TUNIS — In the face of the mounting toll of the coronavirus pandemic, most of the Arab region, as many other parts of the world, has been catapulted into full lockdown mode, with airline travel suspended, schools shuttered, human movement reduced to strict essentials and economic activity screeching to a halt.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases passed 5,000 in Turkey and 3,000 in Israel and was more than 1,000 in Saudi Arabia. Most other countries in the Middle East and North Africa reported hundreds of cases.

Iran remains the worst-hit country in the region, with an official death toll of more than 2,500 and more than 35,000 people infected. About 21,000 people were hospitalised and more than 3,000 were listed in serious or critical condition.

Restrictive measures gradually escalated to daytime and night-time curfews in many places, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Algeria.

Convincing citizens of abiding by curfews and confinement orders has not been easy. Authorities have made arrests, confiscated cars and imposed steeper penalties against violators.

In Jordan, no fewer than 2,000 people were arrested and arrests were made in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. In Saudi Arabia, social media posts showing violations of the curfew can draw sentences of up to 5 years in prison and fines of $800,000.

Sometimes, ordering curfews was easier said than done. Chaotic distribution of goods forced Jordanian officials to relax restrictions.

To dissuade violators of confinement rules, Tunisian police used robots. Zipping through Tunis and handing out infractions to those violating quarantine measures, the security devices made a splash with the public after some people had been reluctant to follow government directives.

“With thermal anomaly detection, real-time video and audio capabilities and a laser telemetry system, the vehicles are an effective tool for ministry officials to communicate government messages and interact with the public while limiting person-to-person contact,” said Radhouane Ben Farhat, commercial director of Enova Robotics, which manufactured the robots.

In most of the Arab world, wariness about the disease and respect for the restrictions prevailed. Social workers and retired doctors volunteered to help. A group of 150 people, mostly women, also volunteered in Tunisia to confine themselves in a factory for a month to manufacture much-needed surgical masks.

Some Salafist advocates tried to exploit the situation by billing mosques closures and bans on group prayers as an assault on the faith but they seemed to have little sway with the public.

Most mainstream Muslims scholars have been supportive of government decisions closing all places of worship as a precautionary measure to stem the spread of the virus.

“After carefully considering the nature of this contagious and rapidly spreading virus and its impact on lives, together with the societal, religious and political implications, scholars agreed… all Muslims and citizens of the United Kingdom should adopt social distancing,” read a statement signed by Islamic figures in the United Kingdom.

Moroccan Salafist preacher Abou Naim called the closures “a scandal” and issued threats that led to authorities arresting him on anti-terrorism laws.

“Whether in Algeria, Morocco or Egypt, Salafists seem to have agreed on using the epidemic to serve their political ambitions,” noted Egyptian writer Ahmad Hafez.

Unauthorised but mostly tolerated nightly marches continued by small crowds in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and other places, uttering religious chants and praying for divine help in “defeating the epidemic.”

In their calls for prayers, muezzins asked the faithful to pray at home while Quranic recitations continued to be broadcast from mosque minarets.

In Baghdad, the anniversary of the death, in the eighth century, of Imam Musa al-Kadhim drew tens of thousands of pilgrims, encouraged to attend by influential Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr.

As they sit home and ponder the public health crisis, many spend time watching television and surfing the internet. Sober discussions are often punctuated with conspiracy theories.

Nowhere was the appeal of conspiracy theories more evident than in an opinion survey conducted March 25-26 in Tunisia that stated that 46% of respondents said they shared the conspiratorial view that the coronavirus was man-made by “US labs seeking to weaken China.”

About 30% of those asked said the contagion was the result of a “natural phenomenon” and 16% blamed hygiene lapses in China.

Lamine Ghanmi is a veteran Reuters journalist. He has covered North Africa for decades and is based in Tunis.

Samar Kadi is the Arab Weekly society and travel section editor.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 704

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One might have thought the coronavirus pandemic would have been an instant and massive boost to xenophobia in Europe and this would be particularly true of Italy.

For it is in Italy that the pandemic has taken its greatest toll and Italy’s far-right League, which has taken its inflammatory viewpoint mainstream in the country and further afield in Europe, enjoys the greatest domestic popularity of any party.

By rights, the conditions should be perfect for the League’s anti-immigrant politics. It should be blooming virulently, in the gritty soil fertilised by fear, fake news, grief and uncertainty.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Termometro Politico (TP), the well-regarded Italian political website, reported that its poll indicated continuing decline in support for the League. The party still has the most support among voters, it said, 31.6%, compared with 21% for the Democratic Party, which is part of the coalition government, but the League’s star appears to be waning rather than shining brighter in the age of coronavirus.

