, after an evening playing cards with friends in January 2022. Soldiers marched Asaad to a nearby construction site and dumped him onto cold stone pavers. That’s where he died of a “stress-induced heart attack”. Alone.
Twelve-year-old Hassan Abu al-Neil was erased by Israel on August 21, 2021 while standing on what remains of Palestinian soil in Gaza in defiance of the occupation.
The lethal ledger goes on and on and on.
In the awful days, weeks and potentially months ahead, a gallery of writers will, no doubt, stand rhetorically shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his appalling calls to impose a total blockade on Gaza and bludgeon it into a “deserted island” in the wake of Hamas’s ruthless onslaught.
Netanyahu’s chilling vow to, in effect, obliterate Gaza and his warning to the 2 million Palestinians who live in that thin strip of land to “get out” is the inevitable expression of apartheid, which is predicated on the dehumanisation of an entire people.
As Palestinian-American writer, Ra’fat Al-Dajani, has explained, the dehumanisation of Palestinians is based on two tenets widely held among Western media: “Palestinians are violent because of who they are – because of something intrinsic in their very nature and culture,” Dajani wrote, rather than “because of the oppression and violence of the Israeli occupation”. As a corollary to this, “since Palestinians lack basic standards of morality… the only way to interact with them is through the use of force, whether state-sponsored force by the Israeli security forces or non-state actors such as Israeli settlers. Force is the only language they understand.”
Both of these blasphemies have already been on display on Western cable news channels’ 24/7 loop and in opinion pages featuring the usual parade of Israeli-aligned officials and pundits.
In rebuttal, Mansour was obliged, remarkably, to state the obvious: “We [Palestinians] are not sub-humans. Let me repeat: We are not sub-humans. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and reneges our rights. A rhetoric that ignores the occupation of our land and oppression of our people.”
Mansour defended the resistance as an understandable response to Israel’s longstanding war on Palestinians, saying: “Israel cannot wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites and expect peace in exchange.”
In the end, the ambassador said, Palestinians, and Palestinians alone, will decide their destiny. “The Palestinian people will be free one day or another, one way or another,” Mansour said.
He is right.
The geopolitics of Al-Aqsa Flood
By Pepe Escobar
Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.
First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.
Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.
Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.
Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.
There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.
Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.
That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.
Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.
Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.
Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.
Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.
Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to nohigh-tech surveillanceaccess, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.
It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”
The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said,ﾠ“Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”
Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians
Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.
Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:
“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”
After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.
Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.
Which brings us to Iran.
Geopolitical plausible deniability
The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.
Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.
In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.
Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”
Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.
The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.
Elsewhere in the region,the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.
Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.
Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor
The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.
A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.
What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.
China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.
Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.
The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.
Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.
Pepe Escobar (born 1954) is a Brazilian journalist and geopolitical analyst.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/the-geopolitics-of-al-aqsa-flood
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