By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 14 2025 – A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.”

While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.”

The journalism from +972 — in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media — has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” — which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

**·Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.

**The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.

**Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.

**Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.

** Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”

**Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77 percent) than to Israelis (23 percent).

The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza — what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed and traumatized — remained almost entirely out of view.

Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.

As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements — and the policies they tried to justify — were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.

The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”

As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.

Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy” — and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”

The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.

This article is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).

This was originally published by MediaNorth.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Tafadzwa Munyaka
HARARE, Jan 14 2025 – Across Africa, economic transformation and development are being fuelled by two significant streams of funding: remittances and philanthropy. Both play vital roles, but as the situations evolve in many African countries, one truth becomes increasingly clear – remittances are emerging as a more sustainable, dignifying force compared to traditional philanthropy.

While philanthropy, often driven by well-meaning donors, tends to create short-term interventions, remittances empower households with the freedom to define their own future.

While philanthropic efforts can provide essential support, a more collaborative approach that prioritizes community engagement and empowerment is crucial in strengthening resilience and enabling communities to chart their own paths toward sustainable development

Remittances are interwoven into the identity of Africans as they support their families and communities, often on the premise and thinking that if one of us makes it, they pull everyone up with them.

With this knowledge, it begs the question, is it not time to reimagine our approach to African development and embrace the profound potential of remittances? A stark distinction of remittances and philanthropy is that the latter is often a result of and comes from excess while the former is derived form a culture and expectation of selflessness.

The Scale of Impact

According to the World Bank, remittances to sub-Saharan Africa exceeded $50 billion in 2023, in a year they were considered to have slowed down, dwarfing the funds allocated by philanthropic organizations and official development aid.

Countries like Egypt, Nigeria, Morrocco, Ghana, and Kenya top the charts, with families using these funds to pay for education, healthcare, and small businesses.

Unlike many charitable initiatives, remittances go directly to the intended recipients – often without the burden of administrative costs or external agendas.

It must be noted that although remittances can be powerful, they often stem from obligation rather than abundance, which can lead to exploitation when the giver is always expected to give, despite the strong bonds that exist.

This dynamic can create a cycle where recipients may feel pressured to rely on these funds, potentially stifling local entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency.

Furthermore, while remittances provide immediate financial relief, they do not always address the underlying socio-economic issues that cause migration in the first place. Ultimately, balancing the benefits of remittances with the need for sustainable development strategies cannot be overstated.

Philanthropic interventions, no matter how generous, often hinge on specific projects determined by donors, who decide which issues take precedence be it education or health.

This top-down approach, while beneficial in the short term, frequently overlooks the unique needs of individual communities, leading to a dependency on cycles of aid rather than embedding empowerment.

When local populations are not engaged in the decision-making process, interventions may miss the mark, failing to resonate with cultural contexts or actual needs.

As a result, communities can become reliant on external resources, which stifles local initiative and innovation, ultimately perpetuating cycles of poverty. Moreover, the focus on immediate results often overshadows the systemic issues that hinder long-term development, creating a dynamic where local leaders feel compelled to align with donor priorities instead of advocating for their community’s true needs.

Therefore, while philanthropic efforts can provide essential support, a more collaborative approach that prioritizes community engagement and empowerment is crucial in strengthening resilience and enabling communities to chart their own paths toward sustainable development.

Empowerment Through Choice

Remittances offer something philanthropy cannot: autonomy. Families receiving remittances decide how best to allocate those funds, based on their most pressing needs.

This flexibility builds and strengthens agency while preserving and promoting dignity, allowing recipients to meet challenges in real time, without waiting for outside interventions.

A woman in rural Zimbabwe, for example, may receive monthly remittances from a relative working in the UK. With these funds, she might choose to send her daughter to school while investing in a poultry business to generate additional income. She is no longer just a passive beneficiary of aid; she is now an active agent in her community’s economy.

This contrasts sharply with philanthropic programs, which may prioritize education or health but overlook opportunities for long-term economic empowerment.

However, we should not overlook that many in the diaspora sacrifice their own financial growth to help their families back home. The impact is real, but the invisible cost to the diaspora is often overlooked.

A Sustainable Alternative

Philanthropy’s Achilles’ heel is often its short-term nature. Donor fatigue, shifting political interests, and economic downturns can abruptly end well-intentioned programs, leaving communities without the support they have come to rely on.

Research highlights how philanthropic underfunding and unrealistic expectations can lead to the failure of nonprofit organizations to sustain their initiatives over the long term, arguably, precisely because of these short-lived commitments.

To contrast this, remittances are a more resilient source of income. Diaspora communities tend to continue supporting their families even in tough times, ensuring a stable flow of funds.

Moreover, remittances are often reinvested locally, creating ripple effects that stimulate small businesses and local markets. This bottom-up economic activity nurtures homegrown solutions to poverty.

In the long term it is expected to contribute to reducing reliance on external aid more so as remittances ensure a stable flow of funds that are often unaffected by political or economic changes in recipient countries.

A 2023 World Bank report highlights that remittances grew by 5% in sub-Saharan Africa, even during global economic slowdowns, underscoring the resilience of these flows.

A New Development Model

To be clear, philanthropy still has an essential role to play, particularly in areas where immediate humanitarian assistance is required, such as in disaster relief or during health crises.

However, as Africa’s economic aspirations grow, there is an urgent need to rethink how development is financed and implemented.

Rather than relying solely on donor-driven models, governments, NGOs, and international institutions should focus on creating enabling environments that leverage remittances.

This means and includes reducing transaction fees, actively supporting diaspora engagement, and building financial infrastructure that allows families to maximize these funds.

If philanthropy is to shake off many of its negative connotations to remain relevant, it must evolve beyond charity. Strategic partnerships with diaspora communities can amplify the impact of both streams of funding, aligning donor goals with grassroots solutions already being tried and tested through remittances.

To sum it up, “philanthropy comes from excess, allowing for strategic, long-term change – building schools, hospitals, and infrastructure that break cycles of poverty.”

Parting shot

Africa’s future lies in empowerment, not dependence. Remittances, with their direct, flexible, and sustainable nature, represent a dignifying form of support available.

As Africans increasingly take charge of their own destinies, it is essential to complement philanthropic efforts with policies that amplify the impact of remittances. The lesson is clear: development is most successful when it flows from the hands of those it is meant to serve.

By Ramesh Thakur
Jan 14 2025 –  
A regime built on terror, ruled by fear and sustained by foreign proxy forces crumbled in less than a fortnight. In the end, the foundations of the House of Assad (1970–2024) rested on the shifting sands of time. In the good ol’ days, despots could retire with their plundered loot into comfortable lifestyles in Europe’s pleasure haunts. No longer. The reverse damascene expulsion has seen the Assads scurry to safety to Moscow.

The beginning of the end of the Assad dynasty can be traced back to Hamas’s brutal attacks of 7 October 2023. Its objectives were to kill, rape, torture kidnap and subject to public humiliation on the streets of Gaza as many Israelis as possible.

Its political calculations sought to undermine Israelis’ confidence in their government’s ability to protect them; provoke retaliatory strikes on the densely populated Gaza strip that would kill large numbers of civilians held as involuntary human shields, and inflame the Arab street, enrage Muslims around the world and flood the streets of Western cities with massive crowds shouting pro-Palestinian/Hamas slogans; disrupt the process of normalisation of relations with Arab states; dismantle the Abraham Accords; and isolate Israel internationally.

It’s fair to say that Hamas has won the propaganda war. Israel has never before come under such sustained international censure in the UN Security Council, General Assembly, Human Rights Council, World Court and International Criminal Court. It’s also been heavily criticised in many previously supportive Western capitals, streets and campuses including Australia.

There are still some 100 hostages captive in Gaza. Israeli soldiers are still being killed and wounded. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis retain residual capacity to launch rockets and drones into Israel.

Yet, Israel has achieved impressive military successes in fighting throughout Gaza followed by Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah have been decimated as fighting forces, with their military commanders and leaders decapitated with targeted assassinations and improvised explosive devices placed in pagers and walkie talkies. Iran has been humiliated, lost its aura of invincibility and seen the destruction of its entire strategy of trying to bleed Israel to death through a thousand cuts inflicted by proxies.

The military outcome thus is a complete reset of the local balance of power to Israel’s advantage. The reason for this is strategic miscalculations by Hamas. It launched the attacks of 10/7 unilaterally, hoping to draw fraternal groups into the war. Only Hezbollah half did so by firing rockets but without committing ground troops.

The second strategic miscalculation by Hamas was to underestimate Israel’s will and determination. This is Israel’s longest war. Israel stayed steadfast on destroying Hamas as a capable military force and governing power in Gaza; relegated the rescue of hostages to a highly desirable but subordinate goal; destroyed Hezbollah and ejected it from southern Lebanon; and checkmated Iran as the over-the-horizon military threat to Israel via its two powerful proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.

A further consequence was to remove the props holding up the Assad regime in Damascus and leave it exposed and vulnerable to overthrow by the well-armed and strongly motivated jihadist rebels. PM Benjamin Netanyahu is right to claim that Israel’s ‘blows inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah’ helped to topple Assad.

The new strategic balance sees the Israeli centre emerging much stronger amidst the ruins of the anti-Israel axis of resistance. The underlying reason for this is precisely the scale, surprise factor and depraved brutality of October 7. This broke beyond repair the endless loop of Hamas and Israeli policies of attack, retaliate, rinse and repeat when desired. Only a new balance of power could restore deterrence-based truce resting on certain Israeli retaliation and Israeli dominance at every level of escalation.

International calls for immediate and unconditional ceasefire and urgings not to go into Rafah proved counterproductive, I believe, for two reasons. For one, given the monstrous scale of 10/7, to Israelis they separated true from fair-weather friends. For another, Western youth and countries, under the impact of changing electoral demographics with mass influxes of radicalised Middle Eastern Muslims, were deserting Israel and softening on fighting antisemitism in their own populations. This drove home the realisation that time was against Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah had to be removed as security threats now or never.

However, post-Assad Syria is highly combustible. Syria is not a nation-state but a tattered patchwork quilt of different sects with a blood-soaked history of feuding. The rebels are diverse in tribe, race and religion and backed by different foreign actors with their own agendas. The chances are that après victory will come the deluge of warring factions and Syria descends once more into killing fields.

The dominant rebel group is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose roots go back to al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Its leader is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani who has had a US $10 million FBI bounty on his head since 2017 as a terrorist. The HTS’s base is the 75 percent Sunni population, with the remaining one-fourth split between Shiites, Kurds, Christians, Druze, Ismailis, Armenians and Alawites.

Israelis cannot assume that Syrians are immune to the Jew hatred that animates many Muslims in the region. Guided by its own precautionary principle, Israel has pre-emptively destroyed much of Syria’s weaponry, chemical weapons infrastructure and arms-production facilities and taken control of the demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights.

The experiences of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya after their humanitarian liberations into freedom and democracy in the 2001–11 decade should give Panglossian optimists on a ‘new Syria’ a reality check.

Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, is emeritus professor at the Australian National University and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He is a former Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute and editor of The nuclear ban treaty: a transformational reframing of the global nuclear order.

This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished from the original with their permission.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Anis Chowdhury
SYDNEY, Jan 13 2025 – Thank God, we have survived another year of genocide, war, destruction and climate crisis. The passing year of 2024 has been a mixture of hope and despair. It began with some hope as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in favour of South Africa’s case against Israel for committing genocide and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention, and to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Anis Chowdhury

Alas, the hope quickly vanished as the genocide continues by the very people who promised, “never again” and worked tirelessly for the Genocide Convention. Officially, more than 45,000 killed – mostly women and children. According to the prestigious medical journal Lancet, the actual death toll by July 2024 reached more than 186,000 due to the cumulative effects of Israel’s destruction of hospitals, blocking of aid, cutting off water & electricity supplies and every other means of ethnic cleansing.

Ironically, it is possible for the apartheid state of Israel to trample on the ICJ and the international humanitarian laws only because of its backing by the US and its allies. One grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of its stone-faced Western allies ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

I wrote three pieces for IPS trying to explain the inexplicable – Gaza Massacre and Western Hypocrisy (4 Mar., 2024); ‘Unbounded’ Impunity Emboldens Israel (27 Feb., 2024) and The West’s Frankenstein Moment (14 Feb., 2024). Amidst the continued horror, injustice and the miseries of the occupied Palestinian people, I thought it was pointless to write or make academic analyses.

Instead, I opted for activism and joined the mass protests that became a regular feature around the world, loudly and defiantly declaring, “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free”, where the two – Palestinians and Jewish people – will live as free citizens, enjoying full democratic and economic rights to realise their full potential as equal human beings.

My children and grandchildren also joined as we drew inspiration from the resilience of the Palestinians, refusing to surrender and demanding to live with dignity.

It seems people power is beginning to have some positive impact. More countries, especially in the Global South, are taking a firm stance against the apartheid state of Israel; breaking with their Western allies. Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia recognized the State of Palestine. Australia changed its position to support a vote at the UN demanding Israel end the occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Yet, there were more disappointing events: Israel expanded its ruthless bombing to Lebanon and assassinated key figures, eliminating likely partners in a possible peace deal; the war in Ukraine became more protracted while Putin threatens to use nuclear war-heads. And the US, the supposed leader of the so-called rule-based ‘free world’, elected a narcissist, Donald Trump, as its President, bent on wrecking the rules, claiming US supremacy and exceptionalism. The CoP29 climate summit ended with disappointment as the world’s most vulnerable nations have been abandoned, and there has been little progress on reducing fossil fuels.

The fate of the displaced people in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere became worse, as conflict drags on. Amnesty International reported, “the Arakan Army unlawfully killed Rohingya civilians, drove them from their homes and left them vulnerable to attacks. These attacks faced by the Rohingya come on top of indiscriminate air strikes by the Myanmar military that have killed both Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine civilians”.

The Rohingya people – the world’s largest stateless population – continue to face persecution and abuse. They now face a double-edged sword as the Arakan Army tightens the noose around Myanmar’s Junta.

Conflict in Sudan has led to a man-made famine, the world’s largest hunger crisis, and the worst internal displacement crisis in the world. Nearly 20 months of war has made more than one-fifth of the country, over 12 million people, displaced from their homes.

Nevertheless, there have been some sparks of hope. The heroic people of Syria and Bangladesh overthrew their repressive regimes, which seemed almost impossible the day before; and it appears a new dawn has come for these nations.

People in both Syria and Bangladesh are hoping for a just, equitable and democratic society. However, they are also genuinely apprehensive as such a systemic transition is fraught with uncertainty. It is like a caterpillar’s morphosis inside a cocoon – it can come out either as a butterfly or as a moth.

The shadow of the failed ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia haunts the Syrian people. They also fear the sectarian conflict and big-power games that followed in Libya as Israel pounds and expands its occupation.

In the case of Bangladesh, the last three attempts at systemic transition have ended in disappointments. The high hope for a democratic, just society evaporated quickly as the country witnessed unprecedented extra-judicial killings, vote rigging and finally turning into a one-party state within about 3 years of its independence earned at the cost of millions of lives. The second attempt post 1975 was skidded by Ershad’s coup whose military-civilian regime was neither a butterfly nor a moth – rather a hybrid. Then the third attempt post 1990, turned into a monster with the tyrant Hasina’s kleptocratic rule by theft and extreme repression.

Despair must not overtake hope. Human history is the stories of struggles; but our ability to rise after every fall, to emerge from the depths of despair with new found determination and unwavering hope determines our progress.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). Held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com

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