Thursday, July 18, 2024

Israel’s Unseen Second Front

While the war in Gaza rages on, militant Jewish settlers are pushing further into the Palestinian heartland



AUTHOR
Edo Konrad
NEWS | 07/11/2024
Scenes of devastation in the village of Duma in the West Bank following a raid by unknown assailants, 12 May 2024.Photo: Flash90 / Nasser Ishtayeh

LONG READ

On 28 February 2024, some four months into Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, dozens of young Israeli settlers saw an opportunity to set a precedent. Nearly 20 years after Ariel Sharon’s government evacuated the Jewish settlements from Gaza, a small number of them — some reportedly carrying construction materials, while at least two were armed with the kind of rifles used by the military — stormed the Erez Crossing in a first attempt to rebuild Jewish settlements.


Edo Konrad is a journalist and the former editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine.


“We came here [because] we wanted to go home. I live in a community of deportees from Gush Katif, and we wanted to go back”, one 18-year-old settler told Local Call. “I would like the government to understand [what] the majority of the people already understood: We are here. It is ours … We need to go to Gaza, destroy all the terror there, and build there ourselves”, said another.

The settlers were successful — at least momentarily. They managed to erect a makeshift outpost, not unlike the kind seen in the occupied West Bank, which they named Nisanit Hachadasha (“New Nisanit”) after one of the settlements of Gush Katif, the Jewish settlement bloc that was evacuated as part of the 2005 disengagement plan. But unlike the disengagement, in which police and soldiers forcibly removed 9,000 settlers from a colony built in the heart of the Palestinian civilian population, this time Israeli security forces stood nearby and provided protection as the settlers swarmed. It would take several hours before the police arrived to remove them.

To the untrained eye, Nisanit Hachadasha might appear as a form of marginal political theatre, not to be taken too seriously. But the event in many ways marked the culmination of a vision that has been percolating among the settler movement for decades — one that could only be realized through a paradigm-shifting explosion of violence such as all-out war or ethnic cleansing, permanently thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state and turning the settlers into the masters of the land.

Israel’s unprecedented onslaught and devastation in the Gaza Strip, which came as a response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Southern Israel and the capturing of hundreds of hostages on 7 October, has provided the settlers with precisely such an explosion. While the mood among mainstream Israeli society is one of painful sacrifice for a “necessary” and “just” war of defence, the settlers and their representatives in the Knesset have had a hard time disguising their celebratory mood. They believe their moment to make history has come. Indeed, the question is not only whether they will succeed, but what kind of threat potential failure could pose to their entire project.
National Religious Revanchism

On the morning of 7 October, as the horrors of the Hamas attacks were becoming clearer (1,200 Israelis killed, 252 hostages taken, and half-a-dozen kibbutzim destroyed), Israel’s Settlements and National Projects Minister Orit Strock spoke before the cabinet. “First of all, happy holiday”, the far-right settler reportedly said at the top of her remarks, referring to the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. “A happy holiday this will not be”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shot back, reflecting the gap between him and the fundamentalist partners key to holding his government together.

As the war dragged on, Strock would come to symbolize what can only be described as a defiant glee that has characterized the National Religious movement since the November 2022 elections brought them to the height of their power, and certainly since the beginning of the war. In May 2024, Strock openly opposed the “terrible” ceasefire agreement, the approval of which would be tantamount to a betrayal of IDF soldiers and Israel’s war aims. In response to American efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, Strock said that the US “does not deserve to be called a friend of the State of Israel”. In early July, she told a group of settlers that Israel had entered a “miraculous” era — the miracle in question being settlement expansion.

She is by no means alone, and the settler movement is certainly not the only segment of Israeli society agitating for more carnage. The entire right wing, from Netanyahu’s allies in the media to right-wing Haredi journalists, is veritably euphoric, joyfully calling for the expulsion of Palestinians and the annihilation of Gaza as we know it.

That euphoria extends deep into mainstream Israeli society, which was shocked by the sheer brutality of Hamas’s attack, enraged by the government and army’s inability to prevent it, and now feels abandoned and betrayed by the world during the Jewish state’s most difficult hours. In this atmosphere, genocidal rap songs have topped the pop charts, large-scale civilian initiatives have been deployed to justify Israel’s ruthlessness, artists who were once associated with multiculturalism have embraced far-right talking points, calls to end the war are often seen as tantamount to treason, and anti-government protests have not reached anywhere near the numbers seen during the movement against the right-wing judicial coup last year.

Were it not for the fracturing of the Israeli public over Netanyahu’s political motivations for quashing any ceasefire deal and the army’s outwardly stated failure to neither defeat Hamas nor rescue the vast majority of hostages through military operations, it is not hard to imagine that the centre and much of the centre-left would still support Netanyahu’s deliberately vague goal of “total victory”. Yet since 7 October, Religious Zionists (the ideology of the vast majority of West Bank settlers) have been the most assiduous supporters of the war and its potential for remaking the country, both demographically and geographically.



Israeli security forces guard as Jews tour the West Bank city of Hebron, 29 June 2024.Photo: Flash90/Wisam Hashlamoun


Religious Rabbis have publicly and unashamedly celebrated the war and the possibilities it opens up for remaking the political order. Settler media outlets such as the radical TV channel Arutz 7 and the more dignified weekly Makor Rishon, widely regarded as the mouthpiece of the settler elite, have been almost unanimous in their celebratory demands for the permanent re-occupation and re-settlement of Gaza. Religious soldiers fighting in the strip — particularly “Hardalim”, far-right nationalists whose political beliefs are imbued with religious zealotry — have used the current war to remake the army in their image and influence soldiers with extremist rhetoric.

Moshe Feiglin, a far-right settler and former member of Knesset for the ruling Likud party, invoked Adolf Hitler while describing what should be done to Palestinians in Gaza. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and one of the most powerful figures in the current government, has publicly demanded permanent military control of Gaza, rejected any accountability for the events of 7 October, and told hostage families that any deal with Hamas to bring back their loved ones would be akin to “collective suicide”.

In Gaza, meanwhile, dozens of soldiers in the Gaza Strip, including officers, have been documented waving orange flags associated with the movement to resettle Gush Katif, displaying posters announcing the renewal of settlements, or calling for the re-establishment of Jewish communities there.


Never have they had this kind of influence over Israeli politics, and Netanyahu is afraid of them bringing down the government, which gives them enormous influence and power to keep the war going.

It is no surprise, then, that the attempt to build a settlement outpost in northern Gaza came only one month after 15 members of the governing coalition, including Smotrich, participated in the “Conference for Israel’s Victory” in Jerusalem, where they demanded the Israeli government promote the re-establishment of settlements in the Gaza Strip. At a time when Israeli soldier casualties were piling up in Gaza, settler leaders were filmed ecstatically dancing. On the wall of the conference hall, a giant map of Gaza could be seen dotted with the locations of potential new settlements to be built on the ruins of cities, villages, and refugee camps. What would happen to the 2 million Palestinians living in the strip was not discussed. A similar conference promoting the settlement of southern Lebanon took place in mid-June.

Within months, the so-called Lobby for the Settlement of the Gaza Strip held its first meeting in the Knesset, where Likud MK Tzvika Fogel called on Israel to “turn Shifa Hospital into a 7 October museum” and Religious Zionist Party member Zvi Sukkot, chairman of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria [West Bank], pledged that one day “our children will play in the streets of Gaza”.

On the ground, settlers and other right-wingers have channelled their power into blocking humanitarian aid trucks and at times destroying cargo to prevent their passage into the Gaza Strip, where the UN says there is an ongoing “full-blown famine”. In some of these cases, police officers simply looked on, doing nothing to stop them.

