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By Vijay Prashad

In the past two decades, the external debt of developing countries has quadrupled to $11.4 trillion (2023). It is important to understand that this money owed to foreign creditors is equivalent to 99% of the export earnings of the developing countries. This means that almost every dollar earned by the export of goods and services is a dollar owed to a foreign bank or bond holder. Countries of the Global South, therefore, are merely selling their goods and services to pay off debts incurred for development projects, collapsed commodity prices, public deficits, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the inflation due to the Ukraine war. Half the world’s population (3.3 billion) lives in countries that allocate more of their budget to pay off the interest on debt than to pay for either education or health services. On the African continent, of the fifty-four countries, thirty-four spend more on debt servicing than on public healthcare. Debt looms over the Global South like a vulture, ready to pick at the carcass of our societies.

Why are countries in debt? Most countries are in debt for a few reasons:

• When they gained independence about a century ago, they were left impoverished by their former colonial rulers.
• They borrowed money for development projects from their former colonial rulers at high rates, making repayment impossible since the funds were used for public projects like bridges, schools, and hospitals.
• Unequal terms of trade (export of low-priced raw materials for import of high-priced finished products) further exacerbated their weak financial situation.
• Ruthless policies by multilateral organisations (such as the International Monetary Fund – IMF) forced these countries to cut domestic public spending for both consumption and investment and instead repay foreign debt. This set in motion a cycle of low growth rates, impoverishment, and indebtedness.

Caught in the web of debt-austerity-low growth-external borrowing-debt, countries of the Global South almost entirely abandoned long-term development for short-term survival. The agenda available to them to deal with this debt trap was entirely motivated by the expediency of repayment and not of development. Typically, the following methods were promoted in place of a development theory:

1. Debt relief and debt restructuring. Seeking a reduction in the debt burden and a more sustainable management of long-term debt payments.
2. An appeal for foreign direct investment (FDI) and an attempt to boost exports. Increasing the ability of countries to earn income to pay off this debt, but without any real change to the productive capacity within the country.
3. Cuts to public spending, largely an attrition of social expenditure. Shifting the fiscal landscape so that a country can use more of its social wealth to pay off its foreign bold holders and earn ‘confidence’ in the international market, but at the expense of the lives and well-being of its citizens.
4. Tax reforms that benefited the wealthy and labour market reforms that hurt workers. Tax cuts to encourage the wealthy to invest in their society – which very rarely happens – and a change in trade union laws to allow greater exploitation of labour to increase capital for investment.
5. Institutional reform to ensure less corruption by greater international control of financial systems. To open the budgetary process of a country to international management (through the IMF) and allow foreign economists to control the fiscal decision-making.

Each of these approaches separately and all of them together provided no assessment of the underlying problems that produced debt, nor did they offer a pathway out of debt dependency.

Effectively, if this is the best approach available, then developing countries need a new development theory.

A New Development Theory

It is by now understood that the entry of FDI and the export of low-priced commodities do not by themselves increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of a developing country. Indeed, FDI – in an age of financial liberalisation and without capital control – can create enormous problems for a poor country since the money can operate to destabilise the economy. The latter requires long-term investments rather than hot-money transactions.

Research by Global South Insights (GSI) and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research shows that it is not FDI that increases GDP over long periods, but that there is a high correlation between an increase in net fixed capital investment and GDP growth (net fixed capital investment is the increased spending on capital stock above depreciation). In other words, if a country invests money to increase its capital stock, it will see a secular rise in its growth rate. That is the reason why countries such as China, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia have sustained high growth rates in a period when most countries (illustratively in the Global North) have had low to negative growth rates (particularly when considering rising inflation). Even the World Bank agrees that the exit from the ‘middle-income trap’ is to increase investment, infuse technologies from abroad, and innovate technologies internally (they call it the ‘3i method’). At the heart of the project must be an increase in net fixed capital investment.

