Image is of legal adviser to Israel's foreign ministry Tal Becker and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the ICJ hearing.
The ICJ case against Israel might not achieve much for the Palestinian cause directly, given that Israeli politicians have explicitly stated that the Hague will not stop them - and I believe them. The Resistance will be what stops them, and they are doing quite well for themselves. Hezbollah has hit highly sensitive and important Israeli military sites over the last couple weeks, and in general persist in several border attacks every day. The battles in Iraq and Syria also continue. Hamas remains largely intact, and is successfully forcing Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip to retreat, and other parts of the Gazan Resistance are continuing to battle down in Khan Yunis. And, last but not least, Yemen is firmly dedicated to the blockade, warding off another ship literally minutes before I started writing this paragraph.
What the ICJ is battling over isn't Palestine and Israel - not really - but the legitimacy of international law itself, and to what degree victimized countries can rely on it to solve problems, versus needing to take more militant routes for justice. In a weird sense, it might be an L for Israel either way. If international law sides with Palestine, then when Israel refuses to stop, it will invalidate international law. If international law sides with Israel, then it will invalidate international law. There is no conceivable way for the West to come out of this looking good.
The South African portion detailing Israeli atrocities against Gaza was largely ignored by the western media. They have instead, obviously, decided to focus on the Israeli portion. Their defense appears to amount to "We didn't do it, Hamas did it. And if we did do it, it doesn't matter, because that's just urban warfare for you. Please get this whole thing thrown out on a very dubious technicality so we don't have to advance to the next stage."
From Craig Murray, who has been physically going to the Hague:
It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.
...I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…
What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.
I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.
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The Country of the Week is South Africa! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
There is no way that the US and the EU can reindustrialize, even if it’s just the military armament complex. We’re talking about entire supply chains that need to be built here, and that requires a lot of adjacent and secondary industries to be rebuilt as well.
But that’s not because they are incapable or incompetent, but because reindustrialization will improve wages and working conditions for the American working class, which is fundamentally detrimental to the financial capitalist class. The banks earn record profits because they are able to keep the working class as debt slaves, forcing them to take on more and more debt to sustain their livelihood. Reindustrialization means higher aggregate wages for the working class, and people not having to rely on taking out loans - this is bad business for the rentier economy as a whole.
Besides, industrialization also means workers gaining leverage, which formed the basis of labor unions and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The capitalist class is going to have to deal with more and more labor actions and the proletarianization of the working class itself. This was why they exported their manufacturing base to the developing world like China in the first place - to crush domestic working class movements in the 1970s.
That’s why you need to understand this as a conflict between two competing ideologies: finance capitalism vs industrial capitalism. Reindustrialization can really only happen if somehow all the neoliberal finance capitalists are defeated in the imperial core, and that requires a revolution, and based on what we’re seeing, we are still very far from that happening.
This is all well and good in peacetime, but do you really believe the US government won't flex it's muscles if a wider war erupts in Europe or the Middle East?
I'm not optimistic enough to believe the US has collapsed that far.
The US is not collapsing. There is a steady decline over the long term (like the fall of the Roman Empire) but it’s not going to collapse like what some people are believing.
The true dominance of the US comes from its financial weapons, not its military. War in Europe is destroying their economic and financial competitor, while bringing over a whole bunch of cheap skilled labor from Europe, and wars are benefiting the military industrial complex. The tons of equipments and munitions lost in Ukraine have meant record profits and contracts given out to the MIC.
I am already sounding like a broken record at this point, but without true dedollarization (and that means mass debt cancellation and China/BRICS stop issuing new loans in dollar), the US is going to be able to maintain its hegemony simply because the world cannot run without dollar.
Socioeconomic orders aren't only just overturned by domestic revolutions. They are also overturned through cataclysmic warfare. The US political class is cooked and its military is nowhere near as good as people think it is although it's still a military superpower. This means that in times of war, the US lacks the leadership to navigate through hardships wrought by war nor the general capacity to effectively wage war in a sustained fashion. Can you imagine a population who mald over wearing masks be living off of year-old rations for two years? The scary part is there will eventually be a country or group of countries that recognize these two weaknesses and be daring enough to militarily challenge the US, even at the risk of the US nuking the entire world. If dollar hegemony won't be overturned by socialist revolution in the US or debt cancellation by BRICS+, then it will be overturned by war. But dollar hegemony will not last forever. Hegemonies never do.
As Mao said, "dare to struggle, dare to win." Dollar hegemony will be intolerable enough that countries would rather risk the world being nuked than continue to live under it, especially since climate change is going to fuck over the world anyways. What's a little nuclear fallout in a world ravaged by climate change?
US hegemony is definitely collapsing. The financial stuff is fake, what matters is global industrial systems, and the US and its closest allies are not catching up. They can pull all the levers of their diplomatic-military-financial empire to try to isolate China and protect their markets, but the best it can do is force a war they can't win. China will just build a conventional military force three times the size of the US alongside literally billions of drones and crush us in 3-4 years, with a huge risk it goes nuclear. The alternative is we just go along with a relatively gradual decline punctuated by crises, and give up the empire with a whimper. At some point in 3-10 years the decline will be undeniable and reshape domestic politics in the US profoundly.
You don’t need full revolution to bring the capitalist class to heel. There are plenty of corporatist strategies that could reset and refocus the economy without fully transforming it. America is significantly more likely to solve this crisis by finding a fash solution than anything else imo
You are misreading the situation. All the military equipments and munitions spent in Ukraine and Europe have meant record profits and contracts given out to the military industrial complex.
Why would America need to refocus its economy when the wars have benefited the financial class? The military contractors are making huge profits from losing equipments in Ukraine. The oil and gas industries are profiting from the European energy crisis and blowbacks from sanctioning Russia. The institutional investors are grabbing up cheap assets from Europe and Ukraine and stripping them bare for profit. The Fed rate hikes have pumped out over $1 trillion free money to the bond holders just in 2023 alone, mostly rich people. S&P500 is at record height, 50% over Trump’s highest point!
Why would the US need to refocus its economy? The capitalist class is not in crisis, the people are.
Why industrialize when you make so much more from not industrializing? That’s the whole point of transitioning into a financial oligarchy!
Because as we both know there will be a bullwhip effect where these financialized highs will break into depression level economic lows. You could’ve said the same thing about the 1920’s. You can’t turn an entire nation’s citizen base into surplus population and liquidate them (at least not from the inside, outside imperial projects have no issue with attempting this). The deaths-of-despair attritional class war model will result in an eventual backlash. Trump rode that anger into the presidency once already, someone else will pick it up in the future. I’m of the mind we might get another Huey Long type within the next two decades but we’ll have to see where that generalized restlessness and anger goes. Finance capital is sowing but it will have to reap eventually. You already saw it fomenting in 2016 era altright memes that would list heads of financial and media industry and then draw little stars of david next to their head
Neither Trump nor Biden was a threat to finance capital. Trump bragged about how good the stock market was under his watch (only to be eclipsed by Biden a couple years later). The real threat (within the electoral system) was Bernie Sanders (or rather, what he campaigned on) and he was promptly taken care of.
Right but none of those three present a truly transformative vision because we haven’t reached that point of crisis yet. Bernie’s negotiated social imperialism was dismissed out of hand, Biden represents the decrepit institutions of liberalism that are currently displaying how woefully not up for the challenge of the modern moment they are, and Trump represents the best augur of the future as his policies have presented the greatest shift in policy orthodoxy since, what, probably Reagan right? We’ve already seen glimmers of right wing heterodoxy in the house with Gaetz’s attempt to detonate the debt bubble during the speaker votes knowing full well that might destroy American financial hegemony. Trump’s campaigning on open hostility to the American administrative state that’s built up and since calcified from the new deal/WWII onwards. I could see a Trump win in 2024 genuinely discrediting the Dem party project to the point it destroys it and a new formation is able to take its place over the coming decade or so. Knowing Amerikkka it will be an unholy fusion of left and right populism built out of good paying weapons manufacturing jobs used to enslave the global south while economic decoupling between great power blocs fuel tariff based trade wars and protectionist policies. Go back and look at the Klan’s economic policy in the 20’s and this suddenly looks way more realistic. Especially knowing that our current monocropping agricultural practices plus climate crisis are setting us up for a dust bowl-esque crisis.
We’re not there yet but tell me you can’t feel that polycrisis cooking
The political angle might have been decisive in winning support for neoliberal development politics in the West, but it's not the only factor at play here. The whole exchange-rate manipulation-financialization scheme is poison to an industrial economy. Building any kind of domestic industry is like marching against a river. The Asians just do everything cheaper, bigger, and now most of the time better. They're doing it all in a concentrated region connected by the newest and best infrastructure in the world. The body of knowledge and experience in so many of these fields is dwindling or non-existant in the US today. We're definitely rich enough to solve these problems of weapons production, but the MIC is mind-fuckingly corrupt and inefficient and completely insulated from military and congressional scrutiny. Any money you throw at the problem will get stolen with little to show for it. We would need a coup for the problem to get fixed and there would be a coup if anyone seriously tried.