How a Secluded 1984 Conference Forged Israel’s Unprecedented Influence Over US Media

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Original article by Kit Klarenberg republished from Mint Press News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

As Israel’s October 1 invasion of Lebanon unfolds, the media’s complicity in shaping public perception raises urgent questions, particularly when viewed through the lens of a controversial 1984 conference where influential advertising and media figures gathered to refine Israel’s narrative strategies. This conference laid the groundwork for a sophisticated propaganda campaign—Hasbara—that sought to sanitize Israel’s actions and cast its military operations in a favorable light. Today, as Western journalists whitewash, distort, and conceal [Israel’s ?] the realities of Israel’s deadly campaign of violence, the enduring legacy of this meeting becomes alarmingly clear, revealing how narratives crafted decades ago continue to shape the coverage of a conflict that claims countless lives.

In the first week of October, Israeli forces fired 355 bullets at a car containing a five-year-old, then shot at rescue workers who rushed to save her life. A horrific crime – yet, per many Western media headlines, she was simply a “girl killed in Gaza.” The circumstances and perpetrators of her death, if mentioned at all, were invariably buried at the bottom of reports, well hidden from the 80% of the news-consuming public who only read headlines, not accompanying articles.

By contrast, on October 15, Sky News was very keen that its viewers know the names and faces of four “teenage” IDF soldiers “killed” in a “Hezbollah drone attack,” humanizing and infantilizing individuals who, by mere token of their service in Israel’s military, are by definition, guilty of genocide. In passing, the same report briskly noted: “‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike.” Their identities, ages, and photos, let alone clarity on who or what murdered them, weren’t provided.

Moreover, the inverted commas incongruously hovering around the number of Palestinians killed subtly undermined that claim’s credibility while reducing the child victims to an afterthought compared to the considerably more important quartet of deceased IDF genocidaires. MintPress News senior staff writer Alan MacLeod put it succinctly when he Tweeted, “In years to come, students in university departments around the world will be studying the propaganda embedded in this headline. It’s truly incredible how much propaganda has been packed into 16 words.”

The mainstream media’s systematic use of distancing and evasive language, omission and other duplicitous chicanery to downplay or outright justify Israel’s murder of innocent civilians while simultaneously dehumanizing their victims and delegitimizing Palestinian resistance against brutal, illegal IDF occupation is as unconscionable as it is well-documented. Amazingly though, ‘twasn’t ever thus. Once upon a time, mainstream news networks exposed Israel’s war crimes without qualification, and anchors and pundits openly condemned these actions on live TV to audiences of millions.

The story of how Western media was transformed into Israel’s doting, servile propaganda appendage is not only a fascinating and sordid hidden chronicle. It is a deeply educational lesson in how imperial power can easily subordinate supposed arbiters of truth to its will. Comprehending how we got to this point equips us with the tools to assess, identify, and deconstruct lies large and small – and effectively challenge and counter not only Israel’s falsehoods but the entire settler colonial endeavor.

‘NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY’

On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The effort was ostensibly intended to drive Palestinian Liberation Organization freedom fighters away from their positions on Israel’s northern border. But, as the IDF savagely pushed ever-deeper into the country, including Beirut, it became clear that ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were – as in Palestine – the true goal. Throughout the Lebanese capital, news crews from major networks and reporters from the West’s biggest newspapers were waiting.

Israel’s rapacious bloodlust and casual contempt for Arab lives had hitherto been, by and large, successfully concealed from the outside world. Suddenly, though, scenes of deliberate IDF airstrikes on residential housing blocks, Tel Aviv’s trigger-happy soldiers running amok in Beirut’s streets, and hospitals overflowing with civilians suffering from grave injuries, including chemical burns due to Israel’s use of phosphorus shells, were broadcast the world over, to nigh-universal outcry. As veteran NBC news anchor John Chancellor contemporarily explained to Western viewers:

What in the world is going on? Israel’s security problem, on its border, is 50 miles to the south. What’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut? The answer is we are now dealing with an imperial Israel, which is solving its problems in someone else’s country, world opinion be damned.”

From: “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies”

Global shock and repulsion at Israel’s conduct would only ratchet during the IDF’s resultant illegal military occupation of swaths of Lebanon. In September 1982, an Israel-backed armed Christian militia, Phalange, entered Sabra, a Beirut neighborhood home to many Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba. Over a two-day span, they slaughtered up to 3,500 people while mutilating and raping countless others. Again, unfortunately for Tel Aviv, mainstream journalists were on hand to document these heinous crimes first-hand.

To say the least, Israel had an international PR disaster of historic proportions on its blood-soaked hands. The risk that further exposure of its genocidal nature might decisively and permanently shift global opinion in favor of the Palestinians and the Arab world more generally was significant. The attack on Lebanon had already spurred Western news outlets to critically reassess other illegal annexations and occupations in which Israel was and remains engaged. As ABC News reporter Richard Threlkeld commented at the time:

Israel was always that gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds. Now, the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, settled down more or less permanently on the West Bank, and occupied close to half of Lebanon. In the interests of self-defense, that gallant little underdog, Israel, has suddenly started behaving like the neighborhood bully.”

So it was that in the summer of 1984, the American Jewish Congress – a major Zionist lobby organization – convened a conference in Jerusalem, Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies. It was chaired by U.S. advertising supremo Carl Spielgovel, who a decade earlier provided pro bono advice to the Israeli government on strategies for publicly communicating why Tel Aviv refused to adhere to the terms of the Henry Kissinger-brokered 1973 Sinai Accords. Spielgovel later recalled:

It occurred to me then that the Israelis were doing a good job at training their military people, and they were doing a relatively good job at training their diplomatic corps. But they weren’t spending any time training information officers, people who could present Israel’s case to embassies and TV anchormen around the world. Over the years, I made this a personal cause celebre.”

The 1984 Jerusalem conference offered Spielgovel and a welter of Western advertising and public relations executives, media specialists, editors, journalists, and leaders of major Zionist advocacy groups an opportunity to achieve that malign objective. Together, they hammered out a dedicated strategy for ensuring the “crisis” caused by news reporting on the invasion of Lebanon two years earlier would never be repeated. Their antidote? Ceaseless, methodical, and wide-ranging “Hasbara” – Hebrew for propaganda – for “changing people’s minds [and] making them think differently.”

‘BIG SCOOP’

The AJC subsequently published records of the conference. They offer extraordinarily candid insight into how multiple Hasbara strategies, which have been in perpetual operation ever since were birthed. For example, basic propaganda messages were agreed upon. This included messages that are echoed by Israel’s supporters to this day, emphasizing Israel’s regional importance to the U.S. and Europe, Western cultural and political values, geographic vulnerability, and supposed striving for peace in the face of implacable Palestinian belligerence and intransigence.

As Judith Elizur, an expert in “communications” from Tel Aviv’s Hebrew University, explained:

Because the ‘power dimension’ of Israel’s image is so problematic, it seems to me that Hasbara must concentrate on reinforcing other aspects of Israel that have a positive appeal – medicine, agriculture, science, archaeology…We have been too preoccupied with extinguishing political brush fires. We need to devote more of our resources to long-range image-making. We must recreate a multi-dimensional image of Israel which will assure us the basic support we require in times of crisis.”

There was extensive discussion of how to present “unpalatable policies” to Western populations, and counter the perception of Israel as “Goliath steamrolling” across West Asia, against adversaries “outgunned, outclassed and outmanned” with “no capacity to resist.” The necessity of training the Jewish diaspora in countering criticism of Israel was considered paramount.

AJC’s president lamented that “many American Jews” had condemned the invasion of Lebanon and “did us a terrible disservice.” Any such future “disagreement” would make it “very difficult for us to conduct Hasbara effectively.”

From: “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies”

Joseph Block, Pepsi’s former vice president of public relations, stressed the need for a dedicated, 24/7 Israel press operation “equipped to offer foreign journalists an occasional exclusive or scoop” and engage in other media outreach to balance critical coverage and get reporters and newsrooms ‘on side.’ Block lamented that had Israeli officials not “briefed NBC and other networks appropriately” and given them “a big scoop” during Lebanon’s invasion, “a different story would have reached America’s 90 million TV households”:

News doesn’t just jump into a camera. It’s directed. It’s managed. It’s made accessible. Public relations is a process that makes news available in a particular form. In the US, PR is as important as accounting, the law and the military…As a corporate spokesman for two of America’s top 50 corporations, I wish I had a shekel for every time I said, ‘no comment’ to a reporter. I was always careful, however, not to antagonize or intimidate the reporter. I knew I had to live with him or her.”

Yoram Ettinger, media analysis chief at the Israel Information Center, concurred, declaring that media framing on Israel’s actions needed to be determined in advance. “Actions” such as “blowing up houses,” which were “difficult to explain,” could be preemptively justified or at least relativized by placing them “in context” while “[drawing] analogies that others will understand.” This would “help others to interpret their meaning,” per Tel Aviv’s perspectives.

The Conference hoped such efforts would mean “our American friends will be able to take a more activist posture as amplifiers of our policy” and assist them in “tucking away the house problems in a back room.” It was also suggested that on an individual and organizational level, Zionist activists serve as a rapid reaction force, deluging news outlets with complaints en masse should their coverage of Israel be at all critical. One attendee boasted of their personal success in this regard:

One day CBS News Radio reported that an American soldier had been hurt by stepping on an Israeli cluster bomb at the Beirut airport. I called CBS to point out that no one had established the bomb was an Israeli one. One hour later CBS reported that an American soldier had stepped on a bomb; this time the report omitted any reference to Israel.”

‘FREQUENT VIOLATIONS’

Another significant recommendation came from Carl Spielgovel: creating a “training program” to bring carefully selected Israeli information specialists into U.S. advertising, PR agencies, and major news outlets. The initiative aimed to equip them with industry insights, ensure Hasbara efforts were maximized, and establish close relationships between Israeli officials and the organizations to which they were assigned.

These “specialists” would operate under the guidance of a U.S.-Israeli council described as “wise persons who can project different scenarios and how to cope with them” on complex issues like “annexation and Jerusalem.” Spielgovel was careful to clarify that he was “not suggesting that we make policy” but rather that “we should make the best minds available to help elucidate the consequences of certain policies.” The goal, he suggested, was to reinforce to the American public that Tel Aviv remains Washington’s “staunch political and military ally.”

Spielgovel further proposed that future AJC conferences should incorporate input from “young people” and people of color to better promote Tel Aviv’s image among diverse “constituencies.” He argued that “Hasbara needs to implant in the consciousness of the world the day-to-day existence” of Israeli citizens, requiring a steady stream of “stories in the arts, business, and cooking sections of U.S. newspapers.” Since then, a dedicated Hasbara program aimed at cultivating skilled Zionist advocates in the U.S. has operated continuously.

Buoyed by its success, the operation soon expanded to include school and university students worldwide, training them to act as vigorous advocates for Israel in classrooms and on campuses. Graduates of these Israeli-funded programs frequently enter influential fields, including journalism, where they continue to promote Hasbara narratives and defend Israel’s actions. The impact on Western media coverage of Palestine has been profound.

To a significant degree, the portrayal of Tel Aviv as “the gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds” has been firmly reestablished. Despite the ongoing crisis in Gaza, mainstream outlets seldom provide context for Palestinian resistance to Israel’s policies of annexation, occupation, and military actions. Coverage nearly always frames Israel’s actions as “self-defense” against “terrorist” threats, with Western journalists keenly aware of potential repercussions for diverging from this narrative.

From: “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies”

The rapid reaction force proposed at the 1984 AJC conference remains highly active. An extensive network of Hasbara-trained individuals and Israel lobby organizations is always on standby, ready to pressure and intimidate news outlets if coverage diverges from favorable framing or casts Israel in a critical light. As a senior BBC producer once confided to veteran media critic Greg Philo:

We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis. The only issue we face then is how high up it’s come from them. Has it come from a monitoring group? Has it come from the Israeli embassy? And how high has it gone up our organization? Has it reached the editor or director general? I have had journalists on the phone to me before a major news report, asking which words can I use – ‘is it alright I say this’?”

An October exposé by Al Jazeera, citing testimony from BBC and CNN whistleblowers, detailed “pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards, and frequent violations of journalistic principles” at both networks. According to insiders, much of this was driven by concerns over how Israeli officials might perceive and react to certain coverage. Independent activists and journalists, however, are not bound by such institutional pressures—and since October 7, 2023, they have mounted a formidable challenge to Hasbara narratives.

Were it not for the persistent investigations by outlets like MintPress News, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada, unfounded allegations promoted by Israel since the outset of the Gaza conflict—such as claims of Hamas committing mass rape or beheading infants—might never have been thoroughly debunked and might still shape the “context” for Israel’s actions against Palestinians. Meanwhile, countless concerned citizens have actively challenged Western narratives on the conflict in real-time across social media, a groundswell of critique that may be fueling pushback within some mainstream newsrooms.

It is a poetic irony that the same information warfare techniques once honed under Hasbara are now being directed at Israel and its defenders. For decades, these methods allowed Israel to proceed with its gradual displacement of the Palestinian people, often with tacit approval from Western audiences. But those times seem to be fading. Today, critics and former targets of Israeli policy are effectively using these strategies, wielding what they see as their most potent tools—truth and justice.

Feature image | Sol Goldstein, spokesman for a group of Jewish organizations, holds up a German language newspaper with headlines questioning the validity of the Holocaust, at a news conference in Chicago, June 14, 1978. Photo | AP

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.

Original article by Kit Klarenberg republished from Mint Press News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

Continue ReadingHow a Secluded 1984 Conference Forged Israel’s Unprecedented Influence Over US Media

‘If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is,’ Says Israeli Newspaper of North Gaza Siege

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Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Forcibly displaced Palestinians flee after an evacuation order by the Israeli military in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on October 23, 2024.  (Photo: Rami Zohud/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

“If this process doesn’t stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.”

The editors of Israel’s oldest newspaper on Wednesday published an editorial decrying the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza amid a ferocious Israeli offensive there that’s killed more than 1,000 people over the past three weeks.

“For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip,” the editors of the left-wing newspaper Haaretz wrote in Wednesday’s lead editorial. “Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.”

“Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose,” the editors noted. “Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.”

“Given this,” they added, “it’s no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.”

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“This suspicion fits with both the principles of the ‘Generals’ Plan’ being pushed by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Giora Eiland—a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing—and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza,” the editorial states.

Last week, senior Israeli officials including members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet and far-right Knesset lawmakers gathered near the Gaza border for a conference dedicated to the ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jewish recolonization in the embattled Palestinian enclave.

“We came here with one clear purpose: to settle the entire Gaza Strip… Every inch from north to south,” settler leader Daniella Weiss told attendees of the rally, which was backed by Netanyahu’s Likud party. “Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza.”

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As the Haaretz editors noted:

Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government want to commit these crimes. As soon as the war began, they began calling for “erasing Gaza” and for perpetrating a “second Nakba.” But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.

Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.

“If this process doesn’t stop immediately,” the editors stressed, “hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.”

Israel was founded in 1948, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Zionist militias—the two most violent of which were led by future Israeli prime ministers—utilized terror tactics including massacres and a death march to force the Indigenous Arabs from their homeland.

Israeli ethnic cleansing continued over the following eight decades and, according to critics, currently involves home demolitions and expulsions in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, systematic land theft, and pogroms and other violent attacks by Jewish settler colonists backed—and sometimes joined—by Israel Defense Forces troops.

United Nations officials and international human rights groups said this week’s Knesset vote to ban the life-saving U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) will exacerbate Israeli crimes in Gaza, including ethnic cleansing.

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“Efforts to eliminate UNRWA are illegal under international law and will only amplify the genocide and ethnic cleansing Israel is enacting in Gaza while also undermining long-term prospects for peace,” the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, said Tuesday. “The Israeli government is not only deliberately blocking humanitarian and medical aid to people who are starving and dying, it is undermining support for Palestine refugees and the international legal framework protecting their rights.”

On Monday, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on Palestine, published a report “contextualizing the situation within
a decadeslong process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine.”

Albanese’s report was released a day after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who supports the “total annihilation” of Gaza and said that killing 2 million Palestinians would be “justified and moral”—reiterated his call for Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank and the expulsion of the occupied territory’s Palestinians.

Israel’s policies and practices in Gaza—where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—are the subject of an ongoing South Africa-led genocide case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK's air force has been essential in Israel's mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK’s air force has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government's support for Israel's Gaza genocide and the UK government and military's active participation in genocide.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Continue Reading‘If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is,’ Says Israeli Newspaper of North Gaza Siege

Report Details Record-Breaking Health Threats of Climate Crisis, Fossil Fuel Subsidies

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Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

People wade through floodwaters in Feni, Bangladesh, on August 25, 2024. (Photo: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“No individual or economy on the planet is immune from the health threats of climate change,” said a lead researcher.

Over $1 trillion spent each year on subsidizing fossil fuel production must be redirected to public health efforts, said the experts behind a new annual report monitoring progress on the climate and global health.

The 2024 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, published Tuesday in The Lancet by the Lancet Countdown at Universiy College London (UCL), found that delayed action on the climate emergency is exposing people across the globe to record-breaking threats, with 10 of 15 indicators showing that specific health threats have reached “concerning new levels.”

“This year’s stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet in our eight years of monitoring,” said Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown and a senior research fellow at UCL. “Once again, last year broke climate change records—with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world.”

With 2023 named the hottest year on record earlier this year by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the researchers behind the new report found that the average person experienced an additional 50 days of dangerously hot weather that would not have happened without fossil fuel extraction heating the planet.

Heat-related deaths among people over age 65 reached the highest level ever recorded, 167% higher than in the 1990s and more than double the 65% increase that was expected if temperatures hadn’t changed since then.

An additional 151 million people across 124 countries experienced moderate or severe food insecurity last year, an increase that was associated with extreme drought that affected almost half of global land area.

“We must cure the sickness of climate inaction—by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction.”

Changing climate conditions across the globe and the flooding that has come with more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms are also fueling a rise in the transmission of infectious diseases like dengue fever, according to the Lancet Countdown, and warmer coastal waters contributed a record-high number of cases of the bacterial infection vibriosis last year.

“The mosquitoes that spread infections like dengue fever epidemics are reaching new countries, and gradually moving north,” said Anthony Costello, a professor at UCL Institute for Global Health and co-chair of the countdown.

But despite those indicators and others, said Romanello, “we see financial resources continue to be invested in the very things that undermine our health.”

Researchers expressed optimism about rising investments in renewable energy, but warned that new fossil fuel investment accounted for more than a third of new energy spending in 2023, and 84% of world governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel production despite clear warnings from scientists that oil and gas extraction have no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C.

Governments are “in effect paying an estimated $1.4 trillion dollars per year to worsen the crisis,” reportedThe Hill.

Meanwhile, “only 68% of countries reported high-to-very-high implementation of the legally mandated capacities to manage health emergencies in 2023,” according to the Lancet Countdown. Just 35% of countries reported having early warning healthcare systems for heat-related illness.

“No individual or economy on the planet is immune from the health threats of climate change,” said Romanello. “The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach.”

Total carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion reached nearly 40 gigatonnes last year, a 1.1% increase from 2022, contributing to high levels of air pollution as well as changing climate conditions.

“National-level net subsidies exceeded 10% of national health spending in 55% of the countries, and 100% in 27% of them,” reads a visual summary of the report. “These funds could be redirected towards supporting the transition to clean energy sources, protect vulnerable populations from soaring climate change risks, and enable a healthy future.”

Redirecting fossil fuel subsidies “would provide the opportunity to deliver a fair, equitable transition to clean energy and energy efficiency, and a healthier future, ultimately benefiting the global economy,” said Romanello.

Released less than two weeks before world governments are set to convene in Azerbaijan for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), where climate finance is expected to be a key issue, the report calls for “new strategies and finance for implementation” in order to protect global public health from climate disasters.

“These must acknowledge climate change’s effects on health and related systems, assess risks and vulnerabilities, and incorporate resilience to shocks,” reads a joint brief by the Lancet Countdown and Médecins Sans Frontières, also called Doctors Without Borders. “Adequate, predictable, and unified climate finance for adaptation and technical support is urgently needed to enable ministries of health and their implementing partners to adopt forward-thinking strategies, integrate anticipatory actions, and enhance flexibility and agility in their operating models.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the report shows “we must cure the sickness of climate inaction—by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction—to create a fairer, safer, and healthier future for all.”

To shift resources toward a “zero-emissions future,” said Costello, “people’s health must be put front and center of climate change policy to ensure the funding mechanisms protect well-being, reduce health inequities and maximize health gains, especially for the countries and communities that need it most.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingReport Details Record-Breaking Health Threats of Climate Crisis, Fossil Fuel Subsidies

‘Two Genocidaires v. the World’: US, Israel Oppose Lifting Cuba Blockade

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Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez speaks during a press conference on the impact of the U.S. embargo in Havana on September 12, 2024. (Photo: Adalberto Roque/AFP via Getty Images)

“The world has spoken—it’s time for the U.S. to listen and lift the blockade.”

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday once again overwhelmingly urged the U.S. government to end its decadeslong blockade on Cuba, with just the United States and Israel voting against the measure and Moldova abstaining.

The UNGA’s other 187 members present voted to adopt the nonbinding resolution on “the necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States” against the Caribbean island.

This is the 32nd straight year that the U.N. body has approved a resolution against the embargo that began in 1962.

“The U.S. and Israel stand isolated as the only two votes against,” Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee said after the Wednesday vote. “The world has spoken—it’s time for the U.S. to listen and lift the blockade.”

Though a few other nations have opposed the resolution over the years, Michael Galant of Progressive International and the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted that this vote was “two genocidaires v. the world.”

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Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its yearlong assault of the Gaza Strip, which has killed at least 43,163 Palestinians and injured another 101,510, according to local officials in the Hamas-governed enclave. The U.S. Congress and Biden administration have given Israel billions of dollars in weapons and opposed U.N. cease-fire resolutions.

CodePink’s Medea Benjamin responded to the Wednesday vote with a video shared on social media, saying that Israel “loves blockades, because it’s doing its own blockade of Gaza,” and “is dependent on the United States to carry out its genocide.”

“Now this is not just some idle vote,” she said of the approved resolution. “This blockade that the U.S. maintains is a form of economic warfare. It’s no exaggeration to say that now, when there is an economic crisis in Cuba, the U.S. blockade, which keeps Cuba from using the financial markets, from having normal trade with countries all over the world, is actually leading to deaths, leading to people going hungry, leading to people lacking food and medicine that are essential for their lives.”

“And that’s why the United States must be condemned for this ongoing horrific, inhumane, and illegal blockade,” Benjamin added.

Cuba’s representative delivered similar remarks to the UNGA on Wednesday. As Reutersreported:

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said in a speech before the assembly that what is often referred to as the U.S. trade embargo is a “blockade” because the web of laws and regulations complicate financial transactions and the acquisition of goods and services not just from the United States but internationally.

“The blockade against Cuba is an economic, financial, and trade war which qualifies as genocide,” said Rodriguez, charging the U.S. policies were deliberately aimed at promoting suffering among the Cuban people to force change in the government.

Some international observers praised the countries who did condemn the blockade. Middle East expert Assal Rad declared, “This is the real international community.”

Manolo De Los Santos, a founder of the People’s Forum and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, said that “this overwhelming consensus is in contrast with the indifference of the United States, which continues to deny any responsibility for sanctions while tightening its stranglehold on Cuba.”

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Earlier this month, the People’s Forum published a letter in The New York Times to U.S. President Joe Biden, warning that he has “exactly 90 days to reverse” former Republican President Donald Trump’s “brutal policy on Cuba.”

Biden was vice president a decade ago when then-President Barack Obama “opened a hopeful new chapter in U.S.-Cuba relations by taking the first steps toward normalization,” the letter details. “People in both countries were optimistic that Cuba and the United States could become neighbors rather than Cold War enemies. However, Trump dismantled that policy, imposing pain and suffering on the Cuban people.”

“Removing the state sponsors of terrorism designation would allow Cuba to engage in financial transactions and restore its electrical grid, as well as address shortages of food and medicine to alleviate the immense hardship faced by the Cuban people, who have endured over 62 years of economic strife under the embargo,” the letter adds. “It’s time to act. Let Cuba live!”

Biden faced similar pressure in August, when hundreds of legal experts and groups called on him “to comply with existing international law by ending the use of broad unilateral coercive measures” particularly in “cases such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.”

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The U.N. vote comes as early voting is underway for the November 5 election in which Trump is facing Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.

Neither campaign provided details on each candidate’s position when contacted by Reuters earlier this week, though Morgan Finkelstein, national security spokesperson for Harris, said that the Democrat “stands with the people of Cuba as they fight for their rights after decades of repression and economic suffering at the hands of the communist regime” and “will stand up to all authoritarians—including the very leaders that Trump has praised and embraced.”

Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Two Genocidaires v. the World’: US, Israel Oppose Lifting Cuba Blockade

“No treatment, no pain relief, no escape,” UN says on healthcare in Gaza

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Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Source: Munir al-Bursh/X

Intensified Israeli attacks have devastated hospitals and healthcare in Gaza, with patients left to suffer amid a blockade of medical resources and repeated denials of evacuation permits

Conditions in Gaza’s healthcare system, already critical, have further deteriorated under Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) attacks on hospitals in the north. Following the forced closure of the Indonesian Hospital, only two hospitals, Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan, remain partially functional. Al-Awda is difficult to access due to damaged road infrastructure, while Kamal Adwan endured a violent raid on October 25-26.

Both have in their care more patients than they can objectively provide care to. During the raid on Kamal Adwan, Israeli soldiers detained or disappeared 44 male staff members, with dozens still imprisoned. According to the UN, by October 29 only two doctors – the hospital director and a pediatrician – remained at Kamal Adwan to manage care for 150 patients without surgical, anesthesiology, or intensive care support. Despite appeals, Israel continues to block access for additional medical teams, supplies, and life-saving essentials.

Read more: 100,000 Palestinians trapped in northern Gaza amid ongoing Israeli massacres and siege

Medical evacuations remain practically non-existent. Since May, only 127 children have been permitted to leave Gaza for critical care. Thousands more injured children face indefinite waits for permits. UNICEF recently expressed what can only be described as desperation, calling out Israel’s bureaucratic “indifference” that leaves children suffering without relief or hope. And, while it is possible to know how few children were allowed to leave Gaza for medical care, Israel does not keep records of how many were denied. “When a patient is denied, there is nothing that can be done,” the agency said. “Trapped in the grip of an indifferent bureaucracy, children’s pain is brutally compounded.”

The situation is far beyond agony for children like Elia, a four-year-old girl who suffered severe burns and multiple amputations after an Israeli rocket attack. Hospitalized for over 40 days, she was admitted along with her mother, Eslam, who sustained similar injuries. Eslam died as a result of the attack in which she and her daughter were hurt, and only then was Elia granted medical evacuation, but without a clear timeline.

Children including infants with cancer and malnutrition, as well as 12-year-olds in need of bone surgery, have been repeatedly denied the right to be transferred to a place where they can access adequate care. “No treatment, no pain relief, no escape,” Elder said of the situation.

Read more: Final phase of polio vaccination in Gaza suspended amid Israeli attacks

There are no healthy people left in the Gaza Strip: those not suffering physical injury are either going hungry or struggling with mental health effects of trauma. Respiratory diseases, jaundice, and diarrhea are rampant due to destroyed sanitation infrastructure and chronic malnutrition. Without an immediate and lasting ceasefire, conditions are expected to worsen further.

Concerns include missing the thresholds set for the polio vaccination campaign, after the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners were forced to suspend the final phase of a polio vaccination campaign in northern Gaza due to escalating IOF violence. While WHO has expressed hopes to resume vaccinations from November 2 to 4, it remains to be seen if Israeli authorities will guarantee the necessary safety assurances.

People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.

Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue Reading“No treatment, no pain relief, no escape,” UN says on healthcare in Gaza