The Fragile World

 

By David K. Shipler                 

                As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia—and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less—mere business fraud—although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.

                The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak—or complicit—organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.

    Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.

                  Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.

    Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.

Israel vs. Hamas: "Whose Side Are You On?"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                On Monday, October 9, two days after the assault by Hamas on innocent civilians in Israel, Kalpana Shipler was asked by a fellow student at her public high school in Washington, D.C., “Whose side are you on?” That was the question being tossed around by multiple teenagers to one another as Israel began bombing Gaza in retaliation. And that seems to be the question dividing college campuses and mobilizing protests, corrupting the capacity to analyze complexity. If you are forced to pick sides, you miss the tangles of guilt that have bound Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs for decades.

                Kalpana didn’t fall into the trap, I am proud to say as her grandfather. She was wise enough at age 15 to resist an instant answer, to know that she didn’t know, a rare skill in today’s America. She deferred to the cause of learning.

                Luckily, young people coming of age are not yet jaded. Shocked by the scenes of devastation and starvation in Gaza, students have acted on a purity of outrage, pushing the envelope of accepted rhetoric and calling to account their own country, Israel’s major supporter.

Yet the impulse to pick a side, as if war were a football game, has an unhealthy feature. It concentrates the blame, villainizing one adversary and idealizing the other. The dichotomy was prevalent among some activists who justifiably protested the U.S. war in Vietnam and decried our ally’s (South Vietnam’s) assaults on human rights, while regarding North Vietnam and the Vietcong as the only authentic patriots, skipping over the North’s tighter dictatorship and the VC’s brutality.

                A similar intellectual and moral flaw runs through the current protests over the Gaza war, in which Israel is supposedly “a monopoly of violence,” in the words of a Cornell professor. Palestinians through Hamas, which strives to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state, are portrayed as exercising their anti-colonialist rights to liberty. Sometimes—only sometimes—vilification of the Jewish state has crossed into vilification of Jews, raising the stench of antisemitism in the “pro-Palestinian” encampments. They might be called “antiwar” encampments if they actually opposed war, if they protested not only against the atrocities Israel has committed in an effort to stamp out Hamas—the vast bombing, the barriers to food and medical care—but also against the intimate atrocities by Hamas—the rapes, torture, mutilation, and kidnappings—which unleashed this fighting.

It was astonishing to see 33 Harvard student organizations sign onto a statement issued by the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee immediately after October 7 holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Seriously? “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement declared. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinians existence for 75 years. . . Palestinians have been forced to live in a sate of death, both slow and sudden.”

                 So spoke some of the purportedly smartest people of the next generation. One can imagine them delighting in their incisive brilliance as they looked past the Hamas violence into its roots. Fine. There is never a vacuum. There are causes of every effect. However, to turn back only one page in a long history of mutual victimization demonstrates a laziness of mind or, perhaps, a mind indoctrinated.

If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the thuggish gangs of Jewish settlers terrorizing and assaulting West Bank Palestinians? If you are pro-Palestinian, do you omit Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinian self-government under Hamas arming itself and rocketing Israel? If you are pro-Israel, do you leave out the stifling border controls that suffocated Gaza’s development and fostered poverty? If you root only for the Palestinians, do you ignore the Hamas suicide bombers sent against Jews two decades ago to torpedo the growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian statehood?

In your journey back in time, do you stop before Arab armies attacked the fledgling Jewish state? Do you stop before the Israelis’ expulsion of Arabs from their home villages before and during Israel’s 1948 war of independence? Do you stop before the earlier Arab assaults on religious Jewish communities in the Holy Land or, on the other side, the Jewish assaults on Arab civilians there? Do you stop before the Holocaust? Before the pogroms of Europe, which so traumatized the Jewish people that its reverberations still ring today?

If you are looking for the original sin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keep going, and going, and going until you come to realize that both sides are victims. This is not moral equivalence. This is suffering that is particular to each people, not to be measured or weighed, but—if you want to campaign against war—to be acknowledged. As an Israeli said to me long ago, putting two victims together is like mixing fire and kerosene.

Victimhood confers an illusion of moral immunity. “The sense of victimhood is functional for a nation that is involved in an ongoing bloody conflict,” wrote the Israeli thinkers Daniel Bar-Tal and Elkiva Eldar in the newspaper Haaretz. “It shapes the perception of the threatening situation against the cruel enemy and provides moral justification for harming it unrestrainedly and without mercy. Victimhood distinguishes between us and the Palestinians and provides a sense of moral superiority and permission to dehumanize them. . . . Victimhood severs the society from a sense of guilt and leaves room only for feelings of anger and revenge.”

The same might be said of the Palestinian side.

So, how does complexity figure into the student-led protests? It doesn’t. Demonstrations don’t do nuance. They are meant to be categorical and dogmatic. They are not dispassionate classroom exercises in the ambiguities and contradictions of history, politics, and warfare. They are meant to galvanize, excite, force change, and call on the clarity of conscience. They don’t even have to be practical, as in thinking that university divestments from companies doing business in Israel, one of their demands, will tip Israel’s policies. What could tip Israel’s policies, imposing a modicum of restraint, are the Biden Administration’s recent delay in certain weapons shipments, steps that might have been propelled partly by those students on the quads and greens.

The campus protests have amplified the growing American disaffection with Israel’s unvarnished brutality against Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli excuses and rationalizations notwithstanding. Yes, Hamas uses civilians as shields and shelters fighters in networks of tunnels, some under hospitals. Does that justify attacking the civilian shields and devastating hospitals? Yes, Hamas smuggles weaponry into Gaza. Does that justify restricting trucks of food and medical supplies destined for children, women, the elderly? The “pro-Palestinian” protesters would presumably say no. “Antiwar” protesters would presumably hold both sides in contempt.

            In true antiwar demonstrations, the symbols, the pieces of colored cloth woven into specific patterns, might be carried together. In true antiwar protests, wartime grief would be common ground. The Palestinian and Israeli flags might be intertwined, perhaps even tangled. Some demonstrators might want to burn them, as some Vietnam era antiwar protesters burned the American flag. But then, some leaders of the that antiwar movement thought it would be a more poignant symbol to wash the flag. What if both Israeli and Palestinian flags were washed in the middle of a college green?

The War of Atrocities

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In a grisly coincidence, the UN within 24 hours has documented two outrages of the Israel-Gaza war that will permanently scar the lives of those who survive: Sexual crimes by Hamas, which probably continue against young Israeli women who are still hostages. And severe malnutrition among tens of thousands of Palestinian children, some at critical stages of brain development.

A team headed by the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict confirmed most earlier reports of sexual assaults by Hamas fighters who invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7. But in addition, the UN task force found “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity and has reasonable grounds to believe that this violence may be ongoing.” The team did not say, but everyone knows, that the deep trauma suffered by such victims is likely to be ongoing as well, perhaps lifelong.

In what might aptly be called divine injustice, the hostages taken October 7, and evidently still being held, include seven young female soldiers from the Nahal Oz military base, an intelligence hub. Women agents there had picked up strong indicators of the coming Hamas attack and repeatedly urged their male superior officers—in vain—to take preventive action.

Whether the hostages are the same women who sounded the alarm is not publicly known, but they are from the same unit. That they should suffer such intimate brutality because they or their colleagues were ignored ought to haunt the incompetent government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its somnolent security apparatus. Furthermore, Israeli officials have reportedly worried that Hamas would rather kill the women than release them to tell the world of their torment.

At the same time, the UN’s World Health Organization has warned that famine is “almost inevitable,” and reported this week that 10 children in northern Gaza had died of starvation. Israel’s retaliatory strategy of cutting off Gaza’s two million Palestinians from most supplies of food, water, electricity, and medical care has taken a severe toll on health, even as sporadic, inadequate aid shipments and air drops have been permitted. Eventually, famine and disease are expected to cause at least as many casualties as the 30,000 deaths Hamas has reported from Israeli bombing and ground fighting.

Here, too, the unseen impacts are inevitable. Just as post-traumatic stress disorder is a lasting condition for survivors of sexual torture, the cognitive damage to children suffering malnutrition is likely to be lifelong. (Why this is not a routine part of the mainstream media’s war reporting is surprising: Neuroscientists have researched it extensively.)

At critical periods of brain development—especially in last two trimesters of pregnancy and the first two to three years of life—the inadequacy of certain nutrients can inhibit the creation of neurons and synapses, of myelin sheaths and the neurological connections that are essential to reasoning, learning, memory, and behavior in adulthood.

For at least half a century, scientists have been documenting how the developing brain suffers from insufficient iron, iodine, folate, zinc, calcium, magnesium, selenium, and various vitamins, all found in balanced diets of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. The finding is made in study after study, including the succinct warning in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics that, after age two, “the effects of malnutrition on stunting may be irreversible, and some of the functional deficits may become permanent.”

Longitudinal studies have shown the lifelong effects. Seventy-seven infants in Barbados, for example, hospitalized with protein deficiency, then received nutritious food between the ages of one and twelve. Nevertheless, in their thirties, they had compromised “verbal fluency, working memory, processing speed, and visuospatial integration” compared to a healthy group from the same classrooms.

Iron deficiency during pregnancy can cause serious damage to the fetus, even if the child gets adequate iron later. Without enough meat, poultry, fish, spinach, or beans, the mother and child can suffer from anemia, which decreases the formation of the myelin sheath, whose fatty matter insulates nerve cells and helps accelerate nerve conduction. Insufficient iron affects the metabolism in the hippocampus, critical for memory, and can lead to low birth rate, which is associated with cerebral palsy and other neurological problems.

Studies following children who were anemic as infants found that years later, in school, they scored lower in math, written expression, motor functioning, spatial memory, and selective recall.

Then, too, hunger—or even the fear of hunger—creates an additional layer of anxiety on top of the terrors of war. Learning disabilities and mental health problems result. “Learning is a discretionary activity, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, who founded a malnutrition clinic at the Boston Medical Center.

Persistent, elevated stress hormones have an impact on the size and architecture of the developing brain, a group of scientists reported in 2016, “specifically the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.” Mental health implications abound: people experiencing food insecurity alone, even without warfare, display depression, PTSD, hopelessness, and suicidality.

All this is happening to innocent Palestinian children in Gaza as a result of Israel’s draconian strategy. And that, in turn, is the result of Hamas’s sadistic attacks on innocent Israelis, which struck the country with a novel, pervasive fear of insecurity. And that, in turn is the result of . . . You can spin back through the weary history of that tortured land and try to find the original sin that caused it all. Or you can understand that every effect there has a cause and no untanglement of cause and effect is feasible.

Then, having been foiled by history, you can look to the future and understand that what lies ahead, damaged by the present, will effectively continue the war’s harm for a generation or more—even if a total cease fire were declared today.