AfroVerdict

Israeli-Palestinian Escalation – Divided Attention for Ukraine

The handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a slippery slope as we've observed tremendous escalation this weekend resulting in death and injury of civillians on both sides. AfroVerdict host, Viktor Anokhin, joins experts to discuss the conflict's origins, US weapons used by Hamas and Israel's failure to predict the attack.
Sputnik
Palestine is the "crux to understanding the conflict" between the country and Israel, a phrase repeated by many, including Professor Ian Liebenberg, political scientist and professor at the University of Namibia and Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

"If we listen to what President Erdogan of Turkey has said, and he's not the first to have said it, but to say that Palestine is a crux to understanding the conflict in the Middle East and Palestine is in fact the main hotspot that triggered many conflicts there," Prof. Liebenberg says.

There are weapons, "big and small", which have been "given to the Ukrainian government" and "unaccounted for", according to Oscar van Heerden, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for African Diplomacy and Leadership at the University of Johannesburg.

"In as much as the US is continuously saying that they can keep track of the weapons that they've given the Ukrainians, the truth of the matter is that we simply don't know what has happened to very much small and large weapons that have gone to the Ukraine and some of it could potentially have found its way to the Middle East," he explains.

The escalation in the Middle East has featured on a number of leading press outlets, turning a deaf ear to the conflict in Ukraine. With the "divided attention", a "decline in terms of commitment of resources" is a possibility, according to Dr Anne Abaho, International Relations and Security Studies lecturer, Nkumba University.

"The commitment will remain there, but resources have to be redistributed to be able to counter the different groups that are fighting American interests and American foreign policy, as in the case of Israel," Dr. Abaho elaborates.

To hear what else the experts had to say, check out the entire episode of the AfroVerdict podcast, brought to you by Sputnik Africa.
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