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Thursday, November 17, 2022

UK TORY LORD

Zac Goldsmith brands XR 'bullies' in row over 11-year-old activist confronting him at Cop27

She earlier hit out at the Lord, saying: "If he can do nothing then why he is a minister?

15 November 2022

Licypriya Kangujam confronted Zac Goldsmith at Cop27. Picture: Twitter/Alamy

By Daisy Stephens

@daisysteph_

Zac Goldsmith has branded Extinction Rebellion "bullies" in a row over an 11-year-old girl confronting him at Cop27

Licypriya Kangujam tracked down Lord Goldsmith in Sharm El-Sheikh to question him on camera, asking: "When are you going to release the climate activists your Government arrested for protesting against new oil and gas licences?"

At that point Lord Goldsmith, the minister for overseas territories, commonwealth, energy, climate and environment, began walking away, with Licypriya in pursuit.

Their conversation is not audible but she said he replied that he "can do nothing about it".

"He replied, 'No idea' & run away!" she tweeted.

The video was then shared by Extinction Rebellion, who asked for the identity of a civil servant Licypriya claimed pushed her twice to get her to stop talking to Lord Goldsmith - leading to the Peer to label them "bullies".

Licypriya Kangujam speaks during Cop25 in 2019. Picture: Alamy

Extinction Rebellion tweeted their thanks to Licypriya "for speaking up for those in prison in the UK" and said Lord Goldsmith owes her answers.

The group also said the "civil servant that pushed an indigenous 11 year old away for asking a question owes an apology", adding: "Anyone at #COP27 know who she is?"

Lord Goldsmith, the failed London mayoral candidate who was handed a peerage after he lost his seat as an MP in the 2019 general election, responded: "What bullies you are.

"She did nothing of the sort as the video shows. She couldn't have been gentler.

"But I'll tell you what she does do: works relentlessly-at a fraction what she'd earn elsewhere-fighting to protect nature. & she succeeds. You should thank her & then apologise

"'Anyone know who she is?' Makes me so angry this. She's a civil servant who can't answer back, who works her a**e off for the env & has helped achieve amazing things.

"If we turn things around it will be because of people like her...the person you are seeking to bully. Just awful."

Licypriya is already a seasoned campaigner, having been protesting against the crisis for about five years, starting in her native India.

She earlier hit out at the Lord, saying: "If he can do nothing then why he is a minister?

"Why he's coming to #COP27?

"This is unacceptable.

"This is not fair."

A number of Just Stop Oil protesters were jailed following a string of disruptive demonstrations on the M25 last week.

Activists scaled overhead gantries, bringing traffic to a standstill.

The group is calling for the government to end all new oil and gas licences in response to the climate crisis.

How a ‘Doomsday vault’ stows the seeds of our future against disaster

The Global Seed Vault in Longyearbyen, built to withstand natural and even nuclear threats, an insurance policy for Earth’s biodiversity.

By Lex Harvey

Transportation Reporter
Tue., Nov. 15, 2022

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway—You’ll need to carry a rifle if you wish to visit the world’s biggest collection of agricultural diversity. Here on Norway’s wild and vast Svalbard archipelago, polar bears outnumber people — and you can never be too careful (though of course, killing one is strictly a last resort).

In the icy tundra of Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, few crops grow. But deep within its permafrost — layers of soil, gravel and sand, frozen in place — lay the keys to securing the world’s food supply, in the form of more than one million types of seeds.

Dubbed the “doomsday vault,” the Global Seed Vault has a certain sci-fi quality to it. The concrete structure jutting out of the hillside is built to withstand the most severe natural disasters, and even a nuclear bomb, according to its manufacturer. But at its core, the vault’s mission is quite simple.

“It’s just seed storage inside the mountain,” says Åsmund Asdal, the vault’s co-ordinator and only full-time employee. Still, since it was built in 2008, the vault has acted as something of an insurance policy for Earth’s biodiversity, a role of increasing importance in a world ravaged by political instability, war and the urgent threat of climate change.

At 78 degrees N, about 1,000 kilometres away from the North Pole, you’d be hard pressed to find a more remote (yet still accessible) place to safeguard the world’s seeds. The vault sits just outside Longyearbyen, up the hill from the world’s northernmost commercial airport. For three months of the year, the vault resides in complete darkness, after the sun sets for the Arctic’s long polar night.

The seeds live in a chilled room, carved more than 100 metres into the rock, through a long tunnel and behind a large steel door that keeps out unwanted visitors. The vault is closed to the public, and its doors are only opened a few times a year to make way for new seeds. But the shimmering exterior, dressed in a design of steel and mirror shards by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne, hints at the magic that lies inside.

The Global Seed Vault, which is operated by the Norwegian government and a German nonprofit called the Crop Trust, is part of a broader network for seed storage. About 1,750 gene banks scattered across the globe hold the genetic codes to the world’s crops, both past and present, in the form of seeds or other plant tissues called germ plasm. Together, these facilities contain about 7.4 million types of germ plasm, according to the UN’s food and agriculture agency.

Around the world, crop diversity is decreasing, as food production converges around a globalized diet. A 2019 University of Toronto study found just four crops — soybeans, wheat, rice and corn — occupy nearly half of the world’s agricultural lands. The researchers also pointed to a lack of genetic diversity within individual crops; for example, in North America, just six individual corn genotypes make up over half of all corn crops. When a small number of crop genotypes dominate globally, that makes our food supply more vulnerable to disease and disaster.

Preserving living crop genotypes in gene banks means plant breeders can tap into that diversity to create new, resilient crops. “We need diversity to create something new,” Axel Diederichsen, a researcher for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, who works at Canada’s plant gene bank, in Saskatoon. “If we only have one type of wheat and we want to make a new wheat, it’s very difficult. But if we have a collection with diverse wheat, then we can make crosses.”

Canada also has two other gene banks: one in Harrow, Ont., which holds fruit trees and small crops; and another, in Fredericton, which stores the genetic material for more than 200 types of potatoes.

But gene banks are fallible. “Many gene banks all over the world have lost seeds, due to flooding, due to fires, due to war and conflict, due to electricity failures, lack of resources,” said Asdal, the vault’s co-ordinator. Anything from a dropped envelope to a natural disaster can threaten the preservation of seeds in gene banks.

That’s where the Global Seed Vault comes in. Gene banks are invited to store duplicates of their seeds in the Svalbard vault, as a backup. Canada has about 32,000 envelopes in Svalbard, each containing about 200 seeds, to grow crops like barley, oat and wheat, Diederichsen said. Since 2008, Canada has made seven deposits in the Global Seed Bank, he said, and has another planned for October.

The vault currently hosts 5,947 plant species, many of which no longer grow on this earth, from 91 gene banks, according to its website. With each new deposit, the vault’s library grows richer. In June, Lithuania and Spain backed up seeds in the Global Seed Vault for the first time, as part of a large deposit that welcomed varieties of rice bean, lablab and a yard-long bean.

The vault’s value has already been tested. In 2015, after Syria’s bloody civil war forced an important gene bank in Aleppo to relocate to Beirut, researchers retrieved more than 100,000 seed samples from the Arctic to replant in the new facility.

The Global Seed Vault’s far-flung location in an Arctic territory of politically stable Norway makes it a comfortable and safe home for the world’s seeds. Svalbard’s chilly climate and hundreds of metres thick permafrost make it a good choice, too. When seeds are frozen, they can stay alive for centuries, Asdal said. The mountain permafrost has a stable temperature of between -3 and -4 C, and the vault uses artificial cooling to keep the seeds at an icy -18C. But even if the cooling system were to fail, the seeds would stay frozen, Asdal said.

But even this so-called doomsday vault isn’t immune to the world’s collective climate change. Svalbard is the fastest warming place on earth, heating at a rate five to seven times that of the rest of the world, and rapidly rising temperatures are causing the permafrost to thaw. After an unusually warm winter in 2017, a flood of meltwater breached the vault. No seeds were harmed, but the scare prompted the Norwegian government to spend about $30 million fortifying the vault.

Despite the existential threats Svalbard is facing — from melting glaciers, to avalanches, to landslides — the Global Seed Vault is safe, Asdal assures, though it may need to use a bit more electricity to keep things cool as the planet warms.

Still, the world will need to lean on the genetic resources in the vault and other gene banks as the climate crisis accelerates, to replant crops that are destroyed in major weather events, and to breed new, adaptive plant varieties. Our food security depends on it.

Lex Harvey is a Toronto-based transportation reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @lexharvs

COLD TRUTHS

In a tiny Arctic village in Norway, Russians and Ukrainians keep an uneasy peace

In the Russian coal mining settlement of Barentsburg — 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole — citizens of the two nations appear to get along. Many don’t have a choice.

By Lex Harvey

Transportation Reporter
Tue., Nov. 15, 2022

BARENTSBURG, Norway—The Russian tour guide welcomes me with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“We were desperately waiting for you all day long.”

It’s nearing midnight, but the tiny Arctic town is golden under the June sun.

Smoke billows from the nearby mine, casting a shadow over the surrounding turquoise Grønfjord, which in turn spills into mountains that are beginning to shed their snow with the early signs of summer.

The guide is Natalia Maksimishina, a young, blue-eyed scholar in Russian Arctic history. And I am the town’s only overnight visitor.

I’ve come to Barentsburg, a Russian coal mining settlement on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

The words “peace to the world,” adorned on the mountain above, might seem ironic in wartime, but here in Barentsburg, where Russians and Ukrainians have worked alongside each other for a century, the atmosphere is eerily peaceful. Though in this unexpected oasis, tensions from a war waged thousands of kilometres away bubble beneath the surface.

Maksimishina says when Russian rocket strikes first hit Kyiv on Feb. 24, the community’s reaction was “basically absent.” People here rarely talk politics, she tells me, and they always stop before things get heated. “As soon as it gets uncomfortable, they just switch the topic.”

The congeniality is, at least in part, circumstantial. Far from many of the luxuries of modern life — such as fresh food, at least in between bimonthly shipments from Russia — in a land where polar bears roam and darkness descends for four months of the year, getting along with your neighbours has long been essential to survival.

Barentsburg is the second largest settlement on Svalbard — 1,000 kilometres shy of the North Pole.

Once home to more than 1,000 people, Barentsburg’s population has whittled down to about 300, two-thirds of them Ukrainian, most from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, which historically have had close ties to Russia.

A 1920 treaty designates Svalbard as Norway’s, but gives signatories equal rights to access, fish, hunt and mine here. Moscow has historically operated several mines on Svalbard, though Barentsburg is the only active one. A second, Pyramiden, was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union, and is now marketed to tourists as a “ghost town.” Russian state-run company Trust Arktikugol owns and operates both towns and employs most of the people in them.

Tourists have largely drained from Barentsburg since the war, thanks to a call by Svalbard’s main tourism board for its members to boycott Russian businesses. Planning an overnight trip here required contacting two separate companies offering the few day trips to Barentsburg from the archipelago’s capital of Longyearbyen, and organizing for one to drop me off and the other to pick me up.

On our midnight stroll, Maksimishina is frank and approachable, her voice high and upbeat. She jokes about not being able to buy a new set of underwear since Russian bank cards no longer work in Norway, a NATO member, but is quick to mention it’s a small price to pay for what Ukrainians are facing. That night, I am the only guest in the local hotel of about 50 rooms.

The next morning over coffee, Barbara Mokshtadt, another Russian guide, says she does not support the invasion, but that she tries not to discuss it with her neighbours.

One of her colleagues is pro-war, she says, but “for me, it is more important that we are friends, now, here, without talking about mine or his position.”

Behind the cash register in the town’s gift shop, Marina, a Ukrainian from Luhansk, tears up as she tells me about the home her family built, now reduced to rubble. (Marina asks me to keep her last name private since she works for a Russian company and could face retribution for speaking out.)

Speaking in Russian through a translator, Marina says she doesn’t view Russia, which invaded Ukraine in February, as an aggressor, and supports people on both sides. While her family in Luhansk, which has been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since 2014, agrees with Russia’s actions, her husband’s family, also in Ukraine, is against the invasion.

When pressed to clarify her position on the war, Marina says, “There is politics outside the settlement on the mainland, and here we live like a big family, all together.”

But everything about Russia’s presence on Svalbard, which is located strategically between the Barents, Greenland and Norwegian seas, is political.

Steps away, in a gated, burgundy building, lives Sergey Gushchin, the bearded, ponytailed consul general — Moscow’s eyes and ears in Barentsburg.

Gushchin has been spreading the Kremlin’s war message in the Arctic, in April dismissing photos of Russian destruction in Ukraine as staged to Norwegian online newspaper, Nettavisen.

When I walk up to the consulate and ring the doorbell, I see Gushchin in the foyer but he quickly makes himself scarce while an aide explains he is too busy for an interview.

Timofey Rogozhin, Russia’s one-time head of tourism in Barentsburg, tells me later that Gushchin could be a factor in Barentsburg’s apparent peacefulness.

Rogozhin says he was forced out of the top tourism job last spring for criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin on social media. Since the war broke out, Rogozhin believes about 100 Ukrainians who do not agree with the war have left the settlement.

One Russian in Barentsburg who asked to remain anonymous, fearing they could lose their job, said Trust Arktikugol managers told employees not to speak about the war online. Then, after thinking for a second, the Russian said, actually, if the posts are pro-Russia it’s probably OK.

The town pub is shut most days, suffering from a lack of clientele because of sanctions affecting Russian bank cards.

Sometimes, locals say, a Ukrainian friend will pick up the tab.

As I sail back to Longyearbyen, it is this image that sticks with me. With the war in Ukraine dividing the world’s powers, in this tiny Arctic village, a Ukrainian buys a round of drinks for their Russian neighbours.

Lex Harvey is a Toronto-based transportation reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @lexharvs

Western allies look to Ukraine as a testing ground for weapons

A drone operator shares footage of an attack against a Russian position with fellow soldiers of the Ukrainian army’s Carpathian Sich Battalion at an underground base in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. | LYNSEY ADDARIO / THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY LARA JAKES
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Nov 15, 2022

Three months ago, as Ukrainian troops were struggling to advance against Russian forces in the south, the military’s headquarters in Kyiv quietly deployed a valuable new weapon to the battlefield.

It was not a rocket launcher, cannon or other kind of heavy artillery from Western allies. Instead, it was a real-time information system known as Delta — an online network that military troops, civilian officials and even vetted bystanders could use to track and share desperately needed details about Russian forces.

The software, developed in coordination with NATO, had barely been tested in battle.

But as they moved across the country’s Kherson region in a major counteroffensive, Ukraine’s forces employed Delta, as well as powerful weaponry supplied by the West, to push the Russians out of towns and villages they had occupied for months.

The big payoff came Friday with the retreat of Russian forces from the city of Kherson — a major prize in the nearly nine-month war.

Delta is one example of how Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come.

The battle for Ukraine, to be sure, remains largely a grinding war of attrition, with relentless artillery attacks and other World War II-era tactics. Both sides primarily rely on Soviet-era weapons, and Ukraine has reported running low on ammunition for them.

But even as the traditional warfare is underway, new advances in technology and training in Ukraine are being closely monitored for the ways they are changing the face of the fight.

Beyond Delta, they include remote-controlled boats, anti-drone weapons known as SkyWipers and an updated version of an air-defense system built in Germany that the German military itself has yet to use.

“Ukraine is the best test ground, as we have the opportunity to test all hypotheses in battle and introduce revolutionary change in military tech and modern warfare,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation.

Fedorov was speaking in October at a NATO conference in Norfolk, Virginia, where he publicly discussed Delta for the first time. He also emphasized the growing reliance on remote-controlled aircraft and boats that officials and military experts said have become weapons of choice like those in no previous war.

“In the last two weeks, we have been convinced once again the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans,” Federov said.

Since last summer, Ukraine and its allies have been testing remote-controlled boats packed with explosives in the Black Sea, culminating in a bold attack in October against Russia’s fleet off the coast of Sevastopol.

A Ukrainian drone operator changes batteries while hunting for Russian positions to target with artillery near the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk. |

FINBARR O’REILLY / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Military officials have largely declined to discuss the attack or provide details about the boats, but both the United States and Germany have supplied Ukraine with similar ships this year. Shaurav Gairola, a naval weapons analyst for defense intelligence firm Janes, said the Black Sea strike showed a sophisticated level of planning, given the apparent success of the small and relatively inexpensive boats against Russia’s mightier war ships.

The attack “has pushed the conflict envelope,” Gairola said. He said it “imposes a paradigm shift in naval war doctrines and symbolizes an expression of futuristic warfare tactics.”

The use of remote-controlled boats could become particularly important, military experts said, showing how warfare at sea might play out as the United States and its allies brace for potential future naval aggressions by China in the East and South China seas, and against Taiwan.

Inevitably, the Russians’ increased use of drones has spurred Ukraine’s allies to send new technology to stop them.

Late last year, Ukraine’s military began using newly developed drone-jamming guns known as SkyWipers to thwart Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region. The SkyWipers, which can divert or disrupt drones by blocking their communication signals, were developed in Lithuania and had been on the market for only two years before they were given to Ukraine through a NATO security assistance program.

Nearly nine months into the war, the SkyWipers are now only one kind of drone jammer being used in Ukraine. But they have been singled out as a highly coveted battlefield asset — both for Ukrainian troops and enemy forces that hope to capture them.

It is not known how many SkyWipers have been sent to Ukraine, although Lithuania reportedly sent several dozen in October 2021. In a statement to The New York Times, Lithuania’s defense ministry said it sent 50 SkyWipers in August after Ukrainian officials called it “one of the top priorities.”

Dalia Grybauskaite, who was Lithuania’s president when the SkyWipers were being designed, said her country’s defense industry made a calculated turn toward producing high-tech equipment during her time in office, from 2009 to 2019, to update a stockpile of weapons that “were mainly Kalashnikovs” and other Soviet-era arms.

“We’re learning in Ukraine how to fight, and we’re learning how to use our NATO equipment,” Grybauskaite said in an interview last week. “And, yes, it is a teaching battleground.”

She paused, then added: “It is shameful for me because Ukrainians are paying with their lives for these exercises for us.”

The Western lethal aid that is being sent to Ukraine consists, for the most part, of recently updated versions of older weapons. That was the case with the German-made infrared, medium-range homing missiles and launchers known as IRIS-T, which protect against Russian rocket attacks.

They have a longer range than the previous generation of air-defense systems that debuted in 2015. Germany’s own military has not yet used the updated version of the systems, which were shipped to Ukraine last month. Additional missiles were delivered last week.

Rafael Loss, a weapons expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that by themselves the upgraded air defenses do not “represent a game-changer.” But he said their use in Ukraine showed how the government in Kyiv had evolved beyond Soviet-era warfare and brought it more in line with NATO.

Senior NATO and Ukrainian officials said the Delta network was a prime example.

More than an early alert system, Delta combines real-time maps and pictures of enemy assets, down to how many soldiers are on the move and what kinds of weapons they are carrying, officials said.

That is combined with intelligence — including from surveillance satellites, drones and other government sources — to decide where and how Ukrainian troops should attack.

Ukraine and Western powers determined they needed the system after Russia instigated a separatist-backed war in Ukraine’s east in 2014. It was developed by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry with NATO assistance and first tested in 2017, in part to wean troops off Russian standards of siloing information among ground units instead of sharing it.

It has been included in training exercises between Ukraine’s military and other NATO planners in the years since.

Information sharing has long been a staple for American and other NATO forces. What NATO officials said was surprising about the Delta system was that the network was so broadly accessible to troops that it helped them make battlefield decisions even faster than some more modern militaries.

In Kherson, Delta helped Ukrainian troops quickly identify Russian supply lines to attack, Inna Honchar, commander of the nongovernment group Aerorozvidka, which develops drones and other technology for Ukraine’s military, said in a statement Sunday.

“Bridges were certainly key points,” Honchar added. “Warehouses and control points were damaged, and the provision of troops became critical” as Russians became increasingly isolated, she said.

Delta’s first real test had come in the weeks immediately after the February invasion as a Russian convoy stretching 40 miles long headed toward Kyiv. Ukrainian drones overhead tracked its advance, and troops assessed the best places to intercept it. Residents texted up-to-the-minute reports to the government with details that could only have been seen up close.

All the information was collected, analyzed and disseminated through Delta to help Ukraine’s military force a Russian retreat, Ukrainian officials said.

“That was the very first moment when Delta capabilities were realized at max,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said in a statement. It said Delta had since helped identify 1,500 confirmed Russian targets across the country on any given day — with “hundreds of them being eliminated” within 48 hours.

The test runs in Ukraine are helping senior officials and defense planners in the United States and its allies decide how to invest military spending over the next two decades.

Even routine missions in Ukraine — like how to get fuel to missile-toting vehicles on the edge of enemy territory — have set off discussions in American commands over how to design equipment that is not dependent on supply lines.

And longer-term strategy about how to coordinate and communicate among allied troops, which officials now say was a challenge during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being developed as the battle against Russia continues to unfold.

Such strategic military reforms were being discussed before Ukraine was invaded, said Gen. Philippe Lavigne of France, who leads NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, but “our early observations of this war is that those assumptions are still valid.”

He said Ukraine had shown how future warfare was likely to be fast-paced and highly contested — not just on the ground or in the skies, but also, most importantly, in cyberspace.

“This is the future operating environment,” Lavigne said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2022 The New York Times Company

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Wednesday, November 16, 2022

US orders Air India to pay $1.4 million for delay in providing refunds for cancelled flights

The Tata group-owned airline has paid $121.5 million (Rs 985.5 crore) as refunds for flight cancellation, mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scroll Staff

Nov 15, 2022 ·

An Air India aircraft prepares to land at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai. | Indranil Mukherjee/ AFP

The United States government on Monday ordered Air India to pay $1.4 million (Rs 11.36 crore) as penalty for extreme delays in providing refunds to passengers due to the cancellation or change in flights, mostly during the pandemic.

Air India is one of the six airlines fined by the United States Department of Transportation for failing to provide timely refunds to passengers after flights were cancelled or significantly changed. The Tata group-owned airline has paid $121.5 million (Rs 985.57 crore) as refunds for flight cancellation.

Besides Air India, the other airlines that were asked to pay penalties for delay in refunds include Frontier, TAP Portugal, Aero Mexico, EI AI, and Avianca.

The six airlines have paid $600 million (Rs 4,872 crore) in total as refunds, the Department of Transportation announced. The department has also assessed more than $7.25 million (Rs 58.8 crore) in civil penalties against the six airlines for extreme delays in providing refunds.

“With today’s fines, the Department’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection has assessed $8.1 million (Rs 65.7 crore) in civil penalties in 2022, the largest amount ever issued in a single year by that office,” said the Department of Transportation.

“When a flight gets canceled, passengers seeking refunds should be paid back promptly,” said US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Whenever that doesn’t happen, we will act to hold airlines accountable on behalf of American travelers and get passengers their money back. A flight cancellation is frustrating enough, and you shouldn’t also have to haggle or wait months to get your refund.”

Under the United States’ law, airlines and ticket agents have a legal obligation to refund consumers if the airline cancels or significantly changes a flight to, from and within the United States, and the passenger does not wish to accept the alternative offered.

Air India took more than 100 days to process more than half of the 1,900 refund complaints filed with the Department of Transportation for flights that the carrier cancelled or significantly changed, reported PTI.

U.S. Says Six Airlines Issue $622 Million In Refunds

By David Shepardson
11/14/22

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg joins a rally to support Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto ahead of the midterm elections in Henderson, Nevada, U.S. November 7, 2022.

The U.S. Transportation Department said Monday that six airlines were slapped with $7.25 million in penalties and agreed to issue $622 million in passenger refunds as the agency vows to aggressively enforce consumer protections.

The actions helped ensure the carriers paid required refunds "to hundreds of thousands of passengers who had their flights canceled or significantly changed," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters. "It shouldn't take enforcement action from (USDOT) to get airlines to pay the funds that they're required to pay."

Many of the refunds involved flights delayed or canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many travelers waited months or even years for refunds.

Buttigieg said under the settlements ultra-low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines was required to pay $222 million in refunds and will pay a $2.2 million penalty, while Tata Group-owned Air India will pay $121.5 million in required refunds and a $1.4 million fine.

