Hordes of settlers continue to wreck havoc in Palestinian occupied territory .. another attack on Al-Mughair village near Ramallah that left a 35 year old man dead and so many houses and cars burnt. #ApartheidIsrael pic.twitter.com/pBcXuOMzqi

— Amal Jadou (@AmalJadou7) April 12, 2024

Palestinian civilians, especially in villages in area C have been abandoned by the world, and so, for that matter, have all the Palestinian populations facing the violence of armed Israeli settlers. The expansion of the Israeli settlements, considered illegal under International Law, and built on stolen Palestinian land, goes on at its fastest rate ever. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the diversion of the world’s attention by its barbaric assault on the Gaza strip to strengthen its grip on the West Bank.

According to a recent UN report which covers the period from November 1 2022 to October 31 2023, illegal Israeli settlements expanded at unprecedented rate since records began in 2017. Approximately, 24,300 units were advanced in existing Israeli settlements including 9670 in East Jerusalem. The same report also highlighted that about 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank including 465,000 mainly live in area C in the West bank and 230,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Displacement or small scale ethnic cleansing were also carried out against Palestinian herding communities. This uprooted about 1105 Palestinians from 28 herding communities from their land between January 2022 and September 2023. Further 878 people including 435 children from 15 herding communities were displaced between 7th and 23rd of October 2023.

The figure of 700,000 settlers is particularly alarming. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in 2002, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank was 380,000 settlers. This massive increase reflects how different Israeli governments worked tirelessly to almost double the number of settlers in the West Bank in 21 years. Such a doubling was also pursued by Israel after it signed the Oslo Accord with the PLO in1993, promising to withdraw from the Palestinian territories by 1997.

It is ironic that the Oslo Accords which were supposed to lead to peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, were followed by the creation of ever more Israeli settlements after dividing the West Bank into areas A, B and C, killing any hope for just peace. To illustrate, area A is about 18 percent of the West Bank and encompasses the main urban areas. Most matters there are under the authority of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B is about 21 percent of the West Bank. It is under joint control between Israel and the PA , which affects health, education and the economy. 60 percent of the West Bank is area C. It is mainly rural, and is where the Palestinians have their main agricultural land, so that it is crucial for their food security. Israel is in full control in this area.

The Israeli refusal to withdraw as agreed enabled Israel to deny the Palestinians permits to build new homes in most of the West Bank while construction in the illegal Israeli settlements was accelerated. These discriminatory policies forced desperate Palestinians to build without Israeli permission. Many of those who dared to do so had their homes demolished by Israel. Between 2009 and 2022, 9,128 Palestinian homes were demolished, causing the displacement of 13,171 Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government offers the Israeli settlers a wide range of financial incentives and subsidies, including but not exclusive of grants and preferential loans to buy property, reduced land prices, reduced taxes for individual and businesses and crucially, indemnity to compensate for any loss of income resulting from EU custom duties. This institutional racism is another manifestation of an apartheid state and settler colonialism.

CBC News Video: “West Bank engulfed by wave of settler violence”

For economic reasons, these racist policies are designed to encourage more Israelis to live on stolen Palestinian land in breach of the international law. This strategy is aimed at easing the demand on housing inside Israel and speeding up its colonization of the West Bank ahead of its declared plan to annex area C to Israel. These policies, combined with the settlers violence will force more Palestinians out of area C towards the already crowded and smaller areas of A and B. This is already causing property price inflation and decreasing affordability. Additionally, these areas are already subjected to frequent Israeli raids, sieges and extrajudicial executions. This is besides other socioeconomic problems such as unemployment and poverty caused mainly by the Israeli occupation.

While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.

Available from City Lights

The center of the world, where recorded civilization got its start over 7,000 years ago, can be found in southwestern Asia, in ancient Mesopotamia. It can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Torah and the Talmud, in The Odyssey and The Iliad of Homer; in Zoroastrianism, which predated the Qur’an by over 2,000 years; in A Thousand and One Nights and in the literature of 20th-century poets and writers, among them Khalil Gibran and Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Ahdaf Souief, Nizar Qabbani, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmood Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Amin Maalouf, Edward Said, Hisham Matar, Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine and too many more to name.

Eventually nationalism took root, as it did in Europe, and the ancient civilizations became identified as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the many other countries, small and large, that stretch from the Mashriq to the Maghreb — as far east as Pakistan and Afghanistan to Morocco in the west.

But in 1902, American naval historian and retired admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan expressed a hegemonic vision of the world in an argument he published in the National Review. In “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” Mahan described the western Asian region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean as “the Middle East,” suggesting that whichever navy controlled that part of the world would hold the key to world domination. After World War I, Europeans jumped into the fray with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divvied up the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, with several countries coming under British or French influence. The domino effect of outsiders meddling in the affairs of west Asian nations led to the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference, the partition of Palestine, the creation of Trans-Jordan (a British protectorate for 25 years), the division of Greater Syria into Syria and Lebanon, then the end of Palestine and the establishment of Israel . . . right up to the year 1953, when the CIA with the machinations of MI6, succeeded in fomenting the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, which would lead to the anti-Shah uprising 26 years later that became known as the Iranian or Islamic Revolution.

Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction, edited by Jordan Elgrably. Click here to buy.

All of this to say that the “Middle East” or the “Near East” are akin to exonyms, terms used by outsiders to define others as they often do not define themselves; they are convenient catch phrases that continue to cause consternation today among those of us who are from the center of the world. Lebanese poet and translator Huda Fakhreddine calls the “Middle East” a trap — “a made-up thing, a construct of history and treacherous geography, the Middle East as an American trope, a stage for identity politics.”

To be sure, neither Rear Admiral Mahan nor Lord Balfour, much less Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot, or any of the other many thousands of Western politicians, secret agents, generals, businessmen and other meddlers have ever given much thought or exhibited empathy when it comes to what it means to be Iraqi or Syrian or Iranian or Egyptian, or Palestinian. Geopolitics has been capitalism’s overlord and nationalism’s emperor, serving agendas that have little to do with the needs of real people.

It is a given that governments prefer borders and passports, shored up by flags and patriotism, while people will always find a way to relate to one another, in spite of their nationalities. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the mosaic or the salad when it comes to parsing identity: just as it takes several colors to create a mosaic, and a salad contains diverse ingredients, we are all the sum of multiple parts, and each of us is much more than our national identity card.

I became closer to my own North African roots as a result of living in Spain in the lead-up to the 1992 Quincentennial, when there was a lot of talk about the Spanish Muslims and Jews who were effectively exiled as a result of the Inquisition in 1492. They left a powerful imprint on the soul of the country, as Marie Rosa Menocal so elegantly describes in her classic work, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002). But the convivencia that Menocal described was not merely a period of Spanish history; this cultural entente was innate to southwest Asian societies, which had long been comprised of a mix of religious, cultural and ethnic communities. In the aftermath of the post–World War II reconfiguration, the Nakba, the Islamic Revolution and the Iraq War, however, the region has lost much of its organic diversity, and current economic strife and climate devastation continue what Western meddlers started over a hundred years ago.

Not all is doom and gloom when it comes to the center of the world today, however, because despite the failures of the Green Movement, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, “what has not changed is West Asia’s geopolitical centrality,” as Chas Freeman has written. “It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe and the routes that connect them meet. The region’s cultures cast a deep shadow across northern Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. It is the epicenter of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three ‘Abrahamic religions’ that together shape the faiths and moral standards of over three-fifths of humankind. This gives the region global reach.”

This is the time for the original voices of people from the region to be heard — for Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Middle Eastern Jews, Armenians, Turks, Afghans, Pakistanis, the Amazigh and Kabyl peoples, Druze, Assyrians, Copts, Yezidis et alia to speak up, and speak out.

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The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were  told that the Israeli commandos will  be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?

 Photo credit: Medea Benjamin

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated  rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf  was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. 
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

Defending itself from Iran’s drones and missiles cost the Israelis alone an estimated 4-5 billion shekels ($1.08-1.35billion). This does not include the cost to US citizens of $1 billion in countering Houthi and Iranian missiles and drones targeted at Israel. Israel’s initial limited response on April 19 through a drone attack on a military base in Isfahan leaves room for de-escalation of tension over a full-scale war.

Iran’s first direct attack on Israel hit the Nevatim airbase, a mere 40 miles south of Jerusalem, practically implying an Iranian credible deterrence capability if the potency of the deterrence is questioned. Prospects for a wider conflict in the region involving Russia and China remain, risking an ultimate nuclear exchange that should remain ‘unthinkable.’ Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check. Whilst the war in Gaza and the Lebanon-Israel border continues. Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza, killing over 34000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, with the vast majority women and children, has turned public opinion against Israel. And, Israel’s attempts to destroy UNRWA — the backbone of relief efforts in Gaza — with its slow, meticulous, and often arbitrary inspection of trucks have further complicated aid delivery.

What indelibly marks these events, aside from the military and political calculations and implications for the region, is that they have occurred in violation of provisions of international law, including, but not exclusively, the breach of sovereignty, international humanitarian laws, laws of war,  crimes against humanity, wars of aggression, and according to a preliminary ICJ ruling, possibly the articles of 1948 genocide convention. Israel’s ‘ironclad’ supporter, the United States, is construed, therefore, as an accomplice in the crime of genocide through its arms transfers to Israel, and vetoes in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to end Israel’s almost seven-month-old military operation in Gaza. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “Nearly 200 bodies found in mass grave at hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis”

A closer look at the post-Cold war period since 1990 reveals persistent US violations of international law, generally related to the 75-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The United States has paid a heavy financial and political, and now explicit moral, price for its protection of the state of Israel. But the biggest victim of this ‘special relation’ has been the very foundation of the liberal international order. The United States’ (along with its Western allies in NATO) double-standard views and application of provisions of international law have been detrimental to an orderly global governance, A major culprit for such liberal/illiberal dichotomy in rhetoric and practice is the US blind commitment to the state of Israel.  

The end of the Cold War promised the End of History and the beginning of a ‘New World Order.’ It promised that globalization of trade and finance and the technological revolution in information technology, transportation, and communication means the falsity of a looming ‘Clash of Civilizations.’ 

The United States experienced almost unprecedented economic prosperity in the 1990s and the European allies celebrated the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The Eastern European countries abandoned communism and joined the ranks of capitalist countries and the European Union. China continued with its miraculous economic performance welcomed Western investments and traded and cooperated in the Security Council curtailing the Iranian nuclear program. Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation similarly welcomed privatization. But,   structural adjustment policies resulted in a defunct privatization of state-owned properties, and with inadequate legal and institutional mechanisms to prevent the rise of the new oligarchs and ‘parasitic capitalism.’ 

Ironically, the new world order was to emerge on the ruins of Iraq after the 1990-91 first Persian Gulf war. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 on 29 November 1990 authorized the first UNSC collective security action against an aggressor since the 1950-53 Korean War. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 triggered the first Persian Gulf war, but we also witnessed 30 scud missiles hitting Israel as Saddam Hussein attempted to expand the war and turn it into another Arab-Palestinian-Israeli war. The Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) was a bloody confrontation between two Muslim countries with opposing views on Islam, power politics, and what constitutes national interest. Yet, the revolutionary state in Iran saw the liberation of al-Quds (Jerusalem) to follow the liberation of Shia holy sites in Kerbala and Najaf in Iraq. Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric and actions have remained steadfast since the advent of the revolution. 

The US Mideast policy immediately after WWII focused primarily on countering communism and securing the flow of cheap oil from the region which demanded dealing with authoritarian Arab regimes fearful of both the threat of communism and radical ideas that may threaten the status quo on the resource power parameters in the state-society relations. Still, the thorny Palestinian issue was two-pronged, and the Arab states fought against and cooperated with Israel to contain Palestinian nationalism. The Arab Israeli wars have always involved competing Arab, Israeli, and Palestinian nationalisms, compounded with inter-Arab states’ political rivalries, sectarianism, and US (and Israeli) interventions during and after the Cold War. Recall, the Arab-Israel-Palestinian wars with such hallmarks, including 1948, 1956, 1967-70, 1973, and 1982-85 (Lebanon) wars.

Regional wars bearing similar traits and related to the wider Palestinian nationalism include the first Persian Gulf War (1990-91), Intifada I (1987-1990), Intifada II (2000-2005), Lebanon (2006), and 15 wars involving Gaza alone since 1948, including the Gazan wars of 2008-09, 2014, 2018-19, and now the ongoing 2023-24 war. No wonder, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the mother of all wars in the region. The conflict over the years has fed the radicalization of politics in the region. The Islamic movements have rallied around the issue of the liberation of Palestine and al-Quds (Jerusalem) to mobilize popular support in advancing political and religious legitimacy in the absence of a viable democratic rule. The 22 authoritarian Arab states, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Türkiye have also been intimately involved with the Palestinian issue.   

The United States has relied on its hard and soft power to lead a liberal global order since World War II. The Cold War preoccupation with polarity and deterrence based on a doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) complicated the plans for a liberal international system, beginning with the creation of the Bretton-Woods gold-based, fixed-rate exchange system and its institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The principle behind the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) eventually developed into the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, as the Europeans’ attempts at integration since 1951 progressed into the creation of the European Union in 1993. Other rule-based regional economic integration also appeared in Asia, Africa, South and North America. Contrary to the unstable interwar period that saw the rise of Nazism and Fascism, the post-WWII ‘peaceful’ international system witnessed 51 founding members of the UN in 1945 increase to 193 countries today. 

The United States’ commitment to the security of the state of Israel has been a dominant theme in its Middle Eastern policy since its creation in 1948 but also at the expense of its advocacy for a liberal-based international law and order. The US has over decades dispensed billions of dollars in economic and military aid premising it on Israel as a strategic ally in countering communism, helping the flow of oil, and keeping Arab radicalism at bay. Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, collecting about $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance. The US diplomatic coverage of Israel also is unconstructive; the UN data shows it has vetoed dozens of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions critical of Israel, including at least 53 since 1972.

A review of debates in Congress and data analysis also shows, “Members of Congress have consistently debated and passed resolutions in support of Israel and in repudiation of its foes, showing strong bipartisan support for Israel.” The US’s unequivocal support of Israel has seen it prevent resolutions condemning, among others, violence against protesters, illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank built since 1967. The US meanwhile has obliged its NATO allies, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and Jordan in its quest to protect Israel and in support of authoritarian Arab states!

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the ‘mother of all conflicts’ in the MENA region that has intimately influenced or been influenced by Arab nationalism, the Islamic movements, the radicalization of politics, and overall governance in the region. To the neglect of elsewhere in Africa, the Sahel region has experienced five military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon. Whilst, Tunisia, Chad, and Sudan have experienced constitutional coups and widespread violence in the case of Sudan. The US Africa Command since 2008  has been involved in military training of African states to counter the Russian and Chinese military and economic inroads in the Continent.  

The restoration of a global liberal order necessitates a uniform and unbiased application of the expectations, norms, and laws of international law. Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel from Gaza, the world has witnessed the continuing degradation of the norms and laws and the expectations of behavior in the so-called international liberal order. The Israeli overreaction to the Hamas attack resembles the United States’ initial response to the terrorist attack on its soil on September 11, 2001. In that instance, the United States, for the sake of revenge, self-defense, or the restoration of international order, took measures that violated the very norms, laws, and expectations of the international system which Washington had championed for decades. The United States in less than a month began bombing Afghanistan and quickly overthrew the ruling Taliban regime and chased al Qaeda fighters across the border into Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond. This story, however, did not end there. The US declared a ‘War on Terror’ resulting in a policy of regime change beginning with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, and unsuccessful attempts in Syria and Yemen.  

Estimates of direct civilians killed due to American military intervention totals stand at least 400,000 since 9/11. The number of people killed indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, including in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, is estimated at 3.6-3.8 million, though the precise figure remains unknown. This brings the estimated total of direct and indirect deaths to 4.5-4.7 million. Similarly, the Israeli overreaction after the tragic events of October 7, 2023, resulting in 1200 Israelis killed, has already led to 34,000 Palestinian dead, with women and children accounting for the majority, not accounting for thousands injured, maimed, traumatized, and remain unaccounted for. The deadly Israeli assault on Gaza has also led to the death of many journalists, members of the NGOs, and the destruction of hospitals and mosques. 

International law today remains incomplete and in need of drastic structural changes, e.g., a reform of the UNSC membership and power structure, a revisiting of the adjudication power of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) and its ‘compulsory’ jurisdiction, the World Trade’s provisions for labor and environmental protection, and a serious re-commitment to empower UN and its functional agencies with necessary resources. The United States unconditional support for Israel and its lack of attention to the welfare of peoples in the MENA region, as well as elsewhere in the developing world, in pursuit of peace, human security, and good governance, is detrimental to the universal compliance and voluntary adherence to the norms and rules of international law.    

Some years ago, I found myself making my way up the narrow stairs of a Learjet on a sultry runway in a deserted airport near the South Africa-Mozambique border. The humidity was there to taste – the air thick with it.

The weather radar was showing a fast-developing thundercloud. Our mission was to fly through the most active part of the storm, measure it, fly through again while dumping a bin load of dry ice, turn hard and fly through for a final measurement.

The inside of the Learjet resembled a food blender, so severe was the turbulence. Thousands of meters below, a smaller plane would be threading through the storm downdrafts measuring the rain. It isn’t something you do every day although the saucer-sized hail dents on the wings of the Learjet told of its many prior engagements.

Apart from the fun of flying through the core of a thunderstorm in a Learjet, I didn’t think much about the time I was lucky enough to be part of that project. Until I heard about the recent freak storm in Dubai.

The project I was part of, neatly named Rain (Rain Augmentation in Nelspruit), was a cloud seeding experiment several years in the making. Cloud seeding involves adding tiny particles into a cloud in order to give moisture something to attach to and form droplets. Gradually those droplets merge and become heavy enough to fall as rain. In theory, the “seeeded” clouds will grow more droplets suitable for rain.

No one flight is proof of seeding having been effective. It can’t be. There is no identical cloud with which to compare the outcome of having seeded a particular cloud. It is therefore necessary to fly a lot of missions and to measure, but not seed, half of them thereby creating a data set for the experiment itself (seeded clouds) and the control (unseeded clouds).

Statistical analysis of the results from Rain was rigorous to say the least. After several years of trying, modification of rain rates from some storms was successful, although it would never be possible to prove that any one storm had been changed.

A perfect storm

Early on Tuesday morning, April 16, the chat network of my school class which is replete with global insights after 40 years of dispersion, lit up with reports of unprecedented rain from Brendan in Bahrain and Ant in Dubai. Ant is a pilot and was flying out of Dubai that morning. He duly relayed photographs of his flight over the saturated desert.

Parts of the Arabian Peninsula received 18 months of rainfall in 24 hours that Tuesday. The airport looked more like a harbour. Being the weather-man in the chat group, I looked at the satellite and the forecast model data. What I saw were the ingredients of a perfect storm.

What normally keeps the old deserts, such as those of the Arabian Peninsula, so very dry is persistent and intense sinking of air – the very opposite of what is required for rain. The sinking air is bone dry, having come from the cold, top of the atmosphere, and is compressed and warmed as it descends. It arrives near the surface like a hairdryer.

Below this layer, especially in deserts close to warm oceans, evaporation is plentiful. But that humidity is kept captive by the sinking air above. It is a cauldron with the lid firmly on.

What took that lid off the cauldron on 16 April was a high-altitude jet stream unusually far south. In fact two jet streams, the subtropical jet and the polar jet that had joined forces and left behind a cut-off circulation of imported, cooler air. The sinking air, along with the cauldron lid, was gone.

“Dubai Inundated,” Digital, Dall-E, 2024.

Meanwhile a feed of moisture laden air was accelerating in from the northern tropical Indian Ocean and converging over the desert. Dew point temperatures over the UAE were similar to those normally found in the rainforests of the Congo basin.

Under these conditions, thunderstorms develop very readily and in this case a special kind of storm, a mesoscale convective system, built and sustained itself for many hours. Infrared satellite data showed it to be about the size of France.

Cloud seeding not to blame

The power, intensity and organisation of a storm like this is hard to fathom. What surprised me, though, was not the majesty of nature, but an emerging set of reports blaming the ensuing rains on cloud seeding. One broadsheet even insinuated the University of Reading, a powerhouse of meteorological expertise, was responsible.

It turns out the UAE has been running a cloud seeding project, UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, for several years. Their approach is to fire hygroscopic (water-attracting) salt flares from aircraft into warm cumuliform clouds. The idea, similar to the Rain project I once worked on, is to promote the growth of cloud droplets and thereby rainfall. Bigger droplets fall out more easily.

So could seeding have built a huge storm system the size of France? Let’s be clear, that would be like a breeze stopping an intercity train going at full tilt. And the seeding flights had not happened that day either. The kind of deep, large-scale clouds formed on April 16 are not the target of the experiment.

The interesting thing is that humans have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that 2,400 gigatonnes of carbon (our total emissions since pre-industrial times) might make a difference to climate, but very readily get behind the idea of a few hygroscopic flares making 18 months worth of rain fall in a day.

Richard Washington, Professor of Climate Science, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I turn 80 in July, which makes me just over a year-and-a-half younger than Joe Biden and almost two years older than Donald Trump. And, honestly, I know my limits. Yes, I still walk — no small thing — six miles a day. And I work constantly. But I’m also aware that, on my second walk of the day and then as night approaches, I feel significantly more tired than I once did. I’m also aware that my brain, still active indeed, does forget more than it once did. And all of this is painfully normal. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing whatsoever.

I also know from older friends that we humans can still be distinctly functional, thoughtful, and capable at age 82 (when Donald Trump would leave his second term in office) or even 86 (when Joe Biden would do the same). But honestly, what are the odds? I’ll tell you one thing that couldn’t be more obvious — not as good as for someone who’s, say, 55 or 60 years old, that’s for sure. Yes, there’s also the reputed wisdom of old age — and it might indeed make Joe Biden a more thoughtful president, were he to get a second term; Donald Trump, of course, would be Donald Trump, at 60 or 82.

And I have little doubt that, whatever age you are, you’ve been thinking somewhat similar thoughts. I mean, doesn’t the very possibility of watching a televised debate between the two of them make you anxious? After all, the oldest president to previously leave office was Ronald Reagan at 77 (and by then he may have had dementia). Before him, the oldest was Dwight D. Eisenhower who ended his second term in 1961 at 70 years old, having had a heart attack while in office. Third comes William Henry Harrison, who entered the White House in 1841 at age 68 and died, possibly of pneumonia, 32 days later.  Now, it’s also a fact that we Americans are generally lasting longer than once upon a time. But is that really where you want to put your political money? I doubt it.

Still, all of the above is too obvious to belabor, so here’s a question: Are there any other implications we can draw from the upcoming battle between those two old men that’s going to grab our attention and steal the headlines for all too many months to come? The answer, I suspect, is yes. Sometimes in our world, the symbolic is all too subtle, but every now and then it impolitely smacks you in the face. And at least as far as I’m concerned, the second Biden-Trump election campaign should more than qualify in that regard.

