Indholdsfortegnelse for 27 October 2023 i Guardian Weekly

The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Vol 209 | Issue№ 17 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia. The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community.…

Gaza Misery on the journey south Page 14 → Europe Antisemitism on the rise Page 15 → Analysis Israel’s missing ‘victory’ vision Page 16 → Last Thursday morning, the USS Carney, a US Navy guided missile destroyer, was in the northern Red Sea when its radar detected three cruise missiles apparently launched by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The missiles’ target was unclear but they were heading north, so it was “potentially” Israel. Within a very short time, the Carney had destroyed them all. These were the first shots fired by the US in defence of Israel in the current conflict. The Pentagon press secretary, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, later told reporters the intervention was “to send a strong message intended to deter a wider conflict” and “regional escalation”. The…

For weeks, Israel has pounded Gaza with missiles, as it gathers tanks and troops for a ground invasion with one stated goal: to destroy Hamas. It is a deceptively simple target, one that sounds urgent and necessary to many in a nation profoundly traumatised by the massacres of 7 October, hoping to reclaim their sense of security, and a military determined to restore its damaged authority. “Now we have a lot of pressure from the Israeli population,” a senior Israeli security official said. “We are really trying in headquarters here not to be emotionally irrational in every decision. The only conclusion is that we have to go in. We have to go in and clean it and to eliminate Hamas from the roots, not only militarily, but also economically, its…

Brutal as they were, last week’s twin UK byelection losses in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire did not necessarily change the plight faced by the Conservatives. But they shone so bright a beam on the situation that even the most self-deluding Tory MP can no longer pretend. It was only three months ago that a narrow victory in Uxbridge gave the Tories hope, with Rishi Sunak saying it meant the next general election was “not a done deal”. But last Thursday’s results suggest the modest 6.7 percentage point swing in Uxbridge from the Conservatives to Labour was an outlier, apparently led by discontent in the outer London seat over the expansion of the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez). Far more pertinent in retrospect was the Selby and Ainsty byelection on the…

I find rewilding an inspiring idea. But, alongside its critics, I’m also troubled by some implications – particularly the idea that farm-land will have to be cultivated even more intensively to produce food because other fields are turned over to nature. Is it realistic? The pioneering English rewilding project at Knepp in West Sussex may produce high-quality free-range meat but George Monbiot – a big fan of rewilding – has pointed out that its meat production per hectare is so small that, if rolled out across 10% of British farmland, it would provide just three meat meals a person a year. Small-scale, low-impact market gardening lacks significant government support and yet it is remarkably productive: as Monbiot reveals in his book Regenesis, market gardener Iain Tolhurst produces 120 tonnes of…

The last time Venezuelans went to the polls, in 2018, the political opposition to Nicolás Maduro, the president, deemed the election so farcical it walked away from the contest. Since then, a fractured opposition has largely resigned itself to watching helplessly as Hugo Chávez’s successor tightened his grip on power and the country fell ever deeper into chaos. About 7.3 million people have fled insecurity, poverty and persecution since 2014, and another 2,000 Venezuelans are risking their lives every day to cross the jungles of the Darién Gap. Now the opposition is back campaigning. Maduro has promised to hold fair elections in 2024 and there is growing hope the opposition’s frontrunner, María Corina Machado, might beat him at the ballot box. The only snag is Venezuela’s controller general has barred…

POLLY TOYNBEE Poland’s turn from populists brings hope Page 48 → There’s a reason we speak of “blind rage”: when anger descends, we cannot see what’s in front of us. And if that’s true of individuals, it’s truer still of nations. That was the message Joe Biden brought when he travelled to Israel last week. Drawing on his own experience of bereavements, he consoled Israelis grieving for the more than 1,400 civilians killed by Hamas in the 7 October massacre and those waiting for word on the 203 hostages, including young children and the elderly, still held in Gaza. But Biden also drew on his memory of how US leaders reacted to America’s collective trauma in September 2001, and he offered something closer to a warning. “I caution you, while…

‘I can lead the people,” says Levy Rozman. That may sound like a bold claim but Rozman, 27, with 4.29m YouTube subscribers, is clearly someone people are happy to follow. Known online as GothamChess, he is the planet’s most popular chess YouTuber. An engaged community of fans hangs on his every word. And he has the credentials to back up his thoughts: he is an international master. His channel has more than a billion views, the first chess channel to reach this figure. Rozman is riding a huge chess wave; one he can take some credit in having created. There were three lightning bolts, he says. The first was The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix drama about a fictional chess prodigy, Beth Harmon; there was the rising popularity of the game on…

Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination. The German film-maker has become meme-ified and satirised – not his work, but his person, his wild-haired, Bavarianaccented, sad-eyed, difficult-truth-intoning person. As I read this book, I found myself thinking of the bears at my local zoo. Two young grizzlies were introduced last year; I became fascinated bythem. As I watched the bears play, swim and sleep, I was occasionally visited by strange, glinting moments of dark understanding: that they were predators, that if I met them in the wild, they might very well consign me to the void. Of course, bears are Herzogian – after all, he made the documentary Grizzly Man, about one conservationist’s obsession with the creatures. The void, too, is ineluctably Herzogian – it hovers at…

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As events in Gaza continue to dominate headlines, we focus this week on the frantic diplomatic efforts to prevent the crisis from spiralling into a wider global conflict. Jason Burke traces the possible route to a wider war or, in the other direction, to at least a pause in hostilities. Elsewhere, Ruth Michaelson hears from terrified Gazans who have been pushed south, while Emma Graham-Harrison and Julian Borger consider the likely consequences of a “victorious” Israeli ground offensive. There’s also a report on rising antisemitism against Jewish people across Europe since the 7 October Hamas terror attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza. And in the Opinion section, Jonathan Freedland and Nesrine Malik both offer powerful perspectives on the conflict. Special report Page 10 → With much attention ranged on the…

Even before Israel gave the order for a million Palestinians to leave their homes and flee south, Lubna took her four children and moved to a friend’s house in Khan Younis, nearer the Egyptian border. The family were able to share a room at first, but now in the wake of the Israeli edict and bombing campaign, that is no longer possible. “We are not the only family at the house now. There are others. We are sleeping seven ladies in the same room and the men sleep outside,” Lubna wrote in a series of texts from Khan Younis. “There is no electricity or water. The strikes are everywhere.” The implication behind the order for northern Gazans to move south to towns such as Khan Younis and Rafah was that…

At the beginning of September, Branko boarded a direct flight from Belgrade to Moscow. After a few days in the Russian capital, Branko, with three other Serbian nationals, was driven to a military recruitment centre in Krasnogorsk, a city on the outskirts of Moscow, where the group signed a contract with the Russian military. “It all went very fast; in one day I became a soldier for Russia … Now I am waiting to be sent to Ukraine,” Branko said in a text exchange on Telegram, requesting anonymity so he could speak freely. Branko, not his real name, was part of Moscow’s latest drive to recruit Serbs to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine, as the Kremlin seeks to replenish its forces, depleted by 18 months of fighting. Based…

Bobby Charlton, who has died aged 86, was the quintessential English footballer, among the very best the country has produced and certainly one of the best-loved. He was synonymous with Manchester United during a 20-year association with the club. As such, his was perhaps the greatest of careers, encompassing as it did the Busby Babes era of the 1950s, the Munich air disaster and its aftermath, and the subsequent rebuilding that culminated in Manchester United becoming the first English team to win the European Cup in 1968. Two years earlier, Charlton had won the World Cup with England. Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick dominated coverage of the final against West Germany, but Charlton’s goals had helped England through the earlier rounds, most notably in the semi-final against Portugal, when his penchant for…

Cameroon In the coastal city of Douala a funeral is being held for Bryan Achou*, whose body was pulled from the Mediterranean and returned to his family less than a year ago. Friends and relatives commiserate about his fate. “He’s a child from my neighbourhood. In less than two weeks, we lost two children: one was in the ocean between Turkey and Greece, the other was in Tunisia,” said one woman. “Really, before 2035, this country will have been emptied of its citizens,” another mourner said. This is a reference to the government’s new development paper Cameroon vision 2035, an outline of plans by the president, the 90-year-old autocrat Paul Biya, to revitalise his ailing, conflict-ridden country. Judging by the resignation in the reactions to the remark, no one here…

You’re a mega-billionaire. You already own one of the world’s most influential social media platforms, and dominate more than half of the US electric car market. You are regularly named as one of the world’s most influential people. You’ve had your hairline sorted, you’ve already had 11 children, so what do you do next? For Elon Musk, the answer is: attempt to dominate space. So far the effort is going well. SpaceX, the company Musk founded in 2002, has launched more than 4,500 Starlink satellites in the past five years, accounting for more than half of all active satellites orbiting Earth. Together those satellites can deliver internet access to almost anywhere in the globe, giving Musk access over global communications and the ability to intervene in military conflicts. But this…

AT THE SECOND BARRIER, A SIGN: Weapons Handover Point. Those who deposit their Kalashnikovs here get a locker number and their weapon back on leaving. The road winds up the hill between circular trimmed hedges. At the third barrier: a body search. Then, behind a metal gate, the driveway to the hotel appears. Car tyres squeal on the marble slabs in front of the entrance. The Intercontinental Hotel towers over the Afghan capital like a castle. Kabul, this war-ravaged city. The noise of its car horns can no longer be heard up here. The Intercontinental, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, opened in 1969. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than 40 years. Rulers came and went,…

A few years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war, I heard an interview on the BBC with a Lebanese woman from Beirut that has stayed with me for 30 years. She was asked if the country had healed the deep divisions that fuelled the war. “They are buried,” she said. “But if you squeeze me very tight, it’s all still there, deep inside me.” Her words instilled in me a formative awareness that no matter how dormant grievances are, they can still, under pressure, come alive. The Arab spring was an uprising of grievances that several strongmen and deep states thought had been put to sleep for ever. But even as the forces of the status quo regrouped and the Arab spring was consigned to the tragic file of…

Making a film in Haiti, as director Gessica Généus can testify, is no easy thing. When she began work at the end of 2019 on her 2021 feature, Freda, the country was engulfed in the Petrocaribe street protests, named for the vast scandal involving Venezuelan oil that saw billions of dollars vanish. Through December 2019 and January 2020 she carried on working, at one stage filming while gunfire rang out for hours outside the nightclub where she was filming, prompting concerned calls from her actors’ families. Généus’s new project, due to begin shooting in the port city of Jacmel next year, will potentially commence in the midst of the even more difficult situation that has engulfed the Caribbean country since the murder of its president Jovenel Moïse by mercenaries in…

For decades, feminists have been pointing out undeniable limitations to George Orwell’s work and life. As Deirdre Beddoe put it nearly 40 years ago, he was “totally blind” to the role that women “were and are forced to play”, and this insight is now being vividly fleshed out by other writers. Anna Funder’s recent Wifedom was a fascinating exploration of what it might have meant for Orwell’s wife Eileen to live in his shadow, while Sandra Newman’s novel Julia is an even more ambitious creation. Here, Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little…

1 TECHNOLOGY Quest for more powerful AI ‘reckless’, say experts Powerful artificial intelligence systems threaten social stability and AI companies must be made liable for harms caused by their products, a group of senior experts has warned. The intervention on Tuesday was made as international politicians, tech companies, academics and civil society figures prepare to gather at Bletchley Park in the UK next week for a summit on AI safety. A co-author of the policy proposals from 23 experts said it was “reckless” to pursue ever more powerful AI systems before understanding how to make them safe. “Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless,” said Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. The document urged governments to adopt…

POLICE Force must explain actions after jihad chants at rally The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, will be asked to explain to home secretary Suella Braverman why the force failed to take action against demonstrators who chanted about “jihad” in London last weekend. Video footage from a rally organised by the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which was separate from a much larger pro-Palestine rally of about 100,000 people, showed a man talking about Palestine and asking what the solution was, before the word “jihad” was heard. The Met said “jihad” had numerous meanings and it believed, after consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), that no offence had been committed. Questioned about the matter on Sky News, the transport secretary, Mark Harper, said the police had the ability to…

A United Nations investigation has found further evidence that Russian forces committed “indiscriminate attacks” and war crimes in Ukraine, including rape and the deportation of children to Russia. “The collected evidence further shows that Russian authorities have committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, rape and other sexual violence, and the deportation of children to the Russian Federation,” a UN commission of inquiry on Ukraine said in a report submitted to the UN general assembly. “The commission has recently documented attacks that affected civilian objects, such as residential buildings, a railway station, shops, and a warehouse for civilian use, leading to numerous casualties.” Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians and has said Ukrainian allegations of war crimes are concocted. The commission said it had focused its investigations on Kherson…

Billionaires are notoriously hard to track. It’s no surprise – the easier they and their assets are to find, the easier they are to tax. But by all accounts, the number of uber-wealthy people in China is in decline. Of the world’s estimated 2,640 billionaires, at least 562 are thought to be in China, according to Forbes, down from 607 last year. With crackdowns on financiers and a roiling political climate, many of China’s rich people are looking to move their money, and themselves, out of the country. Officially, individuals can transfer just $50,000 out of China each year. But in practice wealthy people have a range of official and unofficial ways of shifting their funds, whether through money exchanges in Hong Kong, where controls do not apply, or funnelling…

Death threats. Screaming matches behind closed doors. A futile cycle of votes that put internecine warfare on full public display. The Republican party last week sank into new depths of disarray and dysfunction – with no remedy in sight. Never before has America gone so long without a speaker of the House of Representatives and, critics say, not for a very long time has a major party appeared so broken. It has left a branch of the US government leaderless at an extraordinary moment of peril in the Middle East and Ukraine. A notable setback came last Friday when Jim Jordan, a rightwing Ohio congressman endorsed by former president Donald Trump, lost a third vote to become speaker and was then unceremoniously dumped by Republicans as their nominee. The majority…

THERE ARE PILES OF PHOTOGRAPHS dotted all around James Barnor’s modest west London retirement flat: on bookshelves, in drawers, behind his radio, too. Negatives and contact sheets are laid out on the window sill; bigger prints are stored somewhere beyond his front door, in a cupboard into which he keeps disappearing. “If we’re going to do this,” he’d said after greeting me, followed by a long, deep laugh, “we have to do it properly. Get comfortable – I don’t want us to miss anything.” And we don’t, not that I’ve got any complaints: I’ve barely noticed the light outside fading. It’s now late afternoon on a grey October Monday – the 94-year-old firmly into leading his fourth hour of free-flowing, life-spanning conversation. Sitting squarely opposite me, barefoot in his bright…

In a darkening world, a radiant beam shines out from Poland. Look, it is possible to push back the authoritarian populist tide. Extreme rightwingers who sack judges, try to silence opposition journalists, impose a near-total abortion ban and create what activists decry as “gay-free zones” can be overcome. Unprecedented numbers can be persuaded to vote, including usually reluctant young people. Britain, where one party of the right nearly always wins, with the press dominated by plutocrats and an electoral system warped to favour the Tories, has lessons to learn from how Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) was vanquished. Labour will have watched the campaign of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party and the other anti-PiS parties that are about to form a coalition. True, the Tories aren’t PiS – Labour…

Although veganism has long been practised by many cultures, restaurants have drastically increased the variety of vegan dishes available lately. Here, three vegan-food chefs and business owners share tips for “veganising” omnivore recipes. Cheesy flavours: use fermented tofu Lasagne, mac and cheese, bechamel – how to achieve the cheesiness of these comfort foods, minus the actual cheese? When choosing a replacement, Shannon Martinez of Smith + Daughters in Melbourne, Australia, suggests home cooks consider the role cheese plays in a dish. “Is the cheese there to give the salty flavour of feta, for example, or the slightly funky, stronger taste of blue cheese?” Nutritional yeast has long been a go-to substitute for vegans. But Martinez prefers fermented tofu. “Go to an Asian supermarket, and find a jar,” she says. “It…