Spain, the fourth most Covid-19 affected country after China, Italy and Iran has seen close to 600 deaths and about 14,000 positive cases until now. Though positive cases in India are still in the three digit figures and deaths in single digits, measures taken by other countries, both on ground and on a policy level, can become examples to follow.

Spain ruled by a centre-left coalition, has taken an unprecedented measure to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak in its country. It announced that private hospitals and health care providers would be temporarily nationalized to combat the spread of the disease. Health Minister Salvador Illa said private healthcare facilities and materials such as face masks and tests would be requisitioned for coronavirus patients, while companies and suppliers of needed equipment had 48 hours to notify the government. The government even called fourth-year medical students to reinforce health centres and hospital to increase the workforce in health care which is currently under immense pressure.

The spread of the disease has proved to be a challenge to health care systems of many countries. In many cases it has exposed whether a country’s health care system is pro-poor or is it just a profit-making sector. In India, many suspect that since the test are free and each test costs about Rs. 5,000, the government is reluctant on expanding testing beyond people with travel history, local transmission and now for health care workers coming in contact with positive cases. If that is the case then it is just the silence before the storm, one that India is not prepared to handle.

While Spain has been lauded for taking over private hospitals, the question about what is being done for social security is still looming. People are out of jobs, daily wage workers are suffering and the economy has taken a hit for most part of the world. In such times, while Spain has taken care of health care, the financial burdens of those who have been forced into isolation continues to worsen and that is one more imperative arena the government needs to look into and act fast.

India, going by data, has the lowest COVID-19 testing figures in the world. India is conducting only about 90 tests a day, despite having the capacity for as many as 8,000. So far, 11,500 people have been tested, according to The Associated Press. As per Indian officials the WHO guidance does not apply in India as the situation is not so severe here.

Since India is seemingly a less affected country, it needs to be prepared in case it needs to follow examples of such other countries and keep studying which of these measures are having a positive impact so the same may be replicated here as well, if the need to do so arises.

Related:

Spain takes sweeping measures as COVID-19 escalates

Maha gov’t to stamp those advised home quarantine amid Covid-19 outbreak

“Does the Coronavirus ignore wedding parties, and attack only peaceful protests?”

Govt cannot make compensation conditional: Calcutta HC

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The Alcázar palace in Seville, once home to some of the Muslim rulers in al-Andalus. via shutterstock.com

Their son, Richard, Duke of York, led a rebellion against King Henry VI which developed into the Wars of the Roses. Richard’s second son Edward took the throne in 1461. Thus the legacy of Islamic Spain – better known as al-Andalus – found its way into the Plantagenet royal court.

This lineage has been of recent interest both in the UK and in the Middle East, as it purportedly proves a family relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and the Prophet Muhammad himself. Respected experts and commentators such as Burke’s Peerage and Ali Gomaa, the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, have suggested that Zaida was the offspring of al-Muʿtamid, ruler of Seville and a descendant of the daughter of the Prophet, Fāṭima and her husband ʿĀlī.

As a member of the Hashemite family, the descendants of Fāṭima and ʿĀlī, the Queen would count as relatives, among others, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or the Aga Khan IV, Prince Shah Karim Al Hussaini, a close friend of the current Royal family.
Sadly, the theory of the Queen’s Hashemite lineage is too good to be true. The mysteries surrounding Zaida’s origins, the key to the puzzle, make it hard to sustain her potential right to rule over the realm of Islam.

‘Conviviencia’: there was much intermingling of the faiths in early medieval Spain. Lebedel:

Be that as it may, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the Queen’s Spanish ancestor. The story of the marriage union between Zaida and Alfonso VI not only raises questions about race, ethnicity and cultural belonging, but also adds nuance to explanations of the contact between Islam and the Christian West.

A number of recent books and articles have presented the contact between “Las Tres Culturas” – as the Abrahamic faiths are commonly referred to in Spain – in one of two mutually exclusive ways. Spain was either a land of tolerance, better known as “convivencia”, or it was a theatre of war and inter-religious conflict. In fact, Zaida and Alfonso VI lived in a world which allowed little reflection on these modern debates.

Column of King al-Muʿtamid in the Alcazar of Seville. José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA

Zaida enjoyed the many luxuries of the court of the ʿAbbādid dynasty of Seville through her marriage to al-Fath al-Maʾmūn, the son of the emir al-Muʿtamid. While the accepted story is that Zaida was the daughter of the emir, recent studies have shown she most likely was an outsider, who gained access into the family’s inner circle through this marriage. By the 1040s, the ʿAbbādids supplanted Cordoba as the most prominent in al-Andalus.

This was a momentous change, since Islamic Spain had been ruled by the Umayyad dynasty for about 300 years. Under the rule of Zaida’s father-in-law, al-Muʿtamid, Seville experienced a “golden age” of culture, attracting famous poets from all corners of the Islamic Mediterranean, including Ibn Hamdis, and even al-Muʿtamid himself.
 

Zaida’s capture

In 1091, Seville was captured by the Almoravid troops of Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn, and the emir al-Muʿtamid was exiled to Aghmat, near Marrakech, in Morocco, where he would die soon after, lamenting his own failures in his last poems. As Zaida fled from the disastrous Almoravid siege, in which her husband al-Maʾmūn was killed, her fate appeared sealed. In her hurried exit seeking refuge north of Seville, the princess was taken into captivity and sent to the Castilian court in Toledo, where she would find a new life.

Alfonso VI of Castile. MaiDireLollo via Wikimedia Commons

Her future husband, Alfonso VI, had long been a thorn in the side of al-Muʿtamid, particularly after May 1085, when the Castilian ruler seized the bustling city of Toledo from the local Muslim dynasty. Alfonso VI’s conquest of Toledo was a serious blow to the hegemony of al-Andalus in Iberian politics, causing panic among the different emirs of al-Andalus and fuelling the arrival of the Almoravids north of the Straits of Gibraltar.

Alfonso VI aspired to become the sole ruler of the Iberian Peninsula, including the Islamic territories. According to the 13th-century Tunisian chronicler, Ibn al-Kardabūs, the arrogant Castilian ruler even started to fashion himself as the “Emperor of the Two Religions”. In this context, the decision to welcome Zaida at the Castilian court – instead of sending her to Morocco to her relatives in exile – and Alfonso’s sexual relationship with the Muslim princess, was not as a sign of coexistence, but a confident statement of power.
 

Conversion to Christianity

Zaida’s position at the court was as poorly understood by Christian contemporaries in Spain as it is today. Some texts refer to her as a concubine; in fact, according to Pelayo, the famous bishop of Oviedo, Zaida was “nearly his wife”. And if the presence of the Muslim princess at court might have been a touchy subject in itself, Alfonso VI’s decision to make Zaida his legitimate spouse was even more perplexing.

The birth of Sancho, Alfonso VI’s only son, was the determining factor. Zaida then converted to Christianity, taking the same name, Isabel, later used by her famous descendant. Zaida’s bedroom, which had been so important in her rise to royal favour, also saw her fall. The princess died giving birth to one of the other two children she conceived with Alfonso VI while acting as Queen consort.

Queen Elizabeth II’s ancestors transgressed their religious, cultural and political boundaries in ways which are now difficult to classify. At the same time, the story of Zaida’s marriage to Alfonso VI is a reminder of the intimate and profoundly complex interlacing of our common Islamic and European pasts.
 

Rodrigo García-Velasco, PhD Scholar, Woolf Institute & Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau (Photo: Barcelona En Comú / Flickr)

“We’re living in extraordinary times that demand brave and creative solutions. If we’re able to imagine a different city, we’ll have the power to transform it.” – Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona.

On 24 May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú was elected as the minority government of the city of Barcelona. Along with a number of other cities across Spain, this election was the result of a wave of progressive municipal politics across the country, offering an alternative to neoliberalism and corruption.

With Ada Colau — a housing rights activist — catapulted into the position of mayor, and with a wave of citizens with no previous experience of formal politics finding themselves in charge of their city, BComú is an experiment in progressive change that we can’t afford to ignore.

After 20 months in charge of the city, we try to draw some of the main lessons that can help inspire and inform a radical new municipal politics that moves us beyond borders and nations — and towards a post-capitalist world based on dignity, respect, and justice.

1. The best way to oppose nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment is to confront the real reasons life is shit.

There is no question that life is getting harder, more precarious, more stressful, and less certain for the majority of people.

In the U.S. and across Europe, racist reactionaries and nationalist politicians are blaming this on two things — immigrants, and “outside forces” that challenge national sovereignty.

While Trump and Brexit are the most obvious cases, we can see the same phenomenon across Europe, in the rise of far-right parties like Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Front National in France.

In Barcelona, there is a relative absence of public discourse that blames the social crisis on immigrants, and most attempts to do so have fallen flat. On the contrary, on February 18 of this year, over 160,000 people flooded the streets of Barcelona to demand that Spain take in more refugees. While this demonstration was also caught up with complexities of Catalan nationalism and controversy over police repression of migrant street vendors, it highlighted the support for a politics that cares for migrants and refugees.

The main reason for this is simple: There is a widespread and successful politics that provides real explanations of why people are suffering, and that fights for real solutions.
The reason you can’t afford your rent is because of predatory tourism, unscrupulous landlords, a lack of social housing, and property being purchased as overseas investments. The reason social services are being cut is because the central government transferred huge amounts of public funds into the private banks, propping up a financial elite, and because of a political system riddled with corruption.

While Barcelona played a leading role in initiating a network of “cities of refuge,” simply condemning anti-immigrant nationalism isn’t enough. In a climate where popular municipal movements are providing a strong narrative as to what they see as the problem — and identifying what they’re going to do about it — it’s incredibly difficult for racist and nationalist narratives based on lies and hatred to take root.

2. Politics doesn’t have to be the preserve of rich old white men.

Ada Colau is the first female mayor of Barcelona. She is a co-founder of BComú, and was formerly the spokesperson of the Mortgage Victims Platform, a grassroots campaign challenging evictions and Spain’s unjust property laws. Colau leads a group of 11 district council members, seven of whom are women, whose average age is 40.

BComú’s vision of a “feminized politics” represents a significant break with the existing political order. “You can be in politics without being a strong, arrogant male, who’s ultra-confident, who knows the answer to everything,” Colau explains. Instead, she offers a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions. This is backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and the common good — as well as policies designed to build on that vision.

The Barcelona City Council’s new Department of Life Cycles, Feminisms, and LGBTI is the institutional expression of these values. It has significantly increased the budget for campaigns against sexist violence, as well as leading a council working group that looks to identify and tackle the feminization of poverty.

The changing face of the city council is reinforced by BComú’s strict ethics policy, Governing by Obeying, which includes a €2,200 monthly limit on payments to its elected officials. Colau takes home less than a quarter of the amount claimed by her predecessor Xavier Trias. By February 2017, €216,000 in unclaimed salaries had been paid into a new fund that will support social projects in the city.

3. A politics that works begins by listening.

BComú started life with an extensive process of listening, responding to ordinary peoples’ concerns, and crowd-sourcing ideas — as summarized in its guide to building a citizen municipal platform.

Drawing on proposals gathered at meetings in public squares across the city, BComú created a program reflecting immediate issues in local neighborhoods, city-wide problems, and broader discontent with the political system. Local meetings were complemented by technical and policy committees, and an extensive process of online consultation.

This process resulted in a political platform that stressed the need to tackle the “social emergency” — problems such as home evictions on a huge scale, or the effect of uncontrolled mass tourism. These priorities came from listening to citizens across the city rather than an echo chamber of business and political elites. BComú’s election results reflected this broader appeal: It won its highest share of the vote in Barcelona’s poorest neighborhoods, in part through increasing turnout in those areas.

On entering government, BComú then began to implement an Emergency Plan that included measures to halt evictions, hand out fines to banks leaving multiple properties empty, and subsidize energy and transport costs for the unemployed and those earning under the minimum wage.

4. A politics that works never stops listening.

Politics doesn’t happen every four years — it is the everyday process of shaping the conditions in which we live our lives. This means that one of the central tasks of a politics that works is to forge a new relationship between citizens and the institutions that we use to govern our societies.

For BComú, the everyday basis of politics means citizens and civil society organizations directly shaping the strategic plan of their city. It means not just consultation, but active empowerment in helping move citizens from being “recipients” of a politics that is done to them, to active political agents that shape the everyday life of their city.

