Ukraine coverage shows gender roles are changing on the battlefield and in the newsroom

Mykola Tys / EPA-EFE

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 22, 2022 

News coverage of Ukraine’s war with Russia has been illustrated by images of men, young and old, taking up arms and fighting for their country. The political leaders involved are men who represent very different versions of masculinity.

Meanwhile, from an ad hoc TV studio outside Kyiv, Ukrainian news anchor Marichka Padalko drew attention to the nuances of gender roles during wartime. Interviewed by video link at Oslo’s House of Press, Padalko relayed a discussion she recently had with her husband about who should take care of their three children.

“I must defend the country,” her husband told her. Over a 20-year career as a reporter and anchor, Padalko has built solid audience trust. She felt she couldn’t abandon her people at a crucial time in history. “So do I,” she responded.

In the face of Russian disinformation campaigns, Padalko believes ensuring her fellow citizens get accurate accounts of the conflict is a task equally as important as fighting the Russian militarily. Eventually, her husband travelled with their three children to the western border of the country to bring them to safety.

“I do not have the luxury of seeing my children, but I know they are safe,” Padalko said before bravely declaring: “We will continue to broadcast until the very last minute.”
Gender and war

Besides the powerful testimony of being torn between motherhood and journalism in wartime, Padalko’s comments are a reminder of how gender-segregated wars often take shape.

“The connection between war and gender is arguably the most consistent gender issue across cultures,” renowned political scholar Joshua Goldstein wrote more than 20 years ago. He argued that this is a result of traits being equated with masculinity being constantly portrayed as aggressive and more appealing in situations of war.

In contrast, women are often portrayed as guided by pacifism and concern for others – typically feminine attributes. At a first glance, reports from the war in Ukraine seem to reinforce these gender stereotypes: the endless flow of women and children leaving their country, while men between the ages of 18 and 60 stay behind to fight. On closer inspection, much of the news coverage from the war in Ukraine shows the changing gender roles in war.

A recent New York Times podcast brilliantly addresses the insecurities and fears of Ukrainian men. Listeners are introduced to Eugene, who is ready to fight but cannot come to terms with the fact that the enemy, Russian soldiers, are his neighbours. Another young man desperately tries to cross the border to Poland, without success. He expresses his deep fear of holding a gun and carrying out violent actions and finds it terribly discriminatory that men are not allowed to leave: “I’m an illustrator. I’m trying to draw motivational posters. And just because, I’m sorry, I have a penis, I cannot leave.”

Television reports have featured crying men, devastated by how their lives changed in the blink of an eye, shattered by the sight of their mothers, wives and children fleeing the country. Their stories add nuance to the binary designations that are usually found in war reportage: fight v flee, brave v fearful, active v passive, men v women.

The Ukraine war coverage helps us see that there is not necessarily a difference between fleeing to save your children or fighting the enemy with weapons or words. All are actions of war.

Emotion in the media

In the newsroom, television reporters (not least male reporters) seem to show more emotion in the coverage of this war than what was traditionally seen in war reporting. This is perhaps a testament to the relatively recent emotional turn in journalism. The attention to emotion in journalism represents a shift that has opened up new spaces for more emotional and personalised forms of expression in public discussion.

Not to be outdone, the inspiring work by female reporters covering this conflict hasn’t gone unnoticed.

While not a journalist herself, Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, has also joined the information battle to defend her country. As a screenwriter, she wrote for the comedy group that brought Volodymyr Zelensky into the limelight. Now, she uses her communication skills to dictate the pace of the ongoing information war.

Zelenska’s battlefield includes social media, where she shares images by professional photojournalists and adds poignant captions. In one post, Zelenska included pictures of women in military uniform in the trenches, women as part of a rescue crew with helmet and headlights and women caretakers of newborn babies in a provisional bomb shelter. She wrote: “Our new opposition has a female face to it.” Posts like this support new war narratives that don’t differentiate between fighting and caring as actions of war.



Gender both shapes and is shaped by media content. These personal stories contribute to the overall narrative of the war and feed into a larger story of power and information exchange. The more complex and human media portrayals of gender may also affect the world’s understanding and empathy of Ukrainians’ peril on the battlefield and as refugees, and eventually influence the mood for change in international security policies.

Authors

Kristin Skare Orgeret
Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University

Bruce Mutsvairo
Associate Professor in Media Studies, Utrecht University
Disclosure statement
Bruce Mutsvairo receives funding from Norwegian Research Council

Israel lobby group ADL rehabilitates Hitler’s accomplices in Ukraine

Ali Abunimah 

The Electronic Intifada

17 March 2022

A priest delivers a speech during a torchlight procession honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera in the Ukrainian capital Kiev on 1 January 2022. Bandera’s nationalist movement directly assisted German occupation forces in perpetrating the Holocaust during World War II. 

Pavlo BagmutUkrinform

Israel and its lobby depend on support from the United States.

So when Washington goes to war, the lobby will often lend its propaganda services to the cause.

The Anti-Defamation League, one of Israel’s top US lobby groups, is doing so now by rehabilitating Ukrainian collaborators who helped Hitler exterminate Jews and Poles.

This Holocaust revisionism is motivated by the need to whitewash the present-day, far-right Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis who are supported by the United States.

The reason the US, NATO and the European Union say they are sending weapons and mercenaries to Ukraine is to help a fellow democracy defend its independence and sovereignty against an illegal invasion by an expansionist, megalomaniacal madman.

It is therefore very awkward from a Western perspective that the Ukrainian regime is underpinned by hard-right fascists and neo-Nazis.

Acknowledging this fact, Western war propagandists undoubtedly fear, would legitimize President Vladimir Putin’s claim that the Russian invasion – which has been overwhelmingly condemned by the UN General Assembly – is justified by a need to “de-Nazify” and demilitarize Ukraine.

The dilemma is summed up in an NBC News headline from earlier this month: “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”

But most Western media will no longer even go as far as NBC News in acknowledging this reality.

The current war can be traced directly to the 2014 coup in Ukraine, during which the US and its allies supported far-right and neo-Nazi elements.

The goal was to install a US-friendly regime that would bring Ukraine into NATO, the anti-Russia military alliance. Moscow has long seen NATO expansion as an existential threat.

Key actors in the US-supported coup were neo-Nazi groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion and C14.

They are part of a broader Ukrainian nationalist movement that venerates Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with Hitler during World War II.

During the war, members of the OUN loyal to Bandera formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, commonly known by its Ukrainian initials, UPA.

“Tactical” alliance with Hitler

On 4 March, the Anti-Defamation League published an article by Andrew Srulevitch, its director of European affairs, to minimize the Nazi problem in Ukraine.

The article was also promoted in a 15 March email newsletter from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on how “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and other misinformation are spreading in the wake of the invasion.”

In order to downplay the present-day cult of Bandera and support for Nazism in Ukraine, the ADL finds it necessary to rewrite some history – in effect Holocaust revisionism.

Srulevitch’s article takes the form of a Q&A with David Fishman, a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Fishman is also a member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“We’ve seen torchlit marches in the middle of [Kiev] with the red and black flags of UPA … and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII,” Srulevitch asks. “Isn’t that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?”

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons,” Fishman responds.

“For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine,” Fishman adds.

Fishman’s excuse that Bandera and other Nazi collaborators are “symbols” of the “fight for Ukrainian independence” mirrors the claims from American white supremacists that their display of the Confederate battle flag is merely to honor their “heritage” and not to celebrate a regime that went to war to protect its “right” to enslave people from Africa.

“There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the US, and in Russia for that matter,” Fishman asserts. “But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine.”

In other words, there’s nothing to see here, the ADL wants us to believe.

But Israel lobby groups were concerned over the rise of the Ukrainian far-right before the Russian invasion.

“Holocaust perpetrators are the last people on Earth who deserve to be glorified, regardless of their nationalist credentials,” Efraim Zuroff, a regional director with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, another pro-Israel lobby group, correctly stated in 2015.

“This phenomenon, currently so common in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, clearly shows that these countries don’t fully comprehend the obligations of true democracy,” Zuroff added.

This condemnation came after Ukrainian nationalists held a New Year’s Eve torchlight procession in Kiev to honor Bandera.

But today, just like the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is, for political expediency, denying the support for Nazism in Ukraine.

And also like the ADL, it is citing the fact that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish as evidence that neo-Nazism is not a concern.

However, this is no more convincing than arguing that the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president means that racism and white supremacy have been eliminated from the United States.

Indeed, according to the ADL, the dissemination of “white supremacist propaganda” in the US surged in 2020 – four years after America’s first Black president left office.
Falsifying history

This rationalization, minimization and “both-sidesing” of Nazism and Holocaust crimes ought to be shocking in itself.

But the ADL’s claim that the Banderite alliance with Hitler was merely “tactical” – as if that would in any way mitigate their crimes – is also false.

