World roundup: June 4 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, India, Ukraine, and elsewhere

Jun 05, 2024

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: I am a bit out of sorts this evening so I am foregoing our usual voiceover for this roundup.

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 4, 1615: The army of the Tokugawa Shogunate captures Osaka, ending a siege that had begun the previous month. This was the second Tokugawa siege of Osaka in less than a year—the initial incident, which lasted from November 1614 to January 1615, had ended with a peace agreement that quickly collapsed. With its capture of Osaka, the Tokugawa clan was able to force the disbanding of the Toyotomi clan, the last serious obstacle to full Tokugawa control over Japan.

June 4, 1989: Chinese soldiers charged with enforcing a declaration of martial law enter Beijing’s Tiananmen Square overnight, beginning a violent dispersal of protesters that left many people dead. The square had been the site of large student-led protests since mid-April, motivated by a wide array of issues but chiefly concerned with economic challenges, demands for political reform, and calls for a government anti-corruption campaign. The military action and ensuing bloodshed broke up the demonstrations. Official figures put the June 3-4 death toll at 241, 218 of them civilians, while various unofficial claims have put it at 300-1000 and above.

INTERNATIONAL

According to a new report from United Nations Trade and Development, total global public debt hit a record $97 trillion last year, up a cool $5.6 trillion from 2022. Around 30 percent of that total, $29 trillion, is held by developing countries, roughly one in three of which spends more on interest payments than on development. That is obviously unsustainable but changing it would require creditors to actually consider the interests of the people living in those countries and there’s not much indication they’re prepared to do that. For the United States in particular it might require less rhetoric about the dangers of Chinese-held debt and more action to alleviate the burden that private Western lenders place on developing nations, which is unlikely to happen for a host of reasons.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Spencer Ackerman unpacks the recent drama around the allegedly Israeli ceasefire proposal:

PRESIDENT BIDEN'S SPEECH on Friday endorsing "a permanent end to hostilities" in Gaza, welcome and overdue as it was, was a labored one. It had to obscure the political reality that Israel, not Hamas, are the rejectionists here. As many have observed, the three-phase approach to move from a ceasefire to the end of the invasion of Gaza, guaranteed by hostage releases and prisoner exchanges, is substantially similar to what Hamas proposed in February and accepted from Egyptian/Qatari mediators in May. Not surprisingly, Hamas immediately made clear that it's open to the deal. (More on that in a second.) When Biden said that now Hamas can "prove whether they really mean it," he was saving face—not just for himself, not just for the U.S., but for Israel.
Because Biden, for the first time in eight months, laid out a new war aim for the Israelis that diverges from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demands for "total victory," whatever that means. "At this point, Hamas no longer is capable of carrying out another October 7th," Biden said. That was the most important line of the speech.
Both Israeli and U.S. policies since October 7 have sought, to be blunt about it, regime change in Gaza. I'll get into this in greater detail in a forthcoming Nation piece, but a very significant development over the past month, after Israel rejected the last ceasefire proposal, has been the emergence into the open of deep divides, both within the Israeli government and between the Israeli and U.S. governments, over the endgame in Gaza. The Biden people do not have confidence that the Israelis are defining their aims clearly or can achieve them. Biden is offering Israel an opportunity to declare victory and get out—something that Netanyahu, and not only him, has no appetite for.

Spencer thinks there’s an opening here for Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire with the understanding (between him and his far right coalition partners) that he’ll quash it after the initial phase and resume the Gaza operation. I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. Even a temporary ceasefire could provide some humanitarian relief, but there’s a good chance that if Netanyahu telegraphs his intention to quit the deal then Hamas will reject the whole shebang. Of course that works out for Netanyahu as well, since in that scenario Hamas becomes the wrecker.

In other items:

Outside parties are urging both Israel and Hamas to accept the ceasefire proposal, which seems a little strange insofar as Biden assured everyone on Friday that it was an “Israeli” proposal. Surely they’ve already accepted it, no? Regardless, Gaza mediators Egypt and Qatar are on board, as are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the members of the G7. The Biden administration is going so far as to appeal to the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution in support of the proposal, and while the resolution only urges Hamas to accept it a UNSC resolution would inherently put some onus on the Israeli government as well.
In a lengthy interview with TIME magazine (motto: “It’s been a long TIME since anybody read this magazine”) published on Tuesday, Biden said that there is “every reason” for people to believe that Netanyahu is deliberately drawing out the massacre in Gaza for political reasons. I assume Biden himself does not believe that, because surely he wouldn’t keep arming the Israeli military if he did. Right?
UPDATE: Biden now says he didn’t mean it. In fairness, he does seem to say a lot of things that he winds up taking back later.
A few days ago, Reuters reported that the Israeli government had given commercial food importers permission to start bringing fresh food into Gaza from Israel and the West Bank. What could have been a welcome complement to the humanitarian aid coming into the territory has instead started competing with the aid, as The New Arab reports that Israeli authorities are now giving priority to commercial shipments in terms of inspections. I have no idea if they’re doing this intentionally, but given that most people in Gaza are currently dependent on aid and can’t afford the food that’s available for purchase the effect is to worsen the territory’s humanitarian crisis. Of course, civilians in Gaza may have bigger concerns at the moment, given that the World Health Organization says that many of them are now eating animal feed and drinking sewage.
The Slovenian parliament voted on Tuesday to recognize Palestine as a state. Slovenia’s government endorsed the proposal last week but the opposition Slovenian Democratic Party had pushed to force a referendum on the issue which delayed the parliamentary action. It’s unclear when the formal recognition will take place, but when it does Slovenia will become the fourth European country (after Ireland, Norway, and Spain) to recognize Palestine in less than a month.
The Israeli government has pushed back at reports that Netanyahu will speak to a joint session of the US Congress on June 13. That date conflicts with the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, and those initial reports apparently generated a negative reaction in Israel. So either those reports were mistaken or Netanyahu did agree to June 13 but then backed out after the religious conflict came to light. Presumably his speech will be rescheduled.

SYRIA

According to Iranian media, one of the people killed in Monday’s Israeli airstrikes in northern Syria’s Aleppo province was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps adviser named Saeed Abiyar. This is the first IRGC official killed by the Israelis since their attack on an Iranian consular building in Damascus killed at least seven IRGC members in April. We’ll have to wait and see if this incident draws any sort of retaliation from the Iranians.

LEBANON

Another Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed a Hezbollah member on Tuesday and left at least one other person wounded. Hezbollah says it fired a barrage of drones at the Israeli-occupied Golan in retaliation. Hezbollah’s repeated salvos are apparently setting off brush fires across northern Israel, and Israeli attacks are doing likewise in southern Lebanon. I haven’t seen any indication that these fires have caused any casualties but the cumulative impact is adding to calls for escalation on the Israeli side.

IRAN

Diplomatic’s Laura Rozen is reporting that the US will join the motion that the governments of France, Germany, and the UK are planning to bring forward to censure Iran at this week’s International Atomic Energy Agency. The Biden administration had reportedly lobbied the three European governments to hold off but apparently feels that “if you can’t beat them, join them” is the best approach in this situation. At Responsible Statecraft, Sina Toossi has a piece pointing out that censuring Iran is likely to provoke the Iranian government to take more provocative steps with respect to its nuclear program, which is presumably the opposite of the effect the US and company are intending to have.

ASIA

INDIA

The results of India’s massive general election are (mostly) in, and to no surprise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance coalition has emerged with a parliamentary majority. To some surprise, however, its majority is not nearly as large as Modi might have hoped, and as exit polling had predicted. The current projection gives the NDA 293 seats in the next legislative session and gives Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party around 240 seats. Those are the worst results for both since Modi became BJP leader in 2014, and this is the first time under Modi’s stewardship that BJP has fallen short of a sole parliamentary majority. He will need to be more solicitous of his coalition partners to pass legislation moving forward.

Modi had been gunning for a parliamentary supermajority that would allow him to amend the Indian Constitution, but that seems out of reach at this point. Maybe he’ll be content to be the first Indian prime minister to serve three consecutive terms in that post since Jawaharlal Nehru. Foreign Policy’s Devesh Kapur argues that this is the start of a downward slide for BJP:

While India’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi appear poised to return to power for a third consecutive term—a feat accomplished by a premier only once before in the country’s history—they are much diminished, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority on their own. In his 10 years in power, Modi has never had to rely on coalition partners. The election marks not only the end of single-party control in the Indian Parliament but also the BJP’s having peaked. Coalition governments—the natural order for India’s democracy since the late 1980s, except for the past decade—are back to stay.
The BJP’s supremacy over the past decade was the result of several factors. In Modi, the party had a once-in-a-generation leader whose charisma and communication abilities placed him head and shoulders above the competition in terms of popularity among voters. Religious appeals, welfare programs (especially those aimed at women and the poor), and organizational capabilities that gave the party a superior ground game all helped. So did a ruthlessness in deploying the dark arts of politics, a disunited and weak opposition, and access to oodles of campaign finance.
The BJP’s manifest hegemony appeared to presage its continued dominance of the Indian political landscape well into the future. But from the summit, the only way is down. Of course, the party may stay near its peak for a while and climb down slowly—but that is not a matter of if, but when.

MYANMAR

Local media is reporting that a Myanmar military airstrike hit a wedding in the Sagaing region on Monday morning, killing at least 24 people. The bride was reportedly a member of a local People’s Defense Force militia, one of several that have sprung up across the country in opposition to military rule. That makes it at least plausible that the target was intentional. Elsewhere, a hitherto unexploded grenade went off in a city in southern Myanmar’s Tanintharyi region on Tuesday when a student in a nearby school handled it. The student was killed and at least 23 other people wounded. Myanmar authorities attributed the device to unspecified “insurgents.”

SOUTH AFRICA

The Nation’s Benjamin Fogel parses the results of last week’s South African election:

After 30 years of uninterrupted electoral majorities, the African National Congress (ANC) earned less than 50 percent of the vote. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) confirmed on Sunday evening that the ANC received 40.22 percent of the vote. While it was widely expected that the ANC would lose its majority, the extent of the collapse was shocking. ANC support plummeted 17 points since the 2019 election. The party now has two weeks to cobble together a governing coalition before the next Parliament sits to elect a president. (In South Africa’s political system, members of Parliament appoint the next president in the first sitting after the election.)
The official opposition, the center-right Democratic Alliance (DA), finished second with 21.7 percent, a slight increase from its 2019 performance, and in third was the wild card of this election: Zuma’s Umkhonto’s wa Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation” in Zulu) or MK Party, named after the armed wing of the ANC during the anti-apartheid struggle, which received 14.6 percent. The radical nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters finished in fourth with 9.5 percent.
To its credit, unlike many other former liberation movements, the ANC has accepted the election results. There will be some sort of coalition either with the DA or with the EFF and a few other small parties (the EFF does not have enough seats by itself to form a coalition) or with MK or a government of national unity with the DA and other small parties. The other option is that the ANC could form a minority government in which opposition parties vote with it to appoint a president and then to pass legislation through government without joining the executive, a move even further into uncharted waters for South African politics.

As Fogel notes, any of these options comes with drawbacks. The option with the most drawbacks may be a coalition with former ANC leader Jacob Zuma’s MK party. Not only would that put the ANC back into business with someone who lost his stewardship of the party because of corruption, but Zuma has apparently rejected the election results and is threatening violence if his political demands go unmet.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

US Assistant Treasury Secretary Brent Neiman told reporters on Tuesday that G7 member states are making unspecified progress on the subject of using frozen Russian state assets to support Ukraine. European Union members agreed last month to devote the profits generated by some €210 billion in frozen Russian assets (around €3 billion per year) to Ukraine, but the Biden administration has been pushing to future-proof that money by using the revenue stream to secure an up front €50 billion loan. Ukraine’s international supporters are also apparently discussing ways to reduce and/or defer Kyiv’s debt burden.

UKRAINE

It would appear that the Ukrainian military has begun using US munitions to attack targets inside Russia:

Just days after the Biden administration granted permission for Ukraine to fire American weapons into Russia, Kyiv took advantage of its new latitude, striking a military facility over the border using a U.S.-made artillery system, according to a member of Ukraine’s Parliament.
Yehor Chernev, the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, said on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had destroyed Russian missile launchers with a strike in the Belgorod region, about 20 miles into Russia. Ukraine’s forces used a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, he said.
It was the first time a Ukrainian official has acknowledged publicly that Ukraine had used American weapons to fire into Russia since President Biden lifted the ban on such strikes. For months, the ban had stood as a red line the Biden administration would not cross out of concern about increasing tensions with a nuclear-armed nation.
The Ukrainian military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Unconfirmed claims on social media suggest that there were several strikes targeting Russian air defense batteries over the weekend, but there’s no way to be certain those strikes came from a HIMARS unit. Nevertheless, with the cat apparently out of the bag it remains to be seen how the Russian government intends to respond.

UNITED STATES

As expected, Joe Biden rolled out his draconian new border policy on Tuesday, which will surely cause Donald Trump’s xenophobic supporters to switch their support to Biden and thereby lead to the first 50 state sweep in US presidential election history. An executive order signed by Biden gives him the authority to prevent migrants crossing into the US without documentation from applying for asylum if the number of undocumented arrivals hits an average of 2500 per day, and that’s just one of it features.

Biden rolling out his border crackdown on Tuesday (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

This almost certainly violates international asylum law and coarsens a US immigration policy that already demonizes migrants, even as Biden had the gall to say to reporters that he “will never demonize immigrants.” Biden was at pains to argue that he and Trump are not virtually indistinguishable on immigration now, and as The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling notes that may be true in the sense that Biden’s policy is now even worse than Trump’s:

President Joe Biden just made it a little easier to deport migrants from custody—and he’s proud of it.
The president’s new immigration policy changed critical language that was introduced during the Trump administration, swapping the “reasonable possibility” standard for deportation to an even higher “reasonable probability” standard, according to a Department of Homeland Security asylum factsheet released Tuesday.
It also changed other processing standards in Title 8 immigration procedures, including making those who illegally crossed the border no longer eligible for asylum (except in the event of “exceptionally compelling” circumstances), and further tightening the eligibility guidelines for deportees who fear returning to their home countries.
The reasoning behind the timing of the change is a little transparent. Although poll predictions so far away from Election Day have proven to be historically unreliable, Biden has trailed behind Trump despite the presumptive GOP presidential nominee being a convicted felon. On top of that, voters have resoundingly picked immigration as the number one issue fueling their decisions this election cycle.

I don’t think anybody is under any illusions about how much further Trump will go if he wins in November, but chasing him into the sewer like this is unlikely to win Biden any political support. Most of the voters who say that immigration is their top issue are probably locked into Trump no matter what.