"For I am a direct descendant of slaves, too near to the actual enterprise to believe that its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation. Moreover, I am a direct descendant of Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of language - not to curse our meeting - but to push it further..." George Lamming
I cannot bring myself to commment on this, so I will let others discuss it. As an introduction, I place the following:
...urgent testimonials from doctors, journalists and aid workers in Gaza (as well as from Crisis Group’s own contacts) suggests that hunger has reached a tipping point. The WFP reports that one in three Palestinians in Gaza now go for days on end without food. Médecins Sans Frontières says it treated three times more patients for severe malnutrition in the first two weeks of July than in all of May. Agence France Presse, the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press have issued a joint protest, declaring that their own reporters and families in Gaza are starving. By 23 July, Gaza hospitals were reporting ten to fifteen deaths from starvation every 24 hours – far more than the monthly average over 21 months of war.
Once this tipping point is passed, famines tend to follow a catastrophically self-reinforcing pattern, which is already visible in Gaza. A slow creep of death yields to swift mass mortality as organs fail, immune systems collapse and victims lose the will to go on. Once famine begins, deaths tend to rise exponentially, meaning that waiting for confirmation that the technical line has been crossed to take remedial action could condemn thousands of people – especially young children – to death. For children, surviving such a scenario may entail permanent disability, including cognitive impairment. Some may already be facing exactly this prospect.
Charles 'Chas' Freeman Jr. is a retired American diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years. Trita Parsi is an Iranian-born Swedish writer and activist, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council.
I'm not sure many Americans are aware how much their outlook concerning various
geopolitical affairs (for
those few that care about such things), is
manufactured as a form of consent
for the aims their
secret government
is pursuing at any given point in time. A salient (and recent) example of the effectiveness of this government policy is the following ...
I have my own political views on these
things, but I have to laugh to myself as I observe events unfold during what has
transpired of this decade. I think more Americans are unfortunately prone to
drinking their government's Koolaide
than not. They need to wake up.👀
Wokeness
has become a "thing" these days. Interestingly, the term "woke" eschews immutability: A "dormant" person may become "woke", but equally a "woke" person may become "dormant". However, a more terminal
"antithesis" to wokeness is "blindness".
This takes me to another related topic: American hubris is its own worst enemy:
The heads of Russia and Iran were both
hopelessly (or so it may have seemed) Pro-Western at one time. Not any more!
It almost seems as though the following never happened:
The U.S. Consul General, Jack Gosnell, had a close relationship with Putin when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The two of them worked closely to create joint ventures and other ways to promote relations between the two countries. Gosnell related that Putin was always straightforward, courteous and helpful.
As for Masoud Pezeshkian, his pro-Western leanings were never in doubt.
However, Western "soberbia" in dealing with both turned them into "Anti-Western" leaders, thereby roundly defeating any purpose or outcome the Western establishment may have sought through its collective foreign policy over the years. The immediate outcome of the recent clash between Israel and Iran was totally unexpected and portends uncertainty:
The destruction of Israel is in full swing. The reconstruction of partially destroyed Israel (Tel Aviv, ports, airports and arms factories) will take years, but requires that the ceasefire holds, which is completely uncertain as the protagonists are behaving so unreliably. This will result in the owners concerned not putting up any money in the current situation. Would you rebuild an office building if there was a 50% chance that it would be destroyed again tomorrow?
"Israel has become a liability" (to the West) ~~Jacques Baud.
Once you finish hearing this segment, go back and listen to Jacques Baud's entire talk from the beginning. You will be rewarded with what is arguably profound insight.
If indeed Israel became a liability to the West, following the events of October 7th, 2023, then Hamas rolled a 7 or 11 on that critical "throw of the dice":
Alastair W. Crooke CMG is a former British diplomat, and was a ranking figure in both British intelligence (MI6) and the European Union. Historically, MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States have worked in close collaboration: "The close ties between the CIA and British MI6 were evident in Iran where CIA coup master Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., worked closely with MI6 to coordinate the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had tried to nationalize Iran’s oil industry." He expounds on the current unfolding Middle East War.
If the above video is taken down, you can access the audio of the interview with Alastair W. Crooke HERE.
+ + +
...But wait a minute, haven't we been here before?
Trump has backed himself into a corner. The self-imagined dealmaker sincerely believed that by applying economic pressure on Iran, backed up with the threat of force, the Iranian government would come to the negotiation table and agree to a nuclear deal that denied it everything it had achieved through diplomacy with the Obama administration. Trump believed he could bully America’s allies in Europe to go along with him. And, in the end, when he asked his military leaders to provide him with options to forcefully compel Iran to bend to his will, Trump was told that nothing short of an all-out war, involving more than 500,000 troops, could provide the outcome he sought, and even then only at great cost. Trump had run on a platform that promised an end to costly wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. If he pulled the trigger on Iran, his chances of reelection in 2020 would be all but eliminated.
+ + +
As a way of widening the historical context to this war, it is important to note that said conflict transcends any particular US administration. As General Wesley Clark once admitted in public, this war turns out to be merely the latest in a string of seven planned Middle Eastern wars since the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.
Instead of giving a comprehensive history of the lead-up to the current Iran war, suffice it to say that around three years ago, the stage was being set. On 14 July 2022, then US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid signed a document called the Jerusalem US-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, indicating the US would use all of its “national power” to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. I would furthermore argue that additional events underlay and eventually accentuated the urgency for the USA to "take down" Iran.
Around the same time the US-Israeli Joint Declaration was being signed in Jerusalem, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Tehran for a summit with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. According to analyst Patrick Lawrence,
...the centerpiece of the occasion was a simultaneous memorandum of understanding signed by the National Iranian Oil Company and Gazprom. In an agreement worth $40 billion, the Russian energy supplier is to assist on the technology side as Iran develops two gas fields and six oil fields. Further out, this is part of a long-in-the-making project that will connect Russia, Iran, and India by sea, road, rail, and, eventually, a very significant Iran–to–India gas pipeline.
It is noteworthy that by this time China had already signed a 25–year, hundreds of billions dollar agreement with Iran which included tech transfer, infrastructure development, oil sales, and so on — that had been years in gestation. Needless to say, the prospect of Eurasian integration struck terror into the heart of the United States:
The [International North-South Transport Corridor] INSTC was announced back in the early 2000s, but progress was slow until recently when the West’s actions put it into overdrive. The sanctioning of Moscow and Tehran and the severing of Europe from Russian energy created the incentive to accelerate investments by key stakeholders. The authorities in Tehran realize their centrality on the India-Russia trade route, and considering that India’s imports from Russia quadrupled last year, one can deduct the potential upside for Iran. With an investment boost from Russia, Tehran has been trying to speed up the completion of improved railway networks that will connect to the existing railways of Russia and Azerbaijan and Chabahar Port in southeastern Iran.
+ + +
Postscript
So what are we to make of this new Middle East War? As I (and others) have stated before, this new phase of jingoism accompanied by rank xenophobia we are experiencing in the West is part and parcel of a declining US empire:
There is a certain cadence to decline, a rhythm of arrogance and desperation, of miscalculation and delusion. The late-stage empire, unmoored from reality yet clinging to myths of its own indispensability, lashes out at perceived threats not because they are real, but because it cannot conceive of a world in which it is no longer the gravitational centre of history. In this way, Russophobia and Sinophobia function not merely as ideological constructs, but as symptoms of systemic decay, the fever dreams of a civilisation struggling to process its own obsolescence.
Wow! I can't believe it has been just over ten years since I first traveled to China. My first trip was in 2014: On 20 August, I presented a research paper at the China Goes Global Conference at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. Following the conference, I promptly went on a tour to all the typical tourist hotspots one visits on a first trip to that wonderful country. That is me (in the back with a black cap with red lettering) surrounded by a fine group of multinational tourists prior to the customary trek up the Great Wall.
The next photo was taken of me standing next to Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Gate.
One very interesting albeit minor occurrence oddly (or perhaps not) remains engraved in my mind although it had virtually little or nothing to do with my tour, or with China at all. This merits a brief digression. Those who follow major geopolitical events of this century may notice the coincidence of the year of my visit to China with the "Maidan Revolution" which took place in Ukraine (The Maidan coup had occurred several months earlier in February). Said coup unleashed a series of events that included the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, and marked the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which continues to this day.
Throughout my entire touristic journey in China, I was closely following the events unfolding in Ukraine as best I could (I was particularly pleased that I could access the online blog of the late United States Army officer and private intelligence analyst, and author, Col.Walter Patrick "Pat" Lang, Jr.. On one occasion our group was travelling on the tour-bus through Beijing and the topic of the Ukraine conflict came up. I was suprised by how our Chinese tourguide (a fine young fellow with an inquisitive mind) had accepted without questioning the western narrative of (largely) misinformation regarding Russia's alleged "actions" in the Ukraine conflict. When his words contradicted the authoritative analysis I had read of Col. Lang and others, I interrupted and corrected him. Astonished at how I came up with information that contradicted his own, he naturally asked me for the source and I responded (to his further amazement) that Col. Lang was a graduate of:
...the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the Armed Forces Staff College. He ... [was] a decorated veteran of several of the United States' overseas conflicts. During the Vietnam War, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and Military Intelligence. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East and served in that region for many years. He was the first professor of Arabic at the United States Military Academy,...
Now here is an interesting detail I always hark back to: In those days, Col. Lang had a blog app that highlighted the geographic location of people accessing his blog entries (via little dots of light on a world map) utilizing visitor tracking widgets and map integrations. When I first entered China, I noticed there were no "dots of light" within Chinese territory on Col. Lang's blog app (except one single dot of light corresponding to me!), which meant that nobody in China knew who Col. Lang was or accessed his blog. Most of his readers were either from Europe, the Americas or the Middle East (and Japan). HOWEVER, in the ensuing days after I gave my Chinese tourguide the abovementioned URL's, there suddenly appeared half a dozen highlights from Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities in China!! I can only surmise that my inquisitive tourguide had spread the word far and wide (knowingly or unknowingly), and that there was a growing interest in a different (and authoritative) depiction of the Ukraine conflict within China.
End of my digression!
My last trip to China was in December of 2024. There had been a number of other excursions previous to that one which included this place (can you guess the name of this famous river?):
...and this place (can you guess the name of this snow-covered peak?):
However, there are just too many places to mention at once.
I was reminded of a particular encounter during last December's trip to Dali in Yunnan Province while reading up on some current trends in international economics and commerce. I'm talking about the BRICS:
The BRICS countries have established Hong Kong as the most important financial center in their new system, while HK's banks also serve as a conduit between China's factory sector and the rest of the world. The new BRICS economy, ironically, still uses dollars as the primary medium of exchange between member countries, while completely bypassing the US and SWIFT-regulated financial systems.
Actually, why read it if you can (better) watch a video?
In the second half of the video, Mr. Walmsley noted:
Tether bought 8,888 bitcoin. Eight is a lucky number in China. Chinese pay a high premium to have a lot of 8’s in their phone number, or on their car license plate. It’s especially important in Chinese culture for their home address. These are the three lucky numbers, and why, and 8 relates to fortune.
That statement prodded me to look through my photo collection from Dali. I found the photo I was looking for:
YES! That's it! That structure is part of the Chongsheng Temple in Dali. You know whose statue is inside? Cai Shen, the Chinese God of Wealth, who is often associated with the number eight. The number eight is considered lucky in Chinese culture, and "888 Cai Shen" is a term used to amplify the promise of prosperity and abundance. Meet Cai Shen:
As you will immediately note, this isn't a post of mine as much as it is a plug for an article entitled 'Transition' to a New World Order Is Beyond Most in the West, by the renown geopolitical analyst Alastair Crooke. I do this because social media tends to censor The Unz Review, the alternative media where Mr. Crooke's articles are often published. Although Crooke headlines his article with the phrase The new era marks the end to ‘old politics’, it is changes to the world economic order which I am more interested in. (Since Crooke makes reference to the "financialisation" of the economy over the years, an excellent background reference to that can be obtained via economist Michael Hudson).
I first would draw attention to the excellent quote by the the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker Jr., which Alastair Crooke inserts near the beginning of his article (Please go to the link and read it for yourself). Further on, Crooke writes:
The dollar-led globalist system worked well initially – at least from the U.S. perspective. The U.S. exported its post-WW2 manufacturing over-capacity to a newly dollarized Europe, who consumed the surplus. And Europe too, enjoyed the benefit of having its macroeconomic environment (export-led models, guaranteed by the U.S. market). The present crisis began however, when the paradigm inverted – when the U.S. entered on its era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, and when financialisation led Wall Street to build its inverted pyramid of derivative ‘assets’, resting upon a tiny pivot of real assets.
Perhaps the last quote I will extract from Mr. Crooke's article is the following:
It is because of this western deep devotion to ideology (as well as to the Volker ‘comfort’ provided by the system) that has triggered such a torrent of anger and outright derision towards Trump’s ‘rebalancing’ plans. Barely a western economist has a good word to say – and yet no plausible alternative framework is offered. Their passion directed at Trump simply underlines that western economic theory is bankrupt, too.
Go and read the entire article. The message I would like to transmit out of this is that it is pure fantasy to think that the removal of US president Donald Trump will somehow permit the restoration of the US economy to its prior state, something like the restoration of the original operating system of your PC once it has been hopelessly corrupted. We are in a new world, ladies and gentlemen, and the sooner we realize it the better.
This document was written by Stephen Miran, the economist behind Trump's tariff policies. I'm still in the process of reading it since it is an obligatory assignment for any academic economist that is teaching these days. Granted, it is a bit wonkish for the layman, but I'll just draw your attention to a few statements in the introduction to the first chapter. Like most other significant economic policy changes (and this is one of the most significant so far this century), its effectiveness inevitably requires the implementation of a series of ancillary or "supporting" measures. This is where it gets a bit dicey.
For example, Miran states (emphasis in caps is mine):
President Trump has also discussed adopting SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES TO DOLLAR POLICY. Sweeping tariffs and a shift away from strong dollar policy can have some of the broadest ramifications of any policies in decades, fundamentally reshaping the global trade and financial systems. There is A PATH BY WHICH THESE POLICIES CAN BE IMPLEMENTED WITHOUT MATERIAL ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES, BUT IT IS NARROW, and will require currency offset for tariffs and either gradualism or coordination with allies or the Federal Reserve on the dollar. POTENTIAL FOR UNWELCOME ECONOMIC AND MARKET VOLATILITY IS SUBSTANTIAL, BUT THERE ARE STEPS THE ADMINISTRATION CAN TAKE TO MINIMIZE IT.
Hmmmmm, what are these measures, I wonder?🤔 As I alluded to in my previous post, the US needs to end the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency (to me as an economist, it seems as the only plausible alternative but it would mean that the USA wouldn't be able to have access to cheap money to finance its wars, ... err, I mean its "expenditures"🙄). Since I am profoundly anti-war, I would like nothing less than for the USA to be unable to finance its overseas imperialist wars, so I would favor ending dollar supremacy, hands down. However, does Trump want to do that? Of course not! He wants to have his cake and eat it too:
Trump has praised the reserve status of the dollar and threatened to punish countries that stop using the dollar for reserve purposes.
OK, so what are you going to do, Mr. Trump, in order to ensure the continued supremacy of the US dollar?🧐 The document continues:
I expect these tensions will be resolved by a suite of policies designed to increase burden sharing among trading and security partners: rather than attempting to end the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Regarding China in particular, there are good reasons to believe it is in a much better position to weather Trump's tariff wars. Better than even the United States! To this effect, I would highly recommend the worthwhile round-up by the very competent journalist Helena Cobban, titled China displays its chops in tech, mil-tech, manufacturing– and even political philosophy…. You might also want to check out an earlier interview with Columbia U. economist Jeffrey Sachs.
I've taught international economics at the graduate level and can attest to the difficulties one has as a teacher in effectively conveying how this convoluted system works to students. However, in order to understand the implications of Trump's policies, you have no choice but to (try to) learn something about the system. A good place for the layman to start is with the following introductory video:
You can find a transcript of the above video HERE.
Along with American professor of finance Michael Pettis of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, I believe that “Both the United States and the world at large would benefit from a less dominant U.S. dollar”, although I have my own reasons. You can find Prof. Pettis's work cited in THIS article (scroll down to the heading Are there costs to dollar dominance?).
What about President Donald Trump's current tariff policies, which seem to have the world in such a state of chaos? I came across the following "tweet" by an economist the other day: {the} US tariff agenda is basically designed to cause a negotiated dollar weakening; (now WH chief economist), gave a speech yesterday which basically suggested that reserve status for dollar was a burden which others might need to 'write checks' for. Intrigued, I did an online search which turned up THIS article on the Trump administration's tariffs and currency policy. Aside from my personal animus toward the militarism of the United States, the supremacy of the US dollar is counterproductive if the intention is to bring back manufacturing investment to the USA. Economist Simon Tilford and researcher Hans Kundnani are succinct in their aptly titled article for Foreign Affairs:
Dollar hegemony ... has domestic distributional consequences - that is, it creates winners and losers within the USA. The main winners are the banks which act as intermediaries and recipients of the capital inflows and that exercise excessive influence over US economic policy. The losers are the manufacturers and the workers they employ. Demand for the dollar pushes up its value, which makes US exports more expensive and curtails demand for them abroad, thus leading to earnings and job losses in manufacturing. The costs have been borne disproportionately by swing states in regions such as the rust-belt - a consequence that in turn has deepened socioeconomic divisions and fueled political polarization. Manufacturing jobs that were once central to the economies of these regions have been offshored, leaving poverty and resentment in their wake. It is little surprise that many of the hardest-hit states voted for Trump in 2016.
Despite being behind a pay-wall the entire Foreign Affairs article is worthwhile. It was published in 2020 and is prescient, giving badly needed context to what is happening today. Further on it states:
The domestic costs of accumulating large capital flows are likely to increase and become more destabilizing for the US in the future. As China and other emerging economies continue to grow and the US's slice of the global economy continues to shrink, capital inflows to the US will grow relative to the size of the US economy (...) Given these mounting economic and political pressures, it will become increasingly difficult for the US to create more balanced and equitable growth while remaining the destination of choice for the world's excess capital, with the overvalued currency and deindustrialization this implies. At some point, the US will have little alternative but to limit capital imports in the interests of the broader economy - even if doing so means voluntarily giving up the dollar's role as the world's dominant reserve currency.
If you would prefer avoid the pay-wall, perhaps the following video will be more to your liking. It takes on the issue of President Trump's tariffs head-on:
A more "bricks and mortar" treatment of the topic of the difficulties of enticing manufacturing back to the United States is provided by Molson Hart, the founder and CEO of Viahart, a consumer products company, HERE.
Much to the chagrin of the western establishment, the way of the future is being articulated by this man:
"We have consistently underscored the diversity of the world as a prerequisite for its sustainability.
It may appear paradoxical, as greater diversity complicates the construction of a unified narrative.
Naturally, universal norms are presumed to aid in this regard. Can they fulfill this role?
It stands to reason that this is a formidable and complicated task.
Firstly, we must avoid a scenario where the model of one country or a relatively minute segment of humanity is presumed universal and imposed upon others.
Secondly, it is untenable to adopt any conventional, albeit democratically developed code, and dictate it as an infallible truth to others in perpetuity.
The international community is a living entity, with its civilisational diversity making it unique and presenting an inherent value.
International law is a product of agreements not even between countries, but between nations, because legal consciousness is an integral part of every unique culture and every civilisation.
The crisis of international law, which is the subject of broad public discussion today, is, in a sense, a crisis of growth.
The rise of nations and cultures that have previously remained on the periphery of global politics for one reason or another means that their own distinct ideas of law and justice are playing an increasingly important role.
They are diverse. This may give the impression of discord and perhaps cacophony, but this is only the initial phase.
It is my deep conviction that the only new international system possible is one embracing polyphony, where many tones and many musical themes are sounded together to form harmony.
If you like, we are moving towards a world system that is going to be polyphonic rather than polycentric, one in which all voices are heard and, most importantly, absolutely must be heard.
Those who are used to soloing and want to keep it that way will have to get used to the new 'scores' now.
Have I mentioned post-WWII international law?
This international law is based on the UN Charter, which was written by the victorious countries.
But the world is changing – with new centres of power emerging, and powerful economies growing and coming to the forefront.
That predictably calls for a change in the legal regulation as well.
Of course, this must be done carefully, but it is inevitable.
Law reflects life, not vice versa."
Enter the BRICS+. The recent Kazan Summit is indeed a watershed, but there is disagreement over what was intended and what was achieved. The following video will go a long way toward clarifying these issues. In it, political economist Radhika Desai is joined by Ben Norton and former central banker Kathleen Tyson, author of the book "Multicurrency Mercantilism" to explain BRICS's plans to transform the international monetary and financial system, and to discuss policies at the 2024 summit in Kazan, Russia.:
By the way, Youtube has the bad habit of censoring taking down inconvenient videos. If that happens in this case, the audio of said video can easily be accessed here.
The incredible clarity of Norman Finkelstein. Although the entire interview is absolutely stellar, listen in particular what he says commencing from 25:05.
Every year since I started writing, whether in Arabic or English, I have produced various iterations of the same essay or poem on Nakba Day, riddled with the same facts and figures and tired arguments, in hopes that one day such persuasion and schooling would no longer be necessary. The thesis has been consistent: pairing “anniversary” and “Nakba” in the same sentence is a misalliance; the time frame, 76 years, is a miscalculation. The English translation—“Catastrophe”—is reductive, because it wasn’t a sudden natural disaster. Nor is it a tragic relic from the past. The Nakba is an organized and ongoing process of colonization and genocide that neither began nor ended in 1948. The perpetrators have names and the crime scene remains active. And where you cannot see the rubble, know that pine trees have been planted on top of it, to conceal it.
I read that, in Gaza, they have opened a new kindergarten in the North, a phoenix of sorts, and I want to believe that there is already a clean scent of jasmine that follows the teachers as they go about their day — what, if not jasmine, can ease the nagging of children and the nagging of warplanes? I have been holding on to this piece of good news for the past couple of weeks, filling in the blanks with my own speculations. There is jasmine because seeds do not need permission, or a ceasefire, to germinate. Children nag because that is what children do. What do five-year-olds learn, besides the numbers and alphabet, in the time of genocide? What jokes do they tell to pass the time? Their vocabulary expands, naturally, to include words more brutal than “invasion,” “siege,” and “Nakba,” and their teachers, I imagine, tell them that the Nakba, the original Nakba (1947-49), pales in comparison to Gaza’s present. Even the rich — all of the rich — are in tents this time around.
It is hard to predict how we will historicize this current moment, but if our reflections on the late forties are any indication, we might remember only today’s destruction and defeat. And for good reason — at this very moment, with no hyperbole, our people’s corpses have been piled up in mass graves, plural, their wrists, big and tiny alike, bound with zip-ties. Horrors that we once learned as oral histories and cautionary tales are livestreamed today, incessantly, forever etched in our memories. The past seven months have shown us that even metaphor is a casualty of war. What was once figurative is painfully literal: bloodied beards, furniture in trees, a limb hanging from a ceiling fan, women giving birth on the concrete. Clichés cover the terrain: plants erupting through rubble, flowers springing from cement, etcetera. The surreal happens so much. Journalists are poets, almost, when reporting about the decomposed under ruins. Doctors have invented acronyms for conditions my fiction professors would have called unrealistically episodic. Death is everywhere.
And so when one begins to write or speak about Palestine, it is tempting to look at loss and only loss, and to find in this loss a plea for survival. We have suffered a lot, we say to those who will listen, we have suffered enough. Too often our suffering is reported without a culprit, our anguished cries exist outside of history and politics. We have no national aspirations, no land to cultivate. Our existence is purely mechanistic — we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die. And in our deterministic march to the grave, we encounter each other as unlucky strangers, frail and futureless.
But there is — and always has been — more to our reality. We are, without a doubt, subjects of conquest and colonization, products of circumstance, but we are also so much more than that. At every turn of our bloodied history, we have been brutalized, bereaved, dispossessed, exiled, starved, slaughtered and imprisoned, but we have, to the world’s dismay, refused to submit. For every massacre and invasion, there have been and there are now men and women who pick up their weapons, makeshift and sophisticated — Molotovs, rifles, slingshots, rockets — to fight. There has always been struggle, there has always been jasmine.
In parallel, there is also more to our enemy. Zionism, behind the facade of the impenetrable superpower it purports to be, is more vulnerable today than ever. And I do not say this naïvely: I do not ask that we gloss over our enemy’s capabilities or the power of the empires and mercenaries that back it. Nor do I ask that we trivialize the crushing weight of forty thousand martyrs, or glamorize the men confronting tanks in tracksuits and burden them with more than they can handle. Freedom fighters understand that their opponent is Goliath, that the odds are stacked against them, that they do not have an option but to pick up the stone. But this is a new dawn. Through close inspection — watching state media, listening to the shifting global narrative, witnessing the renaissance of radical movements, even reading the inscriptions in random airport bathrooms — one discovers that this is a new dawn. Zionism may remain a formidable opponent, but it is also an aging, trembling beast, blinded by its own significance, unpredictable as it may be. Sometimes it pounces on you and pierces its fangs in your flesh. Sometimes it is but a paper tiger.
And it is this discovery that not only shatters the myth of colonial invincibility, but it reminds us that liberation is attainable, the future is within reach. Amid the unrelenting airstrikes and the havoc of demolished cities, it might seem frivolous to fixate on the blossoming jasmine. But we owe it ourselves to look at everything, to look for everything. To see the picture with all of its details. As deadly and treacherous and unrelenting as it is, the Nakba will not last forever. The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution. On the phone, my mother tells me, rain is coming and God is almighty. ~ Mohammed El-Kurd
I will dare to make a prediction: The United States has reached the end of its rope: It will (if it hasn't already done so, surreptitiously) throw in the towel. I'm not saying that it will perform some sort of public "mea culpa" and accept that its "unipolar moment" is finally dead and buried. No! By no means. It will instead cling to its pretense of being the world's "indispensable nation" for some indeterminate period of time into the future. For how long? I don't know, but it is likely to be years, if not decades. History is often written in retrospect. Whenever the USA finally admits to its fate (sometime in the near or distant future), the historians and analysts of the epoch will likely ask (or speculate) when it arrived at that conclusion. When was it forced to throw in the towel? It is my firm belief that the consensus will eventually coalesce around the year 2024 (or the transition from 2023 to 2024). The Roaring Twenties? What do you think?😎
Blinne Ni Ghralaigh KC described the situation as a crisis or humanity, and the embodiment of hell. Violence, death, disease, no school, starvation - Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. For children there is nothing but the sound of war, day in, day out. Reports of torture and abuse of bodies more common. 4 out 5 people in the world in catastrophic hunger are in Gaza. The daily stats are clear proof: 247 deaths (including 48 mothers and 117 children, 3 medics, a UN worker, a journalist) Some are wounded over and over. Each day 3,900 homes destroyed, ambulances and hospitals are targeted. Bombs are dropped on places people have been told to evacuate to. There’s a new acronym – WCNSF – which stands for “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family”. There is imminent and irrevocable evidence of urgency. UN aid remains unimplemented. Humanitarian ceasefire calls have been ignored. Since the case was filed, over a thousand have been killed. Over 85% repeatedly forced to move, into shrinking slivers of land. This is a population that was already vulnerable after 16 years of blockade. Many dying from preventable problems. Children in particular subjected to mental torture, much of which is irreparable.
Many people have no access to food, water, medicine or safe shelter. A trapped population that has nowhere safe to go. In addition services are denied or restricted, even though even the US asked for it to be allowed.
Israel denies it is responsible for the crisis. 500 aid trucks were necessary daily before 7 October. Promises of future aid therefore hold little sway. UN SG has stressed that number of trucks doesn’t matter, because aid cannot be delivered effectively. Everyone and everything remains at imminent risk if irreparable prejudice.
The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people. The horror being live streamed, as victims broadcast their own destruction in real time. This has repercussions for generations to come. “The world should be ashamed”. Palestinian pastor on Xmas Day “this is a genocide, we will arise…but this is by far the biggest blow we have received”. South Africa is doing what it can, standing up to be counted.
Abu Obeida, the military spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, expressed his satisfaction with their performance and unity, stressing that thousands of fighters were awaiting their turn on the battlefield. He highlighted the successful targeting of the occupation forces in both old and new incursion axes. Notably, the Qassam Brigades managed to destroy more than 180 military vehicles in prominent areas like Shuja’iya, Zeitoun, Sheikh Radwan, Jabalia camp, Beit Lahiya, Deir al-Balah, and Khan Yunis. These attacks included the use of Yasin shells, canisters, guerrilla tactics, ambushes, machine guns, booby-trapped tunnels, entrapment maneuvers, and sniping operations.