It is significant that the TP poll was conducted March 11-12, 48 hours after the crisis forced the Italian government to announce a stringent national lockdown to halt the spread of the virus. That should have been the very moment when the League, led by Matteo Salvini, tapped into Italy’s sense of panic and dread and wrested the narrative from Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his administration. He hasn’t managed it — yet.

That’s not for want of trying. In late February, Salvini, a former interior minister, demanded Conte’s resignation for his failure to “defend Italy and Italians.” To refocus the coronavirus-afflicted country’s attention on immigrants and Muslims — his main targets for the past six years as the face and voice of the League — Salvini said: “The infection is spreading. I want to know from the government who has come in and gone out. We have to seal our borders now.”

He returned to his trademark rhetoric about African asylum-seekers arriving in Italy from Libya. “Allowing migrants to land from Africa, where the presence of the virus was confirmed, is irresponsible,” Salvini said. He was wrong on the facts when he said it. At the time, Egypt was the only African country to have reported one confirmed coronavirus case. Libya confirmed its first case March 25.

Salvini also seems to have been wrong in his assumption that Italians would be eager to embrace the League’s customary explanation for their woes. Despite obvious efforts to remind voters that their true enemies are the usual visible ones — immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa — Salvini and the League are drawing tepid interest.

There are two possible reasons. There is the mood of the moment that recognises the unprecedented peril posed by coronavirus, an invisible enemy that knows no borders, in Italy or anywhere. The League’s siren song has less purchase at a time Italians are cleaving together in support of their embattled government as it struggles to fight the pandemic.

Indeed, Italian pollster Ixe recorded that Italy’s confidence in its government increased 6 percentage points to 49% the week of March 23 with Conte’s approval rating rising 6 points to 51%. And, if social media memes are any indication, there are many new and affectionate ones about Conte.

Could Italy’s sudden and apparent deafness to the League’s hateful rhetoric signal a deeper change in Europe generally and more particularly in Italy? Is it possible that the fever has broken and the xenophobic phase is over?

There is little evidence of that. In step with Salvini, the leaders of far-right parties in France, Germany and Spain asked for border closures early in the unfolding coronavirus crisis. The call seemed less to do with public health than the far-right’s trademark, the clamour for walls to keep out refugees and illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, justified its March 1 abolition of the right to asylum by discerning “a certain link between coronavirus and illegal migrants.”

Even so, it’s possible the pandemic will eventually blunt some of the sharpest arguments employed by Europe’s xenophobes.

Post-coronavirus, both the left and the right may be increasingly in sync, albeit for different reasons. Even before the virus outbreak, Europe’s left-leaning environmental movement had been stigmatising air travel and demanding that localisation roll back globalisation. The right had consistently called for strong borders and a reversal of globalisation.

After the pandemic, both wish lists might mesh in a way that leaves little space for xenophobes.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 March 2020

Word Count: 750

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So, the coronavirus pandemic has shown its brutal face in Turkey as well. After a long period of silence by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose choice to remain out of the spotlight for about a week raised many eyebrows, the number of coronavirus cases declared by the Ministry of Health points to a surge.

As a result, those who mistrusted the system for its lack of transparency raised their voices even louder.

As of March 20, 359 people in Turkey were confirmed as being infected with coronavirus, with 168 diagnoses recorded in the preceding 24 hours. There have been four confirmed deaths, although that number was predicted to rise geometrically, given the alarm being raised by doctors.

The government agrees. Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said he expected the number of coronavirus diagnoses to peak within two weeks. After a remarkable hesitation in recent weeks, authorities placed about 10,000 people under quarantine.

However, much of the official attention seems disproportionately focused on economic measures rather than tackling the spread of the virus. Ankara’s plan to deal with the pandemic, given the hardships already being faced by Turkey’s embattled economy, has been exposed amid a quickly weakening local currency and soaring unemployment.

All of this points to an uphill battle. Even Erdogan’s recent announcement of a 100 billion lira ($15.4 billion) package to support Turkey’s economy offered more questions than answers, with experts wondering how the envisioned funding will be financed. Many predicted a rapidly rising inflation rate.

On the political level, Turkey’s hard-line administration is demonstrating its well-known reflexes. Erdogan’s much-anticipated speech March 19 was heavily coloured by religion and framed by the elements of a Friday sermon rather than based on concrete preventive steps, which did not go beyond “wash your hands and salute each other from a distance” rhetoric.

“The best way not to fight the epidemic is not to be caught by the virus,” he said, stating the obvious.

However, his broader strategy couldn’t be clearer: Focus on his devout base, even if this falls short of his constitutional duty to embrace the whole nation at a time of global crisis that defies borders.

On the social level, there were facts that surfaced and others that remain question marks.

First, there is the defiant mentality of fatalism that seems deep-rooted in the conservative psyche. Although the mighty Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs), which has more than 100,000 imams on its payroll, decided to close the mosques for Friday prayers and community gatherings, many deeply pious men — apparently influenced by the myth of Erdogan as saviour — expressed indifference, some openly protesting the ban on entering mosques.

The element of religion revealed the main source of the spread of the virus. It was the people returning from umrah — pilgrimage in Mecca — who, despite authorities’ early knowledge of the outbreak, were allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia. About 15,000 pilgrims returned to Turkey during this period and, without being put under quarantine, mingled with their relatives and neighbours. When the next batch of returning pilgrims, around 7,000, were placed in confinement, it seemed too little, too late.

So deep was the ignorance among these returning pilgrims that many of them attempted to escape, some successfully. Such social facts show the weaknesses — or unwillingness — of Turkey’s political leadership.

The big unknown is what to do with the massive number of prison inmates. There are nearly 300,000 people locked up behind bars in Turkey. It is well known that after the 2016 attempted coup, Turkey’s prisons were filled beyond capacity. Human Rights Watch said approximately 50,000 of Turkey’s prison population are political prisoners, the main bulk of whom are Gulenists and Kurdish dissidents, as well as liberals, judges and journalists.

Voices are rising, referring to Iran’s move to release prisoners to curb the pandemic from penetrating prison compounds, with many calling for priority release to be given to Turkish prisoners held on political grounds.

The clock is ticking, but — perhaps no surprise for Turkey observers — Erdogan’s government seems hesitant, delaying the process. There are even signs that common criminals could be temporarily released instead.

COVID-19 may turn out to be a codename for testing Erdogan’s regime to the limit as the pandemic forces a tense and mistrustful society to distance itself even further from those who rule the country and their stunning hubris.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 March 2020

Word Count: 722

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The unfolding coronavirus crisis has elements of the surreal, one of which is the extremist group Islamic State’s “travel advice” to its members.

In its al-Naba newsletter, the Islamic State (ISIS) urged its followers to avoid Europe like the plague. Literally. The “healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic and the afflicted should not exit from it,” the group said, in trademark apocalyptic vein.

The advisory prompted some hilarity because ISIS normally reserves fire and brimstone as a warning for what the West has coming to it, at the hands of ISIS. Indeed, it does seem ludicrous that ISIS, which often incites followers to carry out suicide attacks on the West, should issue an advisory restricting travel to Europe and that ISIS, branded a “death cult” by former British Prime Minister David Cameron, appears to fear its followers could die if they set foot in Europe.

One British tabloid columnist suggested that, if ISIS leaders “had any imagination, they would have claimed responsibility for the virus.”

Richard Littlejohn, who is known for his controversial fulminations, wrote in the Daily Mail: “They could have instructed their jihadists to contract it (the novel coronavirus) as soon as possible and become super-spreaders throughout the West. Beats the hell out of blowing yourself up on a bus. And, if the predictions of mass casualties are to be believed, a lot more effective.”

In a bizarre sort of way, that makes sense, especially when it comes to ISIS, a jihadist group that has long pursued a corporatist management model, which professionalised terrorism with the precision use of suicide attacks. Whether it was car bombers, activists detonating suicide vests, random stabbings in world capitals or coordinated assaults in Paris, Brussels, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere, the whole point of ISIS has been its celebration of death. It calls its cohort of suicide attackers “death admirers, the knights of martyrdom.”

It wasn’t too long ago that Olivier Roy, the French professor considered an expert on political Islam, noted that ISIS had changed the terrorist’s death from mere possibility or an unfortunate consequence of his actions to a central part of the plan. For ISIS jihadists, said Roy, “suicide attacks are perceived as the ultimate goal of their engagement.”

So, what’s with the travel advisory on Europe, the epicentre of the virus, as stated by the World Health Organisation?

There could be two possible reasons. First, ISIS is nothing if not methodical. That’s been clear since 2013, when it started its rise to prominence, going from a wannabe caliphate to holding territory that comprised about one-third of Syria and 40% of Iraq.

In late 2015, approximately 340 official documents, notices, receipts and internal memos of the Islamic State ruled by ISIS showed the extent to which the jihadist group was obsessed with creating a bureaucratic structure to buttress its state-building exercise.

The documents came to light via Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a young researcher in Cardiff in Wales, who compiled primary source material about the state that ISIS was attempting to build. It was Tamimi, incidentally, who translated ISIS’s travel advisory on Europe and blogged about it in English.

The documents gathered by Tamimi about the now-defunct caliphate stated that ISIS created rules and regulations for everything including fishing, dress codes, the sale of counterfeit brands and university admissions. Even though ISIS lost its state and 95% of its territory and revenue sources by December 2017, there is nothing to suggest it has lost its pragmatic gene.

This brings us to the second possible reason for ISIS’s travel advisory on coronavirus-affected Europe. Might it be a recognition that there is no particular reason to terrorise a region that is already so fearful about its very existence? ISIS might sense that richer pickings in harvesting fear and control are to be had beyond Europe.

Could it signal that ISIS is rebalancing? Loss of territory, revenue, operational capacity and manpower the past three years changed the group’s focus. While ISIS claims it is resurgent in Iraq — a new propaganda video boasts of a series of guerrilla attacks in northern Iraq — the growth area for the group in recent times has been the Sahel, from Senegal to Sudan.

Once it controlled most of Syria’s oil fields and crude was the militant group’s biggest single source of revenue. Now, the International Crisis Group said, ISIS is focused on gold mines in the Sahel, particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. It seems to be the region that ISIS sees as a viable host for its own particular virus.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 March 2020

Word Count: 757

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Nine years of a devastating civil war have taken Syria decades backward. Regretfully, there is still no hope on the horizon. Rather, the region is bracing for one of the worst humanitarian crises yet.

Encouraged by recent military successes, Syrian government troops are supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese Hezbollah and Russian ground and air units, courtesy of a new friendship between Moscow and Damascus.

Together they have defeated — although not completely — opposition groups ranging from extremist Islamists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to groups composed of regular people, among them Syrian patriots struggling to bring a somewhat acceptable version of democracy to the war-torn country.

Encouraged by their successes in the fight with the opposition, some supported by the United States and Western Europe, the Syrian government launched another major offensive that human rights observers and refugee relief agencies said would create the largest refugee crisis of the war.

Approximately 1 million people are expected to become refugees because of the latest offensive. They will join 6 million or 7 million other people displaced by fighting in the past nine years.

While coping with such a large movement of population and the logistics that accompany such a migration, there is an immediate component to consider, which, alas, leaders involved in the execution of such atrocities rarely consider: the devastation and the destabilisation of the millions of lives they affect.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so right when he stated, “a single death is a tragedy, whereas a million deaths is a statistic.”

Among issues to consider are having to deal with the immediate crisis, the logistics of funnelling large numbers of civilians through a war zone. There are the problems associated with having to house and feed the refugees and having to provide medical assistance to the casualties of war. There is providing security for refugees from armed fighters looking for foes or deserters.

Another immediate problem goes well beyond the flow of Syrian refugees and concerns the security of Europe. Naturally out of the million refugees streaming north towards Turkey, several hundred thousands are likely to try to find their way to Western Europe.

Hoping to use the refugee crisis to his political advantage, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan allowed thousands of refugees passage through Turkish territory to the border with Greece and thus the European Union.

Thousands of refugees surged into Turkey’s north-western border region and battles erupted between the refugees and Greek police, who used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. In villages near the border, townspeople took it upon themselves to prevent the refugees from settling in their towns.

The Greek Navy fired warning shots at refugees trying to reach Europe by sea aboard small rubber dinghies. In Athens, the Greek prime minister said the agreement the European Union had with Turkey concerning refugees seeking to cross Turkish territory was no longer valid.

The strain the refugees place on host countries is huge. The presence of such large numbers of foreigners vying to gain access to various European countries has divided the Europeans.

There are those who say the refugees need to be allowed entry on humanitarian grounds and those — particularly on the political right — who are strongly opposed to having more refugees enter their country. They often blame the immigrants for a suspected increase in street crime, although detailed studies have demonstrated that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than non-immigrants.

In some instances, there have been clashes between far-right groups and security forces.

Another consideration is the long-term damage that will affect Syria for the next three or four generations. The loss of the well-educated class and the artistic and cultural circles will leave a mark on the country.

After nine years of intense fighting, the Syrian people deserve a break from the harsh dictatorship they are subjected to. Shame falls first and foremost on the leader of that country who values his staying in power far more than the millions who have seen their homes destroyed, their friends and families killed and maimed, arrested and executed, all for the satisfaction of one man.

Shame and fault must also rest on the shoulders and conscience of the international community, particularly countries that have the clout and the power to intervene — the United States, Great Britain and France.

The Syrian people deserve better than this.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 March 2020

Word Count: 732

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Aid activists said a possible outbreak of the new coronavirus in the embattled Syrian province of Idlib could become a deadly threat to millions of people in the region.

Approximately 3 million people live in Idlib, the last stronghold of rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad after nine years of war. The United Nations said nearly 1 million internally displaced people are seeking shelter along the closed border with Turkey in camps that lack basic facilities, such as toilets and showers.

“The minute the virus reaches the camps, there is no way to stop it,” Fadi al-Dairi, regional coordinator for Syria at the British NGO Hand in Hand for Aid and Development, said by telephone.

Idlib, in north-western Syria, has been subject to months of intense bombardment by the Syrian regime and its ally Russia. The Syrian offensive was halted March 6 by a ceasefire negotiated between Russia and Turkey. Ankara has deployed thousands of troops in the enclave, operating alongside its Syrian opposition allies.

Syrian officials said there is no coronavirus case in the country, even though all five of its neighbours — Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan — have detected the virus on their territory.

Recent fighting has damaged Idlib’s medical infrastructure, already devastated by the war, making any outbreak even more serious. Syria’s “fragile health systems may not have the capacity to detect and respond” to an epidemic, World Health Organisation (WHO) spokesman Hedinn Halldorsson told Agence France-Presse.

Unable to provide services from government-held territory in Syria, the WHO provides cross-border assistance to rebel-held Idlib via Turkey, Halldorsson said. Health personnel are being trained “and laboratories in both Idlib and Ankara are being prepared and stocked to safely test and diagnose the virus,” he added.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan scheduled talks via video link with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron to address the situation in Syria and the new refugee crisis between Turkey and the European Union, triggered by Erdogan’s decision in late February to open Turkey’s borders for migrants wishing to cross to neighbouring EU member Greece.

Dairi said there was little Europe could do to address the danger posed by coronavirus in Idlib but he suggested the European Union might be able to send more testing equipment to the province.

Hisham Dirani, co-founder and CEO of the Turkey-based aid group Binaa, said dire conditions in the camps created a fertile breeding ground for the virus.

“So far we have no cases” of coronavirus in the Idlib camps, Dirani said by telephone, “but it is an optimum environment for the virus — a hundred people are sharing one toilet.”

“If a case occurs,  how could aid organisations deal with that?” he asked. “There are only 50 ventilators in the whole of Idlib.”

Syrian authorities announced measures aimed at preventing the virus from reaching the war-torn country, including school closures and a ban on smoking shisha in cafes, state media reported.

Damascus ordered the closure of all public and private schools, universities and technical institutes until April 2, the official SANA news agency reported. The government reduced civil servant staffing 60%, slashed working hours and suspended the use of fingerprint scanners for public employees for a month, SANA said.

Two quarantine centres are to be established in each of the country’s provinces, the government said. There were no details about how the plan could be implemented in Idlib, a region effectively split into a government-held area in the south and rebel territory in the north.

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 March 2020

Word Count: 581

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The World Health Organisation has declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and the group’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noting that the number of cases outside China increased 13-fold in two weeks, said he was “deeply concerned” by “alarming levels of inaction” over the virus.

Apart from China, Italy’s action was perhaps the most draconian, effectively placing 62 million residents under lockdown to slow the spread of the disease, which saw 200 people die in a 24-hour period.

In the United Kingdom, the first MP to catch the virus was Nadine Dorries, ironically a health minister in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government. There has been a debate about whether Johnson should be tested because Dorries and Johnson attended the same reception a few days earlier.

The virus could cross the House of Commons to infect Labour, Liberal Democrat or Scottish National Party MPs because it does not discriminate between House members on the basis of political affiliation party, gender or sexual orientation. Viruses do not discriminate between people and they certainly cross the floor of a parliament from government benches to opposition benches.

The virus outbreak, which started in China, crossed borders and landed in countries thousands of kilometres apart, extending the above analogy that it does not discriminate between its victims and it does not see a victim from one developed country as superior to another from a developing country. This is confirmed by the fact the two major centres of the outbreak outside China are Italy and Iran.

The same has been seen in the Palestinian territories and Israel. The coronavirus has infected both Israelis and Palestinians in almost equal measure. It did not see Jewish Israelis as more superior to Palestinian Arabs and therefore to be avoided.

Israel insisted on citizens arriving at Ben Gurion Airport be committed to two weeks of house quarantine. It barred travellers from several countries from entering and was considering expanding that to all countries, having seen the number of coronavirus cases rise to 97. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu banned indoor gatherings of more than 100 people.

The Palestinian Authority placed all of Bethlehem under quarantine after seven tourists at the same hotel tested positive for the coronavirus. It decided to close schools and universities for a month.

There have been at least 29 confirmed coronavirus cases in the Palestinian territories. One of the latest cases was in the northern town of Tulkarem. The patient is said to have contracted the virus in Israel.

Again, this demonstrates that the virus does not distinguish between Jewish Israeli or indeed a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a Palestinian worker from the occupied West Bank or East Jerusalem.

Even in Israel’s self-declared capital Jerusalem, the coronavirus will not distinguish between East and West Jerusalem or between a Jewish, Christian or Muslim worshipper. Its victim is any human being who crosses its path.

While a rabbi a priest or an imam may pray for his flock’s protection from the virus, the coronavirus will be unperturbed by one more than it is by another. The coronavirus could strike a Muslim on Friday, a Jew on Saturday and a Christian on Sunday. It has no respect for holy days.

This should provide Palestinian and Israeli religious and political leaders with food for thought. At the end of the day, a Jew, Christian or Muslim bleeds, cries and laughs in the same way. They could give each other blood, body organs and bone marrow and actually do so. They like each other’s food and culture, even if they do so secretly.

A Jewish Israeli is likely to be treated by a doctor of Palestinian origin at Hadassah Hospital and when a Palestinian from Gaza needs specialist treatment he could be treated by an Israeli doctor in Haifa.

They may fear the other but often rely on each other for support and can see each other as equal. However, the ideology of Zionism does not see Jews and Palestinians as equal and rabbis often talk of non-Jews as “goyim”, a lesser human being.

This was reinforced by the passing of Israel’s Nation-State Law in 2018, which gave Jews the right of self-determination in Israel (whose borders are not declared) but not non-Jews. The non-Jews include Israel’s 20% Palestinian citizens and if taken together 6 million Palestinians in historic Palestine. It gave Jews across the world the right of return but not Palestinian refugees, expelled in 1948 and since then.

If peace is to come to the Holy Land, Palestinian Muslims and Christians and on the other side Israeli Jews must see each other as equal human beings who will inhabit the holy land for decades to come. It is time for freedom, justice and equality to become a reality and for the coronavirus to be defeated by all.

Kamel Hawwash is a British-based Palestinian university professor and writer.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2020

Word Count: 798

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Given the number of falsehoods uttered by US President Donald Trump it is difficult to believe what he says and tweets and to separate facts from fiction.

Trump, unfortunately, chooses to see only one side to every dispute — his. He professes to know more about every topic than the professionals trained to do the job.

This has been a constant with Trump in nearly all matters, including volatile ones such as the work by the intelligence community and delving into the complexities of the Middle East.

In the Middle East, Trump has demonstrated his ability to promote failure while falsely preaching success. The president’s so-called Middle East peace plan, intended to put an end to the more than 70-year Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was stillborn as Trump and members of his administration assigned to the peace project failed to consult the Palestinians and, in their political naivety, thought they could succeed in a few months where others, far more qualified at resolving conflicts, failed time and again.

Coming after the United States closed the Palestine Liberation Organisation office in Washington, the recognition of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as belonging to Israel and moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump’s plan showed the Palestinians that there was no room for their position in an eventual resumption of the peace talks.

Trump’s failure in the Israeli-Palestinian issue adds up to more shortcomings of US policies in the region.

The United States has been politically on the retreat in the Middle East as it reversed from decades of pushing diplomacy while discreetly relying on the might of the US military.

Since Trump found his way into the Oval Office, the United States’ foreign policy has been conducted much like the rest of the hot issues handled by this administration: by Twitter diplomacy, with the president making important decisions on his own, often without consulting his advisers and staff.

At best the United States has been spinning its wheels when it comes to the status of the US military in the region. At worst, the United States has lost much of the prestige it once commanded. The Trump administration has angered long-time allies and opened the door to long-time nemesis and Cold War foe Russia.

Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, who has shown all the slyness of the KGB operative he once was, Russia wasted no opportunity to slip in while Trump tweeted US forces out of northern Syria.

Trump’s inadequate and confusing policies regarding Syria and the Levant allowed Russian and Turkish troops to move into northern Syria. This left the Kurds, a valuable and loyal US ally, open to retaliation by the Turks and Syrian government troops and put the Russian military on the shores of the Mediterranean, giving the Russian Navy year-round access to warm water and deep-water ports, something the Russians had been working towards since the days of the tsars. Trump’s laissez-faire attitude has muddied the troubled waters of the Eastern Mediterranean.

