Dr. Abdus Sattar Abbasi

Despite huge military might, exceptional industrial potential and deep global penetration Israel failed to provide happy and peaceful life to Israelis. The eventual purpose of the progress and the development is to provide prosperous lifestyle to the nation but Israel remained terribly unsuccessful to realise this dream of millions of Jews because of fundamental flaw in the national approach which rests on oppression, occupation and brutalities against unarmed Palestinians.In spite of exceptional economic growth, erecting separation wall regardless of international condemnation and significant military capabilities Israeli citizens are subject to continuous threat of war and conflict.

There is no comparison of fighting capabilities of Israeli defence forces and Palestinians. According to the Global Fire Power (GFP) website, “For 2022, Israel is ranked 18 of 142 out of the countries considered for the annual GFP review while Pakistan is ranked among top ten. Israel holds a Power Index (PwrIndx) score of 0.2621 (a score of 0.0000 is considered ‘perfect’).

The finalized Global Firepower ranking utilizes over 50 individual factors to determine a given nation’s Power Index score with categories ranging from military might and financials to logistical capability and geography. The smaller ‘PwrIndx’ value the more powerful a nation’s theoretical fighting capability is by conventional means as nuclear capability is not taken into account.” How can anybody justify attacks of such a strong military on unarmed and civilian population of Palestine? A country with more than 40 thousand dollars GDP per capita being 31^st biggest economy of the world with around 9 million of population can extend every peace and comfort to the citizens but Israel rendered nothing but incessant state of fear and unrest to its people.

Since we started learning about global dynamics we are witnessing brutalities of Israel onvulnerable Palestinians.After recent attacks of Israel on Gaza it was heart-breaking listening to a mother when she found her son has been martyred. Addressing a gathering while controlling her sorrow and grief she told age fellow of her son that my son has been shot but you all are like my son. My son followed the path of the prophets. He left for the beloved Creator. My son is the son of Palestine he is precious than my soul, I gave him to the Last Messenger, I gave him to Masjid Al-Aqsa, I gave him to the Creator, the One, the Eternal, the Satisfier of needs.  

Israel does this as a policy, according to Yuval Abraham, “The majority of Israelis believe that hundreds of children or families killed in Gaza during Israel’s military operations are killed unintentionally unlike the terrorist organizations. The former soldiers testified that they were told by their superiors that there is a certain number of ‘non-combatants’ — meaning families and children — that the army is allowed to kill during operational activities. The control of the borders, and the dependence of the strip’s residents on Israel, provides Israel with superior intelligence. They have no way to get out of there. Israel controls all their crossings — that gives Israel a lot of power. If Gaza is connected to the West Bank, you lose some of that power. Today we control everything that goes in and out, whether physically, electronically, or in terms of people. This allows for more modes of action: for example, people in Gaza beg to be able to travel in order to study abroad or visit relatives outside the strip. There is no such thing as privacy in Gaza. You know everything about the person. What they like, what they have photographed [on their phone], and whether they have a lover. Everything is completely exposed. You can collect information about anyone you want. And you know that these people wouldn’t want you to know these things.”

Last year’s report by the Amnesty International speaks volumes about brutalities of Israel. Report states, “During the armed conflict in May 2021, Israel committed apparent war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. According to the OHCHR and the WHO, 242 Palestinians were killed, including 63 children, and some 9,000 were injured. More than 74,000 Palestinians were displaced. The housing needs of 4,000 families, including 7,000 children, whose homes were damaged or destroyed, had not been met by December. On the 10^thMay, Israel bombed the seawater desalination plant in north Gaza, cutting water supplies to more than 250,000 people.”

In a latest report in February this year the agency states, “Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians. Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights. Massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention. Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.”

International community should remember that liberation from such atrocities and brutalities is the natural outcome. According to Geraldine L. Palmer and her colleagues, “At a collective or community level, liberation is only possible when the group is able to gain power and control over the systems, and institutions that surround their lives. Liberation is a social act, a process of becoming free from ideologies that limit our freedom and the institutions or structures that constrain people’s collective determination. Liberation must be understood as having a critical consciousness of the circumstances and conditions of oppression that challenge and limit opportunities for freedom. Liberation is the dismantling of oppression and power, and striving to recognize the humanity and dignity of all people.”

Israel should also learn from 20 years of NATO allied forces in Afghanistan which resulted in a cost around two and a half trillion dollars with eventual withdrawal without any significant achievement except increasing burden to their budgets. We all should respect and support the desire and struggle of Palestinians for liberation from never-ending brutalities of Israel because as Martin Luther King said, “The silence of good people is more dangerous than the brutality of the bad people”.

At first glance, there is little that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist and nationalist, has in common with Dogu Perincek, a maverick socialist, Eurasianist, and militant secularist and Kemalist.

Yet it is Mr. Perincek, a man with a world of contacts in Russia, China, Iran, and Syria whose conspiratorial worldview identifies the United States as the core of all evil, that Mr. Erdogan at times turns to help resolve delicate geopolitical issues.

Seven years ago, Mr. Perincek mediated a reconciliation between Russia and Turkey after relations soured following the Turkish air force’s downing of a Russian fighter.

Now, Mr. Perincek is headed for Damascus to engineer a Russian-backed rapprochement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose overthrow Mr. Erdogan had encouraged for the past 11 years ever since the eruption of mass Arab Spring-era anti-government demonstrations that morphed into a bloody civil war.

Chances are that Mr. Perincek’s effort will be more successful than when he last tried in 2016 to patch up differences between Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Al-Assad but ultimately stumbled over the Turkish leader’s refusal to drop his insistence that the Syrian president must go.

Mr. Erdogan has suggested as much in recent days, insisting that Turkey needed to maintain a dialogue with the government of Mr. Al-Assad.

“We don’t have such an issue whether to defeat Assad or not… You have to accept that you cannot cut the political dialogue and diplomacy between the states. There should always be such dialogues,” Mr. Erdogan said.

He went on to say that “we do not eye Syrian territory… The integrity of their territory is important to us. The regime must be aware of this.”

Mr. Erdogan’s willingness to bury the war hatchet follows his failure to garner Russian and Iranian acquiescence in a renewed Turkish military operation in northern Syria. The operation was intended to ensure that US-backed Syrian Kurds, whom Turkey views as terrorists, do not create a self-ruling Kurdish region on Turkey’s border like the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.

Turkey hoped the operation would allow it to create a 30-kilometre buffer zone controlled by its forces and its Syrian proxies on the Syrian side of the two countries’ border.

Russia and Iran’s refusal to back the scheme, which would have undermined the authority of their ally, Mr. Al-Assad, has forced Turkey to limit its operation to shelling Kurdish and Syrian military positions.

The United States’ seeming unwillingness to offer the Kurds anything more than verbal support, and only that sparsely, has driven the Kurds closer to Damascus and, by extension, Russia and Iran as Syria quietly expands its military presence in the region. The US has long relied on the Kurds to counter the Islamic State in northern Syria.

The rejiggering of relationships and alliances in Syria is occurring on both the diplomatic and military battlefield.

The Turkish attacks and responses by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) at its core appear to be as much a military as a political drawing of battlelines in anticipation of changing Turkish and Kurdish relations with the Al-Assad government.

By targeting Syrian military forces, Turkey is signalling that it will not stand idly by if Syria supports the Kurds or provides them cover, while unprecedented Kurdish targeting of Turkish forces suggests that the Kurds have adopted new rules of engagement. Turkey is further messaging that it retains the right to target Kurdish forces at will, much like it does in northern Iraq.

Both Mr. Erdogan and the Kurds are placing risky bets.

The Kurds hope against all odds that Mr. Al-Assad will repay the favour of allowing the president to advance his goal of gaining control of parts of Syria held by rebel forces and forcing a withdrawal of US forces from the area by granting the Kurds a measure of autonomy.

With elections in Turkey looming in the next year, Mr. Erdogan hopes that Mr. Al-Assad will help him cater to nationalist anti-Kurdish and anti-migrant sentiment by taking control of Kurdish areas.

Turkey wants to start repatriating some of the four million predominantly Syrian refugees it hosts. In early August, Turkey’s interior ministry announced that it had completed the construction of more than 60,000 homes for returning refugees to northeastern Syria.

Concern about a potential deal with Mr. Al-Assad and a call by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusloglu for reconciliation between opposition groups and Damascus sparked anti-Turkish protests in Turkish-controlled areas of northern Syria as well as rebel-held Idlib.

Turkey also expects Mr. Al-Assad, who is keen to regain not only territorial control but also maintain centralized power, to ultimately crack down on armed Kurdish groups and efforts to sustain autonomously governed Kurdish areas.

As a result, Mr. Perincek, alongside Turkish-Syrian intelligence contacts, has his work cut out for him. The gap between Turkish and Syrian aspirations is wide.

Mr. Al-Assad wants a complete withdrawal of Turkish forces and the return of Syrian control of Kurdish and rebel-held areas. He is unlikely willing or able to provide the kind of security guarantees that Turkey would demand.

Both the Kurds and Mr. Erdogan are caught in Catch-22s of their own that does not bode well for either.

The Kurds may be left with no options if a Turkish-Syrian rapprochement succeeds or face a Turkish onslaught if it fails.

Similarly, reconciliation on terms acceptable to Mr. Erdogan may amount to pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Whether he agrees with Mr. Al-Assad or violence in northern Syria escalates, Mr. Erdogan risks sparking a new wave of refugees making its way to Turkey at a time that he can economically and politically least afford it.

In the words of analyst Kamal Alam, Mr. Erdogan’s problem is that the Turkish president “is running out of time before the next election to solve the Gordian knot that is Syria. For his part, Assad can wait this out – because after Turkey once again fails to bomb its way out of the northeastern problem, Erdogan will need Assad far more than the reverse.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.