Climate finance geopolitics

Ali Tauqeer Sheikh 

DAWN

Published February 1, 2024 

THE lines of distinction between climate finance and traditional development financing have been blurred. Concurrently, national and provincial roles and responsibilities in Pakistan to access international climate finance have become muddled, if not messy. All international finance, including FDI and international trade, is fast becoming an instrument of global climate policies and geopolitics.

Pakistan is in the process of rethinking its strategies to access climate financing. Several federal ministries and provincial departments have concurrently begun to assume institutional responsibilities to access international climate finance (ICF). But it is not always clear where bilateral donors fit in their priorities or strategies, and how financial flows will be shaped by Pakistan’s global geopolitics.

Economic growth, development, and macroeconomic stability sans environmental and climate concerns are a notion of yesteryear. Ecological and economic priorities in the past were decoupled to achieve economic development, but no longer.

The rationales have merged now. Emissions reduction has an economic rationale. Pollution-free societies are healthier. Likewise, trade relations with the EU, UK and US are increasingly becoming subservient to their carbon-reduction interests and growing trade and technology wars with China. Healthy ecosystems are essential for sustainable economic growth. As they have become inseparable, all finance has by definition become climate finance.

Fiscal space for development financing is at its lowest ebb. No respite is on the horizon of policymakers who are hard-pressed to deliver a socioeconomic turnaround. Recognising that many specialised ICF windows can be accessed, some federal ministries and provincial departments have begun to race to fill the void.

All finance has by definition become climate finance.

While the national climate finance strategy is in the making, the ministries of climate, finance, and planning are setting up specialised climate finance units. They share the same challenges in finding trained personnel, commissioning technical studies, and looking for grant writers. The most stubborn challenge is clarity of purpose for each undertaking and how best to avoid overlaps.

Likewise, some provinces have begun to identify specific policy options ranging from carbon trading to carbon taxes and levies. Punjab, for example, has progressed in finalising its green financial strategy and an action plan for its implementation. In KP, a climate financing framework and climate investment and implementation plans have been developed. Both provinces are probing the possibility of entering the carbon trading market.

While endeavours at the federal level are mostly undertaken with support from multilateral development banks (MDB), in the provinces, it is primarily bilateral financing that is helping them tread new terrains. So far, none of the federal agencies has leveraged itself to convene them for better coordination and synergy.

Overall, Pakistan’s share of international finan­­ce is minuscule. The economic loss and damage of $30.1 billion inflicted by the 2022 floods was more than the total disbursement by all UNFCCC (Uni­ted Nations Framework Conven­tion on Climate Change) funds since their inception: the Global Environment Facility (1991), Adaptation Fund (2001), and the Green Climate Fund (2014).

Acc­o­r­ding to some estimates, they have collectively disbursed about $22bn globally. Pakistan has ac­­cessed less than $1bn from all these three funds in the last 30 years. Clearly, the gap between Pakis­tan’s investment needs for resilience and low carbon development cannot be met by the present climate finance ecosystem.

As against this, the MDBs are the largest lenders of Pakistan. Their portfolio will grow steeply in the next three to four years as all eight MDBs have recently announced to ‘align’ their portfolios with the Paris Agreement. The IFC and IMF have also begun to champion private sectors’ transition and macroeconomic stability with extreme weather events.

The IMF has developed its own Climate Policy Assessment Tool, known as CPAT, for the rapid quantification of impacts of climate-mitigation policies, including on energy demand, prices, emissions, revenues, welfare, GDP, households and industries, local air pollution, and many more. The flagship Public Investment Management Assessment, which has long been used to assess infrastructure governance practices for countries at all levels of economic development, has become a Climate PIMA (C-PIMA).

It involves an assessment of institutions of public investment management that are key to ‘climate-aware’ infrastructures. The release of the next IMF tranche to Pakistan in March 2024 will hinge on our compliance with the commitments made in C-PIMA, posted on IMF website.

Ironically, the IMF, like MDBs, has had limited success in increasing the ownership for reforms despite insistence. If the election manifestos of the PML-N, PPP and PTI are any indicator, they have not even mentioned IMF, let alone acknowledged and endorsed national commitments made under the Stand-By Arrangement.

The World Bank and IMF align their financing flows with the objectives of the Paris Agreement. In fact, all eight MDBs have now committed to globally coordinating their in-country portfolios.

In Pakistan, the ADB and World Bank are now committed to proactively communicating and coordinating their portfolios. This will be useful for better synergy. It, however, also poses the increased risk of cartelisation of international finance, making countries like Pakistan overly vulnerable if the political headwinds of regional geopolitics become stronger.

Finally, while MDB projects are large, bilateral donors have much smaller financial buckets. They often aspire to add to technical know-how, rather than large infrastructural projects. Working with them on a cascade of relatively smaller projects is pivotal to enhancing technical capacities in various sectors and in the provinces. It is in our interest to tap bilateral donors particularly because bilateral projects are often aimed at promoting a combination of economic growth, bilateral trade, and bilateral lending and investments.

This technical engagement can also serve as an enabler to access over three dozen special purpose ICF vehicles that the UK, Germany, France, EU and several others have created, nationally or by pooling resources for specific Paris Agreement goals.

More than anything else, the strategic objective of engaging bilaterally with parties is to augment trade relations and to build their stakes in regional stability and Pakistan’s climate-smart development. After all, it is global polarisation that is leading the flow of international finance, rather than the UNFCCC.

The writer is an Islamabad-based climate change and sustainable development expert.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2024

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Ajaz Ahmed 

DAWN

 February 3, 2024 

A CIRCULAR economy is a model of economy which focuses on the reuse and regeneration of materials or products to ensure environmentally friendly and sustainable production and consumption. The central idea of this economic system is to keep products and materials in circulation and increase their life cycle as much as possible through reuse, repair, refurbishing, composting, and recycling to avoid waste and promote regeneration. Hence, the circular economy seeks to productively use the products again after the end of their life, thereby creating further value and sending off the traditional linear economic model.

In other words, a circular economy is based on a systems-level approach such that industrial processes and economic activities are designed to be restorative or regenerative, seeking to maintain the highest value of resources while also minimising waste through alternative designs and production and consumption approaches. The redesigning of materials and products entails less resource intensity and the use of waste as a resource to manufacture new materials and products. Thus, the circular economy incorporates the full impacts of materials and waste in a transformative manner which ensures inclusiveness and equity.

This circular economy model incentivises the reuse of products to minimise the extraction of new resources which is critical to tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. While the circular economy model is very important for the efficient use of resources and living within the safe limits of planetary boundaries, ie, the limits beyond which the environment may not be able to sustain itself, the progress is unsatisfactory, to say the least.

Recently, the Circular Economy Foundation released the Circularity Gap Report 2024, showing that global circularity has declined despite the fact that the theme of circular economy has gained a lot of traction in the mainstream. The report claims that while awareness and interest in circularity has increased, more and more resources are being extracted from the pool of natural resources, and the proportion of reuse and use of secondary materials is decreasing. The report claims that globally, the increase in the quantity of materials extracted and used has massively gone up. For example, more than half a trillion tonnes of materials were extracted and used in the past six years alone, which is roughly equal to the total use in the 20th century.

Unfortunately, the global community is not committed to or serious about the conservation of natural resources and a stable future climate, and this is stressful, to put it mildly. The recent COP28 in Dubai was a similar spectacle where several pledges were made without concrete plans of action — speeches and goals are not being translated into much-needed actions and measurable impacts. The limited progress on the circular economy means a risk to global resources and planetary boundaries, which results in violation of the key tenets of the circular economy: reduced use of material for a long time, prioritising use of regenerative materials, and recycling and refurbishing at end-of-life.

This model is important for the efficient use of resources.

Then accelerated consumption and production no longer warrant human well-being, while material extraction and a neglect of the conservation of the natural environment result in more socioeconomic disparities, creating conditions for political and social instability. This is because of the flawed development model where economic growth is fuelled by unsustainable consumption and production approaches. Hence, the global economy must adopt principles of circularity to achieve sustainable development and a resilient future, one that safeguards the real well-being of existing and future generations.

As for the solutions, economic development must consider socially just and environmentally sound approaches. This necessitates a change in the rules of the game which starts with the design and implementation of context-specific policies that minimise the carbon and ecological footprint and ensure environmental sustainability and a climate-resilient future.

There are countless problems and constraints; but, starting small in the right direction with a timeline would not hurt anyone. However, the transition to a circular economy is not a choice as the global economy is changing and so is the structure of different economic sectors as the Earth system is unable to sustain the linear economy of the past, which contributed to climate change, biodiversity loss, and mountains of waste, and was beyond the carrying capacity of Earth.

The writer has a PhD in economics from Durham University UK and works as the director of research programmes for the Social Protection Resource Centre, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2024

Here’s How the Hindu Supremacist Movement Is Infiltrating US Politics

As the 100-year-old movement in India celebrates a key victory, a new report reveals its ties with the US far right.

By Samantha Agarwal , TRUTHOUT   February 2, 2024

Activists of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) conduct Hindu rituals to ensure a win for U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump in Allahabad, India, on May 18, 2016.

RITESH SHUKLA / NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

At 1:30 am on the bitterly cold night of January 22, around 50 people gathered at New York City’s Times Square. The crowd had assembled to watch a live telecast of the consecration of the Ram Mandir, a temple to the Hindu deity Rama in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Built on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque destroyed by a Hindu supremacist mob in 1992, the new state-sponsored Ram temple has become a milestone in the 100-year march to power of the Hindu supremacist movement, also known as Hindutva.

On this winter night, members of the Indian diaspora had congregated in one of the country’s most visible public spaces to bear witness to what they saw as a historic achievement. The crowd glanced expectantly at the towering screens, and, when energy lagged, a few among them led the group in chants of “Jai Shri Ram” (hail Lord Ram) and waved triangular, saffron-colored flags — an unmistakable symbol of the Hindu supremacist movement. (The slogan Jai Shri Ram has been appropriated as a Hindu supremacist slogan over a course of a number of violent campaigns and has become a murder cry during lynchings and assassinations.) Yet, as time dragged on, it became clear that the awaited livestream was not forthcoming.

Whether the advertising space was in fact secured for a screening or not was in the end immaterial. The “news” of the Times Square live telecast had been disseminated in the Indian media and had thus served to validate a story that Hindu supremacists have spent years cultivating: that the Indian diaspora is unanimous in its support for Modi’s India. In fact, the use of Times Square as a symbol of global legitimacy, even when such expressions have been deeply contested, has been a repeated strategy of the Hindu far right in the U.S.

It seemed even the hopeful Times Square attendees understood this ars bellica on some level, which kept their mood from souring too much. “It was supposed to be out here… but it’s too bad,” said Paras Pandhare, with a shrug and a laugh. For Pandhare and other attendees that evening, the moment they had gathered to celebrate was a grand historical occasion, marking the end of what they deemed to be a five-century era of subservience. “India is on the rise again, and it deserves to be,” Pandhare added pridefully.

The Centrality of the Ram Temple to Hindu Supremacist Politics

In a way, the Times Square debacle reflected the broader dynamics that color Hindu nationalism, and in particular the Ram temple movement. As in many fascist movements of the past, its membership and supporters have been far less concerned with facts than with the larger aim of reclaiming the nation from their imagined enemies. The central premise of the Ram temple movement — that a Mughal king named Babur demolished a Ram temple to build the Babri Mosque on the exact birthplace of Lord Ram — are claims that arose in the 19th century from various Hindu groups, but have never been proven, and are unlikely to ever be.

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In the 1980s, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a mass cultural organization which formed in 1964 as part of the Hindu supremacist movement, capitalized on this mythology, turning it into a national campaign to replace the Babri Masjid (mosque) with a new Ram temple. A few years later, the newly formed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules India today, helped propel the “Ram Janmabhoomi” (birthplace of Ram) campaign into the mainstream, first through a 10-state, 10,000-kilometer “rath yatra” (chariot procession) in 1990 and then in 1992 in the demolition of the mosque. The razing of the mosque set off a series of interreligious riots that killed at least 2,000 people, most of them Muslim. This is considered by many to be one of the most tragic moments in India’s post-independence history.

Nonetheless, the Ram temple issue has been a watershed for Hindu supremacists and especially the BJP. Prior to this campaign, in the federal elections of 1984, the BJP won a paltry two seats in the Indian parliament. By 1989, its strength had grown to 85 seats. Ten years later, its seat share had nearly doubled to 161. Today, it has a full majority in India’s multiparty democracy at 303 of the 543 seats. In the past 35 years, the temple has gone from being a site of grievance for Hindu supremacists to a symbol of their triumph. Its construction further rounds out a full decade of Narendra Modi’s rule, during which India saw rising casteist and religious violence, the passage of discriminatory citizenship and anti-conversion laws which target Muslims and Christians, and political disenfranchisement of Indian-occupied Kashmir.

Although the dust from the inauguration of the temple has barely settled, in anticipation of the upcoming national elections Hindu supremacist groups in India and the U.S. are already lining up the next violent usurpation. Times Square rang with chants translating to “Ayodhya is just a preview, Kashi and Mathura are next,” threatening the destruction of two other historically contested mosques. The VHP’s U.S.-based affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, also put out a press release demanding that a mosque in Kashi be converted into a temple. The promise for the destruction of more mosques and the communal violence that will inevitably follow, will continue to be used to buttress the Hindu far right’s majoritarian claims.

The Global Reach of Hindu Supremacy

The Hindu nationalist project has long been transnational, and has deep roots in the U.S. A report detailing this history has recently been launched by a new coalition called Savera: United Against Supremacy, which describes itself as a multiracial, interfaith platform against the rising tide of supremacist politics. Titled “The Global VHP’s Trail of Violence,” this report highlights the growing connections between the Hindu supremacist movement in the United States and the American far right, as well the former’s complicity in multiple instances of deadly anti-minority violence in India.

In particular, the report draws attention to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, or VHP-A, established in 1970, which is the apex Hindu supremacist organization in the U.S with 21 chapters around the country. Although the VHP-A claims to be “legally separate and operationally independent” of the VHP in India, in moments of celebration — as in the past week — it has often been keen to emphasize its central role in the broader Hindu supremacist movement, and in advancing the programmatic agenda of the VHP.

While the VHP-A was not officially connected to the Times Square gathering, it claimed credit for organizing a number of parallel events including large gatherings in San Francisco, Houston, Chicago and Washington, D.C. In these celebrations, the VHP-A boasted of its role in supporting the demolition of the mosque and the construction of the Ram Mandir, corroborating the revelations of the Savera report. In addition to calling for more mosque demolitions, it recently announced a new pan-U.S. “rath yatra” or chariot march, using the same term used by the movement that demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 and sparked frequent incidents of communal violence in its wake. This hate caravan that caused widespread violence in India will now be an affront to Muslims in the U.S.

The Savera report shows that the VHP-A has played a continuous role in Hindu supremacist violence, not just during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, but also in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the state of Gujarat, the 2008 anti-Christian riots in the state of Odisha and the infamous 2020 riots in India’s capital of Delhi. In this latest spate of violence, a VHP-A member from Houston, Sachin Chitlangia, both helped run the online platform of and personally raised over $115,000 for Kapil Mishra, who is widely seen as one of the key architects of the Delhi violence.

The VHP-A also tried to platform another hatemonger and monk, Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, an instigator of the Delhi riots, at an online religious event a year later. “Those we call Muslims in our current era were called demons in earlier eras,” Narsinghanand has said. “Islam should be eradicated from Earth … all Muslims should be eliminated.” The VHP-A had to pull back after progressive groups raised a stink, but their associate Vibhuti Jha went ahead, inviting Narsinghanand to his channel. Jha himself said that “our youth must be trained for war.”

But while VHP-A has contributed to violence in India, it has also worked to fortify far right groups and movements in the U.S. For example, the report recounts the 2012 Stop Islamization of Nations Conference, hosted by infamous Islamophobes Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, whose organizations have been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. At the conference, Babu Suseelan, a long time Hindu supremacist leader and VHP member based in the U.S., preached, “If we do not kill the bacteria, the bacteria will kill us. Muslims will breed like rats and they will be a majority.” He continued, “Islam can be stopped! And it can be wiped out.”

“The extent to which Hindu supremacist groups are emerging as important players in global far right and anti-Muslim networks is a matter of deep concern, and we hope Savera’s report sparks further investigation into the topic,” said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. This is illustrated by the ways in which Spencer has increasingly pandered to an Indian far right audience, including by writing his Twitter handle in Devanagari (the alphabet used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and other Indian languages). In toto, the Savera report documented nearly a dozen such links between far right actors in the U.S. and the VHP-A, its members and affiliates.

© SAVERA 2024 – REPRINTED UNDER CC 4.0

The extent to which the Hindu far right is seeding Trump-aligned candidates is also touched upon. The former 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who attended two fundraiser galas hosted by the VHP-A’s advocacy wings, is a well-known example. But Ramaswamy is just the tip of a much broader phenomenon. A notable example mentioned in the Savera report is Manga Anantatmula, a VHP-A leader who played a critical role in the campaign against affirmative action that eventually resulted in the 2023 Supreme Court decision which ruled affirmative action protections unconstitutional. (Immediately following the decision, VHP-A’s advocacy wing tweeted: “We welcome #AffirmativeAction ruling by the #SCOTUS.”)

Anantatmula has since used that involvement to launch her congressional election campaign in Virginia’s 16th district. In a recent episode framed around strategies to flip Indian American votes to the far right on Vibhuti Jha’s show (Jha has run for state office on a Republican ticket as well), Anantatmula invoked the alarmist discourse of white supremacists in her messaging to Hindus. “Let’s not be daydreamers, thinking that bringing your paycheck home is enough to take care of your family. No, your next generation is about to be hanged,” she said. “If they think that Hindus are safe in this country, they are not safe.”

Finally, Hindu nationalists have been savvy enough not to limit their allegiances to the right-wing camp. There are a number of prominent Democrats including Ro Khanna (D-California), Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) and Preston Kulkarni (Texas congressional candidate) who have accepted campaign contributions from Hindu nationalists and are friendly with the VHP-A or allied organizations. Some of them, like Maryland’s Gov. Wes Moore and Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, deny their ties to Hindu supremacists while depending heavily on these very groups for campaign finance. Although this is not a focus of the Savera report, it is important to understand how so-called liberal Indian Americans are also contributing to the right-wing compact.

The Intersectional Struggle Against the Hindu Far Right

In this context, South Asians in the U.S. have an important role and responsibility in building mass resistance to Hindu supremacy. We can start by educating individuals within our communities about the threat posed by Hindutva (Hindu supremacy) and U.S.-based organizations like the VHP-A. Savera’s new report goes a long way in supplying the information that is needed for such a conversation. Other useful resources include Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative’s VHPA Factsheet, Hindutva Watch and the anti-Hindutva Harassment Manual by the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective.

Moreover, from supremacist chants at Times Square to Anantatmula’s credentials in the attack on affirmative action, it is evident that Hindu supremacy and white supremacy are increasingly joined at the hip — and that many actors in both movements seem willing to put aside their internal contradictions to advance a common majoritarian agenda. The same can be said of the deepening political, economic and ideological ties between Zionism and Hindutva, the stakes of which have never been higher. The Hindu supremacists have not only cheered on Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza but have capitalized on it to demonize Muslims in India.

Additionally, the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s effort to make India a “strategic defense partner” in the U.S.’s rivalry with China has revealed the bipartisan nature of Hindutva’s U.S. base. While the Obama administration worked to rehabilitate Modi (after he was blacklisted by the U.S. government for nearly 10 years due his role in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms) as part of its “Pivot to Asia” policy, President Donald Trump signed over $3 billion in arms deals with India. And despite Modi’s worsening record of human rights abuses, the Biden administration has now given a “free pass” to Modi in order to maintain this “strategic” partnership. Not even an attempted assassination of a U.S. citizen seems to have gotten in the way of another $4 billion in drone sales to India under the current U.S. administration. Biden’s enabling of the first livestreamed genocide in world history further suggests that no caste atrocity or anti-Muslim pogrom will be too much for the U.S. to stomach in the course of its imperial pursuits.

In this context, the South Asian progressives must concentrate on building new movement coalitions that are not only interracial, internationalist and interfaith but also grassroots and responsible to members rather than “national interests.” Defeating the far right will further require us to take an unwavering stance against casteism, racism and ethnonationalism in all of their manifestations. The formation of Savera is thus a welcome development. If the existential challenges we face are so deeply interconnected, movements on the left must cross traditional siloes too, the coalition argues in its report. “It’s a moment of great crisis and precarity, but also one that has produced deep clarity about our interconnectedness.”



SAMANTHA AGARWALl is currently a Changemaker Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of International Service at American University. Her work is on the intersection of caste inequality and ethnonationalism in India.

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Gazans fear Israeli assault on last refuge

Agencies Published February 3, 2024
GAZA STRIP: A displaced Palestinian boy rides his cycle in Khan Yunis, on Friday. Several residents of the conflict-hit territory wear hazmat suits, which are left over from the coronavirus pandemic, as protection from cold weather.—AFP


• Almost 1.2 million people have taken shelter in Rafah
• Unicef says 17,000 children have been separated from parents

GAZA CITY: Israeli forces shelled the outskirts of the last refuge on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on Friday, where the displaced, penned against the border fence in their hundreds of thousands, said they feared a new assault with nowhere left to flee.

More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now homeless and crammed into Rafah. Tens of thousands more have arrived in recent days, carrying belongings in their arms and pulling children on carts, since Israeli forces launched one of the biggest assaults last week to capture Khan Yunis, the main southern city, just to the north of Rafah.



If the Israeli tanks keep coming, “we will be left with two choices: stay and die or climb the walls into Egypt”, said Emad, 55, a businessman reached on a mobile phone chat app.

“Most of Gaza’s population are in Rafah. If the tanks storm in, it will be a massacre like never before during this war.”

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said late on Thursday that troops would now turn to Rafah, which along with Deir Al Balah just north of Khan Yunis is among the last remaining areas they have yet to storm in an almost four-month assault.

As the only part of Gaza with access to the limited food and medical aid trickling across the border, Rafah and adjacent parts of Khan Yunis have become a warren of makeshift tents clinging to the winter mud.

Wind and cold weather added to the misery, blowing tents down, flooding them and the ground between them.

“What should we do? We live in multiple miseries, a war, starvation, and now the rain,” said Um Badri, displaced from Gaza City, now living in a tent in Khan Yunis, also reached by phone chat.

“We used to wait for winter, to enjoy watching the rain from the balcony of our house. Now, our house is gone, and the rainwater has flooded the tent we have ended up in.”



Truce offer

Authorities in Gaza say more than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli bombardment since Oct 7, with thousands more bodies feared lost among the ruins, in an assault that has laid much of the territory to waste.

Mediators are waiting for a response from Hamas to a proposal drafted last week with Israeli and US spy chiefs and passed on by Egypt and Qatar, for the first extended ceasefire since hostilities began in October. Residents hope that would stop the fighting before Israeli tanks enter Rafah.

There was brief celebratory gunfire in Gaza on Thursday when Arabic-language media reported comments by a Qatari official suggesting the ceasefire was close. But Qatar made clear a deal had not yet been reached.

The only truce so far lasted for only a week in late November. The proposal now on the table would be for a far longer cessation of hostilities, letting aid reach the enclave and Gazans return to abandoned homes.

Separated from parents

The United Nations said on Friday it estimates that 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip have been left unaccompanied or separated during the four months of Israeli bombardment.

“Each one has a heartbreaking story of loss and grief,” said Jonathan Crickx, spokesman for Unicef, the UN children’s agency, in the Palestinian territories.

“This figure corresponds to one per cent of the overall displaced population — 1.7 million people,” he told a media briefing in Geneva, via video link from Jerusalem.

Each one “is a child who is coming to terms with a horrible new reality”.

Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2024

Pro-Israel Perspectives Dominate Gaza Debate at Major US Papers

The opinion pages of The New York Times and Washington Post leaned heavily toward a conversation led by Israeli interests and concerns.

Palestinians migrate towards Rafah in the southern part of the city due to intense Israeli attacks in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on December 05, 2023.
(Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

JULIE HOLLAR
Feb 03, 2024

FAIR

At The New York Times and Washington Post, despite efforts to include Palestinian voices, opinion editors have skewed the Gaza debate toward an Israel-centered perspective, dominated by men and, among guest writers, government officials.

In the first two months of the current Gaza crisis, the Times featured the crisis on its op-ed pages almost twice as many times as the Post (122 to 63). But while both papers did include a few strong pro-Palestinian voices—and both seemed to make an effort to bring Palestinian voices close to parity with Israeli voices—their pages leaned heavily toward a conversation dominated by Israeli interests and concerns.

That was due in large part due to their stables of regular columnists, who tend to write from a perspective aligned with Israel, if not always in alignment with its right-wing government. As a result, the viewpoints readers were most likely to encounter on the opinion pages of the two papers were sympathetic to, but not necessarily uncritical of, Israel.

A majority of the U.S. public has supported a cease-fire since the early days of the crisis, and one poll found support increasing over time. Yet in the country’s two most prominent papers, the cease-fire debate was either mostly ignored (at the Post) or presented in a way that came nowhere close to reflecting public opinion (at the Times).

Many opinion pieces at the Times, for instance, mentioned the word “occupation,” offering some context for the current crisis. However, very few at either paper went so far as to use the word “apartheid”—a term used by prominent human rights groups to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Clear calls for an unconditional cease-fire, while widespread in the real world, were vanishingly rare at the papers: two at the Times and at the Post only one, which itself was part of a collection of short responses to the question, “Should Israel agree to a cease-fire?,” which included strong opposition as well.

For guest perspectives, both papers turned most frequently to government officials, whether current or former, U.S. or foreign. And the two papers continued the longstanding media bias toward male voices on issues of war and international affairs: the Times with roughly three male-penned opinions for every female-written one, and the Post at nearly 7-to-1.

For this study, FAIR identified and analyzed all opinion pieces published by the two papers from October 7 through December 6 that mentioned Israel or Gaza, using Nexis and ProQuest. Excluding editorials, web-only op-eds, letters to the editor, and pieces with only passing mentions of Israel/Palestine, we tallied 122 pieces at the Timesand 63 at the Post.

New York Times Writers

During the first two months of the Gaza crisis, The New York Times published 48 related guest essays, along with 74 pieces by regular columnists, contributing writers (who write less frequently than columnists), and editorial board members (who occasionally publish bylined opinion pieces).

Of the 48 guest essays, the greatest concentration (16, or 33%) were written by Israelis or those with stated family or ancestral ties to Israel. Another 13 (27%) were written by Palestinians or people who declared ties to Palestine. Most of the rest (12, or 25%) were written by U.S. writers with no identified family or ancestral ties to either Israel or Palestine.

The occupational category the Times turned to most frequently for guest opinions was government official, with current or former officials from the U.S. or abroad accounting for 11 (23%) of the guest essays. (U.S. officials outnumbered foreign officials, 6 to 5.) Journalists came in a close second, with nine (19%), followed by seven academics (15%). Six represented advocacy groups or activists (13%); four of these were Israeli and two Palestinian.

The paper also relied heavily on the opinions of men rather than women. Ninety-two of the Times opinion pieces were written by men (75%), while 30 were written by women (25%), an imbalance of more than 3-to-1.

Of the 17 pieces written by the Times‘ regular female columnists, eight came from Michelle Goldberg, and the preponderance were about domestic implications of the crisis. Examples of these include Goldberg’s “The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left” (10/12/23) and Pamela Paul‘s “The War Comes to Stanford” (10/13/23), both of which decried the response to the Gaza crisis by the U.S. pro-Palestinian left.

Washington Post Writers

The Post published 46 pieces by regular columnists and only 17 by guest writers. Even given that the Post typically publishes fewer opinion pieces than the Times, that’s a strikingly small number of guest op-eds—roughly one every four days.

Unlike at the Times, the Post guest op-eds were dominated by U.S. writers (seven, or 41%), with only four by Israelis (24%) and three by Palestinians (18%). The Israeli-bylined op-eds expressed varied viewpoints, from hard-line support (“Every innocent Palestinian killed in this conflagration is the victim of Hamas”—10/10/23) to a call for “concrete steps to de-escalate the immediate conflict and to sow seeds for peace and reconciliation” (10/20/23). Two of the Palestinian-bylined pieces came from the same writer, journalist Daoud Kuttab (10/10/23, 11/28/23), who both times argued that President Joe Biden must recognize a Palestinian state as the only way forward.

It’s useful to compare the papers’ current representation of Palestinian voices to their historical record. In +972 Magazine (10/2/20), Palestinian-American historian Maha Nasser counted opinion pieces (including editorials, columns, and guest essays) that mentioned the word “Palestinian” at the Post and Times from 1970 through 2019. Of the thousands of pieces published, fewer than 2% were written by Palestinians at either paper (1.8% at the Times, 1.0% at the Post). In the most recent decade (2010-19), the numbers were only slightly higher, up to 2.8% at the Times and 1.6% at the Post.

While the comparison is not exact—because FAIR used different search terms (“Israel” or “Gaza”) and excluded editorials—in our two-month study period, 11% of bylined opinions were written by Palestinians at the Times, and 5% at the Post. Including editorials that mention Israel or Gaza (six at the Post, four at the Times), those percentages drop slightly to 10% and 4%.

Like the Times, the Post leaned on government officials to shape the public debate; five of its guest op-eds were by current or former U.S. or foreign officials (30%), four by journalists (24%), and only two by representatives of advocacy groups or activists (12%). As at the Times, U.S. officials slightly edged foreign officials, 3 to 2.

The Post had an even more lopsided gender imbalance than the Times, at nearly 7–1. Only eight of its opinion pieces were by women: two guest essays (12%) and six columns (13%).

New York Times Columnists

Several New York Times columnists wrote repeatedly about the Gaza crisis. The Times‘ foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, often writes about Middle East politics; during the study period, he wrote about nothing else, outpacing all of his colleagues with 13 columns about Gaza. Though Friedman is not known for pacifism or expressing sympathy for Palestinians (see FAIR.org, 7/13/20), he typically writes from a reliably centrist pro-Israel position, and his takes on the right-wing Netanyahu government have been generally critical.

During the first two months of the war, Friedman repeatedly wrote columns (e.g., 10/10/23, 10/16/23, 10/19/23, 11/9/23) criticizing Netanyahu and his military strategy, discouraging a ground invasion, and pushing for a diplomatic solution. His columns heavily focused on Israel and Israeli perspectives and interests, rather than Palestine and Palestinians; all but one of his headlines took “Israel,” or “Israeli officials” as their subject, while two also mentioned “Hamas”; none mentioned “Gaza,” “Palestine,” or “Palestinians.”

His last column (12/1/23) in the study period advocated for Israel to abandon its mission of destroying Hamas, and instead negotiate a cease-fire and withdrawal in exchange for a return of all hostages. Yet at the same time, he managed to project his habitual Orientalism and a distinct lack of empathy for the Palestinian humanitarian crisis. Even if it abandons its stated goal of eliminating Hamas, Israel will have succeeded, Friedman argued, because it will
have sent a powerful message of deterrence to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: You destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more. This is ugly stuff, but the Middle East is a Hobbesian jungle. It is not Scandinavia.

“With Israel out,” he continued,
the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar’s and Hamas’ problem—as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.

These arguments—first, that people in the Middle East must be educated through violence, and next, that Israel ought to withdraw and take no responsibility for the crushing humanitarian disaster it has wrought—make clear the underlying callousness of the Times‘ most prolific Middle East columnist.

Fellow long-time columnist Nicholas Kristof also wrote repeatedly about Gaza (10 times), with more attention to the civilian casualties of the conflict. In one column (10/25/23), Kristof highlighted the voices of several Israelis who, despite the trauma they have experienced, have been able to “muster the clarity to understand that relentless bombardment and a ground invasion may not help.” Another column (10/28/23) concluded with the line: “I think someday we will look back in horror at both the Hamas butchery in Israel and at the worsening tableau of suffering in Gaza in which we are complicit.”

Yet Kristof was hardly a voice for the pro-Palestinian left, and twice made clear his position against a cease-fire. For instance, he wrote on December 6:
By pulverizing entire neighborhoods and killing huge numbers of civilians instead of using smaller bombs and taking a much more surgical approach, as American officials have urged, Israel has provoked growing demands for an extended cease-fire that would arguably amount to a Hamas victory.

While the Times‘ prominent centrists favored Israel yet counseled restraint, the paper’s conservative columnists offered even more hawkish takes. Most prominently, conservative columnist Bret Stephens, who serves as a consistently pro-Israel voice on the Times opinion pages, wrote about the issue 11 times during the two-month period.

Earlier in his career, Stephens left The Wall Street Journal to take the helm at The Jerusalem Post “because he believed Israel was getting an unfair hearing in the press.” As he said at the time (Haaretz, 4/20/17): “I do not think Israel is the aggressor here. Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I’m trying to help Israel.”

After October 7, Stephens used his Times column to absolve Israel of any responsibility for Gaza casualties (“Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War,” 10/15/23), attack calls for a cease-fire (“The ‘Cease-fire Now’ Imposture,” 11/21/23), and vilify the pro-Palestinian U.S. left (“The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself,” 10/10/23; “The Left Is Dooming Any Hope for a Palestinian State,” 11/28/23).

Fellow conservatives Ross Douthat and David French offered fewer Gaza takes (five each) and, while less strident than Stephens, still took pro-Israel positions. French, for instance, argued in one column (10/15/23):
The challenge of fighting a pitched battle amid the civilian population would both render Israel’s attack more difficult and take more civilian lives. But refusing to attack and leaving Hamas in control of Gaza would create its own moral crisis.

He later (11/16/23) argued against a cease-fire, which would “block Israel’s exercise of its inherent right to self-defense.”

Douthat, in a column (10/18/23) musing about the lessons of the U.S. “War on Terror” for Israel, included such nuggets of wisdom as “if invasion is your only option, America’s post-9/11 experience also counsels for a certain degree of maximalism in the numbers committed and the plans for occupation.”

As mentioned above, columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote eight Gaza-related columns, but primarily about domestic repercussions of the crisis—which is unsurprising, given her column beat is identified as “politics, gender, religion, ideology.” Goldberg paid particular attention to the debates over protest, speech, and antisemitism, arguing against censorship, as well as against the idea that anti-Zionism could be equated with antisemitism (e.g., 11/20/23, 12/4/23)—though not without frequent barbs at the U.S. left, such as when she blamed “the left” (10/23/23) for supposedly establishing the rules of censorship on campus that she decried: “privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas.”

No other regular columnist wrote more than three pieces touching on the Middle East crisis.

Washington Post Columnists

At The Washington Post, foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius was by far the most prolific writer on Gaza. Like Friedman, he penned 13 columns on the crisis, but because the Post published far fewer Gaza opinions than the Times, Ignatius’ views represented fully 20% of the Post‘s bylined opinions on the crisis. And, as Ignatius acknowledged in one of those columns (11/19/23), he “sees this terrible conflict largely through Israeli eyes.”

That’s in large part due to his sources. Ignatius, a former reporter (and Mideast correspondent from 1980-83), often includes original reporting in his columns. Four of his columns from the two months were filed from the Middle East: one from Doha (11/10/23), two from Tel Aviv (11/14/23, 11/19/23), and one from “Gaza City” (11/13/23)—though that last described his brief visit to Gaza “in an Israeli armored personnel carrier,” during which time “we could not interview any of the Gazan civilians” they saw fleeing along a “humanitarian corridor.”

Many of Ignatius’ columns were filled with quotes from Israelis he interviewed, but not from Palestinians. While not uncritical of Israel, Ignatius offered a largely one-sided view of the crisis to readers.

Conservative Post columnists Jason Willick (who wrote four columns) and Max Boot (who wrote three) were no counterbalance to Ignatius’ pro-Israel tilt. Willick used two of his columns (10/19/23, 12/6/23) to blame leftist “identity politics” for antisemitism in the U.S. In the other two, he blamed Hamas for Palestinian deaths (“Gazans Pay for Hamas’ Guerrilla Tactics,” 11/15/23) and encouraged “a tight embrace rather than a cold shoulder” for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (“Benjamin Netanyahu, Moderate,” 11/26/23).

Boot offered mostly bloodless, academic assessments—such as “mass-casualty attacks are counterproductive” (10/18/23) and “tyrants and terrorists often underestimate the fighting capacity of liberal democracies” (10/13/23). His first Gaza-related offering (10/9/23), though, observed that “responsible Israelis—who are largely missing from Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet—know that Palestinians’ lives have to improve to prevent more eruptions of violence in the future.”

Charles Lane, who occupies a more center-right position on the paper’s op-ed page, used three of his columns to talk about the crisis, each time to emphasize Hamas’ atrocities while denying Israel’s own. For instance, in “The Best Thing Hamas Can Do for Palestinians Is to Surrender” (11/16/23), Lane argued that “Israel does not intentionally kill civilians” and that “to save Palestinian lives,” Hamas ought to surrender, rather than placing “the burden on Israel to end the war.”

Two members of the paper’s center-right editorial board who also write bylined columns for the Post—Egyptian-American Shadi Hamid and Colbert King—published three opinions each related to the crisis during the first two months, columns that in general offered arguably the most balanced perspectives.

Hamid found room, alongside his rebukes of Hamas and the U.S. left, to criticize “the devaluing of Palestinian lives” (11/30/23) and to argue that “now and not later, a cease-fire is necessary” (11/9/23)—even if he added the precondition that Hamas first agree to release hostages, with no preconditions for Israel.

King wrote more about the repercussions of the crisis, including repression of speech (11/18/23) and rising antisemitism and Islamophobia (11/11/23); he also wrote a plea for “full self-government [for Palestinians] and a land they can call their own” (10/21/23).

‘Cease-fire’ Mentions

During the study period, more than 16,000 Palestinians were killed, including more than 7,000 children (OCHA, 12/5/23). From the very early days of the crisis, as Palestinian civilian casualties quickly mounted, calls for a cease-fire grew louder and more prominent. International leaders, human rights and humanitarian groups, and protesters worldwide demanded a halt to Israel’s relentless bombing (and, later, ground campaign) in order to stop the civilian casualties, allow desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter the blockaded strip of land, and work toward a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. (See FAIR.org, 10/24/23.)

A majority of the U.S. public has supported a cease-fire since the early days of the crisis, and one poll found support increasing over time. Yet in the country’s two most prominent papers, the cease-fire debate was either mostly ignored (at the Post) or presented in a way that came nowhere close to reflecting public opinion (at the Times).

In the Times, the word “cease-fire” in relationship to the current crisis appeared in 31 op-eds during the two months, representing 25% of all Gaza-related op-eds. (Four additional mentions referred to the cease-fire that was in place prior to October 7.) Many (11) were simply descriptive. For example, a guest op-ed (11/22/23) noted that “the hostage release deal outlined on Tuesday would include a cease-fire of at least four days.”

Of the remaining 21 that could be classified as advocating a position, 11 were clearly critical of calls for a cease-fire, such as Stephens’ “The Cease-fire Now Imposture” (11/21/23), in which he wrote, “Instead of Cease-fire Now, we need Hamas’ Defeat Now.” Nine of the anti-cease-fire columns were penned by Times regular columnists, four of them by Stephens.

Another two opinions focused on the plight of the Israeli hostages and insisted that a cease-fire should only be possible after all of them were freed. The brother of an Israeli hostage, for instance, made a case (11/15/23) for “the urgent need to prioritize the release of all the hostages as a condition for any humanitarian pause or cease-fire.”

Only seven Times opinions voiced any form of support for a cease-fire; most were mild or indirect exhortations. Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, for example, wrote (10/20/23) that Biden “needs to plan now for meeting Gaza’s immediate needs—which might require an early call on Israel for a humanitarian cease-fire—but must also develop a plan for the day after.”

Gershon Baskin, who negotiated previous hostage deals between Israel and Hamas, suggested (10/21/23) that the U.S. press Qatar to issue an ultimatum to Hamas, but that Qatar was unlikely to agree to that, and “certainly not without an Israeli cease-fire.”

Three Times op-eds in the study period (less than 3% of all bylined opinion pieces) made clear and direct calls for an unconditional cease-fire. Two were written by Palestinians (10/19/23, 10/29/23), and one by Times contributing writer Megan Stack (10/30/23), a former war correspondent who has emerged as a rare strong voice for Palestine on the op-ed page. In the six weeks since the study period ended, Stack published two more essays on the crisis: “For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed” (12/9/23) and “Don’t Turn Away From the Charges of Genocide Against Israel” (1/12/24).

At the Post, we found 16 mentions of “cease-fire” during the two-month study period—far less total attention than at the Times, but a similar proportion of its Gaza opinion (25%). Half of these were simply descriptive. Of the remaining eight, four expressed criticism, three expressed support, and one (11/3/23) was the previously mentioned collection of expert opinion on both sides of the cease-fire question that appeared scrupulously balanced between those in support and those opposed.

Two of the supportive op-eds (11/5/23, 11/28/23) were indirect; the only clear and direct call for a cease-fire, outside of the collection, came from Shadi Hamid, who put preconditions on Hamas but not Israel (11/9/23).

It’s noteworthy that Hamid’s opinion came just three days after the editorial board of which he is a member published an editorial (11/6/23) arguing against a cease-fire, except in the sense of “pauses in the fighting for humanitarian relief,” and even then only on the condition that Hamas release all hostages first. (Israel and Hamas agreed to a series of such pauses on November 9.)

The Times also published an editorial (11/3/23) around the same time calling for a “humanitarian pause,” but not a cease-fire. As the Times explained, “Israel has warned that a blanket cease-fire would accomplish little at this point other than allowing Hamas time to regroup.”

Other Significant Terms

“Genocide” (or “genocidal”) is another term that has been used to describe both the actions of Hamas and those of Israel. At the Times, the word appeared in 13 op-eds (11%) and at the Post, eight (13%).

In the Post, the word was used three times to describe Hamas and five to describe Israel. Two of the three Hamas mentions (10/18/23, 10/25/23) applied the word in the author’s own voice; the third (10/29/23) was quoted approvingly.

Four of the Post‘s five mentions of genocide in relation to Israel were quotes or paraphrases from another person, either offered neutrally or disapprovingly, as when protester signs or chants were described (11/1/23, 11/18/23). The fifth was in the Post‘s collection of opinions about a cease-fire, in which one Palestinian described the recent bombing death of his extended family:
Today, the word “genocide” is being widely used. I can’t think of another word that captures the magnitude of what Israel, a nuclear-armed military power, continues to unleash on a captive population of children and refugees. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the quiet part out loud: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before,” he said. “We will eliminate everything.”

At the Times, the use of “genocide” was more varied, with many of the references used in a more historical way (about the Jews historically being a target of genocide, for instance) or to discuss the domestic debates about the language used by protesters. It was used once to characterize Hamas (10/26/23), twice to quote leftists characterizing Israel (10/25/23, 11/17/23), and twice to characterize Israel’s assault as either “the specter of genocide” (11/3/23) or what “may be… an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide” (11/10/23).

The broader context of the conflict was often missing in the papers’ opinion pages, particularly at the Post. The word “occupation” (or “occupy”) appeared in 58 Times opinion pieces (48%) but only nine at the Post (14%). The word “apartheid,” which multiple prominent human rights organizations have used to describe the crimes committed against Palestinians by the Israeli state prior to October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/21/23), rarely appeared in either of the papers’ op-eds pages: seven times at the Times (6%) and once at the Post (2%).

Meanwhile, “terrorism” or “terrorist” appeared 70 times in the Times (57%) and 40 times in the Post (63%). “Self-defense” or “right to defend” made 23 appearances in the Times (19%) and 10 in the Post (16%).

Xenia Gonikberg, Phillip HoSang, and Pai Liu contributed to the research for this piece.

© 2023 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

JULIE HOLLAR is FAIR's senior analyst and managing editor. Julie has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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The Political Costs of Biden’s Support for Israel’s War Are Mounting

The president's Gaza policy is isolating the United States internationally and threatening his re-election prospects.

By Stephen Zunes , TRUTHOUT  February 3, 2024

A protester holds a sign depicting President Joe Biden reading "Come November We'll Remember" on December 8, 2023, in Los Angeles, California.

DAVID MCNEW / GETTY IMAGES

It would not be an exaggeration to say that President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s ongoing carnage in Gaza puts him in the same position as George W. Bush with the invasion of Iraq, Ronald Reagan with his support for death squads in Central America and Richard Nixon with his bombing of Vietnam. Like the other conflicts, the civilian death toll is extraordinarily high, the United States is largely isolated in the international community and the majority of Americans — particularly Democrats — oppose the policies. In similar parallels, the administration is marginalizing the United Nations, attacking the international legal system and dismissing reports by reputable human rights organizations.

Despite all this, due to the threat of a second Trump presidency and the lack of any viable Democratic challengers, there has been a reluctance within the liberal mainstream to recognize just how extreme the Biden administration’s policies have been.

Indeed, there has been a concerted attempt by the Democratic congressional leadership to effectively obscure the extent of the carnage as a means of shielding the Biden administration from responsibility. For example, in mid-January, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a resolution invoking Section 502B(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act which allows either the House or the Senate to request a State Department report on human rights practices by any country that receives U.S. aid. The resolution would require the Biden administration to issue a report within 30 days about possible abuses and how U.S. weapons have been used in Israel’s war on Gaza. While it would not have restricted U.S. aid to Israel, the Biden administration and Senate Democratic leaders, refusing to even acknowledge that Israel was committing war crimes with U.S. weapons (and thereby fueling further public opposition to the administration’s policies), worked to suppress the measure. With the Biden administration opposing the measure, it was roundly defeated, with only nine Senate Democrats joining Sanders and one Republican voting in favor.

Biden admits that Israel is engaging in “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza but still refuses to demand a ceasefire or to condition the unconditional transfer of offensive military aid. Even though the January 26 ruling by the International Court of Justice found plausible arguments that Israel was violating several counts of the Genocide Treaty, the State Department — which had earlier claimed the charges were “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever” — doubled down, insisting, “We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded.”

Meanwhile, Biden has cast doubts on the high civilian casualties, saying despite detailed records of the names and circumstances of over 20,000 civilian deaths, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Though he acknowledged there were civilian casualties, he said it was simply “the price of waging a war.”

RELATED STORY

US Is Underwriting Israel’s Crimes — Americans Can No Longer Claim Ignorance

Many of us in the Global South are watching the 2024 election to see if US voters implicitly endorse war crimes in Gaza. By Mohamed Seif El Nasr , TRUTHOUT  February 2, 2024

This hearkens back to President Bush’s claim that a Johns Hopkins University study which found Iraq had experienced more than 600,000 civilian deaths as a result of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was “not credible,” and insisting without evidence that the study’s methodology was “pretty well discredited,” even while acknowledging that “a lot of innocent people have lost their life.” It is also reminiscent of the Reagan administration’s coverup of the 1981 El Mozote massacre by U.S.-trained forces of the Salvadoran junta, in which over 1,000 peasants were killed over a period of several days. Similarly, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from the “free fire zones” declared by U.S. forces in areas of South Vietnam controlled by the leftist National Liberation Front and the carpet-bombing of North Vietnamese cities were routinely downplayed by the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

The isolation of the United States in the international community was underscored in early December when it was one of only 10 countries in the 193-member United Nations General Assembly to vote against a resolution calling for a ceasefire. The other dissenting votes came from small countries economically dependent on the United States or those under right-wing leadership.

Later that month, the Biden administration followed up on its October veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire by again blocking an otherwise unanimous ceasefire resolution. It then blocked another otherwise unanimous resolution simply calling for an “urgent suspension of hostilities.” Biden finally allowed a resolution to pass that only recommended creating “the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities” and, even then, abstained rather than joining the other countries voting in favor.

Biden and the congressional leaders of both parties insist the bombing must continue, and that those who are calling for a ceasefire – virtually all the world’s governments, global religious leaders, peace and human rights groups, academics specializing in the region, and two-thirds of the American public – are wrong. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN that as far as the duration and the conduct of the war on Gaza, “these are decisions for Israel to make.”

Indeed, the position put forward by the Biden administration and its supporters regarding Israel’s war on Gaza bears remarkable parallels to the Reagan administration and its supporters’ policy of supporting the Salvadoran junta and the Nicaraguan Contras back in the 1980s: that there should be no ceasefire; that counterinsurgency campaigns involving the mass killing of civilians constitute “legitimate self-defense”; that the U.S. taxpayer should provide the weapons to facilitate the killing; there should be no conditions on military aid regarding adherence to international humanitarian law; that antiwar and human rights activists are supporting terrorism and autocratic ideologies; that human rights organizations that document war crimes are not reliable and are motivated by an ideological bias against U.S. allies; and that the United Nations and the World Court are similarly biased and should not be involved in resolving the conflict.

The United States was similarly solateed in the international community during the 1980s, vetoing otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolutions and being among a small minority in the General Assembly voting against resolutions seeking to end the Central American wars. And, in another striking parallel, most Americans opposed U.S. support for the right-wing forces engaging in war crimes in these wars as well, mobilizing in huge demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere, yet were largely ignored by the administration in power.

The charges during the Cold War of Moscow and Beijing funding and facilitating protests by peace and human rights activists is also seen today. Last weekend, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi claimed that calling for a ceasefire in Gaza “is Mr. Putin’s message,” adding that “Some [pro-ceasefire protesters] I think are connected to Russia” and that she plans to “ask the FBI to investigate” supposed Russian funding of pro-ceasefire demonstrators. Two days later, when antiwar protesters outside of her home correctly pointed out that a majority of Democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza while she continues to stridently oppose it, the former house speaker responded by shouting, “Go back to China where your headquarters is!”

Unlike in the 1980s, now there is a Democratic administration in charge and the majority of Democrats in Congress support U.S. policy. And this is many constituents that typically would comprise Biden’s voter base. Indeed, the single most important variable regarding how well Democrats have done in recent elections has been youth and voter of color turnout. When it’s high, they win. When it’s low, they lose.

According to the latest poll, 72 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war on Gaza. That is a higher percentage of young voters than those who disapproved of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, Reagan’s handling of the wars in Central America or even Nixon’s handling of the war in Vietnam.

Supporters of peace, human rights and international law are divided as to how to respond. Letters, protests, civil disobedience and citing polling numbers have led to growing dissent among a progressive minority in Congress, but has done little to change administration policy or that of the congressional leadership. Many believe that the system has failed and are refusing to support Biden or other pro-war Democrats, even if that means the takeover of government by reactionary autocratic Republicans.

Biden is apparently willing to risk a wider war in the greater Middle East rather than try to stop the Israeli onslaught. U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza has provoked attacks by pro-Iranian militia in Syria and Iraq, thereby leading Biden to bomb those countries, resulting in angry reactions — not just by the Assad regime in Syria but also by the ostensibly allied government of Iraq. Similarly, Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have resulted in major U.S. airstrikes on Yemen, leading to massive anti-American demonstrations.

The United States has been supporting Israel and allied dictatorships for years, but the death rate of civilians is the highest of any war in recent decades and, thanks to advances in media technologies, is being more closely followed than in U.S.-fueled conflicts in the past.

Biden comes from a generation of U.S. politicians who believed that support for Israel had only positive political impact at home and only limited and temporary negative impact abroad. The world has changed, however. The question is: How soon will he finally get the message?


STEPHEN ZUNES  is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (revised updated expanded second edition, Syracuse University Press, 2022).

Israel’s campaign in Gaza ‘plausibly’ amounts to genocide, US court finds

Julian Borger

 Global affairs editor

THE GUARDIAN
Thu, February 1, 2024 

An Israeli tank moves along the border with northern Gaza.Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters


A federal court in California has ruled that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “plausibly” amounts to genocide, but dismissed a case aimed at stopping US military support for Israel as being outside the court’s jurisdiction.

“There are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the court. This is one of those cases,” the US district court in the northern district of California ruled. “The court is bound by precedent and the division of our coordinate branches of government to abstain from exercising jurisdiction in this matter.

Related: More than one-third of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide, poll shows

“Yet, as the ICJ [the international court of justice] has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide,” the judge in the case, Jeffrey White, said in his ruling, in a case brought by Palestinian human rights groups and individual Palestinians against President Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary.

“This court implores defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza,” the ruling said.

The judge explained his decision that the matter lay outside the jurisdiction of his court, because the Palestinian groups were asking it to interfere with US foreign policy.

“Because any determination to challenge the decision of the executive branch of government on support of Israel is fraught with serious political questions, the claims presented by plaintiffs here lie outside the court’s limited jurisdiction,” White said.

The Palestinian groups and their lawyers said they might appeal against the dismissal of the case, but welcomed the judge’s judgment on the potential for genocide.

“While we strongly disagree with the court’s ultimate jurisdictional ruling, we urge the Biden administration to heed the judge’s call to examine and end its deadly course of action,” said Katherine Gallagher, the senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who argued the case before the court.

Related: How South Africa’s genocide case against Israel played out in The Hague

In his ruling, White referred extensively the genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa in the ICJ in The Hague, which issued “provisional measures” on 26 January calling on Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent acts covered by the genocide convention and to ensure “with immediate effect” that its forces do not commit any of the acts covered by the convention.

Israel rejected the ICJ measures as representing a “profoundly distorted” view of the Gaza war that was “barely distinguishable” from that of Hamas.

In his Oakland hearing, White heard evidence from experts on genocide and said in his ruling “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law”.

South Africa alleges Israel violating ruling to prevent Gaza deaths

Miranda Nazzaro
Thu, February 1, 2024 


South Africa on Wednesday accused Israel of violating the United Nations’ top court’s recent ruling to prevent deaths in Gaza, as Israel pushes forward with its campaign to eliminate the threat of Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The U.N. International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling last week ordered Israel to do more to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip, and gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government one month to present a plan. The ruling, however, did not explicitly call for a cease-fire in the war.

The ICJ also found it is “at the very least plausible that Israel is committing genocide,” as the death toll climbs past 26,700 people in Gaza, The Associated Press reported, citing the Health Ministry in Gaza.

Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor on Wednesday said the ICJ’s ruling “makes it clear that it is plausible that genocide is taking place against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This necessarily imposes an obligation on all states to cease funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions,” Reuters reported.

Israel has repeatedly defended its bombardment of Gaza following Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel Oct. 7, which left approximately 1,200 people dead.

Israeli forces continued attacks in the territory following the ruling, according to the Health Ministry, which said Wednesday 150 people were killed in the 24 hours prior, The AP reported. The Health Ministry did not discern between combatants and civilians in its count, but has said the majority of those killed are women and children.

Israel’s government has argued its actions in Gaza do not amount to genocide, and that it has made attempts to limit civilian deaths in the coastal enclave. Netanyahu has said his country “will continue to do what is necessary to defend our country and defend our people.”

“I can’t be dishonest. I believe the rulings of the court have been ignored,” South Africa’s foreign minister said, per The AP. “Hundreds of people have been killed in the last three or four days. And clearly Israel believes it has license to do as it wishes.”

Pandor warned of the dangers if the world does not do more to curb civilian causalities, comparing the situation in Gaza to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when over 800,000 people were killed in the East African nation, the AP noted.

“We are allowing this to happen again, right before our eyes, on our TV screens,” Pandor reportedly said.

She also raised the question of why an arrest warrant for Netanyahu has not been issued in South Africa’s separate case filed at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the AP reported.

Pandor added South Africa would “look at proposing other measures to the global community,” to prevent Israel from killing more civilians in Gaza Strip. Hamas, a group the U.S. and E.U. have designated as a terrorist organization, controls Gaza.

South Africa filed a case against Netanyahu to the ICC in November, alleging Israel is committing war crimes.

“The (ICC) prosecutor assured us the matter is in hand and being looked at by his office,” Pandor said of her country’s allegations. “What I felt he didn’t answer me sufficiently on was, I asked him why he was able to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin while he is unable to do so for the Prime Minister of Israel. He couldn’t answer and didn’t answer that question.”