Mediterranean: a possible second south front.
A few days ago analyzing the MENA situation from the Libyan upheavals, I emphasized the possible opening of a new hypothetical southern front characterizing the ongoing clash, albeit in an atypical Proxy key, between the Russian Federation and the West. In this regard I had written the following:
Recent events in Libya, as well as the pronouncement of Gen. Haftar, motivate us to “consider new possible scenarios of atypical warfare that could exploit the militarization of migratory flows to move a direct attack to strike Europe, and consequently NATO, in an unconventional way.
An attack that, should it be launched and which I believe is currently in the making, would variously see the Russian Federation, Turkey, Gen. Haftar and in due course al-Joulani entering the field.
The hypothesis discussed in the multilingual article that I offer here at the link below draws its raison d’être from what took place at the time of the Elysée’s appearance to Gen. Haftar that followed the fall of Qaddafi.
Appointment that, in fact, saw the migratory flows moving from Libya to Italy create those tensions within the EU that in no small measure weakened the German leadership to the benefit of Paris, tensions that I discussed at length at the time in an analytical work devoted to the dynamics of that protest of the Yellow Gilets that then induced Paris and Berlin to come to milder counsels to the point of anticipating by as much as five years the signing of the Treaty of Aachen”.
For details and a more extensive examination, see the multilingual article “Opening of a New Southern Front? New possible war scenarios”
From hypothesis to verification was a short step as today we learn from the Nova Agency of Russia’s intention to install its own missiles at the Libyan base in Sebha. Specifically in the text released the by the aforementioned agency we read:
“Russia wants to install missile systems at the military base in Sebha, the capital of the Libyan Fezzan controlled by General Khalifa Haftar, to aim them at Europe. This was reported to “Agenzia Nova” by a person close to the dossier, pointing out that the plan would already be at an advanced stage. Sebha, located in southern Libya about 900 kilometers from Tripoli and just over 1,000 kilometers from the Italian island of Lampedusa, is an ideal strategic point to strike European targets with medium- and long-range missiles. On May 12, Abdulghani al Kikli, known as “Ghaniwa,” leader of the “Stability Support Device” (SSD), was killed in Tripoli at the hands of Brigade 444, a militia loyal to the premier of the Libyan Government of National Unity (GNU), Abdulhamid Dabaiba”.
“This episode”, added the Nova Agency, “triggered the worst spiral of violence in the Libyan capital in years, offering Haftar the chance to neutralize all rival militias, advance toward Tripoli and take control of the entire country. The person close to the dossier explains, ‘Haftar, together with his son Saddam, is slowly advancing toward Tripoli to dismantle the mosaic of militias defending the capital, arrest or exile Dabaiba, probably in Istanbul, and take over all of Libya’.”
Beyond the details, so to speak, technical, there is an aspect of this, not even so singular, affair that deserves careful reading given that, apparently, “part of the plan would also be endorsed by the United States, with the mediation of Turkey” and that at the basis of the understanding there would be a kind of agreement concerning the transfer of one million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya: a project of which the U.S. broadcaster NBC had already reported a few days ago, except that it was then officially denied by both Tripoli, and the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.
A double denial easily mostly accepted without reservation if only in light of the fact that a resettlement of such proportions would entail, as things stand today, the use of thousands of flights and dozens of ships, not to mention the impact that such a mass of people would have in a country that currently has just 7.3 Mln inhabitants and already hosts, according to official estimates, more than 800,000 migrants: all considerations that seem not to have prevented Gen. Haftar from giving his “willingness to grant citizenship to deported Palestinians, thus guaranteeing himself a free hand in the management of oil resources and power”.
A Gen. Haftar whose multi-playfulness we found ourselves talking about extensively even recently and whose ambiguity found yet another confirmation in the news spread by the Libya Review concerning both the participation of his men in the NATO exercise, “Anatolian Phoenix 25,” in Turkey and the presence in the same country of 1500-2000 men to be trained there.
Incidentally, again according to the rumors circulating these days, another part of the Palestinians in Gaza, about 800,000, could alternatively be transferred to Syria thanks to an agreement between Trump and that al-Joulani who would not only be willing to accept them by granting them citizenship, but also to take away the military base in Latakia from the Russians so that it could be turned into a commercial port jointly controlled by the United States and Syria.
Completing the articulated picture is what seems to have been reported by an unspecified Arab source heard by the Nova Agency, according to whom the plan for the relocation of the Palestinian population from Gaza would also be endorsed by a Saudi Arabia somewhat interested in future real estate investments in the Strip and, above all, in the exploitation of possible oil fields in its off-shore: a statement that is in no small part notable for being in open contrast to the previous repeated official stances so far taken by Ryadh on everything related to the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza to other countries, but which fits surreptitiously well with what was expressed between the lines on May 20, 2025 when, as reported by the Palestinian News & Information Agency (WAFA), the Saudi leadership made it known that it had “again firmly rejected any attempt at forced displacement or the imposition of solutions not in line with the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people”.
A statement that not coincidentally stands out here and now for our attention not only for that distinction centered on the expressions “forced displacement” and “imposition of solutions” without any reference to the two-state solution, but also and especially for having been made by the Saudi Cabinet during the May 20 session in Jeddah, presided over by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, in response to the fact that, historically speaking, the reasons for many Middle Eastern countries to have so far boycotted the resettlement of those Palestinian refugees in whose fate they were interested only to the extent that their unhappy plight could be used as a tool for media and political pressure against Israel had clearly failed.
In this sense, it is no coincidence that virtually all Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, have so far refused to grant citizenship to any Palestinian refugee residing within their borders because it was considered that resettlement of Palestinians was tantamount to renouncing Arab claims to Palestine: hence, from this hostility against Israel has grown the systematic deliberate refusal to resettle Palestinian refugees in an attempt to maintain their refugee status and thus keep the Palestinian issue alive in the world consciousness.
Unfortunately, one of the few who had the good sense to understand what a tunnel of suffering, violence and hatred an entire population was being forced into for mere political and propaganda purposes was British MP Richard Cross Brian who, visiting a refugee camp in Jordan in March 1951, had this to say “…the Arab League needs the refugee problem in order to continue the struggle against Israel. The resettlement of refugees would have negated its most important tool in this regard.”
An emblematic sentence that I believe should be accompanied by the not secondary emphasis that the same heavy political, moral and material responsibility should also be borne by all those and all those countries that in the decades to follow have used the Palestinian diaspora as an instrument of political struggle against the West, and this starting with the former CCCP and the People’s Republic of China and their acolytes
In light of these considerations, Trump’s proposal appears today, beyond the easy controversy it has generated, to be the only possible key to solving three problems:
- firstly that of the refugees,
- secondly that of Palestinian terrorism generated and supported by several MENA countries and which, in many cases, because of Iran’s entry into the field, has ended up representing a weapon aimed not only at Israel but also at local Arab establishments, and
- thirdly that of an entire region that right now is seeking an affiliation with Israel as a harbinger of undoubted strategic and economic advantages to which the persistence of the existing dispute can only be of annoying hindrance.
Unfortunately, as Col. (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen has rightly pointed out in his recent essay, the Arab community has from the outset focused exclusively on the implementation of the “right of return” and the preservation of UNRWA as a symbol of both the plight of refugees and the responsibility of the international community in implementing UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
This “return” and the political action that the Arab countries, with almost no exceptions, have built up to pursue it, admittedly with very little conviction, having realized early on that they have in refugees an invaluable political resource to be preserved by every possible means, has meant that in practice nothing really has been done for the Palestinian refugees, and nothing yet would be done until, as now, the refugees became a political liability for them, as they have been for Israel, i.e., had reached the point where they were no longer a resource.
Circumstance the latter now becoming quite evident to anyone willing to look at reality for what it is and not for what one would like it to be.
This historically has meant that from the earliest stages of the Palestinian refugee issue all the numerous resettlement projects have been rejected, and this is despite the abundant international funds disbursed and studies undertaken, studies all invariably focused on the benefits to the refugees of their inclusion in the host Arab countries, inclusion which by the promoters of said initiatives had been seen as stimulating the economic development of the host countries through the proposed aid programs: much to say nothing of the fact that such a modus operandi would have removed the main obstacle to a solution of the entire Middle East question, that obstacle which in fact was not intended to be removed at all also because of the instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause by, first and foremost, the, communist regimes.
To sum up, all successive resettlement initiatives over time aimed at improving the lives and alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people were stigmatized by singling out anyone who supported them as an enemy, i.e., a traitor to the refugees’ cause-something that over time has caused the term “return” to remain an empty slogan, devoid of any clear reference to the modalities of its implementation, either in terms of procedure or the political regime that might prevail in a reconquered Palestine.
As it stands, the condition in which Palestinian refugees find themselves is that of beleaguered stateless persons, custodians and guardians of the fanciful and undefined “right of return” that has been the basic premise of the Arab League’s policies on Palestinian refugees and of the excessive and abused eye for the Palestinian cause even by international bodies that have done nothing to solve the problem, starting with UNRWA.
In this regard it is exceedingly interesting to read what Efraim Karsh wrote in a brilliant analysis entitled “The privileged Palestinian ‘refugees’” published by the Middle East Forum the in which verbatim the following can be read:
“No sooner had the Palestinian Arabs fled their homes during the 1948-49 war than they were taken under the protective wing of the international community and protected like no other group in similar circumstances. This special treatment ranged from their very recognition as refugees despite the failure of many to satisfy the basic criteria for such status, to the unprecedented creation of a relief agency committed exclusively for their welfare: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA.
