Spring Thaw: Turkey & Israel

Since Turkey's PM Erdogan stormed out of the World Economic Forum in Davos after a heated diatribe against Israel's military operation in Gaza (Jan 2009), there have been exuberant displays of solidarity and admiration for his confrontational antics: the Muslim world, desperate for a hero, has hailed him as its Knight in Shining Armor (Aljazeera). It is natural for Erdogan's Turkey to have such popularity in Muslim countries; deprived as they are of any sense of common purpose, and lacking in modern hero-figures who transcend national borders and ethnic divides. This recent chain of spats between Turkey and Israel, however, is not indicative of a shift in the geopolitical dispositions of the Near Eastern countries. The idea of Turkey's participation – perhaps in a leadership role – in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot find purchase with the other Countries and factions involved in this tortuous process. Indeed, it is unlikely that this is the Turkish government's primary motivation to begin with. On the contrary, this could be seen as no more than posturing on the part of the Turkish government to appease certain domestic lobbies, and curry favor with Arab and Muslim countries; possibly as a counterweight to perceived over-reliance on European and American markets and alliances.

The location of Anatolia as a crossroads between East and West, in possession of the sole access to the Black Sea, has long placed her in the crossfire of opposing forces. The same strategic importance that led the Crusaders to spend much time crusading against their Orthodox Christian allies in the Byzantine Empire – by means of coups d'etat, palace intrigue and assassinations, direct military intervention – caused all sides in the Second World War to woo Turkey with promises of regaining pride of place in the Near East in the post-War period. Turkey deftly played all sides – German, British and Soviet – and maintained its neutrality through the War, not aligning itself with any power until several years later.

The end of the Second World War was followed by the Greek Civil War, and a shift in US policy towards the Soviets – marked by the adoption of the Truman Doctrine. Turkey was provided with hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the anti-Communist stance of the Turkish administration, the military and economic aid rendered by the United States continued well into the Cold War, with Turkey becoming a member of NATO in 1952.

It should come as no surprise then that Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to lend diplomatic recognition to Israel. 1948 was a turbulent year in the Middle East. The British had been forced out of Palestine, Israel proclaimed independence and was promptly set-upon by every country on its borders. The Israelis fought them to a standstill and even managed to expand into Palestinian territory. The Soviet Union stepped in to rearm the beleaguered Arab states. Having opted-in to the Western Bloc, Turkey pursued her strategic interests in containing and curtailing Soviet influence in her backyard. Recognizing that Israel was there to stay, supported by the same countries that supported Turkey's government and opposed by countries aligned with the Soviet juggernaut poised along Turkey's Northern and Eastern borders, embassies were exchanged between Turkey and Israel in 1949 and ushered in an age – by necessity – of economic, military and diplomatic cooperation between the two countries.

Turkey, of course, gained more from her alignment with the United States than just a regional ally and a military alliance. The Nixon administration granted its tacit endorsement to the Turkish invasion and subsequent division and occupation of Cyprus in 1974. The Kurdish separatist insurgency was suppressed first for the cause of anti-Marxism-Leninism and then as a target for the ongoing War on Terror, with frequent cross-border operations undertaken by the Turkish military in Iraq, as late as 1999. Turkey was allowed to get away with certain flagrant abuses of human rights and other nations' sovereignty in pursuit of these goals, and at least one of the factors in making Turkey such an indispensable ally of the United States and Europe is her cozy relationship with Israel, unique among Muslim countries.

Recently, however, due to anti-expansion and anti-Muslim sentiments in European Union countries, Turkey's application to join the Union, of several institutions of which Turkey is already a signatory and participant, has been stalled on demographic, socio-religious, geographic and political grounds.

