Han Kang’s Nobel Prize Award is a Cry for Palestine

by K.J. Noh / October 16th, 2024

South Korean novelist Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, beating short-listed literary heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Gerald Murnane, and the all-odds-favorite, Chinese author Can Xue.  Han Kang was as shocked as anyone else after receiving the call notifying her that she had won. When asked what she would do next, she said she would quietly “have tea with her son”.

She has refused a press conference, saying that “with the wars raging between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, with deaths being reported every day, she could not hold a celebratory press conference. She asked for understanding in this matter.”

A brilliant, powerful writer, but clearly the literary dark horse in the race, Han Kang’s unexpected award is the closest the Nobel committee could get to acknowledging the Palestinian genocide. Han Kang herself had not mentioned Palestine until her recent Nobel award. But it’s unmistakable that her award is a reflection of the current historical moment.

Of course, we cannot presume what the Nobel Committee’s position on the Palestinian genocide is. Certainly, the Nobel Committee would have been crucified by institutional powers if they had awarded the prize to a deserving Palestinian writer or poet; nor could they have risked a redux of Harold Pinter’s public takedown of Western brutality and hypocrisy.

But the Nobels are always political statements, situated in the political moment, and across a backdrop of live-streamed genocide and daily atrocity, it’s unthinkable that that Palestinian genocide could have been far from their minds or ignored in their deliberations.

The awarding of the Nobel to Han Kang is that oblique acknowledgment. Of the short and long lists, she is the only contemporary writer dedicated to witnessing and inscribing the horrors of historical atrocity and mass slaughter perpetrated by the Imperial colonial powers and their quislings.

The Nobel committee suggests this by praising her for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”  and characterizes her work as “witness literature”, “a prayer addressing the dead”, and as artworks of mourning that seek to prevent erasure.

The echo of Palestine is not lost in that description of her major works:

In Human Acts (“The Boy is Coming”), she wrote about the effects of the US-greenlighted massacres of civilians in the city of Gwangju by a US-quisling military dictatorship.

At the time, the US did not want a redux of the fall of the Shah of Iran, where popular protest brought down a US quisling dictator. Instead, the Carter Administration authorized the deployment of South Korean troops (at the time under full US operational control) to fire on and slaughter students and citizens protesting the recent US-backed military coup.

And exactly as in the current moment, the US portrayed itself as a hapless bystander to mass murder, enmeshed but incapable of preventing it, when in fact, it was the underwriter and the agent of the massacres.

Tim Shorrock clearly documented the doublespeak from a state department official:

“Gwangju was an unspeakable tragedy that nobody expected to happen..[but the United States] has no moral responsibility for what happened in Gwangju”.

Han Kang’s book doesn’t bother to accuse the US: her book is not a political tract, and most people in South Korea who live through the period know these facts backwards and forwards.  Instead, she reanimates the human suffering of this massacre from the standpoint of multiple characters: the grieving, the dead, the tortured, the resisting, the guilty living–including herself.

Starting with a pile of hundreds of decomposing bodies in a makeshift morgue, tended to with exquisite care by a young boy, Dong Ho, she shows us what it smells and feels to contact an unfiltered massacre.  Dong Ho is actually a stand-in for a real person, Moon Jae-Hak, a high school student shot dead in Gwangju. Han Kang reveals that Dong Ho/Jae-Hak had moved into the room of the home that Han Kang herself had vacated 4 months earlier as her family serendipitously moved out of the city of Gwangju. It’s clear that had it not been for fate, Han Kang herself could very easily have been that dead child:  Dong Ho is a stand-in for both Jae-Hak and Han Kang.  That trope becomes obvious as Dong Ho survives a first skirmish, runs away from a shooting, while his comrade falls.  Han Kang writes:

I would have run away… you would have run away. Even if it had been one of your brothers, your father, your mother, still you would have run away…There will be no forgiveness. You look into his eyes, which are flinching from the sight laid out in front of them as though it is the most appalling thing in all this world. There will be no forgiveness. Least of all for me.

It may not be possible to write herself into forgiveness for surviving, and Han Kang does not attempt it.

You’re not like me…You believe in a divine being, and in this thing we call humanity. You never did manage to win me over…I couldn’t even make it through the Lord’s Prayer without the words drying up in my throat. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.

She simply bears witness:

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t realised was there.

And she mourns the unmournable:

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine…After you died I could not hold a funeral.  And so my life became a funeral.

And she denounces, what could easily be an echo of current Israeli “Amalek” doctrine:

At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you…We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

In another novel, I do not part (“I won’t say farewell”; “Impossible Partings“), she tells the story of those who perished, disappeared, were buried, without a farewell.  The title is a message to those who disappeared, perished under rubble, or vanished into mass graves without so much as a farewell, a stubborn assertion that they will not be lost, abandoned, forgotten.

Drawing from an image from a relentless dream, and a line gleaned from a pop song overhead in a taxi, she tells the story of the US-instigated genocide of Jeju Island in 1948, where 20% of population were wiped out, bombed, slaughtered, starved to death under the command of the US military government in Korea.  This is Gaza–with snow:

Even the infants?

Yes, because total annihilation was the goal.

After the surrender of Japan in WWII, post-colonial Korea had been assigned to the shared trusteeship of the USSR and the US.  On August 15th of 1945, the Korean people declared liberation and the establishment of the Korean People’s Republic, a liberated socialist state consisting of thousands of self-organized workers’ and peasant collectives.  The USSR was supportive, but the US declared war on these collectives, banned the Korean People’s Republic, forced a vote in the South against the will of the Koreans who did not want a divided country, and unleashed a campaign of politicide against those who opposed or resisted this.  Jeju island was one of the places where the carnage reached genocidal proportions, before cresting into the full-scale omnicide of the Korean war.   That genocide was covered up and erased for half a century, where not even a whisper of truth was permitted.  For this, Han Kang uses over and over again the metaphor of snow:

A cluster of forty houses, give or take, had stood on the other side, and when the evacuation orders went out in 1948, they were all set on fire, the people in them slaughtered, the village incinerated…

The next day, having heard the news, the sisters returned to the village and wandered the grounds of the elementary school all afternoon. Searching for the bodies of their father and mother, their older brother and eight year old sister. They looked over the bodies that had fallen every which way on top of one another and found that, overnight, a thin layer of snow had covered and frozen upon each face. They couldn’t tell anyone apart because of the snow, and since my aunt couldn’t bring herself to brush it away with her bare hands, she used a handkerchief to wipe each face clean…

Snow, for Han Kang “is silence”.  Rain, she says, “a sentence”.

This is a theme in her books: cleaning bodies, brushing away blood and snow with precision, to see things clearly, trying to recover some dignity and truth, no matter how excruciatingly painful.  The book itself is an excavation–a relay race, as she put it–passed along through three women characters, each one excavating further into the harrowing truth–“to the bottom of the ocean” of horror.

The snow that fell over this island and also in other ancient, faraway places could all have condensed together inside those clouds. When, at five years old, I reached out to touch my first snow in G—, and when, at thirty, I was caught in a sudden rain shower that left me drenched as I biked along the riverside in Seoul, when the snow obscured the faces of the hundreds of children, women and elders on the schoolyard here on Jeju seventy years ago…. who’s to say those raindrops and crumbling snow crystals and thin layers of bloodied ice are not one and the same, that the snow settling over me now isn’t that very water?

As she uncovers—like “a tough homework assignment”–the Bodo league massacres, the Jeju massacres, Vietnam massacres, Gwangju, she tries to thread all of them together in an unbroken thread using “an impossible tool”–the flickering heart of her language–animated by an “extreme, inexhaustible love” and the stubborn refusal to turn away.

Han Kang recalls her very young self when she first became aware of the atrocities in a secret chapbook, and thus formed the question that centers her writing:

After it had been passed around the adults it was hidden away in a bookcase, spine facing backwards. I opened it unwittingly, having no idea what it contained.
I was too young to know how to receive the proof of overwhelming violence that was contained in those pages.

How could human beings do such things to one another?

On the heels of this first question, another swiftly followed: what can we do in the face of such violence?

Han Kang’s question is the question that should animate all of us, as we, too, are confronted with what has happened and what is happening under imperial-colonial regimes.

None of us can unsee what is unfolding in front of our eyes.  The French have an appropriate wording:

Nous sommes en train d’assister à un genocide: we are witnessing—that is to say, assisting, in smaller or greater ways—a genocide.

As Jason Hickel puts it:

The images that I see coming out of Gaza each day—of shredded children, piles of twisted corpses, dehumanisation in torture camps, people being burned alive—are morally indistinguishable from the images I have seen in Holocaust museums. Pure evil on a horrifying scale.

What can we do? Each of us must confront this question individually and collectively, and all of us, together, must take action.  None of us will be forgiven for turning away.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

K.J. Noh is a long time activist, writer, and teacher. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and works on global justice issues. He can be reached at: k.j.noh48@gmail.com. Read other articles by K.J..

 

Nuclear Fever: War Mongering on Iran

by Binoy Kampmark / October 17th, 2024

The recent string of exaggerated military successes – or at least as they are understood to be – places Israel in a situation it has been previously used to: prowess in war.  Such prowess promises much: redrawing boundaries; overthrowing governments; destroying the capabilities of adversaries and enemies.  Nothing, in this equation, contemplates peace, let alone diplomatic resolution. It’s playground pugilism that rarely gets out of the sandpit.

In Washington, a fever has struck regarding Israel’s advances.  The outbreak has stirred much enthusiasm in a doctrine that has been shown, time and again, to be wretchedly uncertain and grossly dangerous.  With no concrete evidence of imminent harm to US interests, it featured in the highest policy planning circles that oiled an invasion of Iraq in 2003.  While the stated objective was the disarming of Saddam Hussein’s regime for having Weapons of Mass Destruction it turned out not to have, the logic was one of pre-emptive strike: we attack the madman in Baghdad before he goes nuclear and loses it.

The establishment wonk on empire and espionage at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, offers a fairly meaningless assessment in terms of claimed Israeli dominance over Iran and its proxies.  After a year of conflict, Israel had “gained what military strategists call ‘escalation dominance’”.  The implication: a decisive attack on Iran is imminent.

The point here (at this juncture, the mind lost seeks sanctuary in a mental asylum of lunatic reassurances), is that attacking Iran in toto will not result in much by way of retaliatory detriment.  Some bruising, surely, but hardly lingering flesh wounds.  Israel has, it would seem, been working some magic, spreading its own view that Iran has a gruesome plan in its military vault: eliminating Israel by 2040.

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war.  “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing.  The reason for such an attack lies in a presumption.  Yet again, the doctrine of pre-emption, one hostile to international law and the UN Charter, plays out its feeble rationale.  Evidence, in such cases, is almost always scanty.  Kroenig, however, is certain.  Iran will secure one bomb’s worth of weapon-grade material within a matter of weeks.  The rest is obvious.  No evidence is offered, nor does it even matter, given Kroenig’s longstanding zeal in wishing to rid Iran of its nuclear facilities.

The Atlantic Council has also suggested a policy that what is good for the goose of Christian-Jewish freedom is not good for the gander of Persian Shia ambition.  It is exactly this full-fledged hypocrisy that the despots of the secular tyranny in North Korea realised in dealing with Washington.  Beware the nostrums against nuclear armament.

In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered: “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

Instead of resisting belligerent chatter, the authors suggest that the US threaten Iran through announcing “yearly joint exercises with Israel, such as Juniper Oak and seek additional funding in the next budget cycle to speed research and development of next-generation military hardware capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program.”

Kroenig shows his usual stuffing.  Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so.  (The Sunni powers, for their own reasons, agree.)  This form of perennial idiocy could apply to all the powers that have nuclear weapons, including Israel itself.  At one point, no state should have had that relic of sadism’s folly.  Then they came in succession after the United States: the Soviet bomb, the Britannic bomb, the Gallic bomb.  Throw in China, India, Pakistan, Israel.  Plucky, deranged North Korea, was wise to note the trend, showing lunacy to be eternally divisible.

It is precisely that sort of logic that has drawn such comments as this from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a May interview: “Iran’s level of deterrence will be different if the existence of Iran is threatened.  We have no decision to produce a nuclear bomb, but we will have to change our nuclear doctrine if such threats occur.”  This month, almost 40 legislators penned a letter to the Supreme National Security Council calling for a reconsideration of current nuclear doctrine.  The greater the fanatic’s desire to remove a perceived threat, the more likely an opponent will give basis to that threat.

For all the faux restraint being officially aired in Washington regarding Israel’s next round of military assaults, there is enormous sympathy, even affection, for the view that wrongs shall be righted, and the mullahs punished.  Bedding for a more hostile response to Iran also features in the inane airings of the presidential election.  Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview with 60 Minutes, remarked that, “Iran has American blood on its hands, okay?” In making that claim, she suggested that Tehran was somehow Washington’s greatest adversary.

