Our Friday News Analysis | What the World Reads Now!

By Amir Tibon
Haaretz Israel
23 May 2024

More than seven months have passed since the October 7 attack on Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn't found the time yet to meet with residents of even one Israeli community of the dozens that were infiltrated by terrorists that day. Israel lost over 1,200 people on October 7; more than 200 were kidnapped into Gaza; entire neighborhoods in some of the border kibbutzim were destroyed.

Yet Netanyahu – the man under whose watch this disaster happened – has failed to perform even this most basic duty of showing empathy and respect for the victims, as well as hearing the stories of the survivors. While other senior officials – President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, war cabinet member Benny Gantz, opposition leader Yair Lapid, and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett – have all met with residents of the communities most impacted by the attack, Netanyahu has failed to do so.

It's not a coincidence that other top Israeli officials have found the time to meet those people, but Netanyahu hasn't. He's also devoted much less time comparatively to meeting with families of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Even several foreign leaders – such as President Joe Biden and British Foreign Minister David Cameron – have met with some hostages' relatives more often than Israel's prime minister has. Netanyahu has shown no interest in experiencing their pain and reliving the horror they have been through every day since October 7.

It turns out, however, that the prime minister did find the time to do something else recently: organize a speech for himself before the U.S. Congress just months before the upcoming U.S. election. The speech is a joint project of Netanyahu's closest confidante, Ron Dermer, and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. It will be made possible thanks to the weakness and shallowness of certain Democratic politicians who have no fundamental understanding of Israeli politics and society and mistakenly think it is "pro-Israel" to cooperate with Netanyahu – a man despised by at least half of his country.

The contrast between the effort Netanyahu put into organizing this speech and his complete disregard for the citizens of his country who had lost everything on October 7 – family members, friends, and neighbors, their homes and communities – is very telling. This is Netanyahu's set of priorities: his interests come first, and the Israelis impacted by his failures come last.

Read more about the Israel-Hamas war:

■ When the Gaza war ends, Israel's mainstream media will have a lot to answer for 

■ The video of captive IDF spotters is more proof of Netanyahu's failure. He has to go 

■ My father is a hostage in Gaza. Palestinians are not my enemy – blind hate is 

■ Video of captive women soldiers exposes Israel's most horrific failure of October 7 

■ When these Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, their gay identity died with them 

■ Palestinians react with joy – and some cynicism – to state recognition by Spain, Ireland and Norway 

■ Israel's attorney general is not a television pundit. She must stop whitewashing and start investigating 

■ At last, justice. But will Israelis start waking up?

What is the Side of the Story that is Not Yet Decisive? Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen.

BIBI IS CHOOSING STEFANIK AND TRUMP. PRESIDENT BIDEN, DON’T BE FOOLED

Credit...Augusto Casasoli/A3/Contrast/Redux

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist
New York Times
21 May 2024

If you are keeping score at home, you have surely noticed that the two most crucial defense officials in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the former military chief of staff Benny Gantz — warned last week that Netanyahu is leading Israel into a disastrous abyss by refusing to present any plan for non-Hamas Palestinians to govern Gaza and appears to be contemplating a long-term Israeli military occupation of Gaza instead.

Gantz said he would leave the government without a plan by June 8.

Here are the stakes for America in what these ministers are saying: Netanyahu has become a radical actor, undermining fundamental U.S. interests and Arab allies and becoming the gift that keeps on giving to Iran.

Just look at the policy choices Netanyahu has made and tell me with a straight face that he has not let Iran completely outmaneuver Israel.

Using its allies Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran has shrunk Israel since Oct. 7 — forcing tens of thousands of Israelis off Israel’s western and northern borders and isolating the country on the world stage over Gaza — while Iran has become a threshold nuclear power and the most prominent imperialist force in the region (given that it effectively controls four Arab states) and is less isolated than it has been in years. All of this has happened on Bibi’s watch.

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SEYMOUR HERSH | BIDEN'S PERMANENT COLD WAR

Why the president can't look at Russia rationally

President Joe Biden speaks at the 140th Morehouse College Commencement Ceremony on May 19 in Atlanta. / Photo by Paras Griffin/WireImage.

By Seymour Hersh

Substack.com
23 May 2024

President Joe Biden’s advanced age and difficulties getting through a speech aren’t the only things that put his re-election at risk. Another liability is his long-standing inability to see the world as it is.

He has made no effort since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 to arrange a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President. (Biden and Putin met briefly in June 2021 in what was described as a summit meeting in Geneva. Biden also met with Putin in Moscow while serving as vice president under Obama.)

The president’s disconnect was displayed in March in what current polling suggests may have been his final State of the Union address. In the president’s telling, the ongoing war between Putin’s Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine had turned into an existential crisis in which the future of America was at stake.

               “[M]y purpose tonight,” the president said, “is to both wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment. . . . Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under attack at home”—a reference to the then pending presidential re-election campaign of Donald Trump—“and overseas, simultaneously. Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.”

It is easy for an American to dislike Putin, who puts reporters in jail and tolerates no significant political opposition, including the assassination of his enemies. For those reasons, I have turned down requests to travel to Moscow for political meetings in recent years.

But there are those in the American intelligence community who believe that America bears its responsibility for the war in Ukraine. Putin and his predecessors in Moscow watched for three decades—since the reunification of Germany in 1990—as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) added member states that brought NATO to Russia’s doorstep.

Putin’s apparent fear as the Biden administration took office—that Ukraine would be the next to sign up—could have been soothed with a few words from Washington. However, none came from Biden and his key foreign policy and national security aides, who echoed the president’s fears about Putin’s intentions.

As those who follow the news know, this is boilerplate history. But some inside the American intelligence community have long feared Biden’s irrational views on Russia and Putin, dating back to his days in the Senate.

One longtime senior American official stunned me recently, saying that he has concluded that Biden sees Putin as a “Death Angel”—someone, the official explained, “who will try to trick you into believing he is a good person.”

Biden's two senior foreign policy aides, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan join him in his hardline stance toward Russia. They are masters of making self-serving leaks to friendly journalists.

Having failed a recent series of negotiations with Israel and Hamas to obtain a ceasefire and hostage releases in Gaza, Blinken returned last week from a visit to Ukraine with a recommendation—one that quickly was made public—that the White House should relax its current ban and, as the New York Times reported, expand the losing war by permitting the Ukraine military to target missile and artillery sites inside Russia.

The Times noted that the president and his aides believe there is a red line that, if crossed, would unleash a strong reaction from Putin, although they do not know where or what that red line may be, nor do they know “what the reaction might be.”

Such is the haphazard state of the Biden administration’s foreign policy.

In his State of the Union speech, Biden repeatedly strained credulity in his urging of Congress for more funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia. He ignored the history of the allied World War II partnership by describing NATO as “the strongest military alliance the world has ever known.” He added:

“We must stand up to Putin. Please send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill. History is watching. If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe at risk. The free world is at risk, encouraging others who wish to harm us.

“We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down. History is watching.”

Today, after more than two deadly years of war in Ukraine and little success, the president’s speech sounds stunningly histrionic.

In the years Biden has been in office, America has spent $175 billion to fight a war that cannot and will not be won.

It will only be resolved by diplomacy—if rationality prevails in Kyiv and Washington—or the overwhelming defeat of the understaffed, undertrained, and poorly equipped Ukrainian army.

In recent weeks, I have been told, several Ukrainian combat brigades have not defected or considered doing so but have made it known to their superiors that they will no longer participate in what would be a suicidal offensive against a better-trained and better-equipped Russian force.

The senior adviser, who has followed the war closely, told me: “Putin is playing the long game. He’s secured Crimea and the four Ukrainian provinces”—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia—after some intense fighting—that he annexed shortly after initiating the war two years ago. “Kharkiv”—Ukraine’s second largest city thirty kilometers south of the Russian border, a cultural and transportation center—“is his next prize. He’s moving now for a checkmate in the city.”

The all-out assault on Kharkiv, whose citizens are already fleeing, will come at a time of Putin’s choosing, the adviser said. “He’s now fighting for a negotiating position of strength in dealing with Trump, who he thinks is going to win” in November. “He will be in a position of strength—the catbird seat.”

Zelensky, meanwhile, whose five-year term as president expired this week—he remains in office under martial law—has been campaigning in newspaper and television interviews for more American missiles capable of striking targets deep inside Russia, for F-16 fighter jets, for more anti-aircraft missiles, and for troop support from NATO that is unlikely to come.

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Zelensky spoke of his children and exhaustion. The newspaper did not report whether he expressed gratitude for the $61 billion aid package approved by Congress last month.

FYODOR LUKYANOV | WORLD WAR THREE HAS STARTED. HERE’S WHAT IT WILL LOOK LIKE

The next act in the sad trilogy of global wars will be a scattered but long conflict.

Palestinian men on the ruins of a building destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on October 8, 2023. © AFP / Mohammed Abed

By Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

The journalistic cliché that World War III is already underway has often circulated from one publication or another for decades. Indeed, since the beginning of the 21st century, when the US was attacked on 11 September 2001, people have been talking about a clash of civilizations as a new form of global conflict.

Then, Washington's declared "war on terror" got bogged down in the Middle East before disappearing from the agenda altogether. Instead, the "good old" rivalry between the major countries was gradually revived, first in the political, propaganda, and economic spheres, but with an increasingly pronounced military and force element. Warnings of the risk of World War III in the classic sense of the last century accompanied this. Such considerations, however, remained notional.

Today, the idea of a "World War III " is fathomable.

Nevertheless, a situation similar to World Wars I and II seems inadmissible at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Some commentators see identical features in the armed conflict in Ukraine. Structurally, however, the state of affairs is very different.

The presence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the world's major players and a very complex range of significant and diverse players in international politics rule out (and make improbable) a head-on collision between the major powers or their blocs, as was the case in the last century. However, the changes taking place on the world stage and in the balance of power are so severe that they are "worthy" of a confrontation on the scale of a world war.

In the past, such shifts have led to major military clashes. However, now the "world war" that some repeatedly talk about is a chain of significant but localized confrontations, each of which, in one way or another, involves the leading players, balances on the verge of spilling over from the original zone. It is indirectly linked to other hotbeds of instability. This sequence of military events began with the Middle East conflicts of the last decade (Yemen and Syria) and continued in Ukraine since 2014, then the South Caucasus, and now Palestine. It is too early to put an end to this list.

The end of the status quo means the world is entering a long period of turmoil.

International colleagues have already pointed out that dormant conflicts and disputes almost resurface as former frameworks and constraints disappear (the decline of the world order, which now seems universally recognized). What has been held back by the pre-existing arrangements is erupting.

In principle, everything is quite traditional; it was before and will be so after. The ideologization of world politics in the twentieth century meant that the end of that political period was ideological. The view that humanity has found the optimal political model to turn the page on previous confrontations has triumphed. This is the only way to explain, for example, the belief that the contours of state borders will not change in the 21st century (or only by mutual agreement) because it has been decided and established that way. The historical experience of Europe and other continents in every historical period does not support such an assumption – borders have permanently changed fundamentally. And shifts in the balance of power and opportunity inevitably give rise to the desire to move territorial boundaries.

Another thing is that the importance of territories is different now than it was in the past. Direct control of specific spaces can now have more costs than benefits, while indirect influence is much more effective. However, it is worth noting that 15-20 years ago, at the height of economic and political globalization, it was often argued that geographical and material proximity no longer mattered in a fully interconnected 'flat' world. The pandemic was the first and most vivid argument against this approach. The current chain of crises has forced a return to more classical ideas about the role of subordination between the regional and the global.

The disappearance of the status quo means that the world has entered a long period of turmoil in which new frameworks have yet to be established (and it is unclear when they will be), and the old ones are no longer working. The formal end of the era of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (Russia has withdrawn from it, and other countries have announced the suspension of their participation) is an example of the dismantling of existing institutions. The unprecedented intensity of the wave of assaults on the UN from all sides is an attack on the main bastion of the world order established after 1945.

The current "World War Three" is likely to endure over an extended timeframe and be scattered in terms of locations. However, based on its results – and there will be some – a different structure of international organizations will emerge. This is always the case. This does not mean that the UN, for example, will disappear, but there will be a profound correction of the principles on which it operates.

BUILDING THE BRIDGE! | A WAY TO GET TO KNOW THE OTHER AND ONE ANOTHER

Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanism for Many to Move Mountains

Photo Credit: Abraham A. van Kempen, our home away from home on the Dead Sea

By Abraham A. van Kempen

Senior Editor
Updated 19 January 2024

Those who commit to 'healing our broken humanity' build intercultural bridges to learn to know and understand one another and others. Readers who thumb through the Building the Bridge (BTB) pages are not mindless sheep following other mindless sheep. They THINK. They want to be at the forefront of making a difference. They're in search of the bigger picture to expand their horizons. They don't need BTB or anyone else to confirm their biases.

Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanism for Many to Move Mountains

Accurate knowledge promotes understanding, dispels prejudice, and awakens the desire to learn more. Words have an extraordinary power to bring people together, divide them, forge bonds of friendship, or provoke hostility. Modern technology offers unprecedented possibilities for good, fostering harmony and reconciliation. Yet its misuse can do untold harm, leading to misunderstanding, prejudice, and conflict.

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