By Julia Wright
African American diplomat, Linda Thomas Greenfield , US ambassador to the United Nations, arrives on October 18th at the Security Council dressed to the hilt and prepared to raise a war mongering hand that will go down in history.
The resolution would have allowed “humanitarian pauses in the conflict between Israel and Hamas to enable humanitarian aid access to the Gaza strip.”
Because the membership rules for votes and vetoes in the Security Council are stacked in favor of the great powers, the U.S. knew its sole vote could prevent the humanitarian pauses. And so, alone against the world, the U.S. voted for war.
Although much of body language analysis is, I believe, a pseudoscience – I was struck by Linda Thomas Greenfield’s sartorial choice as she knew what she was going to vote for on the day.
She wore a chic Chanel style top, suited to the solemnity of her anti peace vote ( Madame Coco Chanel was, as we remember, unconditionally pro Nazi ) but what strikes the observer most is the color choice and the pattern: large black and white rounded chequers.
At first glance, one associates to mourning colors although one wonders what she is mourning since she is on the point of voting for an exponential increase in Palestinian death.
But then I did a double take and wondered : was she wearing – intentionally or unintentionally – an elegant vest that, seen from a distance, could have been cut out of a Palestinian keffiyeh – and what message did that send ?
Was she trying to have her cake and eat it – donning a suit with curved black squares similar to those on a keffiyeh belonging to the very people she was sentencing to death – as if attempting to send the message that standing alone to save the world against “human animals” is martyrdom too ? In any case it would seem she was hijacking her victims’ keffiyeh. We know our own symbols are often co-opted and that these things are scripted.
As I sign off, at the Security Council the Israeli Ambassador to the UN as well as his delegation have theatrically pinned yellow stars to their expensive suits, once again obscenely battening on the Holocaust to play the victims and with a lack of empathy likening them to the nazi final exterminators. This histrionic and cynical recourse to history is to “collectively punish” Secretary General Antonio Guterres and his UN colleagues for not totally towing the Israeli war mongering narrative.
As for Linda Thomas Greenfield, her sartorial choice is a symbol of the widening cracks, divisions and embarrassment of the U.S. government over the Biden-Netanyahu co-genocidal pact.
1 – Josh Paul, a [former] Congress staffer [editor’s note: Paul served 11 years heading the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the US State Department entity most responsible for the transfer and provision of arms to partners and allies], has not only resigned but has borne witness to widespread dissension against the neocons and the hawks inside the U.S government.
Mirroring these ominous divisions, there are increasing street protests in Tel Aviv fed by a growing number of anti Netanyahu Israelis who were opposing his far right judicial reform way before October 7th . To the point where it is said that Netanyahu welcomed the Hamas attack and the pretext to invade Gaza to distract from his unpopularity. Just as Biden seems happy to have Israel’s war to support now that Ukraine is not doing as well as planned.
2 – Another factor that is creating a tectonic geopolitical shift worldwide is the unstoppable grassroot factor of street protests that by now approximate the anti-Vietnam war resistance movement. Not even a budding backlash can equal the street tsunamis. And as Vijay Prashad and Zoe Alexandra reported on People’s Dispatch, the synch October 27th timeline between the UN General Assembly adopting a toothless resolution for a sustainable humanitarian truce – with so many cowardly abstentions – and in real time just down the street the take over of Grand Central Station by thousands of Jews For Peace , is truly indicative of people’s power. As Angela Davis said on October 27th : “Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world.”
Throughout the world, there are daily marches, rallies, sit-ins, direct action, walk-outs, BDS, and shutting down of arms factories :
Globally the trade union movement is becoming a cornerstone of this grassroot upsurge.
In some Middle Eastern countries like Jordan, US brands like Starbucks, McDonalds and Coca-Cola are being boycotted.
3 – Until the ground invasion took place, the western media blackout on Gaza was replaced by teams of on the spot independent journalists and civilians who became the journalists of their own ordeal by documenting the crimes against their humanity with their laptops, smartphones, makeshift mikes. Internet was weaponized and that is how the world was able to see the genocide unfold in real time, going digitally viral.
For the third day now, to cover up any incriminating footage, the IDF has plunged Gaza in darkness, cut internet and power lines on top of the fuel, water, food, medicine blockade. But it is too late: the world saw enough to get moving. What is left to imagination is always worse.
4 – As the October 16th and 18th anti-humanitarian votes by the United States at the Security Council show, America is now clearly a rogue state in the eyes of the world. And the rogue votes also show that the U.S will continue to hold the United Nations hostage unless the Security Council is not just reshuffled but radically restructured to reflect the rise of the Collective South.
5 – 80 % of the world’s population – most of the Global South – condemns the Israeli genocide.
6 – One half to two-thirds ofU.S. voters are now favorable to voting for independent parties.
7 – 66 % of U.S. voters agree the U.S. should call for a ceasefire.
8 – Only a minority of countries in the world recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization – essentially North America, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and Egypt.
9 – The October 27th United Nations General Assembly resolution for a sustained humanitarian truce introduced by Jordan reveals increasing unity in the Arab world in favor of a free Palestine. Here again the pro-Palestinian pressure of the street is a determining factor destabilizing those U.S. vassal Arab elites who increasingly would rather side with their people to stay in power.
10 – The Israelis – past world masters of PR spin and mind control technology – are losing the narrative war.
11 – The resistance of the people of Gaza against Apartheid is the resistance of all liberation movements against Apartheid and colonialism everywhere. As the late Nelson Mandela said : “South Africa will not be free until Palestine is free.”
12 – Alongside Angela Davis, the Critical Resistance movement has stated that abolition means no more war and that dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex is connected to the global movements against war, militarism and colonialism.
Likewise, we in the Mumia coalition say that if Biden has the hypocrisy to claim he cares enough to send planes and bombs to free those taken hostage in Gaza, he should also look inwards to his own hostages – aging U.S. political prisoners, invisible and unrecognized, buried under decades of rubble of media blackout and cruel and inhumane treatment.
13 – Everywhere the youth, the students, the campuses are moving with uplifting messages from the Palestinian Youth Movement ( PYM ) who refuse to be seen as victims but rather stand up as “agents of revolutionary change:”
14 – Already radical scholars, academics and the Stop Cop City movement are connecting the militaristic dots whereby the cop cities of the USA are often heavily dependent on Israeli training.
15 – Following cracks in the armor of the U.S. government and divisions in the Israeli government, a top OHCHR United Nations diplomat, Craig Mokhibe, has just resigned over what he calls the UN’s failure to address “a textbook case of genocide.” His principled and caring letter of resignation will find its way in all people’s history books on the liberation of Palestine and was analyzed by Ben Norton of Geopolitical Economy Report :
16 – Chile and Colombia have recalled their ambassadors to Israel while Bolivia has cut diplomatic ties with Israel citing crimes against humanity and a threat to international peace and security. This should be the beginning of a domino effect
17 – China has started to delete the State of Israel from its online maps :
(c) Julia Wright. October 30, 2023. All Rights Reserved to the children of Gaza – 47% of the population.
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