Tom Roche

"Make sense of the day's news and ideas," urges The Morning, a daily New York Times newsletter. "Get smarter, faster on news and information that matters to you," Axios assures its readership. "This is how the news should sound," The New York Times again declares, via its podcast The Daily.

Over the last ten years, roughly speaking, we've seen the proliferation of the daily digest-style newsletter and podcast at legacy and new media organizations. Inspired, at least loosely, by the so-called explanatory journalism of Vox and similar outlets that arose in the mid-2010s, publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns of the news that allegedly matters most, delivered to the inboxes of upwardly mobile, dinner-party-hosting, perennially on-the-go professionals - or at least those who want to think of themselves as such.

There's certainly nothing wrong with accessibility in news media—quite the opposite, in fact. But, for corporate "explanatory" news models, it's worth asking who makes the decisions about which news is the "most important," and about how that news is framed. How do seemingly benign, even folksy promises to "make sense of the news" mask the ideology of corporate media institutions? And what are the dangers of herding audiences into a center-right political consensus that issues complaints like "campus speech is vexing" and "the left is less welcoming than the right"?

On this episode, we examine the rise and hegemony of centrist micro-news platforms–from Axios's trademarked "Smart Brevity" to The New York Times' David Leonhardt's newsletter The Morning and The Daily podcast–looking at how they package left-punching, pathologically incurious, glib news nuggets served up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning liberals.

Our guest is writer Jacob Bacharach.

EDIT: Original file of this episode contained some muted audio clips. File is now fixed, redownload to correct.

We start off today’s episode with a farewell to the DeSantis campaign as the Never Back Down PAC backs down, and dedicates its last days to puzzling through Iowa to the Moon Palace Retreat. We discuss Biden’s general lack of a coherent position going into this long, long general campaign, and how it’s leaving his would-be defenders in the lurch. BUT, for the main thrust of this ep, we celebrate one man: The Beekeeper. Because when the hive is threatened, when the Queen is producing faulty Offspring, then there’s one man you must call. To Bee or Not To Bee? To bee, bitch. Let’s keep some bees.

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Someone posted a link to an old Bozhidar Batsov post that discusses a nifty little function that automates a simple but annoying manual process. Those of you who use package.el or the use-package macro are probably familiar with the problem. You update a package but it doesn’t load or work correctly. Usually, this is the result of byte compilation problems.

The answer is to uninstall the package and then install it again. It’s not hard but it is a pain. Batsov’s solution is to simply capture the process in a small function. The whole thing amounts to:

1. Unloading the package
2. Reinstalling the package
3. Requiring the package

To make things really easy, he also has an interactive version that does a completing read to specify the package to reinstall. The completing read is populated with the complete package list so it’s easy to get the name right.

If you handle your packages with package.el you should definitely take a look at Batsov’s post. It’s short and easy to read and it’s also easy to just copy his code and insert it right into your init.el.

Julia and Nick sit down for a quick chat with former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis reflecting on 50 years of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising and creating our own hope.

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Special Guest: Yanis Varoufakis.

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Official AP Taiwan Desk James Lin returns to the pod to give us a breakdown of the recent presidential election in Taiwan. The group discusses the three candidates, winner Lai Ching-te’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its moves to avoid repercussions from the PRC (China), the international response to the election, the evolving diplomatic norms …

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Djene Bajalan, associate professor of history at Missouri State University, returns to educate us on Kurdish history. We’ve reached the 1971 coup in Turkey, which has fractured the left. In its wake, a group led by Abdullah Öcalan forms what will become the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The discussion covers the PKK’s ideology, how it differentiates i…

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Krystal and Saagar discuss Bibi saying Gaza war until 2025, Biden failure as Houthi attacks increase, and Antony Loewenstein joins to discuss how Israel uses Gaza and the West Bank as a weapons testing ground.

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We forced Artificial Intelligence to digest massive amounts of human media and then write its own versions. Everything from The One Show, Game of Thrones, Friends, Songs of Praise and more via movies, fables, adverts, Shakespeare, poetry and, er, gardening tips (and much much more) are all forever ruined by technology.

We take the scripts, push them word-for-word into the mouths of actors, and the result is absurdly, joyously - and then absurdly again - hilarious.

This is the comedy that conclusively proves that AI is an absolute idiot.

Based on materials by Keaton Patti.

Forcing A Bot To Write This Show are: Jon Holmes Sarah Dempster Gareth Ceredig

Performed by: Isy Suttie James Lance Lauren Douglin Esmonde Cole and Craig Parkinson as The Narrator Olivia Williams as The Stoyteller

Original Music by Jake Yapp. Lyrics: Holmes / Ceredig / Patti

Produced and Directed by Jon Holmes

Technical Wizardry: Tony Churnside Production Co-ordinator: Laura Grimshaw

An unusual production for BBC Radio 4

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Ryan and Emily discuss Biden's Houthi strikes backfiring as companies halt shipping in the Red Sea, Senate rejects Bernie's bill to investigate Israel human rights abuses, shocking poll shows Nikki Haley tied with Trump in New Hampshire, Texas wars with Biden admin over border security, Ukraine gives psychedelics to troops, and a new report shows the Freedom Caucus and The Squad represent the poorest districts in the nation.

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Headlines for January 17, 2024; Israel’s War on Journalists: More Reporters Killed in Gaza in 3 Months Than Any Country Over Entire Year; How Israel Bombed Al Jazeera Journalists & Blocked Rescue of Cameraman Samer Abudaqa Until He Died; “They Don’t Show Gaza”: Gideon Levy on How Israel’s Press Is Failing to Cover the War’s True Toll; What Happened on October 7? Gideon Levy on Haaretz’s Call to Investigate Kibbutz Killings & More; “The Logic of Escalation”: From Red Sea to Iran & Beyond, Will Israel’s Gaza Assault Spark Wider War?

In parts 1, 2 and 3 we took a single citation in an Org document, applied citation and bibliography styles to it, and used the basic processor to export it. In this post I’ll look at the four capabilities that the basic processor has. They are described in the manual and also in lisp/oc.el, which says (at time of writing):

This library provides tooling to handle citations in Org, e.g, activate, follow, insert, and export them, respectively called “activate”, “follow”, “insert” and “export” capabilities. Libraries responsible for providing some, or all, of these capabilities are called “citation processors”.

The four capabilities are: activate, follow, insert and export. Citation processors don’t need to have all of them, but the basic processor does.

Activate

The activate capability changes how a citation looks and acts in Org. Here’s our sample file from last time when viewed in plain uncustomized Emacs with emacs -Q basic.org (after hitting y several times to allow file-local variables):

Screenshot of basic.org in plain Emacs

The default Org highlighting makes keyword lines (options, bibliography, cite_export and print_bibliography) red and the heading blue. The basic citation processor’s activate capability makes the citation look different: it’s RoyalBlue3.

(To dig into details like this, put the cursor in the citation somewhere and hit C-u C-x = (that’s what-cursor-position with a prefix argument) and Emacs will show you a remarkable amount of information about that character, including that it has the faces org-cite-key and org-cite. They are what you would customize to change the look.)

Another property is that if you hover the mouse over the citation key (in this case @friends) then you’ll see the bibliographic information. In this screenshot you can’t see my pointer, but it’s on top of @friends, which is why it’s turned green:

Hovering over citation key shows metadata

If you hover over the rest of the citation object, such as the word cite, nothing will happen. Only the citation key has information to show.

From now on I’ll show it with my Emacs setup (which I’ve honed since 1995 and continue to fiddle with monthly: it’ll be perfect soon). Here’s the same mouseover, again without the mouse pointer visible.

Hovering over citation key shows metadata

That’s using the solarized dark theme and now the citation object has this colour by default but changes on mouseover.

Here’s some relevant documentation from lisp/oc-basic.el in the source code:

[The] “activate” capability re-uses default fontification, but provides additional features on both correct and wrong keys according to the bibliography defined in the document.

When the mouse is over a known key, it displays the corresponding bibliography entry. Any wrong key, however, is highlighted with `error’ face. Moreover, moving the mouse onto it displays a list of suggested correct keys, and pressing on the faulty key will try to fix it according to those suggestions.

We saw what happens with a correct citation key, but Org can also tell us about broken ones!

Let’s make this a little more interesting by adding a fake item into Basic.bib with a key that’s almost the same as the real one.

@book{friends,
  title = {​{​{LaTeX}​​} and Friends},
  author = {van Dongen, M.R.C.},
  date = {2012},
  location = {Berlin},
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-23816-1},
  isbn = {978-3-642-23816-1}
}

@book{frionds,
  title = {Frionds},
  author = {F. Rionds}
}

Then in our Org file we misspell the citation key as @frinds. The processor knows this key doesn’t exist in our bibliography so it shows it in a different colour.

Incorrect citation key is shown in red

If we hover over it, Org offers help: “Suggestions (mouse-1 to substitute): friends frionds”.

Mouseover text on bad citation key

Left-clicking on the key pops up this in the minibuffer:

1/2 Did you mean
friends
frionds

Up or down to choose the one you want, hit RET (that is, Return or Enter), and that key is put into the citation object, fixing it. Nice! This is a smart, helpful feature. (The suggestions are made with the string-distance function, which calculates the Levenshtein distance between two strings.)

I looked ahead at the other export processors and they do not have any special activate features, so they will fall back on what’s here. Perhaps people will add more features: might it be possible to see a fully formatted citation in the mouseover, similar to a LaTeX preview fragment? Perhaps users could get at the suggestions with the keyboard and not have to use a mouse?

Follow

With a simple citation the follow capability is straightforward: if the pointer is in a citation object and you hit RET, the window splits, a new buffer opens, and the pointer is placed at the start of that entry in the .bib file. I guess this would be used mostly for editing the metadata when you notice a problem, but if you want to use it to look at the entry a quick C-x 0 gets rid of the new window.

With more complex citations this capability does a little more, so we’ll come back to it.

Insert

The command to insert a citation is org-cite-insert, and the keybinding to remember is C-c C-x @. As Emacs keybindings go this is pretty easy to remember (I admit that’s not saying much): Org mode uses C-c C-x so we’re typing that all the time, and the @ goes with the @ in the citation keys.

Let’s say that Basic.bib still has that faked @frionds entry, and we’re in basic.org.

#+options: title:nil author:nil date:nil toc:nil num:nil

#+bibliography: Basic.bib
#+cite_export: basic numeric numeric

"Most scholarly works have citations and a bibliography or reference
section," wrote a computer scientist [cite:@friends].

* Bibliography

#+print_bibliography:

I start a new paragraph after my one sentence and I hit C-c C-x @. This pops up in my minibuffer:

(1/2) Key (empty input exits):
F. Rionds                       Rionds
van Dongen, M.R.C.        2012   and Friends

It may not look like that in yours. If you’re using plain Emacs you won’t see a list of options but they are there. If you’re using a completion system such as Vertico or Ivy or the built-in fido-mode then you’ll see a list. Org knows the options, and your completion system is handling them.

I could move down a line and the van Dongen entry would be highlighted, and then if I hit RET it would be chosen. Or I can do some filtering: here’s what it looks like if I enter “van”:

Filtering to matches on van

If I hit RET the van Dongen entry is chosen and the citation key is added to the list it’s building.

The key has been added to a list

If you’re using plain Emacs, enter “van” and complete it with TAB. You’ll see the bibliographic entry listed, and hit RET to add it.

You can insert more than one citation, but I’m going to deal multiples next so we’ll stop here. In plain Emacs, and some other completion systems, you would hit RET to make the “empty input” that finishes this step. In Vertico and Ivy that won’t work, and you’ll need to hit C-u C-j or (in Vertico) M-RET. (Thanks to two helpful people on the Org mailing list for helping me with this.)

However you do it, when you’ve done it the citation object [cite:@friends] will be inserted into the file. Done!

#+options: title:nil author:nil date:nil toc:nil num:nil

#+bibliography: Basic.bib
#+cite_export: basic numeric numeric

"Most scholarly works have citations and a bibliography or reference
section," wrote a computer scientist [cite:@friends].

[cite:@friends]

* Bibliography

#+print_bibliography:

If you want to delete a citation, giving the insert command a prefix argument (C-u) will do that: if the pointer is on a citation then C-u C-c C-x @ will delete it.

One small last note: Org will let you insert a citation anywhere there is regular text, but not on keyword lines such as options or in source code blocks. You’ll get a “Cannot insert a citation here” error.

Export

Exporting turns the Org file into some other document format, and we’ve been doing that to text or PDF. The export capability is what makes a citation object (perhaps with a style and variant such as [cite/na/b:@friends]) into something human-readable. There’s a lot about this in part 1, but I’ll copy some of that here for completeness.

Showing what’s available in the basic citation processor, here is a table of styles (s), variants (v), how they’re specified, what the citation object looks like in the raw, and what it becomes when exported. The citation exporting happens when the whole document is exported (for example with C-c C-e l o to export to a PDF and then open it)—you don’t have to do anything special to prepare it.

Here’s the table in the LaTeX export, with an extra column specifying the style name.

LaTeX export of table of examples

With the basic processor we can export to text, HTML, LaTeX and OpenDocument. Different processors export to different document types, but they all export to LaTeX and you can always make a PDF.

The next post—the last about the basic processor—will be about complex citations with multiple keys, prefixes and suffixes.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior foreign affairs reporter at HuffPost, returns to the podcast to discuss his recent pieces covering the post-Gaza plans of top White House official Brett McGurk and the imminent departure of the White House’s special Middle East envoy on humanitarian issues. Then, for subscribers, the group gets into the NSC’s attempts to discr…

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Well, here we are, Iowa Caucus day 2024. Considering we all took several points of permanent sanity damage this time 4 years ago, what’s insane this year is how on rails this whole thing is. Nonetheless, our elections correspondent Josh (@ettingermentum) returns to update us on the state of the races for 2024. We look at how Biden’s long-term hyper-commitment to Israel affects his chances, Trump’s advantages and disadvantages in his ‘24 campaign, the RFK Jr. of it all, and the race for #2 between the rest of the GOP candidates..

Find Josh’s newsletter here: https://www.ettingermentum.news/

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Krystal and Saagar discuss 100 days of war in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu tells USA 'this is your war', and two Navy Seals lost at sea during Yemen operation. 

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Finally we are joined by Jacqueline of the Indieheads podcast to talk about Eurodance. A beautiful and wonderful export from this stupid trashy continent.

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My look at citations in Org continues on from Part 1 and Part 2, and here I finish going through the document-level settings.

Keywords and options

We can make document-level settings with three keywords:

• bibliography, to specify where to look for bibliographic metadata (this has no options);
• print_bibliography, to tell Org to print the bibliography, if we want one (this has no options in the basic citation processor but does in some others); and
• cite_export, which we’ll look at here.

cite_export specifies three things, and is used like so:

#+cite_export: citation-processor bibliography-style citation-style

The first option sets which citation processor (or export processor) to use. There are five available in Org:

• basic, the default, which exports to text, HTML, LaTeX and OpenDocument;
• csl, which uses the Citation Style Language, and also exports to text, HTML, LaTeX and OpenDocument; and
• bibtex, biblatex and natbib, which all export only to LaTeX.

We’re using the basic processor here. It’s very simple and useful for figuring out how all this works.

The next choice is about bibliography style. The options here depend on the citation processor. With the basic processor, there are just three:

• author-date (the default)
• numeric
• plain

In the last post we saw how we can set the processor and bibliography style with cite_export, for example:

#+cite_export: basic numeric

Lastly there is citation style, the options for which also depend on the citation processor. With the basic processor there are seven possible styles. (Most have variants that control whether they’re wrapped in brackets and if the first letter of the author name is capitalized.) They are:

• the unnamed default (used if nothing else is specified)
• author
• note
• nocite
• noauthor
• numeric
• text

There’s a table of them all in Part 1. (Look at lisp/oc-basic.el in the source code if you want to see how this is all made to happen.)

Setting a document-level citation style in cite_export

In the first post we saw how we can override the default citation style by adding a style (and possibly variant) to citation objects, for example [cite/a:@friends] (author style) or [cite/a/c:@friends] (author style, with caps variant). This is good for changing one citation at a time. To change them through the whole document, we can specify a new citation style in cite_export and rely on it. (In fact we’re setting a new default, but I’m trying not to use the word “default” in two different ways here. We’re already using “style” two different ways.)

Let’s do some examples. We’ll use the same Basic.bib as before:

@book{friends,
  title = {​{​{LaTeX}​​} and Friends},
  author = {van Dongen, M.R.C.},
  date = {2012},
  location = {Berlin},
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-23816-1},
  isbn = {978-3-642-23816-1}
}

We’ll revise our sample basic.org file to this, with an unadorned citation object ([cite:@friends]) and all the options in cite_export. Here we say we want a numeric bibliography with numeric citations:

#+options: title:nil author:nil date:nil toc:nil num:nil

#+bibliography: Basic.bib
#+cite_export: basic numeric numeric

"Most scholarly works have citations and a bibliography or reference
section," wrote a computer scientist [cite:@friends].

* Bibliography

#+print_bibliography:

Exporting to PDF produces this pleasing match of citation and bibliography, where the reference “(1)” leads to the right source in the bibliography:

Numeric bibliography, numeric citations

The citation object is unadorned but exports in the numeric style because of the document-level setting.

Settings need to work together

It’s possible to put together combinations that don’t make sense. For example, we could use the numeric bibliography style and noauthor citation style. The Org file is the same as above, but with this line changed:

#+cite_export: basic numeric noauthor

Exporting gives this PDF:

Numeric bibliography, noauthor citations

That’s not helpful. Similarly, using the author-year bibliography style and the nocite citation style is silly. Change the cite_export line to this:

#+cite_export: basic author-year nocite

Exporting gives this PDF (notice the tiny space before the full stop, because [cite:@friends] becomes nothing but the space before it is still there).

Author-date bibliography, nocite citations

We need to make sure the citation and bibliography settings work together properly. If you’re using Microsoft Word and pulling in citation information from Zotero then you couldn’t mess things up like this. I think BibLaTeX is aware of context and can sometimes produce different output when needed (we may get to this later). With this basic system it’s up to you. Fair enough.

Overriding the document-level citation style

What if we set a new citation style for the document in cite_export but then want to use something different for one citation? This is always possible. In fact, this is just what we saw in Part 1. By not setting a citation style in cite_export the unnamed default was used, and we overrode it in all the examples. If a different citation style is named, we can override it just the same. We always have the freedom to use whatever citation style we want in any citation object.

There’s one situation where this gets tricky: overriding a named citation style to use the unnamed default. Let’s say we have cite_export set so:

#+cite_export: basic author-year author

Now using an unadorned citation object such as [cite:@friends] will just give the author. To use the noauthor style, for example, we would say [cite/na:@friends]. But what if we want to get the original default? It has no style code like na, so it seems like there’s no way to specify it. As I learned from Ihor Radchenko on the Org mailing list, we can get it with nil.

Here’s an example with the author citation style defined for the whole document, then overridden twice. The first citation object gets a nil style code to give the unnamed default we’ve seen before, the second inherits the document-level setting but uses the caps variant (because it’s at the start of the sentence, and I know I need to force that), and the third overrides to give only the date.

#+bibliography: Basic.bib
#+cite_export: basic author-year author

"Most scholarly works have citations and a bibliography or reference
section," wrote a computer scientist [cite/nil:@friends].

[cite//c:@friends] wrote, "Most scholarly works have citations and a
bibliography or reference section" [cite/na:@friends].

* Bibliography

#+print_bibliography:

This exports to:

In fact, using anything that isn’t a recognized style code will fall through to the default. The same is true of the variants. And it’s also true of the bibliography and citation style settings in cite_export!

This will export with all the default settings, and org-lint doesn’t complain either:

#+bibliography: Basic.bib
#+cite_export: basic alice wonderland

"Most scholarly works have citations and a bibliography or reference
section," wrote a computer scientist [cite/slithy:@friends].

[cite//mimsy:@friends] wrote, "Most scholarly works have citations and a
bibliography or reference section."

But don’t rely on any of that. Use proper names for things, and nil when you want to use that unnamed default citation style.

Next we’ll look at the four capabilities the basic processor has.

Danny chats with Frank Costigliola, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, about diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. They discuss his legacy as a realist with an unending belief in diplomacy, the “long telegram”, his wariness of the public holding sway in foreign relations, the emphasis on industrial …

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Donald Trump cuts a deal with the Taliban — and America begins its withdrawal.

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Full Israel roundup including Saagar's breakdown on US attacks against the Houthis, Krystal on Israel's ICJ defense, Norm Finkelstein on the ICJ case, and Ken Klippenstein on the US directly aiding in Israel's airstrikes on Gaza.

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Derek Sits down with Guillaume Long, senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and and Policy Research (CEPR) and former foreign minister of Ecuador, to discuss the outburst of armed conflict there over the last several days and how this fits into a larger context of issues facing the country.

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Recorded Friday…

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Spencer Ackerman, journalist at various outlets including Forever Wars, chats with Derek about South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide at the ICJ.

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Check out Spencer’s piece on the matter.

Recorded Thursday, January 11, 2024

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Headlines for January 11, 2024; “Nowhere Is Safe in Gaza”: South Africa Lays Out Genocide Case vs. Israel at World Court in The Hague; Palestinian Genocide Scholar & South African Lawyer on “Extreme Urgency” of World Court Case; Gaza War Fuels Climate Crisis: “Massive” Carbon Emissions from Israeli Bombing

We’re joined by the Intercept’s Ryan Grim, who’s spent the last several months attending State Department briefings, directly questioning the department representatives and reporting on administration messaging. We discuss his experiences in the mouth of the consent-manufacturing machine, and how he thinks the admin and various media orgs have functioned while he’s been there. We also discuss Ryan’s new book on The Squad, and how young progressive legislators are shaped and disciplined by the Democratic Party, and the special prominence of the Israel lobby within it.

Check out Ryan’s reporting at https://theintercept.com/staff/ryangrim/

And pick up Ryan’s book “The Squad” here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250869074/thesquad

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Danny and Derek come off the hottest year on record with the new year’s cold, hard facts. This week: South Africa brings a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (2:39) while Antony Blinken tours the region (8:48); Iraqi PM Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani is looking to request the withdrawal of U.S. forces (19:09); the Israel-Hizbollah border battles continue to escalate (22:23); the U.S. and U.K. launch strikes on Yemen (25:31); rebels in Myanmar take the border city of Laukkaing (28:49); Ethiopia looks to make a deal with the unrecognized state of Somaliland (33:56); Ukraine is running out of air defenses and shifting to a defensive posture (37:12); armed battles and chaos break out in Ecuador (40:23); 2023 was indeed the hottest year on record (43:55).

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Recorded Thursday, January 11, 2024

A team of Israeli lawyers and officials presented their defense at The Hague on Friday in the second day of the genocide case brought before the International Court of Justice by the government of South Africa. The lawyers portrayed Israel as the actual victim of genocide, not Gaza, accused South Africa of supporting Hamas, and painted South Africa’s government as functioning as the legal arm of the Palestinian militants who led the deadly raids into Israel on October 7.

Israel benefitted greatly from the fact that there was no cross examination permitted or debate allowed during these proceedings. It embarked on a bold mission to do in a court of international law what its military and political officials have done day and night throughout the course of this war against Gaza: unleash a deluge of what was known within the Trump administration as “alternative facts.” 

Israel’s defense was the inverse of South Africa’s case yesterday, and as weak in offering documented facts as South Africa’s was powerful. History began on October 7, the Israelis seemed to say, South Africa is Hamas, South Africa did not give Israel a chance to meet up and chat about Gaza before suing for genocide, and actually the Israel Defense Forces is the most moral entity on Earth. As for the voluminous public statements by senior Israeli officials indicating genocidal intent, those were just “random assertions” by some irrelevant underlings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements invoking a murderous story from the Bible about killing the women, infants, and cattle of your enemies? The South Africans just don’t understand theology and presented Netanyahu’s words out of context.

While Israel’s lawyers made legal arguments that the genocide charges leveled against it are invalid, their primary strategy was to appeal to the court on jurisdictional and procedural matters, hoping that they could form the basis for the panel of international judges to dismiss South Africa’s case. Aware of the global audience, Israel also sought to reinforce its claims of righteousness and self-defense in fighting the war in Gaza. 

Israel’s representative Tal Becker opened his government’s rebuttal by telling the judges at the ICJ that South Africa’s case “profoundly distorted the factual and legal picture,” claiming it sought to erase Jewish history. He charged that the legal arguments made by South Africa’s team were “barely distinguishable” from Hamas’s rhetoric and accused them of “weaponizing” the term “genocide.”

Becker called October 7 “the largest calculated mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust” and pleaded with the court to factor in the “brutality and lawlessness” of the enemy Israel says it is fighting in Gaza. Israel, he said, has a lawful right to use all available means to respond “to the slaughter of October 7 which Hamas has vowed to repeat.”

He repeatedly attacked the South African government, accusing it of doing Hamas’s bidding and alleging that its true agenda was to “thwart” Israel’s right to defend itself. “South Africa enjoys close relations with Hamas,” Becker said. “These relations have continued unabated even after the October 7 atrocities.” He said that South Africa, not Israel, should be subjected to provisional measures by the ICJ for its alleged support of Hamas. Becker neglected to mention the fact that Netanyahu himself long advocated for Hamas to retain power in Gaza and worked to ensure the flow of money to the group from Qatar continued over the years, believing it to be the best strategy to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. 

Becker rejected South Africa’s characterization of the historical scale of civilian destruction in Gaza — which has now killed over 10,000 children — arguing that what is actually “unparalleled and unprecedented” in this war is Hamas “embedding its military operations throughout Gaza within and beneath” densely populated areas. Becker spoke as though many of Israel’s most outlandish claims about Hamas’s underground operations have not been proven false or shown to be greatly exaggerated, such as the Israeli claim that there was essentially a Hamas Pentagon under al-Shifa Hospital. 

While Israel’s lawyers made legal arguments that the genocide charges leveled against it are invalid, their primary strategy was to appeal to the court on jurisdictional and procedural matters.

Becker also alleged that South Africa’s lawyers had failed to mention how many of the buildings blown up and destroyed in Gaza over the past three months of sustained Israeli bombing were actually “boobytrapped” by Hamas rather than destroyed by Israel. It was a risible claim given not only the scale of the Israeli bombardment of entire neighborhoods, but also because Israeli soldiers have posted videos of themselves gleefully hitting the detonate button to obliterate whole neighborhoods. He dismissed civilian death and injury figures provided by Gaza health authorities, saying that South Africa’s lawyers had failed to mention how many of the dead Palestinians were actually Hamas operatives. It was a striking point given that Israeli officials have openly and repeatedly said that there are no innocents in Gaza, and that United Nations workers and journalists killed by Israel are actually secret Hamas agents. 

“The nightmarish environment created by Hamas has been concealed by” South Africa, Becker charged. “Israel is committed to comply with the law, but it does so in the face of Hamas’s utter contempt for the law.” Becker did not bother to address any of the scores of U.N. resolutions over the decades condemning the illegality of Israel’s apartheid regime and its illegal occupations, not to mention its own well-documented use of Palestinian children as civilian shields and the intentional killing and maiming of nonviolent protesters. 

Becker also claimed that Israel was complying with international law in all of its operations in Gaza. “Israel does not seek to destroy a people, but to protect a people — its [own] people,” he said, adding that Israel is engaged in a “war of defense against Hamas, not the Palestinian people.” There could “hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the charge of genocide.” He accused South Africa of abusing the world court and turning it into an “aggressor’s charter.”

Malcolm Shaw, a British lawyer representing Israel, opened his argument by attacking South Africa’s reference on Thursday to what it described as Israel’s 75-year Nakba against the Palestinians. Shaw called this characterization as “outrageous” and said the only relevant historical “context” were the events of October 7, which he termed “the real genocide in this situation.” Given the civilian death toll caused by Israel in Gaza — upward of 23,000 as of this week — it was a stunning statement. By Israel’s own official count, some 1,200 people were killed on October 7. Of these, 274 were soldiers, 764 were civilians, 57 were Israeli police, and 38 were local security guards. It has still not been determined how many Israelis were killed in “friendly fire” incidents by Israeli forces who responded to the Hamas attacks that day.

Shaw and other lawyers representing Israel acknowledged that civilians had been killed during Israel’s military operations, though Shaw contended that “armed conflict, even when fully justified and conducted lawfully, is brutal and costs lives.” But, he said, Israel was engaged in a lawful and proportionate military campaign and said the ICJ was not an appropriate venue to review the Gaza war. “The only category before this court is genocide. Not every conflict is genocidal,” Shaw asserted. “If claims of genocide were to become the common currency of our conflict … the essence of this crime would be diluted and lost.” 

Shaw spent much of his time arguing that South Africa had failed to follow the mandated procedures for bringing a third-party genocide charge before the world court. He accused South Africa’s government of failing to sufficiently engage in direct communications with Israel to inform it that there was a conflict between the two states. South Africa “seems to believe that it does not take two to tango,” he said. South Africa “decided unilaterally that a dispute existed” between Israel and South Africa, despite what Shaw called Israel’s “conciliatory and friendly” offers to meet with South Africa to discuss its concerns about the Gaza war. This defies common sense, given that in November, Pretoria publicly accused Israel of genocide and called for the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest. Israel responded by withdrawing its ambassador.

Shaw then addressed the voluminous statements made by Israeli officials introduced in court by South Africa as evidence of “genocidal intent.” Shaw dismissed these statements as “random assertions” that failed “to demonstrate that Israel has or has had the intent to destroy” the Palestinian people. He contended that none of those statements constituted an official policy of the Israeli government and said the only relevant factor for the court to consider is whether such statements reflected official decisions or directives made by the Israeli leaders and its war Cabinet. Shaw declared they did not, citing several official Israeli statements directing armed forces to comply with international laws and to make efforts to protect civilians from harm or death. He neglected to respond to the direct connections drawn, including through video evidence, by South Africa’s legal team showing how Israeli forces on the ground echoed Israeli officials’ statements about destroying Gaza as they laid siege to the strip. 

The British lawyer directly addressed Netanyahu’s invocation of the biblical story of the destruction of Amalek, in which God ordered the Israelites to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Shaw argued there was “no need here for a theological discussion.” South Africa, he charged, took Netanyahu’s words out of context and failed to include the portion of his statement where he emphasized that the IDF was the “most moral army in the world” and “does everything to avoid harming the uninvolved.” The implication of Shaw’s argument is that Netanyahu’s platitudes about the nobility of the IDF somehow nullified the significance of invoking a violent biblical edict to describe a military operation against people Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described as “human animals.”

After offering a litany of public Israeli statements about protecting civilians and offering humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, Shaw quipped, “Genocidal intent?” as though these words and claims somehow erase the actual actions the entire world has watched daily for more than three months. With no sense of shame, Shaw characterized Israel’s statements directing Palestinians in Gaza to immediately evacuate their homes as a humanitarian gesture. Yesterday, South Africa called the evacuation order for over a million people on short notice an act of genocide in and of itself. 

In a moment of supreme gaslighting, Shaw concluded his presentation by accusing the government of South Africa of “complicity in genocide” and failing in its “duty to prevent genocide.” He charged, “South Africa has given succor and support to Hamas at the least.” He said the allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous” and argued that Hamas’s conduct, not Israel’s, meets the “statutory definition of genocide.” Unlike Hamas, he continued, Israel has made “unprecedented efforts at mitigating civilian harm … as well as alleviating hardship and suffering” to its own detriment. 

Galit Rajuan, another Israeli lawyer, argued that Israel was operating within the rules of law in its attacks on Gaza. She spent considerable time accusing Hamas of using hospitals and other civilian sites to operate militarily and to hold Israeli hostages. South Africa, she said, pretended “as if Israel is operating in Gaza against no armed adversary” and said the civilian deaths and destruction caused by Israel’s operations is “the desired outcome” Hamas wants. “Many civilian deaths are caused by Hamas,” she alleged. 

She repeated claims that have been debunked about Hamas using hospitals for military operations and holding hostages, claiming that any damage Israel had done to hospitals in Gaza was “always as a direct result of Hamas’s abhorrent method of warfare.”

Responding to South Africa’s assertion that Palestinians were given just 24 hours to flee their homes and hospitals, Rajuan claimed Israel had given the warnings weeks in advance through leaflets, online maps, and social media accounts. She did not mention that Israel has frequently shut down the internet in areas of Gaza and has repeatedly struck areas to which it told people to flee.

After describing what she characterized as Israel’s extensive efforts to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, Rajuan said it was evidence that the charge of genocide is “frankly untenable.” She said she had only told the court of a “mere fraction” of the efforts Israel had made to warn civilians to leave their homes and to deliver aid but that it “is enough to demonstrate … that the allegation of the intent to commit genocide is baseless.” Her portrayal of Israel as a beneficent humanitarian moving mountains to alleviate the suffering Palestinians would be laughable if it wasn’t so deadly. But such statements are easy to offer when your official policy is to portray aid organizations and U.N. workers as Hamas operatives. 

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Israel’s War on Gaza

For months, international aid organizations have condemned Israel, which functions as the overlord of what goes in and out of Gaza, for obstructing humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. Just this week, U.N. officials said that Israel is blocking it from getting aid to northern Gaza, while the World Health Organization said it is facing “insurmountable” challenges in delivering aid. Nonetheless, Omri Sender, another lawyer for Israel, claimed that Israel is delivering large quantities of aid daily to Gaza, despite “Hamas constantly stealing it.” He told the judges that “Israel no doubt meets the legal test of concrete measures aimed specifically … at ensuring the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza to exist.”

Christopher Staker closed Israel’s legal arguments by charging that South Africa was trying to force a unilateral ceasefire by Israel and that this would allow Hamas to be “free to continue attacks, which it has a stated [intent] to do.” He said that the civilian carnage and destruction in Gaza cited by South Africa do not inherently constitute genocide and that it is “not within the court’s power” to order provisional measures directing Israel to cease all military operations under the Genocide Convention. He contended that Israel has a legitimate right to engage in military conduct in Gaza that South Africa is seeking to restrain, and that an ICJ order to cease all operations would cause “irreparable prejudice” to the rights of Israel. South Africa, in its argument on Thursday, contended that by refusing to cease its operations, Israel was ensuring that the pile of Palestinian corpses would continue to grow alongside the amputations of limbs without anesthesia and babies dying of treatable illnesses. 

Staker took a page from Netanyahu’s well-worn propaganda playbook and compared the Gaza war to World War II, saying an international court ordering Israel to cease operations in Gaza would be akin to a court in the 1940s forcing the Allies in World War II to surrender to the Axis powers in Europe. He said a suspension of military operations would “deprive Israel of the ability to contend with the security threat against it” and allow Hamas to commit further atrocities. Such measures by the ICJ, he alleged, would assist Hamas. He also said the orders requested by South Africa were too broadly framed and, if enforced by the world court, would incapacitate Israeli operations in Palestinian territories other than Gaza. He said this as though Israel is protecting a country club in the West Bank from robbers and vandals rather than presiding over an illegal apartheid regime where Palestinians are subjected to conditions not unlike those found in South Africa decades ago.

Staker also said that South Africa’s request that the court order Israel to preserve evidence of potential crimes had no basis in fact and that no proof was offered that Israel was destroying evidence in Gaza. He said such an order would be an “unprincipled and unnecessary tarnishing of [Israel’s] reputation.” Staker may want to peruse the list of Palestinian libraries, archives, cultural sites, monuments, historic churches, and mosques that Israel has destroyed. Not to mention the academics, poets, storytellers, and historians its forces have erased from the earth.

Israel’s representative Gilad Noam closed his government’s defense by claiming that South Africa portrayed Israel as a “lawless state that regards itself as beyond and above the law. … in which the entire society” has “become consumed with destroying an entire population.” This was remarkable in that it represented an accurate characterization of precisely what South Africa argued in its presentation. Of course, Noam assured the court that this characterization was “patently false.” 

South Africa, Noam said, “defames not only the Israeli leadership but also [Israeli] society.” Returning to the statements made by Israeli officials that South Africa’s lawyers said constituted proof of genocidal intent, Noam claimed that some of these “harsh” statements by Israel’s leaders were in response to the “destruction of Jews and Israelis.” He said that Israel’s courts take incitement seriously and are currently investigating such cases. 

Noam accused South Africa of engaging in a “concerted and cynical effort to pervert the term ‘genocide’ itself.” He asked the judges to reject the requests to order a halting of Israeli military operations in Gaza and to dismiss South Africa’s case in full. The president of the court, U.S. Judge Joan Donoghue, adjourned the hearing, saying the judges would rule as soon as possible.

During its presentation before the court, Israel made no arguments to defend its conduct in Gaza that it—and its backers in the Biden administration for that matter—has not made repeatedly in the media over the past three months as part of its propaganda campaign to justify the unjustifiable. Each day that passes, more Palestinians will die at the hands of U.S. munitions fired by Israeli forces and the already dire humanitarian situation will deteriorate further. Should the court take Israel’s side and dismiss South Africa’s claims, Israel will point to that as evidence of the justness of its cause. If the judges approve South Africa’s request for an order to halt Israel’s military attacks, the question will be called on whether Israel and its sponsors in Washington, D.C., will respect international law. If history offers any insight on that matter, the future remains grim for the Palestinians of Gaza.

The post At The Hague, Israel Mounted a Defense Based in an Alternate Reality appeared first on The Intercept.