Democracy Waning in Former French Colonies in Africa

The subversion of democracy in former French colonies in Africa stymies the African Union from developing from a mere confederation, wherein all of the governmental sovereignty resides with the states, to modern federalism, whose chief characteristic is dual sovereignty. There is good reason for the requirement in the U.S. that the states be republics rather than dictatorships, for the latter would be more likely to ignore the federal jurisdiction within their respective states.

As of 2024, the president of Senegal “tried to cancel an election. In Niger, a military coup d’état toppled an elected president, who eight months later [was] still imprisoned in the presidential palace. In Chad, the leading opposition politician was killed in a shootout with security forces. . . . In Tunisia, once the only democratic success story of the Arab Spring rebellions, the president [was] steering the state toward increasing autocracy.”[1] With such political upheaval going on at the state level, any discussions at the AU level on whether the states should delegate any governmental sovereignty would only be stymied and thus useless. This in turn kept the AU impotent in being able to act as a check against tyranny at the state level. This vicious cycle cannot, I contend, be totally blamed on the former colonial status and the ongoing interventions of France, though both have been playing a secondary role.

To the extent that French governmental pressure led the former colonies to mimic the French system of government wherein the office of president is strong, France is culpable in inhibiting democracy in Africa. “After they won independence from France in the 1960s, nascent states modeled their constitutions on France’s, concentrating power in presidents’ hands.”[2] This statement implies that the former colonies wanted a system of government with a strong unitary leader. That the indigenous political culture in Africa emphasized the tribal chief figure likely figured prominently in the decisions to emulate the French system, rather than it being imposed from France.

To be sure, “France maintained a web of business and political ties with its former colonies” that has involved “propping up corrupt governments”—including autocratic ones.[3] The salience of news reports from Africa on France24 and TV5Monde alone attest to France’s continuing interest in Africa. France could arguably make a difference in reducing political instability and enhancing democracy in the former colonies were autocratic rulers and coups discouraged rather than encouraged. Perhaps French government officials fear, and thus seek to prevent, the potential rival power of the AU that could manifest were political stability improved at the state level. Such a narrow perspective would differ significantly from the American position that a stronger union in Europe is in America’s interest, especially considering the cost to America in having fought two World Wars in part in Europe.

Even if France has been propping up cozy autocratic rule in the former colonies, the disillusionment with democracy has been stronger in the former French colonies than in other African states, according to Boniface Dulani, a director at Afrobarometer.[4] “While a majority of Africans polled [in 2024] still say they prefer democracy to other forms of government, support for it is declining in Africa, where approval of military rule is on the rise—it has doubled since 2000. That shift is happening much faster in former French colonies than in former British ones.”[5] Such sentiment may be a preferment for political stability precisely because of the extent of political instability in the former French colonies. In an indigenous soil of tribal chieftains, the allure of a “strong man” to restore and maintain political stability could easily thrive even though it would come at the cost of political freedom. Perhaps in the former British colonies, with the notable exception of Sudan, there is less reason to bear the cost of foregone political freedom. “Eight of the nine successful coups in Africa [between 2000 and 2024] have been in former French colonies.”[6] The coups themselves reinforce the allure of autocratic rule as providing for political stability, even though such stability can only be until the ground shifts again enough for the next coup. This cycle too is difficult to break. In the meantime, the AU has been stuck as a mere confederation, powerless to provide a breakthrough. 

It is not for nothing that the founders of both the U.S. and E.U. emphasized that the states be democratic republics. This lesson finds harder ground where the historical culture is not in line with democracy. So perhaps the quest for the AU might be how to go from being a confederation to embrace modern, dual-sovereignty, federalism by making it in the interest of state-level dictators even though a system of modern federalism would include viable constraints of the power of the states. Delaying the constraints so the current dictators would not face federal strictures would be key, as well as the inevitable political deal-making that is basic to any political animal.

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1. Ruth Maclean, “Democracy Teetering in African Countries Once Ruled by France,” The New York Times, March 23, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Decolonializing the Baltic States: Exculpating a “Victim” Identity

On how to decolonize Eastern Europe, its states must disentangle themselves from the history of the U.S.S.R. and even Russia. This is not simply a matter of severing business and political ties; a more intangible disengagement “mentally” must also take place. Because most of us tend to dismiss the “soft” or paradigmatic side of international political economy, highlighting the “real” implications of not attending to this side is beneficial. In short, I have in mind the “victim” cultural identity that can easily stick to former colonies or parts of empires more generally.

During the early months of Russia’s unilateral invasion of Ukraine, the governments of countries in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, sought reassurance from the West of military protection should Russia continue its militaristic advance beyond Ukraine once that country has been subdued and firmly back in the Russian empire. Even Sweden and Finland, which had not been part of the U.S.S.R., quickly sought membership in NATO. Serbia and Georgia sought to expedite accession talks to become E.U. states even though from the E.U.’s standpoint those two states would be relatively pro-Russia along with Hungary in the E.U. and thus dilute its anti-Russian consensus.

All of those efforts could be said to be predicated on a “victim” identity. Running for protection from a bigger power against a former and yet baleful bully is classic “victim” behavior. This creates a dilemma in that running for cover might be in the existential interests of the governments living near such a bully as Russia, and yet doing so can be said to be from a “victim” self-identity.  Lamenting and trying to “work through” past imperial expansion does not seem very helpful to me. Instead, what is needed is to seek protection and then quickly pivot to non-victim policies, such as in taking an active role within the protection. For example, the Baltic states could have taken an active role in E.U. foreign-policy making, such as in capitalizing on their knowledge of Russia to target particular sanctions against certain Russian oligarchs. Internationally, those states could take an active role by agreeing to more of the alliance’s hardware being located in those states. Eastern Europe can thus both seek out the protection of the West and assert a non-victim stance toward Russia. 

India on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: On the Flawed Hegemony of Political Realism

India took an equivocal position on Russia’s invasion. This is surprising at first glance because India has been so concerned to protect its sovereign territory from baleful encroachments from China. What explains India looking the other way as Russia unilaterally invaded a sovereign state? I contend that the explanation supports the assertion that the world could no longer afford its system based on national sovereignty if political realism is in the driver’s seat at the national level.

According to Sumit Ganguly of Indiana University, one of my alma maters, the USSR was a vital partner of India during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was willing to sell weapons to India for cheap in order to keep China from expanding. For spare parts, India still has to go to Russia and is thus dependent on that country and the good will of its government. No country could ween itself away from a provider of military hardware quickly.

Furthermore, Ganguly noted in a talk in 2024 that India had a history of buying oil from Russia, and this continued during Russia’s invasion in spite of the Western embargos of Russian oil. The U.S. is in part to blame because it would sanction India were it to buy oil from Iran or Venezuela. At the time of the Russian War, India was still a poor country even as its high tech industry was expanding. Russian oil was relatively cheap. Also, India could point to the American hypocrisy in having relations with some sordid, autocratic regimes. This can explain why the government of India was well-aware during Russia’s war in Ukraine that by buying Russian oil and selling it to the EU and US, India was undermining the embargoes. Saudi Arabia was doing likewise, and yet the Biden administration held that both countries were allies of the United States. Everyone was looking primarily or even solely at their own interests.

Ganguly has also pointed out that in Indian culture, there is an obsession for multipolarity: there should be several global powers rather than just one biggie. Therefore, there is a willingness to work with Russia, which could serve as a check on hegemonic American power. This is not to say that Indian culture had any affinity whatsoever, Ganguly insists, with internal Russian politics. Nevertheless, India has had China as its principal long-term threat, and India’s government has recognized for a long time that Russia could act as a check on China.

All of this goes to say, political realism was alive and well as the world adjusted to Russia’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine. In realism, each government orients its foreign (and industrial) policy tightly to the national interest rather than also to cooperate with other governments in the interests of a global order in which international law can be more effectively enforced. The international system is just the aggregate of the self-interests of governments; aggregated parts make up the whole. With human rights suffering from a want of international enforcement in Ukraine as well as in Gaza, the want of international attention in a system of sovereign countries on tightening that system to enhance the enforcement of international law suggests that political realism has become insufficient. Climate change and the risk of nuclear war, which Russia has threatened in the context of Ukraine, only add to the argument that the world could no longer afford an international order that rests on national sovereignty to which political realism is the dominant operating system in governments.

On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming

Agriculture is a major source of carbon and methane emissions, which in turn are responsible for the general trend of the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. In fact, agriculture emits more than all of the cars on the roads. 10 percent of the emissions carbon dioxide and methane in the U.S. come from the agricultural sector. Livestock is the biggest source of methane. Cows, for example, emit methane. Methane from a number or sources, including the thawing permafrost, accounted for 30 percent of global warming in 2023. As global population has grown exponentially since the early 1900s, herds of livestock at farms have expanded, at least in the U.S., due to the increasing demand.[1] We are biological animals, and we too must eat. More people means that more food is needed, and the agricultural lobby in the U.S. is not about to let the governments require every resident to become a vegetarian. Indeed, the economic and political power of the large agribusinesses in the U.S. have effectively staved off federal and state regulations regarding emissions. It comes down to population, capitalism, and plutocracy warping democracy.

In the early 80s, the farm lobby in the U.S. “began to get concerned about environmental regulations” and made sure the FDA would not regulate American farms.[2] The EPA has delegated permits to the States, but they have been “uneven in issuing permits. In 2009, a law barring the EPA from applying clear air regulations to livestock” took effect.[3] The agriculture lobby has thus been “extremely effective.”[4] This has been so even in spite of the Paris Agreement reached in 2016, and the steadily increasing average global temperatures. A U.S. Government-sponsored report admits that increased demand/consumption of meat impacts climate change, which in itself is interesting given all the political donations and lobbying by the agribusiness companies in the U.S., but the report concludes that people in developing countries should eat less meat.[5] Apparently Americans are uniquely privileged to die of heart-disease. Perhaps the hospital lobby wants to encourage more business thanks to third-party payors.

The figures on the political contributions and lobbying by agribusinesses (and oil companies) are mind-blowing. For instance, American agribusiness spent a record $165 million on federal lobbying in 2022.[6] A total of $128 million went to political contributions to campaigns in the 2021-2022 cycle.[7] The sheer amounts spent lend credibility to the claim that wealth rather than votes rule: plutocracy over the veneer of democracy in America. The capture of regulatory agencies by the companies or industries being regulated has existed in the academic literature since at least the 1980s. So too has the strategic use of regulation. For example, the capture of methane at farms through technology qualifies for government subsidies, but only the bigger agribusinesses can afford this technology. Additionally, JP Morgan and other large banks have been lending primarily to large agribusinesses because they are less risky than smaller farms. It is no surprise, when all is said and done, that medium and small farms have been going out of business for decades. I submit that this cannot be explained by economies of scale alone.

To be sure, a lot of agribusinesses have pledged to be more transparent on the emissions from operations, but very few of the businesses report on the bulk of their emissions.[8] Transparency only goes so far until entrenched concentrations of economic wealth (e.g., agribusinesses) find that holding the curtains open too much can hurt business. Moreover, both the political donors and their “elected representatives” both have an interest in maintaining the veneer that the public interest is being served. Adam Smith’s invisible hand only works in a competitive market, whereas neither agribusiness nor the market for political donations in Congress is a competitive market. In Wealth of Nations, Smith does not apply the competitive-market price mechanism to government. In fact, political contributions from businesses can be thought of as a special case of price-fixing.

The encroachments of plutocracy on representative democracy are largely hidden from view, and the corruption does seem to be ineluctable. Given large enough concentrations of private wealth, the buying of political power seems inevitable. Smith wrote as much concerning the use of government by managements outweighing the ability of labor unions to do just that. He predicted the strikes and the one-sided involvement of police and even military troops. The cost of plutocracy at the expense of the public good is much more since public good and the viability of our species came to depend on our baleful impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystems.  Even so, the negative impact of a political economy of business is dwarfed by the negative impact from the sheer growth of the human population on this planet since the 1800s. As intractable as the partisan, self-serving, and narrow involvement of business in government is, it would be difficult for a population that has gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in the twentieth century to begin to trim the sails by discouraging population growth. For one thing, reducing the number of potential consumers would be bad for business.

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1. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Madison McVan, “GRAPHIC: Agribusiness Spent a Record-breaking $165 million on Federal Lobbying Last Year,” Investigate Midwest, February 16, 2023.
7. “Agribusiness Top Contributors,” Open Secrets.
8. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.

Energy and Global Population

There is a temptation, especially since the global average temperature reached the 1.5C increase threshold in 2023 much faster than anticipated, to focus narrowly on the progress in renewable energy sources without placing it in perspective relative to the total amount of energy being used globally, the annual increases in energy demand, and the root cause, the explosive growth in human population since the early 20^th century. The strategic geo-political international interests of countries impacted and should thus be considered as well.  

According to Nick Butler, a former advisor at BP, a European oil company, the global use of energy increased 4-fold by 2024 since 1965. The increased use of energy commercially has led to increased trade as supply has become global. The world has thus become even more interdependent, which means that yet another basis for political instability has sprung up. Interruptions in supply led to a political push in the U.S. for energy independence. Even though as of 2024 every country still depended on the global trade in energy, the U.S. was trending towards energy independence and could eventually even be in a position of being able to export energy supplies without importing any. It’s debatable, however, whether exporting energy increases a country’s power. It had not worked for OPEC in managing prices, although the oil shocks in 1974 and 1979 gave the impression that OPEC could have considerable leverage over the U.S. As it turned out, substitution and the development of new supplies undercut OPEC’s higher prices. In contrast, Butler contends, building up sources of energy is a source of wealth, though political instability can also result as fights can break out over the new wealth.[1]

Besides being at odds with efforts to reduce carbon emissions if the stock is exported to be consumed, maximizing stocks of oil, natural gas, and coal as a source of a country’s wealth be wrongheaded. It may suffer from the same fallacy that is in mercantilism. Under that economic policy, a country minimizes imports and maximizes exports in order to accumulate as much silver and gold as possible. According to Adam Smith, “The exportation of gold and silver in trade might frequently be advantageous to the country.”[2] Historically, “the exportation of gold and silver in order to purchase foreign goods, did not always diminish the quantity of those metals in the [British] kingdom. That, to the contrary, [the exportation] might frequently increase that quantity.”[3] This still assumes that increasing the stocks represents an increase in a country’s wealth. Before critiquing that assumption, let’s look at the argument wherein exporting gold and silver to pay for imports actually winds up increasing the domestic supply of those metals to a net-increase.”

How could trading away some of those precious metals that were used as money increase a country’s wealth? If a country has gold and silver in surplus, part of it could be exchanged “for something else, which may satisfy a part of [the domestic] wants, and increase [the people’s] enjoyments” at home.[4] The benefits from the exports of the metals to pay for imports of goods extend back to domestic manufacturers being able to produce more output, given the increased demand, and thus increase the division of labor—Smith’s big thing!—and thereby produce goods more efficiently.  According to Smith, “By means of [the increased demand], the narrowness of the home market does not hinder the division of labour in any particular branch of art or manufacture from being carried to the highest perfection.”[5] The increased division of labor enhances efficiency of production, which in turn makes the pricing of exports more competitive, and thus demand increases. As exports to satisfy the increased foreign demand for the goods rise, the gold and silver that are used abroad to pay for the goods come into the home country and thus increase its supply of the two metals.

As for the need to increase the holdings of gold and silver as much as possible, the assumption that this enhances a country’s ability to fight a war is something else that Smith contests in his text. Regarding the need for stocks of silver and gold from which to be able to send abroad some in order to pay for the home army while it is fighting abroad, “(t)he commodities most proper for being transported to distant countries, in order to purchase there, either the pay and provisions of an army, or some part of the money of the mercantile republick (sic) to be employed in purchasing them, seem to be the finer and more improved manufactures.”[6] These, rather than sending silver and gold, have the benefit of increasing the demand of manufactures. “The enormous expense of the late war,” Smith contends, “must have been chiefly defrayed, not by the exportation of gold and silver, but by that of British commodities of some kind or other.”[7] So the need to accumulate silver and gold by minimize the imports of manufactured goods while maximizing exports—the key tenet of mercantilism—is, according to Smith, less beneficial than free-trade. Moreover, he holds that the market mechanism is much better than government fiat in allocating goods, services, and even metals used as money and wealth.

Similarly, perhaps exporting other commodities than coal, liquified natural gas, and oil might benefit the U.S. more by enhancing the efficiency of domestic producers of other goods (and services), especially if economies of scale exist, and increasing employment since more workers would be required and each could be more efficient and thus valuable to the companies. Additionally, carbon emissions would not be as high were the U.S. to sit on, rather than export, its stockpiles of “dirty” energy sources.

Admittedly, the pressure from unmet energy demand in other countries that are not energy-independent would tempt the U.S. Government and American companies to respectively allow and make more exports of coal, liquified natural gas, and oil because such sales would be lucrative. Behind this pressure is the relationship between a steeply growing global population and the ongoing prevalence of the “dirty” energy sources in meeting the increasing demand from an exponentially growing population. Indeed, because of shale, the US had become the largest exporter of natural gas in the world by 2024.

As of February, the world had 4 billion more people than in 1970. That translates into a 10,000 increase per hour, which in turn means 200 million new customers for commercial energy supplies every year.[8] Along with the increased global population, oil consumption increased by 150% since 1970. Because renewables were still focused on electricity, which was only one fourth of energy demand globally in 2023, the “dirty” sources were still supplying most of the increased demand.[9] Put another way, the increased supply of renewables was not even keeping up with the annual increases in demand for energy. In spite of the carbon-emission targets, oil and gas still accounted for 80% of global energy in early 2024.[10]

Most of the increase in energy demand and all the increase in carbon emissions during the previous 20 years was in Asia Pacific (esp. China).  By 2024, China was importing a lot of energy supplies—even markedly changing the patterns of global trade away from the U.S. being the dominant import market—and accounted for about a third of total global emissions.[11] Crude oil imports doubled from 2013 and 2023.[12]

Unfortunately, forecasts did not include a dramatic reduction in oil and coal use. In China, 300 million poor people in China were projected in 2024 to move into the middle class by 2050. This means more energy use, and thus more oil and gas. Nuclear energy was being developed there, but coal was still a major source of employment in 2023, and fit the Party’s goal of shifting wealth inland. Also, wanting to be the world’s leading industrial power is not in the direction of decreasing the commercial demand for energy.[13]

It is important to include the impact on international relations. As of the start of 2024, China was dependent on imports from Russia and the Middle East. As the U.S. strategic oil-imports interest in policing the Middle East diminishes as the U.S. gets closer to energy independence, the increased interest of China in exercising control in that region meant that a new conflict-zone might open up between the two empires. 

With the world going from over 8 billion people in late 2023 to a projected nearly 10 billion in 1045, we can anticipate more demand for energy, and with it, more international (and domestic) instability. With plenty of oil still in the ground and decreased demand due to substitutes such as electric cars and nuclear energy, the world won’t run out of oil.[14] This is bad news for our species as the planet continues to warm. Even as the press highlights the increase in renewable energy sources, the default is much, much larger and thus diminishing the share of “dirty” sources will not come as quickly as we might think. In short, we are in quite a mess as a species both because it isn’t easy to reduce our sluggish reliance on sluggish oil and invisible gas, and our global population grew so fast and so much in the 20^th century and has continued to increase in the first two decades of the next century that, as biological organisms needing external sources of energy, the energy demand of our species is likely to keep on increasing even if we become more efficient. The expediential increase in population can be so large that its baleful effects outweigh any gain from increased efficiency. Again, the baseline is so massive that changes from greater efficiency merely mitigate the increased harm done. 

Similarly, the large amount of energy consumption from “dirty” sources relative to the increased supply from renewables renders any shift very gradual. The Titanic could not turn fast enough to avoid the iceberg in 1912 because the rudder was too small for the mass, and thus momentum, of the ship. We would like to turn away from “dirty” sources of energy, but our rudder pales in comparison to the magnitude (and proportion) of those sources. We need a bigger rudder, or we too may flounder. The global economy does not “turn on a dime.”

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1. Nick Butler, Lecture on Energy and Security, Yale University, February 15, 2024.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 4^th edn., R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, ed.s (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1776/1976), sec 9, p. 433.
3. Ibid., sec 7, p. 431.
4. Ibid., sec 31, p. 446.
5. Ibid., sec 31, pp. 446-47.
6. Ibid., sec 29, p. 444.
7.  Ibid., sec 27, p. 443.
8. Nick Butler, Lecture on Energy and Security, Yale University, February 15, 2024.
9.  Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.

On the Impotency of International Law in a System of Sovereign States: The Case of Gaza

The sheer brazenness with which countries ironically recognized as being sovereign states by international law ignore international law even in regard to human rights that seeks to place boundaries on said sovereignty reflects the impotency of international law, and thus even that which recognizes national sovereignty itself. For the rest of us, continuing to believe that upcoming cases before the International Court of Justice, the UN’s court, are of consequence and thus even worth paying attention to, demonstrates abject stupidity, as if we were herd animals without learning curves. Admittedly, the stubborn, self-aggrandizing governments are ethically worse than the world’s population that lets such governments blatantly and even explicitly ignore judicial rulings of the International Court of Justice (and the European Court of Human Rights), but culpability can also be gleamed from the public’s truly pathetic irrational belief that another case against a country that has just ignored a verdict of that very court might just work in curtailing human-rights abuses and outright, even genocide-scale, aggression that outstrips even the sin of retaliation. Either I am blind or the proverbial emperor is not wearing any clothes.

As a case in point, in January, 2024, the International Court of Justice announced its preliminary ruling on Israel’s military incursion into Gaza. “The state of Israel shall . . . take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention,” the court announced.[1] The court had not reached a verdict on whether Israel was committing a genocide, and but was saying that one could be in progress and thus Israel is obliged to see that it does not, and this includes allowing more humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinians. The health ministry in Gaza had reported that thousands of women and children were among the more than 25,000 people killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, which did not “differentiate between civilians and Hamas fighters.”[2] In addition, more than a million Palestinians there had become homeless. Because only 1,200 Israelis had died in the Hamas attack in October, 2023, the scale of the harm in Gaza is beyond the scope of “an eye for an eye” and retribution or retaliation.

Because we humans have flawed judgment concerning punishment for those who harm us, John Locke of the 17^th century in Europe claimed that a major legitimating function of a government is in providing impartial judges so that vigilantes don’t have to dispense justice in their own cases. He wrote, “it will be objected, that it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases, that self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends . . . therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.”[3] We are too violent a species to be able to be fair judges against people who have rendered us as victims. I submit that this holds for sovereign states, which are in a state of nature, Locke insisted, with each other because there is no higher human power that can restrain their lust for violence that goes beyond justice and even retaliation. This is precisely why an international court with no enforcement power, such as in the UN having its own military force with which to “remind” wayward states that they had agreed to be bound by international law. The lack of any such army is, I submit, the proverbial elephant in the room that no one wants to recognize and discuss. By the way, this is precisely why I view my non-academic short essays as a form of charity to my species in spite of itself. I don’t ask whether it deserves it—only whether my ideas can possibly help it. I suppose I am benevolent in spite of myself, for I am human, all too human.

Before the court’s preliminary decision, Israeli Prime Minister Ben Netanyahu had said that Israel’s “commitment to international law is unwavering,” and yet he added that the “charge of genocide levelled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people should reject it.”[4] He would doubtless not be a fair judge in his own case, as he would doubtless throw that case out without letting it be heard. This is precisely why an international court is crucial, and, furthermore, that it must have a direct enforcement mechanism such that its verdicts will stick rather than be dismissed by a guilty defendant.

In its preliminary decision (not yet ruling on whether Israel was committing a genocide), “the court said Israel must restrain from the destruction of infrastructure, should support more humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza strip and prevent calls to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”[5] In reaction to the decision, Netanyahu said, “Israel has an inherent right to defend itself.”[6] Exactly two weeks later, he announced that he had “ordered the military to prepare a plan to evacuate civilians from Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli invasion” of the city.[7] Rafah had been home to 280,000 people, but the addition of other Palestinians made homeless in other parts of Gaza increased the city’s population to 1.5 million.[8] Forcing that many people to move in a short time span could itself be considered a violation of human rights if not part of a genocide. Also, the planned invasion itself would likely violate the court’s decision, which specified that Israel must not destroy the infrastructure in Gaza any further.

As for the court’s insistence that Israel let in more humanitarian aid, Israel actually “imposed financial restrictions on the main U.N. agency providing aid in the Gaza Strip, a measure which prevented a shipment of food for 1.1 million Palestinians” in Gaza.[9] Not even on a humanitarian basis was the Israeli government willing to heed the decision of the court whose jurisdiction Israel had agreed to, and whose law Netanyahu himself had said he respects so much.

There should thus be scarcely any doubt as to whether Israel would adhere to the court’s decision on a case set to begin on February 19, 2024 “into the legality of Israel’ 57-year occupation of land sought for a Palestinian state.”[10] Rather than focusing on Israel’s war with Hamas, that case concerns “Israel’s open-ended occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.”[11] Palestinian representatives planned to “argue that the Israeli occupation is illegal because it has violated three key tenets” of international law: “the prohibition on territorial conquest by annexing large swaths of occupied land,” the “Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” and the prohibition of “a system of racial discrimination and apartheid.”[12] In reading about the upcoming case, I felt an instantaneous rush of hope that the issue that had led to the Hamas attack in 2023 might finally be definitively decided by a neutral court rather than by the warring parties themselves by sheer might and strife in lieu of weak negotiations and weak allies on both sides. I had momentarily neglected to consider Israel’s response to the court’s preliminary decision—namely in dismissing or ignoring it outright and perhaps even going even further by adding a forced exodus from Rafah before another ground invasion. If you tell another person not to sneeze in your face and yet it not only happens again, but at an even closer range, you would naturally conclude that it will happen again unless some obstacle is brought to bear on that person. My point is that an international system in which there are no viable and enforced constraints on state-actors is incompatible with there being real obstacles on the wayward states. Relying on pressure from allies or even an impromptu coalition “of the willing” is not reliable enough to count on as a counterweight to such a severe flaw in the very fabric of an international system of unfettered sovereign nation-states.

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1. Thomson Reuters, “Israel Must Take Steps to Prevent Genocide in Gaza UN Court Says in Ruling on Temporary Measures,” the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), January 26, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True, Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” in The Selected Political Writings of John Locke, Paul Sigmund, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2005): 17-125, sec. 13, p. 22.
4. Thomson Reuters, “Israel Must Take Steps to Prevent Genocide in Gaza UN Court Says in Ruling on Temporary Measures,” the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), January 26, 2024.
5. Brad Dress, “Netanyahu Casts Off Genocide Case, Vows to Push Ahead Against Hamas,” The Hill, January 26, 2024.
6. Ibid.
7. Najib Jobain and Josef Federman, “Israel Seeks to Evacuate Palestinians Jammed into a Southern Gaza City Ahead of an Expected Invasion,” The Associated Press, February 9, 2024.
8. John Gambrell and Phil Holm, “From 200K to 1.5M People: Startling Images Show the Ongoing War’s Impact to This Small Area in Gaza,” The Associated Press, February 8, 2024.
9. Julia Frankel, “Israel Is Holding Up Food for 1.1 Million Palestinians in Gaza, the Main UN Aid Agency There Says,” The Associated Press, February 9, 2024.
10. Mike Corder and Julia Frankel, “Top U.N. Court to Hold Hearings on Legality of Israeli Occupation,” The Associated Press, February 18, 2024.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.

The Humanities on Climate Change

William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know what is pleasing to God outside of divine revelation was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of human knowledge and the presumption to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate a personal ideology were firmly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt.  That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that it could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from its intellectual raison d’être to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution in getting at the underlying source of climate change. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms.

The full essay is at "Humanities on Climate Change."

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1. A.M.C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology Since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 211. 

2.  Ibid., p. 212.

Record Global Warming and Carbon Emissions in 2023: Exponential Population Growth and Beholden Governments

I submit that not enough attention is brought to bear on the root of the warming of the planet: the huge increase in human population in the 20^th century. More attention could also be directed to the disconnect between the warming running up against the 1.5 Celsius limit agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the still increasing amounts of carbon emissions from humans. Finally, the culpability of governments in not being willing to touch economic growth or corporate interests warrants attention. It as if an adult steps on a weight scale and realizes, I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and then eats ice-cream that very night. Unfortunately, the diffusion of responsibility can inhibit governments, industries, and an electorate from having the sort of cognitive dissidence that an individual who has a record weight and then eats ice-cream—not even low-fat!—should have. Such dissidence should trigger changes in conduct. Even so, business and government are comprised ultimately of people and thus have been culpable and are thus blameworthy.  

In 2023, Earth “shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency,” Coernicus announced on January 9, 2024.[1] The use of the word, shattered, seems hyperbolic, or exaggerated, to draw attention, but sometimes small differences in numbers represent significant change that is difficult for us non-scientists to perceive. “Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit).”[2] Very gradual change is the default for the Earth’s climate, which is why a long-term perspective is needed even to assess the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.

“The agency had calculated that 2023 was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming,” the agency’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said.[3] To be sure, not all of the 1.48 Celsius increase from pre-industrial times was due to pollution. “Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes. . . . Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere.”[4] Even so, 1.3 accounts for most of the 1.48 degrees, and is thus significant. This can also be inferred by the estimate that “2023 was probably hottest year on Earth in about 125,000 years,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis. Our species, homo sapiens, has only been around for 300,000.

It looks like hope is running dry on whether economies will push us—or, more accurately, whether we will push ourselves—beyond the 1.5 Celsius limit of global warming agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement. To be sure, “(f)or the first time, nations meeting for annual United Nations climate talks in December [2023] agreed that the world needs to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing climate change, but they set no concrete requirements to do so.”[5] However, even though renewable sources of energy had “expanded at record rates, fossil fuels maintained an 82% share of total primary energy consumption” in 2022.[6] Even at the same share, “carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose 0.9% in 2022 to a new high of 34.4 billion metric tons, indicating lack of progress in curbing worldwide carbon output.”[7]  Emissions thus “moved further away from the reductions called for in the Paris Agreement.”[8] Juliet Davenport, president of EI, said, “We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”[9] So even in the midst of shattering records, governments generally were still allowing their respective economies to increase their emissions, or at least enough governments were resisting taking measures that would reflect knowledge of how rapidly the planet was warming overall.

The lack of concrete requirements had rendered the Paris Agreement toothless, and thus no match for the pressures that governments are always under to facilitate and not thwart economic growth and not to stand up to corporate donors to political campaigns in democracies. More abstractly stated, non-binding international treaties are no match for the human urge for instant gratification and the desire for more wealth (i.e., greed). In spite of our great reasoning ability, our species also has expediency “hard-wired” into our biology. A big unanswered question is whether research into means to “capture” carbon in the atmosphere (and oceans) will undo the damage caused by our species’ heedless impulsive refusal to self-regulate itself.

In the movie, “The Matrix,” agent Smith likens our species to a virus because we keep spreading. In 1900, the global population was 1.6 billion; by 2024, 8.1 billion humans were alive on Earth. Clearly, such a enormous increase in just 123 years must be significant for the planet's ecosystems, even a shock. Few of us even realize that, in line with Thomas Malthus’s thesis that human population can outstrip the world’s supply of food—which stirred controversy among Deists who could not accept such a large flaw in God’s design of the Creation—the exponential increase of our species’ population is a, or even the, underlying cause of the rising carbon emissions from cars, trucks, heating, agriculture, and industrial production levels. Simply put, more people means more cars, and thus more exhaust; more people means more widgets, which means more factories as well as more freighters on the seas, more trucking and more freight-train hauls; and more people means more dwellings, which means more heating and air-conditioning, and thus more demand for heating oil and on coal plants for more electricity. These relationships are really quite simple at the macro level of aggregation, though admittedly I am putting to the side the shift from coal and oil to renewables. We are all organisms, and thus we cannot but consume and use resources; the more organisms, the more food, for instance, is needed. Malthus, an Anglican priest and political economist, was right in his Essay on Population, published in 1798, when the global population of humans stood at 1 billion (1900, a century later, being just 650 million more). If an intelligent design of Creation can indeed be inferred—an inference challenged by Malthus’ theory of over-population wherein geometrical population growth can outstrip arithmetic expansion in resources—self-regulation would presumably be crucial in our species and yet the laggard responses to the Paris Agreement would suggest that we suffer a want of self-discipline on a collective (and individual) level.

From the susceptibility of elected representatives to being beholden to big business, and the insatiable greed etched into the very raison d’etre and being of a company and the manager function, we can infer the very weakness of the human urge to self-limit or voluntarily restrain ourselves relative to an otherwise maximizing, or schizogenic, inbred and culturally-encouraged tendency to resist or ignore soft limits (i.e., those not subject to enforcement). Fortunately, the jury is still out on whether the technological advancements that human reason is capable of (e.g., carbon capture) will rescue our species from its own intractable instinctual urges that are felt so strongly in the moment that our species would even allow itself to deconstruct in the long-term as if this were pre-determined without free-will.   

1. Seth Borenstein, “Earth Shattered Global Heat Record in 2023,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Rapier, “Why the World Keeps Setting Global Carbon Emission Records,” Forbes, August 1, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

On Israel’s Public Relations Campaign against the Charge of Genocide

In theory, state media is more vulnerable to doing the bidding of its sponsoring government than are privately owned media companies. In practice, governments are able to pressure even private news outlets to sway public opinion for political purposes. Even allied governments can pressure the government of a country in which a private news company resides in terms of what stories to air and when to air them, in order to sway that country’s public opinion, and even global public opinion. The sudden appearances in print, online, and on television news networks of former Israeli hostages being interviewed just after the International Court of Justice had announced on December 29, 2023 that Israel would be tried on charges of genocide in Gaza. Not coincidentally, I submit, emotionally-charged hyperbole was used to pull emotional “heart-strings” in order to convince the world, including the justices at international court, that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 had been so bad that even Israel’s extremely disproportionate military attacks in Gaza were justified and thus should not be considered to be genocidal. Besides the logic being flawed, for the infliction of such disproportional harm was not justified, and even a justified genocide would violate the Convention on Genocide, which Israel had agreed to be bound. In short, I suspect that much was happening behind the scenes not only in Israel, but also in the U.S. Government and even private media companies in the U.S. immediately following the Court’s announcement.

On December 29, 2023, the International Court of Justice announced that South Africa had filed papers accusing Israel of being “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” because “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”[1] On January 2, 2024, a spokesperson for the Israeli government “announced that representatives of the country would appear very soon before the court to defend Israel’s position.”[2] Being a signatory to the Genocide Convention, which had been adopted by the UN’s General Assembly in 1948, Israel was not only subject to the court’s jurisdiction on genocides, but also obligated to send representatives to the Court when a defendant. In anticipation, Israel unleased a public relations offensive, which included not only Israeli media outlets, but also American ones too, perhaps from pressure from Washington, an ally of Israel. Not having proof of the complicity, I am basing my hypothesis on the very convenient timing involved, as well as the fact that multiple interviews were published and aired within days of the Court’s announcement.

Admittedly, the first casualty in war is truth, but even subjectivity goes only so far before it becomes hyperbolic or otherwise excessively manipulative (i.e., used as a weapon of sorts) by twisting the meaning of words beyond recognition. In fact, the 20^th century philosophical phenomenologists, including Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre overrated human subjectivity in using it to anchor their respective philosophies. Those philosophers and others like them may have been unduly pessimistic on the potential of human reason because the horrors in the Nazi Holocaust had followed the optimism in the Enlightenment in the 18^th century. As Nietzsche wrote, a philosopher is not a person of one’s day. This means that a philosopher worth one’s salt thinks outside the box, as it were, and so one’s philosophy is not unduly delimited by one’s immediate context. In short, the decadence in the bloodiest century so far had swallowed the philosophical phenomenologists. Meanwhile, analytic philosophers allowed themselves to become reductionists in obsessing on language.

Israel’s government responded to being charged with genocide by exploiting the worst of the 20^th century to stir the world’s emotions against South Africa’s accusation of genocide. In particular, the Israeli government spokesman announcing that Israel would send representatives to the court described South Africa’s accusation as “a blood libel” against what The Times of Israel labeled as “the Jewish state,” as if the South African ministers were antisemitic.[3] The intended allusion was to the Jewish origins of the state due to the blood of the Holocaust, and an implicit claim may have been that the heirs of victims cannot become victimizers, which is not so. Indeed, vengeance against current adversaries can be intensified by resentment of the unspent justice against past aggressors. Such disproportionate vengeance is not fair to the contemporary enemies unless they were also the past aggressors. The Israeli government spokesperson suggested such a link in labeling the South African government as an heir of the Nazis.[4]  In being aided by South Africa, the Palestinians in Gaza too could be vicariously linked to an old enemy. I would not be surprised to find press reports of the Israeli government ministers referring to Hamas as Nazis so as to justify expending even the unrequited vengeance in the previous century following the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Of course, the Israeli spokesman’s “heirs of the Nazis” comment was wildly off the mark. Real heirs would not have waited to see Israel’s wholesale destruction and killing in Gaza before attempting a genocide against not only Israelis, but Jews anywhere. Also, filing an accusation in an international court pales in comparison with what heirs would have done, and is not even close to what the Nazis actually did to Jews in Europe. In actuality, the South African government had pointed to the obligation of any signatory to the Genocide Convention to report possible genocides to the court. With more than 1.8 million Palestinians displaced from their homes and Gaza residents facing the “highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded,” according to the UN’s emergency chief, Martin Griffiths[5], the natural human sentiment of disapprobation—a visceral emotional reaction of revulsion—had more than enough stimulus to be activated worldwide, including in South Africa. Hume refers to such an activation to be what ethical judgment is, underneath—a visceral emotional reaction rather than a Kantian contradiction of reason. In heeding an ethical obligation, the officials in the South African government were hardly heirs to the Nazis.

Another allusion to the Nazis occurred just three days after the court had announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide. Jake Tapper of CNN headlined a former Israeli hostage, Mia Schem, who had been held in Gaza for a harsh 55 days at the home of a Palestinian family (hence thankfully rape was not committed). Schem, a young, beautiful woman who obviously deserves much sympathy for her ordeal as a hostage, nonetheless shamelessly described her ordeal as incorrectly as “a Holocaust.” 

The deliberate misappropriation of such an emotionally-tinged word—and that an Israeli of all people would use the word opportunistically and inaccurately beyond recognition—suggests an underlying motive to manipulate public opinion. Ironically, survivors of the real holocaust would probably bristle at the attempted comparison. What you experienced for 55 days is nothing like what we experienced in Nazi Germany, the retort might insist. The implication that the Palestinians in occupied Gaza—a “ghetto” so called by Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich (who also said on the day after the court’s announcement that “Israel must reduce” the Palestinian population there to 100,000-200,000 from 2.3 million[6])—are like Nazis conveniently denies the decades of oppression exacted by Israel on the residents of Gaza and the obvious difference between the attack by Hamas of October 7, 2023, including the taking and holding of hostages, and Nazi Germany’s many atrocities over more than a decade.

Besides exaggerating in furnishing a label for her ordeal as a hostage, Schem extrapolated in generalizing concerning the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza. Interviewed on Israeli television on the day the court announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide, she accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being a terrorist. “Everyone there are(sic) terrorists . . . there are no innocent civilians, not one,” she said.[7] She based her empirical claim on the acquiescence of the wife and child of the man who had held Schem in his home. No auditor would make such a projection to a population of numbers based on such a small sample size. After Hamas’ attack of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 were taken hostage, Israeli President Herzog had claimed, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” as Israel was ordering 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes.[8]  The implication to be drawn from both statements is that retribution against every Palestinian there would be justified. Indeed, reports from the UN suggest that precisely that was occurring.

Gemma Connell, Gaza team leader for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), referred to conditions in even north Gaza as, “No food, no water, very little medical supplies.”[9] By January 4, 2024, many people in southern Gaza had been “displaced not once, not twice, but six or seven times,” according to Connell. With 2.2 million people in Gaza “in desperate need of help,”[10] South Africa was on firm ground empirically as well as ethically, whereas Schem’s attempt to justify the wholesale annihilation of the Palestinians living in Gaza was empirically and ethically spurious. In outlining plans for Gaza after the Israeli military attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant said on January 5, 2024 that the Palestinian “entity controlling the territory” would “build on the capabilities” of “local non-hostile actors” already present in Gaza.[11] Clearly, not every Palestinian in Gaza was a terrorist, and did not deserve the onslaught of Israeli “collective justice” as if they were.

I contend that Schem’s interviews were part of a coordinated PR offensive by Israel that reached as far as CNN in America. CNN interviewed another former hostage, Doran Asher, days after the Court had announced the accusation of genocide. She was more accurate in labeling the infliction of “psychological warfare” on her during her 50 days of captivity in Gaza.[12] CNN claimed in its headline, "This is what she wants you to know." My question is, who else wanted the world to know?  Who would have had the motive and political power to see it it that you hear or read her story?

That she wanted to tell her story would not have been sufficient to get her on CNN, which would surely not have been acting solely on her behalf. 

It can also be asked what did not make it onto CNN. For instance, the American media had been practically silent in putting the Hamas attack in the wider context of decades of harsh Israeli occupation of Gaza, maintaining it as a subjugated “ghetto.” Not that enduring such harsh conditions for so long justifies the killing and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023; rather, the context is explanatory, and could have resulted in a global public opinion less dismissive of Israel’s vastly disproportionate destruction of Gaza. The omission of proper context can point back to CNN’s bias or the media company’s role as part of a broader PR campaign possibly being pushed by the Israeli government to set public opinion against the accusation of genocide in Gaza in spite of the facts on the ground there.

In conclusion, Israel’s attempt to manipulate global public opinion (and even the justices at the International Court of Justice) may have eventuated into the following narrative: The entire population of Gaza committed a holocaust by killing 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 240 more.  Every civilian in Gaza is culpable, and thus is a legitimate military target and deserves to be homeless and starving. Furthermore, any serious effort to hold Israel back from its extremely disproportionate “collective justice,” which is an inherently flawed ethical theory because even people living in the same geographical area do not all have the same beliefs, values, and ideology, is to be discredited as “blood libel.” Unfortunately for Israel’s credibility in its PR offensive, much more blood had flowed in Gaza than in Israel, and this alone, rather than any antisemitism, had brought South Africa to the International Court of Justice. While it is easy to throw public-relations “bombs” such as Holocaust, Nazi heirs, and terrorists, such irrationality is expedient, and thus may end up working against Israel’s interests. For instance, by inserting Nazi-era terms into the public discourse, calls for a genocide of the Jews could be transformed  from constituting hate speech to being merely countervailing political speech. Additionally, the hyperbole could ultimately undercut Israel’s credibility at the International Court and in the court of world opinion. Viewing an opposing political position on the war as antisemitic even though Israel’s military response had been so very disproportionate could erode Israel’s credibility further. The attack of October 7, 2023 was indeed horrific, as were the ensuing experiences of the Israeli hostages, but so too was the ironic banality of evil in the decades in which Israel occupied Gaza as a “ghetto” subject to the flawed ethical concept of collective justice. To say it has not been a fair fight, even taking the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 into account, is not to be antisemitic. Rather, the charge is political, as were the interviews given by freed Israeli hostages.

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1.. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023; Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
2. Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Heather Chen and Eve Brennen, “Famine in Gaza ‘Around the Corner,’ as People Face ‘Highest Levels of Food Insecurity Ever Recorded,’ UN Relief Chief Says,” CNN.com, January 6, 2024.
6. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is a ‘Ghetto’ For Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
7. Amy Spiro and Michael Horovitz, “Freed Hostage Mia Schem: ‘I Experienced Hell. There Are No Innocent Civilians in Gaza,” The Times of Israel, December 29, 2023.
8. Paul Blummenthal, “Israeli President Suggests that Civilians in Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” The Huffington Post, October 13, 2023.
9.  Michael Rios, “’No Food, No Water, Very Little Medical Supplies’: UN Aid Worker on Devastating Conditions in Gaza,” CNN.Com, January 4, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Amir Tal, “Israeli Government Divisions Burst into Open as Ministers ‘Fight’ over Post-War Plans,” CNN.com, January 5, 2024.
12. Christian Edwards and Bianna Goldryga, “Freed Israeli Hostage Says She Endured ‘Psychological Warfare’ during 50 Days of Hamas Captivity,” CNN.com, January 4, 2024.