[Salon] The horror. The horror. Gaza and the UN (again)



From the desk of Helena Cobban,
Pres., Just World Educational
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Dear friends--

The sheer horror of Israel's (fully US-backed) campaign of annihilation against Gaza continues, constituting a "Heart of Darkness" akin to anything that novelist and navigator Joseph Conrad described being undertaken in colonial Congo.

The horror Israel is undertaking within Gaza was echoed in the horror of seeing diplomat Morgan Ortagus cast a U.S. veto Thursday, to block a UN Security Council resolution that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

All the SC's other 14 members, including France and Britain, voted for the resolution.

What does it say about the effectiveness of the UN if a single state, comprising well under 5% of humankind, is able to thwart the clearly stated intention of the other 95%?

In the week ahead, New York will see a crucial high-level confab of world leaders, coming to mark the 80th anniversary of the UN's founding and to take momentous decisions on issues including Israel's ongoing, now UN Human Rights Council-certified, genocide in Gaza.

Will the representatives from Global Majority nations act to circumvent Washington's veto by using a "Uniting for Peace" vote to initiate bold UN action to end the genocide? Let us all hope so, and do what we can to push our own national governments to make that happen.

However, we need to be clear that any effective UN action to end the genocide necessarily also involves directly challenging Washington and the "ironclad" wall of protection that it maintains around Fortress Israel. It is highly unlikely that this will happen in the days immediately ahead. Though I guess that we should never say "Never"...

The main diversionary move that some European and other states are proposing at the UN is to accord their own (essentially meaningless) "recognition" to a (now also meaningless) "State of Palestine." That move will save no lives in Gaza. Today, we can all, from everywhere, see the deliberate cruelty that Israel is deploying in Gaza being openly displayed on all our screens.

At the UN's 80th-birthday gathering, the organization's 193 member governments therefore face a crisis over the effectiveness and indeed the continuing relevance of this long-lasting governance body. 

... This past Wednesday I had the chance to discuss these matters and their possible impact on global governance going forward with my old friend, colleague, and mentor Amb. Chas W. Freeman, Jr., someone whose breadth of diplomatic, analytical (and linguistic) experience powers his formidable ability to understand the deep trends in global affairs.

You can watch the full recording of our 56-minute conversation, on JWE’s YouTube channel, here. You can click here to download an excellent summary of our conversation, or here to download the full transcript.

Freeman stated clearly and forcefully that the world had already entered a new multipolar era. “The five-century-old domination of the world by the West had come to an end,” he said, pointing to the growing strength of blocs like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He argued that non-Western powers were now the true defenders of principles and practices of international law, while Washington had become a “radical and reactionary” force.

He was unsparing in his critique of Western hypocrisy. He contrasted the outcry in the Western media over Ukraine with its near-silence on U.S.-backed wars in the Muslim world and the genocide in Gaza. “The West has not only lost its commanding power in every sphere but it’s lost its moral standing,” he said, adding that Europe had reduced itself to “a coalition of the deluded.”

On Palestine, Freeman’s words were devastating. He described Zionism as “a negation of Judaism” whose crimes in Gaza had stripped away its moral mask. Comparing Israeli apartheid to South Africa’s, he argued it was “infinitely worse” because its goal was the expulsion or murder of the indigenous population. He predicted that these actions had sealed Zionism’s fate: “I think we’re looking at the end of days in Palestine, not just for the Palestinians, but for the Zionists.”

He crucially also noted that while militarily outmatched, Hamas had achieved a strategic breakthrough by elevating the Palestinian cause to the forefront of global consciousness. “It may be cowering in tunnels, but in the world of ideas and propaganda, it has won,” he observed.

We urge you to use the multimedia resources we've produced from this conversation to help develop you own understanding of world affairs, and that of your friends too. This link will send you (and them) to the main resource-page we've produced based on that conversation.

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I'll be writing a little more, below, about some of the other big developments of the past week that affect the balance in ever-crucial West Asia... including the intriguing fallout from the gathering of Islamic government leaders that convened in Qatar last weekend, and the "snapping back" of tight UN sanctions on Iran that the Security Council voted on, yesterday.

But first, I want to highlight two other, hopefully ongoing, Just World Ed projects:
 

PalCast's convo with a savvy, newly minted Gaza high-school grad


In mid-week, PalCast hosts Dr. Yousef Aljamal (from Sakariya, Türkiye) and Tony Groves (from Dublin) released a new episode of the PalCast: a conversation with newly minted high school grad Ahmad Abushawish, titled "Chasing my dream in a genocide."

Ahmad was speaking with Yousef and Tony from Nuseirat refugee camp in mid-Gaza. He described his struggle to complete his Tawjihi (school-leaving) exams during Israel’s ongoing genocide. He recounted how life seemed to freeze under the constant bombardment, using the metaphor of an escalator moving the wrong way to explain his daily struggle; and he described his efforts to support his community through small initiatives such as producing mosquito repellent for families huddling in makeshift tents.

Despite being displaced, losing close friends, and enduring crowded living conditions, Ahmad showed resilience and an unshaken will to keep moving forward. He also shared his dream of studying at a prestigious university abroad-- not to escape Gaza, but to gain the skills needed to better serve his people. He said he really hoped to apply to UK universities to study engineering.

We are all so grateful to Yousef and Tony for having, week after week over the past two years, worked so steadfastly and so productively to highlight the voices of (especially) young Palestinians in Gaza who've been undergoing unspeakable horrors during the genocide.

In mid-week, Israel cut off nearly all communication between Gaza and the rest of the world. (Yes, Israel's moral center is now truly a "Heart of Darkness.") This makes the archive of recordings that Yousef and Tony have built up over the past two years even more valuable. 

Access this conversation on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share it with your friends. Also, from either of those links you can access the entire back library of PalCast episodes. Please "Like" them there and give them rave reviews! And also new: Tony Groves's amazing production facility Tortoise Shack Media is now offering videos of all the PalCasts (and a lot more.) You can access those via TS's Patreon page, here
 

Still building: JWE's library of timely resources


Over the decade since our late-2015 incorporation as an educational non-profit, Just World Ed has already built a formidable library of useful resources on West Asian and world affairs. You can access many of these via the Resources tab at the top of our website. Others you can find in the archives of our blog, also easily clickable from anywhere on the website.

Some of the online learning centers accessible from the Resources portal offer a considerable breadth of multimedia resources. Those include the "Understanding Hamas" project we ran last year; the "Ukraine crisis" project we ran in 2022; or our projects on "Commonsense on Syria"
the "U.S. China balance", or so on.

Do explore them all! The first two of those also resulted (in addition to the online resources) in the production of actual physical print products, both of which remain extremely timely.

Now, it seems to me, the world balance is changing at an ever faster pace. So I'm a bit dubious about launching any new, big webinar-series project like the ones we presented before. I'm more inclined to proceed in a more agile manner, perhaps by presenting a new recorded-Zoom conversation, or a new small-group webinar each week. We're still figuring out how best to proceed. The week ahead may see some extremely momentous twists and turns in global affairs! We have to stay agile!

For now, I invite you all to browse the small-but-growing library of resources that Just World Ed has made available over the past month:

... And now also my most recent conversation with Amb. Chas Freeman

For now, we'll be posting the products of these activities in as timely a fashion as we can, at the Just World Ed blog, so you might want to put that onto your feed-reader. We will try to do outreach via social media (@Justworlded), but Just World Ed has suffered from shadow banning at the hands of Twitter and Meta for many years now...

Anyway, please stay tuned for news of our activities. If you were forwarded this newsletter and want to receive your own copy going forward, you can sign up for it here.

* * *

Now, just some quick thoughts from me on two big developments/events that affected the balance in West Asia over the past week:

** First, the announcement in the Raudi capital Riyadh September 17 that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have concluded a "Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement." This agreement clearly brings Pakistan's demonstrated nuclear-weapons capability and its other non-trivial military capabilities right into the heart of the West Asian strategic balance.

The photo here shows Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif  and Saudi Arabia's powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman embracing after they'd signed the agreement. Just two days earlier both those leaders had been at the big gathering of 57 Islamic leaders that convened in Qatar to assess possible responses to Israel's September 9 assault on the Qatari capital, Doha.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia-- like Qatar and most other Arab states in West Asia-- have long depended on a de-facto (and sometimes codified) security umbrella from the United States. Israel's September 9 assault, and the clear evidence of U.S. connivance in it, evidently started rapidly to change the strategic calculations of many former U.S. satraps. What we saw from Riyadh this week is only the most visible of what are almost certainly many other analogous changes now underway...

Find a good analysis of the nuclear-proliferation implications of the Pakistan-Saudi agreement here. And an excellent assessment of many of the pact's broader regional (and global?) implications is on the Moon of Alabama blog, here.

** Second, the vote the UN Security Council took yesterday to "snap back" the sanctions on Iran that were suspended under the terms of the six-party 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA. Find some useful background about that decision here. And find a good, early assessment of its possible implications from India's The Week magazine, here.

The vote came after SC President South Korea put forward a proposal to block the implementation of the snap-back mechanism that had been a prt of the 2015 JCPOA. 
Only China, Russia, Pakistan and Algeria backed the President's proposal. Nine members–the United States, Britain, France, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Denmark, Greece, Panama and Somalia–voted against the motion. Guyana and (in the end) South Korea abstained.

As The Week writer Ashish P Joy notes, "The outcome... [confirms] that the Europeans, despite years of delicate mediation, have chosen to confront Iran over its nuclear programme."

Let us just recall that the initial body-blow to the JCPOA came back in 2018 when then-Pres. Donald J. Trump unilaterally and abruptly withdrew the United States from it. Then this June, Trump and his Israeli allies launched an unprovoked and very violent assault against Iran, destroying many of its nuclear-research facilities and assassinating tens of Iranian scientists... And now, Trump and the European states are all colluding in a project to inflict yet further punishment on Iran...
* * *
The past week was already a momentous one in global affairs. (And of course, for the people of Gaza.) The coming week promises to bring more of the same. What additional decisions and actions might we see? Stay tuned...

Thanks for having read this far. I want to thank all the wonderful people who have sent monetary contributions to us in recent weeks-- as well as those who're continuing to send automatic monthly contributions.

Just World Ed is funded only by contributions from supporters like you. This preserves our ability to be agile and far-sighted. And I hope you agree that the pro-peace, pro-justice educational resources that we produce as a result are distinctive, useful, and timely.

If you haven't given recently (or ever!) and you now want to, or if you want to increase the level of your support, then click on the link below in order to do so.

You stay well--

~ Helena

 
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