For Meron Rapoport, a veteran Israeli journalist and editor at Local Call, the settler right’s ecstasy should be taken with a grain of salt. Despite the warmongering and ongoing radicalization, the Israeli public is not interested in sending its children to protect messianic settlers in Gaza. “On the one hand, the influence of the settlers is at its height”, says Rapoport. “Never have they had this kind of influence over Israeli politics, and Netanyahu is afraid of them bringing down the government, which gives them enormous influence and power to keep the war going.” On the other hand, he says, the mainstream Israeli public remains “completely unwelcoming” to the settlers’ messianic vision, particularly after nine months of mass protests against the far right’s attempts to ram through a judicial coup that would neuter the power of Israel’s legal institutions and make it exceedingly difficult to dislodge the Right from power.

According to Rapoport, the settlers know that Israel will not expel the Palestinians from Gaza wholesale, but rather are content with levelling the area and rendering it unliveable, which he says will catalyse a Palestinian exodus. “They believe Israel will create such horrible conditions in Gaza in order to keep the chaos going. Knowing how things work in the West Bank, the settlers believe that the moment the army controls all of Gaza, they will be able to establish communities. If there is no ceasefire deal, and we’re going toward a long war of attrition in Gaza, there is a high likelihood of that happening.”

Nevertheless, he believes the settlers are facing a pivotal moment.


The Right understands that after the war, whenever that will be, the main issue will be the Palestinians after years that they were ignored by the entire world. The settlers fear that a potential future government led by Benny Gantz [Netanyahu’s chief political rival] will accept the premise of a two-state solution, flushing 50 years of work down the drain. They were a step away from realizing God’s plan of emptying the land of its non-Jewish inhabitants and returning it to its “original owners”, and all of a sudden the country is heading toward a conversation on two states? This is the greatest threat to their political project and they won’t have it.
A Long Time Coming

To understand the settler movement in 2024, one must go back not only to its roots, but to the traumas that continue to haunt it today. Up until 1967, the National Religious or Religious Zionist movement was small and relatively powerless, adjoining the ruling Labour Zionist Mapai party that dominated Israel’s political, economic, and cultural order in the early years of the state. But Israel’s breakneck victory during the 1967 War and subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula — tripling the size of the state — injected a sense of euphoria into the national consciousness. This was particularly true of the National Religious community, which viewed the West Bank, which it calls “Judea and Samaria”, as the cradle of Jewish civilization and the historical heartland of the Jewish people.

The newly occupied territories and their residents were placed under military rule. While East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights were illegally annexed, Israel maintained what would come to resemble a military dictatorship over the West Bank and Gaza. Debates over the fate of the territories kicked off almost immediately after the occupation began, along with government plans to thin out the population and put down any attempted rebellion by the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had suddenly come under an Israeli administration that denied them basic human and civil rights.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Levi Eshkol hesitated to endorse widespread settlement in the Occupied Territories, fearing international backlash for violating the Fourth Geneva Convention would complicate prospects for peace negotiations. Yet, as the settler population grew and established a significant presence in key areas, subsequent governments adopted more accommodating policies, providing incentives and support for settlement expansion.

While most of the first settlements in the Occupied Territories were built by secular Jews who identified with the Israeli Left, it was not long before the National Religious community began to organize itself for colonization. One of the earliest and most influential settler organizations was Gush Emunim, founded in 1974, which advocated for the establishment of Jewish communities in the heart of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Gush Emunim attracted support from Religious Zionists who saw settlement as a fulfilment of biblical prophecy and a means to strengthen Israel’s hold on the new territories.

The settler movement expanded rapidly across the Occupied Territories throughout the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the Likud party was elected in 1977, often with government approval and financial assistance. The new settlements ranged from small outposts to large urban developments, transforming the demographic and geographic landscape of the West Bank and Gaza. By the end of the 1980s, 200,000 Israeli Jews lived in dozens of settlements and outposts across the Occupied Territories.


The 2005 disengagement represented a watershed moment — and betrayal — for the movement, one that it has been hell-bent on rectifying ever since.

The Oslo Accords signed between 1993 and 1995 posed a significant challenge to the settler movement, as Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed, at least on paper, to Palestinian self-rule and Israeli withdrawal from large portions of the Occupied Territories. While some settlers and far-right nationalists opposed the peace process and engaged in acts of violence, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, others reluctantly accepted the prospect of evacuation from certain areas in exchange for the promise of enhanced security and normalized relations. Nevertheless, the failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada soon fuelled a resurgence of settler activism and expansionism.

The 2005 disengagement, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its military and evacuated 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, represented a watershed moment — and betrayal — for the movement, one that it has been hell-bent on rectifying ever since. “The disengagement was a slap in the face. It was the first major crisis facing the settlement movement, particularly because it came from the Right rather than the Left”, says Aviad Houminer-Rosenblum, deputy director-general of the Berl Katznelson Center and a member of the Faithful Left movement. “After they were evacuated, the settlers began to turn inward and speak directly to the Israeli public — to ingratiate themselves with the mainstream.”

The new, mainstreamed settler movement, Houminer-Rosenblum recounts, sought to undo its image as an elitist, Ashkenazi-dominated, pampered segment of the population, and instead sought to form common cause with the Likud heartland, much of which is comprised of working- and middle-class Mizrahim [Israeli Jews who hail from Arab or Muslim countries, as opposed to Ashkenazim, or Eastern European Jews, who have historically comprised the Israeli upper classes]. “This allowed the settler movement to speak to ordinary secular people without having to use the language of messianism, redemption, or religious nationalism.”

Within just a few years, fundamentalist religious communities called “Torah nuclei” began sprouting up in Israeli cities and towns with relatively low religious populations, or in places where Jews and Palestinians live side-by-side, such as so-called “mixed cities”. The first victim of the intercommunal violence in May 2021 was a Palestinian resident of the city of Lod, allegedly shot dead by a member of the city’s Torah nucleus.

The killing — along with attempted expulsions of Palestinians from Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, attacks against worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Hamas rocket fire from Gaza — sparked days of deadly riots and lynchings between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Images of settlers being bused in from the West Bank to Lod, where they attacked Palestinian residents, were proof enough that Religious Zionism’s post-disengagement mission of “settling in the hearts” of the Israeli mainstream went hand-in-hand with a kind of violence Palestinians have been familiar with since the early days of the Zionist project.

Children playing in the Bedouin village of Ras Al-Auja north of Jericho in the West Bank, where residents were attacked by Jewish settlers and a number of sheep were stolen, 23 June 2024.Photo: IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire


“The disengagement was the big wound, and today the war and the desire to resettle Gaza is the attempt to close that circle”, Houminer-Rosenblum says.

I would be surprised if there isn’t 90-percent support among the settler movement for resettling Gaza. While the Israeli centre-left feels that its dream has been destroyed, the settlement movement feels the opposite. It is saying, “We were right all along, and now we have the opportunity to rectify the situation.” If you look at [settler] media outlets, there is wall-to-wall support for it.

By 2023, close to 520,000 settlers reportedly lived in the West Bank alone, with another 200,000 in Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, the city Palestinians claim as their future capital. Regardless of whether they will succeed or not, the settlers’ ambitions go much further than simply re-establishing Gush Katif: they want to import West Bank-style annexation, where settler-army collusion has all but become official state policy, colonization of Palestinian land is at an all-time high, and Palestinians are left almost completely defenceless.
Escalation on All Fronts

On 23 June, the New York Times published a disturbing report that hardly made a dent in the Israeli press. According to the piece, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also serves as a minister in the Defence Ministry with broad powers over the West Bank, was recorded at a recent meeting of settler leaders and supporters stating that the government was engaged in a secret effort to transfer more authority from the military — which has officially run the West Bank since 1967 — to the Civil Administration, the body that effectively runs the day-to-day of the occupation. In effect, this constitutes another step toward annexation and cementing formal control of the territory.

Smotrich, who has called for settling 1 million new Jews in the West Bank, is the most powerful proponent of annexation and mass expulsion of Palestinians in a far-right government that views 7 October as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bury any possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state. Yet if Smotrich sought to explode that possibility through politics, settlers on the ground in the West Bank have been just as effective.

Since 7 October, the West Bank has seen a surge of settler violence against Palestinians, particularly in Area C, which is under full military control. Palestinian officials say Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 550 Palestinians in the West Bank since the war in Gaza began. According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that tracks violence against Palestinians, settlers have expelled at least 15 Palestinian communities totalling 800 Palestinian families from their villages.

Shahd Fahoum, a data coordinator at Yesh Din, says that in the past, soldiers assigned to protect the Palestinians would stand idly by during settler attacks. But over the last years, she says, they either actively take part in joint militias, or, particularly after 7 October, are deployed as reservists in so-called “regional defence battalions”, part of an emergency call-up that allows settlers to guard their own settlements in a time of war. Under the cover of war, members of these battalions are reportedly engaging in violence, threats, and destruction of property.

Fahoum explains how the settlers’ complete militarization and the creation of joint militias has facilitated unbridled violence against Palestinians.


Today, the soldiers enter villages and towns, and start attacking Palestinians with stones and rocks. Sometimes they set fires to cars. A lot of the time, if people in the villages come to help, the soldiers will open fire at Palestinians. Sometimes the soldiers and settlers come together. Sometimes the settlers come alone and then the soldiers attack the Palestinians who come to defend their village. The Israeli media will inevitably label this as “clashes between Palestinians and security forces”, which completely erases the reality on the ground.

Law enforcement against settler violence is almost non-existent.


You see it in the numbers. In 2023, only 6.6 percent of settlers who had cases opened against them were indicted, down from around 8 percent in the past few years. When it comes to conviction, it’s even lower. When you look at the sentences of the convicted settlers, you will rarely find an acceptable sentence in proportion to the attack. Usually its community service, or time served — a slap on the wrist.

For Fahoum, the lack of law enforcement is a deliberate feature of Israeli rule over Palestinians. “We talk a lot about settler violence as if it is the problem, but it is a symptom of the problem — the real issue is the occupation and settler colonialism. The state itself sees its settlers as a good thing for its expansionist ambitions, so it makes sense that there is less law enforcement against them.”

Like Fahoum, Hagar Shezaf, West Bank correspondent for Haaretz, sees the current surge of settler violence as the culmination of a years-long process, set in motion before this government even came into power. “When I started reporting from the West Bank in 2019, the general feeling was that few people cared about what was happening in the Occupied Territories”, Shezaf says. “We were seeing the steady growth of outposts, but there was a sense that the entire enterprise was totally normalized.”

But by mid-2021, when Netanyahu was replaced by the so-called “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Benny Gantz, things had begun to shift. First, she says, came the building of Evyatar, a wildcat settlement outpost erected near the Palestinian village of Beita, which launched a protracted struggle that led to the killing of ten residents at the hands of Israeli soldiers. The settlers of Evyatar ultimately agreed to abandon the outpost, but left their structures intact. Even today, a group of soldiers continues to guard the empty buildings, laying the groundwork for the settlers’ return.


The last 25 years have seen the steep decline of any real political challenge to the settlers’ supremacy in Israeli politics.

Shezaf also notes that Gantz, who served as defence minister at the time, effectively allowed settlers to permanently return to Homesh — one of four West Bank settlements evacuated during the 2005 disengagement, and which settlers have been trying to re-establish ever since — following the killing of a settler by Palestinian gunmen in the area in December 2021. By May 2021, Shezaf notes, settlers had taken over senior command positions in the West Bank, and began outwardly proselytizing in ways that were simply not accepted previously.

In the decades after the occupation began in 1967, Israel and the settler movement were able to establish a veritable empire that has all but erased the Green Line, swallowed up Palestinian lands, and built a matrix of control through expanding settler-only roads that connect West Bank colonies to what is sometimes known as “Israel proper”. Today, despite international campaigns to boycott the settlements, there is hardly a distinction between the Israeli economy and its settler counterpart.

By the time the current government was elected in November 2022, the path was paved for what anti-occupation group Peace Now called “probably the best year” for the settlement enterprise. Coalition negotiations birthed the most nationalistic, pro-settlement agreements in Israeli history, even going so far as to state that the Jewish people had a “natural right” to the Land of Israel and making promises to expand settlement building and retroactively legalize settlement outposts that were deemed illegal even according to Israeli law. Within months, Smotrich was effectively in charge of the settlements, a record number of housing units were promoted in the West Bank, 15 illegal outposts were advanced, and the government allocated 3 billion Israeli shekels (roughly 740 million euro) for roads in settlements — constituting around 20 percent of the total budget for such investments.
Cracks in the Facade

The last 25 years have seen the steep decline of any real political challenge to the settlers’ supremacy in Israeli politics. The Zionist Left, once the dominant force in Israeli society, collapsed with the breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the spike in Palestinian armed struggle during the Second Intifada in the 2000s. Israel’s entire political spectrum would soon shift to the right.

The Israelis who remained staunch believers in a two-state settlement may still have constituted a numerical majority, but they shifted towards a political centre that prioritized issues such as cost of living, secular-Haredi relations, civil liberties, and combating political corruption. Netanyahu would return to power in 2009 with the help of the Zionist Left and the centre under the pretext of “managing” — rather than solving — the conflict. The occupation, which had been the lynchpin of Israeli politics since 1967, would only return to centre stage following last year’s attacks.

Palestinians and left-wing Israelis do not count on the Israeli public to put an end to Israeli impunity over the settlements. But can the international community still play a role? Since early February, the US, followed by the UK, EU, Canada, and France, have slapped sanctions including asset freezes and travel bans on a number of prominent settlers and settler groups suspected of committing human rights violations.

An Israeli soldier watches over a rising smoke in nearby Duma town near Nablus after it was stormed by Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 13 April 2024.Photo: IMAGO / Middle East Images


Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, director of research for Israel-Palestine at DAWN, says the move comes after years of pressure on the US to take action against settlers, which he calls a consensus issue in the Biden administration. “For a long time, the political will just wasn’t there”, he says, “but that all changed with the new government, which saw National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir ordering the police to not investigate settler violence, Smotrich taking over the Civil Administration, and the near-denial by the Israeli government that there was anything unusual happening on the ground in the West Bank.”

Then came 7 October and the brutal settler attacks that followed. “The White House understood that something had to be done to stop that violence in the West Bank, and this was used as an opportunity”, Schaeffer Omer-Man continues. “So what do they do? They look into their toolbox at a moment when they need to desperately show, somehow, that there are still limits to what Israel can be allowed to do, as well as to what America will support.”

Sanctions, he believes, have opened the floodgates, prompting other countries to follow suit. “The sanctions of settlers could create a backstop that has a lasting effect, especially considering the irreversible political shift happening right now vis-à-vis Israel. It doesn’t matter how many Republicans come into Congress pledging their support for Israel — lines have been crossed, and it’s going to be hard to go back to a place where people aren’t willing to cross them.”


Even if the US tried to force Israel into negotiations over the establishment of a Palestinian state, the facts on the ground are too dangerous to be ignored.

Yet for Lara Friedman, president of the Forum for Middle East Peace, the move is little more than a “valve” for an administration that is facing widespread criticism for its unbridled support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “They want to make it seem like the White House cares about Palestinian lives and international law — but within a certain limit”, Friedman says. “This way, the Biden administration can try to take the pressure off and show they are doing something in the West Bank, while continuing to give cover to Israel’s war.”

That said, Friedman believes that any attempt to draw a bright red line between the settlers and the Israeli army is a futile one.


Anyone who understands how the settlement enterprise works in the West Bank knows that it is co-led, if not actively led, by the Israeli government. Settler violence is state violence, and the fact is that at this point the Americans aren’t even bothering to respond to Israel’s erasure of the Green Line. Going after a few bad apples is good, but if you want to say that this is going to keep the Titanic from sinking, you’d better think again.

Schaeffer Omer-Man is less pessimistic about the potential prospects, saying that the way the sanctions have been written allows for them to encompass local officials, government ministers, military officials, settler organizations — even entire settlements. “They are starting with bad apples, but everyone understands that sanctions programmes tend to ensnare adjacent and connected entities”, he says. “Because the settlement project is a state project, the higher you go up, the closer you get to state institutions. After that, it becomes harder to segregate different parts of the settler economy from that of the Israeli economy.”

“This sanctions programme is not going to end the occupation or the settlements”, Schaeffer Omer-Man adds, “but it is shifting the goalposts in a way that makes a path seem more possible than it did last year. The fact that Israel’s credibility is being challenged is an opening, it doesn’t mean that it will necessarily lead to something, but it’s a crack that didn’t exist before.”

For all its precedent-setting bluster, it is unlikely that sanctions against settlers will be enough to bring about a fundamental shift in the near future, particularly when set against the Biden Administration’s inchoate policies in Gaza, let alone if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Even if the US tried to force Israel into negotiations over the establishment of a Palestinian state — whether by sheer force, by miracle, or by dangling ample incentives à la Saudi normalization — the facts on the ground are too dangerous to be ignored.

The settlement movement today is a sprawling, extraterritorial empire, a golem diligently handcrafted over decades by the most powerful actors in Israeli society. Ultimately, it is a project with too much to lose and everything to win, and any real attempt to undo its power could very well unleash violence between the river and the sea the likes of which the world has never seen.


 REST IN POWER
Jane McAlevey (1964–2024)

The ground-breaking labour organizer and internationalist leaves behind a powerful legacy



AUTHOR
Ethan Earle

NEWS | 07/08/2024
RLS - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (rosalux.de)
Jane McAlevey speaking at the Irish launch of her last book, Rules to Win By, hosted by the Irish trade union Fórsa, 9 November 2023.Photo: Fórsa

Jane McAlevey died on 7 July 2024 at the age of 59 following a battle with multiple myeloma. Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, Strikes Correspondent for The Nation magazine, long-time political actor, commentator, and educator, campaign strategist, and union organizer — Jane leaves us with a rich lifetime of work to study, understand, and, most importantly, implement in our own organizing in the struggles to come.

Ethan Earle is the Coordinator of Organizing for Power.

Numerous tributes to her remarkable record — four books published in the past decade, alongside a life’s work of training organizers based on well-documented campaign victories — will surely be published in the coming months. I will not attempt to do justice to the fullness of Jane’s amazing life but rather focus on how I knew her best: as a big-hearted humanist and beacon to the international workers’ movement.

Jane’s father, John McAlevey, was a World War II fighter pilot who later became an important progressive politician in New York state politics. Her mother died when she was young, and she would often accompany her father as a “campaign prop”, as she would later say, only half-jokingly. From her father, she developed a lifelong hatred for fascism and learned what it takes to fight and win in the trenches of political struggle. From her mother, she learned that life is fleeting, and not a second of it should be wasted.

Jane got to work young, as a student organizer and outspoken critic of US foreign policy. As president of the Student Association of the State University of New York, she led a campaign that resulted in a historic act of divestiture from Apartheid South Africa. After university, she travelled to Nicaragua to support the revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. There, she learned another key lesson from a Sandinista, who told her that if she was truly committed to dismantling US imperialism, she should go back to fight from within the belly of the beast. Always a close listener, Jane did just that.

Back in the US, Jane spent several years in the environmental movement, followed by a spell at the Highlander Research and Education Center, which famously trained a generation of civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Jane would later speak about how popular depictions of Parks implied that she appeared out of nowhere on that bus in Montgomery, when in fact it was the apotheosis of years of training and disciplined movement building.

While studying at Highlander, Jane had an epiphany that would stay with her until the very end: None of the most important struggles of our time — from women’s liberation to racial equality, from climate justice to an end to war — could be won without bringing majorities of working people on board. She followed this conclusion to its only logical starting point, the labour movement, beginning with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and subsequently moving onto the Service Employees International Union. Over the next two decades she would go on to work with more unions and campaigns than can be listed in the space of one article, and remained in the labour movement for the rest of her life.
Fighting for Workers’ Rights

From Nevada to Philadelphia, Los Angeles to Berlin, Jane played a critical role in winning numerous high-participation union campaigns, bringing material gains to many hundreds of thousands of workers. While her fellow travellers are the ones who should write those battles’ elegies, I will limit myself to saying that she stared down long odds, tough opponents, and nasty union-busting campaigns with courage, conviction and — most memorably — meticulous planning.

It was Jane’s deep belief that workers should never be led into a fight if they were not adequately prepared and did not stand a good chance of winning. That did not mean she was afraid of defeat — and, like any serious organizer, she did sometimes lose, both in campaigns and in the tough internal disputes that scar the trade union landscape — but she never threw workers to the wolves, and she never went down easy.

Jane’s core theory of labour organizing, as it developed through her campaign experiences, was that American trade unions had moved away from the kind of organizing developed in the first half of the twentieth century in favour of what she called “shallow organizing”. The same approach is more commonly known as mobilizing: essentially getting people to turn out to large demonstrations without any plan for what to do beyond the demonstration.

Jane argued that this trend must be reversed, for the sake of workers and the planet that we share, and that what she called “whole-worker organizing” was key to building disciplined majority-led campaigns capable of credibly threatening and executing escalatory actions — up to and including strikes — to win demands. This argument, as well as a comprehensive outline of the methods that this deep organizing entails, was laid out in a series of books that she began to write with her characteristic frenetic energy after being convinced, at the age of 45, to return to graduate school at the City University of New York under the tutelage of renowned sociologist Frances Fox Piven.


It was Jane’s deep belief that workers should never be led into a fight if they were not adequately prepared and did not stand a good chance of winning.

Jane’s first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), outlined the core tenets of her theory of change as they developed across her first decade of organizing in the labour movement. It was named the “most valuable book of 2012” by The Nation magazine, where she later went on serve as Strikes Correspondent. Her 2016 book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, was based on her PhD dissertation and provides her most thorough theoretical analysis, arguing that lasting social change can only happen when organizing is built around workers and ordinary people. It has become something of a bible in the trade union movement, used as the basis for study groups by countless thousands of unionists. Her third book, published in 2020, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy, broadened her lens, focusing on the links between the attack on the workplace and civil democracy, and how the tactics of the right wing can be overcome. Her most recent book, Rules to Win By (co-written with Abby Lawlor), was completed when she already knew her prognosis. In this final piece, she and Abby outline how to democratize union negotiations and build worker power by practicing transparent, big, and open negotiations.

Across this body of work, we see a rhythmic sway back and forth between micro-level campaign analysis and the macro-level implications of how our opponents understand and exercise power, and what it will take to defeat them. Every step of the way, this interplay is guided by the voices, actions, and concrete experiences of workers.
Organizing for Power

I met Jane in 2019, as part of an experimental attempt to run an online training based on the methods she had honed during her decades of organizing. I was working for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and a growing number of German organizers were asking for Jane’s support. At the same time, in the international progressive community we were noting an uptick in demand for proven organizing methods that did not just churn out big crowds but actually built campaigns capable of winning.

Jane was sceptical. Like any good organizer, she placed huge value on one-on-one, face-to-face meetings — but the demand was too real to deny. Two-thousand people came to that initial pilot training, and the six-week program, appropriately called “Organizing for Power” or O4P, has since trained more than 40,000 people from 1,800+ organizations in 115 countries and 19 languages. Participants join a plenary-style webinar, where an expert trainer (oftentimes Jane, but increasingly other organizers from around the world) gives a lesson on a core organizing skill: leader identification, semantics, one-on-one conversations, list work, workplace charting, and building structure tests.

At first, we invited individuals to participate on their own, but Jane, always a believer in raising expectations while “raising hell”, demanded that it be a truly organizational training, with an initial threshold requirement of four people per group, later raised to ten. Members of our team, including me, were worried that this would lead to smaller attendance, but Jane argued just the opposite: higher standards would boost commitment and foster a spirit of solidarity to battle the attrition that often accompanies longer trainings like this.

She won that argument and was ultimately proven right. Raising expectations, if done well, can lead to better results. Now, organizing groups are expected to do thorough preparatory work, meet for “campaign assignments” (or homework) throughout, and break out during sessions to do small-group work in which they practice the lessons that are taught. Our most recent “Core Fundamentals” programme, held in May–June 2024 and featuring Jane in its inaugural session, welcomed 7,500 people from 480 organizations. Meanwhile, O4P “graduates” have scored major organizing victories from Tanzania to Peru, Indonesia to Scotland.
Building on Jane’s Legacy

Over these past years, I worked with Jane on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Her work rhythm has been something to behold. I’m based in France, either six or nine hours ahead of the two places that Jane called home, New York and the Bay Area, and we would joke that this made us perfect work partners, as I could fill her 6:00 meeting slot that so few others were willing to take.

The balancing force to this enormous drive was always Jane’s enormous humanity. When a participant in one of our trainings was arrested in a country with particularly oppressive labour laws, nobody fought harder than Jane for his release. When my son turned one, Jane was the first person to send us birthday wishes — from the hospital, moreover, where she was undergoing a medical procedure related to her condition — together with a request for photos to buoy her spirit. She cared deeply about all the people in her life, all the people whose lives she had touched, and the workers of the world whom she had never met.


For foes and friends alike, Jane had something of a magical aura about her.



Some would call this the mark of a good organizer, and, of course, it was that as well. But even when the cameras were off, when there was no ground to be won, Jane would be there listening, taking notes, and asking attentive, piercing questions that would shine light for her counterpart on their path forward.

She worked almost as hard as ever during her final months, slowing down only for her necessary treatments and the long bicycle rides along the Hudson River that kept up her spirits as much as her physical condition. Over this period, all the Janes were on display: she helped to run a blitz campaign in Connecticut, published articles on contemporary labour strategy, led a multi-day training for the Irish union Fórsa, and worked to build out a team of organizer-trainers to take her place in Organizing for Power after she was gone.

She knew she was going to die, had known it for months, and raced against the clock to complete as much work as she could towards the organizing future that she knew she would not see. That, ultimately, is Jane’s legacy — a gift to all of us. The work output itself, but also her commitment to that work, and the belief that we can in fact win, but only through real discipline and real struggle.

Her track record was formidable — to her opponents but also perhaps to young organizers seeking to follow in her footsteps. For foes and friends alike, Jane had something of a magical aura about her. That said, she always sought to shed that perception. Everything she did was the result of hard work and practice — and all of it can be reproduced by those willing to put in the time that she did.

So, read her books and take her trainings, but not to deify her — nothing could be further from her mission. Take them so that you can put into practice the same methods that Jane McAlevey spent a lifetime practicing, modelling, and instilling in others. And then, as she would so often say at the end of a session: Go forth and win!


You can pre-register now for Organizing for Power’s next programme focused on Jane McAlevey’s Core Fundamentals of Organizing.
Not Diligent Enough

The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could do more to protect African mining communities


AUTHOR
Sikho Luthango

NEWS | 07/17/2024
RLS - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (rosalux.de)
Miners employed at Wolfram Mining & Processing Ltd. in Gifurwe, Rwanda.
Photo: IMAGO / photothek

On 24 May, the European Union passed the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) law, requiring big businesses to identify and address negative human rights and environmental impacts in supply chains regardless of whether the harm occurs in or outside the EU. It will apply to businesses with more than 1,000 employees on average and a net worldwide turnover of more than 450 million euro.

This follows a compromise led by the French government that effectively narrowed the scope of the directive when states such as Germany and Italy expressed reservations about the effect the directive would have on the EU investment climate.


Sikho Luthango is a Public Policy Analyst and Programme Manager for Labour Relations and Economy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation's Southern African Office.

The directive will also apply to non-EU based companies with a turnover of more than 450 euro million in the bloc. EU member states will have two years to adopt the directive into national legislation. The directive creates a deterrent for violations such as child and forced labour and goes even further to include pollution and emissions, deforestation and damage to ecosystems in their supply chain. This is done mainly through the use of human rights and environmental due diligence in relation to their own operations, those of their subsidiaries, and their direct and indirect business partners throughout their chains of activities.

In the absence of binding international regulation of supply chains, the CSDDD marks a significant advance in the regulation of human and environmental impacts of business. More so, in implementing such a standard in the world’s biggest single market, the EU holds sizable control over supply chains, including mining supply chains.

The implication is that South African companies will be indirectly affected by the implementation of the directive. This is an important moment for corporate accountability and human rights in a much contested arena between self-regulation and binding mechanisms for companies, especially those who operate transnationally. That said, from a Global South perspective, inclusive of many producer countries in the supply chain who are privy to the direct effects of mining on people and the environment, there are some crucial elements which the CSDDD does not adequately address.

While the directive has managed to achieve a wide consensus for its adoption, several compromises had to be made, significantly watering it down. The CSDDD exempts financial institutions, arms manufacturers, and companies producing other products subject to export controls such as surveillance technology. The exclusion of financial institutions leaves a gap in the regulation of supply chains especially from an African perspective.

In 2016 and 2021, 132.3 billion dollars in fossil fuel finance US dollars in fossil fuel finance was injected into Africa by public and private financiers. JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and Standard Chartered are among the top five fossil fuel financiers, with some headquartered in Europe. While the CSDDD represents one of the most progressive standards to include obligations for environmental impacts through its climate transition plan, in line with the Paris Agreement and the EU’s objective of achieving climate neutrality by 2050, excluding the finance sector is a missed opportunity to address their role in achieving sustainability across the supply chain.

The “Dash for Gas in Africa” is one such example — the significant uptake of gas projects on the continent financed by Global North institutions. In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war and subsequent sanctions imposed on Russia, the demand for gas by Global North states including the EU has risen.

As an instrument that has been developed without broader consultation with Global South states but one that will affect these states albeit indirectly on some crucial issues, the CSDDD has implications for the ability of these communities to achieve remedy for harm caused by EU-based companies.

This comes at a time where the European Parliament also passed a rule labelling investments in gas and nuclear projects as climate-friendly. This is despite mounting uncertainty about the role of gas for decarbonization efforts and backlash from many civil society actors. In 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz visited Senegal on his first African tour in pursuit of the development of a gas field. This was welcomed by the then president, Macky Sall, forecasting Senegal’s gas output reaching 10 million tonnes by 2030.

In addition, finance for fossil fuel projects takes away from much-needed scaling up of renewable energy technology. For African countries, however, the long-term risk is a “fossil fuel lock-in” infrastructural path. In addition, supplying gas to Europe could reinforce export-led economies and also lead to the stranding of assets in light of Europe’s climate neutrality goals for 2040 that would drive down the demand for gas.

South Africa is no exception for the dash for gas. A Shell oil and gas seismic survey in the Wild Coast was halted in 2022 and remains upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeal following the judgment earlier last month.

In 2022, the Makhanda High Court held that Shell’s due diligence process was substantially flawed, failing to take into account the livelihoods of subsistence and small scale fishers — an important element that should be considered for many current offshore gas projects across the continent, including the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline built primarily to export gas to Europe. In addition, the environmental impacts of oil and gas seismic surveys has been subject to much environmental contestation, with more research indicating that they threaten long-term loss of marine mammal biodiversity.

Furthermore, as an instrument that has been developed without broader consultation with Global South states but one that will affect these states albeit indirectly on some crucial issues, the CSDDD has implications for the ability of these communities to achieve remedy for harm caused by EU-based companies. The issue of attaining EU courts is one such an example. For the purposes of accessing justice, allowing victims to choose a court can have a significant effect on the outcomes of the case.

In 2011, Leigh Day filed more than 2,000 claims against Anglo American South Africa, as a subsidiary of Anglo American Group and where the central administration is based in the United Kingdom. The court first had to grapple with the question of whether the UK High Court was the appropriate court to hear the case.

The case was dismissed in 2013 by the high court and referred to the UK court of appeal. But, because of the risk of having the prescription period expiring (statute of limitations) while deliberations over jurisdiction continue, the claim was instead filed in South Africa. Anglo’s African unit had assets of nearly 15 billion dollars and, as a parent company, should have been held liable for not having properly “controlled and advised its mines with regard to prevention of dust exposure and silicosis”. The victims’ interest in claiming in the UK was driven by the possibility of obtaining higher damages and speedier court procedures, and because the “success fees” would have been paid by the company rather than being deducted from claimants’ compensation.


African states should continue to call for the development of a human rights standard in the regulation of supply chains that resonates with mining affected communities on the ground.

This case highlights the potential challenges that victims can face regarding questions about an appropriate court — potentially even putting their entire case at risk because of the stringent timeframes that govern courts. For many South African mining affected communities and workers, the CSDDD does not provide answers to some of these lingering and relevant questions.

It does not contain provisions governing jurisdiction to deal with such questions and in this case, other EU laws apply. While it is clearer for those companies headquartered in the EU, the governance of companies headquartered elsewhere but with a turnover of 450 million euro would fall under the national laws of member states, making the determination of the appropriate court a more complex issue.

The development of human rights standards such as the CSDDD can be attributed to the widely accepted voluntary international frameworks such as United Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), known as the “Ruggie Principles”. These have, however, proved to be ineffective in closing the international gaps that persist such as issues on jurisdiction.

Developing standards that will resonate with mining affected communities requires negotiation at the United Nations level, with the development of instruments such as the Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights to govern global supply chains. While states such as South Africa are constructive participants in the process to develop such a mechanism, the EU has not yet developed a mandate to negotiate.

In the run-up to the 2024 negotiations, African states should continue to call for the development of a human rights standard in the regulation of supply chains that resonates with mining affected communities on the ground. While the CSDDD can fill some of these gaps in the interim, it is still not enough. The diplomacy of African governments should also be centred on developing a binding international standard, especially in the context of a rush for Africa’s critical minerals and a “dash for gas in Africa”.

This article first appeared in the Mail & Guardian.

'Very high' levels of Covid spreading across these several states in US, daily case burden rises to 307

ByBhavika Rathore
Jul 17, 2024 

Covid cases are rising again in these 7 states in the US for the first time since December last year.


A trend of rising COVID-19 cases has been noticed in particularly 7 states of the US since last winter. As per the data reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a similar trend is being noticed in several other states in the US. These states include California, Arkansas, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon and Texas. Safety guidelines are in effect and people have been urged to follow them to minimise the transmission of the virus
.
Coronavirus cases rapidly rise in several states in the US.

Several states in the US record high Coronavirus levels

States of California, Arkansas, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon and Texas have recorded “ very high” of Coronavirus cases in their waste waters. One of the most populous states of the country. Los Angeles has also noticed an increase in the number of cases with its Mayor, Karen Bass testing positive for COVID-19, as reported by MSN.

According to the most recent data available, the COVID levels of the country are at 27% of last winter’s peak. The data has been availed by the country’s health department and the analysis conducted over 10 days, ending on June 29. The new levels indicate a 17% rise in the country’s level of cases from the last recorded data which ended on June 26.

The average daily cases are also increasing rapidly from 215 per day on June 26 to 307 per day by the end of the first week of July. The cause for the sudden increase in numbers has been given to introduction of COVID-19’s two new variants. One of the new variants called FLiRT is known to be a highly transmissible than the previous one resulting in an increased number of cases. However, the variant does not cause any severe diseases.

According to statistics by Worldometer, as of April 13, 2024, California reported a total of 111 million plus COVID cases, Texas reported over 9 million , Florida had a total of 8 million cases, Maryland and Arkansas reported approximately 1 million cases, Oregan saw a little 992, 925 cases and Nevada marked 923,059 cases.


Symptoms of the new COVID variants

The new COVID variants FLiRT and LB.1 are the cause of sudden rise in number of cases in the US this summer. Expert Dr. Xand van Tulleken suggests to keep an eye out for following symptoms. Some of the common symptoms of the new variants include fever, cough, fatigue, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, muscle or body aches, shortness of breath, headache and runny nose.

Other symptoms of the COVID variants can look like chest pain, difficulty breathing, coughing up blood and swollen and painful neck, as reported by MSN.
Suggested guidelines due to increase in COVID cases

The simple precautions enforced during the pandemic are still encouraged. This includes people wearing masks and avoiding social contact especially if one is a resident of the above mentioned states. Doctors have urged the public to get vaccinated with the updated vaccines especially those in the higher-risk groups. 36% of people above the age of 65 have not taken the updated vaccines which have been available to the public since September, according to the L.A. Times.

Yale Medicine's Scott Roberts suggests that tests can detect FLiRT strains. Experts recommend daily testing for symptomatic individuals with rapid tests over three to five days, noting delays in test positivity. Those testing positive should wear masks, avoid high-risk contacts, and seek medical care. Updated guidelines allow fever-free individuals with mild symptoms to return to school or work after one day of isolation, effective from January 9.
Kenyan migrant workers endure severe hardships, unjust imprisonment in Iraq


2024-07-17 

Shafaq News/ Kenyan migrant workers, particularly young women, are enduring severe hardships in Iraq, with numerous reports of abuse and unjust imprisonment surfacing.

A report by Kenyan news site "Mwakilishi" has shed light on one such case that involves Catherine Wambui, who traveled to Iraq in 2020 with hopes of a better future, only to find herself entangled in a harrowing ordeal.

Wambui, who left Kenya with a two-year contract as a housekeeper, hoped to improve her living conditions. However, her contract marked the beginning of a dreadful experience, exposing the harsh realities faced by Kenyan migrants overseas.

When Wambui expressed her desire to return to Kenya at the end of her contract, her employer refused, pressuring her to extend her stay despite her emotional and psychological distress. The employer not only withheld her return ticket but also confiscated her passport, effectively trapping her in Iraq.

The situation worsened when immigration authorities handed her over to Iraqi authorities instead of facilitating her return to Kenya. Wambui was placed in a high-security prison under inhumane conditions, with overcrowded cells forcing detainees to sleep sitting up, and inadequate facilities exacerbating their suffering.

During Ramadan in 2023, some detainees, including Wambui, were released thanks to financial assistance from her parents in Kenya, who sent money for her plane ticket.

However, many other Kenyans remain unjustly detained in Basra prison, despite committing no crimes in Iraq.

Kenyan migrant communities emphasize the urgent need for better protection of migrant workers' rights and enhanced diplomatic efforts to safeguard Kenyan citizens abroad.

According to Kenyan Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi, there are 150 Kenyan nationals in Iraq, although this figure does not account for those in Iraqi prisons.

Israeli left-wing movement sees unprecedented rise in army service refusals

2024-07-17 


Shafaq News/ The Israeli left-wing movement "Yesh Gvul" (There is a Limit) has reported an unprecedented surge in refusals to serve in the Israeli army amidst the ongoing war in Gaza.

The movement, which has been helping Israelis refusing military service since the First Lebanon War in the early 1980s, received 100 assistance requests from current service refusers, which marks a significant increase compared to the 10-15 requests annually over the past decade and around 40 requests annually during the peak years of the Lebanon War and the First and Second Intifadas.

Yesh Gvul spokesperson Yishai Menuhin stated, "We have assisted around 40 soldiers and reservists who refused to enlist in the current war. Additionally, other activists in the movement have helped dozens more."

Similarly, the "Refusenik" group, which supports young men and women who refuse to enlist in the Israeli army, has noted a sharp increase in the number of reservists refusing service.

Left-wing activist David Zonshein, founder of the "Courage to Refuse" movement, reported receiving assistance requests from dozens of refusers during the current conflict, especially in recent months, surpassing the numbers seen in previous years.

According to a report in the "Times of Israel," the number of refusers has continued to grow due to the complexity of the war, the alleged war crimes, and increasing protests against the government's actions.

Beyond ideological refusals, some soldiers are also declining service due to war fatigue.

In late April, approximately 30 reservists in a paratrooper battalion called up for service in Rafah refused to report, citing prolonged combat affecting their studies, livelihoods, and families and causing them psychological and physical distress.

The refusals are not limited to Gaza. Some soldiers are unwilling to serve in the West Bank, along the northern border with Lebanon, or in any location, including command roles in the Home Front Command.

In response, an Israeli army spokesperson stated, "The army views refusal to serve in the reserves as a serious matter. Each case is individually reviewed and addressed by commanders."

It is noteworthy that since the beginning of Israel's war on Gaza on October 7, 39,289 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of whom are children, women, and elderly.

This figure is expected to drastically increase once the rubble is attended to, as it traps the bodies of less fortunate Palestinians who could not flee the brutal, unbalanced show of power.

 86% of people want their countries to put differences aside & work together to address the climate crisis.

TikTok loses first court challenge to EU’s big tech crackdown


© Photo credit: Shutterstock

17/07/2024

Judges said the Chinese social media platform can’t escape a new law reining in the likes of Google and Apple Inc.

The EU’s General Court said TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. is powerful enough to be covered by the bloc’s landmark Digital Markets Act, which took effect in March. The decision can be appealed to the bloc’s top court, the European Court of Justice.

Judges said in a ruling on Wednesday that TikTok met the necessary thresholds to be brought under the scope of the DMA, and that ByteDance’s attempt to appeal the European Commission’s decision to target it wasn’t substantiated.

The DMA is designed to ban the most powerful tech firms from engaging in a list of potentially anti-competitive actions before it’s too late to save markets. It imposes a rigid regime on firms whose practices have previously resulted in billions of euros in fines and tax orders from the EU watchdog.

The rules apply to platforms with sales across the bloc of at least €7.5 billion or a market capitalization of €75 billion. Platform services are also required to have more than 45 million monthly active end-users and more than 10,000 yearly active business users in the EU to fall under the rules.Also read:

TikTok risks fines as EU issues ultimatum over app launch


The law makes it illegal for certain platforms to favour their own services over those of rivals. They are barred from combining personal data across their different services, prohibited from using data they collect from third-party merchants to compete against them, and have to allow users to download apps from rival platforms.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google Search, Apple’s Safari and Amazon.com Inc.’s marketplace are among the platforms covered by the DMA. Alongside TikTok, both Apple and Meta Platforms Inc. have challenged the designation of certain services under the rules.


TikTok appealed to the court to clarify whether it should be covered by the DMA. In a blog post announcing the decision at the time, the company said it’s “the most capable challenger” to the industry’s biggest players.

The video app is coming under scrutiny across the world as its influence grows and amid fears over its Chinese origins. US President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation in April aimed at banning it in the US unless its Chinese owner cedes control of it. That legislation breezed through both chambers of Congress, and ultimately led to TikTok challenging the legality of the bill.

Meanwhile, TikTok has been investigated by EU regulators for creating potentially harmful features for children. Fines for TikTok’s alleged failings can be as high as 1% of its total annual income, under another freshly minted law, the EU’s Digital Services Act.
Will the assassination attempt make Trump more popular?

JULY 17,2024
DW


Assassination attempts or attacks often boost a politician's popularity, as in the case of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro. Observers wonder whether the same will be true for Donald Trump.

https://p.dw.com/p/4iO4D

Following Saturday's assassination attempt, Donald Trump has officially been selected as the Republican presidential nominee at the party's national convention. Some say the shooting may have made him more likely to triumph in the US general election in November.

"It's certainly the case that the attack will garner him additional sympathy," political scientist and Latin America expert Günther Maihold told DW. "As a consequence, the individual moves into a different realm. The population sees them as both particularly vulnerable, and, at the same time, as a savior. This also applies to Trump."

Maihold compared the situation with the attack on Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was critically injured at an election campaign event in Rio de Janeiro on September 6, 2018. The following month, Bolsonaro won the presidential election with 55% of the vote.

Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach during a presidential campaign rally in 2018; he subsequently won the electionImage: Eraldo Peres/AP Photo/picture alliance


'Combination of victimhood and catharsis'

"I do believe there is a kind of Bolsonaro effect," Maihold said. "The candidate becomes a symptom of the disintegration of their society, and, at the same time, a sympathetic figure. It's a combination of victimhood and catharsis. This combination endows them with an additional element of charisma."

Brazilian columnist Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca went one step further.

"Bolsonaro is not the only one to win an election following an assassination attempt," he wrote in the daily newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. "[US President Ronald] Reagan was reelected by a landslide in 1984 after the attempt on his life [in March 1981.]"

In Pinheiro's analysis, "Both were already the favorite; the attempt on their life only sealed their victory. The same is likely to happen with Trump."
Modi survived an attack

This was also true for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On October 27, 2013, he survived a bomb attack in Patna, the regional capital of the Indian state of Bihar, carried out by the Islamist organizations Indian Mujahideen and Students Islamic Movement of India.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently won re-election; he first came to power in 2013 after surviving a bomb attackImage: -/AFP/Getty Images

The attack occurred in the middle of the election campaign. Voting took place between April 7 and May 12, 2014, and Modi and his BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) won a majority in the Indian parliament for the first time. He has now been in power for ten years.

Like all heads of state and government around the world, Modi condemned the attack on Trump and called for peace. However, beyond the official condemnation of political violence, social media platforms are full of people apportioning blame.

'Global Left networks'

Indian government spokesperson Amit Malviya, for example, blamed the so-called "global Left" for the attack. Shortly after it happened, he posted on X, formerly Twitter: "Shinzo Abe, then Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, and now Donald Trump. […] The threat is real. Vile global Left networks are at work."

Bolsonaro's son Flavio is spreading the same narrative. "The far left demonizes and dehumanizes its opponents with lies — with the support of the mainstream media," he wrote, also on X. "And then a 'lone wolf' appears, who has to save the world from the 'enemy of democracy,' the 'genocidal murderer,' or the 'militias.' This is the formula of hate, which has real and almost deadly consequences."

Both commentators are convinced that "assassination attempts always target right-wing and conservative political leaders." But history shows us that this is not the case.
Political murder in Quito

In 1968, the Democrat presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was murdered during the US primary campaign. He was the brother of President John F. Kennedy, also a Democrat, who was assassinated in 1963.

A particularly shocking example was the murder of the Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year. An investigative journalist who had reported on corruption and violence in his homeland, Villavicencio was shot dead following a campaign rally in Quito on August 9, 2023.

The Ecuadorian anti-corruption journalist and presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead in 2023Image: Boris Romoleroux/Agencia Prensa-Independiente/IMAGO

Political violence on the right and left

Worldwide, the list of attacks on presidential candidates is long. Victims include former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who survived being poisoned with dioxin in 2004, as well as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest and former president of Haiti, who was fired on when traveling in a motorcade on March 20, 2017. He escaped uninjured.

"It's irrelevant whether the attack is perpetrated by the left or the right," said political scientist Maihold. In any case, he points out, the attack on Trump doesn't fit the pattern: The shooter was a member of the Republican Party.

"It's more about us reaching a point where polarization is entering a new phase," Maihold said.

He warns that the use of violence is becoming increasingly acceptable.

"This new level of escalation is particularly dramatic in a country like the US, where there is such a high density of weapons," he said.

This article was originally published in German.

Astrid Prange de Oliveira DW editor with expertise in Brazil, globalization and religion





‘Fight, fight, fight!’ or ‘UNITE’? At historic moment, Trump faces rhetorical choice


(Photo illustration by Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; Photo via Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Staff Writer 
July 17, 2024 

When Jennifer Mercieca published a book four years ago titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” some of her friends immediately questioned the title. “‘Genius’?” they asked. “Really?”

Mercieca stood by it. She told her friends that, over her many years studying the former president, Trump’s ability to use words and images to promote himself and his agenda stood out again and again as exceptional.

That same skill set was the first thing that came to mind for Mercieca on Saturday, she said, when she watched Trump rise from a bloodied rally stage after being shot, pump his fist in the air and utter an instant political slogan: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

“To me, that was a perfectly Trumpian moment,” Mercieca said. “He knows what the scene is. He’s a demagogue of the spectacle. He’s an authoritarian P.T. Barnum.”

In the days since the shooting, elected officials, pundits and other political observers have been focused intensely on political rhetoric and its power to incite violence.


He’s an authoritarian P.T. Barnum
— Jennifer Mercieca, author, on Donald Trump

President Biden said it’s time to “cool it down.” Trump said he’s writing a new message of unity into his planned speech for the Republican National Convention on Thursday. “UNITE AMERICA!” he posted to Truth Social, a social media platform largely built on the divisiveness of Trump’s past political barbs.

Under such a spotlight, and in the wake of what some consider an iconic political moment in modern American history, how are voters and political observers the world over to listen to Trump moving forward? If he calls for unity, should they take him seriously?



Neither Trump’s campaign nor the Republican National Committee, which is working closely with the campaign, responded to a request for comment on Trump’s plans.

But Mercieca and other experts who’ve studied Trump, his image and the way he speaks to his base said they are skeptical that Trump will somehow change his tune now. They said they’ll be listening closely for a message of unity Thursday, but don’t expect it to be his only message — or for it to stick around very long.

“When I reflect back on the nine years that he’s been in public [political] life, he’s been very consistent about how he communicates, and it’s always been a message of projecting strength, of using rhetorical strategies that belittle the opposition,” said Mercieca, a political historian and communications professor at Texas A&M.

“He loves the idea of people uniting if that means uniting behind Trump,” she said. “But as soon as any criticism is lodged at him, he will revert back to his normal, aggressive rhetoric.”

Several experts predicted that Trump will indeed use the attempt on his life to call for unity, but in the short term. In the long term, they say, he is more likely to use it to bolster more divisive political narratives he has long relied on, including the idea that ordinary Americans are under imminent threat from an array of foreign and domestic forces, and that he is the only one who can protect them.

Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy,” said he would be shocked if Trump took up any real notion of unity — like “how Democrats love America, too.”

Instead, Rowland predicted Trump will quickly fall back on “the themes he always falls back on — the nationalist theme, the populist theme that the elites don’t care about you and look down on you, and then the theme that he’s the strongman protector of people.”

Many on the conservative right have reinforced their claim — especially since Saturday’s shooting — that Trump is a religious figure, a man sent by God to defend America and restore Christian values to government.

That idea also could become part of Trump’s message, namely if others around him urge him to incorporate it into his speech Thursday or his stump speech on the campaign trail, Rowland said. But “that kind of rhetoric does not come naturally” to Trump, he said — citing the time that Trump as president walked across Lafayette Park in Washington amid street protests and awkwardly held a Bible outside a local church.

More likely, Rowland said, is that Trump will use the assassination attempt to ratchet up the sort of us-against-them rhetoric.

“Part of his appeal is that he’s the straight talker who will be the defender of these groups who feel put upon by the elites,” Rowland said. After Saturday’s shooting, “the harshness of his rhetoric and what he is going to do to protect them has to leverage up — it can’t become more moderate.”

Ian Haney López, a Berkeley law professor, is the author of two books on political rhetoric in the modern era, including “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.”



The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?
— Ian Haney López, law professor

Haney López said American voters listening to Trump in the coming days and months will almost certainly hear the same sort of fear- and race-based messaging that he said have defined Trump’s political career from the start.

“The language that Trump is using is designed to promote and answer a single question: Who threatens you?” Haney López said.
ADVERTISEMENT


“He’s telling a story of constant and immediate threat that is coming from other people around you — and it can be immigrants, it can be African Americans, Black Lives Matter, it can be transgender people, it can be people insisting on gender equality,” Haney López said.

“He’s saying look at your neighbors, look around you, look at the people near you, but whatever you do, don’t look up. Don’t look up at the billionaire class, don’t look at large shareholders, don’t look at Wall Street, don’t look at the petrochemical industry.”

Haney López said the assassination attempt on Trump will bolster the idea already adopted wholly by Trump and his campaign that white America is “locked into racial conflict,” and that “others” — such as immigrants — “need to be restrained or caged or expelled” to ensure white Americans come out on top.

Mercieca agreed.

“He’s constantly telling his audience that they are the real Americans, they are the good Americans, they are the only ones who count, they have been left behind and humiliated, but he sees them as the good people they are and he will fight for them,” she said. “It’s a politics that is fascist, frankly. It is authoritarian.”

These tactics can be effective politically, she said, but they have consequences. Such rhetoric, she and others warned, spurs the kind of political violence that people on all sides of the political spectrum are denouncing.

Mercieca said data show Trump’s attacks on groups of people have spurred “stochastic terrorism” — or political violence against groups of people targeted with hostile political rhetoric.

Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said such data are everywhere — and undeniable.


SHARDS FROM TELEPROMTER HIT TRUMP'S EAR, NOT A BULLET


Hate crimes against Black people, Levin said, rose when Trump used harsh language to condemn Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. They rose against Asian people when Trump used anti-Chinese rhetoric in speaking about COVID-19. They rose against Latinos when Trump stoked fears about “caravans” of migrants arriving on the southern border.

Levin said “hate rhetoric” is always high during election years, and that everyone — voters, candidates and Trump especially — would be wise to “tone it down.”

Levin said Trump’s next move — and his Thursday speech — matter, but how he and others continue to discuss the stakes of the race from now until November will matter more.

“People are much more likely to embrace bigoted stereotypes when there is a narrative behind it that is repeated and repeated in a way that is entertaining and comforting,” Levin warned. “And you can hear it in the lilt of Trump’s voice.”

More to Read

Abcarian: Don’t let political rhetoric distract you from this truth about the Trump shooting
July 17, 2024


Opinion: This is a turning point for Trump. What will he make of it?
July 17, 2024


Column: Trump betrays call for unity by embracing J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene
July 16, 2024



Kevin Rector
Kevin Rector is a legal affairs reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering the California Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and other legal trends and issues, and chipping in on coverage of the 2024 election. He started with The Times in 2020 and previously covered the Los Angeles Police Department for the paper. Before that, Rector worked at the Baltimore Sun for eight years, where he was a police and investigative reporter and part of a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. More recently, he was part of a Times team awarded the 2023 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress for coverage of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. He is from Maryland.