“On 24 February 2022, while travelling to Lebanon to visit his great-aunt Maria in Lebanon, Ibrahim al-Marashi’s thoughts were with his friend Maria in Ukraine on the first day of the Russian invasion.”

By Ibrahim Al-Marashi | –

( The New Arab ) – As my plane descends into Istanbul airport, from the window I scan the horizon towards the direction of Ukraine, now a warzone. It is 24 February 2022.

While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive.

I make a nidhr, a promise to Sayyida Khawla, the deceased daughter of our revered Imam Hussein that I will visit her shrine in the neighbouring Lebanese town of Baalbek, if Ukrainian Maria survives.

The Maria I am visiting is my grandmother’s older sister, whose family were refugees after World War I, leaving Mardin, in today’s Turkey, to Lebanon. While I was on the plane moving east, I knew Maria in Kyiv was a refugee in the making, and that she would eventually flee to the west.

This tale of two Marias is one of the greater Mediterranean, the sea in the “Middle of the Earth,” flowing into the Black and Red Seas and the terrain surrounding them.

“While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive”

These lands and waters which have witnessed waves of refugees, due to conflicts which compel and coerce. A history of displacement over distance, from antiquity’s Sea Peoples to Syrian refugees.

On Thursday, 24 February 2022, both Maria Marchenko and I are preparing for trips to or away from an airport.

At 5am Maria Marchenko is jolted from her sleep. A barrage of ballistic missiles bombarded Kyiv airport, close to where she lives. Airports around the capital city were targeted that day to prevent Ukrainian planes from taking off, while Moscow sought to secure them as staging grounds for the assault on the capital.

At the same time, it is 6am in Madrid. I am packing for my trip to Lebanon in a few hours to visit Maria Shakir, delivering her the pain reliever Panadol and US dollars, both in short supply there due to an economic crisis.

Istanbul, where I am making my transit, is relatively close to the war zone and I wonder if flights might be cancelled. That would devastate Lebanese Maria. She is 98 and hasn’t seen me in 13 years.

While I’m packing my bag the morning of my flight because I am a procrastinator, Maria hadn’t packed because she did not believe that war would erupt. She thought if she did pack her bag in advance for such a scenario, war would then inevitably occur.

I had prepared my Madrid apartment for Maria, her mother and father in case they needed to flee here. I had arranged fresh linens for them, turning my apartment into a haven to accommodate three potential refugees.

During the morning of the 24th both Maria and I pack warm clothing. There is a winter storm in Zahle, in the high mountains of Lebanon. Maria will be going to a bomb shelter, well below the ground in a freezing metro station.

We collect our documents, laptops, and chargers. Maria packs something I have no need to: photos of family and friends, to preserve their memories unsure if she would see them again.

I shut the teal window blinds on my balcony. On top of the entrance to the convent in front of my house, a dove representing the Holy Spirit flies above the representation of Mary. For her namesake in Ukraine, it is not a dove that flies above her head, but rather enemy aircraft.

 

 

Driving to the airport, I dial Maria in vain. The first leg of my journey is to Istanbul, a four-hour journey where I won’t be able to make calls. At this point, I am not sure if the telecommunication lines have been hit, or even if Maria is still alive.

As I am about to board the plane and turn off my phone, she picks up. When I ask about her, she holds back her tears. Her parents live in Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region, 30 miles from the border and now the front lines. Nonetheless, she declares her wish for peace, with no malice or cynicism in her voice. I remind her that they have a home in Madrid.

I place my KN-94 mask snuggly on. And a surgical mask on top of that. I am so grateful the seat next to me is empty. I have yet to catch Covid and feared how I would fare with this virus in Lebanon, having heard stories about the abysmal conditions of health care as a result of the economic crisis. My grandfather survived a pandemic by moving to Lebanon in the late 1940s. I do not want to repeat history.

For the next four hours I will be dodging viruses. I fret that this plane will also have to dodge missiles as we approach Istanbul airport, close to the Black Sea, where warships are bombarding Ukraine with cruise missiles, according to the news.

Istanbul airport is unusually empty. I look at the screen for the gate to my connecting flight to Lebanon, noticing a list of cancelled flights that were destined for Ukraine and Russia.

I turn on my phone. No messages from Ukrainian Maria, but Lebanese Maria sends me pictures of the dishes she has prepared for my arrival via Whatsapp – hummus with olive oil and sesame seeds and falafel.

She is 98-years old yet knows how to send gifs and emojis. When I confirm I am boarding the plane, she sends a gif of a woman from the Sixties with a bra that fires sparks, like bullets. When I leave her a voice message that the flight to Lebanon is scheduled to leave on time, she sends me an animated image of Jesus Christ.

Five hours later, drenched and exhausted, I arrived at a first-floor apartment in Zahle. Maria is elated. I collapse on her sofa. She hugs me, and screams “tu’burni” or “you will bury me,” which is a term of endearment, but I dread the thought of her passing. She is so short that even sitting on the sofa our eyeline is equal.

While she prepares the food, I recline on the sofa, made out of a wooden frame, yet the cushions are made with thick grey blankets, stamped with the logo of “UNHCR,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, while a stuffed teddy bear and cheetah rest behind me.

 

I am too embarrassed to ask whether her or a resourceful furniture maker had reappropriated them from the nearby camps housing Syrian refugees.

She brings out her folded table and I eat right there.

“My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis”

While I am in the most comfortable setting, my second home, Ukrainian Maria’s second home is underneath the earth, a cold, underground bomb shelter. While I have a sumptuous Lebanese feast, Maria in Kyiv occasionally comes up for air, to find soup during the ephemeral lull of security, until the sirens call her back.

I asked Maria in Zahle to turn on the TV so I can find news about Maria in Kyiv. My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis.

On top of the TV set, on the wooden bookshelf, there are three separate depictions of the Virgin Mary and a drawn image of Jesus holding his hand to his heart, while what seems like laser rays of red and blue are coming out of his chest.

During the late 1940s, my grandfather contracted tuberculosis, the Covid-19 of its time. He had to leave his home, Najaf, in the dusty Iraqi desert to recover in the clean mountain air of Zahle. He probably bemoaned his fate, but there he met my grandmother, a Christian refugee from Mardin.

If it were not for refugees and pandemics my mother would not be born, and I would not exist.

I often question why God let my grandmother die at such a young age, when my mom was barely five years old. For most of my life I did not know Maria Shakir even existed. It was only as an adult I travelled to Zahle trying to find my grandmother’s family, eventually finding Maria.

Maria and my entire grandmother’s family are Syriac Orthodox Christian. The country of Lebanon tore itself apart because its Muslims and Christians could not see what unites them, and instead focused on the narcissism of small differences, plunging the country into a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1991.

Yet this Shi’a Muslim flew across the Mediterranean to help his Christian great-aunt, bringing her money, medicine, and his love.

 

But in Ukraine that same day, the invaders that day could only focus on hate, in their minds, dark, vacuous caverns where only enmity and evil exist, and another set of small differences. Maria in Ukraine became another victim in this cycle.

On the other wall by the TV was an image of Mar Elias Shakir III etched in silver. The Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox church. Maria’s uncle. My great-uncle. I make another nidhr to him: “If you help Maria, she is Orthodox like you, get out of Ukraine safely, I will visit your shrine in Kerala, India.”

During dinner, when I tell my great-aunt Maria about my visit to the shrine of Sayyida Khawla, she informs me that Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, is only ten minutes away from Baalbek.

She tells me this, not to pay a visit as a pilgrim. In fact, rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy.

She tells me that a woman in Bechouat has a café next to the Marian shrine and where I could eat saj, a Lebanese flat bread cooked on an open circular grill, complemented with thyme or cheese. Of course, her saj is not as good as Maria’s, she reminds me, but I should try it still since I will need to eat lunch.

On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, I arrive at the Sayyida Khawla shrine. I approach the shrine, with a gilded minaret and dome, interspersed with turquoise ceramic tiles and white Arabic calligraphy. I pass a pointed arch and enter the main hall, and look up at the dome, a pattern of the top in the shape of a star, a representation of heaven in perfect geometrical symmetry.

Not a single space is unadorned, illuminated with beams of light, with walls and ceilings made up of alternating panels of gold and silver, shimmering, shining, sparkling, with crystals glittering, glimmering, mesmerising.

“Rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy”

I approach the above ground tomb. Khawla was another person displaced by conflict, a refugee of sorts, more akin to a prisoner of war. Khawla was the daughter of Imam Hussein and great granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad. Hussein, the prophet’s son-in-law, and most of his family were massacred in Karbala, in today’s Iraq, in 681 by a political rival, Yazid, based in Damascus.

During a long and arduous journey, the few members of Hussein’s surviving family were taken as prisoners of war across the desert from what is Iraq to Damascus. Khawla died in Baalbek. Zayn al-Abidin, Hussein’s only surviving son, and Khawla’s brother, planted a small branch to mark her grave. Over the years, that branch turned into a massive cypress tree, which is in the middle of the shrine, making it 1,400-years-old.

I sit on a carpet of alternating floral designs of red, black, and white, in front of her tomb. Technically Khawla is like my Khala Maria, my great-aunt, albeit older by more than a millennium and a half.

 

I pray. For the health of my family, that my sister gives birth to a healthy baby, and that I get some message from Maria in Ukraine that she is safe.

Afterwards, I am on my way to Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, because maybe there Ukrainian Maria’s text will also appear.

The church has a bell tower, an exact resemblance to the minaret of the Shi’a shrine, but the entire complex is constructed of monochromatic, soft beige stones, in comparison with the explosion of colour in Sayyida Khawla. While the Shi’a shrine has a single tree, this complex is covered in sprawling olive trees.

It was here that in 1741, a wooden Byzantine icon of the Virgin was discovered in a cave and a church was built above it. Bechouat then became a pilgrimage site after a miracle occurred there for a paralyzed Christian man. The Marian apparition, however, occurred later, in front of the eyes of a Muslim child. Since then, I learned it has become a site of pilgrimage for both Christians and Muslims.

It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims. In the structure housing the statue, there is a painting of the Virgin Mary, standing on top of a crescent moon.

The crescent moon, along with a star, is a symbol associated with Islam. However, it was originally a Christian symbol representing the Virgin. The crescent moon had long been a symbol of fertility in the Middle East from pagan times, and the star stood in for Mary. It was only in 1453, when the Ottoman Muslims conquered Constantinople, that they appropriated the flag.

“It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims”

Within the span of a few hours in this narrow sliver of land known as the Bekaa Valley, settled by Phoenicians and Romans, known for its hashish, I visited two sites dedicated not just to Christianity and Islam, but the divine feminine: Our Lady of Baalbek, Khawla, and Our Lady of Bechouat, Mary.

The Lebanese often boast about how they can ski in the mountains and be able to go to the beach and dip into the water within the span of an hour. I was more impressed that within the span of an hour I could visit these two shrines, one Shi’a and the other Catholic.

In the span of an hour I could pray for protection, asking one holy Maria to protect both my Syriac Orthodox great-aunt Maria and my Ukrainian Orthodox Maria.

A few days later Ukrainian Maria eventually arrived in Parma, Italy, to stay with her aunt. Her parents remained in Okhtyrka, defending their home.

 

Maria was safe. And now I had to fulfil a promise before the year ended that I would travel to India, to visit the shrine of my great-uncle, and thank him for the favour.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History and The Modern History of Iraq.

Follow him on Twitter: @ialmarashi

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author’s employer, or Informed Comment.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany’s boom in stationary batteries linked to solar PV systems accelerated last year, doubling the total number of units to more than one million, reports solar industry association BSW. The batteries have a combined capacity of 12 gigawatt-hours – enough to power 1.5 million 2-person households for a day.

“The expansion of solar electricity storage systems has picked up speed rapidly. Both the total number of solar batteries installed and their storage capacity have doubled in just one year,” said the lobby group.

“When installing new solar power systems on private buildings, electricity storage systems are now standard. More and more companies are also storing solar power from their roofs to use it around the clock,” said the association’s director, Carsten Körnig. He added that the market for home and commercial storage systems grew by over 150 per cent in 2023.

The industry group lamented that current policies still underestimate the potential of battery storage systems, and that market barriers continue to slow their spread. Against this backdrop, BSW welcomed the economy and climate ministry’s proposals for a storage strategy published in December, but said the draft didn’t address central strategic questions regarding the role of batteries in tomorrow’s electricity system.

Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI) Video : “Going Green – Germany’s Energy Transition”

Storage systems should be considered a central pillar of the electricity system, on par with generation, grid, and consumption, the industry association said.

Storage will become key in the next phase of the energy transition, as Germany aims to cover 80 percent of power demand with renewable sources by 2030. A traditional electricity system doesn’t require much storage because power generation can be adjusted to match demand.

This changes dramatically as the system uses more renewable energy, as power generation from wind turbines and solar PV systems depends on the weather. This means that production often dramatically exceeds demand but also that current power production can fall well short of what is needed at a given moment.

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

The Armenian quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City is facing its biggest crisis in a long time. A Jewish businessman with connections to the radical settler movement is poised to develop a quarter of the neighbourhood’s territory, with plans to build a luxury hotel. If this goes ahead, it will significantly change part of Jerusalem’s Old City and hasten the demographic shift towards the city’s Jewish population which has been happening for some years.

The Armenian quarter actually makes up one-sixth of the Old City (the other quarters being the Muslim, the Christian, and the Jewish) and the Armenian presence in Jerusalem dates back to the 4th century. Together with the neighbouring Christian quarter, it is a stronghold for the city’s small Christian minority. The threat of a takeover of parts of the quarter by Jewish settlers is widely seen as altering the demographic status quo to favour Israel’s interests.

Jerusalem: Armenian Christians fight controversial land deal | BBC News Video

In 2021, the Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, Nourhan Manougian, agreed a 98-year lease over part of the Armenian quarter with the developers. The agreement covers a significant area that today includes a parking lot, buildings belonging to the office of the Armenian church leader – known as the patriarchate – and the homes of five Armenian families.

News of the deal prompted strong protests among the neighbourhood’s Armenians last year. Such was the depth of feeling that in October, the patriarch and the other church leaders felt compelled to cancel the agreement. This led to violent confrontations between settlers and local Armenians.

After a few quiet weeks, fighting broke out again at the end of December when more than 30 men armed with stones and clubs reportedly attacked the Armenians who had been guarding the area for several weeks.

The dispute has now gone to court. The question is whether the lease agreement is valid or whether the unilateral termination makes the agreement void. The patriarchate has engaged lawyers – local and from Armenia and the US – who will present its case that the agreement was not entered into properly because of irregularities in the contract.

Changing East Jerusalem’s demography

This is not a single incident. Since the 1967 six-day War, when the whole of Jerusalem came under Israeli control, there has been a concerted effort to change the demography in the traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

In many places the authorities are evicting the Arab families who have lived there for decades with the explanation that they lack documents that they own the house. Then a Jewish family moves in.

This change of the demography of East Jerusalem happens through evictions, demolitions and buildings restrictions. This is also happening in Jerusalem’s iconic and touristic Old City.

Almost 20 years ago, there was a minor scandal when it emerged that the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, a large property owner, had entered into a long lease agreement with a Jewish settler organisation regarding two historic hotels.

Now we have a similar incident concerning the Armenian patriarchate. Selling or renting out property to Jewish settlers for a long time is viewed extremely negatively by the Palestinians, who have long fought against illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas.

East Jerusalem is of vital importance to the Palestinians. In proposed plans for a two-state solution, it is the intended capital of a future Palestinian state. Decisively changing the demography there is therefore a priority goal for some in Israel – including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who doesn’t want a two-state solution.

Hierarchical institutions

This conflict also underlines an old problem with the Jerusalem’s Christian churches – namely the gap between the leadership and the people. Old churches are by nature hierarchical and the leaders at the top rule supremely. In Jerusalem there is an additional problem in that the church leaders are not always drawn from the local population.

The largest Christian denomination in the Holy Land is the Greek Orthodox Church. Its members are largely Arabs, but the patriarch and the other leading prelates are Greeks.

Nourhan Manougian, the current and 97th Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, was born in Syria to an Armenian family. The Armenian patriarchate has been accused of corruption and illegitimate sale of property in the past, long before the current crisis.

If the Armenians lose this battle and the settler movement is able to gain control of such a key site, it will harm a vulnerable small minority. And the settler campaign to colonise East Jerusalem under Jewish control will have achieved yet another victory.

Svante Lundgren, Researcher, Lund University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The spare parts are technically owned by the U.S., but are kept in storage at Woensdrecht Air Base.

The news site quotes Judge Bas Boele as saying, “It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

NL Times adds that the court said, “Israel does not take sufficient account of the consequences of its attacks for the civilian population. Israel’s attacks on Gaza have resulted in a disproportionate number of civilian casualties, including thousands of children.”

The court noted that the Netherlands is signatory to treaties and instruments that make it unlawful under Dutch law to pursue such exports “if a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law exists.”

An Oxfam spokesman expressed his hope to Aljazeera that the ruling would have an impact on other European exporters of military weaponry to Israel. Oxfam is providing aid in Gaza and its workers report that the situation there is dire.

F-35s need three hours of maintenance for every one hour of flying, and constantly need spare parts to keep flying. They are used both for surveillance and for bombing runs.

Although these stories do not say so, it seems clear that the ruling of the International Court of Justice on January 26 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, in which it issued a preliminary injunction against Tel Aviv, played a central role in shaping the views of the judges in The Hague.

The ICJ had written, “The Court considers that the civilian population in the Gaza Strip remains extremely vulnerable. It recalls that the military operation conducted by Israel after 7 October 2023 has resulted, inter alia, in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries and the destruction of homes, schools, medical facilities and other vital infrastructure, as well as displacement on a massive scale . . . The Court notes that the operation is ongoing and that the Prime Minister of Israel announced on 18 January 2024 that the war “will take many more long months”. At present, many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have no access to the most basic foodstuffs, potable water, electricity, essential medicines or heating.”

Even President Joe Biden has referred to Israeli bombing as “indiscriminate,” which is a war crime. Biden, however, has not lifted a finger to stop that bombing, which makes him complicit in the war crime. Israel could not continue to thumb its nose at the International Court of Justice unless the US resupplied it with weapons and ammunition on a daily, real-time basis.

A lower court had rejected the case just last month, and this reversal points to the impact of the ICJ decision.

Aljazeera English Video: “Dutch government to appeal court order to halt export of F-35 jet parts to Israel”

According to Dutch News, Liesbeth Zegveld, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said, “We are extremely relieved,” at a news conference held after the ruling.

The case was brought by Oxfam Novib, Pax Nederland and The Rights Forum.

The government had said last fall that it knew there were potential human rights issues with the export to Israel of the military spare parts, but did not actually do anything about it. It says it will appeal.

The court, however, says that the exports must cease during the appeal process.

NL Times reports that outgoing center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Ministry of General Affairs asked the Legal Affairs Directorate at Foreign Affairs: “What can we say so that it appears as if Israel is not committing war crimes?” Rutte played down the report on the grounds that asking questions is normal.

The siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.

The goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to the Soviet population as “Asians”.

Indeed, the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common practice among European colonial powers. 

The intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:

After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

As one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.

British Movietone Video: “Siege of Leningrad – 1944 | Movietone Moment |

The last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders. The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.

Leningrad, a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union, to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in the Nazi plans.

Sadly, neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101^st Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile. Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.

Human lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop Israel.   

Commemoration of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:

.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with that beleaguered country.

In other words, no military aid for Ukraine in the short term but a possible offer of a golden ticket to join the EU at some unspecified future moment. Ukrainians might well ask themselves whether, at that point, they’ll still have a country.

One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is largely responsible for that contradictory combo. He singlehandedly blocked the aid package, suggesting that any decision be put off until after European Parliamentary elections in early June of this year. Ever the wily tactician, he expects those elections to signal a political sea change, with conservative and far-right forces — think of them as Donald Trump’s allies in Europe — replacing the parliament’s current centrist consensus. Now an outlier, Orbán is counting on a new crop of sympathetic leaders to advance his arch-conservative social agenda and efforts to cut Ukraine loose.

He’s also deeply skeptical of expanding the EU to include Ukraine or other former Soviet republics, not just because of Russian sensitivities but for fear that EU funds could be diverted from Hungary to new members in the east. By leaving the room when that December vote on future membership took place, Orbán allowed consensus to prevail, but only because he knew he still had plenty of time to pull the plug on Ukraine’s bid.

Ukrainians remain upbeat despite the aid delay. As their leader Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted about future EU membership, “This is a victory for Ukraine. A victory for all of Europe. A victory that motivates, inspires, and strengthens.”

But even if Orbán’s resistance were to be overcome, a larger challenge looms: the European Union that will make the final determination on Ukraine’s membership may not prove to be the same regional body as at present. While Russia and Ukraine battle it out over where to define Europe’s easternmost frontier, a fierce political conflict is taking place to the west over the very definition of Europe.

In retrospect, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020 may prove to have been just a minor speedbump compared to what Europe faces with the war in Ukraine, the recent success of far-right parties in Italy and the Netherlands, and the prospect that, after the next election, a significantly more conservative European Parliament could at the very least slow the roll-out of the European Green Deal.

And worse yet, a full-court press from the far right might even spell the end of the Europe that has long shimmered on the horizon as a greenish-pink ideal. The extinguishing of the one consistent success story of our era — particularly if Donald Trump were also to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election — could challenge the very notion of progress that’s at the heart of any progressive agenda.

Orbán’s Allies

For decades, Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom, has regularly garnered headlines for his outrageous statements and proposals to ban Islam, the Quran, and/or immigrants altogether. In the run-up to the November 2023 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, it looked as if he would continue to be an eternal also-ran with a projected vote total in the mid to upper teens. In addition to the usual obstacles he faced, like the lunacy of his platform, he was up against a reputed political powerhouse in Frans Timmermans, the architect of Europe’s Green Deal and the newly deputized leader of the Dutch center-left coalition.

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To everyone’s surprise, however, Wilders’s party exceeded expectations, leading the field with 23% of the vote and more than doubling the number of Party for Freedom seats in the new parliament.

Although mainstream European parties had historically been reluctant to form governments with the far right, some have now opportunistically chosen to do so. Far-right parties now serve in governments in Sweden and Finland, while leading coalitions in Italy and Slovakia.

Wilders, too, wants to lead. He’s even withdrawn a 2018 bill to ban mosques and the Quran in an effort to woo potential partners. Such gestures toward the center have also characterized the strategy of Giorgia Meloni, the head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who downplayed its fascist roots and pledged to support both NATO and the EU to win enough centrist backing to become Italy’s current prime minister.

But what happens if there’s no longer a political center that must be wooed?

That’s been the case in Hungary since Viktor Orbán took over as prime minister in 2010. He has systematically dismantled judicial, legislative, and constitutional checks on his power, while simultaneously marginalizing his political opposition. Nor does he have to compromise with the center, since it’s effectively dropped out of Hungarian politics — and he and his allies are eager to export their Hungarian model to the rest of Europe. Worse yet, they’ve got a strong tailwind. In 2024, the far-right is on track to win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s far-right party leads the polls in France and the equally intemperate, anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland is running a strong second to the center-right in Germany.

No less ominously, the Identity and Democracy bloc, which includes the major French and German far-right parties, is projected to gain more than two dozen seats in the European parliamentary elections this June. The European Conservatives and Reformists bloc, which contains the Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish far-right parties, will also probably pick up a few seats. Throw in unaffiliated representatives from Orbán’s Fidesz party and that bloc could become the largest in the European parliament, even bigger than the center-right coalition currently at the top of the polls.

Such developments only further fuel Orbán’s transnational ambitions. Instead of being the odd man out on votes over Ukrainian aid, he wants to transform the European Union with himself at the center of a new status quo. “Brussels is not Moscow,” he tweeted in October. “The Soviet Union was a tragedy. The EU is only a weak contemporary comedy. The Soviet Union was hopeless, but we can change Brussels and the EU.”

With such a strategy, wittingly or not, Orbán is following the Kremlin playbook. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to undercut European unity as part of an effort to divide the West. With that in mind, he forged alliances with far-right political parties like Italy’s Lega and Austria’s Freedom Party to sow havoc in European politics. His careful cultivation of Orbán has made Hungary functionally his country’s European proxy.

Not all of Europe has jumped on the far-right bandwagon. Voters in Poland last year even kicked out the right-wing Law and Justice party, while the far right lost big in the latest Spanish elections. Also, far-right parties are notoriously hard to herd and forging a consensus among them will undoubtedly prove difficult on issues like NATO, LGBTQ rights, and economic policy.

Still, on one key issue they’re now converging. They used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they largely favor a take-over-from-within strategy. And to make that happen, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of “Fortress Europe” to keep out those fleeing the Global South and frontally assaulting that cornerstone of recent EU policy, the Green energy transition.

The Fate of the Green New Deal

In Germany, the far right has gone after, of all things, the heat pump. The Alternative fur Deutschland’s campaign against a bill last year to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with electrical heat pumps propelled the party into second place in the polls (thanks to an exaggeration of the cost of such pumps). The French far right is also on the political rise, fueled in part by its opposition to what its leader Marine Le Pen, in a manifesto issued in 2022, called “an ecology that has been hijacked by climate terrorism, which endangers the planet, national independence and, more importantly, the living standards of the French people.” In the Netherlands, Wilders and the far right have similarly benefited from a farmer backlash against proposals to reduce nitrogen pollution.

A report from the Center for American Progress concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.” Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway are even more pointed: “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.”

The European far right, in other words, is mobilizing behind a second Great Replacement theory. According to the initial version of that conspiracy theory, which helped a first wave of right-wing populists take power a few years ago, immigrants were plotting to replace indigenous, mostly white populations in Europe. Now, extremists argue that clean green energy is fast replacing the fossil fuels that anchor traditional (read: white Christian) European communities. This “fossil fascism,” as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have labeled it, marries extractivism to ethnonationalism, with right-wing whites clinging to oil and coal as tightly as Barack Obama once accused their American counterparts of clinging to guns and religion.

Believers in this second Great Replacement theory have demonized the European Green Deal, which is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions 55% by 2030. The overall deal is a sophisticated industrial policy designed to create jobs in the clean energy sector that will replace those lost by miners, oil riggers, and pipeline workers. However urgently needed, the Deal doesn’t come cheap and so is vulnerable to charges of “elitism.”

Worse yet, the backlash against Europe’s Green turn has expanded to efforts in the European Parliament to block pesticide reduction and weaken legislation on the reduction of packaging. As a result of this backlash, Politico notes, “The Green Deal now limps on, with several key policies on the scrapheap.” A rightward shift in the European Parliament would knock the Green Deal to the ground (and even kick it while down), ensuring a further disastrous heating of this planet.

The War of Ideas

The war in Ukraine seems to be about the territory Russia has occupied, the fight over the European Green Deal about politics and the far right’s search for an issue as effective as immigrant-bashing to rally voters. At the center of both struggles, however, is something far more significant. From Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin to Marine Le Pen at the reactionary barricades in Paris, the far right is fighting over the very future of European ideals.

Narrowly, that debate is just the latest iteration of a longstanding question about whether Europe should emphasize expanding its membership or the deeper integration of the present EU. Until now, the compromise has been to set a distinctly high bar for EU membership but provide generous subsidies to the lucky few countries that make it into the club. By turning a cold shoulder to a neighbor in need, after having benefitted enormously from EU largesse since the 1990s, Hungary is challenging that core principle of solidarity.

But Orbán and his allies have a far more radical mission in mind: to transform European identity. Right now, Europe stands for extensive social programs that even right-wing parties are reluctant to consider dismantling. The European Union has also advanced the world’s most consequential collective program on a green energy transition. And despite some backlash, it remains a welcoming space for the LGBTQ community.

In other words, the EU is still a beacon for progressives around the world (notwithstanding the neoliberal reforms that are regressively remaking its economic space). It remains an aspirational space for the countries on Europe’s borders that yearn to escape autocracy and relative poverty. It’s similarly so for people in distant lands who imagine Europe as an ark of salvation in an increasingly illiberal world, and even for U.S. progressives who are envious of European health care and industrial policies, as well as its environmental regulations. That the EU’s policies are also the product of vigorous transnational politicking has also been inspirational for internationalists who want stronger cross-border cooperation to help solve global problems.

In the late 1980s, as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union began to fall apart, political scientist Francis Fukuyama imagined an “end of history.” The hybrid of market democracy, he argued, would be the answer to all ideological debates and the European Union would serve as the boring, bureaucratic endpoint of global political evolution. Since the invasion of Ukraine, however, history is not only back, but seems to be going backward.

The far right is at the forefront of that retreat. Even as the EU contemplates expansion eastward, a revolt from within threatens to bring about the end of Europe itself — the end, that is, of the liberal and tolerant social welfare state, of a collective commitment to economic solidarity, and of its leading role in addressing climate change. The battle between a democratic Ukraine and the autocratic Russian petrostate is, in other words, intimately connected to the conflicts being waged in Brussels.

Without a vibrant, democratic Ukraine, the eastern frontier of Europe abutting Russia is likely to become a zone of fragile, divided, incoherent “nation states,” hard-pressed to qualify for EU membership. Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state. Without Europe’s lead, global efforts to address climate change will grow dangerously more diffuse.

Sound familiar? That’s also the agenda of the far-right in the United States, led by Donald Trump. His MAGA boosters, like media personalities Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, have been pulling for Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders, and Vladimir Putin to send Europe spiraling backward into fascism.

Short on resources and political power, progressives have always possessed one commodity in bulk: hope. The arc of the moral universe is long, Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied so many years ago, but it bends toward justice. Or maybe it doesn’t. Take away the European ideal and no matter what happens in the American presidential election this year, 2024 will be the year that hope dies last.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

This imbalance in who is visible on television, in the press, and even often in academia is one of the things that makes the South African genocide case against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice so riveting.

Narratives of European history are consumed by the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet menace, and are remarkably inward-looking. From Europe Israel appears as the nation that can do no wrong because it was formed and populated by Holocaust survivors, and it would be churlish for countries like Germany, which committed the Holocaust, and France, Italy and Poland, which were implicated in it, to criticize the state into which they chased those of Europe’s Jews whom they did not simply murder.

Germany thus ranged itself against South Africa, declaring a position in support of Israel and denying that Tel Aviv is committing genocide, despite the daily video available to anyone who wants to see it of the mind-boggling daily Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Germany might seem distant from South Africa, but in fact it was once a neighbor, as I will explain. And its lack of sympathy with the mass murder of non-Europeans is embarrassing it because of its brutal colonial past.

The small southwest African country of Namibia (population 2.3 million) responded sharply to this German claim. You see, the Germans had genocided Namibians, so they are sore about this issue, and seeing Berlin whitewashing the killing of tens of thousands of brown people a little over a century later.

Windhoek’s Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in German last week,

“The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, was extremely angry at the weekend about Germany, which had sided with Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa’s complaint aimed at stopping Israel’s ongoing warfare in the Gaza Strip and also at broaching the question of whether President Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership should be held responsible for a genocide.

Numerous politicians in Namibia reacted angrily and the otherwise reserved First Lady, Monica Geingos, wrote on X: ‘The build up to the Herero-Nama genocide in Namibia, perpetrated by Germany started on 12 January 1904. The absurdity of Germany, on 12 January 2024, rejecting genocide charges against Israel and warning about the “political instrumentalisation of the charge” is not lost on us.’

Geingob had warned in his New Year’s message: ‘No peace-loving person can ignore the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza.’

The Windhoek Observer reported, “Leader of the official opposition party Popular Democratic Movement, McHenry Venaani, echoed the President’s sentiments. Venaani emphasized the inconsistency in Germany’s moral stance, criticising the nation for expressing commitment to the United Nations Genocide Convention while simultaneously supporting what he called the ‘equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.’ . . . ‘We agree with the president’s statement and Germany is misbehaving. They want to turn a blind eye. Israel cannot do a global punishment because they have lost a thousand people, yes we agree and are not disputing that but what they are is against the law. So what Germany is doing is psychological guilt,’ said Venaani.”

Ironically, Belgium, which committed an earlier genocide in the Congo, has taken the side of South Africa in this dispute.

Aljazeera English Video: “Why is Namibia furious at Germany’s ICJ intervention supporting Israel? | Inside Story”

By 1800, Europe had conquered 35% of the world. Despite the fairy tales they told themselves about their benevolence and their spreading of progress, these conquests were brutal. Philip Hoffman has argued that they depended heavily on advancements in gunpowder technology, which tells you everything you need to know about the character of European advances. By 1914 the Europeans ruled 80% of the world. Gunpowder did not become less important, i.e. the pile of dead bodies only got bigger. Of course colonialism was a complicated system that also required getting buy-ins of various sorts from the colonized, but ultimately it involved keeping guns aimed at the locals and being willing to use them.

The Dutch war on Aceh in what is now Indonesia, 1873–1904, involved killing 60,000 locals by military force or exposure and disease. The US in the Philippines killed at least 20,000 directly and some 200,000 – 400,000 died from exposure and disease.

The historians of the colonial powers have written the history, so that the colonial era is often depicted as a civilizational triumph. It is British railways in India or French road building in Senegal that is celebrated. The pile of dead bodies is mentioned in passing, surrounded by embarrassed silence, when it isn’t suppressed entirely. The history of enslavement and forced labor has often been downplayed. In the second half of the twentieth century, sometimes historians of the metropoles have dropped the colonial dimension entirely from the national narrative, obscuring it. François Furet at one point wrote that he would omit mention of Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt since the episode occurred beyond French soil. (I fixed that.) Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism that a lot of Victorian literature is incomprehensible today unless we remember that Britain was an empire at the time and not a small nation-state. Since people in the North Atlantic world don’t much read historians based in the global South, these histories have become invisible.

In 1904, the Herero people rebelled against German colonialism in southwest Africa, and the German government responded in 1904-1908 by committing the twentieth century’s first genocide against them. So writes Hamilton Wende.

Germany was awarded Namibia at the 1884 Berlin conference as part of what historians have characterized as the “scramble for Africa.” Since the Africans were just going about their lives, the “scramble” was by predatory Europeans. Some 5,000 Germans flooded into Namibia and lorded it over a quarter million local Bantus. To this day, whites, including persons of German descent, own 70% of the land there.

After a Herero attack on colonists that killed over 100 in early 1904, the German Schutztruppe or colonial military replied with Maxim machine guns and artillery (Professor Hoffman might note the prominence of gunpowder). Military commander Lothar von Trotha called for the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. As many as 60,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were mowed down just at the beginning of the punitive German campaign.

Germany grudgingly recognized the genocide in 2021, with the foreign minister saying “If you want to call it a genocide, you can.” Germany’s position is that it took place before the 1948 Genocide Convention, however, and so cannot be the basis for any lawsuit or formal reparations. Berlin did pledge $1.4 billion in aid for Namibia, to be paid over 30 years, but without admitting legal liability. At the same time, German officials have often reprimanded Namibians, saying that they cannot compare their experience to the Holocaust, as though extermination of Europeans is forever more significant than the extermination of Africans, millions of whom were killed by Europeans in the 19th century.

Namibians have complained that the sum offered in aid is not enough to compensate for the damage done or for the ancestral lands lost, which people want restored to them. President Geingob says that Namibia is not done with Berlin, and plans a further lawsuit.

So, for a traumatized Namibian population, to have Germany now engage in genocide denial when it comes to Palestinians just brings back the nightmare all over again.

And at the International Court of Justice, Namibia has a voice, even though it still won’t have access to CNN’s air waves or receive much attention in the North Atlantic newspapers of record.

Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The war in Ukraine is being fought at two different levels. The first one is the military confrontation, where developments are measured in numbers of casualties, kill ratios, and square kilometers changing hands from one belligerent to the other. The second level of the conflict is economic, and here the key aspects are GDP growth, the value of foreign assets seized or companies under sanctions, and the prices of gas and oil. Needless to say, both levels are deeply interconnected. However, for the purpose of this review, it might be useful to look at them separately at first.

The military situation in Ukraine can be best described as one of stalemate when looking at the conflict maps. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, admitted as much on November 2023, when he said that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” During 2023, the frontline barely moved and, on the few occasions it did, the changes came at the cost of enormous human losses. The battle of Bakhmut, which continues around the city after Bakhmut itself was taken by Russian troops following almost seven months of fighting, is paradigmatic of these dynamics.

If the war is slightly tilting in any direction, the current situation would suggest it is in Russia’s favor. Some analysts point out that, while the conflict maps show stability, Ukraine might be slowly exhausting its limited supplies of soldiers, weapons, and ammunition. The recent struggles in both Washington and Brussels to approve supplies for the Ukrainian armed forces lend further credibility to this thesis.

On the economic front of the war, which has pitted Russia against Ukraine and its Western supporters, it is similarly difficult to reach any definitive conclusion on who is coming out on top. What is clear is that neither the West nor Russia achieved their maximalist goals in the economic struggle. Russia did not financially collapse in the face of incremental Western sanctions and Europe had less trouble than expected to surmount last winter’s energy crisis despite Moscow’s resort to cutting gas supplies.

This economic dimension of the war, which in recently published books has received less attention than the military and political dynamics of the conflict, sits at the core of “Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West”, authored by political risk analyst and consultant Maximilian Hess. Hess does not look for winners or losers in the current economic war but provides a broad context to understand what is at stake on the economic front. Hess devotes half of his book to the prelude of the current military and economic war, covering the period that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the establishment of two Russia-supported separatist republics in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West. London: Hurst, 2023. Click Here.

After the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in the context of the Euromaidan protests in 2014, his successor Petro Poroshenko took a more pro-European course. Changes in geopolitical orientation notwithstanding, corruption continued to be rife. As Hess notes, “the revolution and subsequent conflict recast the networks of Ukraine’s politicians and oligarchs” but “failed to break the system that enabled them to rotate in and out of business and politics.”[1] Meanwhile, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for its expansionist behavior but Western European countries limited their extent. In 2017, the Trump administration would also tone down US sanctions.

Germany, with its heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for industries and households, was the main European proponent of retaining economic ties with Russia after the annexation of Crimea. Hess is very critical of Germany’s political leaders during that period. He argues that Berlin pursued economic interdependence but failed to realize “Putin did not oversee a democracy or have to answer to economic pressures from his own business community” after Putin disciplined unruly oligarchs.[2] With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that Europe’s energy dependency on Russia was an enormous mistake.

Even so, countries like Germany were probably not betting so much on the liberal ideal of trade driving cooperation in the political realm but rather on the high loss of revenue Russia would suffer if it stopped selling gas to Europe. After all, the Soviet Union had been a reliable provider of gas to West Germany during the Cold War. Back in 2019, German economist Michael Wohlgemuth argued that Moscow was more dependent on its gas exports to Germany than Germany was on Russian deliveries. This certainly did not stop Putin from attacking Ukraine, but the numbers supported Wohlgemuth’s analysis. In 2021, Russia exported 203 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas via pipeline. Among these exports, almost 146 billion cubic meters (bcm) were going to EU customers and around half of this volume, to Germany.

Hess explains that, although the sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the annexation of Crimea had very limited effects, the Kremlin’s reaction to them “asserted firmer control over Russia’s economy and increasingly sought to undermine the West’s influence both at home and abroad.”[3] As part of these efforts to increase its global geoeconomic power, Russia looked to Latin America (especially Venezuela), Africa and Asia.

But the most important partnership was arguably the one established with Saudi Arabia, the only oil exporter bigger than Russia. Riyadh and Moscow had engaged in an oil price war during the oil glut at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, by 2022 Putin had secured an alliance with the Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman to reduce oil production and ensure higher and more stable oil prices. Thus, Putin felt that Russia’s energy flank “was secure ahead of the all-out economic war that would ensue when its forces attacked”, explains Hess.[4] Russia’s total gas exports fell around 50 percent in 2022, and a further 25 percent in 2023. Although gas prices in 2022 reached historical heights and helped Russia offset the effects of the loss in export volume, in 2023 the prices returned to levels similar to those in 2019 or 2020. It has been oil, not gas, that has sustained Russia throughout the war.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has often been selling its oil at a discount price. The reasons behind this are the limited number of countries willing to buy Russian oil and the oil price cap imposed by the G-7 and the European Union. The oil price cap prohibits G-7 or EU-based finance companies from providing services to Russian oil companies selling their oil above $60 a barrel. Still, China and India, the latter moving in 2022 from barely buying Russian oil to being the second largest importer after Beijing, have kept Russia’s oil exports afloat.   

Hess identifies some key weaknesses in Russia’s position in the economic war against the West. Moscow underestimated the willingness of the EU to stop buying Russian oil and introduce major reductions in its gas imports. Also important, Russia has suffered greatly from the power of the dollar, which allows US sanctions to have a much greater impact than the US share of the global economy would allow. Too often missing in Hess’ “Economic War”, however, is the fact that the West’s economic war against Russia is not supposed to be an end in itself but a means to achieve political results, which so far have been lacking.

A political success would arguably mean either a significant weakening of Russia’s war effort or forcing Moscow to negotiate an end to the war on favorable terms for Ukraine. In one example among many, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced in December 2022, when the oil price cap on Russia was introduced, that “the decision will hit Russia’s revenues even harder and reduce its ability to wage war in Ukraine.”

Hess fails to engage with literature that adopts a critical approach towards the effectiveness of sanctions. To understand why sanctions on Russia have had only modest effects on the country’s war capabilities, it useful to search elsewhere. Nicholas Mulder, the author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War”, explained in an op-ed that “both the deterrent and the compellent effect of US sanctions have fallen dramatically amid rampant overuse.” Writing about the current sanctions against Russia, Mulder has noted that “the lure of cheap raw materials from Russia is spurring sanctions avoidance on a previously unseen scale.”

The use of economic sanctions in modern times, from post-revolutionary Cuba to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has consistently impoverished civilian populations but has a poor record in forcing policy changes. Sanctions, as seen in the case of Iran, have also incentivized circumvention tools that are certainly suboptimal but keep sanctioned regimes going, especially when the state has a reliable coercive apparatus to deal with protests over decreasing living standards. Sanctioned states also tend to cooperate with each other. Iran, with a long experience in dealing with sanctions, has provided drones and drone components to Russia for its use against Ukraine.

Hess concludes his book by noting that “Russia cannot win the economic war with the tools at its disposal. The West, however, could still lose it.”[5] The important question, nonetheless, is whether Russia needs to win the economic war to achieve military successes in Ukraine, or, at least, to prevent Ukraine from recovering territory. Everything seems to indicate that not losing the economic war is more than enough for Russia to fulfill limited military objectives and could even be sufficient to make major advances if external material support for Ukraine decreases. Soon before the EU passed the 12^th package of sanctions against Russia in December 2023, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published a report on the effects of the oil price cap on Russia. The report noted that “the impact of the price cap has been limited due to inadequate monitoring and enforcement.” It added that “the sanctions have not reduced the Kremlin’s resolve for war.”

Hess’ “Economic War” offers the lay reader an accessible but detailed account of the economic war between Russia and the West. The book is particularly valuable for its long-time approach, which allows Hess to carefully explore connections between the post-2014 and post-2022 contexts. “Economic War”, however, would have benefited from a stronger focus on the close relation between the economic war and the political/military war and a more skeptical approach to the power of sanctions to alter state behavior.

[1] Maximilian Hess, Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict between Russia and the West (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 20.

[2] Ibid., p. 62.

[3] Ibid., p. 2.

[4] Ibid., p. 127.

[5] Ibid., p. 201.

The U.S.- and U.K.-led strikes on the rebel Houthi group in Yemen represent a dramatic new turn in the Middle East conflict – one that could have implications throughout the region.

The attacks of Jan. 11, 2024, hit around 60 targets at 16 sites, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Mideast command, including in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, the main port of Hodeida and Saada, the birthplace of the Houthis in the country’s northwest.

The military action follows weeks of warning by the U.S. to the Houthis, ordering them to stop attacking commercial ships in the strategic strait of Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea. The Houthis – an armed militia backed by Iran that controls most of northern Yemen following a bitter near-decadelong civil war – have also launched missiles and drones toward Israel.

As an expert on Yemeni politics, I believe the U.S. attacks on the Houthis will have wide implications – not only for the Houthis and Yemen’s civil war, but also for the broader region where America maintains key allies. In short, the Houthis stand to gain politically from these U.S.-U.K. attacks as they support a narrative that the group has been cultivating: that they are freedom fighters fighting Western imperialism in the Muslim world.

For Houthis, a new purpose

The Israel-Gaza conflict has reinvigorated the Houthis – giving them a raison d’etre at a time when their status at home was diminishing.

By the time of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants in Israel, the Houthis’ long conflict with Saudi Arabia, which backs the Yemeni government ousted by the Houthis at the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2014, had quieted after an April 2022 cease-fire drastically reduced fighting.

Houthi missile strikes on Saudi cities ceased, and there were hopes that a truce could bring about a permanent end to Yemen’s brutal conflict.

Guardian News: “Explosions in Yemen as US and UK launch airstrikes on Houthis after Red Sea attacks”

With fewer external threats, domestic troubles that surfaced in Houthi-controlled areas – poverty, unpaid government salaries, crumbling infrastructure – led to growing disquiet over Houthi governance. Public support for the Houthis slowly eroded without an outside aggressor to blame; Houthi leaders could no longer justify the hardships in Yemen as a required sacrifice to resist foreign powers, namely Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

But Israel’s attacks in Gaza have provided renewed purpose for Houthis. Aligning with the Palestinian cause has allowed Houthis to reassert their relevance and has reenergized their fighters and leadership.

By firing missiles toward Israel, the Houthis have portrayed themselves as the lone force in the Arab Peninsula standing up to Israel, unlike regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The militia is presenting to Yemenis and others in the region a different face than Arab governments that have, to date, been unwilling to take strong action against Israel.

In particular, Houthis are contrasting their worldview with that of Saudi Arabia, which prior to the October Hamas attack had been looking to normalize ties with Israel.

Houthi’s PR machine

The U.S. and U.K. strikes were, the governments of both countries say, in retaliation for persistent attacks by Houthis on international maritime vessels in the Red Sea and followed attempts at a diplomatic solution.

The aim is to “disrupt and degrade the Houthis’ capabilities,” according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

But regardless of the intent or the damage caused to the Houthis militarily, the Western strikes may play into the group’s narrative, reinforcing the claim that they are fighting oppressive foreign enemies attacking Yemen. And this will only bolster the Houthis’ image among supporters.

Already, the Houthis have managed to rally domestic public support in the part of Yemen they control behind their actions since October 2023.

Dramatic seaborne raids and the taking hostage of ships’ crews have generated viral footage that taps into Northern Yemeni nationalism. Turning a captured vessel into a public attraction attracted more attention domestically.

Following the U.S.-U.K. strikes on Houthi targets, Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree has said the group would expand its attacks in the Red Sea, saying any coalition attack on Yemen will prompt strikes on all shipping through the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects to the Arabian Sea at the southern end of the Red Sea.

Weaponizing Palestinian sympathies

Meanwhile, the Houthis have successfully managed to align the Palestinian cause with that of their own. Appeals through mosques in Yemen and cellphone text campaigns have raised donations for the Houthis by invoking Gaza’s plight.

The U.S.-U.K strikes may backfire for another reason, too: They evoke memories of Western military interventions in the Muslim and Arab world.

The Houthis will no doubt exploit this.

When U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin initially announced the formation of a 10-country coalition to counter Houthi attacks in the Red Sea on Dec. 18, 2023, there were concerns over the lack of regional representation. Among countries in the Middle East and Muslim world, only Bahrain – home to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. 5th Fleet – joined.

The absence of key regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Djibouti – where the U.S. has its only military base in Africa – raised further doubts among observers about the coalition’s ability to effectively counter the Houthis.

Muslim-majority countries were no doubt hesitant to support the coalition because of the sensitivity of the Palestinian cause, which by then the Houthis had successfully aligned themselves with.

But the lack of regional support leaves the U.S. and its coalition allies in a challenging position. Rather than being seen as protectors of maritime security, the U.S. – rather than the Houthis – are vulnerable to being framed in the region as the aggressor and escalating party.

This perception could damage U.S. credibility in the area and potentially serve as a recruitment tool for terrorist organizations like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and similar groups.

The U.S.’s military and diplomatic support for Israel throughout the current conflict also plays into skepticism in the region over the true objectives of the anti-Houthi missile strikes.

Reigniting civil war?

The Houthis’ renewed vigor and Western strikes on the group also have implications for Yemen’s civil war itself.

Since the truce between the two main protagonists in the conflict – Saudi Arabia and the Houthis – fighting between the Houthis and other groups in Yemen, such as the Southern Transitional Council, the Yemen Transitional Government and the National Resistance, has reached a deadlock.

Each group controls different parts of Yemen, and all seem to have accepted this deadlock.

But the U.S.-U.K. strikes put Houthi opponents in a difficult position. They will be hesitant to openly support Western intervention in Yemen or blame the Houthis for supporting Palestinans. There remains widespread sympathy for Gazans in Yemen – something that could give Houthis an opportunity to gain support in areas not under their control.

The Yemeni Transitional Government issued a statement following the U.S.-U.K. strikes that shows the predicament facing Houthi rivals. While blaming the Houthis’ “terrorist attacks” for “dragging the country into a military confrontation,” they also clearly reaffirmed support for Palestinians against “brutal Israeli aggression.”

While Houthi rivals will likely continue this balancing act, the Houthis face no such constraints – they can freely exploit the attacks to rally more support and gain a strategic advantage over their local rivals.

An emboldened Houthi group might also be less likely to accept the current status quo in Yemen and seize the moment to push for more control – potentially reigniting a civil war that had looked to be on the wane.

The Houthis thrive on foreign aggression to consolidate their power. Without this external conflict as a justification, the shortcomings of the Houthis’ political management become apparent, undermining their governance. During the civil war, Houthis were able to portray themselves as the defender of Yemen against Saudi influence. Now they can add U.S. and U.K. interference to the mix.

Mahad Darar, Ph.D. Student of Political Science, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.