Hello, and happy Friday.
I’ve been thinking a lot about U.S. power, and what it means to actually wield it. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the Biden administration seek to demonstrate its ability to exercise American leverage in order to compel its close ally Israel to take U.S. interests—or, at a minimum, international law—into account as it wages its war on Gaza. To that end, the U.S. announced new sanctions targeting extremist Israeli settlers. It drafted a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire. It declared, in a reversal of Trump-era foreign policy, new Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be inconsistent with international law. Most recently, it gave Israel a mid-March deadline to provide assurances that it will abide by international law when using U.S. weaponry.
While the Biden administration has ostensibly taken these steps to prove its own strength, it may be achieving the opposite. Observers will tell you that sanctions on Israeli settlers are welcome, but long overdue (and only as powerful as the U.S. is willing to make them; so far, these sanctions have only been imposed against four people). Calling for a temporary ceasefire marks a notable shift in U.S. policy, but human rights organizations warn that only an immediate, permanent one (resolutions for which have all been vetoed by the U.S.) will give Palestinians in Gaza the reprieve they so desperately need. Calling Israeli settlements inconsistent with international law is swell, but it’s only major news if you didn’t think they were illegal in the first place (and it bears asking: what took so long?). Asking Israel to pinky swear that it won’t commit war crimes with U.S. munitions comes off as a similarly feeble gesture, and a belated one at that.
Perhaps the clearest example of the Biden administration failing to utilize its leverage is taking place right now: That the U.S. is reportedly considering airdropping food into Gaza—a move that aid organizations say is expensive, low-volume, and only to be treated as a last resort—is seen by many observers as a direct result of its inability to convince Israel to lift its restrictions on vital aid going into the Strip. As one Oxfam official put it, such airdrops “would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza.”
While plenty has been written on this (by myself and others), we’re already beginning to see the consequences of this perceived weakness. Just this week in Michigan, some 100,000 votes were cast as “uncommitted” in an organized effort to signal voters’ dissatisfaction with President Biden’s handling of the war in the hopes that it might compel the administration to reconsider its approach. Whether they heed the warning remains to be seen. But 100K votes is nothing to balk at—states, and entire elections, have been decided by much less.
In other news: I discussed the above and more last week on Sky News’ The World with Yalda Hakim and the Oh God, What Now? podcast. Tune in, if you fancy it!
What I’ve written
For months, Israel’s allies in the U.S. and Europe had largely avoided using the C-word. Now, more and more capitals are calling for a ceasefire (to varying degrees). I wrote about how Israel’s impending invasion of Rafah may be a turning point:
As Zomlot, and many other observers see it, Western capitals’ failure to act more quickly in demanding a ceasefire doesn’t only pose a risk to the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but to the international rules-based order that leaders in the U.S. and Europe purport to want to protect.
“The post-World War II rules-based order is under the most existential threat since it was established,” Zomlot says, “and I believe it will not hold if [the West] doesn’t take action immediately.” Keep reading here
In the aftermath of Alexei Navalny’s death, I spoke with Evgenia Kara-Murza—the wife of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, who continues to languish in a Russian penal colony—about where the fight for a free and democratic Russia goes from here:
Vladimir Putin is not a confident leader who truly has the support of his population. A confident leader who believes that his population trusts him and has confidence in him would allow his opponents on the ballot. This leader would not use repression against his population. Vladimir Putin wants to create this warped image of reality in which there is this united support for him and the war. Meanwhile, arrests and detentions continue on a daily basis. Over 360 people were arrested just in the last three days for laying flowers for Navalny. I’m not saying that the regime will collapse tomorrow. But I’m saying that it is a regime that is not built on Vladimir Putin’s confidence of the support of the population. And the image that he wants to create for the world of the unity behind him has nothing to do with reality. Keep reading here
For TIME’s 2024 Women of the Year list, I wrote about the Palestinian and Israeli women’s movements doubling down on their demand for a nonviolent political resolution to their decades-long conflict:
While neither Women Wage Peace nor Women of the Sun advocates a particular political solution, both organizations believe that a mutually agreed-upon, nonviolent resolution is vital—and that its absence means Israeli and Palestinian women and their children will continue to pay the price. “We said all the time that we have to solve this conflict as soon as possible because it’s a ticking bomb—it will kill all of us,” Admi, 66, tells TIME. “Now when you see the crisis, this terrible war, how can we suffer it and continue on this path?” Keep reading here
Plus:
What I’ve read
This piece on the case for letting international journalists into Gaza (Sky News)
History has shown, the effective curtailing of media coverage for whatever reasons, results only in confusion and doubts - a breeding ground for conspiracists and non-understanding which can only make peace more elusive.
Our first mission as journalists is to tell the full story. Foreign journalists are not able to in Gaza right now.
This essay on Aaron Bushnell’s act of political despair (The New Yorker)
What does it mean for an American to self-immolate? Since the Vietnam War, Americans have died by this form of suicide to draw attention to climate change, as the lawyer and conservationist David Buckel did, in Brooklyn in 2018, and the climate activist Wynn Bruce did, on Earth Day, 2022, on the steps of the Supreme Court. Like all of us, these men lived in a world that knows about the catastrophic threat of climate change, pays lip service to the need to protect the human population of the planet, yet fails to act. “Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help,” Buckel wrote in an e-mail that he sent to several media outlets before setting himself on fire in Prospect Park. Buckel had been a lifelong activist, a lawyer who had helped to advance L.G.B.T. rights. But, on the issue of climate, despite being surrounded with like-minded people and being able to act with them, he felt helpless.
This long read on the Israeli settlers attacking their Palestinian neighbors (The New Yorker)
The first time that Ma’amar witnessed settler violence was in 1996. It was in the wake of the first election to Prime Minister of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was intent on blocking any progress toward a two-state solution. Shilo took even more land from Qaryut, to make a vineyard. The village staged a protest, which Ma’amar filmed. The Army and settlers rushed in, firing shots into the air, and settlers beat people and tried to take cameras from anyone documenting the scene. An Israeli court ruled that the land should be returned to Qaryut, but Ma’amar said that settlers continued to attack people who approached, so the land was effectively lost.
In the years that followed, settlers put up tents, then mobile homes, on hilltops. Settlements are mostly considered illegal under international law, but these outposts were illegal even under Israeli law. Still, the government did little to dissuade the hilltop settlers, who viewed themselves as pioneers. The outposts were quickly connected to larger settlements by water systems, power lines, and paved roads. In time, a corridor of settlement took shape, slicing across the West Bank until the map looked more and more like the one envisioned by many settlers and political leaders, in which Palestinians would live in small and disconnected territories within an expanded Israel. Qaryut sat right in the corridor’s path; there were now eight official settlements and at least eleven smaller outposts in a five-mile radius of the village. “Without international and legal pressure on the Israelis, Qaryut will disappear,” Ma’amar said.
What I’m thinking about
As the London “no-go zone” discourse has resurfaced, I thought I’d share my own list of actual places to avoid in the world’s best city:
Leicester Square (tourist central—best avoided, unless you really like M&Ms)
The sidewalks surrounding Big Ben (too many tourists, too much photobombing)
The Covent Garden tube station stairs (they never end)
Wahaca (a lackluster Mexican food chain; the weird phonetic spelling of Oaxaca adds insult to injury)
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (COYG)
Until next time,
Yasmeen