Oct. 13, 2023 ❧ Israel-Palestine updates, Protesting "Petro Pete," and another awful Newsom veto
Plus scary facial recognition software, France bans pro-Palestinian demonstrations, George Scam-tos, and an abundance of beetles...
BIG STORY
ISRAEL/PALESTINE UPDATE: SIEGE OF GAZA CONTINUES, NETANYAHU’S POLITICAL FORTUNES REEL, AND RISK OF WIDER CONFLICT GROWS
In Tuesday's briefing, we provided an overview of the horrific violence that broke out over the past weekend in Israel and Gaza and tried our best to give readers context about the history of the conflict and the ongoing blockade. We’d like to provide you with updates on how the situation has developed since from a few different angles, though keep in mind that everything is happening extremely fast, so certain information might be outdated or may have changed by the time you read this. Here are a few important things that have happened since Tuesday.
❧ Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip continues, with Gaza’s casualties exceeding 1,500, including at least 500 children. Israel claims to have dropped 6,000 munitions on the strip in just six days. Bombs have flattened refugee camps, residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and even ambulances. Human Rights Watch has also confirmed the use of white phosphorous in bombings which is illegal under international law and “which can be used either for marking, signaling, and obscuring, or as a weapon to set fires that burn people and objects, has a significant incendiary effect that can severely burn people and set structures, fields, and other civilian objects in the vicinity on fire.”
In order for them to bomb an underground Hamas hideout, Israel has given an order for Gazans to flee from the North to the South in a span of 24 hours, which means that more than 1.1 million people will need to cram into roughly 40 kilometer (25 mile) long piece of land. According to UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric, such a massive evacuation would be impossible without “devastating humanitarian consequences.” Indeed, many Gazans have expressed total confusion about where to take shelter, especially the thousands who are already in hospitals as a result of previous bombings and whose care will need to be uprooted. Many have attempted to flee to Egypt, but they have been met by Egyptian security forces who have been dispatched to prevent their crossing into the Sinai Peninsula.
❧ Israel’s total blockade of food, water, electricity, and medicine—which the UN calls “unlawful” —has made the humanitarian crisis drastically worse. Gaza’s only power plant has run out of fuel, and the International Red Cross has called the escalation “abhorrent.” Fabrizio Carboni, the ICRC’s regional director for the Near and Middle East, said the following in a statement:
As Gaza loses power, hospitals lose power, putting newborns in incubators and elderly patients on oxygen at risk. Kidney dialysis stops, and X-rays can’t be taken. Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues…Families in Gaza are already having trouble accessing clean water. No parent wants to be forced to give a thirsty child dirty water.
But the pleas have fallen on deaf ears, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has pledged that “What was in Gaza will no longer be” and that the assault “will only intensify.” Israel says it will not lift the blockade until hostages are returned, while Hamas has threatened to execute a hostage for each bomb Israel drops on a home without warning. Though, there is no indication yet that they have followed through on that promise.
Here is an interview in Democracy Now! with Israeli writer Gideon Levy who has urged his government to call off the siege:
❧ Israelis continue to piece together the carnage from Hamas’ weekend attack. As of writing, the death toll on the Israeli side is already at 1,300. Israeli officials are working tirelessly to account for all the deaths and destruction from the weekend. Reports continue to roll in of destroyed homes and villages, including some kibbutzim where dozens of people lay massacred. Hamas claims to have taken more than 100 Israeli captives, though the IDF disputes this number saying that only 60 have been abducted, including many civilians ranging from young children to elderly women.
Here is an interview on ABC 7 New York with human rights worker, Yotam Kipnis who had ten of his family members kidnapped from the Be'eri kibbutz in Southern Israel:
❧ The possibility is increasing that the region could be plunged into a wider war. As Hamas launched its attack on Israeli territory, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah—which has backing from Iran—also launched rockets into Israel. This led Israel to launch retaliatory strikes into Lebanon that have killed at least three Hezbollah members. Syria, where Hezbollah has a large presence, has also been hit with Israeli munitions, including in major cities of Aleppo and Damascus. And while the U.S. has pledged unwavering support to Israel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged restraint from Israel and other regional players, fearing the descent into a larger war, and is planning a diplomatic mission to try to keep the lid on the situation. However, it seems as if it will be tough to play the role of a neutral broker given that they’ve pledged unwavering support to one side of the conflict.
