A constant irritant exacerbating the anger in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu privately believing that no solution is really possible though he may pretend otherwise in public, what some call “Bibi-ism,” writes Michael Winship.
By Michael Winship
Maybe I didn’t get the memo, but I hadn’t heard the word “Daesh” used to describe ISIS until our recent trip to Israel and Jordan. Now, since the attacks in Paris, even President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have been saying it.
As The Guardian explained earlier this year, “The term is based on an Arabic acronym al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa’al Sham, which translates as Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (Syria), but is close to ‘Dahes’ or “one who sows discord.’”
That wordplay has ISIS members threatening severe bodily harm to anyone who uses it, yet as Matt Iglesias and Zack Beauchamp pointed out at Vox, “Daesh” is useful in the West because, unlike ISIS or Islamic State, it neither directly suggests some sovereign territorial caliphate nor impugns the Islamic religion.
My girlfriend, Pat, and I had left Tel Aviv at the end of our first week in Israel, flown to the resort city of Eilat and then, early the next morning, walked through the Yitzhak Rabin Terminal, across no man’s land under the gaze of soldiers in watchtowers and into Jordan.
We spent a day at the incredible ancient city of Petra and a day in Wadi Rum, the desert valley through which Lawrence of Arabia trekked on his way to take Aqaba from the Turks during World War I. We drove north to within half an hour of the Syrian border and toured the Roman ruins in the city of Jerash as around us Jordanian schoolgirls sang and danced their way through a class field trip.