MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Cold War II to save USA's Face

During the first Cold War between the United States & West Europe against the Soviet Union injustice and human rights increasingly became a central issue. This ought to have been a positive development, but it was devalued by partisan use and the issue turned into an instrument of propaganda.

The essence of such propaganda is not lies or even exaggeration, but selectivity. To give one example, the focus was kept on very real Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe and away from the savage rule of Western-backed dictators in South America. The political weaponisation of human rights was crude and hypocritical, but it was extremely effective.

As the USA enter a second Cold War against china and Russia, there are lessons to be learned from the first, since much the same propaganda mechanisms are once again hard at work. Western governments and media unrelentingly criticise China for the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, but there is scarcely a mention of the repression of Kashmiri Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Diplomatic and media outrage is expressed when Russia and the Syrian government bomb civilians in Idlib in Syria, but the bombing of civilians during the Western-backed, Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen, remains at the bottom of the news agenda.

Governmental and journalistic propagandists – for journalists who take this selective approach to oppression are no better than propagandists – can see that they are open to the charge of hypocrisy. People ask them how come that the mass incarceration, disappearances and torture suffered by the Kashmiris is so different from similar draconian punishments inflicted on the Uighurs?

This is a very reasonable question, but propagandists have developed two lines of defence against it. The first is to claim that whoever asks « what about Palestine », “Kashmir or Yemen” is fostering “whataboutism”, culpably diverting attention from crimes committed against the Uighurs and Syrian civilians. The nonsensical assumption here is that denouncing atrocities and oppression in once country precludes one from denouncing them in another.

The real purpose of this gambit from the point of view of those waging information wars is to impose a convenient silence over wrongdoings by our side while focusing exclusively on theirs.

The second line of defence, used to avoid comparison between the crimes committed by ourselves and our friends and those of our enemies, is to demonise the latter so thoroughly that no equivalence between the two is allowed. Such demonisation – sometimes called “monsterisation” – is so effective because it denies the other side a hearing and means that they are automatically disbelieved. In the 1990s, I used to write with copious evidence that UN sanctions against Iraq were killing thousands of children every month. But nobody paid any attention because sanctions were supposedly directed against Saddam Hussein – though they did him no harm – and he was known to be the epitome of evil. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified by claiming that Saddam possessed WMD and anybody who suggested that the evidence for this was dubious could be smeared as a secret sympathiser with the Iraqi dictator.

Simple-minded as these PR tactics might be, but they have been repeatedly shown to be highly effective. One reason why they work is that people would like to imagine that conflicts are struggles between white hats and black hats, angels and demons. Another reason is that this delusion is fostered enthusiastically by parts of the media, who generally goes along with a government-inspired news agenda.

With President Joe Biden seeking to rebuild the international image of the US as the « home of freedom and democracy » in the wake of the Donald Trump presidency, we are back to these classic information strategies. For the USA to bounce back unsullied in the eyes of the world, it is essential to portray Trump, with his embrace of autocrats and denunciation of everybody he disliked as a terrorist, as an aberration in American history.

Yet much of the planet’s population will have watched the film of Derek Chauvin slowly asphyxiate George Floyd and may not look at America in quite the same light as before, despite the guilty verdict in Minneapolis this week.

Asked about the impact of that verdict internationally, the US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that America needed “to promote and defend justice at home” if it was to credibly claim to be doing the same abroad. But he dismissed as “whataboutism” and unacceptable “moral equivalence” the suggestion that US protests about the jailing and mistreatment of Alexei Navalny in Russia and China’s actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, was being undermined by the fact that the US holds 2.4 million of its citizens in prison, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

Contrary to what Sullivan and other establishment figures say about refusing to compare the US with Russia and China, “whataboutism” and “moral equivalency” can be strong forces for good. They influence great powers, though not as much as they should, into cleaning up their acts out of pure self-interest, thus enabling them to criticise their rivals without appearing too openly hypocritical.

This happened during the first Cold War, when the belief that the Soviet Union was successfully using the American racial discrimination to discredit the US as a protagonist of democracy, played an important role in persuading decision-makers in Washington that civil rights for blacks was in the government’s best interests.

Once “whataboutism” and “equivalence” become the norm in media reporting, then the US government will have a powerful motive to try to end the militarisation of America’s police forces, which shot dead 1,004 people in 2019. This also holds true for how the police handle race.

Cold War competition between global powers has many harmful consequences, but it can also have benign ones. One forgotten consequence of the Soviet Union launching Sputnik, the first space satellite in 1957, is that it led to a spectacular surge in US government spending on scientific and general education.

For the most part, however, the first Cold War was an arid exchange of accusations in which human rights became a weapon in informational warfare. Can anything be done to prevent the same thing happening as the second Cold War gets underway?

It would be naïve to imagine that governments will not go on maligning their enemies and giving themselves a free pass unless propelled to do better by public opinion. And this will only happen by going beyond selective reporting of human rights abuses and demonising all opponents of their national governments as pariahs.

PALESTINA

Israel is committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians and the international community must reevaluate diplomatic relations with the state, a leading human rights group said in a report on Tuesday.

The 213-page report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) details how Israel has sought to maintain Jewish-Israeli hegemony over the Palestinian people from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

“While much of the world treats Israel’s half-century occupation as a temporary situation that a decades-long ‘peace process’ will soon cure, the oppression of Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, said. “Those who strive for Israeli-Palestinian peace, whether a one or two-state solution or a confederation, should in the meantime recognise this reality for what it is and bring to bear the sorts of human rights tools needed to end it.”

As always, rogue Israel dismissed the organisation’s report, calling it “propaganda”.

The HRW report follows a conclusion reached by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which published a study last January that found Palestinians, divided into four tiers of inferior treatment, are denied the right to self-determination.

Ines Abdel Razek, an advocacy director for the Ramallah-based Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy organisation, said the HRW report is a welcome development in shifting the goalposts of international engagement towards applying international law and human rights – rather than “sanctifying a two-state solution as an empty mantra that has only comforted Israel in its impunity. [It] is clearly of major political importance in order to advance the urgent need to reframe the political understanding about Palestine and Israel,” she told Al Jazeera, “although frustrating for Palestinians to see that the world needs validation from international or Israeli NGOs spelling out what we have been documenting, analysing, saying and writing for decades.”

For Mouin Rabbani, a co-editor of Jadaliyya, an independent research website, the existence of apartheid has been “voluminously substantiated” by Palestinians and their supporters for decades. “It is thus not Israel but rather HRW that has crossed a threshold,” he said. “HRW is the industry leader in its field, and that it has finally caught up with reality is in my view a significant development. The report’s significance lies in HRW “explicitly denouncing Israel as an apartheid regime, calling for Israel to face real and serious consequences for what the report terms ‘crime against humanity’. Perhaps most surprisingly, given its record on such matters, [HRW] is for once not ‘balancing’ its analysis of Israel with ritual denunciations of Palestinians,” Rabbani added.

HRW’s report lists a range of Israeli abuses committed against the Palestinians: sweeping movement restrictions against Palestinians in the occupied territories, the demolition of homes and “near-categorical denial” of building permits, the military occupation, land expropriation, and rejection of the residency rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

In fact, the Israeli government’s own words and actions – such as the 2018 nation state bill, which defined Israel as the “nation-state of Jewish people”, and its unrelenting settlement expansion policy, all point to its intent to preserve its domination, HRW said.

For Israel the term “apartheid” is explosive, vigorously rejected by itself and its supporters. It has long described itself as the only “democracy in the Middle East”, but its rejection of the label “apartheid” is in keeping with Israel’s tradition of denouncing any criticism as “anti-Semitic”.

Even as Israeli politicians openly speak of annexation, expansionism and of maintaining presence in the occupied territories, the Israeli government points to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, a fraction of the total Palestinians under its control, as proof that it is not an apartheid regime, given their ability to vote and be represented in the highest levels of government. They constitute a fig leaf which ultimately fails to negate that Israel continues to control the majority of the Palestinian people without recourse to rights.

By responding to criticism or condemnation of its policies, Israel resorts to delegitimising and, where possible, criminalising its critics and using the anti-Semitic card as the core of its response.

It’s a well-worn playbook, often augmented with other dirty tricks and various forms of propaganda, such as denouncing critics as terrorists. Anti-Semitism has been deliberately redefined by the Israeli government and its supporters to equate with any criticism of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. The very problematic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism explicitly includes as an example that calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is anti-Semitic.

The HRW report recommends that the international community adopt a rights-based and accountability approach regarding engagement with Israel – including conditioned military aid and vetting all forms of trade and cooperation – instead of relying on the so-called peace process, which has been deadlocked for years and has only served Israel to continue its policies with impunity.

Which is sure is that there can be no peace or negotiations in the current power structure, and as long as Palestinians are denied their fundamental national, political and civil right. The current focus should be on increasing the cost of sustaining Israeli hegemony and the continued denial of individual and collective rights for Palestinians. Policymakers must shift their focus away from securing a political solution that might herald peace, and instead fight back against a trajectory of expanding Israeli territorial consolidation and Palestinian dispossession in the entirety of the land.

Forced evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem is an example of a systematic state policy by the Israeli government that the international community can impose punitive measures on, regardless of whether a peace process is ongoing or not.

Palestinians have described their struggle as one against apartheid and settler colonialism for decades, but the international community has largely refrained from defining the Palestinian pursuit of rights in those terms.

While a leading rights group using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies against Palestinians is a step forward, it is nevertheless still unrealistic to expect it to have a direct impact on foreign policy.

This report could serve as a valuable educational resource and assist in advocacy efforts and, as noted above, can serve to mainstream discussion of the issues it raises, including potentially at the political level. In calling out Israeli apartheid, HRW, as the industry leader and a prominent US organisation to boot, makes it more acceptable to have discussions about Israeli apartheid, and how Israel should be held to account, in polite society and mainstream media, particularly in North America and Europe.

Actually, the framework put forth by HRW is “incomplete” as it omits the context that is embedded in settler colonialism. A ‘threshold’ has not been passe. In fact, Israel’s settler-colonial project to conquer and systematically displace, dispossess and fragment Palestinians, who they consider a ‘demographic threat’, to replace them with Jewish settlers has been in place since 1948.

Although it is clear that Israeli Jewish and international human rights organisations coming to embrace using the word “apartheid” is indicative of a shift in how the Palestinian struggle is being seen on the international stage, the policy and political worlds are still lagging.

The finding by HRW that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid foreshadows a future where it will be increasingly difficult for international governments to maintain the myth that Israel’s occupation and its control over Palestinians are temporary. This is a necessary realignment in terms of how international governments and organisations understand the reality in Israel/Palestine today, and eventually, will make it harder for stakeholders to engage with the Israeli government without accounting for this reality.