Big Oil Ignores Millions of Climate Deaths When Billions in Profit Are at Stake

As the world burns, radical climate change activism is our only hope.

By CJ Polychroniou

April 8, 2024

Source: Truthout



Human activity in a profit-driven world divided by nation-states and those who have rights and those who don’t is the primary driver of climate change. Burning fossil fuels and destroying forests have caused inestimable environmental harm by producing a warming effect through the artificial concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) has risen by 50 percent in the past 200 years, much of it since the 1970s, raising in turn the Earth’s temperature by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Indeed, since the 1970s, the decade which saw the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic ideology in the Western world, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90 percent. Unsurprisingly, average temperatures have risen more quickly over the past few decades, and the last 10 years have been the warmest years on record. In fact, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration analysis has confirmed that 2023 was the warmest year on record, and all indications are that 2024 could be even hotter than 2023. In March, scientists at Copernicus Climate Change Service said that February 2024 was the hottest February, according to records going back to 1940.

The world is now warming faster than any point in recorded history. Yet, while the science of climate change is well established and we know both the causes and the effects of global warming, the rulers of the world are showing no signs of discontinuing their destructive activities that are putting Earth on track to becoming uninhabitable for humans. Emissions from Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s utter destruction of Gaza will undoubtedly have a significant effect on climate change. Analysis by researchers in the United Kingdom and United States reveals that the majority of global emissions generated in the first two months of the Israeli invasion of Gaza can be attributed to the aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Indeed, the destruction of Gaza is so immense that it exceeds, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.

Further evidence that the rulers of the world view themselves as being separate and distinct from the world around them (in spite of the fact that all life on Earth is at risk) came during the recent CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas, where executives from the world’s leading fossil fuel companies said that we should “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” Who from the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies gives a damn if the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels until 2050 causes millions of deaths before the end of the century? Oil and gas companies made tens of billions in annual net profit in 2023 as they continued to expand fossil fuel production.

Of course, none of the above is to suggest that the game is over. The rulers of the world (powerful states, huge corporations, and the financial elite) are always pulling out all the stops to resist change and maintain the status quo. But common people are fighting back, and history has repeatedly shown that they will never surrender to the forces of reaction and oppression. We have seen a remarkable escalation of climate and political activism in general over the past several years — indeed, a sharp awakening of global public consciousness to the interconnectedness of challenges in the 21st century that leaves much room for hope about the future. Struggles against climate change are connected to the fight against imperialism, inequality, poverty and injustice. These struggles are not in vain, even when the odds seem stacked against them. On the contrary, they have produced some remarkable results.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is falling dramatically since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came into office — a victory not only for the Brazilian people but for those across the world who care about the environment and justice. In North America, Indigenous communities scored major victories in 2023 in the struggle for conservation, protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land and sacred and culturally significant sites from mining. Climate activists in Europe and the U.S. won major legal victories throughout 2023, such as the youth victory against the state of Montana. Similar climate litigation like Juliana v. United States is only expected to grow in 2024. As actor and climate activist Jane Fonda aptly put it on “Fire Drill Fridays,” a video program that was launched in 2019 by Fonda herself in collaboration with Greenpeace USA, “These lawsuits are not just legal maneuvers … but are at the crux of climate reckoning.”

These victories for our planet are more than enough proof that activism pays off and should be an acute reminder that the kind of transformational change we need will not start at the top. In 2018, the climate protest of a 15-year-old Swedish student captured the imagination of her own country and eventually “aroused the world,” to use the words of British broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough. Indeed, just a year later, Greta Thunberg would be credited with leading the biggest climate protest in history.

It is grassroots environmental activism that created the political space for President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — the largest investment in clean energy and climate action in U.S. history. (It’s important to point out that the law stripped out many social and economic programs in the original draft that are critical for low-income communities and communities of color, and the law lacks a deep decarbonization pathway.) Environmental movements such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Letzte Generation have sparked a global conversation on the climate crisis and have opened up new possibilities for forcing the transition away from fossil fuels across Europe even in the face of a growing backlash by hard-line conservative and far right groups, and even as European governments crack down on climate protests.

The rulers of the world won’t save the planet. They have a vested interest in maintaining the existing state of affairs, whether it be oppression of the weak or continued reliance on fossil fuels. Radical political action is our only hope because voting alone will never solve our problems. Organizing communities, raising awareness and educating the public, and developing convincing accounts of change are key elements for creating real progress in politics. Indeed, as the recent history of environmental politics shows, climate activism is the pathway to climate defense.


CJ Polychroniou  is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

The For-Profit Nursing Home Scam

Private equity–owned nursing home facilities across the country are poaching government funds that should be used to increase staffing levels and pay workers more to line their owners’ pockets.

By Merrill Goozner

April 8, 2024

Source: Jacobin




Last June, an elderly stroke survivor residing at Chicago’s Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center fell to the floor while being transferred by mechanical lift from his bed to a shower chair. The fall broke his leg in two places. A single nurse’s aide had texted her coworkers three times seeking help before attempting the lift. None responded. The nurse — in a clear violation of a requirement that two aides conduct any high-risk transfer — went ahead on her own.

It wasn’t an isolated incident at the 178-bed facility. Since the beginning of 2021, federal regulators fined Lakeview Rehab, which is run by privately owned Infinity Healthcare Management, more than $250,000 for ten serious violations, according to the government’s Nursing Home Compare website. The facility earned just one out of five stars for quality, the lowest possible rating.

In response to the deteriorating conditions at nursing homes nationwide, regulators have proposed bare-minimum staffing standards. The facilities have cried poverty, claiming they can’t afford it. But in fact, researchers have found many of these private equity–owned operations, including Lakeview, are funneling funds — almost all of which come from Medicare and Medicaid — to pay exorbitant fees to their affiliated companies.

In short, nursing home owners are poaching government funds that could be used to increase staffing levels to line their own pockets with inflated real estate and management fees.

The repeated safety violations at Lakeview Rehab are typical of an industry that has long been known for skimping on staff and paying near-poverty wages to its workers. Poorly regulated by understaffed state public health departments, the for-profit owners who now control nearly three-quarters of the nation’s fifteen thousand nursing homes shrug off the minimal fines while complaining they are broke and can’t staff their facilities properly, because of inadequate reimbursement by government agencies.

However, as several studies and investigations have documented in recent years, private equity–owned nursing home chains like Infinity Healthcare Management are highly lucrative. Their owners have created an affiliated network of outside real estate, management, and service firms that extract huge profits while claiming the nursing home itself is either broke or barely profitable.

This is money that should be used to hire more staff, raise pay, and improve working conditions, which would go a long way toward bettering the health and living conditions of the elderly and disabled Americans who live there.

A Need for More Nurses

The nursing home industry has undergone a massive upheaval in recent years, one that began well before the COVID-19 pandemic led to the deaths of more than two hundred thousand residents and sixteen hundred staffers. Large, shareholder-owned chains like Kindred and HCR ManorCare left the field in 2017 and 2018, respectively. A few dozen midsize private equity firms headquartered far from Wall Street emerged to take their place.

This shake-up has exacted a huge toll on nursing home quality.

“These firms, such as Arcadia Care, Brius Health Care, Aperion Care, and Infinity Healthcare Management, perform poorly in the federal government’s nursing home rating system, averaging only 2 on a 1 to 5 scale,” according to a recent report by Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks fines imposed by government agencies. “These bad actors — some of which have doubled or tripled in size in recent years by purchasing facilities sold off by more established operators — have been averaging over $100,000 in penalties per facility, nearly three times the national level.”

To improve safety and the quality of care delivered at nursing homes, the Biden administration last September proposed a minimum staffing ratio for nursing homes. In an attempt to expose the machinations of the industry’s private equity owners, the proposal also called for greater financial transparency. The proposal comes after decades of protests over the poor quality at the nation’s nursing homes by patient advocacy groups and unions representing the homes’ beleaguered and poorly paid staff.

Under the proposed rule, nursing homes must always have a registered nurse on duty, up from the current eight-hours-per-day standard. The total number of registered nurses must equal at least .55 hours per resident per day. The ratio for certified nurse aides, who help residents with most of their daily living chores like eating, bathing, mobility, and toileting, must equal at least 2.45 hours per resident per day.

Though thirty-five states already have a minimum staffing standard, only twelve and the District of Columbia are more stringent than the proposed federal rule.

The Biden administration has bent over backward to make the proposal palatable to an industry that threatened to sue to stop implementation even before the proposal was announced. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees nursing homes, rejected calls by patient advocates and unions representing nursing home workers for tougher rules.

The agency didn’t include a ratio for licensed practical nurses, who administer medications and conduct other medical tasks. It postponed full implementation for three years for most homes and five years for those in rural areas, which have the hardest time finding staff and face the greatest financial difficulties due to the low Medicaid reimbursement rates in their mostly Republican-run states. The rule also provided an exemption for those operating in tight labor markets.

“The proposed rule won’t help all residents,” said Sam Brooks, director of public policy for the advocacy group National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care. “It’s designed only to help the worst performers and bring them up to average.”

Indeed, the proposal’s minimum nursing staff requirement fell short of the 3.9 hours per resident per day that a newer study said would reduce delayed or unmet care to less than one percent of residents, while eliminating 12,100 hospitalizations and 14,800 emergency room visits a year.

Regulators estimated their proposed rule would cost nursing homes $40 billion over the next decade, or about $6.8 billion a year by the time the rule comes fully into effect. That’s less than 3 percent of projected revenue for the $179 billion industry, which is expected to grow by 3.4 percent a year over the next decade as aging baby boomers hit their peak years for nursing home utilization.

The cost to the industry could wind up being even less than the rule writers anticipated. CMS last month offered the industry a 4.1 percent bump in Medicare reimbursement rates for 2025, rejecting the recommendation from independent congressional advisors that it cut rates by 3 percent because profits on short-stay Medicare patients have now reached 18 percent.

Private Equity Strikes Back

Despite the government’s attempt at moderation, the nursing home industry has mounted a scorched-earth campaign to scuttle the proposed staffing rule, which received more than forty-six thousand public comments.

The American Health Care Association, the for-profit nursing home industry’s trade group, ran ads in inside-the-Beltway publications claiming numerous companies would face bankruptcy and closure under the rule, especially those in rural areas. Their chief complaint: in an industry already facing severe labor shortages, government reimbursement rates are too low for them to afford the cost of hiring a hundred thousand new workers to meet the proposed standards.

They’ve been joined by LeadingAge, a lobbying group that represents about a third of the nation’s skilled nursing facilities that are still nonprofit. “The ongoing workforce crisis and the proposal’s astronomical implementation costs make this approach impractical, not viable,” said Katie Smith Sloan, CEO of the group, in a statement sent to the Lever. “How can the administration expect nursing homes to absorb billions of dollars in implementation costs?”

Those groups, along with the American Hospital Association, whose members operate post-acute care rehab facilities, have unleashed a small army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill to make their case.

The American Health Care Association spent $4.1 million on lobbying Congress last year, including $1.34 million in the most recent quarter, its most ever. Its political action committee also contributed nearly $1 million during the current Congress to sitting Senators and House members on both sides of the aisle. LeadingAge, which doesn’t have a PAC, spent $132,000 on lobbying.

In the wake of that lobbying, the Republican-run House Ways and Means Committee, whose health subcommittee oversees nursing home finances, passed a resolution last month that would prohibit the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from imposing the new staffing rule. The bill passed on a 26-17 vote with only one Democrat — Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama — voting in favor.

The bill now moves to the full House, where passage is expected. It could even win in the Senate if a few Democrats from largely rural states come out against the proposed staffing rule.

A Silver Scam

This strident industry opposition ignores mounting evidence that nursing home facilities’ private equity owners are racking up huge profits at the expense of residents and staff.

In a new study that uses data from Illinois, which has one of the nation’s most comprehensive health care institution financial transparency laws, researchers Ashvin Gandhi of the University of California Los Angeles and Andrew Olenski of Lehigh University found that real estate and management firms that were closely affiliated with the nursing homes’ owners siphoned off 63 percent of industry profits, which were masked as costs on nursing home financial reports.

Here’s how it works: a holding company buys a nursing home and puts its operations in a limited liability company. It then sells or transfers the real estate to another company, owned by the same people, which collects rent from the nursing home. The nursing home also hires at inflated rates another wholly owned subsidiary of the holding company to manage operations at the nursing home.

These tactics, which Gandhi and Olenski call profit tunneling, inflate profits in the related entities while turning the nursing home’s operations into what looks like a break-even or even money-losing proposition.

It also insulates the owners from legal liability when the short-staffed nursing home gets sued by family members who’ve seen loved ones die or be severely injured by poor-quality care. There are few valuable assets on its book for aggrieved family members to go after.

“Facilities that transact with related parties for real estate or management services pay considerably more for these services than facilities that do not engage in such transactions, while spending no more on nursing, which is the single largest line item expense,” Gandhi and Olenski wrote in their paper, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Infinity Healthcare Management’s Lakeview facility in Chicago offers a textbook example of profit tunneling. After acquiring the home in 2014, the holding company took over an existing $8.9 million mortgage and transferred the real estate to Lincoln Park Holdings, a wholly owned subsidiary of Strawberry Fields, a publicly traded real estate investment trust that owns ninety-nine nursing homes in nine states. The trust’s CEO and largest stockholder comes from the same family that has a large ownership stake in both Infinity Healthcare Management and Lincoln Park Holdings.

Lakeview Rehab then began paying $1.26 million a year in rent to Lincoln Park Holdings. While rent has stayed constant since the acquisition, interest paid by Lincoln Park Holdings has soared from $349,986 a year in 2015 to $611,298 in 2021, the year before the Federal Reserve Board began raising rates to combat the pandemic-related inflation spike. In 2022, the most recent year reported to the state, interest payments rose by more than 50 percent to $942,284.

Those interest payments go to the capital source for the original purchase: Strawberry Fields. Real estate investment trusts are required by law to pay at least 90 percent of their profits as dividends to stockholders, which in this case include the owners of both Infinity Healthcare and Lincoln Park Holdings.

Lakeview Rehab’s management fees experienced the same run-up in costs since the 2014 acquisition. In the first year, Lakeview paid $478,730 a year to Infinity Healthcare’s consulting arm, which represented 4.2 percent of its total revenue. By 2022, management fees had surged to $775,000, or 4.8 percent of revenue.

Neither Infinity Healthcare Management nor Strawberry Fields returned phone calls and emails seeking comment.

Out of curiosity, I compared Lakeview Rehab to a nonprofit nursing home roughly a mile away run by the religious organization Little Sisters of the Poor. The seventy-eight-bed facility, which earned five stars for quality on Nursing Home Compare, had no rent or interest payments on its books, although it did declare $340,000 in depreciation, which is a non-cash expense that frees up money to invest in repairs and maintenance. It also paid just $63,713 in management fees to the Catholic order that manages its human resources, payroll processing, and information-technology services.

It is instructive to compare the total amount paid by both homes on direct payroll for nursing care and support services like food service and laundry (which does not include benefits or payments for unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance). Lakeview Rehab paid 37 percent of its revenue to its workers. Little Sisters of the Poor paid 46 percent.

In an interview, Olenski, coauthor of the new report on nursing home profit tunneling, said nonprofit nursing home owners appeared less prone to engage in the scam.

“Nonprofits seem less likely to engage in any related transactions,” Olenski told me. “When you look at the amounts spent on related parties [by for-profit homes], it’s not on staffing agencies. For the most part, it’s on rent and management.”

On the Ground

Workers like Shantonia Jackson, fifty-four, who works at another Infinity Healthcare Management facility outside Chicago, have seen firsthand the devastation it has wrought on the quality of care. When she began working as a certified nurse assistant in 1997, she took care of the personal care needs of five to seven residents each day. By 2012, she was caring for twelve residents per day, she recalled.

More recently, there have been some days when she is responsible for more than thirty residents who require her to provide for almost all of their daily care needs.“I can’t do all this work, making sure their hair is combed, that they get their food trays,” she said. “We’ve been short-staffed since 2015.”When I asked Jackson if she ever had to use the mechanical lift for a patient without help, she hesitated before answering.

“The other nurses are busy getting people into bed. How can they help me?” she said. “The law says I’m not forced to do this, but I’m forced to do it because I have no one else to help me.”

“I do this work because I’m going to be that age one day and I don’t want to be mistreated,” she continued. “I’ve been with people who died when I was the only family they had. This is their home. They should be treated with respect and dignity. They shouldn’t have to go through all this.”

Two years ago, during his State of the Union address, President Biden promised to “make sure your loved ones get the care they deserve and expect” when in a nursing home. His nursing home regulators are expected to release their final rule on nursing home staffing requirements sometime this year.

We’ll soon see if they have the guts to ignore the industry’s poverty pleas and approve what advocates say is, at best, a down payment on the president’s promise.

Boris Kagarlitsky’s Open Letter From Russian Prison

‘Supporting Left-Wing Political Prisoners Is an Act of Practical Solidarity’

By Boris Kagarlitsky

April 7, 2024

Source: Links



Writing from a Russian prison, sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky has penned the following open letter in support of a broad solidarity campaign with left-wing Russian political prisoners.

Kagarlitsky himself was jailed for five years on February 13 over trumped-up charges of “justifying terrorism”. In reality, his only crime has been to speak out against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

A global petition calling for his release and all other anti-war political prisoners can be signed here.

The letter was translated by Renfrey Clarke from the original Russian version. Clarke also translated Kagarlitsky’s latest book, The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left, available now for pre-order from Pluto Press.

Reporting to the State Duma, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has cited a host of figures testifying to the growth of the economy and the increased well-being of the population. Unfortunately, there is another index in our country that is growing steadily. That is the number of political prisoners.

A substantial number of the people who are behind bars for their political convictions belong to left organisations. Socialists, communists and anarchists, along with left democrats who are not members of any party or group, are constantly falling victim to the machinery of repression. Every case, of course, has its own peculiarities, but the overall situation is clear. The left movement is speaking out for social and democratic rights, against militarism and authoritarianism, and it is paying the price.

Fortunately, support for political prisoners in our country is also becoming a mass phenomenon. Thousands of people are writing to those who have been arrested, are putting together parcels, and are sending food and warm items. Beyond question, it is necessary to support all those who, without resorting to violence, defend their views and are subjected to persecution as a result. We need to know and remember all their names.

Nevertheless, people on the left can and should do more for their co-thinkers. Most important is the fact that through combining our efforts to help political prisoners we aid in strengthening the movement, and build coordination between individuals and groups. Working together to help our co-thinkers who are suffering for their beliefs is much more fruitful than carrying on endless arguments about who was right in the Soviet political discussions of the 1920s, about how to regard Stalin and Trotsky, and about who should be considered an impeccable Marxist and who a reformist, an opportunist, or on the other hand, a sectarian.

Political unity and political maturity are achieved in the course of political activity. Under today’s conditions, when political action and self-organisation in our country have become extremely difficult, helping our co-thinkers who have been imprisoned is not just humanitarian activity, but also an important political gesture, an act of practical solidarity.

Now that this initiative [in support of left-wing political prisoners] is finally coming to practical realisation, we must all support it; we can and must unite around it. After the first step, other steps will follow. For the future to become reality, we must put in the work now.

I hope very much that my viewers and readers will give their backing to the unity initiative in support of political prisoners and all left activists who have suffered from political repression.

This is how we are going to win!

Boris Kagarlitsky

4 April 2024




Boris Kagarlitsky (born 29 August 1958) is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the Soviet Union. He is coordinator of the Transnational Institute Global Crisis project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO) in Moscow. Kagarlisky hosts a YouTube channel Rabkor, associated with his online newspaper of the same name and with IGSO.

The Wretched of Palestine: Frantz Fanon Diagnosed the Pathology of Colonialism and Urged Revolutionary Humanism

By Dan Dinello

April 8, 2024

Source: Informed Comment

Frantz Fanon at a press conference during a writers’ conference in Tunis, 1959. Frantz Fanon Archives



“The colonized took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society,” wrote the Frantz Fanon in his incendiary book The Wretched of the Earth. “But also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes. As soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world can only be challenged by out and out violence.”

The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution.

In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.”

Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population.

The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip — it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showed that 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear.

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.”

Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.

An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’”

In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.”

The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator.

As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life.

After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”

He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces.

The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.”

The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence.

Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notes Al Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.”

Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.

Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today.

“The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.”

In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort.

The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”

Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology.

Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality.

Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.”

How Israel Facilitated the Guatemalan Genocide

Gaza isn’t the only place where Israel has sponsored mass killing. During the 1980s, Israel intervened in Guatemala as a proxy for the United States, providing arms and training to the military governments that slaughtered thousands of indigenous Maya.

By Mark Lewis Taylor

April 8, 2024

Source: Counter Punch


Anti-genocide protest in Guatemala. Photo: Center for Justice and Accountability.

It was on the streets of Guatemala City in 1987 that I began awakening to Israel’s partnership with the United States in facilitating genocide.

Today we are “seeing genocide” — a decades-long cumulative “genocidal condition” — being played out, as Israeli modern culture and media professor Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues. We see it in the US/Israeli onslaught against Gaza. My memories and knowledge return to reflect on Israel’s connection to genocidal practice, not only in Gaza but also in Guatemala.

In the Guatemala of the 1980s, a counterinsurgency by US-backed military governments slaughtered indigenous Maya and tens of thousands of other dissidents and suspects. There was no social media to cover it. Most American citizens knew nothing of it. The killing of this period in Guatemala has been recognized as “genocide” by official analysts and by a thorough twelve-volume investigative report. This latter study made clear the appropriateness of the phrase “acts of genocide” to name the crimes of Guatemala’s military against the Maya, in spite of the military’s claim that it lacked “intent” to commit genocide, that it was only motivated by economic, political or military concerns. As with Israel in Gaza to Palestine, so with Guatemalan elites relative to the indigenous Maya, it is the historical record of decades of accumulative killing, occupation, forced removal, and dehumanization that establishes the acts and conditions as those of genocide.

The studies of Guatemala’s genocide, as I will show, also reveal the special role of Israel in that slaughter under the aegis of US imperial interests.

I was first in Guatemala in 1987 to interview educators and activists who were important for my research about the role of religious beliefs among Maya indigenous peoples as they waged resistance to their ongoing repression. 1987 was a year when Guatemala’s latest series of military governments had just passed the worst mass violence against Maya communities, the worst occurring between 1981 and 1983. The period is often called a “hidden/silent holocaust,” the “Guatemala holocaust,” or the “Maya holocaust.” And this is only one site of Israel’s involvement with massive state violence and terrorism throughout Latin America. I had been working with Guatemalans and others in the United States to seek an end to US military aid to Guatemala.

Simultaneous to my research, I was also in Guatemala to set up a program for students, one that I ran at Princeton Theological Seminary for almost fifteen years. It placed our students in Central America, usually in Guatemala, for eight weeks of summer learning programs — not for missions or building projects, but primarily for accompaniment, listening, and mutual understanding. Setting up this program through consultations with many Guatemalans and then guiding students through this program remains one of the most valuable of my experiences over forty-plus years of teaching at Princeton.

One day in 1987, as the dust and smog of a Guatemala City street swirled about me, I walked in conversation with an activist friend and mentor. We were interrupted, startled by a loud order given by an authoritative command, projected by a deep vibrating loudspeaker. Call it a Darth Vader–like sound — only sharper, slightly higher pitched, and more threatening at high volume.

“What?” I gasped with irritation.

“Oh, yeah,” clarified my colleague, “Witness our new police vehicles, courtesy of the Israeli Government.”

“Israel in Guatemala?” This disturbed me and started a line of thinking that persisted in my research and writing for decades. The Israeli state’s destruction of more than 400–500 villages in Palestine in 1947–1948 would for subsequent decades be linked in my mind with the destruction of a similar number of villages in Guatemala in the early 1980s. My thinking on this part of the tangled web of world genocidal outcomes became a lifelong concern in my research and publications (and here).

I knew something of Israel’s history of war and repression in Palestine, but I did not know then, in 1987, of its connections to supplying police and military equipment as well as advisors in technology and surveillance to Guatemala. The nation’s police institutions were networked with military and surveillance agencies. These armed agents of state became fearsome threats to its citizens and brutal actors, especially after the CIA orchestrated a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s last democratically elected government.

The worst massacres in Maya villages were part of large military “sweeps” through Guatemala’s northern and western highlands. US colonel George Maynes told journalist Allan Nairn that he had worked with Guatemalan general Benedicto Lucas Garcia to develop this sweep tactic. During the presidency of Pentecostal general Efraín Ríos Montt, this sweep tactic was developed in March 1982 into a systematic strategy against the Maya who were seen as the major “internal enemy” of the Guatemalan state. Nairn also reports that US Green Beret captain Jesse Garcia was even more specific about how he “was training Guatemalan troops in the technique of how to ‘destroy towns.’” Maya indigenous people suffered over 625 massacres and also, by the government’s own admission, the near-total destruction of more than 600 villages in Guatemala’s rural highlands. One hundred thousand fled to Mexico, and over a million were displaced within Guatemala.

It was not just the indigenous Maya who suffered such atrocities. Urban, nonindigenous dissidents or suspects were also rounded up and often interrogated, tortured, or disappeared. Over a million pages of reports from Guatemalan police archives — yes, over a million pages now retrieved — confirm this. Overall, more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared in the war in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996.

In a later visit with seminary students in 1988, accompanied by my family and my two young children, I visited the forensics unit of Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (Mutual Support Group) in a small building in Guatemala City run by the country’s las madres de los desaparecidos (“mothers of the disappeared”). The next morning, we saw in the newspapers that the building had been firebombed by police forces. These were families looking for their disappeared loved ones (and doing so with the support of international delegations of which I was a part), all seeking forensic information that might expose those culpable for the disappearances — this was a crime in Guatemala in those years. The pervasiveness of violence in Guatemala, and the US role in sustaining it, was dramatically marked for me by this encounter.

Israel’s connection to all this has been extensively researched.

Israel became heavily involved with Guatemala’s military government, especially after US president Jimmy Carter cut off most of US military aid to Guatemala in 1977 due to its notorious record of human rights abuses. Investigative journalist George Black, writing for NACLA, reported that Israel eagerly stepped in for the United States, becoming “Guatemala’s principal supplier. In 1980, the Army was fully re-equipped with Galil rifles [Israeli manufactured] at a cost of $6 million.” In later years, Guatemalan military elites were proud that they had quelled the insurgency largely without US aid. Israel had played a much-valued proxy role for US military suppliers.

In an infamous massacre, one of many, the Israeli connection was clearly present. At the village of Dos Erres on December 6, 1982, Israeli-trained commandos left the village completely burned down, after shooting, torturing, and/or raping over two hundred villagers. A United Nations investigative team reported: “All the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles made in Israel.” This was just in the one village of Dos Erres. The same twelve-volume investigation reports that Israeli-made Galil rifles were used throughout the highlands, while US-made helicopters ferried troops into the highlands for what the report argues were “acts of genocide.”

Alas, it took me too long to learn how many other ways Israel had been involved in Guatemala’s massive state violence. Harvard-trained political scientist Bishara Bahbah in his book Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (1986) termed Israeli military aid to Guatemala a “special case” within a larger set of Israel’s armament sales to Latin America over the decades. Other works make similar points, such as the study by Milton Jamail and Margo Gutiérrez, It’s No Secret: Israel’s Military Involvement in Central America.

Scholars continue to study Israel’s military contribution to militarizing today’s global order. Israel is adept at marketing itself as a provider of technology for the “pacification” of the global order’s trouble spots. Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper documents this at length in his book War Against the People: Israel, The Palestinians, and Global Pacification (2015). Halper notes that in Guatemala, Israel’s military aid and training were instrumental in setting up forced-settlement “re-adjustment” communities or “model villages” designed to monitor massacre survivors. This was even referred to by Guatemalan military officers as a “Palestinization” of Guatemala’s postmassacre Maya lands, where shock and awe and scorched earth campaigns had left a devastated people. Guatemala-born journalist Victor Perera described the result “a distorted replica of rural Israel.” Ian Almond, who recounted Perera’s description, stated that Israeli-trained Guatemalan colonel Eduardo Wohlers, in charge of the Plan of Assistance to Conflict Areas, admitted that “the model of the kibbutz and moshav is planted firmly in our minds.”

Here are just a few further notes on Israel’s Guatemala connection:

As early as 1978, joint discussions taking place in Israel between Israeli and Guatemalan defense ministers focused on “the supply of weapons, munitions, military communications equipment (including a computer system, tanks and armored cars, field kitchens, other security items and even the possible supply of the advanced fighter aircraft, the Kfir. They also talked about sending Israeli personnel . . . to train and advise the Guatemalan army and the internal security police (known as G-2) in counterinsurgency tactics.”

As the Guatemalan sweeps against the Maya were beginning in November of 1981, the United States and Israel signed the Memorandum of Understanding Concerning Strategic Cooperation. It focused on their joint efforts “outside the east Mediterranean zone.”

Israel started delivering its Arava STOL utility planes in 1977, purportedly only for transporting nonmilitary supplies, but as advertised by Israelis, the planes are “quickly convertible” for other purposes, even into “a substitute for the helicopter.” They were used for counterinsurgency activity in the Guatemala highlands.

General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, the chief of staff of the Guatemalan military who implemented the genocidal sweeps, expressed appreciation for “the advice and transfer of electronic technology” from Israel while speaking at a special ceremony for the opening of the Guatemalan Army School of Transmission and Electronics.

Journalist Gabriel Schivone offered one comprehensive summary of Israel’s role in “Guatemala’s Dirty War” in The Electronic Intifada, describing how Israel pursued this proxy role for the United States. One Israeli minister of economy, Yaakov Meridor, stated: “We will say to the Americans: Don’t compete with us in Taiwan; don’t compete with us in South Africa; don’t compete with us in the Caribbean or in other places where you cannot sell arms directly. Let us do it. . . . Israel will be your intermediary.”

Consider Israeli general Mattityahu Peled, who was a trained fighter for Israel with the early elite Zionist paramilitary Haganah, a military administrator over occupied Gaza in the late 1950s, and also a general during the 1967 war. Peled gave an honest explanation of Israel’s role in the global arms market:


Israel has given its soldiers practical training in the art of oppression and in methods of collective punishment. It is no wonder, then, that after their release from the army, some of those officers choose to make use of their knowledge in the service of dictators and that those dictators are pleased to take in the Israeli experts.

President Ríos Montt’s 1982 coup, as he himself explained to ABC News, carried the day because “many of our soldiers were trained by the Israelis.” Israeli trainers and advisors for both military and police actions were reported to be 150-200 in number, with some reports stating 300. As the killing in the highlands was at its height, Ríos Montt’s chief of staff, General Hector Lopez Fuentes, admitted, “Israel is our principal supplier of arms and the number one friend of Guatemala in the world.”

One Israeli advisor who did extensive work in Guatemala, Lieutenant Colonel Amatzia Shuali, mentioned to a fellow Israeli, “I don’t care what the gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit.” The interviewer added, “Shuali was too polite to make such a remark to a non-Israeli.” Shuali’s attitude was similar to that coming from the lips of a former head of the Knesset foreign relations committee. About Israel’s relationship to Guatemala, the Knesset member explained: “Israel is a pariah state, we cannot afford to ask questions about ideology. The only type of regime that Israel would not aid would be one that is anti-American.”

Another key Israeli strategist, Pesakh Ben Or, “perhaps the most prominent Israeli in Guatemala” in the 1980s, was an agent for Israel Military Industries and for Tadiran (an Israeli telecom group that serviced the military and surveillance offices at the Guatemalan National Palace). He managed also to maintain “a villa near Ramlah in Israel, complete with Guatemalan servants, pool and stabling for seven racehorses.”

Much of Israel’s military aid is part of an assistance mesh that includes agricultural aid. A NACLA report by investigative journalist George Black summarized from Guatemala: “There is an interlocking mosaic of assistance programs — weapons to help the Guatemalan Army crush the opposition and lay waste to the countryside, security and intelligence advice to control the local population, and agrarian development models to construct on the ashes of the highlands.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as Bahbah summarizes, “With Israeli help, Guatemala even built a munitions plant to manufacture bullets for M-16, and Galil assault rifles.” This plant was opened in the Guatemala town of Coban, a place which I and my students had visited to interview activists and church leaders.

Fifteen years of research and consultation with scholars more expert than me on Guatemala have kept me attuned to the US/Israel/Guatemala military connections. There is more research on the connections during the years of genocide in Guatemala than I can summarize here. I have found the similar patterns of Israeli/US partnership when making visits to other sites of US military interventions, overt and covert (in Peru, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chiapas, Mexico). These countries, too — but especially and always Guatemala — gave me a first window out onto the US and Israel as partners in genocide. Now, especially within the United States, I as a citizen have to reckon with my share of responsibility in all this, given the $3.8 billion dollars per year in military aid that the US sends to Israel to preserve these ways of violence against Palestinians and Guatemalans.

Our pro-Palestinian movements must rise to challenge, once and for all, this US-Israel partnership in the genocidal condition.

The U.S. Used to Stand up to Israeli Expansionism: Time for Biden to Show Eisenhower’s Spine

By Mohamed Jegham

April 7, 2024

Source: Informed Comment



President John. F Kennedy coined the term “special relationship” to describe the American-Israeli relationship. This “special relationship” has only continued to grow stronger, sometimes by fits and starts, since the inception of the Jewish state in 1948.

Despite its support for Israel, when it came to the issue of Palestine, the United States held on to the hope of achieving a two-state solution. To this end, American foreign policy has always sought to show support for both parties and sought a central role as a mediator on more than one occasion. Yet under Trump and Biden, America’s foreign policy has displayed an unbalanced and unwavering support for Israel that has inevitably harmed America’s position in the international community and has left in tatters what little trust Palestinians had in America’s mediation.

Since its creation, Israel has been the biggest beneficiary of American foreign aid, which has over the years totalled $300 billion (adjusting for inflation). Furthermore, since 1945, the United States has acted as a political shield for Israel. It has used more than half of its vetoes in the UN’s Security Council to defend Israel from any repercussions for its illegal behavior. It also shares with Israel a strong economic relationship that reached an annual sum of $50 billion in bilateral trade.

Many readers may be surprised to discover that America’s support for Israel hasn’t always been as unconditional as it is today.

The relationship between the two countries was rocky at times. For instance, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, President Harry Truman slapped an arms embargo on both Israel and the Arab countries as he saw the conflict as a source of instability that might give aid the spread of Communism in the region.

President Dwight Eisenhower was even more stern, when Israel invaded Egypt in October 1956. Eisenhower warned, “Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?”. Eisenhower threatened to call in US loans to Israel and crash its economy if Tel Aviv did not immediately withdraw from the Sinai Peninsulat and the Gaza Strip, which it had seized from Egypt. The Israelis completely caved to the angry demands of the former Supreme Allied Commander who had vanquished the Third Reich.

These two examples reflect the major goal of American foreign policy; Ensuring the stability of the Middle East. Hence, many previous American administrations, while they generally supported Israel, tried to be at least a little even-handed between Israel and Palestine.

The downfall: Trump

The long-standing foreign policy of the United States always had cracks in its neutrality but the rise of Donald Trump ushered in an era of unilateral support for Israel that caused unrest in the region. The Biden administration’s failure to undo Trump’s damage and its unwillingness to condemn or punish Israeli war crimes in the current Gaza war will likely deepen this unrest and fatally undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the international community.

During Trump’s presidency, many controversial policies halted the path towards the two-state solution and rendered it even harder. The biggest blow to Palestinians and Arabs was the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem and the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. That move was condemned by the Palestinians, who still see (at least East) Jerusalem as their capital. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned that this step was proof of the United States’ inability to be neutral.

To add insult to injury, the Trump administration envisioned a peace plan “Peace to prosperity” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that bypassed any Palestinian input, ignored the key demands of Palestinians and provided Israel with the whole of Jerusalem. This plan was rejected vehemently by Palestinians and in turn by the Arab League which led to the disruption of ties between Palestinians, Israel and the US.

The downfall continues: Biden

The ascension of the Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency signified to many people a return to diplomacy and inspired some hopeful thinking about the Middle East. However, throughout his tenure, President Biden had only reversed a part of Trump’s policies, failed to restart any meaningful talks for peace and most glaringly mishandled the current conflict in Gaza to the point that America’s neutral position as a mediator has been damaged beyond repair.

In retaliation for the October 7th attacks on Israel, the Israeli military launched a brutal and long-lasting attack on Gaza aimed at wiping out the entire Hamas paramilitary of some 37,000 men. Israel’s attack on Gazans resulted in the deaths of over 30.000 people in the months that followed, all with the support of American tax dollars.


In response to the attacks, President Biden gave his full support to Israel, “We will not stand by and do nothing again. The support was nothing out of the norm as most Western countries and the international community witnessed an outpouring of sympathy for Israel and the victims of October 7th. However, Biden’s support surpassed that of any previous American leader. His presence and inclusion in the Israeli-war cabinet meeting signified to Palestinians and everyone else, that America was on the side of Israel.

As the war slowly evolved from retaliation and self-defense into genocide, the support for Israel started to wane across the international community. However, at a time when the world began to question and condemn Israel’s actions. the United States led by President Biden is preparing to provide an extra $17.6 billion in new military assistance. This action goes against American law. The Leahy Act forbids the US from sending assistance to foreign governments that are committing gross human rights violations — a characterization that many scholars along with the international community would see as fitting of Israel’s actions.

American double standards:

At the current stage of the war, more than one-quarter of Gazans are on the doorstep of starvation warn UN officials. Most observers agree that the only solution is to implement an immediate ceasefire to alleviate the humanitarian crisis. Yet, the United States keeps beating around the bush.

The United States’ decision to build a pier on the shores of Gaza to provide humanitarian aid made Biden the laughingstock of the international community. This idea has been ridiculed from different sides, Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria said “This is applying a very small Band-Aid to a very big wound.”. While Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative claimed that this idea is nothing but a diversion to distract the international community from the real issue.

The strength of American foreign policy had always been its ability to distance itself from conflicts to adopt a somewhat impartial posture. Howeve, today this is further from the case. After vetoing several different UN ceasefire resolutions over the course of the war, the resolution drafted by the United States calling for a conditional ceasefire was initially vetoed by China and Russia over allegations of prioritizing Israeli demands. When the US abstained and allowed a UNSC demand for a ceasefire to pass, administration spokespersons made a mockery of it by deriding it as “nonbinding.” In the eyes of the international community, if the United States fails to hold Israel accountable for its actions, it will lose any credibility it had in the Middle East and all of the gains of the Abraham Accords would be lost.


Mohamed Jegham an Informed Comment regular, is from Tunisia. He has degrees in English and Cultural Studies.

Is Israel’s plan to draw the US into a war with Iran?

Netanyahu must know Tehran will respond militarily to the attack on its embassy in Syria, the question is whether American troops will be a target

By Paul R. Pillar

April 6, 2024

Source: Resposible Statecraft


An anti-Israel banner with faces of Israeli officials.

The latest Israeli heightening of violence in an already violent region presents the Biden administration with one of its biggest challenges yet in keeping the United States out of a new Middle East war.

Israel’s bombing of an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing a senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and several other Iranian officials in addition to at least four Syrian citizens, was a marked escalation. Besides being as much an act of aggression in Syria as many previous Israeli aerial attacks, hitting the embassy compound constituted a direct attack on Iran.

Iranian leaders will feel heavy pressure to respond forcefully. The extent of that pressure can be appreciated by imagining if the roles were reversed. If Iran had bombed an embassy of Israel or the United States, a violent and lethal response would be not just expected but demanded by politicians and publics alike.

In Iran, too, popular sentiment can play a similar role in such situations, as illustrated by the outpouring of public emotion when a U.S. drone strike assassinated prominent Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani four years ago. In a more calculated vein, just as a need to “restore deterrence” is often heard as a justification for violent responses by the United States or Israel, so too can such calculations figure in Iranian decision-making.

Speaking a day after the attack, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowed revenge and said “Israel will be punished.” The Iranian representative at the United Nations Security Council asserted Iran’s right to a “decisive response to such reprehensible acts.”

Iranian leaders feel pressures in the other direction as well. Involvement in a new war would not be in Iran’s interests, and its leaders have not been seeking such a war.

Reasons include Iran’s decided military inferiority vis-à-vis Israel or the United States and its profound economic problems. A principal reason that regional tensions centered on the tragic circumstances in the Gaza Strip have not escalated any more than they have so far has been the restraint that Iran has displayed in the six months since Hamas’s attack on southern Israel (an attack that surprised Iranian leaders as much as anyone else).

But Iran will respond to the Israeli attack somehow. Predicting exactly which of the options available it will use is as difficult as Iranian leaders’ own decisions will be, as they try to balance the conflicting considerations weighing on them. All one can say with confidence is that Iranian responses will be at times and places of Tehran’s choosing.

Several possible lines of speculation could apply to Israel’s motives in attacking the embassy compound in Damascus. Perhaps Israel viewed this as one more operation in its years-long campaign of aerial bombardment of Iran-related targets in Syria. Intelligence presented a target of opportunity with the IRGC officers at the embassy compound, and Israel seized the opportunity.

Or one might view the attack as one more manifestation of the uncontrolled national rage that has characterized Israel since the Hamas operation in October. This may be the kind of damaging and careless striking out about which President Biden warned when he told Israelis last October that Americans understood “their shock, pain, and rage” but that Israel should not be “consumed” by that rage. He noted that the United States had “also made mistakes” amid its rage after 9/11 — an oblique reference to launching an offensive war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack.

But the bombing of the embassy facility in Damascus was a clear enough escalation (and expansion of Israeli offenses against the laws of war), that it probably reflected a carefully calculated decision at the highest levels of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The calculation did not have much to do with any dent, which is likely to be short-term and minimal, that loss of the IRGC officers would make in Iranian capabilities.

Rather, the attack was part of an effort to escalate Israel’s way out of a situation in which its declared objective of “destroying Hamas” is out of reach, the worldwide isolation of Israel because of its actions in Gaza is becoming undeniable, and even its habitually automatic U.S. backing has patently softened. For Netanyahu personally, escalating and expanding the war, insofar as this also means continuing it indefinitely, is also his only apparent hope for staving off his political and legal difficulties.

Escalation as an intended way for Israel to work its way out of the Gaza dead end has two elements. The main one is to provoke Iran to hit back, which can enable Israel to present itself as defending rather than offending and to push debate away from the destruction it is wreaking on Gaza and toward the need to protect itself against foreign enemies. The other element is to increase the chance of the United States getting directly involved in conflict with Iran. If it does, war in the Middle East would be seen as not just a matter of Israel bashing Palestinians but instead would involve equities of Israel’s superpower patron.

The United States could get dragged into an Israeli-Iranian conflict in either of two ways. One would be through political demands within the United States for Washington to act more directly to defend “our ally Israel” when under attack from Iran.

The other way is for Iranian reprisals against Israel to extend as well to U.S. targets. The plausibility of this — despite Iran’s military inferiority — becomes understandable with some more role-reversal thinking. There never is any hesitation in the United States to blame Iran for whatever recipients of its aid do, even if — as with Hamas’ October attack on Israel — Iran was not involved in the client’s action. Thus, for example, columnist David Ignatius writes that “Israel has a righteous cause in combating Hamas and its paymasters in Iran.”

Israel’s paymasters in Washington have provided it far more than Iran ever provided to Hamas or any of its other friends. This fact underlies the statement by the Iranian representative at the Security Council that “the United States is responsible for all crimes committed by the Israeli regime.” That, and the fact that the Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, like the Israeli flattening of neighborhoods in Gaza, was carried out with U.S.-provided advanced military aircraft.

A war with Iran would be highly damaging to U.S. interests for many reasons, including the direct human and material costs, the disruption to economic activity affecting Americans, the foreign resentment leading to additional violent reprisals, the torpedoing of worthwhile diplomacy, and the diversion of attention and resources from other pressing concerns of U.S. foreign policy.

Avoiding such a war requires not only deft statesmanship in dealing tactically with crises but also a more strategic distancing from the odd relationship with Israel that has gotten the United States into its current difficult and dangerous situation. The United States needs to move away from time-worn notions of who is an ally and who is an adversary and to pay attention to who is an aggressor and who is not.

Despite frequent references in symmetrical terms to a “shadow war” between Iran and Israel, a compilation of events in that war shows an asymmetrical pattern of Israel initiating most of the violence and Iran mostly responding. For the United States to distance itself from this pattern would be not only in U.S. interests but also the interests of regional peace and security.