Library restores Palestinian history one manuscript at a time

Hiba Aslan
Sun, July 23, 2023 

Librarian Khader Salameh with a gilded copy of the Koran from the 16th century

 (AHMAD GHARABLI)

A library in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem offers a rare glimpse into Palestinian history with its treasure trove of manuscripts dating back hundreds of years before the creation of Israel.

At the Khalidi Library in the walled Old City, Rami Salameh expertly inspects a damaged manuscript as part of the effort to restore and digitise historical Palestinian documents.

"The manuscripts range from jurisprudence to astronomy, the Prophet's (Mohammed) biography and the Koran," says the Italian-trained restorer as he carefully manoeuvres a dry brush over a fragile text on Arabic grammar.

From his small workshop, he lets out a sigh of relief, concluding that it won't be necessary to treat the 200-year-old document for discolouration as a result of oxidation.

Working alone, Salameh has already restored 1,200 pages from over a dozen manuscripts belonging to private Palestinian libraries over the past two and a half years.

The items date back as far as 300 years, to the Ottoman period.

The majority of the manuscripts come from the Khalidi Library itself, the largest private collection of Arabic and Islamic manuscripts in the Palestinian territories.

Also on its shelves are Persian, German and French books, including an impressive collection of titles by French writer Victor Hugo.

- Glimpse into history -

Located in the Old City near one of the entrances to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the library was founded by Palestinian judge Raghib Al-Khalidi in 1900.

From its main building, which overlooks the Western Wall -- the holiest site where Jews can pray -- warring sultans reportedly played a role in liberating Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The collection contains books, correspondence, Ottoman decrees and newspapers, including documents from the influential Khalidi family.

They offer a rich view of past life in the holy city, with the oldest book dating back to the 10th century.

"We have manuscripts that talk about the cultural and social status of the people of Jerusalem, and this is an indication of the presence of Palestinians here for centuries," says librarian Khader Salameh, the restorer's father who manages the collection.

"The contents of the library negate the Zionist claim that this country was empty," he added, referring to the common refrain that the land was unpopulated prior to the creation of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians.

Palestinian families and institutions in east Jerusalem have frequently been evicted to make way for Israeli settlements since Israel captured and annexed the area, including the Old City, in the 1967 Six-Day War -- moves regarded as illegal by the UN and the international community.

Part of the library was seized by Israeli settlers to build a Jewish religious school, the librarian lamented.

The library's administration waged a long legal battle to fight the settlement, but did not succeed in preventing the seizure of part of it.

Khader Salameh said the outcome could have been much worse, and the entire property taken by settlers, had it not been for the support they received.

"Israeli intellectuals supported the library administration and testified in court in our favour," he noted.

- 'Delicate' manuscripts -

Ever since, the library has continued to preserve cultural heritage in Jerusalem through their restoration and digitisation, with support from local and international organisations.

"We capture the documents with very high precision without exposing the paper to light, as the manuscripts are very delicate, and we want to preserve them for as long as possible," says Shaimaa al-Budeiri, a digital archive officer.

Surrounded by hundreds of books and equipment in her office, she brushes pages clean before placing them flat to photograph and upload the images onto her computer.

To date, Budeiri has photographed around 2.5 million pages of manuscripts, newspapers, rare books and other documents from the four private libraries in Jerusalem.

She says digitisation is the way forward, as it allows researchers remote access to the library's archive.

They hope to secure more funding for the restoration work to buy costly supplies and equipment, including acid-free storage boxes.

They also want to update the workshop to safeguard against the humidity that threatens their work with the delicate manuscripts.

Budeiri says it is her love for books that drives her passion for her work.

"If I see someone holding a book in a violent way, I feel like the book is in pain," she notes.

"The book gives to you, it doesn't take away from you."

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Progressives dish on 'chilling effect' on Israel criticism after uproar over Pramila Jayapal's comments: 'We never do anything constructive on this issue'


Bryan Metzger
Sat, July 22, 2023 

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, flanked by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, speaks at a news conference at the Capitol on May 24, 2023

.Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Rep. Pramila Jayapal's comments on Israel caused an uproar this week in Congress.


But progressives argue that misses the point — and discourages honest criticism of Israeli policy.


"We never do anything constructive on this issue in Congress," said one top progressive Democrat.

When Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington referred to Israel as a "racist state" at a progressive event in Chicago on Saturday, she also spoke of the strong political headwinds that meet any lawmaker who lodges criticism of Israel, or speaks firmly about the plight of Palestinians.

"While you may have arguments with whether or not some of us on stage are fighting hard enough," Jayapal told a group of pro-Palestinian protesters, "I do want you to know that there is an organized opposition on the other side."

That opposition was demonstrated once more for progressives in the subsequent days.

Even after Jayapal clarified her remarks about Israel, House Democratic leadership issued a statement rebuking her. Separately, 43 House Democrats said in a statement that they were "deeply concerned" about Jayapal's "unacceptable comments." And on Tuesday, House Republicans held a snap vote on a resolution declaring that Israel is "not a racist or apartheid state."

Meanwhile, Israel has continued to greenlight the illegal expansion of settlements deep in the West Bank, settlers often engage in violence against Palestinians, and rocket-fire from Gaza continues, all as the prospect of a two-state solution — and Palestinian self-determination — slips further from view.

"We never do anything constructive on this issue in Congress," said Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a chair emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who said he wanted to see a special envoy appointed to deal with the conflict.

"This seems to happen once a year," said Pocan. "There'll be something that flares up, and we overreact, and then we get back to normal."

Couple the congressional reaction with the millions of dollars spent by pro-Israel groups to defeat progressive candidates and incumbents during the 2022 midterms — as well as the looming threat of future primary challenges — and the "chilling effect" that progressive lawmakers face on this issue becomes clear.

"For some actors in this space, that is the intention," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

"There's a few issues where any nuance is really discouraged," said another progressive House Democrat who insisted on anonymity to discuss the issue frankly. "This is one of them."

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, whose New York District includes Jewish communities in Westchester County, said the situation in Congress was directly impacting the situation in Israel and Palestine.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman said he’s received “blowback” for his positions on Israel.Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

"One of the reasons why Palestinians continue to suffer in this power dynamic is because we're only having one conversation, and everyone's afraid to be critical," said Bowman.

Bowman also noted the strong reaction that he often gets from constituents for his own criticisms of Israel, including joining other progressives in boycotting this week's address by Israel President Isaac Herzog.

"I know what happens when I say certain things," said Bowman. "I know the calls we get, the emails we get, the letters we get, the tweets that go out, the texts to my phone. I know what happens when I say something like, 'I'm not attending Herzog's address.'"

Bowman may soon face a primary challenge himself from a popular local Democratic official over the positions he's taken on Israel.

"Sometimes the blowback is so intense, you can't even do your job for a number of days," Bowman added. "I can't even respond to constituents' needs, because I'm responding to all this blowback from something I said, which was totally reasonable."
'I understand why this is passionate for her'

In recent years, a growing crop of progressive lawmakers have become more willing to criticize Israeli policies in stark terms, often using the "apartheid" label embraced by numerous international human rights groups and observers.

It's a product of several factors, progressives say, including the growing influence of left-wing advocacy, conditions on the ground in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that have become hard to ignore, and even the backgrounds of some of the lawmakers.

Among the nine House Democrats to vote against the Israel resolution were the chambers' three Muslim representatives, including the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Ahead of the Tuesday vote, Tlaib delivered an address detailing the harsh rhetoric used by top Israeli politicians to describe Palestinians.

Sitting behind her the entire time was Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, a Jewish Democrat who was among the lawmakers to co-sign the statement denouncing Jayapal's words.

Phillips embraced Tlaib on the floor after her speech, later telling Insider that though it was "difficult" for him to hear the Michigan Democrats' words, he understood her perspective as a Palestinian woman who still has family members living in the West Bank.

"I have empathy, and I understand why this is passionate for her, and she has given me the same thing," said Phillips. "I gave her respect, and love, because I think she's worthy of it."

But Phillips held firm in his belief that it was important to firmly denounce criticism of Israel when it crosses a certain threshold.

"There needs to be space and place for that criticism" of Israel, said Phillips. "But there are occasions where I think words are awfully damaging from people who have an extraordinary platform, and who I do not think recognize the impact that has beyond the words themselves."

"There's a difference between advocating for Palestinian self-determination, advocating for peace, and criticism of an entire country and people when it is the only place of refuge for the Jewish Diaspora," he added.
'Diversity of opinion on the issue'

Phillips and other Democrats also see the recent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the US as connected to broad-brushed criticism of Israel.

Another House Democrat who signed the statement on Jayapal's remarks, speaking privately, cited the nature of pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses and its impact on young Jewish students as a key example.

Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota embraced Tlaib after her speech on Tuesday.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

Progressives, unsurprisingly, take issue with that idea — and they see Republicans in particular as using the issue as a political wedge.

"I believe that the cynicism of it is now very naked," said Ocasio-Cortez. "I think people now see, more than ever before, that these two issues are not conflated, that criticism of Israel is not in any way equivalent to anti-Semitism."

While Jayapal clarified her comments and voted for the Israel resolution, she notably held firm on her belief that the status quo in Israel is "unacceptable, untenable, and unjust."

And beyond the most vocal progressives and the staunchest pro-Israel Democrats, there are other Democrats who find themselves somewhere in the middle — and frustrated over the lack of nuance.

"The Democratic leadership has to acknowledge there's diversity of opinion on the issue of Israel, and especially how right-wing it has become," said another House Democrat who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the issue, who bemoaned that amid the outrage of Jayapal's comments there was "not a real opportunity to discuss some of the very real problems that exist right now" in Israel.

The lawmaker added that they thought Jayapal's comments may have been too "broad" and "sweeping," but that some lawmakers "live in denial that there are actual issues of discrimination, and segregation, and some racism by representatives of the [Israeli] government."

And though the word "apartheid" has increasingly been employed by international human rights groups — including within Israel — the lawmaker took issue with the term, given its specific association with pre-1990s South Africa and its relative foreign-ness to American history.

They readily conceded, however, that "segregation" would be an appropriate term to describe the treatment that Palestinians often face.

Netanyahu’s Government Passes Law Weakening Israel’s Judges




Gwen Ackerman and Ethan Bronner
Mon, July 24, 2023 

(Bloomberg) -- Israel’s parliament on Monday approved a law that will curb the oversight powers of the courts, a measure that has divided the nation, prompted mass protests and drawn rare US criticism.

The shekel fell — recording the biggest daily loss among a basket of major currencies tracked by Bloomberg — while tens of thousands of protesters converged on the Knesset building where the session took place. Opposition lawmakers boycotted the vote, allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition to pass the bill with 64 votes to 0.

Advocates of the measure, which curtails the ability of the courts to overrule government decisions and appointments on the grounds of reasonableness, argue that the judiciary has grown too powerful and is controlled by the left.

But the plan has drawn fierce opposition from a broad swath of Israel’s establishment, from tech entrepreneurs to CEOs and military reservists. They say it’ll undermine the country’s democratic checks, the rule of law and the economy.

On Monday reports of a potential compromise strengthened the shekel, but those gains reversed after the vote. The currency fell 1.1% to 3.67 per dollar as of 5:50 p.m. local time.

Israeli Shekel Goes to Worst From Best on Judicial Overhaul Bill

Think tanks have warned that the government’s approach risks damaging Israel’s ties with US President Joe Biden’s administration, which had urged it to take time and build consensus.

“It is unfortunate that the vote today took place with the slimmest possible majority,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, adding that the administration supports efforts to reach a broader consensus through dialogue.

The unprecedented standoff over a single piece of legislation has come to represent a broader battle over Israel’s identity and what it means to be a Jewish democracy. Opponents fear the law is the first step toward a religious autocracy, while supporters see it as permitting their once-marginalized voices to be heard.

Why Israel Is Bitterly Split by a Judiciary Overhaul: QuickTake

There was little sign that Monday’s vote would end the crisis. The government, the most right-wing in Israeli history, has indicated it will push ahead with a broader package of changes that have alarmed foreign investors and secular Israelis.

“This is the first step in a historical process,” said Justice Minister Yariv Levin, the architect of the judicial overhaul.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said he planned to appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn the law. The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, a watchdog, tweeted that it had already filed a petition. More appeals are expected in the coming days.

“The battle isn’t over, it is only beginning,” Lapid said. “This is greatest and most dangerous national crisis that we have ever had to deal with.”

Supreme Court Appeal

How the Supreme Court will respond is unclear but most scholars believe it is likely to accept an appeal and hold hearings with an expanded panel of 11 justices, instead of the usual three.

Yuval Shany, a professor of law at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said he would be surprised if the court struck down the law, since it is what is known as a basic law, meaning one with quasi-constitutional authority. Instead, he expects the judges to weigh in on how the law should function.

“The Supreme Court has never struck down a basic law although it says it has the power to do so,” he said. “It would probably have to do so based on incompatibility with basic democratic principles. To me, it would be a stretch.”

Israel has no formal constitution and its basic laws serve as one, giving the law particular weight.

The prospect of a prolonged battle is already making businesses nervous.

Over two-thirds of tech companies have taken financial and legal steps to safeguard their assets since the reform plans were unveiled in January. A report by Startup Nation Central, which tracks the sector, said 22% of 500 companies surveyed moved funds abroad and 8% moved their headquarters.

More than 10,000 reservists joined 1,200 pilots from the air force threatening to suspend service if the bill goes through without wide public consensus. They’ve been supported by dozens of top former security officials, alarming the military leadership as it grapples with growing tensions with Iran and its proxies on Israel’s borders.

--With assistance from Marissa Newman and Alisa Odenheimer.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Generals, Peaceniks, and Palestinian Fighters Agree: Bibi Must Be Stopped

Jesse Rosenfeld
Sat, July 22, 2023 


LONG READ

On a narrow hillside road crowded with stucco apartment buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, 22-year-old “Abu Nidal” sits in an open storefront decorated with posters of fallen fighters, clutching his M16. Voices and static blare from the radio stuck to his green tactical vest. Flanked by young men just like him, he is the face of a new Palestinian armed rebellion.

The will to fight and die against unending Israeli military rule has been spreading through refugee camps and working-class neighborhoods in the occupied West Bank for almost a year. Violence escalated this summer as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged deeper into multiple political crises. Israeli settlers have rampaged in Palestinian villages, while Israel has expanded settlements and carried out large-scale ground and air assaults on Jenin’s refugee camp. Claiming it was necessary to rout out fighters who have launched attacks on Israelis and to destroy explosive-making sites, the Israeli military has forced thousands of civilians to flee. Israeli drone strikes killed Palestinian fighters from the sky as soldiers invaded people’s homes and bulldozers ripped up the camp’s winding streets — smashing its water and electricity infrastructures. Israeli Apache helicopters have launched missile attacks in the West Bank for the first time in nearly 20 years, while armored convoys rolling through Jenin are met with assault-rifle ambushes and have been hit by IEDs from the likes of Abu Nidal and his men.

“Abu Nidal” inside the Jenin refugee camp

Throughout his career, Netanyahu has used military escalation and settlement expansion to rally public support. However, fighters like Abu Nidal say that the roots of their rebellion are in the rage of a generation being forced to grow up in the shadow of Israel’s walls and segregated by its checkpoints without hope of things changing.


Before taking up arms, Abu Nidal studied to become an engineer but saw no escape from the harsh conditions in an overcrowded camp built as temporary relief for his great-grandparents’ generation in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, Jenin has been a hub of Palestinian armed resistance for more than 20 years, and its fighters have carried out attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians across Israel and the West Bank. Its refugee camp was razed to the ground by the Israeli army in 2002 at the height of the Second Intifada, only to be rebuilt and raided regularly ever since.

Abu Nidal insists on the nom de guerre for security precautions. Yet, despite drones buzzing overhead, neither Abu Nidal (Arabic for “Father of the Struggle”) nor any of the other fighters bother to cover their faces. On the one hand, he expects to be killed by an army that has already jailed him for a year, on the other, he and his fighters don’t want to make it easy.

Dozens of young men and teenagers carrying assault rifles patrol through the night on otherwise empty roads and guard the entrances to the 0.16-square-mile camp, home to more than 23,600 residents. They keep a lookout on barricades of twisted-metal beams. Palestinian youth have had most of their lives shaped by Netanyahu governments, all of which have been the most right wing in Israeli history — ending any hope that Israel would dismantle its occupation. However, his latest return to power amid a spreading West Bank revolt has ushered in an era of widespread settler attacks on civilians, encouraged by hardline cabinet ministers who believe in expelling Palestinians.

Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem have been raised amid the constant presence of Israeli security forces, evictions, and settlement expansion in the city they hope to make a capital some day. Just more than 50 miles away, most Gen Z Gazans have grown up trapped in the 25-mile-long coastal strip where drones rule the skies and battleships blockade the sea. Sea water is pumped into homes, and rivers of human waste flow into the Mediterranean because of Israeli bombing of water-filtration and sewage plants, as leaders from Hamas fight with periodic missile fire targeting Israel in an unending siege.

“Israel has left us no choice,” says Abu Nidal. “The occupation has proven that the more we are silent, the more it will take from us.”

A two-hour drive from Jenin, across Israel’s separation wall, a very different struggle for rights has been dominating the streets of Israel’s secular, economic capital. Jewish Israeli society has sharply divided over Netanyahu’s hardline coalition’s efforts to curtail the independence and power of the judiciary, leading to the biggest protest movement in the history of Israel — a battle over whether the country will continue to guarantee its citizens individual rights or subject them to religious nationalist values.

While Tel Aviv is one of the world’s most expensive cities, Jenin’s refugee camp is one of the poorest places under Israeli rule, and the rights of nearly 5 million occupied Palestinians aren’t being fought for by most of the protesters paralyzing the streets. Abu Nidal has been following the rise of Israel’s social unrest and isn’t neutral on what he sees as an internal fight in Israeli society. “I may feel happy because their society is tearing itself apart,” he says. “But don’t expect me to cheer for the oppression of Israelis by their own government.”

Demonstrators chant during a rally in Tel Aviv to protest the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bill as the country begins celebrations for its 75th anniversary.

FOR THE PAST seven months, Tel Avivians of all ages have clogged the streets and freeways with dancing, banging drums, and starting bonfires often just blocks from Israel’s Ministry of Defense. On one spring-night protest, Yaron Rosen, a clean-cut 55-year-old Israeli Air Force brigadier general who was an architect of the army’s cyber division and liaised with heads of the NSA, stands on a grassy hill above the highway, hugging his son with joy. “We’re safeguarding our democracy,” he says.

Rosen is a leader of a movement of reserve soldiers that are threatening to refuse duty en masse in protest of the reforms. Divided into seven pieces of legislation, the overhaul of the justice system will give the government the power to override the Supreme Court, limit the court’s ability to exercise judicial review, and expand the influence of rabbinical courts into civil matters. A law shielding an indicted prime minister, like Netanyahu, from removal from office passed in March.

Rosen says soldiers are worried the country will lose the values they swore allegiance to and have risked their lives for. Looking out at the sea of Israeli flags jamming the highway in both directions, Rosen takes pride in a protest movement rooted in the country’s establishment and defending its founding values.

“Our oath is to protect Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” says Rosen about what motivates Brothers in Arms, the reservist organization that he represents, to protest. “That is what we owe our allegiance to.”

The protests are filled with Israel’s middle and upper classes: professors, students, lawyers, doctors, business owners, and tech workers — many of whom are also reserve soldiers in Israel’s conscript military. They have lost considerable political power since Netanyahu’s 2009 return to office and were quiet amid Israel’s booming economy and relative security, but since taking the streets this winter, they have gained the support of former prime ministers, leaders of the security services, tech, and the arms industry.

“These are the people that are holding the economy, that are holding the military,” says Rosen about the throngs of protesters blocking roads. “They are holding everything that is good about Israel’s society.”

Tension between the religious and secular establishments has run through Israeli society since the country’s creation, but in the past two decades, many Israelis have become far more religious and nationalistic. Netanyahu has responded to these trends with a hard-right vision for the country that mixes militarism, religiosity, and expansionism to cement a permanent system of separation from the Palestinians in all territory under Israeli control: Segregation is Netanyahu’s solution.

Returning to office under indictment on corruption charges for breach of trust, bribery, and fraud, Netanyahu built a coalition of hardline Israeli-settler-based parties committed to Jewish nationalist dominance and religion in public life. He appointed extremist Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power Party who has been found guilty of inciting terrorism and advocates Israeli annexation of the West Bank and expulsions of Palestinians, as his national security minister. The Israeli military reportedly refused to conscript Ben Gvir because it considered him a security risk. Netanyahu also made Bezalel Smotrich his finance minister. Smotrich is a settler leader who has called to wipe out a Palestinian town since taking office and is hostile to women’s and LGBTQ rights; the far-right religious nationalist was also given control of Israel’s civil administration — which handles the military occupation’s civil affairs like building permits for Palestinians and Israeli settlers — to advance his maximalist agenda.

Netanyahu has understood the power of successful low-cost wars to unleash Israeli nationalism. He reaped the political rewards of an electorate becoming more hardline the less they saw of Palestinians, and launched four Gaza wars. When Netanyahu stoked a five-day conflict with Palestinian fighters in Gaza on May 9, the reservists showed up for duty, the weekly protests were canceled, and after months in decline, he rose in the polls. A week later, however, throngs of Israelis were back on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street. The generation of Palestinians and Israelis who grew up under Netanyahu are coming of age amid rebellion in the occupied territories and mass protests dividing Israel. Widespread discontent at the reality forged by a leader who shaped their entire lives is spilling out into the streets, while the gulf between Palestinians and Israelis has never been wider.

HOURS BEFORE THE first Passover Seder, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak overlooks the coastline from the living room of his luxury north Tel Aviv apartment tower. Considering the fate of Palestinians behind the walls, he wants to set the issue aside.

“We know the big elephant in the room is [our] relationship to the Palestinians,” says Israel’s 10th prime minister. “Let’s put it on the shelf.”

Barak defeated Netanyahu’s first government in 1999, and joined his second 10 years later as defense minister. His premiership is defined by the ending of Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000 and the failure to end its much longer occupation of Palestinian land in final-status peace talks the same year. His government collapsed amid the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule that raged from 2000 to 2005.

These days, the retired 81-year-old politician, still Israel’s most decorated soldier, is focused on the protest movement against Netanyahu’s legal reforms and calls on soldiers to refuse service if laws subordinating the Supreme Court to the government pass. Both Barak and Rosen are concerned that the legal overhaul will make Israelis more open to international prosecution for war crimes, but Barak doesn’t believe it should be a main focus. “It’s kind of protecting ourselves, myself included, from being arrested,” he says. It’s easy to see Barak as part of the older generation, when the political class were all former military brass. “There is a reason for officers, even for Bibi and ministers, to be worried about what will happen with the Hague.”

In a 1998 TV interview, Barak famously said, “If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would join, at some point, one of the terrorist groups.” Today, he believes in using military containment to ignore the issue and focusing on what he believes is an existential threat to Israeli society. As he sees it, Israel’s future now hinges on whether “it will turn into dictatorship or not.”

The protests have created a broad tent that spans from feminists decked out as Margert Atwood’s Handmaids to former conservative PMs. Out of politics and out of prison, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert still carries the ease and polish of a man once referred to as Teflon for his ability to survive scandal, until he didn’t. He meets me in his modern central Tel Aviv office and fondly reminisces about relations with the Bush administration and former U.S. Secretary of State “Condi” Rice. Eager to address a U.S. audience, he feels compelled to warn America about how being an endless occupier has changed Israel.

Leaning back in the chair behind his desk, Olmert gently rocks back and forth under a large framed picture of himself with President George W. Bush at the White House. “Israel doesn’t want peace,” says the last Israeli prime minister to try to negotiate a final deal with Palestinian leaders and the first to launch a Gaza war, “[not] since I retired and Bibi took over.” He sees today’s divisions as the consequence of 14 years of Israeli disinterest in dealing with Palestinians.

Olmert, the first Israeli prime minister to be jailed for corruption, is appalled but not surprised by the current crisis. “We are governed today by a bunch of militants, nationalists, chauvinists, [and] radicals,” Olmert says. “Reckless, irresponsible, and totally inexperienced people.”

He doesn’t mince words about his successor: “Bibi Netanyahu is a narcissist. Bibi Netanyahu is a shallow person. Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t believe in anything.”

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert attends a protest against the Israeli government’s plan to overhaul the justice system this July. “Bibi Netanyahu is a narcissist,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Bibi Netanyahu is a shallow person. Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t believe in anything.”

Olmert warns that his country has lost sight of any constraints and has become indifferent to its allies’ concerns. “We are arrogant,” he says emphatically. “We think that no one can hit us, that we can defeat everyone.”

Registering President Biden’s frosty relationship with Netanyahu, Olmert thinks it would take much stronger action from America, like reconsidering its special relationship with Israel before Israelis and their leaders change course. “Had such a thing been spelled out, I guess it may have had an enormous impact.”

Retired Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia sees the reforms as a toxic package that will end judicial independence and destroy Israel’s fragile balance of power that has existed since the country’s establishment. The 82-year-old who adjudicated on Israel’s top court from 2001 to 2011 has become an advocate to preserve the impartiality of the bench and has taken to the stage at anti-government rallies to defend it.

Procaccia acknowledges inherent inequality in a court with jurisdiction over Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza that upholds different rights and legal systems based on nationality and citizenship while consistently greenlighting occupation and settlement policies. “There is an ongoing tension between the national principle, which also encompasses a very prominent religious component, and the democratic principle,” Procaccia says. “[And we’ve] faced an existential security threat since the establishment of the state, which hasn’t ceased but only changed.”

During her tenure as a leading Israeli jurist, Procaccia ruled in favor of the state’s efforts to demolish West Bank Palestinian communities on land that had been requisitioned by Israel. She also accepted government arguments for demolishing the family homes of Palestinian combatants found guilty of killing Israelis — an act of collective punishment that human-rights groups say constitute a war crime.

“The court has nonetheless followed the guidance of the security authorities and said that home demolitions are a preventative policy, a deterrence and not an act of collective punishment,” says the retired justice about the court’s perspective on a policy that has never been applied to the families of Israeli Jews found guilty of killing Palestinians.

Yet this track record of the court doesn’t impress a religious nationalist Netanyahu ally like Simcha Rothman, a key architect of the legal reforms and a chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee. Depicting the largely secular court as hostile to the rights of religious Jews in an increasingly religious country, he cites the Supreme Court striking down laws that entrench military exemptions for ultra Orthodox Jews.

“The court did interfere in many other aspects of life in Israel that have nothing to do with Judea and Samaria,” he scoffs, using the religious terms for the West Bank. The balding 42-year-old was a lawyer before being sent to Jerusalem as an elected Knesset member for Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party. He lives with his family in the small southern West Bank outpost of Pnei Kedem, and like many people living in settlements — considered illegal under international law — he works in Israel.

He is appalled that the court even weighed in to rule on Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law, a 2018 Basic Law that passed with a slim parliamentary majority during a previous Netanyahu government. The law, condemned by international human-rights groups as enshrining inequality, holds constitutional-like weight and effectively denies Palestinians national rights by exclusively defining national rights in Israel as belonging to the Jewish People. The Supreme Court upheld the law, but that doesn’t satisfy Rothman.

“The fact that the court even thought that you can discuss or debate or have a hearing on the validity of a basic law that says that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people just shows you how crazy judicial activism has reached in Israel,” he says.

For Rothman, terrorism is a term that can be applied to Palestinians for a wide range of acts, but it’s one he won’t use to describe Jewish attacks on Palestinians. He is adamant that the Palestinian fighter who killed two settlers in the West Bank town of Huwara on Feb. 26 is a terrorist. However, he refuses to use the term to describe the hundreds of settlers who were protected by the Israeli army as they rampaged in the Palestinian town and surrounding villages later that night, setting homes ablaze, injuring more than a hundred people and killing one.

Rothman is in a combative mood, and throughout our interview, his tone is sharp. The government’s ability to overrule the Supreme Court is essential, he argues, to be able to carry out its elected mandate to voters. Rothman’s party advocates full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, taking over areas administered by the Palestinian Authority, but it is something he doesn’t believe even the current Supreme Court would block. He is reluctant to discuss what rights Palestinians would get under sovereign Israeli rule and is adamant in his denial of the national existence of Palestinians. “It’s about whether they are a nation that can act as a nation,” says Rothman. “And the answer, of course, is no.”

Palestinian nurse Elias al-Ashqar stands by a billboard bearing an obituary for his father, Abdel Hadi, killed during an Israeli raid in Nablus. When Israel conducted its deadliest action in the occupied West Bank in almost 20 years on Feb. 22, al-Ashqar says, he rushed to help the injured only to find his father among the dead.More

ELIAS AND MOHAMMAD al-Ashqar are in a state of shock. Sitting in the living room of their modest ground-floor family apartment in the Askar refugee camp on a brisk winter evening, they are surrounded by men from the community. The al-Ashqar brothers’ father, 61-year-old Abdel Hadi, had been shot and killed during an Israeli-army raid in the adjacent northern West Bank city of Nablus hours earlier.

The Israeli army stormed the crowded city at 10 a.m., opening fire as residents scrambled, abandoning their midmorning shopping to run for their lives down the winding streets. Elias, a 25-year-old nurse, wasn’t supposed to be working at the hospital. He had volunteered to take on an extra shift when casualties from a raid that would kill 11 people and wound more than 100 started arriving. While treating patients in the chaos of the overwhelmed ER, he took a minute to check the dead who had come in and received a horrific revelation.

“I was just looking at the beds to see who the martyrs were,” says the younger al-Ashqar brother. He pauses to collect himself. “I didn’t imagine that it would be my dad.”

It’s a tragedy far too familiar to the residents of the occupied territories. Last year was the most deadly year on record for West Bank Palestinians since the Second Intifada, with the U.N. calculating that 146 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; 29 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks. Since Netanyahu’s return, 2023 is already almost as deadly as 2022.

Abdelhadi worked as a driving instructor. Providing for his family in the cramped camp conditions was a daily struggle in a place where opportunities are few while potential devastation is an army raid away. He had, according to family and witnesses, just finished praying on his morning break when he was shot in the street by the army as it pulled out of the city.

Al-Ashqar’s oldest son, Mohammad, 34, sits across the room feeling devastated. He describes his father as a kind and loving family man who worked hard to give him and his brother more than he had. An officer in the Palestinian security forces, Mohammad was in the radio room when he heard about the Israeli raid.

​​Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces police West Bank Palestinians but are barred from confronting the Israeli military or arresting settlers attacking their communities. As he had done during previous raids, Mohammad followed orders, but now he can no longer justify the command. He wants the PA security forces to start defending Palestinians during Israeli attacks. “To what extent will we be able to stay neutral and calm?” he asks.

The bloody Feb. 22 raid-turned-firefight was directed against the Lions’ Den, a new group of young Palestinian fighters that emerged in the summer of 2022. Hailing from the working-class neighborhoods around Nablus’ old city, the fighters have led armed attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers around the northern West Bank while embroiling the army in firefights during raids. The Gen Z guerrillas, who say they are motivated to fight for national liberation rather than religion, started as a loose affiliation of men from across the Palestinian political spectrum, knowing one another from the streets and sharing the belief that freedom can only be won through force. Despite some of its leaders and members being the children of Palestinian security-force officials, they have confronted PA forces with the same intensity they use during Israeli military raids. Their goals are clear: Fight the system of occupation regardless of who’s enforcing it.

In calls for general strikes on their Telegram channels, groups like the Lions’ Den have regularly galvanized Palestinians with a text message to shutdown the West Bank and East Jerusalem in protest. At the same time, the PA has led an internal crackdown on its security forces in Nablus, arresting people it believed were supporting or defecting to the Lions’ Den.

Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Feb. 22. Israeli troops killed 11 Palestinians in the raid, and wounded more than 100, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

“The newly created armed groups in Nablus and Jenin and elsewhere are the future [that] people are now counting on,” says Khalil Shikaki. The 70-year-old political science professor is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and lives in Ramallah, a mountaintop city of 150,000 nine miles from Jerusalem that serves as the de facto capital of the PA. Recent polls he’s conducted show the majority of the Palestinians in the occupied territories support a renewed uprising and want to see the PA, run by the aging leadership of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), collapse because they believe it serves Israeli, rather than Palestinian, interests.

Barak seems to give credence to these concerns about the PA, describing how Israel offered to remove Hamas by force from Gaza and hand over power to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when he was defense minister. “I will tell you how far we were ready to go with Abu Mazen to arrange for him to take over the Gaza Strip,” says the former Israeli leader, referring to the Palestinian president by his nom de guerre. “We [would] take the blood part and he refused, for some reason.”

Clandestine in the West Bank and isolated in its rule of Gaza for the past 16 years, Hamas’ mantle of resistance is now also being challenged by independent Gen Z West Bankers. Officially embracing the rebellion, the rival Palestinian leadership is not interested in expanding that fight from Gaza, according to Basim Naim, a Hamas spokesman and former Gaza health minister. He has lived through the bitter cost of devastating battles with Israel and, speaking on the phone from Gaza City, says his party is instead focused on supporting West Bank fighters and regionally coordinating a military strategy with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“At this moment, we are not looking to escalate unless we are attacked,” says Naim, 60. “At the same time, if red lines are crossed in the West Bank, like at Al Aqsa — or mass deportations or crimes against our people — we are a part of the Palestinian people and cannot accept this.”

Husam Zomlot, PLO ambassador to the U.K., knows that the Palestinian public is outraged and disillusioned. He accuses Israel of using its agreements with Palestinians to further colonize Palestinian land. The former adviser to Abbas — and a Palestinian ambassador in Washington until the Trump administration closed the PLO mission — contends that rather than use its leverage with Israel, America pressures Palestinian leaders to quell resistance caused by Israeli actions. “The bottom line here is that the West still considers Israel to be the exception of every law,” says Zomlot, 50.

When I tell him about Barak’s comments about elephants on shelves he takes particular issue, describing the protests as indicative of a society where Israelis view Palestinians as expendable. “Both have one thing in common, which is the ‘elephant,’” says Zomlot about Netanyahu and Barak. “The shelf breaks and it comes down on your head,” he warns.

ON THE ISRAELI side of the wall but a nation apart, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have a lot to lose if a far-right government that has built a political career on calling them an enemy from within can sideline the Supreme Court. The community has always bitterly opposed Netanyahu, but during his 2021 Gaza war, bloody street clashes with hardline Jewish nationalists and Israeli police erupted as Palestinian citizens of Israel rose up against the war and their treatment in mixed Jewish-Palestinian Israeli cities. Yet, after a decade and a half of being left on their own to fight Netanyahu governments legislating away their rights, they have opted not to join these protests en masse.

Marching through the Palestinian-Israeli town of Sakhnin, nestled in the hills of the Galilee, Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member for the left-wing Arab-Jewish unity party Hadash, commemorated Land Day on March 30 amid a sea of Palestinian flags. It’s a day of protest marking the 1976 Israeli-government seizure of Palestinian land in northern Israel for Jewish settlement and the six people killed by Israeli forces during the general strike to resist the dispossession.

“That happened not because we were citizens of Israel, but happened because we are Palestinians,” says the 58-year-old Palestinian-Israeli woman from the northern mixed city Acre about the day’s continued significance to Palestinian-Israelis.

Aida Touma-Suleiman

Touma-Suleiman is not surprised by the lack of her community’s participation in the protests, seeing them as focused on the rights Jewish Israelis are worried about losing with no consideration of the rights long denied to Palestinians. “The symbols and the discourse of the protests are not inclusive,” she says. “On the contrary, [they are] pushing Palestinians away.”

Israelis unwillingness to address the conditions Palestinians are forced to live in is no surprise to Gonen Ben Itzhak, a leading anti-Netanyahu activist who campaigned against government corruption and now is on the front lines of the fight against the legal reforms. “The truth is that we still don’t see them as equals,” he says about Palestinians, occupied residents, and citizens of Israel alike. “We as a country, we as citizens, we don’t see them as equals.”

Ben Itzhak would know. Now a lawyer, the stocky 52-year-old spent more than a decade as a senior officer in the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, turning high-value collaborators and targeting Palestinian leaders. Joining the Israeli intelligence organization in 1996, following the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by a right-wing religious nationalist, Ben Itzhak depicts a security service where inequality is an operating procedure. Israeli Jewish targets, he says, will be monitored to prevent attacks on Palestinians, while Palestinians will be assassinated to prevent attacks on Israelis.

Acknowledging routine abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees by the Shin Bet, he disagrees with Rosen and thinks people who commit war crimes should be prosecuted regardless of what happens to the court. Ben Itzhak was personally involved in Israeli assassinations but says the campaign to kill Palestinian leaders in the 2000 uprising was done for the bragging rights of officers who ordered them rather than security. He points to the 2001 assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine whose killing is often credited with spiraling the armed conflict. “He wasn’t important,” says Ben Itzhak. “He wasn’t a terrorist.”

