Dear friends--
I hope you are well and that your psychological/social seatbelts are well fastened.
We here in the United States (and many other friends worldwide) see an era of radical political change barreling towards us, as exemplified in Pres.-elect Trump's appointment of a quite unaccountable non-governmental body headed by billionaires E. Musk and V. Ramaswamy to launch slash-and-burn raids against any portion of the U.S. government that he and they might choose.
The effects that Trump's inauguration January 20 will have on the "world order" will likely be equally-- or even more-- tumultuous. He has already declared he wants to reimpose U.S. control on the Panama Canal and seize control of Greenland. He said that bringing Canada into the United States as the 51st state would be a wonderful thing and that he wants to re-name the present Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America."
Earlier this week, I wrote a short essay in which I noted that the recent death of former president Jimmy Carter marked "the end of an era." (I was also able, on Thursday, to attend Pres. Carter's funeral in Washington's National Cathedral-- see more on that below.)
We are indeed living through a time of deep change, both nationally and globally, in which with every passing week human history seems to be sloughing off successive layers of long-respected norms, institutions, and practices.
![]() Domestically, here in the United States, the norms of political civility, respect for free speech, and the concept of the equal rights and value of all U.S. citizens and residents-- norms that have already long seen serious erosion-- now seem set for a deep collapse. (Recent glaring examples include, of course, the gross suppression of free-speech rights even by "pillars of liberal society" like the New York Times, Columbia University, and so on.)
Internationally, the global order that was painstakingly crafted in the last months of World War II also seems set for collapse. At the pinnacle of that order has been the United Nations, never a perfect organization, but one that prevented a global nuclear holocaust, helped support the freeing of most nations of the Global South from the yoke of colonialism, and started to build a rich concept of the "global good for all humanity."
But today, the UN, many of its own institutions (like UNRWA), and affiliated bodies like the International Criminal Court, along with the whole, late-1940s agreements around the "laws of war" and the internationally recognized obligation to both prevent and suppress genocide: all these have already been systematically attacked by the existing (pre-Trump) U.S. political leadership-- as I wrote here last July. And now, Trump's latest pronouncements against Panama-- a country with which Pres. Jimmy Cater in 1977 concluded a treaty that restored its full sovereignty rights, including over the Canal Zone-- against Greenland, and Canada threaten to blast the biggest hole yet through the concept of the sovereign equality of states that has underpinned the whole "Western"-led world order since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.
Yes, I know that for 300 years, the norms of Westphalia were held to apply only to White, European-led nations, and not to the non-"White" peoples against whom European states and entities enacted their violent and rapacious colonial savagery. But still, with the establishment of the UN in 1945, the norm of the sovereign equality of states became effectively globalized.
![]() Today, with the UN's whole body of norms now under sustained attack from this large global actor the United States, as well as from its junior partner Israel, these attacks are also torpedoing the norms of Westphalia itself. And so, the whole world could very easily be dragged back into the misery of the thirty years of vicious, highly ideologized warfare that preceded the Westphalia treaty. Or nuclear war, indeed...
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Faced with these prospects, what can those of us lucky enough to live in (relatively) secure and prosperous "Western" nations do to preserve our families, our communities, and the values that we hold dear? This is a massive question! My first stab at an answer would be to stress that we need to keep our cool, to hold our friends, families, and neighbors close... And also, to reach pro-actively and energetically across international borders to connect with that vast majority of humankind (more than 85%!) who do not live in White, Western nations and who've been struggling for many decades to build a world truly rooted in respect for the equal value of all human persons rather than in the cruelty, ideas of racial/civilizational superiority, and profit-driven greed that have long marked the history of the White, Western nations.
Basically, those of us who live in Western nations who want to preserve (or regain) our countries' decent, "liberal" values cannot do this on our own. We need the help of allies from the whole of the rest of the world.
![]() ... The organization that I am honored to head, Just World Educational, has done what we could, over recent years, to engage in deliberate, proactive "reaching out" across national borders. We've run-- and shared at no cost to Western publics-- innovative educational programs on topics like South Africa, Syria, the U.S.-China balance, or the need for a negotiated ceasefire in Ukraine...
These past 15 months, we've focused a lot on Israel's genocide in Gaza. We've worked to lift up the stories of the suffering and resilience of the Palestinian people there through our PalCast podcast series, and also to counter the widespread, and harmful demonization of the Hamas resistance movement through our "Understanding Hamas" project.
The de-demonization of Hamas is still very urgent! Israel's government and military are continuing the deliberate, exterminationist cruelty with which they've treated Gaza's people for the past 15 months. (Donald Trump's vow that "All hell will break loose" in Gaza if the Palestinian resistance doesn't release Israel's hostages before January 20 rings hollow to Gaza's people. What kind of situation does Trump think they've been living through for the past 15 months, if not an already-existing "hell"?)
I think of Just World Ed's "Understanding Hamas" project as constituting a radical plea for effective diplomacy.
![]() If anyone wants to free the hostages and end the genocide, then swiftly concluding an effective and durable ceasefire agreement for Gaza is the only viable way to attain those goals. And who need to be the prime parties to such a negotiated ceasefire? On the one hand, the (heavily US-supported) government of Israel and on the other, the Palestinian resistance movement in Gaza, led by Hamas.
If you haven't yet bought and read the book we produced from this project, then I warmly urge you to! Please share it with your friends and networks. We are also, just now, starting to plan a few more book events-- in the United States and also the UK-- around this very timely title. Let me know if you'd like to invite my co-author Rami Khouri or me to come to your community group or congregation to talk about it...
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Gaza's misery continues
Week after week I've been trying in my newsletters to convey the depth of the suffering that Israel-- with the full support and active help of the US and UK governments-- has been inflicting on Gaza's people.
Last week I noted that that the statistics the Gaza Ministry of Health has been reporting for deaths and injuries is almost certainly an undercount, because those stats rely on reporting from Gaza's hospitals. This week, the rightly prestigious British medical journal The Lancet released a detailed study that found that, for the period between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024, the Gaza MOH had under-reported deaths in Gaza from traumatic injury by 41%.
![]() And those, remember, are only deaths from the "traumatic injuries" caused by incoming bombardment. They do not include the deaths from starvation, from cold, from inability to access needed treatment for long-term illness, and so on. Just deaths from traumatic injury... And the main reason for the undercounting in that period that the Lancet study identified was Israel's deliberate and progressive destruction of so many hospitals.
Click on the image to see the effects of the destruction of hospitals. (Or better yet, read the whole study.)
I confess to being a bit of a numbers person. Here are two more informative charts:
![]() For this one, I decided to draw a line graph to show the monthly record since October 2023 of the average number of truckloads of aid that the Israeli military has let into Gaza. (Click on it to enlarge.) Note that the "high point" of that graph, in April 2024, was just over 160 truckloads per day. Before the genocide, Gaza's people already needed 500 truckloads of aid per day...
You can download the UN-OCHA infographic from which I took those numbers, here.
![]() Also on that infographic was this chart that shows that between January 1 and 7, the Israeli military was denying or impeding access to a large number of humanitarian aid missions trying to reach Southern Gaza (40, out of 69 attempted missions), while the various aid bodies were apparently able to get 27 of their missions planned for North Gaza wholly or partially approved.
Bottom line: Unbelievable degrees of cruelty and human misery in Gaza.
![]() To access powerful, more narrative accounts of what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza, of course I recommend our PalCast podcast conversations, always superbly hosted by Dr. Yousef Aljamal; and available for free download from Apple or Spotify. But I also want to give a big shoutout to the fine and piercing materials that the Electronic Intifada produces, both on their website, and in their weekly livestreams. Their latest livestream, from last Thursday, is here, handily divided up onto "chapters" from efficient viewing/listening. (Just a proud note, too, that their talented host Nora Barrows-Friedman, is a longstanding member of JWE's board.)
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About Pres. Carter's funeral
As I mentioned above, I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the "big" funeral gathering here at Washington's "National Cathedral." I believe I received it mainly because my spouse, Dr. William B. Quandt, had been Carter's prime Middle East advisor/staff member during the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations that Carter hosted at Camp David in 1978-- an experience he expertly wrote about in this 1986 book.
![]() (Bill and I have had several robust but friendly discussions about what was achieved at that gathering. On Bill's part, he said he recognized early on that, thanks to Israeli PM Begin's fierce opposition to Palestinian rights, that Camp David process would sadly not lead to any follow-on deal for the Palestinians...)
For my part, I decided I wanted to go to the funeral mainly in order to acknowledge and celebrate several of Carter's more notable post-presidential endeavors. But I insisted on wearing, with my cold-weather funeral garb, a pin I had made that celebrated one of those achievements in particular: the prophetic book he published in 2007 titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. That was the only way I could see myself doing anything to share a public space with the like of "Genocide" Joe Biden, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, etc.
![]() I vowed I would not go to the funeral if anyone, from security or whatever, tried to make me take my pin off. And nobody did. There were nearly three hours of waiting around in various well-monitored holding areas before the service started at 10 am, but there was such a crowd of people that few people noticed my pin. The two who did gave me a quiet thumbs-up, which felt good.
We were seated in an outer aisle of the cathedral. We could see the main proceedings only on the t.v. monitors they provided in our aisle, we and got only tiny glimpses of the coffin as it was carried past or the other things that were happening at the front of the main aisle. (We thus completely missed all the jovial chatting that Donald Trump engaged in, in the second row, with Barrack Obama; the very friendly belly poke with which George W. Bush greeted Obama; and other sights that we saw only later on the network news reports.)
![]() What I really, really liked about the service was that the Carter family had insisted that JC's old friend Rev. Andrew Young give the main homily. Young, you may recall, had been JC's first ambassador to the United Nations; but he was forced to resign from that post after Mossad leaked a recording it had made of him meeting in New York with the PLO's rep to the UN, Zuhdi Tarazi.
The 8-minute homily that Young, now 92 years old, delivered on Thursday was simple, direct, and powerful-- especially given that he was delivering it face-to-face with all the presidential miscreants who seated there very near to him.
The addresses that JC's grandson Jason Carter, who's now the board chair of the Carter Center, and Gerald Ford's son Steven Ford delivered were also pretty good. The music and ambience were great. (But I couldn't help remembering how, back in the mid-19780s, when I was still-- nominally at least-- an Anglican, the National Cathedral had been much more active and outspoken than it is today, in supporting Palestinian rights... More on that, another time.)
Anyway, as I said before, it was very much the ambience of the end of an era... Or not just one era, but many eras of widely varying lengths in the troubled history of the world we find ourselves in today.
Buckle up! We will certainly need a worldwide coalition of forces if we're to roll back the depradations that Israel has been visiting on the peoples of West Asia for decades now... and to resist the very lively threats that the Trump-Musk-Vance "presidency" promises to visit on the whole world, and on the United States itself, over the weeks and months to come.
Wishing the best for you and all those you care about--
~ Helena
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