The New York Review of Books: Confederation: The One Possible Israel-Palestine Solution

Colonial Zionist pioneers, in contrast, harmed native Palestinians by working toward Jewish cultural and economic self-sufficiency, and thus the methodical displacement of the Palestinian peasantry—which is why, at least since the Peel Commission in 1937, an arrangement like “partition” could be entertained. The Israeli occupation may be, in its own way, as cruel as apartheid. But comparable cruelty does not necessarily entail a similar political architecture. (I suspect Erekat knows this, but was hoping to shake Israelis out of their complacency.) [...]

This point needs emphasis because rash talk about one state has been obscuring it. Palestinian youth have told Shikaki of their growing interest in pursuing full civil rights in a single state, but this is really a sign of gloom and no small measure of spite—“the conviction that extremists run Israel, and a certain alienation from the corruptions of the Palestinian Authority,” Shikaki told me. His latest polling, conducted at the time of Trump’s Jerusalem statement, shows a depressing spike in the number of young Palestinians preferring “armed struggle” over the status quo—though they know that Israel, a nuclear state, cannot be invaded and destroyed by regional neighbors, and have witnessed the horrors of civil war in Syria. Israelis, for their part, may indeed be complacent regarding the status quo, but most understand that—even if the occupation can be walled off—violent polarization means that their children and grandchildren will be patrolling hostile streets, while over a fifth of their own citizens, Arab citizens, grow inflamed on their side of the wall. [...]

Indeed, if self-determination means national autonomy in security matters, it is a recipe for disintegration. Israeli and Palestinian governments would be seen, respectively, as accountable for the actions of people acting from their territories—“You’re sovereign, so you’re responsible.” They would make themselves hostage to extremists. Any sustainable solution would entail security cooperation—conspicuous security cooperation—making plain the two states’ reciprocal responsibility for the entire environment. The failure to prevent a terrorist atrocity, which will almost certainly come, must be seen as a joint failure, not one side’s bloody-minded effort to gain advantage over the other.   [...]

We hear much, in this context, about Jewish extremists, the settlers, as much for their encroachments on Israeli democracy as on Palestinian farmers. Many of them see themselves as a messianic vanguard and pour salt on longstanding Palestinian wounds. Grotesquely, they rally much of West Jerusalem to theocracy and treat Arab neighbors with contempt. (There are, as I have argued elsewhere, sound reasons to subject the settlements to an international boycott.) But settlers have also worked to interrupt Palestinian “territorial contiguity,” and so, presumably, to foil independent Palestinian economic prospects (the Likud rank-and-file recently voted to annex much of Area C, the roughly 62 percent of the West Bank where the settlements are, and which, owing to Oslo, was left under exclusive Israeli control). To assume they are succeeding in that mission is to attribute too much power to the settlers. We are no longer living in the period of the 1948-9 war, when about a million people on each side fought for hilltops to control the agricultural land in the valleys.

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The Atlantic: The War in Yemen and the Making of a Chaos State

Two-thirds of Yemenis were already what the UN called “food insecure” before the Houthis advanced south, but in the nearly three years since then, Yemen and the wider Middle East have plunged into dangerous instability. Never known as an international tourist draw, the country has recently made headlines for outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria—and ballistic missiles that travel hundreds of miles toward the Saudi capital of Riyadh. With the war on isis slowing down in Syria and Iraq, Yemen is now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. [...]

“Yemen more closely resembles a region of mini-states at varying degrees of war with one another, and beset by a complex range of internal politics and conflicts, than a single state engaged in a binary conflict,” wrote Peter Salisbury, a researcher with the London-based Chatham House policy institute, in a December report on the country. [...]

Alliances with al-Qaeda and other shady actors are everyday business inside Yemen, but the war has only complicated things, said Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University’s Pembroke College. She’s made multiple trips to Yemen over the years, most recently in August. “Al-Qaeda now don’t hold territory, but they have made strong alliances with tribes,” she said, particularly in the al-Bayda highlands north of Aden, near Houthi forces. “They’re fighting the same mutual enemy—the Houthis—and they’re feeling embattled on various fronts in the home territories against the Houthis. Why would you not hook up with a bunch of guys with guns just because they’re waving black flags?”  [...]

Nearly a third of the Saudi-led coalition airstrikes have hit what local observers at the Yemen Data Project, an independent group that collects information on the war, call “non-military” targets. That category includes marketplaces, water and electricity sites, food storage, hospitals, medical centers, mosques and all those kind of things, Craig said. “Less than 45 percent of Yemen’s medical facilities are now operating because of the conflict. People can’t, a lot of the time, afford to get there.” Since the war began in March 2015, Saudi aircraft have bombed water and electrical infrastructure more than 100 times. Beyond that, “there have been 68 air raids that have targeted medical facilities; 183 that have targeted marketplaces,” Craig said.

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Social Europe: The Populist Hoax – Getting The Far Right And Post-Fascism Wrong

The term could be useful because there is not necessarily a moral evaluation behind it: if they would use far right demagoguery, or fascist politics, it would show something dangerous, extreme. It would ring the bell to us all. Populism does not do so. Historically, populism was used to define political streams which tried to involve people in decision-making, instead of alienating them from their own national political systems, and attacking them because of their political opinion, or because of their race – however, this nuance is not interesting these days. If you check some of the prominent proponents of this populist hoax like Cas Mudde, you see what an artificial and unstable model they have applied to populism: it should be some kind of technique, containing anti-elitism, high level of emotions, mixed with nationalism and ethnicism, probably also racism, but it would not contain a core set of ideological values. What struck me even more is that some leading scholars like Jan-Werner Müller can refer to Carl Schmitt as a populist. Schmitt was a Nazi Scholar and ideologist, president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists, editor of the Nazi journal called Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung. His scientific activity, especially the division of society into enemies and friends (we-them), his anti-liberal (in fact: anti-pluralist) stance, his views on political power and emergency situations made him a prophet of Nazi ideology (the so called “crown jurist of the Third Reich”). And now we should call him simply populist?  

I feel that science has almost completely lost track. That kind of populism which is in the head of scholars is simply demagoguery politics. When political parties are chauvinistic, racist, paranoid, anti-elitist, macho-ist, use emotions to attack minorities, create scapegoats, we cannot say that this is the normal course of democracy. In my home country, such parties destroyed democracy, created an electoral autocracy, a semi-dictatorship, where they abolished checks and balances and fair elections. Fidesz, the ruling party, uses the social-psychology of the communistic regime, which also used the social psychology of Nazis and the Horthy regime. Many of the similar parties use democratic mimicry to mask that they are deeply anti-democratic, and we see what many of them do should they receive power on their own, and have a chance to attack the democratic framework. They do not believe in democracy, in basic values like pluralism which underpin it, or the unity of one human race, where each and every human being is judged based on his or her own merits. Most of these parties are based on the same anti-enlightment attitude which served as the core of historical Fascism. [...]

My own view is that most the above-mentioned parties belong to the post-fascist camp. Roger Griffin wrote a foreword for Tamir Bar-on’s genius book called Where have all the Fascists Gone? In this foreword, he wrote, post-fascism is like an island in a river: it does not reach the banks of fascism, but it also does not belong to conservatism. My view, however, is that these parties are not like islands, but like boats: they move between proper fascism and conservatism, and they rest on both sides of the river. They use all the emotional manipulations their historical predecessors did, from both sides. We can only counter the rise of hate in Europe if we do not think our societies are completely different from old times, or hate-mongering parties completely different from old parties with similar ideologies.

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Jacobin Magazine: How Kissinger Won

Invariably, Kissinger is described as the quintessential realpolitik statesman. Grandin, instead, lays Kissinger bare as a radical relativist, a postmodernist avant la lettre, an almost romantic believer in the ability to create one’s own truth. It was Kissinger’s relativist philosophy of history, Grandin argues, which has been his “chief contribution to American militarism” and “restoring the imperial presidency.” The book gives this aspect of Kissinger’s thought the thorough investigation it deserves.[...]

This worldview didn’t distinguish between “good” and “bad.” In a 1953 Harvard seminar, Kissinger tellingly “used Kantian existentialism (the idea that human beings are radically free) to undermine Kantian morality. ‘We can hardly insist,’ he said, ‘on both our freedom and on the necessity of our values.’” [...]

Managing perception underpinned Kissinger’s call to develop “credible threats” (preferring smaller tactical nuclear weapons over the all-annihilating bombs) and to make the enemy believe in our ferocity through “savage” actions, well-timed small wars, and saturation bombing. “Secrecy and spectacle,” Grandin notes, “the covert and the overt,” describe Kissinger’s true legacy and “have come to comprise a unified form of modern imperial power.”

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openDemocracy: Prosecuting ISIS crimes against women and LGBTIQ people would set a crucial precedent

War-time abuses against people who are marginalised within their societies are rarely documented. As a result, such violations are excluded from human rights discourse and from justice processes. In effect, they are left out of history.

For this reason, Iraqi activists, at great personal risk, have been documenting such crimes committed by ISIS but also by Iraqi government forces, and other militias. They have preserved critical information about perpetrators and larger criminal networks. Many have also provided shelter and safe passage to those at imminent risk of sexual slavery or murder. [...]

Knowledge of egregious crimes committed against women and perceived or actual LGBTIQ persons, for transgressing gender norms during an armed conflict, is not new. But this is the first time the world has seen this kind of robust documentation of such crimes. The petition currently before the ICC therefore offers a new opportunity to challenge this type of violence.

At the world’s first international criminal prosecutions in Nuremberg, Germany, rape and sexual slavery of women and torture of LGBTIQ persons were acknowledged but never prosecuted. It was only in the 1990s, with the ICC’s creation, that gender-based forms of violence were first recognised as violations of international law.

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Bloomberg: This Strategic Corner of Europe Is Pushing Hard to Join the Core

Germany, still smarting after 10 years fighting the Greece-triggered debt crisis, is helping apply the brake to Bulgaria’s euro aspirations while the Netherlands, home of a strong anti-immigration party, and France, which has suffered high-profile terrorist attacks in recent years, are among the EU countries acting as a check on any Schengen enlargement, according to officials in Brussels, Berlin and Sofia who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [...]

Bulgaria, which is planning a bid to join the exchange-rate regime known as ERM-2 that’s part of the road to euro accession, ticks all the economic boxes. It’s national currency, the lev, is already pegged to the euro; public debt is well below both the euro area’s average and the cap set in the EU rulebook; and the nation is running a budget surplus, comfortably far from the European limit for deficits of 3 percent of gross domestic product. [...]

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in September that Bulgaria, along with Romania, should become part of Schengen “immediately” because they met all the technical requirements. Bulgaria’s Zaharieva said that the country has been ready to join Schengen “for many years” and that “this double standard should not exist.”  [...]

Other officials point to Bulgaria’s level of corruption -- the worst in the EU, according to Transparency International. They say the euro area must look beyond hard economic criteria to the strength of national institutions when considering opening the door to new members.

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The Guardian: Rest assured, when Brexit bombs, it won’t be the fault of the Tory right

Patriots who shout about their love of country daily announce their hatred of every British principle that might constrain them. The rule of law and sovereignty of parliament? The Mail echoed every totalitarian movement since the Jacobins and denounced judges as “enemies of the people” for ruling that Brexit couldn’t be triggered without the approval of parliament. Academic freedom? A government whip demanded universities tell him what lecturers were teaching about Brexit. The right of MPs to follow their conscience? Liberal Tories received death threats after the Telegraph called them “mutineers” for not obeying orders and thinking for themselves. Now the civil service is having its ethics besmirched and neutrality threatened. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker accused it of plotting to undermine Brexit by producing needlessly pessimistic forecasts. The lie was so demonstrably false even Baker had to apologise. Tellingly, Rees-Mogg did not. Unnervingly, he may be our next prime minister. [...]

Far from holding back the growth of extremism, our leaders encourage it. The received wisdom holds that Theresa May does not know what she wants from Brexit. As my colleague Rafael Behr says, Mrs May has told us exactly what she wants. She wants Britain to walk away from the EU, its single market, customs union and courts, while retaining privileged access to its markets. The trouble with what she wants is not that she does not know it but that it’s impossible to achieve. [...]

For all the complacency, cowardice still comes at a price – even in Britain. The cowardice of May and Corbyn is preparing the ground for a nationalist reaction to Brexit’s inevitable disappointment. Millions will find they can’t have it all and look for someone to blame. It is not alarmist to imagine a rightwing government deflecting attention from its own culpability and using conspiracy theory to justify attacks on the independence of the judiciary, civil service and BBC. A far-left government would be as eager to assault all three and replace neutral men and women with forelock-tugging ideologues. No one, indeed, should be more grateful to Rees-Mogg and the Daily Mail than John McDonnell. They are providing the ammunition he may reach for in office. 

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Quartz: When it comes to nutritional value, one plant-based “milk” stands out

New research, published in the Journal of Food Science and Technology, compares the nutritional values of four unsweetened plant-based milk products and conventional cow’s milk. The study concludes that cow’s milk beats all the alternatives—but among the substitutes, soy milk was the clear winner. [...]

While acknowledging that each beverage has pros and cons, the researchers concluded that conventional cows milk packed a more well-rounded nutritional punch than any of the other drinks. Coconut milk—which lacks any protein at all—came in last. [...]

Whatever the reason, the data show many people are moving away from drinking milk. In the US, for example, per capita consumption of conventional cow’s milk has dropped precipitously over the last four decades—the government estimates by as much as 35%.

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Al Jazeera: Nigeria migrants who escaped Libya restart their lives

Joshua, 32, is one of the 6,000 Nigerian migrants the International Organization for Migration (IOM) repatriated to Nigeria on a chartered flight from Libya after reports of endemic abuse and modern-day slavery. [...]

Regardless of their status - either as economic migrants or victims of the dangerous trafficking business - these migrants are all escaping grinding poverty and a high rate of unemployment, which push irregular migration across the Sahara to Libya.

A recent report from Nigeria's Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said about 16 million people out of a total active labour force of 85 million were unemployed in the third quarter of 2017. [...]

In Nigeria, it was launched in May 2017 with the aim of helping stranded migrants in Libya. As part of the reintegration and support programme, IOM organised a workshop on business skills and cooperatives for returned migrants in Lagos state. Returnees were invited to Lagos and lodged in a hotel for the four-day training course.

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