Category: Uncategorized

by ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

“Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as ‘a nation of immigrants,’ Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.”

While attending the University of Oklahoma in 1956 – 57, I met a Palestinian petroleum engineering student named Said Abu-Lughod. Said, whose older brother Ibrahim Abu-Lughod would become a renowned professor at Northwestern University, told me how Israeli settlers had violently forced his family out of their ancestral home in Jaffa during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This had happened only eight years earlier, when Said was 12 years old. His family fled as refugees to Jordan. ‘

Said also gave me a book—What Price Israel? by Alfred M. Lilienthal?—?that truly changed my thinking. Now there are many excellent studies by Palestinian and other historians, but in the 1950s there was nothing else like it. (Later, I met the author while attending the 1983 United Nations’ Conference on Palestine— also attended by Yasser Arafat and a large Palestine Liberation Organization delegation?—?and was able to thank him.) 

This experience as a teenager was my introduction to the concept of settler colonialism and made me a supporter of Palestinian self-determination and right of return. It’s also what led me to study history and eventually to write my doctoral dissertation on Spanish settler colonialism in New Mexico, still a major issue there today. 

When I left Oklahoma in 1960 to attend San Francisco State College, I had expected?—?without basis?—?the city to be a hotbed of anti-colonial fervor. This was long before the famous strikes of 1968, but there was a very visible group on campus of mostly white activists attached to the U.S. Communist Party. I was attracted to the zeal with which they supported the burgeoning Black civil rights movement in the South, and, though I was married and working part-time, I attended their rallies on campus as often as I could. What puzzled me about them, however, was their vocal celebration of the state of Israel. Many had visited and lived and worked for a time in the socialist kibbutzim there. Most of these students were not themselves Jewish; the one who became my best friend was from a working-class Greek immigrant family in Indiana.

Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as “a nation of immigrants,” Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.

Their support for Israel was emblematic, I came to understand later, of the seductive mythology that settler-colonial states cultivate and depend on. These young people were drawn to the story about a state created to protect Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Also, the mystic chords of American settlement resonated strongly then, largely due to the ?“new frontier” rhetoric of John F. Kennedy. The grandson of immigrants was elected president and inspired young people. In accepting his nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy intoned: ?“I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. … We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” In the young students’ minds, the state of Israel was duplicating that promise. They had little knowledge of the Indigenous peoples who were driven out of their villages and homelands here in North America and even less about the existence of Palestinians.

Although there are stark differences and time frames for the establishment of settler colonialism, there is a common thread that defines the process. To understand this, it’s helpful to distinguish, as historian Lorenzo Veracini does, between ?“settlers” and ?“immigrants”: While migrants enter existing political orders, ?“settlers are founders of political orders” and carry their sovereignty with them.

Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of South Asian origin who grew up in Uganda, puts it this way in his book Neither Settler Nor Native: ?“If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead, they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.”

In These Times for more

A CRADLE CORRESPONDENT

Julani’s rise from Al-Qaeda affiliate to a western-recognized ‘moderate’ leader exemplifies how geopolitics trumps ideology. For years, the west has pretended to fight terrorism while leveraging Julani and his vast Al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked terror network to destabilize Syria.

Just in time for the Al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) lightning conquest of Syria, a western PR campaign was launched to rebrand the terror group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani. 

The BBC assured their readers that Julani, now commonly referred to as Ahmed al-Sharaa – which is his real name – had “reinvented himself,” while the Telegraph insisted that the former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is now “diversity friendly.”

On 6 December, just days before entering the capital Damascus, Julani sat down with CNN journalist Jomana Karadsheh for an exclusive interview to explain his past.

“Julani says he has gone through episodes of transformation through the years,” CNN wrote, after he assured Karadsheh “no one has the right to eliminate” Syria’s Alawites, Christians, and Druze.

But why was Julani so eager to convince the American public that he had no plans to exterminate Syria’s religious minorities? This question looms larger when recalling the massacre of 190 Alawites in Latakia on 4 August 2013, and the taking of hundreds more as captives. 

Back then, militants from HTS (then the Nusra Front), ISIS, and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) attacked 10 villages, slaughtering civilians in ways documented by Human Rights Watch: gunshot wounds, stabbings, decapitations, and charred remains. “Some corpses were found in a state of complete charring, and others had their feet tied,” the report stated.

Another useful US asset 

Fast forward to recent years, and Julani’s “transformation” seems less about repentance and more about utility. Despite HTS remaining on the US terror list – and an American bounty of $10 million reserved for Julani himself – former US special envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, described the group as a strategic “asset” for US operations in Syria. 

Under the guise of countering extremism, Washington pursued a dual strategy: enforcing crushing economic sanctions on Syria – of the sort that killed 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990s –  while ensuring its wheat-abundant and oil-rich regions remain under US control. 

Ambassador Jeffrey admitted to PBS in March 2021 that Julani’s HTS was the “least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.”

But how did Julani ascend to power in Idlib? His Nusra Front spearheaded the 2015 conquest under the banner of Jaish al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest), a coalition that combined Nusra suicide bombers with Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters equipped with CIA-supplied TOW missiles. Foreign Policy hailed the campaign’s swift progress, crediting this synergy of jihadists and western arms.

Years later, US official Brett McGurk would label Idlib “the largest Al-Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Yet, the crucial role of US weapons and strategic aid in this outcome went unmentioned. 

Assistance from Tel Aviv and Brussels too 

This assistance extended beyond arms: the Financial Times (FT) reported that in response, EU foreign ministers “lifted an oil embargo against Syria to allow rebels to sell crude to fund their operation.” 

While the FSA claimed control of the oil fields, activists openly acknowledged that the Nusra Front was the true beneficiary, trucking barrels to Turkiye for refining or export to Europe. The arrangement netted Nusra millions before ISIS seized the fields a year later.

Academic and Syria expert Joshua Landis noted the importance of controlling the oil fields, explaining that “Whoever gets their hands on the oil, water, and agriculture holds Sunni Syria by the throat” and that “the logical conclusion from this craziness is that Europe will be funding Al-Qaeda.”

Behind the scenes, western and regional powers facilitated Julani’s ascent. Israeli airstrikes supported Nusra during clashes with Syrian forces, while outgoing Israeli Army Chief Gadi Eisenkot admitted to supplying “light weapons” to rebel groups – essentially acknowledging what the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) had been reporting for years to “discredit the rebels as stooges of the Zionists.”

The Cradle for more

by RICHARD SEYMOUR

Richard Seymour on how crisis and catastrophe are feeding the far-right surge

The inchoate breed of fascism emerging today thrives on disasters, chronic and acute. Today’s far right is not yet fascist, or not-yet-fascist. It does not organize paramilitaries with the aim of overthrowing electoral democracy and destroying political freedom. Rather, it has a thin, networked civil society base whose energies are wrapped around culture wars that occasionally explode into the meatspace violence of lone-wolf murderers, vigilantes, riots, pogroms, and pseudo-insurrections. Its elected leaders such as Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán, Milei, and Netanyahu direct their aggression not at electoral democracy, but at the liberal state. They have at times unleashed popular violence in an offensive on bourgeois legality, but the aim is to effect a constitutional rupture that tilts the balance of rule toward authoritarian democracy rather than outright dictatorship.

The fascism that is being prepared through this sequence will not resemble classical fascism. The world that made fascism — colonialism, class civil war, revolution, and intense industrial modernization — has passed. The new world is one in which the big questions will be those raised by the climate crisis: who gets what and who does without, who lives and who dies. Neonate fascism, whether green or brown, is preparing the terrain for a war on what it sees as mutant or out-of-place biology: the migratory or criminal.

According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, classical fascism liberated a popular desire for suicide: its fulfilment was not the fabulated Reich stretching from Western Europe to East Asia, but the Nero decree ordering the destruction of German infrastructure as the Nazis’ final act. Today’s incipient fascisms metabolize the mulch of misery into a form of collective excitement tending toward the ecstatic brush with death that is the metier of the lone-wolf murderer. Wholly lacking the utopian aspects of interwar fascism, with its idea of refining the species through brutal demographic culls and improving living standards through colonial expansion, it is today, more nakedly than ever before, a suicidal programme.

Let me begin with a contemporary disaster story. In the summer of 2020, the US state of Oregon witnessed a wildfire bigger than anything in living memory — so far. Winds blew wildfires into megafires, and downed power lines to create more fires, burning at up to 800C. Ten percent of the state’s population was forced to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed. Thirty-three people were killed.

This acute disaster came hard upon a series of chronic disasters: the financial crash of 2008 was followed by economic depression, soaring poverty rates and joblessness especially in rural counties, pervasive alcoholism, the highest addiction rates in the United States — before the fentanyl crisis took off — and a surge of suicides. We often hear that disasters bring people together: the “city of comrades”, the “democracy of distress”, or what Rebecca Solnit calls “disaster communities”. It isn’t necessarily so. Kai Erikson, a sociologist specializing in disasters, found not a single example of this. If it happens, it happens only where the community wasn’t already riven with ethnic and class fault lines. Erikson found that in most scenarios, acute disaster compounds chronic disaster.

The chronic disasters — of poverty, addiction and public squalor — creep around and shut down a person’s defences without them noticing. When the acute disaster comes, she is in no position to resist. She instead experiences something akin to a “psychological concussion”, a “dull silence”, a retreat to the survivalist enclaves of life. And hopelessness — apocalyptic hopelessness. They share the sense that some bleak truth about the world has been horribly and irreversibly disclosed.

Loving Catastrophe: The Spectre of Disaster Nationalism

Yet, today’s far-right loves disaster. In a world where disasters are not exactly scarce, they can’t stop fantasizing about imaginary disasters: the “Great Replacement” in which migrants will allegedly swallow up white Euro-American societies, the “white genocide” that will be its supposed result, the “Great Reset” favouring globalist elites after Covid, the “gender ideology” that is said to be a plot to destroy Western masculinity from Eastern Europe to Latin America, the “cultural Marxists” plotting sedition from within, and, in India, the “Romeo Jihad” in which deviant Muslim men seduce and convert Hindu girls as part of a thousand-year-old war on the Hindu nation. They love raging and pogroming against imaginary disaster.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for more

by BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

Both personally and collectively, the certainties of the present always carry with them the germ of future uncertainties. But there are moments or eras in which certainties are more pronounced and uncertainties more remote, and moments or eras in which the opposite occurs. What kind of certainty/uncertainty dialectic do contemporary societies find themselves in? As always, history helps us to understand, but it doesn’t prescribe anything for the simple reason that it never repeats itself. Certainties can be shaken by two types of uncertainty: upward uncertainties and downward uncertainties. The former are the challenges that can be overcome with a little more of the same kind of effort that gave rise to the certainties; the downward uncertainties are those that represent challenges which, from the outset, seem lost. But the most important thing about this classification is knowing which class or social group has certainties and benefits from them, and which class or social group has uncertainties and what kinds of consequences they have.

At the beginning of the last century, the European bourgeoisie, which at the time claimed to be the protagonists of the only civilized world, was full of certainties. Scientific and technological advances were dizzying. On the technological front, the two sides of the North Atlantic (Europe and Europe-out-of-place) were rivaling each other in the speed of inventions in the fields of aviation, motorized travel, radio, and cinema. In 1900, French trains were faster than English or German trains, at 59mph, 56.5mph, 50mph respectively. But the Americans outpaced them all: 67mph. Advances in science were equally exciting, even if many of them translated into new technologies. For example, in 1895, Wilhem R?ntgen discovered lightning with an immense penetrating capacity. Since no one knew what they were, R?ntgen called them x-rays. This was followed by the discoveries (sometimes rediscoveries) of radioactivity, the atomic structure of matter, alpha and beta rays, the theory of electrons and the theory of relativity. The absolute space of classical mechanics gave way to the impact of time and speed, the relationship between matter and electric charge, and the relationship between particles and fields. Rutherford described the atom as a miniature solar system and Niels Bohr sought a synthesis between atomic theory and quantum theory, an effort crowned in 1925 by Schr?dinger and Heisenberg and by the concept of entropy. For its part, mathematics, through George Cantor and his theory of sets, had entered a field that had previously been the exclusive preserve of theologians: infinity and the various types of infinity. But perhaps the most important certainty of the early 20th century was that biology would transform humanity in unprecedented ways in the centuries to come. Biology brought together physics, chemistry, psychology, sociology and even ethics and religion. The triumph of science extended to medicine and psychiatry. It was a world of certainties. There were uncertainties, but they were upward, in other words, challenges to be conquered only with more effort.

But this is only part of the story. After all, the First World War was looming. Two downward uncertainties (i.e. uncertainties difficult to conceive of as easy challenges to overcome) haunted the European bourgeoisie: the growing power of the working class as a social and political actor and the awakening of Asia, illustrated by the emergence of the power of Japan, “the yellow peril” of the time. The former was for the working class the first rising uncertainty in its history: the challenge that with a little more effort it could defeat the two pillars of bourgeois power: property and privilege. The bourgeoisie’s second downward uncertainty would eventually lead indirectly to war: the benign side of science and technology concealed the dark side of power struggles, imperial rivalries, living space, the propaganda of war as an exercise in purification and progress, the desperate search for raw materials, the savage destruction of nature and its faithful guardians. Was war the logical outcome of previous progress? And if so, was the previous progress real or illusory? Were there any alternatives? Why weren’t they tried?

The certainties of today

The certainties of today are heirs to those of the last century, except that over time they become more fragile and almost always closer to downward uncertainty. And the protagonists have also changed profoundly. Let’s look at the paradigmatic case.

Science and technology. Every society gets the science it deserves. The conflicts and contradictions in society are always reflected in science. At the beginning of the 20th century, largely due to the growing strength of the working class, the fundamental contradiction was between prosperity and productivity: either maximizing full humanity or maximizing wealth. Prosperity pointed to the distribution of benefits across all of humanity (even if humanity was confined to the North Atlantic). The distribution didn’t have to be egalitarian, but it had to be significant enough to avoid “the rebellion of the masses”. On the contrary, productivity was centered on the accumulation and concentration of wealth because, given the scarcity of resources, no one could get rich without causing the impoverishment of others.

The idea of prosperity dominated both economic theory and law. Far from having altruistic motives, the idea of prosperity was haunted by the fear of socialism. There was theorizing about “the moral obligation of the economy”, the “social function of property”, “the new natural law”, “the morality of competition”. Max Weber anguished over the problem of objectivity in the face of the contradictions he had learned from Marx (without saying so). The boldest ones spoke of solidarism, economic democracy, free association, social protection legislation, integral socialism and imperialism. All this scientific creativity was intended to manage the emerging contradictions, but it had little impact on political decisions, which were increasingly dominated by the idea of progress as productivity and the accumulation of wealth. As always, science and technology followed politics.

The certainties in scientific and technological progress are the same today, but the intellectual and political contradiction between prosperity and productivity has disappeared. To understand this disappearance, we need to answer the question: where are the protagonists of the benefit of certainties today, and the protagonists of the uncertainties they cause?

Z Network for more

by HADIA AKHTAR KHAN

On fighting corporate media with journalism from below.

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Hadia: P. Sainath is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist. Currently based in Mumbai, he serves as the founder and editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), which is an independent, multimedia, digital platform which showcases the stories of rural people and their impact on Indian politics and more. Hi Sainath! 

P.Sainath: Hello Hadia! 

Hadia: What inspired you to become a journalist? 

P.Sainath:There was no grand design. I come from a freedom struggle family. Many of my grandfather’s generation, uncles, aunts – participated in the freedom struggle. The Indian press is really the child of the freedom struggle. There was no nationalist leader worth his or her name who did not double up as a journalist. Our greatest journalists were Gandhi, Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh. Not many people realize that Bhagat Singh was a professional journalist. He wrote in four languages: Hindi, Urdu, English, Punjabi. In his last 270 days in prison, he learned Persian and wrote something. He did all this before he was hanged at age 23. I began journalism at age 23. For anyone who felt close to the values of the freedom struggle, it seemed natural to go into the press because that is what all the freedom fighters I ever knew did.  

Hadia: You worked in corporate media for a couple of decades. What made you decide to leave and start a people’s media organization? 

P.Sainath:  The Indian media was in transition. I was very lucky to join the United News of India (UNI) (a news agency now in collapse) in 1980 soon after the collapse of the emergency. From 1977 onwards there was an explosion in media because the main business-owned media had crawled when asked only to bend, as the saying goes.

A lot of people who would not otherwise have gone into journalism went into it. I did my M.A. in History and was doing my PhD when I decided that journalism was far more interesting to me than academia.  

“In the first 100 to 150 years of India’s media’s history, there’s much to be proud of. Before independence, most of the militant newspapers had been launched and nurtured by freedom fighters. ”

I worked in very different kinds of ownership platforms. UNI was a trust. These organizations were controlled by major newspapers who were providing themselves with a cheap news service. There was a relatively greater autonomy in UNI. Then I worked with. R.K. Karanjia in The Blitz. He made me the Deputy Chief Editor three months after I had joined for something else. I worked there for ten and half years. That was a family-owned newspaper. Then as a freelancer, my work appeared almost entirely in forums like the Times of India, which was family-owned but run on corporate lines.  

In the first 100 to 150 years of India’s media’s history, there’s much to be proud of. Before independence, most of the militant newspapers had been launched and nurtured by freedom fighters. Gandhi launched three, Ambedkar three. One freedom fighter, H.S. Doreswamy, who is in my book, The Last Heroes, is quite a character. He was running one newspaper but he registered it under six different titles. When the British shut down one, the next day the same paper, same publisher, same writers, would appear under a slightly different name – Peoples’ Voice, Peoples’ Choice, Peoples’ Champion. It would be the same content. He drove them nuts with his behaviour.

Jamhoor for more

by STEPHANIE PAPPAS

The oldest human genomes ever sequenced reveal that our Neandertal ancestry came from one “pulse” of interbreeding and pins down the timing

Scientists have long known that humans outside of Africa owe 2 to 3 percent of their genome to Neandertal ancestors. But now, using the oldest modern human DNA ever analyzed, two separate studies have traced this ancestry to a single surge of interbreeding that occurred between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago.

Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens) encountered each other many times over tens of thousands of years: modern human DNA is found in Neandertals who lived more than 200,000 years ago, and some human populations mingled further with Neandertals until the latter species went extinct 39,000 years ago. But not all of these interactions left a shared imprint on all non-African populations today. The moment that left this near-global genetic fingerprint happened over a period of a few thousand years, occurring between Neandertals who were established in Europe and humans who were newly arriving in their territory.

“The height of this interaction was, we think, 47,000 years ago—which also gives us a rough estimate of when this out-of-Africa migration might have happened,” says Leonardo Iasi, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and lead author of one of the studies, which was published on Thursday in Science. He is also a co-author of the other paper, which was published concurrently in Nature.

Multiple waves of humans left Africa, where the Homo genus originally evolved, over thousands of years and established populations in the Near East and Europe. There they encountered and sometimes bred with Neandertals, descendants of an earlier human ancestor who had left Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier. The last common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans remains unknown, but that species likely lived between 650,000 and 500,000 years ago. Researchers still can’t quite say exactly where the Neandertal-human intermingling occurred, but the two new studies narrow down the question of “when” considerably.

In the Nature study, biochemist Johannes Krause, archaeogeneticist Kay Prüfer and doctoral student Arev Sümer, all at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and their colleagues sequenced genomes from six individuals discovered in Ranis, Germany, and one from the Zlatý k?? site in the Czech Republic. These people, who lived between 49,000 and 42,000 years ago, included some of the oldest modern human genomes ever sequenced. They also turned out to include the oldest known family of modern humans, Sümer says. The people in Ranis included a mother and her young daughter, plus another female individual from the same extended family. Even more surprisingly, the person from Zlatý k??—a female individual known from her skull bones—was a more distant relative to this Ranis family.

Scientific American for more

Dutch lawyer Haroon Raza has filed a criminal complaint with the ICC against 1,000 Israeli soldiers, alleging war crimes. In a discussion with Zarrar Khuhro, Raza delves into the evidence collected, war tactics, and the potential ICC verdicts, offering insights into international justice and the ongoing conflict.

Youtube for more

by AZHAR AZAM

China and Brazil deepen ties with major trade agreements and space cooperation, challenging US influence.

In a latest sign of booming relations, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Brazilian President Lula da Silva upgraded their bilateral relationship and struck more than three dozen agreements including on agriculture, trade, investment, infrastructure, industry, science and technology and energy.

Bilateral relations have shown significant dynamism with Beijing being Brasilia’s largest trading partner since 2009, one of the main sources of foreign investment and biggest export destination. Brazil maintains a whopping $51 billion trade surplus with China and its exports to Beijing have surpassed the combined sales to the EU and the US.

China, once a major buyer of the US soybeans, has been diversifying its farm purchases from America, and Brazil is emerging as a ley beneficiary of this trade war. In 2023 alone, the South America agriculture powerhouse shipped more than $60 billion of agricultural products to Beijing, up $9.5 billion from 2022. Brasilia continues to eat the US share by flooding the Chinese markets with its corns and soybeans.

Donald Trump’s return as American president is already helping Brazil as new agreements have opened the Chinese market for four new Brazilian agri products: sorghum, fresh grapes, sesame and fishmeal. Since China buys almost all of its sorghum from America, it indicates that Beijing has made the first move on the geopolitical chessboard to put pressure on Trump, anticipating the coming January storm when he assumes office and dials up his trade war.

One of Lula’s successes in his last year’s visit to Beijing was resumption of Brazilian beef exports. This by the end of 2023 allowed Brazil to export more than $8.2 billion of meat to China, forcing Brazil’s major competitors including the US to slow their production. Brazil, unequivocally, is scooping up the opportunity to boost its agricultural exports to China at the expense of the US.

Brazil has been pursuing an independent and non-aligned foreign policy. Under Lula, Brasilia has become fiercely emboldened in its international approach. Declaring his country’s relations with China “extraordinary”, hoping them to “go beyond” trade, the Brazilian president in 2023 stated: “Nobody can stop Brazil from continuing to develop its relationship with China.” This represented his blatant pursuit of autonomy in international relations and opposition to the Western decoupling (now de-risking) from the world’s largest economy.

Last year, Lula and Xi sought to renew space cooperation and build a seventh satellite in the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) programme. The CBERS-6 would be launched from China in 2028, improving Amazon monitoring, providing more information on deforestation, agriculture, droughts, land use and water reservoirs.

Even though the recent agreement between China’s SpaceSail and Brazil’s Telebras – aiming to challenge Elon Musk’s Starlink by delivering satellite communication services and broadband internet services to Brazil – will account for just 0.5% of the Brazilian total broadband market, it is blow to the US, seeking to hobble China’s tech advancement globally, and the manifestation of Lula’s vision to deepen cooperation with China beyond trade.

Brazil and China are partnering to lead the global south, pushing for a more central role of the developing and under-developed economies in the multilateral institutions and supporting their development through science and technological innovation. While Lula is positioning himself as a new leader of the global south and envoy of peace, climate and global governance reform, Xi is patting Brasilia and Beijing to “assume the great historical responsibility of safeguarding the common interests” of the developing world.