Almost 51% of Turkey's population self-identified as Muslims in 2006, up from 43% in 2005 (Pew Global Report) and previous years. The Islam-branding of the ruling AK Party has placed expectations on the administration to stand up for perceived “Muslim interests.” In retrospect, the likelihood of the Aid Flotilla incident should have been evident considering the Turkish Prime Minister's rhetoric at Davos almost two years ago. The severe Israeli reaction to the Flotilla, and the grim Turkish response are well within keeping of the requirements of their respective electorates. The Israeli public would have accepted no other outcome from the Likud government, and the AKP was expected to put into action the words spoken at Davos and since: stalling the Aid Flotilla or not protesting the Israeli raid on the ships would not sit well with the electoral power-base of the AKP.

Will this diplomatic spat signal the end of Turkey's alliance with Israel and NATO? Do the Premiership of Erdogan and primacy of the AKP in Turkish politics represent a paradigm-shift in her foreign policy imperatives and national interests? Does Turkey seek to take upon herself a leadership role in the Muslim community at large, at odds with its European interests? The answer to all of these questions ranges between “absolutely not” and “probably not.” The Turkish government has deftly handled the various problems in Gaza and used these to embellish its image in Muslim countries while fulfilling some of its campaign slogans. This PR windfall in Muslim countries should yield sizable dividends for the Turkish economy, as well as send a clear message that Turkey retains its ability to play all sides for maximum advantage (incidentally, a new gas pipeline is to run from Russia through Turkey to Europe). Indeed Turkey has a well-established legacy of tactfully preserving, propagating and perpetuating her national interests, come what may.

The United States has a clear understanding of the implications of estrangement or even divergence from Turkey. So much so that President Obama chose Ankara as the destination of his first visit to another State. Turkey's is the successful Muslim secular democratic experiment the West looks to as a solution to the present alienation of the Muslims.

“The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey ['toward a secure and lasting peace' in the Israel-Palestinian conflict]. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security.”

Barrack Obama, to the Turkish Parliament, April 6, 2009

In the same speech, he reaffirmed US support for Turkey's EU application, the fight against the PKK, Turkey's role in salvaging Iraq. The message is clear: Turkey is important to the West and knows it. The recent posturing raises the stakes for appeasing and retaining Turkey's full support for the many thorny issues in the Middle East, while opening up new opportunities for regional relationships (with Iran for example). It was this perceived imperative that has prompted Turkey to embarrass Israel. The defunct Uranium trading deal reached recently with Iran is another extension of the same policy: Turkey is reaching out to her estranged neighbors, re-building bridges to the East while retaining and buttressing those to the West. Caught in the tug-of-war as she is, Turkey seems to have settled, as often before in the past, for making the most of it.

Operation Opera Opportunity Cost: Why Israel will not attack Iran's nuclear facilities

The recent tragedy in the Eastern Mediterranean in which a flotilla of aid ships headed for Gaza were violently stopped and diverted by the Israeli blockade has heightened tensions between Israel and most of the rest of the world. Such drama always raises temperatures and kicks up a lot of dust and, as always, our species is only too eager to lose all perspective. This series of blog posts attempts to weave a single disjointed thread through similar episodes in the violent recent history of the Middle East with the objective being to establish the historical, albeit anecdotal, framework in which to correctly view and appreciate this crisis. It is my belief that only by building a nuanced understanding of the issue by fostering an open and objective discussion (especially within the community) may one ever hope to arrive at an adequate treatment of this festering problem.

June 7, 1981. The morning in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad is eerie and quiet, unfaithful to the raging conflict with Iran that shows no signs of abating. Worshipers in the Iraqi capital make their way back home after the morning prayer. Along the banks of the Euphrates far to the east, the dull thump of artillery has just begun to shake weary Iraqi and Iranian soldiers out of dreamless, zombified stupor. It is just another day in the Middle East. The calm is shattered by the sound of jets diving from the sky; a hail of bombs streaks from the warbirds. Lazily, almost as an afterthought, the sound of air raid sirens and anti-aircraft fire fills the air with a ceaseless, maddening din. The jets are already long-gone: the wreck of Saddam's nuclear reactor lies buried beneath tons of rubble. It is no longer just another day in the Middle East.

The preemptive Israeli airstrike on Osirak was hotly debated and analyzed to no end during the latter half of the decade and several times thereafter. The eventual consensus that did develop amongst all except Israel and her staunchest allies, was that Osirak's value as a weapons facility was dubious at best, and that the airstrike had exacerbated the non-proliferation issue in the Middle East by emphasizing the deterrent value of nuclear weapons and the need to keep such strategic assets secure against surprise attacks. Most analyses did not, however, factor the local political gains made by the Israeli government at the time as a causative agent. Begin's Likud government, which had previously lagged behind its political rivals in the polls, managed to win the largest share of seats in the neck-and-neck elections for the tenth Knesset three weeks later.

Operation Opera did, however, come with a significant opportunity cost. It served as a catalyst for the hitherto-nascent Iraqi nuclear program, established the strategic strike capabilities of the IDF for their potential adversaries to learn from, and expounded the need for adequate hardening of strategic facilities against similar attack. In a nutshell, the success of this feat, the first of its kind, was so great as to instantly make a repeat performance extremely likely to meet with failure. Israel expended diplomatic capital and military capability, and actually exacerbated its security situation for the decades to follow. This puzzling, self-destructive behavior, at odds with the remarkable ability for self-preservation that Israel has demonstrated amply throughout its turbulent history can only be explained by the unexpected victory in the electorate that Begin gained by capitalizing on the success and exaggerating the threat that had been neutralized. Public support in Israel for the incumbent administration ran high following the miraculous deliverance of the Tribe of Israel from a phantom threat of nuclear apocalypse posed by the Osirak reactor. Miraculous because an airstrike on a nuclear facility was too audacious an idea to have been taken seriously before it happened; phantom because Iraqi nuclear weapon ambitions were neither substantial nor directed against Israel.

All politics is local, and nowhere is this more true than in the reunited diaspora of cross-cultural immigrants who are defined and identified not so much by introspective adhesion and ideological common ground as by the forces – imaginary and otherwise – that are alleged to threaten its existence from within and without. Israel exists in a parallel universe where every mundane choice is between black-and-white, every shadow is either with us-or-them, every banality of life is make-or-break, and even inconsequential actions are defined in do-or-die terms; a paranoia in which the Holocaust was not a freak accident in which a bunch of middle-aged men in trench-coats perpetrated a grievous crime in thrall to a madman, but an apocalypse that has almost-happened too many times too easily and must never be allowed to happen again.

Denizens of the Civilized World cannot be blamed for scratching their heads and wondering why Israel behaves so unilaterally with brazen displays of disproportionate force. Muslims in particular, antagonized in equal measure by the inability of the Arab world to intimidate Israel, and the ignominious existence of Palestinian refugees, feel justified in shaking their fists at Israel and ascribing all of their woes: from the mayhem in Somalia to the drone attacks in Pakistan to the Australian intervention in East Timor, to some grand Zionist conspiracy against Islam. That may very well be true, and one may neither refute nor validate such emphatic assertions while holding oneself to standards of rationality and logic. There may, however, be a somewhat simpler and less glamorous explanation: In the most recent episode involving the flotilla of ships bearing aid for impoverished Gazans, imagine that the aid flotilla had been allowed unimpeded access to Gaza and allowed to unload its supplies freely and without hindrance from officious Israeli politicians and soldiers. In this set of ideal circumstances, whenever the next rocket attack on Israeli settlements from Hamas-controlled Gaza takes place, irrespective of whatever damage it may cause, if any, and despite the fact that the rockets were not supplied by the aid flotilla, the political opposition in the Knesset would charge the government with neglecting its sworn duty to protect the lives and property of Israeli citizens. The allegation would run something like this:

1. Aid ships were allowed to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza
2. This symbolic victory and the actual aid delivered by the flotilla bolstered support for Hamas in Gaza
3. The Israelis maintain that the people of Gaza should not support Hamas because of the latter's perceived rejection of co-existence with Israel (on Israel's own terms, no less, it should be noted). Israel should drive home the point that Hamas is a lose-lose for the people of Gaza by making the people of Gaza suffer for having voted for Hamas, hence the blockade
4. The recent rocket attacks were carried out by Hamas only because (this is where the politics get scary for the incumbent administration) the aid ships were allowed to dock, carrying weapons and aid that Hamas was able to use to shore up its support base, undoing perceived gains in Israeli efforts to isolate and topple Hamas

• Hypocritical? Perhaps.
• Plausible course of action for self-serving politicians? Most certainly.

As noted: all politics is local. The Israelis' botched handling of the interception of the flotilla may come under fire on the international stage and in the media, but given Washington's unequivocal support for Israel's actions, however heavy-handed, it is not a PR crisis that threatens the domestic standing of the Israeli government, the actions of which are driven by political self-preservation. An ineffective hailstorm of rockets landing near the blast walls of fortified Israeli settlements built on occupied territory, on the other hand, could create a domestic political maelstrom the hardliner Likud administration cannot afford. One may cry foul and allege double standards, and one may well be right, but one's opinions – right or wrong – carry no weight in Tel Aviv for the simple reason that the Israeli electorate is the sole consideration.

Let us, then, look elsewhere for a propitious handle on the issue.

The Trident of Erebus

The recent furore in Pakistan over the “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” has spawned dozens of anti-groups and a vociferous SMS/e-mail campaign: using flawed assumptions and flimsy mathematics to overemphasize the financial worth of Pakistan's Facebook users and optimistically believing that a 'boycott' by Pakistani users would teach them a lesson. 'Them' being a group of fascist-Zionist (but somehow devil-worshiping) anti-Christs. Of course the whole point of the spirited boycott campaign and Internet-borne heckling (their commitment is admirable, even if one does not agree with their views) has been rendered moot by the Lahore High Court's heavy handed, blanket ban on the social networking giant, extended by the PTA – eager to showcase its own evangelical zeal – to cover Youtube and en.Wikipedia as well. I am generally a very unhurried blogger: content to leave things unfinished, unsaid and unpublished in the security that “it'll be done when it's done,” but the recent spate of bans has me worried they'll shut down Blogspot itself shortly – and I cannot let that happen without weighing in on the issue for myself.

A lot of unqualified, emphatic assertions (to the accompaniment of even more spittle!) have been made in the (mockery of) debate surrounding the subject: Facebook's double standards vis à vis Holocaust denial pages have been particularly lambasted. As someone who followed this older debate closely last summer, the nonobjective bias rampant in these allegations is easily apparent to me. Yes, two pages advocating holocaust denial were removed – but many more were not, notwithstanding considerable pressure by a number of influential forces such as CNN. Ezra Callahan from Facebook's PR team, who also happens to be Jewish, had this to say on the subject: “You do not combat ignorance by trying to cover up that ignorance exists.” When eventually they did take down two of several pages, it was for reasons other than the promotion of hate speech or antisemitism, as evidenced by several other antisemitic pages that continue to exist.

The First Amendment of the American Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and even the freedom of hate speech is held sacred. A United States court tossed out a case last year against a small group of Midwestern hicks who protested the Iraq war in a very unique fashion: by picketing funerals of servicemen killed-in-action and ascribing their deaths to God's punishment for America's tolerance of homosexuality. Very few people, within the United States and without, would consent to that rather unique view; even fewer would consider dishonoring fallen servicemen – regardless of what one thinks of the cause they died for – to be anything but shameful. What prompted a bench dominated by conservative Justices to throw out the petition brought by bereaved and rightly offended families was not an agreement with said Midwestern hicks, but a responsibility to uphold the First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech. Will a fortnight of boycott by Pakistanis, of dubious value to the social networking giant really convince Facebook to clamp down on Islamphobes? Does Facebook's removal of these web pages, even if it were ever to happen, remove the hatred that pervades the thoughts of a small but vocal minority of Westerners? Perhaps most importantly, how does blocking access to Facebook help combat blasphemers or blasphemy? If anything, it plays into the favor of those people who stir up controversy by denying the spirited opposition the means to combat them. Walking away from an argument equals forfeiture; it is not a winning tactic but the opposite - a spoiled infant smashing her sand castle because someone showed her a picture of the real thing.