In the first months of occupying the institutions, BComú introduced an open-source platform, Decidim Barcelona, for citizens to co-create the municipal action plan for the city. Over 10,000 proposals were registered by the site’s 25,000 registered users. While that’s a small share of the city’s population, the online process was complemented by over 400 in-person meetings.

The Decidim platform is now being adapted to run participatory budgetary pilot-schemes in two districts, as well as being used in the ongoing development of new infrastructure, pedestrian-friendly spaces, and transport schemes. Meanwhile, the municipal Department of Participation is undertaking a systematic rethinking of the meaning of participation, looking to move away from meaningless “consultations” and towards methods for active empowerment.

This is an imperfect process, and BComú have gotten things wrong at times — such as the failure to properly engage when introducing a SuperBlock in the Poblenou district — but the principle is simple. To govern well, you must create new processes for obeying citizens’ demands.

At the same time, the structures that built BComú remain in place, with 15 neighborhood groups and 15 thematic working groups providing an ongoing link between activists and institutions. No structure is perfect, and it remains unclear if these working groups can help BComú avoid institutionalization and remain connected to social movements, but the hope is that this model provides a basis for remaining in touch with grassroots concerns.
 

(Photo Mandeep Flora / Flickr)

5. Politics doesn’t begin with the party.

BComú isn’t a local arm of a bigger political party, nor does it exist merely as a branch of a broader strategy to control the central political institutions of the nation-state.

Rather, BComú is one in a series of independent citizen platforms that have looked to occupy municipal institutions in an effort to bring about progressive social change.

From A Coruña to Valencia, Madrid and Zaragoza, these municipal movements are the direct efforts of citizens rejecting the old mode of doing politics, and starting to effect change where they live. Instead of a national party structure, they coordinate through a network of rebel cities across Spain. Most immediately, this means coordinating press releases and actively learning from how one another engage with urban problems.

That doesn’t mean that BComú can reject political parties entirely. While the initiative arose from social movements, it ended up incorporating several existing political parties in its platform. These include Podemos — another child of Spain’s Occupy-style indignados movement — and the Catalan Greens-United Left party, which had consistently been a junior coalition partner in city councils headed by the center-left Socialist Party of Catalonia from 1979 until 2011.

These parties continue alongside BComú, with their own completely separate organizational and funding structures. But entering BComú has forced existing parties to significantly change how they operate. Coalition negotiations encouraged the selection of new council members (only two of the elected candidates have previously held office), and they are subject to a tough ethics code that considerably increases their accountability.

The fluid relationship between the new coalitions and political parties allows for multiple levels of coordination, without having to pass through a rigid central leadership. It may also be replicated in regional government, where the recently formed Un Pais En Comú seeks to replicate the city government coalition across Catalonia.

On a terrain that contains a different set of politics — not least a strong national-separatist sentiment — it remains to be seen whether this latest initiative will be successful.

6. Power is the capacity to act.

BComú doesn’t subscribe to traditional notions of power, whereby if you hold public office, you somehow “have” power. On the contrary, power is the capacity to bring about change, and the “occupation of the institutions” is only one part of what makes change possible.

BComú emerged after almost a decade of major street-protests, anti-eviction campaigns, squatting movements, anti-corruption campaigns, and youth movements — the most visible form being the indignados protests that began in 2011. After years of being at a high level of mobilization, many within these movements made a strategic wager: We’ve learned how to occupy the squares, but what happens if we try to occupy the institutions?

Frustrated by the limits of what could be achieved by being mobilized only outside of institutions, the decision to form BComú was to try to occupy the institutions as part of the same movement that occupied the squares. In practice, this isn’t so simple.

Politics is a messy game, full of compromises forced by working in a world of contradictions.

In the most practical sense, BComú may be leading the council, but it holds only 11 of the 41 available seats. Six other political parties are also represented on the council, mostly seeking to block, slow down, or weaken its initiatives. Frustrated by these moves — and overwhelmed by the demands of the institutions — BComú formed a governing coalition with the PSC, a move supported by around two-thirds of its registered supporters.

But it remains a minority government, and two left parties that refused a similar pact responded by stepping up their block on almost all legislative initiatives. The resulting political crisis delayed the passing of the city’s 2017 budget, which was eventually forced through on a confidence motion when BComú challenged the opposition to unite around another plan — which it failed to do.

While this experience has shown the resilience of BComú in the confrontational confines of the council chamber, the key lesson here is that occupying the institutions isn’t enough. An electoral strategy is not sufficient alone to create change.

The power to act comes from a combination of occupying both the institutions and the squares, of social movements organizing and exercising leverage, providing social force that can be coupled with the potential of the occupied institutions. The power to change comes when these work in tandem.

It’s been a bumpy ride, but BComú has been able to justify its budget on the grounds that it prioritizes social measures (such as building new nurseries, combatting energy poverty, and focusing resources on the poorest neighborhoods) with reference to the extensive and ongoing process of participation that it has encouraged.

One of the biggest dangers in looking to build radical municipalist movements in other cities is to mistake electoral victory with real victory — to sit back and think that now we’ve got “our guys” in the institutions, so we can sit back and let change occur.

7. Transnational politics begins in your city.

In a time where reactionary political movements are building walls and retreating to national boundaries, BComú is illustrating that a new transnational political movement begins in our cities.

To this end, BComú has established an international committee tasked with promoting and sharing its experiences abroad, while learning from other rebel cities such as Naples and Messina. Barcelona has been active in international forums, promoting the “right to the city” at the recent UN Habitat III conference, and taking a leadership role in the Global Network of Cities, Local, and Regional Governments.

These moves look to bypass the national scale where possible, prefiguring post-national networks of urban solidarity and cooperation. Recent visits of the first deputy mayor to the Colombian cities of Medellin and Bogotá also suggest that links are being made on a supranational scale.

One of the most tangible outcomes of this level of supranational urban organizing was the strong role played by cities in the rejection of the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership, or TTIP — a massive proposed trade pact between the U.S. and Europe. As hosts of a meeting entitled “Local Authorities and the New Generation of Free Trade Agreements” in April 2016, BComú led on the agreement of the Barcelona Declaration, with more than 40 cities committing to the rejection of TTIP. As of the time of writing, TTIP now looks dead in the water.

At this early stage, it remains unclear how this supranational network of radical municipalism may develop. Perhaps the most important step for BComú is to share their experience and support those in other cities that are looking to reclaim politics, helping to build citizens platforms across Europe and beyond.

But the idea of a post-national network of citizens also allows us to dare to dream — of shared resources, shared politics, and shared infrastructure — where it’s not where you were born but where you live that determines your right to live.

8. Essential services can be run in our common interest.

The clue to BComú’s strategy for essential services is hidden in its name: The plan is to run them in common.

At the end of 2016, and faced with a crisis in the funeral sector in which only two companies controlled the sector and charged prices almost twice the national average, the Barcelona council intervened to establish a municipal funeral company that is forecasted to reduce costs by 30 percent. Around the same time, the council voted in favor of the re-municipalization of water, paving the way for water to be taken out of the private sector at some point this year.

In February 2017, Barcelona amended the terms and conditions for electricity supply, preventing energy firms from cutting off supply to vulnerable people. The two major energy firms — Endesa and Gas Natural — protested this by not bidding for the €65-million municipal energy contracts, hoping this would force the council to overturn the policy.

Instead, a raft of small and medium size energy companies were happy to comply with the new directive to tackle energy poverty, and stand to be awarded the contracts if a court challenge from the large firms proves unsuccessful. BComú is also actively planning to introduce a municipal energy company within the next two years.

However, it’s important to recognize the major difference between the public and the common. As Michael Hardt argues, our choices are not limited to businesses controlled privately (private property) or by the state (public property). The third option is to hold things in common — where resources and services are controlled, produced, and distributed democratically and equitably according to peoples need.

A simple example of what this could look like was the proposal — which narrowly failed only due to voter turnout — for Berlin to establish an energy company that would put citizens on the board of the company.

This difference underpins the Barcelona experience. This isn’t a traditional socialist government that thinks it can run things better on behalf of the people. This is a movement that believes the people can run things better on their own behalf, combining citizen wisdom with expert knowledge to solve the everyday problems that people face.
 

The post How Progressive Cities Can Reshape the World — And Democracy appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

Demonstrators march on international migrant day 2016. EPA

On December 31 1937, Cambridge classicist and man of letters F L Lucas embarked on an experiment. He would keep a diary for exactly one calendar year. It was, as he put it: “an attempt to give one answer, however inadequate, however fragmentary, to the question that will surely be asked one day by some of the unborn – with the bewilderment, one hopes, of a happier age: ‘What can it have felt like to live in that strange, tormented and demented world?’”

Lucas sought to preserve an affective archive, and to write about how it felt to live in an era of spiralling crisis.

As someone who wasn’t born in 1938 I cannot help but feel that Lucas’ solemn hope that his generation was living through the worst of it – and that lessons would surely be learned – have been well and truly dashed. Has 2016 been 1938 all over again?

Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

At present, as in the “Devil’s Decade”, we are experiencing the capricious convergence of historical forces: the fall-out of economic crisis and the extreme polarisation of the political spectrum from far-right to hard-left – the centre doesn’t hold. A tidal wave of refugees is being met by proportionately more xenophobia than compassion. Militant isolationism is thriving. Doors are being closed and walls built. Culture wars are punctuated by attacks on “experts” and intellectuals. 2016 has even seen open an unashamed airing of anti-Semitism.

The historical parallels between 2016 and 1938 are abundant. There are important differences in detail, in time and place, but the pattern of events, and of cause and effect, is striking.

Civil war raged in Spain then – as it rages in Syria today. Then as now, these internecine conflicts provide mirrors to existing fissures in international relations and deepening ideological antagonisms. By the end of 1938, and after Abyssinia, Spain, Anschluss, and Kristallnacht, not much faith was left in the ideal of internationalism or in the League of Nations – and this too sounds all too familiar.

The aftermath of the Kristallnacht. Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA

The rescue of refugee children through the Kindertransports was just as symbolically important, yet as negligible, a solution to an immense humanitarian and moral crisis as has been the response to lone children refugees holed up in Calais this year. And what of Aleppo? Shame was, and is, a dominant feeling.

Where next?

The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was perceived by many of its British critics as an act of national suicide. The Brexit decision has likewise, again and again, been described as an act of self-harm, even of national hari-kari.

Writing at the end of the year, contemporary historian R W Seaton-Watson had no doubt that 1938 had “resulted in a drastic disturbance of the political balance on the Continent, the full consequences of which is still too soon to estimate”. Treaties weren’t worth the paper they were written on in 1938 – and at the end of 2016 it is worryingly unclear where Britain will stand after triggering Article 50.

Meanwhile, George Orwell’s assessment of the disarray of the political left post-Munich could just as well apply to Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. As Orwell saw it:

Barring some unforeseen scandal or a really large disturbance inside the Conservative Party, Labour’s chances of winning the General Election seem very small. If any kind of Popular Front is formed, its chances are probably less than those of Labour unaided. The best hope would seem to be that if Labour is defeated, the defeat may drive it back to its proper ‘line’.

Full circle

One could go on seeking coordinates but the sum total would still be the same. The rug has been pulled out from under the assumed solidity of the liberal democratic project. A delicate tapestry of structures and ideas is coming apart at the seams.

Even more specifically, it is the psychological experience, the search for meaning, and the emotional cycle, the feelings – collective and individual – of 1938 that are uncannily familiar.

Post-truth politics is anti-rational. Emotion has unexpectedly triumphed over reason in 2016. Love and/or hate has beaten intellect. That’s true for Hillary Clinton’s “love trumps hate” slogan as much as it is for her opponent.

The referendum result shook many. PA

New political technologies render older ones obsolete. In both Britain’s referendum campaign and in the American election, traditional opinion polls failed to capture the emotion being expressed across social media platforms.

Back in 1938, it was British Gallup and the rival Mass-Observation that were the innovative political technologies. Using very different techniques, each offered fresh insight into the psychology of political behaviour and tried to unseal the stiff upper lip of the British electorate.

Mass-Observation tried to get into people’s heads, and diagnosed an increasing occurrence of “crisis fatigue” as a response to nervous strain and “a sense of continuous crisis”.

Almost immediately after the EU referendum, therapists reported “shockingly elevated levels of anxiety and despair, with few patients wishing to talk about anything else”. And the visceral nature of the US election campaign contributed, tragically, to the exponential increase of calls to suicide helplines. National crisis is inevitably internalised.

Reflecting on the psychological fallout of the Munich Crisis, novelist E M Forster observed that: “exalted in contrary directions, some of us rose above ourselves, and others committed suicide.”

As 1938 drew to a close, serious conversations were dominated by the verbal and physical expressions of fatalism, anxiety, sickness, depression, and impending doom. Lucas wrote in his diary:

The Crisis seems to have filled the world with nervous break-downs. Or perhaps the Crisis itself was only one more nervous break-down of a world driven by the killing pace of modern life and competition into ever acuter neurasthenia [shell shock].

It is too simplistic to say that history repeats itself. And yet, throughout this past year I could not escape the feeling that we have been here before. We share with those who lived through 1938 overwhelming sensibility of bewilderment, suspense, desperation and fear of the unknown. I can’t help but wonder what future historians will make of 2016.

It’s probably sage advice to go see a good movie over the holidays – and La La Land, already tipped to win an Oscar, may provide just the kind of escapism that is needed. However, when someone comes to make the movie of 2016, the soundtrack will probably be the late Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker. It certainly feels like 1938 all over again. Time to start keeping a diary.

(Julie Gottlieb is Reader in Modern History, University of Sheffield).

(This story was first published on The Conversation).

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Dozens of Spanish cities declaring themselves ‘Free of Israeli Apartheid’ (Graphic: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement )

An unprecedented victory for the BDS movement and for Palestine solidarity groups across the Spanish state that have prevailed against relentless Israel lobby attempts to intimidate them into silence through propaganda and expensive court cases …

Ironically, Netanyahu has recently boasted that Israel has effectively “defeated” the BDS movement. My personal reaction to the media at the time was:

“Netanyahu’s peculiar claim that his government has defeated the BDS movement would have been worthy of a serious response if it weren’t so outlandish, false and laughable.

The claim comes in direct response to a professional report issued by the Israeli state comptroller accusing the Netanyahu government of utter “failure” in responding to the impressive growth of the BDS movement in recent years.

Despite its undeniable influence in the US Congress and, by extension, in Brussels and other world capitals, the fact that most in the Israeli establishment recognize today is that BDS is winning at the grassroots level, where Israel is losing the global battle for hearts and minds. It is in this arena where our possession of the moral higher ground trumps Israel’s military, financial and political prowess, which is deemed irrelevant.

A quick look at the top 11 achievements of BDS since the beginning of 2016, during the height of Israel’s war of repression and lawfare against the movement, reveals how fast the movement is growing. It also reveals how delusional Netanyahu has become in his desperate attempt to deflect internal condemnation of his failure to stop BDS.”

The inspiring news below from the Spanish state will amplify not only the delusional state of Israel’s far-right leaders but also their deep-seated  — and now famed — aversion to the truth!

— Omar Barghouti

Cadiz, provincial capital in the autonomous community of Andalusia in the Spanish state, has become the latest municipality to pass a motion supporting the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights and declaring itself an Israeli “Apartheid Free Zone”.

With a population of 120,000, Cadiz joins more than 50 cities and towns across the Spanish state which have voted to declare themselves spaces free from Israeli apartheid. Other famous Apartheid Free municipalities include Gran Canaria, Santiago de Compostela, Xixón-Gijón, Sevilla, Córdoba and Santa Eulària in Ibiza.

Inspired in part by a similar campaign during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, the Israeli Apartheid Free Zone campaign, led by the Solidarity Network Against the Occupation of Palestine (RESCOP), seeks to create ‘islands of political consciousness’ and to break local ties with Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid, as well as with international corporations and institutions that are complicit in the maintenance of Israel’s violations of international law.

The campaign, which is supported  by  social movements, businesses, schools, media and public institutions from across the Spanish state, has created a map indicating spaces free from Israeli apartheid.
 

Map of Israeli Apartheid Free space (HALS) (Screenshot: boicotisrael.net/elai/mapa/)

By declaring themselves Israeli Apartheid Free Zones, local authorities agree to boycott corporations complicit in violations of international law and the rights of Palestinians as well as break ties with the Israeli regime and its complicit institutions. They will also support local awareness raising efforts and commit to conscientious procurement policies based on the human rights of the Palestinian people.

Riya Hassan, European coordinator for the Palestinians BDS National Committee (BNC), said:
 

Attacks on a movement for freedom, justice and equality

Growing public support for the BDS movement for Palestinian human rights has prompted Israel and its allies to launch an unprecedented, well-funded and anti-democratic attack against everyone seeking to hold Israel accountable to international law and UN resolutions, especially through BDS advocacy.

The Israeli-sponsored attacks on the BDS movement aim to put pressure on governments, legislators and officials to curtail BDS civic actions and adopt repressive measures that infringe upon their respective citizens’ civil and political liberties at large.

In the Spanish state, attempts to silence the BDS movement, particularly on an institutional level, have been led by ACOM, a pro-Israeli Madrid-based lobby group.

ACOM has launched a number of legal appeals against local councils that have declared themselves Israeli Apartheid Free Zones.

However, ACOM’s strategy of intimidation has not been successful. Targeted cities have defended the democratic outcome of the votes, and informed courts, such as  the First Administrative Court of Gijon, refused to accept ACOM’s complaints.

Similar legal charges were lodged against three local councils in the UK by the  so-called Jewish Human Rights Watch, a London based Israel lobby group. Also there, the UK High Court rejected the complaints and ruled in favour of the three local councils which had passed resolutions in support of targeted boycotts of Israel’s occupation.

RESCOP commented in a statement: :
 

This latest decision by the city of Cadiz to join the inspiring wave of other Spanish cities and towns in declaring themselves zones free from Israeli apartheid is a sign that citizens and elected representatives are not intimidated by ACOM’s legal threats.

“By supporting the BDS movement for Palestinian rights and choosing not to engage with institutions and corporations directly involved in Israel’s egregious crimes against the Palestinian people, people of conscience and municipalities across the Spanish state are taking a concrete step to hold Israel accountable  for its crimes against the Palestinian people,” Riya Hassan concluded.

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LIST OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS DECLARED ELAI AND / OR ADHERED TO BDS IN THE SPANISH STATE (until August 11, 2016)
Andalucía
Diputación de Sevilla
Ayuntamiento de La Roda
Ayuntamiento Castro del Río
Ayunamiento de Montoro
Ayuntamiento de Mairena del Aljarafe
Ayuntamiento Los Corrales
Ayuntamiento Alhaurín de la Torre
Ayuntamiento de Campillos
Ayuntamiento de Casares
Diputación de Córdoba
Ayuntamiento de Velvez-Málaga
Ayuntamiento de San Roque
Ayuntamiento de San Fernando
Catalunya
Ajuntament de Artés
Ajuntament de Sant Pere de Ruidebitlles
Ajuntament de Molins de Rei
Ajuntament de Sant Cebriá de Vallalta
Ajuntamnet de Badalona
Ajuntament de Sant Celoni
Ajuntament de Ripollet
Ajuntament de Sant Feliu de Llobregat
Ajuntament de Abrera
Ajuntament de Sant Boi de Llobregat
Ajuntament de Terrasa
Ajuntament de Olesa de Montserrat
Ajuntament de Sant Adrià de Besòs
Ajuntament de Sant Quirze del Vallès
Ajuntament de Barberá del Vallès
Ajuntament de Viladamat
Madrid
Ayuntamiento de Navalafuente
Ayuntamiento de Rivas-Vaciamadrid
Asturies
Ayuntamiento de Corvera
Ayuntamiento de Castrillón
Ayuntamiento de Gijón
Ayuntamieno de Llangreu
Galiza
O Concello de Compostela
Concello de Oleiros
Islas Canarias
Cabildo de Gran Canaria
Ayuntamiento de Telde
Aragón
Ayuntamiento de Sabiñánigo
País Valencià
Ajuntament de Alcoi
Ajuntament de Muro
Ajuntament de Onda
Ajuntament de Concentaina
Ajuntament de Catarroja
Ajuntament de Xeraco
Ajuntament de Benlloch
Ajuntament de Petrer
Castilla y León
Ayuntamiento de Viloria del Henar
Illes Balears
Ajuntament de Santa Euràlia

This article was first published on Mondoweiss.
 

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