Frontier said it issued $92 million in refunds and redeemed credits and vouchers to customers who voluntarily canceled non-refundable tickets during COVID and were not entitled to refunds. It said the refunds "demonstrate Frontier's commitment to treating our customers with fairness and flexibility."

State-owned TAP Portugal will issue $126.5 million in required refunds and pay a $1.1 million penalty, and Colombia's Avianca will pay $76.8 million in required refunds and pay a $750,000 penalty.

El Al Israel Airlines will issue $61.9 million in required refunds and pay a $900,000 penalty, and Mexico's Aeromexico will pay $13.6 million in required refunds and a $900,000 fine.

El Al told USDOT it had no policy of denying refunds and "prioritized refunds for U.S. passengers," but said it had been unable to meet the department's timeframe because of the pressure the "COVID-19 public health emergency had on its personnel and its finances."

Avianca told USDOT it had no policy to deny refunds but "had to process approximately seven-years' worth of refund requests in one year with reduced staffing."

Aeromexico in 2020 and 2021 determined that refunds would be processed 12 months after receipt, USDOT said, resulting in thousands of U.S. passengers not getting timely refunds. Aeromexico told USDOT "as it faced the possibility that it would need to cease operations, it made the difficult decision to limit how passengers holding nonrefundable tickets could recover the value of those tickets."

USDOT said Air India did not provide timely refunds. The airline said it received a "flood of refund requests from March 2020 through September 2021 because of its "liberal refund-on-demand policy."

TAP said it had faced "an avalanche of refund requests and its call center was quickly overwhelmed."

USDOT said it is investigating other carriers.

USDOT credited airlines with some payments for nonrefundable tickets against the penalties: Frontier got a $1.2 million credit, TAP Portugal $550,000, El Al $450,000 and Avianca $375,000.

British newspaper reporting falls dramatically short on Palestine

Greg Shupak

The Electronic Intifada

7 July 2022

Reporting Palestine-Israel in British Newspapers: An Analysis of British Newspapers by Nadia Sirhan, Palgrave Macmillan (2021)

‘Conflict,’ Nadia Sirhan says in Reporting Palestine-Israel in British Newspapers, is the word most commonly used to describe Palestine-Israel but it should only be used that way if it appears between inverted commas.

The term, she points out, wrongly suggests a power symmetry between the parties, obscuring the realities of apartheid, colonialism and occupation.

“A new lexicon is needed,” she contends, “one that subverts the pervasive propaganda and blatant bias” that consistently favor the nuclear-armed ethnocracy that has dispossessed – and is dispossessing – Palestine’s Indigenous people.

Sirhan has a poetic flare making her work more readable than that of many scholars. She writes, for instance: “The Nakba continues apace. So much has happened since – 1967, the Intifadas, an unrelenting illegal military occupation, an illegal blockade, land theft, human rights abuses, etcetera, etcetera, in an interminable list – innumerable lives lost or destroyed, being lost and being destroyed. Present continuous.”

Yet such literary flourishes do not interfere with her book’s rigor.

Reporting Palestine-Israel in British Newspapers looks at how language is used in media coverage of Palestine and the ways linguistic choices can shape public opinion. Sirhan, a translator with a PhD in Arabic linguistics from SOAS, University of London, dissects word choices and sentence structure while also looking at such issues as Israel’s foundational myths, censorship, agenda setting and sourcing.

Sirhan analyzes approximately 400 articles from five British newspapers: The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and The Times.

She focuses on how these outlets have covered five recent events: Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008-09; the kidnapping and killing in 2014 of three teenage Israeli settlers (Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach); an arson attack in 2015 that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents (the Dawabsha family) while severely burning a young child; the killing in 2017 of an Israeli police officer and two Israeli security guards (Solomon Gavriyah, Youssef Ottman, and Or Arish, respectively) in the illegal Har Adar settlement; and the killing, also in 2017, of unarmed Palestinian paraplegic Ibrahim Abu Thurayya.

Sirhan says the newspapers she looked at consistently provide their audiences with pro-Israel coverage. Sirhan’s third chapter, which looks at language use in the coverage, is especially compelling. She finds that, when Palestinians kill Israelis, the five newspapers use the active voice, but that they use the passive voice to describe Israel killing Palestinians.

Such formulations highlight Palestinian responsibility for violence and conceal Israel’s because passive voice occludes a sentence’s subject whereas active voice is clear about who did what.

Elsewhere in the book, Sirhan notes that just a few of the articles on Operation Cast Lead mention that Israel is an occupier and that many of the pieces “seemed to falsely imply” that, because Israel removed its settlers from Gaza, the Strip is no longer occupied.

The blockade and siege of Gaza are “largely absent” from the articles on Cast Lead.
The apparatus of state

According to Sirhan, fewer than half of the articles about the four other stories describe the West Bank as occupied and many of those that do only refer to it that way once.

In Sirhan’s dataset, moreover, Israeli settlements are seldom described as illegal and international law is rarely mentioned at all. Such sleights-of-hand obscure the extent to which Israel is an outlaw state and undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle.

These distortions have systemic explanations. Sirhan points out that because Israel has a state and Palestinians don’t, Israel can and does use this apparatus to try to manage perceptions of its policies.

It imposed a media blackout during Operation Cast Lead, for example, and – when it isn’t repressing or murdering Palestinian journalists – it obstructs their work by failing to grant them press accreditation, a tactic that Sirhan says has also been applied to non-Palestinian journalists accurately reporting on Israeli crimes.

Sirhan also writes that western journalists report from the Israeli side of the Green Line, or from Israeli-annexed Jerusalem, far more often than from the West Bank or Gaza. News outlets cite Israeli authorities as sources more frequently than they do Palestinians.

Moreover, Sirhan points to research showing that 54 percent of foreign journalists in Israel were fluent in Hebrew while 6 percent were fluent in Arabic. All such factors help make western journalists more likely to see matters from the Israeli point of view than from the Palestinian.

Sirhan suggests a variety of ways to improve the British media’s dismal record on Palestine. News agencies should base a team in the West Bank and should hire more Palestinian journalists who live in Palestine. Lobbies, she contends, should be more carefully regulated and their influence curtailed to rein in their ability to pressure journalists or try to discredit them.

Sirhan convincingly argues that the two-state solution is deceased though it’s unclear how this view squares with her assertion that “Israel must withdraw to the pre-1967 borders,” which seems to imply an Israeli and a Palestinian state. Her book closes by considering possible paths toward a future of peace and liberation in Palestine. She calls for organized mass protests and civil disobedience internationally to demand that governments stop arming Israel, cease buying Israeli weapons, and push for Israel to be prosecuted for its crimes against the Palestinians.

In addition, she advocates for full support of a global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Such developments, in Sirhan’s estimation, will force Israel to abide by international law, end its criminal occupation, lift the siege of Gaza, and – citing France’s removal of one million of its citizens from Algeria – dismantle its post-1967 settlements. In a context like that, Sirhan thinks it might be possible for Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or be compensated if they decline to do so.

Reporting Palestine-Israel in British Newspapers is useful for academics, students and activists, and will be of interest to general readers who are curious about how media manipulation functions or who care about justice in Palestine and beyond.

Greg Shupak writes fiction and political analysis and teaches Media Studies and English at the University of Guelph-Humber. He is the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media.

Gaza’s cesspools

Yasmin Abusayma

The Electronic Intifada

4 November 2022

Around 120,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater flow into the Mediterranean daily from Gaza, yet new wastewater treatment plants are reducing pollution. Mohammed AsadAPA images

“We haven’t felt at ease in two years,” Hana Abu Dhaher, 23, said. “We no longer enjoy meals or family gatherings.”

Life hasn’t been the same for the Abu Dhaher family since April 2021, when a new wastewater treatment plant opened about 100 meters from their family home, located east of central Gaza’s al-Bureij camp.

“Our neighborhood is infested with flies and mosquitoes,” Abu Dhaher, an accountant, said. “Furthermore, the foul odor does not leave the house.”

The al-Bureij wastewater treatment plant was built to treat all of central Gaza’s wastewater – a significant task, given Gaza’s sewage crisis. Currently, the plant absorbs around 60,000 cubic meters of sewage water daily, according to engineer Zuhdi al-Ghariz, the project director of the Ministry of Local Government.

As one of the world’s most densely populated areas, the Gaza Strip and its population of 2.1 million are in dire need of more sewage treatment facilities like al-Bureij.

Currently, around 120,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater from Gaza go into the Mediterranean every day. Though, with new treatment plants, this amount appears to be on the decline.

The existing sewage networks service only 60 percent of homes in the Gaza Strip, and the remaining 40 percent depend on septic tanks that often leak and seep into the aquifer.

Yet, over the past several years, as more facilities are built to address Gaza’s wastewater crisis, the residents in their vicinity are enduring a different kind of nightmare.
Residents protest al-Bureij

While project director al-Ghariz acknowledged that al-Bureij residents might be bothered by the plant’s smell – which he says is caused by the accumulation of untreated wastewater – he said that the plant’s construction was “supervised by international consultants who designed the stations according to international specifications.”

Specifically, Germany, which invested $100 million in the plant’s construction.

The plant “handles the problem of sewage that was spilling into the sea by natural flow, ruining soil and groundwater wells,” he said, noting that in coming years the plant will treat 90,000-120,000 cubic meters daily.

Hashem Taha, the al-Bureij treatment plant operations officer, also did not deny the existence of problems for residents.

“We saw an increase in insects and terrible odors,” he said, “therefore the municipality of al-Bureij was provided with diesel and materials needed to kill mosquitoes and clear weeds that created a fertile environment for their development.”

He said that the smell problem has mostly been resolved, and that it is only particularly bad for an hour or two during the day, when the station processes the wastewater.

Yet Zahia Abu Dhaher, the mother of Hana, said the smell is persistent.

“The smell is harmful, especially for us, the elderly who suffer from shortness of breath,” she said.

Furthermore, the mosquitoes are so bad that her sons and daughters have developed rashes as a result of the nonstop bites and must visit the doctor on a regular basis for treatment.

This past August, the Abu Dhaher family along with other residents of al-Bureij protested outside the gates of the plant, demanding an improvement in conditions, but to no avail.

Zahia Abu Dhaher said that Israel’s May 2021 attack on Gaza only worsened the situation.

The station was operated remotely and faced numerous power cuts, which intensified the smell as a result of the accumulation of solid waste.

During that attack, Israel further destroyed or damaged 23,070 meters of sewage lines and 2,850 meters of rainwater drain pipes, according to the Gaza municipality.

Nihad al-Khatib, the official in charge of operating sewage plants at Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, said the impact of the Israeli blockade on Gaza’s sewage crisis cannot be overstated.

“The development of many plants has been postponed because the occupation has not allowed the entry of equipment needed to operate and complete them,” he said. “Some projects have been suspended for more than a year and a half.”

As Israel destroys Gaza’s infrastructure, prevents the entry of equipment needed to maintain facilities and imposes restrictions on the construction of new infrastructure, the efficient treatment of sewage becomes a near impossibility.

Flooded with sewage in Beach camp

Mousa al-Sisi, 76, dreads wintertime in Beach refugee camp.

In 2019, a sewage pipe opposite his house exploded and leaked into his family’s home. He had to build a wall of sandbags outside to stop the flow and re-route it toward the sea.

For this reason, many Palestinians in Gaza see sewage pipes and drains as bombs just waiting to explode every winter.

“The [sewage] problem has been present for years,” al-Sisi said, “but it has gotten much worse in the last two years due to the camp’s inadequate infrastructure.”

Infrastructure is shoddy throughout the camps in the Gaza Strip, and it causes daily problems that range from a nuisance to catastrophic.

“When my grandchildren go to school,” al-Sisi said, “they jump from stone to stone amid the foul smells.”

Each winter carries the threat of temporary displacement, property damage and health issues due to flooding and burst sewage and drainage pipes.

The Gaza municipality has discussed a development project in coordination with UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, to help address the sewage crisis in Beach camp.

Despite such projects, sewage problems persist. For instance, in the Jabaliya camp, the Abu Rashid pond is a constant nuisance to those who live nearby.

Originally a natural spot where rainwater collected, in 1975 the nine-meter-deep pond became a depository for sewage.

