Today’s Top Stories
1. Gunmen stormed the Paris offices of a satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. As this roundup went to press, 12 people were confirmed dead. The unidentified gunmen are still at large. The Guardian‘s posting live updates.
The magazine has had tense relations with Muslims since 2006, when it reprinted controversial Mohammed cartoons. Since then, it was hit with a lawsuit, and firebombing; tension peaked in 2012 when France closed its embassies in 20 Arab countries for safety reasons when Charlie Hebdo cartoons coincided with riots over the film, “The Innocence of Muslims.”
2. A big winter storm blasted Israel and the Mideast, cutting off roads to Jerusalem and Safed. Low-lying areas of Tel Aviv and Gaza were hit with floods, Netanya was battered by high winds, and Palestinians declared a state of emergency in the West Bank and Gaza.
As this roundup went to press the storm claimed the life of an Israeli boy, a Palestinian baby, and a ten-year-old Syrian refugee in Lebanon. The weather brought a respite to Syria’s civil war; schools in Jordan were closed as well. More at the Times of Israel, Haaretz and YNet.
3. After visiting Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Eyad Madani sparked an important Arab conversation that Israelis should pay attention to.
Madani, the secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), is urging Muslims to visit Jerusalem and strengthen ties to holy sites — despite a long-standing boycott. Asharq al-Awsat columnist Ali Ibrahim writes:
Past calls for Muslims to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque were met with opposition from political circles because it was feared such visits would constitute a kind of normalization of relations with Israel, “gratis”—that is, without Israel giving up anything from its own end on the Palestinian issue or occupied Arab lands. This is an argument that cannot be ignored: any agreement on these visits would have to include Israel, since the reality of the occupation and the absence of a Palestinian state dictate that it is Israel that occupies the other side of this equation between the visitors and the place they will visit.
So, yes, such a move, if it happens, will not be easy, neither politically nor in terms of procedures, and it will certainly constitute a radical change in the way many deal with Israel. But the flood of positive reactions to the calls by the OIC, particularly from the Palestinians, shows that the positives could outweigh the negatives feared by those who make the aforementioned argument about cooperation with Israel.
One of these positives could be the creation of new jobs for Palestinians in East Jerusalem due to the influx of all the new tourists to the area. Another, and which will have a much wider international impact, is the crystallization of the image of Jerusalem as a city for people of all the three Abrahamic faiths, who all have an equal right to it. The Al-Aqsa Mosque, sacred to more than 1 billion Muslims across the globe, is a part of this image, and so any political considerations regarding the area will now have to take them and the visitors among them into account.
4. Has Anyone Seen Any Rockets? To write about the Gaza war without mentioning the rockets that presaged it is simply a lie.
Israel and the Palestinians
• April Fools Day: How appropriate:
UN chief says Palestine will join int’l court on April 1
• French officials warned the Palestinians to cool off their diplomatic intifada, reports Reuters.
• It’s not clear whether Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal was deported from Qatar to Turkey or not. The Washington Post and Daily Telegraph round up who said what.
Where in the world is Khaled Mashaal?
• Palestinian unity down the drain: Hamas and Fatah are back to arresting each other’s people.
• Jerusalem Post: Jury selection begins in first terror trial against the PA in an American court.
Opening statements are set for next Tuesday with the US Supreme Court rejecting an interim-appeal by the PA asking it to intervene and block the trial late Tuesday.
• Anti-Semitism’s the most common prejudice in the Turkish media, according to a study. Whoda thought?
• Syrians are the world’s largest refugee group after the Palestinians, according to UN figures. If second and third generation Palestinian refugees are discounted from the bloated lists, I’ll bet the Syrian refugees would outnumber the Palestinians.
Commentary/Analysis
• Hamas’ deputy foreign minister, Ghazi Hamad tells Palestinians to look in the mirror: Statehood’s going nowhere because there’s no national consensus or strategic vision. He’s careful not to be too critical of Hamas, of course. Read it and draw your own conclusions.
• If you’re trying to get a better handle on Israel’s economic leverage with the PA — especially the now-suspended tax revenue transfers to the PA — make sure you eyeball Steven Rosen‘s assessment.
• Alex Fishman: The Egyptians are doing a better job of disengaging from Gaza than Israel. What does this “strategic failure” mean?
Israel cannot claim a price from Hamas in return for its increased dependency on Israel, because Israel does not recognize Hamas.
Israel cannot translate its deeper involvement in Gaza, into which it is being dragged against its policy, into a security or political achievement, like stopping the production of weapons in Gaza or a long-term commitment to maintaining the calm. On the contrary, the demands from Israel in the international arena are only growing.
• A Los Angeles Times staff-ed blasts HarperCollins for wiping Israel off the maps of its school books.
• Christians in the Holy Land: Don’t call us Arab
• For more commentary/analysis, see Peter Cluskey (War crimes cases against Israel may never get started), Jonathan Tobin (Call Abbas’s bluff), David Makovsky (PA goes to the ICC: policy implications), and a staff-ed in The Australian (click via Google News: Palestinians’ destructive course),
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Time takes a closer look at Hezbollah’s security follies coming to light following the disclosure of a mole penetrating its senior leadership. Thanassis Cambanis focuses on Hezbollah bloated with self-interested opportunists; Karl Vick looks at the organization’s operational failures.
• Are Hezbollah’s glory days in South America numbered?
But things are changing drastically in the region. The late President Hugo Chavez, America’s most ostentatious enemy in the region, is gone. The times when Hezbollah members got Venezuelan papers to travel to the United States and Canada are probably over. Cuba — another country warmly disposed towards Iran, has recently seen an unprecedented thawing of relations with the US . . .
But Mousawi had reason to be upset by the change: the shifts may well mean less cooperation with South American governments; intelligence agencies may begin to open up archives; police may cease turning a blind eye, and the diaspora that has contributed to maintaining the Party’s coffers may be less inclined to risk continuing to do so.
• Who benefits from sanctions on Iran? Corrupt Iranian officials, according to a former economic advisor to former president Hassan Khatami. Saeed Laylaz told CNBC the sanctions provide a convenient smokescreen for government corruption and mismanagement.
• A report accuses Syria of more chemical weapons attacks.
Chlorine gas is not listed as a chemical weapon, and is used for industrial purposes around the world. It can, however, be used as a weapon to induce respiratory irritation.
One village investigated for the OPCW report, Kafr Zita in the north of the country, was said to have been targeted by hundreds of attacks with conventional weapons and hit with toxic chemicals 17 times between April and August 2014.
Featured image: CC BY flickr/Walter Watzpatzkowski; Temple Mount CC BY-NC flickr/Francisco Martins; Mashaal CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, Wikimedia Commons/Trango
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