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I mean, the country that still passes for the greatest power on Planet Earth is going to set a limping age record for president, no matter who wins, leaving China’s Xi Jinping, now 70, and Russia’s Vladmir Putin, now 71, as relative youths in an all-American world of absolute ancientness. And that should certainly tell you something about the state of our country and this planet, too.

To be a little clearer about just what, let me add one more factor to the equation. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are preparing a fight to the wire to lead an America that, not so many decades ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was considered the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. Doesn’t that tell you something?

I think it does. I think, quite bluntly (though I’ve seen no one discussing this amid the endless media headlines and chatter about Trump and Biden), that those two old codgers offer a stunning image of the all-too-literal decline and fall of — yes! — the United States. They should make us consider where the country that still likes to think of itself as the singularly most powerful and influential one on this planet is really heading.

A World Without Peace Dividends

As you might imagine, there’s a prehistory to all of this. George H. W. Bush, president at the moment when the Soviet Union went down in 1991, had that very year ordered the U.S. military to launch Operation Desert Storm, which drove Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait. In its own fashion, it also launched what would, in the century that followed, become a set of American military operations around the globe. At the same time, with Russia in tatters and China still a modestly rising power — with, that is, no true great-power enemies left on Planet Earth — that sole superpower would do something rather surprising. It would continue to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military-industrial complex. Yes, there was talk then about a “peace dividend” for this country and its people, but none ever arrived.

Thirty-two years later, the Pentagon budget has almost hit the trillion-dollar mark annually, while the overall national “security” (yes, it’s still called that!) budget long ago soared well above the trillion-dollar mark. Meanwhile, in this century, George H. W. Bush’s son, elected president in November 2000, would the following September respond to the 9/11 attacks, planned and carried out by Osama bin Laden and his small terror group, al-Qaeda, by launching what quickly came to be known as “the Global War on Terror.” And all too global it would be with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It would also prove a disaster of the first order for the last superpower, whose military would leave literally millions dead across the planet, destroy countries, decimate economies, and create tens of millions of refugees, while costing this country a staggering $8 trillion and counting as, over more than 20 years, the U.S. military lost wars, while terrorism as a phenomenon only grew.

Yes, in May 2011, Osama bin Laden would be killed in Pakistan by a team of U.S. Navy Seals. Still, were he alive today, I suspect he would be pleased indeed. With next to nothing other than his personal wealth, a small crew of followers, and some hijacked airplanes, he managed to outmaneuver and outplay what was then the greatest power on Planet Earth. Thanks to the slaughter of several thousand Americans in New York and Washington, he also managed to draw this country into an endless war against “terrorism” and, in the process, turn it into an increasingly terrorized country, whose inhabitants are now, however symbolically (and, in the future, possibly far more literally), at each other’s throats.

In some eerie fashion, both former President Trump and President Biden might be considered creations of al-Qaeda. And so might the country itself today. I mean, could an American of 1991 ever have imagined that, in 2024, polls would show the urge for violence against fellow Americans reaching eerie highs here? Meanwhile, approximately one in 20 of us is now armed with a military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Even young people can now possess a JR-15 (for “junior”) child’s version of such weaponry that’s all too deadly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, AR-15s have proven the weapon of choice in the worst of the mass killings that have become commonplace in this country and, in recent years, have been distinctly on the rise. They could indeed be considered “terrorist” activities, involving as they do the repeated deaths of startling numbers of us. And all of this is happening without an American-style al-Qaeda yet truly in sight. Mind you, there are now an estimated almost 400 million weapons of various kinds in the possession of American civilians, a stunning arsenal for any country, no less one increasingly divided against itself. Meanwhile, according to a recent NPR/News Hour/Marist poll, 3 in 10 Republicans (or 20 million of us) claim that “Americans may have to resort to violence to set things straight” in this country, while, on the right, militarized terror-style groups are ever more the order of the day.

Consider that a brief summary of the increasingly divided and divisive American society over which those two old men are now fighting, a domestic world that could, in the end, rip apart whatever fantasies our leaders may still have about American power on this planet.

Coming Apart at the Seams?

As was true of the Soviet Union until almost the moment it collapsed in a heap, the U.S. still appears to be an imperial power of the first order. It has perhaps 750 military bases scattered around the globe and continues to act like a power of one on a planet that itself seems distinctly in crisis. It also continues to organize for a new Cold (verging on Hot) War with China in the Pacific. That explains President Biden’s recent highly publicized “summit” in Washington with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines, just as it explains the way U.S. special operations forces have only recently been “permanently” assigned to an island only a few kilometers off China’s coast. Yes, as that recent meeting with the Japanese and Filipino leaders and those commandos suggest, the Biden administration is still dealing with China in particular as if this were indeed a Cold War moment, and the sort of “containment” of a communist country the president grew up with was still the order of the day for the globe’s greatest power.

Unfortunately, that’s truly an old man’s version of the world we now live in. I’m thinking about the planet which, each month, sets a new heat record and where, despite much talk about cutting fossil fuels, the U.S. in 2023 produced more oil (13.5 million barrels a day) than at any time in its history, while China’s coal-power capacity grew more rapidly than ever. And that’s just to start down a list of fossil-fuelized bad news. On a planet that itself looks as if it might be going to hell, amid record heat, fires, storms, and the like, the urge to put such effort into organizing alliances of nations in the Pacific (led by Washington, of course) to “contain” China in an ever more warlike fashion represents, it seems to me, folly of the first order.

It’s increasingly an illusion (or do I mean delusion?) that this country has any sort of genuine control over the rest of the planet (no less itself). And today — with those two old men, one of whom is also bizarre beyond compare, wrestling each other for the presidency — this country is threatening in its own odd fashion, like the USSR in 1991, to come apart at the seams.

It’s strange to think about just how distant the America I grew up in — the one that emerged from World War II as the global powerhouse — now seems. If you had told anyone then that more than three-quarters of a century later, there would be well-armed private militias forming in a country armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry or that one presidential candidate would already be hinting at calling out the military to subdue his opponents if he ends up back in the White House, who would have believed you? It wouldn’t have even seemed like convincing science fiction.

And yet today, the greatest country on Earth (or so its leaders still like to believe), the one that continues to pour taxpayer dollars into a military funded like no other, or even combination of others, the one that has been unable to win any war of significance since 1945, seems to be threatening to come apart at the seams. Yes, this presidential campaign could turn out to be about the decline and fall of it all — and, of course, if Donald Trump (“drill, drill, drill“) ends up back in the White House that decline and fall could happen in a fashion almost beyond imagining.

The once-lone superpower, and now perhaps the loneliest power of all, could even be heading for previously unimaginable autocratic waters or who knows what else? If only it were otherwise, but unfortunately, in the months to come, we’ll be watching as an all-American world possibly spins slowly out of control, while the leftovers of the American Century fight it out in a country where all too many of us seem focused on anything but what matters.

As one old man to two others, if only you could stand down, we could face the world we’re actually in before it becomes too late.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

Clean Energy Wire ) – The damaging effects of climate change are set to hit economic growth severely across most countries, said researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

With the climate change that is already locked-in through past and “plausible” future emissions, income will be 19 percent lower on average globally over the next 26 years than in a scenario without climate change, they said in an article in Nature.

This corresponds to global annual damages in 2049 of 38 trillion dollars (in 2005 dollars), said the researchers. They also compared these damages to the mitigation costs required to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goals and said that climate damages are larger than the mitigation costs in 2050 by a factor of approximately six.

Maximilian Kotz et al. wrote,

“Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity.”

The red shows decreases in income, the blue increases, caused by climate change. H/t Nature

Climate advocates and policymakers often emphasise that the cost of inaction on climate change is set to be much larger than the cost of efforts to mitigate the worst effects by introducing ambitious climate policy.

German government representatives have also said that climate mitigation is of the highest priority, because the less intense the impacts of climate change are, the less money needs to be spent adapting to them.

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”. The text has been augmented by quotes from the original Nature article.

In recent years, a new line of attack has emerged from many pro-Israel groups, conservative commentators, politicians and activists – the idea that “wokeness” and oversensitivity to giving offence are threatening free speech. According to this argument, left-leaning activists and their allies are trying to shut down any speech they disagree with by claiming it is offensive or hurtful. In the name of protecting marginalised groups, the reasoning goes, the “woke mob” wants to “cancel” anyone who challenges their orthodoxy. This is the basis of the moral panic gripping the right, a panic so preposterous as to suggest that all our institutions have descended into the abyss and the entire Western civilisation is on the brink of collapse because of the “woke mob”.

However, while the right-wing claims to be the victim of cancel culture and de-platforming, the reality is that the most significant silencing and censorship is being directed at pro-Palestine activists and critics of Israel. From academic institutions to political circles, those who speak out against the Israeli government’s policies and human rights abuses are facing unprecedented levels of suppression and harassment.

The latest example is the case of Asna Tabassum, a first-generation South Asian-American Muslim, who was set to deliver her valedictorian speech at the University of Southern California’s (USC) graduation ceremony on 10 May. However, due to a campaign of racist hatred and security threats from pro-Israel critics, USC decided to cancel Tabassum’s speech. In an official statement, the University cited safety concerns, stating, “While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety.”

Tabassum, who has been an outspoken advocate for human rights for all, expressed her shock and disappointment at the University’s decision, saying, “I am surprised that my own University—my home for four years—has abandoned me.” This incident is the latest of many, demonstrating that the so called “woke” playbook, which the right claims it is the main victim of, has in fact been weaponised against critics of Israel.

Eyewitness 7 NY Video: “Pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University growing in size”

Like Tabassum, former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, faced censorship and suppression last week when he was banned from entering Germany to attend a three-day Palestinian Congress in Berlin. The conference, which aimed to discuss the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, was shut down by German police just moments after it began. Additionally, several speakers, including Palestinian cartographer, Salman Abu Sitta, were prevented from addressing the conference, even remotely.

Another prominent Palestinian, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah – nephew of Salman Abu Sitta – who had also flown into Germany to speak at the Palestine Congress, was denied entry into the country. Upon arrival, the recently appointed rector of Glasgow University, was stopped at the German passport office. Abu-Sittah was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where he was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours and then told he would not be permitted to enter German soil. Abu-Sittah was also warned that if he attempted to link up by Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, or send a video message, even if he was outside Germany, that would constitute a breach of German law.  Abu-Sittah was threatened with fines or even up to a year of prison.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Varoufakis shed light on the disturbing reality behind the suppression of the Palestinian conference in Berlin. He pointed out that the organisers, including progressive Jewish activists, were unjustly dismissed as Islamists. “They do not want a congress like ours, especially one that includes progressive Jews. That is the main thing that they detested, that they were Jewish demonstrators, Jewish activists, Jewish intellectuals, Jewish speakers with us, with one voice, saying one thing, one thing alone: equal political rights, civil liberties, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” Varoufakis said, highlighting the unified call for justice and equality that advocates of Israel are seeking to silence.

Varoufakis, who identifies as neither Jewish nor Palestinian, emphasised the universal obligation to demand equal political rights for all people in the region. “I think every single human person on this planet has an obligation — not a right, an obligation — to demand, from the river to the sea, equal political rights. And the German political establishment does not want to listen to this,” he asserted.

Furthermore, Varoufakis argued that the crackdown on pro-Palestine voices is part of a larger sacrifice of democratic principles in order to enable Israel’s actions. “The bourgeois, liberal, democratic rights and principles have all been sacrificed on the altar of enabling Israel to complete the genocide which is carrying out — that it’s carrying out not just in Gaza but, as we heard before in the news bulletin, in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank,” he said. Drawing parallels to the moral imperative to support Jews during the Nazi era, Varoufakis stressed that we have a similar duty today to end the genocide in Palestine.

The silencing of pro-Palestine voices is not limited to academic institutions and conferences. In the US, the House of Representatives, this week, passed a resolution condemning the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as anti-Semitic. The resolution, introduced by Rep Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), passed with a 377 to 44 vote, with most Democrats supporting the measure and progressives opposing it.

The examples cited above, from Tabassum’s cancelled graduation speech to the shutdown of the Palestinian conference in Berlin and the House resolution condemning pro-Palestinian chants, all occurred within a single week, underscoring the relentless nature of the attacks on pro-Palestine voices, and silencing of speech critical of Israel. They lay bare the hypocrisy of right-wing commentators who have long railed against “wokeness” and over-sensitivity to giving offence against the left.

The hypocrisy of the right wing’s claims about cancel culture and free speech becomes even more apparent when contrasted with their own efforts, which are more vicious and more successful, in suppressing pro-Palestine voices. While they decry the supposed over-sensitivity of the left and the dangers of “wokeness”, they actively participate in the de-platforming and cancellation of those who speak out against Israel’s human rights abuses.

Moreover, the silencing of pro-Palestine activists is not merely a matter of hurt feelings or political disagreement. It is a systematic attempt to erase the voices and experiences of Palestinians, who have endured decades of occupation, dispossession and violence at the hands of Israel.

It is crucial that we recognise and resist the weaponisation of discourse that has evolved to defend the rights of the marginalised to support an occupying power and perpetrators of genocide. Accusations of “offence”, “hurt feelings”, “safe spaces” and anti-Semitism must not be exploited to silence pro-Palestine speech. We must demand that academic institutions, political bodies and society at large uphold the principles of free speech and open debate, even when it comes to controversial and sensitive issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The silencing of pro-Palestine voices is not a matter of over-sensitivity or hurt feelings, but rather a concerted effort by the establishment and the right wing to suppress dissent and maintain the status quo on Israel-Palestine. By exploiting accusations of anti-Semitism and the language used by marginalised groups to defend themselves against social injustices, they seek to censor and de-platform those who challenge Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights. It is our responsibility to resist this silencing, stand up for free speech and amplify the voices of those who are being suppressed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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