“Although Bandera and his followers would later try to paint the alliance with the Third Reich as no more than ‘tactical,’ an attempt to pit one totalitarian state against another, it was in fact deep-rooted and ideological,” journalist and author Daniel Lazare writes in a 2015 Jacobin review of historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s book Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist.

“Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella.”

Bandera was however detained by the Nazis because he was pushing for Ukrainian independence – something Hitler was not ready to grant. But the alliance between the OUN and the Germans persisted.

“Rather than disbanding the OUN, the Nazis had meanwhile revamped it as a German-run police force,” Lazare writes.

“The OUN had played a leading role in the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in Lviv and dozens of other Ukrainian cities on the heels of the German invasion, and now they served the Nazis by patrolling the ghettoes and assisting in deportations, raids and shootings.”

In 1943, Banderite members of the OUN formed their own militia, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA.

The UPA began the ethnic cleansing and extermination of Poles from territories they saw as belonging to Ukraine.

Citing historians, Lazare writes that “the UPA killed close to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 and that Orthodox priests blessed the axes, pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives and sticks that the peasants it mobilized used to finish them off.”

At the same time, the UPA’s attacks on Jews “continued at such a ferocious level that Jews actually sought the protection of the Germans,” Lazare writes.

“The Banderite bands and the local nationalists raided every night, decimating the Jews,” a survivor cited by Rossoliński-Liebe testified in 1948. “Jews sheltered in the camps where Germans were stationed, fearing an attack by Banderites. Some German soldiers were brought to protect the camps and thereby also the Jews.”
Bandera resurrected

This horrifying history has a direct bearing on events today.

After World War II and with the start of the Cold War, the US and its allies embraced the Banderites, many of whom went into exile in the West, especially in Canada.
Since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent, and even more so in the last few years, the cult of Bandera has re-emerged with a vengeance.

Far from being marginal, it is fully supported by Ukrainian state institutions.

In what NBC News calls an “ominous development,” Ukraine “has in recent years erected a glut of statues honoring Ukrainian nationalists whose legacies are tainted by their indisputable record as Nazi proxies.”

Such monuments can be found all over western Ukraine from Lviv to Ternopil to Ivano-Frankivsk and many small towns in between.

In 2016, the city council in Kiev voted overwhelmingly to rename the Ukrainian capital’s Moscow Avenue in honor of Bandera.

Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, has for years documented how Bandera is regularly celebrated with statues, banners and ceremonies:The Ukrainian ambassador in Germany, Andrij Melnyk, even bragged in 2015 that he “laid down flowers on the tomb of our hero Stepan Bandera” during a visit to Munich.

Potential for horrifying blowback

With the US and Europe arming and supporting the government in Kiev, all this must be buried along with the ample evidence of support for Nazism and fascism in present-day Ukraine.

Acknowledging this reality is not the same as claiming that 40 million Ukrainians are Nazis or that the country deserves to be attacked.

Nonetheless it is crucial for people in the US, EU and NATO countries to know that their governments are colluding with, as well as reportedly arming and training far-right and Nazi elements that are definitely not “marginal.”

On top of the moral revulsion that allying with Nazis – any Nazis – should provoke, it is a strategy that is bound to produce horrifying blowback, even if an escalating conflict in Ukraine does not lead to nuclear war.

In 2019 – before it became politically necessary to whitewash them – the ADL itself warned that an “extremist group called the Azov Battalion has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists” and issued a report on how the Ukrainian militia was trying to “connect with like-minded extremists from the US.”

American and European far-right extremists are flocking to Ukraine to join their neo-Nazi brothers in arms.

When these battle-hardened race warriors return home, it will be Muslims, Jews and anyone else they consider not to be truly “European” or “American” who will likely pay the price.

It may seem surprising that an Israel lobby group claiming to fight bigotry against Jews and others would help to whitewash Nazis. But the alliance between Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism goes back a century.

The ADL may also be taking a leaf from Benjamin Netanyahu’s shameless historical distortions and fabrications. In 2015, when he was still Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu attempted to exonerate Hitler and blame the Holocaust instead on Palestinians.

Nor is it surprising that the ADL, which spied for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, would tacitly join forces with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Nonetheless it is still hard to fathom the cynicism it takes even for an Israel lobby group to brand almost any support for Palestinian rights as “anti-Semitic” while it helps rehabilitate Hitler’s Holocaust accomplices.

Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

Today, the Azov Battalion, fully integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard, 

is reportedly already receiving weapons supplied by Western countries.

How Glasgow university smeared its own journal as anti-Semitic


David Miller 

The Electronic Intifada 

22 March 2022

Glasgow university censored a paper examining the pro-Israel lobby. 

