World roundup: November 4-5 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Russia, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
November 4, 1979: The Iran Hostage Crisis begins when a group of Iranian students storms the American embassy in Tehran and takes 66 US citizens hostage. They would hold 52 of those hostages for the next 444 days, shaping both the 1980 US presidential election and the course of the Iranian Revolution in the process. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used the embassy seizure and hostage crisis to outmaneuver potential opponents within the broader revolutionary movement and ensure that his conception of the “Islamic Republic” would emerge.
November 4, 1995: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical named Yigal Amir. Rabin’s murder is often seen as the reason for the failure of the Oslo peace process, which he’d begun a couple of years earlier with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Oslo’s internal flaws probably doomed it to failure anyway, but Rabin’s killing did hasten the shift of Israeli politics to the right and led indirectly to Benjamin Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister.
November 5, 1556: At the Second Battle of Panipat, the army of the would-be Hindu ruler of northern India, Hemu (or Hemchandra Vikramaditya), is defeated by the Mughal Empire under the young Emperor Akbar and his regent, Bayram Khan. The Mughal victory ended a string of successes by Hemu, a Hindu notable who became the de facto ruler of the remnants of the Suri Empire. His death collapsed his kingdom and left the Mughals as the unchecked power in northern India.
November 5, 1605: Guy Fawkes is arrested by English authorities for his role in the “Gunpowder Plot,” a scheme by a group of Catholics to blow up the House of Lords with King James I in it and install James’ young daughter Elizabeth as a Catholic monarch. Fawkes became the symbol of the plot, and his arrest is celebrated annually as “Guy Fawkes Day” or “Guy Fawkes Night.” Fawkes’ image went from reviled would-be assassin in the years following the foiled plot to something more sympathetic (depending on your perspective) by the 19th and into the 20th centuries.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Given that we’re collapsing two days of news into one roundup I hope you’ll forgive my brevity, but let’s go point by point:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on Tuesday. I say “finally” because by several accounts Netanyahu has wanted to replace Gallant with New Hope party boss Gideon Sa’ar for months now. Sa’ar denied that he was after Gallant’s job and in the end Netanyahu finessed that incongruity by shifting Foreign Minister Israel Katz to the defense ministry and making Sa’ar his new FM. Gallant and Netanyahu had clashed publicly on more than one occasion over the former’s desire to negotiate a deal to release the remaining October 7 hostages and the latter’s insistence that those lives should be sacrificed on the altar of Israel’s unending rampage across the Middle East. Despite that disagreement Gallant has been in lock step with Netanyahu’s approach so far, so the switch to the equally (or more) pro-slaughter Katz is unlikely to spark any meaningful change in policy.
The Forward’s Michael Koplow, among others, is suggesting that Gallant’s firing had in large part to do with his push to draft Haredi men. Gallant has in many respects been the driving force behind that effort, which perplexes Netanyahu insofar as the Haredi parties in his coalition keep threatening to abandon said coalition over it. Koplow also argues, reasonably, that Netanyahu canned Gallant on Election Day in the US to minimize any blowback from Washington.
At least five people at this point have been detained by Israeli authorities over allegations that they leaked classified documents from within Netanyahu’s office. The prime suspect in this case is a former Netanyahu adviser named Eli Feldstein, who apparently had access to classified documents despite having failed a security screening. The leaks consistently supported Netanyahu’s decisions to eschew ceasefire negotiations in favor of continuing to pulverize Gaza. This scandal will provide more fuel for hostage families who feel they’ve been sold out by Netanyahu—as will the Gallant sacking, given that he’d supported a ceasefire—but if it resonates beyond that I will be surprised. Netanyahu’s popularity has been on the upswing as his body count has grown, which is probably part of the reason he felt comfortable firing Gallant. That said, Gallant’s firing has sparked sizable protests across Israel tonight so clearly there is some public opposition.
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least 70 people in multiple airstrikes around Gaza from Monday into Tuesday. At least 29 of them were killed on Tuesday morning, including 20 in one airstrike in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia area. Among Monday’s IDF targets was Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the last (barely) functioning medical facilities in northern Gaza.
Civilian residents of Beit Lahia are still trickling out of the area. They report going without food or water for a month, since the IDF began its siege/cleansing operation in northern Gaza. I mention this because we’re now eight days away from the deadline that the Biden administration gave the Israeli government for improving Gaza’s humanitarian situation, and even US State Department spokesperson Smirking Matthew Miller said on Monday that the Israelis have a “failing” grade on this front so far. When pressed as to what the administration might do if Israel’s grade is still an F after the deadline, Miller would only say that “we will follow the law.” Given that the administration is already violating the law by giving Israel this 30 day grace period instead of ending arms shipments, that statement is essentially meaningless.
Palestinian officials say the IDF killed at least seven people across the West Bank on Tuesday. They killed two people in the town of Tammun, two people in an airstrike in the town of Qabatiyah, and three more in a subsequent raid in Qabatiyah. The previous day, a settler mob descended on the city of Al-Bireh and set fire to 19 cars, though there were apparently no casualties.
LEBANON
Lebanese authorities are saying that an IDF airstrike hit a residential building in a town south of Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least 15 people. The IDF, meanwhile, is saying that it killed another local Hezbollah commander although it’s not saying when that happened.
Airstrike survivors in eastern Lebanon are reporting that the IDF’s evacuation warnings aren’t offering all that much protection to civilians:
The Post talked to survivors and witnesses of four of the 14 strikes that resulted in casualties in the Baalbek region on Friday, all of which took place within approximately 90 minutes, they said. While thousands of families in Baalbek have heeded Israeli evacuation orders and are packed into schools and other shelters in surrounding communities, at least 10 of the 14 areas hit Friday were outside the evacuation zone, according to a Post review of strike locations.
By the end of Friday, at least 52 people had been killed and 76 wounded across the Baalbek-Hermel region, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. It was one of the deadliest days in the Bekaa Valley since Israel’s cross-border conflict with Hezbollah burst into full-scale war in late September.
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to questions about the specific attacks, or about why so many strikes were hitting areas not covered by evacuation orders. It also didn’t answer why strikes on individual buildings were not preceded by warnings to residents, as has been done with some airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
SYRIA
The IDF says it bombed a Hezbollah “intelligence” facility near Damascus on Monday. According to the Syrian government, it struck “civilian sites” in the city’s Sayyidah Zaynab suburb. Both may be true under the perpetual “human shields” construct. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is reporting that the airstrike killed two people, both Hezbollah members, and wounded five others. IDF airstrikes hit the town of Qusayr in Syria’s Homs province on Tuesday but there are no reports of casualties as yet.
ASIA
UZBEKISTAN
The US Treasury Department blacklisted four Central Asian firms on Tuesday for allegedly “providing machine tools and other dual-use equipment to Russia via China in violation of US rules barring trade that can support the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine.” This includes two Uzbek firms as well as one from Kazakhstan and another from Kyrgyzstan. Two of the firms, one Uzbek and one Kazakh, are accused of purchasing the banned items from European firms and then transferring them on to China for further transfer to Russia.
INDIA
Indian soldiers reportedly killed a suspected militant in Kashmir’s Bandipore district on Tuesday. According to Indian officials, they responded to a tip regarding the “presence of terrorists” in the area and wound up in a “firefight.”
MALDIVES
The Maldivian government has recalled its ambassador, Mohamed Thoha, from Islamabad, but not for any apparent issue with Pakistan. Rather, it turns out that Thoha met with the senior Afghan diplomat in Islamabad recently, and as the Maldives has not recognized Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government he probably shouldn’t have done that. So now it sounds like he’s in some professional trouble.
NORTH KOREA
The North Korean military fired no fewer than seven short-range ballistic missiles off of their country’s eastern coast on Tuesday. It seems Pyongyang was looking to register its displeasure with recent joint US-Japanese-South Korean air drills, and perhaps also to chime in ahead of the US presidential election.
Meanwhile, the US and nine other members of the United Nations Security Council issued a joint statement on Tuesday condemning North Korea’s recent intercontinental ballistic missile test. They issued this statement because they were unable to get the same language adopted as a resolution due to the inevitability of Russian and Chinese vetoes. Practically there’s no difference between a statement and a resolution, but symbolically the statement is considerably weaker.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Rapid Support Forces fighters reportedly committed another massacre in Sudan’s Gezira state on Tuesday, gunning down at least ten civilians in a village near the state capital, Wad Madani. This continues a series of recent RSF attacks on civilians in that state. In addition to the casualties and the intense violence (including sexual violence targeting women), which has rivaled some of the most serious atrocities the RSF has reportedly committed in Darfur, those attacks have displaced some 135,000 people according to the UN.
At Foreign Policy, researcher Suha Musa argues that Western intervention is—and this is shocking I know, but bear with me—making the conflict in Sudan worse:
The ongoing humanitarian crisis spilling over Sudan’s borders is one of the largest in modern history—possibly the world’s largest refugee crisis since 1947, when India’s partition left over 15 million displaced. However, despite the harrowing statistics, stories, and images coming out of Sudan, members of the international community, like the European Union and United States, have largely been standing by, unwilling to support the newly displaced in any meaningful way and denying them the same protections given to displaced people from places like Ukraine.
Foreign states have wrongly focused their involvement in Sudan on attempting to bring the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF into negotiations, therefore validating both entities as potential leaders of a postwar Sudan. They did this rather than holding each party accountable and redirecting support to civil society organizations and the resistance groups that better represent the Sudanese people. In the most recent edition of failed negotiations in August, the Americans, Saudis, and Swiss attempted to bring the warring parties to the negotiation table in Geneva—only for neither to show up.
Rather than organizing and “mediating,” the international community must step up to support Sudan’s growing displaced community—but they refuse. As two foreign powers armed with substantial economic power and far-reaching influence in shaping international standards, the United States and EU have largely ignored Sudan, and the greater international community has followed suit.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The foreign ministers of Angola, Rwanda, and the DRC met in the capital of the DRC’s North Kivu province, Goma, on Tuesday to “affirm” the importance of upholding the ceasefire between the Congolese military and the M23 rebel group. That ceasefire is presently in tatters as M23 has resumed seizing territory in the province, but even if this affirmation is entirely fictional that’s probably better than explicitly acknowledging its collapse. An Angolan-led ceasefire monitoring team began work in North Kivu on Tuesday, so clearly there’s still some hope that the deal can be salvaged.
BOTSWANA
Responsible Statecraft’s Dan Ford analyzes the Botswana Democratic Party’s historic defeat in last week’s general election:
Botswana’s economy has faltered in recent years. The country’s relationship to the global economy is heavily dependent on diamond exports, which account for 80 percent of the country’s total exports. As the natural diamond market has suffered from a drop in global demand, in part due to the rise of lab-grown synthetic diamonds, the country has seen its premier industry shrink. The drop in global diamond demand is a major reason for the country’s drop in GDP growth, which fell from 5.5% in 2022 to 2.7% last year.
As the economy has slowed, a growing number of Batswana have struggled to find work. Unemployment in the country has risen to 27%, hitting young people particularly hard.
The ruling BDP’s reelection efforts were also hurt by internal divisions. Ian Khama, the son of the country’s first president and [former President Mokgweetsi Masisi]’s predecessor (Masisi served as Khama’s vice president), publicly criticized Masisi over a number of policy issues and accused him of authoritarian tendencies.
In the end, Khama formed a breakaway party, the Botswana Patriotic Front, which won four seats in Wednesday’s elections, equalling the number of seats won by the BDP.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Ukrainian officials are saying that their forces clashed for the first time with North Korean soldiers in Russia’s Kursk oblast on Tuesday. They’re describing the encounter, which seems to have involved little more than an artillery barrage, as “small scale,” but the significance nevertheless seems obvious—assuming it happened. There’s no independent confirmation of this claim, but regardless of that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address that the alleged engagement will “open a new page of instability in the world,” which seems like an overreach but what do I know? Some 12,000 North Korean soldiers are allegedly in Russia at this point and the European Council on Foreign Relations is apparently considering the possibility that more may be on the way.
Elsewhere, authorities in several Western countries are implicating Russia in a plot to load “incendiary devices” into cargo planes headed for North America. Two such devices ignited in facilities in Germany and the UK back in July and the belief now is that these were part of a “test run” to see if the plan could work. The Polish government has arrested four people in connection with the alleged plot. Russian officials are of course denying the charge. Authorities in the US are also blaming Moscow for a number of hoax bomb threats that were apparently called in to polling sites in several election “battleground” states on Tuesday. The threats disrupted voting but there’s no way to know yet if they had a material impact on the election.
IRELAND
The Irish government has been preparing to enact legislation that would block trade with the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but it’s decided to pump the brakes on that process because of a threat from the US ambassador:
A senior US diplomat warned tánaiste Micheál Martin's office and the taoiseach of “consequences” if government enacted the Occupied Territories Bill – 90 minutes before Martin issued a statement committing only to a “review” rather than enactment of the legislation.
US Ambassador to Ireland Claire Cronin contacted several government offices last month, telling them she was “closely following developments related to the Occupied Territories Bill”, which would ban the sale and import of goods from illegally occupied Palestinian territory.
Cronin offered to “connect” attorney general Rossa Fanning – who recommended the “significant amendments” Micheál Martin claims are necessary to the bill – and government enterprise teams, with “relevant offices in Washington”.
This would, said Cronin, “ensure the best outcome” for the legislation – which government blocked in 2019 after a secret pledge to the Israeli government from Paschal Donohoe to “block” it.
Shortly after government received Cronin's correspondence, Martin publicly announced the bill would undergo a review rather than be enacted.
The “consequences” Cronin outlined were essentially that the US government would bar US companies from operating in Ireland. There are hundreds of them doing so right now and such a move would kneecap the Irish economy.
AMERICAS
BOLIVIA
Bolivian security forces cleared out a major pro-Evo Morales roadblock in the town of Mairana on Monday. The operation appears to have gone relatively calmly and I haven’t seen reports of casualties. Morales supporters have been blocking highways for several weeks in an effort to protect him from potential arrest in light of the rape charges that he may be facing.
UNITED STATES
Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Julia Gledhill wonders whether Congress is going to get serious about addressing defense contractor fraud:
Time is running out for Congress to pass the annual defense policy bill. After the election, lawmakers must reconcile the differences between their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and set the topline for Pentagon spending in fiscal year 2025. When they do, they must strip two measures that will make it easier for contractors to engage in price gouging.
While the House abided by the spending caps Congress established in last year’s debt deal, the Senate added about $25 billion to the president’s budget request for the Pentagon — bringing the department’s topline to a whopping $912 billion. This is excessive, and the increase will not make Americans any safer. Lawmakers should communicate that to those negotiating the final NDAA.
Members of Congress cannot, however, overlook two seemingly benign provisions in the House version of the bill. If retained, Sections 811 and 812 of the House-passed NDAA would bolster contractors’ ability to price gouge the Pentagon — already a significant issue for the military. Just this week the Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General found that Boeing overcharged the Air Force by nearly a million dollars on various products for the C-17 military transport aircraft. In one case, Boeing overcharged the military for a soap dispenser by nearly 8,000%, more than 80 times the commercial price.
A million dollars is a drop in the bucket when it comes to overall Pentagon spending. But this isn’t the first time Boeing has price gouged the department, and the practice is rampant throughout the arms industry. Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that Raytheon will pay nearly a billion dollars to resolve a government investigation that exposed the company for overcharging on government contracts. Whistleblowers exposed both Boeing and Raytheon for price gouging. Without them, the agencies may have never discovered that the contractors overcharged taxpayers.
I’m guessing it will not, but always happy to be proven wrong!