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By Ranjan Solomon

In 2023, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York wrote, and very sharply, that  “{the reason Zionists have the full support of European and US leaders is because the genocidal drive to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ is embedded deep in their psyches.” As millions of Palestinians trapped in Gaza were facing starvation and mass murder, Israel’s invading army made sure to film themselves enjoying “rejuvenation complexes”, where they were lavished with “concerts, massage chairs, buffet, and more. It is surreal to watch Israelis being pampered while slaughtering Palestinians in their own homeland. Dabashi makes a comparative note:

In North and South America, Australia, Asia and Africa, European settler-colonialists have left behind the evidence of their psychotic genocidal practice. The European transatlantic slave trade may have halved the population of Africa, some historians believe. The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many African colonies were all built on the systematic extermination, displacement and internment of the original inhabitants.

What the Israelis are doing in Palestine is what the French did in Algeria, the British did in India, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in Vietnam, the Spaniards in Latin America, the Italians in Africa and the Germans in Namibia, another chapter of European genocidal history. Zionism is the Jewish version of the racist US doctrine of manifest destiny, a belief in the racial superiority of white people and definitive to the American colonial conquest of the Native Americans and other groups they exterminated.

Zionists believe Palestine was their promised land, that it was destined and promised to them by their God, and that the native inhabitants were a nuisance that must be brutally eliminated.

Palestinians are up against a formidable enemy right across the West whose racist pretensions are ones they much prefer to conceal. What the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is the Zionist version of “the great replacement theory” which holds that people of colour are replacing white people and that the process must be reversed.

Everything about the occupation, apartheid, settler violence is about legitimising this theory on-the-ground. This political domination when one considers how French knew just how their colonies were captured and administered, Likewise in Vietnam and Algeria. Or, how the Russians carried out their crimes in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The West knows that Israel’s war(s) are blatantly outrageous  and are committed in the modern capitalist phenomenon of progress, civilization, democracy and the market. Nonsensical claims- each of these. The barbarians were the conquerors – in the most recent instance, the Zionists.

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator

10 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has published a report accusing Israel of carrying out the “deliberate starvation” of the Palestinians in Gaza as a means of exterminating them and annexing their land.

“Israel has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people, which evidences genocide and extermination,” Fakhri said in his report.

[https://twitter.com/MichaelFakhri/status/1832874565762240731]

“Never in post-war history has a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.” The report continues, “On October 9, 2023, Israel announced its starvation campaign against Gaza. By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 percent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger.”

The UN rapporteur’s report stands as an indictment not only of Israel but also of the imperialist powers, including the United States, UK, France, Germany and Canada, that have funded, armed and politically defended the genocide.

Fakhri was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as the lead investigator, also known as special rapporteur, on the right to food in 2020. He is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law.

Since Israel launched its genocidal onslaught last year, 34 Palestinians have been confirmed to have starved to death, while the entire population lacks sufficient food, and 90 percent report going hungry for 24 hours or more.

In a post on X, Fakhri noted, “In Gaza, malnutrition, famine, and disease are killing more people than bombs and bullets.”

Fakhri asks, “Why is this happening? This is about land. In 2023, Israel seized more Palestinian land than in any given year in the past 30 years. Israel wants to erase the Palestinians from their homeland and territory and deny them their right to return to Palestine.”

Fakhri’s report asserts that famine is always deliberate because humanity produces more than enough food necessary to feed everyone. It declares, “The world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the current population, and yet the prevalence of hunger, malnutrition, and famine is on the rise. Hunger and famine are not production problems; they are always caused by acts and omissions that deny people access to food.”

Israel’s deliberate promotion of famine was announced by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, who declared, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” because “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

Current and former government officials have repeatedly stated that mass starvation and the promotion of disease are the goals, not the byproducts of Israeli policy. In November, Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, declared that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers,” adding that Israel’s aim is “not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters” but “irreversible harm to their families.”

Commenting on these and other statements, Fakhri’s report declares:

Israel made its intentions to starve everyone in Gaza explicit, implemented its plans, and predictably created a famine throughout Gaza. Tracking the geography of Israel’s starvation tactics alongside Israeli officials’ statements confirms its intent. Israel opened with a total siege that weakened all Palestinians in Gaza. Then, Israel used starvation to induce forcible transfer, harm, and death against people in the north, pushing people into the south, only to starve, bombard, and kill people in newly created refugee camps in the south.

Fakhri’s report makes clear that the purpose of the famine is the depopulation and annexation of the entire Gaza Strip. “What is at stake is nothing less than Israel’s attempt to annex Gaza, as the current government has indicated on multiple occasions,” it asserted.

The report notes, “Israel has not only denied and restricted the delivery of humanitarian aid and violated its obligations to ensure that the aid that is let through reaches the population, but it has also created a climate of horror by targeting humanitarian workers and civilians seeking humanitarian aid.”

According to official statistics, 40,435 Palestinians have been killed and 93,534 injured since October last year. But this figure does not include 10,000 people thought to be killed and buried under the rubble. According to official figures, the death toll includes 17,000 children, meaning that 2.6 percent of all of Gaza’s children have been killed, with an average of 53 children killed every day since October 7.

Once the victims of Israel’s deliberate famine and promotion of disease are added, the real death toll could be 186,000 or more, according to an estimate published in The Lancet medical journal.

In July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address to a joint session of the US Congress, in which he vowed to expand Israel’s war against the Palestinian population into a conflict throughout the Middle East, centrally targeting Iran.

Netanyahu received a standing ovation from Democratic and Republican members of both houses of Congress, followed by separate meetings with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. After her meeting with Netanyahu, Harris declared, “I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Last month, the US approved a $20 billion arms sale to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, 120 mm tank ammunition, high-explosive mortars and tactical vehicles.

10 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It’s time to ask why

Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.

The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – and the less coverage Gaza receives.

The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.

This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.

We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.

After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.

And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.

No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.

The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.

Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.

In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.

Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”

According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.

A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.

Pulling punches

The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.

Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.

Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.

Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.

Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.

But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.

What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.

Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.

Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.

What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.

Campaign of intimidation

The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.

The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.

Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.

What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.

The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.

British media favours the Israeli narrative

Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.

This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.

No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.

The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.

Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.

Allowable thought

The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.

The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.

The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.

Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.

That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.

Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.

Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.

The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.

Pressing the button

What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.

It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.

The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court. Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.

Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.

Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.

One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.

In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.

They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”

Relentless depravity

It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.

The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.

It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.

After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.

In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.

Former Palestinian detainee recounts torture methods at Israel’s Sde Teiman detention camp

One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.

Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.

None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.

After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.

The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.

Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”

‘Heroic soldiers’

This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.

What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.

In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.

Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.

He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.

Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.

Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.

In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.

There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.

Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.

Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguing that those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.

It was hard not to conclude that he meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.

Inner fascist

Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.

His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.

Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.

Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.

Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.

His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.

The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.

The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.

Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.

Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.

The genocide party

That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.

On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.

7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.

Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.

The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.

The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.

Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.

All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.

All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.

7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

13 September 2024

Source: middleeasteye.net

GENEVA

Gaza’s economy has shrunk to less than a sixth of its size when the Israel-Hamas war began nearly a year ago, while unemployment in the occupied West Bank has nearly tripled, a UN report said on Thursday, underscoring the challenges of reconstruction.

The report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) described Gaza’s economy as “in ruins” more than 11 months after Israel launched a military campaign there that has reduced much of the Strip to rubble in response to the deadly October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants.

The UN trade body said the Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited self-rule under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, is under “immense pressure” that is jeopardising its ability to function.

“The Palestinian economy is in free fall,” UNCTAD Deputy Secretary General Pedro Manuel Moreno told reporters in Geneva.

“The report calls for the international community to halt this economic free fall, address the humanitarian crisis and lay the groundwork for lasting peace and development,” he said, calling for a comprehensive recovery plan.

Declining international aid and revenue deductions and withholdings by Israel, which UNCTAD estimated at more than $1.4 billion since 2019, are adding to the strain on the Palestinians, the report said.

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who ordered the funds to be withheld, accuses the PA of supporting the October 7 attack on Israel. The PA denies promoting violence. Israel also routinely deducts so-called “martyr payments” paid by the PA to families of militants and civilians killed by Israeli forces.

The document described “a rapid and alarming economic decline” in the occupied West Bank, which has suffered a surge in violence since the Gaza war.

A total of more than 300,000 jobs have been lost in the West Bank since the war began, UNCTAD said, driving up the unemployment rate there from 12.9 percent to 32 percent.

UNCTAD blamed the decline on the unrest, which the UN says has resulted in the deaths of more than 650 Palestinians since October 7 as well as new Israeli trade restrictions such as checkpoints.

Israel, which does not give Palestinian death tolls, says around 40 Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians outside Gaza since war erupted. It says its actions in the West Bank have been necessary to counter Iranian-backed militant groups and prevent harm to Israeli civilians. But many of its attacks have been unprovoked and it is accused of doing very little to stop settler assaults on Palestinians.

13 September 2024

Source: thearabweekly.com

Ramallah / PNN/

With the complete suspension of education in Gaza for nearly a year, schools and facilities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have been increasingly targeted by the Israeli military. These attacks are part of a wider assault during the ongoing war, which has affected more than 70% of UNRWA’s schools and centres that serve as shelters for displaced people.

The latest attack struck the Ja’ouni School in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, resulting in the death of six UNRWA staff members, raising the total number of UNRWA personnel killed since the war began to approximately 220. These assaults represent a grave violation of international humanitarian law, according to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Refugee Affairs Department.

Call for an International Investigation

The Refugee Affairs Department has called on the UNRWA Commissioner-General to urgently request the UN Secretary-General to form an independent inquiry committee to investigate the violations against the agency in Gaza. These attacks have led to the deaths of numerous staff members, their families, and displaced individuals, along with the systematic destruction of UNRWA’s educational, health, and service facilities. The department also condemned the continued targeting of UNRWA’s headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, and Israeli actions that obstruct the agency’s work.

Appeals for International Protection

In its statement, the Refugee Affairs Department emphasised the need for international protection for the Palestinian people, who, it said, are facing a “genocide.” The department called on the international community to take a firm stance against the deliberate targeting of UNRWA and the refugee community, asserting that Israel aims to undermine the agency’s operations and spread misinformation about it, with the ultimate goal of passing laws to designate UNRWA as a terrorist organisation. Such a move would undermine the authority of the United Nations and its member states.

Education: The Struggle for Survival in Gaza

The department highlighted the importance of resuming education in Gaza, stressing that UNRWA must develop a strategy to reopen schools and ensure the continuity of education for Palestinian refugees. Education, it said, is an integral part of the struggle for survival and resilience on Palestinian land. The department commended UNRWA’s efforts to continue its “Return to Education” initiative, which aims to preserve education as a vital element in the Palestinian people’s daily fight to sustain life.

12 September 2024

Source: english.pnn.ps

By Muhammed Enes Calli

ISTANBUL

A ministerial meeting involving the Arab-Islamic Contact Group on Gaza and several EU members expressed concern over the increasing violations of international law on Palestinian territories and emphasized the need for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.

Together with other members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Arab League Contact Group on Gaza, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan attended the meeting that also saw the participation of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and foreign ministers from Spain, Norway, Slovenia, Nigeria and Ireland.

During the meeting, steps to be taken to halt Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its crimes in the West Bank were discussed, a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said.

The ongoing cease-fire negotiations for Gaza and humanitarian aid efforts were reviewed, and measures needed for the recognition of Palestine and reaching a two-state solution were discussed, it added.

A joint statement issued at the end of the meeting called on the international community to recognize Palestine as soon as possible and to support a two-state solution, the ministry statement said.

It highlighted the need for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and an end to attacks targeting Palestinians in the West Bank.

The joint statement also emphasized the need for urgent and uninterrupted humanitarian aid to Gaza and expressed support for the work of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), according to the ministry.

It was decided to hold a new meeting in New York at the end of September during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week.

Fidan stressed in the meetings that joint efforts should be increased for Palestine’s full membership in the UN and for its recognition by more countries, the ministry said.

He highlighted the importance of putting pressure on countries that oppose these steps, it added.

Fidan called for more countries to become involved in the genocide case against Israel filed at the International Court of Justice, according to the ministry statement.

“Türkiye will continue to work toward the establishment of an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Palestine, the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the recognition of Palestine and the taking of the necessary steps toward a two-state solution,” it added.

13 September 2024

Source: aa.com.tr

Pope Francis has decried the killing of Palestinian children in Israeli military strikes in besieged Gaza, calling bombings of schools, on the “presumption” of striking Hamas resistance fighters, “ugly”.

Aboard the flight back to Rome from Singapore on Friday, the pontiff expressed doubt about an end to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“I am sorry to have to say this,” the pope said. “But I do not think that they are taking steps to make peace.”

Francis was speaking in a press conference with journalists after a demanding 12-day tour across Southeast Asia and Oceania.

He said he speaks on the phone with members of a Catholic parish in Gaza “every day” and “they tell me ugly things, difficult things”.

“Please, when you see the bodies of killed children, when you see that, under the presumption that some guerrillas are there, a school is bombed, this is ugly,” the 87-year-old pontiff said.

“It is ugly.”

By Palestine Chronicle Staff

South Africa filed a case against Israel in late December arguing that it had violated its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

South Africa is to press ahead with its case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and will file its memorial next month, the presidency has said.

“South Africa intends to provide facts and evidence to prove that Israel is committing the crime of genocide in Palestine,” it said in a statement on Tuesday. “This case will continue until the court makes a finding.”

The presidency stressed that while the case is in progress, “we hope that Israel will abide by the court’s provisional orders issued to date.”

South Africa filed a case against Israel in late December arguing that it had violated its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The country has until October 28 to provide the UN court with its arguments for the case.

[https://twitter.com/PresidencyZA/status/1833514711809511744]

“The case presents a growing global effort towards ensuring peace in the Middle-East,” said the statement, adding that several countries, namely, Nicaragua, Palestine, Turkiye, Spain, Mexico, Libya and Colombia have all joined the South African case against Israel.

The statement comes amid a report by the US-based news website Axios that Israeli diplomats were being instructed to lobby members of the US Congress to pressure South Africa into dropping the case.

Leaked Cable

Citing a leaked cable obtained by Axios, the report said that according to Israeli officials, the Israeli foreign ministry “started a diplomatic campaign in recent weeks to press South Africa not to push forward with the case at the ICJ.”

“The U.S. Congress is a main tool in the effort,” it stated.

Israel Lobbying US Congress to Pressure South Africa to Drop ICJ Genocide Case – Report

“We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price,” the cable read.

The diplomats were, amongst others, instructed “to ask members of Congress and Jewish organizations in the U.S. to reach out directly to South African diplomats in the U.S. and make clear South Africa would pay a heavy price if it doesn’t change its policy.”

In the recent national elections in May, the ruling ANC party lost the majority it had held in government since the first democratic elections held in 1994.

Commitment to International Law

In July, the country’s newly appointed Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola however said that the country will continue to leverage global institutions to defend Palestinian rights and ensure the equitable application of international law for all.

‘Our History of Solidarity’ – South Africa to Continue Advocating for Palestine

“South Africa will continue to act within global institutions to protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza and ensure the fair application of international law for all,” he said.

“Notably, South Africa will continue to do everything within its power to preserve the existence of the Palestinian people as a group, to end all acts of apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people and to walk with them towards the realisation of their collective right to self-determination and this informed our application to the International Court of Justice,” Lamola added.

In January, the ICJ ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide in its ongoing war in Gaza.

Over 41,000 Killed

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.

Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 41,020 Palestinians have, to date, been killed, and 94,925 wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

‘Partner in This Crime’ – Euro-Med Says Israel Dropped US-Made Bombs on Tented Gaza Camp

Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.

Millions Displaced

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

11 September 2024

Source: palestinechronicle.com

By Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe

In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace.

Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around Grants Pass v. Johnson, including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city’s case. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused.

One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised, very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom who argued that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly kills 800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous, “Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing the dwellings and communities of the unhoused.

Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the homeless from encampments. In Palm Springs, for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In the state capital of Sacramento, an encampment of mostly disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington, Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing against the erasure of their lives.

Cruel but Not Unusual

However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of seventeenth-century English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have realized. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasants in England lost their rights to land they had lived on and farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often under the supervision of the church.

To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion in the Grants Pass case, seemed incredulous that the lower court ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or gay people, and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered. In addition to such insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since 600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission only had 138 beds.

Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a review of Martin v. Boise. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, revealed in her fiery dissent: the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down, attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they will want to move on down the road.”

The United States of Dispossession

This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very founding of the United States, as the government encountered Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial, they forced them off those very lands. They also subjected generations of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the highest rates of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, 1% of the American population now owns two thirds of the private land in the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!

In Trash: A Poor White Journey (a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for the crime of sleeping outdoors.

The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the French poet and novelist, said so eloquently long ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from occupying space they don’t own.

After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. Even though there are far more empty homes than homeless people (28 for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have been bad for all too many of us.

In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed. While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place. The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that people will just go down the road and essentially disappear — ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.

The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts (required for county funding for homeless services) that identified more than 650,000 homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is, however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved to be 184,865, or eight times the number used for funding services.

A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this country is closer to 8 to 11 million nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the subsequent loss of Covid era benefits, and crippling inflation and housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable possibility.

Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, 45% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land ownership. Afro-Brazilians were given the right to own land for the first time, although many barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and natural owners of the land” were affirmed, although they continue to find themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those rights. And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to fulfill a social function, be productive, and respect labor and environmental rights. The state has the right to expropriate landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must compensate the owner,” according to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute for Social Research.

That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements of landless peasants that had formed an organization called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could even sue for legal tenure. To date, 450,000 families have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics.

If Not Here, Where?

Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking: “Where do we go?” In Aberdeen, Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30 days to leave or face fines and arrests.

Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and tribal nations fight for their sovereignty and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find justice sooner or later.

Cedar Monroe is a chaplain, organizer, and author. They are the author of Trash: A Poor White Journey and served as a chaplain alongside people experiencing homelessness for 13 years.

Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist.

9 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Craig Mokhiber

What do two South Pacific countries, two North American countries, one country in the Middle East, and (until recently) one country in southern Africa have in common with Europe? The answer is rooted in centuries of imperialism and conquest in the ideologies that have sustained them — and in the four-letter acronym “WEOG.”

Five countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel (and for several years during apartheid, the South African regime) — are part of the UN diplomatic grouping known as “WEOG,” together with 20 European states.

WEOG stands for the “Western Europe and Other Group.” The “WE” for Western Europe is self-evident. But the “other” in the group is more coded, representing states founded by European settler colonialism.

WEOG is one of the five official “regional groupings” of the United Nations. But while the other four are all defined by regional boundaries (Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean), WEOG is cross regional and represents something else: the white world.

The White World’s Bloc

This will instantly shock the casual reader, but for practitioners and academics in the world of international relations, it’s a familiar concept. The West has long centered its approach to international relations on race. Indeed, the study of international relations began in the West as “race relations.” And Foreign Affairs, the leading U.S. publication on international relations, was originally the Journal of Race Development.

That approach was never horizontal, but rather one in which whiteness was centered and supreme. While sometimes obscured by a more genteel façade, below the surface the same dynamics continue today.

Of course, WEOG avoids any such direct racial billing, instead describing itself as a group of “western democracies.” The problem they have, however, is that their membership includes some states that are not (geographically) western, and some that are not democracies. Israel, former member South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand are all situated outside the West.

And as for democracies, original WEOG members Spain, Portugal, and Greece were governed during their membership by dictatorial regimes until the mid-1970s. South Africa and Israel were both admitted under apartheid regimes. And the United States had a formal system of racial segregation until the mid-1960s and was therefore hardly a “democracy” for a significant part of its population.

In other words, WEOG is not now and has never been a group of “western democracies.”

At other times, WEOG has been described as a principally anti-communist or anti-Soviet alliance. But there have been plenty of countries in the global South that opposed the Soviet Union and communism but were never admitted to WEOG. And while the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, WEOG has continued on the same course for over three decades since, proving that this is not principally a Cold War alliance either.

Institutional Inequity

Those tempted to view this as a matter of mere academic interest should first consider that WEOG wields disproportionate power in the UN. WEOG countries represent only about 11 percent of the global population. They are the second smallest UN group — with 29 members compared to the 54 members of the Africa Group, for example.

Nevertheless, three out of five permanent members of the Security Council are WEOG members, and the group enjoys an additional two elected seats on the Council beyond the five permanent members, for a total of seven out of 15 seats. Similar patterns of structural inequities privileging WEOG are reflected in the composition of other intergovernmental bodies as well.

They are also grossly over-represented in the UN’s senior management team. The post of head of political affairs is unofficially reserved for an American, as is the head of UNICEF and of the World Food Programme. The head of peacekeeping is reserved for the French, and humanitarian affairs for the British. And of the nine Secretaries-General in the organization’s history, four have been from WEOG countries.

The group also benefits from the formidable sticks and tempting carrots of the U.S. empire. Regardless of who occupies the rotating chair of the group, the dominant actor remains the United States, the group’s “first among equals.” Even though it sometimes claims to be an “observer,” the United States conveniently accepts full membership when electoral slates for UN bodies are decided.

This disproportionate influence is brought to bear across the UN agenda. The imperial, colonial, and white supremacist roots of WEOG run deep, and they directly impact the policy positions taken by the group (especially the “OGs”) in UN voting. Voting patterns bear this out especially in the defense of colonialism, apartheid, and political Zionism, and in opposition to Indigenous rights, the anti-racism agenda, Palestinian rights, and to the right to development.

This colonial logic is evident in WEOG’s opposition to guaranteeing people control over their own national development, to efforts to control mercenaries (often deployed to deny peoples’ self-determination), and to moves addressing the devastating impact of unilateral coercive measures (like sanctions) imposed by Western governments on countries of the global South.

Members of WEOG actively oppose anti-colonial and post-colonial perspectives on trade, debt, finance, and intellectual property. And when the UN moved to recognize the human right to food in 2021, only the United States and Israel, both WEOG members, voted no. Virtually every effort by formerly colonized countries to break from the exploitative economic relations and destructive racial legacies imposed by their former colonial masters is resisted by WEOG states.

Colonial Values

A clear demonstration of the true nature of the sub-group can be found in its position on the UN’s official global program to combat racism, known as the Durban Declaration.

The global Durban Conference that drafted the declaration in 2001 was boycotted by Israel and the United States — and both the subsequent Durban II review conference and the Durban III meeting were boycotted by Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, and the United States, along with a few European states. The group’s opposition is regularly registered in voting, in diplomatic demarches, and importantly, in positions taken in annual budget negotiations.

Worse still, the United States, Israel, and a hodge-podge of pro-Israel lobby groups, often with the complicity of some European nations, have carried on a decades-long campaign of disinformation to discredit the Declaration, going so far as to call it antisemitic, which is especially ironic given that the Declaration specifically commits the UN to combatting antisemitism.

The Declaration’s real offense? It directly challenges institutionalized racism, including in these countries, and sets out a program of remedial measures. Needless to say, the settler-colonial pedigree of these countries, and their long histories of institutionalized racism, put them squarely in the bullseye of the Declaration, a position that they cannot and will not tolerate. In their view, human rights critique is for the countries of the global South — not for the wealthy, white world of WEOG.

The world saw the same positioning again when the UN General Assembly convened on September 13, 2007 to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, after 20 years of debate. The Declaration was adopted with the overwhelming majority of states voting in favor, a handful abstaining, four countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) voting against. Israel skipped the vote altogether.

Obviously, the shared history (and continued policies) of these five countries in persecuting, dispossessing, and exterminating the Indigenous peoples of the lands they colonized stands in direct contradiction of the provisions of the UN Declaration, and this realization was front and center when they joined forces to oppose it in 2007.

The settler-colonial agenda of the alliance is also evident in voting on Palestine. While most countries of the world recognize the State of Palestine, WEOG is once again the outlier.

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several European states (and, of course, Israel) have still not recognized Palestine. Israel and the United States (which also uses its veto in the Security Council to block Palestine’s full UN membership) consistently vote against UN resolutions supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people, while Canada often votes no or abstains, and Australia and New Zealand frequently abstain. Apartheid South Africa, during its tenure, was one of Israel’s closest allies and routinely supported it in the UN, while post-apartheid South Africa would become one of Palestine’s closest allies.

Indeed, perhaps most revelatory of the strident commitment of these countries to the defense of settler-colonialism is their lock-step support of Israel, even as Israel perpetrates history’s first live-streamed genocide against the indigenous Palestinians. WEOG countries that had previously made human rights and international law key centerpieces of their international public positioning (however cynically) have turned on a dime to openly distort, devalue, and dismiss these rules in order to buttress Israeli impunity.

Some have even crossed the line into direct complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, exposing themselves both legally and politically. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, and several other European states have provided arms, financial investments, intelligence support, and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes, even while they are being committed.

Calls for Reform

The message is clear: the defense of settler colonialism (and its inherent atrocities) trumps all other values, all other interests, and all other rules. The wagons must be circled. The colonial project must be protected. Human rights and international law be damned.

But the UN has been on a constant trajectory of change, peaking in the mid-1970s after the entry of a large number of newly independent states — and again now, as the unipolar moment of the United States begins to fade.

Calls for reform are growing. And if the UN is to survive, the vestiges of the colonial era will need to give way to more equitable diplomatic, political, and economic arrangements. The principles of the organization, including self-determination, human rights, and equality will need to play a more central role in intergovernmental processes.

And WEOG will need to find its place in a diplomatic museum, alongside the top hats, all-male meetings, and smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear.

Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official.

9 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org