(WikiMedia Commons)

A Scottish university refused to properly assess pro-Israel complaints about a peer-reviewed article in one of its journals.

Instead of sending the complaints to the author of the paper for further peer review, the university asked a staff member “close to the [subject] area” to give an informal view.

University documents released under freedom of information rules show it was agreed that the paper – which discussed the Israel lobby in Britain – should also be sent for external review, but this seems not to have been done.

But even this was only agreed after the university had already decided on its response – to endorse the baseless smears of the complainants.

The university is still refusing to reveal who complained about the paper. But extremist anti-Palestinian blogger David Collier has been public about his involvement.

The original article by Jane Jackman – published by eSharp, a University of Glasgow journal, in 2017 – examined the propaganda activities of the Israel lobby in the UK.

After complaints by pro-Israel activists in 2020, the university last year appended a statement to the article alleging it contained problematic features, including the idea that it promotes “an unfounded anti-Semitic theory regarding the state of Israel.”

After a high profile open letter to the university signed by 500 prominent academics including the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, the university removed the reference to anti-Semitism.

But it refused to remove the baseless claim that the paper had used a “biased selection of sources,” claiming that the article promoted “‘what some would regard as an unfounded theory.” This wording obviously still implies that the article is anti-Semitic.
Violation of ethics

Britain’s Committee on Publication Ethics has produced a set of guidelines on how academic journals should respond to complaints about published articles.

The committee advises that when complaints are received, journals should “invite the original authors of the critiqued article to write a reply” and that “the critique and response may be peer reviewed.”

Although eSharp is not a member of that committee, the guidance is widely accepted by academic journals.

As The Electronic Intifada reported last year, Jane Jackman was not invited to respond. In fact, the first she heard about it was via an anti-Palestinian newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, which reported on the university’s apology for publishing her article.

The Committee on Publication Ethics also advises that critiques of published papers “should have evidence or data to support the claims” they contain.

This requirement was not met by Glasgow university. None of the documents released in response to our freedom of information request give any evidence for the claims of anti-Semitism or bias.

What was, however, discussed repeatedly by senior university staff as a reason for the censorship of Jackman’s paper was the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s bogus defintion of anti-Semitism.

Although widely criticized by scholars and lawyers, and rejected by most UK universities, the definition has been pushed by Israel and its lobby around the world. It conflates criticism of Israel and its racist official ideology Zionism, on the one hand, with anti-Jewish hatred, on the other.
Expert opinions spurned

The journal eSharp is published by Glasgow university and is targeted at graduate students.

The journal states that it peer reviews articles, assigning “two reviewers to each paper, making sure that those reviewers have a degree of expertise in the subject matter dealt with in the article.”

But the emails disclosed by the university reveal that the university staff primarily responsible for the apology had no such expertise.

The Electronic Intifada has seen copies of the original anonymous peer review responses. The first stated that the article is a “relevant topic,” asks for “further analysis” and more “signposting.”

The second stated the article was “really engaging and informative” and that it provided “a fresh look into a widely debated phenomenon” and that the “overall argument was a very strong one.” Suggested improvements were made concerning minor grammatical errors, compliance with a style guide and issues with structure.

But it was made clear that “these are just small issues.”

There are no grounds to think that the peer review comments are inadequate and nothing in the Glasgow response has suggested that.

Given the existence of a peer review process, any challenges to the outcome of that process should also require a review of at least equal seriousness.

But the university subverted its own processes by sidelining the editorial team at the journal and putting the complaints in the hands of two academics with no relevant expertise.

Emails released by the university reveal that the lead role in the censorship effort was taken by Nick Fells, a professor of music, and by Bryony Randall, a professor of modernist literature

.
Nick Fells at work (left). Bryony Randall (right). The pair led censorship efforts at Glasgow university. 

(YouTube/Glasgow university)

Although the paper was published in 2017, the complaints only started in December 2020, after a blog post by the extreme Zionist David Collier.

As The Electronic Intifada reported, Collier urged his followers to contact the university. Although Collier has almost 74,000 Twitter followers, only 11 formal complaints were received, a university document shows.

Having agreed a line of approach with senior colleagues, Nick Fells proposed in early February 2021 that “it would be sensible to approach the current editorial team” in order to find out “what their response to the situation would be.”

But already the assumption had been made that the complaints would not be rejected.

At no point in the disclosed documents does anyone at the university consider the possibility of rejecting the complaints – despite the fact that they did not give any evidence showing anything in Jackman’s article was incorrect.

