“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Look around you folks, at what this Trump 2.0 with help by Elon Musk is doing to our nation and the working stiffs who make up 99+ % of us. This is the great upheaval for Capitalism on Steroids! Just the plan to cut Medicaid funding is enough to scurry us all to the poorhouse. How many MAGA  supporters of Trump and Musk will be affected by these cuts? All those working stiff and retired working stiff seniors will one day need to enter a nursing home or assisted living, and the money is not there to aid them… while Trump’s billionaire and mega millionaire friends and supporters get more tax breaks… it would be too late by then.

When our drinking water becomes even more leaded and putrid by industrial wastes and poisons, there will no EPA to soothe us. When schools are forbidden to teach about the evils of American slavery, replaced in the curriculum by teaching about The Gulf of America… we are done for. When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is replaced by The Center for Freedom and Liberty, better put on those N-95 masks folks. When the Trump-Musk tariffs see massive boycotts on American exports by various nations worldwide, who will finally stop this financial bleeding of working stiffs and poor?

As with Scrooge isn’t it funny how the Super Rich, who never had to worry about enough money for housing or food and medicine, love to speak down to us all? The ‘ arrogance of indigence’ becomes deafening. Watch the great Norman Jewison 1975 film Rollerball  and see what can happen when Corporations control us… completely! In the 1976 Sidney Lumet classic film Network the big cheese, Jensen of the media giant, tells it straight to Howard Beale, the radical newscaster: “There is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today!”

Wouldn’t it be great if next Christmas ( or much sooner) those Ghosts of Christmas come to visit Trump and Musk as they sleep? Hope springs eternal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.

In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?

B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide.

In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?   

Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

Whose “foreign subversion”?            

B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state     

Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

• Originally published by Informed Comment.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Steinbock.

Yahweh gave Palestine to the Jews in perpetuity: thus the story goes in the ancient literature of the Hebrews as recorded some 2,500 years ago in Genesis. Why would the Palestinians refuse to handover their country to the ‘original’ Ashkenazi title-holders to Palestine: if not for their hatred of Jews – if not for their inveterate hatred of Jews? Is there be any merit to this accusation? Could it be that in fact, this accusation is a smear – one instance of the weaponization of antisemitism – employed by Zionist Jews to malign their Palestinian victims? Indeed, this smear is hurled at anyone with the temerity to disagree with the narrative that Zionist Jews have constructed to justify their European exclusionary settler-colonialism in Palestine, now ongoing for more than a century.

It is as if the Whites in the United States were to accuse the Blacks of anti-white racism whenever they demanded their human rights. It appears that the Whites in the USA have not thought to be this creative when defending their apartheid, their exclusion of Blacks from the rights of citizenship. That is not to say that they have not been nearly as creative in other ways.

Consider a simple test to discover where the truth might lie in this matter, with the Jewish accusers or the Palestinians accused? Imagine a replay of the history of Palestine starting with the announcement of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917.

In this infamous Declaration – actually a letter written by one British Lord, Sir Arthur Balfour, to another British Lord, Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent member of the Rothschild banking family in Britain. In this letter, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary – tersely and artfully – conveyed the British government’s commitment to create a “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In other words, the British Empire would use all the authority at its disposal to enable European Jewish Zionists to create a Jewish colonial-settler state in Palestine.

Soon after the Balfour Declaration, European Jews began arriving in Palestine, under the military protection of the British colonial government in Palestine. Over the next thirty-one years, these Jewish colonial-settlers – drawn almost entirely from Europe – built the political, social, administrative and military infrastructure of an exclusionary Jewish state in Palestine – one that rigorously excluded Palestinians – with the fullest support and cooperation of its British colonial government.

When the Palestinians organized to resist the settler-colonization of their lands, the British colonialists were ready to use brutal force against them. Starting in 1936, as the resistance gained momentum, the British responded with blunt and brutal force. They made mass arrests of Palestinians, incarcerating them in concentration camps without trial; they demolished homes and villages suspected of supporting the resistance; and clamped curfews on villages and cities to disrupt the movement of Palestinian fighters. By the time the Palestinians resistance was crushed in 1939, nearly all the leaders of the resistance had been executed – often staged as public spectacles – sentenced to long prison terms or exiled. In other words, the British had created the conditions for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Jewish colons.

In 1947, the Ashkenazi Jewish colons began to employ their superior societal, state and military power to initiate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. By the end of 1948, they had captured 78 percent of mandatory Palestine; simultaneously, the Jewish military and militia perpetrated dozens. of massacres to expel 80 percent of the Palestinians from the lands conquered for the Jewish state. Israel banned the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes inside Israel, and those attempting to return were repulsed with deadly force.

Of the Palestinians who remained inside Israel, many lost their homes, agricultural lands and businesses. In addition, all were placed under military rule that would not be lifted until December 1966. After military rule ended, these Palestinians have lived under a variety of restrictions that remain in force to this day. Israel has been an apartheid society since its inception, with two sets of laws, one for Jewish colons and another for Palestinians.

In a mere thirty-one years, then, the European Jewish colons had created a Jewish state in Palestine after ethnically cleansing more than half its population, a unique achievement in the history of settler colonialism. In June 1967, Israel conquered the rest of Palestine – East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and the West Bank – while also expelling another 200,000 Palestinians from these areas.[1]

All the other European colonial-settlers in the Americas, Oceania and Southern Africa had taken centuries to create their own state, something the Jewish colons in Palestine achieved in a mere thirty-one years. In addition, the Jewish colons achieved this without a natural ‘mother country.’ How did a tiny, hated, weak and persecuted minority manage to achieve this miracle?

In our replay of this history, we will not change any of the events of this history of the settler-colonization of Palestine. We will only change the identity of the colons; we will replace the European Jewish settler-colonists with Penguin settler-colonists from Antarctica. These Penguins too will enter Palestine to establish an exclusionary Penguin settler-colonial state after expelling 80 percent of the Palestinians from 78 percent of Palestine. In other words, the Jews and Penguins do not differ in their aims, methods or achievements as
colonial-settlers in Palestine. They differ only in their identity: one group consists of Jews – at first overwhelmingly from Europe – another consists of Penguins from Antarctica.

If Palestinian opposition to the Zionist project was motivated by their antisemitism or prior hatred of Jews – then we should expect them to react differently to an identical settler-colonial project, now undertaken by Penguins from Antarctica. The Palestinian reaction has to be different because the Penguins are not Jews, and no one could accuse the Palestinians of antipenguinism, or an ancient hatred of Penguins because of their Penguin identity.

No Orientalists – Jewish, Christian, or secular: English, French or German – have accused Islam, the Qur’an, Prophet Muhammad, Muslim rulers, Muslim theologians, Muslim poets – Hafiz, Rumi, Omar Khayyam – Muslim philosophers – Al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes – of teaching the Muslims to hate the Penguins.

Simply stated, the Palestinians could not have brought a prior anti-Penguinism to their encounter with the Penguin settlers-colonists in Palestine. Without prior hatred of Penguins, therefore – using the logic of the Zionists – we can expect the Palestinians to welcome the Penguin settlers who begin arriving after November 1917. Since the Palestinians not infected with anti-Penguinism, they would not object to their dispossession by the Penguins.

Indeed, if the Penguin settlers could cite ancient Penguin could cite chapter and verse from their ancient scriptures to prove that a feathered Yahweh, some 5000 years ago, had awarded Palestine in perpetuity to the progeny of a Penguin Abraham and Jacob, we might expect the Palestinians to honor the feathered Yahweh’s pledge, since there is only one God, whether he reveals himself to Penguins, Jews, Arabs, Ostriches or Kangaroos. We might even expect the most devout Muslims among the Palestinians to insist on serving the divinely chosen Penguins as their slaves in perpetuity.

However, we would be sorely disappointed in these expectations. Once we grant the Palestinians their humanity – and we have to, willingly or not – surely they will oppose the Penguin settler-colonists – as they had resisted the Jewish settlers-colonists – but not because of any prior hatred of their Penguin identity. The Palestinians would oppose the Penguin settlers because of what they must do to them as exclusionary settler-colonists. Like their Jewish counterparts, they too will use terror to ethnically cleanse them, and establish an exclusionary Penguin settler-colonial state in Palestine.

In other words, the Palestinians will oppose the Penguins because they have arrived in their land with the same intentions as the Zionist Jews. Notwithstanding their disparate identities, both are exclusionary settler-colonists entering Palestine under the military protection of a British colonial government. Regardless of why the Jews or Penguins may have launched their exclusionary settler-colonial project, regardless of who they are, both will use terror to expel the Palestinians from their lands. Since the Palestinians are humans, as human as the Jews, no more and no less, their human instincts of self-preservation, their human pride in their history and culture, their human love for their homes and their children will persuade them to oppose both the Jewish and Penguin colonial project. Indeed, they have the right and moral obligation to resist settler-colonialism, no matter who the colons are, no matter the promises the deities may have made to the colons, no matter the national mythologies they believe or pretend to believe in.

We may now summarize the argument of this essay. Since an exclusionary settler-colonialism seeks the total or near total erasure of another people, the natural instinct for self-preservation (common to all forms of life) will propel its victims to resist and repel the settlers. The victims’ instinct for self-preservation is not predicated on any prior hatred towards the settler-colonists; their present revulsion over the past and ongoing actions of the colons will suffice to activate their instinct of self-preservation. In other words, the Palestinians resisted Zionism because it sought their erasure as a people, not because the people who sought their erasure were Jews, real or fictive descendants of the Hebrews.

One has to conclude that Zionist accusation of antisemitism against Palestinians is based on the premise that the latter do not possess the instinct for self-preservation. In the Zionist narrative, the Palestinians opposed Zionists not because they were opposed to their own erasure, but because this erasure would be effected by the hated Jews. They would have welcomed their own erasure if only this were to be effected by any other people – Yemenis, Vietnamese, Nepalese or Australian Aboriginals – or any other species – Penguins, Kangaroos, Koala Bears or Dolphins.

Notwithstanding the pretext of Zionism – claiming that the European Jews were reclaiming their divine patrimony – the mostly secular Zionist leaders must have understood that this was a cover for their exclusionary settler-colonial project. The white settlers who effected the erasure of native Americans also sought cover for their slaughter in divine sources. Many of them thought of themselves as the new chosen race, and of America as their promised land. Other white settlers in North America spoke of their manifest destiny: this was part of God’s plan to create a new freer, Christian society in a new land.

The Jewish Zionists owe their success to brute force, not originally their own, but the brute force of antisemitic Western imperialist powers. This is not to suggest that the results of brute force cannot endure. I will claim exemption from such naïvet&eacute. No doubt, the Jewish Zionists were inspired by the many successful European colonial-settler states in the Americas and Oceania. There were many failures too. I am thinking of the many European settler-colonies in North Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa that were dismantled in the second half of the twentieth century. There were also two settler-colonial states that belong in this category: South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

Certainly, history will decide whether Zionism belongs in the first or second category of settler-colonialisms, not time that is measured in years or decades, but historical time that is witness to the birth and death of hundreds of states.

Unfortunately, it may be the case – and I may be wrong about this – that the pioneers of Zionism were not thinking of historical time. Smart as they were, they may have been misled by their own recent successes and by their envy of European nation states.

Notes

1. Israel also captured the Golan Heights and the Sinai, territories belonging respectively to Syria and Egypt.

M. Shahid Alam is professor emeritus of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of two books of poetry: Intimations of Ghalib (Orison Books, 2018) and Yardstick of Life (KDP, 2024). He may be reached at moc.oohaynull@06720malaqla.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by M. Shahid Alam.

When I’m brewing just for myself or with another person, I usually go for the V60, a manual pour-over method. It’s always been my favorite home brewing technique. It doesn’t yield the most coffee, so it’s not great for impressing a crowd, but it’s perfect for small batches. I use a bleached paper filter because it doesn’t leave any extra flavors behind. I find that metal filters can sometimes give the coffee a metallic taste, which can really throw off the brew, and unbleached filters can leave a slight papery flavor. For the setup, I use a temperature-controlled gooseneck kettle and my own grinder.

Do you remember when you first had a “good” coffee?

It was in Edmonton, Alberta. A couple of friends took me to Transcend at the original Garneau location. I think I had a cappuccino or something, and everyone I was with was like, “This is the spot; this is the best coffee.” I didn’t have a frame of reference then, but it completely rewired my brain. I applied for a job there during that visit because I had just moved to Edmonton and needed work. I was hired almost on the spot.

How old were you?

18 or 19.

Would you say that was the beginning of your career?

Definitely. I had just dropped out of university and it wasn’t until I had the 60 hours of one-on-one training that things really clicked. Once I started, I realized, Wow, I’m actually really good at this. I had a strong palate, my retro-nasal senses were on point, and I picked things up quickly.

Does having a strong palate apply to anything else in your life?

Nothing professional, but I’m a big perfume guy. Some people are better tasters and some people are better smellers.

What does it mean to have a good palate?

For me, a well-developed palate can isolate the different flavors, aromas, and textures at play. This can be tricky with coffee, especially if you’re not a regular drinker or not particularly intentional about it. In North America, many people tend to prefer coffee that tastes nutty or chocolatey, whereas something like a naturally processed Ethiopian coffee is very aromatic and bold—it can hit you with flavors like blackberries and Jolly Ranchers. If you build your palate without assumptions, you can sip the coffee and ask yourself, “What else am I tasting?” Often, it’s not immediately obvious. It’s about exploring what else you can detect in the cup.

You work in coffee education. Can you explain what being a trainer entails?

I work as a management consultant and educator for Variety Coffee Roasters in New York. Specifically, for education, I’m responsible for building and executing the coffee program for their retail staff across eight cafes. I redesigned their education program, breaking it into modules. The first module is all about assessing the individual’s experience with coffee. If someone is new to coffee, it will start with a basic PowerPoint covering the fundamentals, like how coffee is a seed inside a cherry, followed by a full menu cupping. The second module focuses on milk-based drinks, including milk steaming and latte art. No one can work in the cafes until they’ve passed the milk training session. The final two modules are all about espresso dialing from scratch.

Before joining Variety, I had been working in coffee education on a consulting basis, helping small restaurants and cafes develop their own sustainable coffee programs. I designed an espresso training cheat sheet, a key part of my consulting. When I joined Variety, I adapted it to their program, and it worked so well that I eventually patented it. This method has allowed me to train people to dial in espresso to a high standard in just a few hours. When dialing espresso, I rely on instinct rather than a clear cause-and-effect process. I just know what to do, but teaching that kind of instinct to others has been one of the biggest challenges in my role as a trainer.

You started your own company recently, Hot Stuff, and you work with Nordic light roast coffee. Can you explain what constitutes a light roast and how you achieve that flavor?

A good way to compare roasts is through sugar: light roasts are like white sugar, medium roasts are like caramel, and dark roasts are like molasses. If you think of fruitier, more expressive coffees you’ve had, they’re likely light roasts. During roasting, after the drying phase and Maillard reaction, there’s a point called the first crack. The first crack is a chemical change when the green coffee stops absorbing heat, then expels it. At this stage, all the moisture is gone, and when the coffee expels the heat, it’s similar to popcorn popping. This is when the coffee’s pores open up, and the sugars inside begin to cook. Green coffee is full of sugar, gas, and oil. The oil and sugars carry the coffee’s natural flavor.

Depending on the coffee’s origin, the flavor can vary widely. African coffees tend to be fruity and tea-like. In contrast, Latin American coffees often have notes of stone fruit, nuts, caramel, and chocolate—flavors that North Americans might associate with more traditional profiles, even though all coffee originates from Ethiopia. For lighter roasts, the goal is to preserve these flavors while ensuring the sugar is developed enough to avoid grassy or underdeveloped tastes. In a light roast, you aim to stop the process just after it has developed enough to avoid those underdeveloped qualities, before the flavors begin to neutralize as the sugars cook… You need to learn how to listen to the coffee and figure out what it wants.

And you’re roasting the coffee yourself?

Yes. It’s a one-person business, but I hired a consultant to help me get started. Coffee roasting is an exclusive field, especially if you’re not a dude, so I brought in a friend who had roasted for Stumptown Roasters for years. Though I had years of specialty experience, he was the only one willing to teach me to roast.

We roast out of my workplace, Variety. I just asked the owner, “Hey, can Patrick and I rent the roastery on weekends for this project I’m working on?” and he said, “You do enough for me, just use it.” It was insanely generous because that saved me thousands and thousands of dollars. I can also store my green coffee there, which is crazy. The reason why most people don’t learn how to roast coffee is because it’s prohibitively expensive.

It feels like there’s so much of you in this project. You’ve been pursuing this since your teenage years, co-owned a café in Montréal for years, worked at Variety, and now launched this Nordic-inspired business. Given that you’re Nordic yourself, it all feels incredibly personal and reflective of who you are. Was that intentional?

I feel like with Hot Stuff, I realized I wanted to do my own thing, and I want to do it the way that I like to do it. I also want it to be less serious! I want someone to be able to walk into a cafe without being scared about asking a stupid question. I want someone trying a fruity espresso to be like, “Why does this taste like this?”

Last year, I hosted a public coffee cupping in my hometown in Saskatchewan, and a huge crowd showed up. I encouraged everyone to dive deeper into tasting coffee. By the end, people were genuinely excited about what they had learned. Even my mom joined in. One coffee was on the table with a noticeable sour defect, and she immediately picked up on it, saying, “This tastes like when a peanut starts to go a little sour.” I was amazed at how quickly she identified it. It made me realize that people inherently know how to taste; they’ve just never been given the opportunity to engage with coffee beyond its typical, commodity-focused perspective.

What do you feel you still have to learn?

I want to deepen my understanding of coffee production and agronomy because they’re incredibly fascinating. With climate change, we’re seeing significant shifts in how and where coffee is grown. Some countries are experiencing frost for the first time, leading to increased defects and challenges in production. Their coffee economies are struggling as a result. Meanwhile, other regions are seeing hotter climates that, surprisingly, are yielding more unique and exciting coffees. It’s been fascinating to observe these changes over the years. In the 11 or 12 years I’ve been in the industry, I’ve noticed how much Kenyan coffee, for example, has evolved in flavor compared to a decade ago.

At the same time, growing coffee is becoming increasingly difficult and costly, which impacts both producers and consumers. As coffee becomes more expensive, I believe it’s the roaster’s responsibility to educate consumers. It’s important to explain why their coffee costs $6—whether it’s due to climate challenges, labour conditions, or production costs—not simply because the roaster wants to charge a premium.

We also can’t ignore the fact that the coffee industry has deep roots in exploitation and slavery. As a coffee company, there’s a responsibility not just to help people enjoy coffee more but also to share the stories behind it—highlighting the producers, the struggles their countries face, and the broader context of what’s happening in the industry.

What does the future hold for Hot Stuff?

When I eventually open a brick-and-mortar roastery, my goal is to establish a program to teach people how to roast coffee, specifically aiming to support marginalized communities. The biggest challenges in learning how to roast coffee are often access-related. First, finding someone willing to teach you the craft can be difficult. As an educator, I’m passionate about filling that gap. But beyond that, sourcing and purchasing green coffee is incredibly challenging, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the process. Then there’s the question of where to store it and where to roast. My vision for the roastery is to address these hurdles and create a supportive environment where people can learn and grow.

I want to create a scholarship program based on a circular economy. The idea is to use still-fresh tasting, past-crop coffee to teach roasting. Participants—two or three at a time—would get meaningful, hands-on experience, not just a quick two-hour session. The coffee they roast would be bagged separately as “scholarship coffee” and sold at a lower price, with revenue reinvested into the program to buy more green coffee and support future participants. The goal is to make this education free and sustainable, reducing waste by repurposing coffee that might otherwise go unsold. There’s a huge demand for roasting education, especially among women and marginalized groups… I hope to create a space where aspiring roasters can learn without the financial burden or logistical challenges. We’ll see who shows up for it!

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

A former National Party Member of Parliament says his late party looked “like dickheads” not supporting the first reading of a bill that would restore New Zealand citizenship to a group of Samoans and is hoping they will change tune.

Anae Arthur Anae told RNZ Pacific it “was outright racism” that National did not back Green Party Member of Parliament Teanau Tuiono’s Restoring Citizenship Removed by Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill.

National was the only party to not support it, citing “legal complexity” as the issue.

Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti declined an interview with RNZ Pacific.

In 1982, the Privy Council ruled that because those born in Western Samoa were treated by New Zealand law as “natural-born British subjects”, they were entitled to New Zealand citizenship when it was first created in 1948.

However, the National Party-led government under Robert Muldoon took that away with the Western Samoa Citizenship Act 1982, effectively overturning the Privy Council ruling.

Tuiono’s bill aims to restore the right of citizenship to those who had it removed.

25,000 submissions
Public submissions have closed and the Governance and Administration Committee received almost 25,000 submissions.

NZ First leader Winston Peters has told Pacific Media Network he intended to continue to back it, if he does, it will likely become law.

Anae said if National continued to “slag it” during the process they would keep making themselves look stupid.

“Not only in New Zealand but internationally and on the human rights issues. They have put themselves in a serious situation here and they really have to get this right.

“I’m hoping and praying that they will see the light and say, ‘look, enough is enough, we’ve got to sort this thing out now’.”

Anae said the world had grown out of the racism he knew as a child and it was time for New Zealand to follow suit.

“Who would have ever imagined the day when the key positions in the UK of Prime Minister, Mayor of London, all senior positions across the Great Britain, would be held by the children of migrants.

“Time has changed, we’ve got to wake up to it.”

Hearings to begin
Hearings will be held in-person and on Zoom in Wellington on Monday, Wednesday and  July 9.

There will also be hearings held in South Auckland on July 1.

Anae said about 10,000 of the submissions came from Samoa and there was a request for a hearing to be held there also.

“Everybody in Parliament right now is under huge pressure with the budget discussions that have been going on, so I do have my sympathies understanding the situation.

“But at the same time this thing is one of the most important thing in the lives of Samoan people and we want it to be treated that way.”

He said almost all the public submissions would be in support of the bill. He said in Samoa, where he was three weeks ago, the support was unanimous.

But he said Samoa’s government was being diplomatic.

‘Sitting on fence’
“They do not want to upset New Zealand in any way by seeing to be siding with this and they’re sitting on the fence.”

Tuiono said it was great to see the commitment from NZ First but because it was politics, he was reluctant to feel too confident his bill would be eventually turned into law.

“There’s always things that will need to be ironed out so the role for us as members participating in the select committee is to find all of those bits and pieces and work across the Parliament with different political parties.”

Tuiono said most of the discussion on the bill was around whether citizenship was extended to the descendants of the group and how many people would be entitled to it.

“That seems to be where most of the questions seem to be coming from but this is what we should be doing as part of the select committee process, get some certainty on that from the officials.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

I had this epiphany about the word deadline–it’s a word we use so regularly. After a while I was like, wait a minute, dead line. You cannot do anything more after this point, you can’t create anymore, there’s no more time to tinker with it, that’s just it. I think of it with our lives as well, the terminus point, which means that up until then, we can do all the tinkering we want to and need to, [thinking of] our lives also as art, right? Life is a creation. I’m in a creative process all the time, and my deadline is going to be my actual death. So I can tinker and tinker and tinker until I get it as perfected for me as possible until I reach that deadline.

When I noticed [that about] the word, it blew me away. I was like, I’ve been saying this for my entire English speaking life, and never paid attention to what it was saying. But within it holds its truth, “the end.”

I saved the epilogue of your book for my oil change this morning. As I waited, court TV played in one corner of the room, someone scratched a lotto ticket in the other, a woman came in with a flat and the mechanic said, “I hope your day gets better.” The waiting scene was mundane but also sort of theatrical. And at the end of your book, while sitting there, I felt like crying and cheering, a testament to how let in I felt as a reader. What was the process of writing and getting to the end like for you?

First of all, you paint such a wonderful scene and I hope that people are taking it in in the middle of life, life, life happening, you know? It’s always stunning for me to hear that somebody got it, because I was just in some room by myself looking at something beautiful for a while, click, clack, clacking, pouring my heart out, and now people are reading it and they’re like, “I got it.” And I’m like, what? It’s so cool.

[Writing the book] was really tricky because I don’t consider myself a writer at all. I haven’t done anything creative before, other than Instagram posts, but I’ve been writing in journals since I was 16, so I have that. I’m used to expressing myself through writing, but very privately for myself. So sitting down to write a book felt like a mountain to climb. Have you played Tetris on the internet? All those little blocks, when you make the wrong one, they just go so fast and you’re like, “No.” It was like that, but with the words, so they came out in a fury, which made it not seem like a mountain to climb. Then it became about moving things around, and making sure it felt like it made sense.

Thinking about putting things out into the world, I know many of us struggle with conflating self-worth with productivity.

I got hit by this really hard when I had the flu a couple years ago, and I was like, oh my god, there’s all this time that I am wasting. All this time that I can’t spend making things or doing things. I’m just recovering. I found myself getting up and trying to clean the house if it had gotten too dirty, or order some food. I even tried to walk to the grocery store. This is after three days of the flu–I had a mask on—but I walked maybe a block and a half, and I had to call Uber to take me back home. Girl, sit down. Sit down. Sit down. How resistant we are to the idea of rest and recovery and allowing ourselves a little bit of space and grace just to be and to divorce ourselves from producing as a testament to who we are in the world and our place in the world and our value.

I had a nice, juicy conversation with my niece who’s now 14, the niece in the book. She’s starting to think about ideas of success and what that means, and so much of it is based on what she does. She would be successful if she made this, if she did this, if she did that. It’s also about people’s perception of what she created in the world as opposed to the type of person that she is. I have 31 years on her, but I realized that for a long time, my definition of success also was based on what I was able to create and do as opposed to just the type of person I was or how I felt in my life as opposed to any external, something that was tangible to market with. We live in a capitalistic society.

Absolutely. You’ve said that meditating on the fact that you are going to die one day helps you in your decision-making in the day-to-day. I know some may feel “Oh my god, thinking about the fact that I’m going to die is the thing that makes me feel like I can’t take a nap, take a break.”

When we think about it, not in the “Go, go, go, do, do, do” capitalistic way of productivity, but rather [in the way of] “Who am I being? What does it feel like to be in this body at this time?” it’s much easier to honor our necessity for rest.

Is there a typical day in your life?

Not anymore. Right now, I’m doing a lot of interviews and trying to find somebody to help me hang up all this artwork. We have an end-of-life training retreat that’s coming up, so a bunch of students are coming to Lake Arrowhead for six days where we’ll dive in. But [generally] it’s like you wake up in the morning, check to see what happened while you were sleeping, if clients are still alive or where somebody else is in the process, or I noticed often, too, that even my end-of-life consultation clients, the ones that have hired me just to help them complete their documents, they come to some big realizations about their lives, or the planning they want to share, so I check in on them, go visit somebody, talk to caregivers, eat some potato chips, eat some cake.

In the book you wrote, “change is the god we must bow to,” a nod to Octavia Butler. You seem to be someone who truly embraces change, in your line of work, certainly, but also how you’ve moved around so much in your formative years, your travel, your major career pivot from lawyer to death doula. What do you want to say about change?

It’s the imperative, right? We don’t have a choice in it and we must adapt. I find that the only thing that makes the process of dying a teensy bit simpler is adaptability. How hard we can flex that muscle of being like, “This is what’s happening now, this is where we are right now. How am I going to deal with what is in front of me as opposed to what I want it to be or what it used to be?”

During business, this comes up all the time. First of all, I am still so surprised that I’m running a business because I’m like, what the hell? I can’t keep my socks straight, let alone taxes and job descriptions. That aside, throughout it, there’s me that’s also had a change to adapt to running a business, had to adapt to everything about this part. Doing it publicly, writing the book, doing interviews, it’s really a shift.

Often when there is a change, there is some grief in it because something old is going and something new is coming. And sometimes we’re holding onto the old and we don’t want the new. Sometimes it requires us to grieve a little bit, or at least to acknowledge and to ritualize that a change has occurred. Yeah, I think that vow can be that ritual.

That’s beautiful. I also appreciate how you speak about the liminal space and how uncomfortable our western culture is with it, and what it means to sit with it in your work.

I love the liminal. The not knowing, the patience with the process. Don’t get me wrong, I get frustrated with it, too. I just moved into this house and I can’t find a handy person to help me do some of this stuff, so all the artwork is still on the floor, and I’m like, “Oh my god.” But also, there’s a process. It’s always a process. And if I can just be with where I am right now, between the old house and set up in the new house, there’s pure potential there. Right now, nothing is on the walls, it could be anything.

It could be anything. I love that. I recently moved too, and I feel that extra.

Are there things on your walls?

A couple of things, but for a long time there were no things because they were in a storage unit, a very liminal space.

That’s such a liminal space. Hey, is most the stuff on your walls your stuff, or is it other people’s stuff?

Other people’s stuff. A favorite part of the book was getting to know glimpses of your clients through you. I felt your sense of reverence for them and their process at the end of their lives.

It’s such an honor. It’s hard not to fall in love with my clients because I tend toward the folks that are willing to be vulnerable and intimate and messy right off the bat. That is that type of space. There are clients that put up a front for a while, but at some point it crumbles down and they show me who they really are. So when I get to be with them in that way, it really fills me. It makes me love humans and humankind and being alive a little bit more. Obviously, it’s sad when they die. It’s part of the job.

Something I’ve been thinking about for the past few years is the tragedy of a lot of lives leaving at the same time, in the event of a pandemic, war, genocide.

So much of the work is about honoring the lived experience and creating an ideal death for folks. Or supporting them in having the most ideal death under the circumstances. So when death doesn’t occur that way, it’s devastating. Like in the early days of the pandemic, in the toilet paper hoarding days, the Tiger King days, I was out of my mind because I couldn’t do the thing that I so desperately wanted to do, and it helped me de-center myself from what occurs for other people. It is hard to sit with so much violent and painful and death that just feels really wrong, death that feels like people shouldn’t be dying this way. At the same time, [acknowledging] the how of people dying is important. How they lived up until then is also very, very important. Often we get stuck in this idea of the good death versus the bad death.

Violent death, genocide, all that is really, really bad death. At the same time, if we take away the value judgment, then death just is, which it is for everybody. I can still live a really good life, I can still feel embodied and empowered and live according to my values, and gratefully for me, despite all of it—call it the world, being a Black woman–I can still live and feel good about the life that I’ve led. That, to me, ultimately makes a good death regardless of how the death actually occurs.

