History behind the headlines

Gaza War series - Episode 6Episode 6 examines the likely and potential global and other consequences of the Gaza war

Gaza War series - Episode 5Episode 5 investigates whether or not Israel had any other choice as to how to react to the Hamas attack

Gaza War series - Episode 4Episode 4 tries to shed light on why Israel reacted in such a disproportionate way

Gaza War series - Episode 3 Episode 3 tries to shed light on why Hamas launched its October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

Episode 2 tells the 20th and 21st century history of Gaza itself.

Gaza War series - Episode 1: Explains the long-term historical background to the Israel/Palestine conflict as a whole. Permalink

Brexit of course has huge implications for Britain's relationship with continental Europe. But it also has disturbing implications for the long-term survival of the United Kingdom itself. That's because Brexit has provided renewed impetus to Scotland's independence movement. For many centuries, Scotland traditionally saw itself as being geopolitically closer than England to continental Europe – and indeed the majority of Scottish voters voted against Brexit in the referendum of 2016 and against Brexit-supporting parties in the recent general election. But, apart from Brexit, what lies behind the growth of Scotland’s independence movement and why do so many Scots see their destiny as being so dramatically different to that of the English. What lies behind the spectacularly different national aspirations that currently exist in the two largest nations of the UK. In essence, the transformation has come about through a combination of long-term factors going back many centuries, and more recent developments that have taken place over the past 65 years. Of course, the most important factor is Scotland’s status as a distinct nation – a status that is grounded in its separate political history, its different legal system and different religious tradition. In political terms, Scotland was an entirely separate kingdom with its own monarchy and its own parliament for around 700 and 400 years respectively, before the Act of Union in 1707. Scotland owed its medieval and early modern independent statehood to the fact that it simply hadn’t been conquered or settled, to the same extent, by the peoples and powers that determined most of southern Britain’s history – namely the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. Instead, Scotland’s own native Pictish tradition of kingship (the kingdom of Fortriu) merged with the western Scottish Gaelic ‘Scots’ royal dynastic system (the kingdom of Dal Riata) to produce a distinctively non-Anglo-Saxon ‘super- kingdom’ in northern Britain. Later on, England’s late 13th/14th-century attempts to conquer Scotland forced the Scottish state to ally itself to continental European powers (especially France) in order to protect itself against English takeover. This fundamentally changed Scottish culture. Educationally and in terms of its legal system it moved closer to Europe than England. Whereas before the English invasion of Scotland, many Scots had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, after the conflict ended with Scottish victory, they tended to go to Paris and Orleans (in France) and Padua (in Italy). What’s more, competing Scottish and English ecclesiastical claims over who should control the Scottish church had led to the pope enforcing a long-lasting compromise by which the Scottish church had become neither Scottish nor English governed – but, uniquely, a ‘Special Daughter’ of the Papal See. This too led to the Europeanisation of Scottish culture, education and law. A third home-grown development also reinforced these trends. Whereas the medieval English state had become increasingly centralised (partly courtesy of the later Anglo-Saxons and the Normans), the Scottish state system was relatively decentralised with local landowners having substantial political and judicial responsibilities. In order for the system to work, landowners therefore had to be well educated. This, in part, lay behind the Scottish parliament’s decision, in the late 15th century, that the elder sons of all medium to large Scottish landowners had to be schooled in the law, Latin and the arts. This, in turn, contributed to an extraordinary educational expansion in Scotland. Whereas, by 1600, England had just two universities, Scotland had no less than five, albeit smaller ones. The creation of all these universities helped generate a large, highly educated class that wanted political influence and helped produce an extraordinarily vibrant civil society. These devolutionary and educational trends helped to generate another great factor that has historically differentiated Scotland from England – namely its religious tradition. For the Protestant Reformation in Scotland occurred in a very different way to that of England – and produced very different results. In England, Protestant supremacy was partly imposed from the top (following Henry VIII’s famous clash with the pope over his royal intention to divorce his first wife), whereas in Scotland what became the country’s dominant Protestant tradition – Presbyterianism – grew from the grass roots up. Consequently, Presbyterianism (as opposed to England’s Anglicanism) was relatively