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Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Gaza, Ukraine, and the Moral Bankruptcy of the “Rules-Based Order”

The vastly different responses to the two wars reveal the hypocrisy at the heart of global statecraft

AUTHOR
Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen

05/24/2024

https://www.rosalux.de/

Protests against the war in Gaza in Indonesia, 13 November 2023.

Photo: IMAGO / Pond5 Images

LONG READ

The last two years have witnessed impassioned debates about the role of the “Global South” in international politics to an extent not seen since the early 1980s. In early 2022, countries in the Global North criticized the Global South’s reluctance to participate in the unilateral sanctions against Russia, a country that invaded its neighbour — a clear violation of international law — and triggered a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By refusing to participate, the argument went, the countries of the Global South were crudely prioritizing their own strategic interests over the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, democracy, and human rights.

Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen worked at the UN Development Programme in Indonesia (2019–22) and the UN Economic and Social Commission for the Asia-Pacific in Thailand (2016–17) on rural development, peacebuilding, trade policy, and survey data and analysis.

For the Global South, however, the overriding question since 24 February 2022 has been, would support for the West’s cause in Ukraine lead to a more egalitarian and consistent rules-based world order, or rather reinforce the hierarchical status quo, characterized by the selective application of and compliance with international law across different wars and occupations? The answer to that question has been on full display since Israel’s latest war on Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, began. The result has been an ongoing collapse of confidence in the so-called “rules-based international order” not only in the eyes of the Global South, but also in the eyes of many feminist, environmentalist, and human rights movements around the world, who are appalled at their Western counterparts’ treatment of the Palestinians.

Popular anger continues to rage against a peripheralized, liberal notion of humanity that values civilian lives differently across different wars and occupations. On 21 November 2023, following Israel’s siege and destruction of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, the Indonesian aid organization that ran the hospital, the Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, published a searing open letter to US President Joe Biden, stating: “You have destroyed the international rules of the game, insulted the authority of the United Nations (UN), torn apart the sense of justice, hurt human values, and tarnished the face of human civilization.”

On 21 October 2023, King Abdullah II of Jordan spoke against the West’s unabashed renunciation of international law when it comes to the Palestinian people: “The message that the Arab world is hearing is loud and clear. Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli ones. Our lives matter less than other lives. The application of the international laws is optional. Human rights have boundaries, they stop at borders, at races, at religions. That is a very, very dangerous message, as the consequences of continued international apathy and inaction will be catastrophic — on us all.”

Notwithstanding the internal contradictions and divergent “national interests” pursued by various states within the Global South, Western leaders, diplomats, and publics are living in denial as they continue to disregard this anger and provide, whether tacitly and openly, unconditional support for Israel’s occupation. By displaying such flagrant double standards, they undermine their own credibility in the eyes of billions. Indeed, the long-term consequences of this deepening but longstanding North–South alienation will be grave.
Western Moralizing and the Illusion of Reciprocity

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the West was unequivocal in its condemnation, while even in the Global South, shock and repugnance were common beneath the layers of official neutrality.

Indeed, two UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions to this effect were passed on 2 and 24 March 2022, relying on widespread support — or at least abstention — from the Global South. Among the major abstainers, discomfort with openly endorsing Russia’s invasion stemmed not only from the country’s undeniable violation of the UN Charter and international law, but also how the West’s unilateral sanctions and weaponization of various multilateral institutions and the global economy — from the scrambling of alternative energy sources to foreign currency — would leave their already pandemic-hit economies and societies even more fragile and weakened.

In March 2023, Kenyan president William Ruto explained his country’s opposition to the Russian invasion as follows: “It is not about the Global North or South, but about what’s right and wrong.” Nevertheless, he said this while sharing the Global South’s many fundamental grievances with the current international system, including inadequate climate finance commitments, indebtedness constraining health and education spending, and wasteful and discriminatory "vaccine nationalism" throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ukraine's government, for its part, acknowledged its decades of lacklustre diplomacy with the Global South, and 2023 saw an unprecedented expansion of engagement beyond the trans-Atlantic world. Particularly noteworthy were the preliminary meetings held in Copenhagen in June 2023, Jeddah in August 2023, and Malta in October 2023 — all which were attended by national security advisors and negotiators from China, Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, and Qatar, among others — in preparation for a “global peace summit” based on Ukraine’s ten-point peace plan.

Overall, condemning attitudes toward the Global South’s neutrality or reluctant support for Ukraine overshadowed Western perceptions in 2022 and 2023. Yet, export data from major EU economies revealed accelerated trade and commercial flows with Russia via a host of third-party countries, complicating Western accusations that Russia’s sustained war efforts rests primarily on the complicity of the Global South.

Rather than a sense of betrayal per se, the events of the last six months seem to confirm an unprincipled opportunism — in the West as much as in the East.

At the same time, Western and Ukrainian diplomats put serious efforts into rallying support across the Global South. This was less about sending arms to wartime Ukraine, and more about Ukraine’s imperative of developing long-term relationships in the Global South in light of the objective fact that geopolitical, technological, and economic developments in the twenty-first century will increasingly be centred on this part of the world.

