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In a newly published book, Hope Never Disappoints, Pope Francis called for an investigation into whether Israel’s actions in Gaza fit the legal definition of genocide. On 19 November, an important part of Europe’s Jewish leadership responded.
The Conference of European Orthodox Rabbis Standing Committee represents an alliance of some 700 Orthodox Jewish leaders in Europe. Their statement was distributed by a Public Relations Company, ROATH. We should have some sympathy for the Rabbis being “deeply disturbed”, their phrase, by Francis’ words. Their language was significantly more measured than Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “disgraceful”. In such a passionate, polarised debate there is urgent need for shared understanding of basic facts. What the Rabbis say deserves consideration and a reply. In what follows all words inside quotation marks are from their short text, nothing I hope considered out of context. I have tried to take their points in order of importance. “Israel is committed to international humanitarian law”. This is the key issue considered by the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC). Both focus on the cutting off of Gaza’s civilian population, intentionally and knowingly, from adequate food, water, electricity and medical supplies. This, rather than the estimated 44,000 Palestinian casualties of war, is the nub of the ICJ indictment of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), and of the recent arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant. Describing Israel’s actions as “defensive war”, after a brutal and criminal attack by Hamas waged against an “unprovoked, barbarous enemy”, does not ensure legality in international law. Evidence from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, describing near-siege conditions and estimating that 70% of Gazan casualties are women and children, does not support the view that Israel is observing international humanitarian law. The ICJ’s opinion is that Israel, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity of the most serious nature, with possibly genocidal intent, has a case to answer. Let’s be clear. The ICJ also accused Hamas of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. An arrest warrant for Hamas military leader, Mohammad Deif (probably dead) was also issued. Nothing can justify 1,200 Israelis killed including hundreds of women, scores of children, and many wounded. But were the atrocities of 7 October “unprovoked”? Many would argue that Israeli governments’ longstanding denial of self-determination for Palestinians, their occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and encouragement of settlers, and the shooting dead of children throwing stones at the IDF, all call in question the Rabbis’ assertion Hamas was “unprovoked”. Hamas, the statement claims, is “a terrorist army that purposefully operates from within civilian population centres”, a slightly less incendiary version of the Israeli Government’s accusation that Hamas is using the civilian population as human shields. No independent observers or unembedded journalists are allowed into Gaza so there is simply no way of verifying or disproving such allegations. But Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The land area on the eastern Mediterranean is 141 sq. miles, 3.7-7.5 miles wide and 25 miles long with a population density of 14,000 per sq. mile (Singapore has 21,500 people per sq. mile). 80% of Gaza’s 2.23 million Palestinians live in urban areas. It is practically inevitable that Hamas’ military wing would be present in “civilian population areas” and in tunnels beneath them, some of which were originally made for movement of imports and exports to sustain a rudimentary economy. This is not to say that the high concentration of civilians in Gaza doesn’t serve Hamas’ fight against a vastly more powerful enemy, and in the propaganda war that accompanies the conduct of asymmetric warfare. “Israel in its military measures to defend itself can still not be said to be engaging in genocide”, the Rabbis’ statement declares. But UN bodies, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Pope are not stating that Israel is engaging in “genocide”. The near siege of 2.23 million Palestinians in Gaza is being condemned as a war crime and a crime against humanity. This is not a matter of “singling out the Jewish State”. They are aware that any such accusation must be determined legally within the very restrictive framework of the 1948 Genocide Convention, itself an international treaty that obliges States’ adherence in international law. A much less publicised case against Myanmar’s military rulers is being pursued. There have been convictions for genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. Putin is driving his tanks, missiles, paid-for North Korean soldiers and Russian troops through international law. Now is the time to support the operation of our international courts. Israel has made itself more vulnerable to charges by the ICJ and ICC of breaking international humanitarian law by failing to adequately curtail and punish criminal military conduct. Failure to institute proceedings when military forces are under suspicion of breaching international law is a cause for the ICC, which has issued individual arrest warrants, to intervene. When it comes to litigation, the ICC’s work is seen as complementary to that of UN member States. The assertion that Netanyahu is “fighting for return of 101 hostages” taken last October is not convincing. Netanyahu knows well, as do countless Jewish protesters including hostages’ families, that the return of the hostages alive depends on a ceasefire and that continued fighting renders a final hostage deal improbable. Netanyahu also knows that an end to hostilities will very likely spell an end to his government and political career. The conclusion to the Rabbis’ statement reads “every word issued from a major leader has immense consequences” which “our lived experience, suffering from rising violent antisemitism sadly confirms”. Their anxiety is understandable. But presenting public concern for the plight of the Palestinians as a cause of antisemitism in Europe is highly questionable. It demeans the Jewish minority around the world who openly oppose the IDF’s conduct in Gaza and are afraid Israel is becoming a pariah state. The European Rabbis do not echo claims often made by representatives of the Israeli government that Israel’s accusers are asserting a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, an omission for which they deserve recognition. The role of the ICC and ICJ is to make legal judgements. When there is sufficient evidence, they make judicial decisions in international law about State and individual criminality - on both sides of a conflict. The ICC and ICJ cannot, and do not, ignore war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Hamas or Israel. The Rabbis’ loyalty to Jewish troops in combat and their fears for Israel itself are understandable. Much less understandable is uncritical loyalty to the current Israeli government beyond the suggestion “the effectiveness of Israel’s ongoing war can be debated”. The Pope’s call was motivated by compassion for those suffering in Gaza and fear for what follows if the Middle East conflict further undermines the international order. It would help to put an end to this tragedy if the European Orthodox Jewish leaders were to put their moral authority behind the quest for a ceasefire in Gaza. Upholding international law, without fear or favour, at a time when international order is crumbling, should be paramount.
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Last weekend, Vatican News and the Italian daily La Stampa quoted Pope Francis having said that some international experts had declared that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide", an excerpt from interviews in a book Hope Never Disappoints. "We should investigate carefully to assess whether this fits into the technical definition (of genocide) formulated by international jurists and organisations," the Pope urged.
These remarks will, without doubt, have caused distress in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world with whom the Pope has worked to have better relationships. Francis visited the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism in 2014, Auschwitz in 2016, and expressed concern about growing antisemitism on Italian television in November 2023. But tensions have been growing as the Israel-Palestine conflict escalated with religious affiliation becoming more significant. The Vatican’s attempt to achieve a balance between Islam and Judaism has become more challenging. Last December, to some degree South Africa pre-empted the Pope’s call, filing a complaint, a ‘Memorial’, in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for its actions in Gaza. The Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN in December 1948 as a response to the Holocaust. Alleging that a Jewish State needed to be prevented from committing the crime of genocide is particularly shocking. The Pope is seeking clarification on whether the Convention is applicable to the situation in Gaza. So, on what grounds did South Africa institute such legal proceedings in the ICJ? There are certain international Conventions which “all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection” and thus an obligation to intervene. The Genocide Convention, an international treaty, is one of them. This principle, erga omnes partes (directed at all parties), was endorsed by the ICJ in 2022 in a case of Gambia v Myanmar involving the plight of the Rohingya. In approaching the ICJ South Africa found legal means and precedent to express its solidarity with Palestinians. In international law the definition of the crime of genocide is highly restrictive. Nonetheless, thirteen other States, including Spain, Mexico, Ireland and Belgium, have indicated their intention of intervening on the side of South Africa at the ICJ with their own ‘Memorials’. A look at how genocide became a crime recognised in international law sheds some light on the difficulty of establishing it legally today. The Polish, Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term ‘genocide’ in late 1942 in the context of Axis rule in occupied Europe: a process of destruction of an oppressed group “after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals”. He struggled to define the term but was clear about its historical precedents. “Bartolomé de las Casas, Vitoria [16th century Salamanca Dominican Friars who championed rights of indigenous peoples], and humanitarian interventions, are all links in one chain leading to the proclamation of genocide as an international crime by the United Nations”, he wrote in a later unpublished essay. By the end of World War II, the crime of genocide was still not fully defined but the prosecutors in the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945-1946) did not flinch from using the term. Though none of the convicted Nazi leaders were found guilty of genocide as a specific crime. The Nuremberg indictments were for one or more crimes notably ‘war against peace’ (waging aggressive war), war crimes and crimes against humanity – which covered genocide. At the time, Lemkin was defining genocide as “the criminal intent to destroy or cripple a human group” with an added emphasis on the destruction of cultures and their loss to humanity. His focus then was on the destruction of racial and national groups citing the fate of Poles, Gypsies and Jews. In a resolution in the September 1948 session of the United Nations, the General Assembly declared that genocide was a crime that could take place in peacetime. In December 1948 the Convention defined genocide in Article II as: “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical sic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part”. Because of the imperial sensitivities of UN member States, Lemkin’s emphasis on the destruction of cultures had disappeared, nor were political groups included. On 8 October, the BBC led on an update report from the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory set up in 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had not allowed them into Gaza. The UN team of three brought considerable combined experience to a difficult task. Members were South African Navi Pillay, former President Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Miloon Kothari, a former convener of the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN, and Professor Chris Sidoti, an academic expert on international human rights law and formerly Australian Human Rights Commissioner and head of the Australian Justice and Peace Commission.. Their report highlighted both Israel’s actions and those occurring during Hamas’ terrible 7 October attack when 1,200 Israelis died, 40 children killed, and hundreds were wounded. At the Nova music festival alone 136 women were slaughtered and there were incidents of sexual violence. 251 hostages were taken. The UN Human Rights Office has examined over 8,000 deaths in Gaza from the beginning of the war. Requiring three sources for each verification of death - for that reason mostly inside residential buildings - the Human Rights Office found 44% were children, 26% women and 30% men. Assuming for every direct killing four indirect deaths because of the war, The Lancet estimate some 190,000 Palestinians have died. In the words of the Austrian diplomat and High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, “unprecedented levels of killing, death, injury, starvation, illness and disease”. Overall, the figures support allegations of indiscriminate bombing and shelling and appear incompatible with Israel’s claimed policy of legitimate self-defence: ending terrorism by targeted attacks on Hamas belligerents. An action cited by Article II as genocidal in the Convention, and relevant when considering the war, is “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Under Article III of the Genocide Convention, direct and public incitement to commit genocide is legally punishable whether or not it results in actual genocidal action. On 28 December 2023, in a letter to Israel’s Attorney General, a group of former Knesset members, Israeli diplomats, academics and journalists gave details of “extensive and blatant incitement to genocide’ by influential Israeli public figures and called for their prosecution. The most significant calls had come from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, who declared those who “celebrate, those who support.... they’re all terrorists and they should also be destroyed”, and from former Minister of Defence, Yoav Gallant, who said Israel was fighting “human animals” and that he was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”. In a statement on 28 October 2023 on war against Hamas, Prime Minister Netanyahu himself urged Israelis to remember their biblical enemy Amalek citing Deuteronomy 25.17. Samuel 15.3 on the Amelekites reads: “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants...” Emotional rhetoric after the security failure and the tragic losses and hostage-taking of 7 October, or incitement and indications of intent? This is the kind of material jurists consider. Proof of specific genocidal purpose will be critical if South Africa’s case is to succeed. Genocide, like any other crime, may be committed for a variety of motives ranging from ethnic or religious hatred revenge or fear to the elimination of an enemy and acquisition of territory. But when purpose/intent is inferred from circumstances rather than directly proved, genocidal purpose must be the sole possible inference that can be drawn from the criminal actions. That would be very difficult. Restriction of medical supplies, food and water, mass displacement as well as killing of the civilian population, conditions close to siege, do not necessarily add up legally to the crime of genocide. But South Africa’s proceedings at the ICJ are looking increasingly grounded in facts. The UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry is examining Hamas’ and the Israel’s actions as possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, no less serious crimes than genocide in international law but more easily proven. All States have a common interest in fulfilling the purposes of the Genocide Convention. South Africa has taken the lead in upholding international law under threat today from so many quarters. The Pope was asking for the situation in Gaza to be clarified legally not claiming that the IDF is committing genocide. Any judgement from the ICJ will take a long time and is far from a foregone conclusion. This is an acutely difficult time for a compassionate Pope seeking ways of stopping or reducing the suffering. Difficult for Catholics horrified at the plight of Palestinians, and difficult for Jewish friends too, processing the pain and insecurity of 7 October. This is an intractable conflict. Pope Francis leads a global Church not the allies of Israel or Hamas. As in the motif of the Synod, Francis would want to open the hearts and minds of both sides to each other. But for the time being that looks impossible. Discrediting the US electoral process is the key weapon in Trump’s assault on democracy. Trump will not stop insisting that this, and the previous, Presidential election was rigged. Win or lose, narrowly or not, on Tuesday 5h November, he will persist. He has been laying the foundations for his own authoritarian rule for years. The threat of election-linked violence is part of it.
