World roundup: April 5 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Somalia, Haiti, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

April 5, 1818: A rebel army commanded by José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins defeats a royalist force led by Chilean Governor Mariano Osorio at the Battle of Maipú. The royalists lost around 2000 men, roughly double the casualties incurred by the rebels. Among the more decisive battles of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence, Maipú effectively secured the liberation of Chile, which meant that the Argentine-Chilean army was free to begin moving north to liberate parts of southern Peru.

April 5, 1879: The Chilean government declares war on Bolivia and Peru, kicking off the War of the Pacific. The war’s causes are still debated to some extent but certainly included disputes over control of rich nitrate deposits in the Atacama Desert and a growing competition for economic and political dominance in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Chile emerged victorious over the Bolivian-Peruvian alliance in 1884, seizing parts of southern Peru as well as the entire Atacama and leaving Bolivia landlocked.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

This broke so late yesterday that I didn’t have time to do much more than mention it, but after what we’re told was a tense phone call between Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and amid threats that the administration might start throttling back US military aid, the Israeli government has decided to take a number of steps that will ostensibly increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The most significant of these are the “temporary” openings of the Erez checkpoint in northern Gaza and Israel’s Ashdod seaport for aid shipments. Netanyahu’s office also announced a commitment to increasing the amount of aid coming via Jordan and passing through the Kerem Shalom checkpoint in southern Gaza.

These are all positive developments, in that they’re preferable to the status quo alternative, and I don’t want to diminish them although I do think skepticism is warranted until we see how these new policies are implemented. But the past couple of days raise a number of questions that I suspect both the Israeli and US governments would prefer to ignore. For months now the Israelis have insisted that they’re doing everything they can to maximize humanitarian support for civilians in Gaza. It plainly wasn’t true but that’s been their story. These steps are a tacit but very clear admission that they’ve been lying. Over that same period the Biden administration has been wringing its hands and insisting that, gee whiz, there’s just nothing we can do to force the Israelis to do more, no leverage that could be brought to bear. That has also now been proven false. So maybe it’s more like one question: why did it take six months and a famine, not to mention the deaths of seven aid workers, to get here?

Elsewhere: