World roundup: March 15 2024

Stories from Iran, Australia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

March 15, 44 BC: A group of Roman senators calling themselves “the Liberators” assassinates Julius Caesar due to fears that he had designs on ending the Roman Republic and making himself a monarch. Their actions ironically hastened the end of the Republic, sparking first the Liberators’ Civil War and then the civil war between Triumvirs Mark Antony and Octavian, which left Octavian victorious and in so dominant a position that he was able to make himself emperor.

March 15, 2011: Protests against the government of Bashar al-Assad that had begun in the city of Daraa earlier in the month spread to Damascus, the Syrian capital. This is usually the date marked as the start of the Syrian civil war. I’m reluctant to try to pass historical judgment on an event that hasn’t really ended yet, but it seems important to note the anniversary.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Jacobin’s Caitlin Procter highlights the Israeli military’s (IDF) annihilation of Gaza’s physical history:

The mass slaughter and destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza over the last five months suggests a clear intention to make the land entirely uninhabitable for the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there. So far, more than thirty thousand Palestinians have been killed, more than two-thirds of whom are women and children.

All of this has been recorded with astounding courage in videos, images, and text by Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Nobody will be able to look back and say they did not know what was happening.

Faced with this, it is difficult to talk about what else is being destroyed in Gaza. Yet as our screens increasingly fill with images of grey rubble, buildings desiccated by bombardment, and vast areas of land filled with tents in which displaced Palestinians are taking shelter, what is missing from the discussion is any engagement with Gaza’s rich historic and contemporary cultural heritage, and the way it is being systematically destroyed.

In other news: