Clara Gabrielle 🌹

RIGHT NOW in Los Angeles: Thousands in the streets in massive display of solidarity with Rafah! Free Palestine! #ShutItDown4Palestine

Video of US troops SAYING they are in Gaza, posted back in November !!

All three of the soldiers killed in Jordan were Black. I beg my people to stop signing up to fight these colonizers’ wars. I get it, you want to get out the hood and see the world, but that ain’t the way, by helping to fuck over other people. Stay home.

I've been saying since the start of the war on Gaza that one key - if not THE key - prism through which one should read the conflict is that it's a fight between America's "rules-based order" and international law (see my original post👇) teapawt.net/RnaudBertrand/st… Sadly, since then events have gradually confirmed this, culminating in the recent cancellation of UNRWA funding by the collective West - led by the US - which is the starkest and most cynical confirmation that this prism is unfortunately correct. UNRWA is of course an expression of international law since it is a UN agency, established in 1949 by a resolution of the UN General Assembly to provide relief to all refugees victims of the Nakba. It is now the largest agency of the UN with 30,000 employees and, especially these days, the Palestinians' main lifeline. UNRWA's role is all the more critical after the ICJ's recent ruling - the ICJ, the world's court, being of course THE most important expression of international law - that Israel was "plausibly" committing genocide in Gaza, and its order in the form of a binding provisional measure that "the State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip". There is simply no way for Israel to fulfill this provisional measure without UNRWA, given that it runs the very infrastructure for basic services and humanitarian assistance on the ground in Gaza. Worth mentioning, according to international law, an ICJ ruling is binding on all of the world's countries - which very much includes Western states - and they therefore have a legal obligation to also take actions that they can to facilitate the fulfillment of the provisional measures. And certainly taking actions that directly contravene the ruling would be a direct violation of international law, and in this case would place violating countries in direct violation of the Genocide Convention. Yet that's exactly what they did. A mere few hours after the ICJ ruling they cut UNRWA's funding. I believe that as of this writing we're at 10 Western states having done so, with the US having initiated the move, followed by its henchmen. So in effect we have proponents of the "rules-based order" yet again in a frontal assault against international law. What's the "rules-based order"? A good definition is that it's a system outside of international law that essentially defends whatever the US judges is in its and its allies' interests at any moment in time. For the best definition that I've ever read on it, see this fascinating study in the Leiden Journal of International Law: cambridge.org/core/journals/… The message this sends couldn't be clearer: do not defy us, we make the rules and we will be ruthless with whoever dares challenge this. It is, first and foremost, a power dynamic, which is immensely telling: the US clearly saw the ICJ ruling as an affront and responded by upping the ante. Which means it sees itself as an adversary of international law, with the latter a force that needs to be brought to heel. In effect this is the US admitting it's lost its role as "the world's policeman" and that it became an insurgent. Much like a disgraced former president would rather launch a civil war than lose their power, the US is in many ways announcing it's now the lead insurgent against a new multipolar world order they don't like having full control of anymore. This can't end well, and presages a period of destabilizing chaos characterized - as we're tragically seeing in the case of the Palestinians - by untold human suffering. It was always naive to imagine the US would take its loss of hegemony constructively but optimists could have at least hoped they wouldn't go full genocidal maniacs. Unfortunately it looks like they've concluded that a couple of genocides here and there are acceptable prices we humanity should pay for their attempt to preserve their fast declining hegemony. The only silver lining in all this is that this can only hasten this declining hegemony. I fundamentally believe that we as a species strive for order and justice and with all this - coupled with its immensely unhinged internal politics - the US is telling the whole world it has become the principal force of chaos and injustice. Also, at a fundamental level, the vision behind it is absolutely revulsive for 90% of the planet as it's all about subjugating them, denying them a voice in the way the world - our shared world - should run. So buckle up for a very bumpy ride, but one which - if we aren't all genocided on the way (and unfortunately that's becoming a bigger "if" by the day) - has some light at the end of the darker tunnel we find ourselves in.