In swing (marginal) States, the harassment of State officials and electoral officers, from the declaration of Biden’s victory to the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, has continued. Radio 4’s PM programme on 25th October featured an interview with Tammy Patrick, Chief Executive Officer for Programs at the National Association of Election officials, and a recognised expert in election administration who for eleven years had served as a Federal Compliance officer for elections in Maricopa County, Arizona (population 4.2 million). She revealed how serious pressure on officials has become. The offices of electoral commissions in Arizona, and other States, have been threatened by MAGA (Make America Great Again) extremists. Now, electoral offices need guards and some have even installed bullet-proof glass. And after family members were followed some electoral officers are driving rental cars. After the 3 November 2020 election, 62 Republican lawsuits claiming widespread electoral fraud and irregularities were filed, without supporting evidence. Within the last two years, an additional 165 lawsuits have been filed, mainly by Republicans and conservative organisations attempting to ease Trump into the White House. The primary purpose of this unprecedented level of litigation is to sow doubt about the electoral process. It is impossible to keep up with Trump’s lies about the elections, which include claims that illegal, unregistered immigrants will be voting, postal votes will be stolen, and there will be widespread impersonation of registered voters. The illegal immigrant voter is a key figure in Trump’s manipulation of fears of uncontrolled immigration. After extensive enquiries, Tammy Patrick reported that Vigilant checking of signatures on postal votes made any chance of potential fraud ‘infinitesimal’ and described the incidence of voter impersonation in 2020 as zero. Stuffing ballot boxes, a resort of the worst autocratic State leaders, isn’t feasible due to the tightly controlled US procedures. How to Rig an Election: Defending Democracy from the World’s Despots by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas (second edition 2024 Yale University Press), whilst focusing on already existing autocracies and ‘counterfeit democracies’, casts a light on Trump’s threat to democracy as well as the importance of Electoral Commissions and observers. But elections can be, and are, rigged long before the main body of election observers are on the ground doing their observing. And even then, there are never enough observers to cover all the polling stations. Amongst the recent proliferation of lawsuits, there are indications that attempts to manipulate and discredit the elections has partly shifted, from the voting itself towards a focus on rigging before the ballot papers are printed or digital voting systems set up: gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinformation, buying votes, intimidation of electoral officials. Though both the US Parties have been guilty of some of the above in the past, they are all major features of the Trump/Republican electoral playbook. Gerrymandering goes back to 1812 and Governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry. He organised the State electoral map so that the bulk of his rival Federalists were squeezed into a handful the electoral districts. The ploy was noticed at the time. Cheeseman and Klaas describe a cartoon in the Boston Gazette depicting one such newly formed district, shaped as a salamander with a forked tongue, captioned “the Gerrymander’. It stuck. Gerry was not re-elected Governor but did end up as James Madison’s Vice-President, dying in 1814. Both US political Parties have been guilty of gerrymandering though the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University Law School think-tank, estimate that Republicans currently benefit most, gaining for them some 16 seats in the House of Representatives. In Presidential elections, the biggest effect is found in three marginal States, Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes), where at time of writing is tied at 48% each, Michigan where Harris is 0.7%% ahead (15) and North Carolina (16) where you can choose which poll to believe. Massachusetts (9) is a good example of democrat gerrymandering where in 2020, Jo Biden won a huge majority, 68.5% against 28.6% for Trump, so gerrymandering did not alter the overall result. Gerry might be smiling. Significant gaps between the two contender Parties are typical of most States. The second major form of rigging was, and is, voter suppression. The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) outlawed discriminatory voting practices in the southern States, notably literacy tests, inaugurating a period of enfranchisement of black voters and minority groups. It also established a VRA formula for deciding which jurisdictions, States and localities, needed to submit changes in voting laws to the Federal Justice Department for ‘pre-clearance’. The 2013 Supreme Court Shelby County (Alabama) v Holder (Federal Attorney General), by 5-4, did away - as outdated and correspondingly unconstitutional - with the VRA formula. Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the judgement as ‘like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet’. In the following decade 23 States created new obstacles to voting largely through varied ID introducing stricter demands for voter identification. It was alleged that changes were intended to counter voter impersonation – which was non-existent. Those who could not produce a passport or a driving licence, predominantly the poor, would be turned away at the polling facility. It is estimated that in the marginal, northern State of Wisconsin 300,000 citizens lacked the required voter identification documents. Trump won the State by 30,000 votes. Nationally, voter suppression gave an advantage to the Republicans - the main reason for its implementation. Incentivising voters by offering some form of reward – for the individual or the Party - or for registering to vote, is run-of-the-mill practice on several continents, but provided the voter believes their vote is secret, is the least reliable rigging method. It is also illegal. Whether Elon Musk’s sweepstake, available only to registered voters in swing States who sign a petition ‘In favour of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms’, might also be illegal is unclear. A daily draw rewards the winner with $1 million could be interpreted as appealing to Republican sentiment against the Democrats’ desire for gun control. Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krassner, is suing Musk and his Political Action Committee which funds Trump’s campaign on the grounds of breaching election law. Illegal or not, Musk’s intervention highlights, as Tammy Patrick said in her interview, that elections should be about ‘the Will of the People not the will of the billionaires’. Trump’s election rigging gambit must be taken seriously. It works. The administration of the US 2020 Presidential elections was carried out with due auditing, caution and integrity. The 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act makes it more difficult for Trump to reproduce the chaos around Presidential elections. But an astonishing number of people believe his allegation that they are rigged. The rigging that has taken place, was inherited, or planned, is not there to thwart Trump’s autocratic ambitions, but to fulfil them. See TheArticle 03/11/2024 Locating turning points in history is strangely attractive. We like to account for them by the actions of great men (rarely women). Before it was like this, after it was like that, the story goes. Though in reality many slow changes and complex dynamics come between before and after.
Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez who died on 22 October 2024 aged 96, for many in the Catholic Church, was such a man. Born in the heart of Lima, wheelchair bound for much of his six teenage years, half Quechuan half Hispanic, he became known as the father of Liberation Theology. His theology is the key to understanding the most important current in Catholicism worldwide since the 1960s. To celebrate Gustavo’s life is to celebrate a key contributor to a gradual but vitally important change in the life of a global Church and its 1.36 billion members in the last half century. From the circumstances of Latin America when he was writing, and Catholic tradition, came his vision of theology’s task, ‘el quehacer teologica’. He posed two foundational questions that lay behind the re-discovery of the Church’s “preferential option for the poor” understood as its principal pastoral concern: “How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?” and “How to speak out of the suffering of the innocent about God?” ‘Hablar de Dios desde el sufrimeineto del inocente’, a task that has, to put it mildly, not become redundant with time. When it comes to acknowledging great men, a Peruvian theologian may sound a surprising choice. Many of the world’s Catholics, at least the older ones, would understandably pick instead Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, John XXIII, born into a sharecropper family of thirteen children from a small village in Lombardy, the Pope who called the second Vatican Council (1962-1965). This would be the turning point that – often forgotten - he opened with a speech underlining the Church’s concern for the poor and suffering. A gathering that brought together bishops, leaders and theologians from around the world, largely from Western Europe, which sought to update and renew the life of the Church. The great man story of historical change holds up quite well for the vision behind the Council. But for – what was becoming – a truly global Church, the story neglects the long process of change that had been going on not only in Europe but notably in Latin America. And the impact of the Council in many countries was muted and blocked by cautious bishops, the UK would be a good example, dashing many hopes. Latin America proved more fertile soil. Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation: Perspectives published in Spanish in 1971 by the Lima Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, and in English by the Maryknoll Fathers’ Orbis in 1973, became the core inspirational text driving this process. Latin America had a head-start in addressing the challenge of poverty. In the 1950s, 60% of the population in Peru lived in poverty with 82% of these living in extreme poverty. CELAM, the Bishops’ Conference of Latin America, held its first meeting in 1955, so ideas for action responding to such acute poverty on the continent, such as radio schools, could be shared. Catholic Action officially defined as “the participation of the laity in the apostleship of the hierarchy” drew on the simple formula of see-judge-and-act in movements such as Young Christian Workers and Young Christian Students. Gutiérrez’s recognition of the importance of the economic, social and political in a Christian understanding of the world around him, like that of several other priests, came through student life in Catholic Action, in his case at the National University of San Marcos in Lima. “The poor are the by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible”, he wrote later. His vocation to the priesthood seems to have been in part a response to this responsibility. Gutiérrez’s clerical training brought him to Louvain where he studied psychology and philosophy and, to Lyon, where he was introduced to ‘la nouvelle théologie’ and the European theologians who were later to influence the bishops in the Vatican Council. Central to the thinking in Lyon were writings from the early Christian centuries, the ‘Church Fathers’, a time when the appointment of a bishop could be challenged if he were not ‘a lover of the poor’. That, as Gustavo later put it, the Church must be “on the side of the oppressed classes and dominated peoples clearly and without qualification” was not some leftist novelty but rooted in Church history. On his return to Peru, after ordination in 1959, he served in the small Church of the Holy Redeemer in Rimac, a working-class area to the north of downtown Lima. This was the period when the Cuban revolution was putting Latin America into ferment. Two major forces, Marxism and Catholicism, contended for hearts and minds. In his exploration of a Christian account of liberation Gutiérrez along with other liberation theologians rejected a binary conflict and borrowed some elements of Marxist analysis for description of the reality experienced by the poor. The year 1968 for Latin America, as elsewhere, was something of a turning point. Father Pedro Arrupe, the Superior-General of the Society of Jesus, called on his fellow Jesuits in Latin America to inform their ministry by ‘an option for the poor’. In late July Gutiérrez presented a paper, ‘Towards a Theology of Liberation’ at a second continentwide meeting of priests and laity in the Peruvian coastal town of Chimbote. It was one month before a major meeting of CELAM in Medellin, Colombia, which adopted the language of a preferential option for the poor. Liberation theology saw liberation as a dimension of salvation, ‘a demand that we go and build a different social order’, part of building the kingdom of God of the Lord’s Prayer rather than an entirely separate secular project. Gutiérrez understood full well that this could not be accomplished without conflict - deadly for many - after the succession of coups bringing to power the murderous US-supported military dictatorships and oligarchies of 1960s Latin America. The National Security States branded pastoral workers amongst the poor as “communist infiltration of the Church”, and the military and death squads killed them with virtual impunity. The martyr archbishop, Oscar Romero, came to personify their sacrifice. Despite this, in the 1980s, the Vatican sought to censure liberation theology, though through dialogue conflict was to some degree resolved. The pastoral concern and spirituality that Gutiérrez embodied had already entered the bloodstream of the global Church. Features of it are seen in Pope Francis’ teaching and approach to the papacy. It has motivated the work of countless Catholics finding their vocation in working with the poor and marginalised of their societies. I’ve listened to Gustavo speaking on far too few occasions. One anecdote has stayed with me. To paraphrase what he said: “I have realised how different my life is from that of the poor. I have enough money and not enough time. They have time and not enough money”. Perhaps less true in frantic 2024 Britain. Amongst years of teaching and pioneering writing, finding time for the poor may have been his greatest gift. May he rest in peace. Perceptions are formed and shaped by experience. Nathan Thrall’s A Day in The Life of Abed Salama (Penguin 2023) offers a vivid vision of the world of Abed Salama, a Palestinian father from a traditional village, close to East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. In the words of Alex Preston of The Observer, this book “speaks with truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history”.
Unlike other Europeans most British people have no historical memory of Occupation. Most of us – Irish immigrants excepted – don’t have that spontaneous sympathy based on historic experience of political domination. South Africans have it, derived from apartheid, passionately enough to take a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice. The conflict over land between Israelis and Palestinians produces two powerful and contrasting emotional responses. The first is sympathy for Israel rooted in the horror of the Holocaust and a European history of Christian pogroms inherited by post-war generations. The second is sympathy for the plight of Palestinians confronted with the might of a US-supported Jewish State blocking their right to self-determination and punishing attempts to achieve it. Emotion can open the mind to empathy and imagination, or to hatred. Consider the emotional impact of the savage Hamas attack of 7th October and the taking of hostages on the many Jewish people for whom the state of Israel is a powerful symbol of safety. Consider the emotional impact as the texture of a Palestinian society is torn asunder, Gaza a killing ground, casualties in the West Bank growing daily. Which is uppermost in the minds of people in Britain, in many cases, will depend on who is winning the propaganda war accompanying the actual conflict, or simply their personal identity. The BBC tries hard to maintain balance between these two perspectives, encouraging the listener or viewer to imagine both, better to understand what the conflict is about and how it might end. (Though only the simplistic story of good allies, some-going-too-far, versus bad terrorists, all-beyond-the-pale, appears admissible to its critics.) Whilst TV images of grieving Palestinians in extremis, filmed in a bombed-out wasteland, or Hamas footage of the 7 October massacre of Jews, can elicit a range of emotions, empathy is not necessarily the most powerful of them. A focus on the present, on news, without historic context does not help understanding. The Life of Abed Salama was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2023. Thrall, an accomplished writer, is a contributor to several upmarket US and British periodicals. A Jewish American living in Jerusalem, he also lived for a while in Gaza working from 2010 to 2020 for International Alert (an NGO dedicated to “solving the root causes of conflict across divides”) leading its Arab Israeli Project. Thrall’s narrative pivots around a 2012 bus crash north of Jerusalem that killed a teacher and six children, several horribly burnt, one of whom, Milad, is the son of Abed Salama. Thrall knew Abed well and his story is knitted into the history of Israeli Occupation in a matter- of- fact way, Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) roadblocks, checkpoints and boundary walls taken entirely for granted. The much-delayed appearance of firefighters and ambulances at the scene of the accident reminded me of entering Israel from Jordan by the Allenby Bridge in the early 1990s. I emerged opposite a large military control tower. After time in South African-occupied Namibia in the 1980s I recognised an occupied territory. And waiting by the bridge I watched with surprise a Palestinian ambulance transferring a patient to an Israeli one. All of this would have been wallpaper for Thrall. For a Palestinian, transport and the geography of Jewish settlements add hours to travel time and complexity compared with the experience of an Israeli citizen. There are three West Bank zones each with their different rules plus Palestinians’ different coloured identity cards, determining where you can and can’t go. The movement of people and goods, both essential to economic development are strictly controlled and obstructed. The office of the Quartet Representative (UN, US, EU and Russia) was created in November 2015 to develop the institutions and economy of the Palestinian territories. The movement of Palestinians living in Gaza, and of goods, was especially restricted requiring a perpetual struggle with the Israeli authorities to keep open Gaza’s border crossings. The much publicised tunnels were dug to allow the import and export of goods sustaining the vestiges of an economy . They also served as the means to import weapons and as arsenals. Thrall is comfortable with cultural difference between Arab and Western societies. Muslim prayer, piety and practice structure time and daily life. And honour, a prime virtue, is paramount. The Palestinian dramatis personae in his book mainly belong to two large extended families who do not intermarry. Marriages themselves are strongly influenced by family interests and parental guidance, not romance. Abed himself as a young man had fallen in love with Ghazl a member of the Hamdan family, he a Salama, a Romeo and Juliet story. Abed’s membership of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) also had implications for personal relationships. Imprisoned for a while because of his DFLP activities, like many, Abed was contemptuous of Fatah and its role in policing the scattered Area B zones on behalf of the Israelis. On the other hand, Abed’s first cousin, Ibrahim Salama became head of the Palestinian Interior Ministry for Jerusalem. And he maintained reciprocal, supportive relationship with his Israeli counterparts. The bond with Dany Tirza and Colonel Saar Tzur, provides the reader many insights. Also unexpected, on the Jewish side of the divide is early Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European Jews) discrimination against Mizrahi, Moroccan Jews, officially led by Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion. Thrall is not writing to make political points, daily life makes the points for him. In the first intifada (1987-1993), Abed was detained for his participation: “The plainclothes captains of Israel’s intelligence service, the Shabak, tortured him in the usual method, known as shabih ....hands shackled to a pipe high above him so that only his toes touched the ground, pulling his limbs as if on a vertical rack”. Written like remedial instructions from a physiotherapist. Everyday stuff. The Life of Abed Salama describes what is happening on the ground, the relentless expropriation of Palestinian land, destruction of property and exclusion of more and more Palestinians from areas claimed by Jews. Thrall’s big picture is of cycles of violence, people somehow getting used to it, while others by their violent actions ensure that peace eludes the peacemakers. Update and add in Muslim and Jewish religious extremists in power on each side, to account for the contemporary catastrophe. Thrall’s book captures the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of a Palestinian community under occupation. Its disciplined prose conveys a deep empathy which many readers will share. It offers no solutions to an intractable problem. But as much as any words can, it may help some readers to beware of importing a tragic conflict from the Middle East to communities in Britain. See TheArticle 22/10/2024 There is no shortage of experts predicting what Putin may do if Zelensky fires his Western long-range ATACMS (army tactical missile systems) deep into Russia. On Syria’s borders are both US military bases and Russian including Putin’s strategically important naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean. But opinions how Russia might respond to a major Israeli attack on Iran, with US back-up, are notable by their absence. Instead, we hear repeated, imprecise warnings of a ‘wider war in the Middle East’. How wide though?
From the inception of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, like Iran, Russia provided Assad with military aid. And from late 2011 Iran sent Revolutionary Guard Forces (IRCG) to join the Hezbollah militias propping up Assad’s collapsing regime. In July 2015 General Qasem Soleimani, later assassinated by Israel, visited Moscow to coordinate military tactics. Two months later Russia intervened decisively with its air-force and troops including Wagner Group irregulars. The resultant bombing and slaughter set a pattern for future Russian war crimes. “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised”, the words of President Obama in August 2012. Almost a year to the day President Assad used sarin gas on the population of Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, killing some 1,400. No US military intervention against the Syrian regime followed. For a variety of reasons, not least the US’ previous debacles in Somalia and Iraq, the red line had been erased. In 2014, a US-led coalition did act but in an air campaign against ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria. An opportunity for Putin had opened up. In 2015, Russian firepower was turned indiscriminately on the Free Syrian Army fighting Assad whose murderous regime was helped cling onto power. Syria fell apart, hundreds of thousands died, 6.7 million left the country mainly to Turkey and Lebanon, and 6.8 were internally displaced. Syria became a haven for militias and terrorist groups. Fast forward to today. It is almost a year since Iran’s Deputy Defence Minister, Brigadier General Mahdi Farah, announced the forthcoming delivery of 24 Russian Sukhoi fighter jets and Russia is also believed to be in receipt of some 200 Iranian surface-to-surface short range (75 kms) battlefield missiles and to be supported in manufacturing drones for its war in Ukraine. How Russia would respond to a major Israeli attack on Iran, with or without US support, remains speculation. But Putin’s past record offers some clues. Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People: How the KGB took back Russia and then took on the West (William Collins 2020) presents Putin as an adept practitioner of the dissimulation, oppression and criminality of the Russian intelligence services both internally and externally. He, and they, foresaw the collapse of Soviet communism, were determined to retain power in any new dispensation, and moved KGB funds into overseas accounts, notably through the ‘Londongrad laundromat’. In the 1990s, Putin deployed his training in deception as a KGB lieutenant colonel, his spy’s divided personality, to great effect, hiding ruthless ambition, saying what his listeners wanted to hear, and for several years took in both Angela Merkel and Tony Blair. He had risen from a modest KGB post in Dresden organising the smuggling of Western embargoed technology into Russia. Then, via the mayor’s office in St. Petersburg (deputy mayor in 1994), he became a trusted advisor to President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999). The next task was to remove Yeltsin and his entourage and become President, then to use of the organs of state to bring the primary beneficiaries of Western enforced privatisation, the oligarchs, to heel, and concentrate power in his own hands. State capture, taking over functioning institutions, required and allowed the gradual accumulation of power, national wealth plundered by selected associates, predominantly FSB, successor to the KGB. Belton tracks the process in extraordinary detail. Until it was too late few Western politicians seemed alarmed that Putin was creating a mafia-style autocracy, opponents assassinated or wasting away in Siberian gulags and prisons, punished for disloyalty. Meanwhile huge sums of money that could be used as future FSB and GRU (military intelligence) obschak, slush fund for subverting democracy, was flowing into London and offshore banks. Bankers, lawyers and reputation managers in London took their fees, oligarchs bought up prime property driving up prices, and FSB enemies were assassinated. But like any good spy Putin needed a good cover story. It was sitting there waiting for him amongst Russia’s economic ruins, the wreckage of the loss of the Soviet Union, and America’s growing influence in Georgia and Ukraine. He, Putin, the story ran, had taken up the Presidency to restore the fatherland and return Russia to its imperial glory. Belton suggests that Putin picked up this Tsarist-sounding nationalism in the 1990s from Paris-based aristocratic White Russians who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and whom he had met and liked. Putin’s adoption of the Russian Orthodoxy that White Russians held dear, as an ideological substitute for communism, fits this analysis. I visited Moscow in 1990 and met with Gorbachev’s religious advisers. They were bewailing the loss of ‘communist morality’. Would Christianity take its place, they asked me? Putin, several years later, seems to have had a similar idea alleging that he’d been secretly baptised by his mother. Archbishop Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, most likely a former KGB asset - undiplomatically warned by Pope Francis not to become “Putin’s altar boy”- was a natural ally. Army officers were even sent to the Russian Orthodox monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos for religious retreats. Kirill proclaimed Ukraine a Holy War. Putin shares space satellite programmes with Iran, contempt for ‘Western decadence’, rejection of all things LGBTQ+, and, of course, the rhetoric and reality of hatred of the USA. Beyond the distorted world of Putin’s propaganda Russia as Christian bulwark against Western secularism seems bizarre. After Afghanistan, Russia’s brutal conflict in Chechnya involving Sunni jihadists, the terrible 2004 Beslan school slaughter of young children and the horrors of ISIS, and with American bases in most Sunni States, it’s not surprising Russia might be more comfortable with the geopolitics of Iran, a Shi’a-led State. What then is Putin’s next move in the Middle East? Russia received a Hamas delegation in Moscow in 2023. It has de facto abandoned its former balanced position on the Palestine-Israel conflict. But this does not amount to the Kremlin committing Russian military forces to support Iran against Israel. The IRCG are competing with the needs of Russian forces in Ukraine. Iran even denies that the awaited delivery of Russian Sukhoi fighters is imminent. Putin will continue attempting to use disinformation and cyber-attacks to disrupt UK society as punishment, not for support of Israel, but for Britain’s outspoken role in Europe championing Ukraine. His immediate task is getting Trump elected and US support for Ukraine curtailed, the decisive victory this would give Russia in the Ukraine war, putting NATO in jeopardy. Ukraine takes, by far, priority over Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians. One thing is sure: Putin will increase his cyber efforts to influence the November US presidential elections and put his friend, Donald Trump, in the White House again. See TheArticle 09/10.2024 When the verbs disappear from a political speech it’s crowd-rousing time. At the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week, the Prime Minister went verbless early. He was describing work begun and “only just getting started”: “more teachers, more neighbourhood police, more operations”. Tucked into the to-do list was “devolution to our nations, regions and cities”. More devolution? In all of these?
Between 1997 and 1999 Tony Blair’s first government passed, after successful referenda, three devolution Acts. Two created devolved legislatures for Scotland and Wales. Within the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, a third established a power sharing assembly and executive at Stormont replacing direct rule from Westminster. To describe these various configurations of executive power as asymmetric is something of an understatement. England, with by far the largest population, lacks almost any devolved government - unless you count the patchwork of Metro Mayors who have proved rather popular- and is governed by MPs serving in the national Parliament at Westminster. The “English question” did bob up between 2015 and 2020 but subsided. The name United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a strict reflection of reality but Starmer’s intimation of more powers for different parts of the Kingdom is important. And what of our “regions and cities”? Past attempts at creating English regional middle-level political authorities, have struggled with two problems: hostility to the notion of another layer of politicians and central government’s inadequate financing of local government. In November 2004, Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott tried and failed: a postal ballot for a new authority in the North-East was negative. Metro mayors, though, have some regional responsibilities. Devolution has traditionally been seen by the Conservative Party as the proverbial ‘don’t go there’ minefield. Apart from David Cameron whose arrogant self-confidence in calling a badly framed, ill-judged referendum in 2014 narrowly missed Scottish secession, Conservatives tend towards limiting devolution and maintaining centralised government in keeping with the party’s name: the Conservative and Unionist Party. Lib Dems on the other hand champion local government. Labour promotes devolution though opinions vary. But by far the strongest argument for greater devolution is that decisions made in Downing Street and Whitehall do not accurately address the needs of “our nations, regions and cities”. Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, Michael Kenny’s Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK, Hurst 2024, provides a comprehensive history of devolution in the UK. Professor Kenny makes comparisons with the experiences of Canada with Quebec, Spain with Catalonia and even Czechoslovakia, a lesson in how to lose a chunk of your territory (Slovakia) peacefully. The book’s title suggests crisis and high drama, but the text is scholarly with the moderate tone and attention to detail of a civil servant – which Kenny isn’t. He is non-judgemental about the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) of Northern Ireland) who contributed to us ending up with the most radical option for BREXIT. The DUP subsequently complained about the terms of Sunak’s Northern Ireland Protocol which dealt with the intractable border issues, a direct consequence of the radical BREXIT to which they had contributed. He does emphasise how Boris Johnson further aroused Scots nationalism over BREXIT, a rejection of Scotland’s significant Remain vote. Unhelpful differences in approach also emerged over COVID strategy. There is a particularly helpful chapter for politicians on future proofing the Union, how to prepare for the undermining of devolved authorities by events, how to increase cooperation between different layers of authority on key topics such as health, housing, transport, and employment. Kenny’s book went to press before the General Election and the dramatic change of political fortunes in Scotland, the implosion of the SNP and Labour’s electoral victory. Luckily for the Labour Party, pressure for a Scottish referendum on independence looks as if it has gone away for at least a decade. But this is not the case for Northern Ireland where Irish nationalist demands are becoming more prominent. It will not have escaped the Prime Minister’s attention that the President of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, attended the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool and spoke at a fringe meeting on Monday 23 September. Her message was that the UK government needed to make clear its intention “to trigger a referendum on Irish unity” before 2030. This sally was one consequence of the restoration of a power-sharing government in Stormont with a Sinn Féin majority. Michelle O’Neill, now First Minister of Northern Ireland, has been making the same demand. But in the Republic of Ireland which needs to agree to reunification Sinn Féin received only 12% of the vote. Sir Keir Starmer has said that an Irish unity referendum is “not even on the horizon”. But that horizon is specified in the Good Friday Agreement, an international treaty. It is binding on the Prime Minister of the UK to call a border poll under certain – somewhat subjective – conditions: “if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a United Ireland”. Polling suggests that 40% of Northern Ireland voters currently want unification with the Republic against 50% opposed. But the government of the Republic isn’t keen to take over the UK’s c. £10 billion subvention for Northern Ireland. Nor to face raising the salaries there to levels in the Republic where they are on average 10% higher. Nor to incorporate a hostile Protestant minority. Who could blame them? True to his word, within four days of entering 10, Downing Street, the Prime Minister was meeting with the UK’s Metro Mayors and out visiting the leaders of the UK devolved authorities. During the March local elections, he had spoken of seeking “full-fat devolution” and wanting to “push power and resources out of Whitehall”. Nestling in the to-do list in a speech where every word will have been pored over “devolution to our nations, regions and cities” should get a little more attention. It suggests a significant transformation of governance in the UK. It may also forestall the growth of popular demand in Northern Ireland for unification with the Irish Republic. See TheArticle 28/09/2024 We associate assassinations by one State on another’s territory - ‘targeted killings’ is the softer sounding word - with autocratic States. But such killings are also undertaken by a variety of different States, and for diverse reasons. Since the end of the Cold War, the most unacceptable have been to humiliate another State considered a threat, purely to wreak vengeance, to silence opposition or to undermine peace negotiations.
Since 1945 the UN founding Charter has made national sovereignty the fundamental, near inviolable, organising principle of international relations. Yet in the last two decades, in flagrant disregard for the UK’s national sovereignty and international law, Russian agents have killed prominent Russian exiles on British soil. Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, was poisoned in 2006 using radioactive polonium administered by two FSB agents who also contaminated several venues in London. Then there were the ‘unexplained’ deaths: for example, in 2013 by a seemingly staged ‘suicide’, the hanging of Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and vocal critic of Putin. Yet an unequivocal reaction from the UK government had to wait until March 2018. Acting after a spectacular, reckless infringement of national sovereignty, Prime Minister Theresa May expelled 23 Russian diplomats following belatedly the attempted assassination at home in Salisbury with military grade nerve agent, Novichok, of former Russian FSB spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia. Other European nations and the US followed suit. Contamination was widespread. An investigating policeman, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, became seriously ill after contact with the poison. That July Dawn Sturgess died from Novichok poisoning after spraying her wrists with polonium from the cast-off perfume bottle used by the assassins, another victim of Russian actions on British soil. Putin, openly taunting the UK government, had the two GRU military intelligence agents, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, give an outrageous RT (State Television) interview in which they claimed to have been tourists with a particular interest in Salisbury cathedral. There is nothing new about autocratic States eliminating opponents on the territory of other States. Famously, in 1940 Leon Trotsky was brutally killed at his home in Mexico City on Stalin’s orders, the archetype for Putin’s actions: punishment for disloyalty, a warning against treachery. Apartheid South Africa used car, letter and parcel bombs in African countries against the ANC, Pan African Congress, and SWAPO (Namibian nationalist) exiles, but avoided alienating the UK by similar tactics. Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, who instituted substantial funding for the ANC, was shot dead on the street in Stockholm in 1986; nobody was charged with the murder. Ten years later Colonel Eugene de Kock claimed – plausibly - this was a South African special unit ‘hit’. The cynically named Civil Co-operation Bureau, and special units under Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok, planned and executed the assassinations. The general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Frank Chikane, was poisoned in 1989 with Paraoxon on Vlok’s instructions. He survived through treatment in an American hospital. Modern drones have increased the opportunity for assassinations by decreasing the cost in manpower and money. Drones also reduced the risk and stress on perpetrators. The Predator drone came into use in 1995 allowing long distance elimination of jihadists and their leaders. However, the killing of Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout required a full Special Forces’ operation with helicopters, watched in real time by President Obama. The impact of 9/11 made drone killings in the Middle East routine. As they responded to, or tried to pre-empt, militia and terrorist attacks, Israel and the USA were drawn even closer together. The words of the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first” fitted the bill. Israel has a long and known history of assassinations in other countries - in Israel’s view, a weapon in its armoury of self-defence or as an arm of justice. After the capture and murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, from just a few weeks after the massacre in 1972 until 1988, MOSSAD hunted down and killed the Black September and PLO perpetrators living in different countries. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister from 1999-2001, a former member of the elite unit involved in finding and killing remaining perpetrators resident in Beirut, was open about the wider Operation Wrath of God. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich tells the tale omitting the killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Black September leader. The film evoked sympathy for the MOSSAD agents, their bravery and the consequences in their private lives. Assassination is liable to drift out of hand. Massively armed Israel, surrounded by a threatening and belligerent Muslim world, has stretched the justification of self-defence to its limits and beyond. A major escalation was the targeted killing of civilians in Iran during 2010-2012. The deaths of particle physicist Professor Masoud Ali-Mohammedi in 2010 and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 2012, expert in uranium enrichment, and other scientists, were attributed to MOSSAD assets in Tehran. Years away from being able to assemble a nuclear warhead, were these Iranians an immediate threat to the security of Israel, a nuclear power? In 2015 Iran signed an international treaty intended to limit the enrichment of uranium needed to develop a nuclear weapon. Israel – and Saudi Arabia - opposed the treaty. After the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, in April 2024, a car was bombed in Gaza killing three sons and four grandchildren of Ismail Haniyeh, Chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau. In July 2024 whilst in Tehran attending the inauguration of the new Iranian President Mahmoud Pezeshkian, Haniyeh himself was assassinated. Haniyeh, not by any normal understanding of the words ‘a moderate’ was considered a potentially pragmatic negotiator during prolonged ceasefire negotiations with Israel - unlike Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ hardline military leader, who planned and executed the 7 October massacres and who is now its uncontested dominant voice. Many observers believe the massacres were, in part, Sinwar’s deliberate provocation to thwart any normalisation of relations between Israel and key Arab States. And many in Israel have come to believe Netanyahu’s order to assassinate Haniyeh as, in part, aimed at aborting negotiations and prolonging the war allowing him to continue as Prime Minister and avoid an Israeli court room. There are many difficulties in attempting to outlaw or even govern assassinations in an agreed, effective ethical regulatory framework, not least that killing by drones, guided by a hand-held device, seems remarkably like playing a computer game. The ethics of ‘targeted killing’, how broadly to define criteria by which such actions might be judged legitimate or illegitimate, such as ‘in military settings’ or ‘for self-defence’ have been widely and eruditely discussed. Do sporadic terrorist attacks create a ‘military setting’ or are they a policing matter? The rise of asymmetric warfare involving extremist groups made such judgements even more difficult. How immediate must the threat evoking self-defensive lethal action be? No agreed answers. Proliferation of assassinations is a symptom of a progressive decline in respect for both international law and national sovereignty on which the UN was built. We need our international legal bodies whether the European Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court, to slow or halt the dangerous erosion. See TheArticle 11/09/2024 We live in interesting times. The Soviet satellites in eastern Europe and elsewhere, the military oligarchies once supported by the United States in Latin America, have receded into the past, features of the second half of the 20th century. During the Cold War, those who suffered under, and resisted, authoritarian regimes understood their rules, their alliances, their diversity and what qualified those who sought change for prison or worse. The collapse of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev heralded not the gradual global triumph of liberal democracy but fresh growth and development of unpredictable authoritarian States.
What causes authoritarianism? Economic explanation of political structures is the tribute Liberalism paid to Marxism. The old liberal refrain was apartheid would be ended if only a black middle class could form sharing in national wealth. The Soviet Union collapsed after economic failure. The ending of support from East Germany and the Soviet Union were largely instrumental in bringing Mandela’s ANC to the negotiating table. And it was economic sanctions against South Africa that drove the Afrikaner regime to negotiate. In October 1990, West German diplomacy achieved the re-unification of Germany. Germany firmly believed that key to its success lay in trade and economic development. As Anne Applebaum puts it in Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators who Want to Run the World, published this year by Allen Lane: * “They also believed that trade and diplomacy would, eventually, help normalize relations between Russia and Europe”, a foundational element of Angela Merkel’s thinking. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was born. In 2022, the $20 billion project designed to bring gas - bypassing Poland and Ukraine – direct from Russia to Germany, was destroyed in an underwater explosion. The hope of “Wandel Durch Handel”, change through trade, went with it. As energy bills rise this winter, we are still living through the consequences of the policy. The priority of trade and economics were UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s refrain as he promoted interdependence with China hoping to bring it into the democratic world during his tenure as Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016. Such was the hold an optimistic economism had on international relations. In 2022 former Hong Kong Governor, Chris ( now Lord) Patten, called Cameron’s position on China “mush diplomacy”, “hoping for the best is not a very good basis for policy”, he added. Yet, a stubborn belief persisted, at least during the first decade of the 21st. Century, that, given time, economic progress, wealth creation, and reduction in inequality could sort things out. As Quartet representative, 2007-2015 (for the UN, EU, US and Russia), Tony Blair was tasked with promoting economic growth in Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of peace. A kind of economistic faith that with enough GDP all manner of things would be well lingered alongside faith in economic sanctions against declared enemies. Applebaum makes a strong case that Russia did not emerge from the 1990s as a State that for a variety of reasons had tried, but failed, to adopt the liberalism its Western advisers were promoting. Rather, from Putin’s first days in the new century, she argues, he was setting up Russia as a mafia State to enrich his coterie, a kleptocracy with added nationalism and a “restorative nostalgia” for a defunct imperial Russia as its motif. The new feature of most post-Cold War authoritarian regimes is organising power primarily to enrich themselves. Trump-like, they do deals with each other forming an eclectic, transactional rather than ideological, network. Such unlikely bedfellows as Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mali and North Korea are participants. In pole position, there is a pragmatic China relying on its economic power to reel in client States and supporting Russia in its episodes of combat with Europe and the USA. There are also States of geopolitical importance, even functioning democracies like Turkey and India, as well as Saudi Arabia governed by a dynastic dictatorship, who for their own purposes occupy a Janus-like position. Iran remains a full-blown autocratic Shi’a theocracy, an active player in the network. Afghanistan under the Taliban stands alone as a Sunni tyranny driven by a crazed gender ideology. The key to the new projection of authoritarian power is found not only at national level: a brutal security apparatus and, in the case of China, Orwellian levels of surveillance. Internationally, technological opportunities open to all allow the spread and sharing of disinformation tailored to intensify social conflict in democracies and the political advancement of political extremes. Social media provides multiple platforms on which “to manipulate discontent, channel anger and fear”, in their target communities and enhance a search for homogeneity, belonging and order over diversity and difference. As Applebaum succinctly puts it, liberalism and democracy were not exported to the East, rather an ‘autocratic pre-disposition' and illiberalism infected the West. This was a message in her Twilight of Democracy first published in 2020 by Allen Lane. But the picture looks a little less dire today. Beginning with the 2023 defeat of the Law and Justice Party in Poland by Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO), followed this July by the Labour Party landslide crushing a Conservative Party too long in hock to its right-wing, then Marine le Pen’s setback in the French elections followed by Bangladesh ridding itself of Sheikh Hasina in August, and the USA seemingly past peak-Trump populism, liberalism has been making a comeback. The problem with Applebaum’s two books – and some sympathy is appropriate – is that while with great journalistic skill she pulls together a convincing diagnosis, her policy prescriptions are either too generic or underemphasise the powerful forces that will block their impact. Most notably getting some control over cyber-subversion and political interference of a sophisticated kind on social media platforms seems intractable. (The arrest of the Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, in France suggests one possibility). She also – laudably - advocates non-violent resistance while acknowledging the terrible toll of civilian casualties that resulted from street demonstrations and resistance in Iran, Myanmar, Egypt, Syria and other authoritarian States. She is right that autocratic drift, the ubiquity of corruption enriching political leaders for whom elections are a form of ‘decoration’, needs calling out. But her suggestion that civil society in democracies, as well as diasporas, should see themselves linked to citizens in autocratic regimes, faces the longstanding dilemma: “foreign interference, working for a foreign power” is the first thing on the charge sheet. Autocracy, Inc. provides a welcome coherent analysis of the kleptocracy network from a prominent centre-right figure. There are very few lacunae in the story Applebaum tells. You get a handle on a vital security topic in double-quick time. It was news to me that an emphasis on a ‘multipolar world’ is a key authoritarian card played to justify repressive political systems, or that the repetition of ‘the decadent West’ is primarily aimed at non-aligned nations. Applebaum’s warning is timely. It explains why States need to pool expertise to counter effectively the combined forces against democracy. There is no doubt the way forward will be demanding for democratic States struggling with overwhelming internal problems created not by authoritarian States but by feckless governments, bankers, tech-giants and, secondarily, by the international energy companies. *Talking about the book in Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, London N1 2UN, September 2nd Doors open 18.00 See TheArticle 30/08/2024 The sigh of relief on 21 July when Jo Biden stepped down as Democrat presidential candidate was deafening. Within less than a fortnight the Democrats nominated Vice-President Kamala Harris to replace the outgoing President with ratification to take place at their 19 August National Convention.
After intense consultations, at a Philadelphia rally on 6 August Harris presented Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz, as her Vice-Presidential running mate. Walz memorably described Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, as “creepy” and “weird”. Walz’s humour and masterful engagement with his audience in an acceptance speech was striking. To those watching from afar it suddenly felt like Trump was toast. The Harris-Walz ticket is nicely balanced. Kamala Harris, a former senator who now presides over the United States Senate and a former Attorney-General of California, tough on crime, modern and colourful, father Jamaican heritage, mother Indian heritage, husband Jewish. Walz, white, Lutheran and folksy with a track record of worker-friendly policy in Minnesota and a personal history that might have been designed to counter Trump. The son of an aspiring Nebraska Catholic family, Walz followed his father, a school superintendent, into teaching. He was his school’s football coach - the nearest thing to a secular priest. In three years, he turned a dud team around to win a state-level schools’ championship. The stuff of movies. He also served 24 years as a US Army reservist and, before entering politics in 2005, taught in China, his interest in human rights gained during this rich experience continues. The religious dimension of the Democrat ticket is perhaps less well balanced. And given the significant white evangelical Christian support for Trump, this matters. Since the attempted assassination, Trump has been ‘doing God’ more and has found a fruitful narrative as beneficiary of divine intervention. Kamala Harris is a member of the progressive Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, established in 1852. It is led by the Reverend Amos C. Brown, a respected former black civil rights activist - taught by Martin Luther King - who supports same-sex marriage. Tim Walz, raised a Catholic, joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ECLA), the most liberal branch of Lutheranism and the largest in Minnesota where it makes up 20% of the state’s Christian community, second only to Catholics. He acknowledges his debt to his Catholic family. “My mum and dad taught us: show generosity to your neighbours and work for the Common Good”. Walz avoids ideological language and presents down-to-earth policy. He is also passionately pro-choice seeing it as a basic human right. His Minnesota State Protect Reproductive Options Act says, “every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health”. Abortion is a salient issue for US voters. Some 82% of Democrat voters disapprove of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that unduly restrictive regulation of abortion by states was unconstitutional. Polling of all Catholic voters by the respected Pew Foundation in 2022 indicates that only 42% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, though for the smaller number of those who attend mass regularly (20%) the figure is 68%. Despite there being some 70 million American Catholics, pro-choice is politically a vote-winning position. The voting behaviour of other groups in US Christian communities remains important. White male and conservative Evangelical Christian voters notably helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Against that precedent the religious implications of the Harris -Walz ticket might remain a vulnerability. But there are far too many political issues for religious positions to determine the result of the Election. Trump, now at sea strategically, has fallen back on branding Kamala Harris a ‘left-wing extremist’. His denunciation of his opponent as a dangerous radical with a ‘crazy laugh’ is manna for Trump’s core constituency, but US Presidential elections are won or lost by swing and undecided marginal voters in seven battle-ground states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. A spectrum of local and national issues, several of them falling into the category of social justice, will decide their choice. The most dangerous for Kamala Harris, whom Trump likes to call Biden’s former ‘border czar’, (though she never had that role), is immigration. It is the American Constitution itself which gives these battle ground states their peculiar importance. In the national vote, which is a stage in the overall electoral process, voters determine the members of the national Electoral College which in turn determines who will be the next President. How many each state is allowed depends on how many representatives the state has in the Federal House of Representatives plus two Senators – a number which is related to each state’s population. In all but two small states, the winner of the popular vote takes all the Electoral College delegates. And it is possible to become President without winning the national vote; Donald Trump did this in 2016 with 77 electoral votes more than Hillary Clinton who beat him by 2.87 million popular votes. In the majority of states, the result of the election is predictable, in UK terms ‘safe’. California, the largest US state with 54 electoral votes, has been solidly Democrat since 1992 and Minnesota, with 10 electoral votes, Democrat led since Richard Nixon’s Republican landslide victory in 1972. As in the UK, the strategic priority is to hold your safe seats and gain the marginals. Fewer than 80,000 combined votes in three out of six of the key marginal states gave Trump the Presidency in 2016. Kamala Harris has considerable ground to make up and she is making it up fast. She is currently behind Trump in only one of the marginals, Nevada, and that by a whisker. Much of the two campaigns is happening and will happen on social media. She performs well with a lightness of touch, laughing at Trump, and benefits from endorsements and funding from stars such as Beyoncé. “She does it all with a sense of joy” in Walz’s unexpected words. The same could be said of Walz himself. Homey, mildly amusing videos featuring his daughter Hope are attracting the generally pro-Democrat Gen-Z voters (18-27). There is a touch of the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey’s, endearing antics. Dad (or Grandad) is on the ticket. A week is a long time in politics and there are under twelve of them before America chooses a President. The US has never had a female President, let alone a black woman, and nobody knows how the idea will play with the Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. Never underestimate misogyny or racism. Never forget the power of repeated lies and disinformation. So even with Dad on the ticket, it is perhaps premature to assume Trump is toast. See TheArticle 16/08/2024 |
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