Human Resources

The term "human shield" is en vogue at the moment because of the claim by supporters of Israel's military action in Gaza that Hamas are using the civilian population to hide behind. A number of people have pointed out that this makes no sense given that meat-based shields aren't very good at stopping bullets or shells. A human shield, properly speaking, is a hostage whose life is threatened by the person being shielded. But given the way in which the IDF is pounding Gaza regardless of the safety of the civilian population, it clearly does not regard Palestinians as hostages whose lives are to be cherished and it clearly has not prioritised the safety of the Jewish and other hostages seized on the 7th of October either, to judge by its indiscriminate bombing and the slow progress towards a ceasefire and hostage-exchange. The IDF's ostensible target is Hamas who, we have been repeatedly assured, are hidden in underground bunkers. But Israeli forces aren't using "bunker-busting" ordinance but simply flattening the buildings above ground, and so far they have provided little verified evidence of Hamas's network of tunnels or substantiated their claims to have killed "thousands" of Hamas fighters. Israel's goal appears to be to destroy the shield, i.e. the urban fabric of Gaza and its civilian population. 

This appears to be an example of the Dahiya doctrine, developed by the IDF in Lebanon in 2006 and later employed in Gaza during the 2008-09 war, which treated civilians and their homes not simply as collateral damage but as an asset to be denied to their opponents: "We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. [...] Harming the population is the only means of restraining [Hezbollah]". This doctrine is a classic counter-insurgency approach whose roots lie in the repressive policing of the European empires from their heyday in the 1880s through to their dismantling in the 1950s. The genocidal free-for-alls of earlier centuries were replaced by a more systematic policy in which native peoples were seen as a valuable resource. Not necessarily one to be preserved, but as one to be denied to the insurgents, both as a source of supplies and funding and as a protective environment within which they could find shelter. One form in which civilians are treated as a resource is through internment. 

In Northern Ireland, this was justified on the grounds of a plausible suspicion of the internees' involvement in terrorism, but the reality - notably in the case of Operation Demetrius in 1971 - was that many innocent people were caught up in the sweep, which inflamed tensions and led to a rise in violence, while the partiality of the Stormont authorities (no Loyalists were interned in the operation) contributed to the decision to suspend the Northern Ireland Parliament and introduce direct rule from London. Internment in Israel/Palestine takes two forms. There is the classic detention without trial, not only of those suspected of being active in the armed resistance but of ordinary civilians, notably women and children, guilty of no more than throwing stones or haranguing IDF soldiers. It's no secret that Israel seeks to always have a large stock of Palestinians in prison as a contingency for its own troops or Jewish civilians being taken hostage: so that it has sufficient resource to agree a hostage exchange without the need to release actual Hamas or Hizbollah fighters. The second form that internment takes is Gaza itself, and increasingly areas of the West Bank, where barriers and blockades create what are in effect open prisons.

A notable early example of mass-internment was the British action in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The British commander, Lord Kitchener, employed a traditional scorched earth policy to stop the rebels living off the land, burning crops and slaughtering or confiscating cattle, but this was combined with an innovative approach to civilians. Where previously these would be left to fend for themselves, which essentially meant condemning them to a forced march to less hostile territory, or allowing them to die through famine, the British decided to incarcerate them in "concentration camps". In effect, to take the families hostage and deny the rebels their material and emotional support. Though not death camps in the sense we would come to know during the Second World War, these places were characterised by malnutrition and disease due to systematic neglect. Of an interned population of some 100,000 Boers, roughly a quarter died, mostly women and children. 

Since then, wars have typically been fought less between armies than between the military and civilians. Even the First World War, which is emblematically remembered in the trenches of the Western Front, saw more civilian than military deaths. The Second World War was a notable example of this with the  destruction of urban populations through mass bombing (and finally nuclear weapons) being as distinctive as the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish population of Germany and occupied Europe. One war where military deaths did exceed civilian, though not by much, was the Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975. This was similar to the Boer War in the use of a scorched earth policy (specifically the use of defoliants like Agent Orange) and of civilian relocation (the Stragetic Hamlet Program). It ultimately failed because of the contradictions between a military counterinsurgency strategy centred on "search and destroy" and a pacification strategy that required territory to be held and services provided to the civilian population to win "hearts and minds". What Vietnam (and indeed Northern Ireland in the 1970s) proved was that counterinsurgency is usually more anti-civilian than anti-insurgent, something that is only too apparent in Gaza right now.

The popular historiography of Israel focuses on the relatively brief military campaigns against the Arab states: the 1948 War, the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This focus is as partial as calling the Israeli military, the most powerful in the region and one that has overseen significant territorial expansion beyond the post-1948 Green Line, a defence force. The other perspective, that of the Palestinians, has focused on the forced expropriation of land and the displacement of the population, starting in 1948, along with the routine harrassment and eviction of the civilian population by both the IDF and settler groups since then. What the current war in Gaza has made plain is that the conflict is at heart between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. It isn't really a military contest at all, despite Hamas's attempts to cast it as such. This has been reinforced by the opportunistic attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, as much as by the Arab states sitting on their hands under the watchful eye of the United States. 

The defence of Israel's actions has included the conflation of all Palestinians with Hamas and the suggestion that civilian Palestinians are no more innocent than "Nazi civilians". Inevitably, criticism of the state of Israel in its aggressive policy has been interpreted as antisemitic, not just by Israeli politicians or Jewish groups in the diaspora, but also by non-Jewish politicians in countries like the US, UK, France and Germany. In some cases, voicing the common line - that Israel has the right to defend itself as it sees fit, that Hamas have brought this on the Palestinians of Gaza, and that calls for a ceasefire are pointless until Hamas is destroyed - is simply a way of indicating fealty to Washington. This, rather than a desire to further stomp on the left, is undoubtedly the main consideration for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party hierarchy, though the opportunity to do a bit of stomping will naturally be taken anyway. Opportunism also underpins the willingness of the National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany to align themselves with the political establishment.

It's worth at this point returning to the history of the Second Boer War. The British government's claim of "military necessity" for its concentration camp policy and its domestic opponents' charge of a "policy of extermination" have obvious echoes today, though it's important to note that no modern politician is willing to use that latter phrase as Lloyd George once did. It isn't hyperbole to talk of Israel pursuing a "policy of extermination", particularly when senior Israeli politicians and military personnel are employing exterminationist language themselves. In fact, the evidence is more compelling this time round. The avoidable civilian deaths of the Second Boer War could be attributed largely to incompetence rather than design, and it was true that improvements made after the public outcry significantly reduced the mortality rate. While Israeli ministers are circumspect enough not to chant "Death to the Arabs" at every opportunity, they are openly advocating the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. That such rhetoric is tolerated by Western states, however uneasily, shows that the problem is not the human shield of Palestinians but the political shield provided by Washington and its allies for genocide.

A VARcical Start to the Season

There is an air of familiarity at the top of the English Premier League, with Manchester City leading Liverpool and Arsenal and the usual suspects close behind, though Tottenham Hotspur appear to have replaced Manchester United as the seasonal anomaly: a team that aren't as good as the pundits claim but who have certainly been lucky. The good fortune that saw Erik ten Hag's team of misfits finish third last season (their goal difference was a paltry 15, which should have consigned them to sixth or seventh) appears to have run out, and luck may be about to do a flit from Ange Postecoglou's refashioned Spurs as well. What Tottenham's recent stumble indicates is that they remain a shallow squad who will probably struggle against teams in the top third of the table on most matchdays, despite the relatively good results achieved against Liverpool at home (that notoriously disallowed Diaz goal) and Arsenal away (a game in which Jesus missed a sitter and Jorginho uncharacteristically gave the ball away). 

The other familiar feature, beyond Chelsea stuck in mid-table, is the interminable chuntering over VAR. For all the obvious errors and angry managerial reactions, this has been a strange debate because it scrupulously avoids the central issue, namely that the obvious incompetence is because the system is controlled by PGMOL. As the Spurs-Liverpool fiasco made clear, the interaction of the match officials lacks process discipline and suffers from over-familiarity ("That's wrong that, Daz"). The obvious flaw is that the official's discussions aren't broadcast. Where that happens, such as in rugby, public exposure encourages both a clear protocol - explicitly state the on-field decision and what is being checked - and militates against ambiguous, blokeish idioms. The whole idea of referees checking their own homework and, as Mike Dean cheerfully admitted, consequently seeking to protect their "mates", was obviously flawed from the start. That said, there was never much likelihood of the technology being introduced without PGMOL being in control of it. 

A long-standing bleat by well-paid pundits is that former players should be encouraged to become referees, which has always struck me as evidence of those pundits' unworldliness. Getting ex-pros to work their way up the ranks as referees isn't going to happen. They don't need the money these days and certainly not the aggro. But there is a good case for them being fast-tracked in as specialist VAR assistants, not simply because of their experience playing the game but in order to maintain some emotional distance between the VAR booth and the officials on the pitch. Of course, this would be akin to putting potential pundits in charge of VAR, and you can imagine the reaction of PGMOL to that, but then if all pundits had to serve an apprenticeship as VAR assistants, would that actually be a bad thing? It might even improve the quality of punditry by encouraging match commentators to be less willing to rush to judgement (though probably not Garry Neville).

The international football break - aka the interlull - has come at the thirdway point of the season, with all teams now having played 12 games. At 27 points and third behind Manchester City on 28 and Liverpool also on 27, Arsenal are slightly worse off than at the same stage last season, when they has 31 points and were 2 ahead of Guardiola's team. The rationalisation among fans is that our dash to the front in 2022 was ultimately undone by conceding too many goals and thus points in the final third of the season, largely due to injuries to key players such as William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu. City paced themselves better, as they usually do, finishing strongly after beating us home and away in February and April. It is widely assumed that Arteta has decided to sacrifice some of the goal-scoring verve that marked the opening third of last season in order to make us more secure at the back. Controlling games better, in the manner of City, and increasing the depth of the squad, should not only make the team more efficient but more durable. Beating City at the Emirates in October might be a taste of that.

However, though our goals scored has dropped from 30 to 26, our goals conceded has only improved from 11 to 10. But an average of a little under a goal a game is probably is as good as it will get: City have now conceded 12 (albeit 4 of those were in today's game at Stamford Bridge). What matters is whether that rate can be sustained through to the end of the season. The last time Arsenal conceded fewer in the opening third, 9 in the 2015-16 season, they finished second behind Leicester City after conceding 13 and 14 in the middle and last thirds (and also losing their shooting boots in that middle third, scoring only 17). With injuries beginning to mount up, Arsenal face a key set of games after the interlull, running through to New Year's Eve, that could go a long way to determining whether Aretea's strategy has a chance of working. The coincidence of games against Liverpool and West Ham United either side of Chrismas, back-to-back fixtures that essentially ended our title tilt last April, offers the chance of psychological redemption.

In terms of the balance of the team, the key issue remains our limited options up front. Though Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz have clearly given Arteta more variety, we just as clearly need another specialist forward who can lead the line as effectively as Jesus but with more reliable end-product. Eddie Nketiah remains a useful backup, as he proved against Sheffield United, but he isn't the sort of dominant striker that Arsenal require. If the team can keep on City's coat-tails until the end of the year, then they may well make a move in the January transfer window. At the other end of the pitch, the demotion of Aaron Ramsdale in favour of David Raya has divided fans, not least because the Spaniard doesn't appear to be that much of an upgrade on the popular English stopper. Time will tell whether this proves an astute tactical move by Arteta, but it is the first test of the much-vaunted "connection" that the club has established with the fanbase over the last couple of years.

In midfield, Thomas Partey's time at the club increasingly looks like it will come to an end this season, his persistent injury problems meaning that he can't be considered a key cog in the team in the way that Declan Rice has quickly become, despite his occasional dominant performances. Rice hasn't been a revelation exactly - he was propping up West Ham for years and always looked comfortable for England - but it's noticeable how much better he looks in a more technical team. If Arteta's endurance strategy is to pay off, it will depend to a large degree on Rice providing drive and defensive security in the middle of the park consistently until May. Jorginho looks like what he is: an experienced pro who can fill-in, but that simply makes him an upgrade on Mohammed Elneny. For all his popularity, the Egyptian is likely to leave by the end of the season while the Italo-Brazilian is unlikely to play more than twenty games. In brief, Arsenal will probably need to bring in another defensive midfielder next summer. 

In terms of the creative roles, niggles for Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli should prove transient, though there remains a concern about the load on the England player. There is also the now perennial hope that Emile Smith-Rowe will finally get a break on the injury front. But it doesn't look like Reiss Nelson or Fabio Vieira are going to make the grade, or secure Arteta's lasting confidence, which amounts to the same thing, so there's every chance the manager and Edu will be in the market for another wide player. Kai Havertz hasn't lived up to his billing, however I have a sneaking suspicion that he could yet be pivotal (I'm obviously just hoping he repeats the trick of scoring the winner in the Champions League final). He's overdue a spectacular goal; or even just an ugly one. His languid style of play has irritated some Arsenal fans, though the player he reminds me of (based on  limited exposure through old videos, it should be said), with his astute positional sense and heading ability, is one George "Stroller" Graham. 

Overall, it's been a fascinating start to the season, with no one team setting the pace in the way that Arsenal did this time last year, and with plenty of unpredictable results and some very good games featuring late drama, such as today's 4-4 draw between Chelsea and Manchester City. As ever, what will matter is consistency in the middle third of the season and then the ability to tighten the screw in the final third, which ultimately reflects the depth of squads as much as tactics. Arsenal look more capable of lasting the distance this time round, though it is going to take some luck - or at least the absence of bad luck - on the injury front, while City are unlikely to repeat their treble triumph of last season and might even prioritise defending the Champions League over another Premier League title. The biggest threat to last season's top two is likely to be Liverpool, who despite looking chaotic at times have crept into second and have the muscle memory of a consistent run to the title to call upon, not to mention the incentive of winning the title in front of their fans rather than a Covid-emptied stadium. It promises to be a vintage season. Let's hope it isn't decided by dodgy VAR.

Time to Move

A dominant theme in the news at the moment is of people on the move, from the anxious queues at the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt to the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. From a UK perspective, the issue of migration has been a persistent theme since the media focus on "bogus" asylum-seekers in the 1990s, and obviously played a crucial role in the upswell of euroscepticism between the accession of Eastern European states in 2004 and the EU referendum in 2016. The most recent manifestation, the so-called small boats crisis - itself a relatively minor subset of the number of asylum claims, which is currently around 80,000 a year - obviously pales in comparison to the prospect of 1.7 million Afghanis moved against their will. Beyond the immediate horizon, the continuing flow of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean littoral, and the growing number of people displaced by environmental degradation arising from climate change, suggests that this century will be defined by the ebb and flow of populations.

Not everyone drawing our attention to the mass displacement of Afghan refugees by Pakistan is arguing for a more humane policy towards refugees generally. For some, it is simply an opportunity to insist that Israel should not be singled out for the crime of ethnic cleansing. But however callous the forced repatriation of refugees might be, it isn't the same as displacing people from their homeland. Of course, the issue becomes blurred over time. Some of those Afghanis were born and brought up in Pakistan, their parents having fled in the 1980s. As the Windrush scandal made clear, states are institutionally oblivious to how quickly people can put down roots, and how even within a single family the understanding of where "home" is can vary (a point well made in Horace Ové's recently reissued film Pressure). But it's also the case that public opinion tends to be sanguine about ethnic cleansing so long as there are no deaths involved, hence the minimal outcry over the Armenians who have fled Nagorno-Karabakh. 

Inasmuch as events in Pakistan have a parallel with those in Israel, it is in the leaked government discussion about the feasibility of expelling the Palestinians of Gaza into Sinai. There's certainly no parallel with the possibility of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt being expelled back into the areas of Israel they left under duress in 1948. There are close to 110 million refugees in the world today, a majority of whom are internally displaced - i.e. they haven't crossed an international border. This figure has risen rapidly over the last decade, largely due to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. If we include migrants - that is people who have moved for a better life but do not yet enjoy the rights of citizenship in their host country - the global population of those living outside their country of origin is 184 million. Add the 62 million internally displaced and you have a global population of almost a quarter of a billion people who have been uprooted: approximately 3% of humankind.

What these figures don't include is the routine deracination that doesn't qualify as forced displacement. This is a combination of economic mobility (moving for work or education), precarious tenancy (a growing problem as homeownership and social renting both decline) and the forced evictions of slum clearances. In his 2006 book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis noted that "Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly ... to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners and middle-class commuters." The result is that "every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of poor people - legal tenants as well as squatters - are forcibly evicted from Third World neighborhoods". The point is that the displacement of people is a constant of capitalism and has been since the initial movement between countryside and town driven by the agrarian and industrial revolutions (the global population became predominantly urban in 2007).

Viewed in this larger context, the struggle for a Jewish homeland during the twentieth century appears like a quixotic act of defiance against capitalism. This was one reason for the emergence of the kibbutz movement's combination of Zionism and socialism, in contrast to the universalist Jewish Bund that prioritised class solidarity across ethnic boundaries. But leftist kibbutzim, despite their presence among the victims of the Hamas attack, are atypical in Israel today, at least in comparsion to the West Bank settlements. While the Palestinian villages they displace are usually agricultural, those villages exist within a geographical hierarchy of small towns and cities housing industry and commercial services (however weak the Palestinian economy may be). In contrast, the Jewish settlements of the West Bank are typically isolated and reliant on communication with towns and cities within the pre-1967 borders. Approximately 60% of the employed population in the settlements works in Israel proper. In other words, the settlements are gated communities made up of commuters and privileged religious groups, the latter of whom are as detached from Israeli society as from Palestinian.

The only way that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank can be functionally incorporated into Israel is if the Palestinians are expelled from Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron so that these and other cities and towns become fully Jewish components of Israel's society and economy. This in turn means that a two-state solution is only viable on the basis of the 1967 borders, which would mean Jews being expelled from all of the settlements constructed in the West Bank since then, just as they were forcibly removed, by the Isreali government, from within the territory of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Liberals who advocate for a two-state solution are usually vague on these practical details, despite the very obvious "facts on the ground", preferring to deride "extremism" on both sides. For example, Jonathan Freedland thinks "the contest that matters most is the battle of hardliners v moderates, or, to be more specific, maximalists v partitionists: those who insist on having the whole land for themselves v those who are ready to share it". 

Freedland's predictably nebulous solution would see "an end to the settlement project in the West Bank and the concession of territory", but an end is not the same as a dismantling. It's clear than many hope the existing settlements can be preserved, even if there is a moratorium on further expansion, and that the major territorial concession will therefore be by the Palestinians, not Israel. But this will leave a dysfunctional West Bank, crippling both a Palestinian state (the current weakness of the Palestinian National Authority isn't solely down to corruption or incompetence) and acting as a fiscal drain on Israel. The territory needs to have integrity. If that cannot be achieved through a single-state solution, then the two states need to be cleanly disentangled. In other words, the best hope is for a bloodless ethnic cleansing. And the only practical way that could be implemented would be for Israel to withdraw all of its citizens from the West Bank (and the Golan Heights) to within its 1967 borders. 

Clearly there isn't much prospect of that happening, and the likes of Freedland would no doubt consider it "extreme", even though it was the original logic of the two-state solution. Likewise, there is little chance of a single-state solution in the foreseeable future, particularly a unitary democracy in which the Palestinian disapora would have the right of return and possible repossession of property, so raising the prospect of Israel neither being a formally Jewish state nor having a Jewish majority population. The outcome that currently appears to have the greatest chance of being realised is the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the West Bank, whose incremental progress has stepped up in recent weeks. When Western politicians talk about it not being the right time to consider a ceasefire in Gaza, insisting that the IDF should have the chance to wipe out Hamas first, we should bear in mind that this is consistent with their refusal to consider BDS as an appropriate response to the encroachment of settlements and outposts in the West Bank. Our politicians and media have been endorsing a slow-motion ethnic cleansing for decades.