Image by Craig Manners.

International leaders who lined up to pledge their support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the largest open-air prison break on October 7, 2023 had paved the way for the ensued Israeli war of genocide. Now, the suspension of funding to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) for the Palestinian refugees, complements Netanyahu’s physical genocide by exacerbating the looming Israeli-made famine and the hardship for the 2.3 million civilians.

UNRWA was created by the UN General Assembly in 1950 to provide Palestinian refugees with humanitarian services including schools, health clinics and other social services. The hasty freezing of financial aid by the US and other donor countries without first conducting independent investigations into the veracity of Israeli claims against UNRWA employees is cabalistic, adds to the Israeli blockade and deepens the suffering of the Gaza civilians.

Sky News, who have reviewed the Israeli dossier on the alleged “evidence” against UNRWA’s staff, has stated that it “has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.” Nevertheless, the Agency’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini summarily terminated the accused, without due process, possibly hoping to avert the very hyperbole reaction from the donor countries.

Meanwhile, the imprudent decision to halt funding for the largest and oldest UN agency serving Palestinians would likely lead to the malnourishment of young children. This decision will also impede UNRWA’s ability to deliver crucial humanitarian assistance to the 2 million displaced civilians, including 17,000 children who are unaccompanied or have been separated from their parents as a result of the Israeli pogrom in Gaza.

After all the damage is done, it may very well be that the Israeli claims against the UNRWA employees are either exaggerated or unfounded. It wouldn’t be different than the debunked Israeli disinformation regarding decapitated children, rape, sexual violence, and mutilation of women reported by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz on the October 7 events.

Having said that, even if Israeli allegations against a handful of low-level individuals held some validity, why should UNRWA be responsible for a conduct carried out by employees outside their working hours, and not associated with their work duties? In fact, in the more than 100 days of the Israel orgy of slaughter, UNRWA has lost 152 employees, a staggering 1300 percent more than the number of the accused staff. Keeping this in mind, one must question whether donor nations and UNRWA’s Commissioner considered the possibility that these allegations could be an Israeli gambit to deflect from its responsibility for murdering 152 UNRWA employees.

Now, let’s examine how donor nations responded to a sister UN organization, the Peacekeeping force, when staff faced accusations of misconduct. In 2021, the UN Secretary-General concluded that it was credible that 450 members of the Peacekeeping force in Gabon were guilty of child rape and sexual exploitation. Unlike UNRWA, however, the US and other donors did not suspend funding to the UN agency when reports of sexual abuse emerged, more importantly, they continued the funding even after the allegations were verified. Canada, for example, did not freeze its aid even after its own investigation accused the UN of “‘glaring’ accountability gaps” in handling sexually abusing people they’ve been sent to protect.”

Yet, immediately after Israel raised, yet to be verified, allegations against a very few of UNRWA staff, Canada and other donors preempted any investigation and froze funding to an organization that currently provides vital humanitarian assistance to a population enduring siege and relentless bombing.

As in the Western hypocrisy case on the war of genocide in Gaza, the incongruence response to the two UN Agencies reveals that Western virtue is gaged by the identity of the victim and victimizer. In response to the more than 2000 allegations of sexual abuse, the accusers were from Africa and Haiti. In the second case, the unverified allegations against the 12 individuals came from Israel. The disparity in the two UN cases is a stark illustration of the evident Western bias, and how it’s driven by the victims/victimizers’ racial characteristics rather than a commitment to genuine fairness.

By immediately pausing UNRWA funding, Western donors indulge Israeli arrogance and its absurd obsession to discredit UNRWA’s vital role in preventing starvation for the “less than equal” 2.3 million human beings. To the point where Israeli Minister of War Yoav Gallant equates UNRWA’s humanitarian lifeline in Gaza to a war against Israel telling a delegation of UN ambassadors that UNRWA was “Hamas with a facelift”. Evoking his rhetoric on Israel’s military objectives in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister told the same delegation “UNRWA’s mission has to end.”

It’s crucial to recognize that Israeli efforts to undermine UNRWA are not a recent development and are not necessarily linked to the current war on Gaza. For years, Israel has actively lobbied different US administrations to defund the UN agency. In 2017, after a meeting with the American UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, Netanyahu told reporters, “It is time UNRWA be dismantled…”

Israeli fixation to “end” UNRWA because the Agency has become a live registry of the Palestinian refugees who continue to challenge the 75-year-old Israeli diabolical prophecy. Following the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, an Israeli foreign ministry study had predicted that “The most adaptable [Palestinians] and best survivors would ‘manage’ by a process of natural selection and others will waste away. Some will die but most will turn into human debris and social outcasts and probably join the poorest classes in the Arab countries.”

In 2018, Israel succeeded when Trump heeded Netanyahu’s demand and cut US aid to UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority (PA) after the PA rejected Trump/Kushner’s steal of the century proposal. The defunding was rescinded by the Joe Biden Administration, however, bankrupting UNRWA remains Israel’s last hope to turn the Palestinian refugees, “into … social outcasts.”

Undeniably UNRWA has provided Palestinian refugees with the basic humanitarian assistance to help them endure life in the miserable refugee camps. When I write on this subject, it’s not merely an abstract academic analysis but it comes from my own personal experience, having grown up in one of those Palestinian refugee camps. For instance, the donor aid for UNRWA provided me, along with tens of thousands of children since 1950, the chance to attend school.

As someone who was raised in a refugee camp, I want to emphasize the significant impact defunding UNRWA would have on children growing up under similar conditions. The camps are among the most densely populated areas on our planet. In my camp, with a population exceeding 30,000 living in less than 0.2 sq miles, the absence of UNRWA funding would mean that children wouldn’t receive vaccinations against communicable diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, tuberculosis, polio, and many others.

A number of pupils in my own school had suffered from polio, at least two in my grade. I remember them clenching on forearm clutches lugging their flailing limbs to go from class to class, or sitting on the sidelines while we ran in the schoolyard. And those were still considered the fortunate ones, as many others had quietly faded away, losing their lives to other preventable diseases.

Without UNRWA, thousands of Palestinian refugee children, myself included, wouldn’t have had the opportunity to attend school. I, for one, wouldn’t have been able to eventually become a professional engineer, post graduate, an author, and most importantly, I wouldn’t have had the chance to write about my own experiences as a Palestinian refugee. UNRWA’s humanitarian role has been instrumental in shaping the futures of countless individuals in otherwise very challenging circumstances.

Perhaps, that’s precisely why Israeli leaders want “UNRWA’s mission … to end.” Over the past 73 years, UNRWA schools have played a crucial role in educating tens of thousands of Palestinian children, contributing to the emergence of one of the most educated groups in the Middle East. UNRWA’s help made it possible for the refugee camps to extricate a highly educated progeny out of the fissures of catastrophe, thereby thwarting Israel’s wish to relegate Palestinians into a “human debris.”

Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/14/defunding-unrwa-the-last-phase-of-israeli-genocide/ 

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Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City.

On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.”

Catastrophe

The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the word “nakba,” used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes. Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.” A month later, the ICJ said that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order).

Netanyahu saying that there would be no “catastrophe” after over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling. Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer. In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)—one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza—said that such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.” The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150 percent capacity, hundreds of the Palestinians are living on the street. In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations—whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis—the situation will deteriorate further.

Safe Passage

Netanyahu says that his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says. A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns. “Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So, we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?”

Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened. The name of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks.

Domicide

On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment. “The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe—everything else can be replaced.’” That is an assessment shared across Gaza amongst those who are still alive. But, as Dr. Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity.

The Israeli attack on Gaza, Dr. Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.” In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60 to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.” Due to this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they go north. Their homes have been destroyed. “This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Dr. Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Dr. Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

As I speak with Saleem the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022).

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In March of 2015, just two months after the Houthis entered the presidential palace in Sanaa, prompting the resignation of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saudi Arabia began a brutal military offensive designed to put a stop to the Houthi rebellion. This conflict would soon become one of the most destructive in the world. The United Nations’ 2021 Country Results Report for Yemen noted that the conflict had resulted in over 377,000 deaths; the same report observed that by the start of 2021, two-thirds of the country’s 30 million people “relied on humanitarian assistance for daily survival.” The war has also witnessed one of the worst cholera outbreaks in recorded history, with millions of recorded cases and thousands of deaths. The famine accompanying the war, one of the worst the world has seen in several decades, has led to mass starvation and malnutrition, with tens of millions in Yemen struggling with food insecurity.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the corporate press’s coverage of the conflict, Washington’s role in the war in Yemen has been broadly criticized by human rights groups around the world. For years, the United States helped to “turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Between 2015 and 2021, the Defense Department sent at least $55 billion in military support to American allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. According to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, since the Saudi coalition began its offensives in March 2015, more than 19,200 civilians have been killed or maimed. A 2021 report from Save the Children found that 25 percent of all civilian casualties between 2018 and 2020 were children. In the summer of 2018, Human Rights Watch published a reportshowing that the United States, a party to the conflict due to its aggressive support of the Saudi war effort, had not adequately addressed civilian casualties and had failed in its duty to investigate credible evidence of war crimes. A report from the U.N. Human Rights Office implored the U.N. Security Council “to refer the situation in Yemen to the International Criminal Court,” noting the United States’ previous resistance to any accountability and its disregard of past recommendations of the Human Rights Council.

Yemen is one of the most striking recent examples of the invisibility (in the West, at least) of some of the world’s worst injustices, even in the smartphone era. Amazingly, the United States succeeded in almost completely blotting the story out of the legacy news media. The world’s most tragic humanitarian crisis was kept from the American public. When 80,000 Hours interviewed Daniel Ellsberg in 2018, he noted the U.S. government’s remarkable ability to hide its greatest misdeeds, citing the catastrophe in Yemen as a current example:

And right now the public knows very little about the degree of our involvement for example in Yemen. Our air support in terms of refueling and loading and target information to the Saudis in carrying out massacres in Yemen. Major war crimes that are happening every day are not in the consciousness of the American people at all.

A 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office shed welcome light on just how little our government cared about the unimaginable civilian tragedy unfolding in Yemen. Covering the years from 2015 to 2021, the report “said the Pentagon and State Department provided no evidence that they had conducted any investigations of the potential unauthorized use of American-made equipment.” No one was watching while the U.S. government colluded with the arms industry to bomb and starve the children of Yemen. As Rachel Hage argued in American University Washington College of Law’s Human Rights Brief, “these illegal actions gravely threaten the integrity of the United States government, and they continue to harm and kill Yemeni civilians.” Hage notes that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have blocked efforts to hold our government accountable for the war crimes carried out in Yemen with American weapons and support to the Saudi regime.

Notwithstanding criticism from human rights organizations around the world and growing resistance from within the State Department, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed forward the disastrous decision to continue arming a corrupt Saudi regime that had demonstrated its indifference to civilian life. In doing so, Pompeo had dismissed the advice of subject matter experts in favor of the wisdom of his legislative affairs team, which happened to be led by a former arms industry lobbyist. After the legislative affairs team politely reminded Pompeo that pulling support for the Saudis would scuttle a multi-billion dollar sale of arms to the regime, the Secretary of State proceeded with the decision to push the weapons through on emergency grounds, citing Iran’s role in the conflict.

This cynical reference to a supposed national security emergency translated to billions to American arms dealers and helped the Saudi government carry out demonstrable war crimes. As The New York Times reported in August of 2020: “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed the $8.1 billion sale of those munitions, mostly made by Raytheon, despite a two-year bipartisan congressional hold on the proposed transfer of the arms, comprising 22 packages.” When the decision to certify this “emergency” was later reviewed in a Office of the Inspector General report, the state department itself acknowledged that more should have been done to ensure the protection of civilian lives. Of course, it is hard to explain what Washington thought the Saudi government would do in Yemen with billions in free weapons, strategic support, and endless political and diplomatic cover.

Former inspector general Steve A. Linick, canned by the Trump administration in the spring of 2020, later testified to Congress that he had been pressured to back off of the issue of emergency arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Pompeo even admitted that the firing of Linick was his choice. Many others who worked in the State Department at the time have corroborated Linick’s story.

Fast forward to 2024 and recent weeks have seen several United States airstrikes in Yemen, as the Houthis vow to continue harrying Red Sea shipping lanes until the United States ceases its support of the genocide underway in the Gaza Strip. The United States has likewise attacked Syria and Iraq in recent weeks, prompting a reproach from the Iraqi government that the United States’ actions “jeopardize civil peace, violate Iraqi sovereignty, and disregard the safety and lives of our citizens.” We must wonder how many Middle Eastern countries the United States will bomb in vain attempts to stop their people from resisting an ongoing genocide. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States government shares the view of the Israeli state: brown, Muslim, Arab people are not people—or perhaps they are people we can safely ignore. To cultivate such a disgusting view in the public is no easy feat, which is the reason for the constant propaganda on “terrorists” and “terrorism.” To the powerful, every freedom fighter is a terrorist.

The Houthis, who had already been fighting the Yemeni government for over a decade by 2015, are a group of Zaidi Muslims from the north of the country who take their name from the Houthi Tribe; the group calls itself Ansar Allah, meaning Supporters of God. The group rose to prominence in part by criticizing the Yemeni government as “a puppet in the hands of influential forces,” a pointed reference to the United States. After removing the terrorist designation from the Houthis in the early days of his presidency in 2021, Biden has now reversed course and reimposed that designation, a decision that the administration knows well will disrupt peace talks that have been underway for years. The designation comes with a number of sanctions calculated to cut off funding and resources to the Houthis. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, the peace plan contemplated by the UN Special Envoy for Yemen includes “an element that is crucial for the Houthis and many Yemeni civilians—salary payments for public sector workers in Houthi-controlled territories who have gone without pay for years.” The U.S. official who spoke to the Times indicated that the terrorist designation could be lifted if the Houthis would halt their attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea, but the Houthis have vowed to continue standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine until Israel agrees to end its massacre of the Palestinian people.

When the United States’ designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group was first announced by the Trump administration, humanitarian aid organizations, the European Union, the United Nations, and even many American elected officials rightly damned the move as imperiling the safety of millions of Yemenis already lacking basic needs. Major EU countries remain split over both the U.S.’s renewed designation of the Houthis as terrorists and whether to participate in the U.S.’s bombings of Yemen in recent weeks.

Despite constant fear-mongering about Iran in the West, it is clear that the Houthis do not take their orders from Tehran and are an independent political movement with their own values and goals. Contrary to Western propaganda, the Houthis didn’t come out of the womb chanting “death to America” and “death to Israeli”—no, those attitudes were purchased with blood as the United States and its allies pursued a policy of regime change and naked empire over a course of decades.

It is important, at this juncture, to restate the fact, well-known to human rights advocates and civil libertarians, that the Saudi Arabian regime is one of the world’s worst human rights offenders. The Saudi monarchy is so depraved that it’s hard to know where to start: Amnesty International noted earlier this year that the Saudi government subjected almost 200 people to the death penalty in 2022 alone, with more than 80 executions in one day—“the single largest mass execution in recent decades. The country ranks as the 2nd highest for use of the death penalty.” Saudi Arabia also enforces a strict guardianship policy over women, stipulating that all women must have a male guardian who lords over her financial and professional affairs—and, importantly, Saudi women have no choice about who that male guardian is. Often it is someone who has physically and sexually abused the woman he has sworn to protect. Further, Saudi Arabia has one of the worst records in the world on the freedom of the press, even murdering journalists who step out of line.

In this way, the United States and Saudi Arabia are very much alike: both regimes are pathologically allergic to sunlight and fight with every means at their disposal, harassment and murder included, to defeat any kind of transparency or accountability. That’s the company our government chooses to keep. Merely for the United States to associate with this regime would constitute a major embarrassment on the world stage. But the U.S. government has made the Saudi monarchy one of its favorite allies in recent years, helping to pummel the Yemeni people and perpetuate one of the greatest human rights tragedies in recent memory.

In the global community of nations, our government is currently the most lawless and irresponsible, flouting international law and actively supporting the worst crimes against humanity in generations, now including the Israeli state’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. President Biden is, in many ways, the perfect representative of the fathomless ignorance that infects the mainstream American narrative around Israel—we refuse to discuss its founding as a white, European, colonial enterprise in the Middle East; its attempts, across decades, at exterminating Arabs on their own ancestral lands; its oppressive dual legal system and illegal apartheid regime; or its violent expansion of illegally occupied territories in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. As Americans, we must ask ourselves why our government would support such a regime, why—when our friends and neighbors are hungry and unhoused—we would send billions of dollars in weapons to a country that has repeatedly, at the highest levels of leadership, compared the People of Palestine to animals who deserve to be wiped off the map.

To anyone paying attention, the masks had been off for decades before the United States government made it clear that it would support—without question, without limit—the clear genocidal intentions of the group of unhinged racists running Israel’s government. As Imam Omar Suleiman recently observed, “I think that it’s clear that the United States cares more about its shipping lanes than it does about Palestinian lives.” Americans have to meaningfully confront the fact that our government has skirted every international legal standard in order to continue funding and aiding the ongoing slaughter of the Palestinian people.

The United States political and intellectual classes are actively trying to get us into wars with China, Russia, and Iran, to name a few. If not now, will we ever be allowed to question the cycle of endless war and the idea of war as a means to peace and security? The foreign policy of the United States is to escalate every conflict as quickly as possible—escalation as a means to deescalation, war as a means to peace. We long ago passed a threshold point—today, Congress couldn’t rein in the policies of endless war and empire even if they wanted to. The American people and our representatives are impotent, and we have made it so by ignoring every major story in a combination of cowardice and apathy.

You can’t have a culture of oppressive conformity without a culture that hates and buries truth. In the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, no one can trust her neighbor, and so no one can share openly how she really feels about the “pyramidal structure” of domination and oppression under which everyone strains to live. All of society has been conditioned to watch, listen, and suspect, everyone treating neighbors as potentially dangerous traitors to the power of the state. Everyone, even the children, is trained to look for signs of individuality, eccentricity, and political unorthodoxy everywhere—everyone an obsequious bootlicker, everyone, in Orwell’s words, “an amateur spy actuated by officiousness.” American culture has been poisoned by this “see something, say something” mentality, particularly since 9/11.

The people of the future will assess this period with clear eyes, as a pivotal moment in the United States’ loss of legitimacy in the world, a moment when our government, still boasting cynically of freedom and democracy, actively enabled a genocide with the whole world watching. They will see a moment when the last of the illusions succumbed to an Information Age still in its nonage, when the gulf separating the rest of the world from the insanity of America’s imperial ruling class widened to a crisis point. If the United States government is at a crossroads, in the middle of a deep crisis of legitimacy, then the American people are too. We have to decide whether it’s okay with us for our government to send billions of dollars to civilian mass murder. We have to decide what our values are and what kind of country we hope to be.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

Reporting by Ahmed Tolba; writing by Adam Makary and Hatem Maher; editing by Jonathan Oatis

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing Israeli government has quickly launched policies that take Zionism to new heights of cruelty and brutality against anyone it considers a foe. This primarily means Palestinians, but also anyone else who defies the new rules of exclusivist, ethno-nationalist Jewish supremacy.

Four parties among Israel’s foes and friends alike must decide if they will complacently watch this political freak show, or check Zionism’s accelerated leap to complete its colonisation of all Palestine. These four are Jewish communities globally; states and movements around the world that support Israel with no questions asked; the post-WWII, UN-based rule of international law and human rights; and, the Palestinian people, who are now essentially leaderless.

Netanyahu wasted no time to say that his government would operate on the basis that, "the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel." The message was clear to Palestinians and many other targets of his racist views: His coalition’s members and supporters on the extreme right would enjoy full rights and freedoms to do as they wish with the Palestinian land and people. 

Others who will suffer in Israel include anyone who raises a Palestinian flag or throws stones to protect themselves, African asylum seekers, and LGBTQ people. Israeli soldiers even beat up young Palestinians who were celebrating Morocco’s victories in the World Cup.

Israel’s policies that demean and dehumanise Palestinians living under occupation, ultimately aim to expel them from their ancestral homeland. The catalogue of these policies includes routine, almost daily, steps to arrest, wound, and kill children, detain thousands of men, women and youth without charge or trial, demolish scores of homes and occasional entire villages, allow out-of-control Jewish settlers to cut down Palestinian farmers’ olive groves, and expand Jewish settlements or even outright annex occupied Palestinian lands.

Alongside all this, hundreds of Palestinians were refused travel permits for urgent medical care; Christians in Gaza were denied travel permits to go to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas; scores of farmers’ applications to drill water wells were denied; endless military check points humiliate people every day and add hours to their daily commutes; and Israeli soldiers dressed for combat routinely detain children or take their toys away from them.

Such brutality is now well documented by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Recent reports show that last year Israel arrested 7000 Palestinians, including 865 children; held 866 people in administrative detention without charges or trial; killed 146, including 54 children; wounded 958; demolished the homes of 960 Palestinians; and approved 4400 new Jewish colonial-settler homes in so-called ‘illegal’ settlements that were not formally sanctioned by the state.

It is important to bear in mind that all these acts are prohibited under existing international law and human rights regimes.

For what purpose? Not security, surely, but perhaps because this is the only way that settler-colonialists know how to behave in the face of a people they are trying to cleanse from the land.

In the first two weeks of 2023 Israel shot dead 14 Palestinians, ordered the eviction of a 1000-strong Palestinian community from its ancestral villages south of Hebron, imposed new travel restrictions on West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem residents, and provocatively sent a firebrand Zionist minister to visit Jerusalem’s Aqsa Mosque compound, the most sensitive political/religious spot in all of Palestine.

Yet, frightening as all this is, two other aspects of Israel’s behaviour reveal the full scale of today’s challenges.

First, the Netanyahu government’s vindictive measures are not new, but are only more intense variations of Zionist and Israeli policies since the 1920s. Zionism today simply reveals its full, true face that it had previously camouflaged under soothing lies and diversions – such as being the region’s “only democracy,” or turning a barren desert into a garden.

Second, for the past century, leading world powers have ignored, passively accepted, or actively supported Zionist and Israeli settler-colonial policies in Palestine, which are now routinely called out as apartheid by leading international, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights organisations. The Netanyahu government’s cruelty is not an aberration by just one part of Zionist Israel, but rather the culmination of over a century of settler-colonial ravages in Palestine at the hands of Israelis and their foreign supporters, especially the UK and US.

So in the months ahead, we will monitor if Israel’s behaviour elicits any tangible reactions from world powers and the United Nations-based system of international law and human rights, two critical parties that must react to ever more vicious Zionist extremism.

If Palestine continues to wither under Israel’s stifling occupation that intensifies by the week while remaining unchecked by global powers, then no people anywhere are safe from similar fates when foreign powers empower, arm, and protect a local colonial predator.

It might explain why this, rather than Ukraine, might be the actual moment of reckoning for any new global order. For Palestine captures, better than any other place in the world, the past 200 years of global militarised colonial assaults that persist today.

Any person who wants to observe how colonial violence subjugates and tries to remove from history another people can now watch live on television and social media Israel’s killings, mass arrests, beatings, expulsions, home demolitions of Palestinians, and continuing forcible expropriations of their land.

No wonder that large crowds across the world routinely march in the streets – or wave the Palestinian flag at sports events – to support the Palestinians. People throughout the South feel the same colonial wounds and pain that they see inflicted daily in Palestine, since many of them have experienced similar colonial assaults by the same global powers that have enabled Israel’s apartheid.

The world’s Jewish communities are the third pivotal actor that must respond to Israel’s vicious behaviour. Many Jews have already expressed concerns, including a few Israeli officials who resigned.

This community has repeatedly proven that it can influence policy in Israel and abroad. A century ago, European and American Jews mobilised effectively, if duplicitously and often behind closed doors, to win political support in London and Washington for the creation of a Jewish Israel in a land that was 93% owned and populated by Arab Palestinians. World Jewry’s prevalent inaction ever since, though, has allowed Netanyahu’s Israeli Frankenstein government to see the light of day, and to claim to speak for all Jews in the world. 

Rami G. Khouri

https://twitter.com/RamiKhouri

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The Unrepentant West: Germany's Olaf Scholz and the Right to Commit Genocide in Gaza  - CounterPunch.org

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/16/the-unrepentant-west-olaf-scholz-and-the-right-to-commit-genocide-in-gaza/ 

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

The Unrepentant West: Germany’s Olaf Scholz and the Right to Commit Genocide in Gaza 

BY RAMZY BAROUD

Olaf Scholz, image courtesy: World Economic Forum.

On February 8, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Washington on an official visit, aimed at working jointly with the United States to make “sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself”.

If such a statement was made soon after the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of October 7, one may cognize its logic, based on the well-known, inherent bias of both Washington and Berlin towards Israel.

The statement and the visit, however, were conducted on the 125th day of one of the bloodiest genocides in modern history.

The purpose of the visit was highlighted in a press conference by White House spokesperson John Kirby, even though, hours later, US President Joe Biden admitted that Israel has gone “over the top” in its response to the Hamas attack on October 7.

If killing and wounding over 100,000 civilians, and counting, is Israel’s version of self-defense, then both Scholz and Biden have done a splendid job in ensuring Israel has everything it needs to achieve its bloody mission.

However, in this context, who is entitled to self-defense, Israel or Palestine?

On a recent visit to a hospital in a Middle Eastern country which remains confidential as a precondition for my visit, I witnessed one of the most horrific sights one could ever see. Scores of limbless Palestinian children, some still fighting for their lives, some badly burned and others in a coma.

Those who were able to use their hands have drawn Palestinian flags which hung on the walls beside their hospital beds. Some wore SpongeBob T-shirts and others hats with Disney characters. They were pure, innocent, and very much Palestinian.

A couple of children flashed the victory sign as soon as we said our goodbyes. Little kids wanted to communicate to the world that they remain strong and that they know exactly who they are and where they come from.

The children were far too young to realize the legal and political context of their strong feelings towards their homeland.

UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (XXIX) has ‘affirmed the inalienable right of the Palestinian people in Palestine (..), the right to self-determination, (and) the right to national independence and sovereignty”.

The phrase ‘Palestinian right to self-determination’ is perhaps the most frequently uttered phrase in relation to Palestine and the Palestinian struggle since the establishment of the UN.

On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) also affirmed what we already know, that Palestinians are a distinct “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Those injured Palestinian children do not need legal language or political slogans to locate themselves. The right to live without fear of extermination, without bombs and without military occupation is a natural right, requiring no legal arguments and unfazed by racism, hate speech or propaganda.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a world of common sense, but in topsy-turvy legal and political systems that exist to only cater to the strong.

In this parallel world, Scholz is more concerned about Israel being able to ‘defend itself’ than a besieged Palestinian population, starving, bleeding, yet unable to achieve any tangible measure of justice.

Despite this, Israel still does not have the right to defend itself.

Logically, those carrying out acts of aggression should not demand that their victims refrain from fighting back.

Palestinians have been victimized by Israeli colonialism, military occupation, racial apartheid, siege and now genocide. Therefore, for Israel to invoke Article 51, Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations is a mockery of international law.

Article 51, often used by great powers to justify their wars and military interventions, was designed with a completely different legal spirit in mind.

Article 2 (4) of Chapter I in the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force in international relations.” It also “calls on all Members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other states.”

Since Israel is in violation of Article 2 (4), it simply has no right to invoke Article 51.

In November 2012, Palestine was recognized as an Observer State at the UN. It is also a member of countless international treaties, and is recognized by 139 countries out of the 193 UN members.

Even if we accept the argument that the UN Charter only applies to full UN members, the Palestinian right to self-defense can still be established.

In 1960, General Assembly Declaration No. 1594 guaranteed independence to colonized nations and people. Although it did not discuss the right of the colonized to use force, it condemned the use of force against liberation movements.

In 1964, the UNGA voted in favor of Resolution No. 2105, which recognized the legitimacy of the ‘struggle’ of colonized nations to exercise their right to self-determination.

In 1973, the Assembly passed Resolution 38/17 of 1983. The language, this time, was unambiguous; people have the right to struggle against colonial foreign domination by all possible means, including armed struggle.

The same dynamics that ruled the UN in its early days continue to this day, where Western countries, which represented the bulk of all colonial powers in the past, continue to give themselves monopoly over the use of force. Conversely, the Global South, which has suffered under the yoke of those Western regimes, insists that it, too, has the right to defend itself against foreign intervention, colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.

While Scholz was in Washington to discuss yet more ways to kill Palestinian civilians, the country of Nicaragua made an official request to join South Africa in its effort to hold Israel accountable for the crime of genocide in Gaza.

It is interesting how the colonizers and the colonized continue to build relations and solidarity around the same old principles. The Global South is, again, rising in solidarity with the Palestinians, while the North, with a few exceptions, continues to support Israeli oppression.

Just before I left the hospital, a wounded child handed me a drawing. It featured several images, stacked one on top of the other, as if the little boy was creating a timeline of events that led to his injury: a tent, with him inside; an Israeli soldier shooting a Palestinian; prison bars, with his father inside and, finally, a Palestinian fighter holding a flag.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

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 Opinion Voices

This past year was rough for the Arab world, the worst is yet to come

Voices

Rami G. Khouri

24 December, 2021

A flurry of new international reports paints a stark picture of harder times ahead for the Arab region, as more its people lack income, education, and the basic services for a dignified life, writes Rami Khouri.

https://www.newarab.com/opinion/worst-yet-come-arab-world?amp=1

 

A flurry of new international reports paints a stark picture of harder times ahead for the Arab region, as more its people lack income, education, and the basic services for a dignified life, writes Rami Khouri.

A Yemeni child suffering from acute malnutrition is seen inside the anti-malnutrition department in Al-Sabeen hospital receiving treatment on 15 December 2021 in Sana'a, Yemen. [Getty]

If you are marking the New Year with the traditional review of what has changed and what is in store ahead for the Arab region, you are missing the greatest threats to the region's people and their states.

Climate change, ideological conflicts, and active wars will continue to cause havoc in most states, but older and more corrosive dangers today endanger the wellbeing of families and the integrity of entire states, as a batch of new international reports last week reminds us: a big majority of Arab families – over two-thirds in some critical sectors like poverty and education – can no longer meet their basic needs, and slowly, quietly, they slip into destitution, desperation, or worse.

The flurry of new reports shows how the COVID-19  pandemic has worsened the already alarming Arab condition in essential realms for a decent life: education attainment and its associated human capabilities, access to sufficient food, inequality among citizens and states, and the pan-Arab failure – after half a century of trying – to create sufficient decent jobs for citizens.

The most frightening new findings – in a report by UNICEF, the World Bank, and UNESCO on the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on educational progress in Arab states – start with the bad news that nearly two-thirds of 5 to 14-year-old children in the region were unable to read with proficiency even before COVID-19. The new calamity is that this could soon rise to nearly 70% of all children due to their missing out on normal schooling in the past two years, and the proportion of 15-year-olds who perform badly in international standardised education test scores could rise from 60.1% to 71.6%.

This guarantees that several cohorts of undereducated Arab youth will not be able to contribute to their national economies beyond menial and manual labour in the informal economy. They will suffer lifetimes of poverty, vulnerability, and marginalization, with problems of mental health, socialization, and low wellbeing and self-satisfaction.

Many will likely become directionless and alienated young men and women who typically are prime candidates for radical and violent movements that ultimately shake the integrity of countries and social systems. Once strong, centralised states could polarise and fragment, with some ultimately shattering (usually with the involvement of foreign military action, as we have seen in recent years in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya and others).

The minority of young Arabs who do get a good education will either dominate the private and government sectors or emigrate to find a better life abroad. This has been happening for the past four decades at least, as governments are unable or unwilling to fix the distortions in their policies and economies. This will further aggravate the existing inequalities gaps within and among Arab countries.

The World Inequalities Report 2022 issued last week confirms that the Arab-dominated Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the most unequal region in the world. In our lands, the top ten per cent richest people control 58% of income (vs. 36% in Europe). It seems hard to get any more unequal, given UN studies in recent years that repeatedly show that poor and vulnerable Arabs account for over two-thirds of the total population – and the COVID-19 crisis has worsened this, too.

Arab poverty, vulnerability, and inequality continue to spread in part because young people are not trained to assume better jobs, and in part – a new paper from the respected Economic Research Forum says – because Arab private sectors do not create sufficient decent new work opportunities.

A majority of educated young Arabs end up taking low-paying informal jobs, because of state policies and private sector practices since the 1990s economic reforms—policies that have not generated sufficient decent formal sector jobs, but rather favoured informal work, low-productivity sectors, and corporate profits, which resulted in low labour force participation.

So it is no surprise that youth unemployment in many Arab countries reaches 40-50 %, and seems stuck there. These structural issues are the result of deeper and chronic dynamics like political instability, poor regulatory frameworks and labour market institutions, fiscal constraints, corruption, and lack of economic diversity.

The last two years of COVID-19

The last two years of COVID-19 pressures have only tightened the screws of citizen helplessness and erratic state social protection responses. Even in Arab countries that offered some emergency assistance to needy families, another ESCWA expert working group heard in a September meeting, their cash contributions were inadequate in most cases, averaging less than 20% of average national income or spending. These experts came in like a chorus in a cathedral hymn, noting the harsh realities for Arab families are due to poverty and associated economic and social problems and longstanding structural barriers to wealth redistribution and equitable economic-political participation.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report issued last week revealed that the percentage of undernourished Arabs increased by 15.8% since 2014, and, more alarmingly, by 91% over the past two decades. COVID-19 has added another 4.8 million undernourished people, for a total of some 69 million. Moderate or severe food insecurity also has expanded in recent years, to reach 141 million.

The deterioration in access to food has impacted all sectors of society, including the shrinking middle class. The FAO report notes: "An estimated 32.3%, or nearly one-third of the region’s population, did not have regular access to sufficient and nutritious food in 2020."

And, no surprise, that same old bell rings in our ears yet again, as the FAO says that hunger and food insecurity result from, "pre-existing vulnerabilities and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as poverty, inequality, conflict, climate change and many others."

In other words, all these new reports tell us in slightly different ways that during the last 40 years or so most Arab societies and economies have been managed inefficiently, inequitably, and often incompetently.

These trends paint a stark picture of the hard years ahead, as more and more people lack the jobs, income, or health, water, food, and education services needed for a life of dignity. All Arab citizens also lack any credible power of political accountability to force their governments to stop this disastrous descent to national collapse, on an ever-widening base of human misery.

The long-term consequences of all this are all the more frightening because poor families today find it almost impossible to escape poverty and enter the middle class. Governments that lack the funds, expertise, or will to reduce poverty and improve overall citizen wellbeing these days react to their people's distress predominantly militarily, and by clamping down on freedom of expression and other basic rights. Not surprisingly, angry, hungry, degraded, and increasingly desperate citizens across the region have erupted in uprisings against their ruling elites since 2010.

A few more reports like last week's, reconfirming the worsening condition of most Arab citizens in the face of their uncaring states, suggest that more difficult days are ahead for both of them.

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Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative. 

Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

Have questions or comments? Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Rami G. Khouri

https://twitter.com/RamiKhouri

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Victoria’s Ties with Israel’s Defence Industry - CounterPunch.org

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/13/victorias-ties-with-israels-defence-industry/ 

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Victoria’s Ties with Israel’s Defence Industry

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Victoria’s Ties with Israel’s Defence Industry

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

Photograph Source: Matt Hrkac from Melbourne, Australia – CC BY 2.0

Times were supposedly better in 2022.  That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two.  That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7, 2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages.  All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial.

Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022.  “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January.  It’s just business.

No one half observant to this should have been surprised, though no evidence of the MoU, in form or substance, exists on Victorian government websites.  (It is, however, listed on the Australian government’s Foreign Arrangements Scheme register.)  For one thing, Israel’s Ministry of Defense had happily trumpeted it, stating that its International Defense Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) and the Victorian statement government had “signed an industrial defense cooperation statement” that December.  Those present at the signing ceremony were retired General Yair Kulas, who heads SIBAT and Penelope McKay, acting secretary for Victoria’s Department of Jobs, Precincts, and Regions.

