Financial investments have never been an easy prospect. For one, there are a number of risks involved, no matter where you are moving an investment portfolio.
There’s market risk, liquidity risk, interest rates, credit hikes – everything that can happen to the market has happened at one point in time, and some investors were either left happy or left wanting.
That is why, over time, it became known as an expert’s game. In other words, if you were going to make a sizable investment, you either had to have a forgone knowledge of the market or enough money to hire a broker who could effectively balance risk against reward.
In 2023 – also an important year of milestones for ML and AI tech – however, that seems to have changed. Nowadays, big data has given both experts and amateurs a clearer insight into complex data, all of which can be analysed to better understand the market and formulate solutions. As we said, making financial investments has never been easy. So is it easy now?
The Power Of Big Data
You might be thinking, “It doesn’t matter how big the data is. It will still be complicated to understand and cannot solely be used to persuade decisions.”
And in many ways, you’d be right. But there’s another technology that has entered the investment scene that might change that.
Artificial intelligence has been around for a while, but people are only just starting to understand how crucial it could be in assimilating and translating data.
For instance, FINQrecently published an article on unleashing the power of AI for investment insights: How Data Analysis Enhances Investment Decisions. In this article, they explain how they are using the combined strength of big data and AI to essentially open up the ballpark for future investors.
Not only can AI attain and assimilate big data, but it can then siphon that data into enhanced solutions, and recommendations, and essentially formulate an investor’s strategy for them.
Making Investment Easier
Of course, even with big data, it would be difficult for investors – and even advisors for that matter – to crunch the numbers and identify specific patterns. With AI, however, this can be done for them, and the capabilities for the tech to do so will only get better over time.
The more big data that AI tools are analysing, the more the technology will understand the market, how it swings, trends, patterns, old solutions, new solutions, and even begin to identify movements that haven’t happened yet.
This essentially makes the route into the financial market – as well as navigating it – easier for amateur investors.
You might now be asking: if everyone becomes an expert through big data, what will the financial market look like in another ten or so years? And the truth is, we don’t know. It’s clear that the financial industry is changing, but how far it might go, and what it might mean for future investments, is hard to tell. What is clear though, is that AI has the power to harness big data and make it accessible.
The Hamas-Israel War did not come out of the blue. And it is not just paving the way to the destruction of Hamas or a hellish ground assault. It seeks to devastate Gaza and could result in expulsions in the West Bank over time. The War will inflame violence within and around Israel. It could escalate across the region. It reflects the failure of 50 years of U.S. geopolitics in the region and will further penalize global economic prospects.
Neither apartheid nor violence can secure an enduring peace in the early 21st century. What is needed is multilateral cooperation and multipolar diplomacy in the region – before it’s too late.
On October 7, roughly 50 years after the Yom Kippur War, several Palestinian militant groups, led by Hamas, launched a coordinated offensive against nearby Israeli cities, Gaza border crossings, and adjacent military installations, which led to Israel’s rapid, lethal counter-offensive. After the brutal Hamas offensive, odd even in view of the violent history of the region, the Israeli preparation for a massive ground assault to destroy Hamas poses an existential threat to 2.3 million Gazans in the region.
That’s the standard narrative. But it’s not what has been taking place behind the façade. That’s far worse.
The Hamas-Israel War is not just the first major direct conflict within Israeli territory since the country’s founding. It is also the latest manifestation of Israel’s “strategy of tension” dating from the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the rise of U.S. economic and military ties. This tension has been seen in several countries, including during Italy’s “years of lead”; a period of extraordinary social turmoil, political violence and economic volatility that lasted two decades. Starting in the late 1980s, it was marked by a wave of false flag terror, first attributed to the far-left but later linked with far-right, as well as Italian and U.S. intelligence agencies.1The strategic objective is to use a general sense of insecurity against targeted groups and to buttress an increasingly repressive government. As geopolitics replaces development, economic welfare suffers, but the perceived common enemy is expected to “unite the nation.”2 Historically, the strategy of tension has paved way to neoliberal economics; for example, the 1973 Pinochet regime relying on U.S.-trained Chicago economists in Chile.3
In contrast to the standard narrative, the Hamas war is manna from heaven to Benyamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has escalated the suppression of Palestinians ever since international attention has focused on the proxy war in Ukraine. It certainly did not come out of the blue. Netanyahu himself has contributed to the creation of Hamas since the ‘90s. In effect, the strategic tension has lasted more than five decades in Israel. But since late 2022, it has been accelerated by the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history.
Legitimisation of far-right extremism
In July, the ex-chief of Mossad Tamir Pardo (2011-16) charged prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu for bringing parties “worse than the Ku Klux Klan” into his government.4 He had a point (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Some Controversial members of Netanyahu far-right cabinet
Source: Wikimedia Commons
(From left to right) Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezazel Smotrich, Israel Katz
Since the tumultuous 70s, far-right politics, violent Messianic settlers and ultra-nationalists like Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach have given rise to far-right movements, massacres of Palestinians and political parties like Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), Kach’s ideological successor. Its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, first gained national notoriety in 1995 by brandishing a Cadillac hood ornament that had been stolen from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car. “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too,” Ben-Gvir said proudly.5 Weeks later, Rabin, the architect of the peace process, was assassinated.
As Netanyahu’s minister of national security, Ben-Gvir has espoused Kahanism. As a settler, he lives in an illegal settlement. He has openly called for expulsions of Arab citizens. His provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the locale of al-Aqsa Mosque, contributed to the onset of the ongoing turmoil.6
Another fatal mistake of the Israeli government has been the decision of Netanyahu’s energy minister Israel Katz that no “electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter” until the “abductees” would be free.7 Reminiscent of Nazi practices, such collective punishments are morally flawed and counter-productive in practice. When revenge massacres are imposed on innocent civilians, they will breed new resentment, new bitterness, and generations of resistance.
Through his 20 years of participation in Israeli cabinets, Katz has fought for more resources for settlements. Opposing any two-state solution, he pushes for the annexation of the West Bank and wants to make Gaza Egypt’s headache.
Netanyahu’s minister of defence is Bezazel Smotrich, a vehement opponent of a Palestinian state and a self-proclaimed fascist, racist and homophobe, who also lives in an illegally built West Bank settlement. In 2021, he declared that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, should have “finished the job” and kicked all Palestinians out of Israel when it was founded. He believes that members of Israel’s Arab minority communities are citizens, but only “for now”.8
When Smotrich was entrusted with much of the administration of the occupied West Bank, the fox took over the hen house. It was a signal to Palestinian Arabs: Leave!
These are the hollow men in Netanyahu’s government. Neither they nor their peers will ever support policies recognising the sovereign and human rights of the Palestinians.
From democracy to autocracy
Since January, the Netanyahu government has pushed for highly controversial judicial reforms, a series of changes to the judicial system and the balance of powers. The effort has been led by Netanyahu’s deputy PM and minister of justice, Yariv Levin, and the chair of the Knesset’s constitution committee, Simcha Rothman. Levin fought Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, opposes a two-state solution and supports settlers.9 A critic of Netanyahu’s corruption trial, Rothman represents the militant, anti-Arab Religious Zionist Party that promotes far-right Kahanism and Jewish supremacy and supports the annexation of occupied territories to Israel.10
The amendment was passed by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in late July. It seeks to limit the Supreme Court’s power to exercise judicial review, granting the government control over judicial appointments. It caused a political and constitutional turmoil that came to a head on 12 September, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. The judicial reform effort reflects descent toward autocracy and was opposed by most Israelis in massive protests.
In the past, Israel’s judiciary has regularly upheld policies, practices and laws that helped enforce “Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians”, including upholding administrative detentions, green-lighting the destruction of villages, and imposing restrictions on family reunification. But on some occasions, the Supreme Court has intervened in protecting Palestinian rights. If the institution loses power to the government, even this “slim and inconsistent” protection would disappear. In view of critics, the proposed overhaul would have chilling implications for Palestinian rights.11
Hoping to undermine the Israeli democracy, Netanyahu’s bedfellows seek to transform Israel within and annex the occupied territories. Given that the coalition government held a 64-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset prior to the Hamas war, opposition parties can do little within the legislature to stop judicial reform.12
Marginalisation of the peace movement
While the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian nightmare were planted 50 years ago, the ongoing Hamas-Israel war has been on the cards for years.13 After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan
Heights. Since then, Israel has allowed and even encouraged its citizens to live in these settlements, often motivated by religious, ultra-ethnic and ultra-nationalist sentiments attached to Jewish history and the land of Israel.
On the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, I toured West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the Golan Heights, and interviewed both the colonisers and the colonised. What I found most ominous was the gap of perceptions between the two. The Israelis saw a bright future and thought they were paving the way to lasting peace. The Palestinians saw no future and dreamed of a land of their own.
After the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Labor coalition began to intensify the expansion of the boundaries of Jerusalem eastward. This encouraged a group of Messianic settlers to create a foothold in the West Bank, including Ma’ale Adumim by the group Gush Emunim.
These religious far-right Jews were met with protests by the peace activists.14
Among the peace movement’s leaders was the author Yael Dayan, the daughter of general Moshe Dayan and future Labor politician and feminist. Like in 1973, Dayan said recently that “there is not and there cannot be a real and lasting peace that can be reconciled with the massive colonisation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”15 After discussions with her, I joined the movement and the protests. I saw the settlements as a time bomb that could subvert Israeli democracy, endanger Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens and Palestinians, morph into apartheid, and cause a cycle of “forever wars” with its Arab neighbours.
One of the founders of the “Peace Now” movement was the late novelist Amos Oz, a dear friend whose book on the settler-induced divisions In the Land of Israel (1983) I would later translate. He was among the first Israelis to advocate a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Oz warned of the dangers of the occupation already back in1967 and called the radicalized settlers neo-Nazis (Figure 2). At the same time, he also said he loved Israel, “even when I can’t stand it”. In one way or another, all of us were called “traitors”. But like Amos, we’d respond: “At least we’re in good company.”
Figure 2. “Corrupting Occupation”
“Even unavoidable occupation is a corrupting occupation; an enlightened and humane and liberal occupation is occupation.” Amos Oz, 1967
In retrospect, the early peace efforts were vital, but no match to the settlement policies that have been legitimised in terms of national security interests and fuelled by massive arms trade and the US Big Defense. Like the peace movement, international community considers the settlements a violation of international law.16 Yet, hawkish advocates of national security favoured their expansion. For all practical purposes, they have won. In the early 1970s, there were barely 2,000 settlers in the West Bank. Today, that figure exceeds 500,000. Their problem is that they will never win the peace.
Far-right terror and assassinations
Among the peace activists, the concern was that if the Messianic far-right Jewish settlers, many of whom came from the US, would be permitted to create a substantial de facto presence, it would be legitimised over time by de jure measures.
In the 1980s, Gush Emunim radicalised further, forming the Jewish Underground, a radical terrorist organisation. Two issues contributed to its creation: the Camp David Accords that led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979, which the movement vehemently opposed, and the settlement project itself, which brought the far-right Messianic Jews in close proximity with Palestinian communities.17
Through the first half of the 1980s, the Underground conducted several vicious terror attacks, including car bombs against Palestinian mayors, and plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock at the centre of the al-Aqsa mosque. The effort was to exploit terror to drive Palestinians out of the occupied territories.18
I had no doubts of these extremist trajectories after a mid-70s meeting in Jerusalem with the US-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, the far-right ultra-nationalist politician and later a member of the Knesset until his conviction of terrorism. Having co-founded the far-right Jewish Defense League in the US, Kahane established the ultra-radical Kach in Israel. Both used terror to advance their aims. In the late 1950s, Kahane’s fanatic anticommunism had made him an “informant” with the FBI.19 By the 70s, he promoted ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As he said at the time, “Every day the Arabs of Israel move closer to becoming a majority. Israel should not be committed to national suicide. Why would we allow demography, geography, and democracy to push Israel closer to the abyss?”
I had never met anyone as full of hate and fully expected Kahane to die in violence (Figure 3).
Figure 3. “Kahane was right”
Source: Wikimedia Commons (France)
“Kahane was right, about this there can be no debate!” A not-so-subtle reference to the need for ethnic cleaning in the Occupied Territories (Sticker in Jerusalem, 2010)
Fast-forward to November 1990. As I was walking to Grand Central, I heard shots and saw a man running. Kahane had been assassinated in midtown Manhattan. But his spirit lived on. Just four years later, Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Amir was associated with religious extremists influenced by Kahanism. Like the Hamas offensive, the assassination was initially attributed to an “intelligence failure”. In reality, the murder was due to the failure of Israel Security Agency (ISA, or Shin Bet). The ISA could have stopped the killer in advance.20
Was the assassination “allowed” to happen by the far-right that had most to gain from it?. In a sense, Rabin’s assassination was the Israeli mirror image of the prior Sadat’s assassination, which has been attributed to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Figure 4). Their members later figured among the fedayeen in Afghanistan that were armed, trained and financed by the CIA’s Operation Cyclone.21
The assassinations’ message to peacemakers was loud and clear: Don’t even try!
Figure 4. Two peace accords, two assassinations
Sources: Wikimedia Commons
(Left) President Anwar Sadat, President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David on 17 September 1978
(Right) Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton, and PLO’s leader Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony on 13 September 1993.
These polarising trends occurred in parallel with the plunge of Israeli Labor, US economic and military aid and growing influence of neoliberal economics.
Plunge of the Labor alignment, US aid and neoliberalism
During the early days of independence, Israel’s politics was dominated by Labor alignments from David Ben-Gurion to Golda Meir. In 1949, the Labor alignment (46) and the left (25) had over 70 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Despite near monopoly, the Labor (51)-left (11) still held over 60 seats in 1973. In other words, Labor actually increased its voice, while the left lost half of its seats. Today, the Labor coalition has lost more than 90 per cent of its representation some 75 years ago (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Rise of US aid, decline of Israeli Labor
Fall of Israeli Labor coalitions since 1974
Sources: Author, data from Israel’s Knesset; ForeignAssistance.gov
US aid to Israel since 1950
Sources: Data from Israel’s Knesset; ForeignAssistance.gov
The debate on the decline of Israeli Labor is long-lasting.22 Usually, the losses are attributed to the failure of the Oslo Accords to make Israelis feel more secure, inability of the alignment to attract Labor voters, failure to stay attuned to demographic shifts, and the overall decline of social democratic parties in Western Europe.
Yet, most analysts fail to associate the parallel trends of the plunge of Israeli labor and the rise of U.S. aid. The erosion hasn’t been gradual and incremental, but disruptive. Even the air triumphs of the Six-Day War were still premised on the French-made Mirage and Super Mystere jets. The US economic and military aid soared only after the 1973 War. Until 2002, Israel was the top recipient of U.S. aid, and it has stayed among the top three with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. U.S. has given Israel over $260 billion in military and economic aid, and $10 billion more for missile defense systems.
For decades a key player in cementing this tie (and undermining Israeli Labor) has been Netanyahu, who has led six Israeli cabinets in the past 25 years. Unsurprisingly, he remains haunted by corruption charges. Through a decade, he has faced a litany of bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges. He needs to stay in power to avoid prosecution.
Despite US aid, the Israeli economy is today more polarised than ever before. Even before the Hamas war, economic growth was slowing. Risks to the outlook were tilted to the downside and risks to inflation to the upside. Continued uncertainty about the judicial reform presented another notable downside risk. Both have been exacerbated by the Hamas war, which Netanyahu has pledged will continue for a long time.23
Worse, due to neoliberal growth policies that Netanyahu has long advocated, Israel has relatively high inequality compared to other OECD countries, despite its early socialism. Long-term trends are alarming. In May, 280 senior economists warned that the government’s budget allocations to the ultra-religious Haredi groups in exchange for their coalition support “will transform Israel in the long run from an advanced and prosperous country to a backward country”.24 The economic backlash associated with the proposed judicial overhaul has already been manifested in a massive capital flight and a sharp decline in foreign investment, resulting in currency depreciation, a sluggish stock market, a slowdown in tax revenues, and rising public debt.25
If the Hamas war threatens to exacerbate Israel’s social and economic tensions, it risks turning Gaza into a desert and the West Bank into a Jewish suburbia.
Gaza’s nightmare and the rise of Hamas
With a population of over 2 million on some 365 square kilometres, the Gaza Strip is one of the world’s most densely populated areas and “largest open-air prison”. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, it became an Egyptian-administrated territory. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, it came under Israeli occupation. The precursor of Hamas, Al Mujamma al Islami (“The Islamic Centre”), was established in the Israeli-occupied Gaza in the 1970s under the auspices of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood.26
One of their adherents was the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the future leader of Hamas. Yassin concentrated the Mujamma’s activities on religious and social services. Ironically, Israeli authorities actively supported its rise, when their main antagonist was the late Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
While PLO operatives in the occupied territories faced brutal repression, the Islamists affiliated with Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to operate in Gaza. Israelis hoped to use the Islamists against PLO.27
Yassin was jailed in 1984 on a 12-year sentence, but released only a year later. At the time, when Netanyahu still served as the Israeli ambassador to the UN, I interviewed him about his Fighting Terrorism (1986), which offered lessons on “how democracies can defeat domestic and international terrorists”. Fast, smart and slick, he represented a new generation of Israeli politicians trained by American PR experts and his former employer, global consultancy BCG. To them the ambitious right-wing Likud politician was manna from heaven.
Launched in 1988 amid the first intifada (uprising), Hamas has always refused to accept the existence of the Israeli state. When the peace process began between Rabin and Arafat, Yassin was again in prison. Hamas launched a campaign of attacks against civilians, which contributed to the rise of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right in 1996 (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Strange bedfellows
Sources: Wikimedia Commons
(Left) Prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s official portrait, 2023 (Right) Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza, in early 2004
Intriguingly, Netanyahu, as prime minister, ordered Yassin to be released from prison (“on humanitarian grounds”), despite his life sentence. He seems to have relied on the Islamists to sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords. After having expelled Yassin to Jordan, Netanyahu allowed him to return to Gaza as a hero in late 1997. Until his killing in 2004, Yassin initiated a wave of suicide attacks against Israelis. As Netanyahu later told his Likud Party’s Knesset members in March 2019, “anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”28
In the 1990s, as part of the Oslo Accords, most of Gaza had been handed over to the Palestinian National Authority, alongside the Israeli settlements, which were evacuated in 2005, despite intense opposition by Israeli far right. In 2007, after a legitimate Hamas election victory that rankled both the West and Fatah, the Islamist group took over and began administering Gaza. That led both Israel and Egypt to impose a land, sea and air blockade, which devastated the poor, ailing economy.
Before the global pandemic, Gazan Palestinians organised widespread protests demanding that Israel end the blockade and address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Already two years ago, Gaza’s economy was on the verge of collapse.29 Yet, those interests that had most to gain from such a humanitarian crisis allowed it to proceed to its inflection point.
The final solution of Netanyahu government’s far right seems to be the devastation of Gaza and the twisted hope that this would cause a mass emigration of Gazans away from the Israeli border. Hence, the preference for the Dahiya Doctrine, outlined by former IDF Chief Gadi Eizenkot in the 2006 Lebanese War and in the 2008-9 Gaza War. It is premised on the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of “hostile regimes”.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”30
Scholars of international law have called it “state terrorism”.31 In view of the UN, it is a “carefully planned” assault intended “to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”.32 In Gaza, it looks increasingly like a war crime of historical magnitude.
After the Hamas offensive, Eisenkot was appointed as a minister without portfolio in Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
West Bank settlements, apartheid regime
The Jewish settlements have fostered a de facto one-state reality in Israel, wherein Israelis have rights and Palestinians don´t. Meanwhile, talks for a two-state solution have been stalling since 2014.33 Rhetoric aside, Netanyahu’s government has “engaged in actions that annex the West Bank and threaten the prospects for a just and lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.34
In the past, periods of heightened security tension and military operations have ensured an opportunity for settlers to establish facts on the ground. After the brutal attack by Hamas, the alarming trend of increased settler violence has rapidly escalated. Nothing has halted the settlers’ steady expansion since the late 1960s and the Israelis’ expansion in East Jerusalem (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Expansion of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, 1967-2021
Source: ICBC
In South Africa, the system of apartheid, based on white supremacy and racial segregation, was in place from 1948 until 1994. In April 2021, the Human Rights Watch warned that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold.35 In early September this year, the ex-chief of Mossad Tamir Pardo said that Israel’s mechanisms for controlling the Palestinians matched the old South Africa. “There is an apartheid state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems”.36
Even amid the peace talks in Oslo in the early 90s, Palestinian per capita income was just 15 per cent relative to the Israeli level. But hopes for peace died with the Jewish far-right assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Despite all the hoopla by the Trump and Biden administrations that the Middle East is at the cusp of peace and prosperity, Palestinian per capita income has fallen and is now only 12.9 per cent relative to the Israeli level, lower than decades ago.37
As bad as these aggregate figures are, they reflect Palestinian averages, not Gaza’s hell. Years of isolation and recurrent conflicts have left the local economy far behind the West Bank’s, due to the Israeli-imposed blockade, four wars, and domestic divisions.
Gazan per capita income is now less than a third of that in the West Bank. Half of the labour is unemployed; over half of the population lives below the national poverty line.38
Long before the Hamas offensive, Palestinian stagnation reflected economic ruin that was excessive even relative to apartheid South Africa. During the apartheid (1948-94), the blacks’ per capita income relative to the whites climbed from 8.6 per cent to 13.5 per cent. In relative terms, the Palestinians’ starting point relative to Israelis was almost twice as high after the Oslo Accords. But today it’s behind that of the blacks at the end of the apartheid. The reversal occurred under the watch of the Trump and Biden administrations (Figure 8).
Figure 8. From apartheid South Africa to West Bank/Gaza
Source: Author, data from IMF
Farsighted Israeli leaders no longer deny the reality of apartheid. Last year, former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair called Israel “an apartheid regime”. Recently, the parliament’s former speaker Avraham Burg and renowned historian Benny Morris were among more than 2,000 Israeli and American public figures who signed a public statement that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.”39
Hall of mirrors
The standard narrative about the Hamas-Israel war is a mere façade. Even the argument that Hamas’s offensive was an “intelligence failure” doesn’t seem valid. Based on two years of video evidence, Hamas militants trained for the brutal attacks in at least six sites across Gaza in plain sight and less than a mile from Israel’s heavily fortified and monitored border.40 For all practical purposes, the offensive was preventable. If the intelligence failure wasn’t a failure at all, what was it?
Similarly, the naïve story about Hamas as Israel’s nemesis doesn’t hold water. The group and its brutal attacks went hand in hand with more than two decades of the rise of Likud and the far-right. Just as the Operation Cyclone had led the U.S. to train, arm and finance a generation of Islamist fedayeen in Afghanistan, including Osama Bin Laden, Israelis thought they could use Hamas; not that Hamas could use them.
Moreover, the war in Gaza serves as a smokescreen to the escalation of settler expansion and violence in the West Bank, which Netanyahu’s far-right ministers hope would result in its annexation and Palestinian expulsions.
Regionally, the war has led Biden’s hawks to refocus attention to Iran. It’s an old project. Since 2003, US Army has conducted an analysis called TIRANNT (Theater Iran Near-Term) for a full-scale war with Iran. Reportedly, this contingency plan (CONPLAN 8022) would be activated in the eventuality of a second 9/11, on the presumption that Iran would be behind it.41 Expectedly, the war has inflamed tensions with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which many in the Congress and the White House would like to link with Iran, to legitimise a major regional confrontation.
Tellingly, after the Hamas attack, when Republican senator Lindsay Graham was asked whether he wanted the US and Israel to “bomb Iran even in the absence of direct evidence of their involvement,” he responded, “Yeah.” The answer stunned even the CNN interviewer, so she asked the question twice and got the same response.42 Recently, Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his panel is drafting legislation to authorize the use of military force in Iran, although U.S. intelligence has said there is no evidence to support the claim of Iran’s direct involvement. McCaul’s comments came on the 21st anniversary of the enactment of a measure that authorized the 2003 misguided U.S. invasion of Iraq.
To Netanyahu’s government, an Iran conflict would divert attention from Gaza and the West Bank. It’s a long dream. In 2011 Netanyahu ordered the Mossad and IDF to prepare for an attack on Iran within 15 days, until Pardo and then-Chief of Staff Benny Gantz – now in opposition but a key member in Netanyahu’s not-so-united war cabinet – questioned the Prime Minister’s legal authority to give such an order without cabinet approval. So, Netanyahu backed off.43 But Iran remains on the government’s agenda. And some critics argue that it is part of the Gaza war agenda. A month ago, in parallel with the domestic Supreme Court turmoil, Netanyahu’s Mossad chief David Barnea vowed to target Iran’s “highest echelon”, if Israeli Jews would be hurt in terror.44
Nor has the Biden administration avoided the temptation to use the war and its “solidarity with Israel” as a demonstration effect for other hotspots. When Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Netanyahu and members of the Israeli war cabinet, he conveyed the US’s “ironclad support” for Israel. It is the liturgical term that the White House has used in the context of Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, the Philippines, and other major US non-NATO allies that have committed to common defence objectives, military bases and arms purchases from US Big Defense, such a Raytheon, Austin’s former employer.45
Giving peace a chance, finally
The ongoing war has severely undermined US credibility as a neutral broker in the region. Officially, Washington seeks to de-escalate tensions. But rhetoric aside, as Israel escalated its counter-offensive, US diplomats were being discouraged from publicly using phrases that would urge calm. In leaked messages, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials did not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire”, “end to violence/bloodshed”, and “restoring calm”.46 It preceded the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to block a “humanitarian pause” and corridors into Gaza.
The Democratic Biden administration has continued Trump’s Middle East policies, which effectively ignore the Palestinian nightmare. Washington’s bipartisan consensus is driven by the priorities of the Pentagon and the Big Defense, which profits from every new major violent conflict by selling security without peace. The Gaza war is a textbook case (Figure 9).
Data from Palestinian Health Ministry, Palestine Red Crescent Society and Israeli Medical Services, Al Jazeera
In the first week of its counter-offensive, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza. That’s almost the number of bombs the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in an entire year. But that may be just a prelude to what’s looming ahead. If and when the expected Israeli ground assault – a “disaster foretold,” as the Israeli columnist Gideon Levy puts it – will begin, all these casualty figures will pale in comparison.
When 1 million people are internally displaced, 90,000 residential units are damaged, electricity and water are effectively denied (and all this before the actual assault), the consequent damage can no longer be considered collateral but intended. And if health systems collapse, misery and vice will follow in the form of famine, epidemics paving the way to new massacres and new wars.
Today, the worst economic risks are unwarranted geopolitical tensions. The outbreak of the Israeli-Hamas War is threatening to inject new volatility back into energy markets, harking back to last year’s commodity chaos after the proxy war in Ukraine. As Biden made his primetime case for “wartime aid to Israel and Ukraine,” he expanded U.S. involvement into two major fronts; multiplied the need for tens of billions of dollars in military aid in addition to the past hundreds of billions of dollars; and accelerated the probability of a looming U.S. debt crisis that could have global repercussions.
After $8 trillion in the misguided post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. war theaters have not disappeared. It’s only the arenas that are shifting. The Biden administration is preparing another unwarranted Global Cold War in a perceived Manichean world of “noble democracies” and “evil autocracies.”
In the past half a century, no US-brokered initiative has achieved enduring peace in the Middle East. Washington has a geopolitical interest in the region as an energy reserve and US defence contractors’ lucrative client. By contrast, China’s approach is premised on stability and cooperation that are necessary for economic development. Stressing the importance of peace and development, Beijing has called for an “immediate ceasefire” and repeated its support for a two-state solution with an independent state of Palestine as a way out of the conflict.
Both the US and China have a role in the Middle East. But without peace, there can be no stability. And without stability, there can be no development. Half a century of wars, colonisation and apartheid will never bring peace to the region; but they will surely ensure more despair, more wars and more dead and injured civilians. What is needed in the region is multilateral cooperation and multipolar diplomacy.
It is time to give peace and development a chance – before it’s too late.
Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/.
References:
See e.g., Bull, Anna Cento. 2012. Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation. Berghahn Books; Dossi, Rosella. 2001. “Italy’s Invisible Government.” University of Melbourne. Contemporary Europe Research Centre.
See Ferraresi, Franco. 1997. Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War. Princeton, N. J: Princeton University Press; Bull; Ganser, Daniele. 2005. NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. London: Routledge.
See Valdes, Juan Gabriel. 2008. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Times of Israel Staff. 2023. “Ex-Mossad chief: Netanyahu allies worse than KKK, overhaul is his ‘master plan’.” Times of Israel, 27 July.
Hendrix, Steve; Rubin, Shira. 2022. “Israel election: A far-right politician moves closer to power”. The Washington Post, 28 Oct.
Toosi, Nahal. 2022. “Biden’s strategy for a far-right Israel: Lay it all on Bibi”. Politico, 20 Dec. See also “Wave of international criticism after Ben Gvir visits flashpoint Temple Mount”. Times of Israel. 3 January.
McKernan, Bethan. 2023. “No power, water or fuel to Gaza until hostages freed, says Israel minister.” The Guardian 12 Oct.
Times of Staff. 2023. “Levin said to call for judges who ‘understand’ why Jews don’t want to live near Arabs.” 29 May.
Ibid.
Oren, Neta; Waxman, Do. 2022-2023. “King Bibi” and Israeli Illiberalism: Assessing Democratic Backsliding in Israel during the Second Netanyahu Era. 009-2021″. The Middle East Journal. Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute. 76 (3): 303-26.
Zaher, Sawsan. 2023. “The Impact of Israel’s Judicial Reforms on Palestinians: A Legal Perspective”. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Mar.
Cook, Steven. 2023. “Israel’s Judicial Reforms: What to Know.” Council on Foreign Relations, 26 Jul
Sprinzak, Ehud. 1986. Fundamentalism, Terrorism, and Democracy: The Case of the Gush Emunim Underground. Presentation at the Wilson Center, Sep. 16. See also T. Hermann & D Newman. 1992. “Extra Parliamentarism in Israel: A Comparative Study of Peace Now and Gush Emunim.” Middle Eastern Studies, 28 (3), 509-530.
De Giovannangeli, Umberto. 2020. “Yael Dayan: ‘My Israel Has Been Betrayed.’ “ Reset Dialogues on CivilizationC. 7 May
Barak-Erez, Daphne. 2006. “Israel: The security barrier – between international law, constitutional law, and domestic judicial review”. International Journal of Constitutional Law. 4 (3): 548.
Sandler, Shmuel. 1997.Religious Zionism and the State: Political Accommodation and Religious Radicalism in Israel,’ in Bruce Maddy-Waitzman, Efraim Inbar (eds.) Religious Radicalism in the Greater Middle East, Besa Studies in International Security, Routledge.
Masalha, Nur. 2000. Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion. London: Pluto Press. See also Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. 2010. Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism. Oxford University Press.
Compare Friedman, Robert I. 1990. The False Prophet Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member. Lawrence Hill & Co., Brooklyn, NY.
Barnea, Avner. 2017. “The Assassination of a Prime Minister: The Intelligence Failure that Failed to Prevent the Murder of Yitzhak Rabin.” International Journal of Intelligence, Security, and Public Affairs, 19:1, 23-43
For a critical review, see Parenti, Christian. 2001. America’s Jihad: A History of Origins. Social Justice, Vol. 28, No. 3 (85), Law, Order, and Neoliberalism (Fall 2001), pp. 31-8
Inbar, Efraim. 2009. The Decline of the Israel Labor Party. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Bar-Ilan University, 23 February; Rapoport, Meron. 2020. “What happened to Israel’s Labor party?” Middle East Eye, 30 April; Mor, Shany. 2020. “Doves’ Labor Lost: How Israel’s Once-Dominant Party Faded into Insignificance.” Mosaic, 12 August.
Compare Israel: 2023 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Israel. IMF, 15 June.
Wrobel, Sharon. 2023. “‘Backward country’: Economists warn government over Haredi budget allocations.” Times of Israel, 21 May.
Razin, Assaf and Sadka, Efraim. 2023. Economic Consequences of a Regime Change: Overview. NBER Working Paper No. 31723, Sep.
See Chehab, Zaki. 2007. Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of Militants, Martyrs and Spies. I.B. Tauris; and Pappe, Ilan. 2017. The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories. Oneworld Publications.
Higgins, Andrew. 2009. “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.” Wall Street Journal, 25 January.
Weitz, Gidi. 2020. “Another Concept Implodes: Israel Can’t Be Managed by a Criminal Defendant.” Haaretz, 9 October.
Economic costs of the Israeli occupation for the Palestinian people: The Gaza Strip under closure and restrictions. UNCTAD. 13 August 2020.
London, Yaron. 2008. “The Dahiya Sategy.” [Interview with IDF Northern Command Chief Gadi Eisenkot], 8 June.
Falk, Richard. 2011. “Israel’s Violence Against Separation Wall Protests: Along the Road of STATE TERRORISM.” 7 January.
Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 25 September 2009.
See also “Why Racist Rabbi Meir Kahane Is Roiling Israeli Politics 30 Years After His Death”. Haaretz. 21 February 2019.
Peace Now in a letter to the President of the United States and the UN Secretary-General: Do not believe Netanyahu. His government is effectively annexing the Occupied Territories. Peace Now, 20 September.
A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. Human Rights Watch, April 2021.
Goldenberg, Tia. 2023. “A former Mossad chief says Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank.” AP, 7 September.
Steinbock, Dan. 2023. “Hamas-Israel War and 50 Years of Failed Military Policies.” China-US Focus, 13 October.
IMF database.
“The Elephant in the Room.” See https://sites.google.com/view/israel-elephant-in-the-room/home
Murphy, Paul P. 2023. “Hamas militants trained for its deadly attack in plain sight and less than a mile from Israel’s heavily fortified border.”
See Arkin, William. 2006. “The Pentagon Preps for Iran.” Washington Post, 16 April 16.
“US and Israel should bomb Iran: Senator Lindsey Graham.” Middle East Monitor, 12 October.
“Ex-Mossad Chief Says He Questioned Legality of Netanyahu’s Order to Prepare Iran Strike”. Haaretz. 31 May 2018
bian, Emanuel. 2023. “Mossad chief vows to target Iran’s ‘highest echelon’ if Israelis, Jews hurt in terror.” Times of Israel, 10 September.
Compare Steinbock, D. 2022. “The Centre of International Insecurity“, The World Financial Review, 22 June; Steinbock, Dan. 2023. “The Unwarranted Ukraine Proxy War: A Year Later.”, The World Financial Review, 27 January.
Ahmed, Akbar Shahib. 2023. “Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza ‘De-Escalation’ Talk.” HuffPost, 13 October.
Every type of business needs to understand its target audience to succeed because it allows them to create meaningful marketing content and develop fulfilling services and products. But how do you go about finding your target audience and how do you reach them after finding them?
Research Industry and Competitors
Researching the industry and competitors will help you understand the latest developments and trends, as well as establish who the main competitors are and what they’re doing well. To gather information, attend industry events, read relevant publications, talk to customers, and analyse your competitors’ websites and social media pages.
After gathering essential information, you can begin intensifying your target audience. Think about who will be interested in your products. What are their pain points and needs? What are their demographics? Knowing this information will help steer your products and services in the right direction.
Analyse Your Customer Base
Picking apart existing customer data is a great way to further understand your audience and what makes them tick. A good starting point is reviewing sales data, which will highlight your best-selling products and the customers that are buying them. Then, you can dive into customer support tickets to identify common issues.
To gain real-time insights from your customers, it’s a good idea to conduct customer surveys. You can encourage participation by offering rewards including discounts and exclusive insights into the business.
Create Buyer Personas
Based on extensive customer research and analytics, you can create a buyer persona, which is a fictional representation of the ideal customer. A buyer persona will include the following details:
Name: This helps make the exercise more authentic and sets it aside from other potential buyer personas.
Demographics: How old are they? What is their gender? Where do they live? What is their income? What is their occupation?
Psychographics: What are they interested in? What are their buying habits? What are their core values?
When creating your buyer persona, it’s important to include as much detail as possible. As well as this, anything you include in the customer persona must be backed up by data, which will help shape the character.
Work with Third-Party Businesses
Your business may not have access to certain resources, but that doesn’t mean you can’t team up with third-party businesses to reach your target audience. For example, B2B Lead Generation Companies will help you to identify ideal customers and then encourage them to purchase products. Even if you have team members with experience in such areas, using a dedicated company will grant you access to the latest equipment, expert knowledge, and an external lens.
Create New Opportunities
Alongside the strategies already mentioned, you cast your business’s net wider by creating new opportunities. For example, by expanding into new markets, you’ll have the opportunity to explore new industries and customer segments. Alternatively, by focusing on innovation, you can attract customers with exciting technologies and ways of operating.
Following the tips outlined above will help you uncover your target audience and connect with them, which is an essential ingredient when it comes to finding success.
The healthcare industry saw the worst amid the pandemic, but the crisis brought several valuable lessons. The most critical one was to prioritize patient experience over everything else. But that’s easier said than done because clinics, small practices, and large hospitals bear the burden of multiple and complex administrative processes.
Automation technology is a game-changer in this context as it can take over repetitive tasks, freeing providers to concentrate on patient care. According to a 2020 survey, 90% of large healthcare organizations stated that they have an automation strategy in place. It was a massive increase from only 53 percent in 2019.
The numbers are equally impressive on the revenue front, with the global healthcare automation market size touching $35.2 billion in 2022. The revenue is projected to reach a staggering $90.88 billion by 2032. Undoubtedly, missing out on the healthcare automation bandwagon is not a choice for providers and organizations.
At this point, you must be selective about the processes you should automate. You can start with the following areas when leading your practice on the automation journey.
Appointment Scheduling and Reminders
Appointment scheduling is perhaps the most cumbersome process for healthcare organizations. Whether you run a small clinic or a chain of hospitals, you may struggle to manage schedules, fit in patients, and handle no-shows. Automating the appointment scheduling process can help you overcome these woes.
An online scheduling system can be a savior. According to Zippia, 68% of patients say that they prefer medical providers with online appointment booking and cancellation platforms. Besides patient convenience, it reduces the workload on administrative staff. Integrating reminders via SMS, email, or phone calls into the system is even better because it can decrease no-show rates.
Revenue Cycle Management
While patient care should be the primary goal for healthcare providers, revenues are critical to fuel the business. Revenue cycle management (RCM) is a complex operational area covering the financial aspects of patient care.
The cycle includes everything from the first appointment to the final payment. You can imagine the sheer complexity of the process when treating hundreds or thousands of patients monthly.
A revenue cycle management company can automate the entire process to reduce your workload. Additionally, automation minimizes the possibility of human error and enhances the financial health of healthcare organizations.
According to Millin Associates, automation of revenue cycle management in healthcare comprises two key elements:
Streamlining Billing and Invoicing
An automated RCM solution generates accurate patient invoices with relevant information such as treatment codes and insurance. Additionally, it can send electronic invoices to patients, creating a transparent system where patients do not worry about billing surprises.
Automated Claims Processing
Automated RCM systems eliminate the burden of manual processing of insurance claims. Manual processes are error-prone and time-consuming, while automated systems ensure accuracy and speed up the reimbursement process.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) Management
Did you know that nearly 9 in 10 office-based physicians in the US adopted an EHR system as of 2021? By now, automation of health records is probably ubiquitous across the country. That’s because the transition from documents to electronic health records (EHR) offers many benefits to patients and providers.
Automated EHR systems are capable of updating patient records in real time without human intervention. They can even empower healthcare providers with patient-specific critical information such as medication interactions and allergies. Additionally, they serve as the foundation of collaborative care by facilitating secure data sharing among different providers and facilities.
Medication Management
Patient care is not just about treating them when they are at your clinic or hospital. It is about providing long-term care, including ensuring they take the right medications at the right time. Beyond adherence, medication management also entails preventing adverse reactions. The process can be complex for facilities treating many patients simultaneously.
Automated medication management systems can reduce the burden on providers and ensure the best patient outcomes. You can trust the system to send timely medical reminders to your patients and provide dosage instructions. An advanced one can even send alerts to providers when a dose is missed by a patient. Prescription refill reminders are also a valuable feature these systems can offer.
Summing Up
Automation in healthcare can be empowering for providers as it takes them the extra mile with patient care. By automating these processes, you can minimize the need to address administrative challenges.
At the same time, you don’t have to stress about revenues and profits because automation streamlines the business part of running a medical facility. With everything else being taken care of, you can give all your attention to patient well-being.
Since the 2000s, Z library has become one of the largest online libraries offering various books, articles, and research papers on different themes. Z library is a free and open-source platform. Thus, people can use multiple sources to get the necessary article they are interested in. The online library is an invaluable global tool for scholars and learners, offering access to books and articles in several languages. Users may search for books, journals, and papers by title, author, topic, or ISBN using the library’s user-friendly interface. There are several forms for the materials in Z Library, such as PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and DJVU.
After more than 20 years, they are more vital and more appreciated than before. Given their extensive selection of books across all genres, dependable customer support, and user-friendly interfaces, it makes sense that users of these platforms choose them for their reading requirements.
How to Effectively Search and Find E-books on Z library?
To get the most out of your study using Z Library, there are a few guidelines you may adhere to. One of the best suggestions is using sophisticated search methods to hone your search results. You may locate materials related to your study subject using quote marks and Boolean operators.
Another advice is making an app account and keeping your preferred materials in your virtual library. It may facilitate future resource access and assist you in keeping track of the resources you have utilized. The virtual library may also be used to arrange your materials according to subjects or categories.
Here is the list of other tips that may assist you in finding desirable resources on Z library:
Try the search bar first. Use keyword, author, or title searched to find your perfect e-book.
Look through the divisions. The Z-Lib is arranged into categories that allow you to search by topic or genre.
Take a look at the staff selections. You’ll discover quality content since the Z-Lib crew selects their favourite eBooks.
Consult your friends for suggestions. Seek suggestions from people who share your interest in eBooks. They may know some excellent books you have yet to come across.
Suppose you are a newcomer to Z library. In that case, it will be beneficial to use advanced search techniques to come up first with your perfect eBook. These filters allow you to narrow your search to items that meet your requirements. To locate the advanced search filters, use the search box accessible at the top of the site. This will allow you to categorize e-books into reasonable collections that fit your needs. It is time to use your creativity with different combinations of search criteria to discover new books and writers you haven’t heard about before. The advanced search criteria are created for browsing the large expanse of eBooks on the site and finding the perfect fit for taking pleasure in reading.
With Z Library’s sophisticated search function, users may look for materials by ISBN, title, author, or topic. Users may use several sophisticated search strategies to improve the quality of their search results. Boolean operators are one of the most potent advanced search strategies available.
Words or symbols known as “boolean operators” allow users to filter their search results further. For instance, the Boolean operator “OR” may be used by a user looking for materials on “global warming” to get items that include either “global” or “warming.” Additionally, they may look for materials that contain both “global” and “warming” by using the Boolean operator “AND.” Quotation marks are another sophisticated search method for finding a specific term. When searching for information on “climate change,” for instance, a user may use quotation marks to find items that specifically mention “climate change.”
How to Understand the Site’s Features?
Z Library is the best resource for learning the research method because of its many features. One of the most important is the size of its resource collection. The library is one of the most extensive digital libraries in the world, with over 5 million books, journals, and research papers. Additionally, app users may search for materials by ISBN, title, author, or topic, thanks to its sophisticated search tool. Users may also filter materials in the library by category, file format, and language using the filter function. The user interface of the library is meant to be straightforward and intuitive.
Users may look for materials using the search box on the library’s webpage. The book cover, author, title, and a summary are shown alongside the search results in a list design. To access the material, users need to click on the title. Another feature of Z library lets users build their virtual libraries. Users can save their preferred books, articles, and research papers in a virtual library by making an account on the app. Students who need to access materials for their assignments or individuals who do in-depth study on a particular subject may find this feature helpful.
Conclusion
Z library is the best resource for learning the craft of research. Users can access almost any research resource with its extensive library of books, journals, and research papers. The library’s comprehensive search options and intuitive design facilitate the process of finding and accessing content for users. With the software, users may make the most of their research by following the advice and avoiding typical blunders. Z Library is an excellent resource for undertaking in-depth study, whether you’re a professional, researcher, or student.
The media, courts, and public opinion have thoroughly debated the moral and legal concerns of downloading music and films illegally. Nevertheless, media piracy persists. The piracy of books is an often disregarded aspect of media piracy, particularly when compared to music, films, and television piracy. Book piracy has become considerably more feasible with the emergence of “e-books,” or digital copies of publications that can be read on computers or other specialized electronic devices.
Millions of individuals steal digital material instead of purchasing e-books or other digital products. The president of the Society of Authors, Sir Philip Pullman, is offended by this, along with thirty-two other authors, including playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, historian Sir Antony Beevor, and screenwriter Malorie Blackman from Doctor Who. He has signed a joint letter to Business Secretary Greg Clark. Not only is e-book piracy common in the US, but it’s a worldwide issue. A recent research on online copyright infringement by the Intellectual Property Office found that 4 million e-books, or 17% of all e-books read online in the UK, are pirated. In this article, you will discover whether it is legal to download e-books and how to download e-books without violating ethical standards.
As the trend of reading in digital media becomes more and more popular, the question of downloading e-books legally becomes more relevant. It is okay to download e-books, but if you do it from reputable websites or store them on your gadget. It is essential to remember these tips while downloading e-books:
Never download eBooks that are pirated. Purchase digital material and books only from reputable sellers.
Some e-books, unless they come from a reputable seller, could have harmful software that infects your computer with viruses, spyware, and malware.
Unless authorized by the author or the firm, do not distribute e-books. Copyrighted content distribution is illegal and is known as piracy.
There are fraudulent websites that give away best-sellers. These websites may not first seem suspicious. However, they are distributing copyrighted content without authorization. Even if this material is pirated, it is often not free. Numerous .pdf, .epub, .zip, and .exe files are infected with malware that may infect your computer, install spyware to track your online activities, or load adware onto it.
Make sure you have trustworthy security software to stay protected.
Is It Ethical to Download E-Books from Online Sources?
The main goal of libraries is to enable public education as a kind of social good, not to profit writers and publishers. In such a scenario, the moral line separating using a library from downloading illegally becomes less apparent. It essentially boils down to your preference for the author’s impact over your convenience. Libraries minimise the impact on writers while maximizing the benefits of reading for the general audience and the public domain. Suppose one is going to ignore the author’s permission. In that case, one has to consider the qualitative distinctions between book piracy and library borrowing.
It is reasonable to assume that most librarians are deeply driven to provide the best possible service and are dedicated to ensuring that knowledge in all its forms is widely accessible. Librarians want to make it simple, dependable, and fast for users to get the material they need or want via e-books. They have to operate under some constraints, however. Libraries must respect the terms and agreements they choose to engage in when deciding to access specific information because publishers are interested in preserving intellectual property, and they acknowledge the significant contributions made by writers and publishers. This is particularly true in the present setting, when many conflicting use guidelines may be an enormous challenge for readers and librarians to get beyond.
Librarians may struggle to balance the rights holders’ and readers’ interests when dealing with e-books. For instance, to meet the demands of a customer, a reference librarian can feel pressured to go over some of the restrictions meant to safeguard the interests of publishers and authors. On the other hand, a library can decide to put author rights ahead of customer service. Even if using some e-books is morally and legally acceptable, a reference librarian may determine that using them is too much work. Instead, they point a client towards a less suitable or inferior resource since it is simpler. Maintaining a good balance is essential.
The Importance of Respecting Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights
Ethical decisions: A reference librarian may decide to:
Utilise e-books to their fullest potential while abiding by the terms of contracts with e-book distributors and publishers, even if the limitations are sometimes rather severe.
Explain to users the rationale behind the several procedures now required to access e-books.
Collaborate with e-book distributors and publishers to provide more approachable options for academic libraries’ users.
Conclusion
Piracy of e-books is ethically unacceptable. If you couldn’t afford a book or didn’t want to pay, you wouldn’t just stroll into a secondhand bookstore or bookshop and take it. The same holds for digital theft: theft is theft. If you steal anything, you are inherently immoral.
Many like reading books online, thanks to the abundance of free internet resources. But the most well-known was Z-Library, which drew tens of thousands of users from all over the globe. In this article, you will discover eight other online libraries that can be good alternatives to Z library.
PDF Drive
One of the best substitutes for Z-Library is PDF Drive, which has almost 80 million e-books. You can easily read them as they are all accessible in PDF format. The fact that this platform is constantly being updated with fresh files and books is its most prominent feature. As a result, more e-books are added to the site every day. There are other formats for e-books, so you may choose your preferred one. The books may be viewed by topic, author, popularity, and other criteria.
Booknet.com
Booknet.com, which seeks to unite authors and readers on one platform, is among the best places to obtain free PDF books. You can read completed novels or works in progress chapter by chapter. You may also get an app for iOS or Android from the website. Here, you may discover books in numerous categories. Science fiction, romance, fantasy, and many more genres are among them. Additionally, you may interact with the writers via blogs or comments. Thus, be sure to check out Booknet if you’re looking for an excellent alternative to Z-Library.
Are you trying to find websites that are the closest to Z-Library? If yes, pay attention to Library Genesis. The website is a search engine for all the reading material you’ll need, including many publications, essays, e-books, and other content. You will quickly locate what you’re searching for on the site, which has over two million books. The platform’s most outstanding feature is how simple it is to discover rare and out-of-print books. Among many other things, Library Genesis provides epub, PDFs, and mobile book formats.
Sci-Hub Proxy
Sci-Hub Proxy is one of the best Z-Library analogues that provides access to research papers and articles. This site has a tonne of reading material since it has been around for the last eleven years. Remember that this site may be accessed via over five hundred domain names. More than 90 million research publications may be found here, including journal articles, book chapters, etc. The website is dependent on donations, which keep the site operational. The website is praised by many for providing open access to information.
E-Library
One of the most incredible places to get free PDF books, e-magazines, research papers, reports, and much more is e-Library. Books in audiobooks, e-books, music, movies, TV shows, learning and exam preparation, periodicals, and newspapers may all be searched by format. The nice thing is that this service offers homework assistance as well. Thus, you may use their tool if you have difficulty and are unsure how to do your task.
BookBoon
Not everyone enjoys reading for pleasure; others read books to learn new things and develop new abilities. One of the most significant resources for learning business and personal development skills through eBooks and audiobooks is BookBoon. You will get the most from this platform as an organization as it allows you to apply the knowledge in groups. You may learn from a variety of categories. These include various topics, such as communication and presentation skills, team and project management, personal productivity, and remote working. Therefore, if you are an employer, you may utilize this website to help your staff become more skilled and productive.
BookYard
You may read more than 24,000 books on Bookyard’s platform with ease. E-books, audiobooks, and much more are available. You may choose from a variety of genres on the site. Science fiction, horror, fantasy, and many other genres are among them. Ads provide money for Bookyard but now rely on their supporters to stay operational. You may support them by donating if you think their platform is superior to Z-Library and enjoy it.
Open Library
More than two million e-books are available to users of Open Library, a non-profit library. It’s among the greatest places to get free PDF books that guarantee you may obtain books in the format of your choice. For your convenience, the novels are available as audiobooks on the website. You may search for the books depending on the topic, genre, author, title, or subject. So, go through them and choose your favourite e-books.
Open Culture
Are you trying to find free internet places where you can download audiobooks? Open Culture may then be your companion. Free cultural and educational material may be located at this alternative to Z-Library. On it, you may access podcasts, films, and online courses. The nice thing about this platform is that it may help with self-learning. Online courses are available in 48 languages, and you may download them for later use. Additionally, Open Culture is a free library that provides online certificate programs for people who need to earn business and management certifications. Make the most of this resource.
Manybooks.net
Manybook.net is an excellent virtual library for those who like reading books. The website presents each category and genre in an easy-to-understand manner. Its extensive contents are the reason they provide it as a free substitute for Z-library. This site offers a vast selection of novels ranging from romance, fantasy, young adult, adventure, and biographies, with over 50,000 e-books available for purchase. You may sort the resources by ratings and languages by clicking on any category you prefer. Alternatively, type the book’s name into the bar search directly. Simply sign into your account to get the free e-books if necessary.
Conclusion
These are the best alternatives to Z library in 2023. These websites are all amazing and will be helpful to you for a long time. Naturally, your requirements and tastes will determine which one you choose to read. Choose the one that best fits you by carefully examining each one. You can read your favourite books for a very long time after you do so.
Credit, in its essence, is trust — the belief that one party will fulfill its obligation to another. Its origins trace back to ancient civilizations, where systems of barter were prevalent. The Mesopotamians, for example, had a system of lending grain which would be paid back during the harvest season. It was not money as we know it today, but a form of credit nonetheless.
Medieval Trade and the Rise of Banking
As trade networks expanded, the need for a more sophisticated system became evident. The Middle Ages saw the emergence of promissory notes and bills of exchange, instruments that allowed merchants to trade without physically moving vast amounts of currency. These instruments were precursors to our modern banking and lending systems.
In Italy, the Medici family, among other banking dynasties, leveraged these instruments, establishing an extensive network of banks across Europe. They introduced basic banking practices that laid the foundation for the financial institutions we recognize today.
The Modern Age: Formalizing Credit
The 19th and 20th centuries marked significant strides in the world of credit. With the industrial revolution came increased consumerism, which led to the establishment of credit bureaus and the widespread use of credit cards. The infrastructure around lending and borrowing became more sophisticated, and the concept of credit scores emerged, determining the creditworthiness of individuals.
Modern Lending
Today, lending is not just the domain of large banks. A plethora of specialized lenders cater to various segments of the market. In the UK, for instance, “Everyday Loans” stands out as a notable brand in the realm of modern lending. While banks have traditionally been the primary source of loans for many, companies like Everyday Loans have offered alternative routes, especially for those who might find it challenging to secure credit from mainstream institutions. By harnessing technology and offering tailored solutions, they embody the spirit of modern-day lending — accessible, flexible, and consumer-centric.
The Future of Credit
With advancements in technology, especially the rise of fintech, we’re witnessing yet another transformation in the credit landscape. Big data, AI, and machine learning are revolutionizing risk assessment, while blockchain offers potential for secure and transparent lending platforms.
While the tools and methodologies evolve, the core principle remains unchanged: trust. As we navigate the future, whether dealing with traditional banking giants or innovative lenders, the essence of credit — belief in one’s promise — endures.
The journey of credit, from ancient grain loans to today’s sophisticated lending platforms, is a testament to human ingenuity and the evolution of trust. As we continue to innovate, ensuring accessibility and fairness in lending remains paramount, guiding us into the next chapter of credit’s storied history.
You’re likely curious about Slovakia’s sports market size, aren’t you? Well, you’re in the right place. Whether it’s the impact of football, the influence of hockey, or emerging sports trends, we’ve got you covered. We’ll even dive into the retail sales of sports goods. So, get ready to explore the fascinating world of Slovakia’s sports industry with us.
Overview of Slovakia’s Sports Industry
In Slovakia, you’ll find that the sports industry has a significant impact, contributing greatly to the country’s economy and culture. You’ll be surprised at how much freedom the industry offers, too! Be it as an athlete, a fan, or an entrepreneur, there’s a spot for you in this market. It’s not just about the competition; it’s about the opportunities that arise from it.
Slovakia’s reputation is growing on the international sporting stage. You’ll see Slovak athletes shining in hockey, tennis, and football tournaments worldwide. These successes aren’t just individual victories; they’re national triumphs that spur economic growth. If You are interested in sports betting You can check doxxbet promo kod. Sports tourism is booming, and the demand for sports equipment and facilities has surged.
But it’s not all business. The love of sport is embedded in the Slovak spirit. Local communities rally around their teams, and families bond over shared passions. Sports isn’t just a game in Slovakia; it’s a way of life, a symbol of freedom.
Professional Sports Leagues in Slovakia
While you might be aware of Slovakia’s sporting achievements, what you mightn’t know is that it’s the professional sports leagues that form the backbone of this thriving industry. These leagues represent a unique blend of tradition, competitiveness, and freedom – the freedom to chase dreams, the freedom to express talent, and the freedom to unite under the banner of sport.
Slovak Extraliga in Ice Hockey: As the highest-tier ice hockey league in Slovakia, it’s a breeding ground for world-class players who go on to compete internationally.
Slovak Super Liga in Football: This is where footballing dreams are born and nurtured. It’s not just about the game; it’s about the spirit of competition and camaraderie.
Extraliga in Basketball: A relatively newer league, it’s rapidly gaining popularity, showcasing that Slovakians aren’t afraid to embrace fresh challenges.
Slovak Volleyball Extraliga: This league reflects Slovakia’s love for team sports and the thrill of the game.
The Impact of Football in Slovakia
You can’t underestimate the impact of football in Slovakia, as it’s not only a popular sport but also a significant part of the country’s culture and economy. In fact, it’s an industry that contributes substantially to Slovakia’s GDP and creates jobs for thousands of people. For you, as an enthusiast, it’s more than just a game. It’s a symbol of freedom and unity, a way to escape the daily grind, and a platform to express your passion.
Let’s look at some facts and figures that further illustrate the influence of football in Slovakia:
Category
Football
Contribution
Importance
GDP
Significant
Boosts the economy
Employment
Thousands of jobs
Reduces unemployment
Culture
Deeply rooted
Unites people
Freedom
Symbol of liberty
Encourages self-expression
Passion Widely followed
Fuels enthusiasm
As you can see, football isn’t just a recreational activity. It’s an engine that propels the country forward, allowing you to revel in the freedom it brings while contributing positively to Slovakia’s socio-economic fabric. It’s the heart of the Slovak sports market.
Hockey’s Influence on Slovakia’s Market
You’re likely aware of hockey’s popularity in Slovakia, but have you considered its economic impact?
Picture the potential of sponsorship and advertising opportunities within this sphere.
Now, think about the role this sport plays in cultivating hockey talent and consequently boosting the market.
1. Hockey’s Economic Impact
In Slovakia’s sport market, hockey’s economic impact really stands out, and it’s a game-changer you can’t overlook. Let’s look at how this sport, adored by many, pours money into our economy and drives growth:
Job Creation: Stadiums, clubs, and retail stores provide employment opportunities for thousands.
Tourism Boost: International tournaments attract fans worldwide, adding to our tourism revenue.
Infrastructure Development: Investments in arenas and training facilities improve our cities and towns.
National Pride: Hockey’s success spurs patriotism, indirectly benefiting the local market.
2. Sponsorship and Advertising Opportunities
Often, hockey’s popularity and influence in Slovakia’s market present numerous sponsorship and advertising opportunities that you shouldn’t miss out on. As a nation deeply passionate about this sport, companies can exploit this affection to their advantage. They can sponsor teams, advertise during matches, or even invest in merchandise. With such freedom in marketing maneuvers, you’re not limited in your promotional tactics.
The buzz created around hockey games, whether it’s local or international, is a great platform for you to showcase your brand. Leveraging this hype can gain you wider recognition and, in turn, increase sales. Don’t let the opportunity slide by.
It’s time to seize the moment and make your mark in Slovakia’s vibrant hockey scene.
3. Cultivating Hockey Talent
Building on the popularity of hockey in Slovakia, it’s not just about taking advantage of advertising opportunities; it’s also about nurturing the wealth of talent that this sport-loving nation offers. You see, Slovakia is a breeding ground for exceptional hockey talent, and it’s your freedom to tap into it.
Freedom to Discover: Unearth the untapped potential of young, passionate players.
Freedom to Develop: Implement training programs that nurture this raw talent.
Freedom to Excel: Propel these players to the international stage, showcasing Slovakia’s prowess.
Freedom to Influence: Shape the future of Slovak hockey, affecting the sport market positively.
Your involvement can be instrumental in fostering new talent, boosting Slovakia’s standing in world hockey, and amplifying the sport market.
Emerging Sports Trends in Slovakia
Over the past few years, you’ve likely noticed a shift in Slovakia’s sports scene, with new trends rapidly gaining traction. Sports that were once sidelined are now taking center stage, as the nation’s appetite for diversity in sports widens.
You’ve likely seen more people engaging in cycling, trail running, and even yoga, haven’t you? These activities are no longer considered hobbies but a way of life for many Slovaks. They’re freeing, flexible, and fun activities that cater to your desire for freedom and adventure.
But it’s not just about individual sports. Team sports are also on the rise. Look at how beach volleyball and floorball are gaining fans and players. They’ve grown beyond just summer pastimes and are now recognized as serious sports, with tournaments attracting national and international attention.
Innovation is another trend you can’t miss. The use of technology in sports, whether it’s to enhance performance, safety, or fan engagement, is becoming the norm. It’s a thrilling time for Slovakia’s sports market, and you’re right at the heart of it.
Retail Sales of Sports Goods in Slovakia
Let’s move on to discussing retail sales of sports goods in Slovakia. You’ll be intrigued by the size of this market, the top-selling products, and the patterns in consumer behavior. Understanding these aspects can provide valuable insights into the overall sports market in the country.
1. Market Size Analysis
To delve into the retail sales of sports goods in Slovakia, you’ll need to understand the scope and dynamics of this rapidly growing market segment. This sector is pulsating with potential, and it’s essential to grasp its scale to fully appreciate it.
Consider these key points:
The retail market for sports goods has seen substantial growth over the past few years.
A burgeoning sports culture is fuelling this progression.
The market isn’t just expanding; it’s diversifying, with a wider range of goods available than ever before.
The potential for new entrants is vast, offering a chance to carve out a niche in this blossoming market.
You have the freedom to explore this market and find your unique space. Don’t just watch this growth – be part of it.
2. Top Selling Products
You’ll find that in Slovakia, the top-selling sports goods range from fitness equipment to athletic apparel, making it a diverse and dynamic retail market. These top-selling products offer you the freedom to choose based on your personal preferences and fitness goals.
Here’s a snapshot of the market:
Product Category
Estimated Sales
Fitness Equipment
HighAthletic Apparel
HighOutdoor Equipment
Moderate Sports Footwear
HighTeam Sports
GoodsModerate
Whether you’re into outdoor adventures, team sports, or personal fitness, there’s a product tailored for you. By understanding these trends, you’re empowered to make informed decisions about your sports gear investments. The Slovakian sports goods market is broad, offering something for everyone.
3. Consumer Behavior Patterns
In analyzing your choices in the Slovakian sports goods market, it’s crucial to understand consumer behavior patterns that shape retail sales.
Freedom of Choice: Slovakian consumers love the freedom to choose from a wide variety of sports goods. A diverse product range drives more sales.
Value for Money: You’ll find that Slovaks appreciate quality but are also cost-conscious. Offering competitive pricing can significantly increase your market share.
Brand Loyalty: Slovaks tend to stick to brands they trust. Establishing a reliable brand image is key.
Online Shopping: With the rise of digital platforms, online sales are skyrocketing. Embrace this trend, and you’ll tap into a vast, growing market.
Understanding these patterns can guide your retail strategy, giving you a competitive edge in the thriving Slovakian sports goods market.
Continuing education is an essential component of professional development for healthcare providers. It enables them to maintain competence, keep up with the latest advancements, and provide the best possible care to patients. However, facilitating effective continuing education across an organization requires proactive involvement from management.
Managers play a pivotal role in creating an environment and culture where continuing education is valued and encouraged. They set the tone by acting as role models in prioritizing ongoing learning.
Management also oversees alignment of organizational objectives with development of individual staff members. When managers are invested in their own continuing training, they gain the knowledge and skills to better promote educational initiatives.
This article will explore the importance of continuing education in healthcare and discuss specific ways management can facilitate opportunities for staff. Investing in continuing education and management training creates a win-win situation, leading to better outcomes for healthcare providers and patients alike.
The Importance of Continuing Education in Healthcare
Continuing professional development (CPD) is essential for healthcare providers to maintain competence and deliver evidence-based care. CPD encompasses formal learning activities that enhance knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
For example, nurses may pursue CPD through academic programs, conferences, grand rounds, simulations, and certifications. These opportunities to learn about new research, technologies, and best practices are vital to improving patient outcomes.
One critical area of continuing education is resuscitation training, such as Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS). ACLS certification equips healthcare teams with the latest skills and protocols to effectively manage cardiopulmonary arrest situations. Requirements for ACLS renewal every two years ensure providers stay up-to-date on the newest science and guidelines around resuscitating patients. This type of specialized continuing education impacts patient survival and recovery rates.
Overall, CPD enables the healthcare workforce to safely meet the complex and evolving demands of practice. Management can facilitate access to impactful CPD activities that align with organizational objectives. When providers participate in pertinent continuing education, they feel empowered to apply their enhanced knowledge to clinical practice.
The Role of Management in Facilitating Continuing Education
Management plays a pivotal role in creating a supportive infrastructure for continuing education. This starts with cultivating a positive organizational culture where CPD is highly valued and emphasized. Managers should communicate that ongoing learning is a priority and align strategic goals with professional development initiatives.
More specifically, managers can facilitate continuing education for staff in the following ways:
Leading by example by pursuing their own CPD activities and special certifications. When managers prioritize their own education, it signals to staff that ongoing learning matters.
Coaching employees on creating personalized learning plans based on performance reviews and career goals. Managers can connect individuals with organizational resources to support professional growth.
Allowing flexibility in scheduling and budgets to accommodate CPD activities. This includes allotting time off and funding for employees to participate in courses, conferences, and other programs.
Tracking and encouraging completion of licensing and certification requirements. Managers can assist staff with meeting mandatory continuing education needs.
Promoting interprofessional education opportunities. Managers can help coordinate educational activities that bring together diverse healthcare roles.
With supportive leadership and infrastructure, continuing education can flourish across an organization. Managers serve as role models, planners, communicators, and facilitators.
The Benefits of Management Training in Facilitating Continuing Education
For managers to effectively facilitate continuing education initiatives, they must possess certain knowledge, skills, and abilities. Formal management training equips leaders with competencies that translate to being better positioned to promote CPD.
Management training programs and certifications can:
Enhance communication, collaboration, and relationship-building skills. This allows managers to connect with staff on development needs and create customized learning plans.
Improve strategic thinking, planning, and decision-making capacities. Managers can then align organizational goals with professional development and continuing education.
Strengthen leadership abilities. Training helps managers role model lifelong learning and advocate for resources to support education.
Optimize management of personnel, budgets, and resources. With these competencies, managers can provide release time and funding to enable staff participation in CPD.
Increase emotional intelligence and mentoring skills. Managers are then better prepared to advise and coach staff throughout their careers.
Investing in management training equips leaders with the tools to effectively oversee, coordinate, and promote continuing education. This benefits both healthcare providers, who can enhance their practice, and patients, who receive up-to-date, quality care.
Challenges in Facilitating Continuing Education
While continuing education is critically important, there are inherent challenges that organizations face in providing and facilitating CPD. Management plays a key role in navigating these barriers.
Common challenges include:
Budgetary constraints on providing education, training, and conference support. Managers must advocate for and allocate funds strategically.
Difficulty covering staff workflows when employees take time off for education activities. Managers can get creative with scheduling.
Limited availability of substitute providers in rural areas. Management may need to leverage online education options.
Trouble tracking completion of licensing requirements. Managers can use auditing systems to monitor compliance.
Pushback from staff who may be resistant to continuing education. Managers should engage them on the merits and incentives.
Inability to measure direct impacts of education on performance. Management can work with departments to identify metrics.
With planned approaches to mitigate these obstacles, management can cultivate solutions to enable continuing professional development.
Conclusion
Continuing education is essential for healthcare providers to deliver quality care, but organizations require engaged management to facilitate it. Managers play an integral role through oversight, strategic planning, allocating resources, role modeling learning, and providing training.
Investing in management skills empower leaders to cultivate a culture of education. When managers make continuing competence a priority across the organization, staff are motivated to enhance their practice through professional development.
Though not without challenges, supportive leadership and infrastructure are key to overcoming barriers. By working together, management and healthcare providers can thrive in a productive cycle of continuing education and improved patient outcomes.
By Terence Tse
CFOs are evolving into AI-driven transformation orchestrators, balancing finance, technology, and strategy while upskilling teams, managing risks, and driving measurable business value.
A key insight from this year’s AI for CFOs event, organized...
The World Financial Review uses cookies to improve site functionality, provide you with a better browsing experience, and to enable our partners to advertise to you. Detailed information on the use of cookies on this Site, and how you can decline them, is provided in our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. By clicking on the accept button and using this Site, you consent to our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. ACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
What Led to the Gaza-Israel Catastrophe? The Nightmare after 50 Years of Failed Military Policies
By Dr. Dan Steinbock
The Hamas-Israel War did not come out of the blue. And it is not just paving the way to the destruction of Hamas or a hellish ground assault. It seeks to devastate Gaza and could result in expulsions in the West Bank over time. The War will inflame violence within and around Israel. It could escalate across the region. It reflects the failure of 50 years of U.S. geopolitics in the region and will further penalize global economic prospects.
Neither apartheid nor violence can secure an enduring peace in the early 21st century. What is needed is multilateral cooperation and multipolar diplomacy in the region – before it’s too late.
On October 7, roughly 50 years after the Yom Kippur War, several Palestinian militant groups, led by Hamas, launched a coordinated offensive against nearby Israeli cities, Gaza border crossings, and adjacent military installations, which led to Israel’s rapid, lethal counter-offensive. After the brutal Hamas offensive, odd even in view of the violent history of the region, the Israeli preparation for a massive ground assault to destroy Hamas poses an existential threat to 2.3 million Gazans in the region.
That’s the standard narrative. But it’s not what has been taking place behind the façade. That’s far worse.
The Hamas-Israel War is not just the first major direct conflict within Israeli territory since the country’s founding. It is also the latest manifestation of Israel’s “strategy of tension” dating from the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the rise of U.S. economic and military ties. This tension has been seen in several countries, including during Italy’s “years of lead”; a period of extraordinary social turmoil, political violence and economic volatility that lasted two decades. Starting in the late 1980s, it was marked by a wave of false flag terror, first attributed to the far-left but later linked with far-right, as well as Italian and U.S. intelligence agencies.1 The strategic objective is to use a general sense of insecurity against targeted groups and to buttress an increasingly repressive government. As geopolitics replaces development, economic welfare suffers, but the perceived common enemy is expected to “unite the nation.”2 Historically, the strategy of tension has paved way to neoliberal economics; for example, the 1973 Pinochet regime relying on U.S.-trained Chicago economists in Chile.3
In contrast to the standard narrative, the Hamas war is manna from heaven to Benyamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has escalated the suppression of Palestinians ever since international attention has focused on the proxy war in Ukraine. It certainly did not come out of the blue. Netanyahu himself has contributed to the creation of Hamas since the ‘90s. In effect, the strategic tension has lasted more than five decades in Israel. But since late 2022, it has been accelerated by the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history.
Legitimisation of far-right extremism
In July, the ex-chief of Mossad Tamir Pardo (2011-16) charged prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu for bringing parties “worse than the Ku Klux Klan” into his government.4 He had a point (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Some Controversial members of Netanyahu far-right cabinet
(From left to right) Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezazel Smotrich, Israel Katz
Since the tumultuous 70s, far-right politics, violent Messianic settlers and ultra-nationalists like Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach have given rise to far-right movements, massacres of Palestinians and political parties like Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), Kach’s ideological successor. Its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, first gained national notoriety in 1995 by brandishing a Cadillac hood ornament that had been stolen from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car. “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too,” Ben-Gvir said proudly.5 Weeks later, Rabin, the architect of the peace process, was assassinated.
As Netanyahu’s minister of national security, Ben-Gvir has espoused Kahanism. As a settler, he lives in an illegal settlement. He has openly called for expulsions of Arab citizens. His provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the locale of al-Aqsa Mosque, contributed to the onset of the ongoing turmoil.6
Another fatal mistake of the Israeli government has been the decision of Netanyahu’s energy minister Israel Katz that no “electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter” until the “abductees” would be free.7 Reminiscent of Nazi practices, such collective punishments are morally flawed and counter-productive in practice. When revenge massacres are imposed on innocent civilians, they will breed new resentment, new bitterness, and generations of resistance.
Through his 20 years of participation in Israeli cabinets, Katz has fought for more resources for settlements. Opposing any two-state solution, he pushes for the annexation of the West Bank and wants to make Gaza Egypt’s headache.
Netanyahu’s minister of defence is Bezazel Smotrich, a vehement opponent of a Palestinian state and a self-proclaimed fascist, racist and homophobe, who also lives in an illegally built West Bank settlement. In 2021, he declared that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, should have “finished the job” and kicked all Palestinians out of Israel when it was founded. He believes that members of Israel’s Arab minority communities are citizens, but only “for now”.8
When Smotrich was entrusted with much of the administration of the occupied West Bank, the fox took over the hen house. It was a signal to Palestinian Arabs: Leave!
These are the hollow men in Netanyahu’s government. Neither they nor their peers will ever support policies recognising the sovereign and human rights of the Palestinians.
From democracy to autocracy
Since January, the Netanyahu government has pushed for highly controversial judicial reforms, a series of changes to the judicial system and the balance of powers. The effort has been led by Netanyahu’s deputy PM and minister of justice, Yariv Levin, and the chair of the Knesset’s constitution committee, Simcha Rothman. Levin fought Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, opposes a two-state solution and supports settlers.9 A critic of Netanyahu’s corruption trial, Rothman represents the militant, anti-Arab Religious Zionist Party that promotes far-right Kahanism and Jewish supremacy and supports the annexation of occupied territories to Israel.10
The amendment was passed by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in late July. It seeks to limit the Supreme Court’s power to exercise judicial review, granting the government control over judicial appointments. It caused a political and constitutional turmoil that came to a head on 12 September, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. The judicial reform effort reflects descent toward autocracy and was opposed by most Israelis in massive protests.
In the past, Israel’s judiciary has regularly upheld policies, practices and laws that helped enforce “Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians”, including upholding administrative detentions, green-lighting the destruction of villages, and imposing restrictions on family reunification. But on some occasions, the Supreme Court has intervened in protecting Palestinian rights. If the institution loses power to the government, even this “slim and inconsistent” protection would disappear. In view of critics, the proposed overhaul would have chilling implications for Palestinian rights.11
Hoping to undermine the Israeli democracy, Netanyahu’s bedfellows seek to transform Israel within and annex the occupied territories. Given that the coalition government held a 64-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset prior to the Hamas war, opposition parties can do little within the legislature to stop judicial reform.12
Marginalisation of the peace movement
While the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian nightmare were planted 50 years ago, the ongoing Hamas-Israel war has been on the cards for years.13 After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan
Heights. Since then, Israel has allowed and even encouraged its citizens to live in these settlements, often motivated by religious, ultra-ethnic and ultra-nationalist sentiments attached to Jewish history and the land of Israel.
On the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, I toured West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the Golan Heights, and interviewed both the colonisers and the colonised. What I found most ominous was the gap of perceptions between the two. The Israelis saw a bright future and thought they were paving the way to lasting peace. The Palestinians saw no future and dreamed of a land of their own.
After the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Labor coalition began to intensify the expansion of the boundaries of Jerusalem eastward. This encouraged a group of Messianic settlers to create a foothold in the West Bank, including Ma’ale Adumim by the group Gush Emunim.
These religious far-right Jews were met with protests by the peace activists.14
Among the peace movement’s leaders was the author Yael Dayan, the daughter of general Moshe Dayan and future Labor politician and feminist. Like in 1973, Dayan said recently that “there is not and there cannot be a real and lasting peace that can be reconciled with the massive colonisation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”15 After discussions with her, I joined the movement and the protests. I saw the settlements as a time bomb that could subvert Israeli democracy, endanger Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens and Palestinians, morph into apartheid, and cause a cycle of “forever wars” with its Arab neighbours.
One of the founders of the “Peace Now” movement was the late novelist Amos Oz, a dear friend whose book on the settler-induced divisions In the Land of Israel (1983) I would later translate. He was among the first Israelis to advocate a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Oz warned of the dangers of the occupation already back in1967 and called the radicalized settlers neo-Nazis (Figure 2). At the same time, he also said he loved Israel, “even when I can’t stand it”. In one way or another, all of us were called “traitors”. But like Amos, we’d respond: “At least we’re in good company.”
Figure 2. “Corrupting Occupation”
In retrospect, the early peace efforts were vital, but no match to the settlement policies that have been legitimised in terms of national security interests and fuelled by massive arms trade and the US Big Defense. Like the peace movement, international community considers the settlements a violation of international law.16 Yet, hawkish advocates of national security favoured their expansion. For all practical purposes, they have won. In the early 1970s, there were barely 2,000 settlers in the West Bank. Today, that figure exceeds 500,000. Their problem is that they will never win the peace.
Far-right terror and assassinations
Among the peace activists, the concern was that if the Messianic far-right Jewish settlers, many of whom came from the US, would be permitted to create a substantial de facto presence, it would be legitimised over time by de jure measures.
In the 1980s, Gush Emunim radicalised further, forming the Jewish Underground, a radical terrorist organisation. Two issues contributed to its creation: the Camp David Accords that led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979, which the movement vehemently opposed, and the settlement project itself, which brought the far-right Messianic Jews in close proximity with Palestinian communities.17
Through the first half of the 1980s, the Underground conducted several vicious terror attacks, including car bombs against Palestinian mayors, and plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock at the centre of the al-Aqsa mosque. The effort was to exploit terror to drive Palestinians out of the occupied territories.18
I had no doubts of these extremist trajectories after a mid-70s meeting in Jerusalem with the US-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, the far-right ultra-nationalist politician and later a member of the Knesset until his conviction of terrorism. Having co-founded the far-right Jewish Defense League in the US, Kahane established the ultra-radical Kach in Israel. Both used terror to advance their aims. In the late 1950s, Kahane’s fanatic anticommunism had made him an “informant” with the FBI.19 By the 70s, he promoted ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As he said at the time, “Every day the Arabs of Israel move closer to becoming a majority. Israel should not be committed to national suicide. Why would we allow demography, geography, and democracy to push Israel closer to the abyss?”
I had never met anyone as full of hate and fully expected Kahane to die in violence (Figure 3).
Figure 3. “Kahane was right”
“Kahane was right, about this there can be no debate!”
A not-so-subtle reference to the need for ethnic cleaning in the Occupied Territories (Sticker in Jerusalem, 2010)
Fast-forward to November 1990. As I was walking to Grand Central, I heard shots and saw a man running. Kahane had been assassinated in midtown Manhattan. But his spirit lived on. Just four years later, Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Amir was associated with religious extremists influenced by Kahanism. Like the Hamas offensive, the assassination was initially attributed to an “intelligence failure”. In reality, the murder was due to the failure of Israel Security Agency (ISA, or Shin Bet). The ISA could have stopped the killer in advance.20
Was the assassination “allowed” to happen by the far-right that had most to gain from it?. In a sense, Rabin’s assassination was the Israeli mirror image of the prior Sadat’s assassination, which has been attributed to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Figure 4). Their members later figured among the fedayeen in Afghanistan that were armed, trained and financed by the CIA’s Operation Cyclone.21
The assassinations’ message to peacemakers was loud and clear: Don’t even try!
Figure 4. Two peace accords, two assassinations
(Left) President Anwar Sadat, President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David on 17 September 1978
(Right) Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton, and PLO’s leader Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony on 13 September 1993.
These polarising trends occurred in parallel with the plunge of Israeli Labor, US economic and military aid and growing influence of neoliberal economics.
Plunge of the Labor alignment, US aid and neoliberalism
During the early days of independence, Israel’s politics was dominated by Labor alignments from David Ben-Gurion to Golda Meir. In 1949, the Labor alignment (46) and the left (25) had over 70 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Despite near monopoly, the Labor (51)-left (11) still held over 60 seats in 1973. In other words, Labor actually increased its voice, while the left lost half of its seats. Today, the Labor coalition has lost more than 90 per cent of its representation some 75 years ago (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Rise of US aid, decline of Israeli Labor
Fall of Israeli Labor coalitions since 1974
US aid to Israel since 1950
The debate on the decline of Israeli Labor is long-lasting.22 Usually, the losses are attributed to the failure of the Oslo Accords to make Israelis feel more secure, inability of the alignment to attract Labor voters, failure to stay attuned to demographic shifts, and the overall decline of social democratic parties in Western Europe.
Yet, most analysts fail to associate the parallel trends of the plunge of Israeli labor and the rise of U.S. aid. The erosion hasn’t been gradual and incremental, but disruptive. Even the air triumphs of the Six-Day War were still premised on the French-made Mirage and Super Mystere jets. The US economic and military aid soared only after the 1973 War. Until 2002, Israel was the top recipient of U.S. aid, and it has stayed among the top three with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. U.S. has given Israel over $260 billion in military and economic aid, and $10 billion more for missile defense systems.
For decades a key player in cementing this tie (and undermining Israeli Labor) has been Netanyahu, who has led six Israeli cabinets in the past 25 years. Unsurprisingly, he remains haunted by corruption charges. Through a decade, he has faced a litany of bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges. He needs to stay in power to avoid prosecution.
Despite US aid, the Israeli economy is today more polarised than ever before. Even before the Hamas war, economic growth was slowing. Risks to the outlook were tilted to the downside and risks to inflation to the upside. Continued uncertainty about the judicial reform presented another notable downside risk. Both have been exacerbated by the Hamas war, which Netanyahu has pledged will continue for a long time.23
Worse, due to neoliberal growth policies that Netanyahu has long advocated, Israel has relatively high inequality compared to other OECD countries, despite its early socialism. Long-term trends are alarming. In May, 280 senior economists warned that the government’s budget allocations to the ultra-religious Haredi groups in exchange for their coalition support “will transform Israel in the long run from an advanced and prosperous country to a backward country”.24 The economic backlash associated with the proposed judicial overhaul has already been manifested in a massive capital flight and a sharp decline in foreign investment, resulting in currency depreciation, a sluggish stock market, a slowdown in tax revenues, and rising public debt.25
If the Hamas war threatens to exacerbate Israel’s social and economic tensions, it risks turning Gaza into a desert and the West Bank into a Jewish suburbia.
Gaza’s nightmare and the rise of Hamas
With a population of over 2 million on some 365 square kilometres, the Gaza Strip is one of the world’s most densely populated areas and “largest open-air prison”. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, it became an Egyptian-administrated territory. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, it came under Israeli occupation. The precursor of Hamas, Al Mujamma al Islami (“The Islamic Centre”), was established in the Israeli-occupied Gaza in the 1970s under the auspices of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood.26
One of their adherents was the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the future leader of Hamas. Yassin concentrated the Mujamma’s activities on religious and social services. Ironically, Israeli authorities actively supported its rise, when their main antagonist was the late Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
While PLO operatives in the occupied territories faced brutal repression, the Islamists affiliated with Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to operate in Gaza. Israelis hoped to use the Islamists against PLO.27
Yassin was jailed in 1984 on a 12-year sentence, but released only a year later. At the time, when Netanyahu still served as the Israeli ambassador to the UN, I interviewed him about his Fighting Terrorism (1986), which offered lessons on “how democracies can defeat domestic and international terrorists”. Fast, smart and slick, he represented a new generation of Israeli politicians trained by American PR experts and his former employer, global consultancy BCG. To them the ambitious right-wing Likud politician was manna from heaven.
Launched in 1988 amid the first intifada (uprising), Hamas has always refused to accept the existence of the Israeli state. When the peace process began between Rabin and Arafat, Yassin was again in prison. Hamas launched a campaign of attacks against civilians, which contributed to the rise of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right in 1996 (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Strange bedfellows
(Left) Prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s official portrait, 2023
(Right) Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza, in early 2004
Intriguingly, Netanyahu, as prime minister, ordered Yassin to be released from prison (“on humanitarian grounds”), despite his life sentence. He seems to have relied on the Islamists to sabotage the Oslo Peace Accords. After having expelled Yassin to Jordan, Netanyahu allowed him to return to Gaza as a hero in late 1997. Until his killing in 2004, Yassin initiated a wave of suicide attacks against Israelis. As Netanyahu later told his Likud Party’s Knesset members in March 2019, “anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”28
In the 1990s, as part of the Oslo Accords, most of Gaza had been handed over to the Palestinian National Authority, alongside the Israeli settlements, which were evacuated in 2005, despite intense opposition by Israeli far right. In 2007, after a legitimate Hamas election victory that rankled both the West and Fatah, the Islamist group took over and began administering Gaza. That led both Israel and Egypt to impose a land, sea and air blockade, which devastated the poor, ailing economy.
Before the global pandemic, Gazan Palestinians organised widespread protests demanding that Israel end the blockade and address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Already two years ago, Gaza’s economy was on the verge of collapse.29 Yet, those interests that had most to gain from such a humanitarian crisis allowed it to proceed to its inflection point.
The final solution of Netanyahu government’s far right seems to be the devastation of Gaza and the twisted hope that this would cause a mass emigration of Gazans away from the Israeli border. Hence, the preference for the Dahiya Doctrine, outlined by former IDF Chief Gadi Eizenkot in the 2006 Lebanese War and in the 2008-9 Gaza War. It is premised on the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of “hostile regimes”.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”30
Scholars of international law have called it “state terrorism”.31 In view of the UN, it is a “carefully planned” assault intended “to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population”.32 In Gaza, it looks increasingly like a war crime of historical magnitude.
After the Hamas offensive, Eisenkot was appointed as a minister without portfolio in Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
West Bank settlements, apartheid regime
The Jewish settlements have fostered a de facto one-state reality in Israel, wherein Israelis have rights and Palestinians don´t. Meanwhile, talks for a two-state solution have been stalling since 2014.33 Rhetoric aside, Netanyahu’s government has “engaged in actions that annex the West Bank and threaten the prospects for a just and lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.34
In the past, periods of heightened security tension and military operations have ensured an opportunity for settlers to establish facts on the ground. After the brutal attack by Hamas, the alarming trend of increased settler violence has rapidly escalated. Nothing has halted the settlers’ steady expansion since the late 1960s and the Israelis’ expansion in East Jerusalem (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Expansion of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, 1967-2021
In South Africa, the system of apartheid, based on white supremacy and racial segregation, was in place from 1948 until 1994. In April 2021, the Human Rights Watch warned that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold.35 In early September this year, the ex-chief of Mossad Tamir Pardo said that Israel’s mechanisms for controlling the Palestinians matched the old South Africa. “There is an apartheid state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems”.36
Even amid the peace talks in Oslo in the early 90s, Palestinian per capita income was just 15 per cent relative to the Israeli level. But hopes for peace died with the Jewish far-right assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Despite all the hoopla by the Trump and Biden administrations that the Middle East is at the cusp of peace and prosperity, Palestinian per capita income has fallen and is now only 12.9 per cent relative to the Israeli level, lower than decades ago.37
As bad as these aggregate figures are, they reflect Palestinian averages, not Gaza’s hell. Years of isolation and recurrent conflicts have left the local economy far behind the West Bank’s, due to the Israeli-imposed blockade, four wars, and domestic divisions.
Gazan per capita income is now less than a third of that in the West Bank. Half of the labour is unemployed; over half of the population lives below the national poverty line.38
Long before the Hamas offensive, Palestinian stagnation reflected economic ruin that was excessive even relative to apartheid South Africa. During the apartheid (1948-94), the blacks’ per capita income relative to the whites climbed from 8.6 per cent to 13.5 per cent. In relative terms, the Palestinians’ starting point relative to Israelis was almost twice as high after the Oslo Accords. But today it’s behind that of the blacks at the end of the apartheid. The reversal occurred under the watch of the Trump and Biden administrations (Figure 8).
Figure 8. From apartheid South Africa to West Bank/Gaza
Farsighted Israeli leaders no longer deny the reality of apartheid. Last year, former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair called Israel “an apartheid regime”. Recently, the parliament’s former speaker Avraham Burg and renowned historian Benny Morris were among more than 2,000 Israeli and American public figures who signed a public statement that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.”39
Hall of mirrors
The standard narrative about the Hamas-Israel war is a mere façade. Even the argument that Hamas’s offensive was an “intelligence failure” doesn’t seem valid. Based on two years of video evidence, Hamas militants trained for the brutal attacks in at least six sites across Gaza in plain sight and less than a mile from Israel’s heavily fortified and monitored border.40 For all practical purposes, the offensive was preventable. If the intelligence failure wasn’t a failure at all, what was it?
Similarly, the naïve story about Hamas as Israel’s nemesis doesn’t hold water. The group and its brutal attacks went hand in hand with more than two decades of the rise of Likud and the far-right. Just as the Operation Cyclone had led the U.S. to train, arm and finance a generation of Islamist fedayeen in Afghanistan, including Osama Bin Laden, Israelis thought they could use Hamas; not that Hamas could use them.
Moreover, the war in Gaza serves as a smokescreen to the escalation of settler expansion and violence in the West Bank, which Netanyahu’s far-right ministers hope would result in its annexation and Palestinian expulsions.
Regionally, the war has led Biden’s hawks to refocus attention to Iran. It’s an old project. Since 2003, US Army has conducted an analysis called TIRANNT (Theater Iran Near-Term) for a full-scale war with Iran. Reportedly, this contingency plan (CONPLAN 8022) would be activated in the eventuality of a second 9/11, on the presumption that Iran would be behind it.41 Expectedly, the war has inflamed tensions with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which many in the Congress and the White House would like to link with Iran, to legitimise a major regional confrontation.
Tellingly, after the Hamas attack, when Republican senator Lindsay Graham was asked whether he wanted the US and Israel to “bomb Iran even in the absence of direct evidence of their involvement,” he responded, “Yeah.” The answer stunned even the CNN interviewer, so she asked the question twice and got the same response.42 Recently, Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his panel is drafting legislation to authorize the use of military force in Iran, although U.S. intelligence has said there is no evidence to support the claim of Iran’s direct involvement. McCaul’s comments came on the 21st anniversary of the enactment of a measure that authorized the 2003 misguided U.S. invasion of Iraq.
To Netanyahu’s government, an Iran conflict would divert attention from Gaza and the West Bank. It’s a long dream. In 2011 Netanyahu ordered the Mossad and IDF to prepare for an attack on Iran within 15 days, until Pardo and then-Chief of Staff Benny Gantz – now in opposition but a key member in Netanyahu’s not-so-united war cabinet – questioned the Prime Minister’s legal authority to give such an order without cabinet approval. So, Netanyahu backed off.43 But Iran remains on the government’s agenda. And some critics argue that it is part of the Gaza war agenda. A month ago, in parallel with the domestic Supreme Court turmoil, Netanyahu’s Mossad chief David Barnea vowed to target Iran’s “highest echelon”, if Israeli Jews would be hurt in terror.44
Nor has the Biden administration avoided the temptation to use the war and its “solidarity with Israel” as a demonstration effect for other hotspots. When Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Netanyahu and members of the Israeli war cabinet, he conveyed the US’s “ironclad support” for Israel. It is the liturgical term that the White House has used in the context of Japan, Taiwan, Ukraine, the Philippines, and other major US non-NATO allies that have committed to common defence objectives, military bases and arms purchases from US Big Defense, such a Raytheon, Austin’s former employer.45
Giving peace a chance, finally
The ongoing war has severely undermined US credibility as a neutral broker in the region. Officially, Washington seeks to de-escalate tensions. But rhetoric aside, as Israel escalated its counter-offensive, US diplomats were being discouraged from publicly using phrases that would urge calm. In leaked messages, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials did not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire”, “end to violence/bloodshed”, and “restoring calm”.46 It preceded the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to block a “humanitarian pause” and corridors into Gaza.
The Democratic Biden administration has continued Trump’s Middle East policies, which effectively ignore the Palestinian nightmare. Washington’s bipartisan consensus is driven by the priorities of the Pentagon and the Big Defense, which profits from every new major violent conflict by selling security without peace. The Gaza war is a textbook case (Figure 9).
Figure 9. Israel-Gaza War: Latest Casualty Figures, Oct. 19, 15.30 GMT
In the first week of its counter-offensive, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza. That’s almost the number of bombs the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in an entire year. But that may be just a prelude to what’s looming ahead. If and when the expected Israeli ground assault – a “disaster foretold,” as the Israeli columnist Gideon Levy puts it – will begin, all these casualty figures will pale in comparison.
When 1 million people are internally displaced, 90,000 residential units are damaged, electricity and water are effectively denied (and all this before the actual assault), the consequent damage can no longer be considered collateral but intended. And if health systems collapse, misery and vice will follow in the form of famine, epidemics paving the way to new massacres and new wars.
Today, the worst economic risks are unwarranted geopolitical tensions. The outbreak of the Israeli-Hamas War is threatening to inject new volatility back into energy markets, harking back to last year’s commodity chaos after the proxy war in Ukraine. As Biden made his primetime case for “wartime aid to Israel and Ukraine,” he expanded U.S. involvement into two major fronts; multiplied the need for tens of billions of dollars in military aid in addition to the past hundreds of billions of dollars; and accelerated the probability of a looming U.S. debt crisis that could have global repercussions.
After $8 trillion in the misguided post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. war theaters have not disappeared. It’s only the arenas that are shifting. The Biden administration is preparing another unwarranted Global Cold War in a perceived Manichean world of “noble democracies” and “evil autocracies.”
In the past half a century, no US-brokered initiative has achieved enduring peace in the Middle East. Washington has a geopolitical interest in the region as an energy reserve and US defence contractors’ lucrative client. By contrast, China’s approach is premised on stability and cooperation that are necessary for economic development. Stressing the importance of peace and development, Beijing has called for an “immediate ceasefire” and repeated its support for a two-state solution with an independent state of Palestine as a way out of the conflict.
Both the US and China have a role in the Middle East. But without peace, there can be no stability. And without stability, there can be no development. Half a century of wars, colonisation and apartheid will never bring peace to the region; but they will surely ensure more despair, more wars and more dead and injured civilians. What is needed in the region is multilateral cooperation and multipolar diplomacy.
It is time to give peace and development a chance – before it’s too late.
About the Author
References: