 Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. This is show number 149 of Give the People What They Want, brought to you by People's Dispatch. And boy, it's great to have Prashant back. Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch. Your favorite news site on the internet. I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter. Another tough week in Gaza. Tough, tough week. Lots more bombing. It has become now almost a cliché to say that this is a bombardment that the people of Gaza have never seen before. Nothing like this. Not in 2014. Not in 2008, 2009. Most recently, really ghastly news from the Palestinian Health Ministry saying that the Rantisi Medical Compound, in which there's the Al-Rantisi Hospital, the Al-Nasser Children's Hospital and the Psychiatric Hospital have been surrounded by Israeli tanks and the Israelis are telling people to leave there. Very much an active war crime because the Geneva Conventions Article 19 specifically says that you cannot target medical institutions. Of course, cannot target medical institutions. Overnight there were a bunch of airstrikes. Al-Shifa Hospital, the biggest hospital in Gaza was hit. The maternity ward, I saw images from there. It was just terrible to watch. Very difficult to look at. I mean, you know, it's striking. So striking that human rights watches. Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir said on, well, it's called X now, formally Twitter, Israel hasn't put forward evidence that justifies stripping Al-Shifa of its protections. Its warning is ineffective, as there's no safe place to go in Gaza and hospitals cannot be pre-fire zones. But that's exactly what has been happening. Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has gone on television to say that, you know what, this is taking longer than I expected. In the United States trying to make some noises about the possibility of slowing things down doesn't look like they're going to be able to get much in the way from the Israelis. They're pretty hard about what should happen. Interestingly, the US government has started to talk a little bit about what's the post-war scenario for Gaza. Here's an interesting thing. A lot of talk about democracy, you know, since the 1990s it became the term of the epoch that you're going to have democratization and so on. Here you have a situation where Hamas won an election, which people were hard pressed to say it was any more of a stolen election than any election at the time. But in 2005 they win an election, come to power. Now the United States is saying that let the Israelis go and wipe out Hamas from Gaza and then the Palestinian Authority should take over. You know, there's no discussion about an election or anything. It's just the imposition of the Palestinian Authority. That's the vision that the United States is putting forward. Israelis, meanwhile, have a vision called the bulldozer vision. They have the bulldozers basically running through northern Gaza. Looks very clear that this is a situation of ethnic cleansing. They are wiping out neighborhoods not only by bomb but by bulldozer. It looks like they're not going to permit people to rebuild their homes at least in the northern part of Gaza, north of Saladin Street. Although I must say that in recent days again there's been bombardment south of Saladin Street. It's not like the Israelis are respecting their own warnings to the Palestinians of Gaza saying go south of Saladin Street and you'll be safe. We're going to just bomb in the north. Now they seem to be bombing in the south, which is why Human Rights Watch says, well, there's no place for the people of Gaza to go where they're not getting bombed. The Egyptians opened the border at the Rafa crossing briefly for dual passport holders. But that has seemed to have closed down again. You're not seeing aid come in in sufficient numbers. You're not seeing people allowed to leave. I think therefore it's very clear that language of ethnic cleansing, language of genocide is still on the table. People are being starved to death. They are being made to live without water and because they can't get dead bodies under buildings and so on, there will be purification, there will be disease. And since people are living in close quarters, there is purification. You're going to have disease spread like wildfire without water. Very hard for medical personnel to basically prevent the spread of disease. Very hard without water, without the ability to clean. Meanwhile, in all this, the group of seven ministers meet in close quarters Prashant to talk about that ridiculous term, a humanitarian pause. Tell us about this whole direction of the humanitarian pause. Right, a lot of it actually builds on what you were talking about, which is really the whole idea of how Israel has sort of defined its assault, its genocide and assault as some kind of a strategic war plan or something whereas it's very clearly just ethnic cleansing. It is genocide that is taking place. And what the idea of the humanitarian pause basically means is to really support that perspective. Now, what is the so-called humanitarian pause? The idea of the humanitarian pause works on this notion that for three to four hours a day, Israel will not conduct offensive operations, whether it be bombings or whatever, and they will give warnings in advance so that people can leave the northern part of Gaza for the southern part. I think one commentator pointed out what this means is basically 20 hours of genocide and four hours of ethnic cleansing. So what this is basically setting out to do is basically create a scenario for people to leave Gaza as though that is less of a war crime in any sense. And we need to sort of go a bit into the past few weeks because we know that when the United Nations discuss this across the world, governments of the global south, especially governments of Africa, governments of Latin America were pushing for a ceasefire. We have seen people's movements across the world talk about the urgent need for a ceasefire. And at that point of time, the United States and its allies kept insisting on what was called the humanitarian pause. And this is exactly what has happened in the G7 meeting, Foreign Ministers meeting that was held in Japan this week as well. All of them backing the idea of a humanitarian, so-called notion of a humanitarian pause. And we have to be very clear about the fact that this is a very cynical and almost criminal use of the word humanitarian to basically talk about what is just a brief halt in operations which might actually benefit Israel's offensive operations more because they end up getting, collecting more data, more intelligence by which they will continue these kinds of attacks. So the fact that this humanitarian pause is some big deal, I think it has to be continuously contested. It is shocking to see how the United States authorities, for instance, keep flaunting the idea of this humanitarian pause as some big achievement. And also I think we talked about this before, how time and again US officials have just utterly dismissed, including Biden, I believe yesterday, completely dismissed the idea of a ceasefire, saying that, you know, oh, Israel has a right to defend itself, etc., etc. So this humanitarian pause being the only viable or seemingly being the best humanitarian option, so to speak at this point, is there is no greater proof of Israel's criminality of the kind of operations it is conducting than the situation right now. The fact that the most powerful economic countries in the world are united in sanctioning this kind of violence, in endorsing this kind of violence really I think says a lot. And like you said, you know, we have hospitals being attacked, we have Red Cross convoys being attacked. We have, you know, the maximum number of UN workers being killed in the UN's history of relief operations. This is just the UN, of course, we talked about if you look at the Red Crescent, if you look at other relief organizations, it's much, much more. And despite all this, there is, you know, like also a complete failure in terms of global governance, because there's another attempt, I believe, by China and the UAE to sort of bring in this notion, you know, to bring this discussion up again did not go anywhere. So I think in all this context, it's very interesting to see what is going to happen in the next few days, because we have the leaders of Arab countries meeting, you know, in the over the coming days. And Iran's president also, I believe, expected to address this session. And this is really a very interesting moment because this is a challenge before many Arab governments who in the past have adopted normalization as a paradigm with Israel, have gone completely with it. And now as their people are, you know, united our steadfast against Israeli occupation, what position do they take? What kind of an alternative can they present? Will they take a stand? Is I think really a question top on the minds of many people at this point. So I think in the coming week, we're going to see many of these challenges ahead as well. That's exactly correct. You know, Prashant, in the first several weeks of the war, the Israeli government said that they challenged the numbers of dead coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health. The United States backed them up, said, look, we don't think the numbers are accurate now. The Gaza Ministry of Health or the Palestinian Ministry of Health says it's over 10,000. I was very interested to hear Barbara Leaf, US Assistant Secretary of State. You know, she went before a congressional committee on the 8th of November. At that meeting, she said that the number of dead in Gaza could be even higher, she said. And then she said, we'll know only after the guns fall silent. So even within the Biden administration, there is an acknowledgement that things are perhaps worse than even they admitted earlier. The entire death toll, Zoe, is that why there's so many people around the world saying shut it down for Palestine shut the whole thing down. Yeah, well, yesterday people did shut it down. And I think that's exactly right that the level of atrocities and horrors that people are seeing every single day on their phones on the TV. Well, not less so on the TV, but mostly on their phones and on digital media websites has really driven people to this to this place of being willing to take constant action. Yesterday, there was a global call for action to shut it down for Palestine. We saw people blocking weapons companies in several countries. We saw people occupying corporate headquarters of companies that invest in countries that are complicit in the genocide. People picketing outside of politicians offices. I mean, a whole diversity of actions also thousands of high school students walking out of school. This is definitely