اندیشمند بزرگترین احساسش عشق است و هر عملش با خرد

Saturday, January 13, 2024

Gaza Cease-Fire Now! No Wider War

January 13, 2024
we must join the majority of the world’s nations in building pressure on Biden and Netanyahu to declare a ceasefire, to deluge Gaza with the food, water, medicines, and fuel essential for life. We must do this with everything we've got and we must do it now.
 Gaza march in London 
Little Amal, a 3.5 metre-tall giant puppet representing a ten-year-old Syrian refugee child, joins tens of thousands of protesters marching through central London in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to demand an immediate ceasefire to end the war on Gaza in London, United Kingdom on January 13, 2024.
(Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
The genocide must end. We must not sleepwalk into a catastrophic regional Middle East War. The decimation of Gaza continues because the United States refuses to demand a ceasefire and provides weapons that have transformed Gaza from an open-air ghetto prison into a compacted zone of death and despair. And if it is possible to think in still worse terms, we should be sobered by the insanity of battling Yemen's Houthis with Tomahawk cruise missiles. That’s the kind of thinking that triggered First World War.
Even as we were shocked by and condemn the brutal massacre of nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7 as the abominations they were, we and most of the world’s nations recoil in horror at what is widely understood as the IDF’s genocidal assault against civilians in Gaza and by the escalating settler violence and land seizures in the occupied West Bank.
An estimated 23,000 Gazans, the vast majority children and women, have been killed in Gaza. That’s roughly 20 times the number of Israelis killed in October. If we translate that proportionately into U.S. numbers, it’s the equivalent of more than three million U.S. people. 70% of Gazan homes have been destroyed, with 85% of Gazans displaced. The UN Humanitarian chief describes Gaza as uninhabitable with water, food, and fuel still in desperately short supply. Many hospitals are no longer functionin and hundreds of thousands of people—not “human animals”—face death from famine, thirst, disease, and lack of medical care.
Yet the war goes on. Even as the Israeli military broadcasts that it is moving into a new and more surgical phase of the war, massive bombings continue. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledges that the war will continue for nine months to a year. And powerful currents in his government are pressing to “thin”—that is, ethnically cleanse—Gaza’s two million people. Another, and even greater, Nakba than what happened in 1948.
And as we see from the escalating attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, from Hezbollah-Israeli exchanges along the border with Lebanon, bombings in Syria and Lebanon, and targeted assassinations in Lebanon and Iraq, the danger remains that the war could explode into a regional cataclysm.
As Richard Falk, the former U.N. Rapporteur or Palestinian Human Rights chillingly warns, faced with an unwinnable war in Gaza, a war he cannot politically afford to end without victory, Netanyahu’s only option may be to trigger a war with Iran in order to drag U.S. forces more directly into the conflict.
Beyond its immediate role in making the extended war possible, President Joe Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu is also having broader and longer-term international ramifications. The US, as we have seen in UN votes, is increasingly isolated as the hypocrisy and double standards of its claims to defend human rights and the rule of law are laid bare for all the world to see. This, in turn, accelerates the relative decline of the U.S./Western empire and the emergence of a still very fluid, and thus uncertain and dangerous, multi-polar world system.
There is also the tragic domestic fallout here in the U.S. In 1948, Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish refugee philosopher, herself a non-state Zionist, warned that justified or not, Jews around the world would be judged by how Israelis treated their Arab neighbors. The savaging of Gaza, which now compounds the abomination of apartheid, not only marks Israel as a pariah nation, but it also compounds the historic currents of antisemitism.
These are very hard times. The need for a ceasefire and a credible process toward just Israeli-Palestinian and Middle East peace based on common security are urgent necessities. And we are not powerless.
Senator Bernie Sanders, bless him, has wisely introduced Resolution 502B(c) which can provide the crack in Congress that can let the light in and shatter the congressional consensus for complicity in genocide. The resolution requires a State Department study on Israeli violations of human rights. That in turn should require halting all U.S. arms transfers to Israel. The resolution may not pass, but the debate itself can begin to crack the obscene and murderous consensus.
Beyond that initiative, we must join the majority of the world’s nations in building pressure on Biden and Netanyahu to declare a ceasefire, to deluge Gaza with the food, water, medicines, and fuel essential for life. We must also launch the common security diplomacy that leads to peaceful, just, and respectful Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Please, if you can, join demonstrations and vigils. Write those letters to Congress and the editor of your local paper. Perform nonviolent civil disobedience. It is time to have those difficult conversations with family, friends, and co-workers. Turning our heads away in silence is not an option. Peace, justice, and coexistence have always been possible.
 
Could Israel’s Gaza Atrocity Spiral into a Red Sea War and Sink Biden’s Reelection?
Joe Biden and his administration believe that they can support the extremist Israeli government in its genocidal assault on the innocent noncombatant Palestinians of Gaza without a political cost at home. They also believe that they can manage the conflict, so that it does not spiral into a wider Middle East war.
These assumptions may be deeply flawed. The Houthi or Helpers of God government of northern Yemen can likely go on harassing container ships attempting to ply the waters of the Red Sea. Biden is bombing them, but the Saudis bombed them for 7 years and finally gave up on accomplishing anything that way. Yemen is among the poorest countries in the world, and can’t be crippled by destroying infrastructure, since they don’t have much of it. Little unmanned aerial vehicles can be hidden and it is difficult to take out the launchers. An Israeli general once complained that he wished Hezbollah in Lebanon had larger rockets, since those would be easier to find and destroy.
Both the Houthi drone strikes on container ships and the Biden response in bombarding Yemen have spooked the shipping industry. Around 10% of world trade goes through the Suez Canal on some 17,000 ships per year. On the order of 12% of world energy supplies also are shipped through the Red Sea. So after two days of US and UK aerial strikes on Yemen, which elicited further Houthi threats, oil prices at one point hit $80 on London’s Brent exchange on Friday.
If the conflict with the Houthis heats up further, Americans could feel it at the pump. Biden should ask Jimmy Carter whether Americans forgive a president who gets involved in fruitless Middle East conflicts and causes their gasoline prices to soar.
One thing Biden could do is halt the Israeli destruction of all of Gaza, which anyway can’t destroy Hamas. The Houthis would likely settle down if the Gaza war wound down. Shooting missiles at them will just stir them up.
Moreover, Biden’s position on Gaza is deeply unpopular in his own party, and particularly among young people– a swing vote in recent years. A UC Berkeley Opinion poll reported by David Lauter and Jaweed Kalim at the LA Times finds that 55% of voters under 30 say that Israel should announce a ceasefire even if it means that Hamas remains significant in Gaza. Only 18% disagree.
In contrast, a slight majority of voters over 65 believe that Israel should fight on until Hamas is taken down entirely, though about a third of elderly voters disagree.
According to the Pew Research Center, Barack Obama got 66% of the youth vote in 2008, and 60% of it in 2012. He outperformed Mitt Romney by 24% among those under 30.
The Center writes, “In Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, Obama also failed to win a majority of voters 30 and older. Yet he swept all four battleground states, in part because he won majorities of 60% or more among young voters. Just as critically, young people made up as large a share of the overall electorate as they did in 2008, according to the national exit poll (19% in 2012, 18% in 2008).”
So Obama benefited from the under-30 vote in two absolutely essential ways. First, they came out to vote in large numbers, and mostly voted for him. Second, they provided the margin of victory in four swing states where Obama did not win 51% of the over-30 vote.
Candidates should not underestimate the possibility of youth apathy. Famously, the under-30 set declined to go to the polls in big numbers in 2004. They had largely turned on Bush because of the Iraq War, but they weren’t brought out to vote by enthusiasm for John Kerry. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, a Democrat, lamented, “The little bastards screwed us again.”
The youth aren’t enthusiastic about Biden. At all. And the campaign to wipe Gaza off the map is one reason. In backing the odious Binyamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich in their creepy annihilation of tens of thousands of Palestinian women, children and noncombatant men, Biden doesn’t only risk becoming unpopular with the under-30 crowd but risks reducing their enthusiasm to vote. The young voters see the horrors of the Israeli campaign on Tiktok and YouTube in a way that the older set does not, since US corporate news is corrupt and distinctly pro-Israel.
The Biden team believes that the voters have nowhere to go because his opponent will be Trump. Hillary Clinton benefited from fear of Trump among youths, who voted in 2016 in numbers similar to 2012. But her percentage of the under-30 vote fell to 55%. It was only a 5% fall from Obama in 2012, but in a race where she lost some swing states by tiny margins, this youth deficit may have contributed to her defeat. The Trump boogey man was not enough– she needed to elicit the enthusiasm of the youth.
Is the administration really so convinced that they can’t be Kerry-ized or Carterized? Doing and saying deeply unpopular things that anger key parts of your base just because you think the rival candidate is unelectable is a hell of a gamble. Ask Mrs. Clinton.

No comments:

Post a Comment