The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon / credit: U.S. Department of Energy
Editor’s Note: The following represents the writer’s opinion.
“This a critical moment for nuclear disarmament, and for our collective survival,” wrote Ray Acheson of Reaching Critical Will, commenting on the 10th Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference taking place since August 1 and ending August 26 at the United Nations.
I attended the conference for several days last week as an NGO delegate from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and have been closely watching the negotiations going on for the entire month over an outcome statement for the conference.
After two weeks, a draft preamble was submitted that reaffirms, among other things, “…that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, and commits to ensuring that nuclear weapons will never be used again under any circumstances.”
This could be an extraordinary breakthrough toward global nuclear disarmament. Right now, 191 countries are represented in this treaty and are seated in the General Assembly hall listening to each other. In the first week, we heard urgent warning statements from the nations without nuclear weapons, such as, “The clouds that parted following the end of the Cold War are gathering once more.” Meanwhile, a representative from Costa Rica scolded, “The lack of firm deadlines has provided the nuclear-armed states with a pathway to disregard their disarmament commitments as flagrantly as they have since the last Review Conference.”
In a hopeful step, 89 non-nuclear states in the last year have either signed or ratified a binding disarmament agreement called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which requires disarmament commitments. These states no longer tolerate the double talk from the nine-nation nuclear mafia made up of UN Security Council member states China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), India, Israel and Pakistan.
How can the United States consider signing the draft preamble while the House and Senate are finalizing the National Defense Authorization Act, which calls for the modernization of its nuclear arsenal? How can the U.S. government even take part in this conference while it is seeking funding for a renewed nuclear edifice of destruction, including Modernized Strategic Delivery Systems and refurbished nuclear warheads? Over the next decade, the United States plans to spend $494 billion on its nuclear forces, or about $50 billion a year, according to a 2019 Congressional Budget Office report. Trillions of dollars for submarines, bombers and buried nuclear missiles. Things they are committing to not use. Please, does this make sense?
At one of the NGO meetings I attended in the basement of the UN, I blurted out, “This conference IS A FRAUD.” The nuclear mafia have no serious plans to disarm, as required by Section 6 of the NPT Treaty. Their duplicity could be rebuked to the world by a walkout in the final days of the conference by the countries that have signed and ratified the agreement, as well as by their supporters.
For the NPT Treaty to collapse would be tragic. But for it to continue when everyone knows it is a lie is a moral and mortal affront to the people of the world.
Robin Lloyd is secretary of the Toward Freedom Board of Directors. She is a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the United States.
Now that my Toward Freedom guest editorship has come to an end, I am reflecting back on the stories we ran for the past 6+ months and the writers who wrote them.
The scenes coming out of Modi’s India and its pandemic nightmare have been particularly horrific, causing me to inquire about the health of Toward Freedom contributor Sanket Jain. Sanket is a freelance journalist based in western India. TF ran two of his stories in December and February about how India’s poorest citizens were barely coping with Covid. He emailed me back: “Fortunately, I am safe. For the past few weeks, I have been on the field documenting the disaster that’s unfolding in remote villages of India. Last week, I was shooting photos at the crematorium to see how many people have died of COVID because the Government is hiding official numbers. It’s a nightmare to see a human disaster unfolding at such a massive scale. From lack of oxygen, improper vaccination policy, COVID patients facing ostracism in the village, to frontline healthcare workers facing verbal abuse and even physical assault, India is witnessing a humanitarian crisis. I hope we come out of this disaster soon.”
Stay safe, Sanket, and keep sending us your stories.
Another writer who moved me deeply is Charles Wachira. His recent story on what’s happening in Uganda opened my eyes to what’s happening throughout much of Africa; the maintenance of dictatorial rule [e.g through the (truly) rigged election of President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda] to ensure “stability” for resource extraction by foreign corporations. With remarkable patience in responding to my queries, Charles produced evidence that the Great Game for Oil is now on steroids in East Africa (much of which lies opposite the Red Sea – and Saudi Arabia.)
Fascinatingly, a similar situation is playing out in West Africa, as explained by Eric Agnero in his story on how President Alassane Ouattara was able to extend his unconstitutional rule over Cote d’Ivoire, aided and abetted by France and the United States.
I admit: I came into this job with a geopolitical perspective, one which is followed by most world powers as they survey entire regions for riches. I discovered it during decades of researching my new book on endless wars. You’ll find a geopolitical analysis reflected in my article on Afghanistan: If you want to understand the many wars that have swept through the Middle East, Central Asia, and now Africa, you need only to follow the pipelines and the oil schemes taking place right now. All this, despite promises by Big Oil to invest in alternative energy to slow down climate change.
Trend Lines in the TF Stories
Looking back, it was a privilege to be able to choose stories that reflected extraordinary, indeed history-making events between October 2020 and early May. Below, I will highlight some of those stories, as certain trends begin to emerge. Call them patterns of history. Ten years from now, you may want to look back on them as if they were diary entries of an unforgettable period in your life, featuring Covid 19, Trump’s defeat, the January 6 assault on the capitol; the re-invigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd; the rise of the right wing in the United States based on claims of voter fraud, the similar tactics used by Trump’s fascist allies abroad. Democracy v Racist Authoritarianism is one overriding theme. Look for others:
In October 2020, Toward Freedom ran stories on two historic elections. Olivia Arigho-Stiles’s article on the elections in Bolivia, which returned the MAS party to power, gave us some hope that massive turnouts could turn the table on authoritarian regimes. Meanwhile, in the leadup to the November elections in the United States, Harvey Wasserman and Greg Palast sounded warnings that voter fraud mechanisms were in place in Florida and Wisconsin. Who could have guessed that Secretary of State Raffensperger (or, as Palast calls him, Raffens-purger) would later emerge as a hero for upholding the integrity of Georgia’s vote for Biden, when in 2020 he was responsible for purging 198,000 names from the voter roles!
The big news in November 2020, was the defeat of Donald Trump thanks to the commitment of black and brown voters, who ensured “the largest turnout ever by U.S. voters in a presidential election.” We were so hopeful, I wrote back then. noting that Trump’s “multiple lawsuits claiming ‘voter fraud’ have been rejected so far by U.S. courts for lack of evidence.” As It turned out, Trump continued to use voter fraud to enrage his base…even against fellow Republicans. The fight against a fascist movement in America is far from over.
We also witnessed through the reporting of Serbian journalist Nicolas Micovec some tense super-power standoffs. In Belarus, a proxy battle by “the Western-backed Belarusian opposition” failed to topple President Alexander Lukashenko, who is still firmly supported by Russia.” In Nagorno-Karabakh, more deadly proxy battles were raging between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces, where “the conflict is being carefully watched for two reasons: 1) its potential to spread beyond its borders, and 2) an underlying energy war between Russia, the US, and the European Union.”
In December 2020, we began to take stock of what the world would soon face with the new Biden administration. Climate change was high on the agenda, especially since the Trump administration in November officially withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement. Rashika Pardikar, an Indian journalist, wrote of the “responsibility to both undo the damage done by the Trump administration and do more to address climate vulnerability concerns, especially in the developing world.’ Especially, she notes, because “the US is responsible for 25% of global emissions.” And what could provide better evidence of the dangers of climate change than two horrific Category 4 hurricanes which slammed into Nicaragua and Honduras in November, two weeks apart? Toward Freedom contacted Dan Higgins of the Burlington-Puerto Cabezas Sister City program. His and others’ reporting helped raise aid for the people of Puerto Cabezas, where roughly 2,000 homes were destroyed, and another 9,000 properties were damaged. The article turned into a good opportunity for Higgins to reflect on the history of “Port,” whose “peoples, languages, culture and history [on the Atlantic Coast} are very different from the Spanish-speaking side of Nicaragua.” He writes that the issue of autonomy “continues to be a flash point in Nicaraguan politics, with differing interpretations of what autonomy means.”
Elections in Venezuela, another hot point in international affairs (due in large part to the Trump administration’s economic sanctions to bring about regime change), came into focus as CodePink sent reporter Teri Mattison to observe the country’s December 6 legislative elections. “The sanctions imposed on Venezuela are a form of economic warfare… meant to create hardship and unrest,” Teri reported. (The elections resulted in a victory for President Nicolas Maduro and his allies. The opposition, which boycotted the elections, claimed “election fraud!” Thanks to reporting from Peter Lacowski, “Cries of election fraud by Donald Trump and his followers are familiar to Venezuelans; their right-wing opposition has been doing the same thing for years.”
In January 2021, we focused on Trump’s lies about a “stolen election,” which triggered the right wing assault on the Capitol on January 6, causing TF to immediately probe for details. Jonathan Ben Menachem provided some shocking details in “Cops at the Capitol,” which revealed, “at least 26 sworn members of U.S. law enforcement agencies from at least 11 states have been identified by law enforcement agencies and local reporting as attendees of the Jan. 6 rally.” Alexander Hinton, in his evaluation of the raid, warned us –correctly as it turned out – not to underestimate far right extremists in the US.
The other big news of January, of course, was the Inauguration of Joe Biden, and “Why Poet Amanda Gorman Stole the Inaugural Show” with her reading of her newest poem, “The Hill We Climb.” We published her poem in full, noting that Gorman was about halfway through the poem on Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the halls of Congress, some bearing weapons and Confederate flags. She stayed awake late into the night and finished the poem, adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day.” Her eloquent performance was a source of pride for the Black Lives Matter movement and its supporters.
By February 2021, Toward Freedom reported that Trump’s voter fraud allegations seem to have found a receptive audience with generals in Myanmar.Emily Blumenthalobserved “glaring similarities between the attempted coup in the US and the successful coup in Myanmar.” She quotes from the rightwing US group QAnon, which supported the coup: “The Burmese military has arrested the country’s leaders after credible evidence of widespread voter fraud became impossible to ignore…Sounds like the controlled media and Biden admin are scared this might happen here. “ An expert on Myanmar concluded, “Trump has given despots across the world fresh rhetorical ammunition to justify their authoritarian actions.”
If this weren’t unsettling news in the post-Trump era, our apprehension about Biden’s foreign policy turned to alarm after US forces bombed Syria in February. In their piece, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies remind us that “the airstrikes were supposedly authorized by the 20-year-old, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation that Rep. Barbara Lee has been trying for years to repeal since it has been misused, ‘to justify waging war in at least seven different countries, against a continuously expanding list of targetable adversaries.’
In March 2021, Toward Freedom observed the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring with disturbing reportage about the least known revolts in Bahrain. Finian Cunningham reveals that “Western powers played a nefarious role to ensure that the Arab Spring was kneecapped in order to cripple any progressive potential.” In Tunisia, where popular revolts launched the Arab Spring, Alessandra Bajek provides an in-depth report, noting that “Tunisia has failed to make any substantial progress in the daily lives of its citizens as the country’s democratization is not accompanied by a socio-economic transition. Nor should we forget that it was the Obama-Biden administration that oversaw the Arab Spring, as well as the regime change in Libya, which devolved into a disastrous civil (read proxy) war, killing thousands with many more displaced. According to Mathew Cole, Blackwater mercenaries poured into Libya, portraying themselves as “unarmed logistical personnel being sent in to support oil and gas companies.”
In April 2021, Toward Freedom reported on escalated tensions between Israel and Iran, after Israel bombed Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Kim Zeterreports, “The sabotage seemed timed to send a message — both to Iran and to the U.S. and Europe. It occurred just days after talks began in Vienna to revive the Obama-instigated 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran to control its uranium enrichment production.” Fortunately, cooler heads once again prevailed, and the negotiations are continuing. There is even talk that Saudi Arabia and Iran have been holding secret talks.
The situation in Yemen, as revealed by William Boardman, is not as rosy as the Biden administration would have us believe. “Biden,” he writes, “promised that the US would be ‘ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.’ Biden gave no specific details. The six-year bombing continues. The six-year naval blockade of Yemen continues. The humanitarian crisis continues, with the threat of famine looming. In effect, Biden has participated in war crimes since January 20, with no policy in sight to end the killing.” Long-time activist Kathy Kelley, worried that the American people were becoming desensitized to the killings in Yemen, reporting on a hunger strike taking place in Washington, DC. demanding an end to the war in Yemen.
Concluding Thoughts: The pandemic brought us many challenges. I, for one, was fortunate to have a job that allowed me to connect with writers from around the world from the safety of my own home.
Now that the pandemic is gradually lifting, I hope to spend more time promoting my book, which suffered greatly from being published during the lockdown. I wish all readers well as they hopefully recalibrate their lives toward a better future. Maybe a new Renaissance will be born out of COVID-19, just as the Renaissance emerged out of Italy’s Black Death in the 15th century. Let history—and science—be our guide, and may today’s movements –for democracy, justice and true equality—be our inspiration!
Anti-government protest in Sri Lanka on April 13 in front of the Presidential Secretariat / credit: AntanO / Wikipedia
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Multipolarista.
Facing a deep economic crisis and bankruptcy, Sri Lanka was rocked by large protests this July, which led to the resignation of the government.
