Why Don't People Seem to Care about Palestinian Lives?

Palestine is being ‘ethnically clensed’ in plain sight - yet the West seems indifferent

By Martin Cohen

Palestine is being ‘ethnically cleansed’ in plain sight - yet the West seems indifferent. Why is this? Wherever you start, the trail soon leads back to US politics.

How close is the current U.S. President, Joe Biden to Israel and how much influence does the US have over Israeli policy? The answer is “very” and “not much”. In 2010, in the middle of the then-vice president’s trip to Israel, the ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu government embarrassed Biden by announcing 1,600 new homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the future capital of a future Palestinian rump state. Biden is notoriously aggressive and won’t normally tolerate any disagreement. Thus, in a 2022 article for Axios, entitled ‘Old Yeller: Biden's Private Fury’, Alex Thompon notes how:

“Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn't yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn't respect you.’

But with Israel, it seems the situation is rather different.

One of Netanyahu’s advisors, Uzi Arad, later revealed that when Prime Minister Netanyahu met with Biden soon after publicly humiliating him, Biden threw his arm around “Bibi” and said with a smile, “Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.” Likewise, in 2012, Biden publicly said to Netanyahu: 

“Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you.”

In vain, it seems, do advisors try to educate Biden about the complex politics of the region. About memories like that of the Nakba, at the heart of this ignored history. This is a term which means “catastrophe” in Arabic. It refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Prior to this, contrary to claims that Arabs and Jews cannot live together, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It is always unpopular to state it, but in fact Hitler supported the idea which surely tells you want a terrible one it always was.

Today, the politics of Americans – and many other countries too, including the U.K –  with respect to Israel is characterised by three things. Prejudice against Arabs - who are seen as various kinds of “terrorist”; ignorance and indifference to the history of the region. However, American politics add in one other ingredient, and a most dangerous one too,  which is an irrational conviction that the Bible predicts the Second Coming of the Messiah – but only once the Holy Land is reunited under Israeli control. It has even been suggested that Joe Biden is part of this evangelical cult, though I have no way of knowing if this rumour is true. What I do know is that this ridiculous and irrational view has considerable influence on both Democrat and Republican parties. It feeds into a political consensus that, one way or bloody another, Palestine needs to become “Israel”.

Nonetheless, in November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab (with Jerusalem under UN administration). When, understandably, the Arab world rejected the plan, Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian towns and villages, forcing tens of thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948. The result of this war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.

Today, most of the inhabitants of Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees from the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 war, and more than half are under the age of 18. Apart from the tragedy of forcibly displacing children, attempts to blame the inhabitants of Gaza for either “voting for” Hamas or not resisting them are hollow given this age distribution.

Today too, due to Israel’s siege of Gaza, the majority of Palestinians there no longer have access to basic needs such as healthcare, water, sanitation services, and electricity. Prior to the siege, their situation was already pretty desperate: according to the UN, 63 percent of the population was dependent on international aid; 80 percent lived in poverty and 95 percent did not have access to clean water.

Alas, many American voters have been encouraged to feel indifference to Palestinian suffering for decades, and instead have passively accepted an alternative reality in which the Jewish people not only there - but worldwide - are a persecuted but courageous minority. Never mind that nearly six million Americans are Jewish and live pretty safely there…

The bottom line then is that, in the normal way, there is NO political price to be paid by the Democrats for supporting the Israeli government in its latest, murderous expansion of “Jewish areas”. However, this time, I actually think is NOT normal.

The catch is, despite Biden's "unconditional" support, Israel knows the Palestinians won't conveniently flee abroad (despite so many being killed at the moment, with highly publicise strategies of cutting off water and bombing hospitals) so its strategy becomes one of just killing. But Gaza alone contains some 600 000 people - mostly children. If they won’t flee, then they need to be killed. After all, Gaza was already a kind of prison. It will be hard to square that circle.

When I was younger, I remember meeting some of the "IDF heroes" of the last war - certainly they fought at a significant disadvantage against well-armed foes. Could it be today that the 360 000 reservists now begin to doubt their commanders? I think it is possible. However, If not, they will soon find themselves wading through civilian bodies in the rubble of Palestinian homes.

But back to a question posed recently on Quora will Biden pay a price for his indifference to the plight of millions of Palestinians? No, in the short term,  I don’t see Biden or anyone else paying a price for this. However, in the longer term – indeed maybe as soon as within a few months – I think things will look very different At which point, either Israel corrects itself (as Netanyahu represents only a small minority) – or history will do it for them.

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Further reading on Palestine

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/http-visualizingpalestine-org-visuals-shrinking-palestine-static

https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rpal20/collections/GazaTwoDecades

The Art of War? Obama's Machiavellian Foreign Policy

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” 

- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

Is Obama a foreign policy genius - a modern day Machiavelli - or an inept ingénue? 

Consider some recent and some ongoing cases.

1. During the US presidential election campaign, Barack Obama mocked his opponent, Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was a threat  - opting instead to forgive Russia past transgressions, press the restart button and have 'business as usual' relations. China, he asserted, was the real threat, even as Chinese money kept the US economy afloat.

Yet, as has widely been pointed out, the Russian military interventions in Ukraine, which have led to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and to the entrenchment of separatist enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, directly challenge the post-Cold War consensus. Eastern Ukraine follows on other more tentative land-grabs, and in turn will be followed by greater prizes - Estonia, Lithuania… And if incursions there show the NATO lion cannot roar, why not further?

2. In Syria, faced with a choice between supporting the moderate rebels, and leaving the extremists to take over, he opted for the latter policy - with the result that the Assad government recovered lost ground and ISIS became a regional force. Originally, U.S. intelligence saw the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset. Now though, as David Kilcullen, the US military strategist said to have saved Iraq through the 'surge' has put it:

'Western countries have a clear interest in destroying ISIS, but counter-insurgency should not even be under discussion. This is a straight-up conventional fight against a state-like entity, and the goal should be to utterly annihilate ISIS as a state.' 

Just unfortunate then that ISIS has now become a force that would require a greater military effort than that of the original Iraq war. Your move, Professor!

3. But it is in Ukraine that his judgements seem most dangerous. Obama has apparently decided that there is no strategic significance to allowing Russia to annex parts of the former Soviet Union. Of course, the morality of this do not concern him - a man who says in one of his books that he learned his his ethics from the backs of cereal packets. In pursuit of this policy there have been so substantial sanctions, although there is a possibility that the US was involved in the Saudi policy of lowering the world price of oil - which has hurt the Russians. Under Obama there has been no access to arms and training, leaving the hopelessly amateurish and poorly equipped Ukrainian conscripts to be slaughtered in their thousands by the separatists backed by Russian special forces and the very best equipment that the Russians have.

4. In Egypt, Obama sided with the Egyptian military against the democracy movement, in due course helping to usher in a new and if anything even more vicious regime than that run by the US's client Hosni Mubarak.

5. As for the Palestine-Israel conflict, Obama has managed to present the US as both powerless and inept - threatening responses and laying down red lines which he never has any intention of following through on. The Israeli Prime Minster is encouraged to treat him with contempt.

6. And then, earlier this month, his international trade agenda was left in tatters after even the Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, voted against his plans to for a new bill, going directly against Obama less than three hours after the president begged his party’s caucus to support it.

7. Not to foget the War in Europe, entirely! The economic policies one between Greece and the Eurozone, that is.  Here, Obama weighed in on the side of Greece, ordering the rest of Europe to forgive its trangressions and, well, bend the Eurozone rules a little. Such advice might have been deeeply probematic for the Eurozone if followed - it certainly helped reduce the liklihood of the Greek's seeking a compromise. Result - this week - boom!

The fact is, Obama sees himself as a true Machiavellian Prince, one who presents one face to the world while acting in a quite different way in secret. He sees himself as enhancing US geopolitical and structural power; strengthening the American identity (hence the oft-repeated determination to stop the torture programme and release the extra-judicial prisoners such as those held at Guantanamo,  policies he has no intention of genuinely carrying out) and the search for domestic political consolidation.

According to former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski:

'He’s not a softy. But he’s a person who tries to think through these events so you can draw some long-term conclusions.'

The longterm consequence of policy in the Middle East seems likely to be polarisation - between a US-backed series of kleptocracies and ultra-Islamists. In Europe, it is likely to be a 'hot war' between the Western Europeans and the Russians. In general, Obama seems to be sowing the seeds of global chaos - but a chaos in which perhaps for some it can be imagined that Continental United States will be immune. If that is indeed his aim, it is certainly a piece of cynicism worthy of the Italian master himself.


Further, or is it backwards? reading here

Primary colours

23 July 2009

Philosophers and Truthiness

By Matthew Blakeway

The comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness* . This is a way of mocking politicians who claim to know something intuitively but fail to put forward any evidence to support their assertion. Too often in political rhetoric, truthiness presents as fact what is merely an ideological belief – not a real truth, but a truth that we want to exist. As Colbert put it ‘Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.’

Over the last few weeks, academic economists have started the share the fun. The equivalent term that Paul Romer coined to mock his less-than-rigorous colleagues is mathiness. This, he says, is an argument that looks like robust mathematics and sounds like robust mathematics, but actually isn’t. Sloppy economists create arguments that use terms that are mathematically defined elsewhere but which have subtly different meanings in the argument presented. In this way, an ideological position (e.g. if welfare is cut, the unemployed will all find jobs) can be presented as a solid economic argument. As Romer says: 

‘Academic politics, like any other type of politics, is better served by words that are evocative and ambiguous, but if an argument is transparently political, economists interested in science will simply ignore it.’ 

Mathematical theories, like those created by academic economists, should only be trusted when each term is precisely defined and consistently used. Only then can the conclusions of such arguments be empirically demonstrated to be either true or false. The example that he gives is growth theory, where competing versions all appear to be clearly stated, yet show no converging consensus.

And now that creating words to mock woolly thinking is in danger of becoming an epidemic. It occurs to me that the humanities need one of their own. Or, as Stephen Colbert might say, ‘truthiness’ and ‘mathiness’ just don’t feel right in our context. So I propose that we adopt the word ‘explaininess’ because I think this is a problem that is pervasive throughout writing in philosophy and human sciences. Explaininess is an intellectual Ponzi scheme where one nebulous notion is needed to explain another nebulous notion, but the cumulative whole is presented as an explanation.