Archives: Articles

By Juan Cole

15 May 2024 – Playing with the death toll from Israel’s genocide on Gaza is not as cruel as actually killing over 35,000 people, the majority women and children. But it is still cruel and heartless. It is also another way we are being gaslit by the pro-Zionist US establishment.

There is that scene in the first Star Wars film when Obi Wan Kenobe uses Jedi magic to convince the Storm Troopers looking for R2D2, “These are not the ‘droids you’re looking for.” Congressional staffers once told me that that is the way politics works on the Hill. Now they’re trying to tell us that actually all those little dead children are figments of our imagination.

The US government repeatedly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist, fascist cabinet not to invade Rafah without a practical plan for protecting the nearly two million civilians whom Israel has force-marched into the small enclave, most with no potable water, no toilets, and insufficient food and shelter.

Israel is in the process of invading Rafah, forcing some 360,000 internal refugees to flee the area designated as a “safe zone” for wilderness or already-destroyed towns that are still being actively bombed.

I think it is in order to take people’s minds off the current additional war crimes being committed by Tel Aviv that Zionist agents provocateurs have signaled their useful idiots to try to make an issue of the Palestinian death toll.

It is a phony issue. Netanyahu himself has admitted that 30,000 are dead, though he implausibly alleges that 14,000 are Hamas militants and he leaves out another 5,000 he’s not accounting for.

The UN World Health Organization said Monday that 25,000 of the Palestinians in Gaza had been positively identified by the Gaza Health Ministry — which is run by professionals, not by the Hamas politburo. Another 10,000 of the corpses awaited such definite identification, coming to 35,000 total. The identification of 25,000 is an advance, since previously names had not been put to so many of the dead.

Persons who hate Palestinians the way the devil hates holy water jumped on the disaggregation of the two figures to allege that the UN was admitting “only” 25,000 had been killed and the MoH numbers were unreliable.

These horrid prevaricators included the US Council on Foreign Relations, which thereby lost all credibility, and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which never had any credibility, and Joe Scarborough, long a right wing clown.

That isn’t what the WHO said.

As a historian I like primary sources. So I’ll let you hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Here’s the video:

WHO Video: World Health Organization Gaza Casualties

And here’s the transcript:

• Storyline
• In Gaza, as more Palestinian casualties of the Israeli military offensive are identified by the enclave’s health authorities, UN humanitarians reiterated on Tuesday (14 May) that a high proportion of women and children were indeed among the 35,000 dead. UNTV CH

Since the beginning of the war in the enclave triggered by Hamas’ deadly 7 October attacks in Israel, the United Nations has consistently relied on casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, noting that independent verification is not possible. Last week, the health authorities updated the breakdown of the figures based on the number of bodies identified, but the UN has maintained that neither the overall death toll nor the proportion of women and children killed had gone down.

Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), told the Press in Geneva: “We’re basically talking about 35,000 people who are dead. And really every life matters, doesn’t it? We know that many and many of those are women and children, and there are thousands missing under the rubble.”

Speaking on behalf of the UN’s humanitarian affairs coordination office, OCHA, Jens Laerke clarified that “what has been provided additionally by the Ministry of Health is more detailed information about a subsection of the overall tally” of the 35,000 dead.

Christian Lindmeier, spokesperson for the UN World Health Organization (WHO), explained that as the Gaza Ministry of Health “identifies every single body… gives names to people to give closure to their family, their friends – that’s when these figures get updated and the data get updated”.

Some 25,000 have been identified, he said, calling the growing number of identified bodies “a step forward” and “a typical and very normal process in any conflict”.

Among the 10,000 remaining dead, some are not reachable, including those “in mass graves”. These individuals need to be brought back to a health centre or morgue for identification, Mr. Lindmeier said, insisting that “every single of these figures is a person with a name, a history and a family”.

The WHO spokesperson also warned against getting “sidetracked” by the death toll updates and breakdowns.

Two recent OCHA situation reports have been widely “scrutinized” for changes in the proportion of women and children killed, he said. However, if one applies the breakdown by gender and age of the 25,000 bodies now identified to the remaining unidentified 10,000 casualties, women and children still represent about 60 per cent.

The UN health agency spokesperson also pointed out that under collapsed houses, there is a “high likelihood that you find rather women and children because they are the ones typically staying at home while the men are out looking for food, looking for business, looking for any supplies for their families”.

Mr. Lindmeier further insisted on the challenges of identification in a “difficult conflict” where people have been “displaced five, six, seven times”, and where, in certain areas, “not a single health worker, no ambulance” can venture to recover dead bodies.

“Once everybody is recovered, you may have a chance to have a name to every person,” he said. “We need a ceasefire now to be able to recover those dead.”

Only the malicious could have read the UN reports in any other way but as an affirmation of the vast death toll and a plea for a ceasefire so that the remaining 10,000 Jane Does and John Does can have a decent individual burial, not the mass graves into which Israeli soldiers are bulldozing them. Of course, a ceasefire would also be nice so as to cease racking up such an astonishing death toll.

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

[From TMS Editor: Today (15 May) marks the 76th anniversary of the Nakba (Catastrophe), the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes to establish the State of Israel. To remember this infamous date, we are reposting this piece from May 2021. Actually, the Nakba never ended.]

************************************

15 May 2024 –Emad Moussa recalls his first trip out of Gaza with his grandfather, whose memory of his original village continued to define all other memories.

It was my first trip out of Gaza, and my destination was the city of Nablus in the West Bank to pursue my university studies. At the time the Oslo Accords were still somewhat in effect. That allowed Palestinians from Gaza to travel to the West Bank – through Israel – provided they were issued a permit by the Israeli authorities.

Since I was only 18, a hot-headed teenager with a mood for security breaches, so the Israeli authorities assumed, I was required to have an adult escort me across the checkpoint exiting Gaza. Someone old enough and, preferably, too frail to pose any security threats.

My grandfather immediately volunteered to be my trip chaperone. He would travel with me to Nablus, find me somewhere to live, and then head back to Gaza on his own. Little did I know then, the trip was going to be a life-changing experience.

As we cut through Israel I was mesmerized by the nice landscape. The scenery may not have been breathtaking, but from the perspective of someone who lived most of his life in a refugee camp, everything seemed novel and extraordinary. Beyond the beauty, however, there was the realization that our loss was indeed enormous.  All this used to be ours? All this was stolen from us? I couldn’t help but wonder in disbelief.

Nearly 30 kilometers away from Gaza, my grandfather broke his silence and asked the driver to slow down and started to look around attentively. At that point, I realized we were somewhere near his old village, Al-Sawafir. Excited, I began to summon all of my grandparents’ magical anecdotes about that “paradise village.”