Both Brazil and China have agreed to find synergies between the Brazilian development plans and Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. This effectively allows Brasilia to benefit from China’s mega infrastructure plan without inviting any resentment from the US, which is the top source of foreign direct investment in Brazil and where Brazil last year dispatched $29.9 billion of manufactured goods to advance its trade diversification. In doing so, Brazil has successfully maintained a delicate balance between the two world powers.

Expree Tribune for more

by FABIOLA CINEAS

How Black support for Zionism morphed into support for Palestine.

As violence and reprisals in Israel and Gaza have intensified since Hamas’s attack on October 7, reactions (or non-reactions) from Black Lives Matter and related groups in the US have come in for particular scrutiny.

Black Lives Matter Chicago was heavily criticized for a since-deleted graphic that seemingly celebrated Hamas’s killing of Israelis, featuring a paraglider with the Palestinian flag, and the words “I stand with Palestine.” (The group later said it “was not proud of” the image, adding “We stand with Palestine & the people who will do what they must to live free.”)

Comedian Amy Schumer reshared a video from former NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire, now an Israeli citizen, in which he criticized Black Lives Matter for its silence on Israel. “I woke up this morning with some disturbing news out of Israel — Hamas kidnapping children, putting them in cages, killing women, killing the elderly. That’s some coward shit. That’s cowardly,” he said. “And for all y’all Black Lives Matter [supporters] who ain’t saying nothing — ‘Well let me figure out exactly what’s happening before I say anything’ — f*** you.”

In a now-deleted post on X, which was reposted more than 1,000 times, writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis wrote, “Jews marched in Selma. Jews marched for George Floyd. Jews showed up for Black Lives Matter. BLM is a disgrace. We will all still be there for you guys next time. Because that’s who we are. But now we know who you are.”

Behind the uproar is a rich history of links between Black American and Palestinian activists — connections that go back to Israel’s founding but have deepened over the last decade, as activists for both issues have come to see their causes as related or even explicitly linked.

In 2014, only a few weeks separated the Gaza war that year from protests over Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri; Palestinians tweeted advice to the protesters on dealing with tear gas. One of the most vocal activists in Ferguson, Bassem Masri, who died in 2018, was Palestinian American. In the wake of the protests, activists traveled to occupied territories, and in 2015, Black activists and leaders publicly declared their solidarity with Palestine.

By 2020, when the murder of George Floyd led to massive nationwide protests in the US, “People were painting George Floyd murals in Palestine. Palestinians were being attacked by Israeli security services, and saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” said Sam Klug, an assistant teaching professor of African American History at Loyola University Maryland. “Over time, African Americans have looked at the Palestinian circumstance and Palestinians have also looked at what is going on in the United States.”

I talked to Klug about this history — about what Black and Palestinian and Black and Jewish relations have looked like over time. We discussed what it means for allyship, protest movements, public opinion, and the future of Palestine and Israel. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Fabiola Cineas

Before we get into the history of Black and Palestinian solidarity, I’d like to talk about Black support for the Zionist cause, which came earlier. What’s the brief history there?

Sam Klug

That history goes back to the 19th century. Many Black nationalist thinkers and activists, people like David Walker, Martin Delany, Henry McNeal Turner, really drew a lot of inspiration from the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible.

In that story, Jews in bondage in Egypt and their resistance and eventual emancipation became a touchstone of African American politics and thought, in the struggle for abolition in the United States, and in 19th-century visions of a potential Black homeland for the African diaspora in the Americas.

The idea of an oppressed people, who have been oppressed throughout the West and are seeking a homeland that has a connection to their ancestral community and establishing a political community there, is not dissimilar from a lot of Black nationalist visions of self-determination based in land for Black people.

[Marcus] Garvey saw a model in the emerging Zionist movement and so did W.E.B. Du Bois, one of his main antagonists. Du Bois was quite supportive of the Zionist idea up through the establishment of the state of Israel.

And then, of course, you have important connections between Jewish Americans and African Americans in the mid-century civil rights movement and the important role that Jewish Americans played in advancing that movement and providing support for it. For example, there’s the martyrdom of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were killed [by the KKK] in Mississippi in 1964 after registering Black voters.