Numerous Western political leaders and media outlets blamed this uprising on a supposed Chinese “debt trap,” echoing a deceptive narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by mainstream academics.
In reality, the vast majority of the South Asian nation’s foreign debt is owed to the West.
These structural adjustment programs clearly have not worked, given Sri Lanka’s economy has been managed by the IMF for many of the decades since it achieved independence from British colonialism in 1948.
As of 2021, a staggering 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owned by U.S. and European financial institutions, as well as Western allies Japan and India.
This pales in comparison to the mere 10 percent owed to Beijing.
According to official statistics from Sri Lanka’s Department of External Resources, as of the end of April 2021, the plurality of its foreign debt is owned by Western vulture funds and banks, which have nearly half, at 47 percent.
The top holders of the Sri Lankan government’s debt, in the form of international sovereign bonds (ISBs), are the following firms:
BlackRock (U.S.)
Ashmore Group (Britain)
Allianz (Germany)
UBS (Switzerland)
HSBC (Britain)
JPMorgan Chase (U.S.)
Prudential (U.S.)
The Asian Development Bank and World Bank, which are thoroughly dominated by the United States, own 13 percent and 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, respectively.
Less known is that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is, too, largely a vehicle of U.S. soft power. Neoconservative DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by Western governments, affectionately described the ADB as a “strategic asset for the United States,” and a crucial challenger to the much newer, Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
“The United States, through its membership in the ADB and with its Indo-Pacific Strategy, seeks to compete with China as a security and economic partner of choice in the region,” boasted CSIS.
Another country that has significant influence over the ADB is Japan, which similarly owns 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.
An additional 2 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to India as of April 2021, although that number has steadily increased since. In early 2022, India was in fact the top lender to Sri Lanka, with New Delhi disbursing 550 percent more credit than Beijing between January and April.
Together, these Western firms and their allies Japan and India own 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt – more than three-quarters of its international obligations.
By contrast, China owns just one-tenth of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.
The overwhelming Western role in indebting Sri Lanka is made evident by a graph published by the country’s Department of External Resources, showing the foreign commitments by currency:
As of the end of 2019, less than 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was denominated in China’s currency the yuan (CNY). On the other hand, nearly two-thirds, 64.6 percent, was owed in U.S. dollars, along with an additional 14.4 percent in IMF special drawing rights (SDR) and more than 10 percent in the Japanese yen (JPY).
Western media reporting on the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, however, ignores these facts, giving the strong, and deeply misleading, impression that the chaos is in large part because of Beijing.
Sri Lankan Economic Crisis Driven by Neoliberal Policies, Inflation, Corruption, Covid-19 Pandemic
This July, Sri Lanka’s government was forced to resign, after hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed public buildings, setting some on fire, while also occupying the homes of the country’s leaders.
The protests were driven by skyrocketing rates of inflation, as well as rampant corruption and widespread shortages of fuel, food, and medicine – a product of the country’s inability to pay for imports.
In May, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt. In June, it tried to negotiate another structural adjustment program with the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). This would have been Sri Lanka’s 17th IMF bailout, but the talks ended without a deal.
By July, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly admitted that his government was “bankrupt.”
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who spent a significant part of his life working in the United States, entered office in 2019 and immediately imposed a series of neoliberal economic policies, which included cutting taxes on corporations.
These neoliberal policies decreased government revenue. And the precarious economic situation was only exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Facing an out-of-control 39.1 percent inflation rate in May, the Sri Lankan government did a 180 and suddenly raised taxes again, further contributing to popular discontent, which broke out in a social explosion in July.
Media Falsely Blames China for Sri Lankan Debt Default
While 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is owned by Western financial institutions, Japan, and India, major corporate media outlets sought to blame China for the country’s bankruptcy and subsequent protests.
The Wall Street Journal pointed the finger at Beijing in a deeply misleading article titled “China’s Lending Comes Under Fire as Sri Lankan Debt Crisis Deepens.” The newspaper noted that the crisis “opens a window for India to push back against Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean region.”
U.S. media giant the Associated Press also tried to scapegoat China, and its deceptive news wire was republished by outlets across the world, from ABC News to Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya.
VOA accused Beijing of “pursuing a kind of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ meant to bring economically weak countries to their knees, dependent on China for support.”
On social media, the Western propaganda narrative surrounding the July protests in Sri Lanka was even more detached from reality.
A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA), Derek J. Grossman, portrayed the unrest as an anti-China uprising.
“China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed,” he tweeted on July 9, as the government announced it was resigning.
After working for U.S. spy agencies, Grossman is today an analyst at the Pentagon’s main think tank, the RAND Corporation, where he has pushed a hawkish line against Beijing.
China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed. pic.twitter.com/WOLIb3SUTf
— Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) July 9, 2022
BBC Reluctantly Admits the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Narrative in Sri Lanka Is False
China has funded several large infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka, building an international airport, hospitals, a convention center, a sports stadium, and most controversially a port in the southern coastal town of Hambantota.
The UK government’s BBC sent a reporter to Sri Lanka to investigate these accusations of supposed “Chinese debt traps.” But after speaking to locals, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that the narrative is false.
“The truth is that many independent experts say that we should be wary of the Chinese debt trap narrative, and we’ve found quite a lot of evidence here in Sri Lanka which contradicts it,” BBC host Ben Chu acknowledged.
He explained, “The Hambantota port, well, that was instigated by the Sri Lankans, not by the Chinese. And it can’t currently be used by Chinese military naval vessels, and actually there’s some pretty formidable barriers to that happening.”
“A lot of the projects we’ve been seeing, well, they feel more like white elephants than they do Chinese global strategic assets,” Chu added.
In our latest film from Sri Lanka, which faces financial collapse as the global Big Squeeze bites, Ben Chu examines the effect that Chinese loans and investment are having on the country:#Newsnighthttps://t.co/GBFZ1ItP0G
The British state media outlet interviewed the director of Port City Colombo’s economic commission, Saliya Wickramasuriya, who emphasized, “The Chinese government is not involved in setting the rules and regulations, so from that standpoint the government of Sri Lanka is in control, and it’s up to the government of Sri Lanka’s wish to flavor the city, the development of the city, in the way it wants to.”
“It is accurate to say that infrastructure development has boomed under Chinese investment, Chinese debt sometimes, but those are things that we’ve actually needed for a long, long time,” Wickramasuriya added.
Chu clarified that, “Importantly, it’s not debt but equity the Chinese own here.”
“So is the debt trap not all it seems?” he asked.
Mainstream U.S. Academics Debunk the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Myth
Mainstream Western academics have similarly investigated the claims of “Chinese debt traps,” and come to the conclusion that they do not exist.
Even a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, which is notorious for its revolving door with the U.S. government and close links to spy agencies, acknowledged that “the Chinese ‘debt trap’ is a myth.”
Writing in 2021 in the de facto mouthpiece of the DC political establishment, The Atlantic magazine, scholar Deborah Brautigam stated clearly that the debt-trap narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.”
“Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota,” Brautigam said in the article, which was co-authored by Meg Rithmire, a professor at the stridently anti-socialist Harvard Business School.
The Chinese "debt-trap" narrative is a false one which wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire write: https://t.co/FagExsdeNT
Brautigam published her findings in a 2020 article for Johns Hopkins’ China Africa Research Initiative, titled “Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics,” along with fellow researchers Kevin Acker and Yufan Huang.
They investigated Chinese loans in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo, and “found no ‘asset seizures’ and, despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.”
They discovered that Beijing cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced roughly $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. At least 26 individual loans to African nations were renegotiated.
Western critics have attacked Beijing, claiming there is a lack of transparency surrounding its loans. Brautigam explained that “Chinese lenders prefer to address restructuring quietly, on a bilateral basis, tailoring programs to each situation.”
The researchers noted that China puts an “emphasis on ‘development sustainability’ (looking at the future contribution of the project) rather than ‘debt sustainability’ (looking at the current state of the economy) as the basis of project lending decisions.”
“Moreover, despite critics’ worries that China could seize its borrower’s assets, we do not see China attempting to take advantage of countries in debt distress,” they added.
“There were no ‘asset seizures’ in the 16 restructuring cases that we found,” the scholars continued. “We have not yet seen cases in Africa where Chinese banks or companies have sued sovereign governments or exercised the option for international arbitration standard in Chinese loan contracts.”
Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.
The entrance to the Khan al-Ahmar school in the West Bank, which reads “Khan al-Ahmar School” in Arabic / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank—More than 70 years after being expelled from the Naqab Desert, Bedouins in the occupied West Bank may become refugees once again.
This month, Israel’s Supreme Court gave the government until April 2 to respond to pro-settler Israeli NGO Regavim’s request to demolish the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. In 2018, the High Court green-lighted Khan al-Ahmar’s destruction, but the government has yet to formulate a plan for carrying out the ruling.
More than half of the village’s approximately 280 residents are children attending Khan al-Ahmar’s primary school, which could soon turn to rubble if the village is razed.
Khan al-Ahmar’s students aren’t the only Palestinian children whose academic futures are under threat, however. According to the Arab Campaign for Education for All, 58 Palestinian schools serving 6,550 children, including Khan al-Ahmar’s, are currently at risk of demolition.
“When our students face the challenges of occupation, it’s not only the damage of the schools, it’s not only the arrests of teachers and students, but the psychosocial part, which reflects in the [students’] attitudes and well-being,” Sadiq Al-Khadour, spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority’s Education Ministry, told Toward Freedom.
The Israeli Supreme Court has approved the demolition of the village of Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
Israel Undermining Palestinian Education
Students face a myriad of obstacles while attempting to earn an education in Palestine. In addition to school demolitions, students experience detention or arrests by the Israeli army, military raids into their school, delays in their commutes due to checkpoints, and violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers on their way to school. According to the UN, students in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem experienced a more than 150-percent increase in education-related violations from 2021 to 2022.
Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem have had their licenses revoked for refusing to teach the Israeli narrative in their curriculum, while those who comply have received a boost in funding. According to the Education Ministry, Jerusalem schools are also the most overcrowded in Palestine, with an average of more than 37 students packed into a classroom. The average student-to-teacher ratio in Palestine is 24-1.
In the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli missiles have destroyed academic institutions and killed teachers and students.
“This undermines students’ and teachers’ right to access the appropriate educational process,” said Tamam Mohsen, advocacy officer at Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. Mohsen’s organization, which focuses on Gaza, explained that more than 571 educational facilities were wiped out by Israeli bombs from 2008 to 2021.
A teacher and students in a classroom at the Khan al-Ahmar school in the West Bank / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
A School Born Out of Necessity
With April’s court deadline fast approaching, the Khan al-Ahmar school and the surrounding community are on edge.
“We’ve heard the news and this has put students in an unstable mood,” said Isra Zahran, who teaches mathematics to students from 7th to 10th grades. Zahran explained constant visits from NGOs and the press have distracted students.
Built in 2009, the school has become essential for Khan al-Ahmar’s children.
Headmistress Halima Zahaike explained that before the school’s establishment, children would take the arduous journey to Jericho for school while some—especially girls—would merely forgo their education.
“Today, girls who are 22 years old or more don’t even know how to write their name because they used to stay home with no education,” Zahaike said. With this clear need, the idea for a school in the heart of Khan al-Ahmar was born.
Like the majority of Palestinian villages in the Israeli-military-controlled Area C of the West Bank, Khan al-Ahmar doesn’t have a zoning plan. Therefore, any construction is deemed illegal. In order to circumvent Israeli military regulations, the school was built as a temporary structure using tires, clay, and mud. The project was built with the support of Italian non-profit Vento di Terra and the European Union.
Yet, even during the school’s construction, classrooms were razed by Israeli authorities.
A Palestinian Education ministry official walks down tires that make up part of the structure of the compound for the Khan al-Ahmar school in the West Bank / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
‘I Will Keep Studying Atop Rubble’
With demolition looming, Khan al-Ahmar’s students are losing their will to learn.
“Many of the students say, ‘Our school will be demolished and we’ll have to go to Jericho. I know that I can’t go to Jericho, so let’s skip,’” Zahran said. “We try to encourage them, but there’s this feeling of not being motivated because they ask themselves ‘what I’m going to do after [the demolition].’”
With these barriers to education, 25 percent of Palestinian boys drop out of school by age 15. Despite this figure, the youth literacy rate is over 99 percent in Palestine.
The feeling of resilience is palpable among Palestinian students. While Zahran appears apprehensive, past school demolitions prove Palestinians’ determination to learn.
In November, Israeli forces demolished Isfey Al-Fawqa elementary school in Masafer Yatta, a collective of rural hamlets in the southern West Bank. Days later, students were studying in tents erected above the crushed cement.
The Ministry of Education provided the tents to Masafer Yatta’s students and said they will do the same for Khan al-Ahmar if dismantled.
“If you ask any one of them, they will say, ‘We will never leave our school,’” Zahaike said of her students. “They say, ‘If it gets demolished, I will keep studying atop the rubble.’”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.