Yet rather than help resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, this unparalleled indulgence has only served to confirm its permanence. And no factor has contributed more to this perpetuation than UNRWA, which, instead of ending direct relief and transferring responsibility for the refugees to the host Arab states within months, as stipulated by its mandate, has kept them on the U.N.’s dole for decades under false humanitarian pretensions”
The use of the expression “privileged” is a consequence of the fact that, as extensively and accurately described and analyzed by Benny Morris in his seminal and ponderous volume entitled “The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited” (a work realized thanks to the non-omerous willingness of the Israeli authorities to grant, unlike the Arab authorities, access to even confidential documentation relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the late 1940s, and which is notable for not being omertous even as to Jewish responsibility), that of the Palestinian refugees was a problem primarily generated by the Palestinians’ refusal to accept the birth of the Jewish state and the consequent, mostly, outright voluntary exodus from Palestine of the local Arab component while waiting for the Arab states of the Middle East to ‘solve’ the problem for them, so to speak.
A problem that was not the consequence of a Zionist plan of programmed expulsion of the Arab component from the region, but rather of a real choice, albeit with all the appropriate distinctions transposed in Palestinian memoirism, made in many cases by emulation of what the local Arab majorities did.
And indeed, it is no coincidence that in Benny Morris’s text at one point we can read the following:
“The exodus took place in four or four and a half phases, closely linked to the development of the war itself. It began between December 1947 and March 1948 -the first phase- with the departure of many of the country’s upper and middle class families, mainly from Haifa and Jaffa, cities destined to be part of the future Jewish state or to be at its mercy, and from the neighborhoods of Jewish West Jerusalem. The flight proved infectious. The family followed the family, the neighbor, the neighbor, the street, the street, and the neighborhood, the neighborhood (as, later, the village would follow the neighboring village, in domino clusters). The well-to-do and educated feared death or injury in the increasingly widespread hostilities, the anarchy that accompanied the gradual withdrawal of the British administration and security forces, the brigandage and intimidation of Arab militias and irregulars, and, more vaguely but generally, the unknown and probably dark future that awaited them under Jewish rule”.
Some of these considerations, in addition to a number of direct and indirect military pressures, including from local Arab backgrounds, also caused the evacuation of most of the rural Arab communities in the predominantly Jewish coastal plain in those months: an evacuation that -as indeed did most of the middle- and upper-class families who moved from Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, Ramle, Acre and Tiberias to Damascus, Nablus, Amman, Beirut, Gaza and Cairo-, probably believed would be temporary.
In the end, for most of those who became the protagonists of the Palestinian diaspora, flight was mostly a consequence of the daily spectacle of abandonment by their “superiors,” with the concomitant gradual closure of businesses, stores, schools, law offices and medical clinics, and the abandonment of public service posts: an overlapping of events that led to a steady attrition of morale, a cumulation of faith and trust in the world around them.
What followed from all this is mostly known history, or at least should be. The solution currently proposed by Trump should have been the solution adopted from the very beginning of this human drama that has come to its end after the events of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing war in Gaza that is still ongoing. And in this there is nothing farfetched and infamous if one only considers that in the same years I have here now spoken of a quite different exodus was underway. An exodus, this yes forced and enforced, generated by the Second World Conflict.
And in fact the end of WWII did not coincide with the end of suffering for millions of people if one only considers the unprecedented humanitarian crisis of those years in which in Europe alone, more than 16 million refugees and displaced persons languished in search of a solution to their plight. This included some 13 million Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and other Eastern European countries; nearly 2.5 million Poles, Ukrainians and million Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and Lithuanians driven out of their homelands to newly demarcated states; some 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors crammed into overcrowded camps (mostly) in the country that had just massacred six million of their brothers; and over 400,000 Finns driven out of Soviet-occupied Karelia for the second time in half a decade.
And this not to mentioned the hundreds of thousands of hapless Jews that were expelled from the Arab states during and after the 1948-49 war. Most of these refugees were absorbed by the Jewish state: of course no U.N. agency was created to deal with this influx and it would be interesting to understand the arcane, but not too much on closer inspection, reasons for this disparity of treatment especially in light of the recent wave of anti-Semitism that is poisoning the entire West.
An anti-Semitism that in my view differs from all previous ones in that, in light of what was considered at the opening of this article, it appears to be something far more dangerous than the missiles being installed or deployed in Libya by the Russian Federation.
Missiles that for certain will not be launched but serve as a useful diversion to gloss over the militarization in anti-Western function of incipient anti-Semitism.
Something that the European Chancelleries seem not to have grasped, unlike the far more alert Saudis and Emratis who I doubt place in al-Joulani, Erdogan and Putin all the trust that in different capacities these characters seem to enjoy in some ways in the West.
Fonti citate:
https://libyareview.com/56048/will-russia-attack-europe-through-libya/
https://libyareview.com/56048/will-russia-attack-europe-through-libya/
https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/157542
“The first ten years – A diplomatic history of Israel” di Walter Eytan https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/firsttenyearsadi001996mbp/firsttenyearsadi001996mbp.pdf
https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/the-privileged-palestinian-refugees
https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/the-privileged-palestinian-refugees
“About Us: Figures at a Glance,” U.N. High Commissioner’s Office for Refugees (UNHCR), New York.
