Commentator

Of hells and handbaskets

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post. This is an attempt (every three weeks or so) to do a round-up on the news, based on reading widely across the international press. I also have a piece up in Compact Magazine on structural violence. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

shares a yahrzeit for her father.

Best,

Sam

GAZA

I’ve been struggling since the beginning of the conflict to understand the real extent of the devastation in Gaza, and this New York Times article from January goes a long way towards explaining why: cellphone blackouts and restrictions on reporting make “the true scale of death and destruction impossible to grasp, the details hazy,” The Times writes. In the absence of reporting, everybody projects their own view of what’s going on — and a great deal of the international ‘journalism’ on Gaza at the moment is mostly wrangling over terms with which to characterize the conflict.

There are a couple of very good recent New York Times pieces that give something like a picture of how the Strip has been affected. The overall point is the complete collapse of any viable economy. As Raja Khalidi, an economist based in the West Bank, put it, “It’s not like any war we’ve seen before, where a certain area is targeted and other zones are less touched and they can quickly re-engage in economic conditions. From Month 1, the economy was put out of commission.”

A UN report estimates unemployment at 75% — a 30% spike since before October 7 — and even those who have money are unable to withdraw it given the scarcity of ATMs. The economy such as it is turns on makeshift marketplaces largely involving resale of humanitarian aid. And then the hall of projections picks up in its analysis of why aid has failed to reach its intended targets. For whatever it’s worth, the Hebrew University’s Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science, and Nutrition has recently issued a paper, based on analyzing truck manifests, holding that Israel’s food deliveries to Gaza have dramatically increased since January and that “the food supply contains sufficient energy and protein for the population’s needs.”

Boy treated for malnourishment in Rafah in March

That is not, needless to say, what is being observed on the ground. The Free Press, based on statements of the US State Department and video evidence supplied by Israel, claims that Hamas has “intercepted and diverted” large quantities of aid. Israel has claimed bottlenecks in distribution by international aid agencies. Those in Gaza, meanwhile, of course blame Israel. Initial reports that the Israelis had been routinely attacking food trucks gave way to a more complicated understanding in which extremist protestors blocked humanitarian trucks, while — as The Intercept reported — the Israeli government let it happen. Human Rights Watch has documented eight cases since October in which Israel attacked convoys or aid workers — enough to make clear a disturbing pattern. Speaking to The Intercept, Allison McManus of the Center for American Progress said, “That is something that everybody can see with their own eyes. The killing of aid workers…that does not happen in a context in which the prosecuting army is adhering to international law.” But the primary accountability for aid shortages seems to be a sort of slow walk on the Israeli (as well as Egyptian) side, with, as The New York Times writes, “aid officials and many donor governments….blaming Israel for tightly restricting aid, including by blocking essential items and imposing a byzantine assortment of security restrictions at nearly every stage of the process.”

Protestors blocking humanitarian trucks to Gaza, February

If the reality is the slow walk of aid, mass hunger — “we have never seen anything like this anywhere on the planet,” said the head of Save the Children U.S. — and Israeli attacks, like the lethal strike on the Tal al-Sultan refugee camp, the key international players all seem to be in fantasy land of one kind or another. The Europeans are engaged in the symbolic act of recognizing a Palestinian state. Israel continues to focus on the illusion of ‘total victory.’ Hamas seems more than content to martyr the Palestinian people for the sake of its greater design. And the US is engaged — as best as I can tell — in a fantasy of striking a grand bargain across the Middle East, just in time for the election.

Biden seemed to pull the trigger on that plan with his unexpected speech calling for a six-week ceasefire. He had claimed that the proposal came from Israel — which it almost certainly didn’t — and is better interpreted as a somewhat desperate US effort to impose control over a spiraling situation. I don’t fault Biden for this — he had to do something — but a spiky Times of Israel analysis makes clear how many central issues Biden elided over. A ceasefire that neither Israel nor Hamas is genuinely party to may be worse than no ceasefire at all, since the re-instigation of conflict, including the select strikes on Hamas’ leadership that Israel regards as non-negotiable, means an enduring collapse of diplomacy. And Biden simply ignored the main issue at stake when he said that the deal would involve “a day after in Gaza without Hamas in power.” Which means what exactly? As The Times of Israel put it:

What is the mechanism for ensuring that Hamas is no longer ruling Gaza? And even if it is not ruling the Strip somehow, will it be barred from any participation in the postwar rebuilding and administration of a region that harbors deep and broad support for the terrorist group?…Military pressure seems to be the only conceivable way of uprooting Hamas, but the proposal is centered on a six-week pause to the war that turns into a permanent ceasefire.

The Times of Israel continued: “This is a zero-sum contest — either Hamas is toppled and Israel prevails, or Hamas retains its arms and retakes the Gaza Strip, a stunning defeat for the Jewish state. No speech of Biden’s can square that circle.” Which does put in stark terms what’s happening and is I suspect basically accurate. Biden can affect the calendar. He can force Israel to at least go through the motions of ceasefire accords and to ramp up humanitarian aid. His main point, I strongly suspect, is that he needs there to be some semblance of peace in Gaza before the November election. But Israel simply doesn’t share the same priorities as Biden — and would probably, on the whole, be just as happy with Trump in power. A blow-by-blow account of the deteriorating US-Israeli relationship reveals Biden to feel increasingly betrayed by Netanyahu’s intransigence and utter unwillingness to see the situation from Biden’s delicate vantage-point. “Some of [those close to Biden] felt it from the standpoint that Biden is taking a political hit and Bibi is reluctant to take any political hit by backing off. ‘How is it that Biden is paying a price and this guy won’t?’” said the veteran US envoy Dennis Ross.

In an analysis for The New York Times, Megan Stack writes that, in a word, Netanyahu really is just channeling the mood of Israel’s population, and this, I suspect, another grim truth of the current conflict. While it is tempting to imagine that a ceasefire could buy time for Israeli elections and for moderates to come to power, Stack notes that, as of January, 94% of Israelis believed the amount of force used in Gaza was either appropriate or insufficient; and that most Israelis oppose aid to the Strip. As Stack writes, “This bleak ideological landscape emerged slowly and then, on Oct. 7, all at once.” The Israeli population simply does not believe in a peace process or anything other than an unremitting hard line against Palestine. What is hoped to be gained in the long-term by that hard line is anybody’s guess.

Maybe the single most arresting piece I’ve read recently on the conflict is an article by Gazan Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib in Abu Dhabi’s The National News. In the piece, titled “Israel’s war has killed 31 members of my family, yet it’s vital to speak out against Hamas,” Alkhatib paints a picture of Hamas as utterly unmoved by the suffering in Gaza and determined to continue its struggle against Israel at all costs. “When asked at the beginning of the war why Hamas never built a single bomb shelter for civilians, one of the group’s senior leaders, Musa Abu Marzouk, said Hamas builds tunnels to protect themselves but that the protection and well-being of Gazans is the responsibility of the UN and the international community,” writes Alkhatib. “This attitude sums up almost two decades of Hamas’s rule in Gaza, in which the group instigated futile wars with Israel that failed to liberate an inch of Palestinian land and would instead get Gazans killed and batter the Strip.”

That strikes me also as a trenchant analysis and, once again, a return to the domain-of-no-good-options. I am glad to see the US exert a degree of leadership and to focus in on a ceasefire, aid, and (implicitly) a window in which Benny Gantz might displace Netanyahu. But, ultimately, we are in a “zero-sum” sort of world, with both Hamas and the popular will in Israel determined to continue the conflict and with Gazans suffering unimaginably.

UKRAINE

There are, by the way, other conflicts going in the world. There is, for instance, the Russian offensive towards Kharkiv, which seems to have stretched Ukraine’s defenses to the breaking point.

The fog of war very much applies here as well, and I’ve read different analysts who give very different accounts of what’s going on. The consensus seems to be that Ukraine is holding around Kharkiv but that its forces have been depleted elsewhere. Meduza has a series of interviews with Kharkiv residents who report a steady barrage of Russian drone and missile attacks on the city.

In the midst of this the United States and its European allies have given permission to the Ukrainians to violate the most prominent red line of the war and to fire into Russia itself. The US’ justification for this decision is, it must be said, a semantic work of art:

[The US] had already concluded that the geography of the battle around Kharkiv would require an exception to the hard rule that the United States had set against firing into Russia. Ukraine was suffering from what one official called “an artificial line” in the middle of the battlefield that kept them from responding to devastating attacks. The US concluded that it made no sense to restrict the Ukrainians from responding — even while maintaining a ban on using American equipment for long-range strikes deep into Russia.

But let’s not gloss over what is happening here. The United States — through a proxy but with American weapons — is directly attacking Russia. Throughout the entirety of the Cold War, this never happened.

In this neo-Cold War, the United States and Russia have been on a direct collision course for longer than is generally believed. It somehow got buried in the world’s press that in 2018 Americans and Russians were directly fighting each other in Syria. And right now is a moment of oh shit, of wondering how exactly the US misplayed its foreign policy hand enough after 1991 to find itself now lobbying missiles into Russia. I don’t really buy the Seymour Hersh argument that the expansion of NATO in the ‘90s is to blame — the Eastern European countries wanted in — but the recent disclosures that the CIA had turned Ukraine into a spying outpost in the 2010s do make one wonder the extent to which the United States really was playing with fire. Still, in terms of why the war has gone sideways in the way it has, the focus has to be on Ukraine’s reluctance to instigate a more general mobilization. In a piece for Harper’s, David Petraeus is quoted as saying, “You probably know the average age of Ukrainian soldiers. I was privileged to command soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, typically of age eighteen to twenty-three or so. In Ukraine, it’s over forty!”

The Harper’s article focuses in on the 2024 Munich Security Conference — the ‘Lose-Lose’ Conference, as its own report puts it. What the conference dealt with was the very real possibility of Ukraine losing the war. The grand geo-strategic ideas hadn’t worked out: sanctions hadn’t crippled Russia’s economy; the brief moment of mutiny in the ranks (the 23 hours of Prighozin) didn’t lead to any loss of will on the Russian side; and the counter-offensive never materialized. The Ukrainians still do have an arrow in their quiver — which is mass mobilization — but the sense at the moment is of both sides running down the clock until the November election and then, especially if Trump wins, coming to terms that will almost certainly be highly favorable to Russia. The Harper’s article quotes the Ukrainian MP Oleksii Goncharenko as “saying something interesting” — that “if all of Ukraine cannot come into NATO, then just take a part of us in for now — take in the part we control.”

Munich Security Conference publication materials

The point is that the resolution of the conflict would be eastern and western Ukraine heading in very different directions — the east essentially annexed to Russia, the west becoming at least a part of the EU if not of NATO. That’s the sort of Korean scenario that, since the beginning, has been the thinking person’s bet for how the war will end, but to get there takes of course both sides giving up on the vision of a unified Ukraine, with Russia accepting a permanent Western orientation for Ukraine proper and Ukraine taking NATO and/or EU membership as the consolation prize for huge territorial losses. No one will be happy with any of that, but that may well be the best outcome out of the year of lose-lose.

SUDAN

At the moment, the world’s leading humanitarian crisis is not Gaza, not Ukraine, but….Sudan, which needless to say is getting next to no attention.

The basic issue is a sort of cognitive overloading, with the West unable to think about Sudan let alone organize any sort of international humanitarian intervention comparable to the Save Darfur coalition of the 2000s.

Now, Darfur is once again facing mass killing. The Rapid Support Forces, who have the Janjaweed in their organizational ancestry, have surrounded the city of El Fasher, the capital North Darfur, and are widely expected to initiate a massacre. “It seems inevitable,” one El Fasher resident told The New York Times.

Bombardment in El Fasher in September

It really is startling how little the catastrophe in Sudan is registering internationally. As The New York Times writes, “A conflict that began as a power struggle between rival generals has devolved into a sprawling conflict that has drawn in ethnic, religious and rebel groups, on both sides, as well as an array of foreign sponsors,” including the UAE and the Wagner Group.

The Times estimates that 11 million have been displaced since the start of the war last year, with some unknown thousands killed. The UN has estimated 10-15,000 deaths alone in an assault on El Geneina in West Darfur in October. Of an attack on a civilian convoy in El Geneina last June, Human Rights Watch writes:

The violence culminated in a large-scale massacre when the RSF and its allies opened fire on a kilometers-long convoy of civilians desperately trying to flee. The RSF and militias pursued, rounded up, and shot men, women, and children who ran through the streets or tried to swim across the fast-flowing Kajja river. Many drowned. Older people and injured people were not spared. That day and in subsequent days, the attacks continued on tens of thousands of civilians who tried to cross into Chad, leaving the countryside strewn with bodies.

A pause has held in El Fasher, with a makeshift truce, but nobody expects that to last. What is clear is that however things end — whether or not El Fasher turns out like El Geneina on a far larger scale — they won’t resolve through international intervention or some concert of nations. Aid has been largely cut off and, from a humanitarian perspective, Sudan left to itself. As Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US envoy to the United Nations, puts it, “History is repeating itself in Darfur in the worst possible way.”