Complacency has been the hallmark of NATO expansion. Over time, it has even become a form of derision, notably directed against Russia. As with many historical matters, records ignored can be records revisited, the second time around sometimes nastier than the first.
With the Ukraine conflict raging, a few of Russia’s neighbours have reconsidered their position of military non-alignment and neutrality. Last month, both Sweden and Finland submitted membership applications to formally join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
This reconsideration must be taken with the heaviest of qualifications. Sweden and Finland, while they have claimed neutrality and non-alignment status, have hardly been neutral on the subject of cooperation with NATO. Since the 1990s, Sweden has become an increasingly important partner of the alliance, using its military in concert with NATO exercises. Finland, with its 280,000 troops and 900,000 reservists, also boasts an interoperability function with the alliance.
Admission to the security club does, however, come with the requirement of unanimity from current members. As things would have it, one country has shown little enthusiasm to acquiesce to the plan. Turkey, at times the large fly in the pact’s ointment, sees an opportunity to extract concessions and muddy the pool of consensus. With the Russian invasion, the Erdoğan regime has broadened its military and political efforts against its long-term enemies, the Kurds. Militarily, Turkish forces have intensified efforts in Kurdish-run parts in northeast Syria. Politically, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hopes to have Sweden and Finland surrender a number of Kurdish dissidents, or terrorists, as he prefers to call them.
The point for Turkey regarding the Kurdish issue is far from new. In 2009, Erdoğan kicked up a fuss by blocking the appointment of former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO chief, citing Denmark’s sympathies for “Kurdish terrorists”. He also accused Rasmussen of failing to heed Turkish requests to ban ROJ TV, a Danish-based station linked to the Kurdistan’s Workers’ Party, the PKK. The appointment did eventually come through after much haggling and a solemn promise from President Barack Obama that a Turk would be given a prominent leadership role.
Be it NATO relations with Israel, efforts to bolster Eastern European states against Moscow, or the acquisition of Russia’s S-400 missile defence system, Erdoğan has proved a determined spoiler. In 2020, he sorely tested NATO relations by teasing Greece with a gas-exploration ship backed by fighter jet support. The Oruç Reis was sent to waters in the East Mediterranean claimed by Turkey, with the purpose of exploring hydrocarbon reserves. France deployed its own ships in support of Greece. NATO had gotten into a squabble with itself.
The PKK continues its unrelenting guerrilla campaign on behalf of the large Kurdish minority within Turkey, one it has waged since 1984. While the party is listed as a terrorist group by the EU and the United States, Sweden and Finland have generally opposed extradition of its members and sympathisers. For its part, Sweden has welcomed somewhere in the order of 100,000 Kurds since the 1970s. Erdoğan, in typically blunt fashion, has accused Sweden of being a “hatchery” for “terrorist” organisations.
Ankara is also unlikely to have forgotten the condemnation by Finland and Sweden of its military incursion into Syria in 2019, a move that was accompanied by restrictions on weapons sales.
Last month, Turkey’s Justice Ministry noted the rejection by Helsinki and Stockholm of the request “for the extradition of people with links to the PKK and Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ)”. In terms of numbers, six members of the PKK and six from FETÖ have been sought for the last five years, while a further 21 “suspects” have bulked the list.
The affair has become something of a spectacle. Sweden has extended an arm to Ankara, hoping to pacify Erdoğan even as he tells members of his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) about the devious way Stockholm and Helsinki have tried to rebrand the PKK in other theatres, such as Syria.
The propitiating move has caused tremors of worry within Sweden. “If you want to sell everything for NATO membership,” stormed Swedish lawmaker Amineh Kakabaveh, “then go ahead but I think it’s awful.”
A note of determined stroppiness has also been struck. “Let’s not fall into Erdoğan’s trap,” urged 17 cultural and literary figures in an opinion piece published by Dagens Nyheter. Other Swedish papers, including Aftonbladet, Expressen and Svenka Dagbladet also ran the piece titled “Do not hand over the publishers to Erdogan!” The key concern: the demand from Ankara that various journalists, writers and publishers be surrendered to Turkish authorities.
This point is particularly biting, given that many of these figures have become Swedish citizens. But it is also of concern given Turkey’s notoriously poor record in treating members of the fourth estate. The stern op-ed recalls “the attacks and assassination attempts against prominent journalists, Can Dündar, in Istanbul, Erk Acarer in Berlin, and Ahmet Dönmez in Stockholm.”
There is a certain irony in the Swedish and Finnish decision, not least in claimed efforts to bolster their security against an authoritarian Russia. NATO, despite supposedly promoting liberal democratic values, has members (Turkey and Hungary spring to mind) who are much at odds with them.
An authoritarian Turkey, argue the 17 signatories, is fiendishly attempting to insinuate its own values into the Swedish political and legal system. The Turkish leader’s “political manoeuvre to extradite the people who took refuge in Sweden to be free as an attempt to export his own understanding of freedom of expression to our country, Sweden.”
Despite the tangle, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is convinced “that we will be able to address the concerns that Turkey has expressed in a way that doesn’t delay the membership”. In the final heave-ho, all eyes will be on what concessions will go Erdoğan’s way.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
The Israeli Supreme Court has decided that the Palestinian region of Masafer Yatta, located in the southern hills of Hebron, is to be entirely appropriated by the Israeli military and that a population of over 1,000 Palestinians is to be expelled.
The Israeli Court decision, on May 4, was hardly shocking. Israel’s military occupation does not only consist of soldiers with guns, but elaborate political, military, economic and legal structures, dedicated to the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements and the slow – and sometimes not-so-slow – expulsion of the Palestinians.
When Palestinians state that the Nakba, or Catastrophe – which led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel on its ruins – is a continuous, unfinished project, they mean exactly that. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the endless torment of Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab and, now in Masafer Yatta, are all testaments to this reality.
However, Masafer Yatta is particularly unique. In the case of occupied East Jerusalem, for example, Israel has made a fallacious, ahistorical claim that Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people. It combined its unsubstantiated narrative with military action on the ground, followed by a systematic process that aimed at increasing the Jewish population and ejecting the original native inhabitants of the city. Such notions as ‘Greater Jerusalem’ and legal and political structures, like that of the Jerusalem Master Plan 2000, have all contribute towards turning the once absolute Palestinian majority in Jerusalem into a shrinking minority.
With the Naqab, Israel’s similar objectives were put into motion as early as 1948, and again in 1951. This process of ethnically cleansing the natives remains in effect to this day.
Though Masafer Yatta is part of the same colonial designs, its uniqueness stems from the fact that it is situated in Area C of the occupied West Bank.
In July 2020, Israel purportedly decided to postpone its plans to annex nearly 40% of the West Bank, perhaps fearing a Palestinian rebellion and unwanted international condemnation. However, the plan continued in practice.
Moreover, a wholesome annexation of West Bank regions would mean that Israel would become responsible for the welfare of entire Palestinian communities. As a settler-colonial state, Israel wants the land, but not the people. In Tel Aviv’s calculation, annexation without the expulsion of the population could lead to a demographic nightmare; thus, Israel’s need to reinvent its annexation plan.
Though Israel has supposedly delayed the de jure annexation, it continued with a de facto form of annexation, one that has generated little international media attention.
The Israeli Court’s decision regarding Masafer Yatta, which is already being carried out with the expulsion of the Najjar family on May 11, is an important step towards the annexation of Area C. If Israel can evict the residents of twelve villages, with a population of over 1,000 Palestinians, unhindered, more such expulsions are anticipated, not only south of Hebron, but throughout the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian villagers of Masafer Yatta and their legal representation know very well that no real ‘justice’ can be obtained from the Israeli court system. They continue to fight the legal war, anyway, in the hope that a combination of factors, including solidarity in Palestine and pressure from the outside, can ultimately succeed in compelling Israel to delay its planned destruction and Judaization of the whole region.
However, it seems that Palestinian efforts, which have been underway since 1997, are failing. The Israeli Supreme Court decision is predicated on the erroneous and utterly bizarre notion that the Palestinians of that area could not demonstrate that they belonged there prior to 1980, when the Israeli government decided to turn the area into ‘Firing Zone 918’.
Sadly, the Palestinian defense was partly based on documents from the Jordanian era and official United Nations records that reported on Israeli attacks on several Masafer Yatta villages in 1966. The Jordanian government, which administered the West Bank until 1967, compensated some of the residents for the loss of their ‘stone houses’ – not tents – animals and other properties that were destroyed by the Israeli military. Palestinians tried to use this evidence to show that they have existed, not as nomadic people but as rooted communities. This was unconvincing to the Israeli court, which favored the military’s argument over the rights of the native population.
Israeli firing zones occupy nearly 18 percent of the total size of the West Bank. It is one of several ploys used by the Israeli government to lay a legal claim on Palestinian land and to, eventually, years later, claim legal ownership as well. Many of these firing zones exist in Area C, and are being used as one of the Israeli methods aimed at officially appropriating Palestinian land with the support of the Israeli courts.
Now that the Israeli military has managed to acquire Masafer Yatta – a region spanning 32 to 56 sq km – based on completely flimsy excuses, it will become much easier in ensuring the ethnic cleansing of many similar communities in various parts of occupied Palestine.
While discussions and media coverage of Israel’s annexation scheme in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley have largely subsided, Israel is now preparing for a gradual annexation scheme. Instead of annexing 40% of the West Bank all at once, Israel is now annexing smaller tracts of land and regions, like Masafer Yatta, separately. Tel Aviv will eventually connect all these annexed areas through Jewish-only bypass roads to larger Jewish settlement infrastructures in the West Bank.
Not only does this alternative strategy allow Israel to avoid international criticism, it will also permit Israel to eventually annex Palestinian land while incrementally expelling Palestinians, helping Tel Aviv prevent demographic imbalances before they occur.
What is happening in Masafer Yatta is not only the largest ethnic cleansing scheme to be carried out by Israel since 1967, but the move should be considered a first step in a much larger scheme of illegal land appropriation, ethnic cleansing and official mass annexation.
Israel must not succeed in Masafer Yatta, because if it does, its original, mass annexation scheme will become a reality in no time.
– Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
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