No, I am not going to be prophetic about the general idea of fatalism by this little pilfering from my title here from William Faulkner. Anyway, Faulkner, the great American novelist, is free game to quote. Let’s try to see the unparalleled wisdom he deployed in this inverted sentence that is easier to comprehend than its wording in some international developments in our region.
As every Palestinian in the West Bank knows, it is not yet a full “intifada,” but it has been heading toward a very large explosion; Palestinians are going to either suffer or enjoy the last days of summer in their homeland. The unexpected and equally unplanned last Sabbath Day explosion is not the one I am talking about. It only gave the "Deep Israel" what has been waiting for to make life a little more difficult for the ordinary Palestinians in the occupied territories and in the occupied part of Jerusalem and the breathing space Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been looking for since he reclaimed the premiership.
The real Shabbat, or sabbath, will not only make those who mark it “blessed in both worlds” but will also give all others “true happiness.” If you are occupying your neighbors’ land unjustly, the Shabbat you observe will not make you “find the real God, the purpose of life.” When you are occupying your neighbors’ homes, you will not even know how to suffer. Neither happy are you going to be for you cannot justify the torment you keep your neighbors under. Tears beget tears. On the 50th anniversary, Yom Kippur still breeds the injustice it was the result of. Occupation produces oppression; especially when you pour tons of cement into the water wells that the legitimate owners of those lands opened decades if not centuries ago! Happiness surges and the suffering is soothed when shared. Nobody shares the occupiers’ happiness or their sorrow.
What Israel needs to do is to come to the negotiation table for the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. Then, only then they find true Shabbat and live in peace and security.
Let’s turn our attention to somewhere else that is also under Israeli occupation: Syria. Lest you forget Israel occupies an area as large as half of the West Bank only 320 kilometers (200 miles) north of the Syrian capital, the Golan Heights, or with its historical name: Jawlani Plato. Israel occupied it all the way to the gates of Damascus in June 1967 during what is called the Six-Day War. It was not a simple “Naksah” (the setback) as the Arabic history books call it. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait (and Lebanon and Pakistan with minor involvements) swooped down on Israel; but it increased its territory threefold. What the Israelis called the “borders of Auschwitz” had been replaced with the West Bank, the Sinai and most of Jerusalem. Israel soon annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel still rules over the occupied territories 56 years later, but neither has it found peace nor has it provided it for the people it now has under its occupation.
We can trace the collapse of the political and social structure in Syria to the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights. The enemy was so close to its capital city that the Syrian Baath Party was hardly able to keep Nureddin al-Atassi as president and soon Hafez Assad, the father of Bashar Assad, toppled the president and government and created his own dictatorship. His son took over the leadership because his father had organized the state along sectarian lines; Sunnis (among them Syrian Kurds) and non-Alawites became figureheads of political institutions, while the Alawites took control of the military, intelligence, bureaucracy and security apparatuses. Hafez and his son denied the basic human rights of the Syrian Kurds.
That dictatorship prompted the bloodiest version of the Arab Spring in Syria: Bashar Assad bombarded his own people, killing a quarter of a million and forcing over 11 million away from their homes, including around 7 million people within Syria and over 4 million who are now refugees abroad, mostly in Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan.
That provided the best opportunity for the architects of former U.S. President George Bush’s "War Against Islam" (oh! I said, “Against Islam”? Didn’t I? Most assume it should be stated as “against terrorism”). The U.S. could bring its war to Syria from Iraq, but there were no terrorists in Syria!
As then-presidential candidate Donald Trump said, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton imported the “terrorists” they created in Afghanistan to Syria. Nobody noticed how those “Arab Afghans” moved over the continents and came to Syria, occupying two-thirds of the country. But they somehow did. Now that the “enemy” (with many names: Daesh) was in place, the U.S. needed allies to fight them. Türkiye was there, and it was already fighting the terrorists who had materialized on the Syrian-Turkish border. But the U.S. had a better idea: They physically carried the PKK terrorists from the caves they had been hiding in Iraq to Syria to fight Daesh.
Even if we accept for the sake of argument the claim that Daesh was occupying Syria, the futility of fighting terrorism with terrorists was quite obvious and the new President Donald Trump had accepted it; he asked his defense chief to come up with a way Türkiye could wipe them out. But you know: his defense head and his envoy to Syria resigned and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had not moved one single soldier out of Syria. Quite the contrary: They created a “Kurdish state” on the Turkish border, the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as "Rojava," a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria. Türkiye had twice pushed this PKK extension, PYD-YPG or, with the fancy name U.S. Army General Raymond Thomas bestowed on them, the SDF, to the south, but it kept harassing the Turkish towns on the north of the border and it kept training terrorists and infiltrating them into Türkiye.
Recently a team of them reached Ankara and tried to attack the security headquarters next to the Turkish Parliament, which was about to return from summer break. Türkiye, warning the U.S. soldiers quartered next to the PKK/YPG to distance themselves from the terrorists who are legitimate targets of Türkiye’s over-the-border operations in accordance with the U.N. regulations.
“Be ready for whatever is coming your way, or get out of the way!” That is what Türkiye declared to the friend-and-foe in Syria when Hakan Fidan, the new foreign minister, unequivocally warned the “third parties” in northern Syria.
"Everything belonging to the PKK/YPG, from infrastructure to energy facilities, in Syria and Iraq are now legitimate targets of our security forces," he said.
Instead of heeding Türkiye’s warning, CENTCOM elected to down an armed Turkish drone that was doing a reconnaissance flight over the terrorists' hideouts. CENTCOM said on social media (and their bosses at the Pentagon had it deleted immediately) that “Türkiye’s counter-terrorism operations were threatening the regional stability.”
In the bad old days, such a message from the central command of a U.S. force might make some Turkish officials shake in their boots! But not anymore. Even when the CENTCOM message was still available on social media, Türkiye sent another and another and yet another drone to wipe out the U.S. ally PKK/YPG terrorists.
Why? Because “if suffer I must I can.”
