Boeing University: How the California State University Became Complicit in Palestinian Genocide

BY JAKE ALIMAHOMED-WILSON, SABRINA ALIMAHOMED-WILSON, ARACELI ESPARZA, STEVEN OSUNA, DENNIS LÓPEZ AND AZZA BASARUDIN

MAY 24, 2024
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OVER 1,000 CSULB STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND STAFF RALLIED FOR PALESTINE ON MAY 2, 2024. (PHOTO: BEN HUFF)

“Over the years, Boeing and its employees have played a vital role in the advancement of Cal State Long Beach.”

Jane Close Conoley, President, California State University, Long Beach

Pro-Palestinian student protests and encampments have bloomed this spring across U.S. universities. Unsurprisingly, campus administrators have responded with calls for civility and peace — that is, when not inviting militarized police forces onto campus to attack and arrest peaceful student demonstrators. At California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), while chiding students for a planned demonstration against Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza, the university President stressed that “we must hold to a vision of peace and reject violence. We must embrace the immeasurable value of human life.” However, this “vision of peace” apparently does not extend to our university’s deep and numerous links to the U.S. military-industrial complex, the largest purveyor of weapons of mass destruction and death in the world, or to Palestinian people.

The “golden triangle” of military, industry, and university cooperation is nothing new, but in today’s neoliberal university — shaped by the politics of austerity and privatization policies and deliberately starved of public funding for over four decades — military and defense industry funding and collaborations have become foundational to the public university’s normal fiscal and research operations. These lucrative partnerships raise serious questions about the ways in which university priorities are inexorably bent and shaped to the will of corporate interests, imperial militarism, and war-profiteering.

As the second biggest campus in the nation’s largest four-year public university system, CSULB, as a site of analysis, is a prime example of this ongoing and growing complicity of higher education with the corporate machinery of war and imperialism. CSULB reveals the troubling ways that public universities have become entangled in the global geographies of racial capitalism and anti-Palestinian violence. In particular, the university’s longstanding partnership with Boeing showcases public higher education’s connections to US-Israeli militarism and genocide.
Boeing’s connection to Israel’s military violence

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Boeing has played a key role in supporting Israel’s military and commercial interests. The Boeing Company is the world’s largest aerospace corporation and fourth-largest defense contractor, valued at over $100 billion. Boeing’s weapons and technology have provided material support for Israel’s military campaigns of displacement, occupation, and brutal violence against Palestinians. While producing profit for the corporation, Boeing’s 75-year relationship with Israel is linked to tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Boeing’s weaponry, the complete destruction of Gaza’s civil society and infrastructure, and the displacement of over 2 million Palestinian people.

Boeing’s financial partnership with Israel has provided key military assets, including (via its merger with McDonnell Douglas) F-15 fighter jets, “Apache” helicopters, hellfire missiles (produced in collaboration with Lockheed Martin), and the “tail kit” navigation system used on massive 2,000 pound MK84 bombs that have devastated Gaza in the latest round of genocidal attacks. Israel’s indiscriminate use of Boeing’s heavy bombs directly contributed to numerous “mass casualty events” and the soaring death toll in Gaza. Since October of 2023, Boeing and Israel have expanded their financial partnership with Israel’s recent purchase of 25 new sophisticated F-15 IA (Israel Advanced) fighter jets, in addition to Israel’s high-tech Arrow-3 missile defense system, marketed for its “hit-to-kill” technology.
Boeing at ‘The Beach’: profit, privatization, and the erosion of the public university

Despite its complicity in occupation and genocide, Boeing has had a long and financially reciprocal relationship with CSULB, one going back decades with its latest iteration being touted as CSULB’s “Boeing Partnership.” CSULB is one of just 16 universities nationwide – and the sole university in California – to be selected by the Boeing Company for an exclusive university partnership. The Boeing Partnership is a university-corporate alliance that has further transformed CSULB into a public relations mouthpiece for the defense contractor. The CSULB-Boeing partnership illustrates not only how defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman profit from Israel’s violence against Palestinians, but also how these massive corporations simultaneously undermine the mission of public universities by harming students domestically and facilitating genocide, militarism, and mass death abroad.

In alignment with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, the global student solidarity movement with Palestine has bravely demanded that their universities “disclose and divest” from stock holdings in corporations that profit off of Palestinian death and support Israel’s settler-colonial war machine. This work has been crucial. Yet it is also critical to expose how the complicity of US universities in Israeli militarism and Palestinian genocide extends far beyond investments in stocks. Under constant threats of austerity measures and the steady erosion of state funding in the neoliberal context, large public university systems like the California State University (CSU) system have quietly become embedded with defense contractors saturating every facet of campus life. The university-corporate nexus has become all-encompassing, producing deleterious consequences for students, faculty, and staff while undermining the university’s mission of promoting the “public good.”

At CSULB, the administration has invited the Boeing Company to become the university’s omnipresent corporate partner. Boeing and CSULB’s insidious alliance can be found in classrooms and research labs, job fairs, Boeing internships, the Aerospace Corporation Leadership Academy, Boeing guest speakers at the Student Leadership Institute, Boeing-sponsored student orientation events, Boeing research competitions, and Boeing-sponsored scholarships for students in Business and Psychology. Students are inundated with Boeing’s footprint on campus. The College of Engineering and College of Business has quite literally transformed into Boeing’s labor-supply mill. CSULB was the second institution to receive Boeing’s “Supplier of the Year” award. It’s no surprise, then, that Boeing employs the largest number of CSULB graduates. In recent years, the College of Engineering introduced the Boeing Endowed Chair in Manufacturing. Meanwhile, the College of Business has also aligned closely with Boeing as one of its key “corporate partners” providing “internships for students, support the different centers, programs, and student organizations at the College.”

The revolving door of defense contractor executives serving as advisors to university administrators at CSULB has become a taken-for-granted reality. Previously, the Vice President of Boeing’s Defense unit served on the Board of Directors for CSULB’s 49er Foundation – the primary body in charge of the university’s endowment and investment holdings. CSULB’s Alumni Association also honored two former Boeing Vice Presidents of Boeing’s Defense, Space, and Security unit with the Distinguished Alumni Award, CSULB’s highest alumni honor.

