In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. [...] In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this.

[...] You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-israel-egypt-soviet-union/

#TechPolicy

Put simply, the bill requires that commercial websites and mobile apps create summary terms-of-service statements.

https://www.techpolicy.press/the-tldr-act-mandated-infrastructure-for-a-consumer-centric-and-transparent-internet/

What Taylor argues in The Age of Insecurity is that we on the left can (and need to) offer a different, better conception of security. We can speak to people’s fears and anxieties. We can’t promise to keep them safe from all of life’s vicissitudes, but we can certainly eliminate many of the “manufactured” insecurities in our society. We can make it so that you don’t have to be afraid that if you need an ambulance, you’ll get an enormous bill. We can make it so that going to school doesn’t leave you indentured for decades afterwards. We can guarantee a job or a basic income. We can protect people against unexpected rent hikes. We can make it so they don’t have to be afraid that if the police come, they’ll shoot the person who called them.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/can-the-left-reclaim-security/

“The financial sector will not be expected to push for market-oriented reforms or even necessarily maximize profit,” he said. “As a program for the financial sector, it is ambitious, disappointing and somewhat ominous.”[...]

“Politics will for sure further dictate China’s finance, effectively moving China even closer to how it was before the reforms started in 1978,” said Chen Zhiwu, a finance professor at the University of Hong Kong.

Some of the policy targets set forth in the essay would not be unusual as regulatory goals in the West. For example, it calls for banks to emphasize financial services for the “real economy,” which the party has long interpreted to include ample financing for the country’s industrial base.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-finance-xi-jinping.html

The (center-) left, by contrast, instinctively and persistently buys into the idea that its raison d’être is to be the steward of good, sensible, reasonable governance and policy, approaching politics more as a pageant of competence and smarts than as a fight against the powerful and entrenched interests of the capitalist economy.

GL-PvdA’s campaign strategy was telling. Initially it was centered on “restoring trust” and, even more so, Timmermans as an individual. As vice president of the European Commission, Timmermans had successfully guided a moderately ambitious climate change bill through the European Parliament. In public appearances and televised debates, he typically excelled when discussing climate change. But in confrontation with the conservative VVD party, he was often put on the defensive about his economic policies — increasing taxation for large corporations and the wealthy. Those defensive moments were also the few times he actually talked about his economic policies in more detail.

In the home stretch of the campaign, when the PVV began to break away in the polls, the GL-PvdA tried to present itself as a last bulwark against the extreme right, not unlike the strategy the Democratic Party pursued against Donald Trump. There was no positive program anymore, just a warning to not make things worse. But in a country that has been trending further and further to the Right for decades, the strategy was doomed to fail.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/dutch-left-netherlands-pvda-far-right-wilders-timmermans/

Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

[...] Although it is unprecedented for the Israeli army to attack more than 1,000 power targets in five days, the idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed by the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” from the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

According to the doctrine — developed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is now a Knesset member and part of the current war cabinet — in a war against guerrilla groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel must use disproportionate and overwhelming force while targeting civilian and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence and force the civilian population to pressure the groups to end their attacks.

[...] Why, then, after nearly two months, has the Israeli army not yet run out of targets in the current war?

The answer may lie in a statement from the IDF Spokesperson on Nov. 2, according to which it is using the AI system Habsora (“The Gospel”), which the spokesperson says “enables the use of automatic tools to produce targets at a fast pace, and works by improving accurate and high-quality intelligence material according to [operational] needs.”

[...] A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks.

[...] A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks.

https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

Europe’s right is stealing both internationalism and thinkers, tools and strategic capacity, from the Left. Through think tanks and satellite organizations, right-wingers have built a network spreading Budapest to Rome and Brussels; they reproduce the same tactics, whether it is an attack on green policies, migrants, or LGBTQ rights. Members of this network, such as the French xenophobic politician Éric Zemmour, explicitly refer to Antonio Gramsci: “I am waging an ideological, or Gramscian, battle,” he says. There is a hegemonic aspiration, and paradoxically it comes from the opposite side of history.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/european-left-parties-eu-parliamentary-election-strategy-unity-far-right-defeat/