The “main questions” were stated as being: “should the paper be removed; or should it remain, but perhaps have some kind of editorial written, which itself might invite further contribution and debate.”

A meeting was duly convened with the editorial group, where it was decided “to leave the article in place, but to write an editorial in response.”

By early March, Fells had accessed “perspectives” on the article “provided by a colleague close to this area.” Fells pointedly does not name the colleague.

The decision to add an editorial note to the original paper was taken – according to the documents – in the absence of any other advice than that given by this informal internal adviser.

The advice was that the article “places itself in the midst of a familiar controversy, that pro-Zionist Jews in Britain are a means by which Israel exercises soft power to advance its cause.”

Rather than dispute this fact, the advice asserted that the article crossed “a fine line from criticism of a government to the restatement of anti-Semitic tropes.” But – again – the email did not explain where this “line” was or how the article had crossed it.

It claimed the paper was “problematic in its discursive strategies” and that aspects of it “would therefore be likely to cause offense.”

This advice is worth some scrutiny. There is no real controversy about whether “pro-Zionist Jews” engage in pro-Israel advocacy. They do, along with pro-Zionist non-Jews.

Do some co-ordinate or collaborate with the state of Israel? Indisputably yes.
Journal editors marginalized

The allegedly problematic “discursive strategies” and “biased” sourcing have still not been specified.

After meeting the editorial team of eSharp, Nick Fells wrote an email with a note summarizing a plan of action to be sent to senior management. The general editor of the journal in 2021 was Caleb Rogers.

The documents reveal that the editor had not seen the original complaints.

It would “be good if at all possible, if I could see some of the complaints in more detail,” one of the emails – apparently written by the editor – reveals.

Fells declined to share details of the complaints with the editor – a lack of transparency which was continued by the university’s freedom of information department when it later refused to release them or name the complainants.

The editor also stated: “I wonder if it might be good to consult with an expert in this field now.” This too was dismissed.

Both of these actions appear to be clear breaches of academic freedom and a subversion of any proper peer review process.

The documents state that the editorial was required to be sent “for final approval prior to publication” to five senior management figures. Overall, the process of dealing with the complaints was run by university management with what appear to be only courtesy meetings with the editorial team of the journal.
Atone for the damage

The Glasgow story is a cautionary tale for those who hope that public institutions will respond to politically motivated complaints of anti-Semitism by relying on evidence and following standard procedures.

Instead the University of Glasgow has capitulated to, facilitated and protected anonymous complainants operating to pursue the foreign policy objectives of a hostile foreign state.

Glasgow is on the back foot, having had to remove the term “anti-Semitism” from the supposed “editorial” it added to Jackman’s paper.

But there is a long way to go before it reverses course and atones for the damage it has caused, both to the reputation of Jane Jackman and to academic freedom at the university.

A fulsome apology to Jackman is the first step in a process which must see the university fully overhaul its complaints procedures.

David Miller is the co-editor of the book What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State.

UN expert: Israel practices apartheid against Palestinians


Maureen Clare Murphy Rights and Accountability 

24 March 2022

Palestinians look at the rubble of a shop destroyed by Israeli occupation forces on the pretext that it was built without a permit in Silwan, East Jerusalem, June 2021. Hundreds of Palestinians in the neighborhood face forced displacement as Israel seeks to build a Jewish archeological park at the site. ActiveStills

Israel perpetrates the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and third states should support accountability efforts at international courts.

So states Michael Lynk, an independent United Nations human rights expert from Canada, in a new report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week.

Last year, that body voted in favor of establishing a permanent commission of inquiry into Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights in all the territory under its control, including inside the 1949 armistice line demarcating Israel from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel is nervous that the commission led by three experts, whose report is expected to be published in June, will characterize it as an ‘apartheid state,” according to a foreign ministry cable seen by the news publication Axios.

Lynk’s new periodic report as a special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council follows a handful of studies from high-profile Israeli and international human rights organizations concluding that Israel practices apartheid against Palestinians – mainstreaming an aspect of what their Palestinian counterparts have been saying about Israeli rule for decades.
Acknowledging the seeming permanence of Israel’s military occupation, human rights groups are also calling for an approach centered on rights and accountability rather than the moribund “peace process” towards a two-state solution championed by the United Nations and other entities complicit in the prolonged situation of injustice in Palestine.



Israel has refused to cooperate with the Human Rights Council’s commission of inquiry and has denied entry and boycotted Lynk and experts who have previously held the role of special rapporteur for human rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Built with concrete

Lynk notes that “consistent with the mandate of the special rapporteur,” his periodic report focuses “on Israeli practices in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.”

As such, he does not examine policy towards Palestinian citizens of Israel or Palestinian refugees in exile but acknowledges that Palestinian, Israeli and international groups have concluded that “it is impossible to have ‘democracy here and apartheid there.’”

Lynk observes that “by their very nature, occupations are required to be built with wood, not concrete.” With the establishment of 300 Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank since 1967, and a massive wall built mostly on Palestinian land in the same territory, Israel’s occupation has involved a great amount of concrete.

Meanwhile in Gaza, for the past 15 years Palestinians there have been barricaded into an “open-air prison,” Lynk states, “a method of population control unique in the modern world.”

People in Gaza have “endured four highly asymmetrical wars with Israel” during that time, “with enormous loss of civilian life and immense property destruction.”

Israeli leaders have “regularly and openly proclaimed that the country’s rule over the Palestinians and their land is permanent and that no Palestinian state will emerge,” Lynk adds.

“The intent is for the Palestinians to be encased in a political ossuary, a museum relic of 21st century colonialism,” Lynk says.

The human rights expert observes that an institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression is “at the heart of Israel’s settler-colonial project” in Palestine.

For example, Israelis residing in Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank enjoy comprehensive rights while Palestinians in the same territory live under “military rule and control.”

Israel’s settlement enterprise is meanwhile “meant to demographically engineer an unlawful sovereignty claim through the annexation of territory.”

And because it is impossible for a colonial power to expropriate land and resources for its own population “without also immiserating the indigenous people and triggering their perpetual rebellion,” Israel has imposed increasingly harsh methods of control over Palestinians.

Legal definition

Israel’s practices against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza therefore pass the test of the applicability of an international legal definition of apartheid, Lynk states.

He observes that only the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1973, and the Rome Statute providing the foundation of the International Criminal Court, drafted 25 years later, provide legal definitions for apartheid.

A contemporary legal definition of apartheid drawn from and consistent with both the convention and the Rome Statute would stipulate:

“There exists an institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination, established with the intent to maintain the domination of one racial group over another, and which features inhuman(e) acts committed as an integral part of the regime.”

All three features must be fulfilled for a situation to be considered one of apartheid, Lynk adds. “Examples or patterns of racial discrimination by themselves are insufficient.”
The social construction of racial identity “should be seen as a matter of perception, particularly in the eyes of a dominant group that distinguishes itself from other groups,” based on social markers such as “nationality, ethnicity, religion, ancestry and descent,” Lynk says.

In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, the former has “determined the allocation, and the denial, of rights in the occupied Palestinian territory through a series of laws, practices and policies which define who is a Jew and who is not a Jew (the non-Jewish population being overwhelmingly Palestinian),” according to Lynk.

“Under this system the freedoms of one group are inextricably bound up in the subjugation of another.”

Lie of Israeli democracy

Palestinian human rights groups welcomed Lynk’s “seminal report” – the first by a UN special rapporteur to definitively state that Israel practices apartheid.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli government officials rejected Lynk’s findings.



Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva, accused the independent expert of recycling “baseless and outrageous libels.”

She added that Lynk aims to “delegitimize and criminalize the state of Israel for what it is: the nation state of the Jewish people, with equal rights for all its citizens, irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

As Lynk notes in his report, however, the 5 million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation are stateless and “living without rights, in an acute state of subjugation and with no path to self-determination.”

And as for the more than 1.5 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, the lie of democracy is dispelled by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose office as prime minister ended last year after more than a decade:

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but the nation-state of the Jewish people and them alone.”

Maureen Clare Murphy's blog

With civilian bombings on state TV, China’s attitude toward Russia is shifting

written by Simone Pieranni, IL MANIFESTO, ITALY

 Analysis. To call Putin a rogue or a criminal would be the same as saying that the Chinese leader has completely miscalculated. China proceeds gradually, fears the unpredictability of events and focuses on being ready for new scenarios.

• TopicChina

• Published on

  March 23, 2022

What will China do? The question has become something of a mantra ever since the Russian invasion began, and has gradually picked up volume as Russian bombings have hit civilians and as American pressure – pushing Beijing to take a clear position – has begun to instill doubts about whether China might support Russia economically and militarily (which has not happened so far, with China repeatedly saying that it has not received any request for armaments from Moscow).

In reality, if we read between the lines, Beijing has given plenty of hints that Putin’s adventure may turn into a disaster: there is no rational reason for the CCP to support such an initiative that, more than anything else, is leading to disorder and unpredictability, which is what China fears the most.

