Occupied Palestine and More

 #Joseph Gecbeon, Covid-19 in Occupied Palestine," The Nation, January 2021. - "Health and economic conditions in the long-blockaded, densely populated Gaza Strip are immeasurably worse, with critical shortages of ventilators and other medical supplies as coronavirus infections sky-rocket." "More than 3.5 million tourists visited the West Bank in 2019, an increase of 15percent from the previous year, according to the Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities."

"About 75,000 people in the territories still haven't recovered the jobs they lost in the past year, pushing total unemployment to 19 percent in the West Bank." "Nearly 60 percent of Gazans who do have a job, work in the service industry." According to the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (2018), any foreign entity receiving US aid must consent to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts regarding anti-terrorism claims, meaning that the Palestinian Authority would be subject to terrorism-related lawsuits based on U.S. law. According to data from the Palestinian Finance Ministry Service, and an analysis by the London-based organization, Al Jasheed, since March, the Palestinian Authority has received no aid from Arab countries, some of which signed U.S.-backed normalization agreements with Israel during the period. "These cuts arrived on top of a 50 percent decrease in foreign aid from outside the region, with total funding dropping from $500 million in 2019 to $255 million in 2020." 

"Yara Asi, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Central Florida. has said: 'Low-income Palestinians will continue to rely on the public health sector, [upheld] by inconsistent aid to the Palestinian Authority, as funding has essentially ended.' 'The occupation really manifests [itself in] hundreds of ways, large and small, from movement restrictions to administrative ones,' Asi said. 'The outcomes of the occupation impact every part of life, from the food they eat, the  social life they can have, the pollution they are exposed to -- all of which are determinants of health.' "

"Meanwhile, the Gaza-based Al Nrejan Centre for Human Rights found that Israeli military bulldozers entered 300 meters into the Gaza Strip in mid-October, resulting in the most damage to agricultural land and irrigation systems by an Israeli military incursion since 2014."

"While Covid-19 has been a terrible blow..." it can be seen in "a broader context that includes decades of military invasions, occupation, expropriation, economic strangulation, and restrictions on freedom of movement."

#Simon Shuster and Billy Perrigo, "Life share recruits," TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "Ali Laufan, a security consultant and former FBI agent who has studied Azou, estimates that more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries. Apart from offering a place for foreign radicals to study the tricks and tools of war, the Azou movement, through the online propaganda, has fueled a global ideology of hate that now inspires more terrorist attacks in the U.S. than Islamic extremism does, and is a growing threat throughout the Western world."

"Facebook's algorithms actually nudged users into joining these groups. In an internal presentation in 2016, the analysts looked at the German political groups [in reference to] the platforms were racist content was thriving. They found that within this segment of Facebook, 64% of the people joining extremist groups were finding them through the platform's own recommendation tools."

#Adam Gopnik, "Fault Lines," The New Yorker, December 28, 2020. "Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise -- that the descent into authortarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that... 'it always happens.' " "The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy." "Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: those were more of the same neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out." "The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us, and so is the work of fending it off."

#Melissa Chan, "Desperate measures," TIME, January 18/January 25, 2021. - "Over the past five years, median funeral costs have increased 6%, to $7,640, and the cost of a funeral with cremation grew 7%,  according to a 2019 report by the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA)." "More than 53% of funeral homes in the U.S. said the pandemic has decreased their profits."

"A measure of relief is contained in the [roughly] $900 billion coronavirus relief package finally signed into law on December 27. Unlike the first one,  approved nine months earlier, this bill includes $2 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to distribute for pandemic-related funeral expenses incurred through December 31."