Linkage

A new campaign calling for ten thousand people to stop paying their wastewater bills, to force companies to end the practice of pouring 11bn litres of raw sewage every year into UK rivers and seas, was launched on 15 November by Extinction Rebellion and local water action groups.

The Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign, which targets all of the major water companies, kicked off with a splash, with campaigners swimming beneath the sewage outflow into the River Roding in East London.

The organisers vow to sign up at least ten thousand people to withhold the wastewater or sewerage part of their water bill. By collectively withholding millions of pounds, the boycotters hope to pressure water companies and the government to fast-track infrastructure upgrades and stop diverting ordinary billpayers’ money into massive profits for shareholders while billpayers’ local waterways are poisoned.

I think that spark burns quietly inside so many of us. Smouldering since those days when everyone watched. A few weeks ago, I went to have my hair cut. The new barber glared at me, a tough, gnarly, squinting Scotsman. I was a bit terrified. Far too scared to turn round and walk out. He sat me down and asked me what I do. I said that I work on Doctor Who. “Never watch it,” he barked. OK.

But then he drifted. He smiled and got a faraway look in his eyes. He said he did watch it when he was a wee lad. Tea with mum and dad then the TV on a Saturday night. He remembered how scared he was, one week, when a woman simply walked into the sea. I said: ‘That’s Fury from the Deep! From 1968! That was Maggie Harris, possessed by a Weed Monster from under the North Sea, walking to her death.” I told him he could go and watch it again, on the iPlayer, 55 years later. He laughed and said he might, and then we talked about everything – TV and family and life and love and loss. All because of an old TV show.

When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, in the midst of the Iraq War, he titled his Nobel speech “Art, Truth and Politics,” and used it to shine a light on this diabolical aspect of U.S. war-making.

After talking about the hundreds of thousands of killings in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, Pinter asked:  “Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy,”

“But you wouldn’t know it,” he went on.”It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Quick question, hotshot: Which political party in the U. S. is more likely to believe gender is fluid? If you think it’s the Democrats, the guys more closely associated with LGBTQ+ rights, you’d be incorrect. More and more, Republicans are claiming that gender identity is not just fluid but so incredibly fragile that even hearing about the possibility of non-cis identities existing poses a serious risk to children.

Case in point: J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, two whole adult male senators, who apparently believe that by asking a test question about gender on the U. S. census the government might infect teens with the notion that trans existence is possible, thereby destabilizing their entire reality… or something.

The reality is that Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely, exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies.

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Another deceit is the impression Blinken is intentionally creating that the US is preparing for a confrontation with Israel over Gaza’s future.

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But the suggestion that Israel and Washington are not on the same page is pure trickery. The “row” is entirely confected, designed to make it look like the Biden administration, in pushing for negotiations, is taking the Palestinians’ side against Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The pretence is a boon to both sides. The US wants to look like one day – after all Gaza’s homes are destroyed and its people ethnically cleansed – it will drag Netanyahu to the negotiating table kicking and screaming. 

An embattled Netanyahu, meanwhile, is able to score popularity points with the Israeli right by posturing defiantly against the Biden administration. 

It is pure theatre. The confrontation will never materialise. The US “vision” is nothing more than make-believe.

The Jewish Israeli activists I interviewed for this story invariably noted that their troubles paled in comparison to the punishment their government was inflicting on Palestinians—in Gaza, certainly, and in the occupied West Bank, but also inside Israel. While Jewish activists are targeted by right-wing mobs with what appears to be the tacit approval of the government, Palestinians experience the full force of the government’s repressive apparatus.

The current crackdown on speech, which involves arrests, police interrogations, and so-called warning talks conducted by the Shabak, the security services, is largely carried out by a task force established earlier this year by the national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to identify cases of incitement to terrorism on social media. Before he was a minister, Ben-Gvir was a far-right activist. In 2007, a Jerusalem court convicted him of incitement to racism for carrying signs and posters with statements such as “Expel the Arab enemy.” Hassan Jabareen, who heads Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal center, told me, “Ben-Gvir’s job is to protect my safety, and he is known as the most racist official in the history of Israel.” Jabareen added, “We are aware that Israeli Jewish society is passing a very, very hard time. But this emergency time is happening under one of the most racist governments in the history of this country.”

The response to our letters also states that Labour’s position must be “in line with Britain’s global allies, namely the United States of America and the European Union”. In this regard, it behooves us to remind you that it is the job of His Majesty’s Opposition to hold the government of the United Kingdom to account, not to follow policy lines of foreign governments.

The legal obligations of the UK government should not be in doubt. Common articIe 1 of the four Geneva Conventions requires states parties “to respect and to ensure respect” for the conventions. We would also like to remind you that the United Kingdom has ratified the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. As confirmed by the International Council of Justice in 2020, all states have an obligation to prevent acts of genocide, irrespective of where they occur. In light of the mounting and compelling evidence of genocide, as affirmed by UN experts and scholars of genocide, the United Kingdom can adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention by calling for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the siege and an end to the forced displacement of Palestinians.

There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.” Now, however, is distinctly not that time, given the treatment of the industry by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment, as well as the nature of current conflicts. Mind you, the American arms industry already dominates the international market in a staggering fashion, controlling 45% of all such sales globally, a gap only likely to grow more extreme in the rush to further arm allies in Europe and the Middle East in the context of the ongoing wars in those regions.

In his nationally televised address about the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars, President Biden described the American arms industry in remarkably glowing terms, noting that, “just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” From a political and messaging perspective, the president cleverly focused on the workers involved in producing such weaponry rather than the giant corporations that profit from arming Israel, Ukraine, and other nations at war. But profit they do and, even more strikingly, much of the revenues that flow to those firms is pocketed as staggering executive salaries and stock buybacks that only boost shareholder earnings further.

Michael Fotheringham, the director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, says the number of corporate landlords is increasing and should “in theory’” offer more stability to tenants.

“Institutional investors behave slightly differently [to small-scale investors], in that they’re more focused on rental yield and the longer term, and therefore tend to be more friendly to longer leases,” he says. “And because they’re often partners in the development of sites, [the buildings are] often higher quality.”

But because corporate landlords are “regulated exactly as well as small-scale investors”, there is no more protection for renters that would ensure “a guarantee of good behaviour”, Fotheringham says.

The executive director of advocacy organisation Better Renting, Joel Dignam, says Victoria should pull itself into line with the ACT and expand its rental protections to also ban no-grounds evictions after the first 12 months of a lease.

“[Forcing people out of a rental is] really hard to justify for a corporate landlord,” Dignam says. “They’re clearly not moving in, they’re not selling the property.”

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter (Likud) was asked in a news interview on Saturday whether the images of northern Gaza Strip residents evacuating south on the IDF’s orders are comparable to images of the Nakba. He replied: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war – as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza – with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.”

When asked again whether this was the “Gaza Nakba”, Dichter – a member of the security cabinet and former Shin Bet director – said “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”