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phyllis bennis
As Israel and Gaza Erupt, the US Must Commit to Ending the Violence — All the Violence
'Right now, we need U.S. support for the U.N. as it calls for an immediate ceasefire'
Oct 08, 2023
The most recent eruption of violence in Gaza and Israel is a tragic reminder of the human consequences of decades of oppression. The human toll – hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis killed so far – tells that appalling story. Many of the targets, and many of those killed, on both sides, were civilians.
And, as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory noted about attacks on civilians, “whoever launches them (Palestinian armed groups or Israeli occupation forces) commits crimes that must be accounted for.”
But while it’s necessary, condemning attacks on civilians isn’t enough. If we are serious about ending this spiraling violence, we need to look at root causes. And that means – hard as it may be for some to acknowledge it – we must look at the context.
While this attack against Israel may have been a surprise to Israel’s political and military officials, it should not have been unexpected. Eruptions of violence have well-known causes; they are no secret. Human rights organizations (Israeli, Palestinian, American and international) and UN officials, parliamentarians and governments around the world have long warned that Israel’s longstanding denial of freedom and equality for Palestinians would continue sparking cycles of violence.
Our understanding of reality is shaped by when we start the clock.
Saturday’s attack from Gaza did not happen out of thin air. It took place in the context of decades of Israel’s domination and control over Palestinians. As the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem describes it, “in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians. … [I]n 2007, Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip that is still in place. Throughout all of these years, Israel has continued to control nearly every aspect of life in Gaza from outside.”
Generations of Palestinians, 80 percent of them refugees, have grown up in the teeming, impoverished Gaza Strip, one of the most crowded pieces of land on Earth. Since Israel besieged Gaza in 2007, most of them have never been allowed to leave the walled-in, military-guarded Strip, have never glimpsed the West Bank or Jerusalem, let alone 1948 Israel, and certainly not the wider world.
In 2012 the UN determined that without “herculean action” by the international community, by 2020 Gaza “will not be livable” – largely, though not only, because of the profound lack of access to clean water. In 2015 the UN again reported that conditions had worsened, particularly because of the Israeli military assault in 2014 and its destruction of water and electrical infrastructure. And once again they urgently warned that Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020.
Yet more than 2 million Palestinians remain in Gaza, locked into an open-air prison. 2020 has come and gone. The international community did not take “herculean action” to stop Israel’s blockade or to stop the current extremist government’s annexation of Palestinian land. They did nothing (then-President Trump even praised it) when Israel passed a law stating that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people” — so even Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are officially denied equal rights. And Gaza remains unlivable.
In 2018, a series of overwhelmingly non-violent marches, organized by Ahmed Abu Artema, a young Gaza poet, and taking place inside the besieged Strip, called for an end to the blockade and freedom of movement for the Gaza population. They were met with tear gas, rubber bullets and Israeli sharpshooters taking aim at the mostly young protesters.
After two years, the result was 214 Palestinians killed, including 46 children, and more than 36,000 injured, including 8,800 children. More than 8,000 of those injured were hit by live ammunition. By the time the protests waned, in 2019, the United Nations reported that 1,700 of the protesters faced amputation of legs or arms because Gaza hospitals had insufficient health care funding to provide advanced care for those shot by Israeli snipers.
None of this makes attacks on civilians legal or acceptable. But without addressing the root causes, violence will continue to erupt. Israel remains the occupying power. Before today, Israeli soldiers had already killed more than 214 Palestinians, 47 of them children, in the occupied West Bank, and settler violence had escalated, with nearly 600 attacks in just the first six months of this year.
Too many Palestinians and too many Israelis have been killed. If Israel was in fact surprised by the attack, it was an intelligence failure – something that won’t be solved by sending it more weapons. The United States provides $3.8 billion – 20 percent of Israel’s military budget – every year, and that clearly isn’t helping deal with the root causes of violence.
Right now, we need U.S. support for the UN as it calls for an immediate ceasefire. And then we need a serious U.S. commitment to ending the violence — all the violence. That means ending Washington’s enabling of Israeli violations, and instead demanding real accountability for violations of human rights and international law, real moves to end the occupation and apartheid system and real moves to demand equality for all living under Israeli control.
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Why Far-Right Republicans Cannot Be Trusted on the Pentagon Budget
We have plenty of good reasons to cut the military budget. But we can’t trust the extremist caucus with either ending wars abroad or funding urgent human needs at home.
Mar 01, 2023
Since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives earlier this year, the so-called “Freedom Caucus” — the badly misnamed right-fringe of the congressional GOP — has been flexing its influence.
Caucus members are deeply invested in an agenda that would increase inequality and enrich corporations and billionaires, strip hard-won rights from people of color, immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community, destroy the environment to enrich fossil fuel companies and slash social investment for the poor.
And yet surprisingly, some of these extremists are also—sort of—calling for cutting the military budget. Does that provide an opening for anti-war progressives looking to cross the aisle? Unfortunately, no.
Of course cutting the military budget is an urgent necessity — both to halt the destruction that military spending enables and to free up the funding needed for social investment at home. But this group of right-wing lawmakers can’t be trusted to do either.
Cutting military spending is an urgent moral need
Some Democrats have criticized the GOP for even considering military cuts. But no progressive — inside or outside of Congress — should defend our bloated military budget.
This year, Congress is giving the Pentagon and the nuclear weapons arsenal $858 billion—which accounts for more than half of all U.S. discretionary spending. The United States continues to spend more on the military than the next nine countries combined, including big military spenders like China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia.
Some of these extremists are also—sort of—calling for cutting the military budget. Does that provide an opening for anti-war progressives looking to cross the aisle? Unfortunately, no.
In fact, you could cut that budget in half and Washington would still be spending about $70 billion more than Russia and China together.
That $858 billion is about $100 billion higher than former President Trump’s last military budget. The increase from 2022 alone could pay for almost all the abandoned social program commitments left unfunded from President Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Or it could help fund lapsed priorities like the expanded Child Tax Credit, which lifted millions of kids out of poverty for one year — only to let them slide back into abject hardship when conservative lawmakers refused to extend it.
Instead, that money is going to the military, fueling war and rights abuses around the world.
Despite bipartisan votes in both houses of Congress to stop supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, for example, U.S. backing for the bombing campaign and blockade of Yemeni ports continues. Because of the U.S.-backed Saudi war, 1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and 2.2 million children under 5 need treatment for acute malnutrition, 17 million more are food insecure, and around 400,000 Yemenis have already died in the war.
Meanwhile, the almost forgotten, smaller-scale wars of the Global War on Terror continue. U.S. airstrikes, drone attacks, Special Forces deployments, and other military engagements persist from Somalia to Syria, Iraq to Pakistan, Mali to Niger and beyond. The Pentagon always has plenty of money for those missions.
More broadly, about half of the Pentagon budget every year goes directly to arms manufacturers who produce bombs, warplanes, armed drones, nuclear submarines, and more — including new ships and weapons designed to challenge China, significantly escalating the threat of military conflict. The budget includes about $19 billion per year to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal, increasing the danger that any accidental escalation between nuclear weapons powers — like in Ukraine — could result in a nuclear exchange.
This renewed military build-up in preparation for great power confrontation with China and Russia is extremely dangerous. And there’s no shortage of funds in the Pentagon budget for increasing it.
We can’t trust the far Right
Military spending doesn’t keep us safe from the real enemies we face — like climate change, pandemics, inequality, gun violence, the rise of white supremacy and authoritarianism. Instead, it does enormous harm.
There is a consensus among U.S. residents that we need to cut military spending. The hard part is convincing Congress to actually do it. So should progressives see these claims by the extremist Republicans as an opportunity to work with them when they say they might be on board with cutting some fraction of military spending?
No — at least not on their terms. These members have said very little about ending actual wars or reducing suffering at home or abroad. Instead, they’ve called for ending so-called “woke” policies in the military, like challenging white supremacy in the ranks, protecting trans troops from discrimination, and considering climate change in U.S. military policy.
And they would do it while adding to the suffering of people in this country. The $75 billion military cut they’ve suggested would come as part of a broader package — cutting $130 billion from social investments — which would mean big cuts to nutrition assistance, healthcare subsidies, climate protection, and other programs that create jobs and keep people and the planet safe.
We have plenty of good reasons to cut the military budget. Such cuts are popular with voters and other people across this country too — so we need to convince Congress of that and push hard for a real plan to cut military spending. But we can’t trust the extremist caucus with either ending wars abroad or funding urgent human needs at home. We can only trust these white supremacist, transphobic, and classist legislators to do exactly the opposite. They’re not our allies.
This article was jointly produced by Foreign Policy In Focus and InTheseTimes.com.
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20 Years Ago Today: We Didn't Stop the Invasion of Iraq, But We Did Change History
The global protests proved the war's clear illegality and demonstrated the isolation of the Bush administration's policies—and later helped prevent war in Iran in 2007 and the bombing of Syria in 2013. And they inspired a generation of activists.
Feb 15, 2023
Twenty years ago — on February 15, 2003 — the world said no to war. People rose up in almost 800 cities around the world in an unprecedented movement for peace.
The world stood on the precipice of war. U.S. and U.K. warplanes and warships — filled with soldiers and sailors and armed with the most powerful weapons ever used in conventional warfare — were streaming towards the Middle East, aimed at Iraq.
Anti-war mobilizations had been underway for more than a year as the threat of war against Iraq took hold in Washington, even as the war in Afghanistan had barely begun.
Opposition to the war in Afghanistan was difficult following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even though none of the hijackers were Afghans and none lived in Afghanistan, most Americans saw the war as a legitimate response — a view that would change over the next two decades, with the vast majority saying the war wasn’t worth fighting when American troops were withdrawn in 2021.
But Iraq was different from the beginning. There was always opposition. And as the activist movement grew, its grounding in a sympathetic public expanded too. By the time February 15, 2003 came around — a year and five months after the 9/11 attacks — condemnation of the looming war was broad and fierce.
Plans for February 15 had been international from the beginning, starting with a call to mobilize against the war issued at the European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002. With just a few weeks of organizing, the first internet-based global protest erupted.
On that day, beginning early in the morning, demonstrators filled the streets of capital cities and tiny villages around the world. The protests followed the sun, from Australia and New Zealand and the small Pacific islands, through the snowy steppes of North Asia and down across Southeast Asia and the South Asian peninsula, across Europe and down to the southern tip of Africa, then jumping the pond first to Latin America and then finally, last of all, to the United States.
Across the globe, the call came in scores of languages: “The world says no to war!” and “Not in our name!” echoed from millions of voices. The Guinness Book of World Records said between 12 and 14 million people came out that day — the largest protest in the history of the world. The great British labor and peace activist, former MP Tony Benn, described it to the million Londoners in the streets that day as “the first global demonstration, and its first cause is to prevent a war against Iraq.”
What a concept — a global protest against a war that had not yet begun, with the goal to stop it.
Standing against the scourge of war
It was an amazing moment — a movement that pushed governments around the world to do the unthinkable: They resisted pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom and said no to endorsing Bush’s war.
The governmental opposition included the “Uncommitted Six” members of the UN Security Council. Under ordinary circumstances, U.S.-dependent and relatively weak countries like Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, and Pakistan could never have stood up to Washington alone. But these were not ordinary circumstances.
With diplomatic support from “Old Europe,” including Germany and France who for their own reasons opposed the war, the thousands filling the streets of their capitals allowed the Six to resist fierce pressure from Washington.
The U.S. threatened to kill a free-trade agreement seven years in the making with Chile. (The trade agreement was quite terrible, but the Chilean government was committed to it.) Washington threatened to cancel U.S. aid, granted under the African Growth & Opportunity Act, to Guinea and Cameroon. Mexico faced the potential end of negotiations over immigration and the border. And yet all stood firm.
The day before the protests, February 14, the Security Council was called into session once again, this time at the foreign minister level, to hear the final reports of the two UN weapons inspectors for Iraq.
Many had anticipated that their reports would somehow wiggle around the truth — that they would say something Bush and Blair would grab to try to legitimize their spurious claims of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Or at least they might appear ambivalent enough for the U.S. to use their reports to justify war.
But the inspectors refused to bend the truth, stating unequivocally that no such weapons had been found.
Following their reports, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin responded with an extraordinary call, reminding the world that “the United Nations must remain an instrument of peace, and not a tool for war.” In that usually staid, formal, rule-bound chamber, his call was answered with a roaring ovation beginning with Council staff and quickly embracing the diplomats and foreign ministers themselves.
Enough governments said no that the United Nations was able to do what its Charter requires, but what political pressure too often makes impossible: stand against the scourge of war.
A new internationalism
On the morning of February 15, just hours before the massive New York rally began outside the United Nations, the great actor-activist Harry Belafonte and I accompanied South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to meet with then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan on behalf of the protesters. We had to be escorted by police to cross what the NYPD had designated its “frozen zone” — not in reference to the bitter 18 degree temperature or the biting wind whipping in from the East River, but the forcibly deserted streets directly in front of UN headquarters.
In the secretary-general’s office on the 38th floor, Bishop Tutu opened the meeting. He looked at Kofi across the table and said, “We are here today on behalf of those people marching in cities all around the world. And we are here to tell you, that those people marching in all those cities around the world, we claim the United Nations as our own. We claim it in the name of our global mobilization for peace.”
It was an incredible moment. And while we weren’t able to prevent the Iraq war, the global mobilization pulled governments and the United Nations into a trajectory of resistance shaped and led by global movements. We created what the New York Times the next day called “the second superpower.” It was a new kind of internationalism.
Midway through the marathon New York rally, a brief Associated Press story came over the wires: “Rattled by an outpouring of international anti-war sentiment, the United States and Britain began reworking a draft resolution…. Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the final product may be a softer text that does not explicitly call for war.” Faced with a global challenge to their desperate struggle for UN and global legitimacy, Bush and Blair threw in the towel.
Someone called in the text to those of us backstage. A quick debate: Should we announce it? What if it wasn’t true? What did it mean? A quick decision: Yes, the people have the right to know. Someone pushed me back out onto the stage to read the text.
Half a million people or more, shivering in the cold, roared their approval.
We didn’t stop the war. But we changed history.
Our movement changed history, but we didn’t prevent the Iraq war. While the AP story was true, it reflected the U.S.-U.K. decision to ignore international law and the UN Charter and go to war in violation of them both.
Still, the protests proved the war’s clear illegality and demonstrated the isolation of the Bush administration’s policies — and later helped prevent war in Iran in 2007 and the bombing of Syria in 2013. And they inspired a generation of activists.
February 15 set the terms for what “global mobilizations” could accomplish. Eight years later some Cairo activists, embarrassed at the relatively small size of their protest on February 15, would go on to help lead Egypt’s Arab Spring as it overthrew a U.S.-backed dictator. Occupy protesters would be inspired by February 15 and its internationalism. Spain’s indignados and others protesting austerity and inequality would see February 15 as a model of moving from national to global protest.
In New York City on that singular afternoon, some of the speakers had particular resonance for those shivering in the monumental crowd.
Harry Belafonte, veteran of so many of the progressive struggles of the last three-quarters of a century, called out to the rising U.S. mobilization against war and empire, reminding us that our movement could change the world, and that the world was counting on us to do so.
“The world has sat with tremendous anxiety, in great fear that we did not exist,” he said. “But America is a vast and diverse country, and we are part of the greater truth that makes our nation. We stand for peace, for the truth of what is at the heart of the American people. We will make a difference — that is the message that we send out to the world today.”
Belafonte was followed by his close friend and fellow activist-actor Danny Glover, who spoke of earlier heroes, of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and of the great Paul Robeson on whose shoulders we still stand. And then he shouted: “We stand here today because our right to dissent, and our right to participate in a real democracy, has been hijacked by those who call for war. We stand here at this threshold of history, and we say to the world, ‘Not in Our Name’! ‘Not in Our Name!'”
The huge crowd, shivering in the icy wind, took up the cry, and “Not in our Name!” echoed through the New York streets.
Our movement’s obligation as “the second superpower” remains. February 15 inspired a generation. Now what we need is a strategy to rebuild the breadth and intensity of that moment, to build broadly enough to engage with power and to challenge once again the wars and militarism, the poverty and inequality, the racism and xenophobia and so much more oppression that still faces people around the world.
We have a lot of work to do.
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