“It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on one’s feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half-lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives were spent like wallowing serfs and base slaves.”
Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can, bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the “motivation for the fight”.
It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava27. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks, on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged in a very long fight for their right to exist.
How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Have improbable capability to survive.
My name is Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me “Blacksmith Winter”, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs needed to name me too in a way familiar to them, so they called me “Abu Yazan”. Because my then-part-girlfriend, part-confidant Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I was deployed but looked and felt a bit younger. I felt brave or stupid enough to volunteer for a war. At the most desperate heights of the conflict, which would end up killing over 500,000 people, there was a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas. Every side called up all available reinforcements. Just before Baghdad almost fell, the mostly Shiite al-Hashid ash-Shabi Popular Mobilization Forces called up half a million Iraqis to hold I.S.I.S. back. The Assad Regime enlisted thousands of Russians, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah28 to fight Daesh and other Sunni rebel factions aligned with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army brands and the Al Qaeda reboot H.T.S. The so-called Islamic State took in over 40,000 foreign fighters and the mostly Kurdish forces in the “Syrian Democratic Forces” enlisted just 500. I fought alongside the Iraqi Special Operations Forces in Iraq and for the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Y.P.G. Militia defending the idea of Rojava in Syria. I contributed very few bullets, mostly serving as combat medic during my time there. Mostly stopping hemorrhage and carrying the wounded to ambulances. Mostly trying to train people to save lives at a time when almost everyone wanted to kill.
“After defeating the so-called “Islamic State” as a force holding any territory, the United States military all but completely abandoned their Kurdish allies and Turkey invaded Rojava. Yet, she did not fall.”
We who survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War, we often found there were not easy words to describe what we took part in. At least not in English. This is a story grounded in history and ideology. The tale of a stateless people spread over 4 nations, over 40 million strong. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and some love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English about Western privileges. I have heard on the wire that the Turkish Army is fully mobilizing to crush Rojava. A fully modern army of over 435,000 soldiers. That Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I once gave hand grenades to, well she died in an airstrike in Afrin29. Here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s very heartland and loving embrace. Doing nothing useful for Kurdistan. Just writing stupid love songs. Composing vain self-serving propaganda plays.
I am not sure exactly what I am supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m very detached from Western thinking, so I don’t know what makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. Actually, the sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly there were many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Heval Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 later perished. Mostly in combat, some in a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.
So, what is the actual purpose of this little manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate the volunteers. I think it’s brave we went there but I don’t think we changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution has even happened. It is surely not my aim to give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the CIA, MI630 and the MIT.31 have all our names.
HEVAL JANSHER
“I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, no one can actually say. Americans, you have the easiest deal. After ISIS32 is finished, maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a N.A.T.O. ally and what not.”
Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, women’s emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war-torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’33 the Scotsman always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try to undo everything. There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G.34 Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You must be little crazy to travel halfway across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O35. I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’ the Y.P.G. guerrilla who helped train us that, if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan36. Honors Abdullah Ocalan37 and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East.
JANSHER
“Maybe Heval, just make it a kind of strange fucked up love story! Call it; A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN! Then allude to something grand and wholly revolutionary!”
Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless black tea. He probably would never have cursed publicly. As he was living a life of “unlimited modesty”. So, I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdoms shared amongst the approximate 500-600 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B.38 Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a footnote in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part of a part.
JANSHER
“It must be a love story, or they will never make a movie about it, comrade! To the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.”
But he also said things like:
“A ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. Any romantic love, or sexual yearning is a bourgeois luxury. For civilians, actually. A Kadro moves beyond the physical temptations of life, not because they are sinful or weak. They are just weakening to a revolutionary militant. Distracting the focus, one must maintain motivation for our fight”.
“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted that Heval Actor Jake Gyllenhaal was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France.
JANSHER
“But that will likely not go anywhere useful. By the time it comes out we will all be dead, or have achieved victory, actually.” He always punctuates or punctuates his thoughts with “actually”.
JANSHER
You see Heval, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well, that’s no longer completely true. The 600 who served and the 45 who died besides the 12,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin.
These were the kinds of little talks we had at theQerechow Academy. Like a father and son seated on the floor of a small office, in a tiny outpost at the end of the world.
That said, this is not a love story at all. It’s not even “a Middle Eastern Western”. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig into the south of the Euphrates River. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the southeast in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.
ADONAEV
“Enemies of the revolution on every single side!”
In fulfilling my promises, I will present our little part of the story as the defense has only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to the vastness and hope of it. I worry, no, sadly I expect, that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all likely be killed.
The Turkish Army will roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t speculation, since it happened many times before.
Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into absolutely everything.
HEVAL CHIYA19
In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.
Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services, the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.
The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted an exceedingly long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3rd November 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.
At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capture most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.
“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing useful at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” It seems like every other day; a man wanders off and steps on something and explodes. The mines are everywhere, can’t be understated. You should try to never walk anywhere you have never seen someone else walk.
Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.
“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland.
As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah20, the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench, I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh21were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate.
Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugees were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river.
“If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they cross the river. Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.
So, the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim22commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one-sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time. A small child runs out into the road and is blown away. Briefly a pause, until he is clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won!
Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.
“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish23 or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh24, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros25being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil26 probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
Kawa, the so-called American, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.
“Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard?”
Those three and letter affiliations, they do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.
How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 800 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?
Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name if this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.
El Al flight 510 touches down at Lod International Airport on May 9, 2001, at exactly 15:04 Israeli time. Which is usually on time, but then makes you wait a long time. After someone is inevitably rude to you. The passengers on the plane start clapping as the wheels hit the tarmac. Many of the passengers are evidently very happy to be home, and happier still that the Palestinians didn’t manage to hijack or ‘explode’ the plane. Someone whispers that things had gotten much worse in the weeks leading up to Independence Day. There had been two bombings the week before. The second Palestinian Intifada has blown the top off the kettle.
“Welcome to Israel,” the flight attendant tells us. She gives the date, time, and weather in Hebrew and then repeats it in thickly accented English, and then once again in Arabic, which is the second national language. English lettering is below all the Hebrew/Arabic signs because America foots the bill around here.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We descend onto the tarmac from the hatchway in the back of the plane. I have an urge to bend down and kiss the ground, but I do not. It is not very dignified something tells me, a voice inside that once had a name. It is brutally hot. I am wearing my kosher, blue pinstripe suit. I am glad I left my Kashmir trench coat in Spain. I stop for a moment and cover my eyes, lowering my head.
“Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohanynu, Adonai EhHad.” This is the only prayer I can remember that would make any sense on this occasion. Also, the only prayer I remember at all.
The revolution had failed me completely. But I knew I had also failed it. I had been misguided. The staunch atheism that the Family School had instilled in me for a time seemed to have been shattered by my last three weeks in Golder’s Green. Rabbi Tatz had opened a door for me only to have it slammed in my face when Rabbi Gabi declared that I wasn’t’ a real Jew. As I stared out the open window of the cab I saw the green fields of my people’s land blooming, highways filled with compact cars, and new buildings being erected everywhere. I was home and ready. Babylon was behind me. There was no longer a need to struggle needlessly. Believing in things that can never possibly exist.
***
All of Tel Aviv is bouncing off the walls. The streets are filled with loud and pushy people. There are beautiful women with olive skin and manly guys with tight t-shirts and jeans. They are all drunk or on the way down that road. Everyone has a gun and a flag. It is Israeli Independence Day and Israel had just won the basketball championship against all of Europe. I have never seen so many beautiful girls in my life. Tel Aviv was wild and free like New York on a beach. They may have driven us into the sea with gas and bullets in Europe but now we struck back with basketball and, well really fucking attractive women. The basketball win is a little hard to believe, but it made me happy we were winning where eevr we could win. The racist in me asserted that Ethiopians had been put in charge of the team. Some girl told me they had just recruited a bunch of American Blacks. Even better.
I check into a hostel on Kikar Dizengoff or DizengoffSquare. An elevated platform supported a white sculpture fountain with interlocking-colored disks in the middle of the square. It was like a Union Square of the Middle East with more junkies and less skaters. The hostel smelled like radio deodorant-free Europe. I was in a coed dorm room with twelve bunk beds. My bunkmates were mostly South Africans. Afrikaans is the ugliest language I have ever heard. I changed out of my suit, showered, and decided to go exploring. I grabbed a street map from the front desk and wandered out into the bustling, raucous Ben Yehuda Street, which I hoped would lead to the beach.
There was a rally going on in the square for the union which controlled Egged Buses, one of the two major government-owned lines. Groups of teenagers were spending time together and drinking in public, which I am told is legal here. A group of Russian punks gave me some unbelievably cheap vodka and I slammed it back. I drew them a picture of a punk with a shotgun mashing. They gave me more vodka but did not speak a word of English. There was a large movie theatre on a corner of the square. What looks like a huge and shady motel occupied another corner under a huge red neon sign that says KDA. Hebrew is spoken everywhere or Russian. I am enthralled and overwhelmed. It is almost too much to take in. The signs and language keep reminding me the land is ours. The cute girls with stacks of party flyers remind me that it’s not just another Friday night; it’s the biggest party night of the year.
Eventually I wound my way down to the beach. It’s an endless strip of mini skyscrapers, hotels highway and the boardwalk, called the tiyeled. Itis the land of see-and-be-seen, play-and-get-hustled, hoot, holler and dance. Little wooden pergolas and stone benches run miles in either direction. It’s on the coast of the Mediterranean, but it’s more like Vegas than Nice. Everything is all lit up in a hundred shades of red or blue and there is live music being performed on mini stages along the way, mostly salsa and house music. I stand below a huge white terraced structure called the Opera Tower and look down at the main strip from Hof Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Beach. Some came to the Holy Land for that broken down wall locked up in the mountains, but I like my pilgrimages to end by the beach with a cocktail. Cars fly by with Israeli flags flapping out the windows. The occupants are yelling on the top of their lungs blasting Arabic sounding music from their vehicles. Everybody keeps offering me shots. Every crew and their Russian girl friends have multiple bottles of vodka and hookah set up for the fireworks show about to light up the beach.
As I walked further down the boardwalk, halfway to drunk by now, I encountered every manner of hustler, hawker, pusher, and thief. Children selling flashy neon toys. Eastern European émigrés hustling the tourists at games of three-card Monty lured in by a cute Romanian girl that keeps winning and might just be the dealer’s lady. Tables set up selling trinkets, selling temporary tattoos, selling smokes, selling girls who sell the smokes and not a single street artist in sight. Or copper for that matter. I decided not to set up tonight. It’s the Shabbos on top of Independence Day and Victory over Europe. Rabbi Tatz said I would learn to carry out the mitzvahs gradually. But then Rabbi Gabbi said I wasn’t a Jew, so why I kept referencing those Jews of the Green was beyond me. The Israeli government counts you as a Jew if a single grandparent was Jewish. This is surely better odds than having a halachically-converted Jewish mother.
I hear a South African saying that it was good they let these not quite Jewish Ruskies in because with the uprising going on in, it was unwise to let the Palestinians cross the green line to work like dogs in all the jobs the Jews don’t want. Half the Russians I was drinking with had gold crucifixes come to think of it. Guess they had a Jewish grandparent before Communism made them Orthodox Christians or whatever-the-hell they are.
I’m happy to be reunited with my Noblisse cigarettes. I remembered hoping they came in menthol when I first found them in the ubiquitous cigarette machines. They aren’t that bad for smoke which cost six shekels. That’s just over $1.50. Thank G-d for no more TOP rollies. These are Israel’s general-purpose cigarettes. They are the cheapest cigarettes you can buy when you’re poor. They are also smoked by the kibbutzniks, because if you live on kibbutz, you’re inherently poor. The Russians don’t smoke them. They smoke something only a little better called L & M, which feels more like a cheap Marlboro Light.
With my sketchpad and accented-English flying, I befriend a Russian named Roman along with his car, his bottle of Russian Standard, and his three lady friends. I take off in this former Soviet stranger’s car, a Roman who “knows where the nature party is up country”. At a good party you can forget about everything. So, I ended up staying in Tel Aviv in the arms of a wild little Russian sweet thing named Anya for nearly a week before I ended up making moves north.
“The order to evacuate Erbil was given just an hour ago. But we have ignored it.”
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 Kirkuk. Also, the last remaining waiter; chain smoking and watching the telescreen nervously. I hold a book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’.
“Total chaos,” says Abu Hamza13.
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 a total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “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 defense of the city, managed by two factions of Kurdish Peshmerga and the CIA will revolve around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring. The last point of defense will be the Citadel at the center.
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, 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 times. 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 as a result 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 Afghanistan14.”
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 declare 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 death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilometers from the outer most ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtually defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had fled. If not for the aggressive Coalition airstrikes Erbil would have fallen to Isis in mere hours.
“Let me begin by saying that the Jew of Beirut is kind!”
So, if anyone ever accused this man of madness, hijackings, robbery, or vice, or immoral acts of cavorting with criminals and whores, all would be fast to say, it is not true. That is not this man! And, they would say, “Go throughout our city asking questions because this man came to us at a tough and strange time with a giving of his whole self.” He, employed, deployed his whole heart and naked soul and opened his pockets on the streets of Beirut for us to see into him. He was in some ways the finest of his kind, in other ways, a crude foreigner, but he was indeed filled with “old soul” and we saw what he said and did; clearly. Well, he has a loveable madness.
They say here, that “the Roots of the Righteous will grow like a cedar in Lebanon” and he did immediately. He flourished, he wilted, and he died three whole times in just forty days for us, to impress us; or almost impress us. Or just to impress upon us that his soul is an old soul, his roots, are from here. Or at least next door.
The Jew of Beirut has a name of course and that name is Sebastian Adonaev. His Kunya is “Abu Yazan,” because at some time during the Isis Wars, he took on the name of the illegitimate half-Druze son of his ex-romantic partner Polina Mazaeva. He also has a Kurdish name if you can even believe such robust internationalism: Kawa Zivistan; the blacksmith of winter; from his time serving in the YPG12. A Kurdish militia he served with in Syria. But we trusted and mostly still trust him. Though not completely with marrying our daughters, unless of course, he converts to Islam or Christianity depending which faction he wants to marry into. He is not wealthy or internationally famous to marry a Druze. Even if he were, we would all trust him even less, and kind of frown on those kinds of unions. Those people think they all come back, that makes them a little fancy if you ask around.
As we tried and recalled the speed of it all in an existential moment, he fell out of the sky into our laps and eventually hearts. Yet, this man was coming to know us, in our hardest times since the civil conflict. He sought to know not only about our current dire straits, but our epic past and a possible, yet improbable glorious future! He was not pursuing “unique experiences” instead he pursued a life he did not get to lead, at least not yet. An old saying of Kahil Gibran: “If I was not born Lebanese, I would have pursued it!”
The Jew of Beirut is a paramedic by trade. Which means at least he is good with his hands when it matters the most. Existing somewhere between a doctor and a bandit. That causes him to want to help anyone and everyone all at once, as well as have an eye for certain details. And so, he encountered us too, as a partly trained lawyer and a full-blown poet, a partisan commander of sorts in his left labor movement, a painter and a life lover; a hustler, a lover, a wide talker; in multilingualism so basically already in a sense fully Lebanese!? No, of course not, but he exudes the energy we have in us as a people surely. A laugh in the face of terrible odds, a free life with style.
They say the Jews are a people with no roots, a drifting trickster people. But as his tribe is known for, he tried to make himself valuable. And valuable we would certainly later declare him to be. A real Bonafide “Middle Eastern gentleman;” “one of us.” Though which faction could claim him?
No one knows precisely how many Jews are left in Lebanon. Maybe ten, maybe forty, maybe just one. But they are certainly one of eighteen classified and protected identities. So, all of them are welcome here in some form! If they are not part of a Zionist invader plot. Preferably if they convert to any of the 17 other confessions before marrying anyone. That would be preferred.
They say, “he is writing something about us.” Trying to translate some shall we call it Easten-Western-Middle Eastern poetry? Something about a “confederation from the Maghreb to the Indus”; talk of a noble mad man.
When they finally arrested the Jew wandering around the working-class Shi’a neighborhood called Chiya he did not know where he was, did not even know what he was. He certainly did not have any “so-called EMT program” in mind at that point.
“A promising idea for a vacation was somewhere with a beach, and they do not hate Americans openly and do not want to immediately kill Jews. A bad idea is a place where just being you makes you a threat to a potentially considerable number of the natives, to several of the population; where being you could get you in trouble. Troubles such as when a citizen patrol stops you and an off-duty cop puts you in some handcuffs. And natives are going in pockets for papers.”
“You’re making us look bad!” yells Yaelle D’Arrigo in his head. Yaelle is his new Vice President and his voice of reason and constraint. Her role as acting President while he travels to Lebanon speaks to who he thinks he can trust, and Sicilian Puerto Rican EMT Yaelle D’Arrigo is stone cold tough, and he trusts her. But she cannot help him now.
They cuff him from the front, which means they don’t really think he’s an actual threat and they go in his pockets and take out his wallet which sort of proves he’s a well-meaning tourist and not an ill meaning spy; since the wallet confirms he’s a paramedic from the city of New York, and an American not an Israeli.
“Is he drunk?” the off-duty cop asks in French.
“I cannot believe you got arrested already,” says Yaelle in his head, “In Chiya of all places. Making pour team look terrible!”
“Why are you here?” the off-duty cop asks. A small crowd had formed, “why are you here in Beirut?!”
“You’re making us look bad,” says Yaelle in his head. Then there is another voice inside his head, where it comes from and who it speaks for no one knows yet:
“If you want to save Yaelle’s life you have to ROAR! KUJUCHAGULIA!and throw this law man across the very pavement; and beat his fucking ass!” Then: “do something really extra fucking crazy so they have to tie you to a chair and disregard you, long enough to escape”, says a voice in his head.
“That is if you want Yaelle to live, if you do not care about the lives of your friends then just go quietly. They are gonna throw little Karessa of a plane with no parachute and splatter her on Martyr Square.” And then you fight your way through the unbreathing gloom!
In his head he wonders if everyone here is just an actor, gathered at dusk, watching him in hand cuffs. He is in one of those sensitivity training villages like in Jordan filled with actors playing Arab civilians. A teaching movement. The off-duty cop slaps him, “Why are you knocking on people’s doors man!”
In Chiya, Beirut the Shiite part of town. He sees a mental of the CIA pushing his little Asian girlfriend Karessa Abe out a plane cargo for and she explodes on the ground of Martyr Square like a red pasta coconut. Of course he does not want anything to happen to his friends.
He yells” “! KUJICHAGULIA!” And throws all his weight at the off-duty copper knocking them both on the ground then he takes off running down the poorly paved street, unlit boulevard howling into the night.
“You’re definitely making us look bad!” says Yaelle in his head.
“Why are you going to Beirut!” Karessa cried the night he left. She begged him not to go. She knew it was potentially a one-way trip. As he runs through the Beirut night, still in cuffs down the unlit streets of Chiya, all he can think about, all he can picture is that there are different layers to the world, and he is crossing over into an uncharted realm. As if, as if, in this world of layers you could take a deep breath, and drop yourself into a subverted reality, a whole other plane of being. And in the movement, in the passing through to the other side if you retained your perspective, you could learn something, even teach something to people that see and live in only one reality of their own creation. And it was if, almost if, you could look into the eyes of G-d.
“Let me begin by saying that the Jew of Beirut is kind!”
So, if anyone ever accused this man of madness, hijackings, robbery, or vice, or immoral acts of cavorting with criminals and whores, all would be fast to say, it is not true. That is not this man! And, they would say, “Go throughout our city asking questions because this man came to us at a tough and strange time with a giving of his whole self.” He, employed, deployed his whole heart and naked soul and opened his pockets on the streets of Beirut for us to see into him. He was in some ways the finest of his kind, in other ways, a crude foreigner, but he was indeed filled with “old soul” and we saw what he said and did; clearly. Well, he has a loveable madness.
They say here, that “the Roots of the Righteous will grow like a cedar in Lebanon” and he did immediately. He flourished, he wilted, and he died three whole times in just forty days for us, to impress us; or almost impress us. Or just to impress upon us that his soul is an old soul, his roots, are from here. Or at least next door.
The Jew of Beirut has a name of course and that name is Sebastian Adonaev. His Kunya is “Abu Yazan,” because at some time during the Isis Wars, he took on the name of the illegitimate half-Druze son of his ex-romantic partner Polina Mazaeva. He also has a Kurdish name if you can even believe such robust internationalism: Kawa Zivistan; the blacksmith of winter; from his time serving in the YPG12. A Kurdish militia he served with in Syria. But we trusted and mostly still trust him. Though not completely with marrying our daughters, unless of course, he converts to Islam or Christianity depending which faction he wants to marry into. He is not wealthy or internationally famous to marry a Druze. Even if he were, we would all trust him even less, and kind of frown on those kinds of unions. Those people think they all come back, that makes them a little fancy if you ask around.
As we tried and recalled the speed of it all in an existential moment, he fell out of the sky into our laps and eventually hearts. Yet, this man was coming to know us, in our hardest times since the civil conflict. He sought to know not only about our current dire straits, but our epic past and a possible, yet improbable glorious future! He was not pursuing “unique experiences” instead he pursued a life he did not get to lead, at least not yet. An old saying of Kahil Gibran: “If I was not born Lebanese, I would have pursued it!”
The Jew of Beirut is a paramedic by trade. Which means at least he is good with his hands when it matters the most. Existing somewhere between a doctor and a bandit. That causes him to want to help anyone and everyone all at once, as well as have an eye for certain details. And so, he encountered us too, as a partly trained lawyer and a full-blown poet, a partisan commander of sorts in his left labor movement, a painter and a life lover; a hustler, a lover, a wide talker; in multilingualism so basically already in a sense fully Lebanese!? No, of course not, but he exudes the energy we have in us as a people surely. A laugh in the face of terrible odds, a free life with style.
They say the Jews are a people with no roots, a drifting trickster people. But as his tribe is known for, he tried to make himself valuable. And valuable we would certainly later declare him to be. A real Bonafide “Middle Eastern gentleman;” “one of us.” Though which faction could claim him?
No one knows precisely how many Jews are left in Lebanon. Maybe ten, maybe forty, maybe just one. But they are certainly one of eighteen classified and protected identities. So, all of them are welcome here in some form! If they are not part of a Zionist invader plot. Preferably if they convert to any of the 17 other confessions before marrying anyone. That would be preferred.
They say, “he is writing something about us.” Trying to translate some shall we call it Easten-Western-Middle Eastern poetry? Something about a “confederation from the Maghreb to the Indus”; talk of a noble mad man.
When they finally arrested the Jew wandering around the working-class Shi’a neighborhood called Chiya he did not know where he was, did not even know what he was. He certainly did not have any “so-called EMT program” in mind at that point.
“A promising idea for a vacation was somewhere with a beach, and they do not hate Americans openly and do not want to immediately kill Jews. A bad idea is a place where just being you makes you a threat to a potentially considerable number of the natives, to several of the population; where being you could get you in trouble. Troubles such as when a citizen patrol stops you and an off-duty cop puts you in some handcuffs. And natives are going in pockets for papers.”
“You’re making us look bad!” yells Yaelle D’Arrigo in his head. Yaelle is his new Vice President and his voice of reason and constraint. Her role as acting President while he travels to Lebanon speaks to who he thinks he can trust, and Sicilian Puerto Rican EMT Yaelle D’Arrigo is stone cold tough, and he trusts her. But she cannot help him now.
They cuff him from the front, which means they don’t really think he’s an actual threat and they go in his pockets and take out his wallet which sort of proves he’s a well-meaning tourist and not an ill meaning spy; since the wallet confirms he’s a paramedic from the city of New York, and an American not an Israeli.
“Is he drunk?” the off-duty cop asks in French.
“I cannot believe you got arrested already,” says Yaelle in his head, “In Chiya of all places. Making pour team look terrible!”
“Why are you here?” the off-duty cop asks. A small crowd had formed, “why are you here in Beirut?!”
“You’re making us look bad,” says Yaelle in his head. Then there is another voice inside his head, where it comes from and who it speaks for no one knows yet:
“If you want to save Yaelle’s life you have to ROAR! KUJUCHAGULIA!and throw this law man across the very pavement; and beat his fucking ass!” Then: “do something really extra fucking crazy so they have to tie you to a chair and disregard you, long enough to escape”, says a voice in his head.
“That is if you want Yaelle to live, if you do not care about the lives of your friends then just go quietly. They are gonna throw little Karessa of a plane with no parachute and splatter her on Martyr Square.” And then you fight your way through the unbreathing gloom!
In his head he wonders if everyone here is just an actor, gathered at dusk, watching him in hand cuffs. He is in one of those sensitivity training villages like in Jordan filled with actors playing Arab civilians. A teaching movement. The off-duty cop slaps him, “Why are you knocking on people’s doors man!”
In Chiya, Beirut the Shiite part of town. He sees a mental of the CIA pushing his little Asian girlfriend Karessa Abe out a plane cargo for and she explodes on the ground of Martyr Square like a red pasta coconut. Of course he does not want anything to happen to his friends.
He yells” “! KUJICHAGULIA!” And throws all his weight at the off-duty copper knocking them both on the ground then he takes off running down the poorly paved street, unlit boulevard howling into the night.
“You’re definitely making us look bad!” says Yaelle in his head.
“Why are you going to Beirut!” Karessa cried the night he left. She begged him not to go. She knew it was potentially a one-way trip. As he runs through the Beirut night, still in cuffs down the unlit streets of Chiya, all he can think about, all he can picture is that there are different layers to the world, and he is crossing over into an uncharted realm. As if, as if, in this world of layers you could take a deep breath, and drop yourself into a subverted reality, a whole other plane of being. And in the movement, in the passing through to the other side if you retained your perspective, you could learn something, even teach something to people that see and live in only one reality of their own creation. And it was if, almost if, you could look into the eyes of G-d.
If I ever see her again, this is what I would say;
“We are all very old peoples 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.
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 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 declare 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 emanate 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. 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 ever 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 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, Russian Federation, and rising China.
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 know a great deal about persecution. Iran and the Shi’a have many characteristics similar to 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 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 will be founded by peoples of nations not 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 is based on ethnic cantons that will be self-governedby 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 is 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 will 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 will 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 will pursue non-alignment.
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 unit’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 Afghanistanand 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 & Middle East since 1920. 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 arrived.”
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 Yisrael1which 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; Hudna2. 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 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 Shoah3 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 contrary4. 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 Palestinian5) and the bloodier melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives6. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians7. 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.
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. The Three Parties of Kurdistan 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 nations. 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 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 up science as a new kind of positivist G-d. We are now at the crossroads. Will the world end with a whimper or a bang? “What could we accomplish if we knew you could not fail!” The world does not fit between a river and a sea.
Once upon a time, in a bustling city called Aley nestled between the mountains and the sea, there lived a storyteller named Nadia. She was known everywhere for her ability to weave tales that captivated the hearts and minds of all who listened. Every evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars emerged in the night sky, people would gather around Nadia to hear her stories.
One evening, as Nadia sat beneath the ancient olive tree in the town square, a young girl approached her with a curious expression. “Tell me a story, please,” the girl pleaded, her eyes shining with anticipation. Nadia smiled warmly and beckoned the girl to sit beside her. “Of course, my Habibi. But first, let me tell you about the power of a single story. Before it is unleashed.”
With that, Nadia began to spin a tale unlike any other, a story of love and loss, of courage and redemption. As she spoke, the girl listened intently, hanging on to every word as if her very life depended on it. And when Nadia reached the end of the story, the girl sat in stunned silence, her heart deeply moved by the tale she had heard.
“That was just amazing,” the girl exclaimed, her eyes shining with wonder. “I never knew that a story could have such power. Or that stories inside stories, inside stories even still exist!”
Nadia nodded, her own eyes twinkling with wisdom. “Indeed, my dear. A single story has the power to change hearts, to inspire minds, to bridge divides. It can lift us up in times of darkness and guide us along the path to enlightenment. But perhaps most importantly, a single story has the power to connect us to one another, to remind us of our shared humanity, and to unite us in our common journey through life.”
And so, as the stars shimmered overhead and the night air hummed with the magic of storytelling, Nadia and the young girl sat together beneath the olive tree, sharing tales of wonder and wisdom until the wee hours of the morning. And though they may have been just two voices in a world filled with billions, they knew in their hearts that the power of a single story could change the world.
***
Something about shards of manuscripts he had cobbled into something very grandiose sounding called “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation,” but that was not that subversive because talk of Confederalism was “very in now.” As the world was unraveling faster each day. In Lebanon, now that the economy did not exist and at least 5 of 18 ethnic confessions run their own ethnic cantons; namely the Maronites of Kataeb (Lebanese Forces), the Druze (Progressive Socialist Party), the Shi’a (under Hezbollah and a lesser way Amal), and the Sunni had their parties too. Hamas, Popular Front for the Future Movement, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the Lion’s Den hid among the 12 camps of Palestinians, hiding in plain sight. No one wants anyone going out of the camps and attaching itself to the Sunni demographic. There has not been a census since 1932, but all suspect the Shi’a are getting bigger than the confessional allotment of the Taif Accords.
“We are all in need of something to believe,” an old song goes, “hope is a smoke.”
Now, the power of a single story told over a multi-course Lebanese meal in New Jersey convinced Souheil Tajer he was dealing with a genuine article. A person, Sebastian, who was obviously Lebanese in another life. And if not Lebanese in another life, someone who was an artistic soul. Writing something noble albeit something one might have to high on drugs to think was a viable plan.
But it was not a single story. It was two, or three, each of varying levels of non-authentication. It was two sentimental tales followed up by a powerful rhetorical device about the impossible. Or at least the possibility of impossible things breaking ground. Sneaking out of boats in the night. Turn the rifles into plow shears and art.
Sebastian confided in Souheil that growing up in kindergarten to 8th grade at the United Nations school his best boyhood to young adult friends were an Iranian named Gyve Safavi and a Maronite named Danny Czar. Thus, in comfort, he felt closer to the Shi’a and Maronites than he even did to his own people the Zionists, ehm, I mean Jews. Which were fully interchangeable words too many these days.
The second story was about 9 months that the Jew served as a medical volunteer, really a non-shooting fighter in Iraq and Syria during the Isis Wars. He had been at the fall of Mosul when they massacred the Isis forces, forced finally to surrender the second biggest City in Iraq after a Stalingrad-like siege. He had been there when Isis was mostly wiped out (before they regrouped thanks to the Saudis) in Hajin, Deir Ez Zor.
So even though Souheil told him “This is, consequently, one of the worst times you could have ever picked to go.” He had gotten his plane tickets just before the Palestinian pogrom of October 7th which took several hundred hostages and butchered 1,200-something civilians, then resulted in Israel committing the ongoing quite possibly “war crimes” that have blown apart about 30,000 and counting people in Gaza. Shows no sign of slowing down.
The two stories resonated but so did the energy of the 39-year-old Sebastian Adonaev. Souhail read over the draft introduction to Rise of the Middle East Confederation, and it stated as a multiplicity of Middle Eastern voices, found it sane, and honest.
SOUHEIL TAJER
“What is your interest in my country?”
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We all have an imagined identity. My white skin, my Hebrew cult half beliefs, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the three wars with Rome; to me are not history. They are my peoples lived and living connection to the soul and being of the Levant. And in that light, the national borders, the wars of states are arbitrary and serve only divisive violence. They serve only oligarchy and outsiders.
SOUHEIL
Quite a Zionist idea.
SEBASTIAN
Confederalist, not Zionist. Nothing about the Jewish historical experience allows us a free license to trample the rights of other peoples. To me the national borders are all arbitrary drawn by Ottomans and Sykes Picot. To me, the Turks and then the Europeans handpicked little groups to lord over fake states, little more than plantations, and now we see that all unraveling.
SOUHEIL
It has been unraveling faster each day since October 7th.
The Palestinians are a source of great controversy and only Hezbollah panders to them out of spite for the Zionists they exchange rocket fire with, as well as a history of pandering to them. Everyone wishes the Palestinians would just go away and now there are 1.5-2 million Syrian refugees to contend with. Syrian beggar children are everywhere. That is 4 refugees for every 1 citizen. You can get Syrian beggar gypsies on like every corner of the Muslim Ras Beirut.
What is your relationship to the Palestinians?
SEBASTIAN
Those are my cousins. They make convincing poets and above average terrorists. That said, I have never had Palestinians try and kill me, where my own people have worked overtime. I have never met a Palestinian that I could not wage a struggle with.
SOUHEIL
I would like you to spend a week in the Chouf and share some of these ideas with my Druze friends. He has a similar thinking to you. Perhaps a great collective unconscious has begun to bring the people of the region to new, better, saner ideas. Your collaboration might yield some interesting conversations. Perhaps, in our lifetimes, before a line is crossed, we may act on some of them. The Chouf is magic. The Druze, well you know the Druze have seen many things, they claim to come back.
SEBASTIAN
I would love to. Sounds very peaceful.
SOUHEIL
You wear so many interesting hats. Student of law, paramedic practitioner, and human rights champion. But, as a writer you must tread carefully if you are seeking to make useful writing for those that live in the Middle East; the hard part is not becoming an “Arabist,” as in seeing us from your own world view. It is almost impossible for you to be an “Orientalist,” seeing the world from our view. As an internationalist, with some useful skills, you are welcome in my country now or anytime, but not now is an unbelievably troubled time.
SEBASTIAN
I am not going to try and convince anyone of any kind of thinking or of new zealous beliefs. I assume the role of a polite guest. Conversationally, I do have some ideas. A fusion of human rights and Middle Eastern shall we say destiny.
SOUHEIL
But be a tourist for now. Tourism is going to bring you unique and exciting experiences, but I will give you some numbers of some old friends I think could help you, or at least provide interesting conversations. Just in case you run out of things to do. Or are in the general market for interesting conversations.
Souheil Tajer gives the Jew the phone numbers of several prominent Maronites, Druze, and Orthodox to help him if he gets in trouble. Though he suspects the Jew has slightly more subversive intention than mere tourism, it did not seem dangerous yet to aid and abet his augmented tourism. He was on both an extremely specific mission planned a decade before and was going to try and convince a lot of people of something very radical: that the Middle East could be confederated. That the Middle East could end the dominance of foreigners and embrace democratic autonomy.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 