Islands in the Stream
China to host 'Palestinian unity talks' between Hamas, Fatah, Washington has lost touch with reality, Pacific Island 2024 Human Development
China to host 'Palestinian unity talks' between Hamas, Fatah
A senior official from Hamas says the group is willing to join a unified government for Gaza and the West Bank with Fatah on the condition of a 'fully sovereign Palestinian state'
Delegations from Palestinian resistance faction Hamas and the West Bank-ruling Fatah have traveled to China for “unity talks” hosted by Beijing as the country looks to expand its newfound role as a mediator in West Asia.
"I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win," Clinton said.
According to a Fatah official who spoke with Reuters, the delegation from the party that controls the Palestinian Authority (PA) is led by Azzam al-Ahmad, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. For its part, the Hamas delegation is reportedly led by senior official Mousa Abu Marzouk.
“We support strengthening the authority of the Palestinian National Authority and support all Palestinian factions in achieving reconciliation and increasing solidarity through dialogue and consultation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a press briefing on 26 April.
The visit will mark the first time Hamas officials have visited China since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October and the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
A Chinese diplomat, Wang Kejian, met Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar last month, according to the Chinese foreign ministry. Beijing says the talks sought to open a pathway to reconcile the two Palestinian parties.
Last year, China brokered a historic rapprochement deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, ending years of hostility. Beijing's diplomatic success also opened the door for talks to end the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
The highly unpopular Fatah has been the de facto ruler of the occupied West Bank since 2006, when Hamas won the last legislative elections to be held in Palestine.
Hamas' victory at the polls was not welcomed by then-US President George Bush, who put in motion a covert initiative to ignite a Palestinian civil war and prevent Hamas from taking power. The meddling from Washington, Israel, and allied Arab states led to a Fatah-Hamas war in 2007 that saw the two parties split control of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively.
In 2016, a leaked audio revealed that, 10 years earlier, Hillary Clinton suggested the Palestinian elections be rigged, calling them “a big mistake.”
"I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win," Clinton said.
China's diplomatic efforts come on the heels of a statement by senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya, who earlier this week suggested that the armed wing of Hamas could be folded into a “Palestinian national army” if Palestinian statehood is achieved.
He also said that Hamas would be willing to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and form a unified government for Gaza and the West Bank with Fatah on the condition of a “fully sovereign Palestinian state” on pre-1967 borders and “the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions.”
In January, Russia hosted a round of “unity talks” between several Palestinian factions, including Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), PFLP General Command, and the Al-Saiqa organisation.
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Washington has lost touch with reality
By Marco Carnelos, Middle East Eye
If the US doesn't adapt, the world will pay
The US intelligence community recently released its annual threat assessment, which focuses on worldwide threats to the country’s national security. The document reflects the collective analyses and insights of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and more than a dozen other agencies.
The report’s foreword provides a clear sense of this community’s dystopian and self-referential thinking: "During the next year, the United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications."
It continues: “An ambitious but anxious China, a confrontational Russia, some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors are challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it.”
Iran, Russia and China are thus the main villains for allegedly challenging longstanding rules of the international system. No surprises here; this has been a US policy mantra for years.
The problem, rather, is that it is not clear to which rules the report is referring: the customary international law enshrined in the UN Charter and UN conventions, or the so-called US-led rules-based world order. The main conceptual problem is that for the US political establishment and its key western allies, there is no distinction. But as is often the case, they are grossly mistaken.
International law and the UN Charter are the pillars of the global order built after the Second World War, to which the US provided an outstanding contribution. Conversely, the US-led rules-based international system is a more recent evolution of American political thinking: a self-referential mindset twisted to the interests of Washington and its allies.
This order is based on neoliberal ideology and imbued with double standards, of which the tragedy unfolding in Gaza is the latest and most visible example.
Based on a series of assumptions, such as US exceptionalism and the undisputed superiority of western democracies (ie, “western civilisation”), this system claims national laws as universal ones. It assumes a set of values and connected rules, but is quite careful not to implement them when they collide with its own interests. This order can be summarised by an informal motto: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Challenging US Hegemony
Unsurprisingly, the report from the US intelligence community blames China, Russia and Iran, along with a handful of non-state actors (including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and the Houthis in Yemen) for challenging not only the rules of the international system, but above all, US “primacy within it”.
It seems that the real crime is not challenging the system itself, but rather US hegemony. Yet, while such a preposterous position could still have been accepted a few years ago, it is now openly challenged - or at least resented - by many countries across the so-called Global South.
Only a minority of countries in Europe and East Asia consider US primacy to be an essential prerequisite of a stable international system. In fact, scrutiny of the last two decades of history proves the opposite.
The global order is shifting from a unipolar configuration centred on the US to a multipolar one. Throughout history, empires have risen and then collapsed. US policymakers would be wise to adjust to these rules of history and give up on the notion of their indispensability. They now face a binary choice: accept history’s verdict, as the UK has progressively done since 1945, or catastrophically resist it.
A reference to the Gaza crisis in the report is even more enlightening about the US intelligence community’s dystopian views: “One need only look at the Gaza crisis - triggered by a highly capable non-state terrorist group in Hamas, fueled in part by a regionally ambitious Iran, and exacerbated by narratives encouraged by China and Russia to undermine the United States on the global stage - to see how a regional crisis can have widespread spillover effects and complicate international cooperation on other pressing issues.”
This passage suggests that the US intelligence community is fundamentally incapable of seeing the conflict in Gaza for what it really is: a national liberation struggle triggered by decades of brutal and unpunished Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, facilitated by massive US weapons deliveries and a political shield at the UN Security Council, where the Israeli government would otherwise be held accountable for its war crimes.
The US narrative - that the events of 7 October are also traceable to Chinese and Russian attempts to undermine Washington on the global stage - borders on the ridiculous.
Double Standards
The real factor undermining the global standing of the US is not the alleged actions of certain autocracies, but mostly Washington’s own international behaviour and double standards, exemplified by its unwavering support for Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza - an assault that violates all the rules that the US has been preaching for decades.
This is demonstrated perfectly by the Biden administration’s behaviour after the recent adoption of a UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. After allowing the resolution to pass by abstaining, the US rushed to minimise its meaning and impact by qualifying it as non-binding.
So, for the sake of clarity, the indispensable nation that prides itself as being the main enabler of the longstanding rules of the international system, the beacon on the hill, is essentially telling another UN member state (Israel) that it can ignore a Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, after more than 34,000 peoplehave been killed in Gaza. The tragic irony is that the Netanyahu government did not even need this US exhortation; it would have ignored the resolution anyway.
For the record, UN Security Council resolutions are always binding. The Biden administration thus missed another excellent opportunity to distance itself from hypocritical double standards. It accomplished an outstanding masterpiece by upsetting everyone: Israel and the vast pro-Israel lobby in the US for not casting its veto; and the left of the US Democratic Party, the Palestinian people and the rest of the world for outrageously calling the resolution non-binding.
Meanwhile, the US threat assessment attributes to China “the capability to directly compete with the United States and U.S. allies and to alter the rules-based global order”. It thus equates a simple Chinese capability into a deliberate intent pursued by its leadership, while indirectly confirming that in US official thinking, the only world order that can be contemplated is one led by Washington.
In a flash of common sense, the threat assessment acknowledges that US actions intended to deter foreign aggression are often “interpreted by adversaries as reinforcing their own perceptions that the United States is intending to contain or weaken them, and these misinterpretations can complicate escalation management and crisis communications”.
If the US intelligence community’s analysts have been surprisingly smart and honest in recognising this problem, known by international relations experts as the concept of “the indivisibility of security” (ie, any security measure taken by one nation can be interpreted as a threat by another), they should also be able to admit that their tendency to equate hypothetical capabilities with automatic intentions, is a big part of the increased tensions characterising modern geopolitics.
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Pacific Island 2024 Human Development
A Complex Landscape of Progress and Challenges
By UNDP
a, Fiji: Pacific Island Countries continue to grapple with a complex development landscape, states a new report launched in Suva today. While progress across several key indicators has been made, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) 2024 Asia-Pacific Human Development Report, launched at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, highlights that persistent disparities and ongoing disruptions threaten to derail further advancement.
The report shows that since the early 2000s there has been a regression on key human development indicators across the Pacific, with heightened human insecurity, and a potentially more turbulent future creating an urgent need for change.
Income inequality remains deeply entrenched, both within Pacific Islands Countries and when comparing the Pacific against its neighbors in Asia. Hundreds of thousands across the Pacific remain confined to the informal sector; in Tonga alone the informal sector accounts for 97 percent of the country’s workforce.
The pandemic saw numerous Pacific Island Countries suffer serious losses in income from tourism, remittances and manufacturing that employ many informal workers. The hardest hit in these already poor households were women, who have suffered serious setbacks in gender equality and empowerment.
The Pacific has seen its worst decline in gender equality in two decades. On current trajectory, the 2030 agenda is projected to be realized some 35 years late – in 2065 – with crucial action needed on Goal 5 (Gender Equality) where not a single indicator has been achieved thus far.
The Pacific grapples with entrenched gender inequalities manifested in limited political participation, economic disparity, and a disturbing prevalence of gender-based violence. However, positive trends in girls' education and the commitment of Pacific nations to address the aforementioned issues offer a glimmer of hope for achieving gender equality.
Other points of note from the report include:
• The Pacific has seen a surge in adult literacy rates from 1990 to 2022, moving from 87.6 percent in 1990 to 94.2 percent in 2022. Tertiary education completion rates also improved, rising from 4.5 to 5.3 percent across the same reporting period.
• Under-five mortality rates improved from 88.3 live births per thousand in 1980 to 38.9 per thousand in 2022, with life expectancy rising from 64 to 72 years in the same reporting period.
• 40 percent of the region's people are digitally excluded, with notable gender and urban-rural inequities.
• While the Pacific contributes 0.1 percent of total carbon emissions, the region has seen the largest impact of climate shocks. The fiscal measures required to tackle this crisis are on the verge of exhaustion, with six out 10 Pacific Island Countries at risk of high debt distress.
• Every US$1 invested in risk reduction and prevention can save up to US$15 in post-disaster recovery. Every US$1 invested in making infrastructure disaster-resilient saves US$4 through fewer disruptions and reduced economic impacts.
To catch up on the human development backlog and confront the turbulent times that lie ahead, the region’s development strategies need to focus more on improving the lives of both current and future generations.
UNDP Pacific Office in Fiji Resident Representative, Munkhtuya Altangerel, said that to advance indicators across the Pacific our focus must be placed on mainstreaming human development, leveraging technology and innovation, and the creation of a governance space that is fit for the future.
“In a world defined by uncertainty, we need a renewed sense of solidarity to tackle our interconnected challenges. We must focus on both empowering people today and prioritizing the well-being of our young people – the future stewards of our Blue Pacific. This means making smart investments in their human development: education, health, and opportunities that will equip them to thrive and tackle challenges yet to come.
“Revitalizing our development strategies to close existing gaps and boost human security is essential: an unrelenting focus on governance, the politics of reform, and on the day-to-day practice of delivery all being required should we wish to boost sustainable development across our Blue Pacific.
“Our work is far from complete, and we must listen to and amplify the voices of Pacific peoples, as they are leading the way toward a future where no one is left behind,” Ms. Altangerel said.
To view the full report, visit: https://www.undp.org/asia-pacific/publications/making-our-future-new-directions-human-development-asia-and-pacific
To view the Pacific Snapshot of the regional report, visit: https://www.undp.org/pacific/publications/2024-pacific-snapshot-asia-pacific-human-development-report