(The Conversation) – The amount of aid reaching Gaza has fallen to an 11-month low according to Israeli figures. And the hijacking, by an armed Palestinian gang, of a convoy of 109 trucks on November 16 has exacerbated the situation. Food prices are soaring and parts of the enclave, where Israeli troops are battling Hamas fighters, are believed to be already experiencing famine.

The administration of outgoing US president, Joe Biden, has been consistent in its political and military support for Israel and its war against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and of course Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Iran. But all the while Biden has urged moderation.

Speaking at the G20 this week, Biden repeated his message that “Israel has the right to defend itself after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust” – but he stressed that “how it defends itself – even as Hamas cruelly hides among civilians – matters a great deal”.

Judging by the first appointments made by the US president-elect Donald Trump to his foreign policy team, the tone of US support for Israel is likely to change.

Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has long been associated with the Christian evangelical right, which wholeheartedly supports Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank.

Huckabee made his position clear in a 2017 interview with CNN, saying: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria [the territory’s biblical name]. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

The proposed secretary of state, Republican senator Marco Rubio, is on the record as being against a ceasefire in Gaza. He told journalists recently that “I want them [Israel] to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals who did horrifying crimes.”

A month out from the election, on October 5, Biden appeared at a White House press briefing and commented on speculation that Netanyahu’s apparent unwillingness to agree a ceasefire was motivated by US politics: “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know – but I’m not counting on that,” he said, adding that: “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none,” he said. “And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”

Netanyahu must view the election result and Trump’s selection of strong supporters of his government as vindication of an approach that now sees Israel, militarily at least, in the ascendant. Israel’s offensive in northern Gaza shows no sign of slowing. And, as more and more people are forced southwards, a new motive for the continuing military operation appears to be coming into sight.

Pressure from the right

Many on the political right – including members of Netanyahu’s government – are now advocating for reoccupation of the north of the Gaza strip by Jewish settlers. These settlers regard the 2005 decision to evacuate the Gaza strip not just as a strategic mistake, but as “hillul hashem”, a blasphemy against God.

And, just as IDF outposts in the West Bank have often been the used as the sites for the construction of settlements, many now suspect a similar pattern will be repeated in at least the northern half of the Gaza strip as its 2 million Palestinian inhabitants are compressed ever more in an ever decreasing space.

For the two most notable Religious Zionists in Netanyahu’s government, interior minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, the election of Trump is the gift that will keep on giving. For them and their power base, full annexation of what they refer to as “Judea and Samaria” remains a mitzvah – a commandment that must be fulfilled if the long-awaited messianic era is to be hastened and their vision of Zionism realised.

small> “Finishing the Job,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

In Trump, Smotrich and Ben Gvir believe they have the international backing to achieve this – regardless of the wider consequences for Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic. For most observers, full annexation would effectively mark Israel as an apartheid state – unless full citizenship with equal political rights were to be conferred on all Palestinians. This is unlikely.

Netanyahu’s calculations

Netanyahu knows this. But the changing dynamics of Israel’s domestic politics means he is no longer so reliant on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The addition to his coalition of a small bloc under Gideon Sa’ar has given him a greater margin of support.

Recent polls also show his approval rating has rallied considerably since Israel’s incursion into Lebanon to take on Hezbollah. Along with a recent fillip in his poll ratings and an opposition that remains divided, Netanyahu appears to be in an unassailable position.

Still, he also knows that Trump is a transactional president elected on a platform to end US involvement in foreign conflicts. Netanyahu also knows that the Gaza conflict has – for now at least – put paid to any prospect of the normalisation of relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, something that Trump counts as one of the foreign policy achievements of his first administration.

Calling Israel’s military actions in Gaza genocidal, Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman has made any moves towards a formal peace deal with Israel conditional on meaningful steps being taken by the Jewish state and its ally the US towards Palestinian statehood.

Netanyahu will know that any move in that direction would fracture his coalition. But he will also suspect that the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies will try to leverage the influence they also have in Washington to put diplomatic pressure on Trump.

Reading Trump’s intentions is not for the fainthearted. But even so, Netanyahu will think the incoming US president is likely to afford him a period of political grace to conclude his wars. Much, of course, remains uncertain. But as ever it will be the Palestinian people who bear the heaviest burden.

As well as lacking effective leadership in Gaza or on the West Bank, they can look forward to scant support from the Arab world. Now they face an Israeli premier in victory mode and the prospect of a US president prepared to go all the way to support him.

Clive Jones, Professor of Regional Security, Durham University

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

In May 2023, renowned Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates spent ten days in the West Bank and Israel, where he spent half his time with Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation.

Going to Palestine was “a huge shock to me”, he told the New York Times. Coming back, he felt, as he told US journalist Peter Beinart, “a responsibility to yell” about what he’d seen – which he describes as apartheid and compares to the segregated Jim Crow South in the United States.

As he was writing his new book, The Message, the October 7 Hamas attacks happened, followed by the ongoing war in Gaza. He doesn’t cover these events in the book, though he has talked about them in interviews, including one in which he described the decision not to allow a Palestinian state legislator to speak at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Kamala Harris as “deeply inhumane”.

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The Message – Ta-Nehisi Coates. Penguin Random House. Click here to Buy.

