Palestinian Information Center – January 9, 2025
Jerusalem in 2024: Settlement, Judaization, and growing threats to Al-Aqsa Mosque
Between Judaization, settlement, killing, and daily arrests, the assaults by Israeli occupation forces in the holy city of Jerusalem varied throughout 2024, attempting to impose a new reality in the city. These assaults included intensification of settlement activity in Palestinian neighborhoods, the displacement of families from their homes in East Jerusalem, as well as a rise in targeted killings of Palestinian youths, accompanied by daily arrest campaigns. These assaults represent part of a systematic policy aimed at Judaizing the city and altering its historical and geographical features to become a unified capital of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians.
In its annual report for 2024, the Jerusalem Governorate highlighted the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation authorities in the holy city and revealed a series of violations affecting various aspects of life in Jerusalem, targeting land, people, and holy sites.
Martyrs
The Jerusalem Governorate recorded the martyrdom of 35 individuals in 2024, including 7 from outside the city and 14 children, the youngest being 3-year-old Ruqayyah Abu Dahok. The occupation also continued to hold the bodies of 45 martyrs until the end of the year.
Continuous targeting of Jerusalem’s symbols
The occupation authorities continued to target national figures in Jerusalem. Notably, this included targeting the Governor of Jerusalem, Adnan Ghaith, who has faced house arrest since 2022, and the preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, who has been arrested and banned from the Mosque multiple times.
Settler assaults
During 2024, the report recorded 159 assaults carried out by settlers, including physical assaults, indicating an increase in the pace of violence. In contrast, the occupation authorities continued to support and protect settlers from legal accountability, encouraging them to commit more crimes.
Arrests and pursuits
The occupation authorities continued their repressive campaigns in Jerusalem, carrying out 1,287 arrests, including 112 children and 65 women. These arrests came as part of a collective targeting policy against Jerusalemites, with the report noting 411 actual prison sentences and 280 administrative detention orders.
Crimes against Al-Aqsa Mosque
Al-Aqsa Mosque continues to suffer from ongoing attacks by the occupation authorities and settlers. In 2024, 60,792 settlers stormed the Mosque, many of whom performed Talmudic rituals and desecrated the holy site. The Mosque witnessed a dangerous transformation with attempts by the occupation to impose a new political reality, exemplified by incursions by ministers and Knesset members into the Mosque’s courtyards, in addition to extremist statements from Ben Gvir about building a synagogue inside Al-Aqsa.
Excavations
The occupation continued to carry out excavation work beneath the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, leading to the collapse of many trees and stones within the sacred site. These excavations targeting the Mosque’s foundations are part of a policy of Judaizing the city and tightening the noose on Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Crimes against Christians
Attacks on Christian holy sites in Jerusalem continue, as settlers targeted Christian places of worship and clergy. In February, they assaulted German monk Nikodemus Schnabel. Additionally, the occupation authorities prevented Palestinian Christians from accessing Jerusalem during religious holidays.
Destruction and demolition
The occupation authorities continue their policy of demolishing homes in occupied Jerusalem, with the report documenting 380 demolition and bulldozing operations in 2024. These demolitions, which have seen a marked increase in recent years, are part of a policy of forced displacement and Judaization.
Demolition notices
The occupation continued its policy of threats and demolitions, delivering over 130 demolition notices across Jerusalem, particularly in areas the occupation seeks to control, reaffirming the policy of displacement and Judaization practiced by the occupation authorities.
https://english.palinfo.com/jerusalem/2025/01/09/331920/
‘Dormant volcano’: IRGC unveils new subterranean missile facility
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has unveiled one of its new underground missile bases, described as a “missile city”, amid the Israeli regime’s heightened escalation in the region and threats against the country.
The sprawling missile base, accommodating advanced Iranian projectiles, was unveiled by IRGC Chief Commander Major General Hossein Salami and Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, according to a report by Tasnim news agency late on Friday.
Broadcast by the national TV, the report on the footage from the subterranean facility said the base lodges such high-tech missiles as Emad, Qadr and Qiam which run on liquid fuel and that 90 percent of the other sections of the missile city were not shown for security reasons.
The advanced projectiles were used in Iran’s stunning missile attacks against Israeli military sites in military operations code-named True Promise 1 and 2 in April and October 2024.
Describing the missile base as a “dormant volcano deep in the heart of mountains,” the national TV report said, “The volcano lying under these mountains can erupt in the shortest time possible.”
During the tour of the missile facility, Salami praised the IRGC forces involved in the two anti-Israel attacks and rejected the enemy’s mistaken belief that Iran’s capability to produce missiles had been harmed.
“Every day, the number of systems and missiles is augmented in the far corners of this land. Maybe the enemy thought that our production power has stagnated, but the growth rate of our missile power is up to date,” the IRGC chief said.
“All components of our power are improving, but missiles, their capacity and capability are increasing and improving every day both in quantity and quality and in efficiency and design.”
Earlier in the day, Salami assertedﾠthat the Islamic Republic has more missiles than it can store, dismissing the enemy’s propaganda about the weakening of Iran’s armed forces following attacks by Israel on Iran and its regional allies.
Salami added that the IRGC Aerospace Force would unveil more new missiles and missile facilities in the near future.
The Armed Forces, including the IRGC and the country’s Army, have been continuously enhancing their military hardware and combat readiness in line with the directives of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
The forces have vowed to defend the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of the threats by the Iranian nation’s enemies.
The Islamic Republic launched some 200 missiles at the Israeli entity’s military, and espionage and intelligence bases all over the occupied territories on October 1 as part of Operation True Promise II.
The operation came in response to the regime’s assassinations of senior leaders of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance and a senior IRGC commander.
In the early hours of October 26, Israel targeted two Iranian border provinces, Ilam and Khuzestan, as well as Tehran. The country’s integrated air defense system successfully intercepted and countered the aggression.
Iran has said it will respond to the recent Israeli act of aggression against the country and will not abandon its rights.
Informed Comment – January 11, 2025
The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf
Review of Allen James Fromherz, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024).
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– Historically known as the Persian Gulf, the body of water stretching from Iraq on the northwest to Oman on the southeast has increasingly been called the “Arab Gulf” since the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the Gulf was the scene of military attacks by Iran and Iraq against merchant vessels in what was known as the “Tanker War.” More recently, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has occasionally seized ships transiting the Gulf’s waters. In April 2024, for instance, the IRGC took hold of a container ship with alleged ties to Israel as a response to the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
The Gulf might have a contested terminology and a recent past of significant military tensions. And yet, focusing too much on these conflictual dynamics would obscure the broad contours of the Gulf’s history. This history, explains Allen James Fromherz in his book “The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present”, has been largely dominated by personal and commercial interactions across the Gulf’s shores and beyond. The Gulf has historically been more of a channel between lands than an unbridgeable rift, argues Fromherz, a historian and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University.
Many authors would be daunted by the task of synthetizing over four millennia of history in a geographical area that encompasses eight different modern states. But Fromherz rises to the challenge. The way he structures the book certainly helps. Fromherz does not present a comprehensive historical account—this would have been an impossibility in less than 300 pages. Instead, he chronologically presents the stories of six different port cities in the Gulf that, in turn, open the door to exploring different historical eras in the region.
“The Center of the World” starts in Dilmun, an ancient kingdom centered in today’s Bahrain, and moves to Basra or Hormuz before concluding with the modern metropolis of Dubai. The centrality of the Gulf for world history, notes Fromherz, is related to the region being a link between the Mediterranean and India via the Fertile Crescent. It was in the Gulf that trade first emerged and later, in the second half of the eighth century, Basra became “Islam’s economic and cultural powerhouse.”[1]
“Geography is destiny” is a sentence attributed to Ibn Khaldun, the Arab scholar born in the fourteenth century. It is perhaps no coincidence that Fromherz is also a biographer of the North African historian and philosopher. In “The Center of the World”, Fromherz greatly relies on geography to explain the Gulf’s history. The Seleucids, the Parthians, the Romans, the Sasanians, and the Ottomans, all failed to dominate the Gulf. This, explains Fromherz, is connected to the Gulf’s three natural barriers. On the Arabian side, vast deserts. On the Persian side, high mountains. And north of Basra, extensive marshes. When the Iranian Sasanian Empire tried to collect taxes from the people living in the Gulf, they would often disappear into the mountains or find temporary refuge in desert oases.
Meanwhile, before the advent of modern topography, the Gulf’s coasts offered small boats too many places to hide for powerful fleets to dominate the waters. The British Empire, the first to accurately chart the geography of the Gulf in the second half of the nineteenth century, was not interested in territorial domination there. To British eyes, the Gulf was a trade area and a vital link between Britain and territories where London wanted to exert direct control, such as India.
Lacking fertile lands to grow agricultural surpluses and develop large urban centers, long before oil could be exploited economically, the people of the Gulf prospered on trade. That was the case of Siraf, in what is currently southern Iran. Even though it had to import freshwater on ships, Siraf grew in the tenth and eleventh centuries as it became an important transit point for Basra and Shiraz. Siraf lived and died by trade, as it collapsed when commercial routes changed in the twelfth century.
Fromherz credits the importance of trade with fostering a climate of tolerance and co-habitation among different religious and ethnic groups in the Gulf. While on the sea, people of diverse creeds and origins coincided as passengers on the same ship. On the dry land, communities that would have been separated in other contexts had to share quarters in small port cities such as medieval Siraf or Hormuz under Portuguese rule.
Tolerance also made economic sense for the Gulf’s rulers. An open-minded attitude allowed a port city to attract all kinds of traders (and the customs revenue that came with them) if they knew their traditions would be respected there. As Fromherz explains, “because a port city would quickly shrivel and die without trade and comparatively advantageous taxation, different levels of society had a vested interest in openness and toleration of diverse groups from throughout the Indian ocean.”[2]
King Sebastian of Portugal, who reigned during the second half of the sixteenth century, is believed to have died during a crusading mission against a Moroccan sultan. Leaving behind this crusading zeal, the same king intervened to stop the planned destruction of a mosque in Hormuz. Highly indebted, Portugal could not afford to antagonize the Hormuzi Muslim traders, who might have moved elsewhere leading to a loss of customs revenue. Hindu temples and synagogues were also spared, and the Catholic priests in Hormuz were relatively restrained in their conversion efforts.
Portugal would ultimately be humbled in 1650 when it lost Muscat to an alliance of Muslim Omanis and Hindu Banians. The conquest of Muscat shocked Europe because “a major imperial Western power had been bested not by another Western navy but by an emerging Gulf coalition.”[3] Similar to the naval battle of Tsushima in 1905, when the Japanese vanquished the Russian navy at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Portugal’s defeat in Muscat questioned beliefs in Western superiority.
Tsushima was the parting shot in “The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia”, as Pankaj Mishra puts it in his book about the rise of the Asian continent. In contrast, three centuries passed between the Portuguese defeat in Muscat and the emergence of the Gulf as an independent center of power. If the nineteenth century in the Gulf was dominated by the pearling industry, the twentieth century would bring with it the much more lucrative oil industry, changing the region forever.
Oil was first exploited in commercial quantities in Bahrain, but the largest oil reserves in the Gulf are found in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. Oil exploitation not only catapulted the region’s economy but dramatically altered the lives of its citizens. In 1960, life expectancy in the United States was 70 years. In Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the figures were 59 and 46 years, respectively. By 2022, both Qatar and Saudi Arabia had overtaken the United States, with Qatari citizens living 82 years on average, five more than US citizens. A similar dynamic had taken place in terms of infant mortality.
In a book that is highly original and full of meaningful anecdotes, the last chapter, which covers the recent history of the Gulf, feels comparatively dull. Even so, Fromherz concludes with some observations about the future of the Gulf worth taking into consideration. He notes that the Gulf’s rulers should avoid rising nationalism, war threats, and isolation from their subjects. Instead, he reminds the readers that “commerce, consensus, and cosmopolitanism… exist deep in the veins of Gulf history, often originating there long before they were practised in the West.”[4]
Although often incomplete, the end of the Qatar blockade in 2021, the truce in Yemen in 2022, and the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran in early 2023 were positive steps. Since late 2023, though, the war on Gaza and its regional implications have thrown the Gulf into new uncertainty. The future of the US presence in the Gulf is also difficult to predict, especially when we are only days away from the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, who has been sending mixed signals on the matter. If the US were to withdraw progressively from the area, Fromherz believes the Gulf would focus on south Asia, its natural partner. This would, in a way, strengthen the notion of history being circular.
[1] Allen James Fromherz, “The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024), p. 77.
[2] Ibid., p. 25.
[3] Ibid., p. 161.
[4] Ibid., p. 258.
https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/center-history-persian.html
Global Research – January 9, 2025
Senegal, Chad and Ivory Coast Have Ordered French Troops to Leave. Francophone Africa Taken Over by the U.S. ?
Are these three countries following the pattern of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES)?
By Abayomi Azikiwe and Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Will Francophone Africa be Taken Over by the U.S. ?
It should be understood that the withdrawal of French troops from Francophone Africa constitutes a “green light” to the United States which currently has a significant military presence in francophone Africa under the banner of “counter-terrorism”.
The withdrawal of France not only points to the “dollarization” of francophone of Africa, it also suggests that eventually, French will in several francophone countries be abandoned as a national language.
Although the circumstances are entirely different to what is currently unfolding, we recall howﾠRwanda which was a francophone country was transformed into an English speaking U.S. Colony in Central Africa.
This is what I wrote in 2000 (25 Years ago) following two UNDP missions to Rwanda in 1996-97:
From a distinctly Franco-Belgian colonial setting, the Rwandan capital Kigali has become –under the expatriate Tutsi led RPF government– distinctly Anglo-American. English has become the dominant language in government and the private sector. Many private businesses owned by Hutus were taken over in 1994 by returning Tutsi expatriates. The latter had been exiled in Anglophone Africa, the US and Britain.
The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) functions in English and Kinyarwanda, the University previously linked to France and Belgium functions in English.
While English had become an official language alongside French and Kinyarwanda, French political and cultural influence will eventually be erased. Washington has become the new colonial master of a francophone country.
Several other francophone countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have entered into military cooperation agreements with the US. These countries are slated by Washington to follow suit on the pattern set in Rwanda. Meanwhile in francophone West Africa, the US dollar is rapidly displacing the CFA Franc — which is linked in a currency board arrangement to the French Treasury. (Michel Chossudovsky, August 2000)
The UNDP report by Senator Pierre Galland and Prof Michel Chossudovsky was submitted to the UNDP and the Government of Rwanda in French. Rwanda’s Vice President Paul Kagame demanded a translation of the Reporting English. Kagame has been president of Rwanda (2000- ) for the last 25 years, acting on behalf of the U.S.
The official UNDP report in French
What prevails today (confirmed by the US Embassy inﾠKigali) is the following:
There are two official languages of instruction throughout the Rwandan educational system: Kinyarwanda in primary school (P1-P3) and English from P4 through University. French and Swahili are taught as an elective or a supplemental subject in public primary and secondary schools.
Francophone Africa. Beware of U.S. Imperialism
It is important that people in francophone Africa realize that the withdrawal of France constitutes the basis of US neo-colonial dominance.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/senegal-chad-ivory-coast-ordered-french-troops-leave/5876705
