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By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Left to its own devices, Israel would never grant Palestinians their freedom.

In the past, some, whether ignorantly or not, claimed that peace in Palestine can only be achieved through ‘unconditional negotiations’.

This mantra was also championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he cared enough to pay lip service to the ‘peace process’ and other US-originated fantasies. Back then, he spoke about his readiness to hold unconditional negotiations, though constantly arguing that Israel does not have a peace partner.

All of this was, of course, ‘doublespeak’. What Netanyahu and other Israelis were, in fact, saying is that Israel should be freed from any commitment to international law, let alone international pressure. Worse, by declaring that Israel has no Palestinian peace partner, the Israeli government has essentially canceled the hypothetical and ‘unconditional negotiations’ before they even took place.

For years – in fact, for decades – Israel was allowed to perpetuate such nonsense, empowered, of course, by the total and unconditional support of Washington and its other Western allies.

In an environment where Israel receives billions of dollars of US-Western aid, and where it grew to become a thriving technological hub, let alone one of the world’s largest weapons exporters, Tel Aviv simply had no reason to end its occupation or to dismantle its racist apartheid in Palestine.

But things must change now. The genocidal Israeli war in Gaza should completely alter our understanding, not only of the tragic reality underway in Palestine, but of past misunderstanding as well. It should be made clear that Israel never had any intentions of achieving a just peace, ending its colonialism in Palestine, that is, the expansion of illegal settlements or granting Palestinians an iota of rights.

To the contrary, Israel has been planning to carry out a genocide against the Palestinians all along.

Israel has already carried out terrible war crimes against Palestinians, during the Nakba in 1947-48, and in successive wars, ever since. Each crime, large or small, was always accompanied by a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Over 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed when Israel was established on the ruins of Palestine 76 years ago. An additional 300,000 were ethnically cleansed during the Naksa, the war and ‘setback’ of 1967.

Throughout the years, mainstream Western media did its best to completely hide the Israeli crimes, or minimize their impact, or blame someone else entirely for them. This process of shielding Israel remains in place to this day, even when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 7 and when the majority of Gaza, including its hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, civilian homes and shelters have been erased.

Considering all of this, anyone who still speaks of ‘unconditional negotiations’ – especially those conducted under the auspices of Washington – is, frankly, only doing so to help Israel escape international legal and political accountability.

Luckily, the world is waking up to this fact and, hopefully, this awakening will mature sooner rather than later, as Israeli massacres in Gaza continue to claim hundreds of innocent lives every single day.

This collective realization that Israel must be stopped through international measures is also accompanied by an equally critical realization that the US is not an honest peace broker. In fact, it never was.

To appreciate the ruinous role of the US in this so-called conflict, just marvel at this fact. While practically every country that participated with a legal opinion and a political position in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) public hearings from February 19 to the 26, formulated its position based on international law, the US did not.

“The Court should not find that Israel is legally obligated to immediately and unconditionally withdraw from occupied territory,” the acting legal adviser for the US State Department, Richard Visek, embarrassingly said on February 21.

76 years after the Nakba and following 57 years of military occupation, the US legal position remains committed to defending the illegality of Israel’s conduct throughout Palestine.

Compare the above stance to the rounded, courageous and legally grounded position of almost every country in the world, especially of the over 50 countries which requested to speak at the ICJ hearings.

China, whose words, and actions seem far more consistent with international law than many Western nations, especially now, went even further. “In pursuit of the right to self-determination, Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression and complete the establishment of an independent state is (an) inalienable right well founded in international law,” Chinese representative Ma Xinmin told the ICJ on February 22.

Unlike the cliched and non-committal position of the likes of UK Foreign Minister, David Cameron, on the need to start an “irreversible progress” towards an independent Palestinian state, the Chinese position is arguably the most comprehensive and realistic articulation.

Ma linked self-determination to liberation struggle, to sovereignty, to the inalienable rights of people, which are all consistent with international laws and norms. In fact, it is these very principles that have led to the liberation of numerous countries in the Global South.

Considering that Israel has no intention to free Palestinians from the grip of apartheid and military occupation, the Palestinian people have had no other option but to resist.

The question now is, will the international community continue to defy the US position in words only, or will it formulate a new approach to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, thus bringing it to an end by any means necessary?

In his statement to the ICJ on February 19, British barrister Philippe Sands, who is a member of team Palestine, offered a roadmap on how the international community can force Israel to end its occupation: “The right of self-determination requires that UN Member States bring Israel’s occupation to an immediate end. No aid. No assistance. No complicity. No contribution to forcible actions. No money. No arms. No trade. No nothing.”

Indeed, it is now time to turn words into actions, especially when thousands of children are being killed for no fault of their own but for being born Palestinian.

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

2 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Fra Hughes

800 years the Irish have fought a genocidal British occupation .

Eight centuries of ethnic cleansing,land clearances,massacres,starvation,colonisation and a brutal military oppression.

Sucessive generations of Irish men and women ,boys and girls have fought clandestinely and openly to liberate Ireland from foreign imperialist control.

Ireland was Britains first conquest.

The British Empire went on to occupy and at times colonise approximately three quarters of the worlds land mass and citizenry.

Australia,Canada,NewZealand, North America,South Africa, Egypt, India,China to name just a few.

The only difference between the British occupation of Ireland and the Zionist occupation of Palestine is one of time and scale.

Ireland endured a British imposed Famine.

In 1847 the ‘potatoe blight’ destroyed a large percentage of the harvest leading to a shortage of a basic food staple and a subsequent increase in prices.

Ireland having been invaded centuries before was now a land of tenants ruled by absentee land lords.Sections of British aristocracy owned large swaves of Irish land stolen through military occupation.

The Irish were disposessed of their homes and farms and forced to become almost indentured slaves ,tilling the land and raising cattle only for the profits of their labour to be extracted for the largess of a foreign occupier who enacted laws to oppress the indugenous population while protecting the invader.

One law for the occupied a separate law for the occupier.

Two million died or emigrated.This is why there are Irish communitues all over the globe.

54 million North Americans claim to be of Irish descent.

The Irish people wers deliberately starved.

Hunger and famine were used as a weapon of war to end ‘ The Irish Question’ at the heart of British politics.

Those who resisted occupation were murdered imprisoned or deported as Felons to Australia, the Americas and the Carribean.

Massacres,land theft,colonisation,famine,imprisonment,ethnic cleansing.These were the weapons of the oppressor.

This is the fate of all people who live under occupation.

This is Irelands history.A legacy of suffering before partial liberation.

People in Ireland support the people of Palestine.That is a fact.

There is a moral imperative on all people who are suffering or have suffered under  foreign occupation or colonisation to support each other.

Ireland gained partial independence in1922 when Britain partially withdrew from 26 of Irelands 32 counties.

This resulted in the Irish civil war were those opppsed to partition were then attacked with British guns and British artillary being operated by their former comrades.

Fratricide, imprisonment torture and summary executions once used as tactics of war  by the oppressor were adopted  by pro partition Irishmen onto the inheritors of the ideals of a fully independent soverign Irish Republic.

In 1969 a new generation of oppressed Irish people in the British  created state of   Northern  Ireland fought to reunify the country.After 30 years of

Struggle a prece deal was agreed between the protangonist.The Irish Republican Movement The British Government The Irish Government and the counter revolutionary death squads armed and directed by British intelligence alongside their locally recruited merecenary forces.

Through out all those years of armed political resistance the Irish Republican Movement supported their comrades in Palestine.

From the Fayedeen through the PLO to the PA.

Now in N Ireland history has been made by the selection for the first time in the countries history an Irish Republican is now First Minister

A party that I have supported all my life is now in government.

Irish reunification is only now a matter time.

Sadly the Irish Republican Movement in the form of Sinn Fein is no longer a radical Republican party.

It is a shallow shadow of its former glory.

Now a Nationalist constitutional party it has embraced the establishment and the trappings of power and although still endorsed by many it has abandoned its revolutionary roots and embraced neo liberalism.

There is a growing chorus in Ireland demanding that Irish politicians do not observe the traditional St Patricks day celebrations at the White House on March 17 2024.

While Shame Fein party members and elected representatives north and south attend and even organise/ control some of these rallies calling for a ceasefire they have publicly asserted their intention to go to Washington .

While Shame Fein and other corporate endorsed Irish politicians drown there shamrock alongside genocide Joe, while posing for selfies,Palestinians will be drowning in their own blood or suffocating slowly to death under the rubble, as the death toll rises under the bombardment of American imperialist bombs remember the treachery of Sinn Fein.

It is not the bombs of our enemies that hurt us the most but the duplicity of our friends and the treachery of their deeds.

Fra Hughes is a Belfast based Palestine solidarity activist

3 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maung Zarni

On 17 February, Johan Galtung finally achieved his own personal peace.

Galtung died in a hospital in an Oslo suburb, in his native Norway in that wintery morning at 8 am, according to a special note from his devoted friend and closest associate Antonio Rosa who informed us the members of Transcend, Galtung’s peace activist network globally.

Tragically, the just peace for the oppressed which he so brilliantly explained in his decades-long scholarly works has remained ever elusive in the World Order managed primarily by corporate Men and Women of Profits, or “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called the 18th century English merchants with their outsized influence on the British state, and the corporate-subservient politicians who don’t view peace as an essential value for in running a state or formulating policies, much less “a way of life,” as Galtung would put it.

Exhibit A: What I call US-Israel joint genocide in Gaza, and the latter’s continuing colonial occupation of Palestine, which the western media misleadingly characterises as “conflict” or “war”. (Other examples abound, including Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, India, USA, and so on).

The old colonial Britain sowed, wittingly or not, the seeds of violence on the soil of Palestine, and the new imperial power of USA, which supplanted the former, picked up where the British Raj left off. Colonialism and imperialism were major topics which had concerned Galtung, who tasted the 5-years of life under the Nazi occupation of his native Norway, as much as me.

I am sharing my reflection on this intellectual and moral giant with whom I had the privilege of learning from and working with in the context of my own country Burma’s unceasing civil war, a legacy of 120-years of the British imperialist rule.

“America? I love the Republic, but I hate the Empire,” said Johan Galtung, in his typically calm and confident voice responding to a question from the audience at his public lecture at St Antony’s College, Oxford. The year was 2007. This time Galtung was sharing his thoughts on the sustainability of the empire which, at the end of the Second World War, supplanted the British Empire and turned it into its poodle, namely the United States.

His lecture was on what he predicted as the coming fall of the United States as the global hegemon or Empire.

My friend and teacher in agrarian studies Barbara Harriss-White, then Head of Oxford University Department of International Development organized and hosted the renowned sociologist of peace and practitioner in the art of mediation, as the department’s distinguished speaker for its annual public lecture. Previous annual lecture was delivered by Noam Chomsky. I was an instigator behind Galtung’s lecture.

First a brief but relevant detour about my link to Galtung.

In the summer of 2003, I first met Professor Galtung in the home of my adopted American sister Marilyn Langlois, at Richmond Point, by San Francisco Bay, a short drive from where US oil giant Chevron, her late scientist father’s employer, is headquartered.

Both of us came from families – one Burmese and the other American – with ties to violence, corporations and/or militarism, which may help explain our shared concern for peace and our high regards for Galtung, “the father of peace studies”. [On violence, Marilyn’s maternal aunt from Berkeley was Oppenheimer’s secretary at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos during the World War II. And my extended family back in Mandalay have served in what has become a genocidal military of Burma over 3-generations since its inception under WWII Japan’s Fascist patronage].

As Barbara entertained suitable invitees for the post-Chomsky annual lecture for that year, I suggested “What about Galtung?” It was an easy sell, given how cross-cutting and influential Galtung’s work had been. During his long life of 93-years, Galtung had authored over 150 books in fields as diverse as peace and peace-making, security politics, violence, alternative defence, macro history, mathematics, peace journalism, future research, social science methodology, world order issues, economics and theory of science.

The public event was held at the main lecture theatre at St Antony’s College, Oxford. St Antony’s has a reputation among overseas students as an Establishment place, or more accurately, a recruiting ground for UK’s security services.

Provocatively titled something like the end of US Empire, Galtung’s lecture attracted the attention of some of the Establishment intellectuals from the college, including Timothy Garton Ash, Director of European Studies, who walked in the corridors of Euro-American powers. Several years later he appeared on Democracy Now! With Amy Goodman to explain his “the fall of US Empire” prediction.

I don’t remember exactly what the diabolical question which Garton Ash asked which solicited Galtung’s “America?, I love the Republic, but I hate the Empire” response.

But suffice it to say, Galtung was not simply a technocratic theorist or expert on mediation in conflicts. His scholarship, public engagement and mediation efforts were transparently and uniformly anchored in his deeply held anti-imperialism, East or West.

In the lecture, Galtung boldly predicted the end of the US Empire. Ever the mathematician, he even came up with which decade (s), Pax Americana would end. In that connection, he reminded, with apparent pride, the audience that he was one of a handful of Soviet observers who predicted the fall of the USSR.

Galtung was born in the inter-war years in Norway, and had a taste of the Nazi occupation with the Quisling regime as its local Yo-Yo, which “invited” Hitler in. At 12, he saw his father arrested by the Gestapo in Norway.

Those in the Cold War West had typically characterised only the USSR, or “the evil empire,” as Ronald Reagan put it in his speech in West Berlin several years before the wall eventually came down in November 1989. They were generally taken aback when someone portrays the United States as a similarly evil empire, with millions of corpses on its track – not even in the closet.

The late Harold Pinter, the British Nobel Laureate in Literature, who, from his death bed, devoted half of his acceptance lecture Art, Truth and Politics to urging the world to start taking stock of the worldwide crimes of the United States while lamenting the absence of such stocktaking.

Indeed, towards other states, the United States typically conducts itself as a neo-totalitarian global hegemon, especially post-Cold War, with its signature “my way or highway” approach in world affairs, for instance, in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza wherein even the fractured world come together to end the carnage.

As late as 21 February, 4 days after Galtung’s passing, the United States vetoed, for the 3rd time in 3 months, the Security Council resolution which called for the immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and to let the population on the verge of starvation eat – and live.

Galtung’s razor-sharp insights from 1960’s about the two types of violence, direct (person A physically harms person B, for instance) and indirect, that is built-in to the social/structural relations, remain perfectly applicable to the Gaza under Israel’s officially declared “total siege”. On the act of starving populations, Galtung writes, “the important point here is that if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation, as during a siege yesterday …. (p.171).”

A decade before the president of the World Bank Dr Robert Mc Namara, the failed head of the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, announced “poverty” as the bank’s priority policy at the conference held in Nairobi – because American strategists identified “mass poverty” as the contributing factor behind the appeal of egalitarian ideologies such as socialism and communism – Galtung was developing his idea of multiple experiences of poverty as “structural violence”. In 1969, he published his seminal essay, framing, in effect, poverty as “structural violence”.

The American officials still don’t get it when they talk about poverty (as income).

[For the advanced understanding of poverty see my old friend and housemate Sabina Alkire’s work on poverty as multiple dimensional beyond income @ Alkire-Foster Method | OPHI . So I was really delighted that Sabina had co-hosted a sumptuous Burmese for Johan and Fumiko during their brief stay in town for the QEH lecture. I cooked the meal, and Sabina baked the desert.]

In a similar vein, Washington again mis-identified “poverty” – not its ruthless, exploitative, and racist foreign policies – in the Middle East (and the greater Islamic world) as a driver of “terrorism” after 9/11.

In his paper entitled “Violence, Peace and Peace Research”, published in the Journal of Peace Research in 1969, Galtung introduced this concept of structural violence as “a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.”

Galtung explained how this violence – “without the actors” – operate to harm people in society. He writes:

“there may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances. Resources are unevenly distributed, as when income distributions are heavily skewed, literacy/education unevenly distributed, medical services existent in some districts and for some groups only, and so on.’ Above all the power to decide over the distribution of resources is unevenly distributed. The situation is aggravated further if the persons low on income are also low in education, low on health, and low on power – as is frequently the case because these rank dimensions tend to be heavily correlated due to the way they are tied together in the social structure.”

On the real-life application of Galtung’s conceptual frameworks to economics and the decades-old “conflict” in the Palestine, Sydney University Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees wrote an eloquent tribute entitled “Death of a Giant for Peace: The Johan Galtung Legacy”, published on 29 February.

In his final months, Galtung must have been pained by what he witnessed virtually the total siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million people that Israel has been perpetrating both types of violence on population under siege, or “a nation under occupation”, as the father of the term genocide Raphael Lemkin would put it.

Post-Galtung world has most certainly witnessed Israel’s deadly mix of direct slaughter by sub-machine gun fire and the slow slaughter by starvation. Fortunately for Galtung, his death spared him the deep pain of knowing that the IDF tanks and soldiers, fired on Gazans who rushed to a rare aid convoy in order to get “flour” to feed families on the verge of famine. Israel’s direct and deliberate violence killed over 100 instantly, while having left 700 half-starved Gaza wounded.

As the world’s condemnations of genocidal violence got louder, all that the United States as the most influential financier of Israeli state terrorism is prepared to do is to offer the air-dropping of aid – not demand immediate ceasefire, for the besieged population of children, women, the wounded. Gazans will thus live another day, before the next round of Israel’s aerial bombardment or tank and artillery fire.