Coates is among the most celebrated and accomplished writers in the US. He is also, importantly, a Black writer in a world still dominated by white Americans. He first grabbed attention with a 2014 essay on America and slavery in The Atlantic, titled “The Case for Reparation”. Subsequently, he has written five books, including a novel, The Water Dancer, set on a Virginia slave plantation. He was even hired to write a Superman movie.

Coates has deliberately cast himself as part of the legacy of Black American writing, most notably through lyrical language that echoes the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. After reading his memoir about the experience of being Black in America, Between The World and Me, fellow writer Toni Morrison said she regarded him as Baldwin’s heir.

Slavery, censorship and culture wars

The Message is a series of three essays directed at Coates’ writing students at Howard University. In it, he chronicles three very different journeys. The final essay, about his trip to Israel–Palestine, takes up almost half the book.

His first trip is to Senegal, in search of the origins of Afro-American slavery. In the second, he visits a small town in South Carolina where there have been attempts to ban Between The World and Me from being taught in schools. Not surprisingly, all three sections are haunted by his awareness of racism and colonialism. His name, Ta-Nehisi, is a deliberate reference to the ancient Egyptian term for the kingdom of Nubia, sometimes translated as “land of the Blacks”.

Coates recognises that Western defence of slavery depended on defining the African as subhuman, just as Western colonialism justified itself with an ideology of racism. In Senegal, he visits the island of Goree, for four centuries the largest slave trading port on the African coast, now a world heritage site.

But like other African-American writers who have gone to Africa in search of their roots, he recognises that he is an outsider: “We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”

These thoughts echo again when Coates struggles to come to terms with Israel, where both Palestinians and Israelis hold deeply felt emotional connections to the land, which makes compromise difficult.

In Chapin, South Carolina, teacher Mary Wood faced calls for her firing for teaching Between the World and Me, and pushed back against an attempt to ban her teaching it. The Message is frustrating in its lack of detail about the case, but Woods’ battle with the local school board has been widely reported as part of ongoing conflict within the US over censorship of books dealing with racial and sexual injustice. Coates is too focused on the fate of his own book to stand back and analyse the bigger conflict it represents.

America’s culture wars, which are echoed in Australia, are essentially battles over how to define a national identity – or, as Coates writes, to “privilege the apprehension of national dogmas over the questioning of them”. Our attack on “black armband” history (as named by Geoffrey Blainey in 1993) is paralleled by right-wing American denials of the centrality of slavery to the creation of the US, and debates over “critical race theory”.

Coates: Israel is not a democracy

Coates’ account of his trip to Palestine has been the most controversial aspect of his book. Significantly, he begins this section with an account of his visit to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

His sense of the horrors recorded there makes his account of Israeli occupation and dispossession of Palestinians more poignant. Reflecting on the memorial, Coates writes: “Every time I visit a space of memory dedicated to this particular catastrophe I always come away thinking that it was worse than I thought, worse than I could ever imagine.”

Aware of the racism that surrounds him as a Black American, Coates can imagine himself as both Palestinian and Israeli. This generosity of imagination does not prevent critical analysis. His accounts of life in the occupied West Bank underline the reality that Israel has imposed a regime that is effectively based on the subordination and dispossession of Palestinians – and a deliberate attempt, he writes, to deny any possibility of a genuine two-state solution.

The Israeli lobby is outraged by claims Israel has created an apartheid regime: many see the term as motivated by anti-Semitism. This is the implicit message of much of the pro-Israeli lobby, as summed up in the demands that Australian universities adopt a particular definition of anti-Semitism.

The strength of Coates’ analysis is that he minimises neither the reality of anti-Semitism, nor that of Israel’s domination of Palestinians. Defenders of Israel struggle to accept that once-persecuted people can become the persecutors. Yet, as Coates writes, “There was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing”.

In Coates’ view, Israel is not a democracy. To claim otherwise, he believes, is to deny the reality of Israel’s effective control of seven million Palestinians living on the West Bank and Gaza, who are now subject to dispossession and destruction in ways that resemble the worst carnage of World War II.

It is extraordinary that our politicians who can extol the virtues of multiculturalism remain blind to the realities of Israeli occupation, and indeed to the growing assertion of Jewish supremacy over those Israeli residents, around 25% of whom are not Jewish.

“Those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world,” he writes. “And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population.”

Coates comes closest to explaining this paradox in his account of a plaque in Jerusalem that bears the name of a former US ambassador and proclaims “the unbreakable bond” between the two nations. This bond, it reads, is based on the shared ideals of the Bible, language that reverberates among many evangelical Christians today.

For millions of Americans, criticism of Israel becomes criticism of the US itself. The strength of the Israeli lobby in the US is enormous. The Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spent over 100 million dollars this year, helped at least 318 American politicians win their seats in the recent US elections.

Not surprisingly, Palestinian voices go largely unheard in the US. Coates points to a study that demonstrates over a 50-year period ending in 2019, only 2% of opinion pieces discussing Palestine had Palestinian authors. (The study covered four major mainstream publications, including the New York Times and Washington Post.)

Honesty and egocentrism

Many reviews of The Message have been critical. Paul Sehgal in The New Yorker described it as “a public offering seemingly designed for private ends, an artefact of deep shame and surprising vanity which reads as if it had been conjured to settle its author’s soul”. I think the book is stronger than Sehgal suggests.

The Message is written as a conversation with Coates’ writing students, and his growing realisation that “becoming a good writer would not be enough”. He acknowledges his own limits: “I had gone to Palestine, like I’d gone to Senegal, in pursuit of my own questions and thus had not fully seen the people on their own terms.”

In fact, though, he did pay attention. The section on Palestine includes conversations with both Palestinians and Israelis, as well as references to the voluminous literature on the conflict. (Unfortunately, he does not include footnotes or a bibliography.) Since the publication of this book, Coates has become an active advocate for Palestinian rights. He recognises he has come late to this debate.

Yes, as his own words suggest, there is egocentrism in The Message. But I read it as an honest attempt to think through how a writer can best influence the world when confronted by slaughter and inhumanity. The Message is an unashamedly personal book. At times, it reads as if the author were in analysis, working through the privileges and burdens of being a successful writer and intellectual.

At several points, he refers to himself as both a writer and a steward, with an obligation to speak out about injustice to others. He writes of his books as his children, which “leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions”. (He hints that of his five “children”, his favourite is his novel, The Water Dancer.)

I only wish the ardent defenders of Israel who occupy our parliament could be persuaded to read Coates’ book. At least it might persuade them that criticism of Israel’s refusal to recognise the claims of Palestinians is not equivalent to anti-Semitism.

Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University

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

(The Conversation) – Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis.

While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.

Orbital was written during lockdown when the meaning of home (for those lucky enough to have one) changed forever. There’s a sense in which Harvey’s six astronauts return us to that moment when our homes became prisons and we were forced to contemplate the global effects of a virus that had no respect for national boundaries.

On the International Space Station, borders are only visible on the side of the Earth that is under night and only really as clusters of artificial light which shows cities. Rivers are “nonsensical scorings … like strands of long fallen hair” and “the other side of the world will arrive in 40 minutes” blurring it all.

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Russian cosmonaut Anton contemplates US astronaut Michael Collins’ iconic photograph of Apollo 11 leaving the surface of the Moon in 1969 with the Earth beyond. He thinks “no Russian mind should be steeped in these thoughts”, but he is captivated by where the people are in the photograph. Is Collins the only human not to appear in it? Or is he the only human presence we can be sure of?

Shaun has a postcard of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, sent to him by his wife. The painting’s complex composition has been said to create a unique illusion of reality where it is unclear who the subject is. Is it the viewer? The royal child? King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain who are depicted on the wall?

“Welcome,” Shaun’s wife writes on the postcard, “to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.” The Italian astronaut Pietro solves the labyrinth with the simple observation that the dog at the child’s side must surely be the subject of the painting. “[It is] the only thing… that isn’t slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities.” Humans, Shaun concludes, are no big deal.

While we gaze at ourselves and try to “ascertain what makes us different” from a dog, which as French theorist Michel Foucault also observed is the only object in the painting that has no function other than to be seen, it reminds us that our differences are negligible. As Shaun concludes, we are also animals fighting for survival.

In 16 orbits, the Earth on its tilted axis delivers a succession of landmasses that the astronauts can name but are de-familiarised by distance and momentum. The Pyramids, the New Zealand fjords, and a desert of dunes are “entirely abstract [and] … could just as easily be a closeup of one of the heart cells they have in their Petri dishes”. Japanese astronaut Chie’s laboratory mice – the canaries in the coal mine of their endeavour – finally learn to negotiate micro gravity “rounding their shoebox module like little flying carpets”. And, on a spacewalk, British astronaut Nell looks back at the “vast spread of the space station and, in this moment it, not earth, feels like home”.

This disassociation from the planet is common among returned astronauts who often report a feeling of closer affinity with their spacecraft. Harvey’s evocative prose describes the tension between a longing for the planet they think of as “mother” and the ambition to leave home forever. At one point Shaun wonders why they are trying to go where the universe doesn’t want them when “there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does.” But later he expresses frustration with the necessity to orbit two hundred and fifty miles above the earth. The moon, he reckons, is just the start.

What Harvey’s novel so skilfully exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis. The future of humanity is written, Shaun tells Pietro, “with the gilded pens of billionaires”. So while an unprecedented weather event threatens life below, the six astronauts and cosmonauts are rigorously documenting “their own selves”, taking “blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples” and monitoring “heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns” to satisfy some “grand abstract dream of interplanetary life” away from Earth.

Orbital is a slim volume of 135 pages but the economy of Harvey’s writing manages to convey a whole universe of meaning. She taps the contemporary zeitgeist of planetary insecurity alongside the span of history from Las Meninas to the spectacle of astronauts “imagineered, branded and ready”, prepared for consumption by “Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney.” “They’re humans,” writes Harvey, “with a godly view that’s the blessing and also the curse.”

Hollywood aside, I was reminded more of John Carpenter’s budget film Dark Star where bored astronauts on an interminable mission to destroy unstable planets are fixated on their dwindling supply of toilet paper. There is a sense, in Orbital, that the mundanity of decay is already overwhelming the spectacle of orbit. The module is “old and creaky” and “a crack has appeared”. The International Space Station is, after all, due to be decommissioned in 2031. Harvey has written a novel for the end of the world as we know it. The hope it offers is that we might learn to know the earth differently, while we can.

Debra Benita Shaw, Debra Benita Shaw is Reader in Cultural Theory in the School of Architecture and Visual Arts, University of East London

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

(The Conversation) – The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was a blow for education across the country – but especially for girls and women. Since then, the Taliban’s leaders have outlawed education for girls after sixth grade, expanded religious seminaries known as madrasas ninefold and reintroduced corporal punishment in schools.

Now, the Taliban are continuing their assault on education for both boys and girls by changing the curriculum in grades 1-12. They have already revised textbooks up to eighth grade, and they’re on track to finish the rest within months. After completion, the revised curriculum will go up for approval by the Taliban’s supreme leader and will likely be followed by swift implementation. The process is straightforward. The supreme leader of the Taliban controls education policy – including the curriculum. Once submitted to him, he has no reason to reject or delay the implementation.

As an educational policy scholar who pushed for educational progress in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, I believe these changes echo the tactics of the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980s to impose an ideology through textbooks. They also reflect the stifling climate of the 1990s, which promoted violence and suppressed critical thinking in education. By controlling education, the Taliban aims to instill their totalitarian and extremist religious-based ideology in young minds, ensuring their grip on power for generations to come.

The curriculum changes

Afghanistan’s education system is centralized, meaning all schools follow a single curriculum. The current textbooks are the result of two decades of reforms that followed the country’s recovery from the Soviet invasion and civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 2001, when the Taliban’s last regime fell, the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with international developmental agencies, undertook a critical revision of the national curriculum. This initiative aimed to make curriculum and textbooks inclusive, nondiscriminatory and free from promotion of violence – a departure from previous textbooks that included illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers and automatic weapons.

In the last decade before the Taliban regained power, the Ministry of Education was still attempting to reform curriculum to focus on students’ personal and economic growth. Unfortunately, the ministry never completed the reforms.

Embed from Getty Images
Afghan school boys attend their first class following the start of the new academic year, at a private school in Khost on March 20, 2024. Schools in Afghanistan opened for the new academic year on March 20, the education ministry said, with girls banned from joining secondary-level classes for the third year in a row. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Within a few months after their takeover in August 2021, senior Taliban leaders criticized the previous education system and curriculum, saying it was brainwashing Afghan youth and weakening religious values. They called for a reeducation campaign.

Since then, the Taliban have been revising the curriculum and aggressively rewriting textbooks for grades 1-12. This is based on 26 recommendations from their education commission. Some of the changes approved by the commission include:

1.) Removing subjects like formal art, civil education and culture. Instead, schools are increasing time spent on religious studies.

2.) Removing content about human rights, women’s rights, equal rights, freedoms, elections and democracy.

3.) Removing all images of living beings from textbooks, including pictures of humans, animals, sports and anatomy. The Taliban believe that only God creates living beings, and producing or distributing images of God’s creation is prohibited.

4.) Adding religious material to the curriculum that enforces Taliban narratives. This includes teachings that justify violence against those who resist or oppose the Taliban’s views.

5.) Shaping student behaviors to fit the Taliban’s vision of society, similar to what they defined in recent vice and virtue laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, among other rules.

6.) Requiring schools to teach and assess students on “emirate studies,” which glorify Taliban leaders and their history by characterizing the Taliban takeover as a defeat of secular values, including equal rights, civil society and democracy.

The Taliban have also banned women from studying abroad. In addition, they have prohibited the sale, purchase and reprinting of more than 400 science and philosophy books and confiscated at least 50,000 books on democracy, social and civil rights, art, literature and poetry from publishing houses, bookstores and public libraries.

A 2023 Human Rights Watch report noted an increase in corporal punishment in schools. Even some teachers of nonreligious subjects, like math and science, now have to pass the religious tests to remain employed.

Beyond shaping thought processes, the Taliban aim to influence students’ actions. Through rigid rules and corporal punishments – including humiliation, beating, slapping and foot whipping – they seek to produce immediate behavioral changes that reflect their desired norms. Their ultimate goal is to cultivate individuals who embody the regime’s values and ideologies.

Consequences for Afghan students – and the world

During their first regime from 1995-2001, the Taliban used textbooks with biased content that promoted violent jihad. For example, the alphabet taught to first graders included teachings like “J” stands for jihad and “M” for mujahideen – referring to Islamic guerrilla fighters.

They increased religious education to 50% of the curriculum and banned art, music and photography. They deemed music against God’s will, according to their interpretation of Sharia.

As a result, academic freedom vanished. Student enrollment dropped. Families lost trust in schools, and many teachers left the profession, leading to the eventual collapse of the education system in the 1990s.

The Taliban are threatening to do the same today with their latest curriculum changes. Schools may turn into indoctrination centers instead of places for real learning. I fear that the altered curriculum could breed mistrust in public education. Furthermore, the Taliban removed the 2008 law that made school mandatory. As a result, many parents may pull their kids from schools again.

The ideologically driven curriculum also raises international concerns and has already led to cuts in foreign aid. Donors won’t support institutions that promote discriminatory ideologies. This is straining an already vulnerable education system, threatening its survival.

Ultimately, the Afghan people will bear the brunt of these policies, but the effects could spill beyond the country’s borders and impact the world.

Enayat Nasir, Doctoral Research Assistant in Educational Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York

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

(The Conversation) – Two years ago, when the curtain fell on the COP27 summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, developing nations on the frontline of climate change had something meaningful to celebrate.

The creation of a new fund for responding to loss and damage was agreed after a hard-fought diplomatic effort, spearheaded by a group of small island developing states (sometimes known as the Sids). The fund would provide much needed support for climate-vulnerable nations faced with a spiralling human and financial toll from sea-level rise, extreme temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and intensifying floods and storms.