VOX for more

by MICHAEL BRENNER

We are experiencing times of global transition. Where we have been is self-evident. Where the world is headed remains obscure. Some states are implacably resisting that transition; others strive to foster a modified international system that conforms to emerging realities. The actions of governments in the two categories are reinforcing each other’s commitments to pursuing these incompatible tacks. There’s the rub.

This is the context for the major crises over Ukraine, in the Middle East, and over Taiwan. Ongoing war in the first two carries the potential for escalation with dire, far-reaching consequences. Each is at once symptomatic of the systemic changes occurring in world affairs and the cause for a raising of the stakes in how that transition is handled or mishandled.

Dilemma 1 USA

There is a lot of talk about how Donald Trump will move quickly to resolve the Ukraine conflict. Maybe not within the advertised 24 hours – but supposedly he sees the pointlessness of an open-ended war with Russia. So, he is expected to get in touch with Putin, personally and/or via a designated envoy, to make a deal. We have heard hints of what the ingredients could be: a ceasefire, the lure of reduced sanctions, some recognition of a special Russian association with the four oblasts Moscow has annexed, Crimea ceded, the remainder of Ukraine autonomous with links to the EU if not NATO. The sequencing, the specifics, ancillary trade-offs are cloudy. To the minds of the more optimistic commentators, an eventual agreement is likely since Trump wants to be unburdened of the Ukraine albatross, since he is not a fan of NATO expansion or NATO itself, since he wants to concentrate on dismantling the federal government while pressing ahead with the rest of the MAGA agenda. Relations with Russia, as with every other foreign power, will be treated in terms of bilateral dealing wherein the U.S, focuses on the trade-offs, i.e. how much it gains as opposed to how much it gives.

It is by no means clear that this approach could achieve the stated goal of ending the war in Ukraine and easing the tense confrontation with Russia. For the Kremlin has set stipulations for a peaceful resolution that could only be met by a broader accord than is visualized in the horse trading anticipated by the Trump entourage and like-minded think tankers. Russia will not stop the fighting until a firm agreement has been reached. That is one. It will not accept any ambiguity as to the future status of the Russophile territories in question. That’s two. It will not tolerate leaving in place a Kiev government controlled by the rabid anti-Russian nationalists who have run it since 2014. That’s three. It will demand a treaty that formally neutralizes Ukraine on the model of post-war Austria. That’s four. It will press hard for the constitution of a pan-European security architecture which accords Russia a legitimate place. That’s five.¹

The implication is that the prospects are dim for a quick, short-term deal that leaves these sensitive issues indeterminate and open to the vagaries of politics in Washington and European capitals. It appears unrealistic that Trump will have the discretionary power, the political will or the strategic vision to design and to implement a multifaceted plan as required to weave together the varied strands of the European security fabric. It is one thing to intimidate the Europeans into taking on a fuller responsibility for their own security by threatening to leave them to their own devices. It is something far more demanding to recast the American relationship with its European allies, with Russia, with other interested, neighboring parties. For meeting that wider challenge has as its precondition a comprehensive redrawing by the United States of the imprinted mental map of the world system. For it is being transformed in basic ways which are at variance with the deep-seated American presumptions of dominance, control and privilege.

Trump is not the man to man to replace the prevailing strategic vision and America’s paramount position in the world with something more refined and in correspondence to the emerging multi-nodule system. Although instinctively he is more of an America firster than a hegemonic imperialist, his actions will be piecemeal and disjointed rather than pieces of an artful new pattern. Even in regard to specific matters like Ukraine or Taiwan it is impossible simply to snap one’s fingers and on impulse shift course. A carefully thought through design and the crafting of a subtle diplomacy is the prerequisite. Donald Trump, incontrovertibly, has no plan, no strategy, no design for any area of public policy. He is incapable of doing so; for he lacks the necessary mental concentration and organized knowledge. The same holds for dealing with China.

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