Beyond Boeing, the university has also formed strategic corporate partnerships with other weapons and defense contractors complicit in Israeli violence, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Engineering currently has three members from Boeing, two members from Raytheon, and two members from Northrop Grumman. Like Boeing, Northrop Grumman is similarly embedded in CSULB faculty and student research, student organizations, along with so-called labor “talent” pipelines. The Dean for Research and Graduate Programs has also sought to build a closer relationship between the university and the US Army. While the university’s purported mission is to promote “global understanding” through “respect and appreciation for different cultures,” collaborations such as these do nothing of the sort. Instead, they facilitate capital accumulation for defense contractors at the expense and destruction of racialized peoples across the globe.
Reclaiming the people’s university from the U.S.-Israeli war machine

As Palestinian life continues to be annihilated by a settler-colonial state aided by its primary ally, the United States, hope has also emerged from university campuses where student movements are demanding transparency about university investments and divestment from corporations that thrive from war profiteering. These organizing efforts stand in stark contrast to the neoliberal university’s collaboration with corporations that profit from war and violence.

Across the CSU, student activists are rising up and demanding transparency and accountability at numerous CSU campuses and they are winning. Cal State Sacramento became the first public university in California to promise divestment from companies doing business with Israel. At San Francisco State, students are redefining democracy at their university by engaging in open bargaining with their campus president over its investments. These movements remind us of the collective responsibility to defend, at all costs, the right to life and human dignity. Students are also mobilizing against public university partnerships with defense contractors such as Boeing. Students at Portland State University demanded the university cut all financial ties with Boeing. The pressure from Portland State’s student activists led to an announcement from the university President: “PSU will pause seeking or accepting any further gifts or grants from the Boeing Company until we have had a chance to engage in this debate and come to conclusions about a reasonable course of action.”

Meanwhile, the CSU Office of the Chancellor has countered that they do “not intend to alter existing investment policies related to Israel or the Israel-Hamas conflict,” choosing to prioritize corporate profit-making and the neoliberal machinery of mass death rather than the purported values and responsibilities of public institutions. Drawing on the politics of scarcity without calling into question the violent logic of austerity, the CSU sanctimoniously continues to justify its support of the US war machine that actively aids genocide in Gaza. CSU leaders claim that “CSU investments provide a stable revenue stream that benefits our students and faculty, and supports our critical campus facilities, scholarships, and other key elements of our educational mission.” The fact that this “stable revenue stream” comes soaked in the innocent blood of Palestinians doesn’t give them pause, since clearly to them the right to life of Palestinians is less important than the CSU system hoarding its $8 billion reserve fund.

Boeing’s takeover of CSULB illustrates the immense ethical challenge facing public higher education. As educators and students, we must actively resist the normalization of university partnerships with corporations that facilitate dehumanization and indignity while imagining new ways to ensure public universities can thrive without becoming complicit in the mounting crimes against humanity perpetrated by the US-Israeli military-industrial complex. The uncritical acceptance of military defense corporations’ enmeshment in all levels of the university demonstrates how a public university’s mission is being eroded before our eyes. We must ask, what role can and should public higher education play in articulating different life worlds where a generative vision of peace, justice, and transformative possibilities can flourish? The answers to these pressing ethical dilemmas are already being generated by student activists, not university administrators; this means, we need to listen to our students.

The authors are all members of CSULB Faculty for Justice in Palestine, an academic worker collective of over 50 tenure-track and lecturer faculty at California State University, Long Beach.

This piece first appeared at Modoweiss.

The Washington Post’s Mouthpiece for Israel: David Ignatius

BY MELVIN GOODMAN

 MAY 24, 2024
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Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has always been an apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency; then he added the Pentagon to his list for institutional apologies.  But now Ignatius is going much further; he has become the mouthpiece for both the administrations of President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  His most recent editorial (“The U.S. is assembling the pieces of a Gaza war endgame”) foresees the “contours of a possible exit ramp” in Gaza that is constructed out of sheer fantasy.

First, let’s examine the bizarre support for President Biden.  Ignatius argues that Biden “rightly called” the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor’s support for arrest warrants for the top Israeli leaders as “outrageous.”  No one in the U.S. government or the mainstream media is questioning the war crime charges against the Hamas leadership, and there is no reason to question comparable charges against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

In fact, Gallant’s very words offer the best explanation for charging the Israelis with war crimes and for supporting arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.  On the third day of the war, it was Gallant who offered this: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip.  There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.  We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”  For the past seven months, the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces have done everything possible to carry out Gallant’s orders.

As part of this campaign, the Israelis have done their best to make Gaza uninhabitable.  They have destroyed farms, schools, libraries, mosques, and essential infrastructure.  Some of Israel’s worst crimes are the destruction of the health care infrastructure of Gaza, and the killing of more than 200 courageous Palestinian aid workers.  The latter went largely unnoticed until six international workers for the World Central Kitchen were killed in an operation that Israel said was the result of a “misidentification.”  This was the same explanation that Israel offered 57 years ago, when the Israelis attacked the U.S.S. Liberty and killed 34 sailors and wounded 171 others.  I’ll be writing about the Liberty next week in order to demonstrate that Israeli duplicity over the years has destroyed any possibility for accepting Israeli claims.

Ignatius believes that “some clarity is emerging about the shape of a possible endgame,” which is outrageous in view of Netanyahu’s unwillingness to accept any discussion of the so-called “day after.”  Ignatius sees a “gradual end to Israeli combat operations” in Gaza, and the “beginning of a still-fuzzy ‘day after’.”  He offers the West Bank as a “model for how Gaza evolves going forward.”  If the West Bank is a “model,” then it can only be a model for Israeli fascism and terrorism.  The war crimes in Gaza are so overwhelming that the war crimes committed in the West Bank are largely ignored.  Fortunately, a long essay in the New York Times’ Magazine last Sunday exposed the violence and terrorism that Jewish ultranationalists with the support of the Israeli Defense Forces have been conducting without notice over the past several decades.

If there is some change in Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, it will not have anything to do with the Biden administration or the occasional criticisms of Israel in the mainstream media.  If there is a change, it will be because the Israels are “unequivocally losing” the struggle.  These were the words of a former Mossad deputy chief and member of the Knesset, Ram Ben-Barak, who identifies Israel’s losses on the international scene, the deterioration of U.S.-Israeli relations, and the economic problems that the war has created.

It has been conventional wisdom that the October War in 1973 and the Hamas invasion in 2023 were intelligence failures because the Israelis had premonitory intelligence months in advance of the attacks and were still totally unprepared.  No, these were not intelligence failures; these were political and strategic failures.  The United States has stood by and fed the Israeli war machine, ignoring the violent system of Israeli oppression in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the system of apartheid that has compromised Israel’s claim that it is the only democracy in the Middle East.

In 1969, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger offered a description of the U.S. failure in Vietnam that is applicable to the Israeli failure in the occupied territories: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one.  We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion.  In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.  The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died after these perceptive remarks from Kissinger, a war criminal himself.  How many Palestinians will have to die because Israel will not stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestine?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Dockworkers Push Union Resolution to Block Shipment of Israeli Military Cargo

By Arvind Dilawar

May 24, 2024 

Source: Truthout


Image by Stephen Edmonds, Creative Commons 3.0

From June 17 to 21, officers, staff and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) will meet in Vancouver, Canada, for their biennial convention. Delegates to the convention will undoubtedly be preoccupied with the immediate business of the union, which represents workers in industries ranging from bookstores to breweries, though it’s best known for unionizing dockworkers up and down the West Coast.

But amid the typical union business, convention delegates will also deliberate on a resolution submitted by Local 10, which comprises dockworkers from the San Francisco Bay Area. Drafted in response to the ongoing Israeli-perpetrated genocide — which has killed more than 35,709 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera — the resolution calls on all ILWU dockworkers to refuse to handle military cargo bound for Israel.

As surprising as this act of solidarity by dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay Area may sound, it is in fact only the latest effort in Local 10’s decades-long history of supporting Palestinian liberation.
“Israel Was Treating Palestinians Like an Apartheid State”

“The ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation, going back as early as the mid ‘80s,” said Peter Cole, professor of history at Western Illinois University, in an interview with Truthout. “And that was a direct result of the ILWU — especially its Bay Area branch, Local 10 — having a longer history of solidarity with people in South Africa fighting against apartheid.”

Cole examines the history of Local 10’s opposition to apartheid in South Africa, as well as its connections to Palestinian liberation, in Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. Made up predominantly of Black workers and motivated by both left-wing politics in general and anti-racism in particular, Local 10 took a stand against apartheid starting in the 1960s by refusing to unload cargo from South Africa. According to Cole, Local 10 members like Leo Robinson were already declaring the demise of apartheid in South Africa by 1988 — and setting their sights on Israeli apartheid next. Since 1967, the Israeli military has occupied internationally recognized Palestinian territory in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where Israel has instituted an increasingly violent system of settler-colonial segregation against Palestinians.

“Leo and others took to the ILWU convention and said, ‘In the exact same ways that apartheid in South Africa is mistreating its Black-majority workforce, so too Israel was treating Palestinians like an apartheid state,’” Cole said. “This was decades before most people were using the term ‘apartheid’ to apply to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But the ILWU convention goes on the record in ‘88, condemning the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And they reaffirm that at a subsequent convention in the 1990s.”

While Local 10 has been on record opposing Israeli apartheid since 1988, it took some time before union members started to act on that opposition. In 2010, Local 10 once again took its cue from South Africa, where dockworkers had refused to handle cargo for the Israeli shipping firm ZIM the previous year, due to Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza. Answering calls to “Block the Boat” from both South African dockworkers and local community activists, Local 10 members refused to handle cargo aboard ships connected to ZIM, which has branches in practically every major port in the United States, in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2018.

“They made a political stand as a union,” said Cole, referring to Local 10. “For the exact same logic that they condemned the treatment of Black people in South Africa, they were condemning the treatment of Palestinians.”
“Action Against the Israeli Government”

Since October 7, Local 10 members and community activists have picketed U.S. military ships believed to be transporting weapons to Israel as it continues its genocide in Gaza. Other ILWU locals have also opposed the genocide, such as Local 23 in Tacoma, Washington, which similarly refused to load military cargo heading for Israel, and Local 5 in Portland, Oregon, whose members have called for a ceasefire.

For Jack Heyman, a Local 10 retiree and former business agent whose family fled the Nazi annexation of Austria, the union’s opposition to the ongoing Israeli-perpetrated genocide is in line with both its condemnation of apartheid in South Africa and racial injustice in the U.S. He points out that Local 10 also organized work stoppages and other actions in 2009 against the police-perpetrated killing of Oscar Grant and again in 2020 against the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd. Retired ILWU members like Heyman are unable to vote on union business, but they retain the right to speak on it.

“Our local is sensitive to racial issues, and I think we see the situation in Palestine very similar to the way that Black people are treated in this country or were treated in South Africa,” said Heyman. “Was it in violation of the contract?” he asked, referring to Local 10’s political actions in the context of its employment contract with port management. “Sure it was. But you know what? Sometimes you gotta break the contract to change the contract, to change what’s happening in the world.”

Heyman describes Local 10 as heavily invested in issues of social justice, including police accountability, racial equality and obviously workers’ rights, and says the ongoing Israeli-perpetrated genocide in Gaza is foremost among such issues today. To that end, other unions have also condemned the genocide, such as the United Auto Workers and National Education Association, both of which have called for a ceasefire.

“There’s not a stronger issue than the genocidal war conducted by the Israeli government in Gaza today,” said Heyman. “I don’t know how much more horrendous a genocidal killing can get than massacring people in hospitals, patients, all these bodies found buried underneath the rubble in the hospitals that have been blown up by the Israeli army. This is going to strike a strong response from the ILWU.”

Part of that response may very well be the “Local 10 Caucus Resolution on the War in Gaza and the West Bank,” Local 10’s resolution to the upcoming ILWU convention, which Heyman drafted and the local passed unanimously in early May. Invoking contemporary calls to action, from groups such as the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, for workers to boycott Israeli cargo, as well as Local 10’s historic opposition to Israeli apartheid in Palestine, the resolution calls for all ILWU dockworkers to “refuse to handle military cargo to Israel” and “honor picket lines protesting the war on Gaza.”

“I am sure that our union is going to make a strong stand — I’m talking in terms of action against the Israeli government,” said Heyman. “There are a lot of good-hearted ILWU members who’ve been up against tough regimes before and aren’t afraid to speak up.”

The Law is Clear: Palestinians Have Right to Resist Occupation w/ Vijay Prashad

By Vijay Prashad, Brian Becker 

May 24, 2024

Source: Breakthrough News

President Joe Biden is joining with Trump backers in Congress in imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court – the ICC – because the court issued a statement that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes. Meanwhile the U.S. is sending more bombs and missiles to Israel as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee Rafah.

Brian Becker is joined by renowned journalist and author Vijay Prashad, the Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.

Nakba Resurrected – How the Gaza Resistance Ended Segmentation of Palestine

by Ramzy Baroud Posted onMay 24, 2024

Inadvertently, Israel has pressed the reset button on its war with the Palestinian people, taking back the so-called conflict to square one.

Save a few self-serving Palestinian officials affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA), most Palestinians do not seem consumed with the return to the peace process, or even engaged in discussions about two state solutions.

The conversation among Palestinians is now mostly concerned with all aspects of the Palestinian struggle, starting with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine 76 years ago, an event known as the Nakba, or Catastrophe.

The Nakba is commemorated on May 15 of each year. The nature of the annual event, however, changes from one stage of the Palestinian struggle to the next.  Indeed, the Nakba anniversary acquires its meaning from the political context of the time – it is elevated during times of hope, demoted during times of despair, defeat and infighting.

In the early phases of the Palestinian struggle, immediately following the expulsion of nearly 80 percent of the total Arab population of Palestine, the Right of Return was not a slogan or symbol. It was, at least in the minds of most refugees, a real possibility.

That right is enshrined in international law under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. At the time, Palestinian exile was perceived to be temporary – thus, the term ‘temporary shelters’ associated with the humble dwellings of refugee encampments immediately after the war. These refugee camps extended from Palestine itself to other countries throughout the Middle East.

Back then, Arab nationalism was a powerful political notion that defined a pan-Arab political discourse, which centered in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. With the passage of time, however, it became clear that Arab liberators were not coming to free Palestine, and that UN resolutions on Palestine were not meant to be implemented. They were mere ‘ink on paper’, Palestinians would often utter.

Experience taught Palestinians to be cynical about lofty promises, especially when the UN-supplied ‘temporary shelters’ became a permanent, everyday reality.

The Palestinians continued to commemorate the Nakba anyway, because their collective memory became their main weapon of fighting back against Israeli erasure.

The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s, its emphasis on the liberation of all of Palestine and its use of revolutionary slogans and armed struggle resurrected hopes among ordinary Palestinians that the Right of Return was still possible.

These hopes were dashed, however, after the PLO’s forced exile from Lebanon in 1982, and the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and increasingly irrelevant Palestinian leadership in 1993.

Oslo and its fraudulent US-led peace process allowed Israel to conclude what it started during the Palestinian Nakba. Israel’s greatest achievement was creating a Palestinian entity that would help it manage its final victory over the Palestinian people. The PA became that entity, leading to widening the factional and class divides in Palestinian society.

Since then, Israel managed to annex large parts of what remained of historic Palestine, control dissenting Palestinians through the PA and besiege Gaza as an act of collective punishment for its ongoing resistance. All wars fought against Gaza in recent years were meant to serve as a reminder to Palestinians of Israel’s might and Palestinian inferiority.

Palestinians, however, continued to commemorate the Nakba, although the Right of Return, as a political concept, became marginal, hardly ever discussed, neither by Israel nor the PA as a pressing political issue.

Recent years indicated that Israel was ready to move past all of this into a whole new stage of politics, one that does not pay the slightest attention to Palestinian aspirations.

The Israeli occupation, illegal settlements, occupied Jerusalem and all other critical topics that mattered to Palestinians ceased to be part of Israeli election campaigns, or even part of the Israeli political discourse, in general. This mindset defined all mainstream Israeli political groups, from the extreme right to the left.

All that seemed to matter to Israel was the expansion of the illegal settlements, the annexation of the West Bank, the normalization of its military occupation and the occasional military raids and wars aimed at crushing the Resistance.

October 7, however, changed all of that. The new political discourse emerging from Gaza following the war has forced an international rethink about Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinians.

This was crystallized in the words of Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, who addressed, in a press conference on May 15, the Palestinian Nakba.

“Seventy-six years on, the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinian people, far from being redressed, has further worsened,” Wenbin said, linking the past to the present, Gaza to historic Palestine.

This new discourse is now taking hold, and the segmentation of Palestinian history resulting from Oslo is quickly disappearing in favor of a wholesome approach to justice in Palestine. Though Washington and a few of its western allies insist on returning to the status quo of endless negotiations, others are no longer beholden to that kind of stifling, self-serving discourse.

This shift in perspective was not only a result of the failure of Oslo, and the extent of the Israeli barbarity and genocide in Gaza, but mainly because of the steadfastness and resistance of the Palestinians themselves.

It turned out that collective memory was not just an academic notion, but a weapon in the hands of ordinary people.

Thanks to Palestinian memory, Palestinians are once more united around their understanding of the past, the steadfastness of the present and the hope for a just future.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow 

ICJ orders Israel to ‘immediately halt’ offensive in Rafah

AFP | Reuters 

Published May 24, 2024

Delegates attend a ruling on South Africa’s request to order a halt to Israel’s Rafah offensive in Gaza as part of a larger case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on May 24. — Reuters

The top United Nations court on Friday ordered Israel to halt military operations in Rafah, a landmark ruling likely to increase mounting international pressure on Israel more than seven months into the Gaza crisis.

Israel must “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said.

It also ordered Israel to keep the Rafah crossing into Gaza open for the “unhindered” provision of humanitarian aid.

The court also demanded the immediate release of all hostages still held by Hamas, hours after the Israeli military announced troops had recovered the bodies of three more of the captives from north Gaza.

“The court finds it deeply troubling that many of these hostages remain in captivity and reiterates its call for their immediate and unconditional release,” it said.



ICJ rulings are legally binding but the court has no concrete means to enforce them. For example, it ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine, to no avail.

Israel had argued before the court that an order to stop military activity would give free rein to Hamas and prevent its army from rescuing hostages taken in the group’s October 7 attack.

The ICJ ruling comes hot on the heels of another highly charged decision by the International Criminal Court prosecutor to seek arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders on Monday.

Prosecutor Karim Khan alleged that senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plus top Hamas officials, were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the fighting in Gaza and the October 7 attack.
‘Obscene exploitation’

South Africa brought the case before the ICJ last year, alleging that Israel’s Gaza offensive breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention — a charge strongly denied by Israel.

In a ruling on January 26 that made headlines worldwide, the ICJ ordered Israel to do everything it could to prevent acts of genocide during its military operation in Gaza.

But South Africa has returned several times to the ICJ arguing that the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza compels the court to issue further fresh emergency measures. The court did so in March, ordering new measures compelling Israel to ensure the “unhindered provision at scale” of humanitarian aid.

In public hearings last week, South Africa’s ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela alleged that “Israel’s genocide has continued apace and has just reached a new and horrific stage”.

“Although the present application was triggered by the unfolding situation in Rafah, Israel’s genocidal onslaught across Gaza has intensified over the past few days, also warranting the attention of this court,” he said.

South Africa argued the only way to enable humanitarian aid to ease the crisis in Gaza was a full halt to Israel’s military operations.

The court will take months if not years to rule on the broader South African genocide case, but it can order urgent measures while weighing its decision.

Israel retorted that South Africa’s case was an “obscene exploitation of the most sacred convention” and the picture Pretoria paints to the court was “completely divorced from the facts and circumstances”.

“It makes a mockery of the heinous charge of genocide,” said top Israel lawyer Gilad Noam at hearings. “Calling something a genocide, again and again, does not make it genocide. Repeating a lie does not make it true,” he added.

Israel also said it was “acutely aware” of the suffering of civilians in the Gaza Strip and that it has made “extensive efforts” to increase humanitarian aid flowing.

US President Joe Biden said this week that “what’s happening is not genocide.”
Stalled talks

Israel said on Thursday it was ready to resume stalled talks on a truce and hostage release deal with Hamas, as Netanyahu faces growing domestic pressure to secure their freedom.

US intelligence chief Bill Burns is expected to meet Israeli representatives in Paris to relaunch negotiations, according to a Western source close to the issue.

Previous talks in Cairo and Doha attended by Qatar and Egypt as mediators for Hamas broke up earlier this month.

Fighting in Gaza broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Hamas also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,800 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Reactions

Israeli Finance Minister Bezazel Smotrich slammed the ICJ ruling, stating that ordering a halt to the offensive was akin to demanding that “it (Israel) cease to exist”.

In a post on X, the minister said, “The State of Israel is at war for its existence. Those who demand that the State of Israel stop the war, demand that it decree itself to cease to exist. We will not agree to that.”



Hamas official Basem Naim said, “We welcome the decision by the World Court that calls on the Zionist occupation forces to end its military aggression on Rafah. We believe it is not enough since the occupation aggression across the Gaza Strip and especially in northern Gaza is just as brutal and dangerous.

“We call upon the UN Security Council to immediately implement this demand by the World Court into practical measures to compel the Zionist enemy to implement the decision.

“We welcome the court’s request to allow investigation committees to reach the Gaza Strip to investigate acts of war of genocide against the Palestinian people and Hamas pledges to cooperate with investigation committees.”

Palestinian Authority Spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said, “The presidency welcomes the decision issued by the International Court of Justice, which represents an international consensus on the demand to stop the all-out war on Gaza.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said the court’s failure to link a demand for an end to fighting with a demand to return Israeli hostages in Gaza was “a moral collapse and a moral disaster”.

Former Israeli UN envoy Danny Danon said, “As ICJ judges in The Hague deliberate in comfort and return to their families, 125 hostages languish in tunnels. Israel will not cease the war until our hostages are brought back home and Hamas is completely defeated.”

South African official Zane Dangor said, “South Africa welcomes the ruling made by the court today. […] This order is ground-breaking as it is the first time that explicit mention is made for Israel to halt its military action in any area of Gaza “This is de facto calling for a ceasefire. It is ordering the major party in this conflict to end its belligerent action against the people of Palestine.”

Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib said on X, “The [ICJ] orders Israel to stop its military offensive in Rafah. (Belgium) calls for immediate implementation of the decision. The violence and human suffering in Gaza must stop. We call for a ceasefire, the release of the hostages and negotiations for two states.”



The Global Rights Complaince NGO also issued a statement: “The ruling today serves as another admonishment of Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law and the obligation to protect civilians in conflict.

“Crucially, it gives critical recognition to survivors and the communities living under these attacks that they are unlawful. The ruling is likely to generate further pressure and international attention against Israel and their conduct of hostilities which has, to date, had all the hallmarks of starvation being used as a deliberate method of warfare.”

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the EU would have to choose between respecting support for international institutions of the rule of law and its support of Israel.

“What is going to be the (EU’s) answer to the ruling of the International Court of Justice that has been issued today, what is going to be our position? We will have to choose between our support to international institutions of the rule of law or our support to Israel.”

ICC Delivers Three Surprises In Overdue Netanyahu War Crimes Indictment

By John Whitbeck

May 23, 2024

Source: Pearls and Irritations


United Nations Photo - International Court of Justice, the Hague. Flickr.

t had been widely anticipated that, to maintain any institutional respect, the International Criminal Court would have to indict some Israeli leaders, unavoidably including Prime Minister Netanyahu, in connection with the Gaza genocide and that, for balance, it would choose to indict at least one Hamas leader at the same time.

Its announcement today of applications for five arrest warrants and the strong language of its announcement, particularly coming from a British Prosecutor who had previously been suspected of being totally subservient to the British government, is excellent news.

However, it offered three surprises:

(1) ANNOUNCING APPLICATIONS FOR ARREST WARRANTS

It is normal ICC practice to announce the issuance of arrest warrants only after the court’s judges have approved them on the basis of an application from the Prosecutor.

This was the procedure followed last year when the court announced the issuance of arrest warrants for President Putin and for Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.

The decision to announce these applications for arrest warrants prior to their formal approval may have been motivated by a sense that the conditions under which the people of Gaza are striving to survive are deteriorating so rapidly and horrifically that there is no time to waste and by a hope that announcing the applications now might have a positive impact on the decisions of relevant decision-makers for whom arrest warrants are not yet being sought but could be sought later.

(2) NOT SEEKING AN ARREST WARRANT AGAINST GENERAL HALEVI

When rumours of imminent ICC indictments started swirling several weeks ago, three Israeli leaders were cited as targeted — Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defence Minister Gallant and General Herzi Halevi, Chief of General Staff of the IDF. Arrest warrants are now being sought only against Netanyahu and Gallant.

The Prosecutor may be hoping that not indicting General Halevi or other top military officers for the time being while stating explicitly that his office “will not hesitate to submit further applications for warrants” if conditions are met might encourage them, in their own self-interests, to try to rein in their political leadership and to wind down or even wind up Israel’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza.

(3) SEEKING AN ARREST WARRANT AGAINST ISMAIL HANIYEH

It was widely reported at the time that Hamas Political Bureau head Ismail Haniyeh and other members of the external leadership of Hamas had no advance knowledge of the October 7 operation, which makes attributing “criminal responsibility” to Haniyeh for the events of that day surprising.

It is possible that, in the hope of mitigating American fury and the publicly threatened American retaliation for any indictments of Israelis, the Prosecutor thought it desirable to seek arrest warrants for more Palestinians than Israelis. Within Gaza, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif are the only widely recognised personalities to whom responsibility might be attributed. Hence, perhaps Haniyeh was added to achieve the desired Palestinian majority.

In these circumstances, it is possible that the court’s “independent judges” might show their independence by not issuing an arrest warrant against Haniyeh, which should not upset the Prosecutor if he was adding Haniyeh primarily to achieve a Palestinian majority.

If an arrest warrant were to be issued against Haniyeh, he might, with good reasons to hope for an acquittal, choose to turn himself in to the court and, thereby, to set a good example for (and contrast to) Netanyahu and Gallant.

Indeed, Sinwar and Dief might at least be tempted to do likewise if they could find a way to be safely extricated from the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, their future has offered only martyrdom — and not necessarily a quick and easy one. They may well be reconciled to martyrdom or actively seek it, but they could also view the chance to live out their natural lives and to defend themselves and their acts on the basis of the right of an occupied and oppressed people to self-defence against perpetual occupation and oppression and on the basis of 10/7 Truth as a viable and even attractive alternative.

It has also been widely reported that Netanyahu is personally obsessed with killing Sinwar and Deif and determined to pursue his assault against Gaza until he achieves that goal.

If that goal were to become impossible because Sinwar and Deif had successfully turned themselves in to the court, thousands of lives might be saved.

An interesting initiative

Faisal Bari 

DAWN

Published May 24, 2024 

PUNJAB’S School Education Department (SED) has recently set up ‘student councils’ in public sector elementary, high and higher secondary schools. The first elections for class representatives, president, vice president, general secretary and finance secretary took place on May 16, when 61,212 school representatives and other office bearers were elected in 15,303 elementary, high and higher secondary schools. Some 3.47 million children voted.

Student councils are not a new concept. Internationally, many school systems, private and public, have them. They are present in some private schools in Pakistan too. But this is a relative first for the public sector in Pakistan and the scale at which it was done was quite impressive.

Literature on student councils shows the latter can have a significant impact on students individually, on student-student, student-teacher and student-community interactions as well as on the school itself. Students gain in self-esteem and confidence, they get used to democratic values and traditions, they understand the value of arguments and learn decision-making and leadership among other skills.

Communication within and across stakeholders can improve as well. The teachers and management do not remain too distant from students, and even student interactions — as a student body — with the community can improve significantly. School can benefit from more involved and engaged student bodies. More co-curricular and sports activities take place, school discipline can improve, student grievances get addressed faster and better and the school can be more involved and engaged with the local community too.

Asking students to suddenly start participating in decision-making is going to be hard.

But the literature also points out that the question of student councils being able to do anything or not depends on a whole host of factors. One of the most important factors pertains to whether or not students feel their representatives have been selected/ elected through free, fair and transparent means. Student cooperation with the council depends on that.

Other factors include whether or not councils and representatives have any actual decision-making powers, access to some of the budget and freedom to act, whether the students have ample support from supervisors/ teachers, and whether teachers/ counsellors have been given adequate training on how they are supposed to work with student councils. If these are not present, the effectiveness of student councils is reduced. And sometimes, if students feel it is a waste of time engaging with student representatives who are selected at the management’s whim or have no actual powers, the impact of the councils can be negative as students become more sceptical about notions of representation and self-governance. This can make them uncooperative.

SED has started out cautiously. Knowing our distrust of people, democracy and representation as well as our particular history with student unions, it has made sure it calls these bodies ‘student councils’. SED has restricted eligibility to the top performers in class, who have at least an 80 per cent attendance record and a good standing in class and school. They have given powers to the school administration to remove members if they breach boundaries, and even do away with the council and re-elect it if things get out of bounds.

However, in the SED document on student councils, there is no mention of the budget that will be there for the council to use when organising activities and taking initiatives. One presumes these will have to be done out of school budgets. Do school budgets have the space to allow activities or to upscale them? Punjab schools do get a non-salary budget, but this has historically not been much for anything beyond repairs, whitewash, maintenance, a teacher or two on a short-term basis, or utility bills. Will the non-salary budget be enhanced, or a proportion of it earmarked for student council-inspired or organised activities? This remains to be seen.

Our teachers, head teachers, principals and education officers are not used to giving space for decision-making to students. Will they be able to do so? Democracy tends to be loud and messy. When you have a student council, with all class representatives there and if they are wanting to do things, there will be disagreements and arguments. Will our teachers and administrators be able to manage things effectively to ensure student participation and ownership? SED has not mentioned any training for teachers or administrators on this count so far. Without training, I presume, the results will be mixed. Some administrators will be able to manage, others will not. But, over time, SED will have to think this through. If they want more effectiveness, trainings will be needed.

A lot of researchers have observed that there is not a whole lot of teacher-student interaction in classes in public schools in Pakistan. Students are not encouraged to ask questions, they are not asked to give arguments, they are not made to debate, disagree, and so on. Respect for the teachers is interpreted in terms of compliance, silence and discipline. Asking students to suddenly start participating in decision-making is going to be hard. We will need time and perseverance and tolerance for mistakes as well.

Even at the level of teachers, when Punjab started the non-salary budget, it took a long time to ‘convince’ the head teachers to start spending it. It involved a lot of trainings too. So, to expect the system to pivot without hand-holding and training is asking for too much. Maybe it will happen in a year or two, when the results from the experiment are better known.

Students councils are a wonderful idea. SED has taken a good and bold step. It can be transformative for the students as well as for the schools. But for that to happen, we need to help teachers and students get used to the idea and experiment with the space they have been provided. And we will need patience. There will be plenty of mistakes but that is exactly what we want students to make. Otherwise, how will they learn? Let us see if SED can now follow up on the initiative and ensure its success.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums.

Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2024

From boom to bust — A balance sheet of Pakistan’s growth patterns over three decades

Between the echoes of past prosperity and the shadows of present stagnation lies the urgent call for Pakistan's economic resurgence.



Ali Hasanain Published May 23, 2024 

In December 1991, the then finance minister Sartaj Aziz delivered a keynote address on Pakistan’s economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums) at a conference that convened some of the country’s brightest minds to assess the country’s economic landscape.

The proceedings of the conference were meticulously edited and published in a book by Professor Anjum Nasim. The late Sartaj sahab’s words are worth reflecting on, and a comparison of the data from his era and ours is illuminating. A few excerpts, with slight edits for readability, will be of interest to readers about the current state of our economy.

The aim? To craft a balanced narrative — one that doesn’t shy away from acknowledging both triumphs and tribulations.


How we grew

Sartaj sahab began his speech systematically. “We need to begin with an overview of the last 30 years of development history in Pakistan and try to make a balance sheet of both positive and negative factors,” he urged. The speech to come would be a clarion call to action, providing a panoramic view of history in order to build a roadmap for prosperity.

“We have many positive features,” he began, “the most important being a sustained growth of almost six per cent (over the previous 30 years)”. This was an entirely different Pakistan from ours, brimming with promise and dynamism, and growing faster than our neighbours.

Across the border, India lagged behind, inching along at just above 4pc. The tables seemed firmly set, destinies apparent.

But fast forward 30 years, and the landscape has shifted drastically. The trajectories of these two nations underwent a dramatic reversal, in an eerily precise way. India, once the tortoise in the race, has surged ahead with newfound vigour, consistently clocking in growth rates of around 6pc. Pakistan, on the other hand, finds itself at a crossroads, grappling with a more subdued 4pc growth rate.

This can be illustrated by comparing the two countries’ data in two halves: in the 30 years leading up to 1991, and the three decades since.

Inflation (mostly) under control

“There has been relative price stability in the country. Of the last 30 years, there have only been seven years when inflation went to double digits,” Sartaj sahab noted at the conference.

He painted a compelling picture — one that revealed a tale of contrasts and fluctuations. Barring the 1973-4 Oil Crisis, Pakistan kept inflation in check, often outperforming India on the price stability front. In fact, inflation remained below that in India two thirds of the time across those three decades.

Again, this picture is nearly exactly the reverse over the last three decades, with our inflation being lower than India’s only a third of the time. Perhaps more worryingly, Pakistan saw three major price shocks (in 2008, 2018 and 2022) that are better explained by our policies than exogenous circumstances.

The dawn of industrialisation

Sartaj sahab continued with optimism: “The industry’s share of the GDP has expanded significantly, rising from 10pc to 26pc. Specifically, large-scale manufacturing (LSM) has surged to nearly 13pc of the GDP (gross domestic product).”

The sector has since fallen back to about 20pc and LSM to under 10pc.





“The increase in exports is also quite encouraging. Two-thirds of our exports are manufactures, although simple manufactures. However, there is a notable structural shift, albeit focused and heavily reliant on cotton.”

Sartaj sahab was correct in being bullish on exports. Pakistan was exporting twice as much as India or Bangladesh, relative to the size of the economy. We were, however, standing at the summit and about to go through a generation of reversal, with our exports nearly halving in share, while our neighbours were gearing up for an unprecedented surge, more than doubling their own export capacities.






As we think about what ails Pakistan’s economy today, it is worth asking: what went wrong in those pivotal decades?

In his prescience, Sartaj sahab was already worrying about emerging vulnerabilities: “This performance, however, is marked by several negative factors, as there are serious weaknesses and imbalances in the system.”

Failure to save

“First, the rate of investments and saving is very low in Pakistan”.

Sartaj sahab’ was already worried, but things were about to get worse.

A comparison with India and Bangladesh illustrates this story of an early 1990s inflection best. Consider the data he would have been looking at, at the top, versus what has happened since, at the bottom. In a meaningful way, we are no longer in this peer group.







Sartaj sahab also had the foresight to warn about our savings rate at a time when all seemed well in terms of our growth.

“For Pakistan, to manage a sustained growth rate of about 6pc with only 18pc investment, is quite heroic. The secret lies in the agriculture and water sectors where pay-off of our investment has been very high, but this cannot be repeated. These easy opportunities of low ICOR (Incremental Capital Output Ratio or the impact of savings on a country’s income) … would not be available anymore. Investment has to be stepped up and … it will require a very substantial increase in domestic (taxation and) savings,” he said.

Nations thrive on investments, yet Pakistan found itself trailing behind its counterparts in this crucial aspect of securing its future prosperity. For too long, it relied on the crutch of infrastructure funded through the Indus Water Treaty and reaped the rewards of the Green Revolution, masking its underlying deficiencies. Sartaj sahab saw through this veneer of success, recognising that without addressing our abysmal savings rate, our growth would inevitably slow down.

As it turned out, this is precisely what unfolded.

In fact, the picture gets clearer — and a lot worse — when we add more comparator countries. Across Asia, the trajectory of economic reinvestment over the past five decades paints a clear picture: China emerges as the frontrunner, Pakistan languishes at the bottom, and the rest fall somewhere in between.



Pakistan’s poor performance on savings is one of the clearest markers of a long-standing crisis: we have underinvested in our future for nearly two generations now. Despite its critical significance, this issue continues to be grossly overlooked in policy discussions to this day.

A mostly closed economy

Reflecting on the seismic shifts that marked the end of the Cold War and the subsequent transformations in Eastern Europe, Sartaj sahab said: “In a world of increasingly rapid changes in technology, business organisations, and economic conditions, the premium is on openness. We should be open not just to trade but also to ideas, to foreign investment, and to business methods.”

These words echo a similar sentiment expressed by former Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao earlier in the year. During a pivotal moment of historic economic reforms, Rao articulated his vision for a self-reliant nation: “Self-reliance means the ability to pay for our imports through our exports. My motto is trade, not aid. Aid is a crutch. Trade builds pride… After changing the value of the rupee, we undertook a major overhaul of the trade policy. Our message was simple — you cannot import if you do not export.”

However, unlike our neighbour, we have deviated from this path of openness in the past decade. Instead, we’ve witnessed a troubling trend of increasing non-tariff barriers to trade, driven by powerful business lobbies and politically connected entities.
Spending beyond means

“Another serious issue is the fiscal deficit. The fiscal situation has created numerous short-term problems because, over the past few years, this growing fiscal deficit has been financed through large-scale external and domestic borrowing. This gives us a key element of the strategy for the future.”

In essence, Sartaj sahab was advocating for a crucial shift: tax more, spend less. These words echoed through countless publications, reports, and strategy papers in Pakistan in the years to come, yielding disappointingly little impact.
Growing malaise in state-owned enterprises

He is worth quoting at length on SOEs:

“I am not implying that public sector enterprises are inherently inferior, but there are political prerequisites for their success: a strong ideological framework; a well-trained and disciplined party cadres, which can create a great deal of non-material motivation. If you do not have these prerequisites, you get stuck with bureaucratic socialism, as we were, and then you get the worst of both worlds.”

“The first problem in most of the public sector industries is overstaffing. Every political government is under pressure to provide jobs…”

“The second problem arises from the relative reluctance or hesitance of the bureaucratic managers to take risks. If they have a job for two or three years, why should they take the risk and make investment in new technologies or in expansion plans unless they are asked to do so by their superiors?”

“And what is much worse, the price policies of most public sector units tend to be influenced by political considerations. As a result, they do not allow the market forces to operate as the public does not take a rise in prices well.”

“The result of the policies are chronic losses in most public sector enterprises. Having invested Rs40 to Rs50 billion in all these units, we should have got a return of at least 10pc a year. Instead, the net impact of all the public sector units has been a net loss of Rs4b to Rs5b every year. And these are only the apparent balance sheet losses and do not include all the loans that were written off or remain on the books as bad loans. Which budget can absorb losses of that magnitude year after year?”

Once again, a problem that was well understood 30 years ago has only been allowed to worsen — the yearly burden of loss-making SOEs now comprises approximately one-fifth of our budget deficit.
Unsustainable domestic debt

He then narrated how domestic borrowing rapidly multiplied in size throughout the 80s, growing to more than 25 times the size it had earlier been.

“[…] the annual borrowing … is just enough to finance the debt servicing. If you borrow at 15pc … the debt servicing doubles in less than five years. Now we are borrowing only to service the domestic debt that we have so far contracted.”

“The total tax and non-tax revenues was Rs150b (last year). Approximately, Rs80b is spent on debt-servicing, Rs70b on defence, and nothing is left for other expenditures. Our entire federal government is financed by borrowing, and our entire development is financed by borrowings. This is the fiscal bind that we face.”

We can only dream of governments with the minimum prudence to heed this advice. In the past decade alone, Pakistan’s debt has risen by more than 40pc, and the gap between taxation and government expenditures has widened.
Missing investments

“Because fiscal resources were scarce, we did not … (make investments) in education and health.

“This is one of the tragedies of Pakistan, that while in economic terms, after achieving 6pc growth rate for 30 years we are about to graduate to middle-income status — in terms of social progress, we are bracketed with the lowest of low-income countries.

“If we had invested more money in education and population planning in the 1970s, when our population growth rate was 2.2pc as in India, today our literacy rate would be (nearly double what it was).

“Thus the fiscal imbalance is not just a fiscal imbalance in a narrow sense, it has created a major imbalance in the development strategy as a whole, because of our inability to balance the social and economic sectors.”

On multiple education attainment measures, Pakistan in 2024 lags behind what other countries in South Asia achieved 20, and even 30 years ago.
Liberalising firms, taxes, and tariffs

“Privatisation involves two processes: one is to sell off those public sector enterprises which we cannot manage very well, and simultaneously open those sectors of the economy to the private sector which are reserved for the public sector at the moment.”

“It will take time to move to a more automatic and capacity taxation system because of the vested interests involved.”

“Why should anybody invest in export industries with (an overvalued) exchange rate?”

Sartaj sahab recognised that the process of tariff reforms, while necessary, is not without its complexities and repercussions. The dismantling of high tariff walls poses a significant challenge to industries that have long thrived under protectionist measures. Hence, a cautious approach is warranted, although with a commitment to gradual reduction over the span of two to three years.

His proposed strategy involves a dual approach: easing tariffs on machinery and capital goods to spur productivity and innovation, while simultaneously lowering maximum tariff rates on consumer imports, with exceptions like automobiles, to a more reasonable 50pc threshold. This balanced approach seeks to foster competitiveness while safeguarding strategic sectors.

In simpler words, his message can be broken down into three core ideas — the first being that a cheap dollar hurts exports and encourages industrialists to move away from export sectors and towards becoming low value-add assemblers who are not viable without high duties.

Second, he says we are constrained in the short term in moving away from tariffs because of our overreliance on tariffs and export duties to raise government revenue. This is the same plea taken every year by our economic managers. The fact that we have not managed to fix this crucial issue in three decades is inexcusable.

Lastly, he defends the protection of certain industries, such as car assembly. The fact that, 30 years later, car (and other durable goods) assembly remains dependent on high tariff walls tells you that this stance was a singular misjudgment in his otherwise insightful speech.
The road ahead

“Now if you look at this balance sheet of our achievements and weaknesses, the strategy for financing our economic and social goals for the next decade flows very logically from this analysis. You can only conclude that without a drastic structural change which reduces the role of the government, you cannot solve any problem. In the past 20 years, governments have been concentrating on issues which are not its concern and neglecting areas like education and health,” Sartaj sahab concluded.

He could have been writing in 2024.

Over 30 years ago, Sartaj sahab had identified the trade and fiscal deficits, inefficient SOEs, low savings rates, and low investments in human capital as some critical economic problems Pakistan faced in 1991. These remain our most pressing issues today. If we are to finally tackle these problems effectively, it is worth assessing the attention being paid to each one, and asking why our history is littered with unheeded policy prescriptions like Sartaj sahab’s.

Header image created with AI



The writer is an associate professor of economics at Lums. He currently chairs the non-partisan Economic Advisory Group.