Image is of legal adviser to Israel's foreign ministry Tal Becker and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the ICJ hearing.
The ICJ case against Israel might not achieve much for the Palestinian cause directly, given that Israeli politicians have explicitly stated that the Hague will not stop them - and I believe them. The Resistance will be what stops them, and they are doing quite well for themselves. Hezbollah has hit highly sensitive and important Israeli military sites over the last couple weeks, and in general persist in several border attacks every day. The battles in Iraq and Syria also continue. Hamas remains largely intact, and is successfully forcing Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip to retreat, and other parts of the Gazan Resistance are continuing to battle down in Khan Yunis. And, last but not least, Yemen is firmly dedicated to the blockade, warding off another ship literally minutes before I started writing this paragraph.
What the ICJ is battling over isn't Palestine and Israel - not really - but the legitimacy of international law itself, and to what degree victimized countries can rely on it to solve problems, versus needing to take more militant routes for justice. In a weird sense, it might be an L for Israel either way. If international law sides with Palestine, then when Israel refuses to stop, it will invalidate international law. If international law sides with Israel, then it will invalidate international law. There is no conceivable way for the West to come out of this looking good.
The South African portion detailing Israeli atrocities against Gaza was largely ignored by the western media. They have instead, obviously, decided to focus on the Israeli portion. Their defense appears to amount to "We didn't do it, Hamas did it. And if we did do it, it doesn't matter, because that's just urban warfare for you. Please get this whole thing thrown out on a very dubious technicality so we don't have to advance to the next stage."
From Craig Murray, who has been physically going to the Hague:
It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.
...I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…
What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.
I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.
The weekly update is here on the website.
The Country of the Week is South Africa! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
A lot of Chinese contracts include ways to circumvent USD payback with collateral. Would not be surprised to see negotiated terms on collateral in exchange for debt cancellation as a policy rather than as a last resort.
Why not just cancel them?
Wouldn't that be advantageous to Bretton Woods & Co? They get their debts repaid and China doesn't
No, it would be disastrous for the dollar hegemony.
Let’s break this down. First, the consequences of dollar loans to the debtor countries:
The point of external debt denominated in dollar is to keep the countries subjugated to the American monetary imperialism. If you’re a developing country that has high amount of dollar debt, there is no way that you can ever repay them. Argentina is never going to be able to repay its dollar debt, only debt cancellation and/or a jubilee can wipe out that debt.
When you’re indebted in dollar, you will have to earn dollars to repay them. That means exporting your goods and services (produced by the hard workers of your country) to buyers willing to accept the dollar. Now, because the net US dollar asset can only be “printed” by the US government (through the Federal Reserve), that means the US is the only country that can reap the net benefit of the dollar. Every other country can only store up their dollar reserves by earning them. When you go far up the chain (or trace the history further back enough), their dollars (including the ones that they lend out) had to have come from the US (most likely by exporting goods/services to the US).
So, instead of prioritizing a national economy that benefits your own citizens, you now instead have an economic policy that prioritizes export. More than that, you now have to compete with every other country selling the same goods/services as the ones you are producing, and that means a pressure on lowering the costs (pay your workers less, force overtime etc.) and depreciating your own currency to make the price attractive enough for US consumers (you get less in return, which makes import more expensive).
Next, such broad economic policy changes often result in the loss of economic sovereignty of the debtor country, especially in energy and food. In addition to importing fuel in dollar at a depreciated exchange rate, other conditions such as loans from World Bank explicitly dictate that your national agricultural plan to produce export crops, instead of building food self-sustainability, and so you have to end up importing food to feed your own people as well. A loss of ability to import fuel and food would be disastrous for the country, as we saw in Sri Lanka and Egypt not too long ago.
Going further, taking loans denominated in a foreign currency means that you have now placed certain public assets/utilities as collaterals. If you fail to repay, you have to privatize and sell these public utilities to foreign creditors, which allow their further encroachment on the national economy. Before long, you’ll find those foreign holders looting national industries and stripping them bare, while you are left saddled in more debt as productivity plunges.
Even more, failure of repayment means you have effectively defaulted, and the consequence is a loss of “trustworthiness” (e.g. downgrade of credit rating). You’ll find less foreign investors, currency exchange rate devaluation, more expensive/worse terms when taking out loans/trade deals, all of which which make the economy suffers even worse and the further the inability to obtain dollars to import fuel and food.
That’s how dollar hegemony works. It’s not so much about “petrodollar” that some people like to think is the only way the dollar gains its dominance. No, the weaponized dollar is far more pervasive and sinister than it appears on the surface. If you have to do anything that deals with global financial institutions (even something as ubiquitous as SWIFT), you can’t escape the dollar. It is an endless spiral that perpetually subjugates your economy to the global hegemon.
The US doesn’t care about being repaid in a currency they can print at any moment. The US cares about exerting its dominance over debtor countries whose only ability to earn this currency is at the complete mercy of the US. As long as the Global South needs the dollar to survive, America will continue to get free lunch.
A mass debt cancellation is the only way to escape this fate for most debtor countries.
——
Now, let’s discuss the consequences to China:
As mentioned before, the only reason China is able to give out dollar loan is because they have amassed a huge reserve by exporting goods/services to the US (through the hard work of cheap Chinese labor) for decades.
First, China is a net exporter country, which means that its economy is structured in such a way that heavily relies on export revenues, and as a net exporter (running a trade surplus with the US), you always end up with more dollars than you can spend.
The question is what are you going to do with those surplus dollars? They can’t purchase important/critical industries in the US, the dollar itself is meaningless for their domestic economy (Chinese citizens use yuan in their everyday transaction). It really is just a pile of junk papers and the only place left to store them is the US treasuries, which gives out like 1-2% of interest every year.
This is where the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI) came from. If you can lend out the dollar to other developing countries to build infrastructures, it can be a net gain for the Chinese economy. You can keep Chinese labor employed, Chinese companies get new contracts from overseas, the massive concrete production that was ramped up in the wake of the 2009 recession will now find new uses as domestic demand dampens. It’s one way of keeping China’s economy going.
Most importantly, China, while looking to internationalize yuan, is very reluctant to do so because they want to remain as a net exporter country. They want people to use the yuan to import Chinese products, they don’t want you to store yuan as a savings/reserves. They want you to use them so Chinese manufacturers can expand and keeping their workers employed.
However, that comes at a significant price. Because those BRI countries have taken loans in dollar, they will now have to repay their debt by earning dollar. This goes back to what I have wrote in the first part, with all the negative consequences to the debtor countries.
(I will not go into details but I should point out that BRI loans can be separated into two types: infrastructure loans (mostly in dollar) and rescue loans (mostly in yuan). There has been a shift towards yuan in recent years because countries found themselves unable to repay so instead of cancelling them, China simply shifts the burden by lending out rescue loans (in yuan) to keep those economies afloat. This doesn’t lessen their debt in dollar, it simply provides a temporary relief to the countries in crisis. To keep it short, debt cancellation is the only way out for most of the debtor countries).
The riskiest part is that China has effectively dollarized those countries when lending out the BRI loans in dollar. This allows the US to have a disproportionate amount of power over those countries, and, if the US plays its cards correctly, will be able to “exploit” the development of these BRI countries as a replacement of China as a manufacturing base, the country it ultimately seeks to decouple. So, cancelling dollar debt might seem like a loss for Chinese creditors, but it is actually a blessing in disguise for China if you look at the long term.
——
Finally, we talk about the US and the dollar hegemony itself:
If you have followed the arguments this far, then it becomes abundantly clear that the dollar hegemony derives its control over the Global South largely through debt. If there is a mass debt cancellation and/or global debt jubilee program that frees up much of the Global South from their dollar debt, and in conjunction with an alternative financial system (such as a BRICS-led financial system) coming into place that fundamentally rewrites the global rules of international finance, then those countries, now free of their debt, will be able to jump on to the new system with relative ease. This will free them ultimately from the collapsing weight of the US empire, like what is bound to happen to Europe, the first to sacrifice itself for the empire.
This is interesting. How did you come to learn this stuff?