Latest news with #UnitedNationsSecurityCouncil
Libya Observer
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Libya Observer
Security Council extends mandate to inspect ships off Libya's coast
The United Nations Security Council has extended its mandate allowing member states to inspect ships suspected of violating the arms embargo on Libya. The resolution, numbered 2780, was submitted by France and Greece and was adopted with 13 votes in favor, while Russia and China abstained. The decision renews the mandate for six months, enabling member states or regional organizations—such as the EU's Operation IRINI—to inspect vessels in international waters heading to or from Libya, provided there are reasonable grounds to suspect they are carrying weapons or related materials in violation of the embargo. The resolution also requests the UN Secretary-General to report back to the Security Council within five months on its implementation. Russia and China expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the EU-led Operation IRINI, currently the sole entity implementing this mandate, and voiced concerns over the disposal methods of seized materials. The Security Council imposed the arms embargo on Libya in 2011 following the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi. In 2016, Resolution 2292 authorized ship inspections to enforce the embargo. Tags: UN Security Council Operation IRINI
India.com
17 hours ago
- Politics
- India.com
Sierra Leones Vice President Backs India In Fight Against Terrorism, Vows To Raise Issue At UN Security Council
Sierra Leone Vice President Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh has extended strong support for India in its fight against terrorism and assured to raise the issue at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Jalloh also assured that his country will use the United Nations Security Council and its position in the African Union to raise the issue of terrorism. "We outrightly condemn terrorism, we know the devastating impact it has not only on the security but also on the development prospects of the country. I want to assure you that Sierra Leone will use the United Nations Security Council, our position in the African Union, and the OIC, wherever we have the platform, because it is not only an issue of Asia but also in our neighbourhood. I will also deliver your message to the President of the country, who is out of the country and will be back on Sunday," ANI quoted Jalloh as saying. Earlier, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Sierra Leone condemned the Pahalgam terror attack. "We have a very vibrant Indian diaspora population in Sierra Leone, and they have contributed a lot to the economy and the relationship with India. So consider yourself at home here. We are aware of the matter between Indian and Pakistan and the recent terrorist attack that happened in April. We condemn the violence and the loss of life of innocent civilians. We want to commiserate with India for that loss. As a non-permanent member of the Security Council, we expressed our concerns regarding the attack in Jammu and Kashmir as part of the Security Council statement that was put out on the 25th of April," ANI quoted Alghali as saying. This comes as an all-party Indian delegation, led by Shiv Sena MP Shrikant Shinde, visited Sierra Leone on May 28-30 as part of a global outreach program to discuss India's response to the April 22, 2025, Pahalgam terror attack and its fight against cross-border terrorism. The delegation includes Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs Bansuri Swaraj, Atul Garg, Manan Kumar Mishra, Union Muslim League's ET Mohammed Basheer, Biju Janata Dal's Sasmit Patra, BJP leader SS Ahluwalia, and former Ambassador Sujan Chinoy. On May 17, the Indian Government announced that seven all-party delegations would visit key partner nations, including members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to project the country's national consensus and resolute approach to combating terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. This was in response to the dastardly terrorist attack of April 22 in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam in which 26 innocent people, including one Nepali citizen, were killed. In response to the terror attack, the Indian Armed Forces launched Operation Sindoor during the early hours of May 7, hitting nine terrorist sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and killing over 100 terrorists.
Canada Standard
20 hours ago
- Politics
- Canada Standard
An historical opportunity to liberate the future from polarization and division
Today the geopolitical relations between many nations are dominated by division and polarization. But culture, people and politics weren't always polarized and divided. More than two centuries ago, despite the spread of colonialist domination of European monarchies and other powers, a rapprochement between people and cultures was notable everywhere around the planet. People started to connect to one another, they moved and migrated from one region to another and from one continent to another. It was a period of convergence of people and culture as the planet was on the verge of globalization. During the Second World War, for the first time in human history, man in power used a mass destruction weapon, the nuclear bombs, and exterminated the population of two entire downtown urban centers in Japan. Then, after the war, humanity witnessed the monstrous consequences of the global division and polarization with the nuclear arms race between the two blocs, the East and the West. The planet was divided between two ideologies positioned to act as instruments of domination. Each side accumulated thousands of weapons of mass destruction. Through the exercise of violence a minority imposes their conditions on the social whole in each blocs. During this period, polarization among cultures, people, and nations accelerated. Then as global polarization grew, social fear and paranoia also grew around the world. For decades, global fear of total alienation was incorporated into the lives of generations through education and cultural production (mass media and movies). This phenomenon produced a huge psychological impact on the population. By the end of the 21st century, humanity witnessed a detente of the geopolitical tensions between the West and the USSR, the two military superpowers primarily responsible for a frenzied arms race. During this period, the Soviet empire fell, but there was no violence or destruction. This moment allowed great achievement in the convergence of peoples, cultures, beliefs, and ideas. It allowed the Western countries and the ex-USSR to open a dialogue and initiated concerted actions for global nuclear disarmament. In short, we witnessed the recognition of two great peoples and cultures. People understood that openness and dialogue are decisive factors in the building of conditions for the evolution of cultures and human consciousness. But a few years later the process of polarization resurfaced as the tensions between major military superpowers rose again everywhere around the planet and the global military budget increased year after year. According to estimates by the United Nations Security Council, Today a quarter of the world's population lives in conflict-affected regions which corresponds to 2 billion people. The UNDP's Multidimensional Poverty Index has revealed in 2025 that nearly 40% of people are experiencing multidimensional poverty and live in countries exposed to violent conflict. These figures demonstrate that conflict pushes people and countries into poverty or keeps them there. In fact, many governments have sidestepped the basic human needs such as public education, universal healthcare, clean water, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and choose to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into armament, anti-missiles devices and the maintenance of weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear weapons. Jocelyn Gardner, a Concordia university student in Montreal published The pitfalls of a polarized nation in the Link (Concordia University student newspaper). In this article Gardner gave his point of view on the acceleration of polarization in society and mentioned several researchers studying the phenomenon. He explains, (...) the competitive and isolating nature of capitalism has penetrated its teeth into a plethora of societal structures, making polarization a key principle of America's hyper-individualistic society that promotes contention over community. (Source: The Link) According to Jennifer McCoy, from the International Catalan Institute for Peace, there is a growing sentiment of competitiveness in democracy. "If you win, I lose" this phenomena accelerated the polarization among political parties and powerful groups of men and businesses. In many contexts opposing sides are seen as rivals to be defeated rather than negotiated and persuaded, said McCoy. In an article published in the American Psychological Association magazine, Community outreach manager Kirk Waldroff explains that existential fear sits at the heart of polarization. Political parties perpetuate this with distorted perceptions, which are driven by fear of the other, said Waldroff. Kirk Schneider, a PhD professor at Saybrook University in California, also links polarization with fear: "Existential fear appears to be at the heart of what drives polarization. One reason we tend to become fixated and polarized is because of individual and collective trauma which is associated with a profound sense of insignificance. In this state, people may feel that they don't matter and fear "ultimately being wiped away or extinguished". (...) if existential fear is indeed a root of polarization, our sometimes-warped view of the other side can perpetuate it. Research indicates that the divisiveness will continue to grow if fear of the other and the wounds fueling that fear are not addressed," says Schneider. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher, who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps (an experience that profoundly shaped his life and thought). Gives a poignant testament to the human spirit's ability to find meaning even in the most extreme situations and moments of profound sense of insignificance. His story, Man's Search for Meaning, has become a classic of existential literature and an essential testament to human resilience and the search for meaning in the face of adversity. At the heart of Frankl's experience, we find the conviction that humankind is capable of finding meaning in life, even in conditions of extreme suffering, fear and despair. Perhaps it's time to understand how the geopolitical tensions and the polarization between the superpowers are generating repetition of endless violence in human history. Perhaps it's time to understand how the image of the human being projected by the old institutions conditioned our perceptions, our beliefs and the way we look at the future and at each other. The projections of fear into the future Today, many politicians and business leaders project futuristic representations marked with fear, violence and wars onto social media, and in doing so, they influence tens of millions of people. They fuel division and polarizing rhetoric among their people. They fuel fear of others by creating enemies. They maintain old prejudices about human nature and human consciousness. Their look upon the human being limits the capacities of their own people to use nonviolent means to resolve personal and social conflict. Their view of humanity is linked to a form of zoological ideology where only the fittest and the strongest will survive. It's terrifying! Perhaps it's time to recognize that geopolitical tensions between military superpowers are not only visible in the physical world through threats, violence and wars. But these tensions are registered by our external senses and penetrate into our body, and generate fear in our consciousness and in our representations of the future. According to Dario Ergas, in his latest book, he explained how polarization and division are rooted in the social historical configuration of the time and generate profound beliefs about human life and the representation of the future. These beliefs are lived as if they were the obvious truth, but today they are in crisis. Ergas has participated in the founding of the Humanist Party in Chile during the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1984 and the creation of the Latin American Humanist Forum in 2001. He explains that in a moment of social despair, a rupture of beliefs generates new responses in front of a danger. A new way of being conscious and a new meaning of the future emerge. He characterizes the present situation as a moment where a certain type of collective mentality rooted in the social historical configuration is disintegrating day by day. Humanity and consciousness in danger In the recent book, Farrell explains the urgency to address one of the most pressing existential themes, the future. She explained how in this polarized world, we are not aware that more than 2,000 nuclear warheads are aimed directly at us every day. But the activity of our instincts of self-preservation are always mobilized. According to Farrell the consciousness seeks to escape the stimuli of pain and suffering registered from the threat of mass destruction through a mechanism called the reveries. The reveries compensate for our fear of pain, suffering, death and massive extinction. According to our research in great danger and despair, the system of vital tensions of the human species is mobilized by the activity of the instincts of self-preservation in order to protect the psychophysical structure. F called this phenomenon the collective state of consciousness in danger. Farrell explained, as the sensations of danger and terror get more intense, human beings experience disorientation towards the future and psychological distress regarding their meaning. Here a summary of our observation I understand that I live in a society that makes me believe that events in the world take place outside of me and seem to have no connection with my body and my consciousness and the mass media and social institutions propose representations that reinforce the belief that the world is experienced as external to the body and consciousness. Yet my body is also seen as part of the world since it acts in the world and receives action from the world. Then, I observe that there is a relationship between my biography and the events taking place in the world. I experience through my body these events that are processed by my consciousness. I understand that my body and my consciousness allow me to act in the world. Thus, the actions of others can also affect my body, my mind, and my consciousness. I recognize that we are unaware of the influence of nuclear bombs on the human consciousness because, from birth, we are immersed in a state that gives us the illusion that this situation is normal. The state of consciousness in danger is formalized in childhood thanks to a structural link maintained by the intentionality of consciousness. We call this structure, the subject-consciousness-world. This structure is developed as the child's consciousness expands from stimuli that are coming from his environment. The stimuli of pain and suffering are captured at all times by the external and internal senses of human beings. These stimuli are translated into impulses by the sensory apparatus and launched into signals into the psyche. Consequently, these signals act on the vital tension system of the human species by increasing psychological tension. Thus, we say that the activity of individual and species-specific self-preservation instincts mobilizes responses from the vegetative center (1) to defend the entire subject-consciousness-world structure. Being immersed in a state of consciousness in danger, we have no records (sensations and memory) of the self-preservation instinct's activity. But the psyche still receives signals indicating that the psychophysical structure is in danger. Consequently, these signals act on the body by activating tension points distributed throughout the intra-body, which we call the vital tension system. (Un sens de la vie qui defie la peur de l'extinction massive, p. 56) Farrell explained how these signals and the psychological distress are interpreted and translated into images by many people who have an artistic sensibility or a cultural sensitivity. Indeed, artists and movie producers translate these signals they perceive in the human mind into narratives. They translate the vital tensions of the human species through dystopias that present a devastating future with depictions of mass extinction of humanity and stories of sociopaths. While others interpret these signals as the need to protect themselves and their cultures against future threats. They protect themselves from other cultures and potential enemies by proposing to exclude, eliminate, or even annihilate the other culture. Others, like Farrell, interpret these signals as the need to change the direction of things in order to liberate the mind of the human being from fear and suffering, amplifying the operational freedom of consciousness and amplifying the space of representation (3). The main interest of Farrell's research is the demonstration of the possible intentional change in the subject-consciousness-world structure, thanks to personal and social actions that are driven to overcome the suffering in oneself and in others. An intentional change driven by the aspiration of giving a new meaning to the future. A future without polarization and division, generating violence and fear. A future where people would transform the world and transform themselves. In short, F quest in the meaning of life is not only about my own liberation process, but about a broader process characterized by a historic opportunity. The opportunity to free humanity from the danger of global annihilation and to free the human being from the state of consciousness in danger in which he is immersed and limit his consciousness and his actions in the world. _____________________________________________________________ Source: Books Ergas, DarioLa Mirada y su Profundidad, The look and its Depth, Park of Study and Reflection Punta de Vacas, September 2019 Farrell, Anne, Un sens de la vie qui defie la fatalite de l'extinction massive, Henri Oscar Communication, Montreal, 2025 Puledda Salvatore, On Being Human, Interpretations of Humanism from The Renaissance to the Present, New Humanism Series, Latitude Press, San Diego, 1997. Others media: The polarized mind: Why it's killing us and what we can do about it, 2013, University Professors Press, .Kirk Schneider, a PhD professor at Saybrook University in California. Healing the political divide: How did we become such a divided nation, and how can psychologists help us bridge the gap?, American Psychological Association, Kirk Waldroff. Polarization as a Global Phenomenon talk with Jennifer McCoyJennifer McCoy, from the International Catalan Institute for Peace The pitfalls of a polarized nation, the Link, Concordia University Montreal, Jocelyn Gardner Themes Centers of responses: Abstraction or conceptual synthesis referring to the different activities of the human being, which encompass the work of different physical points. This conceptual synthesis refers to the mechanism of the psyche that provides a response to the world of sensation. The response is the manifestation of the activity of the center towards the external and - or internal environment. We can differentiate the response centers, either by activity or by the function they fulfill. The centers are in no way separate and work in structure and dynamics, producing a register of concomitance between them; a certain type of energy circulates between them, which we will provisionally call nervous energy, they work with registers of their own, through the internal senses and through the connection between the centers and consciousness. The responses of the centers towards the environment have different speeds. The intellectual center is the slowest while the vegetative center is the fastest - in short, it is the vegetative center that mobilizes the response of the instincts of preservation in the formalization of the state of consciousness in danger. The work of the centers has a structural tendency that is recorded as inner unity. When this work is experienced in different directions, a register of inner contradiction appears. This dysfunction, opposition of the activity of the centers, is recorded as inner pain, as an increase in internal tension. Inner unity is summarized as: thinking, feeling and acting in the same direction. (Amman, 2004 p.314, French edition) Vegetative center: It regulates the internal activity of the body by giving balancing responses to the imbalances produced and by sending signals to the other centers, so that they are mobilized to satisfy its needs, to avoid the pain that one feels or to prolong the pleasure that one experiences. From another point of view, we say that it is the base of the psyche, where the instincts of individual and species preservation are activated; these instincts, excited by signals corresponding to pain and pleasure, are mobilized for the defense and expansion of the entire structure. There is no register that indicates that a part or the entire structure is in danger (instincts are not devices but activities). The vegetative center is mobilized by images of the cenesthetic register caused by fatigue, hunger, fear, threat, and by reflexes coming from the sex. The vegetative center almost completely avoids the mechanisms of consciousness, but its work is captured by the internal senses whose signal, upon reaching consciousness, is transformed into an image that can mobilize the involuntary parts of the other centers. (Amman, 2004, p.163, French edition) Space of representation: is a kind of mental screen where images, formed from sensory stimuli, memory stimuli and the activity of consciousness are projected. In addition to serving as a screen, it is formed from all the internal representations of the cenesthetic sense. The representational space has markers, a volume and a depth that allow us to situate, depending on the location of the image, whether the phenomena come from the internal or external world. (source: Amman, 2004, p. 281, French edition) Human landscape: it is a type of exterior landscape made up of people, and also of human facts and intentions concretized in objects. It is important to emphasize that mentioning the landscape always includes the one who looks at it; on the contrary, in other cases, when we speak of society, it appears to us as exempt from any interpretation of the gaze of oneself. (Silo, 1996, p.56) Source: Pressenza
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Two Extremists Driving Israel's Policy
They are the leading extremists in the most right-wing government in Israel's history: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are both West Bank settlers. They ran together on the same ticket in Israel's most recent election, gaining more votes than ever before for the far right. They both want Israel to reoccupy all of Gaza, to renew Israeli settlement there, and to 'encourage' Palestinians to emigrate. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dependence on their support to stay in power is a key reason, possibly the main reason, that the war in Gaza continues. They are also rivals, evidence that extremism comes in more than one form. A case in point: The Israeli army's new offensive, Smotrich declared in a May 19 video clip, 'is destroying everything left in [the Gaza] Strip, simply because it is one big city of terror.' The population, he said, would not only be concentrated in the southern end of Gaza, but would continue on, 'with God's help, to third countries'; meanwhile, the army was 'eliminating ministers, officials,' and other members of the Hamas administration. Smotrich presented all of this as proof that the government had at last adopted his approach to conducting the war. He ended with a slang term translatable roughly as 'We're kicking the enemy's face in,' and a verse from the Bible. Smotrich's speech can be read simply as a testament to the brutality of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, and to the far right's claim of responsibility for dictating it. But Smotrich was also defending himself against criticism from Ben-Gvir, someone he describes as always trying to be 'to the right of the right.' Smotrich supported Netanyahu's plan, presented the night before in a meeting of senior ministers, to end the total blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza and allow in what Smotrich called 'a minimum of food and medicine.' He described this concession as essential so that Israel's allies would defend it in the United Nations Security Council and allow the war to continue. Ben-Gvir opposed the decision and, in Smotrich's account, selectively leaked bits of the debate at the meeting to the media. Israeli journalists, myself included, promptly received a flurry of anonymous text messages backing Ben-Gvir's position and blasting Smotrich's. In other words, while Smotrich was claiming credit for getting things done, Ben-Gvir was outperforming him on the public stage. This is a starting point for understanding the difference between the two men who are driving Israel's push to the extreme. The Leninist of the Right When I spoke with the Brandeis University professor Yehudah Mirsky, a Jerusalem-based scholar of religious Zionism, he described Smotrich as a 'Leninist': Smotrich 'believes he has the correct philosophical understanding of history,' Mirsky told me, and thinks he's 'part of the revolutionary vanguard that is supposed to seize the reins of power.' Smotrich's 'understanding of history' derives from the theology of a radical rabbi, Tzvi Yehudah Kook, whose teachings became fundamental to the settler movement that sprang up after 1967's Six-Day War. Kook held that the establishment of Israel was part of the process through which God was bringing final redemption to his chosen people. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, and its conquest of the West Bank and other territory, were proof that God was fulfilling biblical prophecies. [Read: Netanyahu takes desperate measures] Kook's disciples came to regard permanently holding the 'redeemed' territories conquered in 1967 as an absolute religious requirement. Their central project was establishing settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights—mostly membership-only communities of like-minded people that grew more and more separate from mainstream Israel. Smotrich, 45, is a second-generation settler, schooled in religious institutions faithful to Kook's political theology. His public statements suggest a dedication to seeing in every circumstance a step in the 'great divine process of redemption.' That includes political setbacks: In a Knesset speech when his party was out of power in 2021, he quoted a Talmudic description of the moral decay that would precede the coming of the Messiah. This is a closed system in which nothing can serve as disproof. Smotrich first rose to public notoriety in 2005. At the time, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, of the Likud Party, was preparing Israel for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the evacuation of its settlements there. The move was not only a political shock for religious Zionists, but also a theological earthquake. How could Israel, an instrument of God's plan, violate that plan by giving up sacred ground? A month before the withdrawal, the Shin Bet security service and police arrested Smotrich and three other activists in an apartment east of Tel Aviv. The men were interrogated for three weeks on suspicions that included conspiring to endanger lives on the roads; then they were put under house arrest, but finally released without charges, apparently after the withdrawal. Smotrich has asserted that he was suspected only of planning protests to block roads—as demonstrators against the current government have done regularly without being arrested. In a 2023 television interview, a former Shin Bet agent who'd arrested the activists insisted otherwise: He said that revealing what Smotrich and his associates had planned would expose Shin Bet sources—but that if they had carried out their plans, Smotrich would now 'not be a minister; he would also would not be a Knesset member.' The Shin Bet was involved, the former agent said, because its mandate is 'preventing terrorism.' Because no trial was held, neither version has been tested in court. [Read: Israel plunges into darkness] The affair did not impede Smotrich's ascent as a settler activist and politician. He was elected to the Knesset in 2015, representing a hard-line faction in an alliance of small religious nationalist parties. His new prominence furnished a platform for statements that shocked many Israelis with their extremity. In 2016, Israeli news media reported that three hospitals were segregating Jewish and Arab mothers in their maternity wards. The hospitals denied the practice—but Smotrich defended it. 'It's natural that my wife wouldn't want to lie next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might murder her baby in another 20 years,' he tweeted. After the 2021 election, Smotrich blocked Netanyahu's bid to include an Arab party in his coalition and said, 'Arabs are citizens of Israel—for now, at least.' The same year, he blamed a resurgence of COVID on Tel Aviv's gay-pride parade. 'In the long term,' he once told an interviewer, he wanted Israel to be 'run according to the laws of Torah,' as in the days of King David. Israel's most recent election, in 2022, catapulted Smotrich to greater power. A short-lived, uncomfortable electoral alliance among his party, Ben-Gvir's, and a splinter religious group won 14 seats in the 120-member Knesset, seven of them for Smotrich's Religious Zionism party. In the new government, Netanyahu made him finance minister. More significantly, he was given a new ministerial post within the Defense Ministry, with wide powers over settlement planning and building. Moving these responsibilities from the army to a civilian official has been aptly criticized as a significant step toward formal annexation of the West Bank—a strategic goal of the settlement movement. Smotrich has used his authority to speed settlement expansion at an extraordinary pace, effectively serving his settler constituency. Despite its small size, the Religious Zionism party has been an equal partner to Netanyahu's Likud in the government's effort to transform Israel's regime. Indeed, it was Religious Zionism, not Likud, that ran in the last election on a platform of hobbling the judicial system. A Religious Zionist Knesset member, Simcha Rothman, chairs the committee responsible for constitutional changes and has pushed along measures designed to give the prime minister and ruling coalition autocratic power. To a large extent, Likud is carrying out Smotrich's program. Then came the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Smotrich treated the catastrophe as an opportunity. In a post on X a year after the war began, he wrote that he'd been expecting the reconquest of Gaza ever since the evacuation of settlements in 2005. 'In the end there will be Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip,' he wrote. In other words, the setback would be reversed, and history would proceed on its divinely determined track. [Read: Ben-Gvir can't bring himself to pretend] In January, when Israel reached a two-stage hostage deal with Hamas, Smotrich pledged that his party would bolt the governing coalition if Netanyahu proceeded to the second stage, which would include a cease-fire ending the war. Ben-Gvir did quit the coalition, promising to return 'if the war is resumed.' Smotrich's threat amounted to the same thing: Ending the war would mean the fall of the government. In March, after the first stage of the deal, the government chose to resume the war, and the coalition survived. If being the vanguard means exerting power, Smotrich has succeeded. If it means leading the masses, he has failed. Polls consistently cast doubt on whether Religious Zionism would receive the 3.25 percent of the national vote it would need to enter the Knesset in new elections. Its success in the last election was likely attributable to Ben-Gvir's relative popularity, which brought votes to their joint ticket. The Rabble-Rouser Ben-Gvir, 49, comes out of a separate stream of the radical right, with a different theological progenitor. The American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense League in New York, had his own perverse religious doctrine. In traditional Judaism, a Jew who is dishonest or cruel 'desecrates the Name of God.' In Kahane's theology, Jewish weakness was the sacrilege, and Jewish strength sanctified God. He made vengeance a central religious value. Kahane moved to Israel in the 1970s and established a party called Kach, or 'Thus!,' whose platform included expelling all Arabs from Israel. In 1984, Kach won a single Knesset seat. In an act of what's known as defensive democracy, the parliament responded by banning racist parties from elections. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. His movement survived him. Ben-Gvir became a Kach activist as a teenager growing up in a Jerusalem suburb. He was 17 in early 1994, when the Kahane disciple Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians at the Hebron shrine known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. The rampage ended when Palestinian worshippers managed to kill Goldstein; Kahanists and others on the Israeli far right elevated him as a martyr. The Israeli government declared Kach to be a terrorist organization, effectively outlawing it. But its members formed new groups, some of which were also declared illegal. These groups vehemently opposed the peace process with the Palestinians that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing through the Oslo Accords. In October 1995, during the Knesset debate on Oslo II, Ben-Gvir was one of the right-wing protesters who surrounded the prime minister's armored Cadillac as his driver brought it to the Knesset. Someone ripped off the hood ornament and gave it to Ben-Gvir, who afterward held it up before a TV cameraman and said, 'Just as we got to the ornament, we can get to Rabin.' Weeks later, another far-rightist assassinated Rabin. Ben-Gvir was not involved, but the ornament clip was shown repeatedly to illustrate the incitement that had led to murder. He'd achieved his first 15 minutes of fame, but not his last. In the years that followed, as an activist on the far-right fringe, Ben-Gvir acquired a long list of arrests and a shorter list of convictions. They included guilty verdicts for support of a terrorist organization—Kach—and incitement to racism. Meanwhile, he moved to Kiryat Arba, a West Bank settlement next to Hebron; got a law degree; and became known as a defense lawyer for right-wing extremists. In their living room, he and his wife hung a photograph of Goldstein. He once sued a journalist who called him a Nazi. The court awarded him one shekel in damages. In his testimony, he said he was 'in favor of expelling Arabs.' He also testified that he'd read all of Kahane's books, and that Israel should be ruled by biblical law. [Read: The hostage I knew] Nonetheless, Ben-Gvir's rhetoric lacks Kahane's theological flavor. 'It's about tribes and revenge,' Yehudah Mirsky told me of Ben-Gvir's political style. 'It's very primal.' But what Ben-Gvir seems to have learned from his master, most of all, is the value of public provocation and displays of anger. In a typical move, he showed up at the site of a Palestinian terror attack in Jerusalem in 2014 with a handful of supporters to demand that the government take harsh steps against Arabs. The media paid attention. To be elected, Ben-Gvir toned down his rhetoric just enough to avoid being disqualified under the anti-racism law. The supreme court, historically reluctant to bar parties, gave him a pass. 'I'm not for expelling all the Arabs,' he said in one interview. 'I'm for expelling the terrorists, the people who throw stones.' The Goldstein photo came down from his wall. After several failed attempts, Ben-Gvir made his way into the Knesset as the head of the Jewish Power Party in 2021, running together with Smotrich's party. After the alliance's success in the following election, Ben-Gvir demanded and received the ministry that administers the national police. Violating law and tradition, Ben-Gvir has politicized the force. In the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians has soared, and law enforcement has faded. Inside Israel, at Ben-Gvir's urging, police have responded harshly to the constant protests against the government. Meanwhile, the rate of traffic deaths has climbed sharply—due to a lack of enforcement, according to a state agency. In Ben-Gvir's first year as minister, the murder rate in Israel nearly doubled, and it has stayed high since. That record seems to have little effect on Ben-Gvir's popularity. Polling shows that if elections were held now and his party ran on its own, it would win eight or nine Knesset seats. Smotrich's message may appeal to a small ideological sect, but Ben-Gvir's ideology-lite anger connects him to a significant slice of the public—one moved less by political philosophy than by hostility toward Arabs, the left, and liberal institutions. When elections are held, Netanyahu will most likely press the two rivals to run again on a single ticket. That's what he did last time, out of fear that one of the parties would not pass the electoral threshold, costing his bloc the election. Indeed, Netanyahu's role is key to understanding the power of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The rise of chauvinistic, illiberal parties and movements is an international phenomenon. What that means for any particular country, however, depends on how mainstream conservative parties respond. Do they form coalitions with the insurgent right, as has happened in Croatia and the Netherlands? Or do they shun them, as in Portugal and Germany, forming alliances with the center and left instead? In Israel, Netanyahu has become anathema to moderate parties. To stay in power, he has helped engineer the electoral success of the far right. He has legitimized it for part of the public by bringing it into government. At the same time, he has competed with it by adopting much of its antidemocratic program. If Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have power beyond their numbers in his government, they are monsters Netanyahu has helped create. *Illustration by Mel Haasch. Sources: Saeed Qaq / Anadolu / Getty; Atef Safadi / AFP / Getty. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Time of India
a day ago
- Politics
- Time of India
'You Gotta Stop Ukraine First': Russia Vs US Fight Rocks UNSC; Big Clash Between Trump, Putin Aides
/ May 30, 2025, 11:12PM IST Russia warned Germany not to help Ukraine develop its own long-range missile systems, telling the United Nations Security Council that it is thwarting efforts to establish peace. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged Wednesday to help Ukraine develop missile systems that would be free of any Western-imposed limitations on their use and targets. The United States defended Ukraine's right to defend itself from aggression. "Ukraine's fellow UN member states have a right to provide Ukraine with the means to do so," ambassador Chris Lu said. Watch.