These developments raise questions regarding NATO’s playbook. For example, what would be expected from NATO if Russia were to attack Turkey, a NATO country? A prime clause of the NATO pact stipulates that an attack against one member is equal to an attack against all 29 NATO members.

To be sure, the Middle East has long been a basket of discontent with turmoil bubbling away but rarely has the area been so close to experiencing large-scale chaos.

This is hardly the end of the region’s problems. Given the US presidential elections in November, Trump will do whatever it takes to win votes and remain in the Oval Office for another four years. He is likely to pull US forces out of an area that requires their presence if it would win him votes.

It would not be a great surprise if given that the so-called peace talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which are unlikely to yield concrete results, Trump would declare victory and return all US troops home.

His previous actions have shown that Trump will choose his personal interests before those of the country. Such a move this time would have a devastating effect on the region.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2020
Word Count: 694
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It speaks to the tension of the moment that, when a car was driven into a crowd of people at a carnival parade in the small German town of Volkmarsen, the first thought was of terrorism — jihadist or far-right, one or the other.

As it turned out, Volkmarsen police said there was no sign the 29-year-old German driver had been politically motivated and that his action February 24 did not necessarily constitute a terror attack.

That seemed to rule out jihadist or far-right terrorism but it didn’t dispel persistent fears about a yet-unseen link or the possibility of a domino effect. In fact, authorities in Hesse, the state in which Volkmarsen is located, cancelled all carnival parades “as a precaution” after the incident.

It stands to reason. The Volkmarsen incident happened just days after Germany had its third deadly far-right attack in eight months. A man, identified as Tobias Rathjen killed ten people, most of them of immigrant origin, in two shisha bars in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau.

The gunman reportedly expressed extreme right-wing views in a letter of confession that was found after he killed himself. In rambling writings and videos posted online before his shooting spree, the killer advocated genocide, expressed hatred of immigrants and peddled conspiracy theories spread by neo-Nazis, posting about the “great replacement,” the claim that Jews and liberals want “inferior” races to replace the white race.

Official condemnation was swift. German Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the “poison” of racism and hatred in Germany. Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht expressed Germans’ growing concerns about the cancer within the body politic when she said the shisha bar killings showed that “right-wing extremism and right-wing terrorism are the biggest threat to our democracy today.” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer acknowledged that “the threat posed by right-wing extremism, antisemitism and racism in Germany is very high.”

Just how high is clear from the tragic and frightening toll it took last year. In October, an attacker killed two people and tried to storm a synagogue in Halle in central Germany. He streamed the assault live online and later admitted to a far-right motive. In June, Walter Luebcke, a regional politician who supported Merkel’s policy of welcoming Syrian refugees, was shot in the head at close range. The killer had far-right links. It was the first assassination of a politician by a right-wing extremist since the birth of the German Federal Republic in 1949.

Seehofer pointed to a longer timeline and a deeper trend, not least a 2016 attack on migrants in a Munich mall and a bloody trail that stretched from 2000-07 of the killing of immigrants by a group that called itself the National Socialist Underground.

Two points are worth noting. First, until very recently, the threat posed by white supremacists was underestimated in Germany and across much of the Western world. Until Christchurch, Charlottesville and the Finsbury Park mosque attacks, the focus was Islamist extremism.

It made sense, at a time when London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels and other European cities faced repeated jihadist attacks but tunnel vision meant another, equally dark and virulent terrorist threat stayed under the radar. That is changing and demonstrably so in Germany and Britain.

For two years, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency MI5 has carried out serious investigations of suspected far-right plots, which police describe as the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the country.

Recently, the German government approved a bill to crack down on hate speech and online extremism, including of the sort advanced by Germany’s anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Though the AfD does not explicitly espouse violence, its rhetoric may nurture it. After the Hanau killings, for instance, the AfD issued a formal condemnation but also suggested that Merkel’s open-door refugee policies were the reason that ordinary Germans “flipped out.”

The AfD’s fulminations are potent. While the party is just 7 years old and garnered less than 13% of the national vote in the last election, it has members in all 16 of Germany’s state legislatures and is the largest opposition party nationally.

The AfD’s increasing ability to influence German political discourse brings us to the second, key point at issue: the rise in Western democracies of nationalist and right-wing populist movements. Their stock-in-trade is xenophobia. They use the guarantee of free speech to advance those views and win a place in legislatures by means of the democratic tools freely afforded to all who seek them.

It is time for the West to wage an all-out battle to preserve those freedoms by confronting all forms of hatred and exclusivism.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2020
Word Count: 760
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BEIRUT — When Syrian fighters were recruited to fight Libya in late 2019, many eagerly signed up, thinking this was going to be a quick 3-month adventure that paid good money.

They were recruited by Turkey to fight alongside the forces of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, engaged in an uphill battle against the Libyan National Army of Field-Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who is backed by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Syrian Organisation for Human Rights (SOHR) said Turkey was paying recruits up to $2,000 per month to save Tripoli from a Haftar takeover. The number of Syrian fighters crossed the 1,000-man mark in October and at least one Syrian has been killed in the Libyan battlefield, SOHR said.

Five months later, none has returned to Syria and more are being shipped off to Libya, only this time to fight alongside Haftar against their fellow Syrians, creating a mini Syrian civil war on Libyan territory.

Two sides of the Libya war “We have entered a new stage in the Syrian conflict,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, senior diplomatic editor at Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, “a stage where Syrians are fighting the war of others in faraway places. With no doubt, this will add to existing complications in the Syrian national patchwork.”

A recent report in Asharq Al-Awsat stated that additional Syrian fighters arrived in Libya in February, recruited by Russia from Douma in the Damascus countryside. Fifty of them signed 3-month contracts and are to receive $800 per month.

Those Syrians will be exempted from mandatory military service back home, given that they are mostly former opposition fighters who reconciled with the Russian and Syrian armies two years ago. They, of course, will be fighting fellow Syrians in Libya.

The Douma factor No breakdown is available as to who the Syrian fighters are nor what cities or towns they originate from. However, Douma is a former hub for the Syrian opposition and its sons are fighting on two sides of the Libyan conflict, shooting at each other outside of Tripoli. This will have ripple effects on Douma, which has not recovered from the trauma of war, nor has it been reconstructed.

“Sending them to Libya — a battlefield to which they have no connection whatsoever — will undoubtedly reflect negatively on their home communities” said Amer Elias, a political analyst in Damascus. “It will reduce their popularity because people will accuse them of abandoning both their cause and community.”

Maher, a Syrian barber from East Ghouta, whose cousin is fighting in Libya, told The Arab Weekly: “We are not happy with his decision but we cannot blame him. He is doing it only for the money.”

“He was uprooted from his home, which was demolished, and sent to live in Jarabulus (a Turkish-occupied city in northern Syria). He cannot find a job and needs to feed his four little children,” Maher said. “When you are sinking, you take anything that is offered to you — even if it’s a straw.”

Maher insisted that his cousin went to Libya “so that he can live and make money. He sought martyrdom in Syria but he doesn’t want to die in Libya.”

Abu Nader, a former member of the armed opposition in Homs, now reconciled with the government, disagreed. Working as a taxi driver in Damascus, he said: “When all of this started, we took up arms to defend our homes and children, not to fight for [Turkish President] Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Halfway through the war, we realised that Erdogan was using us and willing to trade us for any deal that satisfied his ambitions. He doesn’t care about the people of Syria. Anybody who still takes money from him is a traitor to the blood of Syrians.”

The Syrian fighters sent to Libya can be broken down into four main groups. Two are mercenaries from the Al-Mutassim and Sultan Murad Divisions who are in Libya out of obedience to Erdogan. The third group is engaged in Libya because they are ideologically committed to jihad, mainly being fighters from the Sham Legion. The fourth are Russia-paid mercenaries fighting in Libya for purely financial reasons.

No sense at all “My son went to Libya,” said Um Ubada, a Palestinian-Syrian housewife from the demolished Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus. “He was told he was going to fight someone called Khalifa Haftar. I don’t know who Haftar is and I don’t care. I want my son back.

“I don’t want him to be killed and don’t want him to kill Syrians. We have had enough bloodshed. He didn’t go there to fight Syrians but to fight Libyans.”

“The recruitment of Syrian rebels in the Libyan war makes no sense to Syrians or Libyans,” said Hassan Hassan, director of the Non-State Actors Programme at the Centre for Global Policy in the United States. “Turkey did great damage to both causes by sending mercenaries to Libya, especially at a time when northern Syria was being attacked by the Syrian regime and when Turkey failed to force Russia to abide by its promises of de-escalation.

“It also remains unclear why Libyans need a few hundred fighters from Syria. The whole thing makes no sense and is greatly damaging.”

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian historian and author of Under the Black Flag (IB Tauris, 2015).

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 February 2020
Word Count: 865
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