Israel Has Already Made Gaza Unlivable. Now the Coronavirus Is Coming.

Jacobin

Back in 2012, the United Nations predicted that the Gaza Strip would be “unlivable” by 2020 — not, of course, that it had been particularly livable at any point in recent history. Now under Israeli occupation for more than five decades — forget the withdrawal-that-wasn’t in 2005 — the tiny, severely overcrowded Palestinian coastal enclave has also endured a crippling blockade since 2007.

Unemployment and food insecurity are rampant, and 97 percent of Gaza’s drinking water is considered unsafe. Power cuts are continuous. Health care equipment and medicine are in short supply, and Palestinians requiring medical treatment outside Gaza are regularly denied permission to travel by Israeli authorities — who, it bears mentioning, are often directly responsible for the conditions necessitating treatment in the first place, as when the Israeli military maimed Palestinian protesters en masse in 2018–19. Nor is the dismal health care situation ameliorated by Israel’s habit of bombing hospitals and killing medical personnel.

What happens, then, when you add coronavirus to the whole mix? It seems we’re about to find out.

On March 22, Gaza confirmed its first two cases of COVID-19, prompting the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem to warn that the spread of the virus in the Strip “will be a massive disaster, resulting entirely from the unique conditions created by more than a decade of Israeli blockade.” Given that Gaza’s health care system is “already on the brink of collapse,” the group foresees a “nightmare scenario” — one that Israel “created and made no effort to prevent.”

The two initial coronavirus cases were Palestinians returning to Gaza from Pakistan. Seven more cases were subsequently reported among security guards stationed at the quarantine facility where the returnees were being held, and one additional case has now been confirmed.

Al Jazeera writes that Gaza’s two million residents have been “urged to take precautionary measures and to practice social distancing by staying home in a bid to halt the spread of the virus.” But how, pray tell, are people supposed to social distance in a space so jam-packed that there’s barely room to breathe? And what sort of psychological trauma will ensue when an already traumatized population is forced to self-imprison in the “world’s largest open-air prison”? READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Sanctions Against Iran at a Time of Global Pandemic Are Criminal

Jacobin

In January, Donald Trump took to Twitter to address the “brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I’ve stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you.”

He went on: “The noble people of Iran — who love America — deserve a government that’s more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect.”

Trump certainly has an interesting way of showing his solidarity — particularly in the era of coronavirus, when he’s been even more complicit in killing the Iranians he’s allegedly helping.

As of Tuesday, the country had roughly 25,000 confirmed cases and nearly 2,000 deaths. The Iranian health ministry reports that one person is dying of coronavirus every ten minutes. And yet the Trump administration has found the moment opportune to ramp up its economic assault on Iran, where years of US sanctions have already devastated the Iranian health care system.

As Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted last October, sanctions had “drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines, causing serious hardships for ordinary Iranians and threatening their right to health.” Among those especially affected were patients with leukemia, epilepsy, and eye injuries owing to “exposure to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war” of 1980–88 (another period of mass suffering in which the United States was more than slightly culpable, including, as it happens, on the chemical weapons front).

But, hey, so what if the shortage of medicine and equipment prevents Iran from effectively fighting coronavirus? It’s not like global pandemics affect the whole world.

The United States insists that humanitarian assistance to Iran is not prohibited by sanctions. But as HRW found, supposed humanitarian exemptions “have failed to offset the strong reluctance of US and European companies and banks to risk incurring sanctions and legal action by exporting or financing exempted humanitarian goods.”

If that wasn’t enough evidence, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s admission that the United States is engaged in straight-up collective punishment in Iran — in order to “lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime” — would seem to indicate that humanitarianism is not at all the name of the game. War crimes, more like it. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Forty years on, El Salvador's war is still not over

Al Jazeera English

Forty years ago, on March 24, 1980, iconic Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by a sniper while saying mass. 

The assassination, which was orchestrated in part by notorious right-wing extremist and death squad leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, helped definitively plunge El Salvador into a 12-year civil war that killed more than 75,000 people. 

A post-war United Nations truth commission attributed the blame for approximately 85 percent of serious acts of violence committed during this war to "agents of the State" and allied paramilitary groups and death squads.

But the blame hardly stops there.

Shortly before his death, Romero - who had become a champion of the poor and a staunch critic of capitalism, arguing that "the root of all violence is institutional violence" - penned a letter to then-US President Jimmy Carter. In it, he urged Carter to withhold military aid to the Salvadoran junta in light of the rampant killings, forced disappearances, and other atrocities that were already taking place in the country.

And yet, despite all of Carter's purported concern for "human rights", the aid went through - as it would during the subsequent administrations of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, ultimately adding up to billions of dollars worth of lethal encouragement for a maniacally trigger-happy right-wing.

But, hey, this was the Cold War, and the very future of capitalist tyranny - pardon, freedom and democracy - was at stake. 

As it so happens, Romero was not the only one to have given Carter a heads-up about the lay of the land in El Salvador.

In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner notes that, just days before Romero's assassination, Carter's very own ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, wrote in a classified cable: "The daily total of dead, many among them teenagers bearing marks of brutal torture, result from right-wing terrorism."

White's analysis did not succumb to the anti-communist hysteria that was so in vogue in Washington either. In El Salvador, "the rich and powerful have systematically defrauded the poor and denied eighty percent of the people any voice in the affairs of their country," the diplomat explained, adding that the incipient conflict was not the fault of the good old communist menace but rather of "decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of the elite to make any concessions to the masses." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Coronavirus: World cannot afford to continue ignoring Yemen

Middle East Eye

Time for a pop quiz: What, according to the United Nations, is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis - one that has killed more than 100,000 people over the past five years and wrought all manner of other torment?

Hint: It’s not coronavirus. 

Rather, it’s the war in Yemen, which - despite the extensive complicity of the United States and Britain - consistently eludes Western attention and concern.

Much of the blame for the deadly state of affairs lies with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, preferred psychopath of the Trump administration, who as defence minister in March 2015 commenced giddily bombing Yemen, with the help of the United Arab Emirates and other allies.

As New York Times Beirut bureau chief Ben Hubbard notes in his new book, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman, the war constituted a departure from business-as-usual for the Saudi military, which had traditionally abstained from action and simply “served to employ large numbers of Saudi men and enabled princes to sign massive weapons contracts with the United States and other Western countries to underpin alliances and enrich networks of middlemen”.

Of course, massive weapons contracts come in handy in battle, too, and - comfortably backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in US weapons sales and other assistance - the Saudi-led coalition has succeeded in slaughtering thousands of Yemeni civilians.

Among the more publicised manifestations of the gruesome partnership was the 2018 coalition massacre of some 40 Yemeni children on a school bus by a US-supplied bomb.

When a journalist asked then-US Defence Secretary James Mattis whether the fact that such strikes were carried out with “US training, US targeting information, US weapons” was causing him “to rethink the US role in that coalition”, Mattis coherently replied: “There, I would tell you that we do help them plan what we call - what kind of targeting? I’m trying to trying of the right word.” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

San Salvador and Beirut: A Tale of Two Postwar Spaces—and an Ongoing War on Public Space

El Faro English

When I arrived to San Salvador in December for a three-month stay, I asked a neighbor for recommendations on where to go jogging. It was his preference, he said, to avoid leaving the house whenever possible, but I could try the parking lot of the soccer stadium, which—like so many places in the Salvadoran capital—came equipped with a bevy of armed security guards.

To be sure, for the average Salvadoran, the obstacles to maneuvering in public cannot be overstated. In a city that consistently ranks among the most violent and homicidal in the world, the innumerable invisible borders delineating territory controlled by rival gangs means that an act as simple as crossing the street can literally be a death sentence.

On a recent excursion to San Salvador’s historic center—site of the Metropolitan Cathedral—I spoke with a man in his late forties who requested anonymity before remarking that, despite the government’s much vaunted “rehabilitation” of the area, “one block west of the cathedral is one gang and one block north of the cathedral is another gang.” For him, he said, navigating the boundaries was not as much of an issue as it was for his 19-year-old son, who, on account of his age, was automatically presumed by gang members to be from an opposing gang.

Moreover, because his son resides in a San Salvador neighborhood presided over by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)—and because his place of residence is specified on the national ID Salvadorans are required to carry—encounters with members of the Barrio 18 gang can be particularly perilous. But it’s not only the gangs, the man was careful to emphasize; there’s also a “criminalization of youth” by Salvadoran security forces, who are well known for their habit of antagonizing young men—thereby further cramping the freedom of public movement for that demographic. Then, of course, there’s the habit of extrajudicially assassinating people and passing off the carnage as gang-related shootouts. READ MORE AT EL FARO ENGLISH.