Galtung certainly saw through the fog of liberal propaganda – that US is a benign “empire of liberty” – that has, perhaps until 7 October, pervaded the views of the educated classes in USA and the Anglo-phone world, as well as the post-Holocaust Europe. As Galtung Q and A with Oxford’s Timonthy Garton Ash indicated he did not suffer such fools who bought into the Pavlovian view of benevolent Pax Americana with its “soft power”, spreading “European values of Enlightenment” such as democracy, human rights and liberal humanism globally.

Through his penetrating eyes, he saw the ugly workings of the United States, the one which, in reality, was operating behind “a million bayonets”. That was how George Orwell characterized his employer, the British Empire, in his 1st ever novel “Burmese Days.”

Certainly, Galtung did not fail to see the fact that, with unmatched war budget – officially “defence spending” – approaching one trillion $ per year, Washington maintains 750 military bases in 80 countries worldwide, including in his wife Fumiko Nishimura’s native Japan. Besides, Galtung would most definitely know that his native Norway was (and still is) a supplier, among other things, of certain Made-in-Norway components to US F-16 fighter-bombers. His fellow Norwegian humanitarian and professor of medicine Dr Mads Gilbert was openly exposing Norway’s role in the United States direct violence around the world. At the Students Peace Conferences held at the University of Tromso in the early 2000’s, I heard Professor Gilbert speak on the Norwegian contributions to global violence while giving out Nobel Peace prizes annually.

In our numerous conversations and exchanges, Galtung talked, with detectable distaste, of the political class that reign in his country as simply subservient to the diktats of the United States.

As if the political representatives on the Nobel Committee in Oslo reciprocated Galtung’s disdain for the Norwegian subservience to Washington, they had ignored the repeated nominations of Galtung for the prize while peace activists and scholars around the world sought out Galtung, the guru, his ideas as well as his company.

Galtung exuded eternal optimism and bubbling energy, “eternal sunshine,” to put it poetically. A situation as dire and seemingly intractable as Palestine, Galtung would talk about his positive vision wherein all the Arabs and the Israeli can live in peace and equality. Not only was Galtung intellectually towering, but he was also a physically towering figure, with characteristic disarming laughs and smiles.

The last time I saw him was when he was holding Tun Mahathir Global Peace Chair at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur in 2014. Alongside the moral and intellectual giants, including Gideon Levy of Israel, Denis Halliday of Ireland (who resigned from his position as UN Coordinator in Saddam’s Iraq, to protest the US sanctions that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children), Galtung spoke at the Conference which the former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad organized and hosted designed to mobilize public opinion to “criminalize war” – all wars.

We were in Rangoon together in the fall of 2005. It was during my short-lived, unsuccessful attempt at Track II mediation in my country of birth where we had reached a stalemate between Aung San Suu Kyi leadership and the ruling military regime. I arranged a one-on-one meeting for him to talk to the 3^rd ranking Burmese general, who headed the country’s military intelligence services, about the possibilities of peace from TRANSCEND perspective.

The then British Ambassador Vicky Bowman put the Galtungs up in the ambassador’s residence colonially named “Balmoral” across the old War Office on Shwedagon Pagoda Road. At her arrangement, Galtung was also meeting with the country’s peace NGOs, run by a group of national minority representatives.

The Burmese military junta wanted to know if “the professor is our friend?” But Galtung was no friend of any party in conflict, little did they know. He was there to help mediate the conflict. The generals were seriously disturbed that Galtung would go and talk to the ethnic equality rights advocates. His mission was to talk everyone in the conflict. So, he naturally spent a day with those who wanted to rebuild the post-independence Burma of multiple ethnic nations as a “federalist” entity where every group had equal representation and an equal say in the way the country was governed. Paying lip service to “federalism”, the junta viewed any version of Burma other than effectively “unitary state”, as a formula for its disintegration.

Although 30-odd years senior to me in age and wisdom, I remember well how appreciative, eager and even respectful Galtung was in our interactions which involved him learning the specificities of Burma’s conflicts, which he wished to help resolve. Like all great educators, Galtung was not a one-way street “know-it-all” guru. Despite him being feted internationally as the “guru”, he was a lifelong learner and was humble enough to know that he still needed to learn from others, something that deeply impressed me.

Galtung made unparalleled intellectual and practical contributions to the advancement of our understanding of peace, its social objectives and the conditions for peace, in terms of our global understanding of such an elusive goal. The Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee’s refusal to recognize Galtung’s contributions to world peace and peace activism, or understanding of peace, as such, was both disappointing and disgraceful. That is, if we even take a glance at the list of the committee’s ignominious choices for this most prestigious recognition. Henry Kissinger, Likud’s Menachem Begin (whom Einstein called “terrorist” “Fascist”), Aung San Suu Kyi, Abiy Ahmed, or Barak Obama (with the daily “kill-list” over his White House breakfast table).

The neighbouring Sweden’s Right Livelihoods Foundation did at least honour the Scandinavian guru of peace with its Right Livelihoods Award in 1987. He was in good company with the likes of Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of USA, the US National Intelligence Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, and the renowned Buddhist teacher and activist Sulak Sivaraksa of Thailand, among others.

A quick Google search will cough up the incredible quantity of Galtung’s writings as well as practical contributions to peace and conflict research, including the establishment of scholarly journals and institutions including Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), which he founded in 1959 and directed until 1969. After OPRI, he held the world’s first endowed chair in peace studies at his alma mater, the University of Oslo for the following decade. (see the official obituary issued by OPRI here).

Besides his intellectual legacy as “the father of peace studies,” to many of us around the world, who see (just) peace, not simply as a political objective, but as a value to live and act upon, Galtung had gifted us with TRANSCEND Media Services, which collate important and thoughtful writings on peace and world affairs from variously anti-imperialist perspectives.

Naturally, on 17 February afternoon Antonio Carlos da Silva Rosa, Galtung’s friend and Portugal-based Editor and Compiler of TRANSCEND News circulars, sent out the sad news that Galtung died at 8 am at a hospital in Oslo.

I wrote on my social media platform after reading Antonio’s sad and brief announcement.

I know that many of his friends, students, colleagues and acquaintances worldwide who had the privilege and honour of knowing Johan Galtung share my sentiment. One practical way to honour this great man would be to ensure that we keep his TRANSCEND network, with all its various components, alive through our own intellectual and financial contributions.

Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide.

4 March 2024

Source: forsea.co

By Arjun Banerjee

India now counts among the most right-wing countries in the world, with all the classic markers of fascism emblazoned with a leering smugness across the faces of its elite and so-called ‘middle-class’. The ongoing charade of the Anant Ambani pre-wedding brings to light several of its interconnected rightwing maladies.

The first is the mindless worship of money and the power it confers as a birthright upon the wealthy. India has gone into a neoliberal overdrive and has been hawking public resources and infrastructure for capitalist looting, naming this unconscionable theft as ‘monetization pipeline’, ‘business development’, ‘improving services’, and whatnot. Everything from education to healthcare to natural resources has been privatized at breakneck speed in service of private profits.

Those who have amassed their obscene mounds of ill-gotten wealth are praised as job creators and hard workers for supposedly throwing some scraps under the table by way of unstable and highly exploitative private jobs. India is the picture of an average failed banana republic in the way that it is dancing to the egotism and gaudy flashiness of an oligarch who wants to give his son the biggest, fattest Indian wedding anywhere ever.

And so, the resources of the Indian government itself have been pressed into service to convert the Jamnagar Airport into an international airport for 10 days, just to facilitate the supposed ‘dignitaries’ coming in to ‘celebrate’ the wedding, when it is plain as day that this is the hobnobbing of an extremely rich and powerful international class of oligarchs and a coterie of plastic entertainers who are made gods unto themselves in the name of being ‘celebrities’: a hobnobbing whose bill is to be footed by us the peasants leering at awe at the luxuries of the aristocrats, wiping away tears of gratitude to all that Ambani and other corporate overlords have done for the country. (Consider the seething defence of Narayan Murthy’s 70-hour workweek comments)

If doing something for the country brought the same rewards to everyone as it does to Ambani, then we would not see Vakil Hassan’s house demolished and his wife and children assaulted and thrown in the street. We would not see medal-winning sportspersons reduced to penury or face daily public humiliation to secure justice against sexual assault. We would not be putting professors in jail without trial and would not be smearing and shaming a BSF jawan who exposed corruption and neglect of rank-and-file soldiers.

The Indian oligarchy is credited with banishing the darkness of ‘socialism’ (a horrible misnomer for what actually existed in pre-liberalization India) and bringing in the sweet fruits of the paradise of the free market. In reality, the so-called ‘success’ and ‘public good’ attributed to, say, Reliance Jio is built off the back of massive public investment and support. The story of private telecom players piggybacking on public infrastructure to produce private profits is just a drop in this ocean. Don’t believe me, ask ChatGPT, the darling of today’s techies.

There isn’t even a semblance of the republican spirit or even lip service to Constitutional values of equality among citizens and checks on money as a pathway to unlimited power. It is simply the regime of ‘might makes right’. When you have this much money to throw, the system will bend to your will too: that is what the regime’s internet propagandists say to shut down criticisms of the obscenity that is underway right now. I would like to know what is the procedure by which I can apply to have an airport repurposed or reserved for family functions in the way Ambani can. The Noida Metro (NMRC) announced a facility to book railway coaches for gatherings and parties in 2020, and while I still consider it cringeworthy, it was, at the very least, open to all. But Adani’s privilege seems to be a regal prerogative which commoners like us can only dream of. And dream we do. At the end of a heated argument with a friend over this, he said paisa ho toh aisa (if I am to have money, let me have it like this).

Will we ever see a detailed and audited bill of reimbursement that Ambani or Reliance has paid out to the government for all the expenses and manpower wasted to facilitate this entirely private event? Or are we at the stage of explicitly admitting what Marxists like me take as a fundamental truth, that the government is quite literally owned and run by the ruling class of upper castes and capitalists?

The other right-wing aspect of this gaudy wedding celebration is the feudal mindset and rampant casteism of Indian society. Looking at the propaganda blitz, one may easily conclude that we are witnessing the royal wedding of a prince of India and not just another citizen. What was the point of abolishing royal privileges like the privy purse or creating hype about the integration of princely states post-independence when we are perfectly fine with glorifying petty rulers and monarchs of the past and treating the oligarchs of the present like modern-day royalty?

To put it more accurately, this spectacle represents the feudal and casteist structures of Indian society which are not only intact but are growing ever stronger under the present regime.  The intense PR campaign of the various rituals and public appearances that the family is engaging in puts them on a pedestal, in sync with the patronizing superiority that upper castes display to the lower caste masses. The institution of ‘traditional’ marriage is also a mechanism of ensuring that social and economic capital stays within families and communities through the patriarchal exchange of women’s bodies from father to husband. The fact that the Indian State is endorsing this shows its ideological commitment to the institutionalization of marriages, which are overwhelmingly ‘arranged’ between families and do not consider the aspect of love, romance, intimacy, or compatibility between two consenting adults. The State has repeatedly come out in favour of legalized raping of wives and against live-in relationships and homosexual marriage, which shows that it has stakes in maintaining the patriarchal and casteist nature of marriage as an institution.

This Twitter thread about the pampering and privileges afforded to Anant Ambani when he was growing up may be unverified anecdotes, but by themselves, its claims do not seem that hard to believe. We live in a culture where social displays of wealth, connections, and religiosity are paramount. Such flashy displays of wealth and power pay off, at least when it comes to the so-called middle class who would rather foster delusions of becoming the next Ambani than own up to the fact that their personal values, and those of society at large, need to change urgently.

Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi.

4 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Juan Cole

In the midst of Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979, Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a significant fashion across the region. It’s a story that needs to be told.

“Hit Iran now. Hit them hard” was typical advice offered by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a drone flown by an Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militia killed three American servicemen in northern Jordan on January 28th. The well-heeled Iran War Lobby in Washington has, in fact, been stridently calling for nothing short of a U.S. invasion of that country, accusing Tehran of complicity in Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.

No matter that the official Iranian press has vehemently denied the allegation, while American intelligence officials swiftly concluded that the attack on Israel had taken top Iranian leaders by surprise. In mid-November, Reuters reported that Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei informed a key Hamas figure, Ismail Haniya, that his country wouldn’t intervene directly in the Gaza war, since Tehran hadn’t been warned about the October 7th attack before it was launched. He actually seemed annoyed that the leadership of the Hamas paramilitary group, the Qassam Brigades, thought they could draw Tehran and its allies willy-nilly into a major conflict without the slightest consultation. Although initially caught off-guard, as the Israeli counterattack grew increasingly brutal and disproportionate, Iran’s leaders clearly began to see ways they could turn the war to their regional benefit — and they’ve done so skillfully, even as the Biden administration in its full-scale embrace of the most extreme government in Israeli history tossed democracy and international law under the bus.

The gut-wrenching Hamas attacks on civilians at a music festival and those living in left-wing, peacenik Kibbutzim near the Israeli border with Gaza on October 7th initially left Iran in an uncomfortable position. It had allegedly been slipping some $70 million a year to Hamas — though Egypt and Qatar had provided major funding to Gaza at Israel’s request through sanctioned Israeli government bank accounts. And after decades of championing the Palestinian cause, Tehran could hardly stand by and do nothing as Israel razed Gaza to the ground. On the other hand, the ayatollahs couldn’t afford to gain a reputation for being played like a fiddle by the region’s young radicals and so drawn into conventional wars their country can ill afford.

The Adults in the Room?

Despite their fiery rhetoric, their undeniable backing of fundamentalist militias in the region, and their depiction by inside-the-Beltway war hawks as the root of all evil in the Middle East, Iran’s leaders have long acted more like a status quo power than a force for genuine change. They have shored up the rule of the autocratic al-Assad family in Syria, while helping the Iraqi government that emerged after President George W. Bush’s invasion of that country fight off the terrorist threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In truth, not Iran but the U.S. and Israel are the countries that have most strikingly tried to use their power to reshape the region in a Napoleonic manner. The disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and Israel’s wars on Egypt (1956, 1967), Lebanon (1982-2000, 2006), and Gaza (2008, 2012, 2014, 2024), along with its steady encouragement of large-scale squatting on the Palestinian West Bank, were clearly intended to alter the geopolitics of the region permanently through the use of military force on a massive scale.

Only recently, Ayatollah Khamenei bitterly asked, “Why don’t the leaders of Islamic countries publicly cut off their relationship with the murderous Zionist regime and stop helping this regime?” Pointing to the staggering death toll in Israel’s present campaign against Gaza, he was focusing on the Arab countries — Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates — that, as part of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” had officially recognized Israel and established relations with it. (Egypt and Jordan had, of course, recognized Israel long before that.)

Given the anti-Israel sentiment in the region, had it, in fact, been rife with democracies, Iran’s position might have been widely implemented. Still, it was a distinct sign of terminal tone deafness on the part of Biden administration officials that they hoped to use the Gaza crisis to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, while sidelining the Palestinians and creating a joint Israeli-Arab front against Iran.

The region had already been moving in a somewhat different direction. Last March, after all, Iran and Saudi Arabia had begun forging a new relationship by restoring the diplomatic relations that had been suspended in 2016 and working to expand trade between their countries. And that relationship has only continued to improve as the nightmare in Israel and Gaza developed. In fact, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi first visited the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November and, since the Gaza conflict began, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has met twice with his Saudi counterpart. Frustrated by a markedly polarizing American policy in the region, de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resorted to the good offices of Beijing to sidestep Washington and strengthen their relations further.

Although Iran is far more hostile to Israel than Saudi Arabia, their leaderships do agree that the days of marginalizing the Palestinians are over. In a remarkably unambiguous statement issued in early February, the Saudis offered the following: “The Kingdom has communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all the Israeli occupation forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.” Significantly, the Saudis even refused to join a U.S.-led naval task force created to halt attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Houthis of Yemen (no friends of theirs) in support of the Palestinians. Its leaders are clearly all too aware that the carnage still being wreaked on Gaza has infuriated most Saudis.

In late January, President Raisi also surprised regional diplomats by traveling to Ankara for talks on trade and geopolitics with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, another sign of his country’s changing role in the region. At the end of the visit, while signing various agreements to increase trade and cooperation, he announced: “We agreed to support the Palestinian cause, the axis of resistance, and to give the Palestinian people their rightful rights.” That’s no small thing. Remember that Turkey is a NATO member and considered a close ally of the United States. To have Erdoğan suddenly cozy up to Iran, while denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza as a Hitlerian-style genocide, was an unmistakable slap in Washington’s face.

Meanwhile, Iran, Turkey, and Russia recently issued a joint communiqué that “expressed deep concern over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and stressed the need to end the Israeli brutal onslaught against the Palestinians, [while] sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.” From the Biden administration’s point of view, Moscow’s bombing of civilian sites in Ukraine and Iran’s role in crushing Sunni Arab rebels in Syria had been the atrocities that needed attention until Netanyahu suddenly pulled the rug out from under them by upping the ante from mere atrocities to what the International Court of Justice has ruled can plausibly be labeled a genocide. One thing was clear: Washington’s long struggle to exclude Iran from regional influence has now visibly failed.

Iran’s Rising Popularity

At the Gulf International Forum (GIF) last November, Abdullah Baaboud, a prominent Omani academic, said that there had been a “very strong condemnation of Israel from Iran and Turkey, embarrassing some Arab countries that are not using the same language. My worry is that this conflict is leading to the empowerment of Turkey and Iran among the Arab public.” GIF’s executive director, Dania Thafer, concurred. Of that public, she said, “Grief and anger have reached unprecedented levels,” and added, “with each photo out of Gaza, Iran gains more influence across the region.” In short, at remarkably little cost, Iran is unexpectedly winning the battle for regional public opinion and its standing in the Arab world has risen strikingly. Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has been indelibly tarnished by Washington’s full-throated support for what most in the region do indeed see as a merciless slaughter of thousands of children and other innocent civilians.

A recent opinion poll of Arabs in 16 countries, conducted jointly by the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, found that 94% of them considered the American position on Israel’s war “bad.” In contrast, a surprising 48% of them considered the Iranian position positive. To grasp just how remarkable such a finding was, consider that a Gallup poll conducted in 2022 found that Shiite Iran’s name was mud in most Sunni Arab countries and approval of its leadership fell somewhere between 10% and 20%.

In recent months, Iran has made striking use of the weakness of Washington’s case in the region. While the State Department likes to contrast Iran’s “dictatorship” with Israel’s “democratic character,” only recently foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani observed, “The disaster in Gaza removed the mask from the face of the so-called advocates of human rights and showed the extent of vileness, brutality, and lies hidden within the nature of the Israeli regime, whose supporters used to refer to [it] as a symbol of democracy.” Although Iran has among the world’s worst human-rights records, Netanyahu has even managed to take the focus off of that.

Losing the Middle East, Washington-Style

Iran’s allies in the region include Iraqi Shiite militias like the Party of God Brigades (Kata’ib Hizbullah), which first gained prominence in the struggle against the ISIL terrorist group from 2014 to 2018. Those were years when the regular Iraqi army had essentially collapsed and was only gradually being rebuilt. Washington was also focused on destroying ISIL then and so developed a wary de facto alliance with them in its campaign to crush that “caliphate.” In January 2020, however, President Trump was responsible for the drone assassination of the group’s leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, along with Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, just after their arrival by plane at Baghdad International Airport in what was evidently an attempt to prevent them, through the Iraqis, from forging an agreement with Saudi Arabia to reduce tensions with Iran.

That assassination led to a long-running, low-intensity conflict between the Shiite militias of Iraq and the 2,500 remaining American troops stationed there. With the onset of the Gaza conflict last October, the Party of God Brigades began launching mortars and drones against Iraqi military bases hosting American soldiers, as well as against small forward operating bases in southeast Syria where some 900 U.S. military personnel are stationed, ostensibly to support the Syrian Kurds in mopping up operations against ISIL. After more than 150 such attacks, on January 28th one of their drones hit Tower 22, a support base where U.S. troops were stationed in northern Jordan, killing three American soldiers, while wounding dozens more.

Iran’s leaders generally back those Shiite militias, but whether they had anything to do with the attack on Tower 22 remains unknown. Officials in Tehran did, however, immediately recognize the danger of escalation once American troops had actually been killed. And indeed, the Biden administration responded with dozens of air strikes on bases and facilities of the Party of God Brigades in Iraq and Syria. Washington Post reporters were told by Iraqi and Lebanese officials that Iran had actually urged caution on the militias with clear effect. Their attacks on bases hosting U.S. troops ceased. At the same time, the Iraqi parliament and government complained bitterly about Washington’s violation of the country’s sovereignty, while heightening preparations to force the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from their land. In other words, President Biden’s fierce backing of Israel’s war, his decision to increase weapons shipments to that country, and his bombing of pro-Palestinian militias may have led to the achievement of a longstanding Iranian aim: seeing American troops finally leave Iraq.

Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon, where the militant group Hezbollah has been exchanging occasional fire with Israeli forces in support of Gaza, according to the Post reporters, one Hezbollah figure told them that Iran’s message was: “We are not keen on giving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any reason to launch a wider war on Lebanon or anywhere else.” Wars are unpredictable, and the Lebanon-Israeli border could still erupt dramatically. Moreover, Iranian pleas for restraint appear to have had far less effect on the Houthi leadership in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, leading to an ongoing American and British bombing campaign on that city and elsewhere in that country that has so far done little to stop Houthi missile and drone attacks against ships in the Red Sea.

So far, however, despite the Republican urge to devastate Iran, that country’s leaders have taken deft advantage of the butchery in Gaza (in which the Israeli military has killed more civilian noncombatants each day than belligerents have in any other conflict in this century). The ayatollahs have significantly increased their popularity even among Arab and Muslim publics that had not previously shown them much favor. They have strengthened their relationship with the Shiites of Iraq and may be on the verge of finally achieving their goal of ending the U.S. military missions in Iraq and Syria.

They have also achieved closer ties with Turkey, while improving relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab oil states. In doing so, they have distinctly blunted the Biden administration’s aim of isolating Iran while tying the wealthier Arab states ever more firmly to Israel through arms and high-tech deals.

In addition, through its backing of and weaponizing of Israel in these last grim months, Washington has made a mockery of the human rights talking points that the U.S. has long deployed against Iran. In the process, Joe Biden has done more than any recent president to undermine both international humanitarian law and democratic principles globally. With 94% of Arab poll respondents viewing American policy in the region as “bad,” one thing is clear: for the moment at least, Iran has won the Middle East.

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan.

4 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jake Johnson

The U.S. military on Saturday executed the first of what’s expected to be a series of humanitarian aid airdrops into the Gaza Strip, parachuting packages containing 38,000 meals to the besieged enclave’s coastline as the territory’s entire population—roughly 2.2 million people—faces the imminent threat of starvation due to Israel’s ongoing assault and blockade.

The airdrop, coordinated with the Jordanian military, came days after Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of desperate Gazans near a convoy of aid trucks in the northern part of the territory, which Israel has almost completely cut off from humanitarian assistance.

The incident, dubbed the “flour massacre,” was just one of more than a dozen documented cases this year of the U.S.-armed Israeli military attacking Gazans gathering to receive food aid and other assistance, according to the United Nations.

Biden administration officials said Saturday that “the aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere near enough and nowhere near fast enough,” but the White House has done nothing to force the Israeli government to stop obstructing ground-based deliveries, which have fallen in recent weeks and become virtually impossible in much of the territory because of Israel’s restrictions and repeated attacks on aid workers.

Administration officials have dismissed calls to attach conditions to U.S. military assistance to Israel, which has used American weaponry to commit atrocities in the Gaza Strip. The administration is currently preparing to send Israel additional bombs and other weaponry.

“Biden is airdropping food (expensive, inefficient, potentially dangerous) because he won’t condition massive U.S. military aid and arms sales on Israel ending its obstruction of most ground aid deliveries,” said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch.

On Sunday, following the U.S. airdrop, Israeli forces were accused of striking an aid vehicle in central Gaza, reportedly killing eight people.

At least 15 children in Gaza have died from starvation or dehydration in recent days, according to the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights.

A top World Food Program official warned last week that “food aid is required by almost the entire population of 2.2 million people” and that Gaza is “seeing the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world.” The U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, said Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s population, a blatant war crime.

In the face of such a large-scale emergency, critics said the Biden administration’s airdrops are nowhere near sufficient.

“Instead of dropping packages from the sky—some of which end up in the sea or outside of Gaza and which the most vulnerable cannot reach in any case—the U.S., the U.K., and others should ensure that Israel immediately opens all crossings into Gaza for aid and aid workers to assist those in need,” said Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians.

“This includes the Karni and Erez crossings, which give direct access to the north of Gaza,” Ward continued. “Only safe and unfettered access for aid and aid workers, the lifting of the siege, and an immediate cease-fire can end starvation in Gaza.”

Dave Harden, a former assistant administrator at the United States Agency for International Development, said in an interview Saturday that airdrops are “inefficient, expensive, and risky.”

“Airdropping from 30,000 feet is simply not the solution,” said Harden. “And, by the way, it’s a little offensive to the United States, too. I mean, Israel is our ally and we’re supporting them in a very substantial and meaningful way. And for us not to be able to get aid in to innocent civilians in Gaza is really an indictment both on the Biden administration and the Bibi Netanyahu administration.”

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

4 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Professor Geoffrey Sachs says Israel is literally starving the Palestinian people of Gaza and for that it is in a non-stop war crime of genocidal status. See his full commentary. 

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved. I am not using an exaggeration. I am talking literally, starving a population,” says Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is the current director of the Center of Sustainable Development in Columbia University.

“Israel is criminal”

“Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop war crime status. Now. I believe in genocidal status, and it is without shame, without remorse, without truth, without insight into what it’s doing,” he recently told the Judging Freedom Podcast run by Judge Andrew Napolitano.

“But what it is doing is endangering Israel’s fundamental security because it is deriving the world to believe that the Israeli state is not legitimate,” the world’s top economist and an advisor to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns.

It will stop being a danger to itself “when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel,” he firmly points out.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4EFzPyvm80/?igsh=cHlhYmY1cGUzb2Ew

Messianic

Israel has no “self-control” and “there is none in this government” Dr Sachs adding in reference to the Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, saying “there is a murderous gang in government right now”.

“These are zealots, they have some messianic vision of controlling all of today’s Palestinian lands” and “are not going to stop. They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse, depending on whatever is needed.”

What is worse he points out that “it is the United States that is their sole support. And it’s our mumbling, bumbling president and the others that are not stopping this slaughter,” he ends with great dismay.

Professor Sachs is ranked by the Economist as among the three most influential living economists in the world. He is a great intellectual, a best-selling author and a global leader in sustainable development.

Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer specializing on Middle East Affairs

5 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Salim Nazzal

Gaza has a tumultuous history, having endured several Zionist aggressive wars in the past. However, the current conflict surpasses all levels of brutality witnessed before. It is unfortunate that Gaza’s strategic location, serving as a gateway to Palestine from Africa, has made it bear the brunt of its geographical significance. History has taught us that a country’s location often shapes its destiny.

A Yugoslav historian, in his book “A House on the Side of the Road,” highlighted how Yugoslavia’s position as a bridge between Europe and Asia influenced its historical trajectory. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great embarked on his journey towards the east. Gaza resisted his advances, leading to a siege and subsequent massacre of its inhabitants upon its fall. Similar events unfolded in 1802 when Napoleon Bonaparte, claiming to uphold the values of the French Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, pursued an imperialist agenda.

He was among the first to advocate for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In Gaza, Napoleon executed all surrendered soldiers, citing a lack of provisions as justification. The late Moroccan thinker was correct in asserting that the slogans of the French Revolution, such as Liberté, égalité, fraternité, were intended solely for the French and Europeans, rather than encompassing all of humanity.

The ongoing Zionist aggression in Gaza has exposed the hollowness of human rights rhetoric in the West, revealing the existence of double standards. The Zionists’ current actions bear no resemblance to the culture of the Middle East. Instead, they have imported a culture of violence and crime from the Eastern European ghettos they originated from. The Palestinians have suffered immeasurable pain as a result. This barbaric behavior has left an indelible mark on the collective memory of Palestinians and Arabs, undoubtedly fueling future conflicts. Regrettably most Western nations have aligned themselves with this genocidal war.

The nations that opposed the genocide war, including   Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa, and Bolivia, will always hold a significant position in the hearts of the Palestinians and the global community.

The Zionist fascists will ultimately be defeated, and I will have the opportunity to visit a liberated Gaza and a free Palestine.

Salim Nazzal  is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad

5 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college.

These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way. The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods.

A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act. Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe. With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs.

In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.”

Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North. What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire.

Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist.

5 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

29 Feb 2024 – The world recently lost two principled opponents of war, but under drastically different circumstances. Johan Galtung died on 17 Feb at the age of 93. The Norwegian sociologist was known as the father of peace studies, and spent his life researching conflicts and fostering dialog in pursuit of peace.