Israel pounds Gaza with U.S. “heavy” bunker-busting bombs. Erdogan speaks of a Cross vs Crescent war.

As Israel marches further into Gaza and crosses all the “red lines” of the rules of war by its callous disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, its principal backer, the United States, condemns itself to pariah status in the global community of peoples and nations. In the UN General Assembly vote Friday on a Jordanian tabled resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, the United States was in a 10% minority of member states that voted against, while 120 voted for and 45, mostly EU members, abstained. This was a remarkable turning of the tables from the vote in February of this year on a resolution calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine in which the U.S. bribed, cajoled and threatened a large majority of UN member states to censure Russia.

To their credit, major Western media continue to provide extensive coverage of the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian population of Gaza.  The intensity of destruction in Gaza City from bombardment by air, sea and ground in the past 48 hours leave no doubt that an attack described as anti-Hamas, to flush out their fighters from underground tunnels, is in fact a replay of the 1948 nakba which drove Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps. Gaza residential quarters and infrastructure are being ground into dust, while the population is instructed to withdraw to the south of the enclave. Next stop, Sinai?  What Netanyahu and Company are doing makes the ethnic cleanser Milosevic look like a boy scout.

The single truth in Netanyahu’s address to relatives of the hostages yesterday was that Israel is fighting its “second war of independence.”  That first one was not available for viewing on television in households around the world. The sheer ugliness of this one is in the living rooms of 7 billion viewers daily.  As for the rest of his speech, in particular his lauding the Israeli armed forces as being “the most moral” in the world, it was a pack of lies. Cynical lies that promote his political agenda in the Middle East have been the man’s signature on the world stage ever since he sold George Bush Jr on the notion that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction posed a dire threat to international peace, thereby encouraging what became the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion there. And the invasion of Iraq, which cost hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths officially described as “collateral damage” by the U.S. invaders, set the model for what Netanyahu is now perpetrating in Palestine.

To their discredit, major Western media have been less forthcoming about the demonstrations in support of the Palestinians around the world. Perhaps the editorial committees fear giving encouragement to domestic forces of opposition, in particular their own substantial Muslim minority populations.

From among the many demonstrations yesterday in Europe and around the world, surely the most important as indicator of a changing world political and military balance was the one held at Istanbul airport, which is said to have numbered between 500,000 and 1,500,000 depending on your news provider. The lead speaker was Turkish president Erdogan. He denounced the West and especially the United States as being the ones truly responsible for the tragedy being played out in Gaza today. He asked rhetorically if the West was not seeking a new war between the Crescent and the Cross. He labeled the State of Israel as a War Criminal. It is not surprising that shortly afterwards Israel withdrew its diplomats from Turkey. One can easily imagine that Turkey will break diplomatic relations with the Israeli state, thereby putting enormous pressure on Jordan and other Sunni Muslim states in the region to do the same.

I note parenthetically that Erdogan’s balancing act over his country’s continued membership in NATO and his repeated denunciations of the United States may be untenable. If so, NATO stands to lose its single largest military contingent, with a consequential impact on European security architecture that puts in the shadows any imagined boosting of NATO by the recent addition of Sweden and Finland.

Going back eight hundred years, there were two “eyes” in the known world:  Turkey (then the Ottoman empire) as the head of the Sunni Muslims and Iran (then Persia of the Safavid dynasty), as the head of the Shiite Muslims. That religious overlay to political competition in the region holds true to this day. And in that light, it is noteworthy that today Ankara and Teheran are speaking with one voice about the utter unacceptability of what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Let us remember the well known rules of drama established by Anton Chekhov:  if a rifle is mentioned in Act One, it will go off with deadly effect in Act Three. It seems that Netanyahu and his war cabinet have forgotten, or more likely never read Chekhov.

A number of the issues set out in the above constituted the material of a five-minute interview that I gave to WION. Note the very balanced presentation by WION in the introductory section to this interview..

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023