Paradise lost 

I imagined my grandparents’ village as a utopian society with leafy footpaths, lines of olive trees evanescing into the horizon, and fields embellished with countless poppies. I visualized it — as Edward Said once depicted it — “some real but partly mythologized spot of land,” one that stood in stark contrast to life in the refugee camp where we grew up. Through the anecdotes of that paradise lost, at an early age, I learned about loss and internalized an immense feeling of nostalgia for a land that I never physically set foot in.

[Historical_map_series_for_the_area_of_al-Sawafir_al Gharbiyya_1940]

A 1940s map of the area of Al-Sawafir Al-Gharbiyya from the Survey of Palestine. This map is part of a series of historical maps used for comparison, showing the same area, showing the same area, made with help from Palestine Open Maps. (Photo: Survey of Palestine/Palestine Open Maps)

Now in the taxi parked on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by open fields, my grandfather disembarked and walked purposefully into a nearby field.

My grandparents’ village was called Al-Sawafir, based on the ancient Roman name Shaffir, and it was located only a few kilometers from Ashdod, a Palestinian city built upon the ancient Canaanite urban settlement with the same name. Al-Sawafir was divided into three sections, eastern, western and northern, perpendicularly separated by a road originally built by the Ottomans. All of the sections were ethnically cleansed early in 1948 during Operation Barak, a Haganah-led onslaught and part of Plan Dalet, which represented the Zionist master plan for the conquest of Palestine.

My family belonged to the western part, Al-Sawafir Al-Gharbiyya, and that’s exactly where my grandfather was headed. His confident steps made me think he was there only recently and not – at the time – 50 years prior.

All I can see were old ruins, random lines of cacti, sporadic citrus and olive trees, a large sycamore tree, and what looked like a power transformer with a Hebrew placard stuck on it. The village was everything but the utopia in my grandparents’ anecdotes.

Dragging me deeper into the field and looking increasingly confused, my grandfather asked if I could help him find his father’s grave and the ruins of his old house. An odd request, I thought. How can I find my great-grandfather’s grave in a place I never visited before, much less make out a grave-like structure amid the piles of rocks and ruins which can be seen hesitantly peaking through the long grass and bushes?

As time passed fruitlessly, frustrated and seemingly tired, my grandfather collapsed on a small rock and began to weep. Uncomfortable and unsure what to do, I convinced him to halt the search and call it a day.

Strangely, feeling like intruders, we rushed back to the taxi before the Israeli police showed up and continued our journey. To this day, I continue to think about the irony of acting – and feeling – guilty on a land that was stolen from us.

My grandfather’s tears that day were transformative. In Palestine, men are taught not to cry: it is unmasculine, a sign of weakness, and above all, one is always reminded, “fighters do not cry.”  You can’t help it when these are defining standards of Palestinian masculinity, ones specifically designed to withstand the enormous odds in our daily existence. But when men do cry, my grandfather would tell us, it is because “the weight on one’s shoulders is heavier than mountains.”

This is certainly true for him. As the mukhtar, the clan leader of all the Gaza families originating from Al-Sawafir Al-Gharbiya, he always had to remain composed and wear solemnity as a badge of wisdom and dignity. To cry is to basically violate everything he was. It truly was a mountain he could no longer carry. It would take me a few years to understand his metaphor. Only recently, however, I began to identify with his type of pain. The feeling of loss, it seems, grows with you as you get older.

I often wondered how harrowing it must have been for him to wait and wait only to discover that there is no longer a door to the old, rusty key that he had anxiously guarded for decades. The whole exodus was supposed to last for a month at best, so everyone thought. My grandmother told me that this assumption was so strong to the extent that her brother bought several pieces of land in villages on their way to Gaza. He was confident that the “Arab armies were going to push the Zionist gangs out
“ and he’d return, only a known landowner this time. The month turned into months, and the months grew into years, then decades, and the wait continues today 73 years later.

Up until his death, my grandfather continued to speak of that paradise village, of his Palestine. As if what he saw that day was only a fleeting thought. His memories were perhaps more real than the physical ruins of what used to be his village. To him, time stood still, and the memory of the village continued to define all other memories thereafter.

Memory nomads 

My grandfather was not unique in his sentiment. He was, like every other Palestinian, a nomad traveling across a landscape of memory. Like all others, his memory was premised on three main motifs: the praise of a long-gone paradise lost; the lamentation of a present defined by military occupation; and, the hopeful visualization of a return to Palestine, where justice will finally be served.

The longer we clung to that memory the closer we felt we become to the day of return. As if memory was a purpose in itself, as Ghassan Kanafani once said in 1981: “even though we know tomorrow will be no better, we remain here on the shore eagerly awaiting the boat that will not come.”

Same as my grandfather who chose to ignore the seemingly new power transformer and the Hebrew signs in and around his village, one must disregard that we have been mentally and physically erased and replaced. As though to force ourselves to feel that our current state— and theirs — is only temporary.

This is why the question “where are you from?” bears a different meaning to Palestinians. As descendants of refugees living in Gaza, you’d answer by saying you’re from Majdal (Ashkelon), Ashdod, Jaffa, the Negev, and in my case, Al-Sawafir. It’s customary and perfectly normal to ignore the fact that you and possibly your parents were born and raised in Gaza. As if to say, Gaza is only a stop-by on the journey back to Palestine.

This gives us the comforting feeling that history is yet to come to a halt and can still be reversed. It matters not if such worldview is only a coping mechanism or representing a tangible blueprint for return. After all, Palestine is a state of consciousness, Edward Said reminds us, representing “a vast collective feeling of injustice continues to hang over our lives with undiminished weight.”

Erasure 

But, that state of consciousness is also steered by a strong fear of oblivion, of being completely erased from history. As Palestinians look toward Israel, all they can see is that the physical spaces they once occupied have been (or are being) physically transformed to mentally erase them.

Just think for a moment about the tragic irony that the Israeli museum commemorating the Shoah victims, Yad Vashem, sits on top of a hill overlooking the village of Deir Yassin, the site of the known Deir Yassin massacre and a prominent symbol of the Palestinian catastrophe. There are no markers, signs, or memorials, and no mention from tour guides in the museum regarding what their visitors see from where they stand.

This is not a case of absence of remembering or ignorance, but a certain kind(s) of active forgetting that is selective and misleading. As Marcelo Svirsky in his book “After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation” says, it’s one that makes the Jewish memory a means to conceal the hierarchies and constellations of power and deny perpetration, as well as to justify and protect the prevailing social order.

What’s disturbing about such forgetting is its banality. It normalizes and routinizes what otherwise be considered one of the most heinous crimes in modern history.  In “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Ilan Pappé calls the phenomenon memoricide, an erasure of one people from history in order to write that of another people’s over it.