the highest level of mobilization, at least in the United States that I think has ever been seen not only for Palestine, but really for any issue in recent history. I mean, the fact that people from all walks of life from all sectors are taking action around this is really something. And I think that again, what we've talked about this deafening silence of US politicians in the face of this level of mobilizations is making people take action even more because they're seeing this is not a problem of people being uninformed or not doing everything in their power to take action. This is a clear example of there being clear economic and geopolitical interest in continuing to back this genocidal state, this genocide project, and that it doesn't matter. It would appear that to, you know, even Democratic senators who appear to be so left like Bernie Sanders, he said there won't be a ceasefire. And I think people are so enraged by this callousness of the US political establishment and of their complete disregard for human life and Gaza but also for their own constituents. And that has driven people again on to the streets, day after day, week after week, and this power is only building and as organizers of the international shutdown. I have said that that if politicians won't listen to to constant calls to constant mobilizations and they're going to make the business business of genocide unsustainable and so that's why we're seeing so many more actions in all cities and all sectors. Again, this is a really watershed moment for people's movements for the movement in support of free Palestine. We're seeing people's consciousness being shifted. Maybe five years ago the idea that millions of people would be protesting and saying the occupation of Palestine must end. Maybe that was that didn't seem possible and now it's not only happening across the world, but it's happening in the country that has the strongest base of support militarily and economically and at one point, ideologically and politically from a large base, which is the United States and so this is shifting consciousness people are on the streets. I know that there's another day of action called for the 17th. People are going to continue protesting and I think what's interesting about this moment is that people aren't waiting. They're taking action in all ways that they can people are using social media like never before. I'm posting constantly about what's happening and so this is a real moment. Palestine is kind of tearing off this blindfold for a lot of people, not only about the reality of what Israel's doing but also about politicians and how they act in these kind of situations that it's not actually about what your constituents think and what is the right thing to do, but actually their actions really respond to a set of interests that are not in favor of their own people and not in favor of the people. Palestine nor really of the people in Israel because we've seen that people in Israel are protesting as well and saying release the Palestinian prisoners because they want their hostages back. So it's a moment where the voice of the masses is starting to overpower the voice of the minority politicians. Palestine has torn the blindfold from people's eyes says Zoe on give the people what they want, which is brought to you by people's dispatch that Zoe and Prashant and Vijay from Globetrotter. There was another UN General Assembly vote, not much paid attention to against unilateral coercive sanctions. There was a 128 against unilateral coercive sanctions, 54 for them. Of course the 54 were all the countries you'd expect the Europeans, the United States, the Canadians, Australians, New Zealand and so on. Prashant very interesting, two countries voted against unilateral coercive sanctions. One of them was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I would accept that actually expect that actually. In other words Rwanda interesting that Rwanda also voted against the United States and Israel and so on for that. Of course Rwanda's proxy force M23 is in the Congo, very good article, long article at people's dispatch on the displacements in the Congo. I think 7 million Prashant, what's the story in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Absolutely right. Also we have a recent episode of our show Daily Debrief where Kambale Musawili has explained some of these dimensions in a very powerful way as well. Like I said 7 million people displaced in the DRC during due to this fighting and I think it's been almost two years since this fighting has extensively started. There have been some seeds fires in between which have not really worked out. But like I said the most important thing is the fact that the M23 group and often this conflict is purely analyzed in terms of ethnic tensions and stuff like that. But I think alongside that and perhaps as important as what more is the fact that there is widespread understanding of the fact that acceptance of the fact that this M23 militia is armed and backed by Rwanda. So clearly the question of why Rwanda continues to back this M23 militia and why Rwanda continues to enjoy this amount of impunity while doing so is very central as far as the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are concerned. And this is not a question that started with just the M23 in 2021 because the M23 itself is a group with a long history of various names that at all these points of