US And Russia: Great Enemies Or Partners?

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1. Russia’s actual attitudes towards both the U.S. and China. From RT.

   US is whipping up fear of China because Washington simply cannot contemplate a world it does not dominate
   America’s annual threat assessment has highlighted the dangers posed by China. The manufactured hysteria about Beijing’s supposed intentions reveals a country unnerved at the prospect of losing its global preeminence.
   On Wednesday, US intelligence officials provided a briefing on the biggest threats to Washington around the world, giving ample focus to China, but also mentioning Russia and North Korea, building on a comprehensive report that had been released earlier in the week.

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   Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines defined Beijing as “a near-peer competitor challenging the United States in multiple arenas, while pushing to revise global norms in ways that favor the authoritarian Chinese system”.

   The comments built on the report’s assessment that China is “combining its growing military power with its economic, technological, and diplomatic clout to preserve the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], secure what it views as its territory and regional pre-eminence, and pursue international cooperation at Washington’s expense.”

   It served as a vindication of the longstanding ‘China threat’ theory which has now underpinned a new consensus in US foreign policy on geopolitical competition, with the baton passing seamlessly from Donald Trump’s administration to Joe Biden’s.

   However, what does China really want? And is the struggle between Washington and Beijing truly the zero-sum, near life-and-death struggle it is being depicted as? China, of course, has aims and ambitions, as does every country. In reality, this latest development ultimately tells us more about how the US views its global position and the emphasis it puts on undisputed hegemony as an uncompromising prerequisite to its own security than it does about the full scale of what China hopes to achieve.

   Irrespective of Beijing’s actual intentions, Washington cannot comprehend a world it does not dominate, hence its inability to accept China’s rise on its own terms.

   America badmouths China as their joint talks get off to a pugnacious start – but then asks for Beijing’s HELP over North Korea… America badmouths China as their joint talks get off to a pugnacious start – but then asks for Beijing’s HELP over North Korea…
   One of the most perfect summaries of US foreign policy came in the 2004 Green Day song ‘American Idiot’ – written in opposition to the invasion of Iraq the previous year – with its lyrics “can you hear the sound of hysteria?” and “where everything isn’t meant to be okay” touching upon the enormous amplification of threat and fear by Washington in order to manufacture consent for conflict.

   Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been framed misleadingly as a grave threat to the US under the umbrella of terrorism, with his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ forcing America to act in order to safeguard its liberties and its citizens.

   How exactly does this relate to China? In all scenarios, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, to Russia, North Korea and the ‘China threat’, American foreign policymaking is built upon the hysterical amplification of threat and paranoia.

   There is always an enemy, always a bogeyman who is striving to cause imminent harm to America’s wellbeing and security, which subsequently leads to demands concerning the evangelization of US values and interests abroad, via ideological or military means.

   These threat amplifications give political justification to the US pursuing dominance on a global scale for a variety of reasons, and that America cannot be safe or secure with anything less than that.

   This universalist concept of ‘national interest’ is what defines America’s attitude towards a rising China, irrespective of what Beijing’s intentions actually are. In any scenario, China’s rise in economic clout, its technological advances and its military might are all inevitably threatening to America’s vision of universal dominance and so require action.

   China is a ‘competitor’ not because it strives to openly rewrite the international system as Washington states, but because in America’s interpretation of how the world should work, there cannot be competitors, or for that matter alternatives.

   China’s immediate objectives concern developing itself as a prosperous nation, while targeting an overarching goal of ‘national rejuvenation’ – which includes taking back perceived lost territories such as Taiwan and reunifying the country, restoring it to the former glory the West took away in what was known as ‘the century of humiliation’. It has no interests in imposing communism on other countries in the way the USSR once envisaged.

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   Yet this introduces a climate of fear and threat: if a country of 1.4 billion people strives to become wealthy and recover its lost territories, what does that require? The answer, of course, is more technology and more military strength. These unavoidably alter the global balance of power and inevitably put it on a collision course with the US.

   America cannot imagine a country that supersedes its dominance in technology or the military. Even if China only becomes regionally prominent, that in itself undermines America’s dominance and reshapes the global ideological disposition, something which Washington cannot conceive itself compromising on.

   And so the US’ focus is not placed around attempting to coexist with China, or seeking to compromise with Beijing, but to depict it as an “all or nothing” threat to the entirety of America itself. We are then presented with the exaggerated and hysterical narrative as set out in the report and by the FBI that China is not simply seeking its own space, but wants to actively undermine, subdue and infiltrate America.

   This itself only serves to make many aspects of the report self-fulfilling prophecies. Contrary to some of the claims, China isn’t seeking nuclear domination. But as the US looks to militarize around China’s periphery and provoke unrest in Taiwan or Hong Kong, the cycle of distrust provokes Beijing to respond, which creates the vicious cycle commonly known as the Thucydides Trap whereby a rising power threatens a ‘status quo’ power and subsequently creates a spiral which risks conflict.

   In this case, the emphasis of what happens is placed not so much on what is supposedly intended, but the changes in the balance of power which become the real driver of the competition.

   And that leaves us with the bigger irony: that what the US ultimately sees in China is the projection of its own intentions, the goal of sustaining undisputed, uncompromising hegemony at all costs, which leads to a foreign policy legitimated by perpetuating insecurity and hysteria. It’s universal hegemony and strategic dominance or bust, which is why the sword is risen towards Beijing.

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2. Russia’s actual attitude towards Israel. From today’s RT:

   Israeli settlers attack Palestinians, steal land with impunity. Imagine outrage & calls for sanctions if any other state did it
   Every aspect of their existence on occupied Palestinian land is illegal. Still, the violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against civilians continues, propped up by Israel’s legal system and the world’s blind eyes.
   Periodically, we will hear in the news something about the illegal colonies (settlements), but increasingly rarely over the years, and generally without a human face: just numbers and false promises to end the expansion of these colonies choking Palestinians from their land.

   Recently, UN Special Rapporteurs and experts shed light on the uptick of brutality and land theft by Israeli colonists. In a new UN report, they noted:

   “In 2020, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 771 incidents of settler violence causing injury to 133 Palestinians and damaging 9,646 trees and 184 vehicles mostly in the areas of Hebron, Jerusalem, Nablus and Ramallah. Already, during the first three months of 2021, more than 210 settler violent incidents were recorded, with one Palestinian fatality.”

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   Stop for a moment and imagine this was a report on violent incidents by Russia, Syria, Venezuela, or any of the nations in NATO’s crosshairs. Media would be howling with outrage and faked tears, with demands for heads to roll, or at least for perpetrators to face justice.

   But this is occupied Palestine, where the Israeli legal system serves continued colonist expansion and terrorism against Palestinians. And, let’s be clear, what the colonists do to Palestinians is indeed terrorism.

   Colonists have burned alive a Palestinian youth, shot and killed Palestinian civilians, have run people over, including children, leaving them to die. They routinely attack farmers trying to work their land or harvest their olives.

   They hail stones, large rocks, sewage and waste onto Palestinians walking or living below their illegally occupied homes, steal Palestinians’ flocks of sheep (or poison them), even uproot and thieve their olive trees.

   This has been going on for decades, and the so-called international community allows it, in spite of overwhelming documentation of these crimes.

   Israeli rights group B’Tselem has been reporting on such attacks since 1989. A 2017 B’Tselem article noted:

   “Thousands of testimonies, videos and reports, as well as many years of close monitoring by B’Tselem and other organizations, reveal that Israeli security forces not only allow settlers to harm Palestinians and their property as a matter of course – they often provide the perpetrators escort and back-up. In some cases, they even join in on the attack.

   After more than 25 years of this work, there is no escaping the conclusion that the authorities merely make a show of law enforcement in this context and that, with few exceptions, they have no interest in seriously investigating settler violence against Palestinians.”

   Israeli lawmaker manhandled by police as protest against Palestinian evictions turns violent (VIDEOS, PHOTOS) Israeli lawmaker manhandled by police as protest against Palestinian evictions turns violent (VIDEOS, PHOTOS)
   Disturbing memories of colonist brutality

   In 2007, I witnessed and heard of colonist violence and land theft when I spent eight months in the West Bank as an activist documenting the crimes against Palestinian civilians by both the Israeli military and the illegal colonists.

   The city of Hebron has some of the most violent squatters, who, like colonists all over the West Bank, walk with guns slung over their back and routinely attack and abuse the Palestinian residents, including children.

   In fact, during my two-week stay in Hebron in mid 2007, one of the things I and other activists did was simply to stand on shara Shuhada, the once vibrant main street, now a shuttered ghost town.

   We stood, or sat, on that street for hours, in the heat of the day, to deter colonists from attacking children going to or from school, or adults going to market, work or mosque. It seemed a colossal waste of time, but there had been many precedents of Israeli colonists stoning or beating Palestinians.

   South of Hebron, in a desert-like hamlet called Susiya, over the course of many months I stayed in the makeshift tent and metal structures of the Palestinians living there. Prior to their shantytown, they, and generations before them, had lived in stone houses and even cave dwellings. But, they were evicted in the 1980s, when Israel declared the area an archaeological site.

   As I wrote, “We stayed with them in hopes of preventing the inevitable attacks by the nearby colonists. Hajj Khalil, an elder in his eighties, had been brutally beaten by colonists the year before I met him.”

   The recent UN report also noted:

   “Settler violence was predominantly ideologically motivated and primarily designed to take over land but also to intimidate and terrorize Palestinians. The violence and intimidation often prevents Palestinians from accessing and cultivating their land, and creates a coercive environment pressuring Palestinians to stay away from certain areas or even move.”

   Indeed, in the Susiya region, I witnessed land being stolen and quickly annexed by the illegal Jewish colonists.

   As I wrote, “The elderly Palestinian landowners have been harassed and threatened, and physically abused. They have been moved off of the land by menacing of the illegal colonists. The owners of the land very much want to use it for agricultural purposes and have tried–mostly unsuccessfully–to file complaints at the nearest police station, Kiryat Arba, nearly two hours away. These illegal tactics have been largely successful in the region, with many Susiya residents and landowners leaving their land for nearby cities and towns.”

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   During the olive harvest that year, I accompanied Palestinian farmers to their orchards in a northern West Bank region. Not long after they had begun collecting olives, six masked colonists descended a hill, slinging hefty stones at us, for forty minutes stoning and then physically hitting people in our group.

   I wrote about that at the time, noting, “One of the six attackers slung a large rock at me. Hitting my camera hand, the rock missed my temple. One of the farmers, on the other hand, was not so fortunate, with severe gashes on his head from multiple stone strikes.”

   On another occasion, the Palestinians had the needed paperwork to be on their land (that’s right, they have to ask their occupiers for permission to access their land for limited amounts of time, to harvest their olives), and had only just begun to harvest when gun-toting colonists dressed in white descended the hill and began menacing the Palestinians.

   What did the Israeli army do? Point their guns at the farmers and tell them to take a hike. Get off their land. The setters have spoken…

   There are far worse examples. My encounters and documentation at the time was more on the crimes of the Israeli army against Palestinians. But, B’Tselem has pages of reports and videos of Israeli colonists’ attacks on Palestinians.

   In 2015, Haaretz reported colonists had “firebombed” a West Bank house, the ensuing fire burning to death an infant.

   The youth I mentioned earlier, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was indeed burned alive by Israelis, in mid-2014. As I wrote some years ago, “Khdeir went missing while going to mosque for morning prayers in occupied Jerusalem. His slight body was found a few hours later charred and beaten. The autopsy report “showed soot in the victim’s lungs and respiratory tract, indicating he was alive and breathing while he was being burnt.”

   With Biden policy moves looming, Jewish National Fund to openly buy West Bank land, ACCELERATE EXPANSION of settlements – report With Biden policy moves looming, Jewish National Fund to openly buy West Bank land, ACCELERATE EXPANSION of settlements – report
   In a rare instance of justice, the colonist was sent to prison for life for his crime.

   But as Israeli rights group Yeshe Din in December 2019 reported, most attacks go unpunished.

   According to their research, “Israeli Police failed in the investigation of 82% of the files opened between 2005 and 2019. 91% of all investigation files were closed without an indictment. After 15 years of monitoring Israeli law enforcement authorities in their handling of complaints filed by Palestinian victims of ideological crimes committed by Israelis, the picture that emerges demonstrates that the State of Israel is failing in its duty to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from those who would harm them and, in fact, leaves them defenseless as they face assault and harassment.”

   In their 2017 report, B’Tselem further noted, “Violent actions of settlers against Palestinians are not exceptions to a rule. Rather, they form part of a broader strategy in which the state colludes, as it stands to benefit from the result. Over time, this unchecked violence is gradually driving Palestinians from more and more locations in the West Bank, making it easier for the state to take over land and resources.”

   That is the essence: the crimes of Israel’s colonists actually benefit Israel in occupying more and more Palestinian land. So there is incentive to look away, close investigations, let the attacks and murders continue.

   In researching for this article I came across yet another account of colonists beating a Susiya resident I knew. The article described an attack in December 2020 on 78 year-old Khalil Haraini. In which, “about 10 settlers rushed out from behind a hill, armed with pistols, rifles, clubs, axes and iron chains. One of them assaulted the elderly farmer, knocking him to the ground. Settlers then beat him with their clubs.”

   Although I’m not naive enough to believe anything will change after a UN report here or there, I feel the need to write about it still, 13 years after meeting people like Khalil Haraini or the farmers I accompanied.

   Their hell continues and, tragically, no one is going to rein in the terrorists known as Israeli settlers.

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