"Gaza should semain an island of ruins for decades", says Israeli Energy Minister
Cohen outlined the army's two main objectives in Gaza: securing the release of hostages and compelling Hamas to surrender.
Despite the potential for a ceasefire, Israel has said it will maintain a presence in Rafah and establish a 'collection camp' as part of efforts to deport Palestinians abroad.
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Middle East Eye
an hour ago
- Middle East Eye
In praising Israel's 'dirty work', Merz exposes the orientalist roots of German genocidal Zionism
At the G7 summit in Canada last month, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was asked by a German journalist whether Israel might again carry out military strikes on Iran. The journalist described such actions as Drecksarbeit - "dirty work" - a term that, as the Lemkin Institute points out, was once used by Nazi officials "to justify their actions" and is steeped in the fascist, dehumanising language of genocide. Merz embraced the framing enthusiastically, declaring: "This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us." He then added, with perfect imperial clarity: "The Iranian regime has brought death and destruction to the world." This is, of course, in stark contrast to Germany under Hitler and Israel throughout its history - both of which have brought nothing but life, liberty and joy to the world, especially to Palestinians! Merz's remarks exposed what use Israel is to Germany and to Europe more broadly: to do the dirty work they can no longer commit directly, straight from the horse's mouth. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters These psychopaths run the world - and they think they can define it too. When Israel slaughters tens of thousands of Palestinians, it does so not only with Germany's blessing, but as part of a continuum of German state violence Should we be surprised that Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels - or Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir - have emerged from this very culture, this very sentiment, this very language and this very vocabulary? As former Chancellor Angela Merkel famously proclaimed, Israel is integral to Germany's "reason of state", with its security tied to Germany's very existence. In other words, without Israel, there would be no Germany. One must take such declarations seriously. When Israel slaughters tens of thousands of Palestinians, it does so not only with Germany's blessing, but as part of a continuum of German state violence - a genocide of Palestinians built atop the genocide of Jews, and alongside the earlier genocide of Africans in Namibia. The former German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock carried that same legacy when she defended Israel's mass murder of Palestinians with a passion reminiscent of her Nazi predecessor, Joachim von Ribbentrop. In a just world, these people would be on trial at the International Court of Justice. German Islamophobia German genocidal Zionism - now openly championed by elected officials, unelected journalists and popular neofascist parties alike - is rooted in German Islamophobia, which in turn draws from a long tradition of German Orientalism, and from "Islamic Studies" in particular. How Germany is manufacturing the Islamist bogeyman Read More » I have already argued that Germany's genocidal Zionism can be traced back to its colonial history and philosophical racism, from Hegel to Habermas. Here, I wish to draw a more direct line between this genocidal Zionism and Germany's tradition of Orientalism. The aim of "Islamic Studies" was never to "understand" Islam or Muslims, but to silence and pacify them - to treat them as oriental objects of curiosity, while denying them moral and political agency. Reports of rising Islamophobia in Germany are consistent and well-documented. The rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party did not come out of nowhere. It reflects proto-fascist tendencies, rooted in Nazism, with broad support and severe consequences across the country. There is a prevailing hatred of Muslims within Germany's ruling regime - as across much of Europe - and Merz's vulgar racism emerges directly from it. The swastikas may have been scrubbed from Germany's public spaces, but they remain carved and tattooed in the mind of its chancellor. Jews may have been replaced with Muslims, but the genocidal instinct endures. Each time Merz opens his mouth to defend Israeli genocide in Palestine, or Israel's attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Iran, you can hear Hitler screaming in the tone of his voice. Orientalist foundations Why, one might ask, does a country with an extensive history of Islamwissenschaft - the academic study of Islam - harbour such visceral hatred for Muslims? Are Germans not reading their own leading scholars of Islam, Iran, and the Arab world? There's the rub. The rise of Islamophobia in Germany - and Europe at large - is not despite the long history of Orientalism and Islamic Studies, but precisely because of it. How so? Allow me to explain. We must dismantle the entire regime des savoirs of Europe - Germany in particular - through which the West has sought to decode and dominate the world. We must then recode the world beyond and after that colonial regime of knowledge. The problem is not only the contempt Orientalists have shown for Muslims and their histories, theology and scholarship, nor their disregard for the existential terror inflicted on them by Israel. It is also the epistemic insularity of their field: a wilful ignorance, or condescending dismissal, of work produced in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and other non-European languages. Most of these European Orientalists write solely for one another. They have no organic link or moral investment in the countries, cultures or communities they study. They ignore a vast body of scholarship in the languages they claim to know, treating texts not as subjects of interpretation, but as objects of pathological curiosity. Equally troubling, this Orientalism, as a colonial mode of knowledge production, remains impervious to intellectual developments in the social sciences and humanities, even in European contexts. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's war on Gaza They operate like members of an Orientalist fraternity or country club, complete with secret handshakes and absurd rites of initiation: how to place diacritical marks on Arabic or Persian words, how to cite one another, how to ignore relevant scholarship in the original languages they pretend to know. We should therefore read them for what they are: not authorities, but objects of anthropological curiosity - not to learn anything serious from them, but to study them as a pathologist would the symptoms of a terminal disease. It is worth asking what compels figures like Patricia Crone (1945–2015) or Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), two notorious European Orientalists, to devote their lives to studying something they so clearly detested. This, too, is a dark and twisted pathology that must one day be examined. Meanwhile, Joseph Massad, a scholar of Arab politics and intellectual history, offers in Islam in Liberalism (2014) a compelling account of how "the West" fabricates and sustains its fantasy of freedom, equality and tolerance by manufacturing an imagined alterity - "Islam" - which it portrays as oppressive, intolerant, cruel and homophobic. Remove that falsifying mirror and "the West" is left flailing, stripped of the self-delusional fantasies through which it recognises itself. Western fantasies The pathology did not end with the classical period of European Orientalism, best analysed by Edward Said. It continues apace in today's European manifestations of Orientalism - particularly its Germanic variations - evident in such useless and clueless gems as Annäherung und Distanz: Schia, Azhar und die islamische Ökumene im 20. Jahrhundert (1996) and Die Schia und die Koranfälschung (2018). The effect of these 'studies' is akin to misogynists writing about women, or Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein co-authoring a study on the girls they abused These works aim to sow hatred and hostility between Sunnis and Shia, just as British colonialists once incited Hindus against Muslims in India, or Catholics against Protestants in Ireland. Said is sometimes criticised for not engaging with German Orientalism in his transformative scholarship. Whatever his reasons, I believe he did them a great favour. Had he included them, the organic link between German Orientalism and German fascism, colonial violence in Africa, and present-day Islamophobia and support for Palestinian genocide would have been even more fully exposed. Since the publication of Said's 1978 book Orientalism, a significant body of serious scholarship on German Orientalism has emerged, including Nina Berman's Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne (1997) and Suzanne L. Marchand's German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (2010). Paramount in these studies is the recognition that Orientalism and colonialism were not accidentally connected, but epistemically intertwined - not always through overt malice, but through structures of domination, fascination and exoticism. These systems operated for the benefit of the observer, always at the expense of the observed. You may think these "studies" are merely useless, but they are worse than useless. They are instrumental in keeping Muslims as Orientals - stripped of moral and intellectual agency, reduced to objects of juvenile European curiosity. The effect is akin to misogynists writing about women, or Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein co-authoring a study on the girls they abused. It is like white supremacists writing about Black people, or Immanuel Kant dehumanising Africans as constitutionally stupid and subhuman. Germany's silence on Gaza while children starve reveals its dark colonial secret Jurgen Mackert Read More » Years ago, at the Venice Biennale, I saw an African artist with white ink scrawled across his bare chest: "Please do not study me!" Indeed, European and American anthropologists and Orientalists have studied us enough in their hegemonic pursuits. It is time we return the favour and study them as they have studied us - not to subjugate, but to liberate them from their psychotic delusions, ingrained racism, colonial conquest, and murderous domination of others. Today, Israel is the state-of-the-art laboratory for the accumulated terror Europe has unleashed upon the world. This is what Merz celebrates when he says Israel is doing its "dirty work". The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Gulf Today
4 hours ago
- Gulf Today
Israel says Gaza got 120 trucks of aid on day one of pause
Israel said on Monday that more than 120 truckloads of food aid were distributed by the UN and aid agencies in the Gaza Strip on the first day of a promised limited break in fighting. On Sunday, Israel declared a "tactical pause" in military operations in part of Gaza and promised to open secure routes for aid, urging humanitarian groups to step up food distribution. "Over 120 trucks were collected and distributed yesterday by the UN and international organisations," said COGAT, an Israeli defence ministry body overseeing civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories. "An additional 180 trucks entered Gaza and are now awaiting collection and distribution, along with hundreds of others still queued for UN pickup," COGAT said in a post on X. Separately, Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have conducted parachute air drops of smaller quantities of aid. A boy receives treatment for an injury following Israeli bombardment on an area where people displaced by conflict were sheltering in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis, at Nasser Medical Complex on Monday. Agence France-Presse More than two million Palestinians live in Gaza and, before the eruption of the latest 21-month-old conflict between Israel and Hamas, it took roughly 500 trucks per day of commercial trade and humanitarian aid to supply the territory. In recent weeks UN agencies have been warning of a life-threatening famine as aid supplies dry up, and international pressure has been building for a ceasefire to allow a massive relief operation. Hunger 'not a weapon of war' Israel's government, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, furiously denies that it is using hunger as a weapon of war, and instead accuses the aid agencies of failing to pick up and distribute aid delivered to Gaza's border crossing points. "More consistent collection and distribution by UN agencies and international organisations equals more aid reaching those who need it most in Gaza," COGAT said. Agence France-Presse
Dubai Eye
4 hours ago
- Dubai Eye
Houthis threaten to target ships linked to Israeli port trade
Yemen's Houthis said they would target any ships belonging to companies that do business with Israeli ports, regardless of their nationalities, as part of what they called the fourth phase of their military operations against Israel. In a televised statement, the Houthis' military spokesperson warned that ships would be attacked if companies ignored their warnings, regardless of their destination. "The Yemeni Armed Forces call on all countries, if they want to avoid this escalation, to pressure the enemy to halt its aggression and lift the blockade on the Gaza Strip," he added. Since Israel's war on Gaza began in October 2023, the Houthis have been attacking ships they deem as bound or linked to Israel in what they say are acts of solidarity with Palestinians. In May, the US announced a surprise deal with the Houthis where it agreed to stop a bombing campaign against them in return for an end to shipping attacks, though the Houthis said the deal did not include sparing Israel.