Yet two years on, the world’s wealthiest nations – also the largest carbon emitters – are still dragging their feet. They’ve not followed up their pledges with anywhere near the finance required.

Some nations, particularly the 39 Sids, which include places like Barbados, Grenada, Fiji and Vanuatu, are uniquely vulnerable to climate change and are already paying the price.

Sky-high ocean temperatures created the conditions for Hurricane Beryl to develop in July this year, as the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane on record in the Caribbean. As oceans warm up, climate science tells us that this rapid intensification is becoming more common.

The island nation of Fiji, best known as a tropical paradise, has experienced a frightening series of storms over recent years, linked to climate change. Cyclone Winston in 2016, one of the most intense on record, caused widespread flooding and lead to the loss of 44 lives.

This episode reduced Fiji’s GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points. According to the Asian Development Bank, ongoing losses from climate change could reach 4% of Fiji’s annual GDP by 2100, as higher temperatures and more extreme weather hold back growth.

This isn’t an isolated problem. Tropical cyclones and hurricanes have long battered small islands, but what is new is how often the most extreme storms and floods are happening, as well as our improved ability to measure their economic effects.

Direct and indirect impacts

Our latest research looked at extreme weather events affecting 35 small island developing nations. We first collected information about the direct consequences of these extreme weather events: the damaged homes, the injured people, and the bridges that must be rebuilt.

We then looked at how these events have affected GDP growth and public finances. These changes are not felt immediately, but rather as the economy stalls, tourism dries up, and expensive recovery plans inhibit spending in other areas.

In all, from 2000 to 2020, these direct and indirect impacts may have cost small island states a total of US$141 billion. That works out to around US$2,000 per person on average, although this figure underplays just how bad things can get in some places. Hurricane Maria in 2017 caused damage to the Caribbean island of Dominica worth more than double its entire GDP. That amounted to around US$20,000 per person, overnight. Almost a decade later, the country is still struggling with one of the largest debt burdens on earth at over 150% of GDP.

Of these huge aggregate losses across all the small island development states, around 38% are attributable to climate change. That’s according to calculations we made based on “extreme event attribution” studies, which estimate the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions influenced extreme weather events.

“Fiji Superstorm,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

What is clear is that small island economies are among the worst affected by severe weather. These island states have three to five times more climate-related loss and damage than other states, as a percentage of government revenues. That’s true even for wealthier small island states, like the Bahamas and Barbados, where loss and damage is four times greater than other high-income countries. For all small island nations, the economic impacts will increase, with “attributable” losses from extreme weather reaching US$75 billion by 2050 if global temperatures hit 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Our research helps us to see how far short the richer nations driving climate change are falling in their efforts to both curb emissions and to compensate the nations harmed by their failure to prevent climate change.

Developed countries need to pay up

One of the key discussions at the forthcoming COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be the “new collective quantified goal”. This is the technical name to describe how much money wealthy countries will need to contribute to help vulnerable nations to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

That overall goal must also include a target to finance small islands and other vulnerable countries, with billions more needed per year in the new loss and damage fund. Given the extent of actual and likely losses, nothing less than ambition on the scale of a “modern Marshall Plan” for these states will do.

In addition to this extra financing, the fund will need to work effectively to support the most climate vulnerable nations and populations when severe weather occurs. This can be done in a few ways.

The fund could create a budget support mechanism that can help small island states and other vulnerable countries deal with loss of income and the negative effects on growth. It could make sure loss and damage funds can be released quickly, and ensure support is channelled to those who need it the most. It could also make more concessional finance available for recovery, especially for the most adversely affected sectors like agriculture and tourism.

The world has a troubling history of missing self-imposed targets on climate finance and emissions reduction. But the stakes are ever higher now, and any target for loss and damage finance will need to be sufficient to deal with the challenges posed already by climate change, and in the years to come.

Emily Wilkinson, Principal Research Fellow, ODI Global; Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Matt Bishop, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Sheffield, and Vikrant Panwar, Senior Climate and Disaster Risk Finance Specialist, ODI Global

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

The Cuyahoga River, which runs through downtown Cleveland, Ohio, used to catch fire every decade or so. It started in the 1860s, when the river became choked with industrial waste, and the conflagrations continued all the way until the 1960s – the same decade that Americans got serious about environmental protection.

People in the US now take for granted their clean water, clean air, and healthy forests. And when those are jeopardised, such as when residents of Flint, Michigan, could no longer drink their tap water, they feel enraged – and justly so. But at this moment in history, the ability of Americans to expect a healthy and safe environment is in greater danger than at any time since the Cuyahoga River last caught fire in 1969.

The policy proposals outlined by Donald Trump and the thinktanks advising his campaign would turn back the tide on America’s bedrock environmental laws. Most of these laws were passed during the administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Indeed, the blockbuster Project 2025 policy platform calls for “a whole-of-government unwinding” of the nation’s environmental laws, and states that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed.”

Environmental protection should be a non-partisan issue. Instead, it has become ideologically supercharged by its proximity to climate politics. Much of this polarisation comes from highly successful lobbying campaigns from entrenched interests – particularly fossil fuel companies – that are threatened by proposals for an energy transition.

Such issues are hardly new to American politics. In the 20th century, timber companies and mining firms swallowed up huge swathes of American forests, polluted waterways, and threatened beloved ecosystems. And in the 1960s, two enormous hydroelectric dams were nearly built that would have flooded the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River.