That an MoU should grow from this was a logical outcome, a feature of the State’s distinctly free approach to entering into agreements with foreign entities.  In April 2021, the previous Morrison government terminated four agreementsmade by the Victorian government with Iran, Syria and China.  The agreements with Iran and Syria, signed in November 2004 and March 1999 respectively, were intended as educational, scientific and training ventures.  The two agreements with China came in the form of an MoU and framework agreement with the National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC, both part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The Israeli arms industry has taken something of a shine to Victoria.  One of its most aggressive, enterprising representatives has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s prolific drone manufacturing company.  Through Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), it established a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne after announcing its plans to do so in February 2021.

One of its main co-sponsors is the state government’s Invest Victoria branch.  The body is tasked with, in the tortured words of the government, “leading new entrant Foreign Direct Investment and investment opportunities of significance as well as enhancing the business investment environment, developing and providing whole-of-government levers and strengthening the governance of investment attraction activities.”  RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation also did its bit alongside the state government in furnishing support.

The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence had rosy, arcadian goals.  The company’s then managing director and retired Major General Paul McLachlan wanted to impress his audience with glossily innocent reasons behind developing drone technology, which entailed counting any “number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.”

McLachlan, in focusing on “the complex problems that emergency management organisations face during natural disasters” skipped around the nastily obvious fact that the technology’s antecedents have been lethal in nature.  They had been used to account for the killing and monitoring of Palestinians in Gaza, with its star performer being Elbit’s Hermes drone.  A grisly fact from the summer months of July 2014, when the IDF was making much use of Elbit’s murderous products in Gaza, company profits increased by 6.1%.

This was not a record that worried the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge.  As he told the ABC, the MoU “would have been entirely uncontroversial before the Israel-Hamas war.  But now, of course, there’s a live domestic debate about the war, and … most people are concerned about civilian casualties.”

It is exactly the slipshod reasoning that gives the think-tankers a bad name.  It means that Israel’s predatory policies towards Palestinians since 1948 can be dismissed as peripheral and inconsequential to the current bloodbath.  The racial-administrative policies of the Jewish state in terms of controlling and dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank and the trampling, sealing and suffocating of Gaza, can be put down to footnotes of varying, uncontroversial relevance.

The Victorian Greens disagree.  On February 7, the party released a statement promising to introduce a motion calling on the Victorian government “to end its secretive relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence.”  They also demanded the government to “sever any ties with companies arming Israel’s Defence Force, which has killed 27,500 Palestinians in less than four months.”

Given the federal government’s brusque termination of previous agreements entered into by Victoria with purportedly undesirable entities, the Albanese government has a useful precedent.  With legal proceedings underway in the International Court of Justice in The Hague seeking to determine whether genocide is taking place in Gaza, along with an interim order warning Israel to abide by the UN Genocide Convention, a sound justification has presented itself.  Complicity with genocide – actual, potential or as yet unassessed by a court – can hardly be in Canberra’s interest.  Over to you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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Photograph Source: Matt Hrkac from Melbourne, Australia – CC BY 2.0

Times were supposedly better in 2022.  That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two.  That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7, 2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages.  All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial.

Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022.  “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January.  It’s just business.

No one half observant to this should have been surprised, though no evidence of the MoU, in form or substance, exists on Victorian government websites.  (It is, however, listed on the Australian government’s Foreign Arrangements Scheme register.)  For one thing, Israel’s Ministry of Defense had happily trumpeted it, stating that its International Defense Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) and the Victorian statement government had “signed an industrial defense cooperation statement” that December.  Those present at the signing ceremony were retired General Yair Kulas, who heads SIBAT and Penelope McKay, acting secretary for Victoria’s Department of Jobs, Precincts, and Regions.

That an MoU should grow from this was a logical outcome, a feature of the State’s distinctly free approach to entering into agreements with foreign entities.  In April 2021, the previous Morrison government terminated four agreementsmade by the Victorian government with Iran, Syria and China.  The agreements with Iran and Syria, signed in November 2004 and March 1999 respectively, were intended as educational, scientific and training ventures.  The two agreements with China came in the form of an MoU and framework agreement with the National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC, both part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The Israeli arms industry has taken something of a shine to Victoria.  One of its most aggressive, enterprising representatives has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s prolific drone manufacturing company.  Through Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), it established a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne after announcing its plans to do so in February 2021.

One of its main co-sponsors is the state government’s Invest Victoria branch.  The body is tasked with, in the tortured words of the government, “leading new entrant Foreign Direct Investment and investment opportunities of significance as well as enhancing the business investment environment, developing and providing whole-of-government levers and strengthening the governance of investment attraction activities.”  RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation also did its bit alongside the state government in furnishing support.

The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence had rosy, arcadian goals.  The company’s then managing director and retired Major General Paul McLachlan wanted to impress his audience with glossily innocent reasons behind developing drone technology, which entailed counting any “number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.”

McLachlan, in focusing on “the complex problems that emergency management organisations face during natural disasters” skipped around the nastily obvious fact that the technology’s antecedents have been lethal in nature.  They had been used to account for the killing and monitoring of Palestinians in Gaza, with its star performer being Elbit’s Hermes drone.  A grisly fact from the summer months of July 2014, when the IDF was making much use of Elbit’s murderous products in Gaza, company profits increased by 6.1%.

This was not a record that worried the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge.  As he told the ABC, the MoU “would have been entirely uncontroversial before the Israel-Hamas war.  But now, of course, there’s a live domestic debate about the war, and … most people are concerned about civilian casualties.”

It is exactly the slipshod reasoning that gives the think-tankers a bad name.  It means that Israel’s predatory policies towards Palestinians since 1948 can be dismissed as peripheral and inconsequential to the current bloodbath.  The racial-administrative policies of the Jewish state in terms of controlling and dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank and the trampling, sealing and suffocating of Gaza, can be put down to footnotes of varying, uncontroversial relevance.

The Victorian Greens disagree.  On February 7, the party released a statement promising to introduce a motion calling on the Victorian government “to end its secretive relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence.”  They also demanded the government to “sever any ties with companies arming Israel’s Defence Force, which has killed 27,500 Palestinians in less than four months.”

Given the federal government’s brusque termination of previous agreements entered into by Victoria with purportedly undesirable entities, the Albanese government has a useful precedent.  With legal proceedings underway in the International Court of Justice in The Hague seeking to determine whether genocide is taking place in Gaza, along with an interim order warning Israel to abide by the UN Genocide Convention, a sound justification has presented itself.  Complicity with genocide – actual, potential or as yet unassessed by a court – can hardly be in Canberra’s interest.  Over to you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

CounterPunch

• Tells the Facts and Names the Names
• Published since 1996
• This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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• CFO/Administrator Deva Wheeler
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• Alexander Cockburn, 1941—2012

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 Opinion Perspectives

Biden-Putin, colonial legacies, and the Middle East's three great divides

Perspectives

6 min read

Rami G. Khouri

01 August, 2022

Across the Arab world, where people suffer from poverty, authoritarian rule, and subjugation to the games of international powers and regional autocrats, the dynamics of the modern Middle East can be defined by three divisions, writes Rami G. Khouri.

A Tunisian man looks on next to graffiti as protestors demonstrate outside then Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi's offices in Government Square Tunis on January 25, 2011 in Tunis, Tunisia. 

US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s simultaneous visits to the Middle East last month dramatically remind us that little has changed here since Alexander the Great marched his armies to the east in the 4th Century BC. Foreign and regional powers still  compete for strategic advantage in the region to re-configure the political landscape in their own image and interests.

No wonder so many people are confused by what foreign and regional powers actually seek. Global and regional partnerships and confrontations evolve almost seasonally: are Turkey and Israel friends or adversaries? What about Egypt and Qatar, the UAE and Iran?

Various powers scurry around mending old disputes and concocting bizarre new alliances for fresh confrontations – all the while sending arms and troops around the region with abandon.

Leaders of smaller, vulnerable countries desperately seek a regional or global power – any power will do – to protect and finance them. They preach freedom, equality, and economic development, but support authoritarian dictators, pervasive waste and corruption, and massive arms sales.

When two world powers visit in the same week, it amplifies the contradictions and confusion. It also clarifies and perpetuates old colonial traditions that view Arab- and Muslim-majority societies as tools for more powerful states to manipulate at will, with full complicity of local elites that are ever more eager for money and protection to survive.

This is not new. The United Kingdom in the Balfour Declaration promised Palestine to the Jewish people in 1917, when London had no legal claim to that land. A century later, Trump, and now Biden, have effectively given Jerusalem to Israel, when Washington has no legal claim to East Jerusalem.

This colonial legacy of self-serving foreign interventions that disregard the rights and aspirations of the indigenous inhabitants has now mutated into a more sinister local variant: established regional powers, from Turkey to Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia, intervene unilaterally in nominally sovereign Arab states to gain strategic advantages. They use muscle and money to thwart any popular democratic transitions and to reinforce authoritarian regimes.

The simultaneous Biden and Putin visits occurred at a moment when around 70 percent of Arabs are poor or vulnerable to lifelong poverty, and very few enjoy any power to reform their mostly moribund national policies, either through peaceful popular rebellion or democratic elections.

Governments now also monitor their thoughts and movements, usually with the technical or financial assistance of the same regional and international powers interfering in their domestic affairs.

This Biden-Putin moment highlights old colonial practices and clarifies three great divides that define today’s Middle East – divides that also explain much of the area’s violence, instability, and nonstop military and political interventions.

The first is the divide between most Arabs, their leaders, and the institutions of governance. Trust in Arab government performance has declined in recent decades, outside the small wealthy oil producing states, according to regular polling evidence.

 

These polls also show that most populations see corruption as rampant and the rule of law as not applied or favouring certain groups; unsurprisingly, nearly 50 percent of young Arabs wish to emigrate. The erratic but ongoing uprisings in several countries - Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, most prominently - also reveal public discontent with the state’s performance, and the demand for a democratic system.

The second is the long-standing divide between Arab people and the apartheid state of Israel, which polling evidence consistently reaffirms. Even in states that signed normalisation agreements, most Arab citizens shun close ties with Israelis, as was confirmed again this month.

The third is the divide between most Arabs, Iranians, and Turks against Western and Israeli colonial arrogance and direct interventions, including military action and economic sanctions. Polls remind us year after year that a majority of Arabs see Israel and the US as their main security threats, reaching 66 percent of respondents in the latest regional surveys. 

American and a few Arab leaders ignore this overwhelming evidence and continue to force-feed us normalisation with Israel as if we were a herd of goats – which is exactly how colonial powers view their powerless local subjects.

The US has now expanded this into an attempt to form a coalition of Arab states with Israel and the US to curtail Iranian, Russian, and Chinese influence in the region. This runs against the grain of all three of these profound divides that have been among the most consistent characteristics of the modern Arab world.

American recurring dreams to create such Arab-Israeli-US coalitions have repeatedly failed to account for what drives Arab people’s identities, self-interest, and dignity. Almost all Middle Easterners know in their hearts – more importantly from their lived experiences – that over the past century their torments have come from the three main (linked) forces of Western colonial manipulation, Zionist-Israeli apartheid, and home-grown Arab autocracy.

Not only have these combined to leave most of the region the wreck it is today – mostly poor, vulnerable, and subjugated by regional and world powers - but these powers now also cooperate more closely to tighten their authoritarian grip on the lands, people, and resources of the region.

 

The lives, values, rights, and sentiments of nearly 700 million Arabs, Iranians, and Turks are totally absent from the minds of foreign and regional leaders who meet routinely to determine our fate. The colonial and authoritarian eye does not see these people. They are invisible, inconsequential. They do not exist.

What matters at the Biden or Putin meetings are Israel’s security and technology exports, American politicians’ incumbency, the self-preservation of regional autocrats, US war merchants’ income, and carving up the region into spheres of influence – just the way the British and French did a century ago.

No wonder a majority of Arabs feel more and more alienated from their own leaders and have tried to overthrow them, while fearing the motives of Israel, the US, and other powers.

Colonial predators must open their eyes and see the rotten fruits of their legacies – not celebrate them by trying again to rearrange the region for their own domestic purposes.

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Nizar Mohamad

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative. 

Follow him on Twitter: @ramikhouri

Have questions or comments? Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Rami G. Khouri

https://twitter.com/RamiKhouri

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