❧ It has been confirmed by Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that Israeli intelligence had advanced warning at least three days before Hamas launched its attack. “We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” McCaul, a Republican, told reporters on Wednesday. “I don’t want to get too much into classified [details], but a warning was given. I think the question was at what level.” Netanyahu, for his part, denies any forewarning that an attack could be coming, calling it “fake news.” In Israel, public opinion has shifted dramatically against Netanyahu as a result of the Hamas attack. According to one poll from The Jerusalem Post,
Four out of five Jewish Israelis believe the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are to blame for the mass infiltration of Hamas terrorists into Israel and the massacre that followed, a new Dialog Center poll released on Thursday found…An overwhelming majority – 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country’s leadership…Furthermore, almost all the respondents (94%) believe the government must bear some responsibility for the lack of security preparedness that led to the assault, with over 75% saying the government holds most of the responsibility.
Things are moving extraordinarily fast, and for more up-to-the-minute updates on everything, we highly recommend the live coverage of the conflict coming from Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Ha’aretz.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé’s 2017 book, Ten Myths About Israel, is available for free from Verso Books right now as an e-book download.
“In this groundbreaking book, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Occupation, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel.
The “ten myths” that Pappe explores—repeated endlessly in the media, enforced by the military, accepted without question by the world’s governments—reinforce the regional status quo. He explores the claim that Palestine was an empty land at the time of the Balfour Declaration, as well as the formation of Zionism and its role in the early decades of nation building. He asks whether the Palestinians voluntarily left their homeland in 1948, and whether June 1967 was a war of “no choice.” Turning to the myths surrounding the failures of the Camp David Accords and the official reasons for the attacks on Gaza, Pappe explains why the two-state solution is no longer viable.”
FIGHTING BACK
CLIMATE PROTESTERS CRASH A BUTTIGIEG EVENT
The Secretary of Transportation got an unpleasant surprise on Wednesday, as several protestors from the group Climate Defiance interrupted a talk he was giving at a conference in Baltimore. A relatively new group, Climate Defiance shares many similarities with the UK-based Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, operating on a model of “consistent, mass-turnout, nonviolent disruption to stop business as usual.” True to form, the young activists stormed the stage wearing “END FOSSIL FUELS” shirts, and unfurled a banner calling the secretary “Petro Pete.” Much like a cargo train under Buttigieg’s watch, the event was completely derailed.
But just why is he “Petro Pete?” Well, the activists explained. Despite his fervent efforts to appear eco-friendly, talking up the virtues of electric buses and promising to “decarbonize the transportation sector,” Buttigieg has in fact been contributing to the earth’s carbon problem, not reducing it. As Transportation Secretary, he’s approved the construction of the Sea Port Oil Terminal, a mammoth offshore facility designed to export millions of barrels of crude oil from the U.S. to the rest of the world. When the decision was made in November 2022, the Texas Tribune noted that it came “without any public announcement,” and that the facility would “enable continued growth in U.S. shale oil production and in global consumption, dealing a substantial setback to the White House’s goals for drastic cuts in carbon emissions.”
