This lengthy audio interview is well worth a close listening to.

https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/class-and-race-in-israel-palestine-with-emmanuel-farjoun/

At one time Arab workers in Israel we’re just a reserve army of labour. But now he says, in the meantime they have become as an essential, integral part of the Israeli economy without which it would collapse. That’s the main point he brings out in the interview and why he concludes that it gives them some leverage to demand full civil rights and how dependent on non-Jewish labour state of Israel is.

Most work that has no military significance is dominated by them not just construction but health, supermarkets, transport and other services (including even the prisons though these are run by Druze, a special minority, who also serve in the armed forces). And it’s not just cleaners but top managers; most doctors and hospital management are not Jews.

Farjoun’s argument is that this puts the non-Jews in a strong position not just in Israel but in the “Greater Israel” that already exists de facto as a state. He sees the way forward as the 50% non-Jewish subjects of the state of “Greater Israel” bringing pressure to get equal civil rights with its Jewish subjects, and that this will have some success because their of economic importance.

He is in effect saying that the non-Jews of Palestine (which includes Lesser Israel) should go for this rather than for an independent state; and this is what he expects will eventually happen however slowly as it’s what economic trends favour.

He also pointed out that half the Jewish population are in a sense themselves Arabs in that they came from Arab countries where they were Arabs — and Arab-speakers — whose religion happened to be Judaism just as for others it happened to be Christianity. Farjoun points out that in Israel you can’t tell the difference between a Jew and an Arab as they both look and dress the same.

The vital caveat is, however, it would amount to the Zionists having to abandon their ideology of Judaisizing Palestine. But the Boers in South Africa thought they could rule for ever but in the end were undermined by the capitalist economy. Farjoun expects the Zionists to be too.

 In 2004, Hamas leaders, Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz_al-Rantissi, offered to end armed resistance against Israel for a 10-year hudna (a truce) which could be re-newed indefinitely in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem leaving all other issue such as the important right for refugees to return for future generations to negotiate. Israel’s response was to assassinate Yassin and al-Rantisi. 

In his article Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and  professor of Journalism and Political Science, looks at the principles and practicalities for the return of the Palestinian diaspora.

 The American Jewish Committee (AJC) not only endorsed the Dayton agreement but urged that it be enforced by US troops. The 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, stated that “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” and “to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.” 

Yet its  CEO, David Harris, has demanded that Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands.”  

In 2019, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – the US’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group – applauded Congress for imposing sanctions aimed at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of Syrians displaced by the conflict”.

That same year, the Union for Reform Judaism, in justifying its support for reparations for Black Americans, approvingly cited a UN resolution that defines reparations as including the right to “return to one’s place of residence”.

Jewish leaders also endorse the rights of return and compensation for Jews expelled from Arab lands.

 In 2013, Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, claimed: “The world has long recognised the Palestinian refugee problem, but without recognising the other side of the story – the 850,000 Jewish refugees of Arab countries.” Arab Jews, he argued, deserve “equal rights and treatment under international law”. What they want is for the world to recognise Arab Jewish refugees’ rights to repatriation and compensation so Israel can trade away those rights in return for Palestinian refugees relinquishing theirs. 

Jewish leaders to cloak their opposition in the language of universal principle – “refugee status should not be handed down” – while in reality, they don’t adhere to this principle universally. Across the globe, refugee designations are frequently handed down from one generation to the next, yet Jewish organisations do not object. Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it applies to Jews. In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to roughly 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s associate executive director declared: “We stand in awe at the commitment and efforts undertaken both by Portugal and Spain to come to terms with their past.”

Israel and its allies insist that it has no legal or historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians; they also claim that doing so is impossible. Israel, the ADL notes, believes that “‘return’ is not viable for such a small state”. Veteran US Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy”. Too much time has passed, too many Palestinian homes have been destroyed, there are too many refugees. It is not possible to remedy the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for historical crimes, Jewish organisations have shown just how possible it is to overcome these logistical hurdles. And when it comes to effectively resettling large numbers of people in a short time in a small space, Israel leads the world.

 More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish organisations negotiated an agreement in which Swiss banks paid more than $1bn to reimburse Jews whose accounts they had expropriated during the second world war. In 2018, the World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed new US legislation to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants reclaim property in Poland. While the Holocaust, unlike the Nakba, saw millions murdered, the Jewish groups in these cases were not seeking compensation for murder. They were seeking compensation for theft. If Jews robbed en masse in the 40s deserve reparations, surely Palestinians do, too.

When Jewish organisations deem it morally necessary, they find ways to determine the value of lost property. So does the Israeli government, which estimated the value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in order to compensate them. Such calculations can be made for property lost in the Nakba as well. UN resolution 194, which declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation “for loss of, or damage to, property”, created the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to tally the losses. Using land registers, tax records and other documents from the British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 and 1964 assembled what Randolph-Macon College historian Michael Fischbach has called “one of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of any group of refugees in the 20th century”. In recent decades, those records have been turned into a searchable database and cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical complexity. It’s political will.

On the  face of it, the notion that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Palestinians might return to what is now Israel seems absurd.  At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 90s, when the Jewish state took in another 500,000 immigrants over four years. The number of returning Palestinian refugees could be substantially higher than that, or not. When Jews imagine Palestinian refugee return, most probably don’t imagine a modified version of Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they imagine Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. Given Jewish history, and the trauma that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inflicted on both sides, these fears are understandable. But there is little evidence that they reflect reality. For starters, not many Israeli Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since, tragically, only a few thousand remain intact. More importantly, the Palestinian intellectuals and activists who envision return generally insist that significant forced expulsion of Jews is neither necessary nor desirable. Abu Sitta argues that “it is possible to implement the return of the refugees without major displacement to the occupants of their houses”. 

Palestinians  have begun imagining what might be required to absorb Palestinian refugees who want to return. One option would be to build where former Palestinian villages once stood since, according to Lubnah Shomali of the Badil Resource Center, which promotes Palestinian refugee rights, roughly 70% of those depopulated and destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. In many cases, the rural land on which they sat now constitutes nature reserves or military zones. The Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta imagines a Palestinian Lands Authority, which could dole out plots in former villages to the families of those who lived there. He envisions many returnees “resuming their traditional occupation in agriculture, with more investment and advanced technology”. He’s even convened contests in which Palestinian architecture students build models of restored villages.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi thought it unlikely that many refugees – most of whom now live in or near cities – would return to farming. Most would probably prefer to live in urban areas.

Badil Resource Center and Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that raises awareness about the Nakba, suggest two other options, both of which bear some resemblance to Israel’s strategy for settling Soviet immigrants in the 1990s. In that case, the government gave newcomers money for rent while also offering developers subsidies to rapidly build affordable homes. Now, Badil and Zochrot are suggesting a “fast track” in which refugees would be granted citizenship and a sum of money and then left to find housing on their own, or a slower track that would require refugees to wait as the government oversaw the construction of housing and other infrastructure designated for them near urban areas with available jobs. If a Jewish family owns a home once owned by a Palestinian, first the original Palestinian owner (or their heirs) and then the current Jewish owner would be offered the cash value of the home in return for relinquishing their claim. If neither accepted the payment, Zochrot activists Noa Levy and Eitan Bronstein Aparicio have suggested a further compromise: ownership of the property would revert to the original Palestinian owners, but the Jewish occupants would continue living there. The Palestinian owners would receive compensation until the Jewish occupants moved or died, at which point they would regain possession. In cases where Jewish institutions sit where Palestinian homes once stood – for instance, Tel Aviv University, which was built on the site of the destroyed village of al-Shaykh Muwannis – Zochrot has proposed that the Jewish inhabitants pay the former owners for the use of the land.

This all sounds daunting,  because it is. As fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, it is worth considering what happens when they do not occur.

 Israel did not stop expelling Palestinians when its war for independence ended. It displaced close to 400,000 more Palestinians when it conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 – roughly a quarter of whom only lived in the West Bank or Gaza because their families had fled there, as refugees, in 1948. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel rid itself of another 250,000 Palestinians through a policy that revoked the residencies of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who left the territories for an extended period of time. Since 2006, according to Badil, almost 10,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have watched the Israeli government demolish their homes. By refusing to acknowledge the Nakba, the Israeli government and its diaspora Jewish allies prepared the ground for its perpetuation. And by refusing to forget the Nakba, Palestinians – and some dissident Israeli Jews – prepared the ground for the resistance that is now convulsing Jerusalem, and Israel-Palestine as a whole.

 Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance”. Ironically enough, its literal definition is “return”. In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees – far from necessitating Jewish exile – could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organised Jewish life. 

The full article unedited and unabridged can be read here

A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return | Palestinian territories | The Guardian

“Omnia Sunt Communia“, or “everything in common”, a quote attributed to the 15th century German rebel leader Thomas Müntzer

The progress of socialism is governed by the advance of socialist thought among the workers. The socialist movement of to-day cannot bring socialism. The co-operative commonwealth can only be inaugurated by the majority action of the workers. Steadily the workers move along the road to-wards socialism. Circumstances compel them to take that road. Economic laws operate whether they are known or not, but if we understand their operation we can bend them to our purpose and assist society along the course it tends to travel. As a socialists we must help bring this knowledge to our fellow workers.

The shackles of the wage slave and the whip of the master symbolise the reign of capital. Not until slave and master have both disappeared, and forever, and the equal freedom of all has been established, can we lay any proper claim to the term civilisation. The cooperative commonwealth is not dream but entirely within the realm of the possible. This new world will not arrive without the aid of human endeavour. It means hard work. It involves courage. It presupposes earnest convictions. Its goal is industrial freedom and independence that the world has never known and can never know until cooperative labor, solving every problem and surmounting every obstacle in industrial affairs, achieves emancipation. Under the wages system there is no independence for those who toil, because independence means exemption from control by others, the direction of one’s own affairs without interference. There is not in the world a wage-worker who is independent. He or she must not only work to live, but always under conditions dictated by another person. His or her life and the lives of those dependent upon his work are absolutely under the control of others. This is not the land of the free but the home of the slave.

 “Read! Think! Study!” Working people should be ashamed to follow leaders. They may betray. Unions should be educational to spread economic knowledge. Ignorance is slavery. Intelligence is liberty. Socialism is no utopian dream, nor the product of imagination and not a mirage of the desert to allure and vanish, but a theory of life in which the humblest individual owns him or herself. The basis of this new cooperative commonwealth is the brotherhood of man, and the idea of brotherhood carries with it toleration and toleration means liberty of thought, liberty of opinion, liberty of action. We do not fear the man or woman that says I don’t agree with you. The only thing in this world we dread is ignorance. Think for yourself. If you oppose  us – so be it for we will have infinitely more respect for you than if you support the party without thinking for yourself.

We are not after office, we want socialism. We care little about office except in so far as it represents the triumph of socialism. Socialists are not afflicted with the kind of patriotism which makes the slaves of the nation itch to murder the slaves of another nation in the interest of a plutocracy that wields the same lash over them all. It seems not a little ironic that millions are so patriotic in a country in which the only interest they will have is six feet of dirt in a cemetery.

The World Socialist Movement declares that life, liberty, and happiness for every man, woman, and child are conditioned upon equal political and economic rights. That private ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth has caused society to split into two distinct classes with conflicting interests, the small possessing class of capitalists or exploiters of the labour force of others and the ever-increasing large dispossessed class of wage-workers, who are deprived of the socially-due share of their product. Our present system divides society into two classes, the “have all” and the “have nothing” class, and that it is the great mass of the people that do all the useful work who belong to the “have nothing. That capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production, is responsible for the insecurity of subsistence, the poverty, misery, and degradation of the ever-growing majority of people. That the same economic forces which have produced and now intensify the capitalist system will compel the adoption of socialism, the common ownership of the means of production for the collective good and welfare, or result in the destruction of civilization. The WSM declares its object to be the establishment of a system of cooperative production and distribution, through the restoration and repossession to the people of all the means of production and distribution, to be administered by organised society in the interest of the whole people, and the complete emancipation of society from the domination of capitalism. Wage-workers with their historical mission to realise a new world should sever connection with all capitalist and reform parties.

The WSM does not hope for the establishment of social order through the increase of misery, but on the contrary expects its coming through the determined, united efforts of the workers of both city and country to gain and use the political power to that end. American socialism is only a branch of world socialism, as American capitalism is a branch of global capitalism. A socialist does not hate every capitalist individually (although many truly deserve our contempt), that some should be picked out as scapegoats while the economic power and political encroachment of all the others should be silently submitted to. It means that while we understand that every individual capitalist is the result of the present system as much as the wage worker, we still must fight the capitalists as a class, because the producers cannot reasonably expect anything but exploitation from the exploiters as a class. To achieve socialism we want to make use of our political liberty and take possession of the public powers.

The WSM will fight open and above-board everywhere and fight all capitalist parties alike. It cannot and will not assist capitalist politicians of one party in one state and of another party in a different state. In short, members of the WSM will be simply socialists, and nothing else.

“Each for all and all for each”

Pastoral leases cover 44% of Australia, according to Austrade. Pastoral leases are defined by Austrade as a title issued for the lease of an area of crown land to use for the limited purpose of grazing of stock and associated activities. We were able to identify the leaseholders for just over half that area, pulling together data on more than 400 owners who together hold 700 stations covering 189.5m hectares – or about a quarter of the country.

The person who holds the most land in this pastoral-lease data, by far, is the Western Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who controls 9.2m hectares, or 1.2% of Australia’s landmass, through three different corporate entities.

The biggest corporate landholder is the ASX-listed Australian Agricultural Company. AACo’s biggest shareholder is the Bahamas-based AA Trust, controlled by the British billionaire Joe Lewis, who is also the owner of Tottenham Hotspur.

About 40% of Australia is covered by native title, in both exclusive and shared title. Australian government reports state that Indigenous communities hold the freehold title to 17% of the country, mainly in the Northern Territory and South Australia.

Guardian Australia’s definition of Indigenous tenure, for mapping purposes, includes exclusive-possession native title and freehold, which confer the right to exclude others from the land. This amounts to about 26% of Australia’s landmass. This definition does not invalidate non-exclusive native title – land that features other forms of ownership such as pastoral stations – or Indigenous ownership in areas where native title has been extinguished. When non-exclusive native title is included, the proportion of Australia is about 54%.

Keven Smith, chief executive of Queensland South Native Title Services, says, “If you ask the question of who owns Australia, I would say that First Nations people own this country,” Smith says. “Even though there’s limited application of native title over the four corners of this nation, cultural heritage is tenure-blind.”

 The median price per hectare for agricultural land in Australia increased by 12.9% in 2020 to $5,907 a hectare, the seventh consecutive year of positive growth.

Who owns Australia? | Australia news | The Guardian

 Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year in a worsening trend the World Health Organization said.

In the first global study of the loss of life associated with longer working hours, the paper in the journal Environment International showed that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours in 2016. That was an increase of nearly 30% from 2000. 

“Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” said Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health

 The joint study, produced by the WHO and the International Labour Organization, showed that most victims (72%) were men and were middle-aged or older. Often, the deaths occurred much later in life, sometimes decades later, than the shifts worked. 

The study – drawing on data from 194 countries – said that working 55 hours or more a week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease compared with a 35-40 hour working week.

Long working hours are a killer, WHO study shows | Reuters

 As the ecological crisis worsens it would be all too easy to slide into catastrophism, to present mankind’s future as an apocalypse, a social Armageddon. The environmental struggles needs an alternative social vision. The cause of our environmental problems are bad individual life-style choices and the strategy for change does not involve writing pleading letters to politicians to regulate corporate behaviour. These will do next to nothing about the economic system which requires profit expansion that drives it.

Capitalism maximises economic growth. Capitalism just attempts to grow regardless of any consequences which may be harmful to our environment. Competing businesses are concerned only with profit and capital accumulation, not with sustainability. Capitalism doesn’t care for neither either humanitarian  nor environmental welfare are central to its economic decision-making. The result is that both peoples and the planet are suffering. The global competition for profits is larger than any one individual or corporation or government. The system is unstoppable. Its inhumanity  is extreme. the poor are left to die from preventable hunger and curable diseases. The objective of capitalism is simply the achievement of profit and corporations will be environmentally friendly only it is profitable to be, or unprofitable not to be. Big business tramples over people’s needs. Capitalism fails to aid the desperately vulnerable if profit cannot be extracted or costs levelled elsewhere. Ethical investments and government guidance to consumers are inadequate in the face of the omniscient power of the capital economic laws. Business ventures which has the possibility of attracting high profits will always be a magnet for the stock-exchange share-holder regardless of any environmental downsides and they will lobby against any government regulation which is an obstacle to expected lucrative dividends. Divestment merely leaves the door open for others less scrupulous to make a financial return.

A commonly held misconception is that the World’s growing populations present one of the greatest ecological problems. Many in the environmentalist movement seem convinced that the amount of land and resources used by humans far outstrips the carrying capacity of the planet. Yet the apparent logic breaks down quickly. Peoples with the highest birth rates such as in Africa use a fraction of the world’s resources, while a minority with low birth rates in the “developed” countries use most of those resources. The apparent “over-population problem” isn’t one of numbers but more of a distribution of wealth problem. Any ecological carrying capacity calculations do not account for scarcity and starvation. There is ample food presently being grown to sustain the world’s population yet it isn’t filling the bellies of the hungry who cannot afford to pay the prices being paid  to fatten livestock  and or to fill the tanks of cars with  ethanol fuel. Green activists who claim the focus must be on slowing population growth are ignoring the real and imminent threats to our planet.

“Green” capitalism is based around making profits from renewable energy sources, cap and capture technological fixes, electric vehicles and the like, all on the premise on the belief that global warming can be stopped by changing dirty products for clean green ones. Capitalism’s stock-exchanges we’re assured, is capable of saving the planet by the miracle of the invisible hand of the market take hold of the steering wheel and trading in carbon credits. But as we expect it is the need for making profit which drives the whole process. People should not fall for market-inspired “solutions” as the lesser evil and less pain. Socialists go beyond the market-led illusory promises of a low-carbon economy.

A socialist  society would allow genuine possibilities for ecological sustainability. Without profit-seeking being the motivation for production, we will have eliminated the reason environmental safeguards are not put into place. Protecting the environment is often a commercial impracticality, a cost to be cut to the minimum. A world socialist revolution and  constructing a new society not dominated by the needs of capitalist accumulation is necessary where the human carbon footprint would be relatively benign. The struggle for socialism remains an urgent necessity. 

The Socialist Party faces up to the reality, difficult as it is, to prevent exceeding the tipping points and experiencing catastrophic runaway climate change in the future  it will be necessary to do away with capitalism, to overthrow it and replace production for profit with planned production for human need. The battle lines are drawn. There can be no truce and no alliances made with capitalists. The enemy who will sabotage all attempts to mitigate the threat of climate change is the capitalist class.

  Chris Zimmerman, the senior executive responsible for enforcing AmerisourceBergen’s legal obligation to halt opioid deliveries to pharmacies suspected of dispensing suspiciously large amounts of the drugs said the company culture was of the “highest calibre”.

Senior staff at AmerisourceBergen routinely disparaged communities blighted by the worst drug epidemic in the country’s history.

After Florida cracked down on pill mills in 2011, Zimmerman sent an email to colleagues. “Watch out George and Alabama,” he wrote, “there will be a max exodus of Pillbillies heading north.”

One email in 2011 included a rhyme built around “a poor mountaineer” named Jed who “barely kept his habit fed”. According to the verse, “Jed” travels to Florida to buy “Hillbilly Heroin”, the nickname for OxyContin, the drug manufactured by Purdue Pharma which kickstarted an epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives.

Another rhyme described Kentucky as “OxyContinville” because of the high use of the drug in the poor rural east of the state. When Kentucky introduced new regulations to curb opioid dispensing, an AmerisourceBergen executive wrote in a widely circulated email: “One of the hillbilly’s must have learned how to read :-)”.

Another email contained a mocked up breakfast cereal box with the word “smack” under the words “OxyContin for kids”

This is the company that has a culture of the “highest calibre”?

Two West Virginia local authorities accuse the distributors of putting profit before lives and turning Cabell county into the “ground zero” of the epidemic. A data expert told the trial that over nine years the three distributors delivered about 100m opioid doses to Cabell county – which has a population of just 90,000. Drug distributors delivered 1.1 billion opioid painkillers to West Virginia between 2006 and 2014, even as the state’s overdose rate rose to the highest in the US.

AmerisourceBergen paid $16m to settle legal action by West Virginia over opioid deliveries but did not admit wrongdoing. The same year, McKesson paid a record $150m fine after the DEA accused it of breaking the law. Critics, including DEA officials, have accused the companies of regarding the fines as “the cost of doing business” and then carrying on as before.

Big pharma executives mocked ‘pillbillies’ in emails, West Virginia opioid trial hears | Opioids crisis | The Guardian

 The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, voiced outrage that a number of rich countries were now vaccinating children and teenagers while poorer states had barely begun vaccinating health workers and their most vulnerable groups. Instead of offering jabs to young and healthy people, countries should give their doses to the Covax global vaccine-sharing scheme and thereby ensure that those most in need in all countries receive protection, he said.

Canada and the US are among countries that have authorised vaccines for use in adolescents in recent weeks.

In the face of this inequity in access, Tedros warned that the world would probably see more deaths this year than last, despite the arrival of vaccines. “We’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first,” he said. “Saving lives and livelihoods with a combination of public health measures and vaccination – not one or the other – is the only way out.”

Vaccinate vulnerable global poor before children in rich countries, WHO says | Coronavirus | The Guardian

 The media sometimes publish scary stories by high-lighting the scientists worse case scenarios. For the average reader we often miss the many caveats that are included in research papers so one has to be wary of some reporting. 

A third of global food production will be at risk by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current rate researchers at Aalto University in Finland have calculated.

Many of the world’s most important food-growing areas will see temperatures increase and rainfall patterns alter drastically if temperatures rise by about 3.7C, the forecast increase if emissions stay high. 95% of current crop production takes place in areas they define as “safe climatic space”, or conditions where temperature, rainfall and aridity fall within certain bounds. If temperatures were to rise by 3.7C or thereabouts by the century’s end, that safe area would shrink drastically, mostly affecting south and south-eastern Asia and Africa’s Sudano-Sahelian zone, according to a paper published in the journal One Earth.

However, if greenhouse gases are reduced and the world meets the goals of the Paris agreement, in limiting temperature rises to 1.5C or 2C above pre-industrial levels, then only about 5%–8% of global food production would be at risk.

Livestock farming would be affected, as well as the risks to crop production, he said, and many areas were likely to suffer large increases in water scarcity. The researchers examined the impacts of climatic changes on 27 of the most important food crops and seven types of livestock.

By the end of this century, in a high-emissions scenario, there could be as much as 1.5m sq miles (4m sq km) of new desert around the world, the research found.

Under 1.5C to 2C of warming, the boreal forests of northern America, Russia and Europe would shrink from their current 7m sq miles to about 6m sq miles by 2100. In a high emissions scenario, only 3m sq miles would remain, the researchers forecast.

Although rising temperatures could increase food production in some areas that are currently less productive, such as the Nordic regions, that would not be anywhere near enough to offset the loss of important food producing regions in the south, said Matti Kummu, associate professor of global food and water at Aalto University and lead author.

“There will be winners as well as losers, but the wins will be outweighed by the losses, and there is just not enough space for food production to move – we are already at the limits,” he said.

Third of global food production at risk from climate crisis | Climate change | The Guardian

The  evidence of the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims is abundant yet many “anti-imperialists” are in denial, preferring the enemy of my enemy is my friend maxim and offer support for China.

According to this article, the Uighurs are wronged four times over: by China’s oppression, by American imperialist cooptation, by left-wing denialism, and by Muslim leaders’ dereliction.

Not only do we have the United States and its allies decrying China’s human rights violations, and China and its allies denying such violations, and reminding the West of its own abuses of human rights, we now have a group of Western “anti-imperialists” siding with China simply because they feel whatever the US says is suspect, and therefore what China claims is not. World leaders usually regarded as advocates for oppressed Muslims, such as Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, have also signed on to what might be called the “Uighur Exception,” in order to avoid offending the Chinese government and jeopardising the development dollars on which they depend.

For many, the Uighur’s plight is yet another card to play in its China-bashing, along with Hong Kong and COVID-19. In a remarkable reversal, Trump went from lauding mass Uighur internment as the “right thing to do” to labelling it as genocide – all while implementing a Muslim ban and incarcerating thousands of migrants in a vast “concentration camp” system of the US’s own. Biden has maintained the bipartisan consensus in accusing China of genocide – having previously served as vice president in the Obama administration, a pioneer in the preemptive collective criminalisation of Muslim communities in the name of counter-radicalisation. Even one-time anti-Uighur agitators like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have joined the bandwagon of performative allyship with the Uighurs against China’s “modern genocide.” What a change in tune from 2009, when Gingrich denigrated the Uighurs as misogynists, “trained mass killers,” and “terrorists,” justifying their wrongful capture and torture by the US at Guantanamo Bay.

Human rights organisations have long been consistent in exposing and opposing China’s persecutory policies against the Uighurs, even when conflicting with the American empire’s realpolitik.

Amnesty International’s first report (PDF) on atrocities against the Uighurs is from 1992, documenting a “pattern of human rights violations [that] appears to have emerged in Xinjiang since 1989,” including secret detentions, extrajudicial executions, and suppression of religious expression.

Human Rights Watch has been calling on the US government to press China on its treatment of the Uighurs since 1998, in the face of then-President Bill Clinton’s reticence for the sake of augmenting US-China trade.

 In 2004, Georgetown University Xinjiang specialist James Millward authoritatively deconstructed China’s sensationalist and unsubstantiated projections of the Uighur “terrorist” threat – the basis of the US’s designation of the Uighur group East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organisation in 2002 to woo the Chinese government’s support for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Yet some on the left continue to reject reports of China’s oppression and repression as an American imperialist propaganda ploy. The China sympathisers discredit those drawing attention to the Uighur’s persecution by questioning their motives and exposing their association with various anti-China institutions yet all the while ignoring the vast body of evidence.

This includes:

1. Census data showing the long-term demographic replacement of Indigenous Uighurs with the dominant Han ethnic group – encouraged by government incentives for Han migration and settlement.2. Statistics revealing a precipitate decline in Xinjiang birth rates by 33 percent (from 15.88 percent to 10.69 percent), and population growth rates by 46 percent (from 11.40 percent to 6.13 percent), between 2017 and 2018 – misrepresented in the Grayzone as a decrease of only 5 percent, even as it excoriates its ideological opponents for “statistical malpractice” and “data abuse”.3. Counterterrorism laws and “de-extremification” regulations targeting religious practices such as wearing a veil and growing a beard.4. Leaked lists of detainees, such as the Aksu and Karakax lists, detailing the extrajudicial detention of Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims for such “offences” as studying the Quran, travelling abroad, or being “generally untrustworthy”.5. Procurement and budget documents testifying to the prison-like securitisation and weaponisation of internment centres, publicly defended as “vocational training” facilities yet equipped with electric cattle prods, riot gear, tear gas, stun guns, specialised interrogation chairs, and spiked clubs.6. A government-issued “telegram” specifying procedures for the operation and expansion of these internment centres, methods of political and psychological indoctrination, and instructions for maintaining “strict secrecy” and “preventing escapes”.7. State “bulletins” indicating the scale of detention – with 15,683 people reportedly rounded up into camps from four prefectures over the course of one week in 2017 alone.8. Official policies such as Physicals for All, mandating mass biometric and DNA collection, and Becoming Family, planting government officials to live with and monitor Uighurs in their homes.9. Policy documents laying out plans for the mass institutionalisation of Uighur children in residential schools, and the mass sterilisation of Uighur women – otherwise known in Chinese state officialese as “baby-making machines”.10. Official government-issued White Papers and other propaganda materials erasing Uighur peoplehood, indigeneity, and identity, and describing the large-scale transfer of Uighurs out of their indigenous territory for labour programs.11. Statements by public officials ordering to “break [the Uighurs’] roots, break their lineage, break their connections, and break their origins,” and referring to Islam as a “malignant tumour,” a “virus,” and a “weed” – evidence of an intent to destroy the Uighur people as a people, defined as genocidal under international law.