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39 articles · Writing for PUGAT 2021–2026 · 5 series
From the outside the SDF may look like a homogeneous structure, but it is a fragile coalition resting on Arab tribes. At a time when US support is weakening and power has changed hands in Damascus, this alliance is unravelling.
The clash with an ISIS cell in Yalova shook the perception that “the organisation is no longer effective”. Having lost territory, ISIS is in a phase of “strategic patience” with silent, localised cells; the real question is when, and to whose benefit, these cells are set in motion.
The history of humanity is the history of migrations. From the journey of the Jewish people from Babylon to Europe to the Hijra and the migration of the Turks to Anatolia, every migration breaks the shell of the old identity and begins a new birth.
Fatih Altaylı’s 1997 interview with Öcalan was published 28 years later. The leader who said “I will not touch Turkey’s borders” turned, on İmralı, into a theorist of stateless democracy: contradiction or strategic evolution?
Among the Eastern Jews who emigrated to Israel from the Middle East, the Kurdish Jews were a small community with a large influence. The regional knowledge they brought from the mountains left a lasting mark on Israel’s security thinking and its relationship with the Kurds.
Israeli politics is usually discussed along the axes of right and left, religious and secular; yet there is a third axis that deeply affects security policy: the social and political weight of Mizrahi Jews.
The Ashkenazi cadre of the newly founded Israel was a stranger to the Arab world. Mizrahi Jews who spoke Arabic as their mother tongue became intelligence’s most valuable resource, but at the price of having their identity instrumentalised.
In 1948 world Jewry was associated with the suffering of Europe. In the same years, hundreds of thousands of Jews who had lived in the Arab world for centuries also migrated to Israel; this silent migration still shapes Israeli society today.
Druzism is a belief system, but with their strong identity the Druze are perceived almost as a separate people. With influence far beyond their numbers in Lebanon, Syria and Israel, this community holds a critical position in Syria’s new balances.
Behind the debate over the lieutenants lies a deeper issue: the militarism Turkey has carried since the late Ottoman period. A reading that stretches from the birth of the idea of the nation in arms to the coups.
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