Our research shows that as GDP grows, life expectancy rises as well. There are many elements here that require investigation: for instance, if the quality of GDP growth improves (more industry, better social spending), what does this do for social outcomes? To talk about the quality of GDP is to raise issues of allocation of social wealth into specific sectors, which brings up the importance of both robust economic planning and proper fiscal policy that is not motivated by paying off foreign bondholders but by building the net fixed capital in a country over the long-term.

But how does one get the finance to both service debts and build capital stock? That is not an impossibility since most developing countries are rich in resources and solely need to build the power to marshal those resources. The answers might be found less in the laws of economics than in the unequal relations of power in the world. With the churning of the global order, there might now be an opportunity to create new financial strategies for development.

The basis of a conversation about development theory should not be how to sustain an economy in a permanent debt spiral that leads to deindustrialisation and despair. It should instead be about how to break that cycle and enter a period of industrialisation, agrarian reform, growth, and social progress. It is this insight that motivates us to begin a fresh conversation, not about the need for this or that economic policy to salvage a bad situation, but for a new development theory altogether.

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

27 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ann Wright

Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.

During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor  had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.

As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.”  Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.

Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK and it is not funded by Communist China.”  I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.

After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie, “The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.”

Senator Cotton does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

Senator Cotton does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a US Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family.  In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.

CODEPINK members have been challenging in the US Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a US Senator in 2014.  We have been in the US Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested the war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.

After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a complaint to this office staff.

We are also submitting a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.

The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing of telling lies about individuals and organizations that challenge U.S. government politics, particularly its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza must be called out and pushed back against.

And we must push back against US Senators who actually receive funding from front groups for other countries.  Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the genocidal policies of the State of Israel.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel.

27 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Explaining Arab political failure to challenge Israel through traditional analysis—such as disunity, general weakness, and a failure to prioritize Palestine—does not capture the full picture.

The idea that Israel is brutalizing Palestinians simply because the Arabs are too weak to challenge the Benjamin Netanyahu government—or any government—implies that, in theory, Arab regimes could unite around Palestine. However, this view oversimplifies the matter.

Many well-meaning pro-Palestine commentators have long urged Arab nations to unite, pressure Washington to reassess its unwavering support for Israel, and take decisive actions to lift the siege on Gaza, among other crucial steps.

While these steps may hold some value, the reality is far more complex, and such wishful thinking is unlikely to change the behavior of Arab governments. These regimes are more concerned with sustaining or returning to some form of status quo—one in which Palestine’s liberation remains a secondary priority.

Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023, the Arab position on Israel has been weak at best, and treasonous at worst.

Some Arab governments even went so far as to condemn Palestinian resistance in United Nations debates. While countries like China and Russia at least attempted to contextualize the October 7 Hamas assault on Israeli occupation forces imposing a brutal siege on Gaza, countries like Bahrain placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians.

With a few exceptions, it took Arab governments weeks—or even months—to develop a relatively strong stance that condemned the Israeli offensive in any meaningful terms.

Though the rhetoric began to shift slowly, the actions did not follow. While the Ansarallah movement in Yemen, alongside other Arab non-state actors, attempted to impose some form of pressure on Israel through a blockade, Arab countries instead worked to ensure Israel could withstand the potential consequences of its isolation.

In his book War, Bob Woodward disclosed that some Arab governments told then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that they had no objections to Israel’s efforts to crush Palestinian resistance. However, some were concerned about the media images of mutilated Palestinian civilians, which could stir public unrest in their own countries.

That public unrest never materialized, and with time, the genocide, famine, and cries for help in Gaza were normalized as yet another tragic event, not unlike the war in Sudan or the strife in Syria.

For 15 months of relentless Israeli genocide that resulted in the killing and wounding of over 162,000 Palestinians in Gaza, official Arab political institutions remained largely irrelevant in ending the war. The US Biden administration was emboldened by such Arab inaction, continuing to push for greater normalization between Arab countries and Israel—even in the face of over 15,000 children killed in Gaza in the most brutal ways imaginable.

While the moral failures of the West, the shortcomings of international law, and the criminal actions of Biden and his administration have been widely criticized, for serving as a shield for Israel’s war crimes, the complicity of Arab governments in enabling these atrocities is often ignored.

The Arabs have, in fact, played a more significant role in the Israeli atrocities in Gaza than we often recognize. Some through their silence, and others through direct collaboration with Israel.

Throughout the war, reports surfaced indicating that some Arab countries actively lobbied in Washington on behalf of Israel, advocating against an Egyptian-Arab League proposal aimed at reconstructing Gaza without ethnically cleansing its population—an idea promoted by the Trump Administration and Israel.

The Egyptian proposal, which was unanimously accepted by Arab countries at their summit on March 4, represented the strongest and most unified stance taken by the Arab world during the war.

The proposal, which was rejected by Israel and dismissed by the US, helped shift discourse in the US around the subject of ethnic cleansing. It ultimately led to comments made on March 12 by Trump during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin where he stated that “No one’s expelling anyone from Gaza.”

For some Arab states o actively oppose the only relatively strong Arab position signals that the issue of Arab failures in Palestine goes beyond mere disunity or incompetence—it reflects a much darker and more cynical reality. Some Arabs align their interests with Israel, where a free Palestine isn’t just a non-issue, but a threat.

The same applies to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which continues to work hand in hand with Israel to suppress any form of resistance in the West Bank. Its concern in Gaza is not about ending the genocide, but ensuring the marginalization of its Palestinian rivals, particularly Hamas.

Thus, blaming the PA for mere ‘weakness,’ for ‘not doing enough,’ or for failing to unify the Palestinian ranks is a misreading of the situation. The priorities of Mahmoud Abbas and his PA allies are far different: securing relative power over Palestinians, a power that can only be sustained through Israeli military dominance.

These are difficult, yet critical truths, as they allow us to reframe the conversation, moving away from the false assumption that Arab unity will resolve everything.

The flaw in the unity theory is that it naively assumes Arab regimes inherently reject Israeli occupation and support Palestine.

While some Arab governments are genuinely outraged by Israel’s criminal behavior and growingly frustrated by the US’ irrational policies in the region, others are driven by self-interest: their animosity toward Iran and fear of rising Arab non-state actors. They are equally concerned about instability in the region, which threatens their hold on power amid a rapidly shifting world order.

As solidarity with Palestine has increasingly expanded from the global South to the global majority, Arabs remain largely ineffective, fearing that significant political change in the region could directly challenge their own position. What they fail to understand is that their silence, or their active support for Israel, may very well lead to their own downfall.

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

27 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Yasmin Abu Shammala

Yesterday, my brother called me by my grandmother’s name after I had gone through all my siblings’ names before finally realizing his and addressing him correctly. My eyes widened in surprise for a moment before I burst into laughter. At just twenty-three, I had already become a grandmother–if only in name. My focus had begun to wane under the overwhelming weight of keeping pace with the relentless tide of my life. My ceaseless rambling was not the only sign… It was merely another stage in my gradual decline—one of the many inevitable scars war leaves upon you as long as you remain fully immersed in its reality.

I have started to ramble and forget… I do not deny it. What human being, when subjected to the sight of unrelenting horror, could keep their mind intact? I live through every moment of the terror that engulfs us in Gaza. Here, if someone’s mind remains unshaken, it is, to us Gazans, a cause for suspicion. How does a mind endure without faltering—without the silence of night or the steady rhythm of day? This is the question that slips from our lips whenever we encounter such an anomaly—if such a thing even exists in Gaza.

Here, while the rest of the world drifts into slumber, enveloped in the silence of the night and seeking solace in their beds, I fall asleep—if sleep ever finds me—only after taking headache medication, lulled by the symphony of Israeli drones that never loosen their grip on Gaza. And because the world has surrendered all its time to Israel’s whims and its genocide machines, Israeli aircraft never depart from our skies. They tarnish its blue serenity, grow agitated by its vast stillness, then decide to relieve their turmoil by raining destruction upon us. Their distress fades at the sight of our blood—thirsting for it just as their creators do.

After fifteen months of the Israeli genocide in Gaza since October 2023, I thought the war would come to an end with the signing of an agreement titled “Ceasefire Agreement” on its cover. I thought we would be granted even one day from our past lives—a day to release all the sorrow that had consumed us, to let it flow in tears we never had the luxury of shedding throughout the genocide. But we did not. At least, I did not. I longed to begin searching for the self that had shattered amid this devastation.

I began by attempting to regain my stability, returning to the home I had once been forced to flee, and then striving to acclimate my two children to a life under the shadow of their stolen rights, which I continue to struggle to reclaim from Israel’s grip. I sought inner peace to soothe my weary soul. Only then could I embark on the journey of healing my body, which had somehow evaded Israel’s relentless wrath for fifteen months—by one means or another.

But the ceasefire, which was supposed to mark a new beginning—a reset to zero, as we Gazans have done so many times before—brought no change to my life, except for laying the foundation of a semblance of stability for my children.

Only two months passed before Israel discarded the agreement—and Gaza—like mere scraps of paper. Two months were not enough for me to savor the joy of returning home, as I soon found myself displaced once again when the genocide resumed. Two months were not enough to heal my fractured psyche, of which I have yet to find even the first thread to pull myself back together.

Two months were not enough to treat the pain in my back, inflicted when an Israeli airstrike hit our neighbor’s house, causing the ceiling of our displacement shelter to collapse on me. Two months were not enough to treat the eczema that spread across my fingers after I resorted to washing clothes by hand, as Israel had cut off our electricity from the very first days of the genocide. Two months were not enough to find an eye doctor who could explain the cause of my persistent headaches and the pain in my eyes from the dim light we have lived under for over a year and a half.

Two months were not enough to treat the heartburn in my stomach, caused by my unrelenting psychological torment. I found no remedy for my psychological pain, nor did I find the time to seek out a doctor who could ease my physical pain.

And now, as the genocide resumes, Israel takes pleasure in eroding our existence gradually, rather than all at once. I, who had longed for a fresh start, found myself sinking below zero—unable to even pinpoint a new beginning to anchor myself to.

Here in Gaza, if an airstrike does not kill you outright, it ensures you suffer a fate worse than death, leaving you to bleed until your soul, weary of clinging to a broken body, finally surrenders. In the end, you become a bird, gathering the remnants of your dreams, rewriting them into a life where there is no repetition of zero—only a singular zero, and from it, an infinite peace.

27 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Since resuming its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, Israel has been killing at least 103 Palestinians and injuring 223 more every day. Additionally, it never stopped employing other genocide tactics prior to 18 March, and has imposed lethal living conditions since 7 October 2023 designed to eradicate the Palestinian population in the Strip, including starvation and the tightening of its illegalblockade.

Since dawn on Tuesday 18 March, the Israeli occupation forces have killed 830 Palestinians and injured an additional 1,787 in hundreds of airstrikes, artillery shellings, and fire from military vehicles and drones throughout the Gaza Strip, according to the Euro-Med Monitor field team.

The Israeli occupation army also continues tobomb homes with occupants still inside, killing large numbers of people. The most recent incident occurred at dawn today (26 March) in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, when the Israeli army bombed the al-Najjar family’s homeand killed eight Palestinians, including five children.

Without any military justification, the Israeli occupation army has committed the crime oftargeting homes—or what is left of them—every day, including targeting tents where civilians have sought safety following almost 18 months of genocide. This is a clear component of a systematic Israeli policy that aims to kill Palestinians, ruin their lives, and impose a horrificreality that makes it impossible to survive.

Two Palestinian journalists were killed by Israel in two different, deliberate attacks on 24 March. Palestine Today TV journalist Mohammed Mansour was killed and his wife was gravely injured when Israeli planes bombed his home in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip. Journalist Hossam Shabat, who worked as a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher, was killed when his car was targeted.

The Israeli army has also recently killed civilian government officials in administrative positions, including supervisors working in the education sector. The victims include Jihad al-Agha, the head of the Supervision Department at the East Khan Yunis Education Directorate, who was killed in an airstrike targeting his home on 23 March along with his wife, child, and three daughters, and Manar Abu Khater, the Director of Education in East Khan Yunis, who was killed along with two of his sons in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Yunis on 24 March.

An individual does not lose their civilian status or become a legitimate target for attack simply because they hold an administrative or civilian position within a governmental or organisational structure, unless they are actively and consistently engaged in hostilities, which was not the case in the situation of al-Agha or Abu Khater.

The Israeli occupation forces have also been invading the Tel al-Sultan neighbourhood in the west of Rafah since 23 March, committing heinous crimes, including unjustified field killings.

According to testimonies given to Euro-MedMonitor, the occupation forces shot civilians while they were trying to escape, leaving their bodies lying in the streets. Around 50,000 civilians are still confined to a small geographic area in Rafahwhile Israeli military activities, such as shelling, bombing, and raids, are taking place around them.

For the fourth day in a row, the Israeli occupation army has kept the whereabouts of 15 ambulance and civil defence workers in Rafah a secret, raising concerns that they might be killed, subjected to torture, or otherwise mistreated. Since these people are humanitarian personnel protected by the Geneva Conventions, their continued detention without formal notification of their whereabouts or health status is a serious violation of international law and a full-fledged crime of enforced disappearance.

For the roughly 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip who now face Israeli policies of daily killings and starvation due to the continued closure of the border crossings and the denial of aid and medicine, Israel’s return to widespread killing andthe systematic destruction of buildings and property imposes a catastrophic reality on their lives. These acts of genocide are similar to thoseexperienced by residents of the Strip for 15 months before the January 2025 ceasefire.Israel’s recent intensification of its genocide, demonstrated by the increasingly lethal living conditions imposed on Palestinians, will result in slow and gradual death without international intervention.

The public declarations made by Israeli officials regarding their acceptance of United StatesPresident Donald Trump’s plan to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and the proposal of its execution are alarming. Following the destruction of the vast majority of homes, shelters, and buildings in the Strip by the Israeli occupation army, hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to flee yet again, without any shelter, under the pretence of evacuation orders for residents’ “own safety” and ongoing intense aerial bombardment.

These statements represent a reality that is being played out on the ground through mass killingsand the imposition of intolerable living conditions, rather than just threats. The US gives political and military cover for the continuation of Israeli crimes in the Gaza Strip by providing financial and military aid, blocking international efforts to hold Israel accountable, and interfering to stop the issuance or implementation of UN resolutions that could stop these violations. Israel’s actions are carried out with the direct support and acquiescence of the US, making the US a major actor in the ongoing crime of genocide.

In just one week, over 200,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been forced to leave their homes, and thousands more are preparing to leave by looking for temporary housing. Meanwhile, basic services and security remainunavailable across the Strip.

The international community’s virtual silence has incited Israel to carry out its crimes, includingkilling and injuring people without consequenceand attacking international organisations and UN headquarters in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s complete disregard for the rules of international law—rules that give UN headquarters and employees special protection—alone is an international crime of the highest calibre that needs to be addressed right away.

All states, both individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal obligations and act quickly to halt the genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian civilians there must be protected in every way possible; the blockade must be lifted completely and immediately; the movement of people and goods must be unhindered; all crossings must be opened without arbitrary conditions; and effective measures must be taken to protect Palestinians from the slow killing and forced displacement plans of Israel and the United States. An urgent international response is needed to appropriately address the population’s immediate needs including the provision of adequate temporary housing.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

27 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Seth Staton Watkins

Original Song

Oh Palestine, Oh Palestine (Original Song) by Seth Staton Watkins

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Middle East Monitor

28 Mar 2025 – Israeli occupation forces executed nine missing Palestinian medics from the Red Crescent and Civil Defence in Rafah, buried them and destroyed their ambulances, the Palestinian Civil Defence confirmed yesterday.

The medics had been missing for five days after Israeli forces advanced into western Rafah. Their fate remained unknown until rescue teams, coordinated with the Red Cross, entered the area. They discovered that Israeli occupation troops had executed the missing medics and buried them near the barracks. The soldiers also destroyed all Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defence ambulances at the site.

By Jonathan Cook

24 Mar 2025 – Israel has justified bombing a Gaza hospital, killing civilians, because an injured Hamas politician was there. The laws of war only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them. If Hamas struck a hospital treating Netanyahu it would not be justifiable. But the laws of war are forgotten when Israel violates them.

Israel and its genocide cheerleaders are claiming Israel’s air strike on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza last night – which killed several patients and staff – was justified because a Hamas politician was being treated there for injuries from an earlier Israeli strike.

Israel has also seized on the fact that a Hamas official was in the hospital to retroactively rationalise its destruction of Gaza’s entire health sector, leaving more than 2 million Palestinians with barely functioning medical care in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign.

At the weekend, the Israeli army blew up the entire Turkish Hospital in Gaza and did so without any possible military justification. Its soldiers had been occupying the hospital, using it as a military post, for much of the past year.

The hospital had served its purpose for Israel – and Israel sees no purpose for Palestinian hospitals actually serving the Palestinian population. After all, Israel’s goal is to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and that is made easier if Palestinians have no surviving medical facilities in the enclave.

[https://twitter.com/TheCradleMedia/status/1903033960109605265]

Once again, Israel’s “justification” for the latest attack on Nasser Hospital doesn’t even bother to suggest it accords with any known principle of international law.

Here are a few reminders about the long-established laws of war that only ever seem to be forgotten when it is Israel violating them.

Even fighters are considered non-combatants – that is, not legitimate targets for military attack – when they are injured and no longer engaged in combat. That rule applies even more obviously to politicians.

All Israel’s hospitals, such as Rambam in Haifa, regularly treat Israeli soldiers injured in combat. Israeli hospitals are doing so right now – Israel makes no secret of this.

No one, least of all the people defending last night’s attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza, would for one moment consider it legitimate for Hamas to bomb Rambam Hospital, killing patients and staff there, to hit an injured soldier being treated at the facility.

But what Israel did is even more clearly a violation of the laws of war because it bombed the hospital to hit an injured Hamas politician, not a fighter.

That is the equivalent of Hamas striking a hospital in Israel, killing Israeli staff and patients, to assassinate an Israeli politician.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently spent several days in the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem for a prostate operation.

Had Hamas hit the hospital, can one imagine Israel and its supporters – or western politicians and media – accepting that as legitimate grounds for a military attack? The question doesn’t even need asking.

The only reason it is okay for Israel to attack a Palestinian hospital, killing Palestinian civilians, to assassinate a Palestinian politician is because the western political and media class are out-and-out anti-Palestinian racists.

Palestinian life is meaningless to them. Israel calls Palestinians ‘human animals’ – and western leaders secretly concur.

Once Jews were seen that way – as human animals. Their lives were worthless. They were killed on an industrial scale across Europe.

Today’s Europe is no different, nor is the US. It’s just that Jews are no longer the objects of the West’s institutional racism and its structural violence. Palestinians are.

The West’s racism that led to the Holocaust is still with us. We have not learnt from history. Our politics has not evolved beyond that of our great-grandparents’ generation. The Gaza genocide is our generation’s Holocaust. And we are equally complicit.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Chris Hedges

Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.

24 Mar 2025 – I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By TFF Transnational Foundation

Mineral Deal Gives US TOTAL Control Over Ukraine’s Future

Imagine Russia or China had suggested a deal with this content and these intentions, depriving Ukraine of its sovereignty.

28 Mar 2025 – This is posted on Sebastian Sas’ important YouTube Channel with no less than 120,000 subscribers. His succinct analysis is based on an article published by the NED, EU and NATO-supported Ukraine-based newspaper, European Pravda.

I hope you are half as shocked as Sas – and I – are. Because, remember that this war, this destruction of Ukraine has been caused by the Russia-NATO conflict – that is, by the Obama administration’s regime change in Kiev in 2014, the US-led NATO’s expansion and the US/Western pumping of arms into Ukraine.

Now, Ukraine is destined to be paying for generations ahead and give away its natural resources to an extent that makes it impossible to see it as a sovereign state in the future. The Trump Regime’s proposal is in colonial-slave style – also meant to undermine the European Union’s plans…

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org