ISTANBUL: When President Tayyip Erdogan opened a new court complex this month, Turkey’s senior cleric sealed the ceremony with a Muslim prayer, triggering protests from critics who said his actions contravened the secular constitution.
“Make this wonderful work beneficial and blessed for our nation, my God,” Ali Erbas said in his address, adding that many judges had “worked to bring the justice which (God) ordered.”
Erbas’s appearance at the Sept. 1 ceremony in Ankara, and the wave of opposition criticism over his comments, reflect his rising profile at the head of a state-run religious organization and the growing influence it has attained under Erdogan.
The president, whose ruling AK Party is rooted in political Islam, has overturned decades-old restrictions imposed on religion by modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, placing Islam center-stage in political life.
Last year Erbas delivered the first sermon in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia after the Byzantine church-turned-museum was reconverted into a mosque. He did so while clutching a sword, saying this was traditional for preachers in mosques taken by conquest. The church was captured by Ottoman forces in 1453.
His state-run Diyanet organization, or Religious Affairs Directorate, has its own television channel which is recruiting 30 new staff. Its budget, which already matches that of an average ministry, will rise by a quarter next year to 16.1 billion lira ($1.86 billion), government data shows.
Erdogan further endorsed Erbas last week by extending his term at the Diyanet. He was with Erdogan again on Monday in New York, reciting a prayer at the opening of a skyscraper that will house Turkish diplomats based there.
Erdogan’s political foes says Erbas’s growing profile is at odds with the Turkish Republic’s secular constitution, and shows the president is using religion to boost his waning ratings ahead of an election scheduled for 2023.
“It is completely unacceptable for the Religious Affairs Directorate to be used politically by the AKP,” said Bahadir Erdem, deputy chairman of the opposition Iyi Party.
“The reason for Ali Erbas repeatedly making statements that polarize the nation is very clearly the government using religious sensitivities of those whose votes it thinks it can win,” he said.
Apart from the Diyanet’s growing prominence, secularists also fret over a sharp increase in religious ‘Imam Hatip’ schools, a 10 percent rise in mosque numbers in the last decade, the lifting of a ban on Muslim headscarves in state institutions and the taming of Turkey’s powerful military, once a bastion of secularism, all during Erdogan’s rule.
Responding to the criticism over the Diyanet, the presidency shared a picture of Ataturk standing in prayer beside a Muslim cleric at a ceremony outside Turkey’s new parliament 100 years ago, suggesting that even the founder of the secular republic gave space to religion alongside politics.
The secularist main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) accuse Erdogan of deliberately using Erbas to distract public attention from Turkey’s mounting economic woes.
“He has put the Religious Affairs Directorate chairman on the field like a pawn,” CHP spokesman Faik Oztrak said.
Turkey’s constitution says the Diyanet must act in line with the principles of secularism, without expressing political views.
Erbas, a former theology professor who took office in 2017, has not addressed the criticism directly but says his role is limited to religious guidance.
“In line with the duty set out in the constitution to ‘enlighten society regarding religion’, our directorate is working to convey to our people in the most correct way the principles of Islam,” he said in a speech last week.
That message does not reassure secularist critics.
Erbas’s frequent presence at Erdogan’s side reveals a “very significant elevation of the role of Sunni Islam in government in Turkey,” said Soner Cagaptay, a director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“The secularist firewall of the 20th century, established by Ataturk and guarded by his successors, that has separated religion and government, and religion and education, has completely collapsed,” he said.
Erbas has courted controversy in the past. Last year his suggestion that homosexuality causes illness triggered a clash between Erdogan’s AKP and Turkey’s lawyers’ associations over freedom of expression.
But he has won support from Erdogan’s nationalist ally Devlet Bahceli.
“Turkey is a Muslim country,” he said. “The allergy against the Islamic religion of those wicked people who have broken off ties with our national and spiritual values is an incurable clinical case.”
Turkey’s top Islamic cleric moves center stage, irking secularists
Turkey’s top Islamic cleric moves center stage, irking secularists
- Political foes says Ali Erbas’s growing profile is at odds with the Turkish Republic’s secular constitution
Hezbollah says launched drones at ‘sensitive military targets’ in Tel Aviv
BEIRUT, Lebanon: Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it launched drones at “sensitive military targets” in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, after deadly Israeli strikes in Beirut and as news of a ceasefire deal was announced.
“In response to the targeting of the capital Beirut and the massacres committed by the Israeli enemy against civilians,” Hezbollah launched “drones at a group of sensitive military targets in the city of Tel Aviv and its suburbs,” the Iran-backed group said in a statement.
What does the US-brokered truce ending Israel-Hezbollah fighting include?
- The Lebanese army would deploy troops to south of the Litani to have around 5,000 soldiers there, including at 33 posts along the border with Israel, a Lebanese security source told Reuters
BEIRUT: Israel and Lebanese armed group Hezbollah are set to implement a ceasefire early on Wednesday as part of a US-proposed deal for a 60-day truce to end more than a year of hostilities.
The text of the deal has not been published and Reuters has not seen a draft.
US President Joe Biden announced the deal, saying it was designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities. Israel’s security cabinet has approved it and it will be put to the whole cabinet for review. Lebanon Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the deal, which Hezbollah approved last week.
The agreement, negotiated by US mediator Amos Hochstein, is five pages long and includes 13 sections, according to a senior Lebanese political source with direct knowledge of the matter.
Here is a summary of its key provisions.
HALT TO HOSTILITIES
The halt to hostilities is set to begin at 4 a.m local time (0200 GMT) on Wednesday, Biden announced, with both sides expected to cease fire by Wednesday morning.
The senior Lebanese source said Israel was expected to “stop carrying out any military operations against Lebanese territory, including against civilian and military targets, and Lebanese state institutions, through land, sea and air.”
All armed groups in Lebanon — meaning Hezbollah and its allies — would halt operations against Israel, the source said.
ISRAELI TROOPS WITHDRAW
Two Israeli officials said the Israeli military would withdraw from southern Lebanon within 60 days. Biden said the troops would gradually pull out and civilians on both sides would be able to return home.
Lebanon had earlier pushed for Israeli troops to withdraw as quickly as possible within the truce period, Lebanese officials told Reuters. They now expect Israeli troops to withdraw within the first month, the senior Lebanese political source said.
A Lebanese official told Reuters the deal included language that preserved both Lebanon’s and Israel’s rights to self-defense.
HEZBOLLAH PULLS NORTH, LEBANESE ARMY DEPLOYS
Hezbollah fighters will leave their positions in southern Lebanon to move north of the Litani River, which runs about 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of the border with Israel.
Their withdrawal will not be public, the senior Lebanese political source said. He said the group’s military facilities “will be dismantled” but it was not immediately clear whether the group would take them apart itself, or whether the fighters would take their weapons with them as they withdrew.
The Lebanese army would deploy troops to south of the Litani to have around 5,000 soldiers there, including at 33 posts along the border with Israel, a Lebanese security source told Reuters.
“The deployment is the first challenge — then how to deal with the locals that want to return home,” given the risks of unexploded ordnance, the source said.
More than 1.2 million people have been displaced by Israeli strikes on Lebanon, many of them from south Lebanon. Hezbollah sees the return of the displaced to their homes as a priority, Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah told Reuters.
Tens of thousands displaced from northern Israel are also expected to return home.
MONITORING MECHANISM
One of the sticking points in the final days leading to the ceasefire’s conclusion was how it would be monitored, Lebanon’s deputy speaker of parliament Elias Bou Saab told Reuters.
A pre-existing tripartite mechanism between the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL), the Lebanese army and the Israeli army would be expanded to include the US and France, with the US chairing the group, Bou Saab said.
Israel would be expected to flag possible breaches to the monitoring mechanism, and France and the US together would determine whether a violation had taken place, an Israeli official and a Western diplomat told Reuters.
A joint statement by Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron said France and the US would work together to ensure the deal is applied fully.
UNILATERAL ISRAELI STRIKES
Israeli officials have insisted that the Israeli army would continue to strike Hezbollah if it identified threats to its security, including transfers of weapons and military equipment to the group.
An Israeli official told Reuters that US envoy Amos Hochstein, who negotiated the agreement, had given assurances directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel could carry out such strikes on Lebanon.
Netanyahu said in a televised address after the security cabinet met that Israel would strike Hezbollah if it violated the deal.
The official said Israel would use drones to monitor movements on the ground in Lebanon.
Lebanese officials say that provision is not in the deal that it agreed, and that it would oppose any violations of its sovereignty.
3 dead in Israel strikes on Syria border crossings with Lebanon: monitor, authorities
BEIRUT, Lebanon: A Syria war monitor said Israeli strikes on the Lebanon-Syria border late Tuesday killed two soldiers as Lebanon also reported one dead, the latest frontier raids amid news of a Hezbollah and Israel truce.
“Israeli warplanes targeted the Al-Arida crossing in Tartus province for the first time, and the Dabussiyeh and Jussiyeh crossings in Homs province,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reporting “two regime forces killed” at Dabussiyeh.
Lebanon’s health ministry said an “Israeli enemy strike” on the Al-Arida crossing killed “one person,” adding that the toll was provisional.
The Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria, also reported other strikes on unofficial crossings and bridges between the two countries.
State news agency SANA reported “Israeli aggression that targeted the Al-Arida and Dabussiyeh border crossings with Lebanon,” without reporting casualties.
On Monday, Israel also struck a crossing on the Syria-Lebanon border, the latest in a wave of attacks targeting such routes since September.
Syrian state television reported Israeli strikes on several bridges in the Qusayr region near the border.
Israel’s military said strikes that day targeted “smuggling routes to transfer weapons” to Hezbollah, and followed other operations against “Syrian regime smuggling routes” in recent weeks.
Israel intensified its strikes against Syria from September 26, days after launching an intense bombing campaign mainly targeting Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, after almost a year of clashes with the group across the Lebanon border.
Since Syria’s war broke out in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, mainly targeting the army and groups including Hezbollah.
Israeli NGO warns of “quiet annexation” of West Bank under cover of war
- ACRI accuses Netanyahu govt. of “excessive, unrestrained and illegal use of force” in occupied territory in a new report
- Says govt. is “implementing profound changes to all aspects of control, most of which are flying under the radar”
LONDON: On Oct. 12 last year, a group of armed settlers and Israeli soldiers drove into the West Bank village of Wadi Al-Seeq, 10 kilometers east of the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
There, they seized and handcuffed three Palestinian men, subjecting them to hours of abuse and violence, later compared by one of the victims to the treatment meted out by rogue US soldiers to prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003.
The abuses in Wadi Al-Seeq were led by members of the IDF’s Sfar Hamidbar (Desert Frontier) unit, notorious for recruiting into its ranks violent “hilltop youth” from the illegal farming settlements that are proliferating in the West Bank with the blessing of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, which includes, and is dependent on the support of, far-right parties.
“For hours,” as an Israeli newspaper reported on Oct. 21, 2023, the Palestinians “were severely beaten, stripped to their underwear, and photographed handcuffed.
“Their captors urinated on two of them and extinguished burning cigarettes on them. There was even an attempt to penetrate one of them with an object.”
Israeli human rights activists who arrived at the scene were also arrested, cuffed, beaten, threatened with death and, like the Palestinians, robbed.
At the time, many in Israel were shocked to read the reports of the joint operation between the IDF and settlers, exposed by the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
But as a new report from an Israeli human rights group makes clear, such events have become commonplace as, under cover of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, the Israeli government and its agencies have been pursuing the ultimate goal of “realizing the vision of full Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territory.”
In the report, “One year of war: the collapse of human and civil rights in Israel and the West Bank,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) accuses the government of “excessive, unrestrained, and illegal use of force.”
Furthermore, it says, Netanyahu’s government is “demolishing the judicial system and the civil service with the aim of accumulating unlimited power; increasing the use of force in the West Bank and granting tacit permission for unrestrained settler violence; using force to limit freedom of expression and protest; and systematically violating the rights of detainees and prisoners.”
The list of charges levelled against the government is long, including institutionalized discrimination against Arab society, “unprecedented” infringement of the rights of suspects and prisoners, the “mass armament and creation of untrained forces” of settlers, the “destruction of democratic foundations,” attacks on freedom of expression and “normalization of citizen surveillance and disregard for privacy.”
Legislative steps are being taken with the aim of excluding certain parties from running for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Last month a controversial bill was passed to change the rules for banning individuals or parties from membership of the Knesset if they have “supported terror,” a definition which now includes visiting the family of someone accused of an act of terrorism.
Likud, Netanyahu’s party, has even accused Arab members of the Knesset of supporting terror simply on the ground of their support for Palestinian statehood.
“Depriving a population of the right to protest politically and the right to political representation” is “a very slippery slope,” said Noa Sattath, the CEO of ACRI.
“When there’s no political representation of a minority, then there's a radicalization of that minority.”
IN NUMBERS
- 733 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023.
- 40 Israelis killed during the same period.
- 3,340 Palestinians in administrative detention as of last June.
- 11,800 Palestinians arrested since current conflict erupted.
What the ACRI report exposes on a grand scale, says Sattath, is “the excessive use of power. Of course, we see it in Gaza, and in Lebanon now, but we also see it in the West Bank.
“We also see it being used against Israeli protesters. We’re also seeing it in the treatment of prisoners. In all walks of life, basically, the Israeli government has moved to using excessive power against the different players, rather than making more complicated decisions.”
The headline scandal of the past year is what ACRI describes as “the quiet coup” in the West Bank.
“With public attention focused elsewhere,” says the report, “the government is implementing profound changes to all aspects of control in the West Bank, most of which are flying under the radar.
“In the last two years, the government has made giant strides in advancing policies aimed at accelerating the annexation process of the West Bank, while establishing Jewish supremacy and marginalizing the Palestinian population, all in pursuit of realizing the vision of full Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territory.”
The annexation of the West Bank has long been on the agenda, said Sattath, “but the war has given cover and enabled this to happen.
“Basically, they’re creating a new reality on the ground, behind the scenes, without a lot of public scrutiny, without a lot of international discourse on this new reality that they’re manufacturing.”
The Israeli government has, in certain instances, issued statements that aim to distance itself from the violent actions of settlers in the West Bank. Netanyahu has occasionally called for calm and condemned settler attacks on Palestinians, especially after high-profile incidents.
However, ACRI fears that under the incoming US administration of Donald Trump, whose election has been welcomed so enthusiastically by far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, things are only going to get worse.
“I think that the next years are going to be very difficult,” said Sattath.
“The US government is one of the only checks and balances on the behavior of the Israeli government behavior and, even if we would have liked them to be more forceful in the way that they do it, we're very worried that the disappearance of that will have grave implications for the lives of Palestinians, both in Gaza, where the US is currently so involved in the humanitarian aid efforts there, and in the West Bank.”
Disturbingly, she says, Israel is manoeuvring behind the scenes to end the status of the West Bank as an occupied territory under military occupation, which is how it has been defined by international law since the occupation of the West Bank by Israel in 1967.
“It seems a little strange that an organization like ACRI would be advocating for military occupation,” she said.
“But under international conventions military occupation gives the protected citizens of that area many different rights and gives the occupiers obligations.
“Residents in occupied territories cannot be moved. You cannot build on their territory and the occupying force has all sorts of obligations toward them, in terms of humanitarian aid.
“Now, what the settler movement, through its ministers in the government, is trying to do is erase the military occupation, replacing it with government agencies and officials to facilitate the settlement enterprise.”
The process began in February 2023 when, despite disquiet among some members of Netanyahu’s government, authority over many civilian issues in the West Bank was stripped from Defense Ministry agency COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) and transferred to Bezalel Smotrich, the religious Zionism leader and finance minister.
According to a Times of Israel report, the agreement “appears to give the ultranationalist leader sweeping powers over the territory, and allows him to advance his goal of thwarting Palestinian aspirations for a state in the West Bank by enabling the Israeli population there to substantially expand.”
Anti-settlement organizations denounced the agreement, with one, Breaking the Silence, saying it amounted to “legal, de jure annexation,” of the West Bank.
The importance of ACRI’s report, says Sattath, lies in the sheer breadth of abuses by the Israeli government it exposes.
ACRI, founded in 1972 and the oldest civil and human rights organization in Israel, has been publishing reports on the state of human rights in Israel and the West Bank for decades. But, she says, “we have never published a report showing such a severe and comprehensive deterioration as we have seen over the past year.”
ACRI says it hopes its report “will deepen the public’s understanding of the damage being done to human rights and democratic institutions, and that it will stir the public to action and resistance.”
It added: “Monitoring human rights violation processes is also critical for there to be any hope of correction under a different government and reality.”
Sirens sound in central, northern Israel after ceasefire announcement: army
- Sirens sounded in a number of areas in central and northern Israel following projectiles that crossed from Lebanon
JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said sirens sounded across central and northern Israel Tuesday, with three projectiles fired from Lebanon after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his cabinet would vote for a ceasefire.
“Sirens sounded in a number of areas in central and northern Israel following projectiles that crossed from Lebanon,” the military said in a statement. “Three projectiles that crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory were successfully intercepted by the IAF (Israeli air force).”
