The great artist Michaelangelo completed his “David” and some other seminal works before he turned 30. Imagine if, a few decades later, he had carried a sledgehammer along to where “David” stood in Florence’s most famous public square, and set about smashing his masterpiece to pieces…
That is, roughly, analogous to the story of what the U.S. government has been doing in recent years– and more intensively, over recent months– to the whole structure of international law that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt so painstakingly crafted at the end of World War 2.
The past seven days have seen two momentous events. On July 19, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is the highest court in the whole world, adjudicating only conflicts between states, not individuals, issued a landmark judgment to the effect that, inter alia:
Pres. Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate sent waves of horror through all supporters of the U.S. Democratic Party and spurred a gathering wave of Democratic activists at all levels desperate to find a way to replace him at the head of the party ticket in the upcoming election. After the debate, numerous groups of other influential Biden supporters including big political donors and several of the “Western” allies who interacted with him at last month’s G-7 summit in Italy came forward to say that recently many of them had also seen signs of a marked decline in his cognitive functioning.
It is now increasingly clear that, as he has been (allegedly?) working to end the intense, genocidal crisis in Gaza, Biden has been operating in a mental cloud cuckoo-land of his own creation, untethered from any ability to comprehend either what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians in Gaza or– more crucially– the fairly simple steps that he could take to end the crisis by insisting on Israeli compliance with the terms of the 3-phase ceasefire+hostage deal that has clearly been attainable since March or April.
The most charitable thing one can say about Biden’s performance regarding the genocide in Gaza is that he has been operationally AWOL from being able to run U.S. policy in response to the crisis, and that Washington’s very muddled actions and inactions regarding the crisis have instead been the result of ad-hoc decisions taken by his– extremely unqualified– staffers. Those would be primarily his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and his National security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. Neither of those men has any longstanding basis of expertise, wisdom, or judgment that is independent of the role they have both played for the overwhelming bulk of their careers, as staff members for a Joe Biden chronically seeking re-election, whether in the Senate, in the Vice President’s office– or now in the White House: yes, the very White House that is now in such deep chaos.
The image above is a still from footage a Hizbullah drone recently shot of a key Israeli naval base in Haifa
Today, nearly nine months into Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the evidence is mounting that the country’s political-military leadership is on a path to serious defeat not only in Gaza but also more broadly in its decades-long contest against West Asia’s Iran-led “Axis of Resistance.” This fact is only just starting to receive some glimmers of recognition in the corporate media in the West. (Interestingly, one of the few to give it any public acknowledgment at all has been lifelong Zionist apologist Tom Friedman, who did so in some key portions of this June 18 column. Most of the other Zionist apologists who are deeply embedded in the US elite are still publicly spinning fairy tales of “an imminent defeat for Hamas.”)
The defeat towards which the Israeli leadership is currently hurtling is, as I noted, not only in Gaza, where numerous, apparently well-coordinated, cells of armed resisters have been making smart use of the rubble to which the Israeli military has reduced most of the Strip’s buildings, as well as their own tunnels, to launch well-prepared and often lethal attacks on Israel’s tanks, APCs, and snipers across the length and breadth of the Strip… and where Israel’s grotesquely genocidal attacks and other policies have notably failed to turn the population against Hamas. (Find more on the evidence for that key political fact, below.) But this defeat looms also in the ever-tense, but until now somewhat controlled, confrontation Israeli forces have been engaged in in the North, against Hizbullah fighters who are considerably more lethally armed than the Hamas fighters of Gaza and who have continued to upgrade their capabilities almost continuously in the 18 years since they last inflicted a decisive defeat on Israel’s military, in summer 2006.
… is now up at the Boston Review website, here. The piece draws on a lot of the writing I did here at Globalities in the nine months of 2023 prior to October 7. The original title I’d given it was “Gaza at the Hinge of History”… Which I still prefer to the one BR gave it, though I realize I’d used “hinge of history” in the title of an essay here last April about the Arabian Peninsular. But hey, these hinges are definitely linked.
I hope you can read the whole of the new BR article. It opens with an intriguing (one hopes) anecdote/observation. The meaty substance comes down near the bottom:
The Gaza crisis, seventeen weeks old at the time of this writing, has not only brought West Asia (and the world) to the brink of a major war. It has sent shockwaves into the heart of a world order that United States took the lead in designing in 1945 and in which, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has acted as hegemon. Netanyahu and his political allies have adopted an openly confrontational stand not only against the UN’s refugee agency, but also against the UN itself and its highest judicial body, remaining implacably opposed to all those fundamentals of the world system…
Anyway, since BR doesn’t have a Comments section, here is your chance to post any reactions or further thoughts you have about the article, in the Comments box below.
I was planning to write a quick essay here about how the Houthis’ robust pro-Gaza-ceasefire actions in the Red Sea have further strengthened the already clear (can we say “ironclad”?) tie-up between Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the massive shifts now underway in the balance of global power.
I will get to that a little more, below. But meantime the confrontations in the Red Sea and the adjacent Gulf of Aden seem to be escalating—along with the tensions between the U.S. ground/expeditionary forces at the crucial confluence of the Syria-Iraq-Jordan borders, where on Sunday, local anti-U.S. militias killed three U.S. service-members and injured dozens more in a drone attack.
In the global diplomacy over Gaza, much attention has been paid to the (not notably successful) missions that Sec. of State Blinken and CIA Director Bill Burns have been undertaking to try to win that ever-elusive Gaza-Israel ceasefire. Much less attention has been paid to the trip that Biden’s National security Advisor Jake Sullivan made to Bangkok last Friday, where he met with top PRC diplomat Wang Yi to try to persuade Wang to pressure Iran to rein in the Houthis’ actions in the Red Sea.
Above, an UNRWA school in Gaza serving as a shelter for thousands of Palestinians displaced by Israel’s assault
Let us be clear. Israel—a country whose entire existence is the result of the Partition Plan for Palestine that the United Nations adopted in 1947—has a long and serious record of defying U.N. resolutions. Then suddenly, on Friday, Israeli government spokesmen surfaced their accusation that 12 staff members of the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, had been involved in some way in the Hamas-led breakout into Israel on October 7.
Think about it:
The existence those accusations was publicized on the exact same day the International Court of Justice was scheduled to announce its interim ruling on South Africa’s accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.Quelle coincidence! Hey, to the governments and government lackeys of the world: Don’t look over there at The Hague; Look over here! (Presumably, though, whatever “evidence” the Israeli authorities had been basing their accusations on must have been gathered many weeks ago and may also have been shared with the UNRWA head a while ago, too.)
The nature of the accusations has never been revealed. All that we have been told is that they involved 12 members of an UNRWA workforce in Gaza that totals 13,000 people (of whom, by the way, more than 150 have already been killed in Israel’s bombardment.) But neither Israel nor UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini, with whom the accusations were earlier shared, has ever revealed any of the relevant details such as: what acts those staff members were accused of; what level of staff members they were; and whether they were given any chance to refute the accusations.
Instead, according to both Israeli officials and Lazzarini, Israel had shared the accusations—at some undisclosed earlier date—with him and his staff; and at some later date he fired the 12 accused staff members. We have heard no information from UNRWA, which is an international public body, regarding: when all that happened; what kind of an internal investigative process Lazzarini pursued, and how long it took; and what were the results of any such investigation. Hey, for all we know, the Israelis may have initially accused many more than those 12 people who lost their jobs, and UNRWA was able to refute many of those accusations? We don’t know. But doesn’t the global public that pays Lazzarini’s salary deserve to know all this?
So on January 26, immediately upon the Israelis revealing the existence of its accusations and of UNRWA’s firing of the 12 individuals, the U.S. government and half a dozen other “White”-country governments all decided to withhold their contributions to all of UNRWA, with immediate effect. This was kowtowing to the government of Israel of the very first order! One can only assume that all these governments were just delighted to have some Gaza-related news to react to (and to contribute to) that was not the ICJ’s very clear, anti-Israel ruling…
The photo above, by Maureen Clare Murphy, shows a kite displayed at a memorial gathering held in Chicago for my friend the assassinated Gaza writer Refaat Alareer
I haven’t written much here recently. In the past two months I’ve been really busy with the book-publishing business, from which I’d earlier hoped I could start to retire. But my publishing company, Just World Books, has long had a strong list of titles on Gaza, and by Gaza-Palestinian authors, so there’s been a huge run on our books… Plus, on December 6, our wonderful author/editor Refaat Alareer, a professor of literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, was assassinated by Israel; and I’ve been doing what I could to defend his legacy and ensure that the works he edited (and contributed to) get as wide a distribution as possible.
I have also been working on a longer essay for a national publication about the clearly massive impact the Gaza crisis has already had, and will continue to have, on the dynamics of global power. Stay tuned for that… Oh, and with my dear Gaza-Palestinian colleague Dr. Yousef Aljamal and a talented new Irish pal called Tony Groves we’ve gotten our new Palestine-focused podcast, the PalCast, up and running. Hey, we’ve now released eighteen episodes of it! (Catch it at Apple, Spotify, or other good podcast platforms.)
So of course this means I’ve continued to follow all the developments unfolding in (and swirling very broadly around) the Gaza crisis pretty closely. I’ve also been networking with numerous other individuals and organizations that are pushing for a speedy ceasefire there and the launching of a serious, U.N.-led project to end Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank (including E. Jerusalem), and Golan, once and for all.
In these contacts, I’ve encountered quite a few people outside Gaza who admit to feeling “hopeless” to effect change there; and many of those people, and others, frequently express pity for the situation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza. I’ve thought quite a lot about that stance, and my general reaction is as follows: #1, Hopelessness/despair cannot be an option, especially for those of us who are outside Gaza. #2, I’m increasingly of the view that “pity” is a patronizing, othering, and somewhat self-paralyzing kind of response to the situation Gaza’s people are facing, under Israel’s truly outrageous genocidal assault.
What I would urge is that those of us outside Gaza should instead view the situation of the people there with a radical and empowering form of empathy for all of them, and with admiration for the steadfastness and resilience they and their society have shown in the face of Israel’s almost unfathomable cruelty.
For the most of the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza, time has entered a horrifying and quite disorienting warp. How long since they were able to feed their children? How long to remain crammed into an insecure tent as winter’s rains lash? How long till the dysentery takes a loved one? How long since a father, uncle, brother was taken away, stripped nearly naked, and trucked to a distant prison camp? Above all: How much longer now till the crashing of Israeli bombs and bulldozers, the crack of sniper fire, the relentless buzz of drones all finally fall silent?
How long till a ceasefire? How long?
Pres. Joe Biden has, as we know, firmly blocked all the moves the Global Majority has taken to achieve a ceasefire in the Gaza-Israel fighting. Well-connected reporters in Israel have written that the message Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gave during the meeting he held yesterday with Israel’s war cabinet was that Biden could only “allow” Israel a few more weeks before he starts calling for a ceasefire.
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.
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:
