The warning signs of genocide in Gaza had been there for all to see. But the lack of will on the part of UN members to implement 3246 not only let it happen but then failed to stop it even when its ferocity passed all comprehension.

When October 7 erupted the West attempted to airbrush the pre-existing conditions Israel had imposed on Gaza and pretended Hamas started the ‘war’. But 1,000 lawyers, scholars, and practitioners immediately sounded the alarm about “the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” and issued an open letter as early as 15 October.

For a start they reminded everyone that in 1982 the UN General Assembly condemned the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as “an act of genocide”.

Pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had prompted discussion on genocide before, with warnings given over the years that the siege of Gaza (from 2006 onwards) might amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”.

And since 2007, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel had defined the Gaza Strip as an “enemy entity”.

Earlier in 2023 Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant”, and “disgusting” and proposed “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.

Here’s a timely reminder of what else the open letter said.

• In the short space of time between 7 October and 15 October (when the open letter was written), 2,329 Palestinians were killed and 9,042 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, including over 724 children, huge swathes of neighborhoods, and entire families across Gaza were obliterated.

• Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other necessities. This intensifies an already illegal and potentially genocidal siege turning it into an outright destructive assault.

• The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) stated that orders to evacuate, coupled with the complete siege, are incompatible with international humanitarian law. Almost half a million Palestinians have already been displaced and Israeli forces have bombed the only possible exit route that Israel does not control (the Rafah crossing to Egypt) multiple times.

• The World Health Organisation published a warning that “forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence”.

• In the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, since 7 October, Israeli settlers backed by the IDF and police, have attacked and shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range (as documented in the villages of a-Tuwani and Qusra), invaded their homes, and assaulted residents. Several Palestinian communities have already been forced to abandon their homes, after which settlers arrived and destroyed their property.

• Between 7 and 15 October, Al-Haq documented the killing by the Israeli military and settlers of 55 Palestinians in the West Bank with 1,200 injured there.

• Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”, and afterward announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, also stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”

• On 10 October, the head of the Israeli Army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”.

• Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

• On 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas fighters and asserted that Israel will wage a prolonged offensive that will turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble”.

• Israel’s President emphasized that the Israeli authorities view the entire Palestinian population of Gaza as responsible for the actions of militant groups, and subject accordingly to collective punishment and unrestricted use of force: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

• Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz added: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

• On 12 October UN Special Rapporteurs condemned “Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for”.

• UN experts warned against “the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines. Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at an inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity”.

• On 14 October the UN Special Rapporteur, on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, warned against “a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale” as Israel is carrying out “mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”.

• The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life – against a backdrop of Israeli statements that evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.

• Article II of the Genocide Convention provides that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as # Killing members of the group; # Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; # Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; # Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; # Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

• The Convention provides that individuals who attempt genocide or who incite genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.

• The International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harboring specific intent (dolus specialist), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”. (The many means available to the British Government include sanctions – readily applied to other delinquent nations – and withdrawal of favored-nation privileges, trade deals, and scientific collaboration).

• Competent elements of the United Nations, particularly the UN General Assembly, are required to take urgent action under the Charter of the United Nations appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Emphasis is on the General Assembly given that the Security Council is compromised by the US and UK (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel.

• All relevant UN bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, are called on to immediately intervene, carry out necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.

Chock-full of hate

All this was quickly followed by the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023, which contained important warnings regarding international law — for example:

⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means the UK must not itself assist violations by others.

⦁ The UK Government must immediately halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law and in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.

So, within 3 weeks it was clear to everyone paying attention that the Israeli leadership, chock-full of hate, were set on a course of vicious and brutal genocide. Yet the following month John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, dismissed claims that Israel was committing genocide and told everybody that “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So if we’re going to start using that word, fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”

Yes, and let’s use the term “right of self-defence” appropriately. In Gaza and the West Bank it only applies to the Palestinian resistance, not the belligerent illegal occupier.

Incredibly, we’re now entering the 9th month of the genocide in Gaza and it has gone from bad to much, much worse. And there is still no let-up. People worldwide have been watching day after day mainstream and alternative media reports, seeing for themselves the horrors endured even by children, and aghast at the wholesale and wanton destruction of the Palestinians’ homeland. They cannot believe how depraved, immoral and spineless the international community has become, and how paralysed the UN in allowing the slaughter to continue. They are especially sickened by the conduct of the so-called ‘major powers’ and by the lunatic Netanyahu whom their own politicians call ‘friend and ally’ who thinks he can still dictate what happens in Gaza after he eventually condescends to end the butchery.

If he thinks Israel can now grab Gaza by conquest he may be disappointed. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter expressly prohibits aggressive war and Article 5(3) of General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 1975 (which includes the definition of Acts of Aggression) nullifies any legal title acquired in this way. And 5(3) says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations“.

In carrying through its genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilians and their homes, infrastructure and livelihoods Israel cannot possibly claim to abide by international law or honour their obligations under the Charter. And by encouraging Israel — and supplying the weaponry — neither can the US and UK.

And now we have Biden, Israel’s loony protector, setting ‘red lines’ which Israel must not cross while merrily carrying on with their genocide. But they are so elastic that, with US permission, the hateful maniacs can almost do as they please to satisfy their genocidal lust. Biden arrogantly overrules the red lines on war crimes and crimes against humanity that are already set out by international law.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Image by UX Gun.

I’ve been describing this world of ours, such as it is, for almost 23 years at TomDispatch. I’ve written my way through three-and-a-half presidencies — god save us, it could be four in November! I’ve viewed from a grave (and I mean that word!) distance America’s endlessly disastrous wars of this century. I’ve watched the latest military budget hit almost $900 billion, undoubtedly on its way toward a cool trillion in the years to come, while years ago the whole “national security” budget (though “insecurity” would be a better word) soared to well over the trillion-dollar mark.

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

“If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

The post A Slow-Motion World War III? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tom Engelhardt.

And if a hot, dry summer sweeps across the Midwest, drying the river out for hundreds of miles downstream, something very strange happens in southern Louisiana. 

For the past month, as the water level on the lower Mississippi River sinks lower amid an extreme drought stretching from Nebraska to Ohio, a mass of salt water has been pushing upriver from the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans, filling the space where fresh water should be. Salt water is heavier than freshwater, so the water forms the shape of a wedge pressing against the bottom of the river. The wedge has already slithered more than 50 miles upstream, passing several small communities in rural Plaquemines Parish, and experts say it will likely reach New Orleans by the end of the month. Even as local and federal officials rush to slow down the wedge, they’re finding themselves powerless against the laws of nature.

The wedge poses a serious threat to the drinking water supply in communities along the river. Salt water has already begun to contaminate local water systems in the towns of Port Sulphur and Pointe à la Hache, and by the end of next week it will likely reach suburban Belle Chasse, home to around 10,000 people. Rural communities in lower Plaquemines Parish have been drinking bottled water and showering in salty tap water for multiple weeks, and it was only this week that officials installed reverse-osmosis filters at the parish’s treatment plant to remove salt from the local water supply.

When humans drink salty water, the elevated sodium in their blood can raise their blood pressure and make their kidneys work harder. This can be harmful for children and pregnant women, as well as those who need to maintain low-sodium diets for medical reasons. 

“​There is not a firm black line when it becomes unhealthy,” said Joseph Kanter, the state health officer for Louisiana, in a recent interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune. For sensitive groups, he added, “it wouldn’t be bad advice to switch over to bottled water” when the salinity of local water supplies exceeds 250 parts per million, about the threshold at which water starts to taste salty.

The wedge could cause even more significant health problems as it reaches New Orleans. The city has some 50,000 drinking-water pipes that are made out of lead, and the corrosive salt water would permanently damage those pipes as it moved through the system, allowing lead and other chemicals to leach into water. Research shows that drinking water contaminated with heavy metals can significantly increase one’s risk of brain damage, liver damage, kidney damage, and cancer. Exposure is most dangerous for young children.

Louisiana has dealt with several of these so-called wedges before during drought years. The last time a wedge threatened the city of New Orleans was in 1988, when salt water came within a few miles of the freshwater intake valve in the city’s Carrollton neighborhood, the largest source of drinking water for the city. Residents rushed to stock up on bottled water, buying so much of it that a local bottler ran out of stock. State leaders tried to stop the panic, with one health official telling the media that the water contained “less salt than a box of Popeyes Fried Chicken.”

The federal government has already begun sending resources to Louisiana, but its options are limited. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which resumed funding all disaster projects this week thanks to a last-minute infusion of money from Congress, has agreed to help four river parishes manage the costs of responding to the disaster. Local officials will be able to seek reimbursement from FEMA in the coming months for money they spend on bottled water or treatment infrastructure.

The Army Corps of Engineers, the federal civil works agency that manages the river, is working to dilute the salt contamination in local water supplies by hauling in fresh water on barges. The agency delivered its first barge of water to Plaquemines Parish on Monday, dropping off 500,000 gallons at the Port Sulphur treatment facility, where officials have been dealing with contamination for weeks. The agency says it will soon be able to deliver 36 million gallons of water a day to the region, which is more than enough to dilute water for towns downstream of New Orleans.

But the imported water won’t be enough to stop contamination at the much larger water intake facilities in New Orleans. Instead, local officials with the city’s Sewerage and Water Board are hoping FEMA will reimburse them for the cost of building a 12-mile pipeline that would pump water to the city from further upstream, near the city of Kenner. Sewerage and Water Board officials have said the pipeline could cost more than $150 million and begin operations by the end of the month. A spokesperson for the agency told Grist that the agency is in the process of reviewing bids from construction firms and that it expects FEMA to cover the cost of construction. In the meantime, neighboring Jefferson Parish has already begun preliminary construction on its own pipeline.

As far as stopping the wedge itself, that’s almost impossible to do. The Corps has constructed a “sill,” or underwater levee, to stop the progress of the water. The barrier should slow down the saltwater intrusion for a few weeks, but there’s no way to prevent the water from moving upstream without damming the river altogether, which is impossible. 

It will take a heavy round of rainfall in the Upper Midwest to put a permanent end to the crisis, and that might not arrive for months. The Mississippi’s current flow is about 150,000 cubic feet per second, about half of what officials say is necessary to push the salt water back out into the Gulf. Forecasts in the Mississippi and Ohio River watersheds call for around an inch of rain over the coming week, but it could take as much as 10 inches to restore the river’s normal flow.

It was this inescapable truth that informed Kanter’s other main piece of advice.

“Pray for rain in the Ohio Valley,” the state health official told the Times-Picayune.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Louisiana’s saltwater wedge is a slow-motion disaster on Oct 3, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

The post The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tom Engelhardt.

Abbas’s trip was an effort to make the PA appear in control over the restive refugee camp and adjacent city, but the visit—which PA forces coordinated with the militant groups that dominate and effectively govern Jenin—illustrated the opposite. Abbas appeared fragile, anemic, and not long for this world, much like the PA itself, which is polling at record lows among Palestinians. In the absence of any resumption of peace talks, Palestinians increasingly see the PA—which has long carried out the dirty work of policing and counterinsurgency to quell opposition to Israel in the West Bank—as a mere tool of the occupation. In recent weeks, crowds have jeered PA officials visiting the camp and even pushed them out of funerals for Palestinian militants killed in Israeli military operations. “Even before the last incursion, the PA was in a state of slow-motion collapse,” explained Khaled Elgindy, the Middle East Institute’s Director of the Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs.

In an effort to counter the PA’s decline, its security forces are attempting to reassert control over parts of Jenin and Nablus in the aftermath of Israel’s recent incursions. But the process may further compromise the PA’s legitimacy. Not only did the Israeli army operation, which was coordinated with the PA to prevent a clash between Israeli and PA forces, reveal the PA’s inability and unwillingness to defend its own people—now, to show that it is still in control, the PA will need to crack down on the young militants who have taken up the banner of armed resistance to Israel’s occupation, doubly undermining it in the eyes of Palestinians. “It looks like the PA is returning to Jenin on the back of Israeli tanks,” Elgindy said. “That’s not going to do anything to help their already extremely low credibility.”

For some early critics, such as the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said, the PA’s double-bind was inherent in its creation as part of the Oslo peace process. Said presciently charged that by signing the agreement, Yasser Arafat—leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, out of which the PA emerged—ended armed resistance and recognized Israel without ending the occupation, which made Oslo a document of “Palestinian capitulation” and the PA the bitter fruit of defeat. Viewed this way, there has been an inverse relationship between the PA’s popular legitimacy and the extent of its conformity to the Oslo framework since its inception.

For many others, the PA’s built-in contradictions came painfully to the fore in the late 2000s, when it redoubled its “state-building” measures. After Israel destroyed the previous Palestinian security infrastructure during the Second Intifada, the PA—under direct US supervision and training—rebuilt and professionalized its Palestine Authority Security Forces (PASF), which swelled into a massive, repressive security apparatus that today employs more than 80,000 people. In her book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, political scientist Dana El Kurd observes that the PA spends a full third of its budget on the PASF. “There is one security/police officer for every forty-eight Palestinians, whereas there is one officer for every 384 Americans,” El Kurd writes. “As another shocking point of comparison, East Germany, considered the quintessential police state, had only one officer or employed informant per sixty-six Germans.”

The restructured PASF soon began cracking down on Islamist and other non-PA militant groups and quashing internal dissent under the rubric of its revamped security coordination with Israeli authorities. According to a recent article by Alaa Tartir, an academic and program director of the Palestinian think-tank Al Shakaba, the PA “sought to tame resistance to Israel’s occupation and colonial domination by criminalizing militancy.” “The PA and its security forces used harassment, marginalization, arrest, detention, and torture against those engaged in resisting Israel,” Tartir writes, pointing to how PA forces conducted “aggressive security campaigns within the occupied West Bank’s most militant spaces” in order to dismantle armed resistance and Palestinian dissident groups. The PA took these steps to demonstrate its capacity for future statehood to Israel and its international donors, and to reassert its aspirational monopoly on the use of violence among Palestinians within the West Bank. The practical effect, however, was to turn the PA into an oppressive regime detested by its own people.

The post The PA’s Slow-Motion Collapse appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Alaa Tartir.

The FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., seen beyond barbed wire fencing surrounding a construction zone, on Aug. 14, 2022.

Photo: Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto via AP

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Supporters of former President Donald Trump gather near his residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022.

Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images

Trump has brought the hellscape of “The Turner Diaries” out of the realm of perverted fantasy and into grim reality.

Far from trying to rein in Trump and his brown shirts, GOP leaders have stoked the threats of violence.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.