Ben Itzhak sees himself as part of Israel’s occupation machine. Sitting at a cafe in Florentin — South Tel Aviv’s gentrified liberal neighborhood known for its dogs, bars, and pungent smell of weed — he sees Israel’s current divisions as shaped by Israelis ability to ignore their unending domination of Palestinians.

Students and lawyer Gonen Ben Itzhak (right) protest on the blocked Ayalon Highway during the demonstration against the legal reform. More than 130,000 people protested in Tel Aviv against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its controversial legal reform.

“As long as we can live here in Tel Aviv, drink our coffee, have some weed, and have fun, everything is OK,” Ben Itzhak says. “As long as we don’t hear it, we don’t care about what’s going on.”

The former head of the Shin Bet’s Ramallah area office says the only thing he has in common with settlers he once protected is Hebrew. He believes Netanyahu’s government is hoping for a new Intifada and says that Israel will be able to easily contain a wider uprising, in turn using it as a pretext for further dispossessing of West Bank Palestinians while disenfranchising Palestinian citizens. “For this government, a third Intifada is the best thing they can have.”

Many secular liberal Israelis have checked out from politics in cities that feel closer to New York than the West Bank and Gaza. But for the Gen Z Jewish Israeli activists fighting for Palestinian rights, segregation shapes who they meet and how they resist.

At 17 years old, Ayelet Covo grew up completely separated from Palestinians beyond the walls. Most of their life has been shaped under Netanyahu governments, but on April 1, Covo stood in the anti-occupation block of Tel Aviv’s weekly democracy protest and set their army-enlistment papers ablaze with a dozen other teenagers being conscripted.

“This is an attempt to get people to realize that there wasn’t a democracy before the judicial reform,” says Covo, sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe a few days after publicly torching their conscription papers.

Sporting short brown hair and a jean jacket with a patch of the black-and-red Antifa flags, Covo, who uses the pronouns they/them, says that the discrimination they experience as a trans person wasn’t what opened their eyes to Palestinian oppression. “For me, it’s not a factor,” says Covo. “It’s just down to the fact that I don’t think that what’s going on is right.”

Numbering in the hundreds in a sea of tens of thousands, the anti-occupation bloc is the hub for Israel’s small left to gather and attempt to engage anti-judicial-overhaul protesters about equal rights for all. In the shadow of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, they demand an end to occupation and denounce Israel as an apartheid state in Hebrew.

Covo is part of a tradition of military refusal that emerged during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the First Intifada in 1987. At the height of the Second Intifada, a handful of pilots refused to fly missions in the occupied territories while teenage activists went to jail for refusing to enlist. Every generation since has had a small military refusal movement that, unlike the reservist protests defending the Supreme Court, has been about the rights of the occupied and refusing to be part of a military regime that violates them.

“I want freedom and equality from the river to the sea,” says Covo, appropriating a traditional Palestinian national rallying call into advocacy for a binational democracy.

Previous refusnik generations met with Palestinian activists in the occupied territories, joined their protests in the Second Intifada, and worked with rural communities to build campaigns against settlement and wall expansion. However, born after walls were built and restrictions tightened, Covo has never been to Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus, or Jenin. They have only seen the reality of Palestinians under military rule on screens and heard about it from Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem and Israel.

Their youth has been shaped by Netanyahu governments turning late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Olmert’s walls that segregate Palestinians from one another into pillars of Israel’s solution. Seen by his opponents in the Israeli establishment as the force that will end democracy, Netanyahu has ruled long enough to shape Israel in his image and make the unequal reality he inherited into a permanent solution.

Covo has grown up in a far more interconnected world, yet segregation at home is all they have known: “The idea [that Israel is] the only democracy in the Middle East is a fucking lie.”

Matan Cohen contributed to reporting in Israel.

Ahmad al-Bazz contributed to reporting in Jenin and Nablus.

NASA unveils new ‘transformative aircraft’ that could change the future of air travel: ‘[We] are not just focused on stars’



Erin Feiger
Sat, July 22, 2023 

NASA and Boeing have teamed up to build an experimental passenger plane to help achieve the U.S.’s goal of net-zero aviation emissions by 2050, according to Good News Network.

In a joint statement, the two said the aircraft would be built through NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project and that the U.S. Air Force is calling it the X-66A.

X-plane status is given to research aircraft that are meant to test designs and technologies that can also be used in other aircraft designs as opposed to serving as prototypes for production.

Working with NASA through its Sustainable Flight National Partnership — an initiative to make aviation more environmentally friendly — Boeing will develop the plane’s Transonic Truss-Braced Wing configuration and build the prototype.

The X-66A is being designed to improve fuel efficiency in commercial aviation and is the first plane focused on helping the U.S. meet its emissions goal. The technology could go a long way in mitigating the effect of commercial aviation on the environment.

Good News Network reported that single-aisle commercial planes are responsible for almost 50% of global aviation emissions, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration adds that aviation accounts for 3.5% of all sources of Earth’s rising temperatures caused by human activities.

When combined with other technological advancements, Boeing’s TTBW could result in as much as 30% less fuel consumption and reduced emissions as compared to today’s best-in-class planes, according to NASA.

In a press release, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, “At NASA, our eyes are not just focused on stars. … The X-66A will help shape the future of aviation, a new era where aircraft are greener, cleaner, and quieter, and create new possibilities for the flying public and American industry alike.”

Bob Pearce, associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, said, “To reach our goal of net-zero aviation emissions by 2050, we need transformative aircraft concepts like the ones we’re flying on the X-66A. … We’re aiming high to demonstrate the kinds of energy-saving, emissions-reducing technologies the aviation industry needs.”

China is sending zebrafish to the Tiangong space station

A RESILIENT, COMMON, FRESH WATER AQUARIUM FISH

Andrew Jones
Sun, July 23, 2023 

a small striped Zebra fish

China is planning to send zebrafish to its space station in the future.

The small fish species will be sent into orbit on China's Tiangong space station as part of research into the interaction between fish and microorganisms in a small closed ecosystem, Shanghai-based Guancha.cn reported. The experiment will also aid research into bone loss in astronauts.

Zhang Wei, assistant to the commander-in-chief of China's manned space engineering space application system, told Chinese media of the plan during a Space Station Science and Application Project Solicitation Seminar in Beijing on July 10. Further information regarding the timeline of the experiment and its aquatic apparatus was not disclosed.


Related: China's Tiangong space station

It will not be the first time fish have been sent to space. NASA's Aquatic Habitat, or AQH, designed to study how microgravity impacts marine life, was sent to the International Space Station in 2012. It hosted a small school of medaka, a small, freshwater fish native to Japan.

a fish tank with lots of wires attached to it

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Zebrafish, or Danio rerio, were earlier sent to the Soviet Union's Salyut 5 space station in 1976 aboard the Soyuz 21 mission. Soviet cosmonauts conducting experiments with the fish found that the Zebrafish appeared to modify some of their behaviors in response to living in microgravity.

Sending animals to space meanwhile dates back to 1947, before the Soviet space dog Laika took her much more famous flight on Sputnik 2 in 1957. Laika tragically overheated and died just hours into her flight.

UN talks seek to fix 'broken' global food system

Alexandria SAGE
Mon, July 24, 2023

The breakdown of a deal between Russia and Ukraine allowing the export of grain through the Black Sea is causing wheat prices to rise and putting more people at risk of hunger (STRINGER)

A three-day United Nations summit opened in Rome on Monday aimed at tackling a "broken" global food system where millions are starving, two billion are overweight or obese and the planet is suffering.

The food systems summit comes amid growing food insecurity around the world, with UN agencies warning of an increasing number of people suffering from chronic hunger.

"In a world of plenty, it is outrageous that people continue to suffer and die from hunger," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the opening of the meeting.

"Global food systems are broken -- and billions of people are paying the price."

More than 780 million people go hungry around the globe, even as nearly one-third of the world's food is wasted or lost, he said.

And while 462 million people are underweight, two billion are overweight or obese, he added.

The summit brings together representatives from the UN's three food agencies headquartered in Rome -- the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) -- alongside heads of states, government representatives and delegates.

- Radical transformation -

Food systems include all activities related to producing, processing, transporting and consuming food, and making them more sustainable, efficient and equitable is a complex task.

Involving multiple sectors and actors, food systems are affected by varied trends such as urbanisation, climate change, technology and government policy.

Weather shocks, the Covid pandemic and conflicts including the war in Ukraine have helped push the number of people facing hunger up by 122 million since 2019, according to the WFP.

Between 691-783 million people faced hunger last year, with a mid-range of 735 million, WFP estimated in a report earlier this month.

Guterres reiterated his concern over Russia quitting the landmark grain deal that allowed cargo ships carrying Ukrainian grain to depart Black Sea ports.

"The most vulnerable will pay the highest price," of that move, he said, calling the previous agreement a "lifeline" for global food security.

The FAO has said that no less than a "radical transformation in how food is produced, processed, traded and consumed" is required to feed the world's growing population.

Guterres called for at least $500 billion per year to help needy countries scale up long-term financing to invest in higher performing food systems.

Doing nothing amounts to $12 trillion annually in social and economic costs, according to IFAD.

It compared the needed funds with the "$10 trillion in revenue generated by the global food industry or the $700 billion paid in agricultural subsidies by wealthy countries".

- 'Death sentence' -

Unsustainable practices in food production, packaging and consumption are also fueling climate change, Guterres said, "generating one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, using 70 percent of the world's freshwater, and driving biodiversity loss on an epic scale".

The conference comes two years after the UN's first-ever summit on food systems in 2021 and ahead of a summit on sustainable development goals in New York in September.

Over the three days, countries will review progress in meeting past commitments, while identifying bottlenecks to progress, IFAD said.

But more money is key, summit director Nadine Gbossa said.

"Without financing this transition, it's a death sentence for the planet," she told journalists last week, adding that the private sector also plays a major role.

"The public health cost of malnutrition is one of the highest in the world."

ams/ar/lth

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Corruption scandal puts billionaire BT shareholder under pressure

James Warrington

THE TELEGRAPH
Sun, 23 July 2023 

Franco-Israeli tycoon Patrick Drahi developed a reputation as corporate raider after years of executing debt fuelled acquisitions - STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP

“If you want to be successful, work hard, have fun and above all, listen and do not talk too much,” billionaire Patrick Drahi said in a rare interview in 2017.

The Franco-Israeli businessman appears to have taken his own advice. Despite building a fortune from his media and telecoms empire Altice, the tycoon has remained largely under the radar.

Virtually unknown in Britain until recently, Drahi has steadily been building his presence in the UK.


In 2019, he took control of iconic auction house Sotheby’s in a $3.7bn deal. And for the last two years he has tightened his hold over BT as his company has become the telecoms giant’s biggest investor.

Now, though, the reclusive billionaire is under the spotlight.

A major investigation into alleged corruption, tax fraud, forgery and money laundering by individuals and senior executives within his empire has provoked questions about governance at Drahi’s businesses.

Drahi and his company Altice have not been implicated but the scandal has prompted an internal investigation and sparked fears of reputational risk among staff.

At the heart of the scandal is Armando Pereira, the co-founder and former chief operating officer of Altice who is often said to be Drahi’s right-hand man.

Patrick Drahi will face questions as to how much he knew of the allegations now facing his right hand man Armando Pereira - ERIC PIERMONT/AFP

Pereira was one of several figures arrested in Portugal earlier this month in a major probe dubbed “Operation Picoas”, during which officials raided dozens of offices, homes and law firms across the country.

The department of investigation and criminal action (DCIAP) said it had made three arrests and seized documents and possessions – including luxury cars – with a value of around €20m.

Prosecutors accuse Pereira of taking part in fraudulent property transactions and concealing profits from asset sales while working at Altice Portugal. One of the deals under investigation is the sale of four buildings in Lisbon for €15m.

However, officials believe this could be only the tip of the iceberg and the fraudulent schemes could extend to other areas including football TV rights.

Illicit gains could exceed €250m, at the expense of both Altice and the state, according to media reports.

Pereira, who is 71 and described by local press as Portugal’s richest man, has been held in custody and began testifying this week.

A lawyer for Pereira said his client had been the “target of a widespread attack in Portugal in recent days”.

“The communication surrounding this operation was done in such a way that it led to his being immediately found guilty in public opinion,” the lawyer said, adding that his team will demonstrate “the reality is not so simple”.

Pereira last week denied all allegations against him during an appearance in court.

Altice Portugal, which has not been accused of wrongdoing, said it had started an internal investigation of its procurement and real estate sales and has suspended payments to entities targeted by the authorities.

Pereira no longer holds executive roles at Altice. Still, the scandal has shaken the foundations of the telecoms empire he helped to build.

“It’s obviously bad because it throws into doubt the reliability of the organisation and the governance,” says François Godard, an analyst at Enders Analysis.

“It has the immediate effect of forcing the company to scrutinise everything. You stop all your dealings, you stop all new contracts, you look at existing contracts and you have to run checks on all supply agreements.”

Godard adds: “Even if in a few months’ time we see that it was limited to one person and a few suppliers, in the meantime the whole business has been disrupted.”

Drahi is now battling to contain the fallout from the scandal.

Altice insists that its operations in Portugal are separate from the rest of the group. However, there are already signs the shockwaves from Pereira’s arrest will spread through the wider business.

Alexandre Fonseca, Altice Group’s co-chief executive and US chairman, this week announced he was temporarily stepping down.

Alexandre Fonseca oversaw Altice's Portuguese operations before becoming co-chief executive of the whole business - Carlos Rodrigues/Getty Images

Altice said the move was designed to “fully protect and safeguard” the company during an investigation into events that happened while Fonseca was chief executive of the Portuguese division.

In a defiant LinkedIn post, Fonseca insisted he knew nothing about the corruption claims, following up with the Martin Luther King quote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

Altice USA chief procurement officer, Yossi Benchetrit, has also been placed on leave during an internal investigation, as have several employees in the group’s Portuguese operations.

Dennis Mathew, chairman and chief executive of Altice USA, wrote in an internal memo seen by The Telegraph: “We take this investigation very seriously and will continue to act diligently and with urgency to make decisions that are in the best interest of our employees, customers, and shareholders.”

He urged staff not to be distracted by “speculation and rumours” in the media.

However, in France, where Altice owns mobile network SFR and news channel BFM, employees are starting to worry.

Portugal has become strategically important for Altice France, with various suppliers based in the country.

Earlier this week, union chiefs met with Arthur Dreyfuss, chief executive of Altice France, and Mathieu Cocq, head of SFR, to express their concerns about the investigation and the potential impact on jobs.

One union, the CFDT, said it was worried about reputational damage from the saga, “particularly vis-à-vis creditors and future lenders, when the group will once again need to raise debt in 2025.”

The scandal may also reignite scrutiny of Drahi’s ownership of a large stake in BT through a subsidiary of Altice.

While the 59-year-old, who was born in Casablanca to Jewish parents, is not implicated in any wrongdoing and Altice insists it is a victim of a scandal, the fact that Drahi’s right-hand man has been accused will provoke questions of what the chief executive knew and when.

The uncovering of an apparent large-scale fraud at Altice will also lead to questions about governance within the group.

Officials are already on high-alert about Drahi’s stake in BT. His initial investment in BT sparked a national security review, though the government ultimately decided to take “no further action” without sharing details of why.

In May, the tycoon increased his holding to 24.5pc, just shy of a blocking stake that would hand him significant control.

The saga will shift the focus again to Drahi’s status as the biggest shareholder in a company that controls critical national infrastructure.

Godard says the scandal “adds to the case of people saying that his investment in BT should be scrutinised and the Government should never have authorised him to go higher”.

Drahi has developed a reputation as a low-profile but aggressive corporate raider.

After founding Altice in 2002 alongside Pereira and Bruno Moineville, Drahi built the group through a series of high-profile acquisitions, including French mobile network SFR and Suddenlink Communications in the US.

An unsolicited $3.2bn takeover bid for French satellite giant Eutelsat in 2021 failed, but highlighted Drahi’s continued appetite for dealmaking.

Years of takeovers fuelled by low interest rates saddled Altice with more than $50bn of debt.

But Drahi – a self-described penny-pincher – has also established a reputation as a ruthless cost-cutter, stripping out layers of management at the companies he acquires and replacing laid-off staff with outsourced contractors.

Goddard says: “I’m sure BT would prefer for it to be one person doing bad things as opposed to governance being called into question.

“BT will be happy once it’s over.”

UK bill waters down protections against ‘robo-firing’ in gig economy, say experts

Kevin Rawlinson

THE GUARDIAN
Sun, 23 July 2023 

Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Protections for gig economy workers will be watered down should ministers succeed in pushing a controversial bill through parliament, experts have said.

The new law would weaken a relatively little-known right to force app-based firms to explain themselves when they make automated decisions, known as “management by algorithm”, before many workers had even realised they had it, they said.

Campaigners have criticised it as a “deregulatory race to the bottom” that will further disadvantage gig economy workers during the cost of living crisis.

Currently, people are able to see when companies such as Uber use the vast quantities of data at their disposal to automate decision-making. That was reaffirmed by a court in April, which found in favour of several drivers who were “robo-fired” by the taxi firm, then denied an explanation.

Yet few workers know about it, according to the Institute for the Future of Work (IFoW). And a bill that has already cleared several Commons hurdles would make it impractical for many to actually pursue it in future, the research group said.

The campaign group Connected by Data said: “This bill is part of a deregulatory race to the bottom that removes many of the current controls and safeguards over automated decision-making (ADM), data access and usage that protect UK consumers, workers and patients.”

It added: “In practical terms … gig-economy and big tech companies will be further empowered to subject workers to non-transparent ADM without human review safeguarding, more easily refuse workers access to data held on them by the company, and avoid consultation with workers around data-driven systems that affect them.”

The data protection and digital information bill proposed to make it easier for firms to charge people for access to the data used to automatically reach management decisions, and to refuse requests altogether on the grounds that they had defined them as vexatious, an IFoW spokesperson said.

He added that the spread of management by algorithm had “created real problems because, when management functions are replaced by automation, workers lose any sense of agency or redress”.

“Where it becomes complicated is where a person or groups of people are let go but, because there is no transparency, they do not know why.”

He referred to a ruling by the court of appeal in Amsterdam in the case of the UK-based Uber drivers. The judge found in favour of the workers, who claimed they had been “robo-fired” over what they called “spurious allegations of ‘fraudulent activity’” that were not meaningfully overseen by a human. Moreover, they said, they were “stonewalled” by the firm when they tried to find out how it had used its data to make the decision.

The campaign group Worker Information Exchange, which helped bring the case, said this week it received confirmation Uber would not appeal. But it claimed the firm was still not abiding by the ruling.

“The reason Uber is unlikely to go with the ruling is that they don’t want people looking at their algorithm for commercial reasons. That is a problem for workers,” said the IFoW. “Or Uber might offer data to an individual worker that is not in a form that would allow them to understand if any bias has been suffered. We have argued for collective access given, for example, to a union representative who is trained to read the data.”

Uber declined to comment on the passage of the bill. Instead it reissued the statement it offered when the Amsterdam court ruled, which read: “Uber has robust processes in place, including meaningful human review, when making a decision to deactivate a driver’s account due to suspected fraud.” This was despite the court finding its human review was not “much more than a purely symbolic act”.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has been approached for comment.

Treat workers like adults and they’ll get the job done

Gene Marks

THE GUARDIAN
Sun, 23 July 2023 

Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

You know what the worst thing about working for someone else is? It’s wasting your time.

Many years ago I worked at a small pharmaceutical company. I did a lot of time-wasting. I was a senior accountant and I reported to the company’s chief financial officer. He was very old school. My hours were from 8am to 6pm and I was expected to always be at or near my desk during that period. My boss also worked the same hours, sometimes even longer. He stayed until the CEO left for the day, and it was expected that I would stay until he left for the day.

Was I busy? Sure, most of the time. But there were also plenty of times when I wasn’t. Times I could have left work much earlier and spent time with my family. This was in the 1990s so there wasn’t the internet. We had phones and I could easily stay in touch. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the culture of the company – and certainly not a consideration for my boss. So instead I had to spend countless days hanging around the office, literally twiddling my thumbs while my wife and very young children were at home as I waited for my boss to clock out for the day. What a waste of time.

Times have changed.

That’s according to workplace author Minda Zetlin, who recently pointed out that despite a reduction in work hours reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers continue to retain their workers, and are even looking to add. She believes companies are still recovering from the lack of employees as a result of the pandemic and are even hoarding employees. But the main reason behind this trend, she believes, is that more employers are recognizing the importance of their employees’ work-life balance.

“Making time to rest and have a good life outside work actually leads to greater productivity and more achievement than if you spend endless hours at your desk,” she writes on Inc.com.

People who know me know I have little patience for lazy, complaining, “quiet-quitting” workers, not just because their attitude negatively affects the efforts of their employer, but by behaving this way – regardless of the reason – they create significant challenges for themselves. Leaders want to surround themselves with hard workers who take pride in putting in whatever effort is required to get the job done. These are the people who succeed in their jobs and in their lives.

But I remember sitting around that office “working” when work wasn’t really necessary. My performance suffered each day I was forced to do this. If my boss had allowed me to spend more time with my family when things were slow I wouldn’t have been so miserable spending time at work when things were really busy. If he had recognized the importance of my work-life balance he would have had a much more productive and happier employee. The result? I left that job after two years and started my own little business. And I’ve been practicing what Zetlin has been preaching.

I don’t ask my workers to account for their hours. I don’t even have standard office hours for my business. All I care about is that they get their work done. If our clients are happy, I’m happy. If I try to reach a worker and they’re not immediately available, I’m good with a response back in a reasonable amount of time. As a service business – and like most service businesses – I make my money on billable hours. But I don’t impose quotas. I leave the decisions as to when and where to work up to my workers. They’re adults. They know their responsibilities.

And looking back at my time at the pharmaceutical company, I realize that’s why I was so unhappy. I wasn’t treated like an adult. I was forced to be somewhere even when I didn’t need to be there because my boss didn’t trust me to do my job otherwise. That lack of trust was the reason why I left. And because I don’t treat my workers this way my business has had very little turnover. People are happy.

The workday has changed and the workplace is different. The number of hours your employees work in a week is meaningless. What’s important is that they’re doing their jobs and providing your company value. Have that attitude and you’ll have a more profitable business – and happier employees.