Fearing the counter-narrative 

Despite all the show of power and intransigence, Israel remains a torn entity constantly faced by its original sin. Only controlling the narrative through memoricide would allow the country to move past its guilt.

Intrinsic to the Zionist historical narrative is the idea that history could be controlled, molded, and changed by the formation of an active, task-oriented Israeli reality. But the validity and sustainability of such reality have only been achievable through the removal of other realities, the Palestinian reality.

This is exactly why, that, since its inception, the Israeli state has been systematically removing, replacing, or concealing the traces of Palestinian past from the Israeli public sphere: archaeological sites; Nakba-related archival material, school textbooks, as well as by creating legal impediments to make the return of Palestinian refugees virtually impossible.

It boils down to the simple fact that recognizing the Nakba shifts the responsibility for the Palestinian plight to Israel. This will profoundly challenge the country’s foundational narrative. This narrative concerns issues regarding the Jewish people’s historical persecution and the return from exile to sovereignty; the rightful rule over the land;  and the belief that the Palestinian exodus was voluntary. These issues are essential to the maintenance of the societal beliefs in the justness and morality of the Jewish cause, especially upheld by the notion that Israel’s inception is a historical right, a redemption, for the persecuted Jews.

As far as Palestinian consciousness is concerned, none of Israel’s concerns matter. Memoricide doesn’t change the fact that the Nakba is not a past trauma; rather, a continuous reality. Today’s military occupation: the oppression, the checkpoints, the arrests, the killings, the humiliation, the imprisonment, and the lack of autonomy are all but manifestations of the Nakba.

My grandfather died in 2014, and the fact that I couldn’t travel to the besieged Gaza Strip to say my final goodbyes was, and continues to be, another one of those manifestations.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Defend Democracy Press

18 May 2024 – Robert Fico’s first official visit to Ukraine lasted only half a day. He met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal at around 10:00 a.m. local time on January 24 in Uzhhorod, a city in western Ukraine, not far from the border with Slovakia. While the politicians agreed to “continued cooperation,” no other details about their meeting were announced. Right after dinner, Fico flew to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Before the bilateral meeting in Uzhhorod took place, Fico said that “Ukraine is not a sovereign country and is under the total influence of the U.S.” and called the return of territories occupied by Russia “unrealistic.” “What are Ukrainians waiting for? For Russians to leave Donbas and Luhansk? Or Crimea? It’s not realistic. The conflict can’t be solved through military means, and prolonging it will only strengthen Russia’s positions,” said the Slovak Prime Minister in an interview with Radio and Television of Slovakia.

Fico has maintained this position since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 (when he was a lawmaker in the opposition). “An immediate halt to combat operations is the best solution we have for Ukraine. The E.U. should change from an arms supplier to a peacemaker. Let them spend 10 years holding peace talks rather than 10 years killing each other with no result,” said Fico in late October 2023, one day after assuming office.

One of his first decisions as prime minister was to stop sending equipment and ammo from state and army warehouses to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Slovakia had previously sent 13 military aid packages worth 671 million euros (around $720 million), including an S-300 air defense system, 13 MiG-29 fighter jets, Mi-171 helicopters, infantry fighting vehicles, ammunition, and anti-tank systems.

Fico has also spoken out against Ukraine’s membership in NATO and promised to block Kyiv’s potential accession. “It would be nothing but the basis for a third World War,” said Fico.

‘In Slovakia, a significant portion of the population openly sympathizes with Russia’

Robert Fico, who leads the Smer political party, adopted a harsher approach to Ukraine in mid-2022, explains Slovak political scientist Jozef Lenč from the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius: “Around this period, Smer politicians began talking about a peaceful solution, centered on ending military support for Ukraine, and it giving up occupied and annexed territories.”

The Smer party maintains that the war in Ukraine started because of “provocations from NATO and the U.S.” and because “Ukrainian nazis” infringed upon the rights of Russian-speakers in the Donbas. Lenč explained that such statements were Fico’s way of trying to attract voters from the far-right, who tend to hold pro-Russian views. “And that’s what he succeeded in doing,” said Lenč.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Pepe Escobar

13 May 2024 – Welcome to The Unit – a concept that has already been discussed by the financial services and investments working group set up by the BRICS+ Business Council and has a serious shot at becoming official BRICS+ policy as early as in 2025.

According to Alexey Subbotin, founder of Arkhangelsk Capital Management and one of the Unit’s conceptualizers, this is a new problem-solving system that addresses the key geoeconomic issue of these troubled times: a global crisis of trust.

[https://twitter.com/SputnikInt/status/1763997952907858393]

He knows all about it first-hand: a seasoned financial professional with experience in investment banking, asset management and corporate matters, Subbotin leads the Unit project under the auspices of IRIAS, an international intergovernmental organization set up in 1976 in accordance with the UN statute.The Global Majority has had enough of the centrally controlled monetary framework put in place 80 years ago in Bretton Woods and its endemic flaws: chronic deficits fueling irresponsible military spending; speculative bubbles; politically motivated sanctions and secondary sanctions; abuse of settlement and payment infrastructure; protectionism; and the lack of fair arbitration.

In contrast, the Unit proposes a reliable, quick and economically efficient solution for cross-border payments. The – transactional – Unit is a game-changer as a new form of international currency that can be issued in a de-centralized way, and then recognized and regulated at national level.

[https://twitter.com/SputnikInt/status/1778147180777226420]

The Unit offers a unique solution for bottlenecks in global financial infrastructure: it is eligible for traditional banking operations as well as for the newest forms of digital banking.

The Unit can also help to upend unfair pricing in commodity trading, by means of setting up a new – fair and efficient – Eurasian Mercantile Exchange where trading and settlement can be done in a new currency bridging trade flows and capital, thus paving the way to the development of new financial products for foreign direct investment (FDI).

The strength of the Unit, conceptually, is to remove direct dependency on the currency of other nations, and to offer especially to the Global Majority a new form of apolitical money – with huge potential for anchoring fair trade and investments.

It is indeed a new concept in terms of an international currency – anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%). It is neither crypto nor stablecoin – as it’s shown here.

The Beauty of Going Fractal

The Global Majority will instantly grasp the primary purpose of the Unit: to harmonize trade and financial flows by keeping them outside of political pressure or “rules” that can be twisted at will. The inevitable consequence translates as financial sovereignty. What matters in the whole process are independent monetary policies focused on economic growth.

That’s the key appeal for the Global Majority: a full ecosystem offering independent, complementary monetary infrastructure. And that surely can be extended to willing Unit partners in the collective West.

[https://twitter.com/SputnikInt/status/1765046987760566695]

Now to the practical level: as Subbotin explains, the Unit ecosystem may be easily scalable because it comes from a fractal architecture supported by simple rules. New Unit nodes can be set up by either sovereign or private agents, following a detailed rule-book in custody of the UN-chartered IRIAS.

The Unit organizers employ a distributed ledger: a technology that ensures transparency, precluding capital controls or any exchange rate manipulation.

This means that connection is available to all open DEX and digital platforms operated by both commercial and Central Banks around the world.

The endgame is that everyone, essentially, may use the Unit for accounting, bookkeeping, pricing, settling, paying, saving and investing.

No wonder the institutional possibilities are quite enticing – as the Unit can be used for accounting and settlement for BRICS+; payment and pricing for the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU); or as a reserve currency for Sub-Saharan Africa.

And now comes the clincher: the Unit has already received backing by the BRICS Business Council and is on the agenda at the crucial ministerial meeting in Russia next month, which will work out the road map for the summit next October in Kazan.

That means the Unit has all it takes to be on the table as a serious subject discussed by BRICS+ and eventually be adopted as early as in 2025.

Will Musk and the NDB Be on Board?

As it stands, the priority for the Unit conceptualizers – whom I followed for over a year during several, detailed meetings in Moscow – is to inform the general public about the new system.

The Unit team is not interested at all in getting straight into political hot waters or to be cornered by ideologically-laden arguments. Direct references to inspiring but sometimes controversial concepts or authors like Zoltan Pozsar may bury the Unit concept into pigeon holes, thus limiting its potential impact.

What may lie ahead could be extraordinarily exciting, as the Unit appeal could extend all the way from Elon Musk to the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), hopefully engaging an array of crucial actors. After a positive evaluation by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov – who remains on the post in the new Russian government – it’s not far-fetched to imagine Putin and Xi discussing it face to face this week in Beijing.

[https://twitter.com/SputnikInt/status/1747965456827240474]

As it stands, the major takeaway is that the Unit should be seen as a feasible, technical solution for the theoretically Unsolvable: a globally-recognized payment/trade system, immune to political pressure. It’s the only game in town – there are no others.

Meanwhile, the Unit conceptualizers are open for constructive criticism and all manners of collaboration. Yet sooner or later the battle ranks will be lined up – and then it will be a matter of seriously upping the game.

“Academically Sound, Technologically Innovative”

Vasily Zhabykin, co-author of the Unit white paper and founder of CFA.Center, Unit’s technological partner at Skolkovo Innovation Hub in Moscow, crucially stresses: the Unit “represents apolitical money and can be the connector between the Global South and the West.”

He’s keen to point out that “the Unit can keep all the wheels turning unlike most of the other concepts that feature ‘dollar killers’, etc. We do not want to harm anybody. Our goal is to improve efficiency of currently broken capital and money flows. The Unit is rather the ‘cure for centralized cancer’’’.

Subbotin and the Unit team “are keen to meet new partners who share our approach and are ready to bring additional value to our project.” If that’s the case, they should “send us 3 bullet points on how can they help and improve the Unit.”

A bold follow-up step should be, for instance, a virtual conference on the Unit, featuring leading Russian economist Sergey Glazyev, Yannis Varoufakis, Jeffrey Sachs and Michael Hudson, among others.

By email, Glazyev, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) , summed up the Unit’s potential:

“I have been following the development of Unit for more than a year and can confirm that Unit offers a very timely, feasible solution. It is academically sound, technologically innovative and at the same time complementary to the existing banking infrastructure.

Launching it under the auspices of an UN institution gives Unit legitimacy, which the current Bretton Woods framework is clearly lacking. Recent actions by the US administration and loud silence from IMF clearly indicate the need for change.

A decentralized approach to emission of potential global trade currency, whose intrinsic value is anchored in physical gold and BRICS+ currencies, makes Unit the most promising of several approaches being considered. It balances political priorities of all participants, while helping each sovereign economy develop along its optimal path.

The New Development Bank (NDB) and BRICS+ shall embrace the concept of Unit and help it to become the pinnacle of the new emerging global financial infrastructure, free from malign political interferences while focused instead on fair trade and sustainable economic growth.”

A clear, practical example of possible Unit problem-solving concerns Russia-Iran trade relations. These are two top BRICS members. Russian trade with Iran is unprofitable due to sanctions – and both cannot make payments in US dollars or euros.

Russian companies suffer significant losses after switching to payments in national currencies. With each transfer, Russian businesses on average lose as much as 25% due to the discrepancy between the market rate in Iran and the state rate.

And here’s the key takeaway: BRICS+ as well as the Global Majority can only be strengthened by developing closer geoeconomics ties. The removal of Western speculative capital shall free up local commodity trading, and enable the pooling of investable capital for sustainable development. To unlock such a vast potential, the Unit may well be the key.

[Note from TMS Editor: All links to X in this piece have been made unavailable by the Musk outlet.]

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Craig Murray

For spurious and sinister reasons, the Western political and media classes are isolating themselves from public opinion and international law on the Gaza genocide in ways hard to believe. Here are a few examples among myriad.

13 May 2024 – Incredibly, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway.

We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like all the rest.

It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the Western political and media classes. Any thought that their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts to suppress dissent and obscure the truth.

Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with the alleged norms of Western society it is almost impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few examples.

1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out operation after operation, mostly on women and children, as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned around him.

He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University.

When Germany banned him from entering to address the conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as a one-off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked reaction to pro-Palestinian expression.

We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is possible to have some understanding of how it occurred.

But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he was also banned from France. That appeared again something that was almost a technical accident as regards the rest of Europe.

But the Western political establishment has now doubled down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this time the Dutch government has made it clear that it supports the ban, and is not just caught by a Schengen restriction.

So the major governments of the European Union are forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the willingness of the Western political class to abandon the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in the interests of Israel.

2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme violence against pro-Palestinian students on college campuses is another demonstration of the same abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a serious generational divide in Western public opinion, with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in the USA).

This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal.

In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no longer has popular support and now causes public revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them.

3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic “choice” in the West.

Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel” lately, and to row back from his straightforward assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire” to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable” ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives.

But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an address to US Republican senators in which he made the totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale.

4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian, despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and children we have seen on our mobile phones this past seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal attack is on “Hamas militants”.

The bombing and shelling of civilians in tents is still described as “clashes”. This propaganda really does not wash any more, though it may reinforce the morale of hardened Zionists. Everybody else has seen through it months ago. Yet still they persist.

5) The endgame is becoming very apparent. The United States is completing its floating harbour for Gaza, and Israel has gained control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, giving the US and Israel total control of entry points into Gaza. Israel has announced that the Rafah crossing is to be handed over to a US mercenary force. The US can then say it is complying with Biden’s pledge not to put US forces’ boots on the ground in Gaza, while actually taking control.

The Israeli attack on Rafah has been justified by the USA as a “limited military operation”, thus claiming it does not violate Biden’s purported “red line”, even though Israel has ordered over a million displaced people in Rafah to evacuate again, to nowhere.

