First of all: apologies for sending this newsletter a week later than the usual last Sunday of the month. The Middle East was to blame. But having just landed from that parallel world full of violence, it is time to understand, inside and out, its expansive waves.
From the streets of northern Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital, you can see the crystalline skyscrapers of Tel Aviv. From the beaches of Ashkelon and Ashdod, something like the Israeli Benidorm, you can hear the bombs of Gaza and see its sandy shore.
In the Middle East there is war between neighbors who are only a few kilometers apart. Sometimes meters. They seem condemned to understand each other but for the moment the sentence is death. And days after four months of war in Gaza, and despite the evident advance of the Israeli Defense Forces on the ground (see the blue on the map below), peace is far away.
In Israel there is talk that the war could extend to “2025” and that has just begun in 2024. In the north no one believes in peace. In the south nobody believes in peace. Not in the center either. Same to the east. To the west there is only sea.
Israel has added more than a thousand of its own victims since the Hamas attack on October 7. Palestine numbers more than 25,000 in the Strip alone and hundreds in the West Bank. A drama. Another one. And without end, because the missiles from Gaza towards Israel are repeated as the fights are repeated in the strip and the millions of people displaced to theoretically “safe” areas but where violence is not avoided grow.
Peace is a dream that almost no one believes in. Because in the Middle East the war comes from far back and points far away or at least as far as the seven fronts on the map suggest – as confirmed by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant – on which it is fought: Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.
The danger, therefore, expands: there is war in the Middle East, there is a supply crisis due to the conflict with the Houthis of Yemen at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, and growing war tension in the relationship between the US and Iran, squires of each other in the many battles that take place here.
The scenario is complex. And it hits Spain on the rebound, as this map summarizes:
Egypt suffers from the shortage of ships crossing the Suez Canal and its consequent loss of income. Jordan suffers because ships do not arrive at its only port, in Aqaba. Products destined for Europe also lengthen their times and costs (by between three and five times according to the latest calculations) when they go around Africa to avoid ending up attacked in front of Yemen. And the ports in the Mediterranean, in turn, go to a secondary level and the Atlantic or border ports are promoted, such as the Moroccan port of Tangier.
Its effect, with long-term consequences as it coincides in parallel with the intention to restrict the most polluting ships in Europe, is that here, with the war in the Red Sea, Morocco wins and Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean countries lose.
The scenario is complex for Spain, something that was already warned about by the map of Spanish international missions, which coincide with its international interests, which coincide with the hottest points today:
Also because among so much war and death, other parallel crises that speak of the same thing from another perspective tend to be forgotten, as happens with the many deaths that occur on the migratory routes to Spain and Europe.
It is lived very particularly in the Canary Islands. There are thousands of victims. And everything indicates that they will go further in the midst of so much instability and being as it is in parallel to the other cold war between Russia and the West that is being fought in West Africa, with Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger saying goodbye to the Community Economic of West African States (Cedeao, for its acronym).
Moscow supports military coup plotters in the Sahel. The West at the controls answered. The population is in the middle. Many flee.
The military budget, in fact, increases almost without exception and particularly in Sweden, Lithuania and Spain, with one eye on the crises that do not end, such as that of Ukraine although it is now no longer the main focus, and with another on Middle East or the Sahel.
And even more so when senior European military commanders ask citizens to prepare for war.
And a final note: in the midst of so much change and instability, the extreme right is gaining ground in the Old Continent without exception. The cases of Hungary, Poland and Italy are striking and large, but those of France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, Austria are not far behind…
Trying to imagine what would happen if the extreme right governed much of the world is becoming less and less theoretical. One more headache of the many there are.
“Trees do not migrate like animals, but they move slowly through their regeneration. The specimens in lower latitudes die and grow in higher latitudes, where their conditions to survive and reproduce are better,” it is said.
This is already the case in Spain.
The future is unknown but the clues there are worrying. And the reason is summarized as follows: “They play a fundamental economic and ecological role. In addition to their contribution to biodiversity, forests are large carbon sinks, water regulators and home to thousands of species.” The map that follows is that of the oak tree. Here it is for the spruce, oak, pine, beech, and even for the olive tree so characteristic of the Mediterranean. And it happens to everyone.
The maps of the trees that escape from the south to the north of Europe are also the clue to another parallel world that is making its way in an increasingly clear way.