During the meetings in Copenhagen, an EU official affirmed that any just peace in Ukraine “must be based on the principles of the UN Charter and the international laws concerning territorial integrity and sovereignty”. Yet, this political and moral certainty on the part of the Global North, which appeared rock-solid in the face of Russia’s war on Ukraine, seemed to evaporate with Israel’s war on Gaza and escalating violence across the West Bank

By the same token, in 2015, France and Mexico jointly proposed restricting the veto power of permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) in cases of abject genocide and crimes against humanity. The proposal evoked a sense of urgency and gained broader international support following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and by July 2022 it had been endorsed by 106 UN member states, including Ukraine. Yet, to this day, France remains the only permanent member of the Security Council to endorse it, and whatever momentum it had collapsed after the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians and unprecedented devastation of Gaza began to unfold in the wake of 7 October 2023.

Perhaps the most morally and legally crushing complication, however, has been the West’s all-out diplomatic, financial, and military support for Israel’s punitive assault across Palestine. The West’s contrasting responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the risks of a prolonged and expanded Israeli occupation over the Palestinian people have fundamentally called into question whether the Global South’s gestures of tacit cooperation around Ukraine over the last two years will ever be translated into reciprocity from Ukraine and the West on other pressing issues that concern the Global South, including (but by no means limited to) Palestine.
Empathy for Ukraine, Apathy for Gaza

Dehumanizing portrayals of Palestinian civilians, including children, have emanated from powerful governments and influential media alike in a bid to justify violence against a besieged population. In the words of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), “Gazans feel that they are not treated as other civilians. They feel the world is equating all of them to Hamas.”

Such portrayals are part of a broader pattern of bottomless apathy when it comes to Palestinian suffering. This pattern rings tragically similar to Russia’s justifications for invading Ukraine, citing an alleged need to “de-Nazify” the Ukrainian population and incorporate the latter into the “Russian world”. In the eyes of Russia and Israel — occupying forces according to international law — both the Ukrainian and Palestinian senses of nationhood are false, and can only be redeemed through a civilizational “liberation” by extermination. This disregard for genuine political grievances and aspirations on the ground, treating local resistance movements as mere puppets of nefarious geopolitical powers, has historically often justified untold destruction, as was the case during the Vietnam War (1955–75).

On 27 October 2023, following the passage of a UNGA resolution calling for a humanitarian truce and protection of civilians in Gaza, Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which voted in favour of the Ukraine resolutions in 2022, railed against Ukraine and the West’s contrasting responses by drawing direct comparisons between the pleas of civilians in Ukraine and Palestine. In the words of an Indonesian diplomat: “Those who did not support this resolution are those who scream loudly about the civilian casualties in the Ukraine war. Unfortunately, they do not recognize the civilian victims, especially children, who have been massacred in the completely disproportionate fighting in Gaza.”

The message emanating from smaller nations like Palestine and Ukraine is that long-suppressed political aspirations and indeed history itself have returned to the world stage.

The second anniversary of the Russian invasion arrived at a time of faltering global momentum for Ukraine and the West. On 24 February 2024, the countries of the Global North uncharacteristically refrained from introducing a new UNGA resolution in support of Ukraine, largely out of fear that the latter’s declining support across the world would be confirmed. These non-binding resolutions, which have little practical implication or enforcement, are more about mobilizing and sustaining global relevance for Ukraine’s enduring cause. The same approach has been crucial to the political and legal struggle of the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the more than 180 Palestine-related UN resolutions passed since 1948.

At the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi on 24 February 2024, various EU officials argued that Indian purchases of discounted Russian fuels were “producing Russian bullets”, while ignoring their own support for Israel’s carnage in Gaza. This scene serves as an exemplary case of a more fundamental point: among the major countries that were initially principled enough to symbolically support Ukraine at the UN, Ukraine’s and the West’s votes on Gaza and treatment of the Palestine question “will be remembered”. Rather than a sense of betrayal per se, the events of the last six months seem to confirm an unprincipled opportunism — in the West as much as in the East. In this sense, the position of Ukraine abstainers from a strategic geopolitical viewpoint, regardless of their moral and legal justifications, may in fact have been vindicated.
Ukraine’s Agency in the Current Global Predicament

In our age of renewed great power rivalries, the message emanating from smaller nations like Palestine and Ukraine is that, unlike the depoliticized age of capitalist economic globalization (1991–2020s), long-suppressed political aspirations and indeed history itself have returned to the world stage. They can no longer be ignored in the name of international trade, freedom of navigation, and the stability of the “rules-based” order.

There are nevertheless crucial differences in the ideological nature of the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine: the paths of either insisting on a more egalitarian and consistent application of international law across different wars and occupations, or rejuvenating a decaying liberal notion of hierarchical selectivity in the application thereof. In that sense, Ukraine, along with the rest of the West, bears much responsibility for its current diplomatic isolation.

Following the killing of some 1,200 Israeli civilians and combatants by Hamas on 7 October 2023, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made his country’s position clear by siding with Israel in a manner that went beyond rightfully condemning the attack. In many statements made between 7 and 17 October 2023, Zelenskyy portrayed the longstanding Israeli–Palestinian conflict in terms of a belligerent “war on terror” framework, rather than the historical and legal contexts and the escalatory situation in the lead-up to the attack.

As courageously implied by the UN General Secretary António Guterres on 25 October 2023, the conflict’s history began 56 years ago. Prior to 7 October, 2023 had already been the deadliest year in Palestine the past decade, with Save the Children describing it as the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the current death toll of over 8,000 children in Gaza since the war began (the final figure will almost certainly be much higher) can only make anyone with a conscience feel anguished as much as numb.

Yet the Ukrainian state, from its presidential office to the armed forces, immediately drew equivalences between Ukraine and Israel, and between Hamas and Palestinian civilians. The office of Ukraine’s armed forces released a video portraying both Israel and Ukraine as waging wars in defence of “civilization”. Further escalatory violence was in effect encouraged. This contrasts sharply with the immediate responses of Singapore and Kenya, both close defence and security partners of Israel, who nevertheless called for mutual de-escalation and voted for a ceasefire at the UN on 27 October 2023.

On 13 October 2023, Zelenskyy’s aide, Andriy Yermak, published an op-ed in which he made the unambiguous case of “why Ukraine stands with Israel”. This was published on the same day that Israel asked the UN to forcibly transfer 1.1 million people out of northern Gaza within 24 hours, a move that was widely condemned as an attempt at ethnic cleansing, if not what could plausibly amount to genocide, according to an interim assessment by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Personnel, patients, and new-borns were not spared, and for many the move indeed ended up being a death sentence. Even Norway and Ireland, two close partners of the US, immediately demanded Israeli restraint and highlighted Palestinian suffering alongside their Israeli counterparts. In the words of the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “In the laws of armed conflict, there is no hierarchy in pain and suffering.”

The wars taking place in Gaza and Ukraine serve as a poignant reminder that how conflicts are portrayed is ultimately about securing one’s place on the privileged side of an already deeply unequal world order.

Beyond Israel’s allies and partners across the West, no other leader of a country that formally recognizes Palestinian statehood espoused as much support for Israel’s unrestrained retaliation as Zelenskyy. But as a Ukrainian poll from 15 December 2023 revealed, it goes beyond Zelenskyy: Israel’s military actions enjoy widespread support within Ukrainian society, as “a choice being in favour of a free democratic world against a world of medieval terror”.

Ukraine and the West began to belatedly express their humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians on 17 October, only after the latest Israeli assault in Gaza had already obliterated 825 entire families from Gaza’s civil registry. The epitome of this was reached on 31 January 2024, when Ukraine’s envoy to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsa, stood next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together with a handful of other UN envoys in a united call to defund and replace the UNRWA — despite the apocalyptic scale of devastation in Gaza and escalating settler violence in the West Bank.

The scene poignantly contrasted with how many middle- and low-income countries generously donated to Ukraine at the height of the Russian invasion through various UN agencies, sometimes under Western pressure. These countries also saw substantial Western development aid in key areas — from renewable energy to education — abruptly cut throughout 2022–3, as funds were diverted towards supporting refugees coming from Ukraine and the country’s wartime survival. This sort of zero-sum game is precisely why many governments and peoples across the Global South do not share the illusion that the end of the Russo–Ukrainian War will produce a more egalitarian and consistent “rules-based order”.

As much was symbolically manifested by a 14 November 2022 UNGA vote on setting up an “international reparations mechanism” to make Russia pay war reparations to Ukraine: 94 countries voted in favour, while 87 either abstained or voted against. Many understand that such a mechanism is unlikely to be invoked in other wars or occupations — in other words, serving selective justice. It is less a matter of applying double standards as such (of which no country is innocent), but the standards of self-proclaimed democracies themselves. An accelerated loss of attention and support for Ukraine’s cause is the result.
The Global South’s Moment?

The actions of both Russia and Ukraine are symptoms rather than causes of a general crisis in contemporary international politics, in which one’s own liberation necessitates the dehumanization of civilian victims of other wars, occupations, and oppressive regimes. In turn, the violence of unipolarity — i.e., the attempt to rejuvenate an ostensibly liberal, hierarchical rules-based order — is countered by the violence of multipolarity, in which only the politics and agency of rising great powers and their predominantly conservative ruling elites matter.

The wars taking place in Gaza and Ukraine serve as a poignant reminder that how conflicts are portrayed is ultimately about securing one’s place on the privileged side of an already deeply unequal world order. This indeed constitutes the ongoing tragedy of the Global South: although rightfully outraged at the double standards of the West, they themselves remain unable to collectively devise a more universalistic and progressive mode of governance, whether at home or abroad. In that sense, criticism of the West for its own sake often becomes regressive.

In this context, South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ was welcomed as a rare exception to the tide of post-colonial realism, characterized by the pursuit of “national interests” and depoliticized developmental and security-driven imperatives across the Global South since 1991. Accordingly, the provisional measures announced by the ICJ on 26 January 2024 were viewed by many observers as “a moment of the Global South”. This sentiment is partly justified: for many ordinary people around the world, their empathy with the Palestinian people also constitutes a protest against their own governments’ apathy and cynically transactional foreign policies. A degree of realistic scepticism vis-à-vis said sentiment is nevertheless warranted.

For South Africa’s courage must be appreciated not only in contrast to the complicity of the West, but also to the calculated and tepid approach of the rising global powers. Many governments across the Global South are themselves no longer driven by democratic and egalitarian imperatives, as they (at least ostensibly) were for most of the twentieth century. The contemporary politics behind the terms “Global South” and “decolonization” have increasingly become captured by right-wing governments and political forces, in which past transnational struggles for political, economic, and social equality and justice against the discontents of liberal universalism, imperial rivalries, and global capitalism have been replaced with civilizational particularism and culturalism.

Once defined by its anti-colonial heritage, India’s foreign policy is currently undergoing a profound ideological transformation, and the country has issued deeply dehumanizing rhetoric against the Palestinians. Many governments in the Arab world continue to be cautious in their support for Palestine, well aware that the issue remains a potential catalyst for criticism of their own administrations. The protracted disunity within the Palestinian political leadership should also not be downplayed.

When hearts and minds quietly change below the surface of an otherwise resilient and powerful liberal order, then imaginations and preparations toward a viable alternative have inevitably begun, even if only unconsciously.

In Asia, India and Vietnam are perhaps the only states that enjoy strong relations with the US, Israel, Russia, and Iran simultaneously, despite their traditional anti-colonial solidarity with Palestine. During Vietnam’s own struggle for national liberation, the Palestinian Liberation Organization offered unwavering support in its wars with the United States (1965–73), the Khmer Rouge (1979–89), and China (1979–89). As a result, unlike India, Vietnam has consistently voted for a ceasefire in Gaza at the UN and pledged diplomatic and financial support for UNRWA. But beyond its formal proclamations of support for Palestinian statehood, its overall response to Israel’s onslaught has been marked by an unusual tepidity and at times disturbing silence. While evocations of Vietnam’s national liberation and the global anti-war protest movements of the 1960–70s have only grown louder across the world since 7 October, such references remain almost absent in Vietnamese government discourses, state media coverage, and public debates.

Along with growing bilateral military and security cooperation, Vietnam became the second Southeast Asian country to sign a free trade agreement with Israel in July 2023. Vietnam announced the agreement’s ratification by its national assembly on 27 February 2024, as the carnage across Palestine continued. If Che Guevara declared in 1967 that “Vietnam — a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes of a whole world of forgotten peoples — is tragically alone”, then today, Vietnam has been replaced with Palestine.

South Africa’s case against Israel is reminiscent of patterns from the nineteenth century whereby, in the words of legal historian Ntina Tzouvala, “non-Western international lawyers subscribed to the logic of improvement, wholeheartedly embracing the process of capitalist transformation”, while “the same lawyers challenged the self-appointment of their Western colleagues as the sole arbiters of the civilizing process”. Such tensions have re-emerged periodically ever since. Moreover, although the UNSC has been paralyzed by great power rivalries and unable to address abject war crimes around the world, various UN agencies and personnel on the ground have stood up against the organized violence directed at the Palestinian people.

What these simultaneous phenomena indicate about the future is that major countries in the Global South will grow bolder in re-claiming international law, seeking to counteract the ways it has been weaponized or renounced with impunity, as most evidently in Palestine. In other words, international law as the normative foundation of any claim to legitimacy and justice will remain a vital tool, especially for Palestinian statehood. The Global South, notwithstanding its own contradictions and prejudices, has a major role to play here.
The Slow Decay of Liberal Humanism

The West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine may in the end be remembered as an unsuccessful attempt at reinvigorating a decaying, selective, and hierarchical liberal “rules-based” order. The latest Israeli–Palestinian War, by contrast, may be remembered as the war that changed the world — because it also changed the hearts and minds of its liberal adherents across the Global South. It is less a question of Western or Eastern, but rather liberal humanism as such that has died. When hearts and minds quietly change below the surface of an otherwise resilient and powerful liberal order, then imaginations and preparations toward a viable alternative have inevitably begun, even if only unconsciously.

In many ways, this moment echoes the lamentations of anti-colonial intellectuals, activists, and statesmen around the Global North’s betrayal of liberal humanism with respect to national self-determination in the twentieth century. If the horrifying images from the Vietnam War and subsequent anti-war movements constituted a watershed moment across the world, then the ongoing carnage across Palestine and global protests against it may constitute yet another such moment. It could have transformative implications for the global majority’s perception of the Global North’s values and principles, and build momentum for a new, multipolar, and anarchic world that nobody is prepared for.

At stake now is not only Ukraine’s and Palestine’s national survival, but the survival of international law and anything that is left of basic human decency. The violence and brutality of the last two years must prompt all of us — whether in the Global South or North, East or West — to enter into an honest and thorough introspection about the kind of world that we want to live in. What kind of geopolitics, notions of sovereignty, human rights, and legality are needed to overcome today’s challenges? Otherwise, we will slip ever closer towards the abyss of a more violent, nihilistic, and soulless world, in which the weak are crushed in the interests of the powerful few.

Students Are Catching Their Universities in Bed With Arms Companies

Busted. by Zac Larkham

27 May 2024

BAE Systems donated more than £8.5m to the University of Sheffield between 2012 and 2022.

UK universities invest nearly £430m in companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law. These commercial ties are under the spotlight like never before due to the genocide in Gaza, and there are now over 30 university protest encampments now across the UK calling for demilitarisation and divestment.

Some protesters have been busy taking a forensic look at just how enmeshed in the arms industry and Israeli apartheid their universities are.

Top of the league table is the University of Sheffield, which received over £72m in direct funding from some of the world’s largest arms manufacturers between 2012 and 2022 – more than any other UK university, and more than Oxford and Cambridge combined. In the last five years alone, the University of Sheffield took £42m from arms companies.

Last week, the Sheffield Campus Coalition for Palestine (SCCP) – the organisation behind the University of Sheffield encampment – released their Genocide and Apartheid Complicity Report. (Full closure, I did a small amount of editing work on this report.)

It shows that funding from arms manufacturers allows these companies to influence teaching and research areas, provide students with career opportunities in the defence sector, greenwash their products and contribute as little as 4.5% towards their own R&D costs by accessing state funded research to develop weapons. (The university denies that the funding influences research areas.)

Activists have suspected for some time that the University of Sheffield takes more money from arms companies than any other UK university. What that money has been used for is often unclear, but one beneficiary is BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms company and the world’s sixth largest, which donated more than £8.5m to the university between 2012 and 2022.

BAE builds components for the F-35 fighter jets currently being used in Gaza. In February, a Dutch court ordered the country to halt all exports of F-35 parts, citing the “undeniable risk” the parts could be used in “serious violations of international humanitarian law”.

BAE Systems is so grateful to the university that in 2017 it gave two awards to its Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC). The centre’s research was being used to “process a wide range of composite components for military aircraft, saving the company millions of pounds in capital and operational costs over the coming years,” said Ben Morgan, head of the AMRC’s Integrated Manufacturing Group.

The Sheffield report says the university is also currently helping BAE build parts for the RAF’s high tech next-generation Tempest fighter aircraft and armour plating for BAE’s land vehicles, among other projects.

A spokesperson from the University of Sheffield said: “We recognise that some of our research and innovation projects have the potential for dual use and include some research related to defence and global security challenges, however these projects are subject to stringent due-diligence processes, scrutiny and oversight.

“We know that some members of our University community have concerns about this area and we will continue to review our approach, to ensure we are upholding our values and supporting academic freedom.”

Until recently, the university has been stonewalling activists calling for demilitarisation. In the last two years, which have seen a spate of occupations, blockades and now a three-week encampment, management has failed to meet students and staff to discuss their demands.

Last week, however, the university appears to have been rattled by the report.

University management forced the launch event for the report hosted by the local University and Colleges Union (UCU) branch off campus by limiting the number of attendees to 100, demanding no face coverings, banning banners, flags and placards and promising a heavy security presence who would check IDs and bags of everyone attending. (The university says that like all on campus events, the launch was subject to a risk assessment and recommended some safety measures.)

The vice chancellor later sent an email to the entire university assuring students all research goes through “stringent due-diligence processes”, such as credit checks and screening for links to sanctioned countries, making this the first time in recent memory that senior management has addressed all university members explicitly about ties to the arms trade.

A spokesperson from the Sheffield camp told Novara Media: “We refuse to believe that the University is unaware it has blood on its hands. The implication is that they simply do not care. We have one clear message: attempts to ignore us or to remove us will be unsuccessful. Students and staff will continue to challenge the university. They might be able to sit with their consciences – we cannot.”

At the London School of Economics (LSE), students have occupied the Marshall building last week – named after major donor and part-owner of rightwing news channel GB News Paul Marshall.

The LSE Palestine Society has also published a report this month examining what they believe is LSE’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, the arms trade and climate breakdown through their investments.

Research from LSE’s own Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment shows that divesting from fossil fuel companies does not damage value and returns. Students say LSE is not following its own advice and the ESG policy is full of holes.

LSE has an endowment currently valued at approximately £485m. Of that, the report says the university has investments worth £89m in 137 companies involved in what it calls “four egregious activities”: crimes against the Palestinian people, extraction and/or distribution of fossil fuels, proliferation and/or manufacture of arms and financing of fossil companies or nuclear weapon producers.

£48.5m is invested in companies involved in crimes against the Palestinian people and £1.8m in 13 arms companies. A further £7m is invested in companies involved with fossil fuels, £67m in organisations such as JP Morgan that finance the fossil fuel industry and nuclear weapons producers, and £174m is administered by eight mutual fund managers that have lent billions to fossil fuel companies and nuclear weapons producers.

As protests continue, activists have made it clear they are not going anywhere. Ethan Chua, a 2nd year Masters student studying International and World History at LSE, said: “LSE continues to actively profit from the genocide of Palestinians through its egregious investment activities. With no universities left in Gaza, the moral duty of our institution to the Palestinian people is clear.”

A spokesperson for LSE said: “We are carefully considering this report and will respond in due course.

“LSE is committed to strengthening our approach to responsible investment in line with our Environmental, Social and Governance Policy, which was adopted in 2022 with the aid of student input.

“This policy includes LSE not making direct or, as far as possible, indirect investments in companies engaged in tobacco manufacture or indiscriminate arms manufacture. It also seeks to eliminate direct investments, and greatly reduce exposure of indirect investments, to the worst polluting fossil fuels.”

Zac Larkham is a freelance journalist and student activist at Sheffield Hallam University.

Monday, May 27, 2024

Critics of Campus Protests are Weaponizing

Anti-Semitism to Undermine Student

Resistance

BY DANIEL FALCONE

MAY 27, 2024
Facebook

Image by Hany Osman.

College campuses and universities across the country have organized some of the largest peace activities and anti-war protests since 1969. As the social movement points in specific directions in calling for Palestinian liberation, over 100 schools scattered across the United States from American to Yale University have participated and issued their own sets of “Five Demands.”

College students especially are utilizing and expanding their educational experiences and cutting their activist teeth on campus in the form of teach-ins, demonstrations, lectures, speeches, and creative art, largely on their own but also with facilitation and professors in solidarity. Further, it’s not lost on young people elsewhere, as news of the movement reached the Gazan children along with families expressing their gratitude.

A common reaction to the widespread nature and success stories on the part of the student activists has been for naysayers to label and paint the demonstrators and demonstrations as antisemites engaging in antisemitic activity. Perhaps a tool and offshoot from the modern hasbara playbook. Its purpose is to draw suspicion over a real and authentic concern of historical and current antisemitism.

There are several ways critics and campus protest skeptics have constructed their own reality to undermine student resistance. The methods include counter-protesting, the calling of police, message distortion, flimsy polling data, and the utilization of the mainstream press.

From the look of the counter-protesting, the goals look fairly obvious. First, counter-protesting presupposes that the Mideast world was a tidy and peaceful place on October 6th and that Iranian and Lebanese proxies simply created a need for power and dominance to defend “good states” (US, Israel, Saudi Arabia) from “bad states” (Yemen, Iran, Syria) on October 7th. As reported by journalist Joshua Frank, one Columbia professor’s motivation to counter-protest wasn’t based on any intellectual argument at all but rather significant familial ties to arms manufacturing.

Secondly, counter-protesting invites people to think that Israeli force and Palestinian resistance present a “both sides” argument (bad) and this ranges to counter-protesting that characterizes Netanyahu policy as self-defense (worse). Another motivation of counter-protesting is to draw ire and/or elicit a slip up in words or actions from budding activists in a further effort to categorize them as antisemitic. Hecklers of the encampments have tried to test random students with gotcha questions regarding geography (re: from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), to sending in staged distractions to enhance the possibility of media spectacle. These techniques haven’t amounted to much but the proposition alone that they are feasible is enough to warrant a concern regarding perhaps the ultimate goal of counter-protesting – to necessitate a presence for law enforcement.

The idea and symbolic presence of law enforcement in the face of the encampment promotes the idea that the cops are there to catch bad people and to ensure that good kids can safely get to class (they always could) when in fact the role of the police hasn’t changed since the days of ancient societies. That is, the main roles of the police are to protect private property and concentrations of wealth and power from well-organized outside forces of resistance. Often, it is the police force’s duty to make sure that mass movements and mobilization techniques are struck down while maintaining a highly stratified society based on law and order. Universities are complicit businesses that must carry on undisturbed just as free enterprise must remain steady.

It does not help the students either that almost all of New York City’s political class, as an example, is tied to the established order and Biden’s bipartisan consensus when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although they differ from Republicans, Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul are poised to undermine the student’s resistance just as they are to cut public resources whenever their respective donor classes apply economic or political pressure. When a mayor or governor cannot deviate very far from the established order, the police become willing combatants against the students and professors. The misinformation on the part of the police was best illustrated when the NYPD Commissioner held up a copy of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction Series (Terrorism) believing it was a student’s “how to” book. It served as a microcosm for how the entirety of the encampments have been misunderstood by people with authority.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the politics of encampment are how the detractors purposefully change the meaning of protest rhetoric as a scare tactic. In response, it reached a level of such carelessness that a Peace Action Group in New York went out of its way to prohibit signs, slogans, and chants at one of their pro-Palestine rallies. They feared that saying such words as “decolonize,” “intifada,” and “revolution,” (even when Jewish activists wanted to use these words) all constituted terms beyond their control. This form of liberal respectability unfortunately played into the hands of the forces attempting to “other” the campus protests. This wasn’t liberal rationality to eliminate infantile leftism as a knee jerk reaction, but servility to power and privilege to protect their organization.

It gets worse. In a recent Hillel Poll, it found that 61% of college students surveyed cited antisemitism on campus in the wave of protests and encampments. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also concluded that intimidation and assault were increasing because of the protests, while disrupting the ability to attend class (as if student engagement is not a part of higher educations’ purpose). Sociologist Eman Abdelhadi has documented the dialogue and mutual respect found in the encampments that counters Hillel’s forms of cooked data that frames hand selected polls to intentionally distort specific points of view.

Although Hillel’s polling might be more of a political reaction to the reality that many campus demonstrators are in fact Jewish, and not antisemites, it nonetheless sounds convincing, especially when you do not wish to deny a student’s experience or feelings on the matter.

International relations scholar Richard Falk indicated to me that Hillel polls are suspect for a variety of reasons. First, the polls serve as ways to discourage activism that a strong majority of Hillel students may have previously opposed on its merits. Second, facts get in the way of the polls. 15 of 17 ICJ judges (of the two dissenters, one was the ad hoc Israel judge, the other a juridically deviant Ugandan judge with poor prior reputation) have views aligned with the student protests, and not the government. And on an urgent issue of genocide, they support the right of protest. Falk posited further, “Would we accept a comparable argument that anti-Nazi protests in the late 1930s should be suspended because they made German students uncomfortable? Would anyone dare make such an argument?” “Deconstructing the polls is an important issue,” Falk asserted, “given their manipulative role in the present context as justification for encroaching upon the core role of academic freedom in a democratic society.” Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson stated that historically, white students said similar things when schools attempted integration.

Professor and author Stephen Zunes explained to me that Hillel potentially reaches out to students that reinforce their organizational mission. Since Hillel has moved to the right over the last ten years or so, “[they are] essentially saying non-Zionist Jewish students are unwelcomed.” He continued by stating, “even if they did reach out to a more representative sampling, non-Zionist Jewish students might not want to respond if they knew it was from Hillel.” Zunes also pointed out to me: “If [students] are being told repeatedly that ‘River to the Sea’ is not a call for a democratic secular state but the killing/expelling of Israeli Jews and that ‘globalize the intifada’ is not a call for civil resistance but for terrorism against Jews, it would not be surprising that they would say they encountered language that was ‘antisemitic, threatening or derogatory toward Jewish people.’”

Collectively it seems, the goals of the counter-protestors, police, politicians, polls, and corporate media, are to conflate student support for Palestine with the center-right Hamas (who won with less than 50% of the vote in 2006) while categorizing them as a single entity without social, political, economic, or military wings. Perhaps no journalist is more skillful in this enterprise as New York Times reporter Bret Stephens. In his recent “What a ‘Free Palestine’ Actually Means,” he points out that “Israeli settlers have run riot against their Palestinian neighbors,” but cynically asserts it’s all for naught since “under Hamas” there will simply be no democracy for LGBTQ+ people, thanks to college students. He also oversimplifies and cites corrupt Arab leadership to lessen the burden on Western human rights abuses, as his underlying goal in the piece is to delegitimize any view outside of the political center. Stephens further presumes that the student protestors’ only choices are reactionary forms of ethnic nationalism on either side but to avoid the side they don’t know, Palestine. It reads as an unfortunate concoction of patronizing, gaslighting, and victim blaming.

In this writing, I looked at the ways in which campus protest skeptics have developed methods to disparage the encampments. To label them, detractors have crafted an alternate reality or, “big lie” to make the students look hateful, unorganized, unknowing, and disruptive, when they have in fact been the exact opposite. On all counts, the students have been effective in carrying out one of the prime educative examples found in many school mission statements – making extensions beyond the classroom – a feature that institutions advertise, but fear happening because it involves young people questioning the legitimacy of authority and the abuses of power.

Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City.

US: Why Protesting Genocide is Dubbed as ‘Anti-Semitism’

Prabhat Patnaik | 18 May 2024

Weaponising 'anti-semitism' is another face of new McCarthyism linked to the rise of the Right and ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world.

(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The current protests in US university campuses demanding “divestment” from firms linked to Israel’s military machine, are reminiscent of the protests that had swept these campuses in the late sixties and early seventies demanding an end to the Vietnam war. There is, however, a major difference: the US had then been directly involved in the war, while today it is not. This had meant a draft then in the US while today there is none, which makes the current student protests completely free of even a shadow of self-interest.

By the same token, direct US involvement in that war and hence the daily loss of lives of US personnel had invested the calls within the US establishment for ending the Vietnam war with a seriousness that is sorely missing in all such calls today. The fact of the US not being a direct combatant, therefore, makes the protests of the students much more principled and serious, while it makes the pronouncements on peace of the establishment much less principled and serious.

The students, in short, are moved by a pure sense of humanity. Their protests are motivated by an abhorrence for genocide, for settler colonialism, and for imperialist complicity in an apartheid Zionist regime; they are an expression of humanity’s quest for peace and fraternity.

The US establishment, on the other hand, indulges in double talk: while paying lip service to peace it does everything to prolong the conflict, and while professing opposition to the inflicting of cruelty on innocent civilians, continues supplying arms for inflicting such cruelty.

The humanity on one side, the side of the students, is in stark contrast to the chicanery on the other side. If the first is the harbinger of hope for the future, the second represents the frantic dishonesty of a tottering imperialism.

This dishonesty is manifest at every level. For years now, the metropolitan countries have been committed to a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian issue, that is, to having a Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel. The point is not whether a “one-State” solution, that is a single State with its central executive elected through universal adult franchise, and within whose boundaries the Palestinians and the Israelis live together, is better than a two-State one; the point is that a two-State solution has been accepted for long by international opinion and also by the imperialist countries.

A corollary of the two-State solution is that a Palestinian State should come into being immediately and be recognised as a full-fledged member of the United Nations. And yet whenever the issue of admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN has come up, the United States, despite being apparently committed to the idea, has exercised its veto at the Security Council which has the final authority in the matter.

This is what happened on April 19. The Zionist State of Israel does not want an independent Palestinian State for that would put an end to its settler colonial project; and the United States, despite its public posturing, goes along with this Zionist project whenever matters come to a head.

On May 10 again the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (with 143 in favour, nine against and 25 abstentions) for full membership of Palestine, and requested the Security Council to reconsider the matter. While the US, along with some of the arch right-wing regimes of the world like Argentina and Hungary voted against, other metropolitan countries (with the exception of France alone which voted in favour) abstained. The US, when the matter comes again before the Security Council, will no doubt exercise its veto once more to thwart not only any prospect of peace, but also the will of the overwhelming mass of the people of the world to resolve the problem.

The same dishonesty is visible in the manner in which the US establishment treats the student movement. Police have been sent to several campuses to break up the encampments set up by the students and hundreds of student protesters have been arrested, despite the fact that the protests have been peaceful.

The use of strong-arm methods to deal with peaceful protests constitutes an assault on the freedom of expression; but it has been justified by the entire American establishment, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump has talked of “Radical mobs taking over our college campuses” and accused Biden of being complicit with such “mobs”.

Biden in turn who has openly supported police action against students, as at Columbia University, in conformity with “liberal” opinion in general, has charged protesting students with “anti-semitism”, a bizarre charge given the fact that student protesters have included a large number of Jewish students!

Hilary Clinton has accused the students of being ignorant of the history of the middle east, as if awareness of such history could condone the perpetration of a genocide!

The anti-Vietnam war movement had at some point acquired the support of important American public figures like Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, but that again was because of America’s direct involvement in the war. In the present case the entire phalanx of establishment politicians has lined up in favour of the war and against the students.

Similar student protests have broken out elsewhere in the metropolitan world and similar strong-arm tactics have been used in many campuses. But there have also been instances of opposition to strong-arm methods. In Britain, for instance, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s advice to vice chancellors of universities that have seen such protests, to use the State machinery to break them up has not gone down well with all vice-chancellors; some have even refused to attend a meeting called by him. But in America there has been no such opposition; university heads who have sought to assert their own judgement on how to deal with the protests, have been forced to resign.

It is this suppression of thought on campuses that has brought the charge of a new McCarthyism being unleashed in the US. Then, as now, it is a group of Right-wing lawmakers that are in the forefront of the attempt to suppress independent thinking on campuses. But the question arises: in the 1950s the context for McCarthyism was provided by the Cold War and the fear of communism; what is it in the present context that is driving this new McCarthyism?

There can be little doubt that the new McCarthyism is linked to the rise of the Right and to the ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world in the context of the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. What the rise of neo-fascism has done is not just to thrust fascist elements that had hitherto occupied the political fringe to the centre-stage, but also to let such elements hegemonise the so-called “liberal” political forces, to create a more or less unified Right-wing consensus that beats down all efforts at a revival of the Left.

It is noteworthy that when Jeremy Corbyn had been elected the leader of the Labour Party in Britain and had mounted a challenge against the establishment that had threatened to “get out of hand”, a conspiracy had been mounted against him by dubbing him “anti-semitic” (because of his sympathy for the Palestinian cause) and even removing him from the Labour Party itself.

Students and teachers in universities still constitute in the metropolis an independent source of thought, and hence a moral force that poses a threat to this Right-wing consolidation. Control over universities, therefore, becomes an important item on the agenda of this Right-wing consolidation. Independence of thought must be destroyed, every trace of humanity must be destroyed, if this Right-wing consolidation is to have its way. What we are seeing in the United States today is this brazen

Unity Through Resistance: 3,000 Pro-Palestine Activists Reach Detroit

Peoples Dispatch | 25 May 2024

Hundreds of Palestine solidarity organizations are gathered in the People’s Conference for Palestine held in Detroit, MI.

Yara Shoufani delivers keynote speech at first day of People's Conference for Palestine (Photo: Zoe Alexandra)

With 3,000 people and hundreds of pro-Palestine organizations converging in a metropolitan area with the largest concentration of Arab Americans, amidst the largest movement for Palestine in US history, the People’s Conference for Palestine feels nothing short of historic.

“Eternal glory to our martyrs, speedy recovery to our wounded, and freedom for our steadfast prisoners,” Mohammed Nabulsi, leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement in Houston, Texas, opened the conference with these explicitly revolutionary invocations on the first day on Friday, May 24. “In the last eight months, we, the Palestinian people, have demonstrated to the entire world, that the only way we can author our own history, and transform our present reality, is the path of unity through resistance.”

Nabulsi, in his capacity as an organizer, is invoking the global nature of the Palestine solidarity movement, which extends far beyond the Arab diaspora of the world and has in fact touched the hearts and minds of every person who stands against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The Palestinian Youth Movement has been at the forefront of the Palestine solidarity struggle across North America, alongside key conveners of the conference, which include National Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, among others. This is a movement that has ignited the consciousness of millions across the continent, moving hundreds of thousands to cast protest votes against an incumbent president who they voted into office, moving students to set up Gaza Solidarity Encampments that bring them in direct confrontation with police and violent Zionists, and moving all major cities across North America in mass mobilization after mass mobilization.

“Gaza has ushered us into a new era: an era where Palestine has become unavoidable,” said Yara Shoufani, a leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement in Toronto, Canada, said during the opening keynote of the conference. “Gaza stands at the center of the world: waging a heroic battle not only against the Zionist enemy and its backers, but in service of world revolution.”

On the first day, conference attendees heard from key figures of the global Palestinian movement, including British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who worked as a doctor at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza in the early weeks of the genocide. He provided a first-hand account of the horrors of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, as well as dispatches he had received from medical workers on the ground in Rafah, where Israel is waging a brutal offensive.

“The wounded are so malnourished when they are wounded, that their wounds cannot heal,” Abu-Sittah described. “As a killing machine, malnutrition and the manufactured famine is not just taking the lives of children, but also taking the lives of the wounded, whose bodies are no longer able to heal from their wounds and from the surgeries,” Abu-Sittah described.

Mustafa Barghouti, physician, secretary general and co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, also spoke at the opening of the conference, at the plenary entitled, “The War on Palestine”.

“And during the last seven, eight months, Israel committed terrible crimes. Up to now, we’ve lost 45,000 Palestinians, if we count the 10,000 people under the rubble,” Barghouti outlined. “If this had happened in the United States of America, you would be talking about 18 million people killed or injured in less than eight months. And these are not just numbers. Each one of the 125,000 Palestinians killed and injured, each one is a person, a family, a history, a dream.”

But Barghouti also reflected a level of revolutionary optimism that is present in the global movement for Palestine. “Today, the roads are open for reunifying all the efforts of all Palestinian people, whether they live in 1948 areas, whether they live in the occupied territories in West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, or whether they live like you do in the diaspora,” he said. “Our future is one and our struggle is one, and we have to all be unified.”

The conference continues until the final day on Sunday, May 26. On the second day, May 25, the conference will open with a plenary on “Palestinian resistance and the path to liberation,” and will also feature plenaries on “The movement for Palestine in North America” and “Zionism and US imperialism” later on in the day. The day will end with a cultural performance by Palestinian vocalist Sanaa Moussa.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch