“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.

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.

So please don’t misunderstand me. Let me repeat that Russia has violated international law, specifically the law of war, and that the regime of Vladimir Putin is a bad actor.

These charges have been laid by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who underlined at the UN Security Council last spring that world order depends, in the post-WW II era, on basic principles set out in international law: “No seizing land by force. No erasing another country’s borders. No targeting civilians in war.” He said, “If we do not defend these basic principles, we invite a world in which might makes right, the strong dominate the weak.”

Blinken said, “Day after day of Russia’s atrocities, it’s easy to become numb to the horror, to lose our ability to feel shock and outrage. But we can never let the crimes Russia is committing become our new normal. Bucha is not normal. Mariupol is not normal. Irpin is not normal. Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal.”

Blinken has repeatedly charged Putin with war crimes.

And yet on December 8, 2023, the deputy US representative to the UN, Robert Wood, vetoed a UN Security Council resolution, introduced by the United Arab Emirates, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. None of the other members of the 15-nation council voted against the resolution, but one, Britain, abstained. Even the odious Rishi Sunak couldn’t bring himself to vote “no.” Thirteen members voted for the resolution, including France, China, and Russia among the permanent members.

Wood’s vote implicated the Biden administration further in Israeli war crimes in Gaza, which are worse by an order of magnitude than Russia’s in Ukraine.

That’s right. President Biden, Secretary Blinken, and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu are more war-criminally than Vladimir Putin.

Let’s take Blinken’s 3 no-no’s. Israel seized the Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian Gaza by force in 1967 even though those territories were under temporary Egyptian and Jordanian guardianship and did not possess the sovereignty to be belligerents in the 1967 war. Israel has erased the borders between it and the West Bank, illegally annexing East Jerusalem and seeking to annex vast swathes of the Palestinian West Bank.

The UN explains that since October 8, Israel has killed 17,177 Palestinians in Gaza, about 70 per cent of whom are said to be women and children, and 46,000 are reportedly injured. Many more are missing, presumably under the rubble, awaiting rescue or (more likely) a slow and agonizing death.

The reason for the high civilian death toll (which is higher than 70%, since thousands of male noncombatants have also been killed) is that the Israeli army has launched indiscriminate aerial bombings, drone strikes, and tank and artillery volleys against densely populated urban neighborhoods, and has targeted schools, mosques, refugee camps, municipal buildings, and apartment buildings in an orgy of wanton destruction unparalleled since the end of the Syrian Civil War.

That’s Blinken’s supposed third no-no. “No targeting civilians in war.” Although both Israeli and US officials deny that Israel targets civilians (and note that Russian officials also deny targeting civilians), this denial is misleading and mere propaganda. Israel’s army has used artificial intelligence to generate thousands of potential military targets but has set extremely loose rules of engagement with very high tolerance for deaths of noncombatants. One Israeli magazine, +972 Mag, called this approach a “mass assassination factory.” You can’t kill 15,000 civilians in such a short period of time unless you aren’t trying very hard to avoid killing noncombatants. So reckless disregard for civilian life is clearly being exhibited, which is just as bad as targeting civilians. For all we know, the Russian officer corps is also not targeting civilians in Ukraine, but just has loose rules of engagement and a high tolerance for civilian death.

So we may conclude that Biden and Blinken are monumental hypocrites.

But let us look at the numbers.

The United Nations said three weeks ago that Russia had killed 10,000 civilians in Ukraine. In recent months, many of these deaths of noncombatants can be blamed on Moscow’s use of long-range missiles, as well as on delayed explosions of ordnance. The UN official for monitoring this situation, Danielle Bell, said, “As a result, no place in Ukraine is completely safe.”

The UN estimated that the Russians had killed 560 children since February 24, 2022.

Of course, these figures could be grossly underestimated, since Russia hasn’t allowed independent observers into the regions it controls and in places such as Mariupol there appear to have been large-scale atrocities. However, we may note for the purposes of comparison that the same opacity is there in Gaza and that thousands of people are suspected to be lying dead or dying under Israeli-created rubble.

The Young Turks: “U.N. Chief Makes Extremely RARE Move To Push For A Ceasefire”

So at a count of 11,900 women and children, Israel has killed more civilians in two months than Russia has in nearly two years. The discrepancy is even greater since we can probably add some 2,000 noncombatant men to the civilian toll.

Over 7,000 of those killed by Israeli fire have been children.

We can also look at this issue proportionally. 10,000 dead Ukrainians is — while every human being is precious and each death a profound tragedy — a minuscule proportion of the 36 million Ukrainians.

14,000 dead civilians in Gaza would be 0.6% of the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza.

Proportionally, Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza is many, many times that of Russia in Ukraine, and this would be true even if Russia has killed ten times as many civilians as the UN estimates.

As for children, the Israeli killing of minors is so far off the charts compared to Russia in Ukraine that you’d have to move to Mars to do the math.

All this figuring is not intended to in any way diminish the seriousness of Russian war crimes. It is to underline the weirdly monstrous death toll being imposed on noncombatants in Gaza by Israel.

If Blinken is right that “Bucha is not normal. Mariupol is not normal. Irpin is not normal. Bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal,” then neither are Jabaliya, Gaza City, or Khan Younis normal. Bombing schools and apartment buildings in Gaza is not normal.

Is this maybe the thing you didn’t want to be the new normal, Mr. Blinken?

Embed from Getty Images
KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – OCTOBER 30: People search through buildings that were destroyed during Israeli air raids in the southern Gaza Strip on October 30, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza. Heading into a third week of heavy bombing from Israel, Gaza buckles under a shortage of basic needs including fuel, whilst several neighborhoods on the Gaza strip have been wiped out and thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. On October 7, Hamas launched a deadly attack in southern Israel that sparked a retaliatory siege of Gaza. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images.

But this one you refuse to halt. And in so refusing, you make yourself an accomplice. You and Joe Biden and Netanyahu have easily outdone Putin.

Biden linked Ukraine’s struggle against Russia and Israel’s struggle against Hamas by depicting the conflict as one of authoritarianism versus democracy.

Biden denounced Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for depicting Ukraine as an artificial country, granted an identity by the Soviet Union, which the Russian Federation could now withdraw at will.

He made an analogy to Hamas’s determination to destroy Israel.

Everything is wrong with Biden’s equivalencies and analogies. It is not clear how “democratic” the government of Binyamin Netanyahu was before this crisis. Netanyahu is on trial for corruption. He brought into his cabinet parties that not so long ago were on the US State Department terrorist watchlist. Netanyahu and his extreme-right allies were attempting to gut the Israeli supreme court and to move Israel in the direction of an illiberal democracy. They spoke of wiping Palestinian towns off the map. That was the reason Netanyahu had never been invited to the White House.

Despite Biden’s gestures toward Palestinian dignity and self-determination, regarding which he instanced the toothless Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, his administration has stood idly by, as did the administrations of Trump, Obama, and Bush, as Israel has illegally poured hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters into Palestinian areas, who have stolen the lands of Palestinian families and have increasingly subjected them to pogroms. Abbas’s police, which are basically adjuncts to the Israeli occupation forces, are only allowed to patrol 40% of the West Bank, and even there they are routinely over-ruled by the Israeli Army.

The Israeli squatters, who now outnumber Detroit in their population, have divvied up the Palestinian West Bank with the full backing of the Israeli government, and make a two-state solution impossible — indeed, it has been impossible since about 2000, when Binyamin Netanyahu boasted of having killed and buried it.

Let us consider all the things Biden left out.

It is the Israelis who played Putin in 1967 when they illegally seized the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, occupying neighbors’ territory in contravention of the UN Charter.

It is the Israelis who deny that there is an organic Palestinian nation, just as Putin denies there is a Ukrainian one.

It is the Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu, who vows there will never be a Palestinian state.

Biden gave full-throated supported to the Israeli government’s designs on Gaza, which go substantially beyond a punitive expedition to punish or eradicate Hamas for its horrific attack of October 7. But he neglected to note that Israel has cut off water, electricity and food from the 2.2 million innocent civilians in Gaza, who have been under a severe Israeli blockade since 2007.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Union Commission, said of Putin’s actions in Ukraine, “Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror. And we have to call it as such.”

Russia’s attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes.

Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror.

And we have to call it as such. https://t.co/3WY743k1iH

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) October 19, 2022

The US stance on Russian actions in occupying the Donbass region of Ukraine and of waging a total war on Ukrainian citizens derives its moral force from an upholding of a “rules-based international order.”

Yet the Netanyahu government is acting even more harshly and illegally toward the women, children and other innocent noncombatants of Palestinian Gaza than Russia has acted toward those of Ukraine, bad as Russian behavior has been. The Israeli goal is explicitly the complete destruction of civilian infrastructure and the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians for the actions of a few Hamas cadres.

The hypocrisy of Biden saying he cares about these Palestinian civilians, when he vetoed at the UN Security Council a Brazilian resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, is breathtaking. His elision of the whole history of the Israeli dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians makes it impossible for him even to understand what is going on at the moment.

The professional diplomats in Biden’s State Department know that there is something rotten in Denmark. One has already noisily resigned over Biden’s embrace of the odious Netanyahu, and several others are sending a dissent up channels.

It isn’t hard. The Israeli Apartheid toward the Palestinians has to end. Palestinians must be given the basic human dignity of citizenship in a state that could protect their rights. It is only these steps that can deradicalize some of the Palestinian youths who have turned to terrorism. The lives of Israeli civilians are precious and must be protected from the war crimes of Hamas. But it simply is not possible to implement such a peace and mutual understanding under conditions of occupation and Apartheid.

Biden could force a resolution if he wanted to. He doesn’t. He is stuck in a paradigm from his youth in the Senate of the 1970s, when Israel was considered a democracy, and the occupation of the Palestinian territories was thought to be momentary. He is also mired in the long American policy of kicking the Palestine can down the road while mouthing platitudes about a (non-existent and impossible) two-state solution. Biden’s greenlighting of an Israeli ground operation in Gaza is another typical Ugly American atrocity from which it will take decades for the US reputation in most of the world to recover.

This should truly have been the time of our discontent. The northern hemisphere just experienced the hottest summer in recorded history, including month by month the warmest June, July, August, and (by a country mile) September ever. Staggering heat records were set in place after place globally. Fires from Canada to Hawaii to Europe broke all records. (In fact, those Canadian summer fires are now threatening to burn straight into the winter months for the first time — and I fear this phrase is going to be become all-too-boringly repetitive — in history.) The southern hemisphere had a “winter” from — yes! — hell. In Europe, which was burning up, Greece experienced unprecedented fires and floods as well. Libya had a significant part of a major city washed away. China, too, experienced unprecedented flooding around its capital, where 1.2 million people had to be evacuated, and in Hong Kong, too. The sea ice in the Antarctic fell to the lowest levels (yes again!) in recorded history, as did sea ice in the Arctic, helping to ensure a future in which rising sea levels could flood coastal cities. And Greenland has been lending a hand to that same future, starting 2023 with temperatures unmatched in at least 1,000 years and still setting new temperature records in July. Worse yet, that’s just to begin down a list that increasingly seems unending.

In certain parts of my own country, the United States, this summer was all too literally a hell on Earth and, as a New York Times piece headlined it recently, also “A Summer Preview of the Future; Floods, Fires, and Stifling Heat.” (Its first line: “It felt like the opening minutes of a disaster movie.”) A stunning heat wave, for instance, stretched across a drought-stricken Southwest all the way to California, while Phoenix, Arizona, hit an almost unbelievable temperature record of 54 days of 110-degree heat or higher! (Oh, wait, make that 55!)

And that, of course, was just to begin down a seemingly endless list. I haven’t even mentioned disappearing mountain glaciers or the soaring temperatures of South Asia or the Middle East. (Iran hit a record heat index temperature of 158 degrees in August.) But let me stop there. It isn’t hard to see that, if we humans continue to use staggering amounts of fossil fuels and so pour ever more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere — and the latest study indicates that they are heading in that direction at record levels — the Earth, or at least life as we humans have known it on this planet, will, in the long run, almost literally go down in… what else?… flames.

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No, it’s not that nothing is being done. Non-carbon-producing forms of energy are indeed on the rise globally (even in an oil heartland like Texas). Still, to take one example, China, the country moving most dramatically to create ever more green power, is also burning more coal than the rest of the planet combined and still planning to up its use of that devastating source of energy. And keep in mind that, these days, the two greatest greenhouse-gas-producing nations, China and the United States (which is also cumulatively by far the greatest in history), have in recent years hardly been able to exchange a civil word, no less collaborate to try to make this planet a cooler, better place. At the moment, it seems as if they stand a far greater chance of going to war with each other (while incinerating yet more fossil fuels and so much else in the process) than allying to help save the planet as we know it.

Meanwhile, of course, the giant fossil-fuel companies have been making — I know this sounds like a broken record but what can I do? — record (oops, sorry!) profits. And keep in mind that, in the United States, the leaders of one of the two major political parties are wildly focused on supporting and expanding Big Oil and carbon-producing energy sources of every kind, while denying that much of anything I’ve described above is actually happening. Worse yet, according to the latest polls, their unofficial leader, Donald Trump, stands a rather chilling (or do I mean boiling?) chance of retaking the presidency in 2024 and controlling the government for at least four more wildly unpredictable, possibly ever more authoritarian years of carbon hell. Under the circumstances, you might indeed be able to kiss this planet goodbye.

War Is Us

And worse yet, with our increasingly dire global situation in mind, ask yourself this: How is humanity reacting to the deep dangers we now face? Are we focusing our attention on putting out the flames, so to speak? I’m afraid — despite the heroic efforts of any number of young people — the overall answer would have to be: Not on your life! Sadly enough, instead of facing the crisis of climate change head-on, much of humanity seems all too intent on starting fires of the kind that have defined us since time immemorial. I have in mind, of course, a different kind of planetary destruction entirely: war-making. In fact, sometimes that seems to be by far our greatest, if grimmest, skill and deepest nature.

At a moment when peace couldn’t be more needed so that we could focus on our imperiled future, war (and the threat of ever more of it) seems once again to be what we’re all too willing to put at the very heart of things, including of our news reports.

Consider war, in fact, our other version of burning the planet up. Once upon a time, that would simply have been a metaphor for destructive war after war after war throughout human history, but no longer. After all, as anyone who saw the hit film Oppenheimer knows, back in 1945, this country first figured out how to create a global fire that could, unlike climate change, consume our world in essentially no time flat. I’m thinking, of course, of nuclear weapons, and of the fact that their power to broil us (as well as, all too ironically, drive us into a potentially devastating nuclear winter) has only increased immeasurably with time. The weapons in nuclear arsenals now are generally vastly much more powerful than those two atomic bombs that decimated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th of that year.

Almost 80 years later, nine countries have nuclear weapons and the U.S. is planning, in the decades to come, to put up to $2 trillion into “modernizing” its own nuclear arsenal, with the Russians and Chinese following suit. Worse yet, lurking behind the most recent full-scale war on planet Earth, the one in Ukraine, has been the possibility that such weaponry could actually be used on a battlefield for the first time since 1945. I’m talking, of course, about “tactical nuclear weapons” — some far more powerful than the atomic bombs that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and the Russian president’s implicit threats to use them.

And that bloody disaster of a conflict, launched with Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, has now become a full-scale, World War I-style trench war (with the addition of course of so many modern advances like drones) that shows no sign of ending in any imaginable future. And if that war — and other conflicts, in places ranging from Sudan to Pakistan — weren’t enough for you, then how about the now-ongoing Hamas-Israeli nightmare in the Middle East?

Yes, in its surprise assault on Israel, Hamas brutally slaughtered young music festival attendees in startling numbers and an unnerving number of children as well, while Israel is now mercilessly battering Gaza with its trapped two million inhabitants (almost half of them children), hitting schools, hospitals, and mosques, while cutting off electricity and food which, as Senator Bernie Sanders noted recently, is a “serious violation of international law.”

No less grimly important, that disastrous struggle has become a focus of almost all the news shows in a way that would be inconceivable for the long-term danger of climate change. And no one yet knows how that conflict might still develop or spread, but consider it symbolic of so much else that, in response to the initial Hamas surprise attacks, the Biden administration’s idea of restoring peace in a wildly conflict-ridden Middle East was to send in an aircraft carrier task force and fighter planes. I mean, what else could we do?

And mind you, even when we’re not at war, the U.S. and other countries remain all too ready to invest so much more of our wealth in our militaries than in tamping down climate change. Yes, give Joe Biden some credit, he did oversee the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which over time will put several hundred billion dollars into developing a climate-change-ready economy.

Still, that could be his only major climate initiative and investment (thanks significantly to a Republican House) in his four years in office, while every year he’s president the American military has gotten or will get a budget of more than $800 billion (and still rising toward the trillion-dollar mark). Similarly, when aiding allies, as with Ukraine, we’re far more likely to give them billions of dollars for armaments and other kinds of militarized help ($75 billion in the case of Ukraine) than to aid them in battling the growing nightmares of global warming.

Will Humanity Go Asteroidal?

You could say that, historically speaking, as well as in the present moment, war has been both humanity’s foremost talent and our obsession, and that we are, in some basic sense, mad creatures. War still remains a deep and endless part of our world. Making war, in some sense, could be considered our thing. I myself was born in the midst of the second devastating global war of the last century and I’ve lived through American wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice), as well as that endless war on terror.

So, this is us. But here’s what’s different in this moment: while we humans prepare for and all too regularly launch wars, this planet is now visibly making war on us. Global warming is, in some fashion, a slow-motion but increasingly horrifying assault on this planet as humanity has known it these last thousands of years.

Or rather, if you want to think of it this way, humanity is now making war on itself, using fossil fuels as its slow-motion weapon of long-term atmospheric devastation, while distracting itself with more localized wars on this planet. And thanks to that, it has no longer become totally absurd to talk about our possible extinction. In a sense, you might say that, with our own special form of brilliance, humanity has managed to create both a devastatingly fast and a spectacularly slow way of doing ourselves (and so much else) in. I’m talking, of course, about those nuclear weapons and climate change. And thanks at least in part to our inability to stop fighting wars among ourselves, we seem to be ensuring that climate change won’t be the full-scale focus of our attention as it should be.

So, think of those nukes and climate change as fast and slow-motion versions of that asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and so much other life on Earth 66 million years ago.

At least, however, T-Rex and its pals weren’t responsible for the force that made them history. If things don’t change on this planet in the decades to come, the same might not be true of humanity. You would, in fact, have to say that we might have created our own asteroid, sent it on a devastating slow-motion path to Earth, and then (to make matters worse) largely ignored its coming and began killing each other first.

Consider all of this, then, the deepest form of human madness and just hope that somehow, from the Middle East to Ukraine, Beijing to Washington, we can wake up to what we’re doing to ourselves before it’s too late.

Copyright 2023 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

Time is an ally of Russia in the Ukrainian conflict. Russia needs to reduce its rate of battlefield deaths and remain militarily active in Ukraine for as long as possible.

A great aid to Vladimir Putin would be a disruption in the supply of weapons to Kyiv, and a diminishing commitment from European and US governments to support the war or to provide military equipment. A rival crisis to distract Ukraine’s allies, in the form of war in the Middle East, could provide just this.

Hamas’s violent incursion into Israel from Gaza on Saturday October 7 has already distracted the United States diplomatically.

The conflict could also divert military equipment to the Middle East rather than to Ukraine. How large the diversion of arms is depends upon whether Israel chooses to try to reoccupy Gaza or not.

A war might also serve to further loosen the will of Ukraine’s allies to sustain their spending in Ukraine. It might do so because the implications of a wider Middle Eastern conflict, or China opportunistically attacking Taiwan, would outweigh the consequences of continued hostilities in Ukraine.

Russia’s competing friendships

The diplomatic picture for Russia towards the Israel-Hamas conflict is not clear cut. Russia has historically been friendly towards Israel. Israel has mirrored this by toning down any criticism it has made of the Ukrainian invasion.

Russia has recently become friendlier towards Iran as it has sought to buy military equipment. But Iran is likely to be the source of the military equipment used by Hamas to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system and to invade the country, including the electronic interference equipment used to deactivate the border sensors and remote sentries.

Iran is also the likely source of counterintelligence techniques that have enabled Hamas to avoid attention from the capable Israeli intelligence services. Russia has been active in selling intelligence techniques around the world and so Iranian counterintelligence is likely informed by Russian practices.

Russia has long operated multilevel diplomacy – managing to maintain positive relationships with competing and even warring nations – in the Middle East, and will continue to do so. It is unlikely to find disadvantage here.

Putin’s plans revealed?

Putin has a strong history of hiding in plain sight. He tells us what he intends to do, and we assume it is rhetorical bluster. But in reality Putin is telling us his plans and seeing how many of them he can complete.

Missed by the majority of the world’s media was the annual Russian security conference (the Valdai International Discussion Club, known simply as the Valdai), at which Putin spoke on October 5. There he described his ambition being to create a new world order founded upon a “civilisation-based approach”. This would recognise local differences and communities of common interest.

In this, Putin was softly echoing an Indian approach to society which emphasises the environment, meaning the physical environment, the people within it, and community as a supportive structure. It is also an echo of the ethos of Israeli kibbutz which emphasise equality, common identity, community loyalty and shared efforts.

This is an explicit rejection of western individualism and a nod to those in the developing world that Russia is a kindred spirit.

In the speech, Putin recast the previous 20 years as Russia seeking to positively engage in helping to solve global challenges, but that this engagement had been seen as obedience to western desires and norms. Putin further argued that the world required multiple sources of power and ways of seeing the world, rather than to all follow western patterns of economic exploitation and ideological domination.

He cited China and India as plausible alternative sources of power and world views. In Putin’s civilisation-based approach, his invasion of Ukraine is not Russia trying to capture territory, but repelling the Euroatlantic control of Nato and the EU. Liberation from colonialism is at the heart of Putin’s Valdai speech – a message that ordinary Ukrainians would dispute.

Referring to the Middle East, Putin noted that Nato powers selectively engage with Arab nations. Protection is provided to those who are obedient, but not because of their values or traditions.

It is here that we can infer that Putin is supportive of both Israeli and Palestinian claims, and that it is only westerners providing an overriding security guarantee to one side over the other that generates the conditions for continuous conflict between Israel and Palestine.

How Russia benefits

Russia is a beneficiary but not likely an author of the conflict and upheaval in Israel and Gaza. Putin does not need to have caused the uptick in tension but he will not be disappointed to see it further escalate over the coming weeks and months.

Russia also benefits because of the distraction it places at the heart of the upcoming US presidential election and to a world order already placed on high alert because of Ukraine, because of China and Taiwan and Serbia and Kosovo.

For Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then, time remains on its side, despite all its military losses. A change in US president, an activist US Congress continuing to show disquiet about further funding to Ukraine, and the US needing to support Israel in the Middle East all will play decisively in how the Ukrainian conflict will end.

If the war in Ukraine is still raging in 2025, it will be Russia with the upper hand.

Robert M. Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security, University of Hull

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

•  

  by Faaiz Gilani

  FaaizGilani

  ( Middle East Monitor ) – As we watch the events unfolding in the besieged Gaza Strip, where resistance fighters have been battling for the rights of their people which have been usurped from them for over 50 years, I couldn’t help but recall walking through London and coming across the Russian Embassy, where activists had painting the Ukrainian flag on the ground.

  The UK has been at the forefront of condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, emphasising its solidarity with Kyiv and putting this support into action in a number of ways. When Moscow first invaded Ukraine, most European countries announced immediate support for Kyiv through military and financial aid. Within a few days, Russia was slapped with sanctions, and steps were taken to weaken its financial capabilities. The oppressor was left isolated and short of allies.

  This courtesy is not one paid to those living under the world’s longest ongoing occupation; Israel’s control of the Palestinian people, their properties and their religious sites. Where Palestinians are concerned, the media looks the other way, failing to report on the 17-year blockade imposed on Gaza, or how the UN declared Gaza to be uninhabitable. The land of Palestine has been squeezed out of the hands of its owners and is being taken over – with the view to completely annex it – by the Israeli occupation. This can be seen clearly in the occupied West Bank, where the land under Palestinian control shrinks on a daily basis.

  However, protests in support of these oppressed people do not receive the same welcome as those for Ukraine. In 2014, while Israel was pummeling the Gaza Strip with rockets that killed more than 2,250 people, England Cricket team’s all-rounder, Moeen Ali, wore a wristband which said ‘Free Palestine’, during a test match against India. Very quickly he was banned from wearing this ‘political display’ of solidarity. Similarly, in 2021, when Israel was bombing Gaza, Manchester United players, Paul Pogba and Amad Diallo, waved the Palestinian flag at the end of a game to showcase their support for the people of Gaza, calling for peace, the mainstream media advocated the narrative that sports should remain free from political influences and away from personal associations.

   

  For Ukraine, however, things are different. From tennis to football to the Olympics, politics was been intermingled with sports. The Premier League was rebranded, depicting its full support for Ukraine. The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) went a step further and imposed an outright ban on all Russian and Belarusian players from competing at the prestigious Wimbledon Grand Slam in 2022.

  

  The West, the self-proclaimed champions of freedom of expression, resort to a selective mechanism for exercising their support of narratives. Even now, with Hamas fighting back, global leaders, be it Biden or Sunak, took no time to extend a helping hand to their ally, Israel. With the ‘rock-solid and unwavering support’ of the US president, military support is headed towards the Middle East to support Israel. The media, following their state agenda, villainised Hamas and placed a blanket of innocence on Israel, completely ignoring its ongoing occupation an oppression of Palestinians which international rights groups have labelled apartheid.

  The West is not alone in its hypocrisy, the Muslim World has had its share of shortcomings with regards the Palestinian struggle. Prime Minister of Pakistan, Anwar ul-Haq Kakar advocated for a two-state solution, but did not highlight the brutality inflicted on Palestinians by Israel. While the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) called upon international bodies such as the United Nations to ensure the protection of Palestinian civilians.

  Qatar, however, was quick to hold Israel responsible for the escalation in Gaza. Its Foreign Ministry further expressed concerns that Israel would use this incident as a reason to initiate a disproportionate war against civilians in Gaza.

  The situation in Gaza is a reminder that decolonisation is not an abstract thought. It’s a reality beyond history books, research papers and panel talks. The recent attack by Hamas is a stand taken by the Palestinians. After years of genocide, land-grabbing and violation of basic human rights, there comes a time when oppression becomes unbearable, and revolt through an armed struggle is looked upon as the only way out. So while the world media labels this “terrorism”, we need to remember that the oppressed cannot continue to lie motionless on the ground as the occupation tramples all over them and the international community continues to give up the little rights they have remaining

   

  The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

  by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Most commentators about the Mediterranean migrants would claim that there is a migration crisis that explains the harsh treatment and the denial of entry for many refugees. However, is there really a crisis? In truth, the statistics suggest that immigration to Europe from Africa by sea has dropped significantly, from 362,000 in 2016 to around 172.000 in 2017 and to 110 000 in 2018. At the same time, since the war in Ukraine started in February 2022, more than 8 million refugees have been welcomed into Europe, with 40% of those being children. In contrast, 1 in 50 Mediterranean migrants ends up dead or missing. According to a Save the Children report, European countries and the EU exhibit a double standard when it comes to refugees.

Despite the provision of essential services by African immigrants to European states, their reception is often harsh, and often these newcomers are seen as a security threat. European countries’ main response to African immigration is to increase security, intensify national borders, and create more detention centers even at the expense of human lives. For instance, Italy recently made a deal with Libya to train its coast guard to reduce immigration vessels. However, it’s no secret that would-be immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa apprehended in Libya are sent to detention centers.  The bargain Italy struck with Tripoli knowingly left people to be tortured, kidnapped, and put horrendous living quarters. These measures are proven to not diminish immigration.  Instead, they force would-be immigrants to place themselves in the hands of people smugglers who pledge to get them past the Libyan security forces; but these same smugglers do not hesitate to put the lives of these immigrants at grave risk.

Most African immigrants are of North African heritage (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). They comprise almost two-thirds of all migrants in Europe. However, Sub-Saharan Africa is slowly increasing its percentage of immigrants to Europe. As far as destinations abroad, Europe attracts the biggest share of African migrants in comparison to other destinations like the US. This unequal distribution could be linked to multiple factors but mostly to “advantages with relation to transfer cost, and the established cultural and socio‐economic links of African Diasporas to the former colonial powers, England, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany and Italy” (GIGA).

This wave of immigration is for the most part portrayed by politicians and journalists as a negative phenomenon for European countries. In reality however, African migration has a complex impact both on the country of origin as well as on the new host countries. For many European states, African immigrants are “often a valuable and sought-after resource” (Africa and Europe). This is owing to the aging population of many European countries and labor shortages in these states. For example, in many European countries, migrants form a big percentage of the healthcare workforce, an essential sector, which was especially in evidence especially during the Covid-19 crisis. The role of high-powered professionals form Africa in Europe highlights one of the main concerns about this outflow, namely Brain Drain. Most African migrants, contrary to widespread belief, are highly skilled individuals. Over the last couple of decades, Africa has lost about one-third of its highly skilled workforce to developed countries in Europe.

         At the same time, African immigrants in Europe do provide their fair share of benefits to their home countries. A lot of African countries that send students and short-term immigrants north benefit from a reverse Brain Drain, such that migrants return to their home countries with their resumes enhanced by skills, knowledge, and values beneficial for the development of their respective countries.

         Even those who do manage to pass through European borders are not met with the warmest welcome. People confront challenges from the get-go, seeking shelter, food, facing hostile authorities, and more. However, the European response is to attack NGOs and individuals who seek to help such people. According to a 2015-2016 report published by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), these African migrants who are in dire need of help, are often seen as “economic” or “illegal” immigrants without any consideration for the reasons of their immigration.

         Some of the Mediterranean refugees are facing the same situation as Ukrainians, that is, they are fleeing warfare or foreign intervention — including Afghans, Syrians, and Somalis. Yet, “it seemed as if there were two parallel realities: one for Ukrainians and another one for everyone else” (Save the Children). Not only that, but European countries were swift in their response to the Ukrainian crisis, but even far right-wing politicians from the EU who had always spouted a strong anti-immigration stance are now flocking to support Ukrainian refugees. This clearly highlights a deeper issue of racism. The change of heart for many Europeans towards immigration raises the question of who is seen as an immigrant and who is seen as a refugee. Europeans are observing the scene with racial lenses, categorizing newcomers as “Us” or “Them”.

         Ukrainians are truly suffering from a horrendous situation, and they deserve all the help they can get. Yet, the way the EU and the European countries show a double standard treatment exposes an ugly side of humanity. A comment by Flavio di Giacomo, a spokesperson for IOM Italy about rickety immigrant ships in the Mediterranean Sea holds true to this day on the double standard treatment of immigrants “European coast guards are slow to intervene because it is not a priority for their governments”  (NPR).

( Tomdispatch.com ) – A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war — the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically — there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, we are not thinking about planetary climate disruption. This technique of distraction obeys the familiar mechanism that psychologists have called displacement. An apparently new thought and feeling becomes the substitute for harder thoughts and feelings you very much want to avoid.

Every news story about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest demand for American or European weaponry also serves another function: the displacement of a story about, say, the Canadian fires which this summer destroyed a forest wilderness the size of the state of Alabama and 1,000 of which are still burning as this article goes to press. Of course, there is always the horrific possibility that Ukraine could pass from a “contained” to a nuclear war, as out of control as those Canadian fires. Yet we are regularly assured that the conflict, close to the heart of Europe, is under careful supervision. The war has a neatly framed villain (Vladimir Putin) and — thanks to both the U.S. and NATO — a great many good people containing him. What could possibly go wrong?

A fantasy has taken root among well-meaning liberals. Ukraine, they believe, is the “good war” people like them have been searching for since 1945. “This is our Spain,” young enthusiasts have been heard to say, referring to the Spanish Republican war against fascism. In Ukraine in the early 2020s, unlike Spain in the late 1930s, the Atlantic democracies will not falter but will go on “as long as it takes.” Also, the climate cause will be assisted along the way, since Russia is a large supplier of natural gas and oil, and the world needs to unhook itself from both.

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That theory got tested a year ago, with the underwater sabotage of Russia’s Nordstream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. President Biden, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland all welcomed that environmental disaster. In an eventually deleted message the former Polish foreign minister and war advocate Radislaw Sikorski tweeted thanks to the U.S. for what he took to be a transparently American operation. The American media, however, treated the attack as an imponderable mystery, some reports even suggesting that Russia might have destroyed its own invaluable pipeline for reasons yet to be fathomed. Then, in a February 2023 article, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh traced the attack to the U.S., and later Western reports would come halfway to his conclusion by assigning credit to Ukraine, or a pro-Ukrainian group. As of late summer, all reporting on the Nordstream disaster seems to have stopped. What has not stopped is the killing. The numbers of dead and wounded in the Ukraine war are now estimated at nearly half a million, with no end in sight.

The Nordstream wreck was only one attention-getting catastrophe within the greater horror that a war always is. An act of industrial sabotage on a vast scale, it was also an act of environmental terrorism, causing the largest methane leak in the history of the planet. According to a report in Forbes, “The subsequent increase in greenhouse gases… was equivalent to as much as 32% of Denmark’s annual emissions.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is “unprovoked.” In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO, always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider the look of such a policy to the country –- no longer Communist and barely a great power — which, in 2013, American leaders again began to describe as an adversary. 

With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the alliance accelerated dramatically. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004 witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia, look at a map.

Counterfeit Solidarity

The United States has supported Ukraine with copious donations of weapons, troop-trainers, and logistical and technical advisers left to work the interoperable targeting equipment we “share” with that country. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO drilled at least 10,000 Ukrainian troops per year in advanced methods of warfare. In the war itself, weapons supplies have climbed steadily from Stinger and Javelin missiles to Abrams tanks (whose greenhouse-gas environmental footprint is 0.6 miles per gallon of gas, or 300 gallons every eight hours of use), to cluster bombs, and most recently the promise of F-16s.

All this has put fresh wind in the sails of the weapons manufacturers of the American military-industrial-congressional complex. In May 2022, the CEO of Lockheed Martin thanked President Biden personally for his kindness. F-16s, after all, are big money-makers. As for the additional fuel that ordinary Ukrainians require, it is now being sequestered underground by Ukrainian commodities traders at enormous environmental risk.

Wars and their escalation — the mass destruction of human life that is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world — happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to the brink. So close, in fact, that it feels natural to go on. That was certainly the case with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the escalation that followed. Examples of such escalation are indeed the rule, not the exception in time of war.

Think of the invention, testing, and strategic planning that led to the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Jon Else’s extraordinary documentary The Day After Trinity, the physicist Freeman Dyson offered a sober analysis of the momentum driving the decision to use the bomb:

“Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? I would say: it’s almost inevitable that it would have happened — simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time to do it. The air force was ready and waiting. There had been prepared big airfields in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate. The whole machinery was ready.”

In the same sense, all the apparatus was in place for the war in Ukraine. Joe Biden, a conventional cold warrior, has always had a temperament rather like that of President Harry Truman. The Biden of 2023, like the Truman of 1945, comes across as impulsive, not deliberate. He likes to pop off, thinks he is appreciated for taking risks, and fancies himself particularly good under pressure. This state of mind partly accounts for his decision to label Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”: never mind that such a description would apply with equal truth to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — a war that Biden, as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, supported unreservedly. His insistence that “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power for god’s sake” and his belief (as of mid-July 2023) that “Putin has already lost the war” exhibit the same pattern of effusive moralism accompanied by a denial of inconvenient facts.  

A different perspective was offered by Anatol Lieven at the Responsible Statecraft website:

“We are repeatedly told that the war in Ukraine is a war to defend democracy and help secure it across the world. Our American, French and British ancestors (and even the Russians, from March to October 1917) were also told the same about the Allied side in the First World War. It did not quite work out that way, and nothing guarantees that it will happen that way in Ukraine.”

In the case of Ukraine, such false hopes have been pushed far more freely by the media than by the military. War is a drug, and they have chosen to be the dealers. 

The Media Airbrush

War propaganda can be delivered in picturesque as well as popular ways. A prime example of the former approach was Roger Cohen’s August 6th front-page New York Times story, “Putin’s Forever War,” based on a recent visit. (“I spent a month in Russia.”) The apologetic intent here is underscored in the headline, which picks up an epithet once applied to the disastrous American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and slyly transfers it to Russia. The coverage is all in the same key, over six full pages of the paper Times, bulked out with color photographs of cheerleaders, churches, dank stairways, military processions, statues, tombs, and models on a fashion shoot.

From the start, Cohen adopts the voice of a prophetic observer of a new war, even as he makes it sound a good deal like the old war with the Soviet Union. “Along the way,” he writes,

“I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn patience to see out a long war. I found that Homo sovieticus, far from dying out, has lived on in modified form, along with habits of subservience. So with the aid of relentless propaganda on state television, the old Putin playbook — money, mythmaking and menace of murder — has just about held.”

The name Putin appears with great regularity as the article proceeds, doing extra duty for the historical analysis and exposition that are mostly absent.

“I first visited Moscow,” writes Cohen, “four decades ago, when it was a city devoid of primary colors eking out existence in the penury of Communism.” But Moscow has changed and the reason is Putin: “He opened Russia, only to slam it shut to the West; he also modernized it, while leaving the thread to Russia’s past unbroken.” So here, as in many Western accounts, the problem turns out to be not just Putin but the fact that he embodies a backward, naturally vengeful, country and its irretrievable past. The people of Russia are lost and — a few courageous dissidents excepted — they are given over to primitivism, hopeless nostalgia, and of course aggression. Putin is their epitome.

He “governs from the shadows” — no point in skipping the vampire trope — “unlike Stalin, whose portrait was everywhere. There is no cult of the leader of the kind Fascist systems favored. Yet mystery has its own magnetism. The reach of Mr. Putin’s power touches all.” There is, in other words, a cult of personality without either the personality or the display that belong to such a cult: “Putinism is a postmodern compilation of contradictions. It combines mawkish Soviet nostalgia with Mafia capitalism, devotion to the Orthodox Church with the spread of broken families.” It did not take a month in Russia to write those sentences. A day at the New York Times would have sufficed.

The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges as the hero of this story. Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between 2004 and 2018, contributed eight op-eds to the New York Times, the sixth of which focused on climate change and the eighth on the perilous renewal of a nuclear arms race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (which Putin called a “mistake”) and Donald Trump’s similar decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone doubt that Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden administration’s virtual severance of diplomatic relations with Russia?

In an October 25, 2018, op-ed, Gorbachev summed up the American tendency throughout the preceding two decades: “The United States has in effect taken the initiative in destroying the entire system of international treaties and accords that served as the underlying foundation for peace and security following World War II.” Notice that the bellicose American “initiative” began well before the ascent of Vladimir Putin and, according to Gorbachev, it possessed — like the expansion of NATO — a dynamism that operated independently of developments inside Russia.

Return to Earth

The major news of the summer, besides the apparent lack of success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, has been Russia’s sudden cancellation of the Black Sea grain deal — a decision prompted in some measure by a July 17th Ukrainian drone attack on the Kerch Bridge. This is the bridge that has served to connect Russia to Crimea, after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014; and the drone strike was part of a  continuing Ukrainian-NATO effort to undermine — by sanctions, among other means — Russia’s export of its own grain. A typical Western media report about these developments in the Washington Post declined to associate the two events; as if the Ukrainian attack had occurred by coincidence just “hours before” the Russian termination of the deal and its own attacks on Ukrainian grain storage facilities. The events are referred to as “twin developments,” and that is all.

In a recent article at TomDispatch, Michael Klare recalled the public shame that never properly attached to U.S. energy companies for “choosing to perpetuate practices known to accelerate climate change and global devastation. Among the most egregious, the decision of top executives of the ExxonMobil Corporation — the world’s largest and wealthiest privately-owned oil company — to continue pumping oil and gas for endless decades after their scientists warned them about the risks of global warming.”  

Such environmental indifference, as Klare rightly notes, persisted long after the reality of climate disruption was recognized by the polluters. No less irresponsible has been the choice to perpetuate the war habit even as we recognize the inseparable role wars have always played in the destruction of the planet. The Ukraine war was launched by Russia in an exertion of brutal short-term opportunism, but it was also provoked by the United States as one of a long series of wars and regime-change operations that were meant to give the U.S. uncontested leadership of a unipolar world.

All of us now inhabit a war planet threatened in other devastating ways as well. Our escape will not be achieved through a new “norms-based” international order in which NATO, with the U.S. at the helm, replaces the United Nations as the global authority presiding over war and peace. The “next war on the horizon,” whether in the Baltic Sea, the Persian Gulf, or Taiwan, is a matter of grave interest to the citizens on all those horizons who may want anything but to serve as its field of exercise. Meanwhile, the lesson for the United States should be simple enough: the survival of the planet cannot wait for the world’s last superpower to complete our endless business of war.

Copyright 2023 David Bromwich

Via Tomdispatch.com