Of course the larger, perhaps more sensitive, question is why Pakistani sensitivities are offended more easily than those of the larger, vaunted Umma (a worldwide Muslim national identity); or perhaps we are just more prone to expressing ourselves violently than our brethren in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and wherever else Muslims happen to reside. The Jyllands Posten controversy saw millions of dollars of damage to our markets and infrastructure as riotous mobs inflicted righteous justice on themselves; I wonder if these same frothy-mouthed zealots are sitting down across the country with monstrous smug smiles, proclaiming the local and temporary ban on Facebook, Youtube and en.Wikipedia as a great victory for God. I wonder also if these are the same ignorant beasts who believe television is a demonic contraption and the necktie is a symbol of Christianity. I have no illusion that such views are held by only a minority of our people, or that all we're missing for a lasting, forward-looking solution to our rampant ignorance and regressive tendencies is a bit more time for the media/government etc. to work their magic. The people of this country take great pride in their ignorance, and brandish it like a weapon to those that would challenge it – a means and an end in and of itself.

Blind Fake: Talmudic Correctional Paradigms

I happened to find myself at a celebration marking the holy day's of one of Pakistan's minute religious minorities last night. This afforded me, for the second successive night, the opportunity to drag out my soapbox and rant about the fallacy of mechanical religion devoid or distinct of religious faith.

Of course I could only do this circumspectly, because - arising perhaps as the consequence of a community-wide identity crisis - minority communities tend to take themselves and their religions a lot more seriously than those in the comfortable majority.

When surrounded suitably by a bunch of people, I proceeded to tell them of how I had discovered the work of (the Prophet) Tonclerf who, between 1792 and 1796 BCE, was inspired by divine guidance to write what we do today know as the Talmudic Correctional Paradigm / Instructional Protocols. I introduced him to my listeners as a great member of the Jewish Enlightenment of the second millenium BCE; who first introduced the Tribe of Israel to the concept of the Kteowrn (pronounced Kteowrn), which I explained was the belief that the Eternal Soul exists between the time of death and the day of judgement in a state of Disembodied Life, in which it continues the pattern by which it has existed in life. A scholar continues to read and write, to the mathematician all the secrets he has pondered in life are revealed, a sinner on the other hand continues to exist in a state of sin: it is the continuation of life absent physical restrictions, the Soul is freed from the need for sleep, from emotion, from deprivation, and may fully pursue that which it has sought in life - something that defines why the Afterlife is eternal when life itself is so short. I scanned the faces of the audience for signs of disbelief but was disappointed; apparently the Faithful respect others' convictions - if they are convincing enough.

I continued, telling them how life in this blissful disinterred state is determined by our actions in life - a concept I named Bycorz; how our comings-and-goings, our interactions with people and their opinions of us shape our existence as Bycerii. I elaborated at great length on the social structures of the world and our existence in it, and why the concept of a social Ketowrn was not so alien as we might think. I also set their hearts and minds at ease, clarifying that I was not a preacher, that the Talmudic Correctional Paradigms / Instructional Protocols were not so much Scripture as a philosophy of religion, morals and social life. I likened it to Zen and explained how it could be adhered to in conjunction with one's primary faith - that it served to complement religion, not replace it. Having thus garnered several converts to the cause of the Social Ketowrn, and placated their concerns by grandiloquent answers to their timid questions, I made up a name for myself, gave out a bunch of fake names of websites, books and other sources of information, and left.

I suspect that if any amongst my listeners had recalled how Vinton Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP suite between 1972 and 1976 CE, how first the Internet and then Social Networking had evolved - I would have been torn limb to limb by a mob of frothy-mouthed zealots. What I managed to prove to myself - for no reason, and for the umpteenth time, was that humans have a strong ability to rationalize and give in to well-constructed lies, especially when the farce does not affect their lives in any meaningful manner. For some odd reason I'm reminded of a quote from the 1980 movie Flash Gordon, when Ming the Merciless Emperor of Mingo (yeah, I know) says:

"Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror."

What a horrible movie that was.

Romance of the Monodom

They are inseparable, such that it is impossible to define one without the other. Their existential interdependence is so pervasive as to have turned what were once two individual, self-contained entities into a single, apathetic two-headed monster of palpable misery.

She - with her endearing charms and guile, her relentless, futile pursuit of his affections,  does not know when to stop. Despite all her cunning and machinations: the love potions and black magic, astrological predictions and the advice she gets from a wide variety of sources ranging from anonymous message boards on the internet to her best friend's colleague to Oprah, she does not realize that for any design of hers to bear fruit, he must meet her half-way: The black magic cannot work if he dismisses it as hogwash, the astrology is immaterial if he is unwilling to let his actions be influenced by the relative positions of the stars across the sky, the love potions are ineffective if she puts it in his beer and he is unaware of how much more expensive his urine is. And all the counsel she has sought, going to great pains to not seem too desperate, making him out to be more receptive to her advances than he really is, has proven to be useless: the questionable usefulness of such advice diluted further by her pretended indifference to its need. Her prayers to manifold deities, for in desperation she is willing to turn to any source of strength, any possible recourse to let him return her love, have produced no miracles - for her atheistic charmer cannot be swayed by powers that have only an existence hinging on the belief people claim to place in them. He is a man of reason, and she has no rational argument to appeal to his intellect with, his brain does not accept things it cannot understand, and her obsession with him is beyond the ability of his logical processes strengthened by several orders of magnitude, she does not even quite understand it herself, but she does not need to either.

For all he knows, she does not exist, or if she does it is only as a mere nuisance: something akin to the mosquitoes he feeds in his sleep, or the electricity outages he whiles away by swatting them. She lays herself at his feet, an immovable object that like a kitten, becomes an object of affection out of sheer inevitability. But he only sees a viper coiling itself around his limbs, retarding his mobility, intruding on his freedoms, squeezing the life out of him. Her only response when he kicks her away is to cling harder. He has never heard a word of complaint issue forth from her lips, when she speaks she has only the most blatant flattery to spout. Her every action, conscious and otherwise, is geared towards his sustained comfort. His ingratitude does not even seem to slow her down. When she broke a leg after 'falling' from the balcony they were standing on, for she would never admit that he had pushed her off, she had followed him anyway. Crawling and limping, dragging the lifeless, broken limb behind her, trailing in the clouds of dust he blazed in his attempt to be rid of her - catching up to him when he paused for rest. Until the moment he finally stopped caring; she has no longer the prepossession to merit even a chance glance from his skyward-turned eyes, nor can he be bothered to swear and shake his fist at her. The hare has not any need to outrun the turtle. She is in the background: an insignificant deaf mute, that speaks and listens and feels - but cannot get herself to register on his noble, arrogant, savage mind.

They are, as I said, inseparable: he would not be recognized without the trailing husk of a living being that he keeps in thrall, she simply does not exist but as his shadow, or a speck of dust in the little cloud he kicks up with his graceless, heavy stride - willing the earth to split open under the sheer weight of the contempt he has for all things on the surface. They have been cursed with infinite patience, for neither seems to be in a hurry to break the cycle, and indeed it has gone on so long that it is no longer certain whether there is a cycle. They have been blessed with the weakness of mind that prevents humans from changing their minds,  gifted with the lethargy of spirit that keeps people shackled to the easy task of rationalizing the familiar. They were not created for a life of adventure, for the exhilaration of discovery or the admiration of generations to follow. They were created to be ignored in their lifetimes and forgotten after death.  They were created to love and be loved, and that is the fate they seem least willing to accept.