LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
May 29/2019
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today
When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint John 21/15-25:”When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’A second time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Tend my sheep.’ He said to him the third time, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ And he said to him, ‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, ‘Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?’When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about him?’Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’So the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News published on May 28-29/19
Lebanon, Israel close to framework for land-sea border talks
Lebanese Man Killed by Stray Bullet in Attack on Hezbollah Prayer Hall
Lebanese Officials to Meet with Satterfield after Israeli Proposal on Border Demarcation
Public Administrations Close Down in Lebanon for Fitr Holiday
Report: Another Citizenship Decree ‘Looming’
Aoun Inks Decree Sending Budget to Parliament, Another Launching Extraordinary Session
Aoun to Judicial Delegation: Continued Strike Unjustified
Lebanon, Israel Close to Framework for Land-Sea Border Talks
Khalil: Structural Problems Can't be Resolved in One State Budget
Bassil: We Have Reservations on Budget, Concerns over Implementation
Jumblat Makes Appeal after Deadly Saadiyat Incident
Gemayel: Lebanon Cannot Be Built Through Isolation and Unilateralism
U.S. Air Force Central Command Chief Visits Lebanon
Explosion Heard in Zahrani
Are Russia, Iran, and, Hezbollah Trying to Reprise Syria in Venezuela?
Lebanon’s contested gas fields with Israel under discussion
Lebanese Monkey Escapes Nun's Farm, Infiltrates Border, Drives Israelis Nuts

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on May 28-29/19
Iran Tensions Overshadow Mecca Summits
Kushner, Greenblatt in Middle East to Seek Support for Peace Plan
US warns Syria, Russia against ‘reckless escalation’ as 21 civilians killed in air strikes
Iran Sees ‘No Prospect of Negotiations’ with US
Syria: Satellite Images Show Crops on Fire in Idlib
Civilian Toll Mounts as Syria Regime Pounds Militant Bastion
Netanyahu Could Face Election Rematch after Ballot he Said he Won
Israel takes First Step towards New Elections
AU Urges South Sudan Parties to Complete Arrangements before Government Formation
French Police Arrest Suspects in Lyon Explosion
Turkish Military Launches Operation Against PKK in Northern Iraq
Algeria Faces Constitutional Dilemma After Failing to Organize Presidential Elections
Sudan Opposition Relaunches Strike as Deadlock With Military Persists
France Ups Efforts to Avoid Execution of French ISIS Convicts in Iraq
Nechirvan Barzani Elected Iraqi Kurdistan President
EU Leaders Launch Hunt to Fill Brussels' Top Job

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on May 28-29/19
Lebanon’s contested gas fields with Israel under discussion/Makram Rabah/The Arab Weekly/May 28/2019
Are Russia, Iran, and, Hezbollah Trying to Reprise Syria in Venezuela?/Jay Solomon/The Washington Institute/May 28/2019
Iran Must Understand Returning to the Negotiating Table is the Only Way Forward/
Con Coughlin/Gatestone Institute/May 28/2019
Israeli Army Destroys Syrian Missile Launcher After Missile Fired At Israeli Jet/Jerusalem Post/May 28/2019
Questions Remain After Israel Strikes Syrian Air-Defense System/Seth J.Frantzman/Jerusalem Post/May 28/2019
Trump Tweet About Netanyahu's Coalition Negotiations 'Unprecedented,' Former Officials Say/Amir Tibon/Haaretz/May 28/2019
It is Not Surprising to See an Increase in Jew-hatred in Western Europe/Alan M. Dershowitz/Gatestone Institute/May 28/2019
Netanyahu bucks his foes’ bid to rout him for failing to form a governing coalition/Debka File/May 28/2019
Iraq caught between a rock and a hard place/Osama Al-Sharif/Arab News/May 28/2019
Iran’s insincere call for non-aggression treaty/Hamdan Al-Shehri/Arab News/May 28/2019
Why Bolton’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine is misguided/Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/May 28/2019
Lawmakers show there is US appetite for confrontation/Abdulrahman Al-Rashed/Arab News/May 28/2019
Erdogan’s Failure on the Nile/Soner Cagaptay/Cairo Review of Global Affairs/Washington Insitute/Spring 2019

Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News published on May 28-29/19
Lebanon, Israel close to framework for land-sea border talks
Associated Press/May 28/2019/BEIRUT: The Lebanese Foreign Ministry said Lebanon and Israel are close to establishing a framework for negotiations on demarcating the Lebanese-Israeli land and maritime borders. In a statement, it said the form of negotiations to be held under United Nations auspices and the role of each of the concerned parties is still being worked out. The purported negotiations are to be overseen by Washington, which has been mediating between the two Mideast nations.The statement came after a meeting Tuesday between Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil and U.S. Acting Secretary of State David Satterfield. He has been shuttling between the two countries to mediate in the border dispute.

Lebanese Man Killed by Stray Bullet in Attack on Hezbollah Prayer Hall
Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/A young Lebanese man was accidentally killed during an exchange of fire in Saadiyat, in the coastal area of Chouf. The innocent bystander, identified as Mohammed Ali al-Mawla, was killed early Monday in a shooting that broke out after two men on a motorbike threw a stun grenade at a prayer hall belonging to Hezbollah. The guards shot back in the direction of the motorbike. Mawla, who was passing by the area, was hit by stray bullets in the neck and stomach. The victim was rushed to a nearby hospital, but later succumbed to his injuries. In a statement published by the National News Agency (NNA), Chouf MP Bilal Abdullah strongly condemned the shooting and called on security forces to “strike with an iron fist and punish all those who disturb the security or the inviolability of the atmosphere of civil peace.” “Illegal weapons, which we have repeatedly warned of, continue to endanger the security of the people and the region,” he stated. He underlined “the need to lift the cover on offenders” in order to reinstate an atmosphere of peace in the region and dissipate political divisions.

Lebanese Officials to Meet with Satterfield after Israeli Proposal on Border Demarcation
Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Israel has said it was open to US-mediated talks with Lebanon on resolving a dispute over their maritime border, as Acting US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield is set to arrive in Beirut on Tuesday. Israel accepted a Lebanese demand to involve the United Nations in the mediation, and that both land and sea disputes be resolved together. However, the Lebanese presidency and other officials avoided commenting on the statements made by Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz pending Satterfield’s return to Beirut. “We have to wait until we meet with Satterfield to know what news the US official is bringing with him,” sources close to Speaker Nabih Berri told Asharq Al-Awsat. The sources said Lebanon is attached to the UN mediation in talks with Israel, or in other terms, the direct involvement of the international organization in the border demarcation. Satterfield is expected in Beirut Tuesday a day after visiting Israel where he met with Steinitz. The Israeli Minister said Tel Aviv was open to negotiations "for the benefit of both countries' interests in developing natural gas reserves and oil." The issue was also discussed on Monday at the Baabda presidential palace, where President Michel Aoun tackled with UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jan Kubis the world body’s role in the demarcation of Lebanon's southern border. The pair also discussed preparations for the UN chief's report on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701. Last year, Lebanon signed its first contract to drill for oil and gas in its waters. The contract includes the disputed block 9, which Beirut says is in Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), while Israel claims as its own. The two countries have an unresolved maritime border dispute over a triangular area of sea measuring around 860 square kilometers.

Public Administrations Close Down in Lebanon for Fitr Holiday
Naharnet/May 28/2019/Public institutions will close down on the first and second days of Eid al-Fitr, a memo issued by Prime Minister Saad Hariri said on Tuesday. Municipal employees and workers at public institutions will get a two-day holiday which marks the end of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Muslim Sunni authority, announced on its official page that it will announce the exact date of Fitr on Monday evening as per the lunar calendar and the first moon sighting. Media office of late Shiite religious leader Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah announced June 4, as the first day of Fitr.

Report: Another Citizenship Decree ‘Looming’
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/May 28/2019/Another naturalization decree is reportedly “looming on the horizon,” the second during the term of President Michel Aoun, although the appeal against the first decree is still pending in the State Shura Council, media reports said on Tuesday. The new decree, if enacted, would grant Lebanese citizenship to new individuals although the appeal against the previous decree, “secretly” signed by Aoun, Prime Minister Saad Hariri and former Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq on May 11, 2018, remains subject to the Shura Council decision, added the sources. In June last year, Progressive Socialist Party leader ex-MP Walid Jumblat, Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea and Kataeb party chief Sami Gemayal called for the revocation of the edict describing it as “scandalous.”Lebanese were fuming over the decree granting nationality to dozens of people, allegedly including Syrian investors close to the Damascus regime. Critics have slammed the secrecy surrounding the move and say it adds insult to injury for thousands unable to acquire nationality because they were born to Lebanese mothers and foreign fathers. Political discourse in Lebanon, a country of just four million, is deeply divided over the war in neighbouring Syria, with allegations of corruption on all sides. The contested decree has brought all of that to the fore. Lebanese media reported it may include as many as 300 people, including businessmen known to be close to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Aoun Inks Decree Sending Budget to Parliament, Another Launching Extraordinary Session
Naharnet/May 28/2019/President Michel Aoun on Tuesday signed a decree referring the draft 2019 state budget and the annexed budgets to Parliament. Aoun also sent to Parliament a draft law allowing extra-budgetary spending and fund collection until June 30, 2019. The Presidency announced later on Tuesday that Aoun had signed a decree launching an extraordinary legislative session from June 1 until October 21. The Cabinet on Monday approved the 2019 draft state budget after weeks of haggling. Lebanon has vowed to slash public spending to unlock $11 billion worth of aid pledged by international donors during an April 2018 conference in Paris. Last month, Prime Minister Saad Hariri vowed to introduce "the most austere budget in Lebanon's history" to combat the country's bulging fiscal deficit. Lebanon is one of the world's most indebted countries, with public debt estimated at 141 percent of GDP in 2018, according to credit ratings agency Moody's.

Aoun to Judicial Delegation: Continued Strike Unjustified
Naharnet/May 28/2019/President Michel Aoun on Tuesday stressed that calls for preserving the independence of the judicial authority “do not justify at all impeding the judiciary” through a continued strike staged by some judges. "The continued strike by a number of judges undermines the judiciary's image and the rights of litigants,” Aoun warned during a meeting with a judicial delegation led by Higher Judicial Council chief Judge Jean Fahed. The president urged the HJC to address the current situation, noting that “a lot of benefits remained in the state budget and the continuation of the protest movement is unjustified.”The striking judges are protesting financial measures pertaining to the judiciary that were stipulated by the draft 2019 state budget, which was referred to Parliament on Monday.

Lebanon, Israel Close to Framework for Land-Sea Border Talks
Associated Press/Naharnet/May 28/2019/The Lebanese Foreign Ministry said Tue that Lebanon and Israel are close to establishing a framework for negotiations on demarcating the Lebanese-Israeli land and maritime borders. In a statement, it said the form of negotiations to be held under United Nations auspices and the role of each of the concerned parties is still being worked out. The purported negotiations are to be overseen by Washington, which has been mediating between the two Mideast nations. The statement came after a meeting Tuesday between Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil and U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield. He has been shuttling between the two countries to mediate in the border dispute. The Foreign Ministry said Satterfield conveyed Israel's response to the Lebanese proposals and that the atmosphere was "positive."
Satterfield also met Tuesday with President Michel Aoun, Speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Saad Hariri. The National News Agency said Satterfield briefed Aoun on “the outcome of the contacts he has so far made and which will continue over the coming days.”And following the U.S. official's talks with Berri, NNA said “progress is still being made and it requires further steps as part of these efforts.”Hariri's media office said in a statement that talks focused on the local and regional developments. LBCI television meanwhile reported that the Israelis have not yet agreed that the negotiations over the land and maritime borders should be held simultaneously. “Satterfield will return to Tel Aviv to continue discussions over this point in addition to other issues before informing Lebanon of the outcome of his consultations,” LBCI added. Israel on Monday expressed its openness to holding U.S.-mediated talks with Lebanon to resolve the dispute over the borders. Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz's office said in a statement that such talks could be "for the good of both countries' interests in developing natural gas reserves and oil."The statement was issued after Steinitz met with Satterfield.

Khalil: Structural Problems Can't be Resolved in One State Budget
Naharnet/May 28/2019/Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil on Tuesday noted that one state budget is not sufficient to resolve the state's “structural problems.”“There are structural problems in the state institutions that cannot be resolved in a draft state budget, specifically regarding the role of the public sector,” Khalil said in an interview with the Progressive Socialist Party's al-Anbaa news portal. “The debate has started regarding the role of public employees and the restructuring of the entire administrative hierarchy,” Khalil added. The government on Monday approved a long-awaited austerity budget aimed at rescuing an economy crumbling under massive debt and unlocking billions in international aid. "We are ahead of an extraordinary transformation that is... essential to cut spending and boost earnings," Khalil told reporters after a cabinet session at the presidential palace. Sealing weeks of acrimonious budget talks, Khalil said the cabinet approved a budget expected to trim Lebanon's deficit to 7.59 percent of gross domestic product -- a nearly 4-point drop from the previous year. This will be achieved by limiting spending to 25,840 billion Lebanese pounds ($17.1 billion) and accruing a total of 19,6000 billion pounds in government earnings, he said. Debt servicing and public sector salaries and benefits each will make up 35 percent of the budget, while government subsidies to the state-owned electricity company will constitute 11 percent, he added. "Today we are sending a clear message to the international community and all donors committed to supporting Lebanon that we are serious" about economic reform, Khalil said. The small Mediterranean country has promised donors to slash public spending as part of reforms to unlock $11 billion in aid pledged at a conference in Paris last year.
Khalil said the new budget would boost donor confidence and translate into development and infrastructure projects to help revive Lebanon's ailing economy.

Bassil: We Have Reservations on Budget, Concerns over Implementation
Naharnet/May 28/2019/Free Patriotic Movement chief MP Jebran Bassil on Tuesday announced that the FPM has reservations over the draft 2019 state budget and over what might happen during its discussion in Parliament. “We have reservations over a lot of things in the state budget and we have concerns over what might happen in Parliament and during implementation,” Bassil said after the weekly meeting of the Strong Lebanon parliamentary bloc. “We prevented collapse through the state budget but what happened is not sufficient to achieve an economic rise,” Bassil warned. “We cannot say that this is an austerity budget and we cannot say that the budget is based on an economic vision,” he pointed out. He however boasted that “a lot of taboos were broken” in the Cabinet's debate on the budget. “We have reduced the size of the public sector without making a drastic change,” he added. “The deficit reduction is good but less than what's needed... We achieved a lot of things in this state budget but the things that remain pending are much more,” Bassil noted. The Cabinet held 19 sessions to finalize the budget and several parties accused Foreign Minister Bassil of hindering the discussions with side proposals. Lebanon has vowed to slash public spending to unlock $11 billion worth of aid pledged by international donors during an April 2018 conference in Paris. Last month, Prime Minister Saad Hariri vowed to introduce "the most austere budget in Lebanon's history" to combat the country's bulging fiscal deficit.
Lebanon is one of the world's most indebted countries, with public debt estimated at 141 percent of GDP in 2018, according to credit ratings agency Moody's.

Jumblat Makes Appeal after Deadly Saadiyat Incident
Naharnet/May 28/2019/Progressive Socialist Party leader ex-MP Walid Jumblat on Tuesday made an appeal for rescuing “innocent citizens” from “the chaos of gunmen.”“Rescue the innocent citizens in the Saadiyat area from the chaos of gunmen, whoever they may be,” Jumblat tweeted, referring to a coastal Chouf area that lies around 25 kilometers south of Beirut. The young man Mohammed Ali al-Mawla has been accidentally killed during an exchange of gunfire that followed an armed attack on a Hizbullah prayer hall in the area. Saadiyat has witnessed several clashes between supporters of Hizbullah and al-Mustaqbal Movement in recent years.

Gemayel: Lebanon Cannot Be Built Through Isolation and Unilateralism
Kataeb.org/May 28/2019/Kataeb leader Samy Gemayel on Tuesday described his meeting with Shiite Scholar Sayyed Ali Fadlallah as excellent, hoping that it would help break the barriers between the Lebanese so that each one would understand his compatriot better. In remarks published in Al-Joumhouria newspaper, Gemayel stressed the need to steer clear of political bickering and spite, and to focus instead on serving the country's best interest. “I am keen on making sure that our political stances do not be regarded as an attack against one group or sect, especially that we hold firm to the country’s unity and coexistence. We know that Lebanon cannot be built through isolation and unilateralism, but through partnership and openness,” Gemayel stated. "What I care to emphasize is that what drives us to give our opinion regarding this or that issue is our struggle to build a state of law, not to attack one group." The Kataeb leader said that he had told Fadlallah about his readiness to engage in talks with political groups and officials who have have different viewpoints than the Kataeb party, adding that such a dialogue would promote interaction and bridge gaps between the Lebanese. Gemayel stressed the need to address the controversial issue of Hezbollah's arms away from traitorous accusations, saying that those defending the party's arsenal and those objecting to it must not alienate each other. “Regardless of our political differences which might sometimes be deep, all the Lebanese should hold fast to the policy of openness," Gemayel concluded.

U.S. Air Force Central Command Chief Visits Lebanon
Naharnet/May 28/2019/The Commander of United States Air Force Central Command Lieutenant General Joseph Guastella met with Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces General Joseph Aoun, as well as key leaders in the LAF Air Force, while visiting Hamat Air Base and Beirut Air Base on Monday and Tuesday. In his meetings, General Guastella discussed "the many challenges faced by the Lebanese Armed Forces Air Force and reaffirmed the U.S. government’s commitment to strengthening the Lebanese-American partnership and its support to the Lebanese Armed Forces in their capacity as the sole, legitimate defender of Lebanon," the U.S. Embassy in Beirut said in a statement.

Explosion Heard in Zahrani
Naharnet/May 28/2019/An explosion was heard on Tuesday in Wadi al-Numayrieh in southern Lebanon’s Zahrani area, the National News Agency reported. NNA said the reports received did not confirm whether the explosion was a result of detonating an Israeli spy device or an RPG missile explosion. On the other hand, LBCI TV said an Israeli reconnaissance plane has remotely detonated an Israeli spy device situated between Zifta Valley and the town of al-Numayrieh. It added that security forces and the Lebanese army have cordoned off the area and are also working on another suspicious device found in the same location, according to LBCI.

Are Russia, Iran, and, Hezbollah Trying to Reprise Syria in Venezuela?
Jay Solomon/The Washington Institute/May 28/2019
As Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro defies international pressure to resign, his allies in the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere are doubling down on their efforts to score another geopolitical victory against the United States. The crisis risks morphing into a redux of the Syria situation, in which President Bashar al-Assad worked with a similar coalition of countries and militias to withstand an array of U.S.-led economic sanctions and military operations.
According to U.S. officials, Maduro’s allies may be finding new ways to prop up the strongman. In addition to buying up sanctioned Venezuelan oil to buttress his government’s finances, Russia is believed to have deployed around 150 military and security personnel in Caracas in recent months. Iran has commenced weekly flights to Caracas, potentially to ferry military supplies to Maduro. Meanwhile, Lebanese Hezbollah and Cuba have deployed a network of intelligence officials to help him maintain control of the military and the streets, according to Venezuelan and American officials briefed on the relevant intelligence.
If Maduro survives, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah would score another major victory against the West, essentially replicating their defense of Assad in the Western Hemisphere at a much lower cost in lives and treasure. They would also solidify a beachhead in Latin America through which to challenge U.S. allies while drawing from Venezuela’s enormous energy and mineral wealth. U.S. officials are particularly concerned about Hezbollah’s ability to exploit the weakened state to generate more revenue from narcotics trafficking.
PRESSURE ON WASHINGTON TO DO MORE
To deny a Maduro victory, the Trump administration has been imposing further sanctions on Venezuela and its allies, simultaneously working with National Assembly president Juan Guaido to split the military and political leadership from Maduro. Washington formally recognized Guaido as Venezuela’s leader in January after accusing Maduro of fraudulently extending his presidency. Fifty-three other countries have followed the U.S. lead.
The Venezuelan opposition is pressing American officials to be even more aggressive, however. Steps now being considered by the administration include imposing secondary sanctions targeting any foreign firm or person that conducts business with designated Venezuelan entities. The Treasury Department is also studying whether to seize Venezuelan assets overseas, on the argument that they advance the Maduro government’s criminal activities. In addition, Washington is seeking to offer greater financial and diplomatic incentives to Venezuelan political and military leaders who break from Maduro and support Guaido, whose attempt earlier this month to spur military defections failed.
MADURO’S TIES TO THE IRAN-RUSSIA AXIS
Maduro and his mentor, the late dictator Hugo Chavez, share a long history of aligning with Russia, Cuba, and Iran’s “axis of resistance” against the United States and Israel. Chavez regularly met with former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a firebrand who threatened to wipe Israel of the map. Another veteran senior official, Minister of Industries and National Production Tareck El Aissami, has been designated a “drug kingpin” by the U.S. government and accused of bringing Hezbollah operatives to Venezuela. Earlier this month, the New York Times printed the contents of an internal Venezuelan intelligence assessment that concluded Aissami and his Syrian-born father had recruited and trained these operatives “with the aim of expanding intelligence networks throughout Latin America and...working in drug trafficking.”
Because of these links, Maduro’s foreign allies were able to bolster Maduro quickly after Guaido launched his rebellion with U.S. backing in January. Moscow began ferrying supplies to Caracas, and Russia’s state energy company, Rosneft, increased oil purchases from Venezuela’s sanctioned energy behemoth, PDVSA. Rosneft has virtually taken financial control of PDVSA ever since the company began defaulting on Russian bond investments.
These moves are in line with the conclusions of an unclassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report released in February, which described how Russia has sought to expand its military and intelligence capabilities in Latin America through its relationship with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The report cited open-source data showing that Russia shipped $11 billion in arms to Venezuela from 2001 to 2013, making the Kremlin the largest weapons supplier to Caracas by a large margin. The report also documented that Venezuelan soldiers regularly attend Russian war games, and that Moscow has deployed long-range bombers in Venezuela “to display Russian capabilities in a historic U.S. sphere of influence.” According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Moscow holds so much sway there that it was apparently able to stop Maduro from fleeing Caracas earlier this month after Guaido sought to incite military defections. “He had an airplane on the tarmac, he was ready to leave this morning as we understand it, and the Russians indicated he should stay,” Pompeo told CNN.
Tehran has likewise stepped up its diplomatic and financial support to Maduro this year. Iranian state media reported that Defense Minister Amir Hatami visited Caracas in January to discuss security issues, while senior Iranian officials traveled to Moscow in February to discuss support for Maduro. These trips echoed the secret Moscow meetings held by Russian and Iranian security officials in 2015, shortly before they launched a joint military operation to prop up the Syrian regime.
Moreover, the Trump administration has been alarmed by Iran’s resumption of weekly flights to Venezuela in April, using national carrier Mahan Air. The Treasury Department sanctioned the airline in 2011 for allegedly shipping weapons to allies in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. U.S. officials worry that the Venezuela flights could be serving a similar purpose—especially since they commenced just a week after Maduro’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, visited Lebanon and Syria to meet with two of Tehran’s closest allies: Assad and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah.
HEZBOLLAH OPERATIONAL AND DRUG ACTIVITY
The Trump administration is becoming more concerned about Hezbollah as the Venezuela crisis drags on. The Iranian proxy militia has been active in Latin America for decades, often infiltrating Arab emigre populations to conduct operations. For example, investigators concluded that the group coordinated with Iran to bomb the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s, with some senior Argentinian officials accused of complicity in the latter crime. More recently, the Treasury Department blacklisted the Lebanese Canadian Bank in 2011 on charges of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of Latin American drug money into Hezbollah accounts in Beirut.
Today, top aides to Guaido allege that Hezbollah operatives have been working with Maduro’s government and Cuban intelligence to conduct surveillance on the Venezuelan opposition. They are also concerned that the group may be helping Maduro’s security forces conduct crowd control.
Yet Washington’s biggest fear is that Hezbollah will use Venezuela’s financial and political turmoil to increase its drug revenues at a time when Iranian support for the group has been sharply curtailed. According to members of Guaido’s government, cocaine sales out of Venezuela have skyrocketed this year as Maduro’s financial woes mount. Much like the Lebanese Canadian Bank case, U.S. agencies have sanctioned a number of senior Hezbollah and Venezuelan officials in recent years for allegedly colluding to launder drug money (specifically, Latin American cocaine sold in Europe) via accounts in Lebanon.
CONCLUSION
Senior U.S. officials remain confident that Maduro will not last through the end of the year, citing the crippling effects of the West’s financial war on his government and the country’s ongoing electrical blackouts. Yet these officials do not rule out using military force to oust him if the crisis persists, or if terrorist organizations like Hezbollah show signs of gaining a greater foothold in the country. As one senior official put it, “Let’s see where we are in the fall.”

Lebanon’s contested gas fields with Israel under discussion
Makram Rabah/The Arab Weekly/May 28/2019
The Lebanese, who largely hold the view that their past and future are dictated from abroad, tend to remember many of the foreign diplomats who pass through the country. One such dignitary is David Satterfield, the former US ambassador to Lebanon and acting US assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Satterfield’s frequent recent Beirut visits, aimed at establishing backchannels with Israel to help resolve a land and maritime border dispute, underscore the United States’ efforts to stabilise the region and exert crippling economic pressure on Iran and its subsidiaries, primarily Hezbollah.
The border dispute, which centres on 850 sq.km of oil-rich territory between the two countries, should, in theory, be easy to solve through the same mechanism through which Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon was negotiated in 2000. However, fears of a confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel have complicated the process and made direct talks between the two states difficult.
Satterfield’s shuttle diplomacy has been effective. He has convinced both sides to agree to a US mediation role and indirectly engage in talks to work through areas of contention. Once the issue is resolved, both Lebanon and Israel will be able to drill peacefully in blocks 8 and 9 of their newly discovered oil and gas fields. Satterfield’s good offices give insight into the Trump administration’s approach to dealing with Lebanon, which failed to reclaim full sovereignty of its land or address the thorny problem of Hezbollah’s ever-growing arsenal.
However, over the issue of the border and gas field demarcation, the Lebanese state at least has agreed to play by the international community’s rules with respect to the border dispute, publicly calling out Israel rather than merely employing fiery rhetoric.
Satterfield’s diplomatic efforts, however, also come at a price for Lebanon, which the US administration has repeatedly warned of the consequences for not fully abiding by its sanctions against Hezbollah.
One of the United States’ top priorities in Lebanon is to ensure that Hezbollah does not receive funds from future oil revenue, which could help Iran weather the economic storm the United States has unleashed upon it.
This clear red line was drawn by Satterfield’s boss, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, during his visit to Beirut in March. Lebanon’s stability, Pompeo said during the trip, directly hinges on it complying with the sanctions.
Lebanese House Speaker Nabih Berri took those threats seriously. Knowing that Lebanon has more to gain by doing this demarcation dance, Berri convinced his allies in Hezbollah to play along.
Hezbollah’s outlook on the gas dispute with Israel, however, is very sinister. Having committed to defend all of Lebanon’s precious oil fields, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah would like to see the dispute resolved and block 9 drilled so he can assume quasi guardianship over the functioning oil rigs. This would allow Nasrallah to bolster his shattered image as the protector of Lebanon’s sovereignty and bearer of economic prosperity while holding the country’s people and future hostage.
Regardless of any parties’ intention, efforts to resolve the gas dispute greatly benefits Lebanon economically and politically. Not only does it send a clear message to the international community that Lebanon is functional as a state, it, more importantly, reminds the Lebanese that their country’s security cannot be outsourced to a militia whose armament and directives come from Iran. While diplomacy might fail, especially as it involves Israel, by coming to the negotiating table, Lebanon is giving itself an important safety net. This could prove more powerful than Hezbollah and its ballistic missiles, which sooner rather than later need to be properly addressed.

Lebanese Monkey Escapes Nun's Farm, Infiltrates Border, Drives Israelis Nuts
Noa Shpigel/Haaretz/May 28, 2019/The monkey escaped the 'Ship of Peace' farm in southern Lebanon and has been spotted in several locations in northern Israel. A monkey has been spotted in northern Israel after apparently crossing the Lebanese border. A local Lebanese outlet reported that the monkey had escaped from the farm of a French nun named Beatrice Maugerin in the Qouzah village in Bint Jbeil area. The farm from which the monkey fled is called "Ship of Peace." According to reports, the site is intended to be a safe place welcoming Muslims, Jews and Christians. The monkey, which likely belongs to a species from the African savannah, has been seen in several locations in northern Israel - including the communities of Ziri't and Hurfesh - but has yet to be captured. The Lebanese report offered a monetary reward for the return of the monkey.
قرد لبناني يهرب من بلدة قوزح الجنوبية ويدخل قرى الشمال الإسرائيلي ويشغل الإسرائيليين وه لا يزال طليقاً
الخبر نشرته الهآرتس قبل قليل..ترى كم قرد سياسي هو أيضاً هارب من القانون ومن الضرور القاء القبض عليه وحجره إلى الأبد

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on May 28-29/19
Iran Tensions Overshadow Mecca Summits
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/May 28/2019/Regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia hosts Islamic, Arab and Gulf summits this week as tensions between Iran and the US raise fears of military escalation. The three summits in Mecca, Islam's holiest city, allow US ally Riyadh the chance to present unified Islamic, Arab and Gulf fronts against its arch-rival Tehran. Iran itself has not yet confirmed whether it will attend the meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), of which it is a member. Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said Riyadh's aim was "to consolidate Arab and Muslim support, anticipating intensified confrontation or diplomacy". Washington has reinstated tough sanctions against Tehran and decided to deploy 1,500 more troops to the Middle East amid sabotage attacks on oil facilities. Two Saudi oil tankers, among four vessels, were the targets of mysterious acts of sabotage off the United Arab Emirates (UAE) this month, and Iran-aligned Yemeni rebels have stepped up drone attacks on the kingdom -- one of which resulted in the temporary shutdown of a major oil pipeline. Tehran has repeatedly threatened to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which 35 percent of the world's seaborne oil passes.The Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) emergency summits called by Saudi Arabia are to be held on Thursday, a day before the long-scheduled OIC summit. It is not yet clear how many countries will take part in the emergency gatherings, but Qatar -- which has been boycotted by a Saudi-led alliance -- has been invited to attend the GCC meeting.Riyadh cut diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2016 after protesters stormed Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran following its execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.
No easy task
The OIC summit will address "current issues in the Muslim world" and "recent developments in a number of OIC member states", the official agenda states.
Saudi Arabia and its allies have repeatedly accused Iran of interfering in the affairs of other countries, including Bahrain, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, by supporting and arming fighters. "Unity and coordination of positions are necessary at this critical time, and Riyadh... is qualified to play that role," the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, tweeted last week. But the kingdom's aim of a unified Islamic, Arab and Gulf position is likely to be difficult to achieve.  Qatar has grown closer to Iran, while Kuwait has expressed concern over Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, which has good ties with both Iran and the United States, has said it and other parties "seek to calm tensions" between the two countries. Ahead of the summits, Iran's top diplomats have been touring the region, including Iraq, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. Iran, which shares a border with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey, also has good relations with Ankara and Islamabad. The Islamic republic supports political groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. "Several countries may not like Iran and its regional misbehaviour but may prefer to avoid a confrontational or condemning stance," said Simon Henderson, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
'Bargaining power'
Saudi Arabia and the US have accused Iran of being the mastermind behind the Yemeni rebels' attack on a major pipeline, while an investigation has been launched into the attacks on ships off the UAE. The US Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, has between 60,000 and 80,000 troops deployed in the area. On Friday, US President Donald Trump bypassed Congress to sell $8.1 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies, citing an alleged threat from Iran. "Resuming its (Iran's) nuclear activities, making its presence felt in the region, and disrupting Saudi or Emirati oil exports could all be ways of enhancing its bargaining power," the International Crisis Group said in a report. "But if these manoeuvres are a diplomatic game, it is a dangerous one: either side could misinterpret the other's intentions."Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has said his country does not want to go to war with Iran but was ready to defend its interests.

Kushner, Greenblatt in Middle East to Seek Support for Peace Plan
Washington- Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner is leading a US delegation on stops in the Middle East this week seeking support for a late June workshop aimed at helping the Palestinians, a White House official said on Tuesday. Kushner, Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, and US Special Representative for Iran and Kushner aide Avi Berkowitz began their trip in Rabat and were to travel to Amman and Jerusalem, arriving in Israel on Thursday. Kushner will then meet up with US President Donald Trump in London when the president makes a state visit there next week. The trip is similar to one that Kushner and Greenblatt took in February to Gulf states to drum up support for the economic portion of a Middle East peace plan that they have been developing on behalf of Trump. The official said one reason for this week’s trip is to bolster support for a June 25-26 conference in Manama, Bahrain, in which Kushner is to unveil the first part of Trump’s long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. The plan, touted by Trump as the “deal of the century,” is to encourage investment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Arab donor countries before grappling with thorny political issues at the heart of the conflict. Palestinian leaders have been sharply critical of the effort. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have said they will participate. The participants in the conference in Manama are expected to include 300 to 400 representatives and business executives from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and possibly some Palestinian business leaders. A source familiar with the planning said it appeared Egypt, Jordan, and Oman, as well as the G7 countries, would be sending representatives to the conference.

US warns Syria, Russia against ‘reckless escalation’ as 21 civilians killed in air strikes
AFP/May 28/2019/BEIRUT: At least 21 civilians were killed on Tuesday as Syria’s regime intensified its bombardment of the last extremist stronghold in the country’s northwest, a monitor said.Nine children were among the 21 killed in government fire on several towns in Idlib province and the countryside of neighboring Aleppo, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. And the US continues to be alarmed by Syrian government and Russian air strikes in northern Syria, saying recent attacks have killed more than 200 civilians, the State Department said on Tuesday.
"Indiscriminate attacks on civilians and public infrastructure such as schools, markets and hospitals is a reckless escalation of the conflict and is unacceptable," said State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus. Strikes on a busy street in the village of Kafr Halab, on the western edge of Aleppo province, killed at least nine civilians. An AFP photographer said the bodies of the victims were torn apart and several stores lining the side of the road were destroyed. The street was crowded with people out and about before breaking the daytime fast observed by Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan. A hospital in the Idlib town of Kafranbel was also hit by artillery shells, said David Swanson, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian office. “The facility is reportedly out of service due to severe structural damage,” he told AFP. The hospital’s administrative director Majed Al-Akraa confirmed the attack. The hospital is completely out of service,” he said. “It was a strong attack. The generators and even my car caught fire,” he told AFP.It follows two days of intensified regime bombardment on the region that killed a total of 31 civilians on Sunday and Monday, according to the Britain-based Observatory.Rescue volunteers and civilians were seen pulling dust-covered victims from the rubble of destroyed buildings in the wake of those strikes. Idlib and parts of the neighboring provinces of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia are under the control of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an extemist group led by Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate. The region is supposed to be protected from a massive government offensive by a September buffer zone deal, but the extremist bastion has come under increasing bombardment by the regime and its ally Russia since late April. The Observatory says nearly 280 civilians have been killed in the spike in violence since then.
More than 200,000 civilians have already been displaced by the upsurge of violence, according to the United Nations. The UN has warned an all-out offensive on the region would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe for its nearly three million residents.At least 20 health facilities have been hit by the escalation — 19 of which remain out of service, the UN has said. Also on Tuesday, France's top diplomat also said that the country had an "indication" that a chemical attack had been carried out in Syria's Idlib province this month, an attack alleged by Washington last week.
"We have an indication that chemical weapons were used in the Idlib region, but for now it has not been verified," Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told a parliamentary commission. "We're being cautious because we consider that chemical weapons use has to be proven and be lethal, in which case we can react," he said. President Emmanuel Macron has made use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government a "red line" that would trigger a military reprisal against the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Iran Sees ‘No Prospect of Negotiations’ with US
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Iran ruled out on Tuesday the possibility of holding negotiations with the United States, a day after US President Donald Trump said a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program was possible. Asked about Trump’s comments in a news conference in Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency: “We currently see no prospect of negotiations with America.”“Iran pays no attention to words; What matters to us is a change of approach and behavior.”Speaking from Japan on Monday, Trump said: “I really believe that Iran would like to make a deal, and I think that’s very smart of them, and I think that’s a possibility to happen.”Trump also said that United States was not looking for regime change in Iran, adding that “we are looking for no nuclear weapons.”Late on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Trump should make his intentions clear about any talks with Iran through actions, not words. In a late tweet, he said: "Actions—not words—will show whether or not that's @realDonaldTrump's intent.”Trump said that he would back Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to open a communication with Iran. Zarif in his tweet also blamed Trump's economic pressure on Tehran for the regional tensions. Washington withdrew last year from a 2015 international nuclear deal with Tehran, and is ratcheting up sanctions in efforts to strangle Iran’s economy by ending its international sales of crude oil. Iranian Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri said on Tuesday the country was not allowed to pursue the development of nuclear weapon as this was banned by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Tensions have risen between Iran and the United States since Washington deployed a carrier strike group and bombers and announced plans to deploy 1,500 troops to the Middle East, prompting fears of a conflict.

Syria: Satellite Images Show Crops on Fire in Idlib
Beirut- Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/New satellite photos show significant damage to Syrian villages and surrounding farmland as a result of a government offensive on the last rebel stronghold in the country. The images, provided to The Associated Press by the Colorado-based Maxar Satellites on Tuesday, show fires in olive groves and orchards during harvest season around Kfar Nabudah and Habeet, two villages on the edge of Idlib province where fighting has focused. The fires were apparently sparked by intense bombing in the area. Kfar Nabudah fell to government control on Sunday. Activists, experts, and Maxar say the crop burning is part of a "scorched earth" campaign that adds to the hardship of 3 million people in the rebel stronghold. The UN said fires, triggered by bombings, destroyed staple crops such as wheat and barley. Syrian regime forces pounded positions in the northwest of the country as troops on the ground seized the small town of Kafr Nabuda and Habeet. A spokesman for one of the rebel formations in the area, the Turkey-backed National Liberation Front, confirmed regime forces had recaptured Kafr Nabuda after eight-hours of heavy bombardment.

Civilian Toll Mounts as Syria Regime Pounds Militant Bastion
London- Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Another wave of regime air strikes on Tuesday struck a militant bastion in northwest Syria where more than 40 civilians have been killed in several days of heavy bombardment, a war monitor said. Four children were among 10 people killed on Tuesday in government fire on several towns in Idlib province and neighboring Aleppo countryside, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. A hospital in the Idlib town of Kafranbel was hit by artillery shells, said David Swanson, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian office. "The facility is reportedly out of service due to severe structural damage," he told AFP. The hospital's administrative director Majed al-Akraa confirmed the attack. "The hospital is completely out of service," he said. "It was a strong attack. The generators and even my car caught fire," he told AFP. It follows two days of intensified regime bombardment on the region that killed a total of 31 civilians on Sunday and Monday, according to the Britain-based Observatory. Rescue volunteers and civilians were seen pulling dust-covered victims from the rubble of destroyed buildings in the wake of those strikes. Idlib and parts of the neighboring provinces of Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia are under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a militant group led by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate. The region is supposed to be protected from a massive government offensive by a September buffer zone deal, but the militant bastion has come under increasing bombardment by the regime and its ally Russia since late April. The Observatory says over 260 civilians have been killed in the spike in violence since then. More than 200,000 civilians have already been displaced by the upsurge of violence, according to the United Nations. The UN has warned an all-out offensive on the region would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe for its nearly three million residents. At least 20 health facilities have been hit by the escalation -- 19 of which remain out of service, the UN has said.

Netanyahu Could Face Election Rematch after Ballot he Said he Won
Asharq Al-Awsat/May 28/2019/Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to declare himself winner of last month's Israeli election, but he now has until Wednesday to appease an erstwhile ally, form a government and avoid a possible rematch. The man at the center of the crisis in Netanyahu's coalition-building, former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is sticking to his guns in a stalemate over military draft exemptions for Jewish seminary students. The brinkmanship six weeks after the April 9 election poses another challenge to the decade-long reign of the right-wing leader some Israelis have hailed as "King Bibi" and deepens political uncertainty in a country riven with division, reported Reuters on Tuesday. Barring a breakthrough, Israel could hold a new election, with parliament already making initial moves towards a fresh poll and legislators proposing September for the national vote. Without the support of Lieberman's far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, which has five seats in the 120-member Knesset, Netanyahu cannot put together a majority government led by his Likud party. Under a deadline mandated by law, he has until 2100 GMT on Wednesday to announce a new administration. Political commentators were hedging their bets. "Netanyahu is a wounded animal. The man is fighting for his life, and we shouldn't make light of his abilities," columnist Yossi Verter wrote in the left-wing Haaretz daily on Tuesday. Rivals had already smelled blood in the water when Israel's attorney general said in February he intends to charge Netanyahu in three graft cases. Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing, saying he is the victim of a political witch-hunt. But in the closely contested April election, Netanyahu - dubbed "crime minister" by his opponents - appeared on course for a fifth term as head of a right-wing bloc. All it would take, according to conventional wisdom, was the usual wheeling and dealing on cabinet posts and allied factions' pet projects. Few imagined Netanyahu would not put a coalition together, even after he asked for and received a two-week extension to an original 28-day deadline.
Wild card
Suddenly, Lieberman became a wild card and the clock was ticking, with Netanyahu facing a scenario in which President Reuven Rivlin could pick another legislator to try to form a government if he failed. "A lot can be done in 48 hours," Netanyahu said on Monday after parliament gave initial approval to a motion to dissolve itself. "The voters' wishes can be respected, a strong right-wing government can be formed," he said. If efforts to break the political deadlock fail, parliament would take a final vote on an election on Wednesday. A new ballot would mean Rivlin could not choose someone else to put together a governing coalition. But political commentators said it was still unclear if Netanyahu could muster the required 61 votes to pass the motion. The ball would then be in Rivlin's court, leaving Netanyahu, who last lost an election in 1999, on unfamiliar sidelines looking in. Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, began his climb up the Israeli political ladder as a Netanyahu aide and has long insisted ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students share other Israeli Jews's burden of compulsory military service. That has put him at odds with United Torah Judaism in the coalition negotiations, a schism that has played well with Lieberman's support base of Russian-speakers - some of them non-Jews under Orthodox criteria who came to Israel under a right of return for anyone claiming at least one Jewish grandparent.
"Yisrael Beitenu's only motive is standing on principle and the commitments we made to the public before, during and after the election," Lieberman said on Tuesday. But for long-time Lieberman watchers, it's a clear power play by a bare-knuckle politician who once worked as a nightclub bouncer and now seeks, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely of Likud, to seize control of the "national camp", said Reuters. "According to Lieberman's calculations, Netanyahu's time in power is nearing its end. To preserve his own, he knows this is the moment to jump ship," Anshel Pfeffer, who wrote a biography of Netanyahu, said in Haaretz. "And he's doing so carefully, choosing a matter of principle - the military draft law ... as the issue on which to break with Netanyahu." On Twitter on Monday, US President Donald Trump weighed in on the internal Israeli political dispute, expressing support for an ally he calls by his nickname. "Hoping things will work out with Israel's coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever," Trump tweeted, using Netanyahu's nickname. "A lot more to do!"Both leaders have been in lockstep over policy towards the Palestinians, who have accused Trump of being partial towards Israel, and Iran. Netanyahu featured Trump in election billboards placed prominently in Israeli cities.

Israel takes First Step towards New Elections
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 27 May, 2019/Israel took on Monday the first step towards holding new elections as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggled to form a coalition government ahead of a Wednesday night deadline to do so.
On Monday, parliament gave preliminary approval to a law to dissolve itself. Three more votes are required for final approval of the law, which would result in new elections being held. The vote was 65-43 with six abstentions, according to parliament's website. Ex-defense minister Avigdor Lieberman has prevented a deal by refusing to budge from a key demand. He has insisted on passing a new law mandating that young ultra-Orthodox men be drafted into the military, like most other Jewish males. Netanyahu's ultra-Orthodox allies demand that the draft exemptions remain in place. The PM, who claimed victory in April elections, delivered a primetime statement on Monday calling on his potential partners to put "the good of the nation above every other interest" in order to avoid sending the country once again to "expensive, wasteful" elections. Without the five seats of Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party, Netanyahu cannot muster a majority. Netanyahu and Lieberman met Monday evening in a last-ditch effort to find a compromise. Israeli media said the meeting ended without any progress, and quoted Likud officials as saying Netanyahu would soon order new elections. He placed the blame on Lieberman for creating the crisis, but said he was hopeful his efforts to salvage a compromise in the next 48 hours would succeed. Holding elections so close to one another would be unprecedented in Israel, and there have been concerns over the cost and prolonged political paralysis that would result. It would also be a major setback for Netanyahu, who received support on Monday from his close ally US President Donald Trump. "Hoping things will work out with Israel's coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever. A lot more to do!" Trump, currently visiting Japan, said on Twitter, using Netanyahu's nickname.

AU Urges South Sudan Parties to Complete Arrangements before Government Formation
London - Mustafa Sirri/Asharq Al-Awsat/May 28/2019/The African Union (AU) urged parties of the South Sudan Peace Agreement to double their efforts to ensure the completion of all arrangements of the pre-transitional period, which was extended for an additional six months to November. AU’s High Representative for Infrastructure Development in Africa and Kenya’s former Prime Minister Raila Odinga told reporters that parties of the peace agreement should double their efforts to ensure that all arrangements for the pre-transition period are completed. The Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD) endorsed extending the pre-transitional period by six months effective from May 12, 2019 to enable the execution of the critical pending tasks. Odinga called on the leaders of South Sudan to quickly restore stability so that the country can claim its share in the development of infrastructure in Africa. The deadline for the formation of a national unity government in November should not be missed again, he warned. “I would like to see peace and calm reinstated in South Sudan and to end the deadlock in the implementation of the peace agreement until it is possible to form a government.” He noted that citizens are eager for peace, development, stability and security, admitting there are challenges to be solved if everyone agrees to work together, pointing out that he held talks with President Salva Kiir and urged him to prioritize peace and development in South Sudan. In related news, the South Sudan National Pre-Transitional Committee (NPTC) decided to end the accommodation of the negotiating delegations that discuss the implementation of the peace agreement, and asked them to leave the hotel. Head of the Committee for Accommodation Dhieu Mathok Diing issued a letter to the members informing them that their housing in the hotels will end as of Monday May 27 and the NPTC will not be responsible for the accommodation of any member who remains in the hotel from that day. For his part, a top opposition figure told Asharq Al-Awsat that his party is concerned about the opposition delegations after the decision to terminate their stay in the hotels. The member, who preferred to remain unnamed, warned that such decision will disrupt the implementation of the agreement to activate peace and will reflect negatively on the mutual trust between all the parties. Civil society organizations welcomed the move, saying South Sudanese people had repeatedly called for the leaders to return to their own homes. Civil society raised question marks on the government’s decision to host officials in luxury hotels while claiming lack of funds to implement the terms of the peace agreement, especially the security arrangements. The organizations accused some peace delegates of spending lavishly on guards, families and friends rather than providing services to citizens.

French Police Arrest Suspects in Lyon Explosion
Paris- Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 27 May, 2019/French police have arrested three people, including a 24-year-old computer science student of Algerian nationality, in connection with last week’s bomb blast in Lyon that injured 13 people, authorities said. The case is being handled as a terrorism investigation given the circumstances of the attack, committed in broad daylight, and the use of an explosive device capable of hitting a large number of people with screws and metal balls packed into a bag. A police source said the three arrested were the student, who does not have a police record, a minor who studies at a high school in Lyon and is also of Algerian nationality, and a woman. The Paris prosecutors’ office said that minor was a member of the main suspect’s family circle. No information was provided about the woman. French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner also announced the arrest of the man on Twitter, but did not provide further details on the suspect or where he was arrested. Security camera footage of the incident shows a partially masked suspect wheeling a bicycle to the scene, before leaving a bag outside a branch of a popular bakery chain. DNA traces were found on the remains of the parcel, according to a source close to investigation. Another source said the judicial police arrested the man on the street after having tailed him. They decided not to arrest him at his apartment, the source said, for fear that there could still be some triacetone triperoxide or TATP, the powerful but unstable homemade explosive that was used in the attack.

Turkish Military Launches Operation Against PKK in Northern Iraq
Baghdad- Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Turkey’s military launched an operation with commandos, backed by artillery and air strikes, against Kurdish fighters in a mountainous area of northern Iraq, the defense ministry said on Tuesday. The military action began with artillery and airstrikes on Monday afternoon and the operation by commando brigades began at 8 pm (1700 GMT) to “neutralize terrorists and destroy their shelters”, according to a ministry statement. It said the operation targeted Iraq’s Hakurk region, just across the border from Turkey’s southeastern tip, which also borders Iran. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group is based in northern Iraq, notably in the Qandil region to the south of Hakurk. Video published by the ministry showed helicopters landing commandos on mountainous terrain. It also shared photos showing shells fired by howitzers and soldiers perched on ridges, surveying hillsides with their rifles. “The operation, with the support of our attack helicopters, is continuing as planned,” the statement said. The military frequently launches air strikes against PKK targets in northern Iraq but ground operations are less common. The PKK launched an insurgency in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey in 1984 and more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict. It is designated a terrorist group by Ankara, the European Union, and the United States.

Algeria Faces Constitutional Dilemma After Failing to Organize Presidential Elections
Algiers - Boualem Goumrassa/ Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/ A debate in Algeria has begun to heat up over the fate of acting Head of State Abdelkader Bensalah, whose term ends on 3rd of July in accordance with the country’s constitution. The state’s institutional system has been experiencing an unprecedented situation that has puzzled law and constitutional experts, noting that Algeria will remain without a president until the rule is handed over to a prospective elected president. The head of state, who has been leading the country for three months now, following the resignation of the president, failed to perform the most important task mandated by the constitution, which is to pave the way for holding the elections. Algeria’s Constitutional Council announced Sunday that two candidates, both unknown figures to the public, had finally registered for the country’s July 4th presidential election. To be eligible, the candidates have to be backed by 600 local councilors and lawmakers or 60,000 voters in more than half of the country’s regions. The Council has 10 days to review the files of the two candidates and declare accepting or rejecting any of them. In case the conditions were not met, as expected by many observers, the Council will declare the impossibility of holding elections. Yet, the constitution doesn’t allow the Council to decide whether to cancel or postpone the elections, and it doesn’t include any solution for this impasse because those who put it didn’t think the interim president would fail to organize elections. Observers expect the Council to refer the case to the head of state, while others say Bensalah will refer it to the concerned bodies to find a solution. Other predictions indicate that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah has caused this problem since he is the official body that adheres to the “constitutional solution” to the crisis and rejects proposals by parties from the popular movement and other supporting opposition parties.

Sudan Opposition Relaunches Strike as Deadlock With Military Persists
Khartoum- Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Hundreds of passengers at Khartoum airport and the Sudanese capital's main bus terminal were stranded Tuesday as protesters began a two-day national strike to pile pressure on the military to hand power to a civilian administration. Leaders of an umbrella protest movement remain at loggerheads with army generals, who seized power after ousting president Omar al-Bashir last month, over who should lead a new governing body -- a civilian or a soldier. The new governing body is expected to install a transitional civilian government, which in turn would prepare for the first post-Bashir elections after a three-year interim period. In a bid to step up pressure on the ruling military council, the Alliance for Freedom and Change protest movement has called for a two-day general strike starting on Tuesday.
Hundreds of passengers were stranded at Khartoum airport as scores of employees at the facility went on strike, chanting "civilian rule, civilian rule," an AFP correspondent there said. Many employees carried banners or wore badges that read "We are on strike". Sudanese airlines Badr, Tarco, and Nova suspended flights on Tuesday, although some international flights were still scheduled. Passengers were also stranded at Khartoum's main bus terminal as hundreds of employees observed the strike. Many carried banners reading: "Today, tomorrow no buses as we are on strike". "I have to travel to Gadaref to be with my family for Eid, but I'm not angry as I understand the reason for the strike," traveler Fatima Omar said as she waited with her children at the bus terminal. Protest leader Siddiq Farukh told AFP that the strike was a message to the world that Sudanese people "don't want the power to be with the military". Another prominent protester, Wajdi Saleh, told reporters late Monday that there was "still no breakthrough" in negotiations but the protest movement was ready to negotiate if the generals offered fresh talks. "We hope that we reach an agreement with the military council and won't have to go on an indefinite strike," he said. Protest leaders had said medics, lawyers, prosecutors, employees in the electricity and water sectors, public transport, railways, telecommunication, and civil aviation were set to take part in the strike. They said actions in the telecoms and aviation sectors would not affect operations. But the protest movement's plan has been dealt a blow after a key member, the National Umma Party, said it opposed the plan as there had been no unanimous decision for a strike. Umma and its chief Sadiq al-Mahdi have for decades been the main opponents of Bashir's iron-fisted rule, and threw their weight behind the protest movement after nationwide demonstrations erupted in December. Mahdi's elected government was toppled by Bashir in a coup in 1989. Protester Hazar Mustafa said a civilian government was the only solution to Sudan's problems. "We see the military council as part of the former regime. We don't see it upholding any rights and building a just state," she said. The army ousted Bashir in April after months of protests against his autocratic rule, including a sit-in by tens of thousands of protesters outside Khartoum's military headquarters. But the generals, backed by key regional powers, have resisted calls from protesters and Western governments to hand over power to civilians. Thousands of protesters remain camped outside army headquarters, demanding the generals step down. Before suspending talks last week, protesters and the generals had agreed on several key issues, including the three-year transition and the creation of a 300-member parliament, with two-thirds of lawmakers coming from the protesters' umbrella group. But negotiations stalled as protest leaders insisted a civilian must head the new sovereign council, with civilians making up the majority of its members -- proposals rejected by the military.

France Ups Efforts to Avoid Execution of French ISIS Convicts in Iraq
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced Tuesday that Paris was intensifying its efforts to stop the execution of four French citizens in Iraq after they were convicted and sentenced to death for fighting for the ISIS terrorist group. "We are increasing the steps to avoid the death penalty for these four French citizens," he told France Inter radio. "We are opposed to the death penalty," he added. An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced three French nationals to death for joining the terror group, the first ISIS members from France to be sentenced to capital punishment. On Monday, a fourth French citizen was also condemned to death in Baghdad. The four have 30 days to appeal. Two more French members of ISIS were sentenced to death by Iraq on Tuesday. The men were identified as Karam El-Harchaoui and Brahim Nejara. They are among a group of 12 French citizens who were detained by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in neighboring Syria and handed over to Iraq in January. In recent months, Iraq has taken custody of thousands of extremists, including foreigners, captured by the SDF. France has long insisted that its adult citizens captured in Iraq or Syria must face trial locally, refusing to repatriate them despite the risk they face capital punishment for waging their extremist war in the region. Le Drian reaffirmed France's refusal to accept any repatriations of its nationals affiliated with ISIS. "These terrorists -- because they are terrorists -- who attacked us, who also caused death in Iraq, must be judged where they committed their crimes," he said. The Iraqi judiciary said earlier in May that it has tried and sentenced more than 500 suspected foreign members of ISIS since the start of 2018. Its courts have condemned many to life in prison and others to death, although no foreign ISIS members have yet been executed.

Nechirvan Barzani Elected Iraqi Kurdistan President
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 28 May, 2019/Nechirvan Barzani was on Tuesday elected as president of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a spokesman for the regional parliament said. The deputy leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), who had been serving as regional prime minister, won 68 votes from the 84 lawmakers present. He is the nephew of the previous and only other holder of the office, Masoud Barzani. The regional legislature has 111 seats in total. The parliamentary session was boycotted by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of late Iraqi president Jalal Talabani. Masoud Barzani, still the head of the KDP, stepped down after 12 years as regional president in November 2017.

EU Leaders Launch Hunt to Fill Brussels' Top Job
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/May 28/2019/European leaders descend on Brussels on Tuesday to launch the hunt for a new generation of top EU officials in the wake of elections that shook up traditional alliances. The key job to be filled is that of president of the European Commission, the union's powerful chief executive, a five-year post currently held by Jean-Claude Juncker. Under EU treaty law, the European Council of 28 national leaders nominates a commission president, then the new 751-member parliament ratifies their choice. But the procedure, while seemingly straightforward, masks a complex power struggle between rival states and ideological blocs and between the leaders and parliament itself. Juncker's deputy and the centre-left challenger for the top job, former Dutch minister Frans Timmermans, compares the ruthless intrigue to "Game of Thrones". And the game kicks off on Tuesday, when European Council president Donald Tusk hosts the EU leaders for a summit dinner in Brussels to lay out the ground rules. Many in Brussels argue that the European project is best served by a "political commission" headed by a president with a mandate from the trans-national parliament.
But most of the leaders think the union's legitimacy derives from its member states and that the Council should be able to pick one of their own, someone with leadership experience. The results of the EU elections did not strengthen parliament's hand -- except perhaps for the boost of the larger than expected voter turnout. While a threatened surge of eurosceptic and far-right populist parties was contained, the pro-Europe centre was fragmented, with liberals and Greens gaining ground. In previous years, a coalition of the socialist S&D and the conservative EPP was able to wield a majority. Now they cannot govern without the liberal ALDE or the Greens. And this complicates their choice of a "spitzenkandidat" -- or lead candidate. As lead candidate of the EPP, which lost ground but remains the largest voting unit, Bavarian conservative Manfred Weber thinks he should lead the Commission. "We won the election and the EPP candidate, Manfred Weber, will be the president of the Commission," insisted party president Joseph Daul as votes were counted. Despite his confidence, the party has lost ground, starting with 40 seats in the election.
Anyone but Weber?
On paper, eight of the 28 EU leaders hail from EPP parties, but Hungarian premier Viktor Orban's Fidesz is suspended and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz was sacked on Monday. Timmermans, a centre-left Dutchman with more executive experience, will have the S&D's backing and ALDE, while dubious about the process, could back Margrethe Vestager. The Danish competition commissioner might win the backing of French President Emmanuel Macron, while Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel backs Weber. But, according to one senior European official, if it comes down to a Franco-German clash the leaders may choose to avoid a crisis and back a Timmermans compromise. "I imagine that a certain number of leaders will try to torpedo a spitzenkandidat, but not all the spitzenkandidaten," the official said on condition of anonymity. The big three groups are united in opposition to the far-right eurosceptics, but there are signs the Greens, ALDE and the S&D might prefer a progressive candidate over the EPP. Vestager is a younger choice, has a certain profile as the woman who took on the US internet giants as a regulator, and would be the first female president. But she comes from Denmark -- a non-core member which opted out of the euro and the Schengen passport-free zone -- and would probably not have her home government's backing. She might have Macron, but the French leader's decision to invest himself personally in the campaign only to come in second to Marine Le Pen's far-right list has weakened him. Enter Timmermans. "Everyone recognises his intellectual brio. He has fought for the rule of law with passion," the senior official said, suggesting the ground is shifting.

Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on May 28-29/19
Iran Must Understand Returning to the Negotiating Table is the Only Way Forward
 Con Coughlin/Gatestone Institute/May 28/2019
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14297/iran-deal-negotiations
As Mr Trump has made clear at his press conference in Japan, where he is currently on a state visit, his main objective is to agree a new deal with Tehran, one that, unlike Mr Obama's flawed arrangement, addresses all aspects of Iran's nuclear ambitions, as well as its malign activities in the Middle East.
"I really believe that Iran would like to make a deal... I think that's very smart of them, and I think that's a possibility to happen. It has a chance to be a great country with the same leadership." — US President Donald J. Trump, press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo, May 27.
Mr Pompeo told me that that Washington was not pushing for regime change in Tehran, but was instead seeking a revised agreement that satisfied all of Washington's concerns about Iran's conduct, and not just the narrow issue of uranium enrichment.
To date, the Iranians have responded to the Trump administration's actions by threatening to intensify their policy of destabilization in the region.
The aim of US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal was not to provoke a military confrontation with Tehran. On the contrary, his main objective is to agree a new deal with Tehran, one that, unlike Mr Obama's flawed arrangement, addresses all aspects of Iran's nuclear ambitions, as well as its malign activities in the Middle East. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
There is one simple way for Iran to defuse the mounting tensions with the US and its allies in the Gulf: return to the negotiating table and agree to a new deal on Tehran's nuclear programme.
Amid mounting concern that Washington's recent military build-up in the Gulf region will lead to renewed conflict, many commentators appear to have lost sight of the Trump administration's key objective when it withdrew from the 2015 deal negotiated, in large part, by former US President Barack Obama.
The aim of US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the agreement was not, as his Democrat critics have alleged, to provoke a military confrontation with Tehran. On the contrary, as Mr Trump has made clear at his press conference in Japan, where he is currently on a state visit, his main objective is to agree a new deal with Tehran, one that, unlike Mr Obama's flawed arrangement, addresses all aspects of Iran's nuclear ambitions, as well as its malign activities in the Middle East.
And, despite all the talk of increased military tensions, with the US recently deploying an aircraft carrier battle group, a fleet of B-52 bombers and an extra 1,500 troops to the Gulf region, Mr Trump's over-arching ambition remains to persuade the ayatollahs to return to the negotiating table.
"I really believe that Iran would like to make a deal," Mr Trump remarked during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Akasaka Palace state guest house in Tokyo this week. "I think that's very smart of them, and I think that's a possibility to happen. It has a chance to be a great country with the same leadership."
The president's optimism was certainly in contrast to the predictions, especially from European leaders, that his robust stand against Iran had increased the possibility of a major military confrontation in the Gulf.
But this view constitutes, as is so often is the case with Trump administration's many critics, a fundamental misreading of the president's approach, as I discovered during my recent exclusive interview with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in London.
Mr Pompeo told me that that Washington was not pushing for regime change in Tehran, but was instead seeking a revised agreement that satisfied all of Washington's concerns about Iran's conduct, and not just the narrow issue of uranium enrichment.
It would certainly be in Tehran's interests to return to the negotiating table given the profound impact the US sanctions regime is having on Iran's economic fortunes. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was, after all, elected specifically to get the sanctions lifted in order to revive the Iranian economy, which is the main reason he agreed to enter the negotiating process with the US and other world powers.
Now Mr Rouhani finds himself under renewed pressure at home as the latest round of sanctions takes its toll on the Iranian economy. The rial, the national currency, has fallen 60% in value in the past year, inflation is up by 40% and oil exports have been reduced to their lowest level in nearly a decade. Even Mr Rouhani has been forced to concede the enormity of the crisis his country faces, recently comparing Iran's current economic crisis to the hardships the Iranian people endured during the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.
To date, the Iranians have responded to the Trump administration's actions by threatening to intensify their policy of destabilization in the region. Iran is suspected of carrying out the recent attack on four oil tankers in the Gulf, while US National Security Advisor John Bolton says Washington has credible evidence that Iran is planning attacks against US forces and their allies in the region.
Given the overwhelming military firepower Washington has at its disposal, Iran needs to understand that this is a policy that is only going to make Tehran's predicament worse, not better. Therefore, as Mr Trump has indicated, by far the best course of action for the ayatollahs to take is to return to the negotiating table and agree a deal that satisfies all the parties involved.
*Con Coughlin is the Telegraph's Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor and author of "Khomeini's Ghost".
© 2019 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Israeli Army Destroys Syrian Missile Launcher After Missile Fired At Israeli Jet
جيرازولم بوست: الجيش الإسرائيلي يدمر منصة اطلاق صواريخ سورية عقب اطلاقها النار على طائرة حربية تابعة له
Jerusalem Post/May 28/2019
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/75269/%d8%aa%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%b1-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b5%d8%ad%d9%81-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%84%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d8%aa%d8%aa%d9%86%d8%a7%d9%88%d9%84-%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%85/
The missile didn't hit the Israeli aircraft, which was conducting a routine flight over northern Israel, and fell within Syrian territory.
The IAF destroyed a Syrian launcher that fired an anti-aircraft missile at an Israeli plane, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Monday night, stressing that Israel will not tolerate any aggression against it.
“A short time ago, the Syrian army tried to hit an Israeli plane, it did not succeed,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “The air force in response destroyed the launcher from which it [the missile] was fired. Our policy is clear: we will not tolerate any aggression against us, and we will respond to it with force and firmness.”
Netanyahu’s message came just two hours after he spoke to cameras live about the current political crisis stemming from his inability to form a coalition, just 48 hours before the deadline to do so expires.
The IDF spokesman said the Syrian missile did not hit the Israeli aircraft, which was conducting a routine flight over northern Israel, and fell within Syrian territory. The mission was completed as planned, the IDF said.
Arab media, meanwhile, reported on air strikes near Quneitra.
Syria’s SANA reported that “a military source confirmed that at 2110 hours the Israeli enemy targeted one of our military positions east of Khan Arnabeh in rural Quneitra.”The source explained that the aggression resulted in the “martyr’s death and wounding another fighter.”According to Syrian media, the strike took place near Khan Arnabeh, which is very close to the Golan border.
The attempt represents an escalation on the Syrian side. It is not the first time that Syria anti-aircraft missiles have targeted Israel, nor the first time they have been detected heading toward Israeli airspace.
In January, Iron Dome was activated on Mount Hermon to intercept a rocket. In December 2018, a Syrian anti-aircraft missile was fired toward Israel from Syria. In November of 2018, fragments of a Syrian rocket were found in the Golan. An F-16 crashed in the Galilee after being targeted by Syrian air-defense in October 2018. Rockets from Syria fell inside Israeli territory in July 2018.
David’s Sling was used operationally for the first time that month to defend against the rockets. In March 2017, Israel used its Arrow defense system against Syrian air defense. In late March, Syrian media claimed Israel attacked a site near Aleppo and on April 13 and May 18, Syrian state media made similar claims. Israel said last year that it had struck hundreds of targets in Syria, primarily Iranian targets related to weapons shipments. In January, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told The New York Times that Israel had struck thousands of targets in Syria. But for Syria to target a routine patrol inside Israel is unusual. Syria is already embroiled in new air raids in Idlib against Syrian rebels and the US and Iran are involved in major tensions in the region.

Questions Remain After Israel Strikes Syrian Air-Defense System
جيرازولم بوست: أسئلة لم تحصل على أجوبة بعد مهاجمة إسرائيل نظام الدفاع الجوي السوري
Seth J.Frantzman/Jerusalem Post/May 28/2019
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/75269/%d8%aa%d9%82%d8%a7%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%b1-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b5%d8%ad%d9%81-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%84%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d8%aa%d8%aa%d9%86%d8%a7%d9%88%d9%84-%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%85/
Israel said that a Syrian anti-aircraft system fired at an IDF fighter jet on Monday night. Israel responded by targeting the launcher that had shot at the plane. This is the very simple and clear statement that was released. It also said the Israeli jet that had been fired upon was on a routine flight in northern Israel.
Syrian sources have reported that the launcher that was hit, somewhere in the Khan Arnabeh and Quneitra area, was a Syrian ZSU-34-4 Shilka and the soldiers manning it were from the 121st brigade of the Syrian army. The main difference between the various Shilka models is the size of the guns on it, or caliber. For instance the ZSU-23-4 Shilka, which entered service in 1962, had four 23 mm autocannons with radar guidance.
This weapon system has been spotted often in Syria and its cannons have also been seen mounted on other vehicles or even positioned to be used apparently for ground defense. What that means is that this system doesn’t appear to be of the kind that would be used normally to target jet fighter planes, but rather helicopters or slower surveillance aircraft. The system can be updated like what was done with a new system developed by Belarus, mentioned this year in Russia’s TASS, which was armed with short range missiles and a robotized gun to deal with drone threats.
When the Syrian regime forces returned to the Golan border area there were tensions last summer. This was partly because of fears that Iran would use Syria’s return to the area for its own purposes. Israel has said that it struck more than 100 Iranian targets in Syria over the last years. According to Russia’s TASS, when the Syrian forces returned to the area around Quneitra they also recaptured Syrian army equipment from rebel forces. These included “10 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft guns.” That means we know that that Shilka was present in that area.
But questions remain about what happened on Monday night. Why did an antiquated Syrian air defense system fire at an Israeli jet? Why was the system so close to the UN-patrolled zone on the Golan border area?
Khan Arnabeh is directly on Line Bravo where the UN’s UNDOP is supposed to observe the ceasefire line buffer zone. The location of the strike was variously given in Iranian media as Khan Arnabeh or the Quneitra area in other Syrian media. Russia’s Sputnik called it Tel el-Shaar. All of these areas are very close to the sensitive ceasefire line.
Questions remain about why the Syrian air defense would seek to provoke an Israeli response. Over the years Syria has come to know that any rockets or anti-aircraft fire over the border or targeting Israel has resulted in retaliation. This has been the case throughout the fall of 2018 and into the first months of 2019. Syria’s regime is also involved in a massive build-up of forces near its northern Idlib province where it is trying to force Turkish-backed Syrian rebels and other extremists to leave an area that is under Turkey’s control. Why would Damascus create tensions with Jerusalem at this sensitive time?
Another issue involves Iran’s involvement. Iran and the US are in the midst of major tensions. Iran’s Hezbollah ally recently hosted a speech by its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, where he called for support of the Palestinians and opposition to US “plots.”
A third factor is the presence of Russian observers in southern Syria. After the Syrian government retook areas in the south the Russians sent military police and observers to the area as part of efforts to reconcile with the locals. Russia has in the past been closely involved in discussions with Israel about southern Syria. This has resulted in deconfliction agreements and also frequent discussions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That leaves questions also about what the air defense officers near Quneitra were thinking last night when they decided on their rash course of action.

Trump Tweet About Netanyahu's Coalition Negotiations 'Unprecedented,' Former Officials Say
Amir Tibon/Haaretz/May 28/2019
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Giving his statements to the press on Monday evening after the Knesset passed the first vote to dissolve itself, Netanyahu quoted Trump's support for him, saying that the 'two have a lot to do'
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his negotiations to form a governing coalition was described as “unprecedented” by experts and former U.S. officials on Monday.
Trump expressed his support for Netanyahu on Twitter while the prime minister was meeting with former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said his Yisrael Beiteinu party would not join a government led by Netanyahu with the ultra-Orthodox parties, which he called a “halakha government,” referring to Jewish religious law. “Hoping things will work out with Israel’s coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever,” Trump tweeted.
Giving his statement to the press on Monday evening after the Knesset passed the first vote to dissolve itself, Netanyahu quoted U.S. President Donald Trump’s support for him, saying that the two have “a lot to do.”
Shalom Lipner, a former official at the Prime Minister’s Office who served under different prime ministers for two decades, called Trump’s intervention “unseemly.” He also said that while previous U.S. presidents also intervened in Israeli politics, Trump’s aid to Netanyahu “takes it to a whole new level.”
David Makovsky, an expert on Israeli politics and the peace process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, offered a similar conclusion. He called Trump’s tweet “extraordinary” and noted that “even [Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush] Jim Baker, assailed by many Israelis, went mum for three months (!) in 1990” until then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir managed to form a coalition.”
Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, called Trump’s intervention “unprecedented interference in Israel's democracy, plain and simple. The U.S. president should respect Israel’s coalition negotiations, not meddle.”
Earlier Monday, the Israeli Knesset passed a bill to dissolve itself in a preliminary reading. It remains unclear whether the coalition really wants a new election or whether the bill is merely an attempt to pressure its warring members into the compromises needed to form a new government.
If the dispute hasn’t been resolved by then, the bill may well pass the two further required votes on Wednesday, leading Israel to another snap election.
Lieberman and Netanyahu met during the Knesset vote on Monday, but the meeting did not result in any agreements. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to convince Lieberman to avoid another election,” said Netanyahu in a press conference. “The reality is that we must be responsible and form a government immediately.

It is Not Surprising to See an Increase in Jew-hatred in Western Europe
Alan M. Dershowitz/Gatestone Institute/May 28/2019
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14304/jew-hatred-western-europe
"But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians," the European apologists insist, "and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog."
No, you're not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
None of this is to deny Israel's imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.
Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews? Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in western Europe?
To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.
False.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans: by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.
If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.
In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.
"Oh no," we hear from European apologists. "This is different. We don't hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We're left-wing, so we can't be anti-Semites."
Nonsense.
The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire to Karl Marx, to Lavrentiy Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today's hard-left Israel-bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Marr to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.
The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red – victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.
"But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can't be anti-Semites?"
Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.
He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it's "rational" to burn down synagogues.
Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber!
"But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians," the European apologists insist, "and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog."
No, you're not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.
Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?
Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don't remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns – because there weren't any.
When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda machine factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda machine company that employs hundreds of Palestinians.
Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided "aid and material support" to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Center.
The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of western Europe's treatment of the Jews.
Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine. And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.
The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.
Theodor Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe's Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew-hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel.
None of this is to deny Israel's imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.
Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their forbearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.
As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents' Europe were covered with graffiti saying, "Jews, go to Palestine." Now they say, "Jews, get out of Palestine " – by which is meant Israel.
Who do these western European bigots think they're fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents' old biases.
Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. They must be shamed into looking themselves in the mirror of morality and acknowledging their own bigotry.
*Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of The Case Against the Democrats Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2018. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
*This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post on July 21, 2014 and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
Follow Alan M. Dershowitz on Twitter and Facebook
© 2019 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Netanyahu bucks his foes’ bid to rout him for failing to form a governing coalition
Debka File/May 28/2019
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, even after failing to form a government, may opt for a new election rather than let his enemies win. That way, the decision reverts to the voting public rather than the politicians.
Netanyahu has had an amazing run, leading four governments at the head of a successful Likud. This time, he is making a dangerous personal gamble. He may calculate that even if some voters make him pay for failing, the outcome is unlikely to be radically different from the April 9 results. The right-wing bloc which he leads may even gain by sweeping up the 300,000 votes that were lost in April when New Right and rightist splinter groups failed to make it past the threshold.
The question is who will benefit? Netanyahu is beset with legions of rivals and foes, some on home ground in Likud. He faces another harsh test of endurance in which they will go all-out to prove that his failure to form a government shows he has lost his celebrated political touch and it’s time for him to go.
Avigdor Lieberman, who parlayed his five-member Yisrael Beitenu into a club for denying Netanyahu’s 35-strong Likud a majority government, will most likely survive. The only substantial change to be expected is the decline of Blue-White, the opposition grouping born shortly before the April election and which came close to beating Likud.
The next time round, Blue-White will have lost its luster as a new alternative for displacing long-running politicians. It is moreover top-heavy with four leaders – Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid, Gaby Ashkenazi and Moshe Ya’alon – whose entire repertoire consists of one song. Binyamin Netanyahu must go! Even Madonna’s audience demands more variety.
This quartet have tried signaling the Likud party: Get rid of your leader and we can get together for a unity government. Rightist or leftist politics or any other ideology don’t seem to matter, just the removal of the major impediment to their goal.
That is just one of this opposition party’s mistakes. Their cherished slogan may work for the individuals, groups and media dedicated to toppling Netanyahu, but have the reverse effect on the street where the voting public is to be found. There, the long-running hate campaign against Netanyahu only boosts his credibility as a nationalist, populist, charismatic leader. This matches the current trend sweeping many other leaders to power in the West – not only in the US, but in India, Brazil, Germany, France, Hungary, Italy and other countries.
On Saturday night, Blue-White staged an anti-Netanyahu protest rally in Tel Aviv. At the last minute, Gantz invited MK Ayman Odeh, head of the Israeli Arab party list, to join the speakers. He committed the political blunder of giving an Arab nationalist ideologue equal footing with Israeli nationalism, in the hope of a drawing a mass audience. This blunder will haunt him in the forthcoming election campaign for winning the votes of the Jewish majority. So will another: Blue-White orators have joined the prosecution’s campaign, backed by former judges and legal buffs, to force the attorney general to indict him on charges of corruption. Yair Lapid vociferously accuses him of attempting to engineer parliamentary immunity to evade a trial. These opponents present themselves as the guardians of Israeli democracy.
The prime minister claims he and his close family are victims of a political witch hunt. The general public is not entirely convinced of his guilt, especially when he is loudly condemned by “left-wing” politicians and media. Enough voters may be willing to give Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt, so long as he is not proven guilty in a court of law. By the same token, many will turn their backs on his accusers.
On Monday night, Netanyahu was still fighting to save his coalition negotiations. In an emotional TV speech, he appealed to Yisrael Beitenu’s Avigdor Lieberman to give up the “semantic” objections barring the road to the right-wing government which the people voted for on April 9. The dispute preventing negotiations leading to the new government could be resolved in two minutes, he said. Netanyahu stressed that 48 hours remain for his mandate to lead a new government before it expires on Wednesday and “much could be done in that time.”
The prime minister went on the air after a 22-minute meeting with Lieberman failed toto break through the latter’s refusal to make concessions on the draft law obligating the drafting of yeshiva students to the military according to agreed quotas. The ultra-Orthodox parties, which have fought against the measure, gave way on certain points to smooth the negotiations for a right-wing national government. Lieberman’s five-member faction holds the key to a Knesset majority of 65 versus the opposition’s 55 members.
In his speech, Netanyahu said: “A month-and-a half ago, the people spoke and ordered us to set up a right-wing government led by myself. I have made tremendous efforts to obey the people’s will by setting up this government and averting another superfluous election.” He went on to say: “There is no reason in the world to put the country on hold for another year and-a-half and squander billions. Unfortunately, up until now I have not been able to persuade Lieberman to prevent this vote taking place.
Earlier on Monday, a 65-majority of the Knesset, less than six weeks in office, gave the bill for dissolving itself preliminary and first readings. There were abstentions. If Netanyahu fails to form a government by the Wednesday deadline, he intends to let the measure go through to second and third readings, clearing the way for new elections at the end of summer. The alternative dates cited are Aug 27 or September 3. .

Iraq caught between a rock and a hard place
Osama Al-Sharif/Arab News/May 28/2019
Iraq is trying to fend off the specter of being dragged into a war between the US and Iran as tensions between the two countries continue to spike. Following days of verbal and military escalation, both Washington and Tehran are trying to retrace their steps. In Tokyo, where the US president is on a state visit, Donald Trump said on Monday that he was not seeking regime change in Iran and that he believed the Iranians would eventually seek dialogue. Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif was in Baghdad, where, while still in a defiant mood, he said his country was not seeking war and that he had put forward a proposal to sign a non-aggression agreement with his country’s Gulf neighbors.
His deputy, Abbas Araghchi, was touring Kuwait, Oman and Qatar hoping to solicit support ahead of this week’s crucial Islamic summit in Makkah. Riyadh has called for emergency Arab and Gulf Cooperation Council summits, along with an Islamic meeting, to discuss the recent attacks against oil tankers in Fujairah and oil pumping stations in Saudi Arabia. The US army has pointed the finger at Iran and its proxies.
It is against such a backdrop that Baghdad finds itself embroiled in a crisis that could easily turn into a full-fledged war. The recent US military buildup was triggered by the disclosure of intelligence reports suggesting that American troops in Iraq could be targeted by pro-Iranian militias. The US imposed additional sanctions on Tehran earlier this month and cancelled waivers for Iranian oil purchases. The new sanctions came one year after Trump withdrew the US from the international nuclear deal with Iran.
Iraq finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it depends on US military and economic support, while on the other its political system has been manipulated by Tehran for years. Pro-Iranian political parties have isolated Iraq from its Arab surroundings and deepened the sectarian divide that has disenfranchised its Sunni minority. Moreover, the central government has been unable to incorporate the mainly Shiite Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) into the regular army. The PMU’s leaders do not hide their allegiance to Iran and are answerable to the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The recent crisis has underlined the growing disenchantment of ordinary Iraqis with Iranian meddling in their country’s affairs.
And, while the powerful movement led by Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr has called on the Iraqi government to distance itself from a possible US-Iran showdown, the government, headed by Adel Abdul-Mahdi, appears divided. On Sunday, at a joint press conference with Zarif, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali Al-Hakim was clear that his country is siding with Iran “against US unilateral actions,” but added that Baghdad was ready to mediate between Tehran and Washington.
So far, Iran has denied that it was seeking mediation with the US. But its latest diplomatic activity points to a growing concern that punishing economic sanctions and the US military build-up in the Gulf are deepening schisms between moderates and hardliners. Thus the contradictory statements coming out of Tehran: Threats made by the IRGC and conciliatory tones coming from President Hassan Rouhani and his close aides.
The recent crisis has underlined the growing disenchantment of ordinary Iraqis with Iranian meddling in their country’s affairs. The US, which has not commented on Iraq’s offer to mediate, may decide to use this to put additional pressure on the Baghdad government. A main demand will be to deal with the threat of the PMU and find ways to terminate its ties to Tehran. It is unlikely that Abdul-Mahdi can summon the will to do that.
For Tehran, access to Iraq is vital both economically and politically. Iran is seeking to export its oil through Iraq while maintaining its influence over its ailing political system. And, if a military confrontation does break out between Iran and the US, the Iranians hope to use the PMU as a proxy to hit American bases in Iraq.
Both the US and Iran hold strong cards in Iraq and, while the Baghdad government is seeking ways to avoid getting embroiled in the current crisis, internal divisions are likely to spill over if a military confrontation breaks out. Coming out of years of sectarian and ethnic conflicts and a bloody war against Daesh, the country can ill afford to be dragged into a new conflagration.
All the Iraqis can do in reality is to wait for the latest flurry of diplomatic activity to bear fruit ahead of the Makkah summits. But Iraq can also present itself as a possible conduit, one of many, to deliver messages between the US and Iran. But, for that to happen, Tehran must abandon its regional agenda and realize that it cannot ignore the possibility of talking to the Trump administration — as much as that is anathema to the Iranian leaders.
Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman. Twitter: @plato010

Iran’s insincere call for non-aggression treaty
Hamdan Al-Shehri/Arab News/May 28/2019
As usual, Iran is full of hostile actions on the one hand and empty calls for dialogue and agreement on the other. A few days ago, Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif called for a non-aggression treaty between Iran and the Gulf states. This is strange and unprecedented, but observers should not miss the timing of the suggestion nor its objectives — even though it is unsure whether we believe in the sincerity of the call.
First, if we accepted this invitation to discuss and think about a non-aggression treaty, we would see the meaning of it would be to spare the signatory countries any future attacks and to also remove any threats of aggression. For decades, the region has suffered from Iranian meddling, and it is now suffering from the destabilization of its security due to Iranian practices. These include interference by Tehran in the policies of the Gulf states and other Arab countries either directly or indirectly. All the armed struggles in our countries today have Iran behind them, due to its support for the terrorist militias that are engaged in the spread of sectarianism in the region. Tehran has direct responsibility for these actions.
Would a non-aggression treaty be useful in this context and would it be a solution to such problems, which are decades old? Of course not. The foreign minister has certain goals and objectives and we should mention three of them here.
The first is to ease the current tensions and lighten the pressure on Iran by sending messages of reassurance to the countries in the region. This is being done even though there are none in the region or outside it who believe the invitation to be sincere. Because of this disbelief, Iran will continue to make such claims and will not stop repeating them.
We have seen Iran play the role of victim and also aggressor in order to foster the spread of terrorism and the spirit of sectarianism.
The second goal relates to the summit called by Saudi Arabia in Makkah to discuss Iranian threats and attacks. These have taken place and threatened the sanctity of Islam, even in the month of Ramadan. Iran wanted to send messages that would divide some pro-Iranian countries, such as Iraq, Qatar and others, so that they defend Tehran and emphasize that it is opening its arms to peaceful and reassuring solutions, and is willing to go so far as to sign a non-aggression treaty.
The third goal Iran wants to achieve with such a treaty is to establish that any move against it and its militias could be classed as aggression. Tehran wants to re-establish the status quo and impose its militias and agendas on the region, with any resistance to them or any repelling of their terrorism to be called aggression, according to the terms of the treaty.
Tehran plays multiple roles. We have seen it play the role of victim and also aggressor in order to foster the spread of terrorism and the spirit of sectarianism, along with empty promises of death to America and Israel.
*Dr. Hamdan Al-Shehri is a political analyst and international relations scholar. Twitter: @DrHamsheri

Why Bolton’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine is misguided
Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/May 28/2019
You’ve got to envy John Bolton, US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, at least a bit and at least on some occasions. Where others see complexity, he (over) simplifies. When most people in such an influential position as his struggle with the myriad shades of world politics, he reduces everything to black and white. When most professionals who deal with the world of diplomacy understand the value of subtlety, he is the equivalent of a bull in a china shop.
While taking such an approach might make his job somewhat easier for himself, it is menacing to the interests of his own country and the rest of the world, especially as he has the ear of the person who is the commander in chief of the world’s strongest military force. This inevitably raises the question: How dangerous is it, in an already volatile world, for a trigger-happy, single-minded hawk to be serving at the heart of the US administration?
A case in point is Bolton’s view of Latin America, as he outlined in his remarks to veterans of Brigade 2506, which fought in one of the most futile and failed attempts at regime change, the one in Cuba in April 1961. Bolton couldn’t find a more receptive audience than the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association for his criticisms of anything that recalls or resembles socialism. However, while either completely distorting history or demonstrating his utter ignorance of it, he articulated a policy that is nothing short of declaring war on Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, announcing that: “The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”
It has become customary in US foreign policy to pronounce this seminal 1823 stance toward Latin America as dead and buried, only for another administration to resuscitate it, and vice versa. In November 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry declared: “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” Hence, its latest resurrection by Bolton might be partly to do with the current administration’s obsession with banishing every policy associated with the Obama White House.
But all those who want to either vanquish or revive Monroe need their memory jogged, since the essence of that doctrine was to keep colonial powers out of the Western Hemisphere. It states: “The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” It was not about allowing another power to take over the role of colonizer.
In those days, the US was a young and vulnerable nation in the vanguard against European imperialism and monarchism. Fast forward two centuries and the US is a superpower, more associated in the minds of Latin American people with how the European colonialists were perceived back then. Not for nothing have the terms “Yankee imperialism” or “anti-yanquismo” become closely associated with resistance to US intervention in Latin American countries’ domestic affairs when those countries’ policies don’t align with US interests.
The more blunt Bolton is in attacking what he calls the “Troika of Tyranny” — Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — and encouraging their people to get rid of their leaders, the more he demonstrates his own and the US’ hypocrisy. He has no reservations about dealing with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or Xi Jinping’s China, who are not renowned for being shining lights of democracy or defending human rights, and never calls on their citizens to topple them. It is also the lumping together of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as bastions of socialism that demonstrates Bolton’s oversimplification of three very different cases. It might be convenient to do so when one speaks in Miami to Cuban expats who passionately hate the current government in Havana and everything and anything that smacks of socialism, but it is dangerous to generalize about several very different situations that require different approaches.
Moreover, the lessons he is drawing from the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was one of the most embarrassing fiascos in US Cold War history, are completely distorted. To refresh Bolton’s memory: Back in 1961, Fidel Castro enjoyed wide popular support and, at the time of the invasion, Castro and the Cuban Revolution were only toying with socialism; it was more about social justice than communism. But US policies toward the island — first under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and later under John F. Kennedy, including the misconceived Bay of Pigs operation, when a counter-revolutionary invasion comprised mainly of Cuban exiles was roundly defeated by Castro’s forces — pushed Castro and Cuba toward communism and into the arms of the Soviet Union.
The lumping together of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as bastions of socialism demonstrates Bolton’s oversimplification.
There is no denying that large parts of Latin America are in need of reform, and one can only hope that, in Venezuela, the days of Nicolas Maduro in power are numbered — not because he is a socialist, but because of his incompetence and corruption.
Cuba might need to accelerate the pace of change, but it has recently ratified a new constitution that cautiously takes the country in a promising direction and is quite a big leap forward. This includes restricting the president to no more than two consecutive five-year terms and introducing the post of prime minister to run the day-to-day operations of government. In addition, private property is now allowed within the communist system and foreign investment is permitted, in recognition that free market activities are part of the new reality in Cuba.
Despite the economic hardships, universal education and health care remain absolutely free. It is worth reminding Bolton that the maiden debt of a medical graduate in the US is $200,000, while in Cuba, which produces many thousands of doctors, including from the developing world, graduates are completely free of debt, serving their communities and many more around the world. Moreover, according to the World Bank, life expectancy in Cuba is higher than in the US, though income per capita is just a fraction of that of its northerly neighbor.
Instead of invoking the Monroe Doctrine, the US should rethink its Latin American policies. Instead of treating the region as its playground and as subservient to US economic and political interests, it should be investing in the people there, improving their living conditions and prospects. Had President James Monroe been alive today, he would probably have told Washington to stay away from the affairs of its southern neighbors, or at least to approach them through diplomacy, negotiations and mutual respect. Unfortunately, such terms are completely alien to the vocabulary and thinking of Bolton.
*Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations at Regent’s University London, where he is head of the International Relations and Social Sciences Program. Twitter: @YMekelberg

Lawmakers show there is US appetite for confrontation
Abdulrahman Al-Rashed/Arab News/May 28/2019
Some believe that the Americans no longer have an appetite for confrontation; but this is not what we feel in Washington, whether in the legislative and executive branches, or in civil and military institutions.
Uncharacteristically, it is the Congress that is asking for more, as 400 members signed a bipartisan letter last week urging President Donald Trump to increase US engagement in the Syrian crisis. The lawmakers’ message to the president reflects their concern about the war there, despite eight years of conflict, and the failure of attempts to change the regime in Damascus.
The signatories say that the conflict in Syria is complex, potential solutions are not perfect, and there is no choice but to develop policies that would stop the growing threats to US interests, which is a strategy that requires US leadership.
Syria, which neither boasts abundant oil nor possesses strategic weapons, is today the scene of multiple conflicts, both regional and international. The goals of Washington, as identified by the lawmakers, are: Eliminating terrorist organizations, stopping Iran’s penetration of Syria and its destabilizing activities in the region, enhancing Israel’s superiority, protecting US allies, and weakening the Russian military role there.
In their letter, the lawmakers call on the US to play a key role in the Syrian conflict, which goes against the former desire of the president to withdraw troops and reduce the US role. The letter says: “Dear Mr. President: At a time of grave insecurity in the Middle East, we are deeply concerned about the role that terrorist and extremist groups as well as US adversaries continue to play, particularly, in Syria.
As some of our closest allies in the region are being threatened, American leadership and support are as crucial as ever”. It adds “Pockets of ungoverned space have allowed terrorist groups, such as (Daesh), Al-Qaeda, and their affiliates, to keep parts of Syria in their stranglehold. These groups’ ability to recruit, propagandize, and grow is alarming. Though their main purpose now may be to fight inside Syria, they retain the ability and will to plan and implement attacks against Western targets, our allies and partners, and the US homeland. The United States has an interest in preventing these terrorist organizations from solidifying their foothold in the Middle East.” Bipartisan letter signed by 400 members of Congress shows that many US lawmakers support confrontation, which gives Trump a significant margin to move in the region. The letter goes on, stressing that: “The region has also been destabilized by the Iranian regime’s threatening behavior. In Syria, Iran is working to establish a permanent military presence that can threaten our allies.”
Furthermore, the lawmakers who signed the letter believe that Russia is working to secure a permanent presence in Syria, outside its existing naval facility in Tartus, and that it has changed the perimeters of the civil war to ensure the survival of the Assad regime. The signatories doubt Russia’s intentions, and accuse it of complementing Iran’s role.
In addition to Hezbollah’s role in the massacres committed in Syria, the US lawmakers see that the group “now poses a more potent threat to Israel as well.” They believe that Hezbollah is playing the role of an advanced military battalion serving the interests of the Iranians by putting pressure on Israel and obtaining the concessions demanded by Tehran.
The demands of the lawmakers seem more belligerent than those of the White House and the State Department. This is reflected in their letter, in which they called on Trump to implement a strategy that includes the following elements:
• Increase the pressure on Iran and Russia in Syria in order to restrict their destabilizing activities.
• Emphasize the old US policy of supporting Israel’s capability and qualitative military superiority in the context of the current 10-year Memorandum of Understanding.
• Continue economic and diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from supporting Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, as well as standing up to Russia’s support for Bashar Assad’s brutal regime. They also “encourage full implementation of sanctions authorized in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.”
• Increase the pressure on Hezbollah by forcefully and fully implementing the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act of 2015, the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Amendments Act of 2018, and other sanctions aimed at Hezbollah and those who fund it. In addition, they called on the president to continue to press the UN Interim Force in Lebanon to carry out its UN Security Council mandate, including investigating and reporting the presence of arms and tunnels on Israel’s border.
The importance of this letter lies in its timing. It also shows that a large group of politicians and lawmakers support confrontation and are willing to give Trump a significant margin of movement in the region; unlike what some Arab political analysts believe, which is that Washington desires to withdraw.
It is true that the letter from the Congress members does not call for confronting Iran militarily in the current crisis, but it clearly urges more work in Syria, the arena of the current confrontation between the two sides.
*Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al Arabiya news channel, and former editor in chief of Asharq Al-Awsat.Twitter: @aalrashed

Erdogan’s Failure on the Nile
سونر كاجابتاي/مجلة القاهرة للشؤون العالمية/معهد واشنطن: فشل أردوغان في (مصر) النيل
Soner Cagaptay/Cairo Review of Global Affairs/Washington Insitute/Spring 2019
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/75277/%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%86%D8%B1-%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%AC%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%8A-%D9%85%D8%AC%D9%84%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D9%84%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%A4%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9/
How Turkey’s president went from being a regional Islamist leader in the Arab Spring to sharing Qatar’s role as the Middle East’s odd man out.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is one of the most consequential leaders in the history of the Turkish republic. Over the past two decades, he has gradually parted ways with Kamal Ataturk’s West-centric and inward-looking foreign policy model, instead embracing an activist and neo-imperialist foreign policy. He has accordingly pivoted Turkey to the Middle East to build influence over the politics of the region. Often dubbed “neo-Ottomanist,” Erdogan’s foreign policy toward the region is informed by his belief that Turkey can rise as a great power if it becomes the leader in the Middle East first.
At home, Erdogan has consolidated power while defanging the secularist Turkish military and, through that, undermining Ataturk’s secularist legacy in the country. In a set of trials between 2008 and 2011, collectively dubbed Ergenekon, Erdogan locked up nearly a quarter of Turkey’s generals with the help of prosecutors and police aligned with the movement of political Islamist Fethullah Gulen, his ally at the time. In the summer of 2011, the Turkish military’s top brass resigned en masse, recognizing that Erdogan (and Gulen) had won. Around that time in 2010, Erdogan passed a referendum with help from his allies in the Gulen movement, which gave him the prerogative to appoint a majority of judges to the country’s high courts without a confirmation process.
Although a raw power struggle between Erdogan and Gulen would unfold later—culminating in the Gulenist-led July 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan—in the early 2010s, Erdogan increasingly grew confident in his power at home. During the coinciding Arab uprisings, he looked to the Middle East to project Ankara’s influence in the region.
At the onset of the Arab uprisings, Ankara’s fortunes indeed seemed to be rising across the Arab-majority world. After the fall of the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt, Erdogan (then the country’s prime minister) quickly moved in to build influence in Cairo, followed by other regional capitals. At this time, he placed all of his bets on Mohammed Morsi, a fellow political Islamist linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and a candidate for president in Egypt. Erdogan subsequently won great influence in Cairo after Morsi came to power in Egypt in June 2012. However, following the ouster of Morsi by General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in the summer of 2013, Erdogan completely lost his Egyptian gains—almost overnight.
Oddly, the events of the Arab Spring, specifically Morsi’s ouster through a popular protest movement backed by the military, strongly resonated in Turkish domestic politics by shaping Erdogan’s thinking toward his opposition. In May 2013, a popular uprising in Istanbul against the destruction of a historic park by Erdogan’s government, dubbed the Gezi Park movement, rapidly became a source of mass mobilization against the Turkish leader. Erdogan still feared that he too could be ousted by a military-led coup, even though he had neutered Turkey’s Armed Forces. This is because Erdogan lives with a constant fear that the once-mighty Turkish military could return to politics. His worst nightmare appeared to be coming true—as he saw it—in the summer of 2013, just as Morsi was losing power through the machinations of a popular unrest movement backed by the Egyptian military. Erdogan feared that what happened to Morsi was about to happen to him, and therefore violently cracked down on pro-Gezi Park rallies.
The violence of that crackdown has poisoned Turkish politics, creating a rift between two halves of the country: the first, which adores the Turkish leader and thinks he can do no wrong, and the second, which loathes him and thinks he can do no right. The ensuing crisis has resulted in deep domestic tensions, consuming Turkey’s energy and undermining Ankara’s ability to fully project its political power in the Middle East.
Thus in 2013, Turkey pivoted from being a prospective leading country of the region to being embroiled in its own domestic troubles. At the same time, the demise of Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood-related leaders and movements in the Middle East backed by Erdogan has left Ankara with nearly no allies or friends in the region. Essentially, Erdogan’s grand “neo-Ottoman” aspirations to shape the Middle East from Istanbul—where he often works in offices carved out of Ottoman-era palaces—have come to a halt.
Today, Ankara is nearly isolated in the Middle East. With the exception of Qatar, Turkey has no friends or allies in the region. How exactly did Ankara end up so alone? What went wrong, and what accounts for Erdogan’s “Arab fall”?
TRANSCENDING RACIST TURKISH VIEWS TOWARD ARABS
A little-known fact about Turkey: there is a high prevalence of racist views held toward Arabs ingrained in the country’s popular culture. Unknowingly, many people outside of the Middle East often associate Turks with Arabs due to Islam, a religion shared by a majority of Arabs and an overwhelming majority of Turks. Their common faith notwithstanding, many of Turkey’s citizens harbor racist sentiments toward Arabs, and few would wish to be associated with Arab cultures.
Some of these opinions are embedded in recent Turkish history. In this regard, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire sheds light on the relationship between Turkey’s citizens and their neighbors—in this case, the Arabs. As the empire withered away in the early twentieth century, a wave of Arab nationalism spread through its Middle Eastern provinces, especially in Syria. During this period, the Young Turks running the empire increasingly espoused Turkish nationalism. Specifically, Cemal Pasha—one of the three Young Turk leaders who was appointed governor of Syria in 1915—spearheaded a wave of persecution of Arab nationalist leaders in 1916. He ordered the execution of these leaders, including seven in Damascus and others in Beirut. To this day, a major square in the Lebanese capital is named “Martyrs Square,” honoring Arab nationalists sent to the gallows by him. The Young Turk leader is notoriously remembered as “Jamal Basha Al-Saffah” in Arabic, or “Cemal Pasha the Bloodthirsty.”
During World War I—anticipating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and making plans to reconfigure the Middle East in order to maintain control over the strategic seaways to India—Great Britain courted Arab leaders in the region in its quest to gain influence. Enter British policymakers and spies, including Lawrence of Arabia, who ingratiated himself with Arab leaders, most notably the Hashemite family in Mecca.
Convinced the British would present them with their own independent state, the Hashemites and their local followers rose against the Ottomans in a 1916 rebellion stretching from Syria to Yemen (to which Cemal Pasha and his companions responded with vengeance). Despite the persecution of Arab nationalist leaders under Ottoman rule, this legacy of “betrayal” by Arabs against the administration in Ottoman Istanbul during World War I has left a bitter taste in Turkish mouths. To this day, the best-known cultural icon by Turkey’s citizens that commemorates World War I battles is the “Yemen Turkusu” (Ballad of Yemen), a gloomy recounting of the story of an Anatolian soldier who perished in Yemen—fighting Arabs. Generations of Turks, including Erdogan, were taught in Turkish schools during the twentieth century that the “Arabs stabbed the Turks in the back,” and at least some have internalized strongly anti-Arab nationalist tendencies.
The Ottoman Empire for centuries faced Europe, treating its Middle Eastern possessions mostly as an afterthought. An overwhelming majority of the nearly 300 grand viziers (a political rank at the level of prime minister) who served under the sultans in Istanbul hailed from the Balkans and the Caucasus. Many of them were ethnic Albanians, Armenians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, and Serbs. There was even the unlikely sprinkling of Italians and Western Europeans among the list of grand viziers. Yet, excluding those whose ethnic origins still cannot be traced, the first Arab to hold the office, Mahmut Shevket Pasha, assumed power only in January 1913, barely five years before the collapse of the six-century-old empire.
The Turkish language bears linguistic signs of a longer history of Arab disenfranchisement in the Ottoman Empire as well as uneasy Turkish-Arab coexistence beyond the events of World War I. Anti-Arab expressions, many of them widely circulated in contemporary Turkish popular culture, literature, movies, and slang include: “like Arab’s hair” (a mess from which there is no exit); “neither Damascene candy, nor the Arab’s face” (a situation when one has two bad options to choose from); and others that are even less flattering. Erdogan and his foreign affairs minister Ahmet Davutoglu, at the onset of the Arab uprisings, deserve credit for taking an emphatic and passionate interest in the Arab nations and, more importantly, transcending Turkish racist views toward Arabs. Overcoming this mentality was critical to Erdogan’s foreign policy ambitions, and also self-serving. Erdogan believes that Turkey can emerge once again as a great power by leading Muslim countries, starting with the Arab-majority states of the Middle East. By and through Muslims, Turkey can become a great power if Turks are given a superior role in this constellation. At the beginning of the Arab uprisings, which promised to bring Muslim Brotherhood-related parties backed by Ankara to power in various Arab capitals, Erdogan believed this goal was within his reach.
In the wake of the 2011 revolt that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade-long regime in Egypt, Erdogan became one of the first foreign leaders to visit Cairo in support of the uprising. This was part of a larger North African tour for the Turkish leader, who simultaneously visited Tunisia and Libya, both of which were similarly shaken by the Arab uprisings. Erdogan landed in Cairo in September 2011. Egyptian crowds greeted him as a hero. Large billboards featuring his face lined the expanse of highway from the Cairo airport to the downtown area. He presented Turkey as a model of modern Islamic democracy and secularism. Although Erdogan’s support for secularism surprised his Egyptian hosts, it was actually an insightful and wise warning—which they ignored—to maintain sufficient public support to deter a military takeover.
Egyptian newspapers suggested that a new alignment with Turkey would put pressure on Israel, and Erdogan publicized the fact that he was considering a visit to Gaza to signal Turkish support for Hamas and the broader Gaza population. In the end, the Gaza visit did not take place, reportedly due to opposition from Egypt’s then-ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Following the Cairo visit, Davutoglu called for a Turkish-Egyptian alliance, or “the axis of democracy.” Indeed, close bilateral ties were established with the election victories of the Muslim Brotherhood (known as Ikhwanul Muslimin, or simply “Ikhwan” in Arabic) and its candidate Mohamed Morsi in Egypt in June 2012.
Erdogan visited Cairo a second time in November 2012, this time with a large delegation from his government and the private sector. He delivered a speech at Cairo University praising Morsi for the decision to withdraw Egypt’s ambassador to Israel in response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. Erdogan further suggested that an “Egyptian-Turkish alliance” would ensure peace and stability in the Eastern Mediterranean, implying that such an alliance would constrain Israel’s ability to use force. Erdogan praised Egyptian youth activists for bringing down Mubarak’s “dictatorship” and proclaimed, “Egypt and Turkey are one hand,” a play on the Egyptian military’s slogan “the army and the people are one hand.”
Yet, Erdogan’s ambitions for a strategic partnership with Egypt ran aground as Morsi’s handle on rule began to slip. Soon after taking office, the latter set in motion a hasty power grab, granting himself judicial control above any Egyptian court and ramming through a new constitution drafted largely by political Islamists, excluding other groups in Egypt. The speed with which Morsi was able to establish himself as the sole ruler of Egypt in less than a year made Erdogan’s own gradual accumulation of power in Turkey since 2003 appear mild by comparison.
Anti-Morsi and anti-Ikhwan demonstrations in Cairo began in November of 2012 and grew increasingly violent, while attempts at a dialogue between Morsi and the various opposition parties collapsed. By the spring of 2013, the anti-Morsi Tamarod movement had begun organizing mass protests scheduled for June 30, the one-year anniversary of Morsi’s rule. As reports circulated that Morsi had tried to remove General El-Sisi from his position as defense minister, Egypt’s military leadership issued warnings that the army might have to intervene to “prevent Egypt from entering a dark tunnel.”
Erdogan’s appeal to the Egyptians searching for a new political approach remained strong through this period, mainly because of Turkey’s economic success up to 2013. Unlike Erdogan, who boasted about Turkey’s then-booming economy, Morsi faced a deepening economic crisis. Morsi’s 2012 visit to Ankara was significant because it resulted in a $1 billion loan deal from Erdogan, but this was not enough to improve the Egyptian economy. Western and Turkish efforts to help Morsi reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to bolster the Egyptian economy also collapsed, and Morsi withdrew support for reforms only hours after his office announced them. Ankara offered Egypt concessionary trade deals and promoted Turkish private investment, but Morsi’s administration appeared increasingly paralyzed.
As the June 30 protests drew closer, Erdogan sent Turkey’s national intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, to visit the Egyptian leader. Subsequent reports in both the Egyptian and Turkish media suggested that Fidan’s mission was to warn Morsi of an impending coup and perhaps even discuss how to avoid it. Whatever the real substance of the visit, the Egyptian military and its civilian allies perceived the visit as final proof of Erdogan’s alignment with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. As scheduled, millions of Egyptians took to the streets on June 30, this time to protest the brotherhood’s power grab and its failure to tackle ongoing economic and security problems. Brotherhood politicians labeled the protests “a coup attempt” designed to oust their democratically elected leader from the beginning, echoing rhetoric used by Erdogan, who at the time faced the Gezi Park rallies in Istanbul which had begun only weeks before the protests against Morsi.
Yet, when General El-Sisi announced on July 3, 2013 that the army had removed Morsi from power to save Egypt from the specter of civil war, he received support from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, which oppose the Ikhwan in Egypt and regionally. Erdogan’s carefully cultivated relationship with the new Egyptian leadership was over. He referred to El-Sisi as “a tyrant” and accused the interim Egyptian government of practicing “state terrorism.” Erdogan also started to allow pro-Ikhwan and anti-Sisi Egyptian media networks to operate freely from within Turkey.
El-Sisi struck back. Egyptian media accused Ankara of “supporting the terrorist campaign” against the Egyptian security services in the Sinai Peninsula following Morsi’s removal from power. Huseyin Avni Botsali, a seasoned diplomat and Turkey’s ambassador to Cairo, went from being embraced across the spectrum of Egyptian politics to facing anti-Turkish demonstrations at the gates of his residence. Ankara and Cairo canceled plans confirmed during Morsi’s tenure to hold joint naval maneuvers in the Eastern Mediterranean. Finally, in November 2013, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry expelled Botsali, severing ties with Ankara.
Erdogan’s support for Morsi and the Brotherhood in Egypt after their ouster went on to cost Turkey dearly. To retaliate, Cairo started talks with Athens to delineate Egyptian and Greek maritime economic areas in the Mediterranean. In November 2014, El-Sisi held a three-way summit with the Cypriot president and Greek prime minister to promote a deal supplying natural gas from undersea fields off the coast of Cyprus to Egypt. In doing this, he was almost certainly seeking to challenge Erdogan’s power in the Eastern Mediterranean. El-Sisi’s government drove out Turkish businesses, which were a source of Ankara’s ascendancy in the Middle East. Turkish businesses that remained in Egypt have suffered since, undermining Ankara’s cherished soft-power goals.
The continued tension up to the present day in the Turkish-Egyptian relationship is shaped by Erdogan and El-Sisi’s perceptions of each other. Erdogan is the political Islamist leader who has imprisoned secular generals, while El-Sisi is the secular general who has locked up political Islamists. As long as these two men are in charge of their respective countries, it is hard to imagine Ankara and Cairo establishing (much less maintaining) truly friendly relations.
ERDOGAN’S PRIMAL FEAR
The roots of Ankara’s reaction to Morsi’s ouster, and ultimate break with Cairo, lie as much in Erdogan’s past—namely his traumatic and conflict-ridden relationship with Turkey’s own secularist military—as they do in the events of 2013. A looming fear of “the coup” resides in Erdogan and his Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or Justice and Development Party (AKP), members, even though he brought the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) under his authority in the last decade with the help of the Gulenist police and judicial apparatus via the aforementioned Ergenekon trials (2008 to 2011).
These fears can be traced to the “soft coup” of February 1997, in which the TAF orchestrated a civilian protest movement to oust the AKP’s democratically elected political Islamist predecessor, the Welfare Party (RP) and the RP’s leader Necmettin Erbakan (1926-2011). Erbakan was Turkey’s leading political Islamist politician. Erdogan at one time held Erbakan in such high regard that he named one of his sons after him in 1981.
After the Turkish courts shut down the RP in 1998, they sentenced Erdogan—a member, and then-mayor of Istanbul—to a ten-month jail-term (of which he served four months) for reciting a poem that allegedly undermined Turkey’s secular constitution. The outside world stood with the Turkish military’s coup, yet many Turks championed Erdogan as a heroic prisoner as well as the ideological and political successor of Erbakan, in chains.
Of course, by the events of summer 2013, political Islam in Turkey and Erdogan himself had come a long way from the 1997-1998 “soft coup” and a prison sentence. After the RP was forcibly shut down, Erdogan and some younger leaders broke away from Erbakan and his anti-democratic rhetoric, officially founding the AKP in 2001. The new AKP stormed into power in the November 2002 Turkish general election.
When the AKP came to power, Erdogan and the party leadership made an alliance with the Gulen movement, a Turkish political Islamist congregation adhering to the teachings of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. The Gulen movement had thousands of members across Turkey and abroad working in education, the police, media, and the judiciary, as well as private business. The Gulenist-AKP alliance proved to be fruitful indeed for both sides as the Erdogan administration went on to deliver a decade of phenomenal economic growth. In the 2011 parliamentary elections, 49.9 percent of the electorate supported Erdogan and his party, up from 34 percent nine years earlier.
Subsequently, by 2013 Erdogan had become Turkey’s most powerful leader in nearly a century. However, although he was entrenched in power, Erdogan continued to fear a potential coup. In this regard, the events of 2013 in Turkey and Egypt represent a turning point in Erdogan’s career.
THE TURNING POINT: GEZI PARK AND BEYOND
Initially, downtown Istanbul’s Gezi protests happened for no discernible reason, according to Erdogan and his government ministers. The protesters—at first—were small groups of anti-capitalists and environmentalists with little influence in Turkey, much less in Istanbul. However, on May 30, 2013, a brutal police crackdown on these insignificant groups spearheaded mass urban protests in many Turkish cities.
In the matter of a few days, nearly 2.5 million had joined rallies in almost all of Turkey’s eighty-one provinces. The Erdogan-led state was blindsided by the demonstrations and many posited that Erdogan himself would be forced to call early elections, which would lead to his own and his party’s demise. Yet, Erdogan proved resilient, and with backing from his Gulenist allies, he held onto power and hit back at the protesters. His state security forces broke up the protests across the country after a few weeks, resulting in the deaths of seven protesters and police officers by the end of the summer in 2013.
Meanwhile, the ousting of Erdogan’s ally and fellow political Islamist Morsi—with the tremors of the Gezi Park rallies still rumbling, albeit softly in Turkey—marked a new direction for Erdogan and Turkey in the Middle East. Despite crushing the Gezi Park protests, Erdogan’s actions post-summer 2013 indicate that he was a man fearful of suffering Morsi’s fate. Gezi Park and Morsi’s ouster made Erdogan become more authoritarian in quashing any similar protests he feared could oust him in the future. Domestically, this decision increased Turkey’s democratic backslide. Harassment of opposition members and media outlets became increasingly common, as did political interference in the judicial process. In 2015, renewed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) violence against the Turkish government in southeastern Turkey provided Erdogan with a reason to crack down on his broader opposition beyond Gulenist and pro-PKK constituencies. Furthermore, the failed July 15, 2016 coup against Erdogan, by segments of the TAF with anti-Erdogan Gulenist support, meant that Erdogan and his government were even more emboldened to clamp down on dissidents in the country.
For years, Erdogan had been a master of reading the global zeitgeist and responding to it with a public relations executive’s craftiness, for instance portraying his AKP as a “democracy-loving (and formerly political-Islamist) faction” soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks. However, after the summer of 2013 and the Gezi Park rallies, he lost this magic touch and ability to awe the international community. The image of Erdogan as an authoritarian leader belatedly started to take shape in many Western capitals and in financial circles. Investment into Turkey started to dry up, and rising anti-Erdogan sentiments in the West only fed into Erdogan’s rooted resentment toward the West from his political past.
ONLY PALS WITH QATAR
In foreign policy, too, Erdogan faces troubles, especially in the Middle East. With the notable exception of Qatar, following the events of 2013 in Turkey and Egypt, Turkish ties with the Arab monarchies within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have suffered severely because of Erdogan’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. These Gulf monarchies have a deep aversion to the Brotherhood, and see them as their main domestic security threat.
Meanwhile, Erdogan’s pro-Brotherhood stance found limited success in the rest of North Africa, where Ankara fared better in Tunisia than it did in Libya. When Libya descended into civil war, Erdogan threw his support behind the political Islamist factions in Tripoli’s western-based “Dawn Coalition,” which opposed Libya’s “Dignity Coalition” led by General Khalifa Haftar in Tobruk in the northeast. El-Sisi and his ally the UAE worried about the ascent of political Islam in Libya next door to Egypt and, eager to undermine Erdogan, were quick to assist the Tobruk government; they carried out air strikes aimed at the Tripoli factions. Because of its support for the “Dawn Coalition,” Turkey lost many of the pre-war economic contracts and commercial ties it had painstakingly built in Libya over the previous decades. Ankara also failed to build influence on the UN-led peace process regarding Libya, because many Libyans and key international players did not view Erdogan as neutral. This was illustrated by the ostracized Turkish delegation at the Libya conference in Palermo, Italy, on November 12-13, 2018.
Erdogan invested heavily in Tunisia after Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s fall to help the political Islamist Ennahda party, which joined the government in November 2011. A notable initiative in this regard was the establishment of the High Level Strategic Cooperation Council (HLSCC) between Tunis and Ankara, which was signed in Ankara by Erdogan and the then-prime minister of Tunisia, Hamadi Jebali, on December 25, 2012. The declaration created mechanisms for security, military, economic, and trade cooperation. During the first meeting of the HLSCC, the delegations made twenty-one agreements and declared twenty-four twin cities in both countries. Since then, Ankara has provided half a billion dollars’ worth of credit to post-Arab Spring Tunisia, though Turkey’s clout has decreased since Ennahda stepped down from government in 2014.
By 2019, Qatar was Erdogan’s only friend in the Middle East. Doha and Ankara have much in common when it comes to their foreign policies. Both countries support political Islamist groups, including the Ikhwan in Egypt and Hamas in Gaza, as well as Brotherhood-affiliated groups in Syria and Libya. The Turkish-Qatari alliance solidified after Turkey sided with Doha in a GCC dispute in 2017. On June 5, 2017, the dispute broke into the open when Bahrain, Egypt, Libya’s eastern-based government, the Maldives, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Yemen severed relations with Qatar, citing Doha’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and accusing it of supporting terrorism.
Turkey’s immediate reaction to the crisis was to try to remain neutral and call for dialogue. Just a few days into the blockade, however, it became clear that Ankara had decided to take a pro-Qatar stance. Erdogan condemned the Saudi-led coalition’s blockade of Qatar, saying that the isolation imposed on Qatar was inhumane and against Islamic values, even comparing the blockade to a “death sentence.” As the blockade dragged on despite U.S. efforts at mediation, Turkey’s role as a critical lifeline for Qatar became increasingly evident.
THE MIDDLE EAST’S NEW POWER GAME: “AXIS” VS. “BLOC”
Regional dynamics in the Middle East have aligned Turkey and Qatar, almost molding them into a bilateral axis competing against other regional powers including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and occasionally Jordan and Kuwait in a bloc-like formation, with Israel occasionally supporting this grouping behind the scenes.
The “axis” and the “bloc” are informal alliances, but competition between them remains fierce. For instance, throughout the Arab uprisings and their aftermath, Turkey and the UAE ended up on opposite sides of almost every conflict. Despite their initial shared hostility toward a common enemy in the form of the Al-Assad regime in Syria, the Turkey-Qatar axis and the UAE have supported rival groups within the Syrian opposition.
In Palestine, the UAE and Egypt have been trying to broker a deal between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements, while the Turkey-Qatar axis supports Hamas. This competition now extends to East Africa, where the axis is vying for influence against the bloc along the Nile Valley and around the Horn of Africa in a new Great Game.
In the Horn of Africa, Doha and Ankara teamed up to cultivate influence in Somalia in 2011 and later in Sudan. In this alliance, Ankara provides the manpower on the ground while Doha supplies the investments, thanks to Qatar’s deep pockets. The two countries have accordingly invested heavily in supporting various segments of the government and taking control of ports, as well as building military facilities. In Somalia, these investments are centered in the capital of Mogadishu, and in Sudan, Turkey has set out to build a port in Suakin on the Red Sea coastline. Here Ankara is literally trying to bring an abandoned Ottoman-era port back to life. This presence is limited but has not gone unnoticed by regional players. However, it has yet to be seen whether, following the fall of Omar Al-Bashir in Khartoum, Turkey and Qatar’s influence in Sudan will remain unchanged. Egypt and its allies have already recognized the post-Bashir government in Khartoum, potentially undermining the Doha-Ankara axis there.
Underlying this rift is the visceral reaction that the Ikhwan and its regional supporters evoke from the bloc. For Egyptian leader El-Sisi, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and his homologue UAE Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed, the term “Muslim Brotherhood” has become synonymous with Erdogan’s Turkey, Doha, and with “radical political Islamism” as they understand it. While Turkey’s regional initiatives can be explained through the lens of nationalism or geopolitics, the bloc’s readiness to ascribe all Turkish motives to the Muslim Brotherhood agenda and all Sunni Muslim extremism to the influence of the Ikhwan has deepened the already severe policy differences between the bloc and the axis.
Within the GCC bloc, Turkey’s ties are the worst with the UAE, Erdogan’s archenemy in the Persian Gulf and perhaps the entire Middle East as of 2019. Abu Dhabi took a strong stance against Erdogan’s support for Morsi and his subsequent opposition to El-Sisi after the fall of the Brotherhood in Cairo. Erdogan’s September 24, 2014 speech at the UN, in which he implied El-Sisi was an illegitimate tyrant, was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back regarding Ankara-Abu Dhabi ties. Following this, the UAE launched a successful campaign to block Turkey’s bid to join the UN Security Council for its 2015-2016 term. Since then, Turkish-Emirati ties have hit a historic low, with the two countries using any opportunity to undermine each other’s policies, from Syria—where Abu Dhabi supports Bashar Al-Assad and opened its embassy in December 2018—to Somalia, where Ankara backs the central government in Mogadishu and Abu Dhabi backs Somalia’s breakaway regions in the north.
TURKEY AND SAUDI ARABIA
Saudi ties with Turkey, however, deserve separate treatment from the axis and the bloc. A devout Muslim, Erdogan has been deferential toward the Saudi kings, whom he respects as the “Guardians of Islam’s Two Holy Shrines” in Mecca and Medina. In fact, in recent years, Turkish-Saudi ties did improve a bit after Saudi Arabia’s vehemently anti-Ikhwan King Abdullah died in January 2015. However, these ties took a nosedive when Turkey sided with Qatar in the GCC dispute, only to dip further following the October 2, 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Erdogan used this incident for his own sake, slowly leaking evidence to the media, incriminating Crown Prince Mohammed in the murder, and embarrassing Bin Salman internationally.
Overall, the Khashoggi episode has left the crown prince bitter toward Erdogan. Bin Salman has embraced the other members of the bloc, bonding with El-Sisi and Mohammed Bin Zayed even more strongly in their opposition to Erdogan. In 2019, Erdogan therefore faces an Arab triumvirate composed of El-Sisi, Mohammed Bin Salman, and Mohammed Bin Zayed, all of whom aim to undermine him and his regional policies. With Iran and its allies, namely the Al-Assad regime and Hezbollah, also opposing Erdogan, this leaves the Turkish leader almost alone in the Middle East, as well as facing pushback from the Saudis and their allies on one side and the Iranians and their allies on the other.
A FAILED PIVOT AND AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Erdogan and his AKP leadership have carefully recalculated their domestic and foreign policies since 2013 to deal with pressing issues at home and abroad. The mirroring of the Gezi Park protests and the ousting of Morsi in Egypt have left a lasting impact on Erdogan’s leadership in Turkey. He has continued to clamp down on protests and dissent after 2013, up to the present day. In foreign policy, Erdogan has faced off against the Gulf countries, trying to influence the outcomes of the Arab uprisings by exclusively supporting the Brotherhood. However, the horse on which Erdogan bet came in last place. This has created a rift between Turkey and almost all other Sunni powers of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. In hindsight, perhaps no one could have guessed that the Brotherhood would rise and fall so fast. However, as crafty statesmen, Erdogan and Davutoglu should have had the insight to not bet on just one horse, but rather on multiple regional competitors in foreign policy. In addition, Turkey’s Syria policy has put it at odds with the Al-Assad regime and Al-Assad’s regional patron, Iran. Although Turkey’s ties with Iraq have improved a bit since 2017, when Baghdad and Ankara came together to object to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s unilateral independence referendum, Ankara retains less influence in Baghdad than does Tehran.
Accordingly, today Ankara is more isolated than ever in the Middle East. Without a doubt, this all has recalibrated the Turkish government’s and many of Turkish citizens’ regional weltanschauung. Erdogan’s Middle Eastern engagement has resulted in sour Turkish views of Arabs and new stereotypes toward them. Ankara’s poor relations with Abu Dhabi are a case in point. In Turkey’s most recent significant spat with the UAE in December 2017, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan shared a post on Twitter that accused Fahreddin Pasha, an Ottoman general who fought to defend Medina during the Arab revolt of 1916 in World War I, of stealing priceless artifacts and bringing them to Istanbul at the time. “These are Erdogan’s ancestors, and their history with Arab Muslims,” the tweet concluded. The taunt sprung from a deep well of bitterness. On the propaganda front, the UAE has turned to sniping at Turkey, casting it as a foreign power seeking to impose its supremacy over the Arabs.
Stung by the insult, Erdogan fired back at the minister: “While my ancestors were busy defending Medina, you impudent man, what were your ancestors doing?” Erdogan’s spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin also chimed in, calling Bin Zayed’s comments a “propaganda lie that seeks to turn Turks and Arabs against one another.” Erdogan advisor Yigit Bulut piled on criticism too, deriding the UAE as the “52nd state of the U.S.” (Israel, he said, “is the 51st state”). Pro-Erdogan Turkish press sprang into action with stories and op-eds glorifying Fahreddin Pasha and excoriating the UAE for insulting his character. Ironically, Erdogan’s Middle East pivot, which aimed to undo Turks’ racist views of Arabs, seems to have not only failed in transcending such prejudices, but also encouraged a new generation of unfortunately negative perceptions of and tensions with Arabs.
*Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family Fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He would like to thank Egecan Alan Fay for his assistance with this article, which is an excerpt from his forthcoming monograph on Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan.