October Roundup: The Fog of War
Newsletter 026 -- Israel-Palestine. US global standing. International Institutions. Kenyan mission to Haiti. Nagorno-Karabakh.
Welcome back!
I’ve heard the memory of both 9/11 and the Vietnam War invoked many times over the last few weeks, and I agree that the lessons from both are imperative to heed in this moment. As a citizen of one of the most diverse nations in the world, I thought it was perceptive of President Biden to mention a “foreign policy for the middle class” while he was campaigning in 2020. I thought it would mean deeper consideration for how our State Department, our foreign policy, and the President could become more representative of the wishes and hopes of the American people — many of whom have family outside of America and, therefore, a vested interest in how their home country interacts abroad. Biden never offered any substance around this platform item.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has made visible where American foreign policy, the American foreign policy apparatus (the State Department), and International Governance have failed and remain out of touch with their constituents. The vast unpopularity of the US’s response to this conflict has been made clear, the UN’s inability to act has been infuriating, and now people are eager to know what we can do to actually reach the ears of our representatives.
Please excuse the fact that much of this roundup is dedicated to Israel-Palestine. We know there is so much more going on in the world right now, and we are spending time learning about it for next month.
Enjoy!
» Putting This Moment Into Context
Saudi Arabia Puts Deal on Ice Amid War
Across all mainstream media, on October 7th, headlines read some version of “Hamas Attack on Israel.” This was the big event that everyone in the international community was aware of and it is our job, as critical consumers of international news, to look at other related events happening that can give us some insight into October 7th. Let’s break these events down: In the spring of this year, Saudi Arabia was in the midst of repairing its diplomatic relationship with Iran and planned to reopen embassies in each other’s countries, in what was called the Saudi Arabia-Iran deal. This deal was brokered by China, a country with great interest in strengthening relations in Africa and the Middle East. This came as a shock both to the U.S. and Israel, as Saudi Arabia is an ally of the U.S., and the U.S. has a history of bogarting all “peace” brokering work in the Middle East for itself. On the other hand, in the summer of this year, Israelis protested PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing agenda, particularly his passing of a law that limited Supreme Court power and was viewed as a threat to Israel’s democracy. So, before October 7th, Israel was in a predicament: they were at risk of losing an ally, as Saudi Arabia restored its relationship with Iran, the PM’s approval rating was in need of a lifeline, and they needed a unifying measure. Just as another massive protest is set to happen, Hamas sends rockets into Israel and penetrates Gaza’s borders to attack a music festival. The IDF and Israeli security failed to see this coming, even though the U.S. recently confirmed that Egypt warned Israel of a potential attack by Hamas, an attack that as The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy says presents, “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.” This is one framework of context that will be important to consider when we assess the diplomatic landscape of the region after this eruption of violence. — Sarah
Military attack leaves Myanmar’s displaced civilians with ‘no safe place’
Genocide is a word that is often equated with the Holocaust alone, and yet we have witnessed more than one in the last 5 years, and three concurrently. It’s been five years since the start of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Ethnic minorities in Myanmar are facing human rights abuses: a recently displaced Kachin community, was attacked resulting in 28 people killed, and dozens of shelters, a school, and a church destroyed. Back in September, the Myanmar military killed at least 3,800 civilians according to the UN’s human rights office. The Kachins in Myanmar and the diaspora call on the international community to pay attention to what is happening, spread awareness, and offer support. It is becoming increasingly important to name these events distinctly and boldly because once we name it, we begin to recognize it, and once we recognize it, we can rigorously address it. According to the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, genocide is when any of the following acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
— Sarah
“Really I think this is…a repetition compulsion disorder that, ‘that was then and this is now’, there's not really a sort of lasting set of conclusions except for maybe, ‘let’s do our military interventionism better next time’.” (quote from episode)
This episode uses the lessons and experiences from the Vietnam war to explain how the US has made its engagement in wars over the last few decades relatively invisible to the American public. — Alexis
» International Governance & Governing Bodies Are In Flux
The Winds Blowing From Gaza Threaten the US’s Middle East Standing
…the abrupt cancellation of a summit in Amman that was organized and canceled within just a few hours, due to the heightened tension after the Ahli Hospital massacre in Gaza…The cancellation was a humiliation for the president and American diplomacy, but also a sign of a change of direction, and the beginning of a new order in the power equation in the Middle East. (quote from article)
The UN and many Arab states are calling for an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Gaza, a request which the US has made very clear it will not support. This is just one example of how the US has not been unwilling to come to any table (whether it be at the UN or with Arab allies and important players in the region) in good faith to negotiate for some kind of collective response to the crisis. They are unwilling to take the temperature in the room about refugees being relocated to the Sinai, an absolute non-starter for Palestinians and Arab countries who have seen this play out many times before and know that if Palestinians are resettled out of Gaza, they will never be allowed to return. Not just that but this new refugee population will be the responsibility of the governments that take them in, many of which have already taken in Palestinian refugees in previous Israeli campaigns. Experts suspect that many Arab countries have even fewer incentives to deal with the US and its decades-old foreign policy playbook now that China has made its diplomatic presence known in the region since COVID-19. This article states that the US just doesn’t have a good understanding of the region and I don’t think that’s true. A more accurate way to read this situation is that it is desperate to hold onto its brute force approach in the region and is not willing to see, yet, how it could benefit from a change in policy. — Alexis
The UN is Powerless to Help Gaza. That’s How the US Wants It.
Human Rights Watch criticized America’s actions, saying, “Once again the U.S. cynically used their veto to prevent the U.N. Security Council from acting on Israel and Palestine at a time of unprecedented carnage.” (quote from article)
The Security Council is the arm of the United Nations that makes decisions on anything that involves war and it’s made up of 15 countries – five permanent members and 10 rotating members elected by the UN General Assembly every two years. The five permanent members are the US, UK, Russia, China, and France. All five of the permanent members have veto power which means that if they veto any resolution set forth by the Security Council, it will not pass, even if everyone else votes in favor. Since its first veto to protect Israel in 1972, the US has vetoed around 40 resolutions criticizing Israel. In recent years, there has been talk at the UN about changing the way vetoes are used, and, naturally, none of the five members are interested in making any changes. In the last few weeks, the US has vetoed resolutions in the UN that demand a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza, but it has made it clear it’s willing to back a humanitarian pause to allow food and other necessary and life-saving supplies into Gaza. — Alexis
U.S. Civil Society Members Turn Backs U.S. Ambassador During Her Closing Remarks at UN Human Rights Committee Review
“We chose to turn our backs on the U.S. as they have turned their backs on the state repression of Black, Indigenous, people of the global majority, LGBTQIA+ human rights, and the issue of Death by Incarceration (DBI). We have been silenced and met with no legitimate answers during every interaction with the U.S. delegation. Dignitaries from other countries who inquired about human rights violations were met with the same energy.” Rev. Keyanna Jones, of Community Movement Builders, the movement to Stop Cop City (quote from article)
More than 140 American citizens, from a number of civil society groups, traveled to Geneva to petition the UN to hold the US accountable for its policies and practices they say violate the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), of which the US is a signatory. The ICCPR is a human rights treaty, ratified by the US in 1992, and is meant to protect the basic rights of the global population. This includes the right to life and human dignity, freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy, freedom from torture, and arbitrary detention, gender equality, and minority rights. The issues they raised on this trip included issues around the US’s handling of indigenous rights, freedom of expression, and the crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights, sexual and reproductive rights, prisoners’ rights, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the criminalization of homelessness. This instance was the first public instance in which the world got to see that American citizens are thinking critically about their government’s actions on the world stage and are publicly separating themselves from those actions. — Alexis
‘Mutiny Brewing’ Inside State Department Over Isreal-Palestine Policy
Following Josh Paul’s resignation last week, many State Department officials have also considered resignation or have begun to push back on the long-held policies the US has regarding Israel. HuffPost reported that diplomats are preparing a dissent cable over the US’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Dissent Cables are statements of serious disagreement with American policy and is a messaging framework foreign service officials have used to warn policymakers that they’re making self-defeating choices abroad. This protected internal channel was established amid America’s internal conflict over the Vietnam War. Some officials at the State Department are unhappy with Biden’s plan to do little in the way of calling for Israel to use restraint and have also said that their counterparts in many Arab governments are telling them that the US is at risk of losing its standing in their region due to this. Staffers have also said that there’s a culture of silence in the State Department around expressing your views of Israel-Palestine. But, the severity of the language and the number of State Department officials who sign it will give us a better idea of how high the concern is over the US’s position in this war and have a better chance of being impactful. Dissent cables are a protected channel for officials to communicate their disagreement and the State Department bars the retaliation against those who use it. — Alexis
» What Do The People Have To Say?
I pulled quotes from interviews and articles by Palestinian and Jewish writers and academics in the last few weeks to get an idea of what people are thinking and how they’re feeling right now.
Doomsday Diaries
“They’re calling us terrorists, Sarah.” My father’s voice is bewildered, wounded. For thirty years he has waited, sure that, one day soon, America will love him back. We are speaking on Sunday, October 8, and the last thirty-six hours have dragged through us like teeth. “They called it this word, massuh . . . massacre?” His mouth fumbles the English word. “Massacre, Baba. That means killing on a mass scale. And you know what? I think it was a massacre . . . There were a lot of people killed.”
I have held my breath with them through four wars, their bodies trapped under falling skies, sealed off from all escape. Their slaughter so routine Israel calls it “mowing the lawn.” My family, and two million others, caged by a nuclear power that refers to them as weeds.
The rhetoric of the war on terror is reprised; Palestinians, Muslims, ISIS, and Hamas are collapsed into one reviled heap. Israel’s most extreme anti-Arab factions are ascendant, while Western celebrities and governments echo post-9/11 cries of good vs. evil. The very notion of Palestinian civilians vanishes. This is the first kind of death.
Some readers are waiting for me to denounce violent resistance. They imagine that without this assurance, which they ask of no Israeli, I do not have the right to speak. They believe they are owed a version of Palestinian which surrenders everything white, Western liberalism affords our oppressors, and itself: the right to exist, the right to self-defense.
In over ten years of organizing for Palestinian lives, I have never seen such vibrant, diverse, and urgent solidarity…Though I am wary of trusting my social media feed to reflect political reality, I am shocked at the volume of the grassroots anti-Zionist response.
As Palestinian scholar Sophia Azeb puts it, “We are not beholden to structure our epistemologies and aesthetics and politics solely within the architecture of this catastrophe.” Though we have never known a free Palestine, no number of bombs can extinguish the inborn will to live in dignity. In this way, our resistance is, to quote Mahmoud Darwish, incurable.
The Fate of These Two Peoples are Intertwined
The challenge for me is that it’s difficult to find the right balance between the pain that I feel at a kind of familial level towards Israeli Jews and the human obligation to cherish the dignity of all peoples and of all human life. And of course, Palestinians, as always, will suffer far, far more than Israeli Jews because they’re by far the weaker part of this.
Ultimately, Israel doesn’t have a military problem. It has a political problem. It has a human problem. And the problem is that you have these millions of people—most of them are not from Gaza. Most of them are the family of refugees that were forced out of their homes in Israel when Israel was created. And if they don’t have the ability to live a dignified, decent life, then many of them are going to try to make sure that Israeli Jews can’t live safe and dignified lives. That’s the way human beings tend to be, all over the world.
So, how do you show solidarity to a community that you are a part of, that you’re deeply, deeply connected to, and yet also be critical of it? In certain moments like this, I’m just struggling with it. We as a family have been talking about it all weekend. And it’s been really hard for us.
But the deeper problem is that the United States has allowed Israel to act with impunity going back for decades. And that is part of the reason that the blockade in Gaza has continued, that the occupation of the West Bank has deepened, and that has been terrible for Palestinians. It’s totally contrary to the kind of things that American leaders say about democracy and human rights and international law. And the rest of the world notices that.
And I think, ultimately, there’s no other way but recognizing the moral interconnectedness, which means you have to recognize that your family’s safety and dignity and freedom are dependent on you caring about the safety and dignity and freedom of Palestinians and vice versa.
A Desperate Situation Getting More Desperate
Mohammed Deif, the military commander of Hamas: He mentioned the attempts to turn the Haram al-Sharif, the area around the Aqsa Mosque, into a site of Jewish prayer[...] Every day, they kick worshipers out after the morning prayers: Muslim worshippers, and young people, especially. They chase everybody away, and they allow these settler groups to come and pray. Clearly, that’s one motivation. And Deif went through a list of others, such as the siege of Gaza, the creeping colonization and annexation of the West Bank, and the fact that the Israeli government operates as if the Palestine question didn’t exist.
Every ignorant pundit with no sense of history who talked about how unimportant the Palestine issue was to ordinary Arabs or to the Arab countries should never open their mouth again. Because what we have seen is demonstrations in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Bahrain…public opinion across the Arab world has erupted in support of Palestinians.
Zionism was never ashamed, in its early decades, of describing itself as a colonial project. It was and is a national project. It also was and is a spoiled stepchild of imperialism. Why was Herzl going to the Kaiser? Why was the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, going to the British? These were not disinterested neutral Switzerland-like powers — these were the great imperial powers of the age… They called themselves colonists and settlers. The “Jewish Colonization Association” is not some antisemitic slur — it’s what this important body called itself.
Nobody who’s kicked out is ever allowed to return. Every Arab, every Palestinian knows that. Nobody driven into Egypt will ever come back to Gaza or any other part of Palestine.
The other thing I would say to student activists is you have to understand what your political objectives are. If you believe that this is a settler colonial project, then you are in the metropole of that colony, here in the United States or in Western Europe, and national liberation movements have won not only — sometimes not primarily — by winning on the battlefield in the colony…If you believe this theoretical construct — the colony and the metropole — then what activists do here in the metropole counts. You have to win people over. You can’t just show that you are the most pure or the most revolutionary or can say the most extreme things and demonstrate your revolutionary credentials. You have to be doing something toward a clear political end.
—Alexis
» A Look Into The Future
Imagining Gaza Without Borders and Without War
“One thinks very differently about Gaza … if its political border disappears as a physical fact.” Terreform’s vision throws off the “arbitrary and cruel” boundaries imposed by partition and occupation to reknit the city back into the region. (quote from article)
‘Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope’, is a collection of essays and projects curated by Terreform, an urban research center. The book was part of a traveling exhibit that set out a vision for what a free Gaza could look like. Michael Sorkin is the architect who spearheaded the Open Gaza project, and who, throughout his career, has thought a lot about the two factors of urban development I find most interesting — propinquity and, what he calls, the architect of insecurity (we would call this the architecture of the security state). Propinquity refers to the state of being in proximity to others, but more aptly refers to kinship or neighborliness. For their contribution to the project, architects and University of California professors, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman proposed that Cross-Border Community Stations be established in Israel and Palestine. Their work at managing Cross-Border Community Stations at the US-Mexico border leads them to believe that these Stations would build mutual recognition between Palestinians and Israelis at a human-to-human level and would establish the foundation from which both parties can practice planning for their shared future. Sorkin and the contributors that brought life to this project challenged themselves to build a Gaza that was not only free of Israeli occupation but is a thriving multicultural destination with industry. Their proposal reestablished Gaza as a port city that would be open for travel and trade to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In times like these, it is both the most difficult and the most important thing we must do – to imagine the future we wish to work for. Political action, without a clear understanding of where you envision this action will lead, can be unhelpful to the larger cause. — Alexis
» There’s So Much More to Say…
At the beginning of this month, nearly 120,000 Armenians were forcibly displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan’s most recent effort to ethnically cleanse the region of Armenians. In this interview Murtaza Hussain explains the history of this conflict, the geopolitics that play a role in its modern context, and what is happening amongst the international community in the wake of this most recent Azeri aggression. — Alexis
The UN Security Council has approved the multinational security mission headed by Kenya aimed at cracking down on gang violence in Haiti. The yearlong mission was approved in response to the horrific humanitarian crisis on the island that devolved into chaos once gangs began to take charge of the country and the flow of resources. The Security Council doesn’t usually authorize non-UN peacekeeping missions to get involved in conflicts, so i’d be interested to learn more about what factors led them to this decision. — Alexis
Venezuela: Machado claims victory in Presidential Primary Vote & Egypt’s President el-Sissi confirms he will run for a new term in upcoming presidential elections
Many elections in the Global South are set to take place at the end of this year, Venezuela and Egypt most notably. These two countries have been suffering from extreme inflation, poverty, rising unemployment, and corruption. With the use of social media and technology, there are more ways for people to unite under struggle, organize, mobilize, and hold their governments accountable. Venezuela is showing signs of making massive changes, as the majority voted for a new presidential candidate in the primary vote. Egypt however, could be headed towards another revolution. Conditions have not improved for the majority of citizens and Egyptians are outraged at the President’s unwillingness to support Gaza and Palestine. Egypt also received $3 billion dollars from the IMF over the course of 46 months to help stabilize the economic conditions. When el-Sissi first took office he promised to honor the constitution and said he would not seek a third term – he just confirmed that he will run for a new term in the upcoming elections. In addition, Egypt’s parliament voted to change term limits from four to six years, meaning el-Sissi could hold office until 2034. — Sarah
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In Solidarity,
The 823 Team