World roundup: July 17 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Russia, Haiti, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 17, 1936: The Spanish military, led by a cadre of nationalist officers including Francisco Franco, begins a coup against Spain’s Popular Front government starting in Morocco, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands. The intent was to secure those outlying areas before swiftly moving into Spain proper to oust the government the following day, but the effort stalled and the result instead was the Spanish Civil War. Franco and the Nationalists ultimately won but only after hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

July 17, 1968: In a bloodless coup sometimes called the “17 July Revolution,” the Iraqi Baath Party ousts President Abdul Rahman Arif and takes power under its leader, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. To this day the circumstances surrounding the coup remain murky, but the result is not—the Baathists controlled Iraq until the US invasion in 2003 ousted them.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Biden administration’s refusal to sanction the Israeli military’s (IDF) Netzah Yehuda battalion according to US law is paying off, in the sense that a new CNN investigation finds that the unit’s officers are being promoted to higher ranks with greater responsibilities:

Using facial recognition technology and other open-source techniques, CNN has found that three former commanders of the Netzah Yehuda battalion – who were in charge of the unit at the time of alleged abuses in the West Bank – have risen through the ranks of the IDF. CNN tracked these commanders by matching their faces to publicly available imagery over the years, ranging from photographs of military ceremonies to battlefield updates.

CNN has spoken with a former member of the unit, who detailed instances of cruel and excessively violent treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The whistleblower said that commanders actively supported vigilante violence and that promoting them into senior IDF positions risked bringing the same culture to other parts of the military.

Kudos to everyone in the Biden administration who’s been involved in this affair, really a job well done all around.

In other news: