Crises within Crises

For this blog post, I originally intended to write only about COP28, the international meeting dealing with the ever-growing environmental crisis. Then, I read powerful opinion pieces by Robert Kagan and became alarmed at the expanding political crisis in the U.S.

But how can we neglect to consider the crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and other countries where warfare continues, such as in Myanmar and Sudan that get far less press coverage? In addition, there are millions of individuals in our world who are facing personal crises of various sorts.

Indeed, there are crises within crises that threaten the well-being and even the survival of individuals, nations, and the world civilization as a whole. Please think with me about these crises, beginning with the outer circle that includes the whole world and moving down to the inner circle of individuals. 

The ever-growing environmental crisis was the central concern of COP28, which met in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.*¹ The first COP meeting, convened in Berlin, was in 1995 and there have been yearly meetings since then.

As I have repeatedly pointed out over the last two years, the current ecological predicament is a crisis that threatens the very existence of the world as we know it (TWAWKI). Some progress was made toward alleviating the global environmental crisis at COP28, but it’s probably too little too late.*²

There will be dire consequences for most of the world’s population if drastic changes are not made soon, which is highly unlikely. This is the existential crisis in which all the other crises exist.

The wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza are crises for people living in those areas of the world. But there is an ongoing possibility that they will expand into larger wars. In the worst-case scenario, either of these wars could conceivably escalate into World War III.

These crises are rather localized now, but they might conceivably enlarge to rival the ecological crisis as an existential threat to TWAWKI.

Within these two larger crises is the political crisis in the United States. While this crisis is only brewing at present, there is a real and present danger of democracy being replaced in the U.S. with a form of fascism.

I had not been aware of scholar and journalist Robert Kagan until this month, but he is an editor at large for The Washington Post (WaPo) and has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as to Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kagan (b. 1958) left the Republican Party due to the party's nomination of Donald Trump and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

Kagan’s Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 WaPo articles were titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending,” and “The Trump dictator-ship: How to stop it.” (These are long pieces, but well worth reading and reflecting on.)

Some Republican politicians are sounding the same warning. For example, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney's new book (released Dec. 5) is titled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. (Hear her talk about that in this Dec. 4 interview on NPR.)

On Dec. 10, Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, expressed the same sentiment, although more mildly, on “Meet the Press.”*³

There is a lot that can happen between now and Election Day next November, but USAmericans must be aware of the danger of losing their democracy—and minorities, the poor, and the underprivileged are the ones who would suffer most under a non-democratic government.

We common people may not be able to do much about the ecological crisis or the crisis in Ukraine or Gaza, but we do have the power to vote and to encourage our friends and neighbors to be informed and to vote accordingly.

The inner circle is the crisis of individuals who are suffering from illness, poverty, discrimination, or personal tragedies. We pray that many of these people will experience new hope during this Christmas season. Who is one such person you can help between now and December 25?

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*¹ COP stands for the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Click here to access the UNFCCC website.)

*² Here is the link to a helpful summary of the mixed results of COP28 on The Guardian’s Dec. 14 website.

*³ See here; Romney’s discussion of this matter begins at about 7 min. 45 sec. into the program. 

The Palestinian Problem

Some things never seem to end. This month there has, once again, been serious military action between Palestinians and Israelis. There has been intermittent fighting between Palestine and modern Israel since November 1947.

Sixty-five years ago, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Palestine to be partitioned between Arabs and Jews and allowing for the formation of the Jewish state of Israel.

The following day there were protests by Arabs throughout the country, so 11/30/47 was the beginning of “civil war” in Palestine. That led to what is called the First Arab-Israel War, which began in May 1948 and ended in March of the following year.

The story of the struggle the Palestinians and the Jews, both seeking a secure place to live, is engagingly told in The Lemon Tree (2006) by Sandy Tolan, an American journalist, teacher, and documentary radio producer.

Tolan’s book is a fascinating true story about the Khaira family who lived in the Palestinian city of al-Ramla and who had a lemon tree in the back yard of their home. In May 1948, though, Bashir Khaira, who was six years old, and his family had to leave their home, for it was then considered to be Israeli territory.

Six months later the Eshkenzai family, Jews who had been living in Bulgaria, arrived in Palestine and subsequently moved into the former home of the Khairas.

Nineteen years later, in 1967 when he was 25, Bashir went back to al-Ramla and met Dalia Eshkenzai, who was born just three days after the November 1947 decision by the United Nations and who had been living with her family in Bashir’s former house since 1948. Dalia and Bashir begin discussions which have lasted for 45 years now.

Dalia & Bashir

The Palestinian man and Jewish woman were respectful of each other and actively sought to understand each other’s point of view. But to the end of the book there seemed to be no good solution to the problem that resulted from the 1947 U.N. decision—and the subsequent fighting between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

At the very end of the book, though, after the old lemon tree had died, some Palestinian and Jewish young people met in the back yard of the Khaira/Eshkenzai home, and together they planted a new lemon tree. So maybe there is hope for the distant future. But the immediate future still looks bleak.

While not unsympathetic with the plight of the Jews, who were treated so brutally in Europe during the 1930s and early 1940s, I have long thought the Palestinians have been grossly mistreated since 1947. My thinking this way was strengthened by reading Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006). I highly recommend his book.

Carter is probably right when he says that the “two state solution” is the only realistic path to peace and security for Israel and the Palestinians—but that solution is becoming more and more difficult because of the Israelis occupying more and more of the territory.

(The current land area held by the Palestinians is considerably less than what was proposed by the U.N. in 1947, as indicated by the accompanying maps.)

Earlier this month Carter lamented that Israel seems to have abandoned the two-state solution. “Their policy now is to confiscate Palestinian territory,” he said.

So, the Palestinian problem remains dire, especially for the Palestinians. But it is also serious for the Israelis as they are frequent targets of various violent acts of desperation by the beleaguered people of Palestine.

Let’s hope and pray that there will be peace and justice in Palestine soon. Maybe the 11/29/12 U.N. decision was a step in the right direction.

The United Nations and the Future We Want

The Charter of the United Nations is the foundational treaty of the international organization usually referred to as the U.N. That Charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, sixty-seven years ago this week.

It took only about four months for the five permanent members of the Security Council and the majority of the other signatories to ratify the Charter. Thus, on October 24, 1945, the U.N. was formally established for the purpose of maintaining peace in the world. 

There are now many critics of the United Nations, as there have been through the years. There are, to be sure, many weaknesses in it—as there are in all human institutions. But, at least and surely partly due to the work of the U.N., there has not been another world war since it was founded in the year the Second World War ended. (It is interesting to note that the Charter was approved even before WWII ended in the Pacific.)

In this country, part of the opposition to the U.N. comes from those who affirm the concept of “manifest destiny” and “American exceptionalism.” If the USA is unique and qualitatively different from all the other countries in the world, belonging to an organization that basically recognizes the equality of nations is not seen as something positive.

For many years the U.N. has been working on issues such as the deterioration of the natural environment and the problem of climate change (global warming). Just last week (June 20-22), the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (That meeting was also called Rio+20, as the Earth Summit was held in Rio in 1992.)

Some people think that concern for the environment is bad for business and say that human-caused global warming is nonsense. Such persons are less than enthusiastic about the work of the U.N. and the UNCSD, which emphasized, among other things, “a green economy.”

On the other hand, before and during the Rio+20 meetings, there was criticism of the UNCSD from the other side of the spectrum. The People’s Summit, which also convened in Rio, charged that the U.N. conference was making too many concessions to the world’s biggest corporations and to global capitalism.

Similarly, according to Ecumenical News International, “The Geneva-based Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EAA) said that while the conference’s final document . . . . acknowledged that access to food is a human right, it did not pay adequate attention to needed changes in agriculture that favor the small farmer over big corporations.”

Ban Ki-moon (b. 1944)

The theme of the Rio+20 conference was “The Future We Want.” In a YouTube video, U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-moon spoke about the kind of future he wants: a future where everyone can breathe clean air, drink safe water, and have enough to eat.

Ban’s hopes for the future of humanity are good ones. If the United Nations doesn’t take the lead in seeking to reach those goals for the peoples of the world, who will?

Israel and Palestine: Is Peaceful Coexistence Possible?

May is a time of celebration in the modern nation of Israel. Next week on May 15, Israel will celebrate its 64th birthday, as the establishment of the State of Israel took place on that day in 1948. Less than a year later, on May 11, 1949, Israel was accepted by majority vote as a member of the United Nations. 

Previously, in October 1946, President Truman issued a statement indicating America’s support for the creation of a “viable Jewish state.” In November of the following year the United Nations voted for the Jewish people to be given a “homeland” in the territory their ancestors had inhabited nearly two thousand years, or more, before. The United States was one of 33 countries who voted for the new Jewish state.

In passing, it is worth nothing that the modern nation of Israel was established by the United Nations, an organization now much (and hypocritically?) maligned by many people in this country who tend to be staunch supporters of Israel. There was, and continues to be, a problem with the new state of Israel, however. 

Palestine, the land that was partitioned and given to the Jewish people as a homeland, was already occupied. It was inhabited largely by Arabs who were mostly Muslims (although about 10% of them were Christians). Since the ethnic Jews from other countries began moving in and occupying the land, Palestinian Arabs have been squeezed into smaller and smaller portions of the territory. 

Not surprisingly, there was immediate negative Arab reaction to the creation of Israel in May 1948. In support of the Palestinian Arabs, the surrounding Arab states attacked the independent State of Israel on the very first day of its existence. Thus began the first Arab-Israeli War. Even though there have been numerous cease-fires, negotiations, and peace talks, tensions and sporadic hostilities between Israel and Palestine have continued to the present. 

It is not difficult to be sympathetic with Israel’s desire for a homeland. The holocaust in Europe resulted in the extermination of around 6,000,000 Jews. That was an unmitigated human tragedy. And through the centuries Jewish people have been grossly mistreated by many Christians who considered all Jews to be “Christ killers.”

But it is also hard not to be sympathetic with the Palestinian Arabs. Even though about 1/3 of the population of the country was Jewish at the time of the 1947 partition, still, for many of the Arabs who made up the majority, land on which their ancestors had lived for centuries, in some cases, was taken from them and given to people with a different language, different customs, and a different religion. 

It is true that since 1948 there have been many terrorist attacks on the Israelis and other acts of violence committed by Palestinian Arabs. But if there is not provision for a peaceful, and just, settlement of disputes, injustice and oppression usually spawns violent reaction. 
So as Israel celebrates its 64th national birthday in a few days, the burning question remains: will Israel and Palestine ever be able to coexist peacefully?