World roundup: April 22 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Panama, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

April 22, 1809: Napoleon’s army defeats the Austrians under Archduke Charles at the Battle of Eckmühl, in Bavaria. The victory is considered a turning point in the the 1809 War of the Fifth Coalition, because it blunted Austria’s invasion of Bavaria, which had caught the French leader somewhat by surprise, and allowed him to go on the offensive by invading Austria.

Italian painter Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti’s War of the Fifth Coalition, battle of Eckmühl in April 22, 1809 (Wikimedia Commons)

April 22, 1948: In one of the last major engagements before the civil war in Palestine turned into the Arab-Israeli War, the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah captures the Arab sections of the port city of Haifa from the Palestinians. Haifa was one of six largely mixed cities the Haganah captured between the start of April and the middle of May—by the end of May, between voluntary flight and involuntary expulsions the number of Arabs living in those cities collectively dropped from an estimated 177,000 to an estimated 13,000.

INTERNATIONAL

Global military spending hit a collective $2.4 trillion last year according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a 6.8 percent increase over 2022 and the highest annual figure on record (SIPRI began tracking this data in 1988). The United States more than did its part, accounting for some $916 billion all on its own and remaining by far the world’s single biggest arms dealer. Military spending in the Middle East spiked by over 9 percent to around $200 billion, fueled mostly by big regional spenders Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Foreign Policy’s Howard French has written a new column wondering why Western media has so quickly turned its attention away from the famine in Gaza, which as he notes “finally” seemed to be getting serious attention prior to the Israeli military’s (IDF) April 1 attack on that Iranian consular building in Damascus and the ensuing tit-for-tate retaliations. It’s an important question, particularly insofar as the Israeli government also seems to have used the Iran crisis to reset US expectations regarding potential civilian casualties in Rafah. The Israeli government has since October 7 done a very thorough job of keeping Western media out of Gaza—major Western media outlets seem to have been quite accommodating on this point, to everyone’s great surprise I’m sure—so in general coverage of the suffering inside Gaza has suffered for lack of access. But French is right to say that “it does not seem outlandish to imagine that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu timed its strike against the Iranian generals in Damascus precisely to help shift the world’s attention away from the catastrophe in Gaza.” Mission accomplished, then.

Elsewhere: