Last Friday, I set out (with a slight excess of ambition) to compile ten theses that might help guide analysts and policymakers through the uncharted waters of the coming weeks of the Gaza-Israel crisis. As it happened, I was able only to complete the first six of these, which can be read here. I attempted a first draft of Thesis 7, but had to stop midway through. I have now rethought and redrafted Thesis 7 and added in Theses 8-10, as shown below. (You can also read the whole unified list of ten theses, here.)
7. Israel’s decisionmaking is mired in chaos
I wrote some about the crisis of Israel’s leadership decisionmaking early last week (1, 2.) Since then, a lot more evidence has emerged about the depth and many different dimensions of this crisis, including in the NYT, in Haaretz, and elsewhere. What all these accounts point to is the following:
1. The over-arching priority right now is to get a complete, theater-wide ceasefire between Israel and Gaza
This complete ceasefire is quite distinct from a “humanitarian pause”, such as might be used merely to massage some of the pain the Gaza Palestinian are currently suffering, just a little, at some points, for a limited period of time. No! The ceasefire needs to be complete, reciprocal (as between Israel and Hamas-in-Gaza), and monitored by a trusted international body.
Should we also call for a similar ceasefire in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, along the Lebanon border, and between Israel and Syria? Probably so. But given the extreme situation of the Palestinians in Gaza, a ceasefire on that front should be the priority.
2. The UN’s long-existing body UNTSO should monitor the Gaza ceasefire
In yesterday’s essay here on Globalities, I started to dig through the many layers of the continuing Gaza-Israel crisis and concluded that now and for the foreseeable future, “Just continuing to bomb Gaza from the air seems to be something that Israelis and the U.S. political leadership can all agree on… ” Once those airborne weapons fall silent, I noted, two things would happen:
The day of intense political/military reckoning that PM Netanyahu has for so long feared will very speedily come due….
The differences of interest between the leaders of Israel and the United States will become much more evident. (And this will not be helpful for Biden in his presidential bid next year.)
My analysis of Israel’s gathering governance crisis was based to a large extent on the excellent reporting that Amos Harel has been contributing to Haaretz over these past few days. (I should have credited him for that.) Today, he and other Haaretz writers have additional far-reaching pieces about the crisis. And in the New York Times, reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the sense of unease, and of distrust in their government, having grown so great among Israelis that PM Netanyahu, his defense minister Yoav Gallant, and the IDF chief of staff had to publicly issue,
This terrible conflict, which since October 7 has killed 1,400 Israelis and more than 5,000 Gaza Palestinians and in which the United States is very deeply entangled, has many different layers—from the anguish of individual families in Gaza as they continually see their loved ones killed or maimed, and their children terrified… right through to the stability of the global system itself.
At this point in history, these layers are all pancaked in on each other. Perhaps like those many high-rise apartment buildings in Gaza that have been pancaked by massive U.S.-made and Israeli-delivered bombs.
My aim in this essay is to start digging through the different layers of the broadening geopolitics of the Gaza-Israel crisis. Here goes.
Since I posted this piece yesterday, I’ve had a couple of further thoughts, as follows:
1.
The first is that I think we should all call on Hamas to release all the Israeli noncombatants it is holding, immediately or as soon as as is physically possible. International law, religion, and basic morals would all indicate they should do this.
Pres. George H.W. Bush opens the 1991 Madrid Middle East Peace Conference
Last Thursday, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovitch told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that he judged the then-current U.S.-Israeli focus on winning a Saudi-Israeli accord was badly conceived, inasmuch as it tried to bypass or paper over the Palestinian question. He likened the attitudes of Israeli and U.S. leaders to those of passengers on the Titanic, as they blithely sailed toward the large iceberg of the Palestinian issue that still lay very close to them…
36 hours later Hamas launched its Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
That far-reaching and technically complex breakout took nearly all Israelis by surprise, and revealed the deep strategic complacency and tactical chaos into which Israel’s long-famed security system had fallen.
In most of Western discourse, the early reactions to what happened October 7 followed these tracks:
Stunned surprise and horror at images of the suffering of Israeli civilians
Weirdly racist claims that “Hamas could never have been as smart as to organize something like this… So it must have been organized by Iran“
Horror at and excoriation of Hamas’s actions, portrayed as so frequently as “targeting” Israeli civilians
Urgent calls for Israel to respond very forcefully indeed to Hamas, with little or no recognition that any such response would involve inflicting great suffering on Palestinian civilians—and also, potentially, on some of the dozens of Israelis now held captive within Gaza
Repeated avowals that Hamas “must be punished”, accompanied by some unsubstantiated claims that the violence it showed during the October 7 breakout was “akin to that of the Islamic State.” (It wasn’t.)
A general reluctance or refusal to link the October 7 breakout to the great suffering that Israelis have inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Lebanon, and elsewhere for many decades now.
Who are Hamas?
In those Western media accounts, Hamas has nearly always been portrayed as intrinsically violent, deeply anti-Semitic, and unalterably opposed to the existence of Israel. But most of these descriptions are written by people who have never met, interviewed, or interacted with Hamas leaders. I have—periodically throughout the years between 1989 and roughly 2012. (You can find accounts of some of these interviews in The Nation, Boston Review, and elsewhere. E.g., here.)
Here is my current assessment of their positions and capabilities.