Conclusion:

The only possible conclusion from all of the above is to reinforce my analysis that the Zionist political and media classes in the West, including Biden, Blinken, Trudeau, Macron, Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz, von der Leyen and all, are active and willing participants in a programme of genocide.

They had numerous opportunities to turn back. We all saw what is happening months ago. They did not take them.

The endgame remains the processing of the remaining Palestinian population out of Gaza through the US-controlled points of the Rafah crossing and the floating harbour, primarily into camps in the Sinai desert. The Western powers are doubling down on their genocide and on their colonial project.

I see nothing whatsoever that indicates they can have any other long-term objective in mind than the complete Israeli annexation of Gaza minus its civilian population. What do you see?

Craig John Murray (born 17 Oct 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Richard Falk

19 May 2024 – Interview conducted by Daniel Falcone on 13 May. The unabridged interview will be published here after editorial changes and updating.

*******************************

Israel Continues Unfettered Colonization of the West Bank amid Genocide in Gaza

The West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the Zionist settler movement’s pursuit of a “Greater Israel.”

Amid the genocidal campaign in Gaza, Israel has expanded its settlement project and markedly increased colonial violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians. “Killings are taking place at a level without recent precedent” in the occupied West Bank, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, international relations scholar Richard Falk reminds us of the reality and aims of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Falk details the degradation, starvation, human rights abuses, unchecked political power and resource control in the occupied Palestinian territories. He also explains the U.S.’s aims in the West Bank and how they differ from those in Gaza.

Daniel Falcone: With a lot of the attention on Gaza due to the extremity of Israel’s bombing in Rafah, the West Bank is sometimes overlooked in media reports and political discussions about the ongoing Palestinian struggle for survival. How can we understand the differences between Israel’s strategic aims in Gaza and the West Bank?

Richard Falk: The three territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank and the Gaza Strip have experienced rather different conditions of occupation and governance during the 57 years of Israeli control, none of them positive.

The whole of Jerusalem was officially declared by the Knesset in 2019 to be “the eternal capital of the Jewish state of Israel.” Such a unilateral action on Israel’s part was incompatible with international humanitarian law. It also violated the letter and spirit of unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 242, which looked toward the complete withdrawal of Israel’s occupying armed forces in the near-term future with Israeli demands for “minor border adjustments.” It has always been a Palestinian demand and expectation that East Jerusalem would be the capital of any future Palestinian state, and this Palestinian position was generally treated as an integral element of the UN consensus that developed around persisting support for “a two-state solution.”

In 1967 Gaza was deemed the third and least important element in the administration of the occupied territories that came under Israel’s control during the war. Its status was viewed ambivalently at first, mainly because it was deemed as remote from the Zionist project, being conceived as not part of “the promised land” that formed the geographic contours of the Zionist vision of a Jewish supremacy state. It also seemed at first to possess little economic promise from Israel’s point of view. Nevertheless, in the period of 1967 to 2005 Gaza was treated by Israel as part of Occupied Palestine, with an intrusive and abusive IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military presence, and the unlawful establishment of Jewish settlements along the Gaza coast. The administration of Gaza was long viewed by Tel Aviv as an economic burden and security challenge for Israel.

The major resistance initiative directed at Israeli occupation known as the First Intifada originated in Gaza in 1987, challenging both Israel and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat and the coalition of secular Palestinian groups known under the rubric of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]. In 2005, Israel formally “disengaged” from Gaza, contending that the withdrawal of its armed forces and the dismantling of its settlements relieved Israel of further responsibilities as Occupier in Gaza, with possible future peace solutions consisting of some sort of federated arrangement with Jordan and/or Egypt. This Israeli interpretation of disengagement was rejected by the UN and both Arab states. They considered Israel’s revised approach to Gaza as nothing more substantive than a redeployment of ground forces to just across the Israeli border coupled with the maintenance of total control of Gaza’s air space and offshore water. The approach also included a tight regulation of entry and exit to and from the strip. Despite this gesture of “disengagement” Israel never overcame the perception of Gaza as “the largest open-air prison” in the world, which for many in Gaza, including secular Palestinians, meant growing sympathy with and support for Hamas.

The complex Gaza narrative after disengagement included the unexpected 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, previously listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU, as well as Israel. Despite Hamas foregoing “armed struggle,” in 2007 Israel imposed a strict and economically punitive blockade of goods and persons seeking to leave or enter Gaza, engaged in periodic major military incursions and put the population on “a diet.” Despite Israel’s repressive moves and military incursions, Hamas put forward long-term ceasefire proposals that were ignored by Tel Aviv and Washington. A creative nonviolent campaign of resistance known as “the Great March of Return” attributed to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, as well as Hamas, was met with deadly Israeli sniper violence in 2018 at the border, including the lethal targeting of well-marked journalists.

Finally, Israel’s provocations and the Hamas-led attack of October 7 set the stage for the latest genocidal phase of Israel’s presence, combining the wrongs of occupation with many crimes of oppression, dehumanization, devastation, starvation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, culminating in genocide. It seemed that as of 2024, Gaza is strategically and economically far more important to the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu government and its settler temperament than it was earlier. This is due to the discovery of extensive offshore oil and gas deposits, and a reported interest in a major engineering undertaking that involves the Israeli construction of a Ben Gurion Canaltraversing part of Gazan territory, with the goal of creating an alternative to the Suez Canal. During all the devastation, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, obscenely proposed luxury waterfront homes for settlers in a Gaza emptied of Palestinians.

It is against this background that the West Bank has posed the biggest challenge to the pursuit of “Greater Israel,” which was the animating ideal of the settler movement. The settlers were closely allied with the extreme right Religious Zionism coalition partner of the Netanyahu-led government that took over the governance of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in January 2023. From its first days of governance, it became clear that Israel was preparing to push to completion a maximal version of the Zionist Project. Israeli radicalism along these lines was exhibited by the greenlighting of settler violence on the West Bank that involved a series of inflammatory incidents intended to make the Palestinians feel unsafe and unwelcome in their own homeland. The occupying government in Tel Aviv revealed its orientation through tacitly approving settler violence rather than responsibly acting to protect Palestinian residents. Crimes against West Bank residents, including land seizures, were not only tolerated but applauded by rightist members of Netanyahu’s inner circle.

Of supplemental relevance was the official endorsement of increasing the settlement population in the West Bank by expanding building permits and territorial extensions to settlers and their settlements — already estimated to number 700,000 (500,000 in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem). This move to ensure Israeli permanence on the West Bank was combined with the acceleration of diplomacy that focused on forming a de facto alliance with Sunni-dominated Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and the containment and destabilization of Shiite-dominated Iran. Further, Netanyahu’s September 2023 performance at the UN General Assembly in which he arrogantly displayed a map of “the new Middle East” on which Palestine was erased — treated as nonexistent — must have made Palestinian resistance imperative.

These elements are the background context preceding the Hamas-led attack of October 7. The true character of the attack itself needs to be internationally investigated, given the extensive and credible warnings given to the Israeli government, Israel’s ultra-sophisticated surveillance capabilities, and the inflated initial accounts that blamed Hamas for all the most barbaric crimes allegedly committed during the attack. Some of the initial macabre claims of October 7 were later discredited and even modified by Israel. The most suspicious element of the Israeli response was its readiness to embark upon a genocidal campaign, which, while concentrated on Hamas and Gaza, seems also intended to induce a second Nakba with major secondary impacts on the West Bank.

In the months preceding the Hamas-led attack, the West Bank had been the scene of increased settler violence and a heightening of the IDF’s repressive tactics. In the years before October 7, Israel was found guilty of the international crime of apartheid in a series of well-documented reports compiled by objective, expert sources (Special Rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Council and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’tselem). Liberal democracies and the mainstream media refused to acknowledge this damaging consensus bearing on the legitimacy of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and instead smeared and blacklisted Israel’s critics.

In addition to the settlements, Palestinian property rights, mobility and security of residence were undermined and threatened in various ways in the West Bank. Palestinian land was further encroached upon at the end of the 20th century by the construction of a separation wall between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank that expropriated additional Palestine-owned land and divided villages such as Bil’in. Although this mode of constructing the wall on occupied Palestinian territory was found to be illegal by a near unanimous majority of the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2003, Israel defied the findings of the advisory opinion and continued its wall project without deference to international law or international procedures of accountability.

Israel’s rejection of attempts to establish Palestinian statehood with sovereign rights within delimited borders have long concentrated upon the West Bank. This pattern goes back as long ago as 1947, when the UN approved a plan for the partition of Palestine relying on borders derived from the British mandate over Palestine. In the dark shadows cast by the Holocaust, there emerged a UN consensus that the only viable solution for the struggle of the two peoples claiming Palestine as their homeland was to split sovereign rights between two equal states, assumed to be named Israel and Palestine.

Distinguished commentators from both peoples opposed such a territorial division for a variety of reasons, well summarized from a Jewish perspective in Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile and from a Palestinian perspective in the later writings of Edward Said.

Always the central question, even if often left implicit, was the destiny of the West Bank and its residents, as well as whether Palestinian “security” would be restricted by demilitarization and dependence on Israeli forbearance in the two-state models, and whether the Zionist commitment to a Jewish supremacist state could be accommodated or needed to be modified in the one-state models.

What are the U.S. goals in the West Bank and how do they differ from its Gaza policy?

The U.S. has a strong reputational interest in retaining the identity of the West Bank as Occupied Palestinian Territory. If Israel extends its sovereignty over the West Bank, which it has long claimed should be classified as “disputed territory” rather than “occupied territory,” it would bring to a screeching halt any further pretense by the U.S. government to be serious about the advocacy of a “two-state solution.”

Trump’s proposed “deal of the century” contained a nominal Palestinian mini state to sustain the illusion that the interests of both peoples were being considered, but it failed to fool any true two-state advocates.

American credibility as an “honest broker” in the Oslo Peace Process, and elsewhere, was greatly eroded by its acquiescence in the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank despite their patent illegality and negative impacts on a meaningful political compromise on the final territorial allocation between the two peoples. The U.S.’s mild reaction to settlement expansion was limited to the muffled whisper that such behavior “was not helpful.”

By now, given the bipartisan U.S. endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its repeated use of the veto to block a meaningful ceasefire directive and a widely supported initiative to treat Palestine as a full member of the UN, I believe that the U.S. could not any longer put itself forward as a trustworthy intermediary in any future bilateral negotiating process. It would overtly become Israel’s international sword and shield, exhibiting its extreme partisanship while falsely claiming adherence to international law and diplomatic balance.

With regard to the differing interests of the U.S. in the West Bank and Gaza, it comes down to two issues: first, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself in Gaza, while maintaining Israel’s legitimacy as an occupying power in the West Bank and insulating its violations of international humanitarian law from UN censure, boycotts and sanctions; and secondly, recognizing that the West Bank is the integral core of a Palestinian state.

How does Israel complicate the work on the ground by scholars, activists and elected officials? The fact that the two regions are separate seems to make the problem even more insurmountable. 

The differing character of Israel’s approaches to the two areas creates many complications for those who seek normal operating conditions. Gaza is considered by Tel Aviv to be administered by Hamas, a terrorist entity in its view, whereas the West Bank is co-administered with the quasi-collaborationist Palestinian Authority to ensure that resistance activities are minimized. Even peaceful forms of resistance face harsh punishment, and since Israel came under more extremist leadership, the conditions of daily life have become so unpleasant and dangerous that Palestinians may be forced to leave for neighboring countries, and accept the loss of their homeland, becoming refugees or exiles.

Until recently the balance of opinion in Israel was wary about any Israeli state that purported to include Gaza. This wariness was associated with Israeli concerns about an emergent “demographic bomb” accompanying any attempt to absorb an additional 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinians into Greater Israel.

In the West Bank, Israel was nervous about the effect of civil society activism, and even scholarly work, generating unfavorable international publicity as to the nature of such a prolonged occupation. The Israeli occupation is currently being challenged at the ICJ following a General Assembly request to legally assess the continued validity of Israel’s administrative role. This follows years without an implementation of the withdrawal envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and numerous flagrant continuing violations of international humanitarian law.

Even prior to the present Netanyahu government, Defense Minister Benny Gantz issued decrees in 2021 banning the activities of respected West Bank NGOs and deeming them “terrorist organizations.” Elected Palestinian leaders have been harassed and imprisoned despite Israel’s collaboration on security and administrative funding over the years with the Palestinian Authority, which is distrusted by a growing number of Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Territories.

What is the role of the West Bank in President Joe Biden’s foreign policy? 

The West Bank is an indispensable component of Biden’s continued advocacy of a two-state solution. This advocacy was always half-hearted and never a persuasive expression of genuine U.S. policy intentions. The two-state mantra seems more and more like a public relations posture to satisfy world public opinion as time passes. If it had been a genuine goal, Biden would have challenged Israeli moves of recent years, which became more pronounced since the Netanyahu coalition took over in 2023. It was an open secret that this extremist coalition was committed to the unilateral completion of the Zionist Project by establishing Greater Israel in the shortest possible time even if it required brute force to get the job done. Extending Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank would have the consequence of making continued adherence to two-state advocacy a sign of geopolitical ignorance, so out of touch with the geographic contours of Palestinian statehood as to be in the category of a bad joke.

A viable Palestinian state presupposes full sovereign rights over the West Bank, which must include territorial governance and the dismantlement of the settlements. Neither seems likely to happen if Zionist ideology continues to shape the policy of the Israeli state. It would be awkward for Biden to be asked what kind of Palestinian state does the U.S. favor. He likely would be inclined to answer evasively by saying that “it is up to the parties.” But if he was forthright, it would probably look like a permanently demilitarized Palestinian state with settlements governed according to Israeli law and exempted from territorial regulation. Such a Palestinian state might meet the formal requirements of statehood, but it would be a nonstarter for many Palestinians, who continue to insist on their inalienable right of self-determination. The long Palestinian ordeal, stretching over the course of more than a century, would not be ended by the willingness of Israel to allow the formation of a puppet state.

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Robert C. Koehle

15 May 2024 – There’s something happening here . . .

Consider, for instance, the recent announcement by Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia University, that it is divesting from “companies profiting from war in Palestine/Israel” – and, not only that, fully supports the student encampments (at Columbia and all across the country) and condemns the arrests and police violence wreaking havoc on the peaceful, culturally diverse protests.

Indeed, the seminary released a statement that scrambles the quiet certainty of those in power – i.e., that money matters more than anything else: “Over the decades, we have developed what are called ‘socially responsible investment screens’ to express our values and not financially support damaging and immoral investments.”

Values over profit? Over the years, the seminary has pulled its investments away from such industries as weapons manufacturers, for-profit prisons and fossil fuels. But not only that . . . apparently it understands, and values, education itself – a remarkable phenomenon indeed.

Seminary president Serene Jones, in an interview with Democracy Now!, pointed out that the school has opened up its campus “to all the surrounding campuses when students were being expelled, events weren’t allowed to happen. . . . Our doors are wide open, which is what a university should be in times like this.”

She also said: “We support students learning what it means to find their voices, to speak out for justice and freedom.”

Those are the words that stunned me the most. This is what education is, for God’s sake! It’s not just a matter of attending lectures, taking notes, absorbing data. It means finding your voice – finding your deepest values and expressing them in real life, putting them forward not as abstractions but as principles to live by. Entering the world as a grown woman, a grown man, means more than simply finding your place. It means challenging that world as you enter it and, by God, creating it – creating the future.

I certainly don’t mean this simplistically. I speak as an aging boomer, who entered adulthood as the civil rights movement was shaking and shattering the national norms, and as the Vietnam war was bursting into our consciousness. What an injured and deeply flawed world! Something was wrong. Growing up meant finding our voices and addressing – challenging – this flawed world.

In October 1967, for instance, I boarded a bus, along with many of my friends, and participated in the first antiwar march on the Pentagon, which included pushing the edges of social and legal propriety. We did more than listen to speeches. We determined to occupy the Pentagon, thousands of us walking across the grass, coming face to face with the soldiers guarding it. At one point, out of the blue, it seemed, a contingent of soldiers came rushing toward us; I wound up getting clobbered in the head with a rifle butt. I was knocked down but wasn’t hurt and stayed with the protest for several more hours, eventually leaving the Pentagon sit-in shortly before the arrests started happening.

My friends and I made it back to our school – Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo – with a sense that our lives were no longer the same. We immediately took matters into our own hands. We dropped out.

I wound up delaying my eventual graduation by a number of years, and no, I didn’t “change the world” in some idealistically imagined way, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this period of my life – full of protests, drugs, a few arrests, a lot of mistakes – was at the core of my college learning experience. At the same time as all this was going on, I was also finding myself as a writer and, eventually, a journalist. I value the support – indeed, the mentorship – of a significant number of professors at Western. Continually creating the world isn’t simply a matter of us vs. them: young vs. old. It’s a multigenerational effort.

All of which brings me back to the present moment, and the words of Serene Jones, who has not abandoned – or grown cynical about – the values emanating from the student encampments across the country. Much of the mainstream coverage of the protests simply defines the phenomenon in us-vs.-them terms. The protests are “pro-Palestine,” seeming to imply there are two equal (equally brutal) sides in this war, and being pro-Palestine means being anti-Israel, which can easily morph into anti-Semitic. But the protests aren’t simply pro-Palestine; they’re pro-humanity (and anti-genocide).

And the participants are culturally and religiously, but not spiritually, diverse. As Jones writes at Religion News Service: “First and foremost, these encampments are filled with students from different religious traditions — Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, unaffiliated as well as spiritual but not religious students. They are finding solace and courage among themselves. . . .

“It is simply who these protesters are: a community bound by a greater common cause to stop the mass killing of besieged Palestinians.”

Jones’s essay is called “What we have to learn from students leading the charge for justice” – which is itself compelling. The university system – the financial system, the political system – has something to learn from the protesters? Love thy enemy or whatever?

The world these protesters are entering is

a world hardened by cynicism. In such a world, a.k.a., the real world, “love” and other values are appropriate to be uttered in a religious setting with pews and fancy windows, but they’re hardly relevant in the day-to-day world of win-and-lose, gain-and-loss. That’s why the cops are barging in, beating and arresting the protesters and tearing down the encampments.

But Jones is daring to tell us that this is not the real world – simply the current one, which is still under construction.

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer.

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Al Jazeera English

“A land without a people for a people without a land” is how the relationship between Palestine and the Jewish people was described by Christian writers in the 1800s. And the 20th-century history of the Middle East has largely been written through these eyes.

But this documentary looks at Palestine from a different angle. It hears from historians and witness accounts, and features archive documents that show Palestine as a thriving province of Greater Syria and the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the 20th century. Its cities had a developing trade and commercial sector, growing infrastructure, and embryonic culture that would enable it to meet the challenges of the decades ahead.

However, the political ramifications of the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Conference and British Mandate set in motion a series of events that profoundly affected this vibrant, fledgling society and led to the events of 1948 and beyond.

This is the other side of the Palestinian (hi)story.

Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story | Al Jazeera World Documentary

TRANSCEND VIDEOS STAY POSTED FOR 2 WEEKS BEFORE BEING ARCHIVED

20 May 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Vijay Prashad

In the apartment of my friends in Baghdad (Iraq), they tell me about how each of them had been impacted by the ugliness of the 2003 U.S.-imposed illegal war on their country. Yusuf and Anisa are both members of the Federation of Journalists of Iraq and both have experience as “stringers” for Western media companies that came to Baghdad amid the war. When I first went to their apartment for dinner in the well-positioned Waziriyah neighborhood, I was struck by the fact that Anisa—whom I had known as a secular person—wore a veil on her face. “I wear this scarf,” Anisa said to me later in the evening, “to hide the scar on my jaw and neck, the scar made by a bullet wound from a U.S. soldier who panicked after an IED [improvised explosive device] went off beside his patrol.”

Earlier in the day, Yusuf had taken me around New Baghdad City, where in 2007 an Apache helicopter had killed almost twenty civilians and injured two children. Among the dead were two journalists who worked for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. “This is where they were killed,” Yusuf tells me as he points to the square. “And this is where Saleh [Matasher Tomal] parked his minivan to rescue Saeed, who had not yet died. And this is where the Apache shot at the minivan, grievously injuring Saleh’s children, Sajad and Duah.” I was interested in this place because the entire incident was captured on film by the U.S. military and released by Wikileaks as “Collateral Murder.” Julian Assange is in prison largely because he led the team that released this video (he has now received the right to challenge in a UK court his extradition to the United States). The video presented direct evidence of a horrific war crime.

“No one in our neighborhood has been untouched by the violence. We are a society that has been traumatized,” Anisa said to me in the evening. “Take my neighbor for instance. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind because of another bombing.” The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has experienced the kind of warfare faced by the Iraqis, and now by the Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is hard to recover from such violence.

My Poisoned Land

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point to the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations. The U.S. dropped at least 74 million liters of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land.

A Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma terre empoisonnée (My poisoned land) in 2016 as a way to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the U.S. lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how as a journalist in 1966 she was sprayed by a U.S. Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy from the impact of Agent Orange on Trân Tô Nga. “The people from that village over there,” my guides tell me, naming the village, “birth children with severe defects generation after generation.”

Gaza

These memories come back in the context of Gaza. The focus is often on the dead and of the destruction of the landscape. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and of cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now, 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly.

Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organization recognized a phenomenon called “sick building syndrome,” which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighborhoods. There is now over 37 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

Every war zone remains dangerous years after ceasefires. In the case of this war on Gaza, even a cessation of hostilities will not end the violence. In early November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that the Israelis had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (although, as they pointed out, Hiroshima sits on 900 square meters of land, whereas Gaza’s total square meters are 360). By the end of April 2024, Israel had dropped over 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which would be the equivalent of six nuclear bombs. The United Nations estimates that it would take 14 years to clear the unexploded ordnance in Gaza. That means until 2038 people will be dying due to this Israeli bombardment.

On the mantle of the modest living room in the apartment of Anisa and Yusuf, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a small piece of shrapnel that struck and destroyed Yusuf’s left eye. There is nothing else on the mantle.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

23 May 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Inadvertently, Israel has pressed the reset button on its war with the Palestinian people, taking back the so-called conflict to square one.

Save a few self-serving Palestinian officials affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA), most Palestinians do not seem consumed with the return to the peace process, or even engaged in discussions about two state solutions.

The conversation among Palestinians is now mostly concerned with all aspects of the Palestinian struggle, starting with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine 76 years ago, an event known as the Nakba, or Catastrophe.

The Nakba is commemorated on May 15 of each year. The nature of the annual event, however, changes from one stage of the Palestinian struggle to the next.  Indeed, the Nakba anniversary acquires its meaning from the political context of the time – it is elevated during times of hope, demoted during times of despair, defeat and infighting.

In the early phases of the Palestinian struggle, immediately following the expulsion of nearly 80 percent of the total Arab population of Palestine, the Right of Return was not a slogan or symbol. It was, at least in the minds of most refugees, a real possibility.

That right is enshrined in international law under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. At the time, Palestinian exile was perceived to be temporary – thus, the term ‘temporary shelters’ associated with the humble dwellings of refugee encampments immediately after the war. These refugee camps extended from Palestine itself to other countries throughout the Middle East.

Back then, Arab nationalism was a powerful political notion that defined a pan-Arab political discourse, which centered in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. With the passage of time, however, it became clear that Arab liberators were not coming to free Palestine, and that UN resolutions on Palestine were not meant to be implemented. They were mere ‘ink on paper’, Palestinians would often utter.

Experience taught Palestinians to be cynical about lofty promises, especially when the UN-supplied ‘temporary shelters’ became a permanent, everyday reality.

The Palestinians continued to commemorate the Nakba anyway, because their collective memory became their main weapon of fighting back against Israeli erasure.

The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s, its emphasis on the liberation of all of Palestine and its use of revolutionary slogans and armed struggle resurrected hopes among ordinary Palestinians that the Right of Return was still possible.

These hopes were dashed, however, after the PLO’s forced exile from Lebanon in 1982, and the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and increasingly irrelevant Palestinian leadership in 1993.

Oslo and its fraudulent US-led peace process allowed Israel to conclude what it started during the Palestinian Nakba. Israel’s greatest achievement was creating a Palestinian entity that would help it manage its final victory over the Palestinian people. The PA became that entity, leading to widening the factional and class divides in Palestinian society.

Since then, Israel managed to annex large parts of what remained of historic Palestine, control dissenting Palestinians through the PA and besiege Gaza as an act of collective punishment for its ongoing resistance. All wars fought against Gaza in recent years were meant to serve as a reminder to Palestinians of Israel’s might and Palestinian inferiority.

Palestinians, however, continued to commemorate the Nakba, although the Right of Return, as a political concept, became marginal, hardly ever discussed, neither by Israel nor the PA as a pressing political issue.

Recent years indicated that Israel was ready to move past all of this into a whole new stage of politics, one that does not pay the slightest attention to Palestinian aspirations.

The Israeli occupation, illegal settlements, occupied Jerusalem and all other critical topics that mattered to Palestinians ceased to be part of Israeli election campaigns, or even part of the Israeli political discourse, in general. This mindset defined all mainstream Israeli political groups, from the extreme right to the left.

All that seemed to matter to Israel was the expansion of the illegal settlements, the annexation of the West Bank, the normalization of its military occupation and the occasional military raids and wars aimed at crushing the Resistance.

October 7, however, changed all of that. The new political discourse emerging from Gaza following the war has forced an international rethink about Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinians.

This was crystallized in the words of Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, who addressed, in a press conference on May 15, the Palestinian Nakba.

“Seventy-six years on, the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinian people, far from being redressed, has further worsened,” Wenbin said, linking the past to the present, Gaza to historic Palestine.

This new discourse is now taking hold, and the segmentation of Palestinian history resulting from Oslo is quickly disappearing in favor of a wholesome approach to justice in Palestine. Though Washington and a few of its western allies insist on returning to the status quo of endless negotiations, others are no longer beholden to that kind of stifling, self-serving discourse.

This shift in perspective was not only a result of the failure of Oslo, and the extent of the Israeli barbarity and genocide in Gaza, but mainly because of the steadfastness and resistance of the Palestinians themselves.

It turned out that collective memory was not just an academic notion, but a weapon in the hands of ordinary people.

Thanks to Palestinian memory, Palestinians are once more united around their understanding of the past, the steadfastness of the present and the hope for a just future.

– Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

23 May 2024

Source: countercurrents.org