It’s tough. It’s tough. My heart is broken all the time, but I’ve also gotten really used to having a broken heart by virtue of doing this work. My work is informed by my broken heart, and that hasn’t changed. It’s just, how to honor how people are dying, is tricky.

Thank you for asking about genocide because people are really shying away from it now. It’s intense. It’s really intense. I feel like I had to learn very early to create a little bit of separation, otherwise I just went under. Right now it feels to be a time where we’re really calling attention to this one thing that’s happening, but I’ve also been feeling it my entire life. Coming from Ghana, there was violence there, there was colonization there, it is a violently colonized country, [there are] people snatched and raped and tortured and murdered from my entire bloodline in history. So I’ve had to learn how to be able to get up and do my work while there are hundreds, thousands, millions of people dying under circumstances that I deem terribly, terribly unjust.

Thank you Alua. “My work is informed by my broken heart.” A beautiful sentence.

Always. I don’t know how else to be in the world.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Annie Bielski.

I had this epiphany about the word deadline–it’s a word we use so regularly. After a while I was like, wait a minute, dead line. You cannot do anything more after this point, you can’t create anymore, there’s no more time to tinker with it, that’s just it. I think of it with our lives as well, the terminus point, which means that up until then, we can do all the tinkering we want to and need to, [thinking of] our lives also as art, right? Life is a creation. I’m in a creative process all the time, and my deadline is going to be my actual death. So I can tinker and tinker and tinker until I get it as perfected for me as possible until I reach that deadline.

When I noticed [that about] the word, it blew me away. I was like, I’ve been saying this for my entire English speaking life, and never paid attention to what it was saying. But within it holds its truth, “the end.”

I saved the epilogue of your book for my oil change this morning. As I waited, court TV played in one corner of the room, someone scratched a lotto ticket in the other, a woman came in with a flat and the mechanic said, “I hope your day gets better.” The waiting scene was mundane but also sort of theatrical. And at the end of your book, while sitting there, I felt like crying and cheering, a testament to how let in I felt as a reader. What was the process of writing and getting to the end like for you?

First of all, you paint such a wonderful scene and I hope that people are taking it in in the middle of life, life, life happening, you know? It’s always stunning for me to hear that somebody got it, because I was just in some room by myself looking at something beautiful for a while, click, clack, clacking, pouring my heart out, and now people are reading it and they’re like, “I got it.” And I’m like, what? It’s so cool.

[Writing the book] was really tricky because I don’t consider myself a writer at all. I haven’t done anything creative before, other than Instagram posts, but I’ve been writing in journals since I was 16, so I have that. I’m used to expressing myself through writing, but very privately for myself. So sitting down to write a book felt like a mountain to climb. Have you played Tetris on the internet? All those little blocks, when you make the wrong one, they just go so fast and you’re like, “No.” It was like that, but with the words, so they came out in a fury, which made it not seem like a mountain to climb. Then it became about moving things around, and making sure it felt like it made sense.

Thinking about putting things out into the world, I know many of us struggle with conflating self-worth with productivity.

I got hit by this really hard when I had the flu a couple years ago, and I was like, oh my god, there’s all this time that I am wasting. All this time that I can’t spend making things or doing things. I’m just recovering. I found myself getting up and trying to clean the house if it had gotten too dirty, or order some food. I even tried to walk to the grocery store. This is after three days of the flu–I had a mask on—but I walked maybe a block and a half, and I had to call Uber to take me back home. Girl, sit down. Sit down. Sit down. How resistant we are to the idea of rest and recovery and allowing ourselves a little bit of space and grace just to be and to divorce ourselves from producing as a testament to who we are in the world and our place in the world and our value.

I had a nice, juicy conversation with my niece who’s now 14, the niece in the book. She’s starting to think about ideas of success and what that means, and so much of it is based on what she does. She would be successful if she made this, if she did this, if she did that. It’s also about people’s perception of what she created in the world as opposed to the type of person that she is. I have 31 years on her, but I realized that for a long time, my definition of success also was based on what I was able to create and do as opposed to just the type of person I was or how I felt in my life as opposed to any external, something that was tangible to market with. We live in a capitalistic society.

Absolutely. You’ve said that meditating on the fact that you are going to die one day helps you in your decision-making in the day-to-day. I know some may feel “Oh my god, thinking about the fact that I’m going to die is the thing that makes me feel like I can’t take a nap, take a break.”

When we think about it, not in the “Go, go, go, do, do, do” capitalistic way of productivity, but rather [in the way of] “Who am I being? What does it feel like to be in this body at this time?” it’s much easier to honor our necessity for rest.

Is there a typical day in your life?

Not anymore. Right now, I’m doing a lot of interviews and trying to find somebody to help me hang up all this artwork. We have an end-of-life training retreat that’s coming up, so a bunch of students are coming to Lake Arrowhead for six days where we’ll dive in. But [generally] it’s like you wake up in the morning, check to see what happened while you were sleeping, if clients are still alive or where somebody else is in the process, or I noticed often, too, that even my end-of-life consultation clients, the ones that have hired me just to help them complete their documents, they come to some big realizations about their lives, or the planning they want to share, so I check in on them, go visit somebody, talk to caregivers, eat some potato chips, eat some cake.

In the book you wrote, “change is the god we must bow to,” a nod to Octavia Butler. You seem to be someone who truly embraces change, in your line of work, certainly, but also how you’ve moved around so much in your formative years, your travel, your major career pivot from lawyer to death doula. What do you want to say about change?

It’s the imperative, right? We don’t have a choice in it and we must adapt. I find that the only thing that makes the process of dying a teensy bit simpler is adaptability. How hard we can flex that muscle of being like, “This is what’s happening now, this is where we are right now. How am I going to deal with what is in front of me as opposed to what I want it to be or what it used to be?”

During business, this comes up all the time. First of all, I am still so surprised that I’m running a business because I’m like, what the hell? I can’t keep my socks straight, let alone taxes and job descriptions. That aside, throughout it, there’s me that’s also had a change to adapt to running a business, had to adapt to everything about this part. Doing it publicly, writing the book, doing interviews, it’s really a shift.

Often when there is a change, there is some grief in it because something old is going and something new is coming. And sometimes we’re holding onto the old and we don’t want the new. Sometimes it requires us to grieve a little bit, or at least to acknowledge and to ritualize that a change has occurred. Yeah, I think that vow can be that ritual.

That’s beautiful. I also appreciate how you speak about the liminal space and how uncomfortable our western culture is with it, and what it means to sit with it in your work.

I love the liminal. The not knowing, the patience with the process. Don’t get me wrong, I get frustrated with it, too. I just moved into this house and I can’t find a handy person to help me do some of this stuff, so all the artwork is still on the floor, and I’m like, “Oh my god.” But also, there’s a process. It’s always a process. And if I can just be with where I am right now, between the old house and set up in the new house, there’s pure potential there. Right now, nothing is on the walls, it could be anything.

It could be anything. I love that. I recently moved too, and I feel that extra.

Are there things on your walls?

A couple of things, but for a long time there were no things because they were in a storage unit, a very liminal space.

That’s such a liminal space. Hey, is most the stuff on your walls your stuff, or is it other people’s stuff?

Other people’s stuff. A favorite part of the book was getting to know glimpses of your clients through you. I felt your sense of reverence for them and their process at the end of their lives.

It’s such an honor. It’s hard not to fall in love with my clients because I tend toward the folks that are willing to be vulnerable and intimate and messy right off the bat. That is that type of space. There are clients that put up a front for a while, but at some point it crumbles down and they show me who they really are. So when I get to be with them in that way, it really fills me. It makes me love humans and humankind and being alive a little bit more. Obviously, it’s sad when they die. It’s part of the job.

Something I’ve been thinking about for the past few years is the tragedy of a lot of lives leaving at the same time, in the event of a pandemic, war, genocide.

So much of the work is about honoring the lived experience and creating an ideal death for folks. Or supporting them in having the most ideal death under the circumstances. So when death doesn’t occur that way, it’s devastating. Like in the early days of the pandemic, in the toilet paper hoarding days, the Tiger King days, I was out of my mind because I couldn’t do the thing that I so desperately wanted to do, and it helped me de-center myself from what occurs for other people. It is hard to sit with so much violent and painful and death that just feels really wrong, death that feels like people shouldn’t be dying this way. At the same time, [acknowledging] the how of people dying is important. How they lived up until then is also very, very important. Often we get stuck in this idea of the good death versus the bad death.

Violent death, genocide, all that is really, really bad death. At the same time, if we take away the value judgment, then death just is, which it is for everybody. I can still live a really good life, I can still feel embodied and empowered and live according to my values, and gratefully for me, despite all of it—call it the world, being a Black woman–I can still live and feel good about the life that I’ve led. That, to me, ultimately makes a good death regardless of how the death actually occurs.

It’s tough. It’s tough. My heart is broken all the time, but I’ve also gotten really used to having a broken heart by virtue of doing this work. My work is informed by my broken heart, and that hasn’t changed. It’s just, how to honor how people are dying, is tricky.

Thank you for asking about genocide because people are really shying away from it now. It’s intense. It’s really intense. I feel like I had to learn very early to create a little bit of separation, otherwise I just went under. Right now it feels to be a time where we’re really calling attention to this one thing that’s happening, but I’ve also been feeling it my entire life. Coming from Ghana, there was violence there, there was colonization there, it is a violently colonized country, [there are] people snatched and raped and tortured and murdered from my entire bloodline in history. So I’ve had to learn how to be able to get up and do my work while there are hundreds, thousands, millions of people dying under circumstances that I deem terribly, terribly unjust.

Thank you Alua. “My work is informed by my broken heart.” A beautiful sentence.

Always. I don’t know how else to be in the world.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Annie Bielski.

Even though the land could not yet absorb sixteen million, nor even eight, enough could return… to prove that the enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”

— Ronald Storrs, Military Governor of Jerusalem 1917-20, commenting in 1937 on the rationale of the 1917 Balfour Declaration

Zionism is the continual attempt to fit a square into a circle.

— Lowkey, interviewed by Danny Haiphong 25 March 2024

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

— James Baldwin, 1979

Israel was always meant to be a bleeding sore, an unending source of conflict and hence an unending source of suffering. In creating Israel the British were following a policy of divide-and-rule to create an outpost as a way of projecting power into the Arab world and its oilfields. In practical terms British power could only be projected through the maintenance of immanent or actual armed hostility. The success of this strategy, as the baton was passed to the US empire, has caused the region to suffer 100 years of instability and strife while the Palestinians have suffered a long slow genocide of everyday brutality punctuated by massacres and outbreaks of resistance.

The British Empire did not create Israel in gratitude for Chaim Weizmann’s invention and development of synthetic acetone (a component of cordite) during World War I. The British Empire did not create Israel in gratitude for the financial assistance provided by the British branch of the Rothschild clan. I could go into detail on each case but it is unnecessary. We only need to remember one thing: the British Empire would never do anything out of gratitude. Nor, as I will illustrate in the course of this article, did it deign to honour promises it made in order to achieve its own gains. There are romantic notions of a British sense of honour in the official sphere but these are false – products of a robust cultural hegemony and propaganda system. The historical record instead shows that British foreign policy, and before that English foreign policy, has been unusually ruthless, callous, and dishonest.

In respectable discourse it is only possible to refer to British perfidy and US aggression when talking in the abstract or about matters of the distant past, but when talking of current events one must always assume a foundation of benevolence and criticise these countries for straying or being diverted from their true nature. As a rule, all aspects of British and US imperialism are treated as if they exist in an historical vacuum. Comparing British and US interventions with empires of the past is not the done thing. Comparing British and US interventions to their own past interventions is not the done thing. In the case of Palestine, even comparing British actions to their own simultaneous actions in other parts of the Middle East is not the done thing. This is exponential exceptionalism. Just because we are doing this thing it doesn’t mean that we do this sort of thing, and please don’t look at all the other times we have done this thing because it is just not who we are. Luckily it is acceptable at all times to claim that the tail wags the dog of empire, whatever that tail might be. In the case of Israel, existing anti-Semitic tropes about the influence of The Jews makes this all the easier.

Normally, instead of entertaining the possibility that the British and US empires have deliberately created and sustained a situation of endless conflict because it serves an obvious purpose, people are more inclined to blame the Israel Lobby in ways that seem to reflect an intellectual descent from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The power of the Israel lobby is real, but it exists at the sufferance of the Empire Complex. It is a tool for imperial elites to exert control over political representatives and civil society in order to constrain “democratic distemper”, that is why it came to exist (not because of the mysterious control Jews are imagined to exert over the noble but hapless Anglo-Saxons who have traditionally run the world). 

Even when people seek to avoid this anti-Semitism they find other ways to avoid suggesting that any Western wrongdoing is intentional. An interesting example is “Balfour: The Seeds of Discord” (the latest in the seemingly infinite series of Al Jazeera English documentaries about the Balfour Declaration). Avoiding the traditional discourse which suggests that Jews exert a seemingly mystical power that allows them to dictate to Great Powers, the documentary employs a more fashionable way of preserving exactly the same explanation of motive. Instead of Magical Jew Power being at fault, it all happened because people like Balfour and British PM David Lloyd George believed in Magical Jew Power (MJP) due to their yucky anti-Semitism. This is very convenient because you can keep the exact same explanation for the creation of Israel while not having to rely directly on anti-Semitic tropes.

Lloyd George, Balfour and others are said to have thought that the promise of a homeland would unite all Jews to unleash their MJP in aid of the Entente in the Great War. How do we know? Because they said so, and people like that don’t lie, do they? There is a bit of a problem though in that World War I was over before the British could do anything towards creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. According to this reasoning, then, the British incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate for Palestine because they had an irrational belief in monolithic Jewish power and conveniently ignored the fact that most Jews were not Zionists and many found the idea abhorrent and dangerous. At the same time it seems to have slipped their minds that they had already won the War that this was meant to help them win. 

I will have more to say about the Mandate later, but it is worth noting that a prominent expert on “Balfour: The Seeds of Discord” claims that the British were committed to Zionism because it was central to the legitimacy of the Palestine Mandate. This is wrong because the Mandate does not and cannot dispense with the rights of the Palestinian people, even though it is written tendentiously in order to give that impression. Moreover, it seems a little strange to choose a specific exceptional legitimating purpose for the Palestine Mandate when the British operated Mandates in Jordan and Iraq with no need for any such rationale. Yemenis might also raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that the British cared about such niceties given that South Yemen did not gain independence until 1967. 

“Balfour: The Seeds of Discord” mostly suggests that the British do not act, but only react. As is so often true, the British Empire, like the US Empire, is portrayed as unwitting. The moral failures are always those of ignorance and arrogance but never those of immoral intent. In 1883 John Seeley wrote, “we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Outside interests are used as pretexts by the imperialist parts of the establishment, led by the intelligence and military inside government in close intermingled accord with the arms, finance, and extractive industries. In this sense Zionists like Chaim Weizmann and the Rothschilds served the same purpose as US puppets during the Cold War who somehow caused the US to act in ways it did not want to. People such as Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Jose Napoleon Duarte, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, and many more have been cited as forcing or constraining US DoD or State Department actions, notwithstanding that they were dependent on the US and in many cases owed their power entirely to US intervention. The utility of the tactic is self-evident, even when it becomes ridiculous. Ahmed Chalabi, whose power and legitimacy were never more than a US fiction, had his supposed desires used as justifications for US policy. This was an effective distraction because it provided a focus of contention. Journalists and academics lap that stuff up and seem somehow incapable of looking beyond it at possible real causes for an empire’s behaviour, such as… I don’t know, say, the desire to control the most important strategic asset in human history (oil).

In a sane world it would be considered ridiculous to discuss 20th Century Middle Eastern history without reference to petroleum. In our world the near inverse is true. Right-wing people can make pithy aphorisms about oil to show their tough realism, but to actually connect that to an analysis of decision-making is considered heretical. Thus, for example, Paul Wolfowitz can explain the need for the Iraq invasion using the phrase “the country swims on a sea of oil”, but one cannot suggest that decisions were made on that basis. Almost everything else is on the table: humanitarianism, greed, stupidity, security concerns, racism, anti-racism, and, of course, the MJP of the Israel Lobby. One can say that things occurred because George W. Bush was a venal idiot, but it is unacceptable to base a detailed analysis on the notion that this lifelong oil man invaded and occupied Iraq to maintain US control of the global oil trade. Dubya Bush was the 4th generation product of a politically engaged dynasty of energy and finance aristocrats, his cabinet was also full of oil executives, and his own father had begun a genocidal assault and siege on Iraq. Despite these facts in orthodox analysis he cannot be said to have been rationally and intelligently motivated in his actions. This would lead one to conclude that he successfully carried out an intentionally genocidal strategy that increased US power in the world, and that is not allowed.   

Petroleum is equally central in relation to the birth of Israel – and equally unspeakable. To understand why the British wanted to create a permanent open wound of violence in the midst of the Arab world it is necessary to go back to 1895. John Fisher (who would go on to become an admiral, a peer of the realm, and the first person on record to use the abbreviation OMG) became convinced that the Royal Navy must transition its fleet away from coal and into petroleum as a fuel. This was a very hard sell as Britain had ready sources of coal but no oil. It took Fisher 10 years to make his case, but once he did the British were uniquely well positioned to lay claim to the oil they knew rightfully belonged to them (but which non-British people had the temerity to live on top of). At the time, you see, there were no known sources of oil on the extensive soil of the Empire. No problem, though – the British “sphere of influence” was as large as its acknowledged empire, and it turned its baleful eye upon Persia.

The British knew a thing or two about exerting extra-territorial control over other people’s countries. They also knew a thing or two about strategic resources. Their naval power had been built on spreading coaling stations that facilitated its own movement and gave it a way of controlling or denying the same ease of movement for others. The art of strategic denial, which would become crucial to the bloody history of the Middle East, was also honed on its dominance of major sources of gold in South Africa.

(Always bear in mind that these territories, these resources and even this “influence” were acquired with mass violence and retained with mass violence. The British Empire killed people for this. They tortured for this. They beat and robbed for this. All of it.)

Desiring the oil of Persia they set about acquiring it in a quintessentially imperialist style. They did not seek to create stable access to the oil by creating a sustainable transaction of mutual benefit. In zero sum imperialist thinking that would be disastrous. If, for example, they wanted to send gunboats to shell the ports and workers of another country that was not being obedient they would have to ensure that Persia did not object enough to break the deal. That would be an intolerable imposition on the sovereign right of the British to protect its own “interests”. Instead they cut the sort of deal that you would expect from a violent crew of mobsters. Their method of ensuring stability relies on ensuring that the lesser, weaker party does not profit enough that they become less weak and might therefore be in a position to ask for a better deal.

For an empire the ideal relations of informal imperialism separate the interests of a small ruling group from the masses and from the national entity itself. As a good imperialist, you structure deals so that any profit tends to accrue to that small group, creating a beneficial enmity between these rulers and their own subjects who remain impoverished and are displaced, poisoned and often worked to death in the production or extraction of the desired resource. You ensure that much of the money that you do pay is returned immediately to buy arms from your own arms industry for use against the unhappy people. You make the rulers as hated as possible in their own countries, apart from a narrow client base and/or a minority ethnic or religious group. This is highly unstable and a source of continual violence and oppression, but the rulers become dependent on you and they are forced to keep the desired outpouring of national riches flowing. Should the local oppression fail for any reason, such as a popular revolution, you can declare a “national interest” and send in the marines, the gunboats, the spooks, or any combination thereof. The nature of the deal itself is such that it has created military dependency and underdevelopment that ensures that the people of the country have the minimum possible ability to resist your own use of force.

That model is sustained on blood and oppression, and we charmingly name it the “resource curse”. The received wisdom in Western boardrooms, lecture halls, and think-tanks is that somehow the possession of natural wealth creates bad governance. In most cases, this is simply a poor cover for foetid racism. For believers in Western values it is considered common sense that the peoples of the developing world are morally and intellectually inferior to Westerners and this known fact is only suppressed due to wokeness. The agency of Western imperialist power is effaced: deleted from history and deleted from current affairs. 

The massive military expenditures of the US and its constant covert and overt interventions; its bombings; its wars; its threats; its overt and covert control, co-optation and subversion of international institutions is well documented and indisputable. What you are not allowed to say is that they are doing all of this for any cogent purpose. The continual flow of wealth and resources from the developing world to the developed world is meant to be viewed as a simple product of the natural order of things that is totally unrelated to massive arms expenditures, invasions, coups, espionage, economic warfare and so forth. To suggest otherwise is a conspiracy theory or some form of cultish dogmatic Marxism.

I am using contemporary US examples a little ahead of time here, but the British Empire provided the precursors to these structures of power and extraction. The British never had the level of military hegemony that the US possesses; therefore, they became extremely expert at exercising asymmetric power over vast populations using any and every tool available.

Once the British establishment had come to accept the inevitability of the need for the Royal Navy to make the change from coal to petroleum, they sought to intervene in a deal cut between mineral prospector William D’Arcy and the Shah of Persia (now Iran). By some accounts they even sent Sidney Reilly the “Ace of Spies” to deal with what was known as the “D’Arcy Affair” in 1905. This led to the establishment in 1909 of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and later British Petroleum, or BP. In 1913 the APOC negotiated a sale of shares to the British Government. The Crown wanted a government-controlled source of oil. The man in charge of the negotiations was one Winston Churchill. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty and was engaged in continuing the modernising work of John Fisher by switching the fleet wholly from coal to oil as fuel. 

It would be in a letter to Churchill that Fisher first used the fateful letters OMG. More consequentially, though, Fisher would resign as First Sea Lord in 1915 in disgust over Churchill’s disastrous Dardanelles (Gallipoli) campaign, famous for its horrific and pointless loss of life. This precipitated Churchill’s own resignation. He was replaced by Arthur Balfour – yes that Arthur Balfour.

Balfour and Churchill had five things in common: They believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, they were ardent imperialists, they were scions of families elevated to elite status through imperialist exploitation, they were enthusiastic Zionists, and they were anti-Semitic. I have to acknowledge that it is “controversial” to call Churchill an anti-Semite despite the fact that he often wrote and said anti-Semitic things that he never retracted. To be fair Churchill was by no means outstandingly anti-Semitic by the standards of the time and would in later life express an opposition to anti-Semitism, but that does not change the bald facts. His official biographer Martin Gilbert, a Jewish Zionist, counters claims of his anti-Semitism in part by saying that he was an ardent Zionist. This is a laughable claim because non-Jewish Zionists – from Balfour through to today’s Christian Zionists – are frequently explicitly anti-Semitic. Moreover, the link between their anti-Semitism and their Zionism is not hard to explain – whether through racial animus or through religious zeal they want all the Jews to migrate to Palestine. To put it mildly, being a Zionist is by no means proof that one is not an anti-Semite.

Arthur Balfour was the Prime Minister of Britain who supported and approved Fisher’s naval modernisation programme. He was also politically associated with Winston Churchill and Churchill’s father before him. Both were also linked to imperialists like Cecil Rhodes, Lord Rothschild, Lord Esher and Lord Milner. This group were racists who believed in Anglo-Saxon superiority. It is common to suggest that they were “cultural racists” rather than outright racists, but I have seen no compelling reason to believe that this is a lesser form of racism. To illustrate: in Aotearoa some British “cultural racists” told 19th century Māori that they could become British, but those Māori that chose to do so soon discovered that a racial hierarchy based on skin colour was part of being British. This proves rather neatly that Anglo-Saxon “cultural racism” is the embrace of a culture of biological racism. Moreover this “cultural racism” leads to the same horrific conclusions as direct biological racism. Churchill, for example, said, “I do not admit…  that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”  These people believed in an Anglo-Saxon racial empire and believed in using violence and subjugation to create that empire. 

The Anglo-Saxon empire envisioned was to be a transatlantic one. Fittingly it would later be the alignment of British, US and Dutch oil interests between 1928 and 1954 that would provide the strategic underpinnings of such an empire, but Britain would be a decidedly junior partner by 1954. 

There is some controversy over whether the British may have deliberately pushed the Ottoman Empire into joining World War I on the side of the Central Powers. On one hand, Germany was clearly the best European friend that the Ottomans had, probably because they wanted to secure access to oil. Germany was constructing the Berlin to Baghdad railway, aiming at further establishing a port in the Persian Gulf and they had invested much into modernising the Ottoman military. On the other hand, the Ottomans could see a greater potential for security in aligning with the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) so their choice of sides in WWI was by no means set in stone. Supposedly, the British were meant to be courting the Ottomans, but they made the interesting decision to confiscate a newly constructed dreadnought battleship along with an unfinished dreadnought, two cruisers, and four destroyers. This made the Ottoman choice to go to war inevitable. It was Winston Churchill who ordered British crews to take the dreadnoughts, an unambiguously illegal act. Given subsequent events, it is hard to believe that Churchill was not either intentionally pushing the Ottomans into the arms of the Central Powers or had convinced himself that the matter was already decided.

Churchill then launched the first oil war in the Middle East. This war was enormous by any standards other than that of the slaughter occurring simultaneously in Europe. It started with the Dardanelles campaign. This was ostensibly to draw Ottoman forces away from the distant Caucasus where they were fighting the Russians. It is unlikely to have achieved much towards that end. Instead after the first couple of weeks it was quite evident that British, French and ANZAC forces were trapped on the rugged shoreline. Despite this they stayed for eight months of futile slaughter. The campaign cost the Ottomans in blood and materiel, but it was more of a setback for the British, and more still of a human tragedy where lives were spent for no real gain.

Having failed to penetrate the Dardanelles, the British kept fighting a war in the Middle East, notably in Iraq and Palestine. They committed over 1.4 million troops to this theatre when the situation in Europe was clearly desperate. The French made their alarm about this known. Given that the later German effort to “bleed France white” led to serious mutinies and came close to forcing France out of the war, it can be said that the British were truly risking a defeat in the Great War itself by pouring so much into their sideshow oil war. 

Along the way the British displayed the perfidy for which they have such renown. First they betrayed their Arab allies by signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement under which Britain and France would carve up the Middle East. Then they signed an armistice with Turkey (formerly Ottomans) which they immediately broke in order to invade and conquer Mosul. In doing so they also betrayed the French who had been given the area under Sykes-Picot. At the end of the war the British had occupied everywhere in the Middle East known to have oil apart from the Persian oil fields that it already controlled. After the war nearly a million imperial military personnel remained to occupy and pacify the region.

Given the cavalier approach that the British had to the agreements it made to induce others to serve its ends, it is striking that the vague Balfour Declaration is still talked about at all, let alone held up as some form of legitimation of the Zionist project. In contrast to promising to “look with favour upon the creation of a Jewish state” the British had explicitly promised the Sharif of Mecca, Hussain bin Ali, an independent Arab state that stretched from the Mediterranean and Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the Indian Ocean to the border of Turkey. (The only exception was a small strip roughly corresponding to Syria’s current coastal area.) 

I won’t dwell long on the partition and distribution of Arab lands that occurred. The British attempted to install puppet monarchies, but this provoked resistance. In particular Iraq was combative. Formed from the “3 Provinces” of “al-Iraq” in the Ottoman Empire, Iraq had been the greatest source of fighters in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule. Though divided ethnically and by sect, the population of Iraq soon found themselves united by the common hatred of the British presence, British exactions and British violence. Intended puppet leaders have been hard to control in Iraq because of its natural wealth and because its surface divisions are outweighed by a long sense of shared identity and history. It is the Cradle of Civilisation and its peoples have a far longer record of working together as one polity than do, for example, the peoples of Wales, England, Scotland and the northern bit of Ireland.

Winston Churchill directed the repression of the Iraqi Revolt in 1920, going so far as to advocate using mustard gas against villages. Aeroplanes dropped bombs on villages many years before the German bombing of Guernica would spark international outrage. Arthur “Bomber” Harris (who would later work closely with Churchill to conduct the deadly and controversial British “strategic bombing” during WWII) said that Arabs and Kurd “now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” After Iraq was granted “independence” British forces stayed and some sense of how independent Iraq truly was could be measured by the fact that the ostensible monarch of the country, King Ghazi, installed a radio station in his palace to broadcast anti-British political material. He soon died in a car crash that is often attributed to the British or to the pro-British politician Nuri al-Said.

It was in this context that the decisions over the fate of Palestine were taking place: the British needing Middle Eastern oil and finding it difficult to ensure that the Arabs, Kurds, Persians and others living atop the oil would remain compliant. The process of deciding the fate of mandatory Palestine was clearly contested within the British establishment. It may seem like a “conspiracy theory” to state that a clique of oil-loving imperialist Zionists fought for and achieved the establishment of the state of Israel, but that is what the evidence lends itself to. Further, to suggest otherwise is to state that the British state is a monolith where foreign policy is not open to such contestation. The record of disagreements is clear and we can choose to believe that those promoting the establishment of a Jewish homeland were irrational weirdos who had no cogent reason for clinging on to their stance in the face of clear irresolvable difficulties, or we can believe that they kept their own counsel about their motives. They chose to present a face of a sentimental but unreasonable attachment to Zionism because they knew the world at large would not agree that their aims served the greater good. What they intended was unethical and immoral, and its execution would be necessarily criminal, but it was anything but irrational.

The period from 1919 to 1947 was absolutely crucial. The institutional processes show a struggle between different forces pulling in what amounted to opposite directions. Through multiple commissions, enquiries, and three white papers the British foreign affairs establishment repeatedly returned to the conclusion that no Jewish state could be established without clear violations of the rights of Palestinians and a violation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. There was simply no legitimate way to honour the vague promise of the Balfour declaration which, after all, included the phrase “…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Rashid Khalidi thinks that there is a trick in the Balfour Declaration in that it mentions a national identity for Jewish people but not for Palestinians. I think that is according too much credence to the document. Similarly one of the experts on “Balfour: Seeds of Discord” states that the declaration accorded “civil” but not “political” rights but this is not a real division. It is a convention to divide political from civil rights, but the principle of equality before the law inevitably leads to equal political rights. In normal usage the term “civil” refers to political participation. Voting rights, for example, were intrinsic to civil rights struggles in the USA and Northern Ireland. 

Even in discussing semantics we are missing the point. The fact that such microscopic focus is given to the 67 words of the Balfour Declaration is a testament to the pressure to find non-realist explanations for British behaviour. In reality the Balfour Declaration is a meaningless piece of paper and, as I will discuss, Israel could never have been established as a Jewish state in anything like the form that exists today if it did not ethnically cleanse the non-Jewish community and steal their property. To say that this prejudiced “the civil rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine” is a massive understatement.

Ignoring the pointless Balfour Declaration (as we all should) the recognised power that the British had over the land of Palestine came from a League of Nations Mandate. The League’s charter provides for Mandates for League members to exercise power over nations that were no longer under the sovereignty of the defeated empires of Germany, Turkey and Austria-Hungary but were deemed unready for self-rule. The pertinent section for Palestine states: “Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone.” Note the use of the term “independent nations”.

The Balfour Declaration was incorporated in the Mandate, but I must restate here that Zionists were never intending to create a “Jewish Homeland” that could be created without massively violating the civil rights of non-Jewish Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration was not just a dead letter, it was a stillborn letter that never drew a single metaphorical breath. 

The Mandate mentions Jews many times but doggedly refuses to accord any character to any other inhabitant of Palestine. This is quite striking given that nearly 90% of the population were non-Jewish Palestinians and that the League charter states that the Mandate is based on there being a provisionally recognised independent nation. Striking or not, though, it is an exercise in propaganda rather than legally significant. As absent as the Muslims, Christians, Druze and other non-Jewish people’s may be from the text in specificity, they are still there in every legal sense. Universal and general terms (such as the oft-appearing word “communities”) clearly cannot exclude non-Jewish peoples. The imperialists might have wished to create an openly discriminatory Mandate but were forced to affirm that no “discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants of Palestine on the ground of race, religion or language.”

An honest process would have recognised the intractability of the problem as soon as it was identified. An honest process would have acknowledged that the rights accorded to the Palestinian people in the League of Nations Charter, which is where the Mandate derives its claims to legitimacy, and in the Mandate itself make the creation of a Jewish state as such impossible. The conclusions reached by the 1939 White Paper should have been reached far earlier and should have been accepted and implemented. The 1939 White Paper rejected partition and proposed limiting Jewish immigration while transitioning to a sovereign state of Palestine that would be binational in nature. The problem was that, over the years, the abrogation of the rights of Palestinians in order to establish a Jewish state had been rejected many times and no case had been made, nor could be, that provided a path that would in any way satisfy Zionist desires while honouring the rights of the “non-Jewish communities”. With each such finding, though, the British would pointedly revert to the promise of a Jewish homeland in the mandate in order to reject these findings. These are repeated arguments from consequence, which is to say that they are fallacious. They do not deal with presented evidence and reasoning but instead attack the conclusions. It is a legalistic rhetorical trick undertaken in bad faith, and it happened repeatedly.

And what, we might ask, was the pressing need to keep perverting the course of the bureaucracy like that? Once again the conventional historiography would have us believe that it is the work of MJP. Worse still, given that most Jews were not Zionists it seems that the Magic Jew Power was controlled by a Zionist conspiracy. That would be industrial-grade anti-Semitism, and while it is tempting to believe Balfour et al. capable of such twisted thinking, it is not believable. One of their own colleagues, Edwin Montagu who was Secretary of State for India at the time, was an anti-Zionist Jew who made it amply clear that he thought the project anti-Semitic and a source of danger for Jewish people.

We are left with no declared motive on the part of British imperialists that holds up to scrutiny. Therefore we must search for an undeclared motive among at least some of the decision-makers. We might not be able to draw the straight line of an overt declaration that shows a concern for oil directly. As far as I know there is no document to that effect that would satisfy the vulgar empiricists that shamble through the history departments of the world seeking archival proof in the manner of zombies seeking brains. The straight line does not exist, but there are three dots labelled “1”, “2”, and “3” that just happen to lie in a straight line for anyone to join with minimal effort.

The final acts leading to the Nakba also fit the picture of a divided British establishment with some doing everything possible to establish a Jewish state and refusing to accept defeat simply because it could not be done in a legally or morally acceptable manner. The horrors of the Shoah had created a sense of urgency and exception in sentiment, but when the details were taken into account it is very clear that establishing a Jewish state would require a large scale genocide by historical standards. I will explain why this was necessary shortly, but I do want to acknowledge that this large-scale genocide was dwarfed in people’s minds by the scale of death during the recent War and that this will have blunted sensibilities. That said, more sensitive and engaged individuals like Folke Bernadotte, were not inclined to ignore some people’s rights because others had suffered such extremities. Bernadotte, famous for having rescued many Jews and others from Nazi camps, was supportive of “the aspirations of the Jews” but was even-handed enough that members of Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary group often known as the Stern Gang, assassinated him. (One of the three planners of the murder, Yitzhak Shamir, would become the Prime Minister of Israel in 1983). It is reasonable to think that Bernadotte was genuinely sympathetic to Zionism in the abstract but Lehi, like Ze’ev Jabotinski before them, knew that an Israeli state could not be created without genocidal violence. Bernadotte’s condemnation of violence against Palestinians, given his stature, could have harmed the Zionist cause greatly.

I won’t repeat here what I have already written elsewhere on the subject of the genocidal nature of the occupation of Palestine, but a recounting of events with a focus on the practical needs of a “Jewish state” will show anew that genocide was always a pre-requisite even if the word itself was unspeakable.

The British were never able to square the circle of allowing the creation of a Jewish state without clearly violating the rights of the indigenous inhabitants, moreover the gap was far greater than we might suspect now that the establishment of Israel is a fait accompli. Having first rejected its own 1937 partition plan and then rejected its own rejection, the British took to playing the victim. They fobbed the problem off on the UN. Eventually this led in late 1947 to UNGA Resolution 181 laying out a partition plan. The UK abstained from the vote, but we now know that they lobbied vigorously for others to vote in favour of partition.

Two things are worth noting about UNGAR 181. The first is that General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding. Israel, a country that is second only to the USA in violating General Assembly resolutions, should be the first to admit that. The second is that if everyone had agreed to abide by the provisions of UNGAR 181 and there had been a peaceful implementation of the partition plan it would have simply resulted in a temporary and unsustainable partition of a single Palestinian state. Without genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing there could never have been a “Jewish state”. Perhaps even more crucially a Jewish state could not exist without mass theft of Palestinian property.

As things stood the Jewish partition designated in UNGAR 181 would not even have had a Jewish majority without ethnic cleansing. Moreover, Jews owned only about 20% of the land in the partition and something like 10% of the commercial property and small enterprises. Even if they had not instituted a democracy in which they were outnumbered from the outset, respect of the civil rights of Palestinians would have left them totally economically dependent on Palestinians and without the resources they needed to allow the mass Jewish migration that later occurred. The property of refugees was taken and nationalised under the rationale that the owners had chosen to abandon it and were designated “absentees” while being denied the right to return. This created a massive national estate. Much of this was administered by the Jewish National Fund which by its own constitution served only Jews.

After the Nakba Israel established itself on 72% of the land of Mandatory Palestine which in 1945 was only 30% Jewish by population. Despite this the ethnic cleansing they had carried out created a territory with a clear Jewish majority. Israel passed a law of “Return” which referred not to the expelled indigenous inhabitants but to all Jews who were given the right to “return” to Israel from wherever in the world they happened to be. When they got there it was absolutely necessary that they be leased residential, horticultural, agricultural and commercial property or land on which to develop these things. Due to the role of the Jewish National Fund these instant citizens immediately had greater access to these resources than the remnant Palestinians who had gained Israeli citizenship.

It is not hard to imagine what would have happened if the Partition Plan had been implemented. The “Jewish State” could not have survived. There could be no “democratic” elections. Palestinian property ownership and tenure would have needed to be violated or property owning Palestinians would have become increasingly wealthy and empowered by the influx of Jewish immigrants which would have made it difficult to suppress their political participation. The Jewish state needed the violent dispossession of Palestinians in order to be born, but without the credible excuse of conflict it could not have done so and then claimed to be lawful and democratic. The 1947-48 War was crucial to them.

Let me be clear here, I am not saying that Palestinians and the Arab countries should have embraced the Partition Plan. They had no reason to and it would not have stopped the war anyway. UNGAR 181, like the Balfour Declaration, did not show a path towards the legitimate establishment of a Jewish state. It was a piece of theatre. It was an act of public diplomacy designed to give a pretext of legitimacy to an enterprise that simply could not be justified on closer examination.

Genocide is almost invariably carried out under the cover of military conflict. It was true in 1947 and it is true today. Revisionist Zionists knew from the outset that acts of mass violence against the Palestinian people were necessary in order to establish a state of Israel. The first violence that occurred after the Partition Plan was an attack on a Jewish bus, but the perpetrators of these murders were retaliating for murders carried out 10 days before by Lehi. After UNGAR 181 violence escalated and the British largely allowed it to happen. Bearing in mind that UNGAR 181 was not legally binding it did not absolve the British of any responsibilities at all.

The British Government rejected the Partition Plan (even though their officials had lobbied other countries to pass it) which shouldn’t surprise anyone because it would have violated their Mandate and if they could have justified it they would have done it themselves much earlier. They decided to end their mandate in May 1948, but instead of doing what they were clearly obliged to do – create an orderly transition to a sovereign state for the people of Palestine – they allowed violence to spiral out of control. They refused to cooperate with the UN, the non-Jewish Palestinians, or the Jews to work towards a transition. Then in February of 1948, once facts on the ground had made their responsibilities seem impossible to fulfil, they switched to supporting partition and the annexation of non-Jewish parts of Palestine to Transjordan (today’s Jordan). In March Zionist forces began executing the infamous Plan Dalet.

Some Zionist historians claim that Plan Dalet was defensive. It sought to clear threats from around pockets of Jewish population including those that lay outside of the area designated for Jews in the Partition Plan. According to this reasoning the ethnic cleansing was a by-product of a legitimate military exercise. The context to that claim was that, as I have already stated, there could never have been a Jewish state if they had not ethnically cleansed that part of Palestine. Furthermore, they did not give back the land beyond that delineated in the UN Partition Plan. Also, they did not allow these supposedly accidental refugees to return, instead they passed a law to prevent their re-entry, confiscate their property and to strip citizenship from any Palestinian citizen of Israel who married one of them. Moreover, they systematically lied for 40 years about why Palestinians fled and if anyone challenged these lies that accused them of being anti-Semitic.

Given the foregoing, my contention is that British imperialists knew that establishing a Jewish state as such was never going to be possible without the violent dispossession of the existing Palestinian people. They could have insisted to Zionists from the outset that a Jewish state was not on the table and worked towards the peaceful establishment of a “Jewish homeland” in a sovereign Palestine that would accord guarantees of freedom from persecution underwritten by the international community. The Palestinian government would control immigration but would be encouraged to accept Jewish immigrants who would bring funding raised overseas into the country to help development. The British had 30 years to do this yet they chose to keep the dream of a Jewish state alive for their own purposes.

The British wanted a “loyal little Ulster” but they needed it to be in actual or immanent conflict with the Arab world for it to be of use. When the US replaced the UK in the patron role they referred to Israel as one of their “cops on the beat”. This was the term used by Nixon’s Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to refer to Iran, Turkey and Israel. These three non-Arab countries form a triangle around the richest oil fields in the world and it is pretty striking that they would be considered as policing the region when most of the Arab regimes in the area were also US clients at the time. The threat of Arab and pan-Arab nationalism to the ability to control global energy supplies was intense and it is still significant today. This is only aggravated by Islamic solidarity.

Of course the British had no crystal ball to see the future, but it is worth thinking about the nature of the state of Israel now. Both in actions during the mandate period and actions afterwards the US and UK have created a state that can never know peace. The US in particular has exercised its international power, most notably in UN Security Council vetoes, to create an impunity that fuels Israeli delusions of peace through total victory. Israel is still seeking to square the circle that the British could never square.

George Orwell wrote that those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future. He meant that those who shape our understanding of history also shape our beliefs about the present and our reactions to events. The proof of his insight is all around us, but as with all such concepts there are limitations, and those can be very important. There are gross facts that cannot be twisted or suppressed by shared indoctrination. The Nazis, for example, despite having a very strong grip on the communications and ideology of the German people, could not have declared that they had achieved victory in the siege of Stalingrad (though I suspect in early 1943 they would have loved to do so). Some things are resistant to distortion. Words are not simply arbitrary signifiers, they exist within webs of meaning. Israel has laboured tirelessly in arguing that Palestinians have no human rights on the grounds that they are stateless and that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Rhetorical racism aside, though, they cannot claim that Palestinians are not human beings. 

Zionists cannot simply declare Palestinians to be non-humans, though many can be brainwashed into an emotional state in which Palestinians are inhuman or far less human than Israelis. The Orwellianism succeeds in that many people in the world have accepted Israel’s right to defend itself by killing Palestinians without thinking for a second that the Palestinians have the same right only more so because they are by far the greater victims of violence. The problem for Israel is that in formal and juridical contexts it is impossible to dehumanise people in that way.

If the Nakba had happened in 1910 Israel might have been able to establish a Jewish-state-accompli, but after World War II people were writing a new rulebook of international law and human rights. Obviously we have not reached a point where those rules stop powerful state actors from committing crimes, but they do create an historical record in which those crimes are illegitimate. As long as they still stand and hold sway over officialdom, they limit the rewriting of history.

The key problem that Israel has is that it cannot undo the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendents to return. Due to timing Palestinian refugees come under the mandate of UNRWA instead of the UN High Commission for Refugees, and UNRWA doesn’t have the same mandate to seek durable resolution through voluntary repatriation, but that does not mean that Palestinians don’t have the right to return. Rather like the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the failure to name a specific right for Palestinians does not mean that it does not exist. The right of displaced persons to return to their homeland is a human right derived from Articles 13-15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Palestinians are humans, ergo they have that right.

Israel’s admittance to the United Nations was conditioned on its compliance with UNGAR 194 which, among other things, “Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” Most Palestinians are refugees, including half of those in the occupied territories. Clearly Israel did not comply with that resolution. Clearly UN members did not expect it to, but they could not simply pretend that Palestinian refugees did not exist. Their humanity was, and is, a gross fact that cannot simply be ignored for political expediency.

Though under immense pressure Yasser Arafat and the PLO did not renounce the Palestinian right of return in 2000, but if they had it would not have extinguished that right. It is typical of the delusory thinking that Israel is falling into that the leadership thought that Arafat had some magic power to abrogate the rights of Palestinians on the basis that he is a Leader. The whole point of human rights is that political leaders cannot arbitrarily cancel them. They wouldn’t be much use otherwise would they?

I am sure that there have been times in its history when Israel might have found a way to resolve issues peacefully in a way that had enough legitimacy to be lasting. It would have been painful and imperfect and it would have left some injustices unredeemed, but it could have ended the violence and unremitting oppression and crushing injustice that Palestinians have endured for generations. Instead the US gave Israel unconditional aid and assistance that was a poison. They have controlled the occupied territories for 67 years, meaning that they have made subjects of half of the world’s Palestinians without granting them rights while grotesquely claiming to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Drunk on the impunity gifted by the Western world and Israel’s own immense military power, they refuse to even say where their borders are, sponsoring a colonisation and ethnic cleansing programme in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Our political leaders, in obedience to Orwellian principles of power, act as if this is not happening. It is happening, though, and the gross fact is that its victims are human beings.

Palestinians are not transitory phenomena. They are not simply a colour on a demographic map that can be changed with a paintbrush. They are human and their lives, their existences, their very breaths are gross facts that doom the state of Israel to fall. In its mania for a “final status” and in its awareness of the “demographic threat” Israel becomes ever more overtly genocidal. They act as if they can win by inflicting enough pain that the enemy will bend to their will, but they can only get what they seek by the non-existence of all Palestinians. It will not happen and the further they go down that path the worse it will be for both peoples. They cannot kill all Palestinians and the more they do kill the more they are repudiated internationally. The death they have unleashed on Gaza, which sadly will continue to rise even after the direct violence has ended, will never be forgotten, and what can they achieve from it? Seizing the northern third of the strip? It gets them no closer to their goal. Their goal recedes with every step they take towards it.

In the end, whose purposes does this serve? It serves an Empire Complex with military, intelligence, arms, financial, and energy interests at the core, but Israelis only have a fool’s paradise. Zionists could only ever have achieved their desires by making immense compromises in order that they could have a place of Jewish belonging and safety. Perhaps that was never possible, but if it was it could never be made as an exclusive Jewish ethno-state. Fed on the narcotic of impunity and the hallucinogen of exceptionalism they have for generations made it seem natural that the plucky Jewish state should continue – an oasis of [insert Western value here] in a desert of barbarism: 

Enlightenment? Of course.

Modernism? Naturally. 

Socialism? Absolutely. 

Not too much socialism? Heaven forfend! 

Secularism? Well we are a Jewish state, so… just kidding of course we are secular. 

Whatever you want, that is what we are. We are the Athenian Sparta. We shoot. We cry. We write the history and law textbooks to teach everyone that we had no choice.

It all seemed so real, but it was never real because Palestinians exist. Palestine exists.

The loyal little Ulster has served its purpose well, but its time is coming to an end. The UK and US will jettison Israel when it suits them. Israel has been a tool of empire but it never suited the empire to create a stable peaceful Jewish state or homeland. Israelis will someday have to choose to live in a democratic state of Palestine, or to emigrate. There is no point in continuing to kill to chase a dream that can never be.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kieran Kelly.

Sempra’s project, named the Port Arthur LNG Export Terminal, is currently under construction along the Sabine-Neches ship channel, which will give it direct access to the Gulf of Mexico. When operational, it would be capable of producing up to 27 million tons of liquefied natural gas every year, giving it the potential to add more than 7 million tons of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere annually.

The facility, and others like it, also emit chemicals like nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide, which aggravate the respiratory system. Sempra’s construction site is less than 10 miles from Port Arthur, an industrial city where more than 70 percent of residents are Black or Latino and where a labyrinth of refineries and petrochemical plants release toxic chemicals like benzene into the air day and night. 

Local residents and advocates opposed to Sempra’s project argue that it will only worsen public health in an area where asthma and cancer rates already exceed the national average. As a result, many celebrated last week’s decision.

“Every step in this fight, we’ve won by standing up for Port Arthur communities of color to breathe free from toxic pollution,” John Beard, a former refinery worker and one of the region’s most outspoken environmental advocates, said in a press release. “When attacked, we fight back — and win!”

In 2020, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, which regulates pollution for the state, initially approved Sempra’s air permit, which specifies the volume of pollutants the facility is permitted to emit annually. Advocates at the local environmental group Port Arthur Community Action Network immediately requested a hearing to challenge the agency’s decision, arguing that it had applied a substantially less strict standard than those applied to other LNG facilities, particularly the Rio Grande LNG project planned for Brownsville in the southern part of the state. When the latter plant applied for a permit to emit pollution from its refrigeration turbines (the giant engines that cool natural gas down to its liquid state), state officials whittled down the facility’s requested emissions levels by 40 percent, a level that the state said was achievable using emission control technology. But Sempra’s permit, which proposed to use the same kind of turbine, was approved unchanged.

Citing the “arbitrary” nature of these decisions, judges at Texas Office of Administrative Hearings ruled in favor of the community last May, but their ruling was quickly rejected by TCEQ commissioners, who pushed the permit through. The federal Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in Dallas sent a letter to TCEQ, arguing that officials had failed to state a basis for their decision. Advocates then elevated the case to the federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, where three judges sided with the community last week, effectively nullifying Sempra’s permit.

“When a Texas state agency departs from its own administrative policy, or applies a policy inconsistently, Texas law requires it to adequately explain its reasons for doing so,” the judges wrote, adding that state environmental officials had failed to do so. 

Advocates say that the decision demonstrates TCEQ’s willingness to bend its policies to the whims of fossil fuel companies.

“Our clients wanted to be treated in a consistent manner. They wanted to be protected as well as anyone else out there,” Chase Porter, an attorney at Lone Star Legal Aid who worked on the case, told Grist. “And it was pretty straightforward and clear that TCEQ, for no apparent reason other than that’s what the company proposed, allowed them to have higher emission limits than they’ve allowed elsewhere.”

In a statement last Wednesday, Sempra said that it will “continue to actively evaluate options to mitigate any potential impacts of the decision on project schedule and cost.”

Without its requisite air permit, the company may have to restart the permitting process, correcting the inconsistencies identified by the judges. The company plans for the terminal to be operational by 2027. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The liquefied natural gas boom hits a snag in Port Arthur, Texas on Nov 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lylla Younes.

This story is published in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle and the Beaumont Enterprise. It was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Michael Holtham, Oxbow’s plant manager, had been preparing for this moment. He had been on the job for nearly a decade. His three brothers had worked at the Port Arthur plant, as had his dad. He loved coordinating his 60-person team and had enjoyed watching many of them grow in their jobs. But they were now facing a new challenge.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, had installed an air monitor near the plant a few months earlier and was allowing Oxbow to capture nearly real-time data. The data was technically available to the public on request, but Oxbow was the only company in the state to have sought it — and it used the information to its advantage. Every time the wind blew in the direction of the monitor and the readings ticked upward, Holtham and other Oxbow employees were alerted. Then they improvised ways to decrease the brownish-yellow sulfurous plume spilling out of the smokestacks, stopping the company from running afoul of the law.

The Port Arthur plant was built in the 1930s and has been grandfathered in as an exception to the landmark federal environmental laws of the 1970s. The facility has four cavernous, cylindrical kilns that are constantly rotating, each about half the length of a football field. Raw petcoke, the bottom-of-the-barrel remainder from refining crude oil, is fed into the kilns and heated to temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit — a fourth of the temperature of the surface of the sun. The intense heat helps burn off heavy metals, sulfur, and other impurities into the air. It emits more than double the amount of sulfur dioxide, which can cause wheezing and asthma attacks, than the average U.S. coal-fired power plant.

Holtham struggled to find the best way to stop setting off the monitor that January day. At 2 p.m.,12 hours into the ordeal, he increased the air being forced through one of the kilns, in hopes of dispersing the emissions. When that didn’t sufficiently decrease the sulfur dioxide readings, he contemplated shutting down one of the four kilns.

At 6 p.m., he finally turned one of them off. But the damage was already done: A year later when the data from the monitor was reviewed and certified, TCEQ staff would see that the facility had clearly exceeded the federal one-hour standard for sulfur dioxide by nearly 20 percent. The emissions were so high that they set off a monitor more than 2 miles away.

Such exceedances are bound to have an effect on human health. Studies have shown that even short-term exposure to sulfur dioxide can increase the risk of strokes, asthma, and hospitalization. Multi-city studies in China have found that a roughly 4 ppb increase in sulfur dioxide levels is correlated with a 1 to 2 percent increase in strokes, pulmonary diseases, and death. The asthma rate in the residential neighborhood surrounding the plant, West Port Arthur, which is more than 90 percent Black, is 70 percent higher than the national average, according to federal data. And Black residents in Jefferson County, where Oxbow is located, are 15 percent more likely to develop cancer and 40 percent more likely to die from it compared to the average Texan.

In 2017 and the first half of 2018, Oxbow’s emissions often spiked above federal standards by as much as 47 ppb — 62 percent higher than the limit. And all through that time, Holtham and his colleagues continued to improvise. They turned down fans that spewed the emissions into the air, increased the amount of air forced through the kilns, and even tried a chemical treatment. They regularly turned off certain kilns when the sulfur readings at the monitor got too high.

Oxbow has argued that these operational changes were “experiments” that the company conducted to try to bring the plant into compliance. The goal, Oxbow lawyers have said, was to identify a set of operational conditions that would keep them in the good graces of regulators.

Oxbow acknowledges in court records that these “experiments” were conducted for at least a year. But a Grist analysis of 2.5 years of internal operational data shows that, for at least another year, Oxbow’s kiln modifications continued — and occurred primarily when the wind blew in the direction of the air monitor, a likely violation of the Clean Air Act. We spoke to more than 40 public health and environmental researchers, former Oxbow employees, and environmental attorneys and reviewed thousands of pages of legal filings and public records from state and federal agencies. We found that the data Oxbow collected — which was filed in a Texas district court during an unsuccessful suit against the company — show that high winds in the direction of the air monitor predicted decisions to shut down kilns, which reliably led to the monitor registering lower sulfur dioxide levels. About 40 percent of the time, at least one of a subset of kilns were shut down when the wind was blowing to the north.

However, when the wind was not blowing Oxbow’s pollutants toward the monitor throughout this one-year period, the facility did not alter its operations. By ensuring that the monitor was incapable of recording a comprehensive, untampered view of the facility’s emissions, experts say Oxbow flaunted environmental law — in essence, by guaranteeing any air violations would not be detected — and continued to deteriorate air quality in the area. 

“There is clearly a criminal violation of the Clean Air Act,” said Joel Mintz, an emeritus professor of law at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and former enforcement attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.

This chart is called a wind rose. It is a type of diagram used to show the frequency of wind directions at a given location. The length of each bar shows how likely the wind is to blow from that direction.

Longer bars on the bottom, for example, mean the wind blows more frequently from south to north.

From August 2018 to July 2019, wind at the Port Arthur Oxbow facility blew from a variety of directions, but winds blowing from the south to the north were slightly more prevalent.

An air monitor north of the Oxbow facility, which helps measure sulfur dioxide emissions from the plant, is in the path of these south-to-north coastal winds.

Compared to normal conditions, however, we noted that when kilns were shut down during this period in Port Arthur, a more extreme bias emerged in the wind roses. Kilns 2, 3, and 5 at the plant were more likely to be shut down when the wind was blowing from south to north.

We also noted a difference when it came to wind speed. The wider, darker bands in the wind roses indicate an increased frequency of higher-speed winds. Compared to instances in which all kilns were on, these kilns were also more likely to be off during higher southerly winds.

Mintz reviewed Grist’s findings and said that Oxbow’s actions are “fairly egregious” violations of the law. He added that the EPA should open “an investigation with the Justice Department pursuing criminal action.” Presented with Grist’s  findings, an EPA spokesperson said the agency “will follow up based on the information” provided. 

According to the latest public data, Oxbow still emits more sulfur dioxide than any facility in Texas aside from five coal- and gas-fired power plants. One simple but pricey solution is to install sulfur dioxide scrubbers, which run emissions through a slurry of chemicals to mitigate their toxicity. But for at least three decades, in four different states, Oxbow has been trying to outrun environmental regulations that might require this expensive step. Oxbow’s creative use of real-time official regulatory data has not only helped it stay in business — it’s also helped the company rake in an estimated $80 million in sales a year.

The costs of continuing to pollute are felt most acutely by those who live near the plants. The three plants Oxbow currently operates in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma are the largest sulfur dioxide polluters in their respective counties — which combined are home to more than 750,000 people — and taken together emit more than 38,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a year.

In 2021, environmental groups and a legal aid firm filed a civil rights complaint against TCEQ, asking the EPA to investigate Oxbow’s use of “dispersion techniques,” including the monitor alert system it set up. The groups also modeled sulfur dioxide concentrations based on Oxbow’s maximum permitted emissions. The model found the maximum concentration around the facility would have been eight times as high as the 75 ppb threshold.

The modeling results “demonstrate that Oxbow is likely emitting [sulfur dioxide] in amounts greater than in its permit,” the complaint claimed. “Without intervention from the EPA, this lax regulation of Oxbow’s operations is likely to continue.”

“They’ve been causing air quality conditions that we now know are harmful to human health since this thing began operating,” said Colin Cox, an attorney with the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, one of the groups that filed the complaint.

Brad Goldstein, a spokesperson for Oxbow, called Grist’s review of the company’s data “flawed” and said that the findings are “”reckless and unsupportable.” He added that the company is “proud of its compliance record,” emphasizing that the sulfur dioxide readings at the monitors in Port Arthur are consistently below federal standards. “Oxbow values its reputation as a responsible corporate citizen and will vigorously defend it,” he said. Holtham, the plant manager, declined multiple interview requests. (Accounts of his activities are drawn from sworn depositions he provided in court.)

For those like Ronald Wayne, a 65-year-old longtime resident of West Port Arthur, the combined emissions from Oxbow and the town’s other industries have meant never getting used to the stench of sulfur, a rotten-egg smell that just “stink, stink, stink.” He’s woken up to find his car coated in a layer of thin yellow or black dust, and changes the ruined filters on his air conditioner three or four times a month.

Worst of all, he’s become accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night gasping for air. “You gotta force air in because it feels like my lungs are closing up,” Wayne said. “You never get used to it — and then again, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The rules that Oxbow is required to follow are due to the fact that sulfur dioxide is one of six “criteria air pollutants” listed by the federal Clean Air Act, which requires the EPA to periodically assess them and set safe levels for their concentration in the air.

There’s no question that the act has resulted in tremendous gains in cleaning up the nation’s air. Sulfur dioxide levels nationwide have decreased by 92 percent since the 1990s, and the days of acid rain are well behind us. But in recent years, progress on improving air quality has stalled, if not reversed. Americans experienced more days of “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” air between 2018 and 2021 than anytime in the last two decades.

One reason for the hindered progress is the carve-out that the Clean Air Act of 1970 provided for polluting facilities that were already in operation when it was enacted, including at least two Oxbow facilities. In order to make the legislation politically palatable, these facilities were “grandfathered” in and were able to retain their original emissions limits as long as they didn’t significantly modify their operations. The provision provided a perverse incentive to keep old and dirty plants in operation and delay upgrading them. 

Grandfathered facilities also benefit from another facet of the Clean Air Act: its prioritization of the concentration of pollutants, as opposed to volume. Since the Act requires counties to meet specific air quality concentration thresholds, dilution is often the preferred solution, rather than actually reducing the raw volume of pollutants that emerge from industrial processes. Some of these dispersion methods, such as increasing stack heights to legal limits or slowing the rate of emissions, are widely employed and legally permissible. Others, such as changing operations depending on climatic conditions, could be considered illegal.

By its own admissions in court, Oxbow conducted “75 experiments” from January 2017 through June 2018 in order to “see how various operating procedures would affect the dispersion of the plumes.” The “dispersion protocol” that the modeler and others developed involved changing the amount of air fed through the kilns, the amount of coke being processed, and operating temperature depending on one primary atmospheric condition: wind direction. 

Such operational changes appear to violate the Clean Air Act under two separate provisions. One section prohibits dispersion techniques that include “any intermittent or supplemental control of air pollutants varying with atmospheric conditions.” Another clause lists penalties including up to two years in prison for any person who knowingly “falsifies, tampers with, renders inaccurate, or fails to install any monitoring device or method required to be maintained or followed.”

Mintz, the former EPA enforcement official, said that Oxbow’s activities appear to be in violation of these provisions. “They have knowingly rendered inaccurate their device,” said Mintz. “If they had some sort of permission from the government to experiment as they did, that might be a defense, but doing it unilaterally, I don’t think so. It would be up to a court to decide, but I don’t think that should be, in my judgment at least, a basis for not prosecuting them.”

Bill Koch is the lowest-profile of the famously wealthy Koch brothers. Known for their outsized role in Republican politics and helping gut government action on climate change, the Kochs have collectively given millions to conservative causes. But Bill Koch’s most public endeavors thus far have been his vendettas against those who have sold him counterfeit wine. He claims to have spent $35 million tracking down counterfeiters, including when a con man sold him four bottles allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson for over $400,000.

When he’s not chasing after con artists, Koch runs Oxbow’s industrial empire, which operates a coal mine in Colorado and coke plants in Argentina, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. New environmental regulations have periodically led Oxbow to consider installing sulfur dioxide scrubbers at its coke plants, but for decades it found alternate ways to comply.

In 2010, however, the EPA dropped a bombshell by lowering the limit for ambient sulfur dioxide concentration from 140 ppb averaged over 24 hours to 75 ppb averaged over one hour. The rule, which withstood multiple legal challenges from industry, required that states draw up a list of the top sulfur dioxide emitters and require them to prove their emissions could stay within the new limits. At the time states began to implement the EPA’s plan, Oxbow operated plants in Illinois, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. In all four states, the company was shortlisted as a major sulfur dioxide polluter. 

Oxbow’s plant in Lemont, Illinois, had already been the target of multiple EPA inspections and enforcement actions. It emitted as much as 7,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a year and was using an expired permit that appeared to cap emissions around half that. A monitor about two miles away was recording readings close to or above 100 ppb, which put it in the EPA’s and state’s crosshairs when the new sulfur dioxide rules took effect.

Oxbow had considered scrubbers but found they would cost north of $50 million — “not in the cards economically,” an executive would later recall. Given that it had about 30 percent extra capacity at its other plants, Oxbow shuttered the Lemont plant that year and spread its operations among the company’s other three locations.

Unwilling to put scrubbers in its other facilities as well, citing costs, Oxbow attempted to prove through its own modeling that its other plants could stay below the new 75 ppb standard. It’s unclear what the company’s internal modeling found, but Oxbow abandoned the effort in 2016 and elected to have state agencies place monitors near its plants instead. As David Postlethwait, the former plant manager of Oxbow’s facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, later put it, executives believed “the air models tend[ed] to overestimate emissions” and monitoring with “real data” would be more reliable. Modeling is the cheaper option — for both Oxbow and the state agencies. Monitors cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase, install, and operate. Oxbow bore some of those costs.

The EPA must collect three years of data to determine compliance — meaning monitors bought the company at least three more years to comply with the rule. It was a common strategy: Of the 25 Texas facilities that were at risk of violating sulfur standards, more than half elected to show compliance through monitoring data.  

As the state agencies in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma purchased the monitors and decided where to install them, Oxbow set up a task force that came up with sophisticated software to track the monitors’ readings. Although the monitors were continuously recording sulfur dioxide readings every minute, the state environmental agencies at the time were only posting one-hour averages on the website. Oxbow wanted close-to-real-time data and negotiated access to directly download readings at five-minute intervals from the monitors. It could take up to 30 minutes before the readings reached Oxbow servers, but it provided enough of a lead time for plant managers to track when sulfur dioxide levels were ticking up.

Oxbow employees then gathered meteorological data — specifically wind direction and wind speed — and added it to the software that was recording the monitor readings. A number of plant managers, environmental engineers, and executives were given access to the data, and the software sent them emails when the wind was blowing in a 30-degree band over the monitor and recorded levels above a set threshold. The company replicated the system for its facilities in Louisiana and Oklahoma, similarly negotiating access for five-minute data from the respective state environmental agencies.

The fact that employees had spent months setting up this software was no secret. A senior Oxbow employee provided updates to Bill Koch. A December 2017 memo to Koch, made public in court filings, noted that employees were running “dispersion testing under various preselected scenarios for each facility when conditions warrant.”

Control room operators started noticing changes, too, once the monitors were installed. Milton Fuston, who was the main operator at the plant in Enid, Oklahoma, said that he received calls from a supervising engineer telling him to reduce the amount of coke being fed through the plant or to make other operational changes to reduce emissions. Some of these calls came during his night shifts, he said, when the engineer wasn’t at the plant. It led Fuston, who worked at the plant for more than a decade before leaving in 2019 when the long and taxing shifts began taking a toll on his body, to believe that the monitor readings were driving the changes.

“In the beginning, every one of my nights I’d get a call to shut it down,” Fuston told Grist, though he added that he wasn’t directly told about a strategy to avoid pinging the monitor. “Some days we’d go three days of shutting it down. [Other days they’d] let us spin, shut it down, let us spin, shut it down.”

Kurk Paul, who worked as a production supervisor at the Baton Rouge plant, recalled having to field complaints about the dust coming from the plant. Chad Sears, who worked at the Oklahoma plant, said the emissions were so thick that a public pool nearby was often covered in a layer of dust. Oxbow, he said, was paying for pool cleanup as a result.

“When you’re on the highway driving there in the summer, there’s so much dust and smoke in the air, it looks like the whole place is on fire,” Sears said. “It’s like a black hole.” 

The clearest picture of Oxbow’s operations emerges in Port Arthur, where the company was sued by a contractor. Since the superheated coke has to be cooled down before it can be shipped off to customers, Port Arthur Steam Energy, or PASE, saw a business opportunity to capture the excess heat, use it to generate steam, and sell the steam to a nearby Valero refinery. A portion of the profits was to be shared with Oxbow. For many years it seemed like a win-win deal — and perhaps an efficient and even “green” process, since it used energy that otherwise would have gone to waste. 

But the contractual relationship between Oxbow and PASE soured in 2017 after TCEQ installed the monitor. Oxbow claimed PASE’s operations were to blame for the Port Arthur plant’s high sulfur dioxide readings. The company said that when PASE captured the stream of hot gases as the coke was being processed and cooled it down, the emissions were released from its smokestacks at lower temperatures. As a result, the emissions were less likely to disperse into the air and more likely to be picked up by the monitor for exceeding limits. Oxbow ended its contract with PASE in June 2018 as a result, effectively running PASE out of business. 

“They just killed this green-air process,” Ray Deyoe, one of the co-founders of PASE, told Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. “Just because Bill Koch didn’t want to go sell one Picasso or one of his Billy the Kid statues or whatever to pay for his scrubbers in Port Arthur.” PASE sued, alleging that Oxbow had been trying to “game the monitor.” 

PASE initially won in a Jefferson County court but lost the appeal. The companies then proceeded to arbitration, where a panel of former judges ruled in Oxbow’s favor, ordering PASE to pay administrative fees and $500,000 plus interest. When PASE appealed the judgment in a Harris County district court, it lost. While these proceedings bankrupted PASE, the litigation provides an incredibly detailed window into Oxbow’s operations. The discovery process and depositions led to Oxbow handing over thousands of pages of internal documents. Key among them is a spreadsheet of the five-minute data Oxbow collected from TCEQ’s monitor alongside information about whether each of its four kilns were on at any given time. The spreadsheet, which was filed in the Harris County court, contains wind direction, wind speed, sulfur dioxide monitor readings, and kiln behavior information at five-minute intervals from January 2017 through June 2019.

Grist analyzed the dataset from August 2018, after Oxbow ended its contract with PASE, to July 2019. We found that winds blowing north, high wind speeds, and periods in which the winds were shifting toward the monitor predicted shutdowns.

When we looked at monitor readings 24 hours before and after a kiln was shut down, we found that readings tended to spike in the 24 hours following a shutdown decision, while they were relatively stable in the preceding 24 hours — suggesting that shutdowns were executed in advance of known changes in environmental conditions.

Oxbow’s operations in March 2019 are particularly illustrative. Even with just two kilns operational, the readings began ticking upward in the early hours of March 8. That morning, Oxbow reduced the feed into two of the kilns by two tons per hour — but it seemed to make no difference. By lunchtime Oxbow had registered five-minute readings above 75 ppb even though by then it was operating at just 25 percent of its average capacity. 

Nevertheless, ultimately the maneuvering worked. The wind changed direction, and the readings dropped enough to lower the average that would determine compliance. When the state regulator eventually crunched the numbers, it reported the highest one-hour average for March 8 as 49.2 ppb — well below the federal threshold. 

In response to detailed questions about Oxbow’s operations in March 2019 and Grist’s analysis, Goldstein, the Oxbow spokesperson, said that the company “sees no reason to relitigate our previous dispute with PASE for your purposes.” 

“The case is now closed,” he said. “Oxbow prevailed and the entire file is a matter of public record. The answers to your questions can be found at the courthouse.”

States have few incentives to intervene when allegations of gaming air monitors surface. After PASE executives dragged Oxbow into court, they met with TCEQ staff to explain how they believed the company was cheating the monitor. But nothing came of the meeting; TCEQ didn’t investigate whether Oxbow was using the data inappropriately.

“TCEQ was trying their best to get through this monitoring program and sort of sweep all of this under the rug,” said Ray Deyoe, a PASE co-founder. “Because here we are squealing about this … and instead of helping us and going in and really doing something about it, it just seemed like they were turning a blind eye.”

TCEQ continues to provide five-minute monitoring data to Oxbow. The agency told Grist that the information is public and available to anyone who seeks it — it’s just that no other company in Texas has. 

High monitor readings spell trouble not just for Oxbow but the entire county, TCEQ, and the state. When the EPA finds that a county is in “nonattainment” of a certain ambient air quality standard, it requires the state to come up with a plan of action to cut pollution. The state environmental agency in turn typically requires polluting facilities in the entire county to reduce emissions, a costly and time-consuming endeavor. The process of developing such a plan is also expensive, taking up a significant amount of resources within the agency and racking up employee work hours. And if states don’t come up with a sufficiently stringent plan, the EPA can take over and withhold federal funding.

Louisiana appears to have followed Texas’ lead. The state Department of Environmental Quality did not respond to specific questions about the access that it gave Oxbow to monitoring data, but internal emails, available through court records, between Oxbow employees confirm that the company was able to access near real-time monitoring data for its Louisiana plant as well. During this time, the monitor did not register any sulfur dioxide levels above 75 parts per billion, and after three years of monitoring, the Louisiana environmental agency decommissioned the monitor and Oxbow was found to be in compliance with the air quality standard.

In Oklahoma, where Oxbow operates a calcining facility in Kremlin, roughly 100 miles north of Oklahoma City, regulators took a different tack. Initially, the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, granted Oxbow the ability to access monitoring data directly. But a few months into the arrangement, the agency received an anonymous complaint that the company was using the data to change its operations such that it didn’t set off the monitor. As a result, the agency ended Oxbow’s access to the monitor. 

“In order for DEQ to continue to certify to EPA that the data being gathered by the monitor is accurate and depicts the true [sulfur dioxide] levels that exist and will exist in the future, DEQ has determined that it can no longer provide five-minute data to Oxbow via the .csv link,” the then-air quality director wrote to Oxbow executives. A spokesperson for the agency told Grist that it never restored the company’s access. “No entity currently receives five-minute data,” the spokesperson said.

At more than 150 feet tall, Oxbow’s massive smokestacks stick out like beacons in the industrial corridor in Port Arthur. The yellowish-brown plume from the plant carries far and wide. When the cloud cover is low, the emissions stagnate, forming a sulfurous haze around the plant. Sometimes the stench is so strong that Hilton Kelley, a Goldman Environmental Prize winner and local activist, can smell the sulfur when he steps out of his restaurant, Kelley’s Kitchen, almost three miles away.

“It smells like somebody is tarring their roof,” Kelley said. “It can make your throat itchy and can make your eyes burn.”

Exactly how far the pollution is carried depends on a number of factors including the height and diameter of the stacks. The taller a stack, the farther the plume drifts. Tall stacks, a 2011 Government Accountability Report found, increase the distance that pollutants travel and harm air quality in regions further away. They do nothing, of course, to decrease the amount of pollution spewed into the air. Rather, taller stacks are a dodge to reduce the concentration of pollutants while doing nothing to decrease their magnitude. As a result, stack heights have risen steadily over the years. 

The Port Arthur plant has had its stacks raised at least twice in the last few decades, once in 2005 before Oxbow’s purchase of the plant and again in 2018, when Oxbow found that the plant was violating sulfur dioxide limits. Holtham, the plant manager, notified TCEQ in September that Oxbow was replacing one of its stacks with a new structure that would be 20 feet taller — and almost three feet narrower, another strategy that forces emissions out higher into the air. The change “will provide additional loft of the plume” and “provide better dispersion from the Kiln 4 stack which will lower off-property ambient concentrations of air contaminants,” Holtham wrote. Oxbow’s stacks are now among the tallest in Texas, according to a Grist analysis of nearly 10,000 stacks at similar industrial operations.

Replacing the stack had a marked effect on the “experiments” that Oxbow was running. In 2017 and early 2018, prior to replacing the stack, Kiln 4 exhibited a similar shutdown bias to the other kilns when the wind blew in the direction of the monitor: It was down 11 percent of the time when the wind was blowing north (versus 8 percent for other wind directions). But in 2019, after the stack was raised, any such correlation between wind direction and whether the kiln was on disappeared. The overall wind-direction distribution at the site didn’t change, but after its replacement, Kiln 4 was virtually never shut down during periods when the wind blew in the direction of the monitor.

Oxbow continues to argue against installing scrubbers in filings with state regulators. Over the last couple years, states have been developing plans to reduce smog in national parks, and Oxbow’s facilities have been flagged as a major contributor to regional haze in all three states they operate in. The environmental agencies in Louisiana and Oklahoma required the company to conduct a “four-factor analysis” investigating different equipment that would reduce emissions, the cost of compliance, and any environmental impacts not related to air quality that may result. In Oklahoma, Oxbow claimed all three options that it explored were “economically infeasible.” In Louisiana, it claimed installing scrubbers would cost at least $88 million a year. And Texas’ plan to reduce regional haze left Oxbow out even though the Port Arthur plant releases more than 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a year, making it one of the largest polluters in the state. 

Residents who live around the Oxbow facilities have been complaining about its pollution for years. Brannon Alberty, a pediatrician, first called the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or LDEQ, about Oxbow in 2016. Alberty grew up in Baton Rouge and was used to seeing plumes spewing from smokestacks. But the plume from Oxbow’s facility was different. It had a hazy orangish-brown color and was bigger than anything he’d seen from any other facility in the area. Driving home from work on Highway 61, Alberty saw the plume multiple times a week.

“I’m not like an environmentalist or anything like that, but it’s just one of those things that clearly anybody can look at and say, ‘This isn’t right,’” he said.

Between 2016 and 2018, Alberty called LDEQ to report the plume multiple times. Each time, LDEQ checked the facility’s monitoring records and told him the company was operating within the limits established in its permit. Fed up, Alberty called local TV stations and newspapers. He called the EPA, and he even tried to get his neighbor, an attorney, to see if there was a class action lawsuit that could be filed. Eventually, Alberty decided to look at the health data he had access to at his hospital. He found that ER visits and asthma rates in the ZIP codes in and around Oxbow were two to three times higher than the rest of the state. 

Armed with this information, he called the state epidemiologist’s office and flagged the numbers for them. The state health agency took his complaint seriously and in 2019 published a report on the childhood asthma rate in East Baton Rouge. The report doesn’t list Oxbow as the cause for higher asthma rates, but in a map of industrial facilities in the area, the company is named.

Like Alberty, John Beard has been complaining about Oxbow’s emissions in Texas for years. Beard, a local activist and executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, has testified in front of the state legislature and shown up at TCEQ permit hearings, advocating for stricter emissions limits on Oxbow and other polluters. Most recently, Beard teamed up with an environmental group and a legal aid firm to petition the EPA to examine TCEQ’s decisions to renew two permits. The EPA sided with the environmental groups last year in one of the cases and has directed TCEQ to reexamine Oxbow’s recordkeeping and air quality monitoring requirements. The groups have also filed a separate civil rights complaint against TCEQ over Oxbow’s emissions with the EPA.

Specifically, the complaint requests that the agency look into TCEQ “tacitly approving Oxbow’s dispersion techniques,” by failing to investigate the company’s practices. The complaint has since been accepted by the EPA and the agency is currently investigating.

Oxbow did not respond to specific questions about whether it continues to run such experiments to this day. The data submitted to the court cover the company’s operations from January 2017 through June 2019. In a deposition in November 2019, Holtham, the plant manager, said that the company was still running experiments based on wind direction and other parameters because “we still have emissions” and “we want to find out what process parameters” to run in order to operate on a permanent basis. 

According to TCEQ, the agency continues to provide near-real-time monitoring data to Oxbow. At the very least, Oxbow made operational changes based on wind direction from 2017 through half of 2019. If those experiments continue to this day, it raises serious questions about the validity of the monitoring data that the EPA relied on to certify Jefferson County’s air quality. In 2021, after examining air quality data from 2017 to 2020, the EPA declared that the county was in compliance with the sulfur dioxide standard.

Nevertheless, over his decades of advocacy on behalf of Port Arthur residents, Beard has come to identify Oxbow as a “serial polluter.”

“If you came to Port Arthur, walk the streets and you ran into someone and you ask them, ‘Do you know of anyone who either had cancer, died from cancer, [is] currently undergoing treatment, or has been treated for cancer,’ you will not find a single person of adult age who will tell you they don’t know of anybody in this whole city,” he said. “That’s scary. In a city of 55,000, that’s scary.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Koch Oxbow Port Arthur Texas Clean Air Act Pollution on Feb 16, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Marshal Arthur Harris, the director of England’s Bomber Command decided, in mid-1941, to abandon the illusion of surgical strikes. Harris, nicknamed “Bomber,” mastered the ins and outs of committing war crimes from his insidious instructor, Winston Churchill.

The year was 1919. The Royal Air Force asked Churchill for permission to use chemical weapons “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment.” Churchill, secretary of state at the war office at the time, promptly consented. “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he explained. Bomber Harris, an up-and-coming air force officer in 1919, concurred: “They [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage.”

Harris and Churchill teamed up again some 25 years later to execute a relentless terror bombing campaign during WWII for which neither offered any apologies nor demonstrated any qualms. “Now everyone’s at it,” Churchill said about the deliberate targeting of civilians. “It’s simply a question of fashion — similar to that of whether short or long dresses are in.”

Bomber’s attitude was best displayed when, during the later stages of the war, a motorcycle policeman stopped Harris for speeding. “You might have killed someone, sir,” came the reprimand, to which Bomber Harris replied, “Young man, I kill thousands of people every night.”

As for the Americans in the European theater, under direct orders from President Roosevelt, US bombers initially stuck to a slightly more humane policy of daylight precision bombing. Unlike their British counterparts, Americans did not have images of the Luftwaffe over London to motivate them towards unabashed mass murder; it took them a little longer to reach the point of targeting civilians as policy.

The risks of daylight bombing runs did not pay off in accuracy—only 50 percent of US bombs fell within a quarter of a mile of the target. America soon joined its English allies in the execution of nighttime area bombing campaigns of civilian targets in Germany. The saturation bombardment of Bomber Harris and his US counterparts resulted in at least 635,000 dead German civilians.

Day or night, the great number of shells falling where they were not aimed easily debunked the myth of precision. A July 24 and 25, 1944 bombing operation called COBRA called for 1,800 US bombers to hit German defenders near Saint-Lô. The planes arrived one day early and bombed so inaccurately that twenty-five Americans were killed and 131 wounded — causing some US units to open fire on their own aircraft. The next day, with the American soldiers withdrawing thousands of yards to avoid a repeat performance, the bombers still missed their mark and ended up killing 111 GIs and wounding nearly 500 more.

“In order to invade the Continent,” says historian Paul Fussell, “the Allies killed 12,000 innocent French and Belgian civilians who happened to live in the wrong part of town, that is, too near the railway tracks.”

In 1945, Britain and America added fuel to the fire.

On February 13–14, 1945 — 78 years ago today — Allied bombers laid siege to the German town of Dresden which was once known as “Florence on the Elbe.”

With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city’s population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million.

Following up on a smaller raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed at least 48,000 civilians, Winston Churchill enlisted the aid of British scientists to cook up “a new kind of weather.”

The goal was not only maximum destruction and loss of life but also to show their communist allies what a capitalist war machine could do…in case Stalin had any crazy ideas.

An internal Royal Air Force memo described the anti-communist plans as such: “Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also [by] far the largest un-bombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter, with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter… but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas… The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most…and to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”

There was never any doubt on the part of the Allies exactly who they would be bombing at Dresden. Brian S. Blades, a flight engineer in a Lancaster of 460 (Australian) Squadron, wrote that during briefings, he heard phrases like “Virgin target,” and “Intelligence reports thousands of refugees streaming into the city from other bombed areas.”

Besides the stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli.

On the evening of February 13, none of this would matter.

Using the Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next eighteen hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange brew. Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 miles per hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm.

Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs.

Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum or shrunk them into three-foot-long charred carcasses.

Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the “human soup” found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside Dresden.

“The flames ate everything organic, everything that would burn,” wrote journalist Phillip Knightley. “People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. Then American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the banks of the Elbe.”

The Allied firebombing did more than shock and awe. The Greatest [sic] Generation bombing campaign murdered more than 100,000 people — mostly civilians — but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.

In his wartime memoirs, Sir Winston Churchill seemed unable to work up much emotion in recalling the Dresden assault. He wrote: “We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communication of Germany’s Eastern Front.”

It’s well-known that the victors write the history.

Let’s be the victors this time.

Reminder: The Greatest Generation Deliberately Bombed Civilians

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Their case is part of the long and documented history of the Chicago Police Department  coercing false confessions particularly from BIPOC young men using violence, threats, and intimidation. In addition to now invalidated arson science, the key piece of evidence used to convict Mr. Galvan and his co-defendants was a false confession coerced from him after he was handcuffed to a wall and beaten by police.

Mr. Galvan, Mr. Almendarez and Mr. Nanez’s wrongful conviction was based on three key factors. First, a neighborhood man claimed that he saw Mr. Galvan come out of the alley behind the building that burned around the time the fire began. Second, a Chicago arson investigator said that the fire was an arson based on faulty arson science. Third, and most importantly, Mr. Galvan gave a confession, which he has always maintained was the product of police torture.  

The three men were also convicted despite the fact that the only witness who claimed she saw this fire begin, a woman who lived across the street from the building that burned, testified at trial that she saw a group of people in the alley at the time the fire began, but that Mr. Galvan was not in that group. Additionally, Mr. Galvan’s family testified that at the time of this fire he was home asleep.

Years of post-conviction litigation and appeals by the Innocence Project (representing Mr. Galvan), The Exoneration Project (representing Mr. Galvan and Mr. Almendarez) and the Cook County Public Defender (representing Mr. Nanez), revealed that new developments in arson science discredited the testimony of the state’s arson expert as to the cause and origin of the fire. 

“At 18, 20, and 22, the lives of these three men were just beginning when their freedom was stolen. They have shown such determination and strength over the last three and a half decades,” said Tara Thompson, Mr. Galvan’s Innocence Project attorney. “This case is representative of the many wrongful convictions stemming from the pervasive misconduct by Chicago law enforcement, as well as invalidated forensic techniques. We have to address these recurring issues if we are to have truly fair and equitable systems of justice in this  country.”

“It has been a true honor to represent these courageous men who have endured unspeakable tragedy. Yet again, the Chicago justice system failed. It failed these men and it failed the families of two people who tragically died 35 years ago. Chicago needs to do better,” said Joshua Tepfer, attorney at The Exoneration Project, who also represents Mr. Galvan and is Mr. Almendarez’s attorney. 

A Fatal Fire

On September 21, 1986, an early-morning fire seriously damaged a two-flat apartment building in Chicago. Siblings Blanca Martinez and Jorge Martinez escaped, but their two brothers, Guadalupe and Julio, died.

Police immediately began interviewing the surviving victims and surrounding neighbors. Blanca Martinez, the sister of the victims, and several neighbors told police that a woman from the neighborhood had threatened to burn down the building in apparent retaliation for the death of her brother. The woman was questioned by police and denied involvement but said that Mr. Galvan was involved. 

In their investigation, police also interviewed two men from the neighborhood, Jose Ramirez and Rene Rodriguez, who told police that Mr. Galvan, his brother, and Mr. Almendarez’s brother were involved in the deadly fire. Police then arrested all three men along with Mr. Almendarez. 

In multiple interactions with the police, Mr. Galvan, Mr. Almendarez, and Mr. Nanez gave coerced confessions to the police, and were charged with aggravated arson and murder the next day. Mr. Galvan’s statement says that the occupants of the home were in the Villalobos Street gang – a supposed rival gang – and he killed them because he had been jumped by members of the gang earlier and wanted to get back at them. In this account, he, Mr. Almendarez, and Mr. Nanez started this fire by throwing a beer-bottle’s worth of gasoline into the porch area of the home and lighting it with a cigarette. 

Evidence Presented at Trial

At trial, Mr. Galvan professed his innocence. The night of the fire he went to his grandmother’s at about 3:00 a.m. and went to sleep. While driving around earlier that night he saw  two men who were drinking and threw bottles at him, and would later point the finger at him in the police investigation – Jose Ramirez and Rene Rodriguez.

Mr. Galvan testified at trial he was arrested by Detective Victor Switski who awoke him from his sleep, handcuffed him, and took him to the police station and then handcuffed him to the wall. Detective Switski said he wanted Mr. Galvan to implicate other people so he could leave. He also threatened him, telling him he would get the death penalty and would be “laying next to his father,” who had passed away. Mr. Galvan was crying, but Detective Switski kept “going over and over about it.” Detective Switski told him that if someone else threw the bottle, Mr. Galvan could go home. Mr. Galvan testified that Detective Switski started “making up the story” that Mr. Galvan threw a match on the gasoline while Mr. Nanez threw the bottle. Detective Switski then made him go over the story – repeating it over and over, writing it down, and giving it to Mr. Galvan to review. Mr. Galvan testified that Detective Switski hit him with an open hand on the back of his head an undetermined number of times when he wouldn’t agree to what Detective Switski wanted him to say. 

Also at the trial, Detective Mark Scheithauer from the CPD Bomb and Arson Section testified as an expert witness, insisting that the origin of the fire was the porch in front of the doorway going into the first-floor apartment, based on “significant burning and deep charring” on the first-floor porch, as well as areas of burn-through in front of the back doorway. He testified with specificity that this burn-through indicated “something was laying on the surface of the floor that involved the wood to a greater degree than the surrounding areas causing it to burn down and through the floor.” He identified the cause as “propagated by means of a liquid accelerant” with an unknown ignition source. This evaluation would later be proved scientifically impossible.

Mr. Galvan, Mr. Almendarez and Mr. Nanez were convicted on all counts and sentenced to life. 

Post-Conviction Evidence

Mr. Galvan, Mr. Almendarez, and Mr. Nanez fought for years through the Illinois post-conviction process to get an evidentiary hearing on new evidence they found supporting a number of post-conviction claims, including actual innocence, ineffective assistance of counsel, Brady violations, a violation of  Fifth Amendment rights not to have an involuntary confession used against them, and a Batson violation. In Mr. Galvan’s case, the Court of Appeals ordered that he receive an evidentiary hearing and in 2015 and 2016, Mr. Galvan presented numerous days of testimony and evidence he started amassing in 2001. That evidence included:

Newly-discovered evidence about developments in arson science.

Dr. Russell Ogle, who has investigated hundreds of residential fires, and was qualified as fire and explosions expert explained that Mr. Galvan’s purported confession was inconsistent with the true ignition source of this fire. The confession presented a scenario that was scientifically impossible for multiple reasons, including (1) it is now undisputed in modern science that a burning cigarette cannot ignite a flammable vapor, and (2) a Molotov cocktail could not have been involved in the ignition of the fire, because a burning cigarette cannot ignite wood that has been soaked in gasoline, and the volume of gasoline in a beer bottle was too small to burn down a building. 

Evidence Pointed to a Neighborhood Woman as an Alternate Suspect

Detective Thomas Jones of the Chicago Police Department testified that there were multiple witnesses who told him that a neighborhood woman had made threats to burn down the building in retaliation for the death of her brother. This evidence is reflected in police reports documenting interviews with neighbors and associates of the woman. 

A Witness Testifies that John Galvan and Arthur Almendarez Were Not In The Alley on the Night of the Fire

A witness who was on the street the night of the fire told the CPD detectives he knew Mr. Galvan and Mr. Almendarez, and that he did not see them there the night of the fire. During that interview, police asked him if anyone else was around that night, and the witness told them that there were a couple of young guys in the alley whom he did not recognize. 

Additional Evidence Emerges that the Confessions Were Coerced

Mr. Galvan’s brother confirmed Galvan’s account police torture, testifying that he could hear yelling, crying, and noises on the wall or table during Mr. Galvan’s interrogation. Mr. Galvan’s mother also said that when she saw him after his police interrogation, he looked shaky and pale, telling her that “he couldn’t take it anymore” and that his confession was the result of physical abuse. Additionally, seven witnesses testified that they had also been victims of torture at the hands of the detectives who coerced confessions from Mr. Galvan and Mr. Almendarez. These witnesses described in detail what happened to them during their interrogations and how they came to falsely confess.

In 2019, the Appellate Court granted Mr. Galvan post-conviction relief on the grounds of actual innocence.  The appellate court focused on the pattern of torture evidence presented at the hearing, and concluded that without Mr. Galvan’s confession, “the State’s case was nonexistent.” The Court also found that there was additional “strong evidence of actual innocence, especially in light of the fact that the only evidence against petitioner [was] his own statements. No physical evidence or eyewitness testimony tied the petitioner to this crime, and he contends that his statements were not voluntary.” 

Mr. Galvan, Mr. Almendarez, and Mr. Nanez were granted new trials.

The Brady rule requires prosecutors to disclose materially exculpatory evidence in the government’s possession to the defense.

The Batson challenge refers to the act of objecting to the validity of a peremptory challenge, on grounds that the other party used it to exclude a potential juror based on race, ethnicity, or sex. 

The post John Galvan, Arthur Almendarez, and Francisco Nanez Are Exonerated in Alleged Aggravated Arson and Murder Case appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by jlucivero.