World roundup: September 6 2024

Stories from Iran, China, Tunisia, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

September 6, 1522: The Victoria arrives at the Spanish port of Sanlúcar as the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the earth. It had set out as one of five vessels in Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition in 1519 and was the only ship to survive the journey. In that sense it fared better than its admiral, Magellan, who was killed after picking an ill-advised fight with a group of indigenous people in the Philippines. And its haul of spices in particular was worth more than the other four ships combined, so investors still came out ahead. The Victoria would fully complete its trip around the world two days later by returning to the port whence it departed, Seville.

September 6, 1955: The two-day Istanbul Pogrom begins amid news reports that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki (located in the former home where Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was born) had been bombed by Greek agents. A mob began attacking Greeks in Istanbul and then expanded its scope to include Armenians and Jews. Between 13 and 30 people are said to have been killed in the violence and the incident began a process of Greek emigration that played out over the next several years. In reality, the consulate was fine and the whole thing was a planned operation by Turkey’s two “Operation Gladio” organizations, the Tactical Mobilization Group and Counter-Guerrilla. They were responding to the rise of Greek unionist sentiment (Enosis) in Cyprus and were likely also working on a longer-term project to “encourage” minority emigration and thereby “Turkify” Turkey.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Haaretz’s Jonathan Lis is reporting that the Biden administration may present a new “bridging proposal” to the participants in the barely-hanging-on Gaza ceasefire talks as soon as this weekend and that it will include “creative solutions” to the issues that remain outstanding. Those presumably include the status of the Israeli military (IDF) deployment along the “Philadelphi Corridor,” the wedge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used to prevent a deal to date, as well as the details of the prisoner exchange, which has become the Biden administration’s new excuse to blame Hamas for blocking the deal instead of Netanyahu. According to Lis’s “Israeli source” the administration will frame this proposal in a “take it or leave it” fashion, which will be a bluff but one US officials hope will force Netanyahu to take it seriously.