A wildfire near Povoa de Montemuro, Portugal, 18 September 2024. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters
Labour seems gripped by a form of denialism. The danger is real and incremental change won’t avert it
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If our political leaders acted out of humanity, the plight of others would be enough to motivate them into action. In the absence of empathy, perhaps we need to be more direct: the climate crisis is coming for you, because it is coming for us all.
Without urgent action, “once-in-a-generation” events – the flooding of New York subways, the typhoon-like winds sucking people out of their apartments in China, the forest fires – will become the new routine of daily life. Politicians abandoned the goal to stop climate breakdown many years ago. We have a much more basic demand: to stop climate breakdown entering a new phase of existential disaster.
That means avoiding certain “tipping points” that would put humanity on an irreversible path to catastrophe. The collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, for example, would disrupt the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and west Africa. Permafrost thaw would generate an irreversible release of carbon dioxide. And the loss of the Greenland ice sheet would result in disastrous runaway melting.
Few politicians deny that human-made global heating is real. Instead, our government peddles a different – more insidious – kind of denialism. One that moves away from a disbelief in the climate crisis, and toward a belief that incremental change can fix it.
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This government is not just failing to stand up to fossil fuel giants. It is failing to confront the economic system that empowers them. The richest 1% are responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, yet our government still refuses to bring in wealth taxes to reduce inequality. Unless the government has the courage to rewrite the rules of our ecocidal economy, its climate targets will soon become yet another broken promise.
A planet cannot be cooled by warm words; we need fundamental change, now. A Green New Deal would invest in publicly owned renewable energy and water. It would create millions of green jobs. It would promote sustainable farming based on the principles of agroecology. And it would kickstart an economy based on human need, not corporate greed.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
A Just Stop Oil protester on the M25 in 2022. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images
Forty people, aged 22 to 58, incarcerated for direct actions on climate and Gaza actions amid crackdown on dissent
A record number of people who have taken part in protests will be in prison in the UK this Christmas, raising concern about the ongoing crackdown on dissent.
Forty people, aged from 22 to 58, will be behind bars on Christmas Day for planning or taking part in a variety of protests relating to the climate crisis or the war in Gaza. Several of them are facing years in prison after courts handed down the most severe sentences on record for direct action protests.
Jodie Beck, a policy and campaigns officer at the civil rights group Liberty, said the number of protesters in prison and the severity of their sentences was “a damning reflection of the state of democracy” in the country.
“We should all be able to stand up for what we believe in without fear of lengthy prison sentences. Continuing to prosecute people for exercising their right to protest will only serve to exacerbate the crisis in our criminal justice system alongside stopping people from making their voices heard,” Beck said.
Nineteen people are in prison – 10 of them on remand – after taking part in climate protests with the campaign group Just Stop Oil. They range from five people who received multi-year sentences after being found guilty of conspiring to cause gridlock on the M25, to two young people jailed for more than 18 months for throwing tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery in London.
Palestinian children gather to receive bread in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, Gaza on December 19, 2024. (Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“People in Gaza are struggling to survive apocalyptic conditions, but nowhere is safe, no one is spared, and there is no exit from this shattered enclave,” said the humanitarian group’s secretary-general.
The international humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières published a report Thursday detailing how the Israeli military has systematically destroyed conditions of life in the Gaza Strip over the past 14 months by dismantling the enclave’s healthcare system, forcibly displacing most of the population, choking off humanitarian aid, and reducing much of the territory to rubble.
MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, noted in its 34-page report that its staffers have witnessed and in some cases been the victims of large-scale “violence unleashed by Israeli forces,” which has “caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing offensive and a 17-year-long blockade.”
While MSF secretary-general Christopher Lockyear stressed that the group doesn’t “have legal authority to establish intentionality” on the part of the Israeli military, “the signs of ethnic cleansing and the ongoing devastation—including mass killings, severe physical and mental health injuries, forced displacement, and impossible conditions of life for Palestinians under siege and bombardment—are undeniable.”
“People in Gaza are struggling to survive apocalyptic conditions, but nowhere is safe, no one is spared, and there is no exit from this shattered enclave,” said Lockyear, who visited Gaza earlier this year. “The recent military offensive in the north is a stark illustration of the brutal war the Israeli forces are waging on Gaza, and we are seeing clear signs of ethnic cleansing as Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped, and bombed.”
“What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict,” he added, “is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”
Even if Israel’s assault ended today, MSF said, “its long-term impacts would be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction and the extraordinary challenges of providing healthcare across the strip.”
“The cumulative physical toll and mental trauma caused by the extreme violence, loss of family members and homes, repeated forced displacement, and inhumane living conditions will scar generations,” the group added.
Medics care for patients at a clinic set up by Doctors Without Borders in Rafah, Gaza on April 24, 2024. (Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)
MSF’s report, titled Gaza: Life in a Death Trap, finds that Israel’s response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack “provoked the collapse of Gaza’s already-vulnerable healthcare system” and compromised its ability to provide humanitarian assistance with attacks on aid workers.
Since October 2023, at least eight MSF workers and “many of their family members” have been killed in Gaza, the group said Thursday.
“The pattern of attacks outlined above coupled with its foreseeable consequences and the denial of access to medical care and humanitarian assistance… effectively demonstrate Israeli forces waging a ‘war on the health of Gazans’ that has left the healthcare system in shreds,” the new report states.
The report quotes MSF staffers relaying their horrifying experiences working in Gaza’s barely functional hospitals and clinics without adequate supplies to treat the massive influx of Israeli airstrike victims.
“There are wounded lying everywhere,” Karin Huster, medical referent for MSF in Gaza, said in June. “Bodies are being carried out in plastic bags, the smell of blood is unbearable. Hundreds of people are in the hospital waiting for news of their loved ones injured in the bombardments.”
“Nothing justifies what I saw today,” Huster added. “These children, the three-month-old baby, the 7-year-old, the 12-year-old who died, the 25-year-old man, the 78-year-old woman, all with horrific injuries: Why did they deserve this?”
Human Rights Watch said Thursday that “Israeli authorities have deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.”
“In doing so,” HRW added, “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide.”
Doctors Without Borders said Thursday that “an immediate and sustained cease-fire must be implemented” and the “complete destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza and all things that make up the very fabric of society must stop.”
Additionally, the group urged Israel’s allies to end their unconditional support for the assault on Gaza and demanded an independent investigation into attacks on humanitarian workers.
“Israeli authorities continue to actively block MSF and other humanitarian organizations from providing lifesaving assistance to people trapped under siege and bombardment,” the group said. “States must leverage their influence to alleviate the suffering of people and enable a massive scale-up of humanitarian assistance across the Gaza Strip.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support 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/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
A Palestinian girl carries an empty jerry can amid the ruins of Khan Yunis, Gaza on December 4, 2024. (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease,” said the rights group’s director.
A Human Rights Watch report published Thursday accuses Israel of “extermination and acts of genocide” in Gaza “by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.”
Mirroring language used in Article II of the Genocide Convention to define the crime of genocide, HRW said that Israeli officials “have deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza” by deliberately denying Palestinians “access to safe water for drinking and sanitation needed for basic human survival.”
“Israeli authorities and forces cut off and later restricted piped water to Gaza; rendered most of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure useless by cutting electricity and restricting fuel; deliberately destroyed and damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials; and blocked the entry of critical water supplies,” the report states.
“In doing so, Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide,” HRW continued. “The pattern of conduct, coupled with statements suggesting that some Israeli officials wished to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, may amount to the crime of genocide.”
NEW: For over a year, the Israeli government has deliberately denied Palestinians in Gaza the minimum water needed for survival, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.A calculated policy.An act of genocide. 🧵⤵️www.hrw.org/news/2024/12…
HRW “also found that some statements from senior Israeli officials calling for cutting water, fuel, and aid, in tandem with their actions, have amounted to direct and public incitement to genocide.”
According to the report:
Immediately after the attacks in southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups in Gaza on October 7, 2023, which Human Rights Watch has found amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Israeli authorities cut all electricity and fuel to the Gaza Strip. On October 9, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.”
That same day, and for weeks thereafter, Israeli authorities cut off all water and blocked fuel, food, and humanitarian aid from entering the strip. Israeli authorities continue to restrict the entry of water, fuel, food, and aid into Gaza and to cut Gaza’s electricity, which is required to operate life-sustaining infrastructure. This continued even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures in January, March, and May 2024 ordering Israeli authorities to protect Palestinians in Gaza from genocide and, in so doing, provide humanitarian aid, specifying in March that this includes water, food, electricity, and fuel.
HRW detailed how Israel “also barred nearly all water-related aid from entering Gaza, including water filtration systems, water tanks, and materials needed to repair water infrastructure,” and how Israeli forces “have deliberately attacked and damaged or destroyed several major water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities.”
“Based on interviews with healthcare professionals and epidemiologists, it is likely that thousands of people have died as a result of the Israeli authorities’ actions,” the report states, adding that deaths are in addition to the more than 45,000 Palestinians directly killed by Israeli bombs and bullets.
HRW added that hundreds of thousands of Gazans have contracted diseases and ailments attributable to a lack of access to safe and sufficient water, including diarrhea, hepatitis A, skin diseases, and upper respiratory infections.
“Water is essential for human life, yet for over a year the Israeli government has deliberately denied Palestinians in Gaza the bare minimum they need to survive,” HRW executive director Tirana Hassan said in a statement. “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide.”
Without naming any specific nations, the report notes that “several governments have undermined accountability efforts and continue to provide the Israeli government with arms despite the clear risk of complicity in serious violations of international humanitarian law.”
The United States is Israel’s main arms supplier and diplomatic ally, approving tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons transfers, vetoing several United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions, and threatening international officials seeking to hold Israel accountable for its crimes.
“Governments should not contribute to the grave crimes that Israeli officials are committing in Gaza, including crimes against humanity and genocidal acts, and should take all steps possible to prevent further harm,” Hassan said. “Governments arming Israel should end their risk of complicity in atrocity crimes in Gaza and take immediate action to protect civilians with an arms embargo, targeted sanctions, and support for justice.”
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
