World roundup: November 12 2024

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

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TODAY IN HISTORY

November 12, 1893: Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan agrees to accept the boundary drawn by British Foreign Secretary for India Sir Mortimer Durand as the new border between Afghanistan and British South Asia. The Durand Line, which ran through the traditional homelands of both the Pashtun and the Baluch peoples, has for better or worse (usually worse) remained the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to the present day.

November 12, 1942: The naval Battle of Guadalcanal begins. The battle ended three days later with a decisive US victory over Imperial Japan that ensured the Japanese would be unable to provide significant support to their soldiers on Guadalcanal itself. It thus marks a decisive turning point in the Guadalcanal Campaign and, at least for some historians, marks the overall turning point in World War II’s Pacific Theater.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

With the deadline it had given the Israeli government to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza approaching, the Biden administration on Tuesday declared its demands fulfilled and let Israel off of the proverbial hook. It did so even as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency joined eight humanitarian NGOs in saying that Israel had “failed to comply” with those demands—and over the objections of State Department officials who agreed with the NGOs—because this charade was never actually about Gaza or humanitarian aid or even Israel really. The letter the administration sent to Israel last month laying out its demands and the deadline was purely an election stunt, a con played by Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin to try to take some Gaza heat off of Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign. Now that the election is over, and Harris has lost, there’s no need for the administration to continue pretending that it ever gave any thought to actually reducing military aid to Israel or that it ever cared about Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

Israel objectively failed to meet the letter’s conditions—at least those that were objective in nature, like the insistence on 350 aid trucks being allowed into Gaza per day. This is a verifiable thing and the Israelis have verifiably not done it. They have made a few token humanitarian gestures over the past few days, but these are all things they could have been doing for months and that they may not even bother doing now that the supposed US “threat” has passed. Now US officials say they’re hoping Israel will continue to take steps to improve Gaza’s humanitarian conditions, but I can’t imagine anyone in the administration is dumb enough to believe that will happen. They do think the rest of us are that dumb, though.

Elsewhere, according to The Wall Street Journal, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party are nearing an agreement on a “day after” plan for Gaza that would put the governance of the territory in “apolitical” hands:

Palestinian officials from both factions, long bitter rivals, have reached a consensus to create an apolitical committee of Palestinian technocrats not affiliated with either of them to manage the sensitive and massive jobs of aid distribution and rebuilding, Palestinian and other Arab officials said. Their acquiescence clears one potential obstacle to a postwar plan discussed by the U.S. and Israel, which would put a temporary technocratic government in place in Gaza until it is stable enough for elections.

“They have a lot more room and urgency for common ground now and to avoid being sidelined,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at the Palestinian Policy Network, a think tank.

Hamas is open to a committee not aligned with Palestinian factions to oversee aid and reconstruction, Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’s Doha-based political bureau, said in an interview. Fatah is also warming to the idea of an apolitical Gaza committee, said officials in the Palestine Liberation Organization political body and the Palestinian Authority, both controlled by Fatah. “An agreement [on such a formula] is likely,” said a senior official from the Palestinian Authority.

It seems presumptuous at this point to believe that there will be a “day after” in Gaza, given that the Israeli government only seems willing to countenance two scenarios: ethnic cleansing or perpetual killing. But as the piece notes, the US and Israel have been insisting on a “technocratic” administration in Gaza—as has the UAE, which is going to be expected to finance this project. That said, when the US and Israel talk about a “technocratic” Gazan government I think the vision is that Hamas would have no role in forming it because it will be either eradicated or forced into exile. So I’m not sure how well this idea is actually going to go over.

Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he’s appointing former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as his ambassador to Israel. The evangelical Huckabee will, needless to say, be no obstacle to whatever plans the Israeli government has for brutalizing Gaza, annexing the West Bank, or otherwise immiserating the Palestinian people.

LEBANON

I don’t spend much time dwelling on headlines, but The New York Times published a story on Tuesday under the headline “Israel Intensifies Strikes in Lebanon Amid Push for Cease-Fire” that I think is perfect for this moment for what it says both about the ceasefire “push” and the NYT’s skewed approach to covering the Middle East. Israeli military (IDF) bombardments killed at least 33 people across Lebanon on Tuesday and featured a particularly heavy round of strikes on southern Beirut’s Dahiya suburb. That doesn’t sound like much of a ceasefire push at all to me, but what do I know? Hezbollah rocket fire, meanwhile, killed at least two people in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya.

YEMEN

An apparent Houthi attack targeted a cargo vessel in the Red Sea on Tuesday, though despite reports of “multiple explosions” in the vicinity it seems the ship got through unscathed and continued on its way. I mention the incident only because these strikes against commercial shipping have become less frequent in recent weeks for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. It could be that the Houthis are running low on ordinance, possibly in part because of US strikes against their storage facilities, although they are still attempting periodic attacks against Israel so they’re clearly not running that low.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

According to Reuters, the Chinese government is pushing its Pakistani counterpart to allow Chinese security personnel to operate on Pakistani soil. This request comes after a long string of attacks against Chinese nationals in Pakistan, mostly by Baluch militants. Beijing wants to create a “joint security management system” to protect Chinese nationals moving forward. Part of that system’s brief would involve the deployment of Chinese forces to Pakistan for “counter-terrorism” purposes (and vice versa, though a scenario wherein Pakistani forces deployed to China is difficult to envision). Chinese officials seem particularly upset about a bombing in Karachi last month that killed two Chinese engineers, mostly because from the description Reuters offered it sounds like it involved a massive security failure by the Pakistanis.

MYANMAR

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army rebel group is claiming that Myanmar’s military carried out an airstrike that hit a crowded tea shop in Shan state on Thursday. Local media puts the death toll so far at 11 civilians, with many more wounded.

CHINA

The Chinese military unveiled its latest advanced weapon during an exposition on Tuesday:

The maiden flight demonstration of the J-35A, a “fifth generation” fighter designed to evade radar detection and attack enemy targets at supersonic speeds, was the main attraction on the opening day of the Zhuhai air show on Tuesday.

Millions turned in to state broadcaster CCTV’s live stream of the aircraft performing aerial acrobatics against a gray sky.

This year’s gathering of leading Chinese defense contractors has been celebrated by Chinese state media as a milestone in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ambitious plans to forge a world-class fighting force by 2050.

To achieve that goal, Xi has pushed the country’s defense industry to invest heavily in cutting-edge technologies.

Little is known about the J-35 or this J-35a variant, which may be geared toward the global arms market. Its appearance and designation suggest it’s meant to be a response to the US F-35, though it’s unclear whether it costs as much or delivers as little as its American counterpart.

A J-35a in flight during Tuesday’s airshow (Chen Jimin/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

AFRICA

SUDAN

The Biden administration on Tuesday blacklisted Abdel Rahman Juma Barkalla, a Rapid Support Forces commander allegedly culpable in multiple atrocities in Sudan’s West Darfur state. He’s one of two RSF figures who were sanctioned by the United Nations on Friday. While we’re on that subject, the UN Security Council is reportedly deliberating a resolution, drafted by the UK, that demands a cessation of fighting between the RSF and the Sudanese military and the facilitation of humanitarian aid into the country. If it’s adopted, there is no reason to believe it would be any more meaningful than the UNSC’s two previous Sudan-related resolutions, which is to say not meaningful at all.

SENEGAL

The campaign ahead of Senegal’s snap parliamentary election on Sunday appears to be on the verge of devolving into full-scale violence. Claiming numerous attacks against members of his PASTEF party, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko on Tuesday called not for calm but for those attacks to “be proportionally avenged,” citing “our legitimate right to retaliate.” This is not exactly the sort of thing one says in order to calm the situation. Sonko blamed the violence on Dakar Mayor Barthélémy Dias and his Samm Sa Kaddu coalition—which, in turn, accused Sonko of calling for Dias’ “murder” and said that it “holds [him] responsible for anything that might happen to its members, activists, supporters and voters.” Sonko and Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye dissolved parliament back in September in hopes of electing a legislature more favorable to their agenda.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

The Ukrainian military is claiming that its forces have inflicted a significant number of casualties on the Russian military in Kursk oblast over the past few days. According to The Independent, Kyiv is asserting that the Russians—who are undertaking an operation to drive the Ukrainians out of Russian territory—took some 1770 casualties on Sunday and another 1950 on Monday. There’s no confirmation of these figures, nor is there a breakdown as to the number of dead versus the number of wounded or the number captured. There are indications that despite the casualties (assuming those figures are in the ballpark) the Russians have made some territorial gains, though details seem to be extremely spotty.

MOLDOVA

The Moldovan Foreign Ministry summoned Russia’s ambassador in Chișinău on Tuesday to lodge a diplomatic protest over alleged Russian interference in Moldova’s recent elections. President Maia Sandu won reelection and voters adopted a Sandu-backed resolution to write Moldova’s goal of European Union membership into the country’s constitution in votes that took place last month and earlier this month. But both of those votes were closer than expected, with Sandu forced into a runoff, a result she’s blamed on a Russian vote-buying scheme.

GERMANY

Germany will hold a snap parliamentary election on February 23, following the collapse of its three-party governing coalition last week. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) reached an agreement on the timeline with the main opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) alliance, which had pushed for an earlier vote while Scholz was angling for a date in March. The first step will be a parliamentary no-confidence vote on December 16 that Scholz’s government will surely lose, forcing the snap election. CDU/CSU is expected to win that contest, though it will probably need the support of at least the SPD, if not SPD plus another party, in order to hold a majority in parliament. The aim of any such grouping will be to prevent the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which polls in second place and has surged in state elections of late, from holding power.

AMERICAS

HAITI

The US Federal Aviation Administration instituted a 30 day ban on US commercial flights going to Haiti on Tuesday, one day after gunfire forced the diversion of a Spirit Airlines flight from Florida that was about to land at Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture International Airport. JetBlue and American Airlines later found evidence via “postflight inspections” that their planes had also been hit by gunfire while taking off from that facility. The AP on Tuesday described life in the Haitian capital as “frozen” amid an intensive new wave of gang violence. Criminal gangs are now estimated to control around 85 percent of the city.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Donald Trump’s foreign policy team is already starting to take shape and, well, if you were actually expecting some sort of radical break with The Blob I’m afraid I have some bad news. As noted yesterday Trump will name Florida Senator Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, while Florida Representative Mike Waltz will serve as Trump’s national security adviser and New York Representative Elise Stefanik will become ambassador to the UN. Trump’s former director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is being tapped to run the CIA, while South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem will serve as secretary of homeland security. Late Tuesday news broke that Trump will offer the post of defense secretary to Fox News personality Pete Hegseth.

The thing these people all have in common—perhaps except for Hegseth, whose main qualification for the job is that he plays a character on Trump’s favorite TV show—is that they’re all pretty well established hawks. Several of them have deep neoconservative roots, chief among them Rubio—though, in fairness, Rubio is such a lickspittle that he’s repudiated several of his neocon positions in order to better toady to Trump. This means we can once again put to rest the canard that Trump is some sort of “dove” when it comes to foreign policy. He’s always been a militarist first and foremost, and according to POLITICO he’s likely to get a chance to act on his militarism in pretty short order, at the expense of the American people:

Sen. Roger Wicker, one of Capitol Hill’s most vocal defense hawks, will soon get the chance to pursue a larger Pentagon budget — and it stands a much better chance with Donald Trump headed back to the White House.

The Mississippi Republican is poised to chair the Armed Services Committee after the GOP romped in Tuesday’s Senate elections. And he brings to the role a plan for tens of billions of dollars in new military spending to expand the Navy and Air Force, modernize the nuclear arsenal and ramp up defense manufacturing.

“We’re not where we need to be in our Navy and our Air Force,” Wicker told Mississippi’s WAPT News in an election night interview. “So that’s going to be an opportunity for me as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, if this majority that's been projected does hold, to work across the aisle ... and build up our military so we can stay out of war.”

Wicker, according to POLITICO, intends to juice the Biden administration’s most recent military budget request by a cool $55 billion and eventually to bring military spending up to at least 5 percent of GDP—which would blow right past a $1 trillion Pentagon on the way to $1.5 trillion and beyond. Now, one area of serious divergence between Wicker and Trump, and indeed between Trump and some of his own prospective appointees, is Ukraine—they support continuing/increasing US support and Trump opposes it. But I suspect that if Trump green lights this level of military spending, Wicker and company will be more than willing to sweep their disagreements on Ukraine under the proverbial rug.