democratically organised – with its clergy accountable to popularly elected local church bodies rather than appointed from on high. All these factors generated a distinct and more egalitarian civil society and an enduringly different national identity. Nevertheless, after the largely Scottish-Highlands-based rebellions of the early to mid 18th century, Scotland had, by 1760, largely evolved into a loyal participatory member of the United Kingdom. Forming the union in 1706 and 1707 had been an act of political and economic expediency on Scotland’s part. It had just emerged from dire economic problems. The decision to join England in forming the UK (and to therefore scrap its own Scottish parliament and sovereignty) had been taken by the old Scottish parliament itself. But, although the Scots entered the UK somewhat divided in their enthusiasm for it, subsequent developments gradually won over the vast majority. First, Britain’s imperial and mercantile expansion created huge economic, industrial and professional opportunities for the Scots – and many became prominent in the British army and imperial administration. Then, in the 20th century, the experience of the two world wars seems to have generated a spirit of common destiny and solidarity which helped reinforce loyalty to the union. And, lastly, the postwar UK-wide ‘welfare state’ settlement lifted living standards in Scotland and helped change key aspects of Scottish society. But the passing of the empire, the establishment of relative peace in Europe and the late 20th-century perceived erosion of some elements of the welfare state created a new situation in which there were no obvious unifying factors. These historical developments formed the background against which more recent factors have come into play. Over the past seven decades, the Scottish political landscape has changed out of all recognition. Just 65 years ago – in 1955 – half of Scottish voters supported the Conservative Party. Today the figure is less than half that ( they got just 22 per cent in the last Scottish parliamentary election). In the first election for the Scottish parliament in 1999, almost 40 per cent of voters backed the Labour party. Yet, in the most recent Scottish parliament elections (in 2016), only 23 percent did so. In the UK general election of 1987 only 14 per cent of Scottish voters supported the Scottish Nationalists. Yet by 2019 45 percent did so. It’s an extraordinary transformation but what lies behind it? Four key factors stand out: the change in the nature of the British Conservative party, especially as perceived in Scotland; resentment over North Sea oil revenues; the idea of Europe as an alternative supranational umbrella to the UK; and the launch of devolution in 1999. First, Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Edward Heath’s more traditional brand of Conservative ideology, ‘one nation Toryism’, led to an acceleration in the decline in Scottish support for the Conservatives. A key event in that process was Mrs Thatcher’s decision to introduce the widely unpopular poll tax in Scotland a year ahead of England. But it was the consequences of Thatcher’s economic policies (triggering increased de-industrialisation and unemployment in the 1980s) that perhaps caused most fury in a country that depended even more on heavy industry than England. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, as the SNP and others gained from the Conservative party’s Scottish decline, Labour decided to counter the SNP’s independence policy with a ‘halfway house’ product: devolution complete with a Scottish parliament. Labour hoped that devolution would harm the SNP electorally by making its independence policy irrelevant – but, at least in elections to the Scottish parliament, the SNP’s popularity grew. The re-establishment of a Scottish parliament (after an absence of almost three centuries) confirmed the Scots’ sense of nationhood. And the Edinburgh parliament gave the SNP a custom-built platform from which to operate. So, why did the UK Labour government create the Scottish parliament? The answer lay, in part, in the nature and history of the Labour party itself. Ever since the days of Labour Party co-founder, Keir Hardie (a Scot from near Motherwell), and particularly since the late 1980s, Scottish Labour politicians had been extremely influential in the Labour party at Westminster. Key leaders (including John Smith, Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown) were sons of Scotland who knew the importance of the Scottish Labour vote in UK electoral arithmetic and feared the SNP’s potential impact on it. With the creation of the Scottish parliament, the SNP’s rise quickened, especially when they managed to produce an effective administration despite operating as a minority government between 2007 and 2011 and since 2016. In 2011, they won the Scottish general election and formed a majority government, committed to holding a referendum on independence.They lost that independence vote by 10 percentage points (45% against 55%). However Brexit seems to be dramatically increasing Scottish support for independence. The most recent opinion poll puts support for independence at 49%, three percentage points ahead of anti-independence Scots (with 5% of the population still undecided). The U.K.'s survival lies in the balance every bit as much as it's future relationship

India's continued abrogation of normal human rights in Kashmir - the only Muslim-majority region in India – is compromising the world's biggest democracy's relationship with several other key geopolitical players – including Turkey, China, Malaysia and potentially the European Union. An EU/India summit meeting on India/Europe relations is due to take place in Brussels next month. Above all, the situation in Kashmir continues to heighten tension between South Asia’s two great nuclear-armed rivals – India and Pakistan – and the potential for escalation is substantial. Kashmir – where India, Pakistan and China meet – is one of the most strategically and geopolitically sensitive places on earth. Up until the mid-20th century, it formed the north-west part of British India. Now India rules almost half of it, Pakistan controls just over a third – and China rules the remaining 20%. Kashmir has been the cause of four wars and countless terrorist outrages and human rights violations over the past 72 years – an intermittent conflict which has so far cost at least 90,000 lives. In a note to the UN Security Council last year, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, warned that “India should not mistake our restraint for weakness.” The note stated ominously that “if India chooses to resort again to the use of force, Pakistan will be obliged to respond, in self-defense, with all its capabilities.” The past year has already seen a major terrorist attack in Kashmir (by Pakistan-based Islamists) and subsequent Indian and Pakistani air strikes and cross-border shelling. The Indian-controlled part of Kashmir (the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir) is an anomaly – a majority Muslim territory in a majority Hindu country. It is one of the world’s most dangerous political flashpoints. Over most of the past ten days, parts of the region have been in a state of complete lock-down. Curfews have been imposed and more than 1300 Kashmiris - politicians, activists and others - have been arrested. But why has Kashmir become such a fraught and geopolitically volatile place? The story started at least 250 years ago when the great Muslim empires of south Asia – first, India’s Mughal Empire and then the Durrani (Afghan) Empire – went into decline. Up till then, Kashmir had been a predominantly Muslim territory under continuous Muslim rule for more than four centuries. But, in the late 18th century, in lands immediately to the south of Kashmir, the Sikhs (a religious group in Punjab) broke free from the Durrani Empire, created their own imperial state and, early in the next century, conquered both Jammu and Kashmir. The newly acquired territories (including Muslim-majority Kashmir) were now subject to non-Muslim (ie., Sikh) control. But, to the south and east, the British East India Company (which ruled much of India) was deeply unhappy about the political instability within the Sikh empire, and decided to take it over. The Sikhs were defeated in 1846 at the great battle of Sobraon (just 50 kilometres south of Sikhism’s holiest place – the Golden Temple in Amritsar) – and Kashmir consequently fell into British hands. The British then proceeded to sell Kashmir – for 7.5 million rupees – to the very ruler that the Sikhs had previously installed in neighbouring Jammu, a Hindu prince by the name of Gulab Singh, who had sensibly stayed neutral in the Anglo-Sikh war. However under the sale agreement, the prince (now with the title of Maharaja) was to hold Kashmir (and Jammu) as a British vassal. Kashmir therefore became the only major Himalayan state to form part of the British Empire (other key Himalayan kingdoms – Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan – were never part of the British Raj). The British were keen to maintain overlordship of Kashmir for two reasons – firstly because the British Imperial government in far away Calcutta (the other side of India) and in London itself became convinced that the Russians were interested (as part of the so-called ‘Great Game’ rivalry) in gaining influence in Kashmir. Secondly, the East India Company was keen to secure control over the lucrative Kashmir wool and shawl market. Kashmir (or ‘Cashmere’) shawls had, after all, become ultra-fashionable in European high society – especially in France where Napoleon Bonaparte had, earlier in the century, presented one to his wife, Josephine. Despite its subjects’ Muslim faith, the British-backed Hindu Maharaja’s administration in Kashmir did not wear its Hinduism lightly. On the contrary, it saw itself as the inheritor of a pre-Islamic Hindu ‘Aryan’ tradition that had flourished in Kashmir prior to the Muslim conquests of the 13th century. Culturally and linguistically, it was encouraged and supported in this ethno-religious cultural revivalism by British upper-class orientalist scholars, administrators and soldiers. Reared on the Greek classics, these UK colonialists saw ancient Hindu Sanskrit ‘Indo-European’ culture as the long-lost linguistic/ethnic cousin of that of Homer and Aristotle. In 1947 the British-ruled Indian subcontinent was partitioned into two independent states Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Muslim-majority (but Hindu-ruled) Kashmir was contested between the two newly independent nations. Muslim tribal irregulars invaded Kashmir from Pakistan, and the British and Indians made it clear that military help would only be sent if Kashmir joined India. The territory’s Hindu ruler was therefore faced with a difficult decision: should he throw in his lot with India or Pakistan. In the end, and despite the fact that he would probably have preferred Kashmir to become independent, he opted to side with India – a decision that was eased by the fact that the leading Muslim-majority political party in Kashmir was actually pro-Indian. At partition in 1947, Pakistan and India fought each other over Kashmir – and Pakistan succeeded in seizing the western, more sparsely populated, half of the territory. It did so with the help of tribal warriors – mainly Pathans from Pakistani territory near the Afghan border – and regular forces it subsequently sent to Kashmir to confront the Indians. India’s response was to complain to the United Nations and propose that a plebiscite should be held in the state. The UN agreed and asked Pakistan to withdraw all its forces from the area of Kashmir which it had occupied. Pakistan supported the plebiscite proposal – but refused to pull out its troops. As a result, India refused to go ahead with the plebiscite while Pakistani forces remained on Kashmiri territory. Nobody had really seen the Kashmir problem coming. Just a few years earlier, partition itself had not even been on the agenda. The British (and indeed most Indians) had thought that the Raj would become a single independent state – rather than two. But for decades, the British had felt unable to initiate any democratic reform in India’s princely states (including Kashmir) – and so when Muslim/Hindu communal violence erupted in the subcontinent in 1946, there was neither the time nor the democratic institutions to credibly determine what the people of Kashmir (or indeed other princely states) really wanted. However, despite the de facto 1947 division of Kashmir between India and Pakistan (and another war over Kashmir in 1965), the situation had become reasonably stable by the 1970s. But then two new elements entered the equation. Firstly, India started to increasingly interfere in Kashmir’s internal politics in a way which fatally undermined the electoral credibility of the leading majority Muslim political party. By 1987 there were accusations of Indian government-backed electoral gerrymandering. With traditional politics discredited, anti-Indian protests erupted in Kashmir – and were violently suppressed by the authorities. Soon, the violence was spiralling out of control. Secondly the armed insurgency by Islamic militants (partly funded by the American CIA) against the Soviet-backed Afghan government in the 1980s, just a few hundred miles to the west of Kashmir, created a new Islamist jihadi momentum in the region which soon started to affect Kashmir. What’s more, when the Soviets (and their Afghan protégées) were defeated, many of the Islamist combatants merely transferred their attention to Kashmir. Some of them joined Lashkar e Toiba (the ‘Army of the Righteous’), one of the most active ‘Kashmir issue’ Islamist organisations. Founded in Afghanistan in 1991, Lashkar e Toiba has killed literally hundreds of civilians in terror attacks in Kashmir and elsewhere in India. So far, since 1989, more than 70,000 people have died as a result of the Kashmir conflict – the great majority in Kashmir itself. Many have been killed by Islamist and separatist terrorists. The rest – Muslim insurgents, anti-government demonstrators and others – have been killed by Indian security forces. Indeed, India now has an estimated 600,000 troops and paramilitary personnel in the troubled state. Just as significantly, the conflict continuously undermines the prospects for any rapprochement between India and Pakistan, both of which possess nuclear weapons, and has helped provide substantial opportunities for Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups to operate in the region. The current tension in the area follows India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s decision just over six months ago to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir of the special status it has enjoyed since 1954. Up till last year, Jammu and Kashmir had had its own state constitution (quite separately from the Indian national constitution) and residents of other Indian states had not been allowed to buy land there, thus protecting the area’s Muslim demographic status quo. The Indian government’s decision earlier this month to revoke Kashmir’s special status, to scrap its existence as a state, and to impose virtual direct rule from New Delhi has infuriated the area’s Muslim majority. All te

To the south of the United States’ 2,000-mile-long border with Mexico, a terrible war has been gathering pace over the past 13 years. So far, the conflict has claimed 230,000 lives, with countless others maimed, bereaved and impoverished. Tens of thousands of children have lost one or both their parents – and several hundred thousand people have been forced to flee their homes, creating a ever-growing army of refugees. Mexico’s drug war – an ultra-violent multi-sided conflict over who controls the country’s $30bn per year illicit drug trade with the USA – is currently costing almost 3,000 lives per month. But how did it all begin?

