After more than 90 days of war in Gaza, in which at least 22,000 Palestinians are reported to have been killed, Israeli officials have shifted their attention to what happens once the fighting has ceased.

There has been considerable controversy over proposals from far-right members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The pair, who Netanyahu needed to include in his coalition to form a government last year, have advocated for Palestinians in Gaza to be resettled in countries around the world, making space for Israeli civilians to reoccupy the area.

Israel’s allies, who have thus far supported its war aims, have been quick to condemn the proposal. The United States released a press statement on January 2 rejecting the plan as “inflammatory and irresponsible”. Washington confirmed its support for Gaza as Palestinian land. The statement further claimed that Netanyahu had reassured the US that the proposal does not reflect government policy.

But while Smotrich and Ben Gvir represent the most extreme factions of Israel’s ruling coalition and were frozen out of the war cabinet, it would be unwise to dismiss their comments as merely another incident of incitement against Palestinians.

The pair have the power to bring down the ruling coalition and Netanyahu if their demands are not heeded. And they have considerable support within the settler movement, which has been influential in the policy and practice of settlement building throughout Israel’s history.

And it is also important to note that proposals to relocate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip were initially proposed by Israeli lawmakers considered to be more moderate.

‘West should welcome Gaza refugees’

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on November 13, 2023, two Israeli lawmakers – former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon and centre-left politician Ram Ben-Barak, formerly deputy director of Mossad, wrote that countries around the world should accept some of Gaza’s population who “have expressed a desire to relocate”.

They criticised the international community for not fulfilling “their moral imperative” to “help civilians caught in the crisis”.

Intelligence minister, Gila Gamliel – who represents Likud, the mainstream conservative nationalist party led by Netanyahu – reiterated this proposal in an article in the Jerusalem Post on November 19, 2023. She referred to Gaza as “a breeding ground for extremism” and called for the “voluntary resettlement” of Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip.

Both these proposals suggested humanitarian concerns for Palestinians alongside security concerns for Israelis. But others who also support the plan do so out of strong religious ideology.

Return of the settlers?

As documented by political geographer David Newman, the Israeli settler movement mainly comprises religious Zionists who believe the greater land of Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God. In light of this, many believe that settling the land is an opportunity to fulfil God’s promise.

Following the 1967 and 1974 wars, they rejected those who believed returning land to the Arab countries would secure peace. Instead they advocated for the establishment of Israeli settlements to ensure the land was never relinquished. They have had significant influence on Israeli policy and practice and now find themselves represented in the corridors of power by Smotrich and Ben Gvir.

The movement was dealt a severe blow following the decision by former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan in 2005. Sharon evicted about 8,000 Israeli settlers from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Settlers have been quick to respond to the current conflict, seeing it as an opportunity to fulfil the religious promise. At the end of December last year, the leader of the Nachala Israeli settlement movement, Daniella Weiss, appeared on mainstream television calling for Palestinians to be cleared from Gaza.

This was so that Israeli settlers “can see the sea … There will be no homes, there will be no Arabs – it’s just an elegant way of saying, I want to see the sea.” She declared that Gaza City had always been “one of the cities of Israel. We’re just going back. There was a historical mistake and now we are fixing it.”

Middle East Eye: “‘Erase Gaza so settlers can see the sea’: Head of Israeli settlement movement”

What these positions fail to fundamentally understand is the deep connection Palestinians have to the land and their steadfastness in remaining there.

Deep divisions

Weiss’s position – and the aspirations of the settler movement – appear to have been dealt a setback by Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who has presented his plans for Gaza after the destruction of Hamas.

On January 5, he said: “Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against the State of Israel.” Gallant further proposed that there should be no Israeli civil presence in Gaza.

An account in the Times of Israel said that the cabinet meeting at which Gallant outlined his proposal ended in acrimony, exposing the deep divisions in Netanyahu’s government.

Gallant’s proposal comes days before US secretary of state Antony Blinken is due to visit to discuss “transitioning to the next phase” of the war. The proposal has been presented to the US administration, although it does not yet form official policy.

As attention turns towards the end of the hostilities, Netanyahu will have a difficult juggling act in placating the different factions of his coalition and the Israeli public, as well as satisfying demands from the US. What is missing from the discussions thus far is the voice of the Palestinians – which must be put at the centre of any future solutions.

Leonie Fleischmann, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, City, University of London

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

Some countries are cutting financial support to the very local organizations that are best positioned to respond to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

By Tania Principe | –

( Waging Nonviolence ) – Almost a month has passed since the Hamas militant group launched a deadly attack on Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking over 230 innocent civilian hostages. In retaliation Israel declared war on Gaza, implemented a siege, cut the civilian population off from basic necessities — such as food, water, fuel and electricity — and launched ongoing ground and air offensives.

The U.N. estimates that over half of Gaza’s inhabitants have become homeless. The death toll has surpassed 10,000; at least 4,000 of those are children. That is more conflict-related child deaths than the annual number of children killed in all of the world’s conflict zones since 2019 according to Save the Children.  

To call this a humanitarian catastrophe is an understatement. 

While humanitarian aid remains committed, and in some cases increased by donor countries, several European governments are re-thinking their financial aid to human rights and civil society organizations in the region.

On Oct. 10, Sweden and Denmark announced they would suspend financial support indefinitely to organizations in Palestinian territories, citing a need to conduct thorough reviews to ensure no funds are given to organizations that do not unequivocally condemn militant groups. The European Commission also announced that it is reviewing its development assistance to Palestinian organizations. On Oct. 25, Switzerland was the latest country to suspend its financial support to six Palestinian and five Israeli human rights organizations, while it carries out an in-depth analysis of whether the organizations’ communications are in compliance with the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Code of Conduct and anti-discrimination principles. Prior to the current war, these well-respected organizations were long-standing, funded partners of these same donors and organizations like the Nobel Women’s Initiative, where I work.

“Israeli Blockade Hinders Aid Delivery to Gaza, Palestinian Envoy Speaks Out | India News9

National and local civil society organizations play a crucial role peacebuilding and supporting democracy in the region. Donors recognize this. There has been a welcome trend in Western donor communities to bypass international organizations, and instead fund local organizations directly — precisely because they are best positioned to identify and respond to the most pressing needs of civilians, including marginalized groups.

Increasing aid to humanitarian organizations, while cutting it to local civil society goes directly against the trend. For example, the EU announced an additional $26 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza, delivered via UNICEF and other international organizations. Germany announced an additional $53 million to Palestinian territories through the World Food Programme, UNICEF and UNWRA.  

During conflict a functioning civil society is critical — human rights violations escalate, as does misinformation, and those who are most vulnerable suffer the harshest consequences. Human rights and civil society organizations, regardless of their mandate, pivot to provide psychosocial support, shelter and services for victims of violence, and facilitate access to limited humanitarian aid. Equally important, local civil society organizations, also witness and document violations of human rights and international law, thus ensuring that, eventually, justice and accountability can be sought, and a truthful historical record created.Few organizations in Palestine are willing to publicly raise concerns about the suspension of their funding for fear of jeopardizing relationships and losing even more support, now or in the future. But the implications of such cuts are devastating. In Gaza and the West Bank, transferring and receiving funds in the best of times is challenging, yet these organizations rely on this funding to plan their activities, staffing and programming. Sudden cuts to already committed funds, especially in times of crisis, can result in paralysis, loss of staff, a further reduction in services and potentially increased loss of lives.  

As this crisis persists with no end in sight, the work of civil society is life-saving. These organizations have local expertise living the humanitarian catastrophe, seeing first-hand what is needed and responding to it under unbearable conditions. For years, international donors and agencies have championed localization. This is the time to put their money where their mouth is. They should be putting their efforts into negotiating a cease fire, not ceasing aid.

Tania Principe

Tania Principe is the Interim Executive Director of Nobel Women’s Initiative. She has over two decades of experience working globally and locally in women’s rights and gender equality leading efforts to end systemic and cultural inequality with organizations like Gender at Work, AWID, and WITT National Network.

Waging Nonviolence

@saribashi

( Human Rights Watch ) – The Israeli government is deliberately deepening the suffering of civilians in Gaza by refusing to restore the flow of water and electricity and blocking fuel shipments. Willfully impeding relief supplies is a war crime, as is collectively punishing civilians for the actions of armed groups.

On October 7, Hamas-led fighters crossed into southern Israel and committed the worst civilian massacre in Israeli history, gunning down families, burning people in their homes, and taking more than 200 hostages. Those atrocities were war crimes.

The fact that Palestinian fighters committed unspeakable war crimes against Israeli civilians does not justify Israeli authorities committing war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

Gaza’s infrastructure relies on the flow of electricity and drinking water from Israel and supply trucks entering via the Israeli crossings, but Israel cut those supplies following the attacks. By blocking objects necessary for the survival of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents, nearly half of whom are children, Israel is punishing all of Gaza’s civilians for Hamas’s attacks.

Israel, as the occupying power in Gaza, is required under the Geneva Conventions to ensure civilians have access to basic goods, and, as a party to the armed conflict, it must facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. During previous hostilities, it has maintained electricity and water supply to Gaza and found ways to open its truck crossings. Not this time. “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week.

As of October 24, the Israeli military has allowed a total of 34 supply truckloads, overseen by UN agencies, to enter via Egypt’s Rafah crossing with Gaza, far fewer than the 100 daily truckloads aid agencies say are the minimum needed. Israeli authorities have also refused to allow fuel, saying Hamas diverts it for its use. Fuel is desperately needed for hospital generators, water and sewage pumping, and aid delivery. While the laws of war allow a warring party to take steps to ensure shipments do not include weapons, deliberately impeding relief supplies is prohibited.

The roots of the violence in Israel-Palestine are multiple and run deep; the October 7 atrocities triggered another round of violence and tragedy for civilians in Israel and Palestine. All parties should respect international humanitarian law and not commit unlawful attacks on civilians. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups should immediately release all civilian hostages. Israel should restore the flow of electricity and water, allow monitored fuel into Gaza via Rafah, and take the necessary steps to open its own crossings into Gaza for humanitarian aid.

Via Human Rights Watch

U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said on October 15 that there was a risk that militant group Hizballah or Iran could get directly involved in Israel’s war with Hamas.

“There is a risk of an escalation of this conflict, the opening of a second front in the north, and of course of Iran’s involvement,” he told CBS’s Face The Nation.

Sullivan said he was foremost concerned about Lebanon-based Hizballah attacking Israel from the north.

There have been minor skirmishes over the past week between Hizballah, an Iranian-backed militant group, and Israeli forces.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian warned Israel against invading the Gaza Strip, saying Tehran would not “remain a spectator” in such a situation

Israeli forces have been pounding the Gaza Strip for days as they prepare for a ground invasion to wipe out Hamas, which rules the enclave.

Israel declared war on Hamas on October 8, a day after its militants invaded southern Israel, killing more than 1,000 people in the deadliest attack in the country’s history.

Israel has said it can fight on two fronts should Hizballah attack.

Sullivan said the Biden administration will push Congress this week to pass an emergency spending bill that includes billions of dollars in military aid for Israel.

He said the administration also ordered a second aircraft-carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean near Israel to deter Hizballah or Iran from joining the conflict.

While the United States has not had formal diplomatic relations with Iran since 1980, Sullivan said the White House has means of communicating privately with Iran.

“We have availed ourselves of those means over the past few days to make clear privately that which we have said publicly,” he said.

French President Emmanuel Macron spoke directly with his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, on October 15 to also warn Tehran from “extension of the conflict, especially to Lebanon.”

In the meantime, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been on a whirlwind tour through Middle East capitals as the Biden administration seeks to contain the conflict, find a resolution, and help Gaza refugees.

Blinken will return to Israel on October 16 following visits to Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

“There’s a determination in every country I went to, to make sure that this conflict doesn’t spread,” Blinken said on October 15 as he prepared to leave Cairo. “They are using their own influence, their own relationships, to try to make sure that this doesn’t happen.”

The Middle East accounts for about 30 percent of the world’s oil production and expansion of the conflict could drive prices above $100 a barrel at a time when the world is struggling to contain inflation.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2023 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

A couple of months after that hundredth birthday, he traveled to China, as he had first done secretly in 1971 when he was still President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. There — in contrast to the tepid reception recently given to U.S. officials like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry — Kissinger was welcomed with full honors by Chinese President Xi Jinping and other dignitaries.

‘That ‘lovefest,’” as Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy wrote at Politico, “served the interests of both parties.” For China, it was a signal that the United States would be better off pursuing the warm-embrace policy initiated so long ago by Nixon at Kissinger’s behest, rather than the cold shoulder more recent administrations have offered. For Kissinger, as Drezner put it, “the visit represents an opportunity to do what he has been trying to do ever since he left public office: maintain his relevancy and influence.”

Even as a centenarian, his “relevancy” remains intact, and his influence, I’d argue, as malevolent as ever.

Rehab for Politicians

It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.

This was certainly the case for Richard Nixon who, after resigning in disgrace to avoid impeachment in 1974, worked hard for decades to once again be seen as a wise man of international relations. He published his memoirs (for a cool $2 million), while raking in another $600,000 for interviews with David Frost (during which he infamously said that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”). His diligence was rewarded in 1986 with a Newsweek cover story headlined, “He’s Back: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.”

Of course, for the mainstream media (and the House of Representatives debating his possible impeachment in 1974), Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors involved just the infamous Watergate break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and his subsequent attempts to cover it up. Among members of the House, only 12, led by the Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, had the courage to suggest that Nixon be charged with the crime that led directly to the death of an estimated 150,000 civilians: the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war.

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More recently, we’ve seen the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, under whose administration the United States committed repeated war crimes. Those included the launching of an illegal war against Iraq under the pretext of eliminating that country’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, attempting to legalize torture and unlawful detentions, and causing the death of almost half a million civilians. No matter. All it took for the mainstream media to welcome him back into the fold of “responsible” Republicans was to spend some years painting portraits of American military veterans and taking an oblique swipe or two at then-President Donald Trump.

A “Statesman” Needs No Rehabilitation

Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.

His crimes did come up in the mainstream, only to be dismissed as evidence of his career’s “broad scope.” CNN ran a piece by David Andelman, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and one-time student of Kissinger’s at Harvard. He described watching “in wonder” as demonstrators gathered outside New York City’s 92nd Street YMCA to protest a 2011 talk by the great man himself. How, he asked himself, could they refer to Kissinger as a “renowned war criminal”? A few years later, Andelman added, he found himself wondering again, as a similar set of protesters at the same venue decried Kissinger’s “history concerning Timor-Leste (East Timor), West Papua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Angola, and elsewhere.”

The “events they were protesting were decades in the past,” he observed, having happened at a time when most of the protestors “were only barely alive.” In effect, like so many others who seek to exonerate old war criminals, Andelman was implying that the crimes of the past hold no meaning, except perhaps in testifying “to the broad scope of people, places, and events that [Kissinger] has influenced in the course of a remarkable career.” (“Influenced” serves here as a remarkable euphemism for “devastated” or simply “killed.”)

Fortunately, other institutions have not been so deferential. In preparation for Kissinger’s 100th, the National Security Archive, a center of investigative journalism, assembled a dossier of some of its most important holdings on his legacy. They provide some insight into the places named by those protestors.

A Dispassionate Cold Warrior

If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.  

Richard Nixon’s presidency was, of course, the period of Kissinger’s greatest influence. Between 1969 and 1974, Kissinger served as the architect of U.S. actions in key locales globally. Here are just a few of them:

Papua, East Timor, and Indonesia: In 1969, in an effort to keep Indonesia fully in the American Cold War camp, Kissinger put his imprimatur on a fake plebiscite in Papua, which had been seeking independence from Indonesia. He chose to be there in person during an “election” in which Indonesia counted only the ballots of 1,100 hand-picked “representatives” of the Papuan population. Unsurprisingly, they voted unanimously to remain part of Indonesia.

Why did the United States care about the fate of half of a then strategically unimportant island in the South China Sea? Because holding onto the loyalty of Indonesia’s autocratic anticommunist ruler Suharto was considered crucial to Washington’s Cold War foreign policy in Asia. Suharto himself had come to power on a wave of mass extermination, during which between 500,000 and 1.2 million supposed communists and their “sympathizers” were slaughtered.

In 1975, Kissinger also greenlighted Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, during which hundreds of thousands died. In contravention of U.S. law, President Gerald Ford’s administration (in which Kissinger continued to serve as national security adviser and secretary of state after Nixon’s resignation) provided the Indonesian military with weapons and training. Kissinger waved off any legal concerns with a favorite aphorism: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Southeast Asia: Beginning in 1969, Kissinger was also the architect of Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, an attempt to interdict the flow of supplies from North Vietnam to the revolutionary Viet Cong in South Vietnam. He believed it would force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table. In this, the great statesman was sadly mistaken. It’s fair to say, in fact, that Kissinger either initiated or at least supported just about every one of the ugly tactics the U.S. military used in its ultimately losing war in Vietnam, from the carpet bombing of North Vietnam to the widespread use of napalm and the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which led to the torturing or killing of more than 20,000 people.

The Vietnam War might well have ended in 1968, rather than dragging on until 1975, had it not been for Henry Kissinger. He was acting as a conduit to North Vietnam for the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, which was working on a peace deal it hoped to announce before the 1968 presidential election. Believing Republican candidate Richard Nixon would be more likely to advance his version of U.S. strategic interests in Vietnam than Democratic candidate and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Kissinger passed information about those negotiations with the North Vietnamese on to the Nixon campaign. Although Nixon had no clout in Hanoi, he had a channel to U.S. ally and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and convinced him to pull out of the peace talks shortly before the election. Thanks to Kissinger, the war would follow its cruel course for another seven years of death and destruction.

Pakistan and Bangladesh: In 1971, in a famous “tilt” towards Pakistan, Kissinger gave tacit support to that country’s military dictator General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. In response to a surprise victory by an opposition party in Pakistan’s first democratic election, Yahya then loosed his military on the people of East Pakistan, that party’s geographical base. Three million people died in the ensuing genocidal conflict that eventually led to the creation of the state of Bangladesh. In addition, as many as 10 million members of Bengali ethnic groups fled to India, inflaming tensions between Pakistan and India, which eventually erupted in war. Although the U.S. Congress had forbidden military support for either nation, Kissinger arranged for an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to travel to the Bay of Bengal and provide war materiel to Pakistan. (By then, contempt for congressional restrictions had become a habit for him.)

But why the tilt toward Pakistan? Because that country was helping Kissinger create his all-important opening to China and because he also viewed India as a “Soviet stooge.”

For all his supposedly “brilliant statesmanship,” Kissinger proved incapable of imagining any event as having a significant local or regional meaning. Only the actions or interests of the great powers could adequately explain events anywhere in the world.

Latin America: There was a time when September 11th called to mind not the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the violent 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected socialist president. That coup, which made General Augusto Pinochet the country’s dictator, was the culmination of a multi-year U.S. campaign of economic and political sabotage, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.

Once again, a genuinely indigenous economic reform movement was (mis)interpreted as evidence of growing Soviet strength in South America. Within the first few days of the coup, 40,000 people would be imprisoned at the National Stadium in the capital, Santiago. Many of them would be tortured and murdered in the first stages of what became a regime characterized for decades by institutionalized torture.

Similarly, Kissinger and the presidents he advised supported Argentina’s “Dirty War” against dissidents and the larger Operation Condor, in which the CIA coordinated coups d’état, repression, torture, and the deaths of tens of thousands of socialists, students, and other activists across Latin America.

So, what should we give a hundred-year-old presidential adviser for his birthday? How about a summons to appear at the International Criminal Court to answer for the blood of millions staining his hands?

What’s Real about Realpolitik?

If you google images for “realpolitik,” the first thing you’ll see is a drawing of Henry Kissinger holding forth to a rapt Richard Nixon. As a political thinker who prides himself on never having been swayed by passion, Kissinger would seem the perfect exemplar of a realpolitik worldview.

He eschews the term, however, probably because, given his background, he recognizes its roots in the nineteenth century German liberal tradition, where it served as a reminder not to be blinded by ideology or aspirational belief when taking in a political situation. Philosophically, realpolitik was a belief that a dispassionate examination of any situation, uninflected by ideology, was the most effective way to grasp the array of forces present in a particular historical moment.

Realpolitik has, however, come to mean something quite different in the United States, being associated not with “what is” (an epistemological stance) but with “what ought to be” — an ethical stance, one that privileges only this country’s imperial advantage. In the realpolitik world of Henry Kissinger, actions are good only when they sustain and advance American strategic power globally. Any concern for the wellbeing of human beings, or for the law and the Constitution, not to mention democratic values globally, is, by definition, illegitimate if not, in fact, a moral failing.

That is the realpolitik of Henry Alfred Kissinger, an ethical system that rejects ethics as unreal. It should not surprise anyone that such a worldview would engender in a man with his level of influence a history of crimes against law and humanity.

In fact, however, Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik is itself delusional. The idea that the only “realistic” choices for Washington’s leaders require privileging American global power over every other consideration has led this country to its current desperate state — a dying empire whose citizens live in ever-increasing insecurity. In fact, choosing America first (as Donald Trump would put it) is not the only choice, but one delusional option among many. Perhaps there is still time, before the planet burns us all to death, to make other, more realistic choices.

Copyright 2023 Rebecca Gordon

Via ( Tomdispatch.com

Unfortunately this reasonable request for transparency was sidelined by Florida Supreme Leader Ron DeSantis, who opined that the candidates “were not schoolchildren” and should just “have the debate.” DeSantis has done his best to keep schoolchildren from having a balanced, science-based education. Unfortunately, despite not being schoolchildren, DeSantis and his colleagues also appear to have been denied a science-based education, or maybe they played hooky during eighth-grade chemistry. DeSantis didn’t repeat it here, but his silliness on the issue is that he says “I don’t politicize the weather.” This assertion is ignorant, since the issue is climate, not weather, and it is stupid, because of course allowing ExxonMobil to conduct a vast experiment in geo-engineering our planet to be much hotter is political.

Businesses with a practical interest in climate change are voting with their feet. State Farm has announced that it will not insure any more houses in Florida. Gee, Ron, why do you think it might be? Could it be because the Atlantic and Caribbean are heating up, fueling more powerful and destructive hurricanes, and State Farm fears climate change will bankrupt it in Florida? That is the state of which you’re supposed to be the governor, right? Do you know anything?

Exhibit A for science illiteracy is Vivek Ramaswamy, an obscure Indian-American businessman and former hedge fund manager who, worryingly, seems to have large positions in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. He began with an oxymoron, went on to a bald-faced lie, and ended with paranoid delusion: “Let us be honest as Republicans — I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this — that climate change is a hoax . . . And so the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

If this guy’s investments in biotech and pharmaceuticals produce any medical products, I’d avoid them like the plague, since he has no idea what he is talking about.

So, human-caused climate change is not a hoax. The science is established and virtually unchallenged in contemporary peer-reviewed academic journals. Nobody is dying from climate change policies, which simply promote wind, solar, and battery power generation. In fact, coal plants in the US were killing 24,000 people a year in 2004, and as the plants have closed it fell to 3,100 in 2016. Those plants were replaced in part by wind and solar, so the exact opposite of what Ramaswamy said is true. Combating climate change is also saving lives because fossil fuels not only produce explosive carbon pollution but also particulate matter that causes lung cancer and heart attacks.

Also, we are now at the point where human-caused climate change is visible to the naked eye and doesn’t require higher degrees to see. Cold places like Canada didn’t used to have annual wildfire seasons, balmy tropical paradises like Maui didn’t used suddenly to burn to the ground, we didn’t have a month-long heat dome over the middle of our country, and 60,000 people didn’t used to die of heat stroke during European summers. I grew up in France and when I was a kid it was cold in Paris and Orleans in June, and I was made to learn to swim even if it turned me blue. Even when I was a young adult working in the India Office Archives in London in May, I used to have to get under the covers when I got home because I was chilled to the bone. Now London has deadly heat waves in late spring and summer.

Polling shows that 63% of Americans who have experienced unusually hot days this summer believe that human-caused climate change is at least part of the cause. Even 35% of Republicans say this is true. 85% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents affirm it. So this roster of Republican candidates is not only out of the American mainstream on this issue, it is probably not even reflective of the full spectrum of positions inside the Republican party, since a third of the candidates didn’t assert that there is a climate crisis and we are causing it.

Then Nikki Haley weighed in. “Is climate change real? . . . Yes, it is. But if you want to go and really change the environment, then we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.”

It all depends on how you count things. The US is the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases. China won’t overtake us in that regard until 2050, and India’s footprint is about a third of those two. It is true that the US needs to work with China and India to reduce CO2 emissions rapidly. But America will have more credibility in seeking such cooperation if it is itself lowering its emissions (it isn’t, so far).

America is in crisis. It is facing the most profound security threat, in the form of the climate crisis, that it has ever confronted. The only practical and rational response is to cease burning fossil fuels and go to green energy as fast as humanly possible. Only the government can carry out this task at the necessary scale. That we have these ignorant nonentities running to head up that government in the midst of this crisis is a horrifying travesty.

(The Conversation) – It made world news last week when a small lake in Canada was chosen as the “Golden Spike” – the location where the emergence of the Anthropocene is most clear. The Anthropocene is the proposed new geological epoch defined by humanity’s impact on the planet.

It took 14 years of scouring the world before the geoscientists in the Anthropocene Working Group chose Lake Crawford – the still, deep waters of which are exceptionally good at preserving history in the form of sediment layers. Core samples from the lake give us an unusually good record of geological change, including, some scientists believe, the moment we began to change everything. For this group, that date is around 1950.

But what didn’t get reported was the resignation of a key member, global ecosystem expert Professor Erle Ellis, who left the working group and published an open letter about his concerns. In short, Ellis believes pinning the start of our sizeable impact on the planet to 1950 is an error, given we’ve been changing the face of the planet for much longer.

The other working group scientists argue 1950 is well chosen, as it’s when humans started to really make their presence felt through surging populations, fossil fuel use and deforestation, amongst other things. This phenomenon has been dubbed the Great Acceleration.

The disagreement speaks to something vital to science – the ability to accommodate dissent through debate.

Image by Benita Welter from Pixabay

What’s the debate about?

Would the public embrace the idea that our actions are making the world almost wholly unnatural? The answer, of course, depends on the quality of the science. Since most people aren’t scientists, we rely on the scientific community to hash out debate and present the best explanations for the data.

That’s why Ellis’s departure is so interesting. His resignation letter is explosive:

It’s […] [im]possible to avoid the reality that narrowly defining the Anthropocene […] has become more than a scholarly concern. The AWG’s choice to systematically ignore overwhelming evidence of Earth’s long-term anthropogenic transformation is not just bad science, it’s bad for public understanding and action on global change.

It’s not that Ellis thinks the way we live is problem-free. The central issue, in his view, is that there’s powerful evidence of much earlier global-scale impacts caused by pre- and proto-capitalist societies.

For instance, as Earth systems experts Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have shown, the violent Portuguese and Spanish colonisation of Central and South America indirectly lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. How? By killing millions of indigenous people and destroying local empires. With the people gone, the trees regrew during the 17th century and covered the villages and cities, expanding the Amazon rainforest.

Why we should welcome honest disagreement in science

Scientists have been debating in recent years over whether the Anthropocene should be deemed an “epoch” with a specific start date, or else an historically extended “event” caused by different human practices in different places, such as early agriculture, European colonisation and the spread of European and North American capitalism worldwide.

Ellis’ resignation stems from this debate. He’s not alone – other group members and experts have also worked to refute the epoch idea.

As philosopher of science Karl Popper and others have argued, productive scientific debate can only occur if there’s space for dissent and alternative perspectives. Ellis clearly believes the Anthropocene group has gone from debate to group think, which, if true, would challenge the free exchange at the heart of science.

Longer term, a compromise may well be reached. If the Anthropocene group were to shift tack and label the start of the epoch a multi-century event (a “long Anthropocene”), we’d still benefit from having labels for periods such as our current one where the human impact ramped-up significantly.

One issue with such tensions is what happens when they hit the media. Consider Climategate, the 2009 incident in which an attacker stole emails from a key climate research centre in the United Kingdom. Bad faith actors seized on perceived issues in the emails and used them to claim anthropogenic climate change was fabricated. The scientists at the heart of the controversy were cleared of wrongdoing, but the whole affair helped seed doubt and slow our transition away from fossil fuels.

The risk here is that if the public gets only a glancing, oversimplified view of these debates, they may come to doubt the abundant proof of our impact on Earth. It falls to journalists and science communicators to convey this accurately.

As for our trust in science, the case for declaring the Anthropocene will be subject to very close scrutiny and may not be ratified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body responsible for separating out deep time into specific epochs.

Stratigraphers such as Lucy Edwards have argued that an emerging epoch isn’t a fit subject for stratigraphy at all because all the evidence cannot, by definition, be in.

What does this tension mean for the Anthropocene?

The epoch versus event debate doesn’t mean we’re off the hook in terms of our impact on the planet. It is abundantly clear we have become the first species in Earth’s long history to alter the functioning of the atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and pedosphere (the soil layer) all at once and very quickly. Species such as cyanobacteria or blue-green algae had huge impact by adding oxygen to the atmosphere, but they did not affect all spheres with the speed and severity we have.

While we did not set out to alter the planet, its implications are profound. Humans are not only altering the climate but the entirety of the irreplaceable envelope sustaining life on the only planet known to have life. This is a complex story and we should not expect science to simplify it for political or other reasons.

Noel Castree, Professor of Society & Environment, University of Technology Sydney

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

The justices aren’t even hiding it anymore.

By Jim Hightower | —

( Afterwords.org ) – When public officials get themselves mired in the muck of corruption, they can always count on Senator Ted Cruz to issue a moral judgment: If the offender is a Democrat, he pronounces the corruption inexcusably grotesque; if it’s a Republican, he wails that the offender is the victim.

For example, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was recently caught (yet again) butt-deep in judicial immorality, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of freebies from a Texas real estate baron who has both a partisan and corporate interest in Thomas’ court rulings.

So, Cruz to the rescue! No judicial impropriety here, he squawks, for this is nothing but a diabolical plot by Democrats to “smear” poor Clarence.

But Thomas is busy smearing himself. From the start of his court tenure, Thomas has been a shameless seeker of personal gain, tucking untold sums from untold sources in the inner pockets of his judicial robes.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

He learned to hide his corruption in 2004, when he actually reported taking pricey gifts from a special interest, which got him widely condemned. So, he “reformed.”

No, he didn’t quit taking gimmes — he just quit disclosing them!

Thomas is a supreme grifter, but sadly he’s not alone. Many recent justices have fallen from the pedestal of judicial integrity, cozying up to the moneyed interests. Gifts aside, we now have a hyper-partisan, right-wing Republican majority taking their judicial opinions from those same interests, turning America’s unelected third branch of government into an autocratic, plutocratic political agency.

Then they wonder why their public approval rating – and legitimacy – are in the ditch! Since they won’t reform themselves, we the people must do it for them. To help, go to fixthecourt.com.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker

H/t Public Domain Vectors