Newsnotes

Notes on the News

By Gwydion M. Williams

Israel Against Zionism?

A War of Populations?

Snippets

Benedict Arnold Not a Traitor?

Property Only With Privilege

Climate Change Costs

An end to Feed-the Rich?

Poor People’s Burden

Democratic Secession – Either Admirable or Forbidden

Kiev Facing Defeat?

China Purges

Israel Against Zionism?

Israel and its supporters have lost sight of what Zionism was originally about. It began as a marginal dream, but became serious in the late 19^th century. Growing nationalism and militarism included an intensification in European anti-Semitism.

The USA, previously mild, disliked taking in huge numbers of East European Jews with unfamiliar values. Migration got cheaper, so large numbers of poor people took advantage. Especially Jews, and many went to Britain:

“The [UK] Aliens Act 1905 introduced immigration controls and registration for the first time…

“The British Brothers’ League … its speakers said that Britain should not become ‘the dumping ground for the scum of Europe.’”^[1]

The current crisis can only be understood by looking at past roots.

Writing near the end of October, I won’t talk about specific fast-moving events. I will say that after the first few hours, nothing Israel did could be truthfully called ‘Israel defending itself’.

Israel retaliating was normal enough. But things have gone way beyond that. Life in Gaza is being made impossible unless Hamas releases its hostages without getting anything in return. No Israeli government could think that Hamas would do that: so how does it end?

The Global West cheers on acts of aggression that hurts non-combatants. ‘Defensive’ only if they believe it makes Israel safer in the long run.

Or some of them may just see it as the best thing to say, to advance their careers at this moment in time. Cynics may have noted that few had their careers blighted by supporting the pack of lies over Iraq. Or an Afghan intervention that has left the Taliban far stronger than before.

My view is that Israel will only be secure when the majority of Arabs and Muslims accept it. Agree to a Jewish state on land that was overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim until the 1940s. Israelis convincing themselves it is just the fault of Palestinians would be irrelevant, even if it were true.

And while some global politicians genuinely wanted to help Jews, most just cared about power.

During World War Two, the USA and the British Empire ignored requests to bomb railway lines leading to the Death Camps. Most Germans and German allies believed that Jews were being deported, not murdered. It had to be done out of sight. Many on the allied side had thought it exaggerated, which supposed World War One German atrocities in Belgium really had been.

Stripping Jews of their rights as citizens was no secret, of course. And the USA and the British Empire had wanted no more Jews – even Einstein had a problem getting refuge in the USA.

Bombing the actual Death Camps might have killed more than it saved, but huge numbers of Jews would have survived had they not been sent to there. But was this something that most politicians would make sacrifices for? Delay final victory, and slow the race into Germany as the Soviet army advanced?

The Nazis had killed more than half the Jews in territories they controlled. Many of the survivors had been hidden, at great risk to whoever hid them. Only in the Baltic states, Croatia and parts of Ukraine was there local enthusiasm for killing neighbouring Jews. Done along with Gypsies and Serbs in Croatia and Poles in Ukraine. But the survivors were mostly not wanted as part of the population of any part of Continental Europe. Nor were they welcome in the USA or the settler colonies of the British Empire.

The British Empire had already tried defining a British Palestine that was smaller than historic Israel, but did include most of the places that had historic meaning for Jews. Churchill saw it as a convenient place to send Jews who might otherwise join Global Communism. But people who’d lived there for centuries, mostly Muslim but some Christian, didn’t want to suddenly become strangers in their own land.

Europeans since Columbus had been displacing, de-culturing, and sometimes exterminating other populations. The original inhabitants of North America, Australia and New Zealand had been swamped, and at that time they were dwindling in numbers. De-cultured to be inferior minorities who mostly imitated settler values. Likewise in Latin America, where those of mostly-European descent held most of the wealth and power.

Post-1945 leaders dumped unwanted Jews onto the unimportant inhabitants of British Palestine, and assumed it would work. In 1947, the British Empire had reluctantly let go of the Indian subcontinent, but most British politicians intended to keep the rest of the Empire. France and the Netherlands re-asserted control of their own Empires, with fierce resistance in Vietnam and Indonesia.

Without the Soviet Union championing anti-Imperialist causes, a total clearance of the non-Jewish inhabitants of British Palestine might have happened right then. As things were, two separate and sovereign states were proposed:

“The proposed plan is considered to have been pro-Zionist by its detractors, with 56% of the land (mainly the sparsely populated Negev desert) allocated to the Jewish state despite the Palestinian Arab population numbering twice the Jewish population.”^[2]

The Arab and Muslim world would not accept this, just as Britain and the USA had earlier shut out unfamiliar Jews from foreign cultures. But they did not respond coherently. Tiny new Israel was better prepared, and took more than the UN had offered. Drove out much of the non-Jewish population.

Israel became Europe’s final settler-colony,^[3] though later joined by Jews from the Muslim world.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 to 1995 stopped short of the Two-State Solution that the United Nations had authorized in 1947.^[4] Yasser Arafat as the world’s most respected Palestinian accepted it in principle: something he should have done years earlier. But with the USA briefly dominant, Israel chose to offer far too little. Jewish settlement on the West Bank expanded, which is unacceptable to all Arab and Muslim opinion.

Even more serious for Muslims are threats to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which sits on top of where the Jewish Temple stood before the Romans demolished it. Loose talk of a Third Jewish Temple alarms and outrages devout Muslims. And the Anglosphere has willfully demolished or discredited most Arab Secularism.

A War of Populations?

Hamas attacking into Israel surprised me as much as it surprised most people.

I initially took it to be a coldly calculated attempt to start a War of Populations. Hamas’s Gambit – leaders aware that they may lose control of Gaza. Not wanting to run a stressed and weak Bantustan, while Israel takes more of the West Bank.

I’ve now heard other interpretations. I may be wrong about intent. But the outcome remains likely. The world has polarised, with the USA letting Israel do almost anything.

US Presidents have spoken against Israel expanding on the West Bank. But never said that aid would be cut unless it stops. So it does not stop.

Globally, there are 14.3 million Palestinians. 2.03 million in Israel. 2.17 million in Gaza. 3.19 million in the West Bank. 2.17 officially recognised as such in Jordan, but probably more. 0.57 million in Syria. 0.46 million in Lebanon.^[5] Which makes more than 11 million ruled by Israel, or close enough to join a fight if the governments ruling them would allow it.

Many more Arab Muslims and Global Muslims would also join. Including some Global Uighurs, but less than if Beijing had not cracked down on Extreme-Islamist separatism.^[6]

Against that, there are only 6.7 million Jews in Israel. 15 to 20 million Jews globally, but how many of those would risk their lives for Israel?

Another aspect: ‘guest workers’ from Thailand were among those killed or captured.^[7] An article in the Financial Times explains that they had been encouraged as a way of employing fewer Palestinians.^[8] But if they can’t be tempted back by relatively high wages, Israel may become increasingly isolated and short of people.

Supposed friends of Israel are more dangerous to its future than overt enemies.

Sn ippets

Benedict Arnold Not a Traitor?

I was making a general study of cases where politics get called treason, because someone dares seek a different outcome. I hadn’t thought Arnold was one such, but probably he was.

Yet another hole in the US vision of themselves as the world’s main Abode of Virtue.

In 1778, the British government sent out the Carlisle Peace Commission.^[9]. British America was offered everything they had been originally asking for. Arnold when he changed sides argued that this met the reasons why he originally took up arms. The Declaration of Independence was a mistake: the alliance with anti-democratic France was worse.^[10]

My planned study is about Democratic Secession. The United Nations, operating by selfish power politics, always condemns it until the relevant government gives up.

Norms of International Law are ignored by almost everyone, when they are inconvenient. But the USA since the Soviet collapse has been much the worst offender.

Property Only With Privilege

“England worst place in developed world to find housing, says report.

“Quarter of UK private renters spending over 40% of income on housing amid warning people are ‘trapped in poverty’.”^[11]

The Thatcherite vision was a property-owning democracy: the automatic outcome of a minimum of regulations.

Not what actually happened.

On wealth-creation, the ‘brilliant’ New Right never did better than the ‘disastrous’ Keynesian era. And now does much worse.

They massage conservative feelings, but have never yet delivered a conservative result. Things that were still solid in the 1980s have now fallen apart.

I see them as historic failures, likely to be viewed with contempt by future generations.

Climate Change Costs

“Climate crisis costing $16m an hour in extreme weather damage, study estimates

“Analysis shows at least $2.8tn in damage from 2000 to 2019 through worsened storms, floods and heatwaves”.^[12]

The cost falls mainly on ordinary people, especially the poor. Britain’s boiler and car control schemes don’t include decent subsidies. Most politicians don’t dare ask the very rich to pay even the same percentage taxes that ordinary citizens must pay.

Action is needed. What’s happening now could sensibly be called Climate Genocide. Not extinction, but hotter countries could have seasons that were too hot for humans. A mix of heat and humidity, unlike the hot-but-dry conditions of East Africa where we evolved, cooling ourselves by sweating. Sweating does not work in high humidity.

We now pay vast amounts, in lives and in misery, and even in crude economic terms, for not having acted strongly in the 1990s. That was when a large majority of the experts decided climate change was real.

In 20 or 40 years’ time, if we do not act strongly now, those still alive will face a lot more cost and suffering.

The whole thing gets confused by what I call the Miss Greenpest Effect.^[13] Climate change warnings come most loudly from Deep Greens with unrealistic notions of ending modern society. It gets overlooked that most scientists take a different and much more realistic view.

Or do you want to say ‘2% of Climate Experts Can’t Be Wrong’?

An end to Feed-the Rich?

«A minimum 2% tax rate on billionaires’ global wealth would raise $250bn (£205bn) a year.

«There are around 2,500 billionaires with a combined wealth of $13 trillion.»^[14]

This is from the EU Tax Observatory in Paris. But will voters see it as a good idea? The people who’d have to pay dominate the media. They persuade ordinary people that tax is a burden on everyone, and the enemy of wealth.

The real story is that the West’s Mixed Economy won the Cold War.^[15] But critics of capitalism mostly fail to mention that.

Also forgotten is that Khrushchev ‘reformed’ the Soviet economy by replacing harsh and coherent Stalinist planning with a bizarre system of pseudo-markets.^[16] ^[17] A system as easy to fraudulently play as Enron’s manipulation within US Capitalism. And just as destructive of real wealth.

Poor People’s Burden

“If You Want Our Countries to Address Climate Change, First Pause Our Debts

“When poor countries are forced to default on their foreign debt, as Ghana and Zambia have done, they pay a heavy price. Cut off from credit of any kind, spending on health, education and dealing with the damaging effects of climate change comes to a juddering halt.

“Countries in the West often plead with us to invest in the kind of ambitious resilience projects we need to survive in a warming world. But in Africa, we can’t fix the climate issue unless we fix the debt issue. Of the 52 low- and middle-income countries that have defaulted on their debts or have come close to it in the last three years, 23 are in Africa. The continent’s debt burden is skyrocketing as a result of factors beyond its control: the aftershocks of the pandemic, rising fuel and food prices, higher interest rates and climate catastrophes that weaken our economies and sap our ability to repay creditors.

“During the pandemic, rich countries pumped trillions of dollars into their economies to support families and businesses. African governments had no such option. Instead, their leaders kept their nations afloat by taking on more debt, which turned out to be a very expensive life raft. As a result of rising interest rates, Africa’s debt repayments will surge to $62 billion this year, up 35 percent from 2022.

“To put this figure into context, Africa is now paying more in debt service than the estimated $50 billion a year the Global Center on Adaptation says it needs to invest in climate resilience. These investments are not nice-to-haves — they are vital for building roads, bridges and dams that can withstand torrential rains and floods. Failure to do so is to invite catastrophe, as the recent floods in Libya so tragically attest.”^[18].

Democratic Secession – Either Admirable or Forbidden

The geniuses of the New Right saw no need to protect that complex system of autonomy that Lenin and Stalin had created. The fifteen Union Republics were sovereign. Surely democracy would solve everything?

But populations that had fought each other before the Soviet Union stabilised went back to fighting each other after the Soviet collapse. And even before that in Former Yugoslavia. Yet Western observers could not understand it, despite their own failure to get peace in Northern Ireland until the IRA / Sinn Fein settled for compulsory power-sharing.

Parliaments with MPs elected for particular regions easily start wars between previously peaceful nationalities. MPs and parties can flourish by saying that whatever their own nationality have, it is far less than they deserve.

An ethnic Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh grabbed too much, and have now lost everything.

Georgia was led on by Western words, and let down when Russia went to war. They have no meaningful control over South Ossetia. Nor Abkhazia, where Russia may beef up its naval base to keep control of the Black Sea.^[19]

But Kosovo, autonomous and not sovereign within Serbia, was given independence by an arbitrary act of the USA. And though the Serbs were a majority in a distinct region in the north, the USA insists that they must be ruled by ethnic-Albanians who hate them.

The New Right idea is that they ought to learn to ‘get along’. But the sad reality is that they have split the USA into factions that hate each other. It may have been only the danger of being accused of not helping Israel that broke the deadlock on the US Republican’s choice of Speaker.

Kiev Facing Defeat?

“Russian forces intensify pressure on Ukraine’s Avdiivka, Kherson…

“Avdiivka has become a watchword for resistance, viewed as the gateway to recapturing the Russian-held city of Donetsk and the rest of Donbas.”^[20]

Western media say as little as possible: just repeating Kiev’s claims of huge Russian losses. And never mentioning that when the First Orange Revolution began to polarise Ukraine in 2004, the regions now annexed by Russia had clear majorities for anti-Orange parties.^[21]

While there were still open elections – Kiev has now banned all of the anti-Orange parties, even though they spoke against the Russian invasion – everywhere was split. But the elected regional government of Crimea seceded, and then invited Russia to annex them. The Donbass regional governments sought the same.

Far-Rightists infested with neo-Nazism began the main violence.^[22] Got away with mass murder by arson against anti-Orange demonstrators in Odessa in 2014.^[23]

Why do I say Kiev, not Kyiv? Because that’s how it was always written in Global English, before the current crisis. I will not express implicit support for them trying to purge Ukraine of the Russian influences: the bulk of their real history.

I will not glorify anti-Russian politics noted mostly for failure, and for massacres of Poles and Jews.^[24]

China Purges

When President Xi began purging corrupt officials, Western experts said he was using it just against rival factions.

No one doubted that there was massive corruption, which had to be dealt with. But strong government action offended Western liberals. It was supposed to happen by spontaneous action, which hardly ever triumphs in the real world.

China used to be rated above India on official indexes of corruption. And were unexpectedly re-rated as worse, when some of us started drawing attention to it.

Once it was clear Xi would not trash China in the way that Yeltsin trashed post-Soviet Russia, Western reporting found him wrong whatever he did. So when people seen as his supporters were included, this too was called wrong.

Chinese politics is largely hidden from outsiders. But the Financial Times is there to give hard facts to the rich and powerful. So I was only mildly surprised to find this:

“A high-profile Chinese television presenter who was in a relationship with the country’s ousted foreign minister had a child last year with the help of a surrogate mother in the US, people familiar with the matter have said.

“Fu Xiaotian, 40, was in a relationship with Qin Gang, according to six people close to Fu and China’s foreign policy establishment. She told a close associate about the surrogate pregnancy last year, the person told the Financial Times. Two other people familiar with the matter also said she had a child via a surrogate. Surrogacy is illegal in China.

“Chinese authorities are scrutinising the relationship between Qin and Fu, said two separate people familiar with the matter, although it remains unclear how central it was to his sudden disappearance in June and removal a month later as the country’s foreign minister.”^[25]

Speaking personally, I’d like to see surrogate mothers legalised. Do it within a framework of licenced non-profit agencies. These would be required to support babies born disabled, or otherwise unwanted. But that’s just me. I won’t criticise China for enforcing its own vision of Family Values.

Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_Act_1905

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine

^[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/post-liberalism/israel-as-a-western-colony/

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution

^[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinians

^[6] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/West-Reports-Only-Propaganda-on-Xinjiang

^[7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/i-just-want-my-son-families-of-thai-workers-in-israel-face-painful-wait-for-news

^[8] https://www.ft.com/content/9ddbdee8-c566-47b1-b514-b3ad6c45f641 – pay site

^[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Peace_Commission

^[10] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Benedict_Arnold%27s_letter_To_the_Inhabitants_of_America

^[11] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/05/england-worst-place-in-developed-world-to-find-housing-says-report