By the end of the 1960s, these assaults on public land, air, and water had slowed. But conservation and commonsense prevailed only because of regulation that evaluated the potential private benefits of development against the potential public costs. Industry frequently lost out, but public lands, public health, and America’s natural heritage won.

Today, few Americans would argue against the wisdom of these decisions to slow old-growth timber harvesting, to stop damming wild rivers, and to clean up the acid air in US cities. Yet they are now witnessing a once-in-a-generation push to turn back the clock on these hard-won victories, while also scuttling the path-breaking climate and green manufacturing achievements of Joe Biden’s administration.

Trump has promised to fire experts in government, install loyalists in their place, and adopt a “drill, baby, drill” mentality. And unlike in decades past, the threat of this deregulation is amplified by the enormous challenges posed by climate change, and the brazen willingness of certain cronies to peddle conspiracy theories about ecology and earth science.

“Negative Sunshine,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.

Endangering the future

Gutting regulatory capacity, reducing public support for emergency preparedness (for example, by privatising the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement. These actions all reveal a shocking naivete, as though the era of environmental tragedy were purely a thing of the past.

But in 2023 alone, the US suffered a record 28 climate and weather-related disasters – shattering the previous record of 22 such disasters in a given year. Each caused more than US$1 billion (£770 million) in damage, with a total price tag north of US$90 billion.

These figures come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 says “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatised, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

America’s environmental regulations are, admittedly, far from perfect, and the agencies tasked with enforcing them are often so underfunded that developers face long, burdensome delays. Bipartisan proposals to improve these issues are currently being hotly debated in Congress.

The future of America’s farms, infrastructure, homes, coastal communities, and forests is on the ballot. As election day approaches in this decisive decade for climate action, Americans should look to the past to ensure they don’t take a healthy environment for granted, while securing a safe climate for current and future generations.

Upon signing the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act, which protected vast swathes of US public land, President Lyndon B. Johnson called environmental regulations “the highest tradition of our heritage as conservators as well as users of America’s bountiful natural endowments.” This heritage and our shared planetary future depend on voters to steadfastly defend this tradition of stewardship.

utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=Imagine&utm_content=DontHaveTimeTop”>Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 35,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Stephen Lezak, Programme Manager at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford and Barbara Haya, Senior Fellow at the Center for Environmental Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

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

(The Conversation) – In the last few days, a seasonal weather system known in Spain as the “cold drop” or DANA (an acronym of depresión aislada en niveles altos: isolated depression at high levels) has caused heavy rain and flooding across Spain’s Mediterranean coast and in Andalusia, especially in the Valencian Community, Castilla-La Mancha and the Balearic Islands. The storm has left hundreds dead and many more missing, with immense damage in the affected areas.

50 years ago, a DANA occurred every three or four years, typically in November. Today, they can happen all year round.

How does a DANA form?

These storms are formed in the same way as Atlantic hurricanes or typhoons in China. The difference is that the Mediterranean is smaller than these areas, and so storms have a shorter path, and store less energy and water vapour.

Decades ago, warm sea surfaces at the end of summer would cause water to evaporate into the atmosphere. Today, the sea surface is warm all year, constantly sending massive amounts of water vapour up into the atmosphere.

The poles are also much warmer now than they were 50 years ago. As a result, the polar jet stream – the air current that surrounds the Earth at about 11,000 metres above sea level – is weakened and, like any slowly flowing current, has meanders. These bring cold air, usually from Greenland, into the high atmosphere over Spain.

The evaporated water rising off the sea meets this very cold air and condenses. The Earth’s rotation causes the rising air to rotate counterclockwise, and the resulting condensation releases huge quantities of water.

This combination of factors causes torrential, concentrated rains to fall on Spain, specifically on the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean coast, sometimes reaching as far inland as the Sierra de Segura mountains in Andalucia and the Serrania de Cuenca mountains in Castilla la Mancha and Aragón. These storms can move in very fast, and are extremely violent.

On occasions, this Mediterranean water vapour has moved as far as the Alps, crossing its western point and causing downpours in Central Europe.

Warming oceans, warming poles

Many years ago, humans discovered a gigantic source of energy: 30 million years worth of the sun’s energy, stored under the ground by plants and animals. Today, we are burning through this resource fast.

This fossilised energy source is made up of carbon compounds: coal, hydrocarbons and natural gas. By burning them, we release polyatomic molecules such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and other compounds. Once released into the atmosphere, these trap some of the heat radiating from the earth’s soil and seas, returning it to the planet’s surface.

This process is what causes climate change, and it can occur naturally. When these molecules, especially methane, are stored in continental ocean slopes, the water cools and the carbon dioxide captured by the waves is trapped inside. As the planet cools and sea levels fall, methane is eventually released into the atmosphere. The atmosphere warms up, warming the sea, and the sea releases CO₂ which amplifies the effect of the methane. The planet then gets warmer and warmer, causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise.

This alternation of cold and hot has occurred eight times over the last million years.

No end in sight for fossil fuels

Today we are forcing this process by emitting huge quantities of polyatomic gases ourselves. The question is whether we can limit these emissions. So far, this has been impossible.

To this we can add the fact that by 2050 there will be about two billion more human beings on the planet, who will also need food, housing and transport. This means more chemical fertilisers, cement, petrol, diesel and natural gas will be consumed, leading to further polyatomic gases being released.

Various measures to limit the burning of carbon compounds are falling short, or developing very slowly. Hopes for electric cars, for example, have been greatly diminished in recent years.

In Europe progress is being made in solar and wind energy, but electricity only makes up around a third of the energy consumed. Europe is also the only region making real progress on alternative electricity generation – much of China’s progress is being offset by its continued construction of coal-fired power plants.

Despite some large, high-profile projects, the reality is that we will continue to burn carbon compounds for many decades to come. This means the concentration of polyatomic gases in the atmosphere will increase over the next century, and with it the temperature of the planet, leading to more DANAs, hurricanes, typhoons and floods.

Climate adaptation is vital

What we are left with is adaptation, which is much more manageable as it does not require international agreements.

In Spain, for instance, we can control flooding through massive reforestation in inland mountainous areas, and through rainwater harvesting systems – building small wetlands or reservoirs on hillsides. This would slow the amount of water reaching the ramblas and barrancos, the gorges and channels that funnel rainwater through Spain’s towns and prevent them from flooding. At the same time, this would mean water can be captured by the soil, where it can then be gradually returned to the rivers and reservoirs.

Not only is this feasible, it is cost-effective, generates many jobs, and could save hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

Antonio Ruiz de Elvira Serra, Catedrático de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Alcalá

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

AP: “Climate change is making extreme downpours in Spain heavier and more likely, scientists say”

(The Conversation) – Israel’s relationship with the United Nations has historically been strained, but over the past year, tensions have reached new levels. On October 28, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) passed a law to prohibit operations of the UN’s relief and works agency (Unrwa) – the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees – within the territory it controls. It’s a legal and political development which many fear will have grave humanitarian consequences for Palestinians in Gaza and beyond.

The decision also prompts questions about what lies ahead for the increasingly divisive relationship between the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the UN. There is even speculation that the Unrwa ban could lead to Israel being expelled from the UN general assembly.

Israel’s relations with the UN have long been fractious. But Unrwa has come in for particular criticism from successive Israeli governments over the years.

The agency was set up in 1949 to support Palestinian refugees displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. What was originally intended to be a temporary agency has now operated for more than seven decades, thanks to the unending hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian people. In addition to humanitarian assistance, Unrwa provides education, healthcare and a range of social services to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Unrwa’s schools have been a particular bugbear for Israeli critics. It has been pointed out that textbooks provided by the Palestinian Authority and used in some Unrwa schools were “pivotal in radicalising generations of Gazans”. There have also been allegations that money intended to support Unrwa relief works has been finding its way to Hamas.

But it was the alleged involvement of Unrwa employees in the October 7 attack on Israel, spearheaded by Hamas, that brought the issue to a head earlier this year. In January, Israel presented Joe Biden’s US administration with a dossier that purported to present evidence that 12 Unrwa staff had taken an active part in the attack. The UN announced it had dismissed the surviving staff named in the dossier – but the accusations led several countries to suspend their Unrwa funding.

Unrwa’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, described the suspension of funding as a “collective punishment”. He said it would have grave consequences for Gaza’s civilians who were – and remain – at high risk of famine.

An independent review set up by Lazzarini reported in April and found no evidence that the agency had been infiltrated by Hamas. Instead, it stressed how Unrwa’s work was an “indispensable lifeline” for civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. As a result, international funding of Unrwa was resumed by all countries but the US.

At loggerheads

Now Israel has gone a step further and banned Unrwa operations. This appears to be the latest blow in a campaign of hostility against the UN that has been years in the making.

In recent years, Netanyahu’s anti-UN rhetoric has escalated considerably. In 2022, the UN general assembly (UNGA) voted in favour of a resolution calling for the International Court of Justice to give its opinion on Israel’s “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory”. Netanyahu called the decision “despicable”. He refused to recognise the vote, saying:

Like hundreds of the twisted decisions against Israel taken by the UNGA over the years, today’s despicable decision will not bind the Israeli government. The Jewish nation is not an occupier in its own land and its own eternal capital, Jerusalem.

During the past year, as it has continued its assault on Gaza, Israel’s efforts to delegitimise the UN have also intensified. At the beginning of October, after Iran had launched a barrage of rockets at Israeli military installations, Israel barred the UN secretary general, António Guterres, from entering the country. Foreign minister Israel Katz commented: “Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel … does not deserve to set foot on Israeli soil.”

“Death of UNRWA,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Crop2Comic, 2024.

Meanwhile, units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been involved in a number of incidents which have threatened the safety of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon (Unifil). The peacekeepers are there under a mandate to safeguard Lebanese civilians in the area, where Israel has been conducting what it calls its “military operation” since the beginning of October. Many scholars of international law believe the IDF’s actions could be interpreted as war crimes.

This in turn led to a public spat with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Calling on Israel to respect the neutrality of Unifil peacekeepers, Macron said Netanyahu should “not forget that his country was created by a decision of the UN” – to which Netanyahu replied:

It was not the UN resolution that established the state of Israel, but rather the victory achieved in the war of independence with the blood of heroic fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, including from the Vichy regime in France.

The last clause was a pointed reminder that a section of the French government collaborated with the Nazi regime in the extermination of French Jews.

International condemnation

But it’s the decision to bar Unrwa from Israel that has drawn the harshest international criticism, and which threatens to further isolate the country diplomatically. The UN secretary general has been joined by the EU and US in urging Israel to reconsider.

Washington has already been highly critical of what it describes as “Israeli efforts to starve Palestinians” in parts of Gaza, and the US and UK are both reported to be considering suspending arms sales to Israel.

Amnesty International, meanwhile, said the law “amounts to the criminalisation of humanitarian aid and will worsen an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis”. But Israel has signalled it intends to hold firm, while insisting it will “continue to do everything in its power” to ensure that aid continues to reach “ordinary Gazans”.

But the vast majority of Gaza’s population is now displaced. Most of the built infrastructure – including hospitals – has been destroyed. And Israel’s military operations are forcing most civilians out of the north of the Gaza Strip. So, the question now is whether the effective crippling of the largest international aid agency working in Gaza will simply make matters worse for the people living there.

Lisa Strömbom, Ph D, Associate Professor, Lund University

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

(The Conversation) – “Where is the UN?” is a question that has often been asked since the start of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. As the death toll rises and the conflict spreads, the UN appears woefully unable to fulfil its mandate to save humanity “from the scourge of war” – as it was set up to do.

While the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has repeatedly condemned Israel – and been banned from the country for his pains – his pleas have been ignored. Attempts by the UN to sanction Israel have also failed. UN sanctions require the UN security council’s consent. The US has used its power as a permanent member to veto draft resolutions seeking to do so.

There have also been calls to suspend Israel from the UN. On October 30, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, called on the UN general assembly to suspend Israel’s membership because, as he said: “Israel is attacking the UN system.”

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories is reported to have told a news conference the same day that the UN should “consider the suspension of Israel’s credentials as a member of the UN until it ends violating international law and withdraws the ‘clearly unlawful’ occupation.”

But suspending a member is more complicated and politically fraught than many appreciate.

Israel and the UN

For decades, Israel’s relationship with the UN has been fractious. This is primarily because of the UN’s stance on what it refers to as Israel’s “unlawful presence” in what it defines as
“occupied territories” in Palestine. In the past 12 months of the latest conflict in Gaza, this relationship has deteriorated further.

Many have argued that Israel has repeatedly violated UN resolutions and treaties, including the genocide convention during its campaign in Gaza. Some UN officials have accused Israel – and certain Palestinian groups – of committing war crimes. Israel has also come into direct conflict with UN agencies – some 230 UN personnel have been killed during the offensive, and many governments and UN officials have alleged that Israel deliberately targeted UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

But the enmity between Israel and the UN came to a head on October 28, when the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, banned the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa) from operating inside Israel, sparking a wave of condemnation.

The UN’s powers

Given this open hostility towards the UN, it is not surprising that some are now calling for Israel’s membership to be suspended.

But can the UN legally suspend a member? The answer is yes. Under articles 5 and 6 of the UN charter a member state may be suspended or expelled if it is found to have “persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter”.

But articles 5 and 6 both state that suspension and expulsion require the consent of the general assembly as well as “the recommendation of the security council”. As such, suspending Israel requires the consent of the five permanent security council members: the US, UK, China, Russia and France.

And, given the US’s past record and current president Joe Biden’s affirmation of his “ironclad support” for Israel, this is effectively inconceivable. But while it is, therefore, highly unlikely that articles 5 or 6 will be invoked against Israel, there remains a potentially feasible option.

The South Africa precedent

At the start of each annual general assembly session, the credentials committee reviews submissions from each member state before they are formally admitted. Usually, this is a formality, but on September 27 1974, the credentials of South Africa – which was then operating an apartheid system – were rejected.

Embed from Getty Images
Key Speakers On The Final Day Of The 79th Session Of The United Nations General Assembly. Sheikh Shakhboot Nahyan Al-Nahyan, United Arab Emirates’ minister of state, speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. World leaders from more than 190 nations have descended on New York City for the general assembly’s annual high level debate as well as discussions on the war in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and issues ranging from climate change to the challenge posed by artificial intelligence. Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Three days later, the general assembly passed resolution 3207 which called on the security council to, “review the relationship between the United Nations and South Africa in light of the constant violation by South Africa of the principles of the Charter”.

A draft resolution calling for South Africa’s expulsion was eventually put to the security council at the end of October, but it was vetoed by the US, the UK and France.

However, on November 12, the president of the general assembly, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, ruled that given the credentials committee’s decision and the passing of resolution 3207, “the general assembly refuses to allow the delegation of South Africa to participate in its work”. South Africa remained suspended from the general assembly until June 1994 following the ending of apartheid.

It is important to note that South Africa was not formally suspended from the UN, only the general assembly. Nonetheless, it was a hugely significant move.

A viable solution?

Could the same measure be applied against Israel and would it be effective? The South Africa case shows it is legally possible. It would also undoubtedly send a powerful message, simultaneously increasing Israel’s international isolation and restoring some much needed faith in the UN.

The 79th session of the UN general assembly began in September, so it’s too late for the credentials committee to reject Israel. But this could conceivably happen prior to the 80th session next year, if there was sufficient political will. But this is a big “if”.

Though a majority of states in the general assembly are highly critical of Israel, many do not want the credentials committee to become more politically selective because they fear this could be used against them in the future. Likewise, few want to incur the wrath of the US by suspending its ally.

As ever, what is legally possible and what is politically likely are two very different things.

Aidan Hehir, Reader in International Relations, University of Westminster

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