Above: Pres. Putin poses with some of the African leaders who attended the Russia-African summit he hosted this past week
Biden administration officials and their supporters have long claimed that the conflict in Ukraine is a clear-cut contest between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” that affects the whole world… and that on that basis the countries of the Global South should line up to support NATO’s campaign against Russia. One big recent version of this argument has been the claim that Russia’s refusal to renew the agreement allowing Ukraine to export grain via the Black Sea is raising grain prices and preventing much-needed foodstuffs from reaching hunger-struck countries in Africa…
But the campaign to win global support for NATO’s anti-Russia crusade has never been very successful. Recall that in the three votes Washington initiated at the UN last year to denounce Russia’s actions inside Ukraine (e.g., 1, 2), three dozen countries including global behemoths China, India, and three dozen other countries failed to support the “Yes” vote.
And just this past week, the proceedings of key gatherings held in South Africa and Moscow have underscored the extent to which the “West” has lost the support of that large majority of humanity that lives in the formerly colonized countries of the Global South. (If indeed, it ever had it… Perhaps a better description of what’s been happening in recent months is that the West is now revealing itself as incapable of imposing its will on the countries of the Global South. More on this, later…)
The above image shows four major heat-domes over the northern hemisphere this week. Credit @WeatherProf via Umair Haque
The climate crisis we’re living through this year is real. It’s global. And it’s just a foretaste of what humankind will see over the years ahead if the leaders of our most powerful governments don’t find a way, SOON, to work together to address it.
The impact of this crisis (actual, and forecast) puts the conflict in Ukraine that has dominated the attention of Western media for so long now into a much more realistic and sobering perspective. From a global point of view, the conflict in Ukraine is yet another localized tiff between different factions in that tiny (< 12%) portion of humanity that is of European heritage. And by contrast with the two larger intra-European conflicts of the 20th century, this time around most of the rest of global humanity is actually very little involved. During the two intra-European wars of the 20th century, the global reach of that era’s European empires brought hundreds of millions of non-Europe directly into the hostilities—as combatants, as conscripted labor, or as direct or indirect victims of the conflict.
This time, not nearly as much. This time, quite appropriately, the reaction of the vast majority of non-“Western” governments and peoples to the intra-European conflict in Ukraine is mainly: meh.
It’s not that the Ukraine conflict hasn’t harmed the peoples of the Global South. It has. The main ways it has done so have been:
Have you, like me, been wondering what U.S. “climate czar” John Kerry has been talking about with his hosts in a Beijing that, like much of China and the United States, is drenched in extreme weather events?
If you read the (uber-nationalist) New York Times account of the meetings, you’ll learn that Kerry lectured and hectored his hosts. The Washington Post account was more measured, starting as it did with this lede:
John F. Kerry praised China’s “incredible job” expanding renewable energy sources Monday, while urging the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter to stop building coal-fired power plants.
Let’s hope that Kerry’s approach toward his hosts was indeed respectful and collaborative. The fate of humankind and our whole, deeply troubled planet hangs on these two mega-powers finding ways to work together to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while also reining in the currently raging over-depletion of all of our planet’s material resources.
If these two governments cannot overcome, or set aside, their political differences and find a way to work together to reduce CO2 emissions and resource depletion, then we will surely, within the next 20 years, see extreme weather events “baked” into all of the world’s climate system. We will also see entire economies, small and large, forced screeching to a halt—and also, all the social and political turmoil that will predictably result from that.
First, two key pieces of data regarding these two countries’ recent and projected CO2 emissions:
Click on either graph to expand it. The y-axes (verticals) show the same thing: billions of metric tons of CO2 emissions—but to different scales, as shown. The x-axes show past reported CO2 emissions levels through 2021 or 2022, and then projections from then through 2050.
The above painting is of the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), estd. 1602. The painting is from later in the 1600s.
In the earliest phases of the West Europeans’ construction of transoceanic empires, from 1415 CE through the early 1500s, well-armed Portuguese and Spanish flotillas would use the height and maneuverability of their ships and the firepower of their cannons to overcome Indigenous populations and then either outright rob them of their crops and possessions, or force them on pain of torture, death, or enslavement to trade those items on highly coercive terms.
Portuguese fort in Malacca, 1511
The earliest of those contacts were, as we saw here, “hit and run” raids. But soon, the plunderers saw the advantages of maintaining more permanent garrisons to control the Indigenes and extract and exploit their resources. Those coastal garrisons then grew into the remarkably durable, trans-oceanic settler-colonial empires that plunderers from the west coast of Europe established and maintained on every continent except Antarctica between the 16th and 18th centuries CE.
The early Portuguese empire-builders had pioneered the (neo-Viking) model of organizing a multi-nodal, trans-oceanic plunder network, which they did down the coast of West Africa. Then, in the 16th century it was the Spanish who pioneered the model of a more durable settler colonialism, which they did initially in the Caribbean and the Americas. (Later, the Portuguese, seeing the profitability of this model, tried to institute something like it in Brazil.)
The Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) that the Spanish monarchs established for this purpose assigned exclusive control over vast tracts of land in the “New World”— including all the human and non-human resources therein—to conquistadores who were favorites of the king, under a system called the encomienda. That system had been perfected over some centuries within Iberia itself, as the Christian lords of Castile and Aragon seized—or, as they claimed, “reconquered”— successive tracts of land from their former Muslim rulers. It was then transferred with few changes, but on a far larger and more lucrative scale, to “New Spain” and “New Granada” in Central America…
