Informed Comment Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion 2024-05-18T05:11:31Z https://www.juancole.com/feed/atom WordPress Juan Cole http://juancole.com <![CDATA[Biden’s Potemkin Village: US Aid Dock Theatrics as Gaza Drowns in Starving Refugees amid Rivers of Shit]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218618 2024-05-18T05:11:31Z 2024-05-18T04:15:37Z Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The story has it that Russian noble and officer Grigory Potemkin, who stole the Crimea from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, faced a dilemma. The place was a mess after the Russian conquest, but Queen Catherine the Great wanted to see her new possession. So Potemkin set up fake façades in pasteboard that looked like a village, and brought in some smiling peasants to stand before them, as Catherine sailed by. Then he had them dismantled and reassembled downriver so that she would think there was a whole set of such thriving villages. The tale is untrue, but worked its way into a popular biography of Potemkin and became the stuff of legend.

President Joe Biden’s floating pier off Gaza, which went operational on Friday, is such a Potemkin Village. While it isn’t completely useless, it cannot replace overland truck deliveries of food and aid. At most it will supply 150 trucks worth of aid daily, when 500 are needed. It is a PR band aid on the gaping wound of Israeli genocidal blockage of aid to the civilian population.

The pier’s operation is interrupted anytime there are high winds or sea swells. It is far from population centers. It is vulnerable to Israeli indiscriminate artillery and drone fire. It can be hit by Hamas sabotage. It depends on the delivery of the aid by United Nations workers (including UNRWA, which Biden hysterically defunded because of Israeli lies that it is a Hamas front). These aid workers, as with those of the World Central Kitchen, have sometimes been struck by Israeli fire, apparently in some cases deliberately.

The floating pier cost $320 million, which could have fed a lot of Palestinians if the Israelis hadn’t closed off almost all aid truck routes into the Strip.

Al Jazeera English: “Aid agencies: Land routes are more effective”

Meanwhile, in the real world the Israeli attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable and to ethnically cleanse its Palestinian inhabitants accelerated.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that the Israeli army has in recent days forced 640,000 Palestinian refugees out of Rafah (to which it had earlier exiled them).

Embed from Getty Images
Displaced Palestinians pack their belongings before leaving an unsafe area in Rafah on May 15, 2024 (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images).

This expulsion of nearly a fourth of the entire population is problematic because, OCHA says, “Our colleagues working on ensuring that people in Gaza have adequate shelter say there are no remaining stocks of shelter materials inside Gaza.”

No shelter, no shelter materials.

People don’t have a pot to piss in. Or defecate in. The mass displacement at Israeli hands “has exacerbated the water and sanitation crisis, with sewage overflow and solid waste spreading across roads, displacement camps, and the rubble of destroyed homes – with a catastrophic impact on health.”

I repeat, sewage overflow and solid waste are spreading across roads and through the makeshift camps. Aid workers have talked about Gaza being awash in green slime, with the toxic brew spread to humans by a cloud of aggressive black flies that try to get into your mouth. The NGO Action for Humanity (AFH) says that some 270,000 tons of garbage and sewage have piled up in Gaza, with the Israelis interdicting access to the major landfill and preventing it from being disposed of.

AFH continues, “The lack of safe drinking water and poor sanitation conditions continue to fuel rising cases of acute jaundice syndrome and bloody watery diarrhoea, posing a significant public health challenge.”

These refugees, hungry, sick, and some wounded by Israeli indiscriminate fire, have been death-marched to Deir al-Balah governorate or to Khan Younis, both of which have been destroyed and left bereft of shelter, toilets, functioning hospitals and bakeries. The World Health Organization says of hospitals that they are themselves on life support because the Israelis have embargoed the fuel they need to operate: “Spokesperson Tarik Jašarević reported that only 13 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are now partially functioning, emphasizing that fuel is required for electricity and to run generators. He said health partners require between 1.4 million to 1.8 million litres monthly so that hospitals can function, but only 159,000 litres have entered Gaza since the border closure, ‘and that’s clearly not sufficient.'” The Israelis are letting in a tenth of the fuel needed to run the hospitals.

Imagine being told you have to hit the road carrying your few possessions and children, after months of starvation and drinking dirty water, and to try to find shelter in Khan Younis, which looks like this:

Embed from Getty Images
A displaced Palestinian woman pushes a stroller as she walks in front of destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 16, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Or perhaps you might prefer the well appointed apartments of Deir al-Balah after they’ve been the recipients of the tender mercies of the Israeli military:

Embed from Getty Images
DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA – MAY 15: A general view of the completely destroyed house belonging to the Berash family and the damaged buildings around it as a result of the Israeli attack on Bureij refugee camp in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on May 15, 2024. As a result of the Israeli attack, one building was completely destroyed and many houses and structures in the surrounding area were damaged as Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip continue uninterruptedly for 222 days. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Grain is essential to the human diet. In central Gaza, there are only five bakeries still functioning that Israel shells haven’t pulverized, four in Gaza City and one in Deir Balah. About twelve more are physically intact but have the severe disadvantage of having no fuel or flour, which would not make for what you might call… a bakery.

UN and volunteer aid workers can therefore only provide tiny meals, and are concentrating on Khan Younis and Deir al Balah.

]]> Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty <![CDATA[U.S. Seeks Shift In Iranian ‘Decision-Making Calculus’ Through Saudi-Israeli Normalization]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218615 2024-05-18T03:34:49Z 2024-05-18T04:04:40Z By Kian Sharifi

( RFE/RL) – The United States wants to force a gradual shift in Iran’s “decision-making calculus” by signing a defense deal with Saudi Arabia and securing the normalization of relations between Riyadh and Israel.

“We continue to work with allies and partners to enhance their capabilities to deter and counter the threats Iran poses, impose costs on Iran for its actions, and seek to shift Iran’s decision-making calculus over time,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told RFE/RL.

The security package has several components, including a bilateral U.S.-Saudi defense pact aimed at enhancing the Sunni kingdom’s deterrence capabilities. But Washington is adamant that regardless of how close the Americans and the Saudis are to a bilateral agreement, the security package cannot materialize without Saudi-Israeli normalization.

Saudi Arabia has conditioned the normalization of ties with Israel on the establishment of a cease-fire in Gaza and a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden sees a three-way deal key to ensuring a sustainable peace in the Middle East, which includes isolating Iran and making it costly for the Islamic republic to maintain its current regional policies.

“Iran’s isolation in the region and in the international community is a result of its own policies,” the spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement to RFE/RL.

Hindustan Times Video: “Iran’s Khamenei ‘Warns’ MBS; Lambasts U.S. For ‘Forcing’ Saudi Arabia To Normalise Ties with Israel”

A calculus shift will “definitely” happen, but not in the way that the United States wants, according to Hamidreza Azizi, a fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“Any sort of coalition-building would result in Iran going for counter-coalitions,” he added.

But analysts maintain that for Saudi Arabia, isolating Iran is not the core objective of a security pact with the United States.

The Saudis see normalizing relations with Israel as a strategic leverage to help them extract substantial security commitments from Washington, “thereby balancing against Iranian influence without overtly antagonizing Tehran,” Azizi said.

Meanwhile, securing a path toward Palestinian statehood could help Saudi Arabia assert its leadership within the Muslim world and effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Iran has long opposed Arab normalization with Israel and is a staunch critic of the Abraham Accords, which saw Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) establish diplomatic ties with Israel in 2020.

On May 1, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei implicitly criticized Saudi Arabia for looking to normalize relations with Israel in the hopes of resolving the Palestinian question.

Anna Jacobs, a senior Gulf analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, argued that the U.A.E. model of balancing relations with Iran and Israel suggests that Saudi Arabia can do the same.

“Riyadh seems confident that normalization with Israel wouldn’t have a major impact on its relationship with Tehran,” she said. “The Saudi strategy with Iran right now is both containment and engagement.”

