Tag: Israel

Expired: The UN’s Resolution Prohibiting Exporting of Iranian Missiles and Drones

The Caspian Sea linking Iran and Russia may seem to be a quiet body of water, but the reality is that it has become Iran’s busy artery for exporting weaponry to Russia in violation of the United Nations Security Council’s 2015 prohibition on missile and uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV) transfer, known as Resolution 2231.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence has indicated a recent uptick in Caspian shipping between Russia and Iran, some ships going dark. Additionally, CNN has tracking data, showing 85 Iranian cargo plane trips to Moscow airports between May 2022 and March 2023.

In any case, Iran has been violating the Resolution for several years, supplying drones to Houthi rebels in Yemen, who’ve employed them to attack Saudi Arabia and, this week, American naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.

Additionally, we know from intelligence sources that they’ve been supplying lethal drones to the Russians since the summer of 2022, who have been employing them on a near daily basis in Ukraine.

Both Iran and Russia vociferously deny violating Resolution 2231. They needn’t worry. It expired on October 18, 2023.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration has been amiss in soft-pedaling Iran’s intransigence in a concerted effort to renew the 2015 Nuclear Arms Limitations Treaty with Iran. Though the US has pledged to monitor the illegal weaponry trade, employing sanctions if needed, Biden approved the return of $6 bn of frozen Iranian funds from South Korean banks as part of a prisoner exchange deal in August.

Qatar will administer Iranian access, to be used only for humanitarian purposes. This will free, however, Iranian budget money elsewhere for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians was augmented by hundreds of Iranian supplied rocket salvos into the Israeli infrastructure, including Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, Hezbollah in Lebanon have been firing missiles into northern Israeli settlements and attacking American forces in Syria and Iraq.

Iran possesses a sophisticated arsenal of some 2000-3000 missiles that include short-and medium-range ballistic missiles, a long-range cruise missile, and long-range rockets. Its medium ballistic missiles could conceivably be armed with a nuclear payload, should Iran continue its advance to a nuclear bomb.

We know, too, that the Iranians have been working on a ballistic anti-ship missile to be potentially used against American aircraft carriers.

Will they ultimately effect a nuclear capacity to hit the US mainland as North Korea has done? Or before then, will Israel, under grave nuclear threat, launch a first strike of its own on Iran’s myriad underground bunkers, plunging the world into a nightmare scenario?

–rj

Space as Identity: The Plight of Bedouins in Israel

Gretel Ehrlich, in her splendid The Solace of Open Spaces, writes that “a person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place.”

This brings to mind Israel’s Bedouins, a traditionally nomadic people once populating a vast desert terrain, whom T. E. Lawrence understood and celebrated. And they reciprocated.

In his own time, Lawrence lamented the increasing fate of urbanized Bedouins, their loss of place and a way of life: “The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanised Arab is appalling. Better a thousand times the Arab untouched.”

Much of that traditional way of life is but memory, especially in Israel, where Jewish settlers in the Negev have frequently seized Bedouin lands and driven out their people.

A vivid example is Twayil Abu Jarwal, one of forty unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev. Lying north of Beersheba and off the beaten track, you’ll not find it on any map.

It has no permanent structures for its 450 inhabitants, housed in tents, and clinging stubbornly to place and a way of life.

The village and its fields have been bulldozed so many times that no definitive account exists, perhaps between 25-50 times.

Still they cling to what’s long been theirs for two millennia or more.

After each razing, they re-assess, restore their sheltering tents, and plant anew.

Ilan Yeshurun, who directs the local Israel Land Authority, interviewed in the Jerusalem Report, defends these demolitions: “This is not a village. It doesn’t exist on any map or in any legal registration. It’s only a village in the eyes of the Bedouin.”

Critics call it “urbicide,” an Israeli attempt to destroy perceived communities of potential Palestinian resistance. I think it more than that—a quest for expanding settler homesteads, akin to America’s violent history of seizure of Native American lands.

Meanwhile, some fifty illegal settler farms have sprung up and, politics as usual, nothing is done.

There are now just six Israeli authorized Bedouin villages. Presently, an extended Highway 6 thrusts its way into their traditional landscape, with Israeli plans to continue their policy of demolition and resettlement.

Understandably, Trayil Abu Jarwal villagers fear not only a loss of their land, but a way of life.

Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that “you can’t go home again,” meaning that time brings evolution and experience changes us, uprooting past constituents of our nurturing tied to place.

On the other hand, his dictum locates the modern tragedy of living in a mobile society. Home is an extension of ourselves, evoking sanctuary and fostering identity..

T. E. Lawrence had promised the Bedouins emancipation from the Ottomans Turks. But with takeover of Ottoman land by a modern Israel, they languish still, their cries unheard.

–rj