Time in the time of coronavirus: Where did 2020 go?

 Al Jazeera English

In March, I ended up stuck in the southern Mexican coastal village of Zipolite on account of the pandemic – an abrupt change of pace from the past 17 years, which I had spent darting schizophrenically between countries. There was no official lockdown or curfew in Zipolite, but checkpoints were installed on either side of the village to restrict access and departures.

In a split second, then, my daily routine changed from one of being constantly on the road to one of lying in a hammock watching ants parade across my stomach and thinking of all the things I could be doing were I not lying in a hammock.

While the individual days passed excruciatingly slowly, the months flew by. The end of the year has now spontaneously arrived, and I can’t fathom how it is that I am still in Zipolite.

Indeed, for many across the globe, a coronavirus time warp has taken hold. As a New York Times article notes: “Google has registered a surge of searches for the day of the week”. The Washington Post remarks: “Every day is Blursday”.

Over at Wired magazine, Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Kevin LaBar explains that the human brain “likes novelty … It squirts dopamine every time there’s something novel that’s happening, and dopamine helps set the initiation of the timing of these events.”

Hence the warping of time perception when there is not much going on. Trauma and anxiety also alter the perception of time, as does uncertainty about the future.

In my own privileged case of quarantine lite – in which I have not had to deal with added stressors like unemployment, lack of food, or domestic discord – the time warp has featured an element of “coronastalgia”, if you will. Bizarrely, I have found myself missing the very situation that I have yet to emerge from confinement to one village.

But while my brain has apparently decided to view the present as past from some projected future vantage point, others are experiencing a “feeling of being stuck in the present”, as Felix Ringel, an anthropologist of time at Durham University, writes in the Conversation.

Ringel observes that, for many, the sensation of “stuckness” is nothing new thanks to the “acceleration of time” produced by neoliberal capitalism, which has “put humanity into crisis mode for several decades already” by disappearing welfare states and job security and generally relegating the masses to infinite precariousness.

To be sure, there was plenty of uncertainty about the future before the onset of the pandemic – and not just in terms of capitalism-driven planetary self-destruction.

Capitalism itself is traumatic for the non-elite majority of the world’s population, upon whose perpetual immiseration the whole system depends. And chronological limbo has long been the norm for many refugees from imperial wars and neoliberal destruction, not to mention climate change and related ills. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s Honeymoon With the United Arab Emirates Is Grotesque

 Jacobin

Back in 2010, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman issued the following complaint: “Destructive critics dismiss Gaza as an Israeli prison, without ever mentioning that had Hamas decided — after Israel unilaterally left Gaza — to turn it into Dubai rather than Tehran, Israel would have behaved differently, too.”

Never mind that Israel never “left” Gaza — or that even if Hamas had managed to transform the diminutive Palestinian coastal enclave into the capital of Iran, international law would not have authorized the Israelis to then convert it into the “world’s largest open-air prison.” It’s also unclear how any territory could be turned into Dubai while under siege and frequent bombardment, or how Gazans would go about building malls with ski slopes — or building anything, for that matter — when Israel intermittently blocks construction materials from coming into the narrow strip of land.

Now, courtesy of the September normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates — the culmination of a long-standing clandestine love affair — it seems the Palestinians will finally get to experience a taste of Dubai. (And Emirati alcohol consumers will get a taste of Israeli-made wine from the illegally occupied Golan Heights.)

In a recent CNN dispatch titled “The UAE and Israel’s whirlwind honeymoon has gone beyond normalization,” correspondent Ben Wedeman writes of the “mutual enthusiasm” infecting the Israeli government and the federation of Arab sheikhdoms, so much so that the UAE “appears to have dropped, in practical terms, any objections to Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.” That’s no accident. Disappearing the occupation is a primary function of normalization, fitting right in with the Friedmanite approach to Middle East peace, which posits that, if the Palestinians would just stop bitching about being occupied and massacred and get on with their lives, they, too, could be Dubai — the equivalent of telling a person in a burning house to simply ignore the flames. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

UAE National Day: Lavish celebrations in a surveillance state

 Middle East Eye

On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates celebrates 49 years of existence.

The Gulf News website suggests "49 things to do" in honour of National Day, such as “go shopping” - no doubt a fitting activity in a police state of mega-malls, soul-obliterating materialism and shameless overconsumption, where basic freedoms of speech, expression and association are effectively criminalised, while bombing and starving the nation of Yemen are not.

In a 2006 essay titled “Fear and Money in Dubai”, American historian and urban theorist Mike Davis described the iconic Emirati city-state as epitomising “apocalyptic luxuries”. Dubai, he wrote, had become a “huge circuit board upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within cities - whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids”.

Nearly a decade and a half later, things have naturally only gotten more apocalyptic. And as if there weren’t already enough luxury and fake cheer to go around, the UAE is set to hold a Golden Jubilee when it turns 50 next year. Think midlife crisis on steroids.

But in the meantime, the current year has been a momentous one for the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms - and not only because the Covid-19 pandemic has given the Emirati monarchs an excuse to further eradicate civil liberties at home, while also engaging in nefarious collaboration with the UAE’s newly unveiled BFF, Israel.

As detailed on the official web portal of the Emirati government, the year 2020 - excitingly themed “Towards the next 50” - had been dedicated to preparing the country not only for the golden jubilee celebrations, but also for the next half century of existence, ideally culminating in a centennial in 2071. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

“You Pay to Die” — New Anthology ‘Asylum for Sale’ Assesses the Global Anti-Immigration Regime

 El Faro

In 2016, Uyi, a Nigerian artist, attempted to leave Libya—where he had endured months in prison-like accommodations following a perilous overland journey from his home country—and make it to Europe on an overpacked rubber dinghy. Reflecting on the time he spent being tossed by waves in the Mediterranean, Uyi says: “We stayed on that boat for what felt like days. It was so horrible. You pay to die. That is how it is: you pay to die.”

Uyi survived the voyage thanks to a migrant rescue ship that has since been forced out of service by the homicidal European Union policies often collectively referred to as “Fortress Europe,” which envisions mass drownings as a handy deterrent against continued immigration. In 2016 alone, an estimated five thousand people perished while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, by far the deadliest migrant corridor in the world. And yet physical death is, it seems, only one way to die in the context of a thoroughly dehumanizing industry that has arisen around anti-migration policies—and that essentially makes migrants pay for their own dehumanization. 

I recall an elderly Syrian refugee I met in 2015 in Lebanon, where widespread physical and economic abuse of refugees has merely compounded the trauma of the war they fled at home. As a result, the old man said, many saw themselves as dead already.

Uyi’s reflections appear in one chapter of Asylum for Sale, a new book edited by Siobhán McGuirk—a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London—and Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC. The anthology of writings and artwork takes on the commodification of asylum as a lucrative industry under neoliberal capitalism. Contributors include scholars, activists, journalists, and asylum seekers themselves—such as José López, the pseudonymous author of the book’s first chapter: “On Seeking Refuge from an Undeclared War.”

The war in question is in Honduras, a nation that has long occupied a special place in the sadistic heart of the United States, serving as a base for imperial military and economic operations in the region. In the aftermath of the right-wing coup in 2009, the US increased aid to Honduran security forces that were murdering, raping, and otherwise terrorizing Hondurans; after all, maintaining a corporate-friendly regime in the country was more important to the gringos than, you know, worrying about human rights. The climate of violence and impunity would ultimately cause countless Hondurans to flee towards the United States in the direction of potential safety —for many, a hazard-ridden trajectory rendered only more lethal by frenetic border militarization schemes and the effective criminalization of migration.

López, a gay man involved in the anti-coup resistance, sought asylum in the US in 2016 after concluding that remaining in Tegucigalpa was likely a death sentence. He was interned for three months at the Atlanta City Detention Center — “one of the worst immigration prisons in the country,” he describes it — where the city received $78 per day from the federal government for each Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee, putting the price-tag for López’s own suffering at $7,020. Remarking on the “massive money in asylum”—from private sector prisons to corporate contractors to the exploitation of an underpaid immigrant workforce by the very setup that criminalizes them, as with “illegal” immigrants employed in the prisons themselves—López observes that “it’s an entire economic system,” a “vicious cycle with profit at every stage.” Indeed, not only is profit wrung from the US-backed neoliberal war on Honduras, the victims of that war are then revictimized in the interest of further neoliberal profit and the expansion of the asylum industry. READ MORE AT EL FARO.

The Biden plan for Central America: Militarised neoliberal hell

 Al Jazeera English

On November 1, just prior to the elections in the United States, US President Donald Trump tweeted with regard to his Democrat rival: “[Joe] Biden is a proven Castro puppet! Vote TRUMP.”

The tweet did not specify any Castro in particular, but it is likely the reference was to late iconic Cuban leader Fidel, a staunch critic of US imperial aggression in Latin America and capitalism in general – a system he accurately saw as perpetuating poverty.

Considering now-President-elect Biden’s Latin American track record, however, it appears the deceased Castro is a rather terrible puppet master.

For eight years, Biden served as vice president to US “Deporter-in-Chief” Barack Obama, who assumed power in 2009. That same year, the democratically-elected president of Honduras was overthrown in a right-wing coup d’état, the success of which was ultimately ensured by the Obama-Biden administration.

The coup plunged Honduras into a seemingly irreversibly violent neoliberal hell, with skyrocketing homicides and widespread impunity for murders, rapes, and other abuses committed by Honduran security forces – and all with the help of increased US military and police aid.

A principal excuse for such aid to Honduras and other trigger-happy states like Mexico was, of course, the “war on drugs” – the gift that keeps on giving in terms of legitimating post-Cold War US imperialism and continuing militarisation of Latin America.

During a 2012 excursion to the region to reiterate US satisfaction with the panorama of right-wing, corporate-friendly brutality, Biden affirmed that there was no possibility for drug legalisation in the eyes of him and his boss, despite the horrific levels of violence generated by the drug war itself.

The perils of existence in Honduras have only been compounded by the post-coup privatisation binge, mega “development” projects entailing land grabs and environmental despoliation, and other US-backed neoliberal experiments in mass impoverishment and communal displacement. Given this reality, it is only logical that a whole lot of Hondurans – as well as other Latin Americans in a similar boat – would attempt to migrate in the direction of potential physical and economic safety.

And yet when a surplus of unaccompanied minors, most of them from Honduras, turned up on the US frontier in 2014 to seek asylum, Biden saw it as a “dangerous surge in migration”. This opinion was espoused in his 2015 New York Times article, “A Plan for Central America”, in which the vice president outlined his strategy for ameliorating violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and thereby stemming the migrant surge.

Biden’s plan, also known as the “Alliance for Prosperity”, was based on the notion that “security makes everything else possible”. The plan prescribed collaboration between the US, the three aforementioned governments, and “international financial institutions and the private sector”. Never mind that, in all three locations, the current lack of security has pretty much everything to do with decades of US interference and furtherance of the interests of – what else – international financial institutions and private sector. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Coronastalgia

Evergreen Review

I had been in Zipolite for more than two months when I learned it was called la playa de la muerte.

I arrived in mid-March from El Salvador, via Mexico City and Oaxaca City. In Mexico City I slept on the airport floor until scolded for uncivilized behavior by a security guard. From Oaxaca City I embarked on what I assumed would be a short bus ride to Zipolite but turned out to be seven hours of mountain curves and speed bumps taken at high speed. My stay in the village was meant to be brief. I was rendezvousing with Marwan, a friend from Lebanon—Mexico being one of a select group of countries that doesn’t make life hell for the Lebanese visa applicant—after which I would continue on to Turkey-Spain-Greece-Albania and a slew of other places, in keeping with the essentially schizophrenic itinerancy since I abandoned the United States 17 years ago.

The pandemic brought to a halt any aspirations to motion. Marwan was able to return to Lebanon on a series of flights that the Lebanese embassy in Mexico City assured him was his last chance to get home for the foreseeable future. I had no home but was committed to avoiding the homeland at all cost. I rented an apartment on the main road into Zipolite from the nearby town of Puerto Ángel and prepared myself for what seemed to be an inevitable claustrophobia-induced nervous breakdown after so many years of being constantly on the move.

As if the prospect of having to sit still and deal with myself weren’t awful enough, a coronavirus checkpoint was erected directly in front of my house. It was one of many such checkpoints throughout the region, manned by a fluctuating array of civilian volunteers and policemen. Heavily armed Marines were added later, when it was determined that the first two groups were disproportionately focused on eating and not sufficiently intimidating to aspiring violators of the quarantine. The checkpoint and I got off to a rough start. On the day of its materialization, I was not allowed into my house for lack of a face mask. Numerous futile appeals to logic and a near-aneurysm later, I was taken aside by a policeman, given a disposable mask, and told to wear it within ten meters of the checkpoint, after which the need spontaneously expired.

I was under de facto 24-hour surveillance. An act as simple as lighting the gas stove in the kitchen was liable to elicit loud and teasing speculation from the permanent band of eavesdroppers about what I was cooking for my supposed novio, who although never showing himself in the flesh was a constant source of speculation. Granted, the checkpoint did have its uses, like whenever I needed a jar of hot sauce opened or a wasp killed—a feat requiring two cops, one civilian, and a frisbee—or a coconut sliced with a machete, and despite the initial friction I gradually got used to stepping over a rope every time I went outside, just as I also grew accustomed to the rotation of upbeat songs about the coronavirus with which someone somewhere had decided to inundate radio waves. READ MORE AT EVERGREEN REVIEW.

Robert Fisk: Shining a light on western abuses in the Middle East

 Middle East Eye

It was the Day of the Dead here in Mexico when I received news of the death of Robert Fisk, who himself spent much of his life writing about dead people. 

The award-winning journalist and author passed away on 30 October in Dublin at the age of 74. Based in Beirut since 1976 - the year after the launch of the 15-year Lebanese civil war - Fisk joined the Independent in 1989 as the British paper’s correspondent in the region.

Various obituaries have commemorated him as an acclaimed but “controversial” figure, with the Guardian specifying that he was “known for his criticism of the US”.

Indeed, while the ostensible function of journalism is to speak truth to power, the few journalists who actually do so are labelled as problematic. Much of the “controversy” surrounding Fisk stemmed from his efforts to place the 9/11 attacks - the horrific and criminal nature of which he fully acknowledged - within the necessary context of malevolent US-led machinations in the Middle East. 

Nor did the powers-that-be appreciate Fisk’s insistence on connecting the dots back to that time in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden was fighting on, you know, our side. Fisk, who interviewed bin Laden on three occasions, understood quite well that history mattered not a bit in the propagation of the “war on terror”, and was instead something to be actively covered up in favour of reductionist rhetoric featuring hordes of Muslims who hate us for no reason.

As Fisk writes in his tome The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East: “‘Terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously.” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Gal Gadot as Cleopatra: Hollywood whitewashing in the 'woke' era

 Middle East Eye

On 11 October, Israeli actress Gal Gadot tweeted an oil painting of Cleopatra by 19th-century Orientalist artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman of Tuskegee, Alabama. Accompanying the photo was the announcement that Gadot would be teaming up with director Patty Jenkins and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis to bring the iconic Queen of Egypt “to the big screen in a way she’s never been seen before”.

The novelty of the approach, in Gadot’s view, is that Cleopatra’s story will be told “for the first time through women’s eyes, both behind and in front of the camera”.

As if that weren’t already the most exciting news to hit the world of Orientalist showbiz since the time Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra in 1963, Gadot appended another tweet specifying: “And we are especially thrilled to be announcing this on #InternationalDayoftheGirl. We hope women and girls all around the world, who aspire to tell stories will never give up on their dreams and will make their voices heard, by and for other women.”

It’s always moving, of course, when the ultra-rich emit platitudes about female voices and dreams, notwithstanding the fact that their own ultra-richness is entirely dependent on the general misery of the masses - and especially the female masses.

It’s even more moving when the hashtag track record of the person tweeting about #InternationalDayoftheGirl also includes things like “#loveidf” - an homage to the Israeli military. This particular expression of love took place in a July 2014 Facebook post by Gadot, in the midst of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip. In a matter of 50 days, the Israeli army eliminated some 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza, among them 551 children and 299 women. Hard to make your voice heard if you’re dead. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Nas Daily's normalisation tour: Loving the UAE

 Middle East Eye

When I was growing up in Maryland in the 1980s, the highlights of existence included visits to a gaudy family entertainment centre with a compelling whack-a-mole game. 

Nowadays, whenever a certain Palestinian-Israeli video blogger who goes by the brand Nas Daily pops up on my Facebook feed, I feel a similar physical compulsion.

The 28-year-old Harvard graduate, whose real name is Nuseir Yassin and who hails from the town of Arraba in the Galilee, shot to internet stardom in 2016 when he left his $120,000-a-year high-tech job in New York to travel the world posting daily 60-second videos oozing with cliche and orchestrated cheer. 

His Facebook page currently boasts 17 million followers, which does not inspire enormous confidence in the human race. Video topics have ranged from "The Most Lovable Country!" (the Philippines) to “Serbian Food Heaven!” to “AFRICA’S SECRET COUNTRY!”, Swaziland, where Yassin documented "half naked" dancers and, as Steven Salaita writes, it all "looked like a research trip for a 1940s Disney feature".

It gets more problematic, of course, when Yassin takes a break from revelling exuberantly in superficiality and engages in blatantly political commentary - like the time he explained, in one minute, the mass slaughter, destruction, and expulsion of Palestinians that attended the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948: "Some Palestinians left, some got killed, and some stayed in their land. My people stayed."

Stating that he had opted to "accept the borders of Israel" and to "move on", Yassin lectured his audience that "in life there are better and bigger things to focus on than the name of a piece of land!"

This is a fine and dandy sentiment, to be sure, unless the land in question continues to make life hell for millions of Palestinians more than seven decades after it was forcibly renamed.

It’s not quite clear how residents of the Gaza Strip, for example, are to "move on" in the midst of a blockade and regular Israeli military massacres of civilians. The vast majority of Palestinians - not to mention the vast majority of humans on this planet - don’t have the option to move from Harvard to a $120,000 salary to a career of international gallivanting that entails being lodged for free in executive suites in exchange for a mention on Instagram. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Neoliberal obesity and coronavirus in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

In August, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca banned the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to children under the age of 18.

Mexico's Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell, who has denounced soda as "bottled poison", expressed support for the new law, which has begun to catch on in other Mexican states as well. 

Lopez-Gatell is also the government's coronavirus tsar, and early on highlighted the role of the country's "epidemic" of diabetes and obesity in exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico has reportedly recorded more than 70,000 COVID-19 related deaths to date - although the actual toll is likely much higher.

In recent years, Mexico has vied with the US for the title of most obese nation on earth - three-fourths of adults there are overweight, and at least one in 10 have diabetes.

Oaxaca, one of the poorest Mexican states, has among the highest obesity levels and the highest child obesity rate in the country.

I have been in Oaxaca since March, and can confirm that - as is the case in much of Mexico - it sometimes seems impossible to take a step without tripping over Coca-Cola advertisements or similar propaganda. 

Indeed, Mexicans drink more soda per capita than any other country in the world, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox was once the CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico. In 2017, diabetes became the nation's number one killer.

How, then, did Mexico end up in such a deadly position?

To answer this question, a good place to start is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which came into effect in 1994 - and was recently repackaged as something-way-better-than-NAFTA under the auspices of resident continental megalomaniac Donald Trump. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel-UAE deal: The two-(police)-state solution

Middle East Eye

In 2016, award-winning Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor - who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates for such unspeakable crimes as insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols,” including its leaders - was the victim of a hacking attempt by NSO Group, an Israel-based cyber warfare firm.

According to the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which analysed the attack, the goal of the operation was to convert Mansoor’s iPhone into a "digital spy in his pocket" - taking control of the camera and microphone and recording the activist’s communications and movements.

This, mind you, was four years before the normalisation of UAE-Israeli relations last month - the culmination of a longstanding, secret love affair between the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms and the Zionist state known for habitually massacring Palestinians and otherwise tormenting the Emiratis’ fellow Arabs.

The targeting of Mansoor is hardly the only instance of pre-normalisation surveillance collaboration. There’s also Falcon Eye, a mass civil surveillance system installed in Abu Dhabi by an Israeli-owned company.

A Middle East Eye article from 2015 quoted a source on the system’s utter creepiness: “Every person is monitored from the moment they leave their doorstep to the moment they return to it. Their work, social and behavioural patterns are recorded, analysed and archived.”

Indeed, the UAE is believed to possess one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras on the planet.

Then there’s DarkMatter, the Emirati cyber-intelligence and hacking firm that has been described as “Big Brother on steroids”. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Abu Dhabi-based outfit employed not only former US National Security Agency personnel, but also former Israeli military intelligence operatives. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Tehran: New Israeli spy thriller is Orientalist brainwashing

Middle East Eye

On 24 June, Haaretz ran the exuberant headline: “New Israeli Spy Thriller ‘Tehran’ Is Even Better Than ‘Fauda’” - the wildly popular Netflix show that gets off on Palestinian suffering while pretending not to.

The article’s author swears that the three episodes of Tehran that she viewed “reveal a television series that is outstanding, polished and very effective by American criteria”, and that “when you watch it you will curse the screen and the broadcasting corporation, because there’s no option for binge watching”.

The series is furthermore “beautifully filmed in Athens, which suddenly looks like the capital of Iran as we imagine it” - calling to mind the sensational Orientalism of like-minded productions such as Homeland, the Beirut portions of which were filmed in Tel Aviv. 

Apple TV has purchased the new show and it is, well, pretty much exactly what you would expect from an Israeli TV show called Tehran. The storyline of the first season goes something like this: a young Mossad operative named Tamar Rabinyan, who is Iranian by birth, returns to her homeland as part of a plot to hack into Iran’s air defence system and take control of its radar so that Israel can bomb a nuclear reactor. . . .

According to Moshe Zonder, a co-creator of Tehran who also co-wrote Fauda, the new series “presents a different, pleasant side of Iran, which as far as I know, no western series has ever shown”. It’s anyone’s guess, of course, how a show about Israeli spies running around the Iranian capital constitutes presenting a pleasant side of the country.

But Zonder is sure of it, and also hopes that the series “will do something to help with the total disconnect between Israelis and Iranians”. Indeed, just imagine if the Islamic Republic were to produce a series called Tel Aviv about Iranian spies trying to blow up Israel: there’d be all sorts of de-disconnecting! READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Israel Is an Army With a Country Attached

Jacobin

A week into Israel’s summer 2006 assault on Lebanon — which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians — Harvard Law School’s resident psychopath Alan Dershowitz surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with his latest upbeat intervention on behalf of Israeli war crimes.

The article, titled “Arithmetic of Pain,” posited the need for a “reassessment of the laws of war” in light of what Dershowitz determined to be an increasingly blurred distinction between combatants and civilians. Unfurling his concept of a “continuum of ‘civilianality,’” he explained:

"Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually."

The upshot: even purely innocent Lebanese babies were merely “near” the civilian-ish end of the continuum, while Israel was entirely exempt from the whole scheme because it is a “democracy.”

As it happens, however, it is Israel that is suffering from a dearth of “civilianality” — something that is made painfully clear in a new book, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation, by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner. Recalling Prussian minister Friedrich von Schrötter’s characterization of Prussia as “not a country with an army, but an army with a country,” Bresheeth-Zabner contends that this is “even more apt regarding the relationship between Israel and the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces].”

The process was facilitated by Zionism’s embrace of the “mythical biblical Jew” and invention of an “unambiguous trait of Jewish militarism,” thanks to which two millennia of history were excised from the equation and the “new Jew became the imagined heir of genocidal Joshua, Bar Kochba, and Judas Maccabeus — a rogues gallery of militarized heroes who formed the foundation for the conquest of Palestine.”

And as the conquest of Palestine proceeds apace — with the army-with-a-state continuing its traditions of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and massacres to this day — brutal militarism remains the unifying national element. Alongside near-universal conscription is the near-universal approval among Israeli Jews for IDF-inflicted slaughter. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Against the Loveless World: A Palestinian tale of exile and resistance

Middle East Eye

When Nahr, the thirty-something Palestinian protagonist of Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World, is tried in an Israeli court, the trial is conducted entirely in Hebrew; Nahr doesn’t find out until she’s in jail what the nature of her alleged crime is.

As the trial takes place near the end of the book, the reader is already sufficiently acquainted with Nahr’s individualistic personality - and the pleasure she derives in throwing Israelis in particular for a loop by behaving in unconventional fashion - that her comportment in the courtroom doesn’t come as a great shock. She launches into a medley of Arabic songs, hoping to make her husband Bilal - himself a frequent prisoner of Israel and a model of defiance - proud, wherever he is:

"I started with ‘Yumma Mweil elHawa,’ to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. ‘El Hawa Hawaya’ followed by my favorite, ‘Qariatol Fingan.’ The judge was baffled, then irate, yelling at me, at the prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs. She ordered the guards to silence me."

As she sings, Nahr - the first-person narrator of the book - summarises the function of her performance for the reader: “I colonised the coloniser’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”

It turns out that Nahr’s words are fitting beyond the immediate context, as Against the Loveless World itself constitutes a defiance of colonising narratives and a reclaiming of Palestinian space - by both Abulhawa and her characters.

A Palestinian-American writer, human rights activist and biologist, Abulhawa hails from Jerusalem and currently resides in Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including The Blue Between Sky and Water and her acclaimed first novel, Mornings in Jenin - about various generations of a Palestinian refugee family - which has been published in more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Abulhawa is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organisation that builds recreational spaces for children under Israeli occupation.

From her writings and public appearances, Abulhawa seems - much as the fictional Nahr does - as someone who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, regardless of the effects on personal reputation or career. Case in point: some years ago she publicly took on Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School’s former resident cheerleader for Israeli war crimes, at the Boston Book Festival in 2010, calmly and collectedly tearing him and his arguments to pieces. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Virus Gives Erratic El Salvador Strongman Excuse to Fill Jails

The Washington Spectator

On April 21, in the midst of El Salvador’s hard-core coronavirus lockdown, President Nayib Bukele tweeted a photo of himself seated behind a desk in an elegant office, wearing a face mask. Accompanying the photo was the following reassurance: “The rumors of my kidnapping by aliens are completely unfounded.”

As if that weren’t odd enough, the next day he updated his profile picture to the same image of him face-masked, this time with the desk photoshopped out—and replaced by a spaceship.

Granted, Bukele had already gone orbital long before the coronavirus struck—like that time he announced: “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too … we both use Twitter a lot, so, you know, we’ll get along.” This, mind you, was after the same Trump had referred to Bukele’s country as a “shithole.”

A former advertising executive and mayor of San Salvador, Bukele assumed power in June 2019 at the age of 37, having successfully marketed his Nuevas Ideas party as a desperately needed break from ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that have dominated contemporary Salvadoran politics since the end of the bloody civil war in 1992. It seems, though, that Bukele’s ideas aren’t so nuevas—in that phenomena like unchecked authoritarianism and power-tripping have been around for quite a while.

In addition to tweeting ad nauseam and taking selfies from the podium at the United Nations, Bukele’s presidential activities have included deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly in February and threatening to dissolve it if lawmakers didn’t cooperate on a loan he was demanding for his Territorial Control Plan. According to Bukelian fantasy, this plan will resolve the country’s gang problem—and to hell with democracy. The militarization of the Assembly was a stunt unseen even during the 12-year civil war, during which the vast majority of atrocities were committed by a U.S.-backed right-wing military and allied death squads. But, you know, new ideas.

I happened to be in San Salvador at the time of the Assembly spectacle this winter and attended a brief pro-Bukele demonstration in front of the building. Demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in from outside the capital, were given black crosses adorned with a hashtag denouncing the recalcitrant lawmakers as mierda, signified by the poop emoji. The crosses were meant to symbolize how Salvadorans were dropping dead because Bukele wasn’t getting his loan; it was not clear, however, how anyone in such a fanatically religious country had deemed it prudent to put a poop emoji on a cross. The lawmakers, for their part, were given at least a temporary reprieve when Bukele called off the siege of the Assembly, informing his followers that he had spoken with God, who had told him to be patient. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

The United Arab Emirates Is One of the US’s Favorite Middle East Monarchies

Jacobin

Last week, the Associated Press reported that efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to combat coronavirus had “renewed questions about mass surveillance” in the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms.

Believed to have “one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world,” the UAE is well poised to use the current pandemic to eviscerate civil liberties — not that there are really any to speak of in the first place.

The slightest criticism of the government can get you imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared; talking about human rights is a particularly dangerous pastime. In a country of obscene material wealth and malls with ski slopes, ubiquitous surveillance — of both physical movement and personal communications — means that freedom of speech, expression, association, and thought are practically nonexistent luxuries.

The AP report notes that, in May, the Dubai police announced the local surveillance camera system would start checking temperatures and ensuring social distancing. An experiment for thermal helmet cameras for police officers is underway, too, while “‘disinfection gates,’ which fog chemicals on people, similarly use thermal cameras that also can record and upload their data.” And as pleasant as fogging chemicals sound, there’s more: “Nothing prevents these additional cameras and their data from being fed into wider facial recognition databases.”

Having had the misfortune to find myself in the Emirates on a smattering of occasions, I can confirm the distinctly criminalizing sensation of having security cameras pointed at you from every direction. In fact, the UAE is one of the few places on earth where a mere few minutes in the country was enough to convince me that human existence is itself one big cruel experiment. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Friedman at 50 Friedman Units: What Did We Do to Deserve This?

FAIR

In a recent dispatch on coronavirus, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains that he is “stunned by the criticism that anyone talking about saving lives and jobs in the same breath is an unfeeling capitalist.” Given that Friedman has long opposed job security as an impediment to progress, innovation and national competitiveness—even lambasting the US Congress in 2004 for being “out to lunch—or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean” (how’s that for unfeeling capitalism?)—it’s not clear why he’s suddenly concerned with saving US jobs in the middle of a pandemic.

As for Friedman’s own highly remunerated job (as of 2009, his speaking fee alone was no less than $75,000), this year marks the 25th anniversary of his service as foreign affairs columnist at the Times, where he has held various posts since 1981. To put it another way, Friedman has been writing a column on international relations for more than 50 Friedman Units—to use the metric coined by blogger Atrios (5/21/06) in honor of the pundit’s penchant for declaring that “the next six months” were always the critical ones in Iraq (FAIR.org, 5/16/06).

Unlike Susie Smith, Friedman’s livelihood has never been in jeopardy, despite his myriad professional defects. These range from rhetorical incoherence and continuous self-contradiction (e.g., Iraq was “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched,” even as Friedman self-defined as “a liberal on every issue other than this war”) to his tendency to imbue utterly frivolous jet-setting experiences with global political significance (e.g., that time on an Emirates Air flight from Dubai when the Pakistani passenger sporting a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” spontaneously evolved into a sign that Pakistan was the Titanic, or possibly the iceberg). (In the same article, Friedman cautioned that an American victory in Afghanistan was possible only if the US recognized that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas.”)

Then, of course, there’s the fact that he is certifiably wrong on a regular basis. (“There is never going to be any European monetary union,” he wrote on October 4, 1995, a little more than three years before the launch of the euro. “Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”) And yet, thanks to his relentless service as a mouthpiece for US empire and capital, he’s permitted to continue churning out his pseudo-thoughts week after week—even if, as he inexplicably joked in his 2005 ode to corporate globalization The World Is Flat, “some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.” READ MORE AT FAIR.