SMOKERS’ CORNER: MIDDLE CLASS SENSIBILITIES

Nadeem F. Paracha 

Published January 14, 2024
DAWN

Illustration by Abro


If a rickshaw driver had an accident and was in trouble, some of the first people to reach out to help him would likely be other rickshaw drivers. They immediately sympathise and empathise with his plight.

In 1987, when I was still in college and often travelled on rickshaws, a rickshaw I was travelling in came across another rickshaw whose front wheel was stuck in a manhole. My driver immediately screeched to a halt and jumped out to help the four other rickshaw drivers who were all trying to pull the wheel out.

After they succeeded, the driver of the rickshaw I was travelling in returned to drive me to my destination. He seemed to know the person whose rickshaw had got stuck in the manhole because, during the rest of the journey, he continued to curse him, calling him a scoundrel.

Although he didn’t like the other driver, he couldn’t help but empathise with his predicament, because both belonged to the same social class. Both were working class folk who worked as rickshaw drivers.


According to the 19th century German political theorist Karl Marx, exchanges between different classes create differing interests. Therefore, classes unite with their own to protect their respective economic and political interests. Marx wrote that the creation of classes leads to “class conflict.” Later, many post-Marxian theorists added various nuances to this theory.


Occasionally the notion of ‘class solidarity’ kicks in within the middle class, despite the presence of intra-class tensions — as was seen following the outpouring of online support for the ‘middle class uprising’ on May 9 last year

For example, within a class, there can be differing political points of view that can hamper “class solidarity.” During the 2016 US presidential election, the bulk of Michigan’s working class that, since the 1990s, was considered to be a ‘solid’ Democratic Party constituency, voted for the more conservative Republican Party.

Even though the victory margin was just 0.23 percent, this showed that, within the state’s working classes, there was no clear consensus on protecting any mutually agreed class interest. Whereas many from this class had chosen to continue voting for the Democrats, many more flipped the equation by casting their vote for the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump.

Those from this class who voted for Trump in Michigan might have voted against their class interest, but they related more to the manner in which Trump evoked the nostalgia of Michigan once being a mighty industrial state that was now in decay.

Just after the 2016 election, the Democratic Party senator Gary Peters lamented that his party ignored engaging with labour unions in Michigan. The party’s message was squarely formulated to attract urban middle class liberals and minority groups. Joe Biden won back Michigan for the Democrats in 2020, but by only a two percent margin. This suggests that the cleavages in the state’s working classes are still present.

However, there can be a lot more cleavages in the so-called middle classes. When populists such as Imran Khan in Pakistan and Narendra Modi in India began making deeper inroads in the politics of their respective countries, it was understood by various political economists that their rise was being largely facilitated by Pakistani and Indian middle classes. This is not incorrect as such.

But what often gets lost in this debate is that there were also many within this class who were vehemently opposed to both the leaders. In Pakistan, Khan’s middle class supporters were mostly located in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Sindh’s capital city, Karachi.

In Punjab, though, tensions had been developing within this class. There was a clash between differing political and economic interests in this class, as was the case within Michigan’s working class. This intra-middle class clash in Punjab was manifested by the animosity between Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N).

In the 1970s, the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright posited that classical Marxian class theories needed to be evolved because within middle-class groups are large segments that are neither bourgeois (capitalists having the means of production) nor the proletariat (the working classes).

Wright called this “contradictory class location.” By this he meant that between the capitalists and the proletariat was not really a homogenous middle class, but segments within this class having contradicting characteristics of the classes above and below them. However, Wright was of the view that such groups are likely to support the political choices of the classes that control the means of production.

Therefore, in Punjab, one part of the middle class supported the PML-N (headed by an influential business family) and the other supported the PTI, a party that, rather visibly, was being financed by multi-millionaires.

But there are also occasions when the old Marxian notion of ‘class solidarity’ kicks in within the middle class, despite the presence of intra-class tensions. On May 9 last year, images of men and women destroying public and state property in Pakistan began to flood the electronic and social media. The rioters were PTI supporters and members.

These images seemed to excite a lot of middle class men and women. Many of them were not necessarily PTI fans. In fact, a lot of them had been critical of Khan’s fallen regime. Yet, they couldn’t help but applaud (on social media) this ‘middle class uprising.’ What they saw were (albeit riotous) people who were dressed like them, spoke like them, and could have belonged to their own social circles.

A year before, though, when hundreds of working class men from Punjab belonging to an Islamist party had gone on a rampage in Lahore, those who were applauding the May 9 ‘uprising’ were not impressed at all. Their criticism of that particular violence was scathing, whereas the violence committed by members of their own social class, on May 9 last year, triggered sympathy and even admiration in them for the rioters.

Additionally, thousands of mostly poor women are rotting in Pakistani jails for years. Yet it was only after some middle and upper class women belonging to the PTI were put in jail that many members of the middle class became sensitive about the ‘plight of women prisoners.’

Quite a few middle class men and women who opposed PTI politically are now likely to sympathise with this party’s ‘besieged’ top and core leadership. Their political motivations may be still different, but there is clearly an overarching sense of class compatibility at work here.

This has recently helped PTI attract sympathy from a wider circle of middle and upper income groups. Can one frame this as ‘middle-class-consciousness?’ I think one can, and these days it is on full display in Pakistan — at least on social media.

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 14th, 2024

Viva South Africa

Abbas Nasir 

Published January 14, 2024 


SOUTH Africa has shown the way to the impotent Organisation of Islamic Cooperation member-countries by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and presenting a robust case for a ruling against the Zionist state which has executed a genocide with impunity so far.

Given the composition of the ICJ, in the end any verdict given by the court may represent the compulsions of the 16 judges and the stance of their countries of origin on various issues rather than the merit of the arguments presented before it.

But as things stand this weekend, many independent legal experts are lauding South Africa’s preparation for and presentation before the court, and feel that the case stands established. The political compulsions referred to were listed very eloquently in a TV interview by US Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein, who vehemently opposes Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.

For example, he said that among the permanent members of the UN Security Council who have seats on the ICJ the position of the US and UK was very clear with slight ambiguity about France’s stance, given different Macron statements at different times.

True to Mandela’s spirit, South Africa has gone and stood in the corner of the oppressed.

Equally, Prof Finkelstein was unsure with Russia’s vulnerabilities on Ukraine and China’s on Uighurs, the judges from the two countries would vote against Israel for fear of opening the door to similar charges and cases against their own countries.

Ergo, notwithstanding the merit of the case by the excellent South African legal team, he suspected the decision may go in Israel’s favour by a small majority. For further details, look up his interview which is available online. This by no means is a foregone conclusion but his breakdown and analysis carried weight.

In any case, even a verdict calling for an immediate ceasefire may have amounted to naught. Israel lost the moral argument within weeks of its Gaza campaign after the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 last year, but has carried on relentlessly, egged on by unconditional support from the US and its Western allies and has been immune from global outrage at daily images of its slaughter in Gaza.

In Europe, Germany has been particularly active with its own government leaders and through the German EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to plead Israel’s case. Both have seemingly remained blind to the Gaza genocide, compelling some commentators to say Germany wants Palestine and Palestinians to atone for the sins of Nazi Germany by quietly submitting to the ongoing genocide.

True to Nelson Mandela’s spirit, South Africa has gone and stood in the corner of the oppressed. In doing so, it has tried to reciprocate how the Palestinians stood by it through the PLO during the African National Congress’s (ANC) long struggle against the apartheid regime when it was termed a ‘terrorist organisation’ by the US and other Western powers.

South Africa’s decision to move the ICJ reflected very badly on the member states of the OIC, the ummah, which have extended little support even rhetorically to the Palestinians in the face of a genocidal Israeli assault. To be honest, reflected badly is an understatement. It shamed them.

From Turkiye and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, UAE and Bahrain words have come to varying degrees but nothing more substantial. The less said about the Pakistani position the better. Despite each of these countries’ disagreements with the US in other areas, they seem helpless in taking a robust line for the Palestinians because, it seems, they fear annoying Washington.

After the 1973 Middle East flareup, the Ramazan War, (Israel called it the Yom Kippur war), when President Nixon asked Congress for $2.2 billion in emergency assistance to Israel, the Organisation of Arab Oil Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo targeted mainly at the US.

This quadrupled the price of oil in the international market. Higher oil prices inevitably led to higher commodity prices and side by side with spurring inflation also slowed growth. The impact on Western economies was soon to be felt as energy shortages were also rampant.

Today the memory of those days is fast fading aided by the utter disinterest in, and apathy towards, the Palestinian victims of genocide among the US allies in the ‘Islamic’ countries in the Middle East with vast oil and gas reserves and immense wealth, mostly kept in US and other Western banks. All this as Biden pumps in bombs, military equipment worth some $15bn to facilitate Israeli atrocities.

The ‘Islamic’ countries/entities that are speaking up for the Palestinians such as Iran, Yemen and Lebanon’s Hezbollah and possibly Syria, which their supporters call the Axis of Resistance, have limited ability to do more as they have long suffered crippling US-led international sanctions.

While Iran was sanctioned on grounds of pursuing a nuclear weapons programme and supporting international terrorism and its own often poor human rights record, the others have faced isolation on not dissimilar grounds, apart from the nuclear arms charge.

Israel’s hugely disproportionate response to the Hamas attack on Oct 7 last year, during which the Zionist state has targeted women, children and all infrastructure in Gaza with the aim of rendering it uninhabitable and forcing the Gazans out, and the Western support to it, have opened up a huge divide between the Global South and the North with the latter backing the genocide in the name of right to self-defence.

For now, some countries in Latin America and most notably South Africa have taken concrete measures, so to speak, to put their money where their mouth is. The horror the rest of the world feels may be reflected in the UN General Assembly votes on a ceasefire but that is how far it is prepared to go. To so many, what South Africa has done is heroic, principled and ethical.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2024

Insurgency then and now: British India’s rebels and Israel’s Hamas

In the same way that the British cited terrorism as the reason why India was not ready for self-rule, so do the Israelis and their Western benefactors in denying freedom to Palestinians.

Arpan Roy 

January 9, 2024

Videos released by Hamas’s media team towards the end of October and broadcast on Al-Jazeera showed the militant group releasing Israeli hostages captured on October 7. The videos also showed Hamas fighters behaving with unexpected kindness while doing so — they hugged and gave dap handshakes to elderly ladies, cared for puppies, held hands with children, exchanged terms of endearment with their captives in Hebrew, and made sure everyone had bottles of water.

The scenes looked like family farewells, but surreal, with the fighters saying goodbye from behind balaclavas and slinging kalashnikovs. Watching Hamas’s etiquette and decorum, I was reminded of a phrase gleaned from the archives by the historian Durba Ghosh — gentlemanly terrorists.

The words do not normally go together. The amalgam was coined in the context of British rule in India — a juxtaposing of the Bengali bhadrolok, roughly meaning “gentleman,” with “terrorists,” that which the Empire thought many of these gentlemen to be.

The gentlemanly terrorists are not considered terrorists in Bengal. In Bengal, once the cradle of the armed anti-colonial struggle in British India, they are simply biplobi [revolutionaries]. Their names adorn major intersections and railway stations, they are taught in schools as national heroes, and their biographies are the subject of television programmes.

Elsewhere, they are a largely forgotten chapter of the Independence story. It was because of their constant agitation, however, that the British moved the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 — a move that established a symbolic genealogy with Indian kingship (Delhi having been the Mughal seat of power), but also acquiesced that Bengal had become ungovernable.

In a way, Bengal was Britain’s Gaza.

Khudiram Bose — the boy revolutionary

Khudiram Bose was one of the most prominent of the gentlemanly terrorists. He was 18 years old when, in 1908, he attempted, along with his accomplice, Prafulla Chaki, to assassinate the Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta in his carriage.

The operation was botched, and they instead killed two British women by bombing the wrong carriage. Prafulla took his own life while on the run, and Khudiram was arrested, tried in a show trial, and hung a few months later. Newspaper reports from the era state that he was “cheerful and smiling” both in court while receiving the verdict, and when his executioners drew the cap over his head.

Khudiram’s story does not end there. Alarmed that the assassination attempt was part of a larger insurgency, the British cracked down on other potential ‘terrorists’, including luminaries of the Independence movement like the brothers, Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh. The gentlemen were rounded up in Alipore Jail in Calcutta in 1909 and 36 were convicted. The event became known as the Alipore Bomb Case. The Ghosh brothers were both sentenced to death, although Aurobindo was subsequently acquitted and Barin later managed to escape from prison.

Others who publicly supported Khudiram were arrested for sedition, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was jailed for six years on exactly this charge — a trial in which he was defended, albeit unsuccessfully, by a young Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Khudiram, thus, spooked the British in a way that arguably nobody had since the 1857 mutiny.

Khudiram had a kind of afterlife in the early 1940s. An anonymous Bengali artist illustrated Khudiram’s execution scene in the style of popular calendar art, depicting him childlike and in bright colours, smiling, and with a noose around his neck. The circulation of the image helped close the discursive gap between disparate acts of revolutionary violence across historical time and a cohesive revolutionary ethos that was an important component (among others) of the Independence movement.

It was, in a sense, what in Palestine would be a mulasaq shaheed [martyr poster], in which a political martyr is commemorated via easily reproducible print media.

But one individual who was unimpressed was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi denounced the assassination attempt against the magistrate, concurring with the British that revolutionary terrorism would only procrastinate the arrival of self-rule in the subcontinent: “The Indian people will not win their freedom through these methods.”

Gandhi’s steadfast commitment to nonviolence does not require an elaboration, but it does perhaps require a deconstruction. Recent studies of Gandhi have argued that even more than Gandhi’s long-term experimentation with ways to overcome the Empire — and, perhaps, imperialism generally — a more intimate and equally long-term enemy was the Indian armed resistance.

Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s first major treatise, was published in 1909, during the fallout from the Khudiram event, and was written as a fictional dialogue between a naïve revolutionary and a sage-like Gandhi who imparts the apparent superiority of his nonviolent method.

There are two points to be made here. First, Gandhian nonviolence, based on the Sanskrit theological concept of ahimsa [non-injury] already precludes violence in so much as it is a negative definition that draws its essence from what it is not — there is no nonviolence without violence.

The second point is that although Gandhi trivialised the revolutionaries and, later, actively sabotaged large-scale military efforts to combat British rule, he held the highest esteem for those who had “the courage to die.” Possibly, he saw martyrdom as the logical maximal conclusion for the self-sacrifice and suffering that was the basis of his satyagraha [nonviolent resistance]. Regardless, it is precisely because of his hostility to local armed resistance that Gandhi never enjoyed the same reverence in Bengal that he did in other parts of India. Indeed, in certain circles even in contemporary Bengali society, Gandhi is not the Mahatama.

The Chittagong uprising

Another of the gentlemanly terrorists was Surya Sen, a schoolteacher from Chittagong in what is now Bangladesh. Inspired by the Irish republicans, he masterminded an uprising in 1930 designed to take control of two armouries, cut off communication lines between Chittagong and Calcutta, and take hostages from a colonial bungalow and social club.

Except for the miscalculation of having raided the club on a holiday — Good Friday, when there were no hostages to take — things went mostly as planned. Having taken control of the armouries, the insurrectionists proclaimed the inauguration of a Provisional Revolutionary Government.

The British caught up with them a few days later, and a shoot-out ensued in which 12 of Sen’s insurrectionists and 80 British soldiers were killed. Sen was able to flee and go into hiding, until the manhunt caught up with him after three years.

Legend has it that part of the excruciating torture inflicted on Sen in prison included smashing his teeth with a hammer. When he was hung in 1934, it is said that his tortured body was already practically dead, and that he could barely stand on his feet for his own execution. Perhaps because of the spectacular nature of the Chittagong uprising, Sen’s story is better known than those of the other gentlemanly terrorists. He has been the subject of various cinematic portrayals, including the 2010 film Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, starring Bollywood scion Abhishek Bachchan — one of the biggest box office disasters in Indian cinema history.

Scale aside, the parallels between Sen’s Chittagong armoury raid and Hamas’s uprising on October 7 are striking — both took control of military installations, cut off communication channels, sequestered hostages (or at least tried to), and killed many on the enemy lines. But the parallels do not end there.

