Middle East - Anthony Ham [44]
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Hamas was founded in the living room of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in Gaza‘s Zeitoun neighbourhood. Yassin, a quadriplegic since the age of seven, was killed by an Israeli helicopter missile in 2004.
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Zoom in a little closer and you’ll see that it remains, for the most part, business as usual. The generational change that sparked such hope in Syria with the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000 has seen Syrians granted more freedoms; until his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, can break free of the influence of his father’s old-school advisers, however, the process of change promises to be slow. Father-to-son dynasties are also a feature in Jordan, although King Hussein (who died in 1999) is proving a hard act to follow for his son, King Abdullah II. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak seems intent on outlasting the pharaohs, while Israel keeps recycling yesterday’s politicians to lead the country (Tzipi Livni’s ascension to lead the Kadima Party notwithstanding), and corruption allegations continue to swirl around the polity. For its part, Turkey is doing everything it can to join the EU, even as it struggles with its decades-old issues of the religious-secular divide and a Kurdish insurgency in the southeast.
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THE 2008 GAZA STRIP CONFLICT Amelia Thomas
On December 27 2008 Israel began an air, and subsequently ground, offensive in the Gaza Strip, stating its aim as the permanent prevention of missile strikes on southern Israel by Hamas fighters. Three weeks later, the BBC reported that the offensive had resulted in more than 1300 Palestinian fatalities, around 65% of them civilians, and at least 13 Israeli fatalities.
In mid-January, as this book went to press, Israel had declared a unilateral ceasefire and its troops had began withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed its operation’s aims had been accomplished; senior Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh said on Hamas TV that Israel had failed to achieve its goals and that, despite ‘all the wounds, our people didn’t surrender, but demonstrated a legendary perseverance.’
Meanwhile, shell-shocked civilians began the painful process of salvaging what they could of their devastated homes and lives.
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Iraq aside, most of the Middle East is nominally at peace. But it’s a pretty weary peace, not to mention a fragile one. The region has reached something of an impasse with the issues of the past 60 years frozen into seemingly perpetual division that sometimes spills over into open warfare, but more often festers like an open wound. The Palestinian still dreams of returning home. The Israeli still dreams of a world free from fear. In the meantime, the two sides come no closer to a resolution. These are real issues that make life a daily struggle for ordinary people and the sad fact remains that, for many Middle Easterners, life is no easier than it was 60 years ago. But such a time frame is the mere blink of an historical eye for this part of the world, where moments of hope have all too often yielded to cycles of conflict.
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TIMELINE
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250,000 BC The earliest traces of human presence appear in the Nile
Valley. Little is known about them, but they are thought
to be nomadic hunter-
gatherers.
5000 BC Al-Ubaid culture, the forerunner to the great civilisations that would earn Mesopotamia (now Iraq) the sobriquet of the cradle of civilisation, arises in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
4000 BC The Sumerian civilisation, immortalised in the Epic of Gilgamesh, takes hold in Mesopotamia. They would rule the region until the 24th century BC and invent cuneiform, the world’s first writing.
3100 BC Along the