IT IS A COLLISION between two nationalisms – both forged substantially in exile. It is a struggle between two peoples whose militant wings both still lay claim to the same territory. It is perceived by some as a clash between the first and third worlds or between Islam and Judaism, even between Islam and the West. At its heart lie thousands of years of history and some of the holiest places on earth. But how did this epic conflict arise and what are the histories of the peoples involved? Today there are 15 million Jews scattered across the world. But originally many of their ancestors came from ancient Judea (formerly the area covered by part of the Biblical kingdom of Judah). The first Israelite (or proto-Jewish) period of statehood lasted from around 1000 BC to the partial destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC. According to biblical tradition there was initially a single Israelite kingdom but after a century or so it seems to have split into two separate Israelite states – the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. The second period of statehood lasted from 165 BC to the Roman Conquest of 63 BC (a period when the area was ruled by an independent Jewish dynasty known as the Hasmoneans). Two short periods of independence followed revolts against Rome in 66 and 132 AD. In between all these periods of statehood, the area was ruled successively by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans. The long exile of Jews from Judea started in earnest after the Babylonian onslaught and accelerated after each revolt against Rome. From the second century onwards the Jewish population of Palestine – the geographical region covering what is now Israel and the West Bank – shrank massively. A limited return of some Diaspora Jews to Palestine only seriously got underway in the 13th century following the Muslim defeat of the crusaders. More than a dozen relatively small waves of Jewish immigration, mainly for religious reasons, took place over the next 700 years. Large Jewish communities developed in Safed (in what is now northern Israel) and in Jerusalem – but as a percentage of the total population of Palestine the Jewish element was small – only around six per cent by 1880. But two phenomena combined to change the situation. Firstly, from 1881 onwards, violent anti-Semitism massively increased in Russia. Secondly most of the peoples in Europe had been developing nationalist ideologies and the continent’s Jewish population now did likewise and developed the concept of Jewish nationalism (Zionism). Over the next 30 to 40 years the Jewish population of Palestine quadrupled – by 1914 accounting for 14 per cent. In 1917/18 Britain captured Palestine from the Turkish Ottoman Empire shortly after Britain’s foreign secretary Balfour had announced that the UK favoured the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. After the rise of Hitler and after the Holocaust, Jewish migration to now-British-ruled Palestine speeded up massively. By 1948, 40 per cent of Palestine’s population was Jewish. As Britain prepared to withdraw, the UN approved a plan – opposed by the Arab countries and the Palestinian Arabs – to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. In late 1947 hostilities broke out between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab populations. British control ended in May 1948. The Jewish population immediately declared the State of Israel and regular troops from Arab countries became involved in the fighting. Israel succeeded in capturing substantial amounts of additional territory and emerged victorious. Only the West Bank and Gaza remained of what the UN plan had envisaged as a Palestinian state – these areas were taken over by Jordan and Egypt respectively. The year 1948 marked the final end of partial Jewish exile from Palestine, but it also marked the beginning of a partial Arab exile from the land. We have charted the Jewish relationship with Palestine but what of the Arab and Muslim relationship with it? Even before the substantial collapse of the Jewish presence in Palestine, following the revolts against Rome a substantial percentage (possibly even a majority) of the population of Palestine was Greek or Arab – not Jewish. By the fifth century it was mainly Christian. Then in the early seventh century in the deserts of Arabia, a new monotheistic religion, partly inspired by aspects of Judaism, burst into existence. Islam became a major military force and quickly conquered Palestine. Jerusalem (not Mecca) had initially been the direction of prayer for very early Muslims, and is still the third most holy city in Islam. Apart from the period of the crusades, Palestine formed for 1,300 years a small part of a succession of Islamic empires – first the Arab Caliphates and then the Turkish Sultanates. In Palestine relations between Arabs and Jews were generally good – until Jewish immigration began to expand in the 1880s. Just as Jewish nationalism (Zionism) had developed in the late 19th century, so did Arab nationalism. By 1891 Arab community leaders in Palestine were petitioning the Turkish Ottoman authorities to stop Jewish immigration and land purchases. Jewish settlements were attacked, and anti-Zionist newspapers and societies formed. In 1947 the Arab world opposed the UN’s plan to partition Palestine – and as Jewish and Arab extremists committed atrocities against each others’ communities, 725,000 Palestinian Arabs, who had lived in what is now Israel, fled to Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and the West Bank and were prevented by Israel from coming back. Over the next seven years, thousands tried to return (illegally in the Israeli view) – and many were shot dead by Israeli border guards. In Arab countries hundreds of Jews were murdered and at least 400,000 were forced or frightened into leaving. Most of the Arab world remained technically at war with Israel despite a cease-fire in 1949. But clinging to the belief that Israel would ultimately be defeated, the Palestinian refugees were not integrated into the countries they had fled to, but were kept in often appalling conditions in dozens of permanent refugee camps. In 1958 Palestinian nationalist Yasser Arafat set up the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine (FATAH) – and six years later an umbrella body, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was established. In the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and much of the Arab world, Israel gained control of vast new territories including the West Bank and Gaza. This meant that tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who had fled Israel (and been refused re-entry) back in 1948, suddenly found themselves under Israeli rule. In 1987 a Palestinian nationalist rebellion broke out in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Within a year, Jordan relinquished its claim on this territory, handing over legal authority to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. By 1993 Israel finally agreed to hold direct talks with the Palestinians and gave them autonomy, under ultimate Israeli control, to rule themselves in Gaza and in part of the West Bank. At the same time the PLO recognised the State of Israel. But progress from autonomy to statehood has been elusive. The latest proposal – from the Trump administration – has been embraced enthusiastically by the Israeli government – but rejected as grossly unfair by the Palestinians. At the heart of this disagreement lie two key factors – the envisaged nature of any future Palestinian state and the status of the settlements which Israel has built on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank. Excluding East Jerusalem, there are now 121 such settlements, all of which are considered illegal by the international community. Since 1980, there has been a 40 fold increase in the number of Israelis living in such settlements. The West Bank Jewish population is now more than 400,000. The latest US so-called peace plan envisages Israel annexing all the land on which the 121 settlements stand as well as the strategically and agriculturally important Jordan Valley. The Palestinians would get 70% of the West Bank – but the envisaged Palestinian state would be completely surrounded by Israeli controlled territory. What's more, Israel would control its airspace and much of its water supply and would in effect also control much of its foreign, domestic and security policy. Such a Palestinian state would obviously be a sovereign nation in name only. Far from bringing peace nearer, many fear that it pushes the prospects of justice and peace even further away. Over more than seven decades well over 22,000 Palestinian civilians and 4000 Jewish Israeli civilians have died in the conflict. Countless others have been maimed by Palestinian terrorists and Israeli snipers. So for the time being, the 72-year-old Israel Palestine conflict is sadly almost certainly nowhere near its end