In response to this fatuous remark, Justin Logan of the Cato Institute offers an ice-cold bath of reason: “This is not the Wehrmacht in 1940.”  The path to dominating the Middle East hardly involves such tools as propaganda, proxy operations and psychological warfare “much less becoming the greatest threat to the United States.”

The nuclear option is now available to governments that should never have had them.  But acquiring the dangerously untenable followed.  To assume that brutal, amputation loving theocrats in Tehran should not have them defies the trajectory of a certain moronic consistency.  The Persian bomb is probably imminent, and it is incumbent on the murderous fantasists in Israel and the United States to chew over that fact.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, the fetish against acquisition risks expanding a conventional conflict through testing the will and means of a power that, while wounded, hardly counts as defeated.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Bayer’s “Backward” Claim: A Bid to Reap Control of Indian Agriculture

by Colin Todhunter / October 17th, 2024

For some critics, if one firm tops a league table for anti-people, anti-nature business practices, it is Bayer (although there are many other worthy candidates). Nevertheless, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) signed a memorandum of understanding with Bayer in September 2023.  

Bayer’s approach to agricultural development involves promoting a model of industrial agriculture dependent on corporate products, including its toxic chemicals and genetically modified crops, and advocating for precision, data-driven agriculture that relies heavily on its proprietary technologies and software. 

Simon Wiebusch, Country Divisional Head of Crop Science for Bayer South Asia, recently stated that India cannot become a ‘developed nation’ with ‘backward’ agriculture. He believes India’s agriculture sector must modernise for the country to achieve developed nation status by 2047. 

Bayer’s vision for agriculture in India includes prioritising and fast-tracking approvals for its new products, introducing genetically modified (GM) food crops, addressing labour shortages (for weeding) by increasingly focusing on herbicides and developing herbicides for specific crops like paddy, wheat, sugarcane and maize. 

Government institutions like the ICAR seem likely to allow Bayer to leverage the agency’s infrastructure and networks to pursue its commercial plans. 

Wiebusch’s comments have received much media coverage. There is a tendency for journalists and media outlets to accept statements made by people in top corporate jobs as pearls of wisdom never to be critically questioned, especially in India when there is talk of the country achieving ‘developed status’. But people like Wiebusch are hardly objective. They are not soothsayers who have an unbiased view of the world and its future.    

Bayer has a view of what agriculture should look like and is gaining increasing control of farmers in various countries in terms of having a direct influence on how they farm and what inputs they use. Its digital platforms are intended to be one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the agronomic and financial data harvested from farms.  

As for carbon credits, the non-profit GRAIN argues that, like digital platforms per se, carbon trading is about consolidating control within the food system and is certainly not about sequestering carbon.  

So, what does Wiebusch mean when he talks about modernisation of a backward agriculture in India? All of what is set out above and more.  

Like Wiebusch, corporate lobbyists often refer to ‘modern agriculture’. Instead, we should say: a system that produces healthy food for all while sustaining farming communities and livelihoods. Because the term ‘modern agriculture’ is deliberately deceptive: it means a system dependent on proprietary inputs and integrated with corporate supply chains. Anything other is defined as ‘backward’.  

According to Bayer, Wiebusch is a star player who can drive market share and create business value for the company. On the Bayer India website it says: Simon’s key strengths include unlocking business growth, redefining distribution strategies, driving change management and building diverse teams that drive market share and create business value.  

Stripped of the corporate jargon and any talk of ‘helping’ India, the goal is to secure control of the sector and ensure corporate dependency. 

India has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food (in terms of calories) available to feed its entire population. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton. 

So, we might ask: who needs Bayer? 

Bhaskar Save certainly did not on his impressively bountiful organic farm in Gujarat. In 2006, he described in an eight-page open letter (along with six annexures) to M S Swaminathan (widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India) how the type of chemical-intensive agriculture that Bayer promotes and the urban-centric model of development favoured by the government has had devastating environmental economic and social consequences for India.  

Save offered agroecological alternatives to address the problems, including solutions to boost farmer incomes and rural communities, cultivate a wider range of nutrient-dense crops, build soil fertility, improve water management, enhance on-farm ecology and increase biodiversity.  

Vandana Shiva recently posted on X:  

India’s agriculture was sustained over 10,000 years because it was based on nature’s laws of diversity, recycling, regeneration & circularity. Albert Howard spread organic farming worldwide learning from Indian peasants. Working with nature is sophistication, not backwardness. 

Bayer calling India’s agriculture backward is a new toxic colonisation. Bayer/Monsanto, the poison cartel whose roots are in war, has driven biodiversity to extinction with monocultures, spread cancers with glyphosate & herbicides, destroyed democracy.

Bayer promotes a corporate expansionist ‘development’ agenda that is self-sustaining and can be described as anything but development (see the online article Resisting Genetically Mutilated Food and the Eco-Modern Nightmare).  

Companies like Bayer present their technologies and products as fixes for the problems created by the model of ‘growth’ and ‘development’ they promote. ‘Scientific innovation’ is touted as the answer. The proposed solutions often create new problems or worsen existing ones. This leads to a cycle of dependency on corporate products and technologies. Monsanto’s failed Bt cotton in India being a case in point. 

Problems created by corporate-led development become opportunities for further corporate inputs and the commodification of knowledge and further ‘expert’ interventions. The primary motivation is financial gain rather than genuine societal improvement. 

Corporate-driven ‘development’ is a misnomer, especially in agriculture, as it often leads to regression in terms of health, environmental sustainability and rural community resilience, while perpetuating a cycle of problems and ‘solutions’ that primarily benefit large corporations. 

But the type of agroecological solutions presented by the likes of Bhaskar Save run counter to Bayer’s aims of more pesticides, more GMOs, more control and corporate consolidation. For example, the industry seeks to derail the EU’s farm to fork strategy (which involves a dramatic reduction in agrochemical use), and Bayer spends record amounts to shape policies to its advantage, courtesy of its entrenched lobbying networks. 

Of course, Bayer presents its neocolonial aspirations in terms of helping backward Indian farmers. A good old dose of Western saviourism. 

To promote its model, Bayer must appear to offer practical solutions. It uses the narrative of climate emergency to promote a Ponzi carbon trading scheme that is resulting in land displacement across the world. And Bayer says that labour shortages for manual weeding in Indian agriculture are a significant challenge, so the rollout of toxic herbicides like glyphosate are a necessity. 

But there are several approaches to address this issue beyond relying on herbicides like glyphosate (it will kill all plants that do not have the herbicide tolerant trait), which is wholly unsuitable for a nation comprising so many small farms cultivating a diverse range of crops.  

Mechanical weeding using animal-drawn or tractor-powered implements for larger farms is one solution, and there are several agronomic techniques that can help suppress weeds and reduce labour needs: crop rotation disrupts weed lifecycles, higher planting densities shade out weeds, proper fertilisation gives crops a competitive advantage and use of cover crops and mulches can suppress weed growth. 

Even here, however, there are cynical attempts to get farmers to change their cultivation methods (with no tangible financial benefits) and move away from traditional systems.  

In the article “The Ox Fall Down: Path Breaking and Treadmills in Indian Cotton Agriculture,” for instance, we see farmers being nudged away from traditional planting methods and pushed towards a method inconducive to oxen ploughing but very conducive for herbicide-dependent weed management. That article notes the huge growth potential for herbicides in India, something companies like Bayer are keen to capitalise on.   

Wiebusch talks of India reaching ‘developed status’. But what does the type of ‘development’ he proposes entail?  

We need only look around us for the answer: decision-making centralised in the hands of government and corporate entities, traditional local governance structures weakened and standardised, top-down policies and corporate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions with local independent enterprises struggling to compete. 

Consolidated corporations have greater lobbying power to shape regulations in their favour, further entrenching their market position. In other words, political centralisation and corporate consolidation are often intertwined. Centralised political structures tend to align with the interests of large, consolidated corporations, and both centralised governments and large corporations exert greater control over resources.  

This dual process has led to reduced economic diversity and resilience, weakened local communities and traditions, increased vulnerability to systemic shocks and diminished democratic participation.  

‘Developed status’ also means accelerated urbanisation, land amalgamations for industrial-scale farming and depopulation of the countryside.  

It has been estimated that between 2016 and 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems. Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. This land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.   

As cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers are displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in the Global South and are key to global food security.  

A combination of urbanisation and policies deliberately designed to displace the food-producing peasantry will serve to boost the corporate takeover of India’s agrifood sector.  

But none of this is inevitable. Many of us know what the response should be: prioritising sustainable, locally appropriate solutions and restoring food sovereignty and the economic vibrancy of rural communities; focusing on holistic human well-being rather than narrow economic metrics of ‘growth’; preserving traditional knowledge that underpins highly productive  farming practices for the benefit of farmers, consumer health and the environment; and empowering communities through localism and decentralisation rather than creating state-corporate dependency. 

Such solutions are markedly different from those characterised by rural population displacement, the subjugation of peoples and nature, nutrient-poor diets, degraded on-farm and off-farm ecosystems and corporate consolidation.  

There are alternative visions for the future, alternative visions of human development. But these do not boost corporate margins or control and do not fit the hegemonic narrative of what passes for ‘development’. FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here. Read other articles by Colin.

 

Israel’s War on the World

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 17th, 2024

Photo credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons

Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China.

The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.

Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated.

After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.

Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.

 A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.FacebookTwitterReddit

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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense o Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022.  Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran:  The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands:  The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

 

Gaza Lives: Resisting Cultural Genocide

Chapter 1:Cutural Genocide in Gaza

by Visualizing Palestine / October 17th, 2024

By destroying universities, museums, libraries, and archives, Israel seeks to make our memory, whether it’s collective or institutional, inaccessible. It’s an assault on continuity. They want to force people out of Gaza but they also want to make sure if people return to Gaza they find nothing and dwell for eternity in this limbo of nothingness, in this void. Israel is trying to impose a rupture between the present and the past and the future.

— Jehad Abusalim, executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies

For the past few months, we had the opportunity to collaborate with the talented data storytellers at Kontinentalist to create Gaza Lives: Resisting Cultural Genocide. In three chapters, this story presents the devastating impact of the ongoing Israeli genocide on Palestinian cultural life and heritage; features interviews with five Palestinian cultural practitioners; and introduces Israel’s decades-long, colonial campaign to erase Palestinian culture since 1948.

This chapter details how Israeli forces have deliberately targeted and obliterated key elements of Gaza’s cultural life, bombing ancient sites, religious monuments, personal archives, and community spaces.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.

Musk Spent $1bn on Coup Attempt – Maduro

by RT / October 16th, 2024

The billionaire distributed the money to “fascists” through opposition figure Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan leader has claimed.

 

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro during a press conference. ©  Jesus Vargas / Getty Images

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has accused tech tycoon Elon Musk of “investing” at least $1 billion in inciting violence in the South American country after the presidential election earlier this year.

Maduro was declared the winner of the July 28 poll by the national election authorities, though the US claimed that victory had been stolen from opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez.

During his weekly television program on Monday, Maduro alleged to have direct knowledge that Musk – with whom he has been engaged in a long-running public feud – had spent “no less than $1 billion” on “the coup d’etat, the fascist outbreak, the violence against the electoral process in Venezuela.”

The Venezuelan leader named his political opponent, businesswoman Maria Corina Machado, as the distributor of the alleged funding to “fascist” groups, claiming that the US government was ultimately behind attempts to oust him from power.

Following the vote in July, Musk accused Maduro of “major election fraud,” while the Venezuelan president declared the South African-born billionaire his “arch enemy” who “controls the virtual reality” created by social media. The two agreed to settle their differences in a fistfight, which never happened. Musk has also threatened to singe Maduro’s famous mustache “from space” in response to a threat to suspend his social network X in Venezuela.

US policy has long been to put economic and political pressure on Venezuela in an attempt to replace its government. For years, Washington and other Western nations recognized opposition politician Juan Guaido rather than Maduro as leader of Venezuela. This allowed the US-backed figure to press claims on Venezuelan national assets in Western jurisdictions, including stakes in oil companies on US soil and gold reserves held in the Bank of England.

Musk has previously expressed support for removing foreign governments in pursuit of his corporate interests. In July 2020, he was challenged online with a claim that Washington had orchestrated a coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales so that his electric car company, Tesla, could secure access to the country’s rich lithium reserves. Musk responded with a post: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

Morales was ousted by right-wing political forces during the mass protests of 2019, which followed a disputed presidential election. His political force, Movement for Socialism, made a comeback by winning the 2020 general election and defeating an attempted military coup earlier this year.