San Francisco 2.0
San Francisco 2.0
UPDATE: China’s leader Xi Jinping will meet President Biden Nov. 15 in San Francisco with four high cards in his hand. Policy advisers close to Xi express an unprecedented kind of confidence in China’s strategic position.
The BBC is studiously failing to report, despite mounting evidence from a variety of sources, including the Israeli media, of the current horrors in Gaza. Instead the BBC is sticking resolutely to a narrative crafted for them, and the rest of the western media, by the Israeli military: that Hamas alone caused all this destruction. Simply repeating that narrative without any caveats has by now reached the level of journalistic malpractice. And yet that is precisely what the BBC does night after night.
Xi holds four aces as he meets Biden
Ukraine stalemate, tech war flop, China’s enhanced stance with Global South & US military’s caution bind Biden
By David P. Goldman
China’s leader Xi Jinping will meet President Biden Nov. 15 in San Francisco with four high cards in his hand. Policy advisers close to Xi express an unprecedented kind of confidence in China’s strategic position.
First, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces and its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” is a setback for America’s strategic position and a gain for China, which has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Second, the US tech war on China has flopped, as Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processors in place of chips from Nvidia and other US producers.
Third, the Gaza war provoked by Hamas on October 7 gives China a free option to act as the de facto leader of the Global South in opposition to Israel, an American ally. China now exports more to the Muslim world than it does to the United States.
And fourth, the US military wants to avoid confrontation with China in the Northwest Pacific region as well as its home waters in the South China Sea, where the PLA’s thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and nearly 1,000 fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes give China an overwhelming home-theater advantage in firepower.
Mutual fear of war
In the background of the Biden-Xi summit is a fear – shared by both sides – that a US-China confrontation could lead to war.
Henry Kissinger told the Economist last May: “We’re in the classic pre-World War 1 situation where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences.”
A prominent advisor to China’s Communist Party, Renmin University Professor Jin Canrong, told “The Observer” on November 9, “The world today has entered an era of great struggle: the old order dominated by the West. It is disintegrating, but the new order has not yet been established.” Jin compared the world situation to China’s bloody Warring States period (475 BCE to 221 BCE).
A major concern on the American side is the expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal to a projected 1,000 warheads by 2030, from just 220 in 2020. A November 10 commentary in Foreign Affairs warns, “Chinese analysts are worried that the United States has lowered its threshold for nuclear use – including allowing for limited first use in a Taiwan conflict – and that the US military is acquiring new capabilities that could be used to destroy or significantly degrade China’s nuclear forces.”
Newsom shows how to pull back
A foretaste of the Biden-Xi discussions came from the October 25 Beijing visit of California Governor Gavin Newsom, the likeliest 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden withdraw for health reasons or in response to Congressional investigations of his personal and family finances. A widely-circulated scenario for the upcoming presidential race foresees Newsom replacing an ailing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Significantly, Newsom has been quoted as saying that he had “expressed my support for the One-China policy … as well as our desire not to see independence” of Taiwan. Newsome spoke of “renewing our friendship and re-engaging [on] foundational and fundamental issues that will determine our collective faith in the future.”
Newsom’s clear rejection of Taiwanese independence contrasts with Biden’s earlier statements that although the US is “not encouraging their being independent,” independence is “their decision.” Biden had also declared that the US has a “commitment” to defend Taiwan, drawing protests from China’s Foreign Ministry. Biden is likely to sound more reassuring – that is, more like Newsom – in San Francisco.
PLA might, assertiveness grow
The growing assertiveness of China’s navy and air force in the South China Sea also worries the US military. China in effect dared the United States to get into a scrap by suspending the hotline between the militaries of the two nations. Last month a Pentagon official complained complained that Chinese warplanes had conducted 200 risky maneuvers near US aircraft since 2021.
The conventional arm of the PLA Rocket Force “is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough anti-ship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” Major Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a US Army journal.
Chips war boomerangs
America’s restrictions on high-end chip exports to China failed to prevent Huawei Technologies from offering a new smartphone as well as Artificial Intelligence processors with performance comparable to or close to what’s achieved by the products of Nvidia and other US designers. On November 7, Reuters reported that the Chinese Internet giant Baidu had ordered 1,600 of Huawei’s 910B Ascend AI chips, reportedly on par with the Nvidia A100 Graphics Processing Unit, the most popular AI processor.
Nvidia, meanwhile, has offered a new set of chips for the Chinese market scaled down to conform to new Commerce Department restrictions announced last month. As Semianalysis, a consulting firm, reported on November 9, “To our surprise Nvidia still found a way to ship high-performance GPUs into China with their upcoming H20, L20, and L2 GPUs. Nvidia already has product samples for these GPUs and they will go into mass production within the next month, yet again showing their supply chain mastery.”
Exploiting the Gaza crisis
With its leading economic presence in the Muslim world, China sees the Gaza war as a rallying point for sentiment against the United States and its allies. “The voice of the Global South has become louder and louder, the Arab world in the Middle East is moving toward reconciliation, and the voice of the Third World continues to grow on the international stage,” wrote Jin Canrong in the cited ”Observer” piece on November 9. “China can be seen in these landmark events, and these countries have increasingly high expectations and calls for China.”
Significantly, Jin included Israel as part of the core of Western countries:
Everyone keeps talking about the West, but what exactly does the West mean? The West refers to three big countries and four small countries. The three big countries are the United States, Europe, and Japan, and the four small countries are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. They are a small, closed circle that other countries cannot enter. There is a group of right-wing intellectuals in China who still dream of joining the West. Even if they demolish the Forbidden City and build the White House in its place, they will not be able to get in. If they go in, they will be servants guarding the palace, like Japan and South Korea.
Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been a consistent American ally, buying most of its military hardware from the US and jointly developing a variety of weapons systems, but it has not acted as a core member of the Western alliance. Unlike New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, Israel does not belong to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing group. And it refused to provide lethal aid to Ukraine.
Israel and China: what might have been
Israel and China, moreover, both have problems with Muslim terrorism and have held informal discussions on possible cooperation – none of which have led to practical agreements.
In 2019, I attended a closed-door seminar with prominent Chinese and Israeli security specialists, under Chatham House rules (speakers cannot be identified). A prominent Chinese policy advisor asked the Israelis to help China explain its policy towards the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province to the American government.
A former top Israeli official responded
Will Israel help China with the US? We have experience in this regard. It’s no longer a secret. The Egyptian ambassador to Washington said publicly that Egypt could not have gotten through the last four years of the Obama administration without the support of Israel. We helped with Congress and the White House. The success of [Egyptian president] El-Sisi against the Muslim Brotherhood was important. But if we help China, we have to ask, why? You expect us to defend your policy toward Uyghurs. Will you defend our policy vs Hamas? No. Why should we defend you? Change your policy first. You can’t expect Israel to do anything when you are condemning Israel.
The Chinese spokesperson protested that China has 20 million Muslims whom it doesn’t want to provoke by voting with Israel at the United Nations, not to mention more than 50 Muslim embassies.
The ranking Israeli in the room retorted that the Indian President, Modi “has more Muslims than you do, and he voted with the US at the UN! India changed policy. It has good relations with Iran, which we don’t like. States like China as well as India are big enough to do what they want. It amazes me that, unlike India, a strong country like China is still explaining that they are too weak to vote against the 57 Muslim countries in the UN. It doesn’t hold water after the experience of India.”
The Chinese advisor responded: “I have witnessed great changes taking place in the US. It is not as tolerant as before. China has become more confident, sometimes overconfident. We face difficult domestic issues. China is turning left domestically, and the US is becoming more conservative.
“Domestic politics have taken a different direction,” he continued, referring to the Trump Administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports. But the Chinese advisor added, “Israel will play a positive role because Israel has a great relationship with the US. Chinese people admire Israel and the Israeli people. Most Chinese people have a good impression. We also have a large Muslim population, and they are pro-Arab. This is a fact.”
China’s darker view
The above are extracts from my verbatim notes on the conversation. This was a rough-and-tumble negotiation, but not a hostile one. China’s tone has changed markedly since then, with a sharply hostile tone towards Israel across all Chinese media.
China’s perception of American intentions has changed in the meantime. In his November 9 “Observer” interview, Jin Canrong added,
Although the world order is chaotic everywhere, the most dangerous element by far is the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Ukraine is an agent and puppet of the United States. American politicians and media have publicly called the Russia-Ukraine conflict a “Proxy War.” There are 193 United Nations member states and more than 200 countries and regions on the planet, but the ones that truly have strategic independence and the ability to destroy each other are China, the United States, and Russia, two of which are in a state of military confrontation.
Sadly, Jin’s harsh words about the US role in the Ukraine war are justified. Regime change in Russia through a sequence of color revolutions on its border has been an obsessive theme of neo-conservative policy since Washington backed the 2004 “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine.
China and the Global South
China sees an opportunity to push back against the United States and is drawing on its heightened standing in the Global South to undermine American geopolitical influence. Since the cited conversation in 2019, China’s exports to the Global South have roughly doubled
Washington has few cards to play, and Biden is likely to respond to his weakened position by back-peddling on Taiwan.
Read more here.
Western Media bias over October 7
By Jonathan Cook
It is journalistic malpractice for the media to still be repeating so credulously the Israeli military’s account of that day.
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson was taken once again this week to view the terrible destruction at a kibbutz community just outside Gaza attacked on October 7. As we have been shown so many times before, the Israeli homes were riddled with automatic fire, both inside and out. Sections of concrete wall had holes in them, or had collapsed entirely. And parts of the buildings that were still standing were deeply charred. It looked like a small snapshot of the current horrors in Gaza.
There is a possible reason for those similarities – one that the BBC is studiously failing to report, despite mounting evidence from a variety of sources, including the Israeli media. Instead the BBC is sticking resolutely to a narrative crafted for them, and the rest of the western media, by the Israeli military: that Hamas alone caused all this destruction.
Simply repeating that narrative without any caveats has by now reached the level of journalistic malpractice. And yet that is precisely what the BBC does night after night.
Just a cursory look at the wreckage in the various kibbutz communities that were attacked that day should raise questions in the mind of any good reporter. Were Palestinian militants in a position to actually inflict physical damage to that degree and extent with the kind of light weapons they carried?
And if not, who else was in a position to wreak such havoc other than Israel?
A separate question that good journalists ought to be asking is this: What was the purpose of such damage? What did the Palestinian militants hope to achieve by it?
The implicit answer the media is supplying is also the answer the Israeli military wants western publics to hear: that Hamas engaged in an orgy of gratuitious killing and savagery because … well, let’s say the quiet part out loud: because Palestinians are inherently savage.
With that as the implicit narrative, western politicians have been handed a licence to cheerlead Israel as it murders a Palestinian child in Gaza every few minutes. Savages only understand the language of savagery, after all.
Brutal tango
For this reason alone, any journalist who wishes to avoid colluding in the genocide unfolding in Gaza ought to be increasingly wary of simply repeating the Israeli military’s claims about what happened on October 7. Certainly, they should not credulously regurgitate the latest agitprop from the IDF press office, as the BBC is so evidently doing.
What we know from a growing body of evidence gleaned from the Israeli media and Israeli eyewitnesses – carefully laid out, for example, in this report from Max Blumenthal – is that the Israeli military was completely blindsided by that day’s events. Heavy artillery, including tanks and attack helicopters, was called in to deal with Hamas. That appears to have been a straightforward decision in regard to the military bases Hamas had overrun.
Israel has a long-standing policy of seeking to prevent Israeli soldiers from being taken captive – chiefly, because of the high price Israeli society insists on paying to ensure soldiers are returned. For decades, the military’s so-called “Hannibal procedure” has directed Israeli troops to kill fellow soldiers rather than allow them to be taken captive. For the same reason, Hamas expends a great deal of energy in trying to find innovative ways to seize soldiers.
The two sides are essentially engaged in a brutal tango in which each understands the other’s dance moves.
Given Hamas’ situation, effectively managing the Israeli-controlled concentration camp of Gaza, it has limited resistance strategies available to it. Capturing Israeli soldiers maximises its leverage. They can be traded for the release of many of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in jails inside Israel, in breach of international law. In addition, in the negotiations, Hamas usually hopes to win an easing of Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza.
To avert this scenario, Israeli commanders reportedly called in the attack helicopters on the military bases overwhelmed by Hamas on October 7. The helicopters appear to have fired indiscriminately, despite the risk posed to the Israeli soldiers in the base who were still alive. Israel’s was a scorched-earth policy to stop Hamas achieving its aims. That may, in part, explain the very large proportion of Israeli soldiers among the 1,300 killed that day.
Charred bodies
But what about the situation in the kibbutz communities? By the time the army arrived and was in position, Hamas was well dug in. It had taken the inhabitants as hostages inside their own homes. Israeli eyewitness testimony and media reports suggest Hamas was almost certainly trying to negotiate safe passage back into Gaza, using the Israeli civilians as human shields. The civilians were the Hamas fighters’ only ticket out, and they could be converted later into bargaining chips for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The evidence – from Israeli media reports and eyewitnesses, as well as a host of visual clues from the crime scene itself – tell a far more complex story than the one presented nightly on the BBC.
Did the Israeli military fire into the Hamas-controlled civilian homes in the same fashion as it had fired into its own military bases, and with the same disregard for the safety of Israelis inside? Was the goal in each case to prevent at all costs Hamas taking hostages whose release would require a very high price from Israel?
Kibbutz Be’eri has been a favoured destination for BBC reporters keen to illustrate Hamas’ barbarity. It is where Lucy Williamson headed again this week. And yet none of her reporting highlighted comments made to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator. He said Israeli military commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages”.
That echoed the testimony of Yasmin Porat, who sought shelter in Be’eri from the nearby Nova music festival. She told Israeli Radio that once Israeli special forces arrived: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”
Are the images of charred bodies presented by Williamson, accompanied by a warning of their graphic, upsetting nature, incontrovertible proof that Hamas behaved like monsters, bent on the most twisted kind of vengeance? Or might those blackened remains be evidence that Israeli civilians and Hamas fighters burned alongside each other, after they were engulfed in flames caused by Israeli shelling of the houses?
Israel will not agree to an independent investigation so a definitive answer will never be forthcoming. But that does not absolve the media of their professional and moral duty to be cautious.
‘Hamas as savages’
Consider for a moment the stark contrast in the western media’s treatment of events on October 7 and its treatment of the strike on the car park at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in northern Gaza on October 17, in which hundreds of Palestinians were reported killed.
In the case of Al-Ahli, the media were only too ready to cast aside all the evidence that the hospital had been hit by an Israeli strike immediately Israel contested the claim. Instead journalists hurriedly amplified Israel’s counter-allegation that a Palestinian rocket had fallen on the hospital. Most of the media moved on after concluding “The truth may never be clear”, or even less credibly, that Palestinian militants were the most likely culprits.
In telling contrast, the western media have not been willing to raise even a single question about what happened on October 7. They have enthusiastically attributed every horror that day to Hamas. They have ignored the reality of utter chaos that reigned for many hours and the potential for poor, desperate and morally dubious decision-making by the Israeli military.
In fact, the media have gone much further. In advancing the narrative of “Hamas as savages”, they have promoted obvious fictions, such as the story that “Hamas beheaded 40 babies”. That piece of fake news was even taken up briefly by US President Joe Biden, before it was quietly walked back by his officials.
Similarly, it is still a popular throwaway line among the western commentariat that “Hamas carried out rapes”, though once again the allegation is evidence-free so far.
We should be clear. If Israel had serious evidence for either of these claims, it would be aggressively promoting it. Instead, it is doing the next best thing: letting innuendo gently sink into the audience’s subconscious, settling there as a prejudice that cannot be interrogated.
Hamas undoubtedly committed war crimes on October 7 – not least, by taking civilians as human shields. But that kind of crime is one we are familiar with, one “ordinary” enough that the Israel military has been regularly documented carrying it out too. The practice of Israeli soldiers taking Palestinians as human shields goes under various names, such as the “neighbour procedure” and the “early warning procedure”.
Worse atrocities may have happened too, especially given the unexpected scale of Hamas’ success in breaking out of Gaza. Large numbers of Palestinians escaped the enclave, some of them doubtless armed civilians with no connection to the operation. In such circumstances, it would be surprising if there were no examples of the headline-grabbing atrocities being committed.
The issue is whether such atrocities were planned and systematic, as Israel claims and the western media repeats, or examples of rogue actions by individuals or groups. If the latter, Israel would be in no position to judge. Israel’s own history is littered with examples of such crimes, including the documented case of an Israeli army unit taking captive a Bedouin girl in 1949 and repeatedly gang-raping her.
Savagery would certainly not be a uniquely Hamas trait. Following the October 7 attack, videos have been emerging of systematic abuses of any Hamas fighters captured, whether alive or dead. Images show them being beaten and tortured in public for the gratification of onlookers, when there is clearly not even the pretence of information gathering. Others show the bodies of Hamas fighters being defiled and mutilated.
No one can claim the moral high ground here.
What the media’s uncritical promotion of Israel’s “Hamas as savages” narrative has achieved is something sinister – and all too familiar from the West’s long colonial history. It has been used to demonise a whole people, presenting them either as barbarians or as the willing protectors and enablers of barbarism.
The “savages” narrative is being weaponised by Israel to justify its mounting campaign of atrocities in Gaza. Which is why it is so important that journalists don’t simply allow themselves to be spoonfed. Far too much is at stake.
Hamas committed war crimes on October 7 on a scale that is unprecedented for any Palestinian group. But there is little more than Israeli narrative spin so far to suggest that there was an unparalleled depravity to Hamas’ actions. Certainly from what we know, it is hard to see that anything Hamas did that day was worse, or more savage, than what Israel has been doing daily in Gaza for weeks.
And Israel’s actions – from bombing Palestinian families to starving them of food and water – has the blessing of every major western politician.
First published by Jonathan Cook November 2 ,2023
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/ and you can also find his articles on https://jonathancook.substack.com/.
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