A fragile truce broken by attacks between Israel and Gaza

A fragile truce broken by attacks between Israel and Gaza

After a ceasefire was brokered by Egypt attempting to end five days of violence, Israel retaliated against rocket attacks into the south from the Gaza Strip with an airstrike killing two Palestinians purportedly from Islamic Jihad. The truce had come after the worst violence seen in the area in months, after attacks left 10 Palestinian militants and one Israeli civilian dead. The sides maintained calm for nearly a day, until an Israeli air assault targeted militants that Israel claimed were about to set off five rockets. Additionally, up to three rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip after the ceasefire. Two small militant organizations and Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the rocket fire into Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had no choice but to retaliate against such attacks, stating two principles: “Kill or be killed” and “He who harms you should bear the blood on his head.”

Headlines  

• The Iranian Parliament has presented a petition to summon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for questioning over an economic scandal in a political battle as elections draw closer.
• Yemeni officials closed Sana’a International airport after four explosions at the adjacent military airbase set two fighter jets on fire.
• UNESCO will vote today on Palestinian membership amidst threats from the U.S. that it would cut funding to the agency.
• Syrian President Assad said he would cooperate with the opposition after the Arab League submitted a plan to end violence that stemmed from seven months of uprisings.

• The U.S. will build up forces in the Persian Gulf to address regional security after the withdrawal of troops from Iraq at the end of the year.

Daily Snapshot

An Iraqi policeman stands guard outside the Church of Our Lady of Deliverance/Salvation (Sayidat al-Nejat) in central Baghdad on October 31, 2011 on the first anniversary of a violent attack on worshippers in the church killed 46 people (portraits) (SABAH ARAR/AFP/Getty Images).  

Arguments & Analysis

‘The Arab intellectuals who didn’t roar’ (Robert Worth, New York Times)

“More than 10 months after it started with the suicide of a Tunisian fruit vendor, the great wave of insurrection across the Arab world has toppled three autocrats and led last week in Tunisia to an election that many hailed as the dawn of a new era. It has not yielded any clear political or economic project, or any intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward. In those revolts, thinkers or ideologues — from Thomas Paine to Lenin to Mao to Vaclav Havel — helped provide a unifying vision or became symbols of a people’s aspirations. The absence of such figures in the Arab Spring is partly a measure of the pressures Arab intellectuals have lived under in recent decades, trapped between brutal state repression on one side and stifling Islamic orthodoxy on the other. Many were co-opted by their governments (or Persian Gulf oil money) or forced into exile, where they lost touch with the lived reality of their societies. Those who remained have often applauded the revolts of the past year and even marched along with the crowds. But they have not led them, and often appeared stunned and confused by a movement they failed to predict.”

‘Letter from Libya: king of kings’ (Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker)

“When is the right time to leave? Nicolae Ceausescu didn’t realize he was hated until, one night in 1989, a crowd of his citizens suddenly began jeering him; four days later, he and his wife faced a firing squad. Qaddafi, likewise, waited until it was too late, continuing to posture and give orotund speeches long after his people had rejected him. In an interview in the first weeks of the revolt, he waved away the journalist Christiane Amanpour’s suggestion that he might be unpopular. She didn’t understand Libyans, he said: “All my people love me.” For Qaddafi, the end came in stages: first, the uprisings in the east, the successive fights along the coastal road, the bombing by NATO, the sieges of Misurata and Zawiyah; then the fall of Tripoli and, finally, the bloody endgame in the Mediterranean city of Surt, his birthplace. In the days after the rebels took over Tripoli, this August, the city was a surreal and edgy place. The rebels dramatized their triumph by removing the visible symbols of Qaddafi’s power wherever they found them. They defiled the Brother Leader’s ubiquitous portraits and put up cartoons in which he was portrayed with the body of a rat. They replaced his green flags with the pre-Qaddafi green-red-and-black. They dragged out carpets bearing his image-a common sight in official buildings-to be stomped on in doorways or ruined by traffic. At one of the many Centers for the Study and Research of the Green Book, a large pyramid of green-and-white concrete, the glass door was shattered, the interior trashed. Inside, I found a dozen copies of the Green Book-the repository of Qaddafi’s eccentric ideas-floating in a fountain.”

‘Islamist victory in Tunisia a win for democracy’ (Noah Feldman, Bloomberg)

“Although secularists in Tunisia and Egypt didn’t want elections to come too quickly, they haven’t been heard arguing that elections are a mistake altogether. That is, the ideology of the Arab Spring actually is democracy. The proof is in the willingness of the leading revolutionaries to be beaten by social forces they don’t fully trust. The Islamists, too, reflect the ideals of democracy. This phenomenon goes back 20 years to the Algeria‘s experiment in democracy, when Islamists realized for the first time that the public in an Arabic-speaking country would support them only if they declared that Islam and democracy were compatible. Since then, in a gradual process, more and more political Islamists have become democrats. Ennahdha’s Ghannouchi, exiled in Europe for decades, was a thought leader in the process of the Islamist embrace of equal citizenship and equal rights — which makes it especially fitting that his party is playing a primary role in Islamist electoral politics. Combining pragmatism and principle, mainstream political Islam has undergone an extraordinary democratic transformation. And it has done so in the very years when radical jihadism threatened Islamic democrats with condemnation and murder. From the standpoint of the global ideal of democracy, this is a victory of historic proportions.”