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Via RFE/RL

]]> The Conversation <![CDATA[Extreme Heatwaves in South and Southeast Asia are a Sign of Disasters to Come]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218611 2024-05-18T03:20:33Z 2024-05-18T04:02:30Z By Neven S. Fučkar, University of Oxford | –

(The Conversation) – Since April 2024, wide areas of south and south-east Asia, from Pakistan to the Philippines, have experienced prolonged extreme heat. Covering some of the most densely populated regions in the world, the series of heatwaves has affected everything from human health and wellbeing to the economy and education.

Many pupils in India, Bangladesh, and Philippines have been told to stay at home for days due to a severe health risk from extreme heat, while the heatwaves are becoming a major issue in India’s election. Bangladesh even closed all primary schools for weeks while the temperature reached 43.8°C on April 30.

Once the temperature goes above 38°C, it exceeds the core human body temperature (about 37°C) and the chance of heat exhaustion and even heatstroke increases dramatically. This is compounded by increasing humidity in the region which puts additional heat stress on the human body, as sweat is not able to evaporate as effectively (the primary mechanism for cooling the human body).

That is why extreme heat in a tropical country can be less pleasant and more dangerous than the same temperature in a desert.

Tens of millions of people have been exposed to such health threatening conditions in south and south-east Asia in April and May so far, and this extreme heat has substantially affected labour productivity.

Unusually prolonged periods of extreme heat:

Shaded map of south and south east asia
Parts of India, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia were extremely hot almost all April.
Neven Fuckar / Data: MSWX

Now shifting westwards:

Shaded map of south and south east asia
The most consistent extreme heat is currently in western India and Pakistan.
Neven Fuckar / Data: MSWX

How it got so hot

Extreme heat is driven by several processes, operating from global down to local scales. At the local level, less vegetation and soil moisture tends to mean more heat, while cities of concrete and asphalt are hotter than the surrounding countryside thanks to the urban heat island effect. Other local and regional factors include the wind, and whether conditions are ripe for clouds to form.

Then there are the more global factors: El Niño, and of course global warming. El Niño refers to the warm phase of a natural fluctuation of temperatures in the tropical Pacific (its opposite side is La Niña).

Voice of America Video: “Heatwave shatters Southeast Asia records in April”

The Pacific has been in an El Niño phase since May 2023, releasing additional heat and exacerbating global warming in many regions. In parts of Asia, this leads to periods of extreme heat happening more often, lasting longer and being even more extreme in addition to global warming contribution.

This is particularly dangerous for the many cities in south and south-east Asia being hit by the current series of heatwaves, which over the past 85 years have already experienced long-term increase in the number of days in April with such dangerously high temperatures.

Short term noise, long term trends:

Line graphs
Extreme heat in April since 1940 in three selected cities (labelled in the previous maps).
Neven Fuckar / Data: ERA5

Occurrences of extreme heat days over years typically looks rather noisy when plotted on a graph. Some years may have many days of extreme heat, others only few or none. But over a longer timescale of multiple decades, a clear trend emerges of more and more very hot days, driven by climate change.

Indeed, scientists from the World Weather Attribution team recently described the latest heatwaves as “impossible” without climate change.

Action needed

April and May are typically the hottest months in south and south-east Asia. As the climate keeps warming, is the region ready for extreme heat?

The projected increases in extreme hot temperatures demands rapid adaptation measures, along with the obvious global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That means heat action plans that are tailored to address the specific climate, public health and socioeconomic conditions in a given region. What works in Singapore (urban, wealthy, incredibly humid) might not be appropriate in drier, poorer and more rural parts of India.

We have to combine estimates of environmental hazards with exposure and vulnerabilities information on population and assets to provide actionable risk assessment and formulate efficient temperature mitigation measures for different levels of extreme heat.

Some countries in south and south-east Asia are making progress with their heat action plans in response to extreme heat they have already experienced. However, there is room for further improvement and a more targeted approach at the district level. This is critical as we expect that disruptive extreme heat events in this part of the world will become more frequent, widespread, and intense.The Conversation

Neven S. Fučkar, Senior Researcher, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

]]> Juan Cole http://juancole.com <![CDATA[S. Africa v. Israel on Rafah Genocide: Endgame in which Gaza is utterly Destroyed for Human Habitation]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218601 2024-05-18T02:07:53Z 2024-05-17T05:41:48Z Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – South Africa returned to the International Court of Justice in the Hague on Thursday over the Israeli invasion of Rafah, which its attorneys alleged is a further act of genocide in Gaza. South Africa had laid out its initial case in January. The court will take months to come to a decision on whether Israel has violated the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The court ruled on January 26 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide and issued the equivalent of a preliminary injunction against the further commission of acts of genocide. It issued a further injunction on March 28.

The South African case has now been joined by Ireland, Egypt, Colombia, Libya, and Nicaragua, and Turkey says it too will join shortly. Egypt and Turkey have had strong trade and security relations with Israel and their decision to support Pretoria’s suit is a slap in the face of the Israeli government and a signal that Israel is losing what few friends it had in the region.

The Israeli government, given impunity from UNSC sanctions by the Biden administration, thumbed its nose at the injunctions and went on with its slaughterhouse policies. Adilah Hassim, one of several South African attorneys pressing Pretoria’s case, pointed to five pieces of evidence that the Rafah campaign is genocidal. At one point in her detailing of Israel’s atrocities she broke down. She said,

    (1) First, Israel has continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza, including women and children, at an alarming rate.

    (2) Second, as a result of Israel’s onslaught, Palestinians in Gaza are facing what the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations has described as the “worst humanitarian crisis” he has seen for more than 50 years.

    (3) Third, Israel’s systematic targeting and bombardment of hospitals and medical facilities, and its throttling of humanitarian aid, has pushed Gaza’s medical system to collapse;

    (4) Fourth, Israel’s direct attack and siege of Gaza’s biggest hospitals have led to the uncovering of mass graves evidencing Israeli massacres of Palestinians seeking shelter and medical treatment;

    (5) Finally, most recently, Israel has intensified its attacks in the north while pressing on with its Rafah offensive leaving displaced Palestinians nowhere safe to go.

Video: Lawyer Adila Hassim Outlines ‘Genocidal Conduct’ in Gaza at South Africa’s ICJ Hearing Against Israel

Earlier in the trial, Vaughan Lowe, Chichele Professor of Public International Law in the University of Oxford and himself a barrister, explained that “Israel’s action is directed against the Palestinian people throughout Gaza and the West Bank. South Africa’s request was initially focused on Rafah, because of the imminent prospect of death and suffering on a massive scale resulting from Israel’s attack. Since that request was made, it has become increasingly clear that Israel’s actions in Rafah are part of the endgame in which Gaza is utterly destroyed as an area capable of human habitation.”

Professor Lowe is clearly flabbergasted that partisans of the far, far right Netanyahu government continue to attempt to gaslight us all and to assert that nothing out of the ordinary is happening in Gaza. To the contrary, he said, we have the “evidence of continued bombings, attacks on people in so-called ‘safe areas’ to which they have been directed by Israel, attacks on aid convoys, and of mass graves and the horrors of which the corpses speak.”

Lowe deals summarily with the smarmy claim that the Israeli government is only exercising its right to self defense: “First, the right of self-defence does not give a State a licence to use unlimited violence. No right of self-defence can ever extend to a right to inflict massive, indiscriminate violence and starvation collectively on an entire people. Second, nothing — not self-defence or anything else — can ever justify genocide. The prohibition on genocide is absolute, a peremptory norm of international law. Third, the Court ruled in 2004 that there is no right of self-defence by an occupying State against the territory that it occupies.” (Emphasis added.)

If I owned a fleet of small aircraft I’d arrange for these words to be sky-written over every major city in the world. What Lowe is saying is that in some instances, two legal principles might come into conflict with one another. Where, for instance, does free speech stop and libel begin? But there are some laws that trump others. Genocide is the ultimate in this regard. It trumps every other law. There is no legal principle you can invoke to justify genocide, not even the right to self-defense, which is enshrined in the UN Charter and is generally sacrosanct.

Remember this the next time you hear a glib US government spokesman dance around the Gaza genocide by saying that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas.

As Max du Plessis explained Israel’s command that Palestinians who had taken refuge in Rafah must now leave is genocidal in effect: “Not only is there nowhere for the 1.5 million displaced people and others in Rafah to safely flee — so much of Gaza having been reduced to rubble — but that if Rafah is similarly destroyed there will be little left of Gaza or prospects for the survival of Palestinian life in the territory.” In particular, he said, the last functioning hospitals are in Rafah, and if they are destroyed as all the others have been, health care in the Strip will be dead.

At the same time, du Plessis pointed out, virtually all aid has now been blocked by the Israeli government, which seized the Rafah border checkpoint from Egypt and closed it. Gaza cannot feed itself in the best of circumstances, but it is now a basket case needing hundreds of trucks of food and medical aid a day to survive. Hunger and disease are spreading, since most of the trucks are now barred.

Du Plessis said, “Deliberately herding 1.5 million Palestinians into Rafah and then carrying out a full-scale bombardment while sealing off entry and exit for life-saving aid to an already devastated population, while exposing them to famine and human suffering, leaves only one inference, regrettably, and that is of genocidal intent.”

Prominent attorney and senior counsel (SILK) Tembeka Ngcukaitobi pointed to the extensive statements made publicly by Israeli officials that prove their genocidal intent:

The Israeli Minister of Defence: Yoav Gallant said that Israel is “taking apart neighbourhood after neighbourhood” and “will reach every location” in Gaza.

Finance Minister and Cabinet heavyweight Bezalel Smotrich : “[T]here are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — total annihilation.” He goes on to say: “We are negotiating with the ones that should not have existed for a long time.”

Ngcukaitobi cited reams of quotations showing genocidal intent from government officials — quotes that somehow I never see quoted by CNN anchors in the United States.

On January 26, the court had found that Israel was violating specific provisions of the Genocide Convention, to which Tel Aviv is signatory, regarding targeting a group of people because of their ethnicity:

    (a) killing members of the group;

    (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

    (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and

    (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

All of these genocidal actions have continued and intensified ever since.

]]> Middle East Monitor <![CDATA[How Israel is Carving up and Reoccupying Gaza]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218599 2024-05-17T05:47:05Z 2024-05-17T04:06:51Z By Rabia Ali | –

( Middle East Monitor ) – As Israel shows no signs of stopping its devastating assault on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the question now is what it plans to do with the besieged enclave. The growing fear among Palestinians is that after inflicting all this death and destruction on 2.3 million people in Gaza, Israel is now planning to reoccupy the Palestinian territory, as suggested by various recent reports and developments on the ground.

These include the construction of a buffer zone and the establishment of corridors that give Israel strategic control in vital areas, all fuelling speculation about Israel’s intentions and its long-term strategy for Gaza.

“Over the years, there has been a gradual encroachment by Israelis on Palestinian territory, where they gradually take off more and more territory, partially occupy it militarily, and then eventually cut Palestinians off from access to that territory,” analyst Andreas Krieg told Anadolu. “That could very well happen in Gaza as well.”

Krieg said that there are certain groups within the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing for the reoccupation of Gaza. “Basically, reoccupying it in the same way that they’re doing in the West Bank,” explained the senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London.

Reports of Israel creating a buffer zone in Gaza first emerged last November, with local media revealing that a zone one kilometre wide would extend all along the nominal Gaza-Israel border, from Beit Lahiya in the north to the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south.

Israeli Adi Ben-Nun, a professor at the Hebrew University and expert in geographic information systems (GIS), used satellite images to explain to Anadolu how Israel has been remodelling the enclave. For the buffer zone, he said that 90 per cent of approximately 3,000 buildings in its path “are already demolished.” It forms a new perimeter along the border and reduces Gaza’s total territory by around 16 per cent, Ben-Nun added.

Back in February, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk commented on reports about Israel’s plan to create a buffer zone, asserting that it could constitute a war crime. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem also condemned the plan, saying that the demolitions carried out by Israel are unlawful and do indeed constitute a war crime. The group pointed out that these demolitions are a preventive measure intended to thwart a future threat, which is absolutely prohibited under international law.

Another major step in remodelling the Gaza Strip has been the establishment of the so-called Netzarim Corridor.

This four-mile stretch of road, named after a former Israeli settlement in Gaza, has “basically split the north from the south,” according to Ben-Nun. Large swathes of agricultural land and around 200 to 300 buildings were razed to make way for the corridor, which is officially known as Road 749 and stretches from the nominal border to the Mediterranean coastline, he said.

He also pointed out that the corridor is near the pier that the US has built off the Gaza coast to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid.

Al Jazeera English Video: “IRC says the ‘scale of the crisis defies imagination’ in southern Gaza”

Elaborating on the specifics of the corridor, Krieg said it has two east-west connections that cut the Gaza Strip into two. “I think it’s a quasi-permanent structure that I don’t think the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] is going to withdraw from any time soon.”

He explained that the corridor has barriers and forward operating bases, along with a partially tarmacked road, making it “very much a solid barrier” to passage from north to south in Gaza, or vice versa.

“It’s not a temporary one, but a permanent structure that suggests that the IDF is most likely going to keep the corridor and create checkpoints, making it part of a wider stabilisation operation which can last years,” he explained.

For Krieg, it is clear that the Israeli military is “dictating a political strategy for Gaza.” The military’s plan “is to defeat Hamas by keeping a quasi-permanent presence for years on the ground with forward operating bases from which they can go and strike deep inside the territory. The effect on the ground will be that the Gaza Strip is no longer one territory, but divided into two territories. Israel will probably create quotas that will limit how many people can move south and how many people can move north. It will very much undermine the freedom of movement of Gazans.”

He noted that this sort of thing has already been seen in the West Bank. “And even if it is not a full reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, it will have a similar impact on the psyche of people in Gaza, who will feel the Israeli presence basically suffocating them.”

Krieg believes the Israelis are enforcing a “very strict policy” that “will lead to more radicalisation and potentially more resistance. They will probably operate a martial policy and martial law across the Gaza Strip for years to come, which will mean it makes it very, very easy for them to kill indiscriminately any suspect who they consider to be a threat.”

The victims could be youngsters or women, as has also been in the occupied West Bank. “That can be, and often is, civilians, so this will really determine the future moving forward.”

He thinks that the international community, including the US and European nations, will not allow a permanent Israeli presence, such as settlements, in the Gaza Strip. However, Krieg pointed out that there has been no initiative, from the UN or other members of the international community, for “the governance of the Gaza Strip… or for the day after.”

The US has no real policy and has been pushing the idea of the two-state solution, said Krieg. “In this vacuum, in the absence of a clear strategy, it’s quite concerning that the Israelis will do whatever they want to do, and gradually, bit by bit, create a fait accompli on the ground that would see Palestinians basically being more confined and more restrained in their freedom of movement on the ground.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

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]]> Andrea Mazzarino <![CDATA[The Forever Wars, MAGA and the Loneliness of Anger]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218596 2024-05-17T03:19:43Z 2024-05-17T04:02:14Z ( Tomdispatch.com) – An acquaintance who hails from the same New Jersey town as I do spends his free weekends crawling through the woods on his stomach as part of a firearms training course, green camouflage paint on his face and a revolver in his hand. He considers this both a way to have fun in his free time and to prepare for the supposed threat from immigrants everywhere. (“You never know when something could happen,” he tells me.) He’s never gun-less. He brings his weapon to diners and dinners, to work meetings, and always on walks in his quiet neighborhood, where he grumbles “this is America!” whenever he hears Spanish spoken by neighbors or passersby. The implication, of course, is that the United States has become both less American and, to him, by definition, less safe in these years.

He spends his other weekends right-swiping on dating apps to try to find a new partner (he’s being divorced) and watching — yep, you guessed it! — Fox News. He can be counted among a growing population of White, rural Americans who are lonely, lack people to count on as confidants, and feel poorly understood, not to say excluded from this country (at least as they imagine it).

In 2019, even before the Covid pandemic made gatherings more dangerous, social scientists and public officials had already noted an uptick in Americans who would describe themselves as lonely — nearly three in five — many from rural areas and many of them older. Today, though schools, parks, and businesses have reopened, things don’t seem much better. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently highlighted the problem, claiming that loneliness was as dangerous to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases the risk of various illnesses like heart disease and raises quality of life issues like addiction, depression, the urge to commit suicide, and the odds of premature death.

Our poor relationships, in short, are killing us.

Loneliness and a Lack of Self-Control

I’m a clinical social worker who treats Americans from all walks of life, including serving troops and veterans affected by our post-9/11 wars. Since I live in a rural area just outside Washington, D.C., I can work with both city dwellers and farmers in a single day and so get a sense of what seems to shape the wellness (or lack thereof) of an increasingly sweeping demographic. A key insight in my discipline is the value of human connection, particularly relationships with people who understand your experience and can reflect it back to you. I’ve seen the transformative power of just such relationships and how, when people feel supported and understood, they start to venture out more often, even volunteer in their communities, and cease having angry meltdowns in public. Empathy, in other words, leads to motivation and self-control.

Its underbelly, however, is alienation, loneliness, and their close cousins, anger and fear. I’ve seen a lot of anger lately in people who, like my friend, rant about immigrants and carry guns on their errands in the name of self-defense, while all too often isolating themselves at home or in solitary activities. Both young adults and older ones tend to feel more isolated than the middle-aged, especially if they’re poor and live in rural areas like mine. And many of those who feel lonely and depressed are also angry.

Trump and His Band of Lonely Followers

I’m hardly the only one who’s noticed that former President Donald Trump’s die-hard supporters tend to fall exactly into that crew of people who live in rural America, are poorer, older, and (much like the Donald himself) socially isolated. As pollster Daniel Cox wrote shortly after the 2020 election, “The share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.”

As Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender also noted, Trump rallies build a sense of community among “mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck… retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children… Trump had… made their lives richer.” He noted how Trump supporters came to share homes and transportation, form relationships, and chant the same slogans (like “Build the wall”) in unison. I would add that those slogans can get so much uglier: “Fuck those dirty beaners” and “Fuck Islam” are anything but unheard of.

Buy the Book

Writing in the wake of the Nazi movement that murdered more than six million European Jews, the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that those people most likely to align themselves with totalitarian movements lack a sense of their own usefulness to society and feel excluded. In my own world, Arendt’s insight feels true when it comes to the Trump supporters I know in my family and community and know about in this country at large.

What Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders have done is take emotions like loneliness and channel them into a social movement. Key evangelical Christian figures like Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, or the Reverend Franklin Graham provided the initial ideological scaffolding by selling Trump as someone who could deliver policy wins on issues like abortion and prayer in schools.

Later, when Trump’s extramarital affairs and crude sexual remarks made it clear to such figures that he was not exactly a shining example of Christian morality, they needed a different tack. As journalist Tim Alberta has pointed out, evangelical leaders then began selling Trump as one of a line of unlikely Biblical figures (if not Jesus himself) who led the Israelites out of peril. In other words, they saw him as powerful exactly because he was an outsider.

Donald Trump, in short, has provided a world in which isolated Americans can be — yes! — alone together, while embracing hate in an unabashed and distinctly public fashion. In doing so, he’s made the experience of being a resentful outcast a transcendent one in twenty-first-century America. Trump’s rallies are invariably both loud and distinctly angry, like the motorcycle gangs with Confederate flags that roar past me on the rural highway I often take, or church services with MAGA preachers. These sorts of gatherings seem to reflect what French sociologist Emile Durkheim once called collective effervescence, or shared emotional experiences that transform isolated people into something larger (if also in this case angrier) than life.

The anger of the MAGA movement is transcendent. When people act on it, their bodies trigger the release of adrenaline, which can alter behavior. I saw this outside my home once when a White male driver who had crashed his speeding car into a guardrail then threatened a group of Spanish-speaking drivers he’d just passed, calling them “beaners” and kicking and punching the side of their car, even though they’d stopped to help him. Reason and self-control prove elusive at such moments in a world infused with racial slurs as solace for peoples’ woes.

The most striking recent example of how anger can find collective social expression was, of course, the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington that came all too close to giving us a new autocratic-style government founded on a sense of rootlessness, victimhood, and rage.

Our Loneliness Epidemic

Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many of us have been scratching our heads, wondering how to explain what gave rise to his self-styled band of lonely followers. Are they the victims of global capitalism and university systems that all too few can afford? Are they a cultural movement responding to demographic shifts involving immigration and low birth rates among White families? Personally, I’d like to see more discussion about the decisions many American voters and our representatives in Washington have made to support endless foreign wars with trillions of our tax dollars, instead of investing them in protecting the places here at home that would make community more possible for more of us.

After all, even a relatively modest percentage of our wildly overblown annual “defense” budget, now heading for the trillion-dollar mark, would have funded many of the types of programs Americans need in order to work less and live in cleaner, safer environments. Military spending and where it goes can be hard to understand but, for instance, the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped to start, has broken down our disastrous war expenses — all eight trillion-plus dollars of it — in this century. And now, as defense expert William Hartung points out, a significant part of the Pentagon budget is being spent to deter a hypothetical war with China, whose military isn’t configured to threaten American safety. Meanwhile, since 2018, at least tens of billions of dollars of classified defense contracts have been transferred to some of the world’s largest private tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, in addition to tech startups, to develop surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence, and advanced weapons systems.

President Biden’s original Build Back Better Act (voted down in the Senate in 2021) would have allocated $400 billion over six years to fund universal preschool, $150 billion to be applied to homecare for elderly and disabled Americans, and $200 billion in child tax credits. So, for less than the amount we spend on defense in just one year, taxpayer dollars could have made it possible for Americans with children to stay at work (at a time when more than one in four of us have had to leave jobs or school to avoid soaring child-care costs).

Today, the vast majority of nursing homes are short-staffed, but had we decided not to fund the disastrous Global War on Terror, we could have helped seniors get high-quality care in their own homes. And just think how much more money we would have been able to devote to cleaning up pollution, investing in safer public transportation and infrastructure, restoring state and national parks, and mitigating the worst effects of the Covid pandemic on schools, houses of worship, and businesses — not to mention American lives. And if so, just think how much less isolation, loneliness, and MAGAtivity there might have been.

An incident I witnessed at my rural home last summer epitomized what it means for so many of us to lack the necessary resources to relax and enjoy life with one another in reasonably good health. While smoke from Canada’s wildfires engulfed the D.C. area last June, my children and I watched as the young, Black grocery delivery driver we’d paid to bring us food arrived in his car. A child in a car seat squirmed in the back. He wore a tiny KN95 mask. Why wasn’t he at home or at a childcare facility while his father worked? What kind of quality of life did he have driving through hills and woods he would probably never have a chance to enjoy? I cringed with guilt. The quiet appearance of isolation and alienation in that car stood in marked contrast to the angry Whites at Trump rallies, who looked a lot like me.

In such an ongoing climate of isolation, anger, and underdevelopment, there seem few safe and accessible ways for Americans to gather peacefully anymore. Much has been made lately of antisemitic chants at the student protests against the Israel-Gaza war and the American weaponry eternally being shipped to Israel. As Columbia journalism professor Helen Benedict pointed out in the case of the protests at her university, a majority of the students couldn’t have been more peaceful and less MAGA-style angry as they advocated for a cease-fire and the release of Israeli hostages, even in the face of a disproportionate law enforcement response. Such protests say everything about the ability of disaffected young voters to claim space and connect around common values, even in the face of a militarized police response. And when you think of those 2,000-pound bombs our government has been sending to Israel to devastate Gaza, they should remind us of just how far afield our spending priorities have taken us from what we should truly value.

I do try to claim space that’s positive and community-based in my world, but it isn’t easy. Even going to our church on a Sunday sometimes feels precarious to me. I find myself worrying about what I would do to protect my small children if someone as disturbed as many in my community of origin entered with a gun and started shooting the place up. (And though that doesn’t happen often, it certainly does happen.)

I recently participated with a family friend in a race in deep blue Syracuse, New York, meant to benefit local community-based healthcare. As my young companion and I moved through the starting gate together, a large banner hung above us with a “Blue Lives Matter” flag on it, signaling support for law enforcement as a counter to Black Lives Matter.

As we ran, I couldn’t help noticing boarded-up public housing and abandoned schools, potholed roads and a visible (though supportive) armed police presence to help us make our way through city traffic. I wondered what it meant that an event as innocent as a race to benefit healthcare could just as easily have been mistaken for some sort of post-apocalyptic scene.

Yes, the degradation has been gradual, caused by the bleeding out of U.S. cities, thanks at least in part to the dozens of large and small armed conflicts we’ve fought so disastrously around the world in this century and our taxpayer dollars that have been funneled in that direction.

If only we were to reshape our priorities in enough time to vote in leaders who cared about peace, perhaps our democracy and the ideas that define it wouldn’t be coming apart at the MAGA seams. Wouldn’t it be great if we all could get out more and do so together?

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

]]> Juan Cole http://juancole.com <![CDATA[From Campus Climate to Middle East Climate Emergency]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218584 2024-05-16T05:17:32Z 2024-05-16T05:06:00Z Juan Cole: Israel, Gaza and Campus Protests, Part II on Sea Change Radio with Alex Wise. Transcript below.

Or listen here:

This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our discussion with Middle East expert Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. In this episode, we talk about some of the problems presented by certain trigger words when discussing Israel and Palestine and look at the handling of recent campus protests by police and college administrators. Then, we revisit part of our 2022 conversation with Prof. Cole to examine environmental and energy-related issues in the Fertile Crescent.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Juan Cole (JC) | 00:19 – I don’t see how anybody can investigate what’s been going on in the Palestinian West Bank since 1967 and not come to the conclusion that this is an apartheid arrangement.

Narrator | 00:33 – This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our discussion with Middle East expert Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. In this episode, we talk about some of the problems presented by certain trigger words when discussing Israel and Palestine and look at the handling of recent campus protests by police and college administrators. Then we revisit part of our 2022 conversation with Professor Cole to examine environmental and energy related issues in the Fertile Crescent.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:05 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Juan Cole. Juan is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Juan, welcome back to Sea Change. Radio.

Juan Cole (JC) | 01:26 – Thank you so much.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:27 – Let’s talk about the language for a second, because I think there are these trigger words like anti-Semitism and genocide, and Zionism, which can be in the eye of the beholder used either as a cudgel, a pejorative, but also a compliment. There’s a lot of wiggle room within these words, and I think they’re, they’re lightning rods for a lot of misunderstanding. For example, what you just said, if somebody is protesting what’s happening in Gaza, does that make them anti-Semitic, some people would say, yes. You talk about Trump. There’s that refuge that they constantly seek in victimization, right? He’s always the victim when he’s in court. He wants to be a martyr, even though he’s, he’s led one of the most privileged lives anyone can possibly consider. Antisemitism is also, it’s used to be victims when there’s not necessarily anybody being victimized in this sense, except that you happen to be Jewish and you disagree with me. It’s difficult because I want to respect the people who have had to deal with a lot more antisemitism than me, for example. But I can’t help but draw some parallels with the MAGA victimization and some of American Jewish people who are very quick to assign this term to people. And on the flip side, I think genocide is a trigger word, like apartheid was, it’s not necessarily inaccurate, but it’s a trigger word because people think, “oh, well, genocide is.. that’s the holocaust. That’s not war.” It definitely can incite, escalate the rhetoric, I think sometimes unfairly and to a level that I think is counterproductive.

Juan Cole (JC) | 03:17 – You’re right, these words, are not used in the same way by everybody. And the differences in nuance can cause problems. There are people who would say that Zionism is a settler colonial ideology, and that if you identify as a Zionist you’re identifying with a historic wrong. I think for a lot of American Jews who say they’re Zionists, what they mean is they’re proud of Albert Einstein, and they’re proud of the accomplishments of the Jewish people by saying they’re Zionists. They don’t mean that Itamar Ben-Gvir is allowed to invade a Palestinian’s property in the West Bank and usurp it.

AW | 04:00 – I think it’s such a hard word to generalize. I just have family members, for example, who might think they’re Zionists because they think that Israel has a right to exist versus somebody who thinks that Israel has a right to the whole region, or that American Jews have an obligation to go back and live in Israel. There’s a wide spectrum of that definition.

JC | 04:22 – Yes. It doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody. And you know, I’m a historian, so I I’m trying to be sensitive to nuance, but you get out there on social media or you’re in a campus protest, it’s not a place of nuance. And with regard to charges of apartheid and genocide frankly, these are legal matters. And , there’s a technical legal definition of these things. in international humanitarian law, I advise everybody just to go to the Rome statute. It’s online, it’s easily Googleable. And it’s kind of a summation of international humanitarian law that was drew on the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention and so forth. And it was finalized between 1998 and 2002, and about 124 countries have signed onto it. It became the charter for the International Criminal Court. So it has a section on apartheid. It has a section on genocide. Go and see what it says. So some people who get offended that, the current, Gaza campaign conducted by the Netanyahu government has been characterized by South Africa as a form of genocide don’t know what the word means in that context, because they, South Africa brought this action at the international Court of Justice, which is the court that was set up at the United Nations to adjudicate disputes among member nations. And it has a very specific set of meanings. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to kill millions of people. A genocide can be conducted by killing a relatively small number of people. It has to do with why you killed them, how you killed them, if you kill them because of who they are, that’s genocide. Likewise with apartheid, it’s not that everything has to be exactly as it was in South Africa. Apartheid has become a term of art in law, and there are some actions that a government takes disadvantaging people because of their race that that constitute a crime of apartheid. I don’t think, I don’t see how anybody can investigate what’s been going on in the Palestinian West Bank since 1967 and not come to the conclusion that this is an apartheid arrangement.

AW | 07:00 – It’s not inaccurate, but it becomes inflammatory because of the lack of curiosity, let’s say, or, or not being educated on the topic.

JC | 07:09 – Yeah. And as you said before, there’s a lot of tribalism so on all sides. So there are Jewish Americans who’ve grown up with a vision of Israel as a place that can do no wrong. It is the most moral army in the world, according to them. And I mean, frankly, they say silly things, and it becomes a form of ego inflation. They invest a lot of their, their own being in it. It’s a form of nationalism. You see Americans who do this, they won’t, won’t accept any criticism of anything the US government does.

AW | 07:48 – I think Trump has kind of changed that calculus for a lot of Americans. .

JC | 07:52 – Yes, exactly. Well, it’s nothing peculiar to Jewish Americans devoted to Israel, but it’s a wrong way of thinking, and it gets you into intellectual trouble. My country, right or wrong was a a saying that was put forward by an American, admiral [Stephan Decatur], I believe, in the 19th century, and which was rebuked by, right thinking, members of America’s, political establishment. We have to critique what our government does. There was a famous exchange by, I can’t remember who it was. It was a senator who called Ollie North, to testify before Congress. And North was one of those who thought that, you know, if the president does it, that it’s, it’s by de facto legal as, as Nixon said, and, whatever you have to do what you have to do for the United States. And so he was, Oliver North was taking money from Khomeini in Iran, selling them, illegally, selling them weapons in the Iran-Iraq War, and taking that money and giving it to right wing death squads in Central America, all off the books and explicitly beyond what Congress had authorized. And he was defending it. He defended what he did, and it was clearly unconstitutional. And if Senator said, you know, in the United States, critiquing the government is a good thing. [Sen. George Mitchell D-Maine said, “and in America disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.”] It’s, the foundation of our nation. So we have to be able to critique Netanyahu’s government. We have to be able to critique the US government. We have to be able to critique Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And if we don’t, then, then we end up with the Soviet Union. You know, we end up with gulags and and,totalitarianism. And I don’t know why anybody would want that. Certainly, I can’t understand why Jews would want that, because that doesn’t lead in a good direction for minorities.

(Music Break) | 10:08

AW | 10:48 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Juan Cole. He’s a professor of history at the University of Michigan. So as an academic, how do you feel when you see video of the professor in Emory University being pushed to the ground by the police and elsewhere? I mean, and it makes my blood boil, but I’m not a colleague of hers – you are.

JC | 11:10 – At Washington University in St. Louis also, there was an incident where a professor had ribs broken. Well, I think that it’s police brutality and it’s overreaction. I am an army brat, and I grew up in a family where my father was in the service. And I don’t approve of using insulting words for police. I respect our police but some of them are bullies who happen to get into uniform. Some of them are prone to overreacting. And, I think, that’s why you don’t call them. If somebody is used to dealing with bank robbers who might be armed and might hurt you, so the first thing you want to do is get them on the ground and make sure they’re not armed. That’s not the kind of person that you want to call on a college protest, because those are not dangerous situations. And, they shouldn’t be dealt with by police.

AW | 12:23 – You can see a, a whiplash effect against these rich college kids where you have the police force coming in with a carte blanche to bash some heads could be dangerous.

JC | 12:34 – Well, this is not new. I mean, we, we saw those kinds of fissures in the Vietnam War when a lot of police were angry at young people for not supporting the war and couldn’t see that it was a kind of genocide. You know, the United States probably killed between two and 5 million innocent civilians in Vietnam. And the police were, were angry that they were protesting against their own government. And class comes into it. But nowadays, in American University, and you talk elite universities, there are very substantial number of scholarship students. There are working class kids on that campus, and some of them are involved in these demonstrations as well. So if anybody thinks it’s just a matter of a elite, spoiled children, acting out, that would not be accurate, and it wouldn’t be fair to the students. So I think in some instances there has been police brutality and the police who undertook it should be blamed. They should be investigated. They’re acting, not as law enforcement, but as bullies. But I don’t think that’s typical of police. And I think the real problem is that the police have been put in an impossible situation–that they’ve been called to deploy the tools that they have, against people against whom those tools are not appropriate. You should never call the police in, on a nonviolent, non-disruptive event. And even the definition of disruption is open for debate because I think protests is inevitably to some extent disruptive. But I don’t know of any of these protests that have prevented people from learning or from taking their classes. And, I think, that the charges of such things are in every case that I know about overblown.

AW | 14:33 – So how does this play out, Juan, on campuses around the country? Most colleges are looking at commencement on the very near horizon. Do these protests peter out during the summer, or do you think they, they resume assuming that the aggression is still occurring come late August? Do we see a resumption of these protests around the country?

JC | 14:55 – Well, I can confidently predict that all the campuses in the country will be empty…

AW | 15:00 – going out on a limb there.

JC | 15:01 – …Within about a month, right? month, month and a half at most. We’re speaking in early May. So, wise administrations, and I think this is true of Michigan State University to some extent, the University of Michigan will just wait them out. There’s no reason to take a dramatic action as what is quite crazy, what, what Columbia did and what some of these other campuses are doing. There’s no student activism during the summer. And we’ll have to see what’s going on still in the fall. But, these are fast-moving developments. The US government can, I mean, I can’t imagine, frankly, that the, that the Biden administration wants this to go on very much longer. And already, here in early May, there’s just been an announcement of the Biden administration denying, some forms of ammunition to the Israeli military. And again, Israelis ran out of ammunition a long time ago. They’ve been being resupplied on a daily basis by the United States. And often Biden has gone around Congress because Congress should be appropriating, or making the decision about the use of these weapons. And Biden has just opened the storehouses to the Israelis. But in the same way that he has done that so far — he’s been a, very firm supporter of this campaign– he can also close it off, and I think to any extent that it’s starting to get in the way of his reelection, there will be pressure on him to wrap this thing up. And so I don’t feel comfortable speculating about what will be going on next fall. But I do think that the universities are being silly, frankly, to use such um, force against demonstrators when we’re, we’re coming towards the end of the semester, in any case, and they’ll all be gone. The, the University of Michigan has had its commencement. We,end early compared to most universities must have something to do with bringing in the spring wheat in the old days or whatever reason. We have our commencement in very early May. And there was a demonstration at the commencement. Students lifted Palestinian flags and marched out of the stadium. Nothing happened.

(Music Break) | 18:54

(2022 Interview) AW | 18:57 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Juan Cole. Juan is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and a longtime blogger informed comment is his website. Juan, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

JC | 19:11 – Thanks so much.

AW | 19:13 – You wrote recently, you’ve dived into giving us a, a glimpse of the various Middle Eastern countries and how they’re being affected by climate change. Why don’t we start with this region in Iran, Abadan and what they are encountering right now in terms of heat?

JC | 19:33 – There have been new records set in Abadan in southwestern Iran this summer with the temperatures getting up to 122 Fahrenheit. These are dangerous temperatures that we’re seeing in the region.

AW | 19:50 – And talk about their water usage in Iran’s decade long drought and how it’s affecting not just Abadan but the entire country.

JC | 20:00 – Iran really only has one big river system, and again, it’s in the southwest of the country, the Karun River and its tributaries ;and the former government of Iran under the Shah — the King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was overthrown in 1979 –while he was in power, he initiated a lot of dam works in hopes of creating artificial lakes that would yield irrigation possibilities, but then also to make hydroelectricity. And these monumental projects were pursued by the Shah, without much consultation with local people or much understanding of local conditions. And so some of the water now has been diverted to a big agricultural use and that has hurt Iraq where, where the water used to flow into from Iran. And now there’s this long, long term drought that we’re seeing that’s similar to the mega drought that we’re having in our American Southwest. And so major bodies of water like the Zayanderud, the major river that goes through the city of Isfahan have dried up that that river over which there is a historic ridge from the 16 hundreds does not exist at the moment. And farmers are not being able to irrigate as they used to from these streams and have demonstrated against the regime. So the government clearly is not dealing very well with with the drought. And it really threatens Iranian agriculture threatens people’s livelihoods food sources, and it has geopolitical implications because Iraq is furious that it’s not getting the water from the Iran anymore.

AW | 22:04 – Yes. I want to dive into that in a second and turn to Iraq, but just staying with Iran for a minute, what are the geopolitical consequences of this drought and possible agricultural shortfall in terms of embargoes and how western countries might approach negotiating with Iran moving forward? How dependent is Iran on foreign imports, for example?

JC | 22:32 – Yes. Well, Iran imports a lot of food. And most modern countries can no longer feed themselves. They’re, they’re part of a globalized, trade in commodities like grain. The US sanctions, which are very severe — they were called by Trump “he maximum pressure campaign” — have had a horrible effect on the lives of everyday people. But those sanctions don’t target food imports or medicine imports. The sanctions do weaken the earning power of people in Iran. And so there may be medicines they can’t afford as a result of the sanctions. And there may be certain kinds of food that they can’t afford, but the sanctions themselves don’t, don’t target that sector. I, I think the bigger political fallout from the drought and what I see as the Iranian government’s lack of ability to address it with engineering and administration, is that the rural sector could turn against the Iranian government. And the rural sector has been a pillar of this government. So, that’s bad news for Tehran.

AW | 23:49 – So let’s turn to Iraq for a moment, if you will. You, you wrote not that long ago on informed comment post titled 19 years ago, America really wanted Iraq’s Basra for its oil, which is now making it uninhabitable. Why don’t you explain, for those who aren’t familiar with Basra, this, this vital oil producing region and what it’s facing with climate change.

JC | 24:17 – Iraq’s major oil fields are in the south of the country around the riverine port of Basra. And, those oil fields had been under US sanctions after the Gulf War because Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, which was illegal in international law. And the US and the UNput sanctions on Iraq’s ex oil exports as a result. It’s my thesis that one of the reasons for the Iraq war was not so much that Bush and Cheney wanted to steal Iraq’s Petroleum. I think they just wanted to open it up for exploitation and allow American oil majors to get in there. And they couldn’t under the sanctions regime. And as long as Saddam Hussein was in power, I think there was very little likelihood that the Congress would take off those sanctions. And so I think it occurred to Dick Cheney in particular that were they to overthrow Saddam Hussein and have a new government, then the sanctions would go away and the oil would be available for exploitation, which is what happened. And Iraq is a major oil producer now and exports 4 million barrels a day, which is quite substantial.

AW | 25:50 – It’s a good opportunity for us to turn to desalinization efforts in the region. This leads to some unintended consequences with the handling of the, the byproduct of these plants. And I’m curious if this sludge that gets created by desal is affecting these river deltas that you’re talking about with Iraq and Iran at all.

JC | 26:18 – Yeah, not so much the river deltas, but the Persian Gulf itself, which is a big important body of water and very polluted with — oil tankers have spilled into it, and all kinds of runoff is there from agriculture and chemical plants. But yes the current technology that is being largely being used for desalinization has an environmental flaw which is that the way that the water is desalinized is, it’s taken up from the ocean and, distilled and that creates clean water when you recover the vapor. But then what’s left behind is the salt and the heavy metals and the more toxic elements in the water, and then they dump that back into the ocean. And if you do that consistently after a while, you create a dead zone where fish cannot live. And dead zones are very common throughout the world. There’s a big dead zone off of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s just from agricultural runoff. But but the desalinization plants also have this problem. And I believe it’s one of the reasons that when a desalinization plant was proposed for Huntington Beach, the population voted against it because they, they depend on their beach for tourism, and they don’t want a dead zone.

AW | 27:47 – Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and people can read his blog Informed Comment at JuanCole.com. Juan, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

JC | 28:01 – It’s great being here.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the New Orleans Klezmer All-stars, Bob Marley & the Wailers and Radiohead. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

]]> John Feffer http://fpif.org/ <![CDATA[The Race to End Fossil Fuel Production]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218579 2024-05-16T04:24:15Z 2024-05-16T04:06:51Z

Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it. Here are some exceptions.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.

Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.

Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.

Given all this Green rhetoric and crude (oil) action, it’s hard to find examples around the world where people are actually doing something to end fossil fuel production.

One of those places is Ecuador, which held a referendum last August about keeping oil under the ground of a certain plot of land in the Yasuní national park. “Yasuní is the most important park in Ecuador,” observes Esperanza Martínez, of Acción Ecológica in Ecuador. “It has been recognized as the most biodiverse region in the world, and it’s also home to many indigenous peoples.”

Thanks to the work of several collectives, Ecuadorans voted 54 to 37 percent in the August referendum to stop all operations to explore for and extract oil from Block 43—also known as ITT—within the park. Since the referendum, however, an election brought in a new president who has threatened to ignore the results of the referendum in order to raise funds to address the country’s security crisis.

Another example of effective action, this time at the international level, comes from the organizers of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), an effort to roll back fossil fuels at the global level, reports. Currently, 12 countries have endorsed the initiative, including a number of small island states but also, most recently, Colombia.

“Colombia is the first continental country to sign, with more than a century of petroleum extraction,” one of those organizers, Andrés Gómez O, one of the FFNPT organizers, points out. “So, this is a very important game-changer in the battle.”

One of the backers of the this Treaty, the one with the largest economy, is the U.S. state of California, which has been a leader in the United States in terms of expanding the renewable energy sector. There is so much energy generated by solar panels on sunny days in California that sometimes the net cost of that electricity drops below zero.

But as Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch points out, California is also the largest importer of oil from the Amazon. In 2020, the United States imported nearly 70 percent of the oil produced by Amazonian countries, mostly Ecuador but a small amount from Colombia and Peru as well. And California is the state that’s importing by far the largest amount of this oil. So, shutting down the production of fossil fuels in Ecuador and elsewhere also requires addressing the largest consumers of those resources.

These three Latin American experts on the challenge of ending the international addiction to fossil fuels presented their findings at an April 2024 seminar sponsored by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. They not only discussed the appalling state of affairs in the world of energy and environment but also explained how some people are actually doing something about it.

The Example of Yasuní


“Rigged,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v. 3, PS Express, By Juan Cole, 2024.

The effort to preserve the biodiversity of Yasuní in the Ecuadoran Amazon and keep out the oil companies has been going on for more than a decade. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa floated a plan for international investors to essentially pay Ecuador to keep its oil in the ground. When the international community didn’t pony up the $3.5 billion, Correa abandoned his plan and pledged to move forward with drilling.

That’s when Esperanza Martínez and others began to organize the first referendum to keep that oil in the ground. They collected 850,000 signatures, 25 percent more than was necessary to trigger a vote. But the National Electoral Council threw out the petition, arguing that 60 percent of the signatures were fakes.

“We spent ten years fighting in tribunals and legal proceedings,” Martínez relates. “And what the National Electoral Council did was a fraud. We could prove that it was a fraud.”

The August 2023 referendum was a dramatic vindication for the Yasunídos. “Five million Ecuadorans said that it was right to leave the crude oil underground,” she continues. “This was a campaign that had never been seen before in the country to stop oil companies from extracting oil from the ground and preventing the negative impacts on the health and environment. We won!”

In the same referendum, voters also decided to stop mining activities in the “El Chocó” biosphere reserve in the capital city of Quito. The campaign, “Quito sin mineria,” opposed mining projects in the Metropolitan District of Quito and the Chocó Andino region, which comprises 124,000 hectares.

But the referenda on Yasuní and El Chocó were not the only elections that took place on that day in Ecuador. Voters also went to the polls to vote for a new president. In a later second round, businessman Daniel Noboa won. Noboa had supported the Yasuní referendum, pointing out that a ban on extraction actually made economic sense since it would cost $59 a barrel to extract the oil, which would sell for only $58 a barrel on the international market. After his election, he said that he would respect the results.

But then, in January 2024, he reversed himself, calling instead for a year moratorium on the ruling. Ecuador, Noboa argued, needed the money to address its worsening security situation: a surge in narcotrafficking, a skyrocketing murder rate, and a descent into gang warfare.

The Yasunídos argue that even this perilous situation should not affect the results of the referendum. “In Ecuador, nature is the subject of rights,” Martínez says, referring to the fact that Ecuador was the first country in the world in 2008 to include the rights of nature in its constitution. “The discussion is no longer if this part of the park should be closed or not, but how and when.”

Looking at the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is a powerful symbol of biodiversity all around the world, even for people who can’t identify the countries through which the Amazon river flows.

“It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest,” reports Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch in Peru. “It houses up to 30 percent of the world species and contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. It is home to 410 indigenous nationalities, 82 of them living in isolation by choice, all of them helping in global climate regulation.”

But the Amazon region also contains an abundance of natural resources: timber, gold, and fossil fuels. “Any just transition requires ending the extraction of oil—and not only oil—from the Amazon,” Hoetmer continues. “It also requires ending the system that is behind this extraction.”

The degradation of the Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point. The estimate is that when deforestation reaches 20-25 percent of the biome, the area can’t recover. Hoetmer reports that deforestation is now approaching 26 percent.

Fossil fuel extraction is contributing to that deforestation is several ways. Millions of hectares are currently slated for oil and gas extraction. The drilling itself requires deforestation, but so do the new roads established to reach those sites. Those roads in turn open the region up to other forms of exploitation such as logging and agribusiness.

Then there are the oil spills that contaminate vast stretches of land. Several major pipeline breaks have dumped oil into the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Ecuadorian environmental ministry estimates that there have been over a thousand “environmental liabilities” and over 3,000 sites “sources of contamination.” Between 1971 and 2000, Occidental Petroleum dumped 9 billion gallons of untreated waste containing heavy metals into Peru’s rivers and streams, leading to a lawsuit against the company by indigenous Peruvians that resulted in an out-of-court settlement. Colombia’s oil industry has been involved in over 2,000 episodes of environmental contamination between 2015 and 2022.

Shutting down oil and gas production in the Amazon requires looking beyond the producers to the investors and the consumers. California, since it absorbs nearly half of all Amazon oil exports, is a major potential target. On the financing side, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude campaign is working to stop new financial flows into, for instance, Petroperú, the country’s state-run oil company. Campaigners are targeting major banking institutions in the Global North, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America. Community-led protests have taken place in the United States, Chile, and Germany. By raising the costs of investment into Amazonian extraction, campaigners are pushing lenders to remove Amazonian oil from their portfolios.

Another strategy is strengthening territorial sovereignty in indigenous lands. “One of the processes that gives us hope is this proposed proposal to reconstruct the Amazon based on strengthening the self-governance of Amazonian people,” Hoetmer notes. “The notion of Autonomous Territorial Governments started with the Wampis peoples but has now expanded to over 10 indigenous nations. The Autonomous Territorial Governments defend their territories  against illegal mining as well as land invasions and fossil fuel extraction, demand and build intercultural education, and negotiate public services with the Peruvian state.”

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty

Frontline communities particularly those from the Global South are paying the highest price of fossil fuel exploitation and climate change, yet they are the least responsible. All over the world and for decades, frontline struggles have shown leadership in resisting the plundering of their territories. Today, for many communities around the world—and for some whole countries—continued fossil fuel extraction and climate change represent an existential crisis.

In response to this crisis, an early proposal came from officials and civil society leaders in the Pacific for a moratorium and binding international mechanisms specifically dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in the Pacific. In 2015, in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change issued from the Pacific Islands Development Forum Third Annual Summit held in Suva, Fiji, decision-makers called for: “a new global dialogue on the implementation of an international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, particularly the construction of new coal mines, as an urgent step towards decarbonising the global economy.”

In 2016, following a summit in the Solomon Islands, 14 Pacific Island nations discussed the world’s first treaty that would ban new coal mining and embrace the 1.5C goal set at the Paris climate talks.

Initiated by island countries most at risk from rising waters, the movement for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has now been endorsed by a dozen countries and more than 2,000 civil society organizations as well as a number of cities and states like California and more than 100 Nobel laureates.

“Our treaty is based on other treaties that have talked about nuclear weapons, mines, and gasses like the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone-depleting substances,” relates Andrés Gómez O.

“What’s clear is that we don’t have time for business as usual,” the FFNPT organizers argue. “The International Energy Agency determined that there needs to be a decline of fossil fuel use from four-fifths of the world’s energy supply today to one-fifth by 2050. The fossil fuels that remain will be embedded in some products such as plastics and in processes where emissions are scarce.”Critical to this process is action by richer countries. “Countries that are better off economically can support other countries to step away from the fossil fuel system,” Gómez continues.

A key strategy, he adds, would be “the Yasunization of territories.” He explains that “this means, first, making this park a utopia for the country. Then we localize this approach in different provinces in Ecuador where we say, okay, in this province we have our own Yasuní.” This local approach has had some precedents. The Ecuadoran city of Cuenca, for instance, held a referendum in 2021 banning future mining project.

The treaty appeals not only to the environmental movement. By connecting the struggle to the experiences of local communities—the violence associated with extraction, the cancer cases, the oil spills—“we are not just interested in convincing the already existing movements,” he says, “We also have to move the whole society.”

He concludes succinctly: “We are not just about saying no—to fossil fuels, to extractivism. We are about saying a very big yes: to life!”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

]]> The Conversation <![CDATA[Israel’s Assault on Rafah risks making Victory against Hamas more Elusive]]> https://www.juancole.com/?p=218577 2024-05-16T03:34:45Z 2024-05-16T04:02:24Z By Ben Soodavar, King’s College London and Rhiannon Emm, King’s College London | –

(The Conversation) – The prospect of a ceasefire agreement, which Hamas claimed it had been offered earlier this month, was a source of optimism for Gazans seeking respite from the war. That sense of jubilation was short-lived. According to mediators in Qatar, the talks have lost steam.

And with Israel pressing ahead with its new military offensive in the southern border city of Rafah and parts of northern Gaza where Hamas has regrouped, there is no indication that this conflict has an expiry date.

Israel’s offensive in Rafah, where more than 1 million displaced Palestinians are seeking refuge, is growing more intense. Israeli tanks have advanced further into the eastern part of the city, reaching some residential districts. An estimated 500,000 civilians have now fled this area of fighting, and the Palestinian death toll has topped 35,000 – a number that includes both civilians and fighters according to the Gaza health authority.

On May 14, as Israel celebrated its day of independence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the country and warned that the war would not stop “until the Hamas monsters are eradicated”. His remarks are being met with frustration by even Israel’s staunchest of allies. The US, for example, has warned that the new offensive could lead it to suspend the transfer of some weapons to Israel.

Increased diplomatic pressure, rising military casualties and the continued problem of Israeli hostages in Gaza have not been enough to deter Netanyahu from ordering the new offensive. But there is a lot to lose by continuing with this strategy.

It not only risks perpetuating the conflict, but could also make an Israeli victory over Hamas more elusive. External pressure from the US and EU will continue, and may come to limit the extent to which Israel can pursue its military objectives.

This leads us to question the psychological conditions that govern Netanyahu’s war policy. We argue that Israel is locked in a “loss dilemma”. This concept describes a process where actions taken to overcome state anxiety by choosing to avoid one kind of loss (military failure in eradicating Hamas) creates a new anxiety about suffering another one (losing domestic political standing).

The result of this has probably influenced Netanyahu’s war cabinet to pursue its current policy, and perhaps explains the disregard for civilian casualties and Israel’s waning international reputation.

Internal pressures

The trauma of potentially losing the Israelis that are still held captive by Hamas is a reason to commit to a ceasefire, especially when Netanyahu has been pressured by the Israeli public to bring them home. Israel says 128 hostages remain unaccounted for in Gaza, at least 34 of whom are presumed dead. But the internal politics of Israel’s war coalition has prevented this.

Al Jazeera English Video: “‘Israeli actions in Gaza amount to genocide,’ says former PLO legal advisor” (Added by IC).

Netanyahu has positioned himself as a leader that will “deliver security and retribution for Israel”. His grand claim of a military victory in Gaza places his political standing directly at risk of being undermined. Any sense of a U-turn on his pledge to secure Israel’s borders will make it difficult for him to remain in power.

This dilemma is further compounded by the pressures that are being put on him by the ultra-nationalist contingent of his political coalition, which he currently relies on for political power. Over the course of the war, national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s hardline position has drawn support from some on the right of Netanyahu’s Likud party.

At a recent rally, Ben-Gvir argued that Israel needs to “encourage the voluntary departure of Gaza’s residents” so that Israelis can resettle in the “holy land” of Gaza.

One of the fundamental dynamics at play here is the question of who may be at home in the “homeland”. Gazans, in being at home in the Gaza strip, are seen by Israel as constituting a fundamental security threat. This logic suggests that Palestinians inhabiting Gaza will always produce Hamas fighters, and therefore any Gazan represents a potential threat to the very existence of Israel.

Clearly, this is about loss, not least the historical loss of the Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005. However, as tensions continue to rise within Israel about the conduct of the war, it is becoming harder and harder for Israel to maintain a singular image of who may be at home within that state. As plurality becomes politically poisonous, more primitive identities are used as the foundation for who is legitimately allowed to call Israel and the land it occupies home.

This loss dilemma, which underscores the internal dynamics of Israeli politics at present, has influenced Netanyahu to commit his army to not only rid Gaza of Hamas fighters but to pursue a policy that sees an expansion of Israel’s borders.

Time will tell whether Netanyahu ultimately acquiesces to such calls by the ultra-nationalist members of his coalition. But one thing that is certain is that the current strategy won’t lead to total victory for Israel and will instead ensure the conflict continues for years to come.

Palestinians will be firm on maintaining control of the Gaza Strip and will want to avoid their homeland being taken over by Israeli settlers.The Conversation

Ben Soodavar, Researcher, Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Rhiannon Emm, PhD Candidate in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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