time it has been brought back by Rwanda. There is a long history stretching back the 90s when Rwanda and Rwanda were responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the DRC for which at least Rwanda has not paid any price. In fact Rwanda has acted as an enforcer of the United States of the United Kingdom in Africa and that is actually in fact a source of a lot of Rwanda's economy and for that matter it's credibility globally, so called credibility globally as well. So when it comes to this specific conflict we know that this has been going on for some time. There are East African community forces in Congo supposedly they were originally deployed to sort of hold a 5D M23 then did not, which is not surprising considering the fact that this community also consists of Rwanda itself. So Rwanda is a member of the organization which is deploying soldiers against the militia which Rwanda was backing, that's the, you know there is an irony in Naira 1000 deaths at this point. And which is why this force is incredibly unpopular, its mandate is unlikely to be extended. Similarly unpopular is the UN peacekeeping forces as well which have been completely discredited although it's a very expensive UN operation maybe the longest and the largest and that has also been discredited. So what we're seeing basically is that you know a large section, large parts, there are even towns in the DRC which are completely out of the control of the government and at this point of time people are just leaving areas of conflict and droves, there is really no solution. And ultimately I think it, the situation in the DRC is a direct challenge, is a direct question to the African Union to various organizations in Africa and to the international community itself that why such a situation is allowed to continue well. So Rwanda continues to back the M23 in this conflict and allow it to perpetuate. So all the statements, all these peacekeeping forces, all the sort of comments that are made are kind of irrelevant when it comes down to this. The DRC also having an election next month will be closely following that massive concerns being raised about whether the election will be fair. The current President Felix Scherzikedi won in 2018 in what was considered widely to be a process that was rigged, a process of compromise between him and the former establishment of Joseph Kabila, whether Scherzikedi will continue to perpetuate those irregularities remains to be seen as well. So a very important few weeks for the DRC and a few couple of coming months as well. Well, election is the DRC. This is going to be the jump to the next story Prashanta. I'm sorry to say take advantage of that because Zoe is back on the election beat in South America. In Argentina, it's the top card of the fight. Massa versus Millay, the center versus the hard right. Extraordinary situation, one week to go. Maybe the city of Buenos Aires, 37% of the votes of the whole country is going to save the day. Who knows? Will Millay take Argentina out of bricks? Zoe, what's going on there? Well, Millay would definitely like to take Argentine out of bricks and break economic ties with Brazil. However, he does say that as they want to limit the state to the smallest entity possible, any individual or any company has the freedom to do business with whoever they want. Just a little taste of his bizarre thinking. However, as bizarre and as maybe difficult to follow as Millay is and his proposals, the latest poll regarding these elections, which are going to take place in just over a week, has Sergio Massa polling at 46.7% and Millay at 45.3%. And so that means that this is an extremely close race. This is again the second round of the elections. In the primary elections, Millay had been polling. Millay actually achieved the largest vote share with just over 30%. Massa in the first round of the elections was able to actually overcome this. However, after this first round of the elections, this center right slash traditional right, it's hard to kind of decipher between these right wing positions. And now apparently now just not wanting to dissolve the central bank can make you a centrist, but I think really what it is is this this right wing block that's represented by figures such as Mauricio Macri, Patricio Bulrich, Gerardo Morales, who's the governor of Jujuy, this block has been essentially in flux since the first round of the elections because they're left with this, this choice, which is okay. Massa Sergio Massa he is in theory peronista he is allied with people like Christina Fernandez the Kitchener. And as we know in Argentina, the process of lawfare has been accompanied by a media campaign to essentially demonize anything that's related to Christina Kitchener, this anti anti kitchenerismo similar to what we saw in Brazil with the anti Lula anti PT. So you have Massa who's directly so decided to that he's the current economy minister he has historically been in this kitchenerisa peronista block, which again is extremely heterogeneous does not mean he's left wing he's really a centrist. However, he still is related to them and then on the other hand you have this person. Javier Millay who said he's going to again dissolve the central bank, dollarize the economy. And so you have people like Gerardo Morales, who was a presidential candidate for this together for change block but did not proceed to the elections he's saying he's because if me lay wins then he's not going to have a budget to pay his, his municipal workers with he's a governor of a province. And so you see many, many divisions within this right block of how to proceed because they hate peronista so much. So, if me lay wins they, they literally cannot go about business as usual and it's going to destroy the economy I think that's why we saw this week. A letter was released and signed by over 100 economists saying that the economic plan of me lay is dangerous and destructive for Argentina a country that's already reeling from an economic crisis. Over 40% of the Argentine population is living below the poverty line, record levels of hunger record levels of unemployment. This has been slightly ameliorated in the past two months due to emergency measures taken by Sergio Massa, but the fact remains that Argentina is in an economic crisis inflation last in 2022 was 100% the devaluation of their currency is is one of the, it's one of the highest levels of devaluation in the world, several hundred percent from the past couple years So, and if me lay takes office and he implements this plan it will cause further destruction for the people and so again a lot of these right wing centrist parties are saying that we're taking a position of neutrality, but within this block we've seen either they're not going to support me lay they don't support his policies, and that this would be destructive so it honestly is a very tenuous situation in terms that there's no, it doesn't seem like one candidate is kind of leaning ahead before the other one would think that being having the more sensible and not destructive policy would be pulling way ahead, but we know that this the legacy of Auntie Kitchenerismo and also the legacy of Alberto Fernandez government means that for a lot of people it's not that easy of a decision. And also, it's very hard to believe that the far right is just, you know, not legitimate because some other things people say are crazy. In the United States, the Biden collapse of his vote share, most likely going to lead to an open lane for Trump. Here we go again, you know, Trump at one end of the Americas. And could it be me lay at the other terrifying thought. The one Gaza has of course had a lot of knock on effects, you know, on the second day of the war, President of Iran spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. They opened a channel of discussion, seemingly put in abeyance, a project that the United States has put a lot of stake on. This is the so called India Middle East Europe corridor, which was to started in Gujarat, gone to Dubai by sea. Then from Dubai overland across Saudi Arabia up the Hijaz Railroad really the old Hijaz Railroad to the port of Haifa, and then from the port of Haifa to Perez in Greece. There was always going to be problems with this project because the Turks, for instance, were not happy with the idea of ships going between Haifa and Perez using what they considered to be a Turkish waters. This is known as the Aegean dispute. There was always a problem in a sense with the IMEC project. Also, the United States said that this is really about isolating China and going around the Belt and Road initiative run by China. Actually, that was also not interesting because the port of Perez is managed by a Chinese company and the port of Dubai is in partnership with two Chinese shipping companies. So in fact, the IMEC was going to utilize the Belt and Road, not go around it. Now with this war, it looks very unlikely that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are going to go along with anything that uses Israeli ports. By the way, the port of Haifa is owned by Gautam Adani's Adani port, which is an Indian company. Mr. Adani himself is very close to the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So it's not exactly an Israeli port. It's more an Adani port, but it is on Israeli territory. Very unlikely that at least the Saudis and the UAE would go along with this. It looks scuttled. Although I must say in the last couple of days, the Saudis have continued to talk with the United States about IMEC as a possibility. Now, the other issue with this of course is it relies on private sector funding. If a war like this continues, it's very unlikely that the private sector is going to come in here with hundreds of billions of dollars to produce infrastructure given the uncertainties in Gaza. And everybody has been talking about the fact that off the coast of Gaza, there are natural gas fields. By the way, you don't actually need to have the Israelis eject the Palestinians from Gaza for Israel to be the solitary beneficiary of those natural gas fields, largely because Israel controls all the waters of the beaches of Gaza and would never be doing any kind of revenue sharing. There's never the possibility of a two-state solution where somebody might go to court and say, that's my natural gas. Nonetheless, lots of business interests have been now junked in the pile as a consequence of this war in Gaza, including the process of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, pretty much in the junk pile for now. Look at all the information you get in half an hour with Give the People, what they want, Prashant and Zoe from People's Dispatch. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. This has been Show 149. That means next week it's the 150th show and we have a surprise planned for you. See you then.