When the world’s biggest superpower goes rogue, nowhere is immune from the effects. So the Trumpian revolution in American foreign policy is raising questions in every corner of the world. That includes places that were in a ferment already, such as the Middle East.
Trump’s geopolitical swing towards Russia came too late to save the pro-Russian Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Last December he was overthrown by a popular revolutionary movement led by Ahmed al-Sharaa (now interim president) and backed by neighboring Turkey. That’s put Turkey and its authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, back at the centre of the region’s politics, with apparently some important decisions to make.
Turkey’s attitude to Syria is framed in large part by its fears of its own Kurdish minority, which inhabits the south-east of the country, adjacent to Kurdish territories in Syria, Iraq and Iran. Over many decades, all four countries have oscillated between co-operating with their neighbors to suppress the Kurds and using the Kurds as a sort of fifth column to destabilise their neighbors.
Erdoğan came to power as a champion of liberalisation, including peace and reconciliation with the Kurds. But the peace process broke down a decade ago and Erdoğan swung around to a militant nationalism. That complicated his policy in relation to Syria, since he was simultaneously trying to aid the resistance to Assad and to limit the influence of Syria’s Kurds, who were a key part of that resistance.
Now, peace is on the agenda again. In a case of “Only Nixon can go to China”, it was Erdoğan’s fiercely nationalist and far-right ally, Devlet Bahçeli of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), who commenced a peace overture last October by reaching out to the pro-Kurdish party, Dem, and suggesting that imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan could be freed if he renounced violence.
With the Syrian flank now apparently secured, both Erdoğan and Öcalan have cautiously embraced the idea. Last week Öcalan called on his guerilla organisation, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), to lay down its arms, saying “There is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and realisation of a political system”; on Saturday it responded by announcing an immediate ceasefire.
Having been disappointed by Erdoğan before, the Kurds are understandably wary. But Erdoğan’s position is not as strong as it once was; his last election victory, in 2023, was uncomfortably close, and term limits prohibit him from running again unless he can amend the constitution – a project for which Dem’s support would be critical. And with the Ukraine war on his doorstep he has been trying to mend fences with the European Union.
For all that it tries to balance between competing interests in the region, Turkey’s primary rival has always been Russia. Although there are clear similarities between Erdoğan’s governance and that of Vladimir Putin, Turkey has consistently voted with Ukraine at the United Nations (including last week). The defection of the United States to the Russian camp is therefore a matter of pressing concern.
Where the US goes, Israel tends to follow (or perhaps vice versa); it too switched sides at the UN last week, and Benjamin Netanyahu has followed Putin’s line in most respects for a long time. So it’s no surprise that Israel views the new government in Syria with deep suspicion, and has used the opportunity to degrade its military capacity and occupy a further swathe of its southern territory.
Israel and Turkey, once close, have been estranged since the outbreak of war in Gaza. Now the fear of Turkish influence is apparently leading Israel to lobby for Russia to retain its bases in Syria as a counterweight – putting the Syrians in a quandary as they try to avoid offending either of their heavily-armed neighbors. Nobody knows where all this will lead.
Hussein Ibish, writing at the weekend in Haaretz, suggests that Israel, the US and Iran (and presumably Russia, although he doesn’t mention it) will collude to make peace at the expense of the Palestinians. That would be bad news for Turkey, and it’s unlikely that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states would be very happy either. But whether they can make common cause with the EU and other western democracies remains to be seen.
The World is Not Enough 
There is a complex regional balance of power in Syria and Iraq between Turkey, Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia. I don’t think things will play out as Hussein Ibish suggests, but it is likely that losers will be the Palestinians, whatever the result.
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Thanks Gary – Yes, I fear you’re right about that. Iraq is a whole other dimension of the question that I haven’t had the chance to look at properly; some other time.
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NRWA’s charter defines a Palestinian as any person of Arab descent who had been living in Mandate Palestine for two years before the 1948 war, as well as all their male-line descendants. This means that a large number of people who migrated to Mandate Palestine from Transjordan, Egypt and other Arab countries, attracted by the economic opportunities provided by Jewish investment and British administration, were classed as Palestinians even though they had no actual Palestinian ancestry. Their descendants are still classed as Palestinian refugees.
Now, 76 years after the creation of UNRWA, nearly all of the original 700,000 refugees are dead. Mahmoud Abbas, the self-styled and unelected president of the “State of Palestine,” who was born in Safed in 1935 and soon to be 90, is among the last of that generation. Nearly all of those now officially classed as Palestinian refugees are the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the 1949 refugees.
These descendants now number more than 5 million, almost none of whom have ever set foot in what is now Israel. Of these, 1.2 million live in Gaza and 770,000 live in the West Bank. Another 2.1 million live in Jordan, 530,000 in Syria and 450,000 in Lebanon (many of those in Syria fled to Jordan or Lebanon during the Syrian civil war).
It needs to be stressed how unique this situation is. No other refugee population in the world contains almost no actual refugees: that is, people who have fled or been forced from their homes. Nearly all of the official Palestinian refugees live where they were born, and where in most cases their parents were born. The decision to continue to class them, even to the fourth generation, as refugees was and remains a political choice made by the majority bloc at the UN.
What was the alternative? It was obvious by the mid 1950s that Israel was not going to allow the Arabs who left its territory in 1949 to return, and the 1956 and 1967 wars made it clear that Israel could not be coerced into doing so. At that point efforts to resettle the refugees should have begun. The obvious place to resettle them was and still is Jordan, which was originally the eastern half of Mandate Palestine and which has a population of majority Palestinian descent. Jordan is an artificial creation ruled by a dynasty imported from the Hejaz and imposed by the British. It could very easily have been redesignated as Palestine, and still could be.
Let us take the most obvious analogy from the same period of history. At the end of World War II some 12 to 15 million Germans were expelled from their homes in eastern Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Today their descendants have been successfully integrated into German society. Although many retain their cultural identity as Pomeranians or Sudetenlanders, there is no agitation whatever to reverse the postwar territorial settlement.
It will be argued that the resettlement of the German refugees was possible only because there was still a German state for them to be resettled in: they were only being resettled from one part of Germany to another. But this ignores the fact that Germany only became a united country in 1871, and that in 1945 it was a much less homogenous country than it is today. There were wide differences between, for example, East Prussians and Bavarians. They spoke different dialects, dressed differently and (most importantly) went to different churches. For a Protestant East Prussian refugee in 1945, Catholic Bavaria was in many ways a foreign country.
By contrast, despite recent efforts to create a separate Palestinian cultural identity (“Palestine music”, “Palestinian food”), there is very little difference between a Palestinian born in Jaffa or Nablus and a Jordanian born in Amman. They are mostly Sunni Muslims and they speak the same Shami or Levantine dialect of Arabic (as do most Lebanese and Syrians). If the Palestinian refugees had been resettled in Jordan in the 1950s or 1960s, the “Palestinian question” in its current form would not exist. Today, after decades of nationalist propaganda (inculcated in UNRWA schools), this would be much more difficult, but not impossible.
(In fact, as everyone familiar with the issue knows, most Palestinians, wherever they live, would very happily be resettled, provided they could be resettled in the United States or Western Europe. In the current political climate, after 50 years of Palestinian terrorism, that’s not very likely, although several hundred thousand Palestinians have emigrated from both Gaza and the West Bank over the past 20 years, mainly to Western Europe or Canada. Israel has quietly facilitated this exodus.)
Today UNRWA has more than 30,000 employees, nearly all of them Palestinians, to manage these 5 million official refugees. (By contrast, the UNHCR, which is responsible for the welfare of more than 20 million real refugees, has 18,000 employees.) While this is represented as “empowering refugees,” what it means in practice is that UNRWA has come under the control of the Palestinian political factions to whom these employees owe their first loyalty: primarily Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.
UNRWA provides a variety of social services to the officially designated Palestinian refugees, most of whom live in what are usually described as refugee camps, but are in fact sizeable towns. This arrangement relieves Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, as well as the Palestinian Authority, of the need to provide services to these communities. It also serves to prevent the Palestinians from integrating into the societies of their host countries, and freezes them into the status of permanent, hereditary refugees, which suits the political agenda of the anti-Israel majority at the UN.
Most notably, UNRWA operates school systems in all the Palestinian localities. Before the current conflict, these schools served about 500,000 students. They are staffed entirely by Palestinians, most of whom are members or supporters of the various Palestinian political factions such as Fatah and Hamas. This is most obviously true in Gaza, where UNRWA provides schools for the large majority of the territory’s students, and where Hamas has had complete control of the system since its seizure of power in 2007. It has been claimed that all of the perpetrators of the 7 October attacks on Israel were graduates of UNRWA schools. That cannot be proved, but it is likely that the great majority were.
What is undeniably true is that UNRWA schools have inculcated into several generations of Palestinian youth a visceral hatred of Israelis, Zionists and Jews. They have drawn no distinction between these three categories, which is why the Hamas attackers cheerfully murdered Israeli peace activists such as Vivian Silver. Someone also taught these young Palestinians that the gleeful murder, torture and rape of Israeli Jews is an approved form of “armed struggle” against the Zionist occupiers. If it wasn’t UNRWA schools, who was it?
UNRWA’s Palestinian employees also get to spend most of UNRWA’s $US1.1 billion annual budget. It is a sad fact that all foreign aid programmes are riddled with corruption and embezzlement. In programmes which transfer large amounts of money from rich donors to very poor recipients, this is understandable. In the case of UNRWA, however, the principal motive for diversion of aid money is not survival, or even personal enrichment (although as the opulent mansions of the Fatah and Hamas leadership testify, that is certainly a factor). The motive is mainly military and political.
Both Fatah and Hamas have stolen huge amounts of foreign aid over recent decades, and much of that money has passed through the hands of UNRWA officials before it has been used to buy weapons, build missile sites, dig tunnels and spread antisemitic propaganda. UN officials, most of them supporters of the Palestinian cause, have made no effort to police this, and the donor countries, particularly in Europe, have not been much better. No-one wants to be called an Islamophobe or (even worse) a Zionist for trying to prevent the theft of taxpayer money to fund warfare against Israel.
It should be noted in passing that the great majority of UNRWA’s funding comes from Western countries. Before the current conflict, the largest donors were the United States, the European Union, Germany, Britain and Sweden. The EU and its member states together provided over 40% of UNRWA’s funds, while the United States provided 29%. The only Arab states to make significant contributions were Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, although between them they gave less than Sweden. China, India and Russia gave only token amounts, Iran gave nothing. Australia gave $20 million a year.
What this means in effect is that Western taxpayers, including you, have been forking out more than a billion dollars a year to keep 5 million Palestinians penned up in refugee camps in perpetuity, to be used as a weapon in the campaign of the anti-Israel (and anti-Western) majority bloc at the UN to destroy Israel and either kill or drive into exile the 7 million Jews who live there. And all this to create another poor, corrupt, despotic Arab state, run either by the gangsters of Fatah or the religious fanatics of Hamas.
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