RUTHFULLY YOURS

The next Gaza war is fast approaching, with the terrorist group Hamas feverishly expanding its tunnel network to launch attacks inside Israel and Jerusalem now debating the shape and timing of its next move.

So get ready for the usual drama: Hamas will seize or kill Israelis by attacking through a tunnel; Israel will receive significant global support at first when it defends itself by counterattacking; Hamas will then ensure the deaths of Palestinian women and children by hiding its terrorists in homes and schools as Israel responds; the global media will promote images of Palestinian suffering while ignoring its cause; support for Israel will erode in Europe and then Washington; Israel will face war crime charges at the United Nations; and Jews around the world will come under attack.

Before long, Israel will succumb to mounting global pressure to halt its counterattack; Israel and Hamas will agree to a ceasefire; Hamas will portray the ceasefire as but a temporary respite before its next round of rocket fire and underground incursion; an increasingly isolated Israel will face a more energized global movement to isolate the Jewish state through sanctions and boycotts; and the Western intelligentsia will ignore Hamas’ genocidal motives, target Israeli settlements as the driving force behind the mayhem, and push mindlessly forward for the wholly unrealistic two-state solution.

Clearly, Israel didn’t deliver the deterring blow to Hamas during their seven-week war over the summer of 2014 that it had hoped because, just 18 months later, both sides are sliding toward the next round.

Today, along the border with Gaza, Israelis complain that they hear the digging of tunnels beneath their homes. “The fear among everyone here is constant,” one Israeli told Reuters. “I’ve heard the sound of a hammer and chisel and my neighbor says she can hear them digging under the cement. We’re stressed out.”

Last week marked the 17th anniversary of Jordan’s King Abdullah’s coronation after the death of his father, King Hussein.

Abdullah’s ascension to the monarchy was unanticipated. His uncle Hassan was his father’s long-serving crown prince and was expected to inherit the throne. Hussein made the change in succession from his deathbed.

Today it is hard to believe that Abdullah will have the power to decide who succeeds him.

For generations, the largest looming threat to Jordan was its Palestinian majority. Although estimates of the size of Jordan’s Palestinian population vary widely, some placing it at just over 50 percent, and other estimates claiming that Palestinians made up 70% of the overall population, all credible demographic studies have agreed that most Jordanians are Palestinians.

It was due to fear of his Palestinian citizenry that for the past decade or so, Abdullah has sought to disenfranchise them. Beginning around 2004, Abdullah began throwing Palestinians out of the Jordanian armed forces. He also began canceling their citizenship.

According to a 2010 report by Human Rights Watch, between 2004 and 2008, the kingdom revoked the citizenship of several thousand Palestinian Jordanians and hundreds of thousands were considered at risk of losing their citizenship in an arbitrary process.

Today, concerns that Palestinians may assert their rights as the majority and so threaten the kingdom have given way to even greater fears. Demographic changes in Jordan in recent years have been so enormous that Palestinians may be the least of Abdullah’s worries. Indeed, it is far from clear that they are still the majority of the people in Jordan.

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, between 750,000 and a million Iraqis entered Jordan. Current data are not clear regarding how many of those Iraqis remain in Jordan today.

But whatever their number, they have been eclipsed by the Syrians.

Because almost every religious and/or ethnic community in Syria is divided, some siding with Assad and others fighting against him, it is difficult to establish clear sectarian demarcation lines. Syria today is a patchwork of emirates.

The Islamic Republic of Iran needed Syria to complete the “Shiite Crescent” which it saw as its glacis and point of access to the Mediterranean. Iran is estimated to have spent something like $12 billion on its Syrian venture. By the time of this writing, Iran had also lost 143 ranking officers, captain and above, in combat in Syrian battlefields.

Turkey’s “soft” Islamic leadership, the main source of support for anti-Assad forces, has always had ties to the global movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is likely that Turkey’s leaders see the Syrian imbroglio as an opportunity for them to “solve” the problem of Kurdish-Turkish secessionists based in Syrian territory since the 1980s.

Turkey has become host to more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees, posing a long-term humanitarian and security challenge. Ankara’s decision to goad large numbers of refugees into the European Union was an attempt at forcing the richer nations of the continent to share some of Turkey’s burden.

The country most dramatically, and perhaps permanently, affected by the Syrian conflict is Lebanon. More than 1.8 million Syrian refugees have arrived, altering the country’s delicate demographic balance. If the new arrivals stay permanently, Lebanon would become another Arab Sunni majority state.

Next March will mark the fifth anniversary of what started as another chapter in the so-called “Arab Spring” morphed into a civil war, degenerated into a humanitarian catastrophe and, finally, led to the systemic collapse of Syria as a nation-state.

That sequence of events has had a profound impact on virtually the whole of the region known as the Greater Middle East, affecting many aspects of its component nations ranging from demography, ethno-sectarian composition and security. Since the purpose of this presentation is not to offer an historic account of the events, a brief reminder of some key aspects would suffice.