In a year of record-breaking high temperatures and thousands dead around the world from climate-related disasters, the protestors have every right to be furious at Buttigieg for his complicity in this monstrous project. He might as well be personally setting fire to the world’s forests with a Zippo, at this point; the damage is comparable. It takes unusual courage to confront a powerful government official on his home turf, and drag to light an issue he’d rather everyone forgot about—but that’s what Climate Defiance has done. With any luck, it won’t be the last time.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ A dozen CEOs have called for Harvard students who issued a statement criticizing Israel to be doxxed and blacklisted from employment. On Saturday, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups released a statement calling Israel “entirely responsible” for the ongoing violence in the region, adding that “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison”— a statement which 34 other student groups initially signed onto. Though the initial statement did not explicitly condemn Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians, a spokesperson for the group later clarified that “the PSC staunchly opposes violence against civilians — Palestinian, Israeli, or other.” Then, billionaire Bill Ackman penned a tweet asking if Harvard “would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter...so as to insure [sic] that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” Afterward, twelve other CEOs signed onto the request. As the last few years have shown, issuing even mild public statements that criticize Israel is something that can result in job loss—it’s something that has already happened to AP journalist Emily Wilder, Rising host Katie Halper, and our very own Nathan J. Robinson, who lost his job at The Guardian for making an extremely tame joke about U.S. military aid to Israel. Similar efforts have been made to blacklist students, led by groups like the Canary Mission, who post dossiers of personal information about BDS and other pro-Palestinian activists on their website, which are given to employers to prevent them from getting jobs and have even led to some being interrogated by Israeli security officials. Apparently, cancel culture is fine now!
❧ Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have capped California’s insulin prices at $35 for a 30-day supply. Attempting to justify the unjustifiable, the governor argued that his own plan—to manufacture insulin directly through a $50 million contract with the generic drug company Civica Rx, and sell it for $30 a vial—is superior. But this plan hasn’t taken effect yet, and it’s unclear how long California’s diabetic patients will have to wait until it does. A price cap would have provided immediate relief, across all brands and providers of insulin. State senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s author, calls the veto “a major setback that will keep tens of thousands of diabetic Californians trapped in the terrible choice between buying insulin and buying food,” and he’s not wrong.
❧ A creepy new facial recognition software is becoming widely used on TikTok. The program, known as PimEyes, is a search engine that allows users to snap photos of anyone and initially scan the internet for every bit of information linked to them. According to NPR:
It's an AI tool that's like a reverse image search on steroids — it scans a face in a photo and crawls dark corners of the internet to surface photos many people didn't even know existed of themselves in the background of restaurants or attending a concert.
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Even Google was too afraid to release this technology to the public. Even though they had created a version of it all the way back in 2011, they concluded that in the wrong hands, it could be dangerous. Even in an era where A.I. is accelerating at a bewildering pace, little has been done by public regulators to rein in the technology. No federal laws exist at all governing facial recognition technology.
❧ INTERVIEW: In recent weeks, record numbers of migrants have been attempting to reach the United States, and President Biden has responded with a harsh crackdown. A lot of coverage has been given to the humanitarian crisis at the border and the struggle in cities to find accommodations for them. But comparatively less focus is put on why so many migrants feel the need to risk their lives to travel to the United States in the first place. Here is an interview from Democracy Now! with Illinois Representative Chuy Garcia on the root causes of the migrant crisis:
AROUND THE WORLD
No me asusta la amenaza (You can’t scare me with your threats)
patrones de la miseria (you masters of misery)
la estrella de la esperanza (the star of hope)
continuará siendo nuestra (continues to be ours)
— Victor Jara
❧ A former Chilean soldier has been arrested in Florida, for his role in the murder of Víctor Jara. Sometimes called “the Bob Dylan of South America,” Jara was the most popular and influential folk singer of the Chilean workers’ movement, and an implacable enemy of the Pinochet regime as it came to power. In 1973, he and dozens of his comrades were tortured and killed by the military in Santiago’s Estadio Chile; today, the stadium is renamed Estadio Víctor Jara, in his honor. On Tuesday, Florida immigration officials arrested Pedro Pablo Barrientos, a 74-year-old former army officer, and announced that he “will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing.” In 2016, a civil trial found Barrientos liable for Jara’s death, with one witness testifying that he showed off an antique pistol and bragged that “I killed Víctor Jara with this.” Seven of Pinochet’s men have already been convicted in Chilean courts in connection with Jara’s death; with extradition on the horizon for Barrientos, it appears justice has caught up with another.
❧ In a flagrant violation of free expression, France’s interior minister has banned all pro-Palestinian protests and ordered that any foreign nationals who engage in public demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights be “systematically” deported. Since the ban went into place, French police have already violently dispersed two peaceful protests in central Paris, blasting their participants with tear gas and water cannons. This entire situation speaks to how weak free speech protections are in France and Europe more generally. Even though France has the right to free expression enshrined in its constitution, a 1971 law allows certain acts of speech to be banned, including those that “provoke discrimination, hate, or violence towards a person or a group of people because of their origin or because they belong or do not belong to a certain ethnic group, nation, race, or religion.” This is an extraordinarily broad power that could be stretched to outlaw just about any form of speech the government doesn’t like. In this case, it’s the speech of people who support the rights of Palestinians being criminalized, because it could inspire hate crimes against Jews. But couldn’t this power just as easily be used to ban pro-Israel demonstrations because they could inspire hatred toward Muslims? It seems like instead of criminalizing speech because of its possible effects, countries should be sending their police after the people who are, you know, actually committing hate crimes.
❧ The upcoming elections in Poland have unusually high stakes. The far-right Law and Justice party, or PiS, are seeking an unprecedented third term in power, and they currently lead in nation-wide opinion polls. So far, PiS has introduced legislation to restrict abortion and sex education in Poland, allowed hundreds of so-called “LGBT-free zones” to crop up around the country, and targeted women’s rights activists for police raids, among other abuses of power. Their main opposition comes from the Civic Coalition (KO), a broad-tent organization led by former prime minister Donald Tusk. KO also has the support of Jaroslaw Walesa, son of the famous Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa, who has criticized PiS as “a huge step backwards” and “not what my father fought for” during Poland’s independence movement. As the Guardian’s editorial board has noted, though, almost 100 percent of the news coverage on state television is pro-government, sparking fears of an “illiberal takeover of the state” already in progress. The vote will be held on October 15th, and the future of democracy and civil rights in Poland may hang in the balance.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians”)
❧ The word “grifter” is often overused in political discourse. But if there’s anyone that word totally applies to, it’s Congressman George Santos (R-NY). He has been charged with ten more felony counts that detail even more small-bore Saul Goodman-esque criminality. Federal prosecutors accuse Santos of, among other things, stealing the credit card number of a donor and transferring $11,000 dollars to his own bank account, and stealing the identities of other donors in order to charge their credit cards without their authorization. Santos has been urged by other New York Republicans, including four members of the House GOP, to resign.
Things have gotten even worse for him since his former aide, Samuel Miele, pled guilty to impersonating an aide to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy in order to solicit campaign donations for Santos. But as the walls continue to close in, Santos has remained defiant, calling the charges a “witch hunt.”
The latest charges build on 13 counts filed against Santos in May, which included fraudulently obtaining unemployment benefits and tricking donors into giving money to a fake nonprofit, which Santos then allegedly used to pay off his own debts and purchase designer clothing. And though he has not been charged over this, Santos has also been found to have fabricated basically every aspect of his life’s story, including his education and employment history, his experience running an animal charity, and being a landlord. He even appears to have made up whole-cloth claims that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors, that his mother died in the Sept. 11 attacks, and that his company lost four employees in the 2015 Pulse nightclub shooting. Every politician tells lies, but Santos’ stats may be unmatched by anyone else who has ever held federal office in recent memory.
BEETLE FACT OF THE WEEK
Astonishingly, one-fourth of all animal species on Earth is a beetle. And if you include plants and animals, beetles still make up one-fifth of all the species. There are more than 400,000 species in the order Coleoptera (beetles) and hundreds of new beetle species are discovered each year.
There are so many goddamned beetles out there that the British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane once said that if God exists and truly created the universe then he must have had “inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Scientists suspect that there are actually anywhere from 1 to 2 million unique beetle pecies—most of which have not yet been identified.
This is far too many. Current Affairs is calling for an official moratorium on beetles until we figure out what the hell is going on.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. 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.