Friday, July 7, 2023
Israel raids refugee camp, Biden appoints a war criminal, cluster munitions, record-breaking temperatures, felony re-enfranchisement, and more…
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[Correction: Due to a mixup in the time-stamp department, the original version of this briefing stated that today was Friday, June 9. Today is not Friday, June 9. It is Friday, July 7. We have had disturbing reports of readers who, trusting the authority of this magazine, acted on the assumption that today was Friday, June 9 and governed themselves accordingly—with catastrophic results. The error will not recur.]
I. THE BIG STORY
ISRAEL RAIDS JENIN REFUGEE CAMP
Earlier this week, the Israeli military carried out a two-day attack on the refugee camp of Jenin in the occupied West Bank. Israel launched at least ten drone strikes and sent in around 1,000 troops as part of an attack that killed at least twelve people (including four teenagers) and injured 100 more. Houses, streets, and critical infrastructure were destroyed and thousands fled their homes. It’s the second attack on the refugee camp within the last month—another one two weeks ago killed seven people.
Much of the media coverage focuses on the “militants” that Israel sought to root out of the refugee camp, which was the putative justification for these strikes—as always, American politicians read their lines about Israel’s right to “self-defense.” But there is considerably less coverage of why a refugee camp of around 20,000 people (one of many) exists in the first place. Who is taking refuge, and from what?
The people living in Jenin’s refugee camp are descendants of Palestinians who were expelled from their homes when Israel was established in 1948. More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes to make way for the State of Israel. There are 19 sites throughout the West Bank that house these people, who still lack a right to return to their homeland. Palestinians are still being pushed out to make way for Israeli settlements (just last month, 50 more Palestinians were pushed out, and 39 homes destroyed). They lack freedom of movement and the civil rights afforded to Israelis. And when they resist this state of affairs, they are hit with U.S.-funded artillery far more powerful than anything they possess. One need only glance at the casualty count to see how disproportionate this “conflict” really is—87 percent of the more than 14,000 dead between 1987 and 2021 have been Palestinian. Meanwhile, Israeli officials have made clear their intent to annex the conquered territory in total disregard for international law.
In a recent piece in Current Affairs, editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson explained that Israel’s territorial conquest over occupied Palestine is morally indistinguishable from the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
Discussion of Israel’s “right to self-defense” makes about as much sense as a discussion of Russia’s “right to self-defense” in the context of its occupation of Ukraine. Every aggressor has always portrayed its actions as purely defensive (the Emperor of Japan even claimed that Pearl Harbor was a defensive act). But if we are to evaluate when the use of force is legitimate, we have to understand how the conflict arose in the first place. An occupying power can’t claim that it’s merely “exercising the right to self-defense,” even if has been attacked violently by the people it’s occupying.
Any Palestinian actions towards Israel must be put into context of resistance. This does not make all of their actions justified—for instance, during the raid on Jenin, a member of Hamas drove a truck into a crowd of people in Tel Aviv and injured eight people, an act that was rightly condemned as terrorism. The problem is that that label is rarely applied when Israel attacks hospitals, assassinates journalists, and indiscriminately bombs civilians.
II. STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
BIDEN NAMES A WAR CRIMINAL TO DIPLOMACY COMMISSION
President Biden has named former assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams to the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy—an organization which is responsible for “appraising U.S. government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities.”
Abrams’ record as a supporter of barbaric U.S. interventions in Latin America makes him perhaps the worst person you could pick for that particular job (or any job that takes place outside a prison cell). In 1991, Abrams pled guilty of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra Affair, during which the U.S. illegally funded a murderous, drug-trafficking paramilitary group in Nicaragua (President George H.W. Bush gave him a pardon) and advocated for a full invasion of the country. He is also infamous for helping to cover up a massacre of at least 986 people, including 500 children, by U.S.-backed death squads in El Salvador in 1981. He praised the military government that perpetrated the crime (and killed more than 75,000 people during an twelve-year civil war) calling U.S. policy in the country a “fabulous achievement.” He backed similarly brutal dictatorships in Guatemala and Panama, attempted coups in Venezuela and Palestine, and the War in Iraq. Jon Schwarz of The Intercept wrote an excellent overview of Abrams’ horrendous record back in 2019, after he was nominated to be Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela (a country Trump, incidentally, had discussed invading):
“The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America’s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors — the brutality and the unctuousness — is Abrams’s core competency…Abrams participated in many of the most ghastly acts of U.S. foreign policy from the past 40 years, all the while proclaiming how deeply he cared about the foreigners he and his friends were murdering. Looking back, it’s uncanny to see how Abrams has almost always been there when U.S. actions were at their most sordid.
The appointment of Abrams prompted a remarkable confrontation between Abrams and then-freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who bravely called out his atrocious record (and was summarily tarred across the U.S. press as an anti-Semite for saying completely true things about the Israel lobby). You can view that confrontation here:
That Biden would nominate a man with such a record is unconscionable, but we can’t say it’s surprising. Biden, too, has spent his career as an unrepentant war hawk. As Schwarz points out, Abrams came up as an aide to interventionist Democrats and his cachet in politics has always been bipartisan:
“The distressing reality is that Abrams is no rogue outlier, but a respected, honored member of the center right of the U.S. foreign policy establishment… He’s mostly a cog in a machine. It’s the machine that’s the problem, not its malevolent parts.”
DON’T GO BREAKIN’ MY CHART
The U.S. on average has a lower life expectancy than the worst town in England: the very dour-sounding Blackpool. In West Virginia, the average life expectancy is significantly lower than that of North Korea.
III. AROUND THE STATES
Affirmative action in higher education has been overturned by the Supreme Court. But what about affirmative action for affluent white people, otherwise known as “legacy admissions”? Three civil rights groups have filed a complaint with the Department of Education arguing that Harvard’s preferences for the relatives of alumni and donors are effectively a form of racial discrimination which violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (70 percent of donor and legacy admits are white). The lawsuit plainly asks, “Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?”
Minnesota just gave 55,000 people with felony convictions the right to vote as long as they are not in prison. Thirty-two states disenfranchise people on parole, while 14 bar people with felony convictions from voting even after serving their sentences. The Minnesota ACLU, which has advocated for the law, argues that “allowing people to vote after release from prison encourages participation in civil life and helps rebuild ties to the community that motivate law-abiding behavior.” Minnesota’s law is one of the many pieces of progressive legislation passed in the current session of Congress by the state’s narrow Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party majority. In just the last year, they have also passed paid leave, union protections, abortion up to viability, a school lunch guarantee, and more.
Nurses in Joliet, Illinois say their hospital, Ascension St. Joseph Medical Center, gives nurses too many patients to care for at one time, violating a safe-staffing law and putting their safety in jeopardy. In negotiations for their next contract, the nurses are demanding that the St. Joe’s private hospital network fix the staffing shortage in compliance with the bare minimum that the law requires. Since the COVID pandemic, the U.S. has dealt with a massive shortfall of nurses, who are routinely overworked and underpaid. One recent report says 100,000 have left the profession over the last two years due to “stress, burnout and retirements” while more than 610,000 more plan to leave by 2027.
According to an investigation by Reuters, five living presidents, two Supreme Court Justices, 11 governors and 100 federal legislators have ancestors who enslaved Black people. These lawmakers are not directly responsible for the sins of their forebears. But the fact that so many descendants of slaveholders now roam the halls of power does speak to a tendency for ill-gotten wealth and privilege to be consolidated and handed down generationally. In fairness, just because your ancestors didn’t own slaves doesn’t make you Not Racist. (For instance, Trump is the only living president who does not descend from slave owners, a fact he believes entitles him to votes from Black people.)
LONG READ: Despite the inspiring union victories at companies like Starbucks and Amazon, the labor movement is still far less powerful than it was forty years ago. Since 1983, the share of Americans in unions has dropped by half. As Dylan Matthews argues in Vox, a true resurgence of the labor movement will require more than just enthusiasm—it will require changes to the law:
“Whatever explanation you choose, any attempt at union revitalization will require much more than organizing a few Starbucks locations. It will require wholesale change to labor law. The political scientist David Madland’s book Re-Union gets into the details well, but the gist is you need to find ways to organize unions across whole sectors, not just workplace by workplace. In many European countries, firms don’t pay a penalty for paying good union wages; union contracts are “extended” to whole sectors. If UPS drivers win a good contract, FedEx would then have to abide by those terms too, even though it doesn’t have a staff union. This would be an ambitious change.”
On the latest episode of the Current Affairs Podcast, hear labor experts Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor respond to the statistics presented in this piece. We ask them: is it fair to say that the labor movement is not being revived, or does that paint too bleak of a picture?
RFK JR. DEFENDS HIS NEW CLIENT: INFECTIOUS DISEASE
Last week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a Democratic presidential candidate and all-around Very Normal Guy—got together with a group of other Very Normal People to chat about the horrors of vaccines. In attendance was Dr. Sherri Tenpenny (who has claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine makes people magnetic and connects them to 5G towers) and Joseph Mercola (a “natural health” guru who has profited from selling fake COVID cures).
In the presence of these luminaries, Kennedy, who is a lawyer and not a doctor, boldly claimed that those of us who blamed disease for millions of deaths have got the wrong guy—that the poor microbes have been framed! “I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health,” Kennedy said. He then falsely asserted that all the worst pandemics of human history—from AIDS to the Spanish Flu—were actually caused by vaccine research.
RFK Jr. may be a crank, but he’s also one of the most calculating liars around (something Current Affairs has a feature-length article exploring in more detail). He understands that Americans have very good reasons not to trust our for-profit medical institutions. He takes these rational fears and uses them to justify irrational paranoia that turns people against basic medical concepts like germ theory, while getting rich along with others who want to sell them fake cures.
IV. AROUND THE WORLD
At nearly 63 F on average, July 4, 2023 was the hottest day since we began recording global temperatures in 1979. Some scientists believe that it was the hottest day in the last 125,000 years. Fifty-seven million Americans were exposed to dangerous levels of heat (which kills more Americans each year than any other weather phenomenon). As climate change accelerates, we can expect more of this, as the globe is on track to reach 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels (the point at which human-made climate change will become irreversible) as soon as 2027. (Meanwhile, The New York Times and other major newspapers have covered this event as a strange aberration with hardly a mention of climate change or its causes, a phenomenon we have discussed at length in a Current Affairs web-exclusive.)
Joe Biden has agreed to give Ukraine dangerous and illegal cluster munitions, which break apart in midair and spread small “bomblets” over a wide area. As we have covered in a previous briefing, these munitions “have a tendency to blow up innocent people for years after their initial use,” and Human Rights Watch has previously condemned the use of cluster bombs by both Ukraine and Russia. Ironically, the White House, via former Press Secretary Jen Psaki, had called the use of cluster munitions a potential “war crime” when Russia was accused of doing it. The U.S. ambassador to the UN had said these weapons had “no place on the battlefield” and are “banned.” (She did not mention that the U.S. refusal to participate in the ban is one of the main reasons these weapons still exist after 99 percent of stockpiles worldwide have been destroyed.) Again, the number one rule of U.S. foreign policy is Do as I say, not as I do.
Thousands of teachers in Hungary may soon be leaving the profession after a new bill revoking their status as public employees passed. It drastically reduces their rights, increasing the amount of time per week they can be forced to work and allowing them to be transferred to other schools without any say in the matter. The teachers have dubbed it a “revenge law,” suggesting that it was passed by the far-right Orban government in retaliation against the teachers unions that have been striking for better pay and conditions over the last year. Hungarian primary school teachers receive the second-lowest wages among the 38 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (only Slovakia is worse).
South African police sparked outrage when they were caught on film kicking and stomping on two men after pulling them over on the highway. South Africa notoriously has one of the most brutal police forces in the democratic world. During apartheid, South African police famously enforced a system of racial hierarchy and suppressed enemies of the regime. This legacy has survived into the era of post-racial democracy. In 2012, the police shot 34 striking miners, and not a single officer was prosecuted. Between 2012 and 2019, more than 42,000 complaints were made about police abuses to a government watchdog group, which helped to cover them up.
The government of Hong Kong has issued a bounty of $125,000 for information on eight pro-democracy leaders who have been exiled after protests in 2019. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee said that the exiles would “live in fear” unless they hand themselves over to face charges of “anti-China activities.” DW News has an interview with one of the exiles, Finn Lau, who says,
“We are facing more and more transnational repression, as well as local crushing of civil liberties, autonomy, and democracy. That is why it is very important for us to continue to fight. So that kind of volunteer reward will not deter us in any way.”
LONG READ: Indigenous people in Jujuy, Argentina have been in the streets for the last several weeks. They are protesting wage cuts and new laws that would open more of their land up to resource extraction and curtail their rights to demonstrate. Sam Carliner writes in Truthout,
“Reports from on the ground show repression including massive deployments of riot police, people being chased in the streets and home invasions. However, there are also many videos of resistance, including huge marches, Native women working together to expel plainclothes police officers from their protests, and displays of solidarity from sugar workers and miners.”
OSTRICH FACT OF THE DAY
Ostriches can run faster than most horses, reaching top speeds of 43 miles per hour! If you are a horse, and an ostrich bets it can beat you to the end of the park and back, don’t take the bet! Horses comparatively excel at endurance, ostriches at speed. (If the ostrich bets it can beat a horse to the other side of the country, the horse may stand a better chance.)
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.