November 2023 – Globalities

The record of Gaza’s ‘humanitarian pauses’

Helena CobbanNovember 29, 2023November 29, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, U.S. policy, United Nations1 Comment

We are nearing the end of the sixth day (in West Asia) of the daily ‘humanitarian pauses’ that have been painstakingly negotiated between the Hamas military/political leadership and their Israeli counterparts, via a trail that goes through Qatar and Egypt, with the Biden administration also eager to take a lot of credit. The first of those pauses was agreed to be four days long, then there was a two-day extension. Right now there are reports that Hamas is offering a further extension of two or even more days, on basically similar terms.

These arrangements have four well-known components: a strong bilateral restriction on conducting hostilities; Hamas’s release of an agreed daily number woman, children, and non-Israeli captives; Israel’s release of an agreed daily number of Palestinians women and children captives, on a basis of 3-to-1; and Israel’s “permission” to aid organizations to send an agreed number of aid trucks into Gaza, in a greed manner, each day.

The fact that these terms have been largely met by both sides for six days is very significant. Primarily, it shows that Hamas’s command-and-control apparatus in Gaza remained fundamentally intact even after the extreme pounding (bombing from land, sea, and air, use of large tank and other ground-force formations, etc) that Israel inflicted on Gaza for seven weeks prior to the start of the ‘pauses’. Hamas showed it was able to abide by the ceasefire provisions and impose discipline on other Gaza groups that might have sought not to. Hamas showed it was able to organize at least one release of hostages from within the (northern) environs of Gaza City, which the IDF had previously encircled and on which it had inflicted a terrible, Dresden/Stalingrad degree of damage.

I also want to give a strong and awed shoutout to the resilience, dignity, and commitment of the people of Gaza. They have suffered almost unimaginable harm over the past 54 days. The Government Media Office there reports that “more than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including about 6,150 children and 4,000 women.” Untold thousands have been injured. 1.7 million Gaza Palestinians have been displaced. Most of the Strip’s hospitals and many other public-use buildings have been destroyed. Schools have been turned into refugee camps (and several of them also destroyed.) The ‘pauses’ allowed many Gazans to go out and about and to see the extent and degree of the physical damage, and also to see the remains of unburied corpses on the streets and in pancaked buildings. Despite all this, there have been very few mass melees around arriving aid trucks. On the day that cooking gas was delivered to a station in central Gaza, Gazans arranged their families’ gas canisters in an orderly line that reportedly stretched for two kilometres.

Yes, Israel’s whole 56-year occupation of Gaza has to end. Now.

Helena CobbanNovember 20, 2023November 20, 2023BRICS, China, Diplomacy, Gaza, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy1 Comment

As diplomats from the Global Majority start to gather in Beijing (shown above) and prepare to hold a virtual BRICS summit on the Gaza crisis starting tomorrow (November 21), here is a recapitulation of some of my thinking on how this urgently needed crisis-ending diplomacy should proceed…

Many voices worldwide have been talking about what comes after a ceasefire. A loud chorus inside Israel is urging their military to stay in as much of Gaza as possible, and to rebuild there an even stronger presence of the (always quite illegal) colonial settlements that existed prior to 2005… Pres. Joe Biden, who has given Israel unstinting support for its assault on Gaza, has murmured that after the fighting ends it should withdraw back to its side of the 1949 Armistice Line. In the intellectually thin and bombastic WaPo column that he penned yesterday, Biden wrote that after Israel withdraws, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) should take over in Gaza…. Other Washington voices have suggested that an international force of unspecified origin and authorization be sent in to do that…

But the head of the PA has made quite clear that he and his colleagues reject being parachuted in to Gaza in that role and the heads of the Arab states most often mentioned as part of that elusive “international force” have all likewise refused to be drafted into it.

The quandary of “how to rule over post-ceasefire Gaza” shows that American power in the region is now coming up against unprecedented limits.

Internationally, the call for Israel to withdraw all the ground forces it has had rampaging around inside Gaza will grow louder and louder over the weeks ahead.

But the United States has shown that it cannot on its own cobble together any plausible “coalition of the willing” able to go into Gaza to oversee the massive tasks of relief, reconstruction, and emergency “governance” that the whole Strip requires. In today’s world, it is only the United Nations that can achieve this.

Elements of an effective, UN-supervised ceasefire in Gaza

Helena CobbanNovember 17, 2023November 18, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, United Nations, West Asia3 Comments

There is a broad and growing global campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza. (U.S. Pres. Biden has countered it by calling for one or more much briefer “pauses” to allow for humanitarian operations. But still the pro-ceasefire campaign continues to grow.) The Israeli government and military and their supporters worldwide have argued very strongly against a ceasefire, saying it would “reward Hamas”, or would be “a surrender to Hamas.”

Many supporters of Israel also use arguments like, “How can we have trust in a ceasefire? After what Hamas did October 7, how can we ever trust them to abide by a ceasefire?” This argument, unlike the two recited above, is worth examining. Its proponents usually refer to the series of ceasefires that Israeli governments concluded with Hamas (through third parties) that brought to an end the previous rounds of fighting between the two parties—for example, in 2009, in 2014, and 2021. One first observation is, of course, that each of those ceasefires did lead to a halt in the active fighting for a number of years. So they were not worthless. However, none of them led to any indication that the suffocating military occupation that Israel has maintained over Gaza since 1967 was on its way to coming to an end. Hence, the tight, concentration-camp-like pressure cooker of Gaza’s 2.3. million rights-deprived people was just put back on to the stove to boil.

The UN Security Council can end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Here’s how.

Helena CobbanNovember 10, 2023November 10, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Global governance, Israel, Palestinians, United Nations5 Comments

In the past 35 days, the Israeli military has killed well over 10,000 people in Gaza. It has reduced most of Gaza City and the extensive refugee camps that surround it to barren moonscapes of rubble. Meantime, Israeli settler extremists have gone on killing and land-grabbing sprees in the occupied West Bank, with great help from the Occupation Forces there. The currently sharp intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has considerably inflamed tensions along Israel’s northern border. And the high degree of the United States’ direct and indirect involvement in Israel’s war effort, which has included dispatching two aircraft carrier battle groups, a nuclear-capable submarine and other U.S. military forces and assets to the region, has further inflamed tensions in a swathe stretching from Western Iraq through Syria and right down the Red Sea to Yemen.

This madness needs to stop!

As do the series of intense and long-unresolved political conflicts that underlie all these tensions, with at their heart the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The United States. Must step aside. From Arab-Israeli ‘peacemaking’.

Helena CobbanNovember 8, 2023November 9, 2023China, Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, Palestinians, U.S. policy, United Nations2 Comments

The United States. Must step aside. From Arab-Israeli ‘peacemaking’. It is that simple.

For 50 years now, Washington has dominated all the efforts that the world’s nations have undertaken in their search for a just and lasting resolution to the many strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict. That U.S. move to dominate the peace diplomacy was launched in late 1973 by Henry Kissinger, who uniquely combined the roles of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. In the aftermath of the October 1973 war, Kissinger brusquely elbowed aside the Soviet Union, which had hoped to “co-lead” the post-war diplomacy.

From December 1973 until today, the United States has dominated all Arab-Israeli diplomacy, with the level of that U.S. domination rising to a situation of unabashed hegemony after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. And as I’ve written elsewhere, in 2005 Pres. George W. Bush even managed to subordinate the United Nations (and the EU, and a then-very-weak Russia) to Washington’s “leadership” of the diplomacy through an extraordinary arrangement called the “Middle East Quad.”

The results, for citizens of all the Arab states with the possible, partial exception of Egypt, have been disastrous. But the impact on the Palestinians has been particularly dire. They have seen Israeli settlers grabbing huge new areas of Palestinian land in the West Bank. They have seen the lives of all the Palestinians still resident in their historic homeland tightly constrained by Israel. They’ve seen Israeli forces and their allies commit unspeakable atrocities in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. They’ve seen their freedom to worship in their holy places in Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere attacked.

And what has Washington done? Washington has continued to shovel massive sums of money and soaring mountains of arms into Israel. It has protected Israel from any international accountability by using its veto at the U.N. Security Council. It has given formal recognition to Israel’s (quite illegal) annexation of Greater East Jerusalem and of Syria’s Golan. It has demonized all who tried to resist Israel’s continued violence and encroachments by calling them terrorists and wielding tough sanctions against them.

And now, in Gaza City and the surrounding Gaza Strip—and also in the West Bank—we see the culmination of all that fervent, intensely one-sided support that successive U.S. presidents and their officials, and the U.S. Congress, have lavished on Israel over the past 50 years.

Yes, Joe Biden, you can stop Israel’s genocide on Gaza!

Helena CobbanNovember 6, 2023November 11, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, U.S. policy4 Comments

Sec. of State Antony Blinken traveled to Israel over the weekend to urge Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu to allow “humanitarian pauses” in the bombing and ground campaign against Gaza that has now killed > 10,000 people there Netanyahu publicly rebuffed that appeal. Today’s newspapers contain some somewhat anguished accounts about the White House’s “frustration” over Netanyahu’s rebuff.

For example, in the Washington Post, Yasmeen Abutaleb wrote,

U.S. officials had hoped there could eventually be regular bombing pauses so that humanitarian and aid workers could safely operate in Gaza, according to a U.S. official familiar with the discussions. But securing such an arrangement seemed further out of reach after Blinken’s visit…

Pres. Biden might want to take a lesson from his predecessor of 41 years ago, Ronald Reagan?

In June 1982, a previous Israeli PM from the Likud Party, Menachem Begin, sent his military deep into Lebanon and up to Beirut in an attempt to “eliminate” the PLO militias who had operated there for 12 years. By early August the Israelis were encircling the PLO’s last strongholds in West Beirut and bombing the heck out of that portion of the city, which included several large Palestinian refugee camps. Very disturbing images of that destruction were starting to fill the U.S. media…

Michael Deaver was Reagan’s deputy chief of staff at the time. In his 2001 memoir, A Different Drummer, he wrote about his misgivings over Israel’s attacks grew as the weeks progressed:

Gaza’s agony: Ten theses and an agenda (Comments)

Helena CobbanNovember 1, 2023November 2, 2023Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, United Nations2 Comments

I recently completed my essay on this topic, which you can read in full here. Since that space on Globalities does not allow for comments or reactions, I invite you to post your reactions to it into the Comments box here: