Informed CommentThoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion2024-04-25T04:43:42Zhttps://www.juancole.com/feed/atomWordPressMarc Martorell Junyent<![CDATA[German Far Right Leader on Trial for Nazi Slogan: “X” Marks the Spot]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2182252024-04-25T04:43:42Z2024-04-25T04:15:10ZHalle an der Saale, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– On the morning of April 18, in front of the district court in Halle, it became evident that not many people had taken up Björn Höcke’s invitation to support him before a trial. Höcke, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the central-eastern state of Thuringia and power broker at the national level, had unusually posted in English on his “X” account (Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter) on April 6. He had done so to invite people “to come to Halle and witness firsthand the state of civil rights, democracy and the rule of law in Germany.”
Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine.
Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany.
Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939.
The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X” since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone.
Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020.
Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.
Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.
Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019.
In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”.
The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025.
In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.”
]]>Ramzy Baroud<![CDATA[The Ideological Coup: How Far Right Kahanist Extremists Became the Face of Israel]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2182232024-04-25T02:35:38Z2024-04-25T04:06:37Z( Middle East Monitor ) – Throughout history, fringe religious Zionist parties have had limited success in achieving the kind of electoral victories that would allow them an actual share in the country’s political decision-making.
The impressive number of 17 seats won by Israel’s extremist religious party, Shas, in the 1999 election was a watershed moment in the history of these parties, whose ideological roots go back to Avraham Itzhak Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Hacohen.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé referred to the Kooks’ ideological influence as a “fusion of dogmatic messianism and violence”.
Throughout the years, these religious parties struggled on several fronts: their inability to unify their ranks, their failure to appeal to mainstream Israeli society and their inability to strike the balance between their messianic political discourse and the kind of language – not necessarily behaviour – that Israel’s western allies expect.
Though much of the financial support and political backing of Israel’s extremists originate in the United States and, to a lesser extent, European countries, Washington has been clear regarding its public perception of Israel’s religious extremists.
In 2004, the United States banned the Kach party, which could be seen as the modern manifestation of the Kooks and Israel’s early religious Zionist ideologues.
The founder of the group, Meir Kahane was, in fact, assassinated in November 1990 while the extremist rabbi – responsible for much violence against innocent Palestinians throughout the years – was giving another hate-filled speech in Manhattan.
Kahane’s death was only the start of much violence meted out by his followers, lead among them an American doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down on 25 February 1994, dozens of Palestinian Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.
The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers while protesting the massacre was nearly as many as those killed by Goldstein earlier in the day, a tragic but a perfect representation of the relationship between the Israeli state and the violent settlers who operate as part of a larger state agenda.
That massacre was a watershed moment in the history of religious Zionism. Instead of serving as an opportunity to marginalise their growing influence, by the supposedly more liberal Zionists, they grew in power and, ultimately, political influence within the Israeli state.
Goldstein himself became a hero, whose grave, in Israel’s most extremist illegal settlement in the West Bank, Kiryat Arba, is now a popular shrine, a place of pilgrimage for thousands of Israelis.
Particularly telling is that Goldstein’s shrine has been built opposite Meir Kahane’s Memorial Park, which is indicative of the clear ideological connections between these individuals, groups and also funders.
In recent years, however, the traditional role played by Israel’s religious Zionists began to shift, leading to the election of Itamar Ben-Gvir to the Israeli Knesset in 2021 and, ultimately, to his role as the country’s national security minister in December 2022.
Ben-Gvir is a follower of Kahane. “It seems to me that ultimately Rabbi Kahane was about love. Love for Israel without compromise, without any other consideration,” he said in November 2022.
But, unlike Kahane, Ben-Gvir was not satisfied with the role of religious Zionists as cheerleaders for the settlement movement, almost daily raids of Al-Aqsa and the occasional attacks on Palestinians. He wanted to be at the centre of Israeli political power.
Whether Ben-Gvir achieved his status as a direct result of the successful grassroots work of religious Zionism, or because the political circumstances of Israel itself have changed in his favour, is an interesting debate.
The truth, however, might be somewhere in the middle. The historic failure of Israel’s so-called political left – namely the Labor Party – has, in recent years, propelled a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon – the political centre.
Meanwhile, Israel’s traditional right, the Likud Party, grew weaker, partly because it failed to appeal to the growing, more youthful religious Zionism constituency, and also because of the series of splits, which occurred as a result of Ariel Sharon’s breaking-up of the party in and the founding of Kadima in 2005 – a party which has been long disbanded.
To survive, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has redefined his party to its most extremist version of all time and, thus, began to attract religious Zionists with the hope of filling the gaps created because of internal infighting within the Likud.
By doing so, Netanyahu has granted religious Zionists the opportunity of a lifetime.
Soon, following the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and in the early days of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Ben-Gvir launched his National Guard, a group which he tried, but failed, to compose prior to the war.
Thanks to Ben-Gvir, Israel, now, per the words of opposition leader Yair, has become a country with a “private militia”.
By 19 March, Ben-Gvir announced that 100,000 gun permits had been handed over to his supporters. It is within this period that the US began imposing ‘sanctions’ on a few individuals affiliated with Israel’s settler extremist movement, a small slap on the wrist considering the massive damage that has already been done and the great violence that is likely to follow in the coming months and years.
Unlike Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir’s thinking is not limited to his desire to reach a specific position within the government. Israel’s religious extremists are seeking a fundamental and irreversible shift in Israeli politics.
The relatively recent push to change the relationship between the judicial and exclusive branches of government was as important to those extremists as it was to Netanyahu himself. The latter, however, has championed such an initiative to shield himself against legal accountability, while Ben-Gvir’s supporters have a different reason in mind: they want to be able to dominate the government and the military, with no accountability or oversight.
Israel’s religious Zionists are playing a long game, which is not linked to a particular election, individual or government coalition. They are redefining the state, along with its ideology. And they are winning.
It goes without saying that Ben-Gvir, and his threats to topple Netanyahu’s coalition government, have been the main driving force behind the genocide in Gaza.
If Meir Kahane was still alive, he would have been proud of his followers. The ideology of the once marginalised and loathed extremist rabbi is now the backbone of Israeli politics.
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.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
]]>Committee on Academic Freedom<![CDATA[Our Alarm at Escalating Repression of Protest on Campuses (Middle East Studies Assn. / CAF)]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2182202024-04-25T02:21:29Z2024-04-25T04:02:38Z Middle East Studies Association | Committee on Academic Freedom
MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF concerning escalating repression of protest on campuses
The Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom view with increasing alarm the growing number of attempts to intimidate, repress, and criminalize campus protests against the ongoing Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the US diplomatic, military, and economic support for it. Federal, state and local government officials—from the president, to congressional members, to governors and mayors—have exacerbated the threats on campuses by encouraging university administrators to violate basic commitments to freedom of expression, while casually smearing overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with unsubstantiated claims of violence or discriminatory speech. University leaders should constitute the first line of defense for students and faculty in the face of forces seeking to vilify, harass, and silence them. Instead, we regret that several university boards of trustees, presidents, and their administrations have acquiesced in the ugliest of campaigns targeting their students and faculty for engaging in what have been peaceful protests, joined by a wide cross-section of their campus community.
As Palestine solidarity and anti-war demonstrations have proliferated and intensified, sweeping characterizations of them as violent, dangerous, and antisemitic have been deployed as part of a campaign that has weaponized the language of “safety” to delegitimize, intimidate, and forcibly disperse legal, peaceful dissent. University administrations, most egregiously at Columbia, New York University, and Yale have—in some cases, in violation of their own university policies—called in the police to break up protests and arrest tens of students, some of whom have been summarily suspended and evicted from university housing. At NYU, faculty, too, were arrested. The University of Southern California cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement address after a slanderous hate campaign was launched against her for her pro-Palestinian views; the University of Pennsylvania revoked Penn Against the Occupation’s status as a registered student group; Harvard has now banned that university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Given the developments of the past several weeks, we are extremely concerned about what these disturbing events portend as commencement season approaches.
Attempts by universities to limit or suppress Gaza war-related speech and protest have been all too common since shortly after the 7 October attack. But the growing securitization and outright repression on campuses have reached levels not seen since the 1960s. We are witnessing a situation in which, in the name of security, it is university leaders themselves who have become the primary threat to the rights and safety of members of the campus community. The appeasement of malign forces seeking to destroy academic freedom, faculty governance, and curricular diversity, in which Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik so willingly participated during her 17 April congressional hearing, must not be allowed to metastasize. Today the goal is to suppress speech on Palestine, but the battle over free speech and academic freedom on our campuses did not begin, nor does it end, there.
We therefore call upon college and university boards of trustees, presidents, and administrations across the country immediately to clearly and forcefully recommit themselves to the freedom of inquiry, expression, and protest on campus that have been pillars of the US academy for decades. As the massive killing and destruction in Gaza continue, we also demand that you fulfill your responsibility to your profession and your campus community to defend peaceful protesters, uphold academic freedom, and reject all pressures seeking to criminalize peaceful encampments and demonstrations against this horrendous war—and our government’s complicity in it.
]]>Juan Colehttp://juancole.com<![CDATA[No President of a Major American University has Deplored the Israeli Destruction of all Gaza Universities]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2182122024-04-24T05:01:17Z2024-04-24T04:48:16ZAnn Arbor (Informed Comment) – American campuses are being roiled by student and faculty protests against the ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has found to be plausibly described as a genocide. These harmless student demonstrations, of a sort that have been normal throughout the past sixty years, have been met with a harsh police response and criminalization by university administrators unmatched since the Kent State University president called in the National Guard on May 4, 1970, when green troops panicked and killed four students.
Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.
The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.
It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).
Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.
“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”
The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.
Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).
Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.
About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.
As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.
The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.
Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.
That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.
This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.
]]>The Conversation<![CDATA[Gaza War: Artificial Intelligence is radically changing Targeting Speeds and Scale of Civilian Harm]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2182082024-04-24T03:23:17Z2024-04-24T04:06:29ZBy Lauren Gould, Utrecht University; Linde Arentze, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and Marijn Hoijtink, University of Antwerp | –
(The Conversation) – As Israel’s air campaign in Gaza enters its sixth month after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, it has been described by experts as one of the most relentless and deadliest campaigns in recent history. It is also one of the first being coordinated, in part, by algorithms.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to assist with everything from identifying and prioritising targets to assigning the weapons to be used against those targets.
Academic commentators have long focused on the potential of algorithms in war to highlight how they will increase the speed and scale of fighting. But as recent revelations show, algorithms are now being employed at a large scale and in densely populated urban contexts.
This includes the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, but also in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, where the US is experimenting with algorithms to target potential terrorists through Project Maven.
Amid this acceleration, it is crucial to take a careful look at what the use of AI in warfare actually means. It is important to do so, not from the perspective of those in power, but from those officers executing it, and those civilians undergoing its violent effects in Gaza.
This focus highlights the limits of keeping a human in the loop as a failsafe and central response to the use of AI in war. As AI-enabled targeting becomes increasingly computerised, the speed of targeting accelerates, human oversight diminishes and the scale of civilian harm increases.
Speed of targeting
Reports by Israeli publications +927 Magazine and Local Call give us a glimpse into the experience of 13 Israeli officials working with three AI-enabled decision-making systems in Gaza called “Gospel”, “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?”.
These systems are reportedly trained to recognise features that are believed to characterise people associated with the military arm of Hamas. These features include membership of the same WhatsApp group as a known militant, changing cell phones every few months, or changing addresses frequently.
The systems are then supposedly tasked with analysing data collected on Gaza’s 2.3 million residents through mass surveillance. Based on the predetermined features, the systems predict the likelihood that a person is a member of Hamas (Lavender), that a building houses such a person (Gospel), or that such a person has entered their home (Where’s Daddy?).
In the investigative reports named above, intelligence officers explained how Gospel helped them go “from 50 targets per year” to “100 targets in one day” – and that, at its peak, Lavender managed to “generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”. They also reflected on how using AI cuts down deliberation time: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage … I had zero added value as a human … it saved a lot of time.”
They justified this lack of human oversight in light of a manual check the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ran on a sample of several hundred targets generated by Lavender in the first weeks of the Gaza conflict, through which a 90% accuracy rate was reportedly established. While details of this manual check are likely to remain classified, a 10% inaccuracy rate for a system used to make 37,000 life-and-death decisions will inherently result in devastatingly destructive realities.
“Lavender III,” Digital Imagining, Dream, Dreamland v. 3, 2024
But importantly, any accuracy rate number that sounds reasonably high makes it more likely that algorithmic targeting will be relied on as it allows trust to be delegated to the AI system. As one IDF officer told +927 magazine: “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”
The IDF denied these revelations in an official statement to The Guardian. A spokesperson said that while the IDF does use “information management tools […] in order to help intelligence analysts to gather and optimally analyse the intelligence, obtained from a variety of sources, it does not use an AI system that identifies terrorist operatives”.
The Guardian has since, however, published a video of a senior official of the Israeli elite intelligence Unit 8200 talking last year about the use of machine learning “magic powder” to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza. The newspaper has also confirmed that the commander of the same unit wrote in 2021, under a pseudonym, that such AI technologies would resolve the “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets”.
Scale of civilian harm
AI accelerates the speed of warfare in terms of the number of targets produced and the time to decide on them. While these systems inherently decrease the ability of humans to control the validity of computer-generated targets, they simultaneously make these decisions appear more objective and statistically correct due to the value that we generally ascribe to computer-based systems and their outcome.
This allows for the further normalisation of machine-directed killing, amounting to more violence, not less.
While media reports often focus on the number of casualties, body counts – similar to computer-generated targets – have the tendency to present victims as objects that can be counted. This reinforces a very sterile image of war. It glosses over the reality of more than 34,000 people dead, 766,000 injured and the destruction of or damage to 60% of Gaza’s buildings and the displaced persons, the lack of access to electricity, food, water and medicine.
It fails to emphasise the horrific stories of how these things tend to compound each other. For example, one civilian, Shorouk al-Rantisi, was reportedly found under the rubble after an airstrike on Jabalia refugee camp and had to wait 12 days to be operated on without painkillers and now resides in another refugee camp with no running water to tend to her wounds.
Aside from increasing the speed of targeting and therefore exacerbating the predictable patterns of civilian harm in urban warfare, algorithmic warfare is likely to compound harm in new and under-researched ways. First, as civilians flee their destroyed homes, they frequently change addresses or give their phones to loved ones.
Such survival behaviour corresponds to what the reports on Lavender say the AI system has been programmed to identify as likely association with Hamas. These civilians, thereby unknowingly, make themselves suspect for lethal targeting.
Beyond targeting, these AI-enabled systems also inform additional forms of violence. An illustrative story is that of the fleeing poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was allegedly arrested and tortured at a military checkpoint. It was ultimately reported by the New York Times that he, along with hundreds of other Palestinians, was wrongfully identified as Hamas by the IDF’s use of AI facial recognition and Google photos.
Over and beyond the deaths, injuries and destruction, these are the compounding effects of algorithmic warfare. It becomes a psychic imprisonment where people know they are under constant surveillance, yet do not know which behavioural or physical “features” will be acted on by the machine.
From our work as analysts of the use of AI in warfare, it is apparent that our focus should not solely be on the technical prowess of AI systems or the figure of the human-in-the-loop as a failsafe. We must also consider these systems’ ability to alter the human-machine-human interactions, where those executing algorithmic violence are merely rubber stamping the output generated by the AI system, and those undergoing the violence are dehumanised in unprecedented ways.
]]>Bob Dreyfuss<![CDATA[Trump blew up the Iran Nuclear Deal, unleashing Tehran — Can Biden Fix it?]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2182032024-04-24T04:31:35Z2024-04-24T04:02:33ZBy Bob Dreyfuss
( Tomdispatch.com ) – One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.
In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict — with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” — including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria — has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
It was President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could “obliterate” Iran.
Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.
Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.
“Natanz,” Digital Imagining, Dream, Realistic v. 2, 2024.
Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as the Washington Postreports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”
Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad
While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.
Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.
In exchange, the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.
Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.
But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)
Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Timesop-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”
Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions…. We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”
Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.
Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.
“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”
Biden’s Reign of (Unforced) Error
Having long supported a deal with Iran — in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders — Joe Biden called Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.
Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.
Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks.”
It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”
When the talks finally did resume in April — “gingerly,” according to the New York Times — they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.
That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.
It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”
Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again. “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.
By the end of 2022, Biden reportedly declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil, and increased concern about Iranian drones being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.
Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks — helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues – resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political ceasefire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”
But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7th attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.
The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?
Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.
What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”
“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.
The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”
And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket.
]]>Mohammed Samaana<![CDATA[Israeli Squatter-Settlers in Palestinian West Bank Expanding at Fastest Rate in History, as they attack Indigenous Towns]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2181882024-04-23T04:26:49Z2024-04-23T04:15:04ZBelfast (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – While the world’s eyes have been on Gaza, Palestinian villages in the West Bank have been subjected to savage attacks by extremist Israeli settlers. In Al-Mughair village in Ramallah area, settlers, protected by the Israeli army, killed two Palestinians. They also burned dozens of Palestinian properties and vehicles and killed animals.. The settlers’ violence also claimed two more Palestinian lives in Nablus area. This past weekend was no different to the one before it in the violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers’ towards the Palestinians with more attacks on numerous hamlets.
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. #ApartheidIsraelpic.twitter.com/pBcXuOMzqi
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.
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.
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.
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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]]>Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies<![CDATA[Will the Freedom Flotilla Sail to Gaza?]]>https://www.juancole.com/?p=2181912024-04-23T03:04:26Z2024-04-23T04:02:37Z( Code Pink ) – The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” our trainers insisted.
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.
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