Will Egypt take some Gazans? (plus some news on Turkey)
I hope it’s true, but I don’t have much confidence in the possibility
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has informed other Arab leaders that he is willing to temporarily relocate half a million residents from Gaza to northern Sinai in a designated city as part of the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, according to a Friday report.
According to the report in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar newspaper, Sissi made his willingness known during meetings held by Arab leaders in recent weeks in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. There was no confirmation of the report from any other source.
The Egyptian State Information Service denied the report, saying, “Egypt’s position is firm in its absolute and final rejection of any attempt to displace Palestinians, and the Cairo Arab Summit’s emergency plan for reconstruction is based on it.”
Of course, you can hardly blame Egypt if it sticks to its “no.” Gazans are trouble wherever they go. Egypt and Arab nations only pretend to champion them, but in reality they want nothing to do with them and only use them as foils to Israel.
The next bit of news isn’t about Egypt or Arab nations or even about Israel, but I’m putting it here because it’s about an Islamic regime that’s seeing some disruption right now – Turkey:
The arrest of the mayor of Turkey’s largest city in a dawn raid last week was a watershed moment in the country’s prolonged shift away from democracy. Opponents of president Recep Tayyip Erdo?an fear it is a move to sideline the sole challenger capable of defeating him in upcoming elections, expected before 2028.
On Saturday, protests in support of ?mamo?lu erupted in Istanbul – where flares and stones where thrown at police, who responded with pepper spray – while in Ankara, the capital, police used water cannon and tear gas on demonstrators.
The interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, said 323 people had been detained in connection with an investigation into the Istanbul municipality on Saturday night, following protests. …
Within days, what began as protests in response to ?mamo?lu’s detention has grown into something more. “This is bigger than ?mamo?lu. It’s about a fight for democracy, law and equal rights,” said Azra as demonstrators massed around her. …
Supporters of the mayor said 300,000 people joined the demonstration in Istanbul on Friday night, while video showed protesters taking to the streets and clashing with the police in major towns and cities across the country.
Much of the rest of the article, which is in The Guardian, blames Erdogan’s actions on Trump. I kid you not.
By the way, Erdogan is the guy who famously said, back when he was mayor of Istanbul:
Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.
Street demonstrations are all very well and good, but they lead to nothing expect arrests and violence against the demonstrators unless and until the police or the army decide not to fight them but to join them in toppling the government.
Democracy is like a window, nice to look through, but not so nice as an exit?
yes the grauniad, has one setting, even when the facts are against the premise,
Erdogan was Obamas favorite leader, until 2016, for reasons that might be clear,
Defenestration. One of my all time favorite words.
The fact that very large demonstrations are going on all around Turkey, and continuing, may be significant. As you say, all this means nothing unless the police and military turn and side against the government, or at least stand off.
Istanbul, on both sides of the Bosporus, has long been a modernist stronghold. Ongoing protests in Ankara and on the Black Sea coast are a new aspect.
On Egypt: If the U.S. actually succeeds in stopping the Houthi blockage of the Red Sea, Egypt should be greatly in our debt. The Egyptian budget relies heavily on tourism and Suez Canal fees.
for similar reasons, I’m not terribly sanguine about these new comers from the other end of the sinai,
erdogan used the grey wolves bogeymen ergonokon, to purge most of the institutional kemalists in the Army and the security services, his wingman was the late gulen, who was purged in the next round,
even though his faith is some brand of sufi, he does allow too much of the islamists, abdullah bozkurt, a dissident in norway, has pointed this out,
his influence is seen in the enclaves in Germany and France,
some western analyst like Mike Doran, has a blind spot about this matter, even though they are pretty solid on most other things,
so Al Sharaa the former Al Jolani, is sketchy in my view,
This has been a troubling theme during Erdogan’s tenure. Turkey is a predominantly Muslim nation. But it is a secular nation and not an Islamic state. I think this goes back to Ataturk.
Under Erdogan Turkey has become increasingly more Islamic.
Sanity podcast interviews Mike Doran: https://youtu.be/N9r7pLyHwCE
“all this means nothing unless the police and military turn and side against the government, or at least stand off.” Kate
The operative principle required to render legitimacy to governance is Consent of the Governed. Any police or military force that enforces the edicts of a regime that gravely and consistently violates that principle is a participant in tyranny. The international court at Nuremberg established that “only following orders” is not a legally valid defense.
The Erdogan regime doesn’t care about international courts or the consent of the governed.
“Consent of the governed” is something that you only know definitively when it has been revoked.
There is no dictator or totalitarian state that can rule without at least the passive consent of the governed. There are never enough thugs to force everybody to conform. People will put up with a lot of bad predictability before they start trying to overthrow the government with its attendant violent instability.
@Rick67:But it is a secular nation and not an Islamic state. I think this goes back to Ataturk.
That was a top-down imposition by the people who seized power in 1922, cementing their rule with genocide and ethnic cleansing, and the secularizing and Turkification reforms had a purpose of destroying the Ottoman elite and replacing it with Ataturk loyalists. I don’t know that Turks are broadly loyal to that vision any more than the French were when their revolution forcibly secularized France.
“Ataturk” means “Father of the Turks”, and the name was imposed by law in 1934. Imagine if Congress had voted to change George Washington’s name to “Father of the Americans” and we all had to call him that.
Way back in the eighties, when I evaluated proposed air defense systems, I noted Turkey’s new system was mostly oriented towards Greece.
Trumpo-Vision Terrific!
“This has been a troubling theme during Erdogan’s tenure. Turkey is a predominantly Muslim nation. But it is a secular nation and not an Islamic state. I think this goes back to Ataturk.
Under Erdogan Turkey has become increasingly more Islamic.” –Rick67
That’s probably _inevitable_ , given Turkey’s fertility dynamics. For years, the more Westernized regions of Turkey have picked up on the Western habit of lower birth rates, which means that the voting balance tips over time toward a more fundamentalist Islam.
Turkey has always been a schizophrenic country, ever since Ataturk. As Niketas Choniates correctly observed, the Turkish Republic was imposed from above by a half-westernized cohort of rebels out of the rubble of the old Ottoman Empire. The cultural ‘hard wiring’ of Turkey is Islamic, with a Western political overlay. .
Given that politics is down-stream from culture, as Andrew Breitbart liked to point out, it’s probably more or less Turkey’s natural flow to move toward an Islam-shaped order. The best the West can probably hope for is to influence it toward a more moderate and democratic form (which is possible, historically there have been both hard-core and moderate Islamic regimes). But even a genuinely democratic Turkish Republic is going to have a very strong Islamic influence, by the nature of the case.
(One of the mistakes the West made in both Afghanistan and Iraq was to try to export a Western hypersecular vision, in line with what Western elites believe in, to societies hardwired to reject it. Instead of trying to turn them into secular states, we should have been trying to set up more amenable Islamic regimes to take the place of the previous states. That would have likely doable.)
@ HC68:
Yes, the demographics of Turkey seem to lead to Islamic preferences, but I wonder about the trade-off between the Turks and the Kurdish population growing in the eastern regions? Any thoughts on if ethnicity will play out to the Turks disadvantage?
“… we should have been trying to set up more amenable Islamic regimes to take the place of the previous states. That would have likely [been] doable.” Highly desirable if possible compared to what we ended up with, but I am skeptical the real requirements of separating religion and devotion to the Quran from “all men are created equal” natural rights and politics would be possible.
I could try to imagine political units based on tribes and clans rather than geographic areas to obtain some form of “representation”, and that is probably in sync with various tribal councils in the past, etc. But as we know, separation of powers is a tricky concept to implement without a full discussion of its benefits and limits and achieving consent might still be problematic.
If you have some ideas of how that would/might work (in Turkey or Iraq), I welcome the opportunity to learn about them.
Re: Turkey / Islamic preferences
It’s a sore point with me. I must point out that historically almost all of Turkey was once part of the Byzantine Empire, which means the Eastern Orthodox Church and therefore Christian.
Constantinople was the Rome of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Constantinople is now called Istanbul.
If you know your New Testament, you know many of the major cities in the area we now call Turkey:
* Nicaea
* Ephesus
* Tarsus
* Antioch
The Byzantine Empire fell to the Muslims after being debilitated by wars with Persia and the Justinian plague.
Hell no, I ain’t forgetting!
@ huxley > “The Byzantine Empire fell to the Muslims after being debilitated by wars with Persia and the Justinian plague.”
You might enjoy a historical novel of the Empire by Robert Graves, called “Count Belisarius.” The Count was an actual person, actually a military super-general whose “secular” rank was at about that level in a European system.
I don’t know how accurate it is, but I like the way Graves used a rather sardonic “personal memoir” of the count’s wife’s top-level servant (a eunuch, of course) to tell the story. Even the accounts he gave of the somewhat interminable wars were interesting, to me anyway. The politics driving them were, well, Byzantine.
Aesop. Agree on Graves. But, given his life, sardonic is to be expected. Got his autobio in used paperback half a century back. “Good Bye To All That”. Front cover pic of healthy, smart, intense young man from head up. . Back cover, same pose, ravaged by events. WW I being the culprit.
Belisarius is a good book,, although I don’t recall hearing of throwing darts for heavy cavalry anywhere else in mil hist.
A number of Christian documents are to or from cities now in Turkey. And that’s back to Biblical era stuff.
The Galatians were a Celtic group, part of the earlier Geek wars…some how…who had maintained their identity and required extra attention from the disciples. Same as the Galicians in Spain. I’ve heard of Galician pipes–bag or other wise—and I believe they may still be in use. Not sure about the same in the Turkish version.
Can you have a “nice” Islam without apostasy? See lots of Douglas Murray on youtube.
@ Richard – do/did you have the first version of his autobiography, or the later edited one, with some of the more interesting parts of his relationships removed?
IIRC, Graves tried to recall all the earlier ones.
I read the older one in our local community college library probably 40 years ago, when I went back to re-read, it was gone.
I hope a librarian spotted its rarity and pulled it for conservation, and not to trash it because it was so old.