Tag: Gaza

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Opinion The Last Word

The ‘Accepted Insanity’ of World War III

“National interests” are the prize at stake. (Photo: James Vallee | Dreamstime.com)

“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”

Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from The New York Times — from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on brink of … uh, World War III. It’s the forgettable quotes, especially in regard to ongoing war, that may be the most dangerous because all they do is solidify a collective sense of normalcy. My term for it is “accepted insanity.” We have the technological and psychological capacity to kill not simply thousands or even millions of people but the whole human race, but let’s talk about it in terms of strategy, tactics, and public relations! Let’s talk about it as though we’re covering a bunch of 10-year-old boys throwing stones. Which one’s going to win?

That’s the key issue here: winning. When two cowboys face off in an armed confrontation, the one who draws and fires fastest, hitting the other guy in the stomach or wherever, wins. He gets to walk away with a self-satisfied smirk.

I’m not singling out the Times story quoted above as uniquely problematic in its coverage of the latest turn of events in the Middle East, but rather as representative of the accepted insanity of endless war — the reduction of war to an abstraction, virtually always involving clearly defined good guys and bad guys, and describing murder (including mass murder) as retaliation, self-defense, “show of force,” etc., etc. “National interests” are the prize at stake. Human lives are just bargaining chips, except, of course, when the bad guys kill them.

The Times story, for instance, steps beyond its abstraction of the Israel-Iran confrontation at one point. Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing several Iranian officers, the story informs us. Iran retaliated two weeks later, firing 300 drones and missiles at Israel, almost all of which were shot down, and very little damage was caused. The Times notes: “The only serious casualty was a 7-year-old girl, Amina al-Hasoni, who was badly wounded.”

War affects children! Yes, yes, yes it does. My heart goes out to Amina al-Hasoni. But my God — some 13,000 children have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, and thousands more injured, not to mention orphaned. And some are simply missing, lying under the rubble. What are their names?

What if war were covered the way street crime is covered — not as an abstraction, but with awareness that it’s a profound social problem? What if war were covered with external awareness, i.e. with wisdom that transcends political platitudes — rather than in obeisance to those platitudes?

Here, for instance, is CNBC reporting on the Israel-Iran confrontation. Noting that Israel has pledged to “exact a price” from Iran in response to the missile attack, CNBC then quotes President Biden condemning the attack and adding that the United States “will remain vigilant to all threats and will not hesitate to take all necessary action to protect our people.”

Can you believe that his words didn’t make me feel safer? I’d been pondering not just the possibility but the likely reality of World War III, and to read these words — “take all necessary action to protect our people” — made the wolves start to howl in my own soul.

Platitudes plus nukes? Biden wasn’t talking about transcending war and shunning the country’s trillion-dollar military budget. Presumably, he was talking about using it, putting it to work to “protect” us — you know, to “defeat” our declared enemy (Iran, apparently), no matter the price exacted on Planet Earth, including on you and me. How about some media coverage that doesn’t blow this off with a shrug?

Coverage of war requires awareness of the lies that prop it up politically. For instance, as World Beyond War has put it: “According to myth, war is ‘natural.’ Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to prepare most people to take part in war, and a great deal of mental suffering is common among those who have taken part.”

In other words, war is not a product of human evolution — humanity finally becoming mature enough to fight itself in an organized, collective fashion — but essentially the opposite of that: an unevolved aspect of who we are … an embedded failure to evolve, you might say.

So many veterans, as the World Beyond War quote implies, often bear the burden of this truth well beyond their time of service. They are forced to face, on their own, the psychological and spiritual implications of what they did — of following orders, of participating in the dehumanization and murder of alleged enemies. In the wake of wars, vet suicide rates can be horrific. While such psycho-spiritual trauma is officially defined as a mental illness — post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — others with deeper understanding, including many vets, call it moral injury. Following orders forced them to act beyond their own humanity: When you dehumanize others, you dehumanize yourself.

This is the accepted insanity the corporate media cover with such win-lose abstraction, even when we’re on the brink of World War III. Multiply moral injury by several billion human beings and what you could wind up with is human extinction.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

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Opinion The Last Word

Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza

The war in Gaza has exacerbated food insecurity and malnutrition. (Photo: Mohamed Zarandah | Dreamstime.com)

Among the many brutalities in war prohibited under international humanitarian law are starvation of civilian populations and deliberate attacks on aid workers. Here are some new findings worth considering as we ponder the continued decline of human security in the Gaza fighting.

By now we are all familiar with the appalling food situation in all parts of Gaza. Now, a multiparty global initiative known for short as the IPC — which stands for Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — has documented and closely analyzed the matter.

Half the Gaza population, 1.1 million people, now face “catastrophic food insecurity.” Unless a ceasefire can be agreed upon, by July just about the entire population will be in that condition. Moreover, “Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”

The report further notes: “The famine threshold for household acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded and, given the latest data showing a steeply increasing trend in cases of acute malnutrition, it is highly likely that the famine threshold for acute malnutrition has also been exceeded.”

Decreasing delivery of food and other basic necessities is a major cause of the famine.

“From a pre-escalation average of 500 trucks a day of which 150 carrying food, in the period between 7 October 2023 to 24 February 2024, only 90 trucks per day, of which only 60 carrying food, entered the Gaza Strip. Consequently, virtually all households are skipping meals every day and adults are reducing their meals so that children can eat. In the northern governorates, in nearly two thirds of the households, people went entire days and nights without eating at least 10 times in the last 30 days. In the southern governorates, this applies to one third of the households.”

We need to remember just how destitute the Gaza Strip was before the war. The IPC report reminds us: “In 2022, the Gaza Strip faced an unemployment rate of nearly 45 percent and, by September 2023, the poverty rate was at 60 percent, among a population that included nearly 70 percent of refugees. Due to severely constrained livelihood opportunities, in 2022, over half of the population was relying on humanitarian assistance as their main income source and about one-third on casual labour, with 70 percent of the population food insecure.”

As I noted in a podcast on opinion polling of Palestinians, many believe the war has finally focused international attention on Gaza’s desperate conditions.

Adding to the food insecurity in Gaza are the perilous conditions for humanitarian relief workers. That was brought home with the death of seven members of the World Central Kitchen in an Israeli raid that the Israeli Defense Forces have called a “tragic mistake,” but which WCK’s Chef José Andrés has called Israel’s “war against humanity itself.”

Prior to that attack, 196 aid workers had been killed in the war between last October and late March. That’s an astounding figure when, according to a group that tracks humanitarian assistance projects, no aid workers had been killed in all the Occupied Territories in the three previous years. Nor has any conflict zone ever experienced so many deaths of aid workers.

The unprecedented number of aid worker deaths in Gaza has raised accusations that relief organizations are being deliberately targeted. As one writer puts it:

“Israeli forces have targeted healthcare facilities, aid convoys, and ambulances with apparent impunity. Aid groups say they have shared the GPS coordinates of their facilities and convoys with Israeli authorities to avoid unintentional bombing — a strategy known as deconfliction — but aid facilities continue to be hit. ‘There is complete disregard for the norms of modern warfare,’ said Bob Kitchen, vice president for emergencies and humanitarian action at the International Rescue Committee.”

Now, according to a report in The New Humanitarian, Israel has set up a separate, privately contracted aid system that it can protect and control, avoiding reliance on the UN’s relief organization as well as on NGOs.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of political science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

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Opinion The Last Word

Biden’s Choices

A cease-fire is the clearest path toward humanitarian aid. (Photo: Viorel Dudau | Dreamstime.com)

Presidents always face uncomfortable choices: supporting human rights versus providing weapons to governments that consistently violate human rights; adding to the nuclear weapons stockpile versus spending money on social well-being; sanctioning an adversary or working with it.

In the Middle East today, Joe Biden’s choice is between wholeheartedly supporting Israel and doing all he can to protect the innocents in Gaza. He’s trying to do both, but he is not satisfying advocates of either policy. In Israel, Biden’s pressure on the Netanyahu government to avoid a full-out invasion of Gaza, provide humanitarian aid, and avoid unnecessary civilian casualties are resented by the Israeli far right. It wants 100 percent support, period, and it has a powerful argument: It has been attacked, many innocent lives have been lost, and there are well over 200 hostages. Nor is Biden’s approach appreciated in Palestinian circles, in Arab countries, in the UN leadership, or by U.S. human rights groups, progressives in Congress, and some officials in his own State Department. They all see his policy as impossibly contradictory: You can’t have an “ironclad” pro-Israel policy and expect to moderate Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The Biden administration is a party to the war but, in fairness, is not at the controls. To be sure, U.S. military aid — jet fighters, drones, and Special Forces — is supporting Israel’s operations in Gaza. But it’s the right-wing government in Tel Aviv that not only wants to decapitate Hamas but also use the war to exert new controls on the Palestinian population, possibly including mass deportation.

Unless Biden is willing to do what no previous U.S. administration has been willing to do — namely, impose severe restrictions on U.S. economic and military aid and political support, subject to Israel’s behavior in Gaza — the administration has very little leverage.

Unwillingness to use U.S. leverage undercuts Biden’s entire Middle East policy. He can’t expect Saudi Arabia to move on normalizing relations with Israel. He can’t expect support from the region or from developing countries for putting pressure on Iran and Hezbollah not to enter the fighting. Nor, at home, can Biden expect understanding from Palestinian and other Muslim communities — or even from progressive Jews — on his current policy.

All these groups see the glaring contradiction, not the logic, of fully supporting Israel while calling for its restraint. They all are calling on the administration to push for a cease-fire. But Biden, like previous presidents, seems to have given Israel veto power over such calls. Netanyahu has explicitly ruled out a cease-fire until the hostages have been released. Biden has finally called for a pause “to get the prisoners out,” but not for a cease-fire. Yet only a cease-fire holds out any hope for the release of some hostages, for saving civilian lives in Gaza, for enabling hospitals to treat the wounded, and for opening the way to more substantial humanitarian aid.

The fundamental dilemma that Biden faces is that he is the inheritor of many decades of unqualified U.S. support of Israel. Numerous critics over those years have warned of the consequences of that support, most especially for the deprivation of Palestinian rights and the denial of their statehood aspirations.

Liberals in the U.S. government, notably in Congress, have from time to time tried to tie U.S. aid to Israel’s apartheid policies (as Jimmy Carter called them), but politics at home — the Israel lobby, in short — has always nipped that effort in the bud.

I sympathize with Biden’s situation. I believe he and other top U.S. officials are truly concerned about, perhaps even appalled by, the devastation of Gaza and the civilian deaths there. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an impassioned plea for protection of Palestinian civilians in a Washington Post op-ed, saying that “preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is vital to Israel’s security.”

And we know that Biden is no friend of Netanyahu; he probably mistrusts any assurances Netanyahu has given him about trying to limit civilian losses of life and property. Yet as The New York Times recently described, Biden has a long and deeply personal history of support for Israel — so much so that “a longtime Israeli official more recently called him ‘the first Jewish president.’”

He has made numerous trips to Israel and has met with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir. No doubt Biden can count on considerable financial support for his presidential campaign from Jewish organizations.

All these ties only tighten the bind he’s in, not least because they increase his difficulty in dealing with members of Congress and State Department officials who are now sharply critical of his policy. They don’t see the choices he is making as either wise or humane.

What they, and we, do see every day is video and photographs of deadly bombardments that are making Gaza a moonscape and killing scores of innocent people with every strike.

The only way Joe Biden can break the bind is to do the courageous thing, which is also the right thing: join those calling for a cease-fire in order to save lives, including those of the hostages and Gaza’s population; and support a “safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state” as essential to the long-term security of both.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of political science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

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Opinion The Last Word

Gaza and Maine

In 2021, 48,000 Americans suffered gun-related deaths. (Photo: Sheila Fitzgerald | Dreamstime.com)

I live a couple of counties away from where the mentally ill Robert Card, apparently hearing voices inside his head that sounded as if people were putting him down, shot up a bar and a bowling alley and forever changed the lives of too many of the good citizens of Maine.

The horror in what has been statistically the safest state in the nation competed for headlines with the exponentially larger agony of the brutal Hamas attack and Israel’s decimation of Gaza. The tragedies in Maine and Israel are cousins, however different in scale they appear. But are they in fact so different in scale? 48,000 Americans suffered gun-related deaths in 2021, the last year for which reliable statistics were available.

Our newly minted speaker of the House offered the usual contemptible dodge of thoughts and prayers, confirming the outrageous inability of our political system to address the gun violence epidemic. After the massacre, by contrast, one member of Congress, Lewiston-born Jared Golden, had the courage to change his mind toward favoring an assault rifle ban.

Ironically, there are very strict gun laws for civilians in the state of Israel. They must demonstrate good reason for gun ownership and obtain a permit, and people who are caught with an unlicensed gun receive strict sanctions, often a year in prison. The result has been far less gun deaths per capita there than here — at least until October 7th.

To get and to stay elected in the U.S., politicians have had to augment their campaign funds with the blood money of the NRA, tenaciously ignoring the clear wishes of the American people for sensible reforms like universal background checks. The U.S. Congress along with a majority on the Supreme Court stubbornly adheres to obsolete interpretations of an amendment that was written hundreds of years before the AR-15 perversely became “America’s gun.” Nick Kristof, in an excellent article The New York Times keeps republishing after each new mass shooting, makes a case for the “whys” of our appalling statistics (for one, the crystal-clear correlation between numbers of guns and gun deaths). Kristof also lays out the common-sense changes we could make that would save a whole bunch of lives. Liberals blame the conservative obsession with the Second Amendment while conservatives advocate beefing up mental health initiatives. But real solutions will not emerge from blaming and either/or polarities.

A similar political refusal to address root causes has come back to haunt Israeli politicians — and massacre the innocent by the thousands in both Israel and Gaza. Netanyahu maintains his power with a coalition that ignored the longing of great numbers of Israeli citizens for a peace that can only come by looking into the mirror of equivalent Palestinian longings. While a subtle anti-Semitism often holds Israel to a higher standard than other nations, its reputation will take a tremendous hit from its military’s vain attempt to stamp out an idea, or an attitude, by collective punishment. The catastrophic destructiveness of Israel’s reaction, far from eliminating the cynical and nihilistic Hamas, will ensure a further generation of young men who see no alternative to murder and martyrdom. Hamas is playing Netanyahu like a violin.

There are plenty of wise citizens of Israel who, in spite of their tears and rage, have not been swept away by the siren voices of violent revenge. New Yorker editor David Remnick’s recent on-site report cites a retired army general named Yair Golan, who told Remnick: “When you have a crisis, like Pearl Harbor or September 11th, it is a multidimensional crisis, a multidimensional failure. [Netanyahu] wanted quiet. So, while Hamas was relatively quiet, Netanyahu saw no need to have a vision for the larger Palestinian question. And since he needed the support of the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox, he appeased them. He created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the over-all perception that the best thing to do was to annex the West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas.”

The cycle of violence is clearly systemic and cyclical, with mistakes, missed chances, and the inability of some to take “yes” for an answer. The righteous assertions of blame churned out by all sides becomes so much static, irrelevant to the copious flow of innocent blood.

In like fashion, the U.S. head-in-the-sand fetish of gun rights guarantees an equivalent flow of blood will continue here. Robert Card lost the capacity to see his victims as fully human. Netanyahu heeds a voice within that tells him that only more violence can save his nation. He has been unable to see Palestinians as fully human, just as Hamas refuses to see Jews as fully human.

The paralysis that continues this cycle of mutual dehumanization engulfing thousands of families and children in the Middle East may be different from the paralysis in the U.S. that failed to prevent yet another troubled man with a gun from mass murder and suicide. But the two tragedies are not only indistinguishable in their heartrending pain and loss.

In Maine and in Gaza, violence became the last best way to subdue the “other.” Robert Card didn’t get adequate help for his illness, and acquired a gun far too easily. It could have gone another way. Hamas and Netanyahu each chose mindless revenge. It could have gone another way.

Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide and serves on the advisory board of the War Prevention Initiative.

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Editorial Opinion

Foreign Affairs Should Move to the Front Burner in Congressional Races

Former University of Memphis law professor Larry Pivnick, whose underdog candidacy for Congress in the 8th District is discussed in this issue, turned up at a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club last week with copies of

a broadside he intended to pass out in support of his campaign. On a single sheet of paper were crowded 12 bullet points, dealing with foreign policy issues relating to Israel/Hamas, eastern Ukraine, and other potential flashpoints on most of the continents of the known world.

Another subject, that of the amount of attention, which the media owe a candidate like himself, a certifiable longshot, came to occupy Pivnick, however — to the point that, when his time came to say a few words, he ditched his intended subject and discoursed instead on the problems that political neophytes like himself have in transcending anonymity.

“Discoursed” is something of a euphemism; the (usually) mild-mannered ex-academic, who normally lectures in what might be considered a professorial style, was hot under the collar and, as a result, was making his points sharply, concisely, and directly — in a mode, in other words, that might work for him out on the hustings.

As for the discarded 12-point position paper, it is highly doubtful that there were — or are — any votes in it, however Pivnick might choose to deliver it. It has been a long time since foreign policy played a major role in determining the outcome of American political contests, and the further down the power chain you go — to the level of congressional candidates, say — the more minute is the impact of such matters on the electorate. That’s the bottom line — especially so, one might conjecture, in the mainly rural and agriculture-oriented 8th District, despite the inclusion of a hunk of eastern Shelby County in the redistricting that followed the census of 2010.

Even more to the point, freshly elected congressmen have almost no say on which committees they’re assigned to (Foreign Affairs is a plum for the well-tenured) and not much post-assignment influence in them for years to come. The more’s the pity. The fact is that rarely have so many global issues posed such direct import on the future of domestic circumstances in the United States — perhaps not since the end of the Cold War.

Or should we say the original Cold War. There may be further surprises to come from the hand of Vladimir Putin, but there is no great mystery as to what he is up to — a wholesale revision of the adverse circumstances imposed on Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union under the terms of what former President George H.W. Bush used to call “the New World Order.”

That “order” is now under enormous strain and may not last. Clearly, the Middle East is undergoing unprecedented jihadist ferment virtually everywhere, and the decades-long standoff between Israelis and Palestinians is igniting disastrously, once again. There are multitudes of other such issues, and there would be worse things indeed than having a few more foreign policy mavens on hand in Washington, where they might find that their concerns have jumped all the way to the front burner.