In the same way that the hearts of Bengalis burst with pride when recalling our era of armed resistance, so do the hearts of Palestinians in their own revolutionary context. Also, in the same way that the British cited terrorism as the reason why India was not ready for self-rule, so do the Israelis and their Western benefactors in denying freedom to Palestinians.

Anti-colonialism and its perils

Colonialism and anti-colonialism work in sets of patterns, sometimes mismatches, and often comparable narrative arcs. One might easily find comparable situations in Algeria, South Africa, and across the darker continents that constituted the colonised world. Because British India was an exploitation colony and not a settler colony — meaning that its raison d’être was Britain’s monopoly over resources and not any kind of large-scale settlement project looking to replace Indians with Britons — perhaps some of the other colonies make even more compelling cases for comparisons.

But a latent pedagogy from a possible blood bond between the experiences of colonialism in Palestine and the subcontinent, however they might diverge or meet, is one that has not often been explored. The exception here is Kashmir, where the haemorrhage of Partition bled into further tragedies — those in which Kashmiris have long seen their own experience reflected in Palestine.

Not limiting themselves to “terrorists”, the British used a plethora of choice terms to describe the revolutionaries — fanatics, dacoits, thuggees, goondas, anarchists and bomb worshippers. Of this lexicon of slurs, the only one with any grounding in reality is anarchist, as some of the revolutionaries did indeed have personal ties to anarchist thinkers and philosophers in Europe, like Emma Goldman.

The British also widely speculated that the Bengali affinity towards bombs was cultish, and deeply rooted in Hindu religion, particularly the worship of Kali — the black goddess of death and rebirth. Consider here how it is Islam, rather than nation or the human spirit, that is often cited as the ideological basis for Palestinian resistance — that Hamas, in spite of everything, do not have any legitimate cause against Israel other than the stories of Bani Israel’s treacheries as revealed in the Holy Quran, or that the militant’s fearlessness before death is not driven by love of the homeland but by a libido for houris in heaven.

Freedom fighters, not terrorists

Khudiram Bose and Surya Sen — and, in Punjab, Baghat Singh and others — are part of the fibres of the protracted and multifaceted processes of Independence. Their contributions to this accomplishment is in no way minor to those brought about by the political work of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Ambedkar, and the other usual suspects.

In Palestine, there is a similar pantheon of names that coexist in spite of political and ideological divides — Yasser Arafat, of course, but also leftists like Abu Ali Mustafa, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi — the Islamist founders of Hamas —and dozens more. All were assassinated by Israel.

When Israel released Palestinian prisoners during the temporary truce with Hamas last month, jubilant crowds in Ramallah flew green Hamas flags alongside those of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — flags that denote distinct but interconnected movements that are integral to Palestinian society. It is because of such ecumenism that Israel’s psychotic war campaign in Gaza is not against Hamas but against all Palestinians.

It is only sensible, however, that Hamas — the only major Palestinian faction to have “resistance” enshrined in its name — is also the only one to have been born and taken shape in Gaza — always the most rebellious and ungovernable of the Palestinian enclaves. The first intifada began in Gaza in 1987. It was also in Gaza, in 2005, that the second intifada ended, when Israel was no longer able to provide security for its 9,000 settlers living there. The dismantling of 17 Jewish settlements in Gaza was a victory not only for Hamas but for the Palestinian people.

As is always the case for those who are militarily weaker but spiritually mightier, this victory came at an enormous cost — over 3,000 Palestinian lives lost, thousands more jailed, homes demolished, economic hardship, and the aggressive growth of Israel’s security infrastructure — to name only the material losses.

Whether it is the experience of the two intifadas, or the presently unfolding tunnel-guerrilla warfare with the Israeli military in Gaza — even under conditions of earth-shattering bombing; against all odds — Palestinians have shown the world again and again that they are willing to lose everything for their cause. The same cannot be said of their colonial masters. Were this to be otherwise, there might be new conditions for moral equivalency.

Politics, in many ways, is about subjective identification. I mean this in the Freudian sense — identification as a libidinal investment in a cause, idea, person, or public. It is perfectly admissible from the perspective of Western interests that Hamas, the vanguard of Palestinian armed resistance, at least in recent decades, are “terrorists.” Nobody expects this to be otherwise. It is because of this that I, unlike Gandhi, do not see the universal value in appealing to the moral compass of one’s enemy. Some enemies, especially those backed by colossal structures of power and capital, do not have a moral compass.

Back to Khudiram. Who would have thought that an 18-year-old “gentleman” would shake things up as much as he did? There was armed resistance in Bengal before him, but, perhaps because of the exaggerated British reaction to his case, after him, something changed.

In 1910, two years after his execution, it was estimated that 6,000 Bengalis were involved in resistance cells. In 1912, Bengali revolutionaries attempted to assassinate Viceroy Lord Hardinge in Delhi, narrowly missing, but leaving him wounded. In 1915 alone, there were 49 cases of terrorism in Bengal, including 10 assassinations. These days, we would probably call it an intifada.

Here there is another connection to be made. In present-day Kolkata — formerly Calcutta — there is a metro station in the Garia neighbourhood named after Khudiram, called ‘Shaheed Khudiram’.

This is another of Khudiram’s afterlives. In addition to being a gentleman, a terrorist, and a revolutionary, Khudiram is also a shaheed — and, in this, he is a node in a symbolic universe that narrows the distance between Palestine and Bengal, via Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and — to borrow from the great Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali — from our witnesses to our beloveds who sacrifice their lives not in vain.

Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published in 2024 by University of Toronto Press.




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US Officials Care More About Protecting Oil Tankers Than Palestinians – OpEd

 January 14, 2024  

By Edward Hunt

While Israel continues its military offensive in Gaza, the United States is directing a major military operation in the Red Sea, where U.S. warships are maintaining a persistent presence to protect shipping lanes.

With its recently launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, the United States is leading a multinational military coalition to occupy the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab, where oil tankers and commercial vessels have come under attack by Houthi militants in Yemen. The U.S.-led military intervention has brought the United States into direct conflict with the Houthis, who insist that they will continue their attacks until Israel ends its military offensive in Gaza.

“This is about the protection of one of the major commerce routes of the world in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab,” a senior official in the Biden administration said.

Strategic Waterways

For years, the U.S. military has played a central role in the Red Sea, a large waterway between northeastern Africa and the Arabian peninsula that facilitates regional commerce. In April 2022, the U.S. military oversaw the creation of Combined Task Force 153, a multinational naval partnership to patrol the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab, and Gulf of Aden.

“As everyone can appreciate, those waters are critical to the free flow of commerce throughout the region,” Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, the regional U.S. naval commander, explained at the time.

The Red Sea is a vital shipping route, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all seaborne trade. It facilitates commerce between Europe and Asia, enabling commercial ships to save time by passing through the Middle East rather than taking a longer route around Africa.

The Red Sea is also a major transit route for the world’s oil and natural gas. Significant amounts of oil from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the Persian Gulf are routed through the Red Sea to markets in Asia, Europe, and North America. Overall, the Red Sea accounts for 8 percent of global trade in liquefied natural gas and 12 percent of seaborne trade in oil.

“The Red Sea is a vital waterway,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said at a January 3 press briefing. “A significant amount of global trade flows through that Red Sea.”

Of particular concern to U.S. officials is the Bab al-Mandab, a strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. Only 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, the strait forms a chokepoint that forces commercial vessels into tight shipping lanes. As of early 2023, an estimated 8.8 million barrels of oil passed through the Bab al-Mandab every day, making it one of the world’s most significant chokepoints.

“The Bab al-Mandab Strait is a strategic route for oil and natural gas shipments,” the U.S. Energy Information Agency notes.

Operation Prosperity Guardian

Now that the Houthis are attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea, the United States is establishing a larger military presence in the region with Operation Prosperity Guardian. Under this new initiative, the United States is working with its coalition partners to establish what U.S. officials call a “persistent presence” in the southern Red Sea, meaning that coalition warships and other military assets will remain actively spread out across the area in a kind of military occupation.

“Together, we now have the largest surface and air presence in the southern Red Sea in years,” Cooper said at a January 4 press briefing.

As part of the operation, warships from France, Great Britain, and the United States are positioned throughout the southern Red Sea. They have been reinforced by the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which is located in the Gulf of Aden.

Already, the U.S.-led military coalition has engaged in hostilities with the Houthis, including one incident on December 31 in which U.S. forces sank three Houthi small boats, killing 10 fighters.

“It’s up to the Houthis to halt the attacks,” Cooper insisted. “They’re the instigator and initiator.”

The United States and the Houthis

This is not the first time that the United States has come into conflict with the Houthis. For years, the United States supported Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthis. Both the Obama and Trump administrations provided a Saudi-led military coalition with advanced weaponry and military advice, even as it repeatedly committed war crimes by striking civilian targets.

The Saudi-led military intervention sparked one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, leading to the deaths of more than 377,000 people. A temporary truce that began in April 2022 led to a reduction in hostilities, but the war has never ended, creating fears that it could reignite at any moment.

“Nobody should believe that the current state of affairs with relatively low levels of fighting is going to last,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted late last year.

Throughout Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the United States has been the main power behind the scenes, arming its allies while their military operations have caused tremendous harm to civilians. Officials in Washington have insisted that they have sought to minimize civilian casualties, but their priority has been to prevent the wars from disrupting commerce in nearby waterways, especially in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab.

“There’s no question in my mind that this is very important, not only to the countries in the region but globally,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said last month, referring to the need to ensure freedom of navigation. “What the Houthis are doing affects commerce around the globe.”

U.S. Considerations

As several powerful companies have begun halting their operations in the Red Sea, some current and former U.S. officials have been calling for stronger military action, such as military strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. The United States previously took direct action against the Houthis in October 2016, when a U.S. warship fired cruise missiles against radar sites in Yemen.

Still, high-level officials have been careful about taking the war directly to the Houthis. So far, President Biden has decided against striking Houthi targets, even after being presented with military options.

A major concern in Washington is that any kind of escalation against the Houthis could reignite the war in Yemen, which has already left the Houthis with the upper hand. When former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel considered the prospect of a U.S. war in Yemen late last year, he questioned whether the people of the United States would support such a war.

“I would venture that if you ask 100 Americans, ‘who are the Houthis?’” Riedel said, “99 percent of them would say, ‘the whats, the whats?’”

Another major concern is that a U.S. war against the Houthis would create further complications for the United States and its allies. If the United States attacked the Houthis, then the Houthis might respond by bringing the war to areas beyond the Red Sea, such as Israel. Already, the Houthis have launched drones and missiles toward Israel.

Officials in the Biden administration have been so concerned about the implications of going to war against the Houthis that they have not accused the Houthis of attacking the United States, even as the Houthis have repeatedly fired drones and missiles in the direction of U.S. warships. Administration officials have claimed that they cannot conclude with certainty that the Houthis have deliberately targeted U.S. military forces.

Additional members of the current U.S.-led military coalition share similar concerns, with some even going so far as to refuse to disclose their participation in the U.S.-led military coalition. Whereas some are concerned about retaliation, others fear what people might think about their participation in a military operation that is indifferent to the suffering of the people of Gaza.

“Not all want to become public,” Kirby acknowledged.

Implications for Gaza

While officials in Washington weigh their options, they are doing little to address the core issue, which is Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The Biden administration opposes a ceasefire, even as it repeatedly demands that the Houthis end their attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

Essentially, the Biden administration is engaging in a form of imperial management, as its works to help Israel continue its military campaign in Gaza while limiting its effects on regional dynamics and global markets. Rather than backing a ceasefire, the Biden administration is hoping to minimize the repercussions of Israel’s offensive for the global economy and contain any movement toward a wider war.

What the Biden administration has shown, in short, is that it cares far more about protecting fossil fuels and the world’s most powerful businesses than it does about protecting the people of Gaza.

This article was published by FPIF

Edward Hunt

Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies

 from the College of William & Mary.

CAIR Commends 400,000+ Marchers for Historic Turnout at March on Washington for Gaza

Ismail Allison
January 13, 2024

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today commended the more than 400,000 marchers who attended the historic March on Washington for Gaza.

Muslim, Jewish, Palestinian, and Arab Americans, and others from different faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds, attended the March on Washington for Gaza to demand President Biden support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, an end to U.S. funding of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and for the U.S. to hold the Israeli government to account for its war crimes.

The event featured remarks by Dr. Cornel West, Jill Stein, Rep. Andre Carson, Imam Omar Suleiman, Dr. Osama Aburishaid, Nihad Awad, Colorado state Rep. Iman Jodeh, Code Pink Director Medea Benjamin, and others. The event culminated in a march to the White House. Before the event began, six Palestinian-American families whose relatives have been killed, injured, displaced or abducted in the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza shared their personal stories and called on President Biden to secure a ceasefire to prevent further loss of life.

WATCH A VIDEO OF THE SPEAKERS

SEE: Thousands at Saturday protest in Washington DC call for Israel-Hamas cease-fire

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/thousands-at-saturday-march-for-gaza-in-washington-dc-call-for-israel-hamas-cease-fire/ar-AA1mU5fg

In a statement, CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said:

“We thank every person who attended this historic event to call for an end to the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and an end to our government’s support for their atrocities. The Biden administration can no longer ignore the millions of Americans who are saying ‘enough is enough.’ It is time for the administration to listen to the people and demand an immediate ceasefire, end its support for the Israeli apartheid government, and hold Israeli officials to account for their crimes against humanity.”

CAIR’s mission is to protect civil rights, enhance understanding of Islam, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.

La misión de CAIR es proteger las libertades civiles, mejorar la comprensión del Islam, promover la justicia, y empoderar a los musulmanes en los Estados Unidos.

https://action.cair.com/a/newsletters — For more information, email: info@cair.com, CC ihooper@cair.com

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March on Washington for Gaza Supporters Send Letter with Demands to President Biden

Ismail Allison
January 12, 2024

The letter endorsed by dozens of Muslim, Arab and Palestinian-American groups says President Biden has “severely” damaged his relationship with their communities

The organizers of the March on Washington for Gaza and 80 Muslim American, Arab-American, and Palestinian-American organizations today sent a letter to President Biden that urges him to stop supporting the Israeli government’s war crimes in Gaza and warns that his policy on Gaza has “severely” damaged his relationship with their communities.

The letter sent by the American Muslim Task Force on Palestine communicates the demands of the January 13th March on Washington for Gaza, which is organized in partnership with the ANSWER Coalition, endorsed by over 300 groups, and expected to be the largest pro-ceasefire protest of the past three months.

CLICK HERE: READ THE LETTER

Join the March on Washington for Gaza: March on Washington for Gaza (march4gaza.org)

Watch a livestream of the march

The American Muslim Task Force on Palestine includes American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim American Society (MAS), Muslim Student Association-National (MSA), Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), and Young Muslims (YM).

Additional signatories to the letter include some of the nation’s most prominent Muslim, Arab and Palestinian American groups, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, Emgage, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), The Mosque Cares: The Ministry of Imam W.D. Muhammad, MPower Change, Indian American Muslim Council, and the US Council of Muslim Organizations.

Sent today to the White House, their letter calls for the President to secure a complete and verifiable ceasefire, the release of all hostages in Gaza and political prisoners in Israel, the termination of unconditional U.S. financial and diplomatic support for the Israeli government, holding Israeli officials accountable for the Gaza genocide, and the initiation of credible negotiations for a just and enduring peace by ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The letter highlights concern over recent decisions by the Biden administration, including the approval of new shipments of weaponry to Israel without congressional review and the dismissal of legal filings against the Israeli government. It also condemns the war crimes committed by the Israeli government, citing attacks on refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and other civilian facilities.

The letter emphasizes the need for a change in the administration’s handling of the crisis, citing its impact on the relationship with Muslim and Arab communities.

Letter endorsers are calling on President Biden to honor his pledge to prioritize human rights in foreign policy, stating, “For the sake of justice, peace, your legacy, and your relationship with our communities and the broader American public, please end our nation’s support for this violence today.”

For further information, please visit march4gaza.org.

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CONTACT: American Muslim Task Force on Palestine media Coordinator & CAIR Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, e-Mitchell@cair.com