Even with the numerous development projects in this area, the pond still emits a powerful stench and attracts rodents and insects, especially in summer.

Abdel Rahman al-Ajrami, 35, is unemployed and lives near Abu Rashid pond.

“We really do not need the problems caused by the pond,” he said. “We live in a state of anxiety with the first drop of rain in winter, as the water level rises and sometimes gets into our homes.”

Hamdi Mutair, the former director of Jabaliya municipality’s water and sanitation department, said there are efforts in place to maintain the pond, such as pumping in water and spraying pesticides.

Yet constant interruptions of electricity and the fuel crisis have instead made the pond a cesspool.

Yasmin Abusayma is a freelance writer and translator from Gaza, Palestine.

The burden Western liberals impose only on Palestinians

Joseph Massad

The Electronic Intifada

9 November 2022

Billionaires Sheldon Adelson (left) and Haim Saban (right), pictured in 2014, are among the wealthy pro-Zionist Jews who have financed Israeli colonization. Their role is comparable to the European Christian businesses and states that funded colonization in Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, New Zealand or even Israel. Shahar AzranPolaris/Newscom

Since the beginning of Zionist Jewish colonization of their country in the 1880s, Palestinians have faced demands that they carry a double burden: to fight off the Jewish racist colonists while having to defend their colonizers against anti-Jewish European Christian racism.

No other colonized people has been forced to carry such a double burden. Not even the Indigenous African peoples of Liberia were asked to defend their own Black American racist colonizers who despised them against European and US anti-Black racism that targeted the Black colonists.

Neither were Black South Africans ever asked to defend their Afrikaner oppressors against the British who oppressed the Afrikaners, even placing them in concentration camps.

And no one ever demanded that Indigenous people defend their white colonizers against the religious persecution they suffered in Europe which they claim impelled them to colonize North America.

When these various colonized peoples attacked the oppressiveness of their colonizers and their supremacist and exploitative crimes, no one seemed concerned that such criticisms would be used by the former oppressors of the colonists against them, or that the colonized had no right to condemn their oppressors.

By contrast, the general demand put to the Palestinians by many European Christians and Jews and by the colonizing European Jews is that Palestinians should have ceded their homeland voluntarily to European Jews and expressed sympathy with the European Jewish plight against European anti-Semitism.

Short of that, European Christians and European colonizing Jews would insist that the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle against Jewish colonization is “anti-Semitic,” meaning that the Palestinians do not oppose the principle of the colonization of their homeland, but rather that they only oppose the right of Jews, but not other peoples, to colonize it.

Were Christians, Muslims or Hindus to colonize Palestine, the Palestinians, according to this logic, would have ceded their homeland willingly, but they refuse to do so in the case of Jews simply because they are anti-Semites.

Conditional sympathy

In the last 50 years, western Christian and Jewish liberals who sympathize with Palestinians as victims of Israeli oppression, but not as anti-colonial resistors, insist that all Palestinian criticism of Israel must be carefully calibrated lest it be perceived by Europeans as anti-Semitism.

However, during the same period, the Israelis and their Western supporters have waged a major campaign arguing that all criticism of Zionism and Israel is “anti-Semitic,” a campaign that culminated in the recent adoption by European countries and the US of the anti-Semitism definition concocted by the European-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

These accusations have centered on several suspect arguments that many Western supporters of the Palestinians-as-victims-but-not-as-resistors want to bar the Palestinians from making.

The Zionists and Western liberals argue that if Palestinians attack Jews’ right to colonize their lands, it would be anti-Semitic because in denying European Jews the right to be colonists the Palestinians would be denying their alleged “right” to self-determination. Or worse, that Palestinians would be denying the racist connection that Protestant Europeans conjured since the 16th century, namely that European Jews are fantastically somehow the descendants of Palestine’s ancient Hebrews, (something European Jewish lore also sometimes claimed) and not later European converts to Judaism!

By this logic, the Zionists argue that the Palestinians are in fact the colonists of Palestine, while the European Jewish colonists were the real natives of Palestine who were repatriating to the homeland of their alleged ancient ancestors.

In the early 19th century, many European philhellenists considered themselves the descendants of the ancient Greeks and saw the indigenous Greeks as “Christianized Slavs” who migrated south to ancient Greece and that they were more akin to the Turks.

But as no settler-colonial project was ultimately conceived for Greece, the matter was dropped in favor of Greek “independence” from the Ottomans and Greece’s appropriation as part of Europe rather than the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Zionists have never been original thinkers, as most of their arguments are derived from other European colonists. It was the French and later the Italians who argued that their colonization of North Africa was nothing short of the return to the ancient land of the Roman Empire and that the Indigenous Arabs were the actual colonists!

Indeed, Western racist luminaries like Albert Camus insisted that the Algerian Arabs were foreign colonists while claiming that “the French of Algeria are also natives, in the strong sense of the word.”

European anti-Semitism projected onto Palestinians

Should Palestinians then concede the Zionist fabrication that European Jews are the Indigenous people in Palestine and that they are the actual colonists, lest they be accused of anti-Semitism?

When Palestinians claim that the Western and US media have always been pro-Israel and racist against the Palestinians, their Western supporters worry that this would be perceived as anti-Semitic, because European and US anti-Semites traditionally accuse European Jews of controlling the Western media.

However, the Palestinian claim is no different from the Algerian claim that the Western media always supported French colonialism in Algeria, or the Native American claim that the Western media supports the rights of the white colonists in the United States.

That Western media, which is the media of colonizers and colonists, supports colonialism attests to a structural bias, sometimes even a conspiratorial bias, against the Indigenous peoples.

This does not mean that Jews control the Western media as the anti-Semites claim. It means that European colonists, Christians and Jews, and pro-colonists do.

Should Palestinians then not attack the endemic pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias of the Western media lest they be “mistaken” for anti-Semites by liberals?

Palestinians have also traditionally identified the huge financial and political power that the Zionist movement mobilized since the 1880s to fulfil its plan for the colonization of Palestine, beginning with the Rothschilds who financed the earliest European Jewish colonies in Palestine.

Again, when Palestinians speak of wealthy European or American Jews, businesspeople and bankers, who support Zionism and Israel, conceive of plans to expel the Palestinians and promise to finance their expulsion – as the wealthy American Jewish Zionist Edward A. Norman proposed in 1934 – or to steal their lands, Western Christian and Jewish liberals flinch that these arguments smack of the Christian European anti-Semitic canard that all Jews are rich and run the entire financial system of the West.

But the fact that rich pro-Zionist Jews support Israel and finance the colonists is no different from the investment of European Christian businesses and states in financing the colonization of Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, New Zealand or even Israel.

Exposing wealthy European and US Jews who finance Zionism is on account of their formidable colonial role and influence in destroying Palestinian society and oppressing Palestinians.

It does not imply, as the anti-Semites would have us believe, that all Jews are bankers who run the lives of European Christians, or that all Jews are rich, which they are not – even if and when, by most accounts, a majority of European and US Jews have supported and continue to support Jewish colonization in Palestine since World War II, just as a majority of French and British Christians supported colonization in Africa.

Should Palestinians then remain silent on the influence of those Zionist European and US Jews who contribute to their oppression lest they be mistaken for anti-Semites?

Colonial encounter

Not being European, Palestinians have encountered Jews since the 1880s mainly as armed colonists, intent on stealing their lands and expelling them from their country.

While it is true that some Palestinian political leaders sought to use European anti-Semitic rhetoric against their European Jewish colonizers to defend against Zionist colonization, the majority of Palestinian leaders have often done the exact opposite and conceded several Zionist colonial and racist claims as the writer and intellectual Yusuf al-Khalidi did over a century ago, Yasser Arafat did in 2002 and Mahmoud Abbas continues to do today.

Al-Khalidi, who lived in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, protested the choice of Palestine as the location of a future state for European Jews on account of it being the home of the native Palestinian Arabs.

He responded to the assertions of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, to whom he sent a letter in 1899, as follows: “By what right then do the Jews claim it for themselves?”

Strangely, buying into Zionist racialist and anti-Semitic claims that European Jews were direct biological descendants of the ancient Hebrews, al-Khalidi, most likely on account of the European colonial education he had acquired, affirmed that “Zionism, theoretically, is a completely natural and just idea as a solution to the Jewish question,” and indeed, “who can challenge the rights of the Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”

However, in the interest of peace, al-Khalidi proposed that the Zionist movement look for other “uninhabited countries where millions of poor Jews who may perhaps become happy and find a secure life there as a people.”

“That would perhaps be the best, the most rational solution to the Jewish question,” he argued. “But in the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace.”

Many Palestinians after al-Khalidi continue to fall for these bogus Zionist arguments.

The rewards of anti-Palestinian racism

The irony lies in the fact that the Western liberal critics of the Palestinians and those who support Palestinians-as-victims seldom take the Zionists and pro-Zionists to task for their interminable racist outbursts against the Palestinians and other Arabs, and their use of traditional European and white American anti-Arab racism that led to the murder of millions of Arabs from Algeria to Libya by the Europeans during the anti-colonial struggles, and Iraq by the Americans since 1991.

American Jewish journalist Jeffrey Goldberg revels, for instance, in his published work in having been a colonist in Israel and in joining the Israeli army and serving in its ranks as a prison guard of Palestinians jailed for opposing Jewish colonization (he was also a cheerleader of the US invasion of Iraq).

Yet Goldberg is celebrated, respected and given editorial jobs in the most prestigious liberal US magazines, along with journalism awards, despite his deplorable views of the Palestinians and Iraqis, not to mention his direct role in acts of persecution as a prison guard.

In contrast, if a Palestinian journalist is discovered to have expressed abhorrent views in support of European anti-Semitism in her immature and ill-informed youth, not in published work, but on Facebook, views she flagrantly mistook as part of legitimate expression of rage against her oppressors, she is fired from her job even by a pro-Palestinian media outlet.

Moreover, a journalistic award is rescinded to the satisfaction of Western liberals, even when her youthful infraction was not repeated during her journalistic career.

Meanwhile, the former Israeli prison guard continues his anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian journalistic rhetoric and his ongoing attacks on those Palestinians who defend their people against colonialism as anti-Semites.

Another prominent American Jewish journalist, Ben Shapiro, has called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians and endorsed the killing of Palestinian and Afghan civilians.

Shapiro once declared that “Israelis like to build” while “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.”

Yet these and other racist comments did not stop The New York Times from celebrating Shapiro as “provocative gladiator” and “prizefighter,” while at the same time noting that he has been a target of anti-Semitism.

Of course, white American and European Christian journalists such as The New York Times’ John F. Burns, who support and report glowingly on US invasions abroad, have always been and continue to be celebrated.

Jewish journalists are punished too

However, Jewish journalists who criticize Israel are dismissed from liberal Western media outlets as happened to Emily Wilder, who was let go by the Associated Press in 2021, and more recently Katie Halper who was fired by The Hill.

In the case of Wilder, her “activism in college was the real issue” that led to her firing, according to media reports.

Compare her case with the mainstream Western media’s celebration of the Israeli prison guard’s account of his encounter with Palestinians in Israel’s dungeons as grounds for his promotion, not ostracism or dismissal!

What European and American liberals want is that Palestinians remain silent on the international mechanisms that support and defend the Jewish settler-colony, that Palestinians solely oppose the oppression to which they are subjected by their Jewish colonists, but not the Jewish colonists’ right to colonize them; that Palestinians must defend their Jewish colonists against European anti-Semites; and that Palestinians stand in solidarity with the colonists-as-victims while the Palestinians are quashed under the colonists’ military boots.

Meanwhile, almost no amount of active collaboration with the Israelis in their oppression of the Palestinians, let alone regular Israeli and pro-Israeli expression of anti-Palestinian racism, even merits censure when espoused by Israelis or their Western fans.

When a majority of the Palestinian political and intellectual class heed calls by Western liberals to defend Jews against anti-Semitism, as the Palestine Liberation Organization had done in honoring the Jewish victims of the Holocaust since the 1970s, neither Israel nor its supporters are satisfied.

Their objective is not to teach Palestinians about the history of European Jews as victims of oppression, but rather to teach them why European Jews as oppressors had and have every right to colonize them and take their country away from them.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York. His most recent book is Islam in Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015).