For the Chinese Communist Party and its hybrid modus operandi, between Leninism and Confucianism (at least on paper), the most important thing is order, both domestic and international, a fundamental condition for “good governance,” for “harmony,” stability, and, above all, so that business can proceed smoothly. War is the ultimate stage of disorder, chaos, an inability to continue as before. A war undermines the perception of security—while it should be noted that for Chinese Communist Party officials, “the security of China” is synonymous with “the security of the CCP.”

On the other hand, Xi Jinping himself, in his two-hour dialogue with Biden on Friday, stressed that the war, the sanctions and the return of Covid (which on Sunday claimed its first two victims in China in over a year, and set the country back two years with the closures of cities, factories and logistics hubs, with everything this will entail for the global supply chain) are very serious concerns for the leadership in Beijing. Similarly, the signals that have come from the economic front show that China is complying with the sanctions, however critical of them, and does not seem intent on changing its attitude.

All the more so because Beijing cannot sacrifice trade with the EU and the US and become isolated in order to support an economic partner of smaller proportions such as Russia, especially at a time when its economy is slowing down (the growth estimate, at 5.5%, is the lowest in 30 years), which has resulted in some reforms – on pensions and house taxes – being put aside for the moment.

So, why doesn’t China definitively disavow Putin and his war in Ukraine? There are many reasons having to do with expediency, including the fact that it was China’s number one, Xi Jinping, who invested so much in the relationship with Moscow in the first place. To call Putin a rogue or a criminal would be the same as saying that the Chinese leader, who is about to be named for a historic third term in office (in October, at the 20th Congress), has completely miscalculated. Xi Jinping, and his coterie of officials at the topmost levels of power together with him, would lose face, both internationally and domestically. Presumably, this would to cause Xi actual problems, but the goings-on of the internal clashes within the CCP are unpredictable, as well as almost always inscrutable.

China, from our Western point of view, is a land of contradictions (after all, its model is called by the Chinese “market socialism”), to which we must add yet another one at this historical moment: namely, “standing with Russia without standing with Russia.” In the West, we expect a clear answer, as per our preference, in one direction or the other; this won’t happen, at least for now, because China proceeds gradually, waits for the right moment to “discover itself,” fears the unpredictability of events and focuses on being ready for new scenarios. The possibility that Beijing could be a mediator is not on the table at this point.

As Giulia Sciorati, an analyst of Asian geopolitics at the University of Trento, explained to il manifesto after Friday’s virtual meeting between Biden and Xi: “As expected by a number of observers, there were no great steps forward in the videoconference between Biden and Xi. In fact, the point that was truly highlighted by Beijing regarding the war in Ukraine was China’s commitment to providing humanitarian assistance to the victims of the conflict, an issue on which China has begun to focus its narrative more and more after the criticism – both domestic and international – it has taken in recent weeks for maintaining a rhetoric that is, if not exactly neutral, at least too cautious. One cannot expect anything different from a meeting like this, under the spotlight of the whole world: and it is precisely on this point that one can expect Beijing’s efforts, both practical and narrative, to continue in the immediate future.”

On the alliance – the “strategic partnership,” as they call it in Beijing – with Russia, Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist, told Die Zeit that “it would be a strategic error to form an alliance with Russia. But what is a ‘friendship without borders’? Every relationship between states has boundaries; one should not take it too literally. A ‘friendship,’ unlike an alliance, is difficult to define. Remember that Mao Zedong broke with the Soviet Union in short order in the 1950s. Some now believe that Russia will become China’s vassal state. This will not happen. Russia is Russia, China is China.”

Many Chinese intellectuals have spoken out on this topic in the first days of the war, when the Chinese information ecosystem was taking clearly pro-Russian positions (in the last days, we have observed that, for example, Chinese state TV has been broadcasting images of the bombings against civilians, offering a new narrative of what is happening in Ukraine).

After the popularity of an analysis by Hu Wei, an advisor of the Chinese government who is critical of Putin and whose article was censored but continued to spread on WeChat, others have also expressed similar opinions. For example, Qin Hui, a former professor of history at the prestigious Tsinghua University, wrote that “We should note that while Putin condemns Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he does not say a word about Tsarist Russia’s oppression of ethnic groups or imperial expansion, and between the lines, he clearly expresses his yearning for the legacy of imperial Russia and his resentment of the Bolsheviks for destroying it. Back in the day, when Mao Zedong, in an anti-Soviet moment, famously labeled the CPSU a ‘new Tsar,’ this was perhaps not entirely appropriate, at least from an ideological point of view, but ‘emperor Putin’ can’t wait to wear this crown.” (Qin’s article has been translated from readingthechinesedream.com).

So what is the “pace” of Chinese evolution on the subject? At this point, one should remember the first statements of Foreign Minister Wang Yi, made in Munich before the invasion, when he stressed that the territorial inviolability of Ukraine was considered sacrosanct by Beijing.

However, the Chinese positions most likely cannot be understood without considering the relationship with the United States and the latest phone call between Xi and Biden. In this regard, ISPI analyst Filippo Fasulo explained to il manifesto that “both China and the US see the conflict in the light of the competition between great powers and damage to the bilateral relationship. Beijing is insisting on the humanitarian dimension because it feels the reputational risk of being associated with Russia’s violence. This should limit the possibility of military support for Russia. Beijing has noted the US media pressure and tried to ‘strike back’ by issuing statements while the meeting was still in progress and issuing a press statement shortly afterwards. We will see the effects in the coming days, just as this meeting itself took place in the aftermath of the one in Rome, but the indications to the lower tiers of negotiators to focus on being more operational in the following phases suggests that common ground has been found.”

Giulia Sciorati concurs: “While Beijing and Washington have found a common point in the willingness to facilitate a negotiated solution to the conflict in Ukraine, the differences in their approach to the international system remain many, as recalled by the same leaders in the official post-videoconference communiqué. A positive sign can be noted in the fact that both sides stressed that they wanted to extricate themselves from the ‘cold war mentality’ that began, in practical terms, with the trade war under the Trump presidency. However, as was the case with the Shanghai Communiqué 50 years ago, there is still a lot of diplomatic work to be done before a normalization of bilateral relations can be achieved.”

How A 1999 Russian Bombing Led To Putin's Rise To Power

Business Insider

David Satter is a US journalist who spent decades covering Russian politics before he was expelled from the country after claiming that President Putin and the FSB may have been involved with the deadly Russia apartment bombings in 1999. 

We talked to Satter about the bombings at PutinCon, a summit organized by the Human Rights Foundation that gathered together some of Putin's biggest critics. Following is a transcript of the video.

David Satter: You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see what was going on. And in particular, you had to be willfully ignorant if you didn't see the implications of the Ryazan incident.

David Satter is a US journalist and expert on Russian politics. He was expelled from Russia after claiming that Putin and the FSB were behind the apartment bombings

Satter: In the summer of 1999 the approval rating of former President Yeltsin was 2%. There appeared to be no chance whatever that Putin, who was designated by Yeltsin as his successor could possibly become the next Russian president. The apartment bombings changed everything. It was said after those buildings went up that now we're living in a completely different country.

More than 200 people were killed in the September bombings. Russia blamed Chechen militants, triggering the second Chechen War.

Satter: Putin came forward as the savior of the country. He was put in charge of a war in Chechnya. The bombings were blamed on Chechens without any evidence whatsoever, and as a result of the successful prosecution of that war, against all odds he was elected the next Russian president. The apartment bombings appear to be the keystone of a plot to confuse Russian public opinion, to create terror, to distract the Russian public, to redirect their anger away from the corruption that had flourished under Yeltsin, and toward the Chechens who had had for a number of years a semi-independent government in Chechnya and in that way create the conditions for the Russian people to vote in what they absolutely consciously did not want, which was a successor to Yeltsin who would protect Yeltsin.

There was an enormous amount of material in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta which pointed to the possibility and in fact to the likelihood that the authorities themselves blew up those buildings. At the same time a fifth bomb was discovered in the basement of an apartment building in Ryazan, which is a city southeast of Moscow. And I went to Ryazan after the bomb was discovered and diffused to talk to local residents and it was clear from those conversations that what took place was a genuine attempt to blow up a fifth building. The authorities said that this was only a training exercise, but it was nothing of the kind.

And what was most important was that three persons were arrested for putting a bomb in a building in Ryazan. They turned out to be not Chechens, not terrorists in the usual sense, but rather agents of the Federal Securities Service which is the FSB.

I asked for documents from the CIA from the FBI, from the directorate of national intelligence from the state department. I got very, very little that was of any use. But I did get a few documents from the state department which indicated that their sources of information were telling them that the apartment bombings were extremely suspicious. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see what was going on. And in particular you had to be willfully ignorant if you didn't see the implications of the Ryazan incident in which three FSB agents were arrested for putting a fifth bomb in a building, even though the bomb didn't go off it was a live bomb. What was it doing in the basement of an apartment building?