This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
The horror and human suffering in Gaza have destroyed the claim of Western democracies to behave better than dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. By rejecting a ceasefire and supplying weapons to Israel, the US, UK and their allies are seen by the rest of the world as participants in a merciless war that has reportedly killed 28,064 Palestinians and injured 67,611, as of a week ago.
President Joe Biden’s call to the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to show due regard for the safety of civilians while conducting military operations against Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped, comes across as grotesque and hypocritical. As with past Biden calls for restraint, the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) bombardment is continuing as normal, although the ground assault may be delayed by lack of military reserves.
“Categorically, Israel could not continue this war without a constant flow of weapons from the US,” says Daniel Levy, a former Israeli diplomat and president of the US/Middle East Project. He adds that the Biden Administration has never been prepared to use its supply of arms to Israel as leverage to make it stop the war.
The assault on Gaza was at first viewed by many, following the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, as an excessive but understandable retaliation for the killing of 1,200 Israelis. But four months on, the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of tens of thousands of its people has become an appalling war crime.
Israel is a Western state in the eyes of much of the world, whose actions are backed by the US and the West as a whole. This perception has turned the Gaza war into a turning point in history, delegitimising Western pretensions to uphold a rules-based international order rooted in human rights and restraint in the use of violence.
Battered by the actions of US-led coalitions in the Iraq and Afghan wars, any bid to occupy the moral high ground has been finally discredited by Western complicity in the massacre in Gaza.
“I really am shocked,” says Ali Allawi, a historian and until recently finance minister and deputy prime minister of Iraq. “Gaza has exposed the utter hypocrisy underlying the Western policies towards the Global South. The deeply cynical, amoral [Western] political class blithely ignores, whenever inconvenient, its self-styled universal liberal values, the very same ones which were trumpeted as presaging the end of history with the fall of the Soviet Union.”
The US, the UK and their allies have not yet taken on board just how much damage they have inflicted on themselves by their response to Gaza. If – in future – an American, British or German political leader denounces Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Chinese mistreatment of the Uyghurs, or the Syrian government bombardment of rebel-held towns and cities, their protestations of concern will be widely greeted with contemptuous laughter. Western protests over the suspected poisoning of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, by the regime will be robbed of impact.
As Western governments and elites become aware that their reputations are being damaged beyond repair by the taint of Gaza, they have produced a series of PR ploys and alibis. The simplest is to call for Netanyahu and the IDF to show restraint, fully aware that their track record indicates that they will do nothing of the sort.
Netanyahu is likely to lose his job as soon as the war ends, so he and his extremist government, the most anti-Palestinian in the history of Israel, have every reason to continue the war and extend it to the West Bank.
Two other alibis are more sophisticated and superficially plausible, one being the venerable “two-state solution”, which – even if it was not being rejected by Netanyahu – offers the Palestinians almost nothing in terms of personal security and equal treatment with Israelis.
Loudly advocated by Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron, this long-discredited scheme focuses on a hazy over-the-horizon objective, usefully diverting attention away from the more immediate need to bring a murderous war to an end. Even if a Palestinian rump state is recognised internationally, Palestinians fear that it will consist of little more than their flag floating over ruined houses and well-filled cemeteries.
The second alibi is a little more complicated, but equally detached from political reality. The strange idea being pushed by the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is that out of the hell-scape of Gaza, can emerge a positive reset in Israeli-Arab relations, whereby Saudi Arabia and its allies will recognise Israel in return for the formation of a Palestinian state.
This “independent” entity would be ruled by a reformed Palestinian Authority acceptable to the US, Israel and the Saudis. The US hope is that the very presentation of such an offer would break up Netanyahu’s coalition and see him replaced by a more co-operative Israeli leader.
“I don’t think that the plan is realistic,” says Mr Levy. He believes that the Americans push it because it is politically palatable to themselves, and they cannot think what else to do. As with the two-state solution, says Levy: “It is a place of refuge for those who don’t want to talk about a ceasefire.”
The excuse of American, British and EU officials for not supporting a ceasefire is that they will do nothing to impede the IDF in eliminating Hamas, Israel’s declared war aim. But US intelligence officials recently told a closed-door briefing of members of Congress, as revealed by The New York Times, that Israel is nowhere near close to destroying Hamas.
They expressed doubts about whether this goal could ever be achieved, saying privately that perhaps only one-third of an estimated 20-25,000 Hamas fighters have been killed (Israel claims two-thirds). But US officials add that the US has learnt in war after war that enemy casualty figures are meaningless, since insurgents can always find fresh recruits if the core issues driving a conflict are not resolved. In other words, if only the destruction of Hamas will end the war, there is no reason it should ever stop.
Why have the US and its Western allies gone so determinedly down a path over Gaza which is doing them such gigantic and permanent political damage? Reports from the White House suggest that its total backing for Israel in the war – in sharp contrast to the actions of past US presidents – comes from Biden himself. “He is a dyed-in-the wool Zionist with a fantasy picture of Israeli politics and his team have been unable to budge him,” says one close observer.
Another believes that Biden’s team, the most visible of which are Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, is of mediocre quality and unable to get a grip on the crisis.
As with the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington two decades ago, the Gaza war has led the US, UK and the West in general to make a colossal blunder by backing an out-of-control Israeli government, some of whose senior members openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
“I know that Gaza is going to unravel the ideological basis of Western political life,” says Ali Allawi. “That is what people will remember from this war.”
I was finishing the above column when news came through that the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, had died suddenly in his remote Arctic prison. Given his comparatively young age, and the murderous record of the Russian security services, I suspect the strong likelihood is that he was poisoned on orders from on high.
The Russian authorities appear to have decided – perhaps warned by the significant role of dissidents in exile or in prison in the demise of the Soviet Union – that the safest course is to kill them off and ignore the inevitable international opprobrium.
Moreover, the use of exotic state produced poisons like Novichok in Salisbury in 2018 and on Navalny in 2020, is evidently geared to advertising the fact that opponents of the Russian state face inevitable liquidation.
I did not know Navalny, but I have another long-time friend, Boris Kagarlitsky, a brilliant sociologist with a highly original and critical mind, whose fate now worries me. He received a savage sentence of five years in prison for minor offences on 13 February.
I first met Boris in 1984 when I was a correspondent in Moscow and saw him repeatedly over the years. He was harassed by the Soviet authorities for his dissenting views and we talked often about where the Soviet Union was going. As well as detecting interesting social trends, he had a highly developed sense of humour and collected amusing and politically revealing anecdotes about everything.
His imprisonment was for the most minor of offences, but was in reality all about his opposition to the Ukraine war. The court of appeals replaced an earlier fine by a Moscow military court in December of 600,000 rubles or “justifying terrorism”, a charge he denied. The original sentence was rejected by the court as too lenient, though all he had done was post a humorous video on YouTube about the partial destruction of a bridge to Crimea by an explosion in 2022.
As for Navany, I admired his courage in going back to Moscow after recovering from the bid to poison him, presumably knowing that there was a good chance that it would happen again. Boris had stayed in Moscow, though he must also have known the risks.
Is it a coincidence that one man should receive a long sentence and another die in such a short space of time? It would be difficult to say there is a tougher policy, because it was already tough – no opposition to or criticism of the state is allowed, and when it occurs, will immediately, and very publicly, be stamped out. This approach was well under way by 2020, well before the Ukraine war, when the scope of the law on foreign agents was extended.
Navalny went back to Russia because he wanted to stay politically relevant – and this he had some success in doing. His murder, as it most likely was, does not mean that President Vladimir Putin’s regime is rocky or vulnerable to dissenters, but rather the opposite. From Russia’s point of view, the Ukraine war is going far better than a year ago.
But in the age of the internet, the silencing of a dissenter this side of the grave has become more difficult, so the final removal of Navalny was always going to be an option.
I am asked occasionally what famous people I have interviewed. The questioner is usually disappointed when I say very few and looks dubious when I add that I have generally avoided big shot interviews because they take great trouble to arrange and generally produce little or no significant news. Political leaders are unsurprisingly averse to making shocking disclosures in a formal interview to a foreign correspondent or suddenly confess their sins.
Most media critics of Tucker Carlson, the former star of Fox News, must know this, but this did not stop them hypocritically denouncing his interview with President Vladimir Putin as Kremlin propaganda. Carlson is accused of giving the pariah-president a platform from which to express his self-serving views, though that is par for the course in any political interview, which explains their tediousness. Carlson was accused of conducting a “soft” interview by journalists who have cravenly built a career on doing nothing else but toss soft ball questions at the powerful.
The interview with the big boss, be he Saddam Hussein or Rishi Sunak, has an iconic status in the news business that it does not deserve. Big media organisations like them because they think they add to their status, ignoring the boredom they are inflicting on readers, viewers and listeners.
I used to apply at one time – along with many other Middle East correspondents – for an interview with the Libyan leader, Muammer Gaddafi. The journalistic visa application had a section under the heading “world leaders interviewed”, which I used to fill it in at random with historic figures from Anne Boleyn and Botticelli to Rasputin and James Joyce.
Months would pass without response, and then, often at some inconvenient moment like New Year’s Eve, there would be an excited call from the Libyan “People’s Bureau” in London, saying that the leader had granted my request and I should get on the next plane to the Libyan capital Tripoli to await final instructions about the time and place of the meeting.
I sensed that there was something dodgy about all this, but it was impossible to turn down the offer. Disillusionment swiftly followed as, looking around the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport, I recognised the weary faces of fellow Middle East correspondents who had all received the same phone call. In Tripoli, we would wait and wait to meet Gaddafi, almost invariably in vain, until it was reasonable to tell our publications that it was time to cut our losses and go home.
I once encountered a correspondent who had stuck it out in Tripoli and finally, much to her amazement, had got the prized interview with Gaddafi, which was, she added sadly, “three hours of complete blather”.
I have long believed that a real test of the current or future impact of climate change in bringing unprecedented catastrophe would be the attitude of the reinsurance companies. My argument is simple enough: insurance companies will take on almost any risk, so long as they can get reinsurance cover at the right price and terms which will protect them from disastrous losses.
Any long-term increase in the chances of catastrophic loss, will soon be reflected in the price of the reinsurance available from the giant companies which insure the insurers. These companies, like Munich Re, must take an objective view of the true increase in risk posed by climate change, if they do not want to be saddled with crippling losses.
Figures are difficult to come by, but the first really informative piece I have read on this topic, headlined “The uninsurable world: what climate change is costing homeowners“, appeared recently in the Financial Times. It says that last year there were an unprecedented 37 separate disastrous events costing insurance companies more than $1bn in losses.
But is this the trend for the future? The piece says that “a run of four consecutive years when overall insurance losses from natural catastrophes have topped $100bn, previously the mark of a remarkably bad year, has spooked [insurance company] executives”. Premiums in disaster-prone parts of the US and Europe have risen astronomically or there is no cover is available. Some insurance executives are quoted as saying that the industry has long underestimated climate change.
Yet the evidence is not quite as conclusive as the FT headline suggests. Climate change may be responsible for bigger natural catastrophes, but so too is more houses built on flood plains, in forested areas in places like California – or because of a steep rise in the cost of rebuilding damaged properties. These variables are important but, even so, the ups and downs of reinsurance rates remain one of the best guide to the risk of a more catastrophic future.
One of the strange aspects of the decline of the UK, as a political and economic power, is that it is so well-documented in highly informed parliamentary and government reports. Few of these get the publicity they deserve and there is little sign that they spur the Government to positive action, but historians will be grateful.
It was only last November that Rishi Sunak cancelled most of the northern part of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway project, citing its runaway costs and uncertain benefits. He promised that the money not used for the cancelled sections of the plan would be used to upgrade existing rail links in the north of England.
Since then HS2 has largely disappeared from the news agenda, though large chunks of the vastly expensive scheme are still ongoing – and these are now turning into a second debacle.
The select committee on Public Accounts has produced a devastating report on the latest failings of HS2 which deserves further study.
It says that despite the cancellation of the latter stages of the HS2 programme, the London to the West Midlands section, costing up to £67bn, “will achieve poor value for money for the taxpayer”. Nevertheless, cancelling the rump of HS2 would still involve £11bn “in remedial costs”.
The committee is “highly sceptical” that private investment can be found to build a new London terminus station. The Department of Transport has yet to say how the £36bn saved from the partial cancellation of HS2 will be spent over the next two decades.
“Crucially,” concludes the report, “the Department [for Transport] does not yet understand how HS2 will operate as a functioning railway following recent changes.” In other words, the shambles goes chaotically on.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
