A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times.
I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav an,d they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I spent about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.
The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine.
I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew.
Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’
Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.
I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven.
“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?”
“How many of you are there?”
“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”
“Just like in the States.”
“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.”
“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.”
“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.”
“Ah. Answers about what?”
“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.”
“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?”
“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?”
“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.”
“Which would take a miracle.”
“You’re not saying…”
“Who’s Mike Washington?”
“How did you….?”
“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.”
“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.”
“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?”
“Something like that.”
“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?”
“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.”
“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.”
“Who? Mike Washington?”
“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.”
“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.”
“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.”
“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.”
“With Maya or Emma?”
“Same person.”
“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?”
“Emma told you my real name?”
“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?”
“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.”
“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?”
“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.”
“That’s part of it. What else you feel?”
“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.”
“Whatcha gonna do about it?”
“Why so you can tell her?”
“Information only flows one way around here.”
“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.”
“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.”
“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?”
“And stop being promiscuous.”
“You and Emma are gonna do that?”
“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.”
“Why the fuck is that?”
“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.”
“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?”
“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.”
“Eleven more years?”
“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.”
“The world doesn’t ever end.”
“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.”
“Why 2012?”
“It’s the Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.”
“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?”
“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.”
“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.”
“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.”
***
So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print glossy club flyers with a grey fist.
We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:
“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.”
“Go big or go home.” We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.
If I ever see her again, this is what I would have said; “we are all very old peoples, with stiff necks that never forget.” “We all laugh, we love, and we dance in circles with our comrades. We have many types of language and customs, and many of these customs have been subsumed, or evolved, or were maintained with the zeal and blood of the martyrs.”
But I never saw her again, she was cut down in a Turkish airstrike during the general defense of Afrin Canton. She died in ball of flame. A pretty face on yet another martyr poster.
It is not in our interests to keep fighting even if we have no will to make peace. For we have no ability or actual willingness to destroy each other. So, we must find a way to live on our hugely different terms. For thousands of years our people gathered at the crossroads of the world. Or were born here in the shifting sands. We traded, we intermarried, we made alliances, we raided, we fled, we made wars and also, we conquered, pillaged, assimilated, massacred, made total fitna. But none of our peoples have killed in the numbers we now kill with weapons from outside our sphere. Many tribes, many peoples are we who remember our ways and our customs back thousands of years. With our stiff necks and incredible stubbornness to relinquish our sense of identities or beliefs. We all live with memories and tribulations going back several thousand years.
This is a treatise co-written by “the People of the Book”, but also those that came before these books, and those that never believed in a religion. It is pieced together and translated differently by the Zoroastrians, and the Judeans; by the Persians, by Arabs, and Phoenicians, by the Kurds; by the Palestinians living as citizens in exile or in camps as refugees. By Assyrians and Druze, by Shi’a, by Sunni, by Orthodox and Latin Christians. By Yemenites, Chechens, Assyrians, Armenians, Maronites, Sunni and Shi’a Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrian Arabs, Alawites, and Georgians as well
All who wish to see peace and if not peace, separation, and long-term ceasefire. If not peace, if not understanding; then trade and normality. All the people in our region have suffered enough. To survive the wars of the last four thousand years, to stop the wars of tomorrow:
“Enough! Ceasefire.”
Build our long-needed confidence apart. “Let us separate into our respective camps and return to our ancestral lands or in those lands we are welcomed; let us confederate and defeat forever the meddling of outside nations that speak of peace, trade in arms, and reduce us to barbarism!”
“These authors and practitioners of a fourth track diplomacy call for an end to false, wasteful peace. An end to all outside invasions. If we cannot pray in the same ways or speak the same languages, this is no impediment to declaring HOLLIS! HUDNA! From our many flags, let us become a Middle East Confederation from the Western Maghreb to the Indus River. None of us are pro-peace. We are pro-survival. Pro-stability. Pro-living our lives with dignity. We are invested in the possibility that the birth of the Confederation will stop the flow of blood throughout our lands. We have all been taught an endless amount of mythology, based on extraordinarily little tangible evidence. It suggests that what occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates, and what occurred down the Nile was “progress”. It suggests civilization, and later religion, and even later science all emanates from our peoples and our lands.
The Ziggurats of the Neolithic age tell a story.
Civilization began with the creation of castes and the centralization of power into early state systems. The cradle of all civilization began with specializations of labor; chaining early humanity to useful trades; and the conscription of worker slaves. The appointment of Kings. It began with tributes to unseen Gods, all-powerful oligarchs, and eventually a cast of priests to preside over mythology, then later religions, later still over since, and this all served one thing: to prevent us from rebellion. The unnatural subjugation of all humanity into productive labor is not a unique story to Mesopotamia. This book is not about insurrection or economic development. It is not a rejection of ethnic identity or the work of atheists. What is clear:
The status quo is not sustainable. The status quo is not sustainable! It is chaotic uncertainty at best. The entire Middle East is awash in an endless war and has experienced every measure of barbaric atrocity. This state of modern warfare has proceeded without any actual peace since 1920, but the bloody chaos existed a long time before that. In perpetuity for as long as we have known. Every nation is vulnerable; every nation is complicit in the killing fields today. The Western powers and Eastern powers have used us. They have handed us sophisticated weapons to murder each other in varying combinations while the great transnational corporations harvest the energy supplies in the ground. This has nothing to do with civilizational clashes or the competing interpretations of the Abrahamic religion. That is just the framework for our terrifying division, not the cause of it. The Modern Middle East must cast off its oligarchy, cast off its foreign domination, cast off its ethnic particularism, and embrace peace on its own terms.
It is not true that the tinderbox of the dying Ottoman erupted via Palestine or can be cured from there. Nor is it true that the roads to Jerusalem from Cairo, Damascus, Karbala, Najaf, Mecca, Medina, and Tehran are all guarded by the now-flailing American empire. Not all original sins of the region began with Crusaders, Ottomans, Zionists, meddling foreigners, and with our oil. The truth is that any so-called peace process is little more than a short-term buy-off. Allowing the hegemon powers more time to take, to utilize what lies under our sands until it all runs out.
Egypt, Jordan, and briefly the PLO were paid off to make peace. Now the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and soon even possibly Saudi Arabia are paid to stand down because the Americans and Europeans use Israel in Palestine as a forward operating base. Just as the Russians use Syria and Iran. Of course, the Iranians and Israelis have their interests, and of course, they have their own regional goals; but without external arms and subsidies, they could not sustain such aggressive posturing and mount such adventuristic foreign policy.
It is also a wild deception that the Islamic State (ISIS) has its origins in any normal version of Islam. That its goals were divinely inspired and that its recent defeat brought an end to this type of Wahabi Salafist insurgency. ISIS was an entity controlled by, supplied by, and supported by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan’s intelligence services.
It is time now for the coming generation of the Middle East to take steps to prevent the interventions of foreign powers, as well as to contain the regressive impulses of theocracy. In short, the road to an actual long-lasting peace is not through the conquest of states, the dispersion of the Jews again, or religious zeal and fundamentalism!
The road to peace is in fact not peace; it is instead about ceasefire, and separation into stable units but not embracing the chauvinistic nationalism of outsiders; particularly the meddling of the East and the West: NATO aligned crusaders, Russian aligned crusaders, and rising China hungry for all resources of all types. We do not have to commit to anything with these actors. But we must enter a confederation strong enough to repel foreign aggression, stamp out internal fundamentalism, stamp out ethnic conflicts, and secure the ceasefire. Secure a framework of civil and human rights acceptable to the diversity of religions and of course, prevent the indefinite traffic of weapons and currency for access to the finite resources of gas and oil.
The academia, the media, and the West obsessively have focused on Palestine, because:
(a) The Israelis, despite being mostly Jewish are at least half European or Slavic in appearance (approx. 2 million are Ashkenazi/ European and 4 million are Sephardic/ Mizrahi).
(b) Israel is without a single doubt a manipulation of several thousand years of collective trauma experienced by the Jewish people into being a modern Outremer: a colony that Europe and America rely on for regional control. But while accepting or refuting that statement; it cannot be denied that so was Pahlavi Iran until 1979. So has been Jordan and Egypt, and the abomination of Wahabi Salafist extremist Saudi Arabia; as well as each of the Petro-States of the Gulf. Unique in a world where race is the most essential passport to privilege; of 8-9 million Israelites: 3 million look fully European. For the greater part of 800 years since being butchered by Crusaders culminating in the holocaust; the Jews have, or at least the Ashkenazi in charge of Israel decided they will collaborate with Christian Europe against their Semitic cousins, the people of the region they were expelled from by Romans 1,900 years ago.
The Shi’a also knows a great deal about enduring persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics like the Jews. Particularly a feeling of their backs against a wall, then the sea. The world’s oldest groups of Christians; the Armenians, Assyrians, and Maronites have survived endless wars by retreating to the mountains. The Sunni are being held hostage between secularism and regressive fundamentalism; Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan are caught between those feelings. The contradictions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are lost on no one.
Thus, an unusual realignment is suggested. Five pillars, keystone nations if you will, that if realigned restore the Israelis to their lost homeland indefinitely and return the Jews to being a people of the Middle East. With the realignment of Israel away from her European mixed tribes, abusers of over two thousand years back to the tent of her blood; then there are only four nations left that can sow widespread death, extremism, and disorder and they; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Türkiye will be managed one by one.
The five intrinsic incubators of regional instability and endless war behind which the Middle Eastern resources are divided up and plundered: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan. Each with an external pipeline of funds and trade linking back to hegemonic power. The semi-peripheral powers of the Middle East.
The three intrinsic imperialists are external profiteers who secure themselves from endless war. They steal resources and direct efforts toward Maldevelopment: USA-NATO, Russian Federation, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. (Though their imperial footprint is still light).
The initial geography behind which a Middle Eastern Confederation can be birthed, formed, and fortified: Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Türkiye, Armenia, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Kashmir.
For the skeptics let us draw on the fact that America is under 300 years old. The complete reliance on fossil fuels for transport and trade is less than 100 years. All of Europe exhibited mass violence and religious atrocity for around 2,000 + years and the nations of the Middle East have produced all Western religions, writing, science, and literacy dating back perhaps 3,000 years. Essential to this document is an understanding that we are proposing the confederation of peoples who have lived beside each other in relative non-violence for as long as recorded history existed, and only the interventions of Crusaders, Mongols, and European imperialists have escalated conditions to perpetual war and genocide.
The road between both halves of Jerusalem to Al-Quds runs in fact to the mountains of Kurdistan. To a people without a state, who by historical circumstance were in the last 40 years trained to fight by Palestinians and trained to organize by Zionists. Who, although speaking 11 dialects of Kurdish, are linguistically and culturally most like the Persian Iranians. The Iranians, who are the only existential threat to Israel, still have over 40,000 Jewish citizens and share a version of Shi’a faith with the Lebanese, Yemenis, Bahrainis, and Iraqis and a language with the Afghans; fight East and West via these Proxies. Finally, Egypt is a nation that subsists on Western aid, but revolution is always below the surface. Jordan is over 60-70% Palestinian and without American and Israeli support could not exist as a country.
So, it is not the coexistence of Israel in Palestine that is the lynchpin of peace. Yet in warfare, they have drawn in all the actors that are needed to make a Hudna, or a lasting ceasefire for the Israelis to ally with the two other powers that ensure the Confederation can raise its flags; Iran and Egypt. Which is to say the historic enemies of the Jews. Nations such as Egypt and the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires did attempt to obliterate the Jews, then the “Eivree” or Hebrews. “Jews’ is a word invented by Romans, as there is no J sound in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Although all our people learn and think in several thousand-year segments. Although we find almost unceasing war records no matter what empire or confederation was in power. The point of unity for the nations of this proposed Confederation is the historical legitimacy and self-awareness of monotheistic, desert tribes that absolutely no outsider or insider to the region could subjugate completely. This does not make an argument that Palestinians are Canaanites, the Lebanese Phoenicians, or that Jews should not be called Jews but are the 20-30% intermixed survivors of the Israelite tribes Dan, Yehuda, and Levy; Eivri, or Yehudeans. Or that of the 13 million worldwide population of descendants of the Jews as few as 5 million are remotely even practicing the religion. Which is speculated.
“Essentially speaking we are talking about a confederated alliance of states and self-governing cantons that must find a common cause for separation and economic development intrinsically linked to a series of strategic agreements between Judeans, Persians, Arabs of all religious confessions, and Kurds of all political types. Not factoring in whether they have states or are not recognized by the world state system.”
The Confederation shall be founded by the peoples of nations, not by states. The geographic boundaries are contingent upon the peoples who reside in the Maghreb, Middle, and Near East. Specifically, the fertile crescent with geopolitical implications from Tunisia to the west, to Kashmir in the East, to Sudan in the south, and the Caucuses. But rooted deeply in accords between Israel, Palestine, Shi’a Iran, Lebanon, and the Parties of the Kurds.
The Confederation shall be based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governed by religious law, civil law, or tribal custom but all cantons must be Universal Human Rights law-abiding; which is to allow the exit from any community of those that wish to live under secular civil law.
The Confederation shall be based on democratic autonomy; thus, a co-gendered leadership, a census, and a system of voting and elections must be in place to implement religious laws that are binding throughout a canton.
The Confederation shall conscript and maintain a unified Defense Force and Civil Service that through 3 years of military or civil duty deploy diverse forces amid the Confederation to foster shared values in a complex and diverse society.
The ethno-civil administrative capitals of the Confederation pending cessation of military conflict shall be Cairo, Jerusalem-Al Quds, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tehran.
The Israelis and Palestinians are not the key elements of actualizing the Confederation, but they are capable of indefinitely destabilizing the effort to form the alliance and must be specifically managed.
The Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish agreement is the only way to militarily secure the confederation.
The Kurds (in civil society/ ideology), Shi’a (in security), Lebanese (in trade), and Israeli (in technology, but certainly all sectors) have specific developmental technology as well as governance systems that are integral to this project.
The Confederation shall pursue non-alignment.
The Confederation shall enshrine into law and fiercely defend universal human rights, and all other canton level legal configurations will be subordinate to that code.
There are critical security, international relations, and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low-intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars, and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, and object to calling the separation barrier the “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success of this committee’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel are sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was, is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual anarchic non-governance of both countries today. And of course, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is an open wound that festers, then bleeds out.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Judeans, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Kurds concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, unending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has a coalition government but is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 16 million humans living in Greater Israel/ Historic Palestine; the varying scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest.
Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 5-6 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear-armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 2-3 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb and Middle East since 1920, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The false consciousness of the invented Nationalism. All the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region to our specific peace. A peace that will never be under the dynamics of the current situation, the minuscule size of the land, and endless regional intrigue. Arms and aid money, for control of energy resources.
Thus, we concern ourselves in this first manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 85 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
“A new level of atrocity is coming; in fact, it has very much arrived.”
Between October 7th, 2023, and the January 2025 ceasefire the Palestinians killed around 1,700 Israelis, the Israelis killed around 75,000 Palestinians (and counting) and over 5,000 Lebanese. Some portions had weapons, and many did not.
Palestinian demographics will increase to above 50% inside the green line which they trend toward (currently the reality is something like 7 million Arabs to 8 million Jews + others), and or if Israel uses a nuclear weapon of which it has over 500. Or Israel is sucked into or provokes a war with Iran. Or any number of scenarios with state collapse, proxy war, Saudi and Iranian warfare, and further misadventures with enormous cost in-human life. To stop the final floodgates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure a viable Middle Eastern Confederation, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael3which can broker regional stability. Israel must deal directly with Hamas, Fatah, Kurdish Parties, and most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran. Only an uneasy truce and alliance of this kind can focus policy and praxis on awakening the consciousness of the Sunni Arab majority.
“It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures, or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting more banal and expensive anthropological studies on identity.”
In the Israeli Knesset, amid the Palestinian resistance factions, among the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in the Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for the proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However, the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons in history and sound political science.
This treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyah to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development, and most importantly; Hudna4. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran. But we envision and call for something so much more powerful.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made from sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance unalterably changed and requires the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis, and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a recurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that will not render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered even openly said in both camps is the notion that it would not be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah5 cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land today. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience, or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the absolute contrary6. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance. Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian7) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives8. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians9. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015, an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Approximately 1,300 Israelis and 50,000 Palestinians have died in the latest war.
Between 2015 and 2023 multiple rounds of fighting in Gaza killed several thousands of Palestinians and a few dozen Israelis. In the same period, the Syrian Civil War killed over 500,000 people. That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to all other ethnic conflicts that is a footnote, a statistic. The body count of the Palestinian-Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
Then in under a year the Jewish State killed over 75,000 people in retaliation for the brutal killing on October 7th of 1,200 Israelis.
Hamas must be directly engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. (Most no longer believe that is the truth on the ground, as of July 2025 Hamas is reeling).
The Three Parties of Kurdistan (PKK, PUK, KDP) must be supported aggressively by both people overtly and covertly. Shi’a Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US-backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. The road to peace does not run through Jerusalem/ Al-Quds, but without a full ceasefire between the Judeans and Palestinians no other keystone ally, tribe, or faction can be aligned to the program to build up a Middle East Confederation in our lifetimes.
“The window of achieving political and military victory within our lifetimes is a narrowing window. If we falter, if we squander possibility in the name of imagined identity and unseen gods; all will be lost. All our people no matter what they pray to, will be facing annihilation together.”
“We ask you to read these documents carefully and go back to your factions, parties, organizations, armies, and places of worship to testify on the nature of this plan.”
By the best calculations of our Party, we have a window of less than 200 years before the oil reserves run out, but under 40 years to achieve the Confederation on the terms of the many peoples of our nation. There is nothing in anyone’s scripture that calls for this endless warfare. There is nothing that tells us there must be homogenous practice or uniform belief. “We are going to use thin, durable, and yet fully understandable code.” We are going to use metaphors inside the allegories. We will fight on the low roads and high roads and from the mountains. We will not contradict myths or religious tenets; we will not offer science as a new kind of positivist God. “We call on all patriots to mount a defense of our realm. The barbarians are not just inside the gates; they have taken over the majority of our states and their governments.”
“The order to evacuate Erbil was given just an hour ago. But we evidently have ignored it.” My Kalashnikov, out from the trunk of my car, lies on the bar. A sense of grim theatre.
How many Cheta (bandits) (“Deash”) are advancing, closing in form the West on the “world’s longest continually inhabited City”? Could be several thousand, the satellite pictures suggest.
We are at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good looking shall we call it “Dutch journalist?” My new friend and associate, “Abu Hamza”, is a Kurdish patriot from the City of Kirkuk. “Never turn down a fight city”. Now in the hands of the PUK faction of Kurds, but for how long? It has a lot of oil. Also, with us, the last remaining waiter; perhaps a plant from The Party, chain smoking and watching the telescreen nervously. I hold an important book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’. The title, the Kurds seems to change the title all the time; the Defenses, the Prison Writings; now the latest edition from Suly; “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation.”
“Total chaos tonight,” says Abu Hamza1. Whose actual name is Alacan. A sullen serious Kurd in his mid-twenties.
Just outside the city, to the Southwest, in the darkness are gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of unlimited violence. Many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows? Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The horde is at the gates. “Daesh”, “ISIS” is here. The city is understandably in total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “Arbil, or Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds. The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well-lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This is a city on the very edge of oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.
The alleged defense of the city will be managed by three factions of Kurdish militia. Two from the Peshmerga; the KDP who control the city and the the PUK several hundred trucked in from Sulaymaniyah. Some number, a few hundred PKK stay behinds will dig in for some guerrilla style hit and run and hold out as they do with little regard for their own safety.
Some number of CIA, how many who know, will involve themselves with directing air strikes around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring. The last point of defense will be the Citadel at the center.
The CIA is coordinating with the KDP and PUK, although many have fled. PUK has just arrived. The PKK is coordinating with the PUK, as they typically do, but not the KDP.
On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed-race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. “If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialize, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.”
“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan.” From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.
ABU HAMZA
The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I took a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.
Abu Hamza looks a little, shall we say, a real fucking dower. Probably calculating just how indefensible the city is, based on how many Peshmerga militia have fled, or will soon flee.
JUSTINE TOMAS FALAFARIAN
“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”
One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of time. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost must always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So, in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let us try to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I can only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
“The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!”
The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of home. People who own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own arms, or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear is of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kids drive is all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank G-d the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium-scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course, the West allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived. We are supposedly all very democratic in the West.We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it is a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It is hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also, generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands at populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second-biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about it in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. America is a back-and-forth two-party state, and Russia is a multiple-party, one-party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war cannot be just about oil at all.
China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas, are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran because of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.
For over 2/3rds of humanity, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other, or the long-running Sunni v. Shia wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods, and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold War’s brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free-market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters, periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy, nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in human nature is self-interested, violent, and cruel. But we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919, and it is irresponsible to pretend that it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be very small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there could not be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming, and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long-running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather than the West-armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Americans created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001, and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in the 1990s where one in four or seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
ABU HAMZA
“Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni-oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan2.”
Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity; it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development, and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening “out here in the Middle East”. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region.
Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.
JUSTINE
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter Heval!”
Or the places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petrol-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. Frankly, enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in, is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, most intolerant, male-dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
ABU HAMZA
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declared it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of humanity.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” it.Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part utterly hate the United States. The Shi’a have gained the most politically speaking. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Sometime around 0300-0400 there were mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the Hord, the incursion advancing. Followed by endless bombardments of death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilometers from the outermost ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtually defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had completely fled for their lives. If not for the aggressive Coalition airstrikes, Erbil would have fallen to Daesh in mere hours.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 