Countercurrent – January 31, 2024
‘I am An Arab Jew, I Denounce Zionist-settler Colonialism’: Avi Shlaim
by Dr Marwan Asmar
Editor’s Note: Avi Shlaim is an eminent Israeli-British historian and international relations expert at Oxford University in the UK with many books on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is part of what is called the “New Historians” who sought to provide a critical analysis of the prevailing Israeli view claiming Palestinians left their land of their own free will and were not forced out in 1948 as Israel was created.
In the light of Israel’s latest genocide in Gaza, he provides what he calls a “personal commentary” of his views as a Jewish Arab and on the current Netanyahu government.
“I am an Arab Jew. I was born in Baghdad and I grew up in Israel. My Iraqi birth certificate gives my name as Ibrahim. So, I am the real Ibrahim Al Baghdadi. The other chap is a fake. He stole my Identity,” he says in a mirthful manner.
“I am proud of my Arab heritage and I am equally proud of my Jewish heritage. The three pillars of Judaism are truth, justice and peace,” the historian, who left Baghdad at the age of five in 1950, emphasizes.
“The Netanyahu government is the opposite of these core Jewish values,” adding “it is the most aggressive, expansionist, overtly racist and Jewish supremacist government in Israel’s history,” Shlaim maintains.
“The essence of Judaism is non-violence.” The present government is the anthesis of this non-violence,” he laments.
“As a Jew and an Israeli, I therefore feel that I have a moral duty to denounce Zionist-settler colonialism and American imperialism and to stand by the Palestinians in the anti-colonial struggle, in the just struggle to live in peace and dignity in their own land,” he concludes.
Dr Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman Jordan.
https://countercurrents.org/2024/01/i-am-an-arab-jewdenounce-zionist-settler-colonialism-avi-shlaim/
Electronic Intefada – January 31, 2024
Dying of Thirst in Gaza
by Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman and Salma Yaseen
Finding clean and safe drinking water in Gaza has become nearly impossible.
Aref Abed, 60, lives in Gaza City’s al-Yarmouk neighborhood. Typically, Abed would fill his 1,500-liter barrel with desalinated water from a desalination truck.
Yet this is no longer an option.
The desalination plants are closed entirely or operating at extremely limited capacity due to a lack of electricity and fuel. Israel has also destroyed much of Gaza’s sanitation and water infrastructure or deliberately cut off the piping in of water.
Abed’s options for safe drinking water were nonexistent, so he went to a nearby well. Abed knew that such wells do not provide safe drinking water and instead are used for irrigation or other water needs, but he was desperate.
When he arrived at the well, he was so thirsty that he drank without thinking.
He knew the water was dirty by its taste. Then, when he washed his hands, he saw they were covered in sediment.
“I saw the water was not pure and had some dirt,” he said. “I think it is untreated from sewage and unsuitable for using to wash, to clean or even to bathe.”
He vomited from the water. Still, he forced himself to continue drinking.
Then, in mid-January, Abed went to the hospital because he had a high fever and constant diarrhea. He was severely dehydrated.
Doctors diagnosed him with typhoid, a life-threatening bacterial infection. If left untreated, he could experience kidney failure.
Clean water is expensive
The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza do not have adequate access to clean water.
Abed was given antibiotics to treat his typhoid, but since he was continuously drinking contaminated water, his condition was not improving.
“My brother always buys bottled water for me, just so I can be healed and for him to avoid the illness,” he said.
Yet this is an option that the brothers can barely afford. The cost of a small bottle of water, about 500 milliliters worth, now costs nearly $3, which is 10 times its cost before October.
“Bottled water is not always available in the city, and if it exists, is it sufficient? How will I save my life when there is no clean water in the city?”
How can I provide water when even UNRWA can’t?
Most of the nearly 2 million people who have been displaced in Gaza are now in the south. The lack of clean drinking water is especially acute there.
Kanz Sulaiman, 7, is sheltering in an UNRWA school in the southern city of Khan Younis. Her family was displaced two months ago from Gaza City.
Kanz received bottled water from her parents to drink, but when that was not available, she would drink from the tap at the UNRWA school.
“I was thirsty to death,” she said. “Everytime I didn’t find [water] in our gallons, I drank from [the tap].”
Earlier this month, Kanz came down with a fever and was vomiting and having severe diarrhea for several days. At the school’s health center, she was diagnosed with intestinal catarrh.
The doctor advised her father to try and provide clean drinking water, since the school’s tap is polluted. The doctor said that ingesting the water could lead to something more serious, like cholera or typhoid.
Hamza Sulaiman, Kanz’s father, said that he asked the doctor, “How can I provide clean water for her if [UNRWA] is unable to provide it for us in the school?”
The doctor had no response. He instructed Hamza to head to the main UNRWA clinic in Khan Younis for medications since the school had run out. Unfortunately, the main clinic – as well as seven pharmacies Hamza visited – had also run out of medications.
Within the week, the entire family, including Hamza’s 11-year-old son Yazan, was sick.
Fortunately, a relative had the necessary medication, and Kanz improved after a week of illness.
“I was grateful for my relative who saved my daughter’s life when he gave us the medication,” Hamza said. “I feared losing her as I couldn’t do anything for her.”
Still, accessing clean water is a daily struggle. Hamza fills up their water containers at UNRWA, when water is available, but it is often not.
“The desalinated water is not 100 percent clean like before the war,” he said. “There is some saltiness to its taste. I think it is half desalinated because of the lack of fuel.”
Turning to seawater
Fadia Waleed and her five children have turned to the sea for water, even though they know it is polluted with sewage.
She washes their dishes and cleans their clothes with seawater, and her children bathe in the ocean. They have no other alternative, as the UNRWA school where they are sheltering is no longer providing water from the taps.
Yet this month, Fadia’s son Yaseen got sick with a fever and abdominal pain. They went to the hospital and he was diagnosed with Hepatitis A.
He took medications for two weeks, and his condition gradually improved.
“During those 14 days, I was scared to lose him,” Fadia said. “I stayed all night awake over him to watch his health.”
“I borrowed some bottled water from my neighbors in the school,” she said. This clean water helped save his life.
The family has stopped using seawater for daily chores after Yaseen’s illness, but they still don’t have regular access to water.
“If they drink from the sea, they will die, and if they keep thirsty without clean water, they will die as well. So what’s the solution?”
Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman is a journalist living in Gaza.
Salma Yaseen is a student of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/dying-thirst/44221
World Socialist Web Site – January 31, 2024
US-backed Israeli war machine destroys last standing university in Gaza
Nancy Hanover
Earlier this month, Al Jazeera posted an extraordinary video showing the January 17 controlled demolition of Israa University in Gaza City. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) detonated 315 mines in order to destroy the complex—the last standing university in the Gaza Strip. This criminal assault followed the bombing of the Islamic and Al-Azhar universities.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that to date 12 higher education institutions in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces.
The IDF is also targeting primary and secondary schools. Since the beginning of the war last October, K12 schools have been repeatedly bombed, forcing closures and leading to the decision of the Ministry of Education to officially terminate the school year across Gaza on November 6.
Israel is obliterating the entire educational infrastructure in Gaza, with the aim of making the destruction permanent.
This includes the eradication of the human bearers of culture. A January 20 report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor denounced Israel for the targeted assassination of academic, scientific and intellectual figures across a variety of research disciplines, including 17 individuals with professorial degrees, 59 with doctoral degrees, and 18 with master’s degrees.
According to the South African complaint argued before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on January 11, leading Palestinian academics who have been assassinated include:
- Professor Sufian Tayeh, the president of the Islamic University. An award-winning physicist and UNESCO chair of astronomy, astrophysics and space sciences in Palestine, Professor Tayeh died alongside his family in an airstrike.
- Dr. Ahmed Hamdi Abo Absa, the dean of the Software Engineering Department at the University of Palestine. Dr. Abo Absa was reportedly shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he walked away from them after being released from a three-day forced “disappearance.”
- Professor Muhammad Eid Shabir, professor of immunology and virology and former president of the Islamic University of Gaza.
- Professor Refaat Al-Arﾒeer, poet and professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza.
- Before the genocidal assault on Gaza, there were 625,000 students and 22,500 teachers in the enclave. Since then, as many as 350 schools have been destroyed or damaged. In what is undoubtedly an undercount, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that at least 4,327 students have been killed and 7,819 students have been injured. The same agency reports that as of January 24, 231 teachers or administrators had been killed and 756 had been wounded.
These acts, as the South African ICJ document establishes, are violations of the Geneva Convention, which outlaws “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, civilian objects and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected.”
The South African ICJ complaint quotes UN Security Council Resolution 2712, which expresses “deep concern that the disruption of access to education has a dramatic impact on children, and that conflict has lifelong effects on their physical and mental health.” It cites an interview with an emergency coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières who spent five weeks in Gaza:
[I]t’s even worse in reality than it looks. It’s—the amount of suffering is just something … incomparable. It’s really unbearable. I’m speechless when I try and think of the future of [these] children. It’s generations of children who will be handicapped, who will be traumatized. The very children in our mental health program are telling us that they would rather die than continue living in Gaza now.
Women and children have suffered 70 percent of the deaths and injuries in Gaza. In an exhibit posted by Al Jazeera, the names of about half of the child victims are listed, together with their ages. The thousands of individual names give a sense of the unspeakable horror experienced by the population.
The silence of AFT President Randi Weingarten and the teachers union apparatus on Israel’s systematic and calculated destruction of education infrastructure and targeted murder of educators in Gaza speaks volumes.
Their deeds speak even louder. Both the AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) are actively campaigning for Biden in the 2024 presidential race. With this endorsement, the union apparatus has provided its seal of approval to the American government’s full financial, logistical, military and political support to the Zionist genocide.
At the same time, the AFT and NEA are seeking to suppress anti-war protests among their members, just as they suppressed the fight for COVID protections and for decades undercut and betrayed the struggles of teachers and the working class as a whole over wages, working conditions, jobs and inequality.
But opposition among educators is mounting. A petition circulating widely within the NEA is demanding that the union revoke its endorsement of Biden in the 2024 presidential race until he secures a “permanent ceasefire,” stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” and commits “to a fair due process for asylum seekers and refugees.”
Reporting on this petition, a recent article refers to the “splintering” of the NEA, the largest union in the US. According to the Nation, “19 local, state, and regional bodies of the NEA [have called] for a cease-fire in Gaza, including the National Council of Urban Education Associations.”
In response to these developments, AFT President Weingarten reposted on Twitter/X a January 22 column authored by J Street, a pro-Israeli lobby and political action committee, of which she is a prominent board member. The statement, “Time for Diplomacy,” calls for a “negotiated stop to the fighting” in order “to bring freedom to the hostages” and “relief” to the people of Gaza.
The reference to a “stop in the fighting” and “relief” does not signify opposition either to the war or its genocidal character. Rather, it echoes the statements of top US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security spokesman John Kirby, that the US is pushing for a negotiated month-long “humanitarian pause” in the fighting and a “hostage exchange.”
It remains to be seen whether such a pause takes place, but even if it does, it will not alter the strategy of ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza and the West Bank that underlies the current genocidal campaign. In fact, release of the remaining US and Israeli hostages being held by Hamas will arguably give the fascist regime in Tel Aviv and its enablers in Washington a freer hand to complete their “Final Solution” of the “Palestinian Problem.”
In the statement, Weingarten and J Street insist, “Israel had the unquestioned right to respond militarily to the horrific terror attack of October 7.” It goes on to give a green light to new crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, saying Tel Aviv will “have an ongoing responsibility to continue to protect and defend its citizens and hold to account those who perpetrated the October 7 attack.”
This is a justification of war crimes, not a demand to halt them.
Nor should anyone be misled by the addition of the word “ceasefire” to some of Weingarten’s recent social media posts. Her talk of a ceasefire expresses not a change in position, but a rhetorical adaptation to the concerns of the AFT membership—overwhelmingly in favor of a ceasefire—carried out with an eye to corralling teachers behind Biden in the November presidential election.
On January 29, the AFT Executive Council adopted a resolution calling for an “end to the Israel-Hamas War by negotiated bilateral cease-fire” and “steps towards a two-state solution.” Amid hand-wringing over “cycles of violence and retribution,” the resolution re-states the standard justification of the war: “We have long recognized the right of Israel to protect its citizens against crimes of war and aggression. The horrific slaughter of Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others on Oct. 7 was the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.”
Ludicrously, the AFT resolution seeks to assign the basic blame for the bloodbath in Gaza (the word “genocide” does not appear) not on Israel, but on “the dictatorial rule of Hamas.”
The “process” of a “two-state solution” has supposedly been on the agenda since the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian National Authority. Since that time, the Zionist regime has proceeded with repeated mass killings of Gazans, intensifying repression, expanding war, and now openly carrying out genocide. Throughout, it has enjoyed the full and indispensable support of US imperialism, without which it could not pursue its expansionist policy.
The so-called “two-state” process was and remains a cover for Israeli aggression. Even in the unlikely event that a two-state system arose out of the ashes and above the corpses of the present slaughter, it would in no way represent an advance for the oppressed Palestinian masses.
As explained in ﾓBernie Sanders, the left face of genocide,ﾔ a Palestinian state would be tasked by US imperialism and Israel with maintaining a police-state grip upon the population. Elements of the hated and corrupt Palestinian Authority, voted out of office in Gaza in 2006 due to its subservience to Israel and notorious corruption, would be installed to serve as the puppet administrators of continued imperialist domination of the region and its peoples.
There is no progressive national solution to the genocidal onslaught on the Palestinian masses. The genocide in Gaza is itself part of the descent of world capitalism, in the throes of its greatest ever crisis, into barbarism: world war, genocide, authoritarian and fascist rule, and the further impoverishment of the working class. But this crisis also produces revolutionary struggles of the working class internationally.
Weingarten and the entire trade union apparatus serve as the labor police of the ruling class, suppressing the class struggle and seeking to uphold the political subordination of the working class to the capitalist parties. This pro-imperialist, pro-war bureaucracy must be overthrown and replaced by organizations of the rank and file, fighting to unite the struggles of all workers in an international offensive to put an end to imperialism and capitalism and establish world socialism. An essential component of this program is the fight for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.
We urge educators in the US to join the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, to fight for this perspective.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/31/frbp-j31.html?pk_kwd=wsws
Chatham House – January 25, 2024
Will the war in Gaza become a breaking point for the rules-based international order?
The scale of death and destruction in Gaza is increasingly viewed as an indictment of a system facing perhaps its most daunting and most stubborn challenge – global perceptions of hypocrisy.
Dr Renad Mansour
As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recognizes its prima facie jurisdiction to investigate Israel for carrying out genocide in Gaza, also on trial is the so-called ‘rules-based international order’.
This global set of rules, norms and institutions – the ICJ itself being one – was established by the victors of World War II to manage relations between states based on shared principles of human rights and international law. The intention was to prevent conflict and ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe or anything like it would never happen again. Many saw still greater hope in this order during the era of US unipolarity that followed the Cold War.
However the ICJ case eventually resolves, the rules and institutions comprising the rules-based international order are today being undermined by the very countries that created the system.
But with Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza, this order is facing perhaps its most daunting and most stubborn challenge – global perceptions of hypocrisy.
However the ICJ case eventually resolves, the rules and institutions comprising the rules-based international order are today being undermined by the very countries that created the system.
Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters are the ones pushing for these institutions to call out double standards by Israel’s allies and hold them to account. This has become a defining moment for the future of the current international settlement.
The international order under US unipolarity
Today’s international order has been integral to the global projection of Western engagement and power for decades. Military interventions, such as in Iraq in 2003, or more recently defending Ukraine against Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, were driven by realpolitik calculations but legitimized through a defence of human rights, democracy and international law.
After the attacks on 11 September 2001, at the peak of US unipolarity, President George W Bush infamously said ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ The world was thus divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ revealing the ideological edifice through which US military and economic prowess and expansion were justified.
Cracks and contradictions are not new to the rules-based order. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration sidelined the UN when it refused to bend to US decision-making. US actions in its so-called ‘war on terror’ also contradicted the country’s purported values, as shown by revelations of abuse and torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Still, the US has consistently rebounded, retaining and projecting ideological power, partly by invoking the rules-based order.
The Western response in Ukraine is as a clear example of this. The US, UK and EU mobilized global rules, institutions and norms to resist Russian aggression. Hillary Clinton, for instance,ﾠwarned ‘if Russian leadership would rather not be accused of committing war crimes, they should stop bombing hospitals’. Russia claimed these hospitals were used by the Azov Battalion and other radicals for military purposes.
Nonetheless, Western powers were in lockstep, insisting they stood in defence of democracy, human rights, and the norms and institutions of the rules-based order. This allowed them to rally huge public support for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
Waning US influence and legitimacy
The Israel–Palestine conflict is exposing the inherent contradictions in the West’s stance as the guarantor of the international order.
Since Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,200 and took 240 hostages, Israel’s air and ground campaign has killed over 25,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 children. An estimated 8,000 Palestinians are missing, likely dead under the rubble. According to theﾠUN, Israel is ‘destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon’ that risks widespread famine.
The Israel–Palestine conflict is exposing the inherent contradictions in the West’s stance as the guarantor of the international order.
But the US and UK governments, who believe in Israel’s right to self-defence and classify Hamas as a terrorist organization, are now among only a small handful of countries refusing to call for a ceasefire at the UN – an event that could halt Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.
Instead they continue to supply Israel with weapons and funding even as it bombs and lays siege to hospitals in Gaza, strikes that human rightsﾠorganizations and journalists argue violate international law. Israel claims these hospitals were used by Hamas for military purposes.
Meanwhile in Washington, the Biden administration is struggling to use a combination of diplomatic, economic and coercive incentives to compel countries in the Middle East and North Africa to now normalize relations with Israel.
Governments in the region find it impossible to stand with Israel (at least publicly) because their own publics are ardent Palestine supporters. They are therefore declining US overtures, often citing clear contradictions between US policy in Ukraine and Palestine. The timing of both conflicts, only a few years apart, makes it easier for many in the region to spot the double-standard.
Global calls for justice growing louder
Legal, institutional and even moral appeals that make up the international rules-based order have proven unfit to ensure a sustainable resolution to the Israel–Palestine conflict. Instead, achieving fundamental change and a more viable solution requires moving past the orthodoxy of the rules-based international order and levelling the playing field.
This will only come through the growing calls for justice from publics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the Global South, and Global North whose governments purport to defend the rules-based order. Without this pressure from its public, no government – regional or international – will seek to broker a more sustainable solution.
Dr Renad Mansour is a Senior Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme; Project Director, Iraq Initiative
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/01/will-war-gaza-become-breaking-point-rules-based-international-order
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