Tag: War / War On The Public / War Against Citizens

Peace & Justice History for 12/26

December 26, 1862
38 members of the Santee Sioux tribe were hanged in a public mass execution in Minnesota. 300 members of the band had been convicted of participating the the Minnesota Uprising and ordered to hang. However, all sentences except the 38 had been commuted by President Abraham Lincoln.
For decades white settlers had been encroaching on Santee Sioux territory, and they had been victimized by corrupt federal Indian agents on the reservations.In July agents and contractors had withheld food when their demands for kickbacks had been refused. The Indians eventually struck back, killing Anglo settlers and taking some hostages. In two battles with the U.S. Army, they killed or wounded dozens of soldiers, but ultimately lost and were put on trial.

America’s only legal mass execution
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December 26, 1966
The first Kwanzaa was celebrated in Los Angeles, California. It was conceived and organized in the wake of the Watts riots by Dr. Maulana (Ron) Karenga, a professor and chairman of Black Studies at California State University at Long Beach. Kwanzaa is a non-religious African-American holiday focusing on family, community, and culture.The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase “matunda ya kwanza,” which means “first fruits” in Swahili. The celebrations are expressed through song, dance, drumming, storytelling, poetry and the lighting of candles in a Kinara, all followed by a large traditional meal. The holiday is observed for seven days, each representing a different principle:

a Kwanzaa Kinara
• Umoja (oo-MO-jah) Unity
• Kujichagulia (koo-gee-cha-goo-LEE-yah) Self-Determination
• Ujima (oo-GEE-mah) Collective Work and Responsibility
• Ujamaa (oo-JAH-mah) Cooperative economics
• Nia (NEE-yah) Purpose
• Kuumba (koo-OOM-bah) Creativity
• Imani (ee-MAH-nee) Faith

Ron Karenga lighting the Kinara
History, Principles, and Symbols of Kwanzaa 
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December 26, 1971

Two dozen members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War “liberated” the Statue of Liberty with a sit-in to protest resumed U.S. aerial bombings in Vietnam. They flew an inverted U.S. flag from the crown as a signal of distress.
more on this action 
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December 26, 1992

photo: Simran Sachdev Belgrade, 7.2009
Women In Black began campaign against rape during war, Belgrade, Serbia.
WIB website 
Women in Black is a world-wide network of women committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and
other forms of violence.
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December 26, 1999
Alfonso Portillo Cabrera scored a resounding victory (nearly 70% of the vote in the second round) in Guatemala’s first peacetime presidential elections following a 36-year civil war.

Alfonso Portillo Cabrera after his election
Some perspective 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december26

Peace & Justice History for 12/24

December 24, 1865
Months after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Its first priority, declared in its creed, was “to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal.”
In fact, the Klan terrorized and killed former slaves, sympathetic whites and immigrants.

Three Ku Klux Klan members, September 1871.
The building where it happened still stands with a bronze plaque reading, “Ku Klux Klan organized in this, the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, Dec. 24, 1865.” When the building was purchased in 1990, the new owner, Don Massey, instead of removing the plaque, simply reversed it, showing the smooth back side.
More on the Klan 
December 24, 1924

Costa Rica indicated its intention to withdraw from The League of Nations to protest lack of progress on regional issues, particularly U.S. dominance of the hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, established the U.S. sphere of influence encompassed the entirety of North and South America, as well as the Caribbean island nations.
Read more 
December 24, 1947
President Truman pardoned 1,523 of the 15,805 World War II draft resisters who had been convicted and served time in prison for their offense. Five years later on the same day, shortly before leaving office, he granted full pardon and restoration of civil and political rights to former convicts who had served in the peacetime army or who had not been covered by his earlier pardon, as well as all convicted peacetime deserters.
Read more 
December 24, 1991
Parents of reservists from Grocka protested at Army headquarters in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, worried their sons would be caught up in the war threatened by Serbian nationalist expansionism.
December 24, 1992
President George Herbert Walker Bush pardoned six Reagan administration appointees in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, and Robert McFarlane, the President’s former national security advisor.He did so with less than one month to go in his presidency, and one week before Weinberger’s trial on four felony charges was to begin.
These people and others were responsible for selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran in hope of the release of hostages held in Lebanon, despite then-President Ronald Reagan’s repeated pledge not to negotiate with hostage-takers.

The Iran-Contra Boys

Otto Reich /Elliott Abrams /John Poindexter/Edwin Meese George H.W. Bush/Casper Weinberger/Oliver North/Robert McFarlane

The money raised through the arms sales was used to fund the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua, who were violently trying to overthrow the government. This support was in violation of an explicit legal ban on such activities under the Boland Amendment [see December 21, 1982].

Text of Bush’s Grant of Executive Clemency
U.S. presidential pardon history: 
More about presidential pardons: 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december24

Peace & Justice History for 12/20

Vermont Freedom To Marry Passes, and more on this date:

December 20, 1946
The morning after Viet Minh forces under Ho Chi Minh launched a nighttime revolt in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, French colonial troops cracked down on the communist rebels. Ho and his soldiers immediately fled the city to regroup in the countryside.
That evening, the communist leader issued a proclamation that read:
Ho Chi Minh, Paris 1946

“All the Vietnamese must stand up to fight the French colonials to save the fatherland. Those who have rifles will use their rifles; those who have swords will use their swords; those who have no swords will use spades, hoes, or sticks. Everyone must endeavor to oppose the colonialists and save this country. Even if we have to endure hardship in the resistance war, with the determination to make sacrifices, victory will surely be ours.” The first Indochina War thus began.
December 20, 1960
North Vietnam announced the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of the South (usually known as the National Liberation Front or NLF), designed to replicate the success of the Viet Minh, the umbrella nationalist organization that successfully liberated Vietnam from French colonial rule.

National Liberation Front flag 
Ho Chi Minh biography (two separate links.)
December 20, 1990

Kansas reservist Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn refused orders to serve in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm) and was later sentenced to prison. The Kansas medical board withdrew her hospital privileges.
“The issue was not whether I belonged in the military but whether the military belonged in the Middle East waging war. I did not want to focus on the personal decision. I was trying to focus on the decision for which each and every American would have to be responsible.” — Yolanda Huet-Vaughn
What if they gave a war and nobody came? 
December 20, 1994
100,000 Chechnyan civilians linked hands in a 65 km-long human chain (40 miles) to protest the Russian invasion of their country and attack on their capital, Grozny.
Read more  OR TRY HERE if you don’t have an account with the NYWT.
December 20, 1999
The Vermont Supreme Court rulled in Baker v. State of Vermont that homosexual couples were entitled to the same benefits and protections as wedded couples of the opposite sex.
History of the Freedom to Marry 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december20

Peace & Justice History for 12/16

December 16, 1942
Heinrich Himmler, head of the German Gestapo, made public an order that Gypsies, or Roma, and those of mixed Roma blood already in labor camps be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.”Himmler was determined to prosecute Nazi racial policies, which dictated the elimination from Germany and German-controlled territories of all races deemed “inferior,” as well as “asocial” types, (hardcore criminals, homosexuals, Communists, Slavs, Catholic priests). Gypsies fell into both categories according to Nazi ideology and had been executed widely in Croatia, Poland and the Soviet Union.

Gypsy arrivals to the Belzec death camp.
The Porajmos (also Porrajmos) — literally Devouring — is a term coined by the Romani to describe attempts by the Nazi regime to exterminate most of their people in Europe.
Read more
Video 
December 16, 1950
President Truman proclaimed a national state of emergency in order to fight “Communist imperialism.” This followed major Chinese intervention in the Korean War, launching a counter-offensive with 300,000 men against Republic of Korea, United States and United Nations troops.The U.N. command, under General Douglas MacArthur, had attacked the North Korean Army at Inchon three months earlier, liberating Seoul, destroying three divisions and forcing a retreat by the North Korean People’s Army.

North Korean Leader Kim Il Sung (second from L) with the Korean-Chinese joint military command

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december16

Saturday AM Poetry

Please click through on the title to read more about the poet, and the poem.

My Apologies

Ammiel Alcalay

after Bulund al-Haidari

To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorous and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again.

Copyright © 2024 by Ammiel Alcalay. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on Decmber 6, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Peace & Justice History for 11/27

November 27, 1095
Pope Urban II called on all Christians to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims and reclaim the Holy Land: “Deus vult (God wills it)!” What is currently called the Middle East was then in control of the Turks who frequently barred Christian pilgrims entrance to the city.
At the Council of Clermont in France, the pope promised absolution and remission of sins for all who died in the service of Christ. The mobilization of 60,000 to 100,000 Christians throughout Europe in this effort became known as the First Crusade. 
November 27, 1914
The No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) was founded by two English pacifists, Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway. They opposed the Military Service Act which introduced conscription, and then mounted a vigorous campaign against the punishment and imprisonment of conscientious objectors.
They were consistently opposed to the war in Europe.

Early Fellowship members 

Fellowship members at a recent protest

Read more about Clifford Allen, Fenner Brockway and No-Conscription Fellowship 
More on the No-Conscription Fellowship from the Swarthmore College Peace Collection 
November 27, 1957
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, made an impassioned speech appealing to the United States and the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) to end testing and begin nuclear disarmament. The two superpowers were the only nations with atomic weapons at the time.
Nehru had fought to free his country from British colonial authority through acts of nonviolent passive resistance with Ghandi, and they achieved independence. He stressed the urgency for the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to “save humanity from the ultimate disaster.”Nehru’s Congress Party government nevertheless pursued an aggressive nuclear program, starting in 1948, publicly committed to peaceful purposes exclusively. Nehru acknowledged that the possession of fissionable materials and growing expertise could readily be directed toward production of such weapons. In the absence of universal nuclear disarmament, he feared acquisition of such weapons by potential adversaries. In particular for India, this meant Pakistan or China.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru
Nuclear India – a short history 
November 27, 1965
In Washington D.C., 35,000 anti-war protesters circled the White House then marched on to the Washington Monument for a rally against the war in Vietnam.
November 27, 1967
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, a movement to broadly address economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action. “It must not be just black people,” argued King, “it must be all poor people. We must include American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and even poor whites.”

Why a Poor People’s Campaign? 
November 27, 1969
Over one hundred members of the U.S. 71st Evacuation Hospital and the 44th Medical Detachment at Pleiku, Vietnam, organized a Thanksgiving protest fast called the “John Turkey movement.” In Home before Morning, nurse Lynda Van Devanter recalled her change in attitude.

Nurse Lynda Van Devanter
“Earlier in my tour, when I had heard about the war protesters, I had felt angry at them for not supporting us.  Now I wished I could march with them . . . Most others in Pleiku felt the same way . . . We even held our own Thanksgiving Day fast—the John Turkey movement — as a show of support for those who were trying to end the war through protests and moratoriums. We heard that the fast had spread to units all over Vietnam.” The fast received considerable media coverage when Denise Murray, a nurse at Pleiku and daughter of a distinguished admiral, made antiwar statements to the press.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november27

‘I had to get out’: the US military officers filing for conscientious objector status over Gaza

Disillusioned members of the US military have turned to Vietnam war-era policy to terminate their service because of religious or moral convictions

For Joy Metzler, a second lieutenant in the US air force, joining the military had felt like answering a calling. An adoptee from China who was raised in a conservative Christian family, she believed she owed a debt to the United States.

But the Hamas attacks in Israel last year, and Israel’s war that followed, rocked Metzler’s convictions. Within months, she filed for conscientious objector status, one of a small number of US military personnel seeking to end their service because of their moral opposition to US support for Israel.

“I didn’t know Palestine was a place before October 7,” Metzler told the Guardian.

“All of a sudden it felt like a light clicking on for me.”

As the war in Gaza enters a second year, some disillusioned members of the US military have turned to the Vietnam war-era conscientious objector policy to terminate their military service because of religious or moral convictions.

There are few avenues to express dissent in the army. Earlier this year, Harrison Mann, an army officer assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency resigned in protest of US support for Israel. In a far more extreme gesture, 25-year-old US airman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in February.

The conscientious objector route is a seldom-invoked alternative that few service members are aware of – though some advocates say there has been an uptick in interest in the last year.

The defense department referred questions about the number of conscientious objectors to each branch of the military. A spokesperson for the air force said that it has received 42 applications since 2021 and granted 36. Applications since 7 October “are on trend with pre-conflict averages”, the spokesperson added. (The army, navy, and Marine Corps did not respond to requests for comment.)

But while the numbers remain relatively low, the war in Gaza is top of mind for those service members who have considered conscientious objector status this year, said Bill Galvin, a Vietnam-era objector and director of counseling at the Center on Conscience and War, one of a handful of groups that helps military members navigate the complex bureaucratic process.

Galvin said his group helps roughly 50 to 70 applicants a year, across military branches, and that there’s been more interest than usual this year.

The US has subsidized Israel’s war in Gaza to the tune of nearly $18bn over the last year, and is growing more deeply entangled as the conflict spills into the broader region. The Biden administration recently announced the deployment of 100 troops to Israel to man a missile defense system in anticipation of an escalation against Iran.

“Almost everyone that I’ve talked to has at least cited what’s happening in Gaza as a factor in causing them to rethink what they’re doing,” Galvin said. “Some have actually said: ‘I know that the airplane that I’m doing maintenance on is delivering weaponry to Israel and so I feel complicit.’” (snip-MORE)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/military-officers-conscientious-objector-status-gaza?CMP=share_btn_url

Peace & Justice History for 10/16:

It is World Food Day. (Among other things; this is a busy date!)

October 16, 1649
The British colony of Maine granted religious freedom to all citizens the same year that King Charles I was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church.
October 16, 1859
Abolitionist John Brown led a group of 21 other men, five black and sixteen white, in a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
They had hoped to set off a slave revolt — throughout the south — with the weapons they had planned to seize.
 John Brown
Virtually all his compatriots were killed or captured by General Robert E. Lee’s troops; Brown was wounded and arrested, and hanged for treason within two months.
Read more
  
The Tragic Prelude (John Brown)mural by John Steuart Curry (1937-1942)
Former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said of Brown that he was a white man “in sympathy a black man, as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
October 16, 1901
President Theodore Roosevelt
President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most prominent African American of his time, to a meeting in the White House. The meeting went long and the president asked Washington to stay for dinner, the first black person ever to do so. Newspapers in the both the South and North were critical, but the South with more venom. The Memphis “Scimiter” said that it was “the most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” Roosevelt claimed he had invited a friend to dinner with his family and it was no one else’s business.
Booker T. Washington
October 16, 1934
Dick Sheppard, who volunteered and joined the Army as a chaplain in World War I, started the Peace Pledge Union in England. In a letter published in The Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, Sheppard, a well-known priest in the Church of England, invited those who would be willing to join a public demonstration against war to send him a postcard. Within a few weeks he had received 30,000 replies. Members of the Peace Pledge Union vowed to “renounce war and never again to support another.”

Reverend Sheppard had been the first ever to broadcast religious services on the radio and, when Vicar of St. Martin-in-the Fields, Trafalgar Square, he had opened the building to the homeless of London.“Up to now the peace movement has received its main support from women, but it seems high time now that men should throw their weight into the scales against war.” -Dick Sheppard
Read more about the Peace Pledge Union 
October 16, 1964
China detonated its first atomic bomb, becoming the fifth nuclear-armed nation. The 20-kiloton fission device (equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT) was detonated in the vicinity of Lop Nor, a lake in a remote region of the Central Asian province of Sinkiang.
” To defend oneself is the inalienable right of every sovereign State. And to safeguard world peace is the common task of all peace-loving countries. China cannot remain idle and do nothing in the face of the ever-increasing nuclear threat posed by the United States.China is forced to conduct nuclear tests and develop nuclear weapons . . . In developing nuclear weapons, China’s aim is to break the nuclear monopoly of the nuclear Powers and to eliminate nuclear weapons.”
Chou En-lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, sent messages to all heads of government for a world summit conference on nuclear disarmament. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a news conference that the United States did not regard Communist China’s proposal “as having any practical value.”Deng Jiaxian. The father of the chinese bomb.
TRINITY AND BEYOND™ (The Atomic Bomb Movie), a documentary by Peter Kuran
October 16, 1967

Joan Baez the day after the arrest
Folksinger Joan Baez was arrested in a peace demonstration as rallies took place across America during “Stop the Draft Week.” 1158 young men returned their draft cards in eighteen U.S. cities. Baez was among 122 anti-draft protesters arrested for sitting down at the entrance of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California; she was sentenced to 10 days in prison.
Read more 
October 16, 1968
During medal presentations at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, winning sprinters Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) raised their black-gloved fists while the U.S. national anthem was played. They were suspended from the team at the insistence of the International Olympic Committee, and expelled from the Games two days later.
Smith later told the media that he raised his right fist in the air to represent black power in America while Carlos’s left fist represented unity in black America.
They were wearing just socks to represent
world poverty.

Peter Norman (silver medalist, left) from Australia also wears an OPHR (Olympic Project for Human Rights) badge in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. He was castigated upon return to Australia and throughout his life for his support of these two brave athletes.
Read more 
October 16, 1973
Henry Kissinger
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, though accused of war crimes by some for the massive bombing of Laos and Cambodia, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (who refused the honor) for the cease-fire agreement they had negotiated. This occurred just a month after the bloody military coup, fully supported by the Nixon administration and aided by the CIA, that overturned the democratically elected government of Chile, and installed General Augusto Pinochet as military dictator for the next 17 years.
October 16, 1984

Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of South Africa, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in fighting apartheid. He has gone on to be a relentless advocate for justice around the world.
Desmond Tutu – Nobel peace prize recipient 
October 16, 1998
In a human rights and international law breakthrough, British authorities, after receiving an extradition request from Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, placed former Chilean dictator, and senator-for-life, General Augusto Pinochet under arrest for “crimes of genocide and terrorism that include murder.”
Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher
Chronology of Pinochet’s rule 
October 16th every year
United Nations’ World Food Day is recognized every year.
About the annual day of hunger awareness

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october16

A dark week for Ukrainian journalism by Anastasiia Lapatina

And, the Ramstein meeting gets postponed because of Hurricane Milton.

Read on Substack

This week was a dark one for Ukrainian journalism. 

On Oct. 9, Ukraine’s leading news outlet Ukrainska Pravda (UP) said the President’s Office was threatening their work by exerting “long-term and systemic pressure” against the newsroom. 

UP said Zelensky’s office was blocking government officials from talking to the outlet or taking part in its events, as well as pressuring businesses to stop advertising collaborations with the outlet. 

“These and other non-public signals indicate attempts to influence our editorial policy. It is especially outrageous to realize this at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when our joint struggle for both survival and democratic values ​​is extremely necessary,” UP said in a statement.

The statement also referenced the outright disrespectful exchange between Zelensky and UP’s star political reporter Roman Kravets during a press conference in late August. The President was visibly annoyed with Kravets, interrupted him, and eventually accused the outlet of having a secret agenda to undermine him with negative coverage. 

It’s worth noting that all governments, even democratic ones, try to control media narratives and restrict access to journalists. All those anonymous American officials giving comments to journalists without authorization risk getting fired when doing it, for example. 

However, what is happening to UP is worse than just normal politics. Pressuring businesses to stop collaborating with the outlet directly undermines UP’s ability to stay afloat, at a time when advertising already plunged because of the war. 

To be frank, apart from being objectively worrying, this situation is also quite embarrassing. Every public-facing Ukrainian spends countless hours persuading the world that Ukraine is a democratic country that’s defending European values and is worth the world’s help. Why the Ukrainian government would shoot itself in the foot when the world’s patience and money for Ukraine are running out is a mystery to me. 

Yet this wasn’t even the worst piece of news. On the next day, we learned that Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna died in Russian captivity.

She was only 27, and was supposed to be included in the upcoming prisoner exchange, the government said. She was reportedly held in a brutal detention facility in the Russian city of Taganrok, known for its torture of prisoners. 

I never met Viktoria, but her former colleagues say she was the embodiment of her profession – brave and determined, always the first one at every scene, working and bothering editors about her work 24/7. 

She was taken captive while reporting from Russian-occupied territories in August 2023. But that wasn’t her first time in Russian captivity. 

Viktoria was first detained by the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB) for 10 days in March of 2022. To the dismay of her colleagues, she was trying to get into occupied Mariupol, which was being obliterated by Russian fighter jets back then. 

“Nothing could stop Vika if an idea was born in her head. Nothing was more important to her than journalism,” her former colleague Yevheniia Motorevska wrote on Facebook. “She was a force of nature that we failed to tame.”

On the geopolitical front, Ukrainians were disappointed with the postponement of the Ramstein group meeting because of Joe Biden’s preoccupation with Hurricane Milton.

The Ramstein group—which is called the Ukraine Defense Contact Group but steals the name from Germany’s Ramstein Air Base, where its meetings happen—is a coalition of more than 50 states who militarily support Ukraine in its war against Russia. 

The group was scheduled to meet this Saturday, Oct. 12, at the level of state leaders, for the first time ever. Zelensky hyped up the meeting beforehand, saying it would be “special”, while the media reported that President Biden may even be ready to advance Ukraine’s NATO bid before he leaves office, perhaps making significant decisions during the Ramstein.  Biden was supposed to chair the meeting. But it didn’t happen: The US President had canceled to stay in the US and deal with the hurricane.

With Ramstein postponed indefinitely, Zelensky went on a European tour with his “victory plan”, presenting it to leaders of France, the UK, and NATO.

Presidential Office advisor Mykhailo Podoliak said on Saturday that the President might reveal the plan to the Ukrainian public within days. I’ll keep you updated as soon as that happens.

That will be it for today. I’ll be back next week,

Cheers, and Glory to Ukraine

— Yours Ukrainian

A year of war accelerates ‘silent departure’ of Israel’s elite

Brain drain could undermine the country’s hi-tech economy as liberal families conclude social contract has been broken

This summer, the Nobel laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover joined a group of prominent Israelis gathered in the ruins of the Nir Oz kibbutz to demand a hostage release and ceasefire deal.

Nir Oz was the worst hit of all the communities targeted by Hamas on 7 October, with a quarter of its residents kidnapped or killed. Twenty-nine are still in Gaza.

If the hostages were not brought back, the basic social contract that underpinned Israeli society would unravel, the 77-year-old professor of medicine warned – with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.

He cited an accelerating “brain drain” of doctors and other professionals as a worrying sign that some of Israel’s elite already feel they no longer have a future in the country. And without them, Israel itself might struggle to have a future.

Ciechanover is a long-term critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and joined protests against his government before the war. But concern about this trend is not limited to political opponents of the Israeli leader. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel, joined forces with the administrative expert Ron Tzur to warn that Israel faces an existential threat.

In a paper calling for a new political settlement, they warned that under a business-as-usual scenario “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades”. (snip)

The problem precedes the 7 October attacks and the war that followed, as demographic and political shifts have prompted some secular, liberal Israelis to question their future in a state increasingly dominated by religious traditionalists.

Noam is a father of three with businesses that include a PR consultancy and a cannabis pharmacy. He expected that his 40s would be a time of “less doing, more enjoying”, after decades of hard work.

Instead, he and his wife spend evenings poring over school options in European countries as they weigh up where to start a new life. The war increased the urgency of the search, but it has been a decision born out of longstanding concerns.

“The main reason we are leaving is that we are seeking a better future for our children. Even if peace can be brokered tomorrow, we still can’t see a future we want to be a part of,” Noam said. “The demographics speak for themselves.”

(snip-MORE- not tl;dr)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/06/as-war-and-religion-rages-israels-secular-elite-contemplate-a-silent-departure