Israel wants retaliation, Hezbollah is sending threats – and blue helmets are trying to preserve the crumbling peace in northern Israel
It is good and sometimes courageous that Western politicians are getting on a plane these days and demonstrating in Israel and its neighbouring countries that they want to help and mediate in a terrible conflict. German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius visited the German peacekeepers stationed there in Lebanon today, more precisely those who are on duty on the corvette Oldenburg.
The Germans are part of the UN peacekeeping mission UNIFIL, which was founded in 1978 to prevent a military escalation between the Shiite militia Hezbollah, which is stationed in Lebanon, and Israel's army. 10,000 soldiers from 49 countries are part of the Blue Helmet force, and within a few days rockets have hit the UNIFIL headquarters twice.
Today, my colleague Christoph Reuter reports on what is probably the most dangerous border in the world, which is 121 kilometres long. "Hezbollah has threatened to attack with all its might in the event of an Israeli ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and is already fueling the limited small-scale war," he writes. "Grenades and occasionally rockets fly over the line all the time," he said, adding that there are deaths on both sides almost every day.
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UNIFIL troop observation post right on the border
Photo: Ammar Awad / REUTERS
In the hills on both sides of the border, it could be decided whether the new Middle East war, in all its horror, will be limited to Gaza and Israel's army – or whether it will move to other countries. There are many indications that neither side wants the conflagration, according to Christoph. But after a hit, perhaps not even intended, and an answer to it, a race that is as fatal as it is frenzied could begin. "Will Israel be the first to hit Hezbollah's thousands of rocket bases? Or is Hezbollah going to launch countless rockets first to pre-empt just that?"
The 10,000 soldiers of UNIFIL, who come from Indonesia, Italy, India, Malaysia and Spain, among others, are supposed to preserve the crumbling peace. The Blue Helmets are more important than ever right now, but not in a military function, the SPIEGEL reporter has learned, but because the hostile sides communicate practically only with the help of the Blue Helmets. It is "a bizarre, cynical cosmos" in which shells are more often seen as messages than serious attacks, and Hezbollah fighters are warned by the Israeli military shortly before a rocket attack in order to avoid the death of the men.
In Lebanon, even Hezbollah's "soulful haters" are apparently shocked by Israel's weakness revealed by Hamas terror. In Israel, on the other hand, the population overwhelmingly wants to see retribution. My colleague Christoph's assessment is worrying: "The combination of the two changes is what makes the situation so dangerous."
Read the full story here: At what is currently the world's most dangerous border
More news and background information on the war in the Middle East can be found here:
The thing about the "but": The philosopher Slavoj Žižek is scandalous, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth is changing: the book fair is dominated by the war in Israel. Impressions from the debate seismograph .
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What to do when employees incite against Israel on the Internet? Bundesliga soccer players Anwar El Ghazi and Noussair Mazraoui have made anti-Israel statements on social media. Here, a lawyer explains what employees are allowed to do – and what the employer is allowed to do.
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He grew up in Wedding – and now speaks for Israel's military: His experiences in Berlin's Wedding district continue to shape his view to this day: Arye Shalicar is a spokesman for the Israeli military – and has been on continuous duty since 7 October. Here he talks about his mission.
Here you can find all the latest developments: The news update
2. Even after the start of the Ukraine war, Western companies were probably still supplying material for an LNG plant to Russia – by exhausting deadlines
Even though the greatest attention and concern of many residents of Western countries is currently focused on the conflict in the Middle East, people continue to die every day in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
Why do the sanctions against Russia, which were imposed by the United States, Canada and the EU, among others, after the start of the war, seem to have little effect? I often find this difficult to comprehend. One suspicion is that the sanctions are apparently being circumvented more or less secretly by Russia.
My colleague Sophia Baumann and my colleague Claus Hecking, as well as ZDF journalists Hans Koberstein and Nathan Niedermeier, report today on how Western corporations continued to work on the Russian prestige project of a gigantic liquefied natural gas plant even after the war began.
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Arctic LNG-2 plant in Siberia
Photo: NOVATEK
Arctic LNG-2 is the name of the plant that will be used in an elaborate process to cool natural gas in the Arctic to around minus 160 degrees Celsius so that it can be loaded onto ships as liquefied natural gas (LNG). The West is already an important customer," writes the SPIEGEL and ZDF team. The European Union absurdly imports more Russian LNG than it did before the war in Ukraine."
Among others, the former German company Linde, which has been headquartered in Ireland's capital Dublin since a merger in 2018, was involved in the planning of the Russian plant. The company is "one of the 2023 World's most ethical companies", Linde praises itself, one of the most ethical companies in the world – and yet the company apparently used a legal transition period until 27 May 2022 and continued to deliver to Russia until then. Despite the bloodshed in Ukraine that had already lasted for months. "Crucial components for Arctic LNG-2 probably made their way to the East in this way," says the colleagues' story.
Investigations by SPIEGEL and the research associations Data Desk and Anti-Corruption Data Collective suggest that a number of companies were trying to bring the last material to the Russian construction sites before the export bans came into force. For the Arctic LNG project, Russian customs registered large-scale shipments on June 1, 2022, five days after EU sanctions came into force. When asked, Linde assured that all deliveries had left European ports before the deadline and that the group had always adhered to global sanctions.
In the meantime, the company's business in Russia has probably actually come to an end. However, important technology for the Arctic LNG project may now be built by Russian manufacturers with know-how from the West. "Linde may have left Russia," the colleagues report, but the knowledge from the company "has apparently remained."
Read the full story here: How Western corporations made a Russian prestige project possible
3. Elon Musk and his company Tesla could be spoiled by the Cybertruck electric pickup truck
Elon Musk's often puzzling behavior and questionable business decisions have made it so far that many people react with schadenfreude when his ventures don't go so well. Today, Musk's car company Tesla disappointed many stock investors with not particularly good figures for the past quarter. And Musk complained in a conference call last night, among other things, about the high interest rate level, which keeps people from buying a car. He also mentioned the difficult economic situation and announced: "We are not sinking, but even a great ship has to fight in a storm."
Tesla shares initially lost value after the figures were announced, although the company recently made well over $1.8 billion in profit. The delivery of Tesla's electric pickup truck, which is to be called Cybertruck, is eagerly awaited. The massive pick-up model is intended to open up a new customer base for fans of the XXL vehicle category, which is extremely popular, especially in the USA. On November 30, the first vehicles from the production already started in Texas are expected to be delivered. Tesla wants to build up to 250,000 units per year.
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Elon Musk with Cybertruck (at the presentation of the prototype in November 2019): Risky project
Photo: Frederic J. Brown / AFP
Because Elon Musk apparently has a special talent for mixing serious and bizarre ideas, he also said the sentence on Wednesday evening: "We dug our own grave with the Cybertruck." What exactly did he mean by that? In fact, the production ramp-up for the Cybertruck seemed to have been dragging on for a long time. My colleague Arvid Haitsch assesses the latest Musk volte face as follows: "The sentence contains a kernel of truth: Musk has already succeeded in many ventures, but this one is probably too radical. The extra-hard constructed monster pick-up truck is a danger to outsiders – and also to the company's balance sheets."
Read more: Tesla has "dug its own grave" with Cybertruck
What else is important today
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Iranian Jina Mahsa Amini receives posthumous Sakharov Prize: Jina Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Iran. Protests erupted – the authorities cracked down on the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement. The Kurdish woman has now been awarded the EU Prize for Democracy and Human Rights.
Wagenknecht files a complaint for fake website: On a website, members are to be recruited for a new party of Sahra Wagenknecht and donations are to be collected. According to SPIEGEL information, it is a fake. The politician now wants to take action against this.
My favorite story today: »Rick and Morty« will be continued
The audience is always "distraught and excited," writes my colleague Arno Frank about the effect of successful episodes of the animated series "Rick and Morty." What is the 2018 Emmy-winning series about? The narrative starting point is a single-family house in a quiet neighborhood with a large garage and a well-kept garden. That's where the Smith family lives. Father Jerry works in the advertising industry, mother Beth is a specialist surgeon for horses. "The marriage is unhappy and will soon be divorced. Daughter Summer, 17, is going through puberty. Latecomer Morty, eternal 14, has a rather soft and simple disposition," Arno writes. It's Rick Sanchez, the mad scientist, who causes the deceptive idyll to explode uncontrollably in every episode." Rick is Beth's long-lost raven father, has turned the garage into his lab and considers himself the smartest person of all imaginable universes. A "Doctor Faustus on amphetamines" is this strange hero, my colleague enthuses. The series is "the most entertaining attempt to distill something like a truth out of the turbulence of our present using pop cultural means – even if this truth is an abyss of madness."
Read the full story here: Cheerful Nihilism
What we recommend today at SPIEGEL+
Mr Steinmeier is looking for anger: Southern Thuringia is an AfD stronghold – and it is precisely here that Federal President Steinmeier has moved his official residence for three days. But where is the much-vaunted frustration of the citizens?
How far will Germany go to get the Olympics? At first, the German sports officials were in favor of excluding the Russians from the Olympics. Now they are turning around. There's a reason for that.
»You feel purer when you eat according to this cuisine«: Trout, bison steak, wild three-pudding with sunflower butter – in his book, indigenous chef Sean Sherman shows the cuisine of the early inhabitants of North America. Here he tells us why traditional food is so precious.
What is less important today
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Photograph:
Felix Hörhager / picture alliance / dpa
Hyper Love Rush: Singer H.P. Baxxter, 59, has gotten engaged to his 22-year-old girlfriend Sara. The frontman of the techno band Scooter, whose hits like »Hyper Hyper« I find quite terrible, is one of the really curious and sometimes amusing figures of the German tabloid world. The entertainer claims that he hasn't given too much thought to the details of the planned wedding, which would be his third. "That's all to come. For now, we're happy."
Mini Concave Mirror
Von Augsburger-Allgemeine.de: "In the vanilla ice cream from Gut & Billig, which is sold at Edeka, whipped cream has been replaced by coke fat."
Here you can find the whole concave mirror.
Cartoon of the Day
And tonight?
Could you read the very funny novel »Drifter« by the writer Ulrike Sterblich, who was shortlisted for the German Book Prize with this book – and unfortunately did not receive the award at the award gala on Monday evening.
The novel reads as if the whole world had plopped into a pot of very good drugs and then resurfaced refreshed. In cheerfully upbeat, casually punchline sentences, the author describes the psychedelically charged adventures of the two big city heroes Wenzel and Killer. The two friends are halfway successful with media – and one day they are charmed by an encounter with a superheroine-like woman named Vica. »Drifter« is about one of the two heroes being struck by lightning, causing his personality to change, and many more absurdities.
The author Mortal lives in Berlin. Years ago, you can look it up on YouTube, she worked in video clips as a satirically gifted reporter under the name Supatopcheckerbunny.
I often had to laugh out loud when reading »Drifter« – also because the book takes a critical look at the media world of today.
Have a nice evening. Heartily
Yours sincerely, Wolfgang Höbel, Author in the Department of Culture