Disgraced media

Muna Khan 

Published October 13, 2024 

DAWN

LAST week, I wrote a piece on Western media’s coverage of the war in Gaza for Prism on the Dawn website. I re-read part of Edward Said’s 1981 book Covering Islam on how the Western media distorts the portrayal of Islam and depictions of Muslims as “fanatical, violent, lustful and irrational”. I often return to this book as it remains relevant. It’s a sad indictment on the Western media whose reporting on Muslims and Palestinians has resulted in their dehumanisation over the decades.

Despite knowing all this, I felt foolish when I read how The New York Times told its staff to restrict using words like ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ and avoid ‘occupied territories’ in their reporting on Gaza. This was revealed by The Intercept in April which received a copy of the internal memo the paper sent to its staff. They also told staff not to use the word ‘Palestine’ “except in very rare cases”. It is mind-boggling.

However, acclaimed author Pankaj Mishra was not shocked when the draft of an article wherein he criticised Israel, submitted to a Canadian newspaper, was returned to him with ‘Israel’ removed.

Mishra, the recipient of a $75,000 Weston International Award for his non-fiction writing, was going to deliver a lecture in Toronto last month. Winners get an excerpt from their lecture published in the leading newspaper The Globe and Mail. The paper, however, edited that excerpt with reportedly all 17 instances of Israel cut out. Mishra pulled the excerpt after receiving the edits.


It was a political decision to attempt to edit Mishra’s excerpt.

In an interview to The Breach last month, Mishra said he was not surprised as it was “part of a continuum of such attempts that I’ve personally encountered to suppress and stifle criticism of Israel”.

One of the lines cut from the excerpt said: “My own sporadic attempts to tackle the subject in the past made me aware of an insidious Western regimen of repressions and prohibitions.”

The paper also cut: “Even the liquidation of Gaza, which unlike many atrocities, has been live-streamed by both its perpetrators and victims, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the main organs of the Western media.”

Clearly, it was a political decision to attempt to edit Mishra’s excerpt and speaks to the Western media’s complicity in covering up the true scale of the crimes committed in Palestine and everywhere else. Lest we forget, the US declared war on Iraq under the guise of destroying weapons of mass destruction; they declared war on Afghanistan to, among other reasons, liberate the women. The government of the day finds powerful allies in papers who support (read: cheer) such policies and it is no different in the case of Gaza.

“We have faced a consistent regime of censorship and suppression,” Mishra told The Breach. “Not just Palestinians, not just Arabs, you talk to even some of the most successful writers of non-Western ancestry, and each one of them will tell you many, many stories about editors saying ‘We can’t do this. Can you change that? Can you rephrase that?’”

Non-white writers often have to acquiesce because they want to be published and options elsewhere are limited. This is how the arts and entertainment as well as the publishing industry manages people of colour by ‘keeping them in their place’.

Perhaps one of the most influential intellectuals in the US right now, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is facing the brunt of Big American media’s wrath about his new book The Message which chronicles, among other trips, his 10-day experience in Gaza and Israel in 2023. He has described his trip as “revelatory”; that he didn’t think Americans understood the extent of “what we’re doing there”, adding that he uses ‘we’ bec­ause it wouldn’t be possible without US support.

“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn str­a­nger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes in his book, an excerpt that has widely been shared. But he is subject to much attack, the usual accusations of antisemitism, for telling the truth, which his detractors tell you is ‘his truth’. I find this practice of adding pronouns to truth tiresome; truth is meant to be universal and this idea of my truth reeks of a sense of entitlement in the face of what we can see on TV screens.

I laud Mishra for withdrawing his excerpt and refusing to accept the paper’s discriminatory edits. His is a small example of the pushback we’re seeing to the Israeli-Western media narrative shoved down our throats. Al Jazeera ran a story last week featuring BBC and CNN journalists “alleging pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles”. I’m sorry it took so long for the truth (see what I did there?) to arrive but I hope it will pick up pace and more audiences will see it for what it is: not the journalism everyone deserves.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.
X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2024

Burying the lede in Gaza for 75 years

The double standards exhibited in the Western media when it comes to reporting on Gaza have only widened the mistrust between it and the audience.

Muna Khan 

Published October 6, 2024

“You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once — there has to be a limit.”

Edward Said wrote this nearly 50 years ago, but the limits he wrote about have long been crossed by Israel’s powerful propaganda machine, which has found plenty of allies in the Western media.

How else do you explain the continued circulation of the false story about the 40 beheaded babies — which emerged in Israel’s Kfar Aza Kibbutz following Hamas’ attack on Israel — one year ago? The story quickly made global headlines and received condemnation, including from US President Joe Biden, whose staff, it later emerged, had cautioned him from mentioning it.

Yet, those cautions fell on deaf ears when Biden said he had seen those images and then had to retract. When history reviews that moment, it will likely put Biden’s lies down to his old age and confused state of mind. However, to those of us long familiar with how “we” are reported on, we know “they” only see the worst of us.

As Said wrote in his book Orientalism in 1975: “In newsreels or news-photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.”

The Palestinian Arab, thus, must be put in its place.

While US presidents, sitting and hopeful, are quick to believe Israel’s version, it is nonetheless shocking to see them defend the damage caused by Israel’s airstrike on Rafah in May which, to be precise, charred to death scores of children. This was days after the International Court of Justice had ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel would describe it as a “tragic mistake.” Unlike the imaginary 40 beheaded Israeli babies, here we saw a father hold up a decapitated baby in Rafah, but it did not make the headlines. Only prominent diaspora writers, with links to the Arab or Muslim-majority countries, wrote about it on their Substacks or social media; perhaps there was an op-ed or two in left leaning papers like The Guardian.

Were it for not social media, and phones recording the horrors of the genocide in Gaza, we would be dependent on Israel’s manipulation of these falsehoods. They do this to garner support, to shape policy, to ensure that any sympathy toward Palestine is quickly turned into a “do you support Hamas?”. And they have mammoth support from Western media and scholars and influencers.

As law professor, Khaled Beydoun, wrote following the Rafah massacre: “On a landscape ravaged by unhinged Israeli militarism and unchecked American might, the lie of headless Israeli children means everything; while the truth of beheaded Palestinian children means nothing.”

More than the depiction of Hamas as terrorists — that fighters hide in hospitals or among civilians, the sexual assault claims or the inability to accurately document the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I am appalled at the Western media’s ignorance on the children impacted by this war. The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimated in March that at least 13,000 children had been killed by Israel, yet headlines did not show this. As one study showed, of 1,100 news articles surveyed between Oct 7 to Nov 25, only two mentioned young Palestinian victims. At least 6,000 children were killed during the aforementioned period. This is truly abhorrent.

Dehumanisation in plain sight

Said had warned about the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in his writing, letting us know just how much had been invested in extinguishing Palestinians. But perhaps, even he would be dismayed by the lack of humanity in the portrayal of Palestinians as mere bodies.

British data journalist, Mona Chalabi, has been documenting how Palestinians are reported on. She wrote on Instagram: “While Israeli victims are documented as people who were loved, Palestinians are uprooted, even in death.” Chalabi has been producing neatly packaged datasets documenting Israeli violence against Palestinians and how the media aids in the spread of their version. “Palestinian deaths are often mentioned in the context of vengeance (“retaliation”/“retaliatory”/“retaliated” appear 190 times in this dataset) and, unlike Israeli deaths/hostages, these victims are rarely mentioned by name.”

In her analysis of BBC News’ language for Israelis vs Palestinians, she found: “Israelis reject any comparison between the way Hamas kills civilians and the way Palestinian civilians die in their air strikes.”

The BBC also deserves special mention for their bias as documented in research which analysed stories between October 10 and December 2, 2023. They examined how many times words like “massacred” were used for Israelis (23) versus Palestinians (1) in that period.

Unsurprisingly, they found machine bias against Palestinians.

Meanwhile, many independent media have reported on the bias in US media coverage. The Intercept, for example, said “iterations of Israel and Israeli received more mention in New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times “even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths.”

William Youmans, writing in Dawn MENA Media — an organisation founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 before his brutal murder in Istanbul — discusses a study he conducted on US TV shows like Meet the Press (NBC), Face the Nation (CBS), This Week (ABC) and Fox News Sunday (FOX) between mid October and mid-January. He found framing around Gaza “aligned far more with pro-Israel talking points”.

He references another study on cable news shows which “found pervasive patterns of privileging pro-Israel framing and narratives.” It also found that by the time 11,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by early November, the Israeli hostages held in Gaza “were still getting more attention on American cable TV news.”

As Youmans notes, when the media reports Palestinians as “being left to die”, (and not by whom or how) it “softens Israel’s culpability.”

Ryan Grims’ story in The Intercept in April echoes similar findings. People who only get their news from cable “are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general.” Meanwhile, people who get their news from social media, podcasts or Youtube “generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.”

An April report published in the The Intercept exposed an internal New York Times memo, instructing staff to limit the use of Palestine “except in very rare cases.” The memo also asked staff to restrict words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land. This was done under the guise of maintaining “objectivity”, New York Times staffers told The Intercept.

“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” The Intercept quotes a NYT newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”

These are not style guidelines. The dotted i’s and crossed t’s seem to be about deferring to Israel. What else explains their use of emotive words like “slaughtering” and “massacre” for Israelis, not Palestinians?




Decades of dehumanising Palestinians in the Western media has resulted in this genocide in Gaza. I am not calling it a genocide simply because I side with Palestine, or can see who the aggressor is, or because I saw the video of the father with his beheaded baby in Rafah.

The United Nations Human Rights (UNHR) council also says it’s a genocide. But it does not seem to matter to world leaders, the UN, the international courts, policy-makers etc. The presidential debate in the US saw both candidates clamouring over one another to prove their loyalty to Israel. But for many Arab and Muslim Americans, the issue of Gaza weighs heavily on their mind as they prepare to cast their vote, or not, in the November polls.

Silence is complicity

Tomes can, have and will be written on the media bias that favours Israel. But the uptick in coverage criticising this media bias can be put down to the way audiences consume news today. It also speaks to an age-old problem of lack of diversity in newsrooms, and one that isn’t simply about employing different races as much as it is about not having Global South perspectives.

Two BBC journalists resigned in October 2023 accusing the organisation of bias in its coverage of the issue. Jazmine Hughes, magazine editor of The New York Times, resigned in November 2023 after objections were raised to her signing a petition by the Writers against the War in Gaza. About 1,000 US based journalists signed a petition calling on Western editors to “use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organisations including apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.”

An Associated Press reporter was asked by his employer to remove his name from the petition. David Velasco, editor of Artforum magazine, which published an open letter on the same issue and was signed by thousands of artists, was fired. The Los Angeles Times disallowed three staffers from reporting on Gaza if they signed a strongly worded letter criticising Israel, according to Semafor media.

Malak Silmi, a Palestinian American freelance journalist, wrote about why she quit journalism in the US in a moving piece for Al Jazeera in January this year. “I saw the journalism that I wanted to be a part of and that was possible, but learned that its standards could not be applied to my people. I saw the efforts that were put into getting the facts right and centering local Ukrainian voices. I saw what was possible for others but not for the Palestinian people.”

The double standards exhibited in the media have only widened the mistrust between it and the audience.

Legacy papers like the Wall Street Journal published a story in January suggesting links between Hamas and 12 workers of UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The paper cited Israeli evidence when it reported that 12 members participated in the attack. However, as Semafor reported, it was an unsubstantiated claim. Responding to the claims, the paper’s editor, Elena Cherney, wrote: “The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back, or that there is a correctable error here.”

This story had significant repercussions including a freeze on $450 million in aid from several countries at a time Gaza desperately needed it. It still needs it.

While the paper stands by the story, its former standards editor, Richard Boudreaux, admitted the Wall Street Journal, “leaned too heavily on Israeli voices and did not include enough Arab perspectives.”

This is exactly how Israel’s occupation is justified, how Palestinian deaths are reported.
Gen Z is here to turn the tide

Public opinion, however, has shown an appetite for more informed balance, writes Youmans. This explains the rise of social media platforms as sources of news for younger audiences no longer consuming print or TV or cable, save shows like John Oliver or Jon Stewart, who are providing alternative viewpoints.

The younger generation has been instrumental in leading pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the US, despite harsh consequences and also harsh media portrayals describing them as dangerous. They have stood up to opposing protestors, university administrators, the police, even security guards like the one at City University of New York who told them he supports genocide and “killing all you guys.” Although he was suspended by the college, there was scant attention to this story compared to the many about a Palestinian protestor at Columbia who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” The university said it banned him from campus. Guess which of the two aforementioned was described as violent and a danger to society?

This young generation’s steadfastness is remarkable; they have found ways to bypass tactics like shadow banning. They have made lists of products to boycott, they are calling out all attempts to muzzle their speech in favour of Palestine.

Heck, the Western media even turned on Greta Thunberg after she voiced her support for Palestine. She was arrested in Copenhagen at a pro-Palestine rally last month.

This shift, however small, in news consumption is something the media has to come to terms with if it wants to regain lost credibility, especially with younger audiences. A poll by YouGov and The Economist in January found that half of Biden’s voters in 2020 said Israel was committing a genocide in Israel. Only 20 per cent said that was not the case. This is despite all the aforementioned media bias and internal memos on how to report on Gaza and the blackout on the genocide in Gaza.

The media just can’t parrot US foreign policy directives, which heavily side with Israel. They did it with Iraq under George W. Bush, swallowing the weapons of mass destruction narrative whole, without so much as asking a question. Now, it appears they are practicing embedded journalism with (and for) Israel, with one or two stories on Palestine thrown in for the appearance of fairness.

Edward Said wrote that Israel was in a state of delusion about itself. “In some ways, it is true that Israel’s early history as a pioneering new state was that of a utopian cult, sustained by people much of whose energy was in shutting out their surroundings while they lived the fantasy of a heroic and pure enterprise. How damaging and how tragic this collective delusion has been is more evident with the passing of each day. How long will the awakening take, and how much more pain will have to be felt, before the opening of eyes is fully accomplished?”

Something’s got to give. I don’t know what or when.

The writer is co-producer and host of Unpressedented, a podcast on the media landscape in Pakistan. The writer is an instructor of journalism.

PAKISTAN

The plight of female farmers

Aslam Memon | Dr Muhammad Ismail Kumbhar 

Published October 14, 2024

DAWN 


Climate change is becoming one of the most significant concerns for agricultural workers worldwide, particularly in susceptible areas like Sindh. As temperatures rise and weather patterns grow more irregular, the farming sector, which is the foundation of Sindh’s economy, suffers significantly.

Female farm workers, who account for a sizable share of the labour force, are among those most affected by these developments. There are different challenges that female agricultural labourers in Sindh confront as temperatures rise and weather patterns become more unpredictable.

Women play an important part in agriculture in Sindh, completing chores such as sowing, weeding, harvesting, and post-harvest processing. Despite their critical role, female agricultural workers frequently lack recognition, sufficient compensation, and access to resources such as land, credit, and technology.

They typically labour in tougher settings and are more susceptible to external shocks such as climate change. Rising temperatures, in particular, have exacerbated existing inequities, making people’s lives more difficult.

Extreme heat events have become more common as a result of climate change. Rising temperatures make it harder for female agricultural labourers to do physically demanding activities, especially when many work long hours in the fields under the searing heat. This causes heat-related ailments like heat exhaustion, dehydration, and heat stroke. The absence of healthcare services in rural Sindh exacerbates these health risks, giving women limited options for medical treatment.


Agricultural labour puts a huge strain on women, who are pushed to work longer hours without receiving equal compensation

Furthermore, the physical strain of working in extreme temperatures is especially difficult for pregnant women and elderly workers, putting them at a higher risk of major health issues.

Changing climate has also resulted in more frequent droughts, unpredictable rainfall, and catastrophic weather events like floods. These changes reduce crop yields, resulting in lower revenue for agricultural households. Female workers, who frequently get paid on a piece-rate basis, experience monetary vulnerability when crops fail or harvests are delayed due to unfavourable weather conditions.

As agricultural output decreases, many women face growing food insecurity, both for their families and themselves. Women are frequently the last to eat in rural households, and climate-related food shortages exacerbate this gendered inequity. With decreased agricultural output and salaries, female agricultural workers are more likely to sink deeper into poverty.

Water is crucial for agriculture, and its shortage as a result of climate change is causing anxiety in Sindh. Female workers are often responsible for collecting water for home consumption, a task that has become increasingly difficult as water sources dry up or become contaminated.

This dual responsibility — managing both agricultural work and home water needs — puts an additional demand on women’s time and energy.

Furthermore, as climate change damages agriculture, there is increasing pressure on rural populations to move in quest of better economic prospects.

In other circumstances, male family members might migrate to urban areas, leaving women to handle both agricultural and household duties on their own. This “feminisation of agriculture” can put a huge strain on female workers, who are pushed to work longer hours without receiving equal compensation or support.

Beyond that, climate-related disasters, such as flooding, can displace entire households. Displacement carries with it other issues, such as land loss, disruption of traditional livelihoods, and greater exposure to gender-based violence in temporary shelters and camps.

Addressing the issues confronting female agricultural workers in Sindh needs gender-sensitive policy interventions and actions. Female agricultural workers require better access to resources such as land, loans, and agricultural technologies to help them adapt to climate change. Government programmes should prioritise providing women with the resources and information they need to engage in climate-resilient farming techniques.

There is an urgent need to enhance access to healthcare services in rural regions, particularly among women. Furthermore, social protection plans such as crop insurance, healthcare benefits, and income assistance programmes should be tailored to include female agricultural workers, who are frequently excluded from such benefits.

Women should be trained in climate adaptation measures such as effective water use, heat-resistant crop types, and sustainable farming practices. Education initiatives aimed at rural women can also promote knowledge about the dangers of heat exposure, as well as the significance of staying hydrated and protecting their health during hot weather.

Policymakers must ensure that climate change mitigation and adaptation plans address women’s special needs and vulnerabilities. Gender-sensitive methods of disaster management, agricultural policy, and resource allocation are crucial for mitigating climate change’s disproportionate impact on women workers.

Aslam Memon is the director of, and Muhammad Ismail Kumbhar is a professor at the Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, October 14th, 2024

US or China?

Touqir Hussain

Published October 12, 2024 

DAWN

THE challenges that China poses to America exceed those witnessed during the Cold War, according to US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. US policies reflecting this perception have been a source of much upheaval in US-China ties. But the latest developments raise hopes that relations may finally be stabilising.

The visit to China by Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, that had capped months of his unpublicised talks with Wangi Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, and the exchange of cabinet-level officials, besides two meetings between presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, reportedly resulted in clarity on some fundamental issues. The US-China competition is intense, structural, and expansive, covering the economic, security and technology fields, but the two countries seem to have reached a consensus that they must manage it responsibly.

Will the US still tell countries to choose between Beijing and Washington? US diplomacy “is not about forcing countries to choose”, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in 2022, “It’s about giving them a choice.” The position has been confirmed by the US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns. Speaking to the Foreign Policy magazine after Sullivan’s visit to China in late August, he said the US is not asking countries to choose. “The world does not work like this anymore,” he added. Obviously, the US has learnt its lesson after the failure of its debt-trap rhetoric and being told by country after country that forcing a choice on them would not work.

While the US was busy in this futile campaign and in building military alliances against a hypothetical military threat from China, Beijing was hard at work expanding its economic footprint globally. By the time the US woke up, it was no longer possible to force a choice on anyone. Most countries, especially in Asia, where the US-China competition would have been fierce, had made their choice: they would have strong economic ties with China but look to the US as a security provider, given their own issues with Beijing. China has an edge in geo-economics, America in geopolitics and military power.


Most countries, especially in Asia, have made their choice.

Each year, the Yusof Ishak Institute of the National University of Singapore polls opinion leaders from Asean countries. In this year’s poll, the majority of respondents, for the first time, picked China over the US when asked who Asean should align with if forced to choose. The US is seen as a distant and unreliable power.

In courting the Global South, the US has obviously fallen behind the curve. It has belatedly set up the Asia Pacific Economic Forum, which has so far shown little progress. Its Build Back Better World initiative to fund infrastructure projects would be largely led by the private sector and may not be competitive against China. Yet this initiative and the APEF give countries another option.

The globalised, integrated and interdependent post-Cold War world offers great possibilities for prosperity, allowing countries to rise economically and militarily following the devolution of global power once monopolised by two superpowers. The US-China rivalry now gives them space to de-risk overdependence on either of them. Their ambitions find common purpose with both China and America. It is an ideal situation, especially for the middle powers, to hedge against any possible threat from China yet concert with Beijing through BRICS and the SCO against US hegemony. The alliance system has become polygamous as countries multi-align and multi-network.

Pakistan’s fear of being pressured to choose between China and the US is overblown. US interests — both direct and indirect — in Pakistan would be limited but sustainable. The US is interested in Pakistan’s stability as an un­­stable Pakistan would foster militancy, en­­danger its nuclear assets, and raise the prospect of an India-Pakistan conflict. China’s economic ties with Pakistan may be helpful in so far as they contribute to Pakistan’s stability. Washington is also interested in Pakistan due to Afghanistan and counterterrorism.

Regarding indirect interests, America does not want Pakistan to completely fall in the Chinese orbit as this might lead to such cooperation with China, like militarisation of Gwadar, that would undermine the Indo-Pacific strategy. For the same reason, the US would not want Pakistan to upset the strategic balance with India.

As for Pakistan’s interests, its strategic ties with China remain vital to them but if Pakistan also had good relations with the US, both Washington and Beijing would have an incentive to keep the ties strong. But for that Pakistan needs to gain internal strength and stability to enhance its appeal to them. A weak Pakistan will have no freedom of choice.

The writer, a former ambassador, is adjunct professor Georgetown University and Visiting Senior Research Fellow National University of Singapore.

Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2024

US lighting the match to Taiwan separation

By SHI YU | China Daily | Updated: 2024-10-14 

BALOCHISTAN

A radical shift in insurgency

Muhammad Amir Rana 

Published October 13, 2024

DAWN

THE Baloch insurgency has undergone a drastic shift, with the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) playing a key role in reshaping the movement. Meanwhile, security institutions are struggling to adapt their counter-insurgency strategies to keep pace with these changes.

Last week’s attack on Chinese nationals in Karachi by the BLA showcased its growing operational capabilities, as its suicide squad successfully targeted a heavily protected convoy of Chinese nationals. The BLA has a history of launching high-intensity terrorist attacks in Karachi, and the recent attack was its 11th out of a total of 17 — five attacks were carried out by the banned Balochistan Liberation Front and one by the banned Baloch Nationalist Army.

It was the fourth strike on Chinese interests in the city since 2012, and one of the worst since the attack on the teaching staff at the Confucius Institute of the University of Karachi. The area around Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport is part of a high-security zone. Previously, it was the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, which breached airport security in 2014 and launched a terrorist onslaught inside the premises.

The Aug 26 terrorist wave on the major highways of Balochistan exposed the BLA’s intentions to take its violent campaign to another level, but it was also an indication that the group had achieved something unusual, which was contributing to its operational strength. After the Oct 6 attack in Karachi, the BLA revealed the secret behind its renewed violent strength — Zirab, the ‘intelligence and analysis’ wing of the insurgent group set up around one and a half years ago. ‘Zirab’ is a Persian word, also used in the Balochi language, meaning ‘underwater’. There is also a city by that name in Iran. The strategic choice of the name reflects the BLA’s deliberate approach to branding what it refers to as its intelligence unit.

This unit has contributed to enhancing the proscribed group’s ability to plan and execute terrorist attacks, as it did in the Karachi attack while gathering and analysing information about Chinese presence in the city. It is assumed that previously, the BLA was mainly reliant on Baloch recruits and violent Sindhi nationalist groups to launch its attacks in Karachi, but now it appears to have developed a sophisticated intelligence network in the metropolis. The group claims that Zirab spent over a year conducting intelligence work, which enabled its recent attacks on Chinese nationals.


The broad-brush approach is a key issue that has exacerbated terrorist acts.

The BLA has been actively recruiting educated Baloch youth, and following its use of female suicide bombers against security personnel, the establishment of an ‘intelligence wing’ was anticipated. The group’s indoctrination of educated Baloch youth is now enabling it to maximise its capabilities and transform the insurgent movement.

This shift is evident in the banned outfit’s rapidly evolving targets and tactics, marking an unprecedented change in Pakistan’s insurgency history. These developments can be compared to the transformation of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The Taliban had exploited the young and had also had external support from many fronts, including Russia, Iran, and Pakistan. The BLA also has external support from some of Pakistan’s neighbours who are critical of the country.

The state’s response, unfortunately, has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving insurgency. The security institutions have invested heavily in costly security paraphernalia, developed SOPs, and employed conventional tactics. However, these measures have so far not proved to be effective in quelling the terrorists. The issue of missing persons has also reached a critical point, with its political and security costs escalating rapidly.

External support for the insurgency can be instrumental in enhancing its operational capabilities, but the insurgents derive power for their political and ideological arguments from misplaced state policies, which have failed to resolve the crisis in Balochistan. The state’s counter-insurgency strategy hasn’t produced the desired results and is only increasing the cost of war. It is true that the strategy has a political component but that has been hijacked by certain spoilers of peace in Balochistan. Some of them include contractors, there are some in politics and some can even be found in security institutions. Their nexus has become a significant hurdle in the resolution of the conflict.

State institutions heavily rely on these elements to shape their political policies. These elements may oppose dialogue with the Baloch youth, civil society, and the genuine political leadership. They label all legitimate Baloch representatives as insurgents. This broad-brush approach is a key issue that has exacerbated the insurgency in the province.

State institutions only use the term ‘dialogue’ in certain contexts, especially when it comes to religious groups, whether it is the TTP or the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan. The reason is evident: religion remains a crucial ingredient in the crafting of nationhood, and state institutions firmly believe that religious groups cannot go to the extent of breaking the country. Though the TTP is out to disprove this concept through its actions, the state institutions have yet to review this stance.

State institutions must re-evaluate their political and strategic concepts. They must shift towards a belief that dialogue is more viable with marginalised communities and that it can trigger a healing process. However, this shift also requires the power elite to increase the pool of resource beneficiaries and trust the marginalised.

The state may need a fourfold strategy to counter the Balochistan insurgency effectively. The first two components of this strategy should focus on countering operations and enhancing analysis capabilities. Additionally, the state should work to develop mechanisms with its neighbours, Afghanistan and Iran, to discourage their support for those carrying out terrorist attacks. These countries will undoubtedly have their own demands, which should be brought into the public domain for open discussion. The well-known and oft-proposed political strategy suggests finding a viable resolution for the missing persons issue and immediately initiating a multilayered dialogue with Baloch society.

The writer is a security analyst.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2024

THE DARK HEART OF ZIONISM

As Israel conducts a genocide in Palestine, bombs Lebanon, Yemen and Syria and seeks to pull Iran into a wider war, the Middle East teeters at the brink of what could potentially morph into a new world war.

Ejaz Haider 

Published October 13, 2024 

EOS/DAWN


“Listen up — there’s no war that will end all wars…War is a perfect, self-contained being.” — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore


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“On the hill we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts or fades but doesn’t end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible…The outpost was the beginning. Its end was still the beginning…The Pumpkin is gone, but nothing is over.”

— Matti Friedman, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War

PREAMBLE

Iran’s missile attack at three military targets in Israel on the night of October 1, 2024 has brought the Middle East close to vertical escalation. Iran’s attack was a response to Israel’s targeted killing of the Chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and multiple assassinations of Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, including the killing of Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

For its part, Israel has promised a punishing response at a time and place of its choosing. What that response might be is outside the scope of this article. What I seek to do here is to get to the basic problem that has brought the region to a major violence spiral with the potential to impact global geopolitics. That problem, in one word, is Zionism. It began even before the United Nations’ Partition Plan. Without getting rid of that plague, Middle East’s generational war will surge, shift or fade but never end. It’s an existential war with many battles at multiple fronts.

HOW DID THE REGION GET HERE?

Most Western news, commentary and analyses will have everyone believe that this war and Israel’s response began on October 7, 2023 with Hamas breaching Gaza’s “iron wall” and attacking Israeli military bases and Kibbutzim close to Gaza. What Israel has since done, goes the line, is mere self-defence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While violence had begun before the British left Palestine, let’s take the Nakba [catastrophe], the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in May 1948, as the starting point. Britain gave up its mandate on May 15 and the war began.


As Israel conducts a genocide in Palestine, bombs Lebanon, Yemen and Syria and seeks to pull Iran into a wider war, the Middle East teeters at the brink of what could potentially morph into a new world war. But the issue at the heart of this dangerous conflagration is neither security nor self-defence but the contradictions in Israel’s founding political ideology

Some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, at the time nearly half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population, were expelled from their homes by Zionist terrorist organisations such as Haganah and Irgun, which then became the Israeli Defence Forces by the end of May. More than 15,000 were killed as part of ethnic cleansing. During this Zionist campaign, up to 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Further, as Israeli historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar show in a paper published online on September 19, 2022, titled, ‘Cast Thy Bread: Israeli Biological Warfare During the 1948 War’, Haganah’s science corps (known by its Hebrew initials HEMED) was instrumental in poisoning village wells in an operation code-named ‘Cast Thy Bread.’ This programme was fully supported by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jew trained as a biochemist. Ben-Gurion was to become Israel’s first prime minister while Weizmann became Israel’s first president.

In an essay reviewing Tom Segev’s biography of Ben-Gurion, and titled ’From ‘Virtuous Boy’ to Murderous Fanatic: David Ben-Gurion and the Palestinians’, Dr Jeremy Salt writes: “Ben-Gurion and the man he had grown to despise, Chaim Weizmann, were delighted at the spectacle of deserted villages and towns and rich agricultural farmland. It was all theirs now. Hundreds of villages were destroyed, not as the unavoidable consequence of war but because the Palestinians could not come back to what had been destroyed.”

That this policy of expelling and exterminating the Palestinians was — and remains — a deliberate one is clear from statements by various Zionist leaders, including Ben-Gurion himself. They knew then and they know now that they have stolen a people’s land. As Morris noted in his book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Ben-Gurion understood clearly that Arabs would not accept this theft:

“Years later, after the establishment of Israel, [Ben-Gurion] expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: ‘I don’t understand your optimism… Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural…We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?’”

Ben-Gurion is not the only one. Yitzhak Shamir, a former terrorist and later Israel’s prime minister, wrote a letter to the king of Morocco and told His Majesty — quoted by Mohamed Heikal in Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War — that “We [Israelis] understand their dreams very well, but unfortunately here we have a conflict between two dreams… we agree to the Palestinians having a dream, but they should understand that it is impossible.”

There’s absolute clarity here about the expansionist and exclusionary Zionist approach. There can never be a sovereign Palestinian state. In the best possible scenario, to quote Ami Ayalon, former admiral and later head of the Shabak (intelligence service known as Shin Bet), “Peace was more important than absolute historical justice.”


While violence had begun before the British left Palestine, let’s take the Nakba [catastrophe], the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in May 1948, as the starting point. Britain gave up its mandate on May 15 and the war began. Some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, at the time nearly half of Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population, were expelled from their homes by Zionist terrorist organisations. More than 15,000 were killed as part of ethnic cleansing.

The line, from Ayalon’s 2020 memoir, Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy, refers to his efforts to find a viable peace framework in collaboration with Palestinian philosopher and academic Sari Nusseibeh, who was then president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem and Arafat’s top man in Jerusalem before he fell out with Arafat. That was the quid for the quo.

Ayalon’s contradistinction between peace and historical justice in and of itself refers to two facts that inform even peace-seeking Zionists: that historical justice abhors the existence in Palestine of a settler-colonial project, but that Israel being a “reality”, there must be some peace framework which can allow Israel and the Palestinians to live together by allowing the latter agency over their affairs, something the Oslo Agreements failed to do.

Ayalon is also one of those Israelis who believes, as he told Le Monde in an interview on January 24, 2024, “If we refuse peace, what awaits us will be even more violent than October 7.” Recently, as noted by Professor Joseph Massad in an op-ed for Middle East Eye, Ayalon told the Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv: “As far as the Palestinians are concerned, they lost their land, which is why when people ask me, what would you do if you were Palestinian? I say that if someone came and stole my land, the land of Israel, I would fight him without limits.”

Possibly the best account of the contradiction at the heart of Zionism, which Times of Israel in an article called “defining”, comes through in a speech by Moshe Dayan in April 1956 at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, barely a mile away from Gaza. Dayan was then the chief of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF). Roi Rutenberg (or Rothberg as some writings name him) was a young officer and in charge of the Kibbutz’s security. He was captured and killed by a group of Palestinians and Egyptians. Dayan spoke at his funeral:

“Yesterday with daybreak, Roi was murdered…Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

And what was the lesson Dayan drew from this? That this historical injustice must be reversed? No. And that’s where we constantly bump into the contradiction that lies at the dark heart of Zionism. Dayan went on to speak of “the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty”, which requires that “if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.

“A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon, we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house…and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water…The gates of Gaza were too heavy for [Roi’s] shoulders, and they crushed him.”

Sixty-seven years later, the gates of Gaza and its “iron wall” — the reference to Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s essay, ‘The Iron Wall’ — became too heavy for another set of Roi Rutenbergs, crumbling under the weight and demand of historical justice. The steel helmet and the maw of the cannon, now replaced by terrifying Israeli air power and the munitions it can deliver, continue to fail in the mission of subjugating the Palestinians.

As I have noted in this space before, even Jabotinsky understood this contradiction. Political paterfamilias of right-wing Israeli political party Likud and supreme commander of the terrorist group Irgun, Jabotinsky had no empathy for the Palestinians but, as a pragmatist, was more forthright and unapologetic about “Zionist colonisation.”

Jews must be the majority, he contended; there must be an “iron wall” separating Jews from Arabs and “justice” must be enforced — once the wall has been built and the Jews are strong, Arabs would come and sue for peace and accept the terms of co-existence, as dictated by the Jewish state.

Again, like Dayan, he thought the wall wouldn’t collapse under the weight of injustice. Like Dayan he was wrong. But where both of them were right was in the thinking that, without repression, Dayan’s steel helmets and canons, Israelis “shall not pave a path nor drill for water.” And that brings us to the red-herring called the “two-state solution.”

Women and children being ‘deported’ from the Palestinian village of Tantura, three weeks after the Israeli takeover in 1948: it is clear from statements by various Zionist leaders that this policy of expelling and exterminating the Palestinians was, and remains, a deliberate one | Benno Rothenberg Collection



TWO-STATE SOLUTION WAS DEAD ON ARRIVAL

Statehood in international law is informed by much debate. Scholars of international law have noted that, while legality and laws require a clear explication and codification of norms and concepts in legal instruments, such codification as a prerequisite for statehood escapes objectivity.

This is important for our present purpose, unpacking Zionism and the violence that inheres in it. Jewish populations from Europe and North America (later the Middle East too) declared themselves a Jewish nation and came to Palestine in multiple batches to create a Jewish state: a nation of colonial settlers coming to claim a state on the basis of their ancient exile from Canaan. But there already existed a nation in Palestine, the Palestinians. The Jews, however, got a state for themselves on the basis of the United Nations’ acceptance of their “right” to have a state.

While the UN also accepted the right of the Palestinians to have a state alongside the Jewish state, the Palestinians were not prepared to accept an imperial decision that flowed from and was the expression of post-World War II power relationships and the security architecture. This was true of the Jews too. They had not come to Canaan to share the land with the Palestinians. It was theirs. The Bible had promised the “chosen people” the Holy Land.

That led to armed conflict and the Nakba. The Jews got a state under the UN resolution and then expanded it, first in 1948 and then 1967 through wars. After 1967, they began building settlements on occupied Palestinian land, the territory demarcated by the UN for a Palestinian state. The Oslo Agreements, which Palestinian academic Edward Said described as “a Palestinian Versailles”, gave the Palestinians a mere 22 percent of the land they were entitled to under the UN scheme.

Even that truncated territory was to be divided into Areas A, B and C. As Yitzhak Rabin said in his October 5, 1995 speech to the Knesset, this was not a sovereign arrangement, not a “state”: “We would like this [Palestinian Municipal Authority (PA)] to be an entity which is less than a state and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”

This was to be an administrative arrangement for peace, not a relationship between two sovereign entities.

While debates on the issue of statehood continue to inform international law and comparative politics, the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is often cited as the criteria for statehood, and the Convention now has a place in customary international law. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention says “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications — a permanent population, a defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states.” These are essentially the attributes of sovereignty.

Article 3 of the Montevideo Convention also declares that statehood is not contingent upon recognition by other states. This is also consistent with the current practice of recognition.

This argument essentially flows from the “declarative” school. In contrast, the “constitutive” school stipulates that a state only becomes a state when it is recognised by other states — ie once the Montevideo criteria are met in fact, those facts should be recognised by other states. Since there are no accepted global criteria to determine statehood and recognition becomes a matter of political and geopolitical interests, the constitutive criterion becomes untenable in practice.

This is an important point with reference to recognition of a Palestinian state for two reasons. One, in the absence of a universal standard, individual states can decide the issue of recognition; two, while many states have recognised Palestine as a state, many others, notably the United States and Israel, have refused to do so. This refusal is of course in violation both of the UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) as well as the spirit of the Oslo Agreements. Yet, it brings into sharp salience the geopolitical factors at play.

Among other reasons, the refusal by the US and Israel to accept Palestinian statehood is related to the concept of self-defence. If Palestine is accepted as a state, then it must exercise its right to self-defence as a sovereign state, a right also enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Palestine’s right to self-defence would effectively deprive Israel and its Zionist supporters of the narrative that brands the Palestinian armed resistance as “terrorism”, a characterisation meant to free Israelis of the moral and legal burden of perpetrating and perpetuating violence against them and to present the Palestinians as barbarians, anti-Semites and human animals.

The narrative of terrorism is not just a matter of semantics. Nor is it just a cognitive exercise. It’s about ascribing meanings to words in a particular setting and the effects they can create. They denote power relationships and are about exercising control and power.

Joseph Massad notes in his 2006 book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: “The Israelis seem to believe that the only way Palestinians can repudiate terrorism is by internalising it as their identity first…If Palestinians refuse the designation as one that is self-chosen, then they will have the same objective power as the Israelis in identifying who the real terrorist is.”

Palestinians sit on the rubble of their home after an Israeli attack in Nuseirat in the Gaza Strip on April 18, 2024: if Israel cannot find peace with the Palestinians, Israel won’t find peace | Reuters



IF NOT TWO-STATE THEN WHAT?

During a recent conference abroad, I had this discussion with a former foreign minister of Pakistan. He said that Israel would never accept a one-state solution. He was right. But the issue is not about Israel’s acceptance. Israel, as noted above, has not accepted a two-state solution either, a Palestinian state which has the attributes of a state, as understood and accepted by International Law.

The core point today, as it was when Zionism’s father Theodore Herzl and others before him spoke of Zionism and the imperial powers helped them achieve that dream, is that Zionism is a settler-colonial project, bio-imperlialism, if you will, to put a variation on Michel Foucault’s term that seeks to control and subjugate the bodies and lives of Palestinians. The issue at the heart of all the violence is not Judaism but Zionism.

There were Arab and Iberian Jews (Mizrahi and Sephardi) in Arab lands much before the imperial powers decided to resolve Europe’s Jewish problem by foisting it on the Palestinians. The most important point that is constantly evaded is simple: peace and Zionism do not go together. Peace requires syncretism and assimilation; Zionism, to go back to Dayan’s words, “steel helmet and maw of the cannon.”

Just days ago I heard a professor on Al Jazeera argue that, while the French, despite the pieds noirs [Europeans born in French-ruled Algeria], could go back to France, Israelis cannot and therefore it is politically and morally incorrect to take that approach. The argument seems to ignore that Israelis are quite candid in suggesting that the Palestinians should leave and be subsumed in the various Arab states. But even leaving that aside, the professor’s argument did not offer statistics on how many Israelis hold dual nationality and how Israel has populated the illegal settlements through state incentives.

The argument for one state is not about pushing the Jews out of Palestine but establishing a normal, democratic state without the racist and supremacist toxicity of Zionism. It is a measure of entrenched power interests that a solution that would be considered perfectly normal in any other setting should become a non-starter in the context of a Jewish state that also claims to be a democracy but refuses to grant equal citizenship rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Even before the 2018 basic law defining Israel as a Jewish nation-state, Palestinian citizens of Israel — distinct from Palestinians in Occupied Territories — have been agitating the point about equal citizenship. The second intifada began in 2000 after demonstrations broke out in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque. About a month after that visit, during one of the protests, Israeli police opened fire and killed 13 Palestinian boys. Twelve of the killed were Israeli citizens.

Israel set up a Commission under Justice Theodor Or to inquire into what had happened. Despite obvious biases, the Or Commission could not evade certain facts, such as discrimination against Arab Israelis, noting that “Arab citizens live in a reality in which they are discriminated against” by the state.

The task of implementing the recommendations of the Or Commission was given to an inter-ministerial committee headed by justice minister Yosef Lapid. As Professor Mahmood Mamdani notes in his book Neither Settler Nor Native: “The refusal to take seriously the Or Commission’s seemingly modest proposal that Israel actually do what it claims it does — treat Jewish and Palestinian citizens equally — demonstrates just how radical that idea really is.

“Equal citizenship threatens fundamentally the Zionist foundation of the state of Israel. A state in which non-Jews have the same rights as Jews would still be a home for Jews, even a majority population of Jews. But it would not be a Jewish state.”

Once again, we are thrown back to the central problem: Zionism. The only solution to that problem, as noted by multiple discerning scholars and observers, including the Jewish ones: de-Zionisation. And de-Zionisation, as Mamdani notes, has to be along the lines of the end of apartheid in South Africa. Everything else, on the pretext of the sublime and high diplomacy, is just a lie, regardless of which high pedestal it might be mouthed from.

How scared the Israelis are of that model is evidenced by what Ayalon writes in his memoir: [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s] explanation for his urgency sounded like something straight from a People’s Voice pamphlet: “If the day comes when the two- state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”

EPILOGUE

Israel has tried many strategies. It has fought wars, tried to keep the Palestinians under the jackboot, discriminated against them, subjected them to daily humiliations, killed them, hampered innocent movement, destroyed their properties, businesses and dreams, arrested, tortured and jailed them, put collaborators in their midst, reached out to criminal Middle East rulers to prescind the Palestinians from the equation of a grand, overarching peace. None of that has worked.

As Ayalon has noted, if Israel cannot find peace with the Palestinians, Israel won’t find peace. The steel helmet and the maw of the cannon can only go this far and no more. Violence cannot beget deterrence in a generational, attritional war.

With each iteration, even when losing in statistical terms, the resistance gets stronger and learns. Technology has a way of getting cheaper through commodification and lateral diffusion. Every round, instead of deterrence, steels the resolve of the resistance to come back and challenge the Zionist oppression. This is not a linear war. This war is a perfect, self-contained being.

This is what the late Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El-Sarraj meant when he told Ami Ayelon at a conference in London, “In our mutual experience of collective trauma, we are at long last equals.” But unlike Jabotinsky and Dayan, Shamir, Begin, Sharon and now Netanyahu, Ami Ayalon got it right:

“The more I thought about it, however, the more I had to acknowledge that we Israelis had never felt more defeated. How could we call ourselves winners if we were afraid to board a bus or sit in a bar? I can’t say how long I remained lost in thought but, in that interlude, all my assumptions of war crumbled.”

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 13th, 2024

 

Study Highlights Potential and Challenges of Onboard Carbon Capture

Report used Stena's MR tanker as the basis saying the class could lead industry adoption (Stena Bulk)

Published Oct 10, 2024 5:35 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

 

An engineering study exploring the potential for the use of carbon capture aboard vessels highlights the feasibility of the technology both for retrofits and newbuilds demonstrating that it can be a key step in the efforts to reach the IMO’s decarbonization goals. The results showed despite the high current costs of the technology it could significantly extend the economic life of a vessel while also achieving meaningful reductions in CO2 emissions with a small fuel penalty.

The study was launched 18 months ago as a cooperation between the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD), and Stena Bulk together with a consortium of the world’s leading maritime organizations. The goal was to identify the potential for using carbon capture as well as practical barriers, such as port readiness, which need to be addressed before OCCS can be widely adopted across the maritime industry.

“OCCS has gained traction in recent years as a feasible approach to meet the 2023 IMO revised GHG emissions reduction targets,” said Professor Lynn Loo, CEO of GCMD. “However, its adoption faces numerous hurdles, including the need to balance the tension between maximizing CO2 capture rates while maintaining commercially acceptable CapEx and OpEx.”

For the engineering study, they selected a medium range tanker highlighting that it is a common class of vessel with 1,700 in operation in the 40,000 to 50,000 dwt range. However, they note that it is not the most efficient segment but if successful with the technology it could lead to broader adoption in the industry.

Working with Stena Bulk they studied the Stena Impero (49,683 dwt), a modern product tanker built in 2018. The vessel uses a common two-stroke MAN diesel engine for propulsion and is currently fitted with an exhaust scrubber.

The engineering project analyzed the design and cost implications of retrofitting a carbon capture system on the vessel. It found that the technology could reduce the vessel’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by as much as 20 percent per year, with a fuel consumption penalty of just under 10 percent.? 

The cost of building and installing the full system on the Stena Impero was estimated at $13.6 million, with an abatement cost of avoided CO2 for the first-of-a-kind prototype evaluated at $769/ton CO2. However, the consortium believes that further research and development will drive down costs, making OCCS increasingly viable for the shipping industry. 

With the use of OCCS technology, the report concludes that the Stena Impero could maintain its CII rating of “C and better” for an additional nine years. The vessel would be able to remain in compliance until the end of its economic life, assuming a CII reduction factor of two percent from 2027 onwards.

Dr. Michael Traver, head of OGCI’s Transport Workstream called the study a “major milestone in understanding the potential of using carbon capture technology.” The technical feasibility demonstrated in the project he said “is highly encouraging.”

The study also looked at incorporating OCCS on newbuild vessels, with the findings that improvements to capture rate and fuel penalty may be achieved using more efficient engines, heat pumps, and alternative solvents.  

“For OCCS systems to be practical, the industry needs to manage captured CO2 effectively. To this end, GCMD has previously completed a study to define the operational envelope for offloading onboard captured CO2, contributing to the whole-of-system approach to emissions reduction via carbon capture,” commented Professor Loo.

The study provides quantitative insights on managing the trade-offs between the actual cost of operating OCCS and its emissions reduction potential. It also highlights that many challenges remain to be addressed.  This includes the lack of a defined regulatory framework and operational challenges include recurring additional costs due to fuel penalty, amine solvent replenishment, manpower, maintenance, and offloading services.  

The study points out that offloading captured CO2 is in its nascency, with a lack of national and port policies for accounting for captured CO2 and its final deposition. There is also a lack of infrastructure at ports to support offloading and storage.  The results are detailed in a 139-page report released by GCMD.

They are calling for collaboration and support from stakeholders across the value chain needed to develop offloading infrastructure and onshore storage. Logistical and policy support for permanent sequestration or utilization of the offloaded CO2 they conclude will also be necessary to encourage the adoption of OCCS solutions.

 

Norway’s Kleven Returns to Shipbuilding Four Years After Bankruptcy

Green Yard Kleven will build a unique Field Support Vessel for Romania's first deepwater LNG project (Marin Teknikk)

Published Oct 11, 2024 7:40 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

Norway’s Kleven shipyard (now known as Green Yard Kleven) reports it is returning to shipbuilding four years after its bankruptcy and sale to Green Yard, a Norwegian company focused on ship recycling, modifications, and lay-ups for ships and rigs. The company, which had a long history in shipbuilding including innovative offshore vessels, has been carrying out mostly retrofits since its bankruptcy in 2020 which came months after its sale to DIV Group, the owner of Croatian shipyard Brodosplit.

The company won an assignment from the Austrian-Romanian energy company OMV Petrom and its Neptun Deep project to build a Field Support Vessel. Along with Marin Teknikk who designed the vessel they highlight the order is not only for new construction but also for a unique vessel.

“Since taking over the shipyard in 2020, we have worked purposefully to establish ourselves in the new construction market with the right project for us, it is therefore very satisfying that we have now landed this contract,” said Hans Jørgen Fedog, CEO of Green Yard Kleven. “We are very pleased that OMV Petrom chose us for this contract. It has been an incredibly rewarding collaboration throughout and with great trust between the parties.”

Marin Teknikk explains the concept for the vessel started in 2006 with an original focus on the needs of the offshore wind sector. The concept was to develop a design that was both better and different from the OSV and CSOV that were then prevailing in the market. The design is both for the wind or offshore oil sector and they have been working with OMV for a year to customize the design to the unique needs of the oil and gas project.

The vessel will operate for the Neptun Deep project, which will be the largest natural gas field in the Romanian Black Sea area as well as Romanian’s first deepwater offshore project. OMV Petrom calls it a strategic site for the county noting that when it starts production in 2027 it will have an estimated total volume of around 100 billion cubic meters. It will position Romania as the largest gas producer in the European Union.

The Neptun Deep block in the Black Sea has an area of 7,500 square km and is located about 100 miles from shore. It is in an area with water depths ranging between approximately 300 feet to over 3,000 feet. Construction on the topsides for the unnamed platform is already underway. The total investment for Neptun Deep is estimated at up to €4 billion.

 

Green Yard Kleven's first newbuild contract is for a unique Field Service Vessel (Green Yard Kleven)

 

Marin Teknikk highlights since the vessel will be supporting operations at the unmanned platform all the technical and administrative personnel will be living on the vessel. They sought to improve the typical walk-to-work application to enable more operational days per year. The ship uses four azimuth propellers and special systems so that it will be able to stay connected with its walkway in wave height of up to an average of approximately 15 feet and a maximum of more than 25 feet without disconnecting. 

The vessel will measure 295 feet (90 meters) with 90 cabins to accommodate 90 people. It will be able to store liquid cargo to be used by the rig in gas production and features a large aft deck for loading rigging equipment and containers. 

The ship will have a large battery bank installed. It will also be equipped with tanks to use green methanol and biofuel in the future.

Green Yard Kleven reports the hull will be built by a subcontractor, Montex in Poland, and is expected to arrive in Norway at the start of 2026. The assignment begins immediately for Kleven and the ship is to be delivered in the second half of 2026.
 

 

Settlement of Pier Dispute Clears Way for SS United States to be Reefed

Once historic profile of the vessel will be lost as the funnels and mast are removed for the reefing project (Allan Jordan photo)

Published Oct 11, 2024 4:44 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

 

Update: The signing of the documents to transfer ownership of the liner took place midday on Saturday, October 12

 

 

The SS United States Conservancy has reached a settlement with Penn Warehousing & Distribution the company that controls the Philadelphia pier where the once famed ocean liner has sat for nearly 30 years. As part of the terms of the settlement, the title to the ship will be transferred in the coming days to Okaloosa County, Florida which is proceeding with its plans to sink the vessel to become the world’s largest artificial reef.

The non-profit confirmed in a statement today, October 11, that it has settled in the court-ordered mediation with its landlord. Terms of the agreement were not announced, but according to a briefing to the Okaloosa Board of County Commissioners, Okaloosa assumes the rent payments retroactively as of September 12 and faces a penalty if it does not remove the vessel by December 12. It will also pay up to a third of the cost of repairs to the pier’s bollards and fenders.

“Because of the court proceeding, we had a very limited time to find a new home for the SS United States. Despite intensive outreach to private pier owners, government agencies, elected officials, and public authorities at the local, state, and federal levels,” said Susan Gibbs, President of the SS United States Conservancy, “no suitable and available location was secured within the mandated schedule. While we have vetted various entities with proposals to purchase and relocate the ship, none satisfied our minimum due diligence or proved viable within our current timetable and logistical constraints.”

They blame the rent dispute and court decision to evict the ship for having “drastically impacted our plans for the ship’s long-term future.” The group had been seeking proposals to convert the ship into a multi-use attraction and was working with a real estate development company. 

“Unable to save the SS United States in her current state and under a binding court order, we faced the painful but unavoidable choice between scrapping America’s Flagship or converting her into an artificial reef in tandem with a land-based museum. We chose the latter as the most dignified path,” said Gibbs. “While this is not the outcome we originally envisioned, the ship will have a future.”

Okaloosa Country’s Board of County Commissioners approved a $10.1 million budget earlier this month, including paying $1 million to acquire the vessel. The plan calls for the ship to be towed in the coming weeks from the Philadelphia berth that it has been sitting at since 1996 to a working berth in Norfolk, Virginia where the remediation efforts will begin to prepare the vessel for reefing. The tow is expected to take approximately two days. Observers noted this week that removal of the vessel’s anchors had begun. 

The budget for the remediation is estimated nearly $7 million and will require many months. It will entail emptying and cleaning the vessel’s fuel tanks, removal of remaining contaminants, scraping the loose paint and deck materials, and removal of the funnels and radar mast.

The Conservancy plans to develop a museum and visitor center to which Okaloosa County will contribute $1 million. The plan calls for incorporating one or both funnels, the mast, and recreating spaces as well as displaying the Conservancy’s collection of artworks and artifacts from the vessel.

Retired from commercial service in 1969 after sailing for just 17 years, the sale of the SS United States ends a more than 40-year effort to repurpose the vessel. She took the speed title for the fastest Atlantic crossing by a passenger ship in 1952 and still holds the honor. She transported many passengers mostly on the Atlantic crossing between New York, England, France, or Germany, as well as military personnel, dependents, and government personnel during her career which was cut short by the end of the passenger liner era. She is one of the last surviving examples of the grand era of passenger liners.

Okaloosa County has identified several locations near Destin and Fort Walton Beach for the reefing. The goal is to create a tourist attraction that they hope will attract recreational divers to the region in Florida’s panhandle.