World roundup: October 7 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Guatemala, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 7, 1571: A Holy League fleet wins a major victory over the Ottoman Empire at the naval Battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth, thanks largely to more advanced ship designs and the adoption of firearms for close quarters sea combat. The Ottomans lost some 200 ships to the Christians’ ~50, and although they replaced those vessels their navy after Lepanto was never quite the Mediterranean power it had been before. The victory has been widely celebrated in Europe as one of the most important naval battles in history, though its impact on the tactics of naval warfare may have been more important than its immediate geopolitical impact.

Flemish painter Laureys a Castro’s c.1683 The Battle of Lepanto (Wikimedia Commons)

October 7, 2001: The US military begins its invasion of Afghanistan. Though it replaced Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government with a friendly regime within weeks, the US finally left Afghanistan nearly 20 years later (in August 2021) with the Taliban back in control of the country.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

It has now been a full year since the Hamas attacks across southern Israel, and naturally the day has been replete with commemorations of the victims and protests against the ongoing violence, as well as retrospectives and attempts to divine what the next year may hold. At this point “more of the same but worse” seems the likely answer for the latter. At Jacobin, activists Nimrod Flaschenberg and Alma Itzhaky argue that the events of the past year have fundamentally changed Israeli society:

The human catastrophe unfolding in Gaza is unprecedented and incomparable to anything that came before it. An ongoing, yearlong war crime with no end in sight, it constitutes one of the worst man-made catastrophes of the twenty-first century and the paramount moral issue of our age. Despite what mainstream English- and German-speaking media often suggest, this catastrophe has perpetrators. Indeed, an entire society is behind this massacre, this eradication of an entire place. Although Hamas certainly bears responsibility for its crimes on October 7, which led to the war, Israel bears the responsibility for what it has done to Gaza.

The societal transformation that enabled these crimes did not begin on October 7. Israel’s gradual slide to the extreme right has played out over at least twenty years, if not longer. Its ideological roots date much further back, and policies of ethnic cleansing and Jewish expansionism have been characteristics of the Zionist project since the beginning of organized Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early twentieth century. Yet if these characteristics were historically contested within Israeli society, perhaps the most striking consequence of October 7 has been the consolidation of an increasingly belligerent pro-war majority.

The flimsy liberal-democratic veneer that preserved a sense of normality (for Israel’s Jewish citizens) amid what was and is effectively an apartheid regime has shattered, exposing a yawning, black abyss of hatred. It is as if October 7 awakened all the underlying structural elements of the Jewish state — the uncompromising reliance on military force, the implicit belief that Palestinians are less than human, and the demand for unquestioning loyalty to ethnicity and nation. These cruelest and most ugly features of our society frighten us as Israelis who believe a different path might have been possible.

A couple of pieces at The New Republic may also be of interest. Yousef Munayyer suggests that Israel’s retribution for the October 7 attacks—seemingly fueled by rage more than anything else at this point—has foreclosed permanently on any hope of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. There seems to be little concern about this within the Israeli political establishment, which always favored walling off the Palestinians to coexisting with them—and now, having overseen the failure of that approach, prefers simply killing them.

Matt Duss recounts the role that the Biden administration has played in enabling Israeli vengeance and the extent to which it therefore owns the catastrophe that has ensued. The administration has graced Israel with a whopping $17.9 billion in military aid since October 7, the most the US has ever given Israel in a one year span. It’s also spent another $4.86 billion on stepped up military operations in the Middle East that are intended in part to protect Israel from the repercussions of its many escalatory actions over the past year.

In other items: