Yves here. Let me address two minor sour notes in Satyajit Das’ otherwise fine piece on the dismal prospects for happy endings in the Middle East. Both come in this short sentence “Palestinians would need to recognise Israel’s right to exist and forsake violence. ”
In reverse order, it seems odd to focus on Palestinian violence when Israel, from its inception, has been engaged in a campaign of brutal ethnic cleansing and has a doctrine of disproportionate retaliation. Moreover, the occupied have a right under international law to resist occupation, including using violence (provided civilians are not targeted).
To the first point, states do not have a right to exist. From Foreign Policy Journal:
Zionists taking it upon themselves to try to defend Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people frequently level the charge that its critics are attempting to “delegitimize” the self-described “Jewish state”. Israel, they counter, has a “right to exist”. But they are mistaken.
This is not to single out Israel. There is no such thing as a state’s “right to exist”, period. No such right is recognized under international law. Nor could there logically be any such right. The very concept is absurd. Individuals, not abstract political entities, have rights.
Individual rights may also be exercised collectively, but not with prejudice toward the rights of individuals. The relevant right in this context is rather the right to self-determination, which refers to the right of a people to collectively exercise their individual rights through political self-governance. The collective exercise of this right may not violate the individual exercise of it. The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect individual rights, and a government has no legitimacy without the consent of the governed. It is only in this sense that the right to self-determination may be exercised collectively, by a people choosing for themselves how they are to be governed and consenting to that governance.
The right to self-determination, unlike the absurd concept of a state’s “right to exist”, is recognized under international law. It is a right that is explicitly guaranteed, for example, under the Charter of the United Nations, to which the state of Israel is party.
The proper framework for discussion therefore is the right to self-determination, and it is precisely to obfuscate this truth that the propaganda claim that Israel has a “right to exist” is frequently made. It is necessary for Israel’s apologists to so shift the framework for discussion because, in the framework of the right to self-determination, it is obviously Israel that rejects the rights of the Palestinians and not vice versa.
And it is not only in the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory that Israel’s rejectionism is manifest. This rejection of Palestinians’ rights was also manifest in the very means by which Israel was established.
There is a popular belief that Israel was founded through some kind of legitimate political process. This is false. This myth is grounded in the idea that the famous “partition plan” resolution of the United Nations General Assembly—Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947—legally partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948.
Indeed, in that very declaration, Israel’s founding document, the Zionist leadership relied on Resolution 181 for their claim of legal authority. The truth is, however, that Resolution 181 did no such thing. The General Assembly had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants. Nor did it claim to. On the contrary, the Assembly merely recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which would have to be agreed upon by both peoples to have any legal effect. The Assembly forwarded the matter to the Security Council, where the plan died with the explicit recognition that the UN had no authority to implement any such partition.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (2024)
This is the last of a three-part series examining the unfolding events in the Middle East.
Former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee once observed: “friends can change but not neighbours who have to live together”. Israelis and Palestinians are tied by geography but a definitive military or diplomatic solution appears unlikely.
Fateful Enemies
The Palestinians do not have a military path to victory. An Israeli victory would require occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which historically has proved difficult. Expulsion of Palestinians from their lands into neighbouring states may be viewed as an act of war by Egypt and Jordan. Extermination of Palestinians in a final solution will mean the end of Israel and have far reaching consequences for the world Jewry.
A negotiated settlement faces major hurdles. Palestinians would need to recognise Israel’s right to exist and forsake violence. Israel would need to abandon its “unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel”, as US Secretary of State James Baker told the AICPA on 22 May 1989. West Bank Jewish settlements, which now number nearly 150, housing some 700,000 Israelis and covering about 40 percent of the land area, would have to be removed. Israel would have to accept a fully-fledged sovereign Palestinian state, requiring it to relinquish all security authority over Gaza and the West Bank. It would have to accept Palestinian and Arab absolutist requirement for a right to return of refugees.
Such compromises are unacceptable to Israel. Since its founding, its leaders have convinced the population that the Arab world will not allow the Jewish state to survive and are waiting to massacre Jews. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion went further tying the survival of all Jews to Israel’s survival. Successive generations have been taught that they are condemned to live by the sword and in a state of siege.
Territorial concessions are refused on Biblical grounds and rabbinical views that Jewish law prohibits any ceding of Israeli land to a foreign people and has no halachic and legal validity. Palestinian right of return is rejected on the ground that it would mean the demographic implosion of Israel. Yet, Aliyah, the Law of Return, gives all diaspora Jews, their children and grandchildren the right to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship. Compromise is painted as rewarding violence with leaders arguing that it would result in endless cycle of terror forcing continuous Israeli retreats.
In 1969, Golda Meir suggested that “there is no such thing as Palestinian people”. Her mentor David Ben Gurion taught that it is not important what non-Jews think but what the Jews themselves do. In his 1905 Le Reveil De La Nation Arabe Dans L’Asie Turque, Arab Nationalist Najib Azouri made a dark prophecy: “The Zionist and the Arab Nationalists were destined to fight each other until one of them prevails.”
Containment
The world is weary of the conflict. People not directly affected have become inured to the horrific images of death and carnage and want to wish the problems away.
The West and the Arab world deploy money, weapons and statecraft on ‘containment’, that is, preventing the spread of an unresolvable conflict into the region or one involving great powers. Initiatives over decades, such as the treaty between Israel and Egypt, the Oslo and Abrahams Accords and numerous roadmaps, were directed to this end.
Containment requires congruent aims and interested actors. There is acceptance of the need to prevent military escalation to secure energy supplies and important transport corridors such as the Suez Canal. Agreement beyond this encounters irreconcilable differences.
Alongside its economic interests, America sees Israel as its proxy to keep Iran in check. Combined with the pressure from the domestic Jewish lobby, this limits any check on Israeli actions. The UK, at least its government, reliant on its ‘special relationship’, follows Washington’s diktats.
Europe does not share all US objectives. It is energy deficient and needs to diversify away from Russian to Middle-Eastern gas. Holocaust history as well as its dependence on US military protection means that its willingness to reign in Israel is weak.
America and Europe are wary of rising Russian and Chinese influence, which Moscow and Beijing see as a front in the new super-power confrontation. China has important trading relationship and is dependent on secure transport routes. Russia wants to revitalise its historical role in the region, lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is linked to Iran by their mutual distrust of America. Russia is cautious about the petrostates. President Putin is wary of Saudi Arabia and its historical links to the US, especially its suspected complicity in manipulating oil prices to inflict economic damage on the USSR which contributed to its breakup.
The petrostates are dependent on growing energy export markets in Asia, especially China. They needs access to technology. Petrostate surpluses are mainly invested in Western assets which are at risk from sanctions or confiscation if they side with the Palestinians against Israel. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are wary of growing Iranian influence through the Middle East and radical Islamic forces.
Iran’s position is shaped by history. The Ayatollahs’ hatred of America and its acolyte Israel derives from the CIA orchestrated 1953 coup against the elected Mosaddegh government, support for the subsequent authoritarian rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its murderous secret police (the SAVAK), US backing of Iraq in its war with the Persian state, and the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliners by the US navy. Iran is fearful of US organised regime change. It resents the crippling sanctions and refusal by the US to honour the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement under which Iran made significant unreciprocated concessions.
Predominantly Shite, Iran sees itself as the protector of this branch of Islam. It regards the Sunni Gulf states, with their ties to the US, as apostates. Saudi consent for US forces to enter a state which houses Islam’s two holiest sites during the inter-Arab Iraq-Kuwait conflict has never been forgotten.
Despite its forced isolation, Iran has developed its missile and drone technologies well suited to asymmetric warfare. It has nurtured, trained and armed highly effective regional militias. It has a nuclear program which may be capable of being scaled up to weapons capability. Israel carried out an airstrike with US assistance on the Osirak nuclear site in 1981, used the Stuxnet virus and has carried out assassinations of civilian scientists to impede Iran’s weapons programs.
Resurrecting its Ottoman past, Turkey aspires to economic and political influence. Unlikely to gain coveted membership of the EU, it sees its future in the region. It must manage the internal threat from Kurdish separatists working towards a homeland of their own. Alongside Turkey, Egypt and Jordan are concerned about any influx of refugees into their territories. Both countries have seen inbound tourism fall. Egypt also faces economic problems from the reduction in shipping through the Suez Canal, down two thirds since the start of 2022. There is fear the rise of radical Islam.
Syria is involved in a protracted civil war, encouraged by Western powers during the Arab Spring. The Baath regime is fighting for survival. Syria wants to regain the Golan Heights lost in the 1967 war. Iraq and Lebanon are failed states trying to avoid a break-up along religious and ethnic lines.
This toxic cocktail shapes events and places boundaries on actions. Robert Frost thought that “way leads on to way” precluding retracement. The Middle East testifies to that. The difficulty of containment let alone resolution means the ordinary people, especially the Palestinians, are trapped in blood, impoverishment and despair.
Events
Winston Churchill warned that in war you are “… the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” Carl von Clausewitz held that “everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen it”. The exact trajectory set in train on 7th October 2023 is unpredictable.
The Palestinians, now unintentional flag-bearers for the Arab world, have succeeded in puncturing the view of Israeli invincibility and drawn in Iran, Hizballah and the Houthis. They have united to some degree Arabs, at least the population if not the leaders, across Sunni-Shite divisions. As with its ancestors such as Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation, they have drawn attention to their plight at great cost in human lives and suffering.
Israel is trapped. In an opinion piece in Haaretz on 11 April 2024 entitled Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat, journalist Chaim Levinson argued that the war’s aims will not be achieved, the hostages will not be returned through military pressure, security cannot be restored and Israel’s international ostracism will continue: “We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology… It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves….Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit … Israel has no diplomatic exit.” He argued that Israelis may now never be able to return to the northern border and Israelis’ sense of security had been lost: “For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.”
Any victory over Hamas in Gaza will be inconclusive. Occupation is unsustainable. Palestinian rule by Hamas or its rival Fatah is unacceptable. Any Arab peacekeeping force requires agreement to a two-state solution. Total destruction and withdrawal from Gaza would, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, allow forces, likely fundamental Islam, to fill the vacuum. Guerrilla actions, insurgencies and terrorist acts against Jewish assets in Israel or anywhere in the world would return. Western supporters of Israel face reprisals in the form of suicide bombings, hijackings and other violence, such as 911 and similar attacks. In the words of Calgacus, recorded by Tactitus: “where they make a wasteland, they call it peace”.
Israel might escalate, initially against Hizballah and the Houthis to divert attention from Gaza and defer the end of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s career and exposure to criminal prosecution. But there are concerns about the IDF’smorale, readiness and limits of combat capabilities as well as its reluctance to continue the war and implicit criticism of political goals. Widening the war to involve Iran, Israel hopes to draw in the US and its allies, something that even hawkish elements in Tehran and the West have no appetite for. They do not want to commit troops to the conflict and face financial and materiel constraints.
Should combat operations in an expanded war turn against it, there is a risk of Israel resorting to nuclear weapons. Unlike the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) constraints that inhibit great powers from taking such action, Israel may feel emboldened because its enemies cannot respond in kind. The probability of such a chain of events is not trivial given Israel appears to have lost all logic in its vindictiveness.
Back to the Future
Bereft of ideas, the West has reverted to the failed two-state solution underlying the Oslo Accord. They want to believe that a more rational, united centrist Israeli government would change the environment, This ignores the underlying political changes. Western commentators have pointed to anti-government protests as a sign of hope. In reality, they are focused on domestic issues like changes to the Supreme Court and legislative curtailment of civil rights. Since the start of the war, they have been directed against the unpopular Prime Minister and specifically the return of hostages.
The population favour security irrespective of the cost and are disinclined to compromise.
According to the long-standing Peace Index of Tel-Aviv University, support for negotiations and belief in peace prospects have fallen sharply since October 2023.
Many Jews, uncomfortable criticising a government during wartime, have supported its conduct. 51 percent of the Jewish public believes that the firepower used by the IDF in Gaza is adequate or too little. 88 percent believe that the scope of casualties on the Palestinian side is acceptable. 84 percent of right-wing voters, 54 percent of centrist voters, and 24 percent of left-wing voters oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. There is almost no support for reconciliation on either side with 90 percent of Palestinians and 63 percent of Israeli Jews believing that they are entitled to do whatever is necessary to survive. 93 percent on each side see themselves as the rightful owners of the land. 93 percent of Palestinians and 68 percent of Israeli Jews deny the other’s claims.
There is political hopelessness. Israeli politicians fear that concessions will ensure electoral oblivion and expose them personally, like Itzhak Rabin, to ideologically motivated assassination. As the late politician Yossi Sarid wrote in Ha’aretz in June 2008: “The feeling is we are stuck with the same politicians…after the elections, they will shuffle the cabinets seats.. the group picture will remain the same and with it the situation.”
Belief in Abraham
The only new initiative is the US proposal to expand the Abrahams Accord. Negotiated by the Trump Administration and signed in 2020, these bilateral treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalise the relationship with the Jewish state in return for it announcing that West Bank annexation would not proceed. The Arab states gained through expanded trade and co-operation and access to technology and weapons.
The Americans want a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia. In return for normalisation with Israel, Saudi Arabia would gain access to US weaponry and nuclear technology. It may include a defence agreement with America. Saudi Arabia would commit to managing energy prices, ending the ongoing war in Yemen and easing political repression.
The Saudi expansion requires the Jewish state to commit to a two-state solution, something which it has been reluctant to embrace. Some reports suggest that Saudi Arabia has frozen talks on any agreement over normalization because Israel was refusing any gesture to the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has doubts about America’s ability to deliver on its end of the bargain. US suspension of the agreed sale of F-35 to the UAE as well as tensions over the ties to Russia amid the Ukraine war and to China have increasingly undermined the original Accord.
Expansion of the Abraham Accord could destabilise the Gulf regimes, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Succession Matters
The current nominal Saudi ruler King Salman belongs to a generation deeply connected with the Palestinian cause. While it difficult for the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (“MBS”) to disown the Palestinians while his father is alive, the position may change if and when he succeeds him.
MBS ascension is not guaranteed. It was the result of a palace coup where King Salman by-passed Crown Prince Muqrin and Muhammad bin Nayef and made his own son the heir. The change in the line of succession was unusual.
To consolidate power, MBS ordered the detention of prominent members of the royal family, including Prince Alwaleed, who holds over $20 billion worth of assets across the globe. It targeted cash and assets worth up to $800 billion. Some were freed after paying ‘taxes’ and allowed to leave the Kingdom. Others were stripped of assets and positions or died in mysterious circumstances. The ‘anti-corruption’ measure (ironic because of concerns about MBS’s own business dealings) was in reality a purge. To paraphrase, Oscar Wilde’s quip: the Crown might not have any enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends.
The West has hailed MBS with the usual adjectives – young, dynamic, modern, reforming. But the Crown Prince’s record is not without blemish. Nicknamed ‘Mr. Everything’, he has centralised power. Unlike previous rulers who worked by consensus, his actions are impulsive. Surrounded by flatterers and enthralled by expensive foreign consultants, there are few moderating influences on his plans.
Ill-advised proxy wars in Yemen and Syria have cost billions. Saudi Arabia orchestrated a diplomatic crisis with Qatar from which it had to retreat. The Kingdom has been implicated in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at its embassy in Istanbul and alleged attempt to intimidate or eliminate Saad al-Jabri, a close adviser to MBS’s chief rival. In 2019, Saudi Arabia was accused of hacking the phone of Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post and major shareholder of Amazon.
MBS’s Vision 2030 is a risky and ambitious program to diversify away from fossil fuel exports to a technology and tourism based future. But the economy remains heavily reliant on oil. His decision to sell-off a stake in the Kingdom’s crown jewel – ARAMCO which controls its oil reserves – to finance these new initiatives are controversial within Saudi Arabia. New taxes and cuts in subsidies have proved unpopular.
MBS has used clerics loyal to him to change the legal system and move to a poorly defined moderate Islam. The religious establishment, who dictate the interpretation of Salafism which Saudi society adheres to, do not necessarily endorse the reforms and their reduced influence. State-clerical conflict is not impossible.
Liberalisation takes the form of an entertainment authority which has introduced comedy shows, professional wrestling events and monster truck rallies. There has been some well-publicised expansion of women’s rights, such as the removal of the ban on female drivers and weakening the male-guardianship system. But Saudi Arabia remains an authoritarian state, with political dissidents systematically repressed via imprisonment and torture. The jailing of prominent women’s rights activists shows little toleration of dissent.
Irrespective of who ultimately succeeds the ailing King Salman, the Palestinian issue and the American proposal for an agreement with Israel will need to be addressed.
Pathways
Saudi Arabia could reject an agreement with Israel, which is unlikely to commit to a Palestinian state. The Saudis could assume the mantle of protectors of Islam, joining a diplomatic, economic and, perhaps, military anti-Israel coalition. They could collaborate with Iran, relations with whom have improved, to create a joint Sunni-Shite initiative. This would play to the Arab nations eager to avenge the humiliation of multiple defeats since 1948.
Alternatively, Saudi Arabia could agree to a treaty on the basis of vague Israeli assurances of progress towards a two-state solution, which they could withdraw in the future. The benefit would be security and economic guarantees.
As in the West, the wider population and ruling classes differ on the Palestinian cause. The impetus for an Abrahams-like accord comes from Western oriented younger royals who are driven by financial rather than religious or historical considerations. They regard the Palestine fight for a homeland as a barrier to access to Western markets, technology, investment, weapons and protecting their substantial investment in securities and businesses overseas. The Gaza war has caused declines in tourism. Foreign investment into Red Sea resorts and the Crown Prince’s cherished Neom project has slowed, allegedly requiring it to be scaled back. Like Egypt and Jordan, Saudi Arabia do not want a widening of the conflict and would benefit from an end to the war.
But any such agreement could destabilise the region where there is overwhelming grassroots support for Palestinians. The Abrahams Accord normalisation of relations with Israel was criticized by citizens of the Arab states that signed. It was also rejected by ordinary people in other Arab countries as it failed to make progress in resolving the Palestinian conflict. In November 2022, 76 percent of Saudi respondents were negative on the Abraham Accords. By December 2023, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 96 percent of Saudi participants believed that Arab nations should cut ties with Israel.
Rapprochement with the Jewish state could prove a catalyst for a ‘Gulf Spring’. The civil unrest may present an opening for factions within the ruling families to move against MBS. The Palestinian cause may also galvanise actions against unpopular royal families and their repressive authoritarian rule. In July 2024, the UAE held a secret mass trial for around 80 political dissidents and activists, which resulted in 43 life sentences for alleged terror offences. In Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz Almuzaini, a popular animator for Netflix, was sentenced to 13 years in jail for an animation seen as supportive of the Islamic State and extremist ideology. Egyptian cartoonist Ashraf Omar was arrested for criticising power cuts. Throughout the region, public support for Gaza has been violently repressed by the authorities. Anger at economic inequalities feed into this spiral of revolt. As the Arab Spring highlighted, anti-government protests can quickly gather momentum.
If the armed forces obey orders and attempt to violently suppress any challenge, then it will feed cycles of violence. It would set up dangerous civil wars which other actors, such as Iran and the great powers, might exploit to their advantage. If the armed forces, who have more in common with the protestors than the rulers, refuse to act against the population, as they did in North Africa, the house of Saud and others may fall. The princes and emirs would load their Gulfstream aircraft for an opulent exile in the West.
As the Arab Spring demonstrated, the situation can descend into chaos rapidly as divided opposition groups are rarely ready to take power far less govern, Radical Islam would exploit the situation. Some already specifically target and call for revolt denigrating the House of Saud as “agents of the Americans” urging ordinary people to seek change by any means. As Israeli journalist Ari Shavit wrote in Haaretz on 29 December 2011 in the aftermath of the Arab Spring: “We should have known that Hosni Mubarak would not be replaced by the Google Youth, but by the Muslim Brotherhood”.
Uncontained
For the West, the concern is not the tragedy of Palestinian but its economic impact – the effect on transport routes and energy supplies. Under any scenario, both would be affected.
An united Arab anti-Israel group could use energy as an economic weapon. In 1973, in response to American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, a group of Arab nations cut oil production and embargoed oil exports to the US. In case of an expansion of the Gaza war or civil unrest in petrostates, production would be disrupted. This may come at a time when energy markets remain delicately balanced and non-Middle East supplies such as US shale oil and gas production may have peaked. An energy price shock, such as those in the 1970s, which unleashed economic devastation and reshaped global politics, cannot be discounted.
The US and its allies backing for Netanyahu’s war may have costs higher than they can bear. As Nikolai Bulganin, Premier of the Soviet Union, wrote in a letter to David Ben-Gurion in 1957: “The Government of Israel is criminally and irresponsibly playing with the fate of the world, with the fate of its own people”.
Hamas has showed that the world’s neglect of the Palestinians is a mistake. The title for its operation – al-Aqsa Flood – may prove prophetic. The forces unleashed are unlikely to be contained and will flow out through the region with unknown consequences.
We are entering a period where the wills of great nations, each seeking to fulfill aims and ideals, are colliding. Underlying this is the imperatives of strategy, tactics, vulnerabilities, geography and politics. Then, there is, as US national security adviser Jake Sullivan states in the BBC TV series Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?, the “loop of imperfection” with “imperfect people, with imperfect information, facing imperfect choices” devising solutions that “create new problems” to be tackled with the same “imperfect process”.
The confrontations between Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas, and China-Taiwan remain regional conflicts. If these conflicts expand into a global conflict among nuclear powers, then there might be no return. Russia, China, Iran and their allies see it as an opportunity to undermine the US and Western global order that emerged at the end of the Cold War.
Most refuse to see the risk. In the early 1910s and the 1930s, people sensed what was on its way but dismissed it as unlikely to happen. They deployed the same avoidance mechanisms seen today. They assume that they can prevent the slide into catastrophe. They assume they have time. The reality is different. They are like a person who has jumped off a fifty storey building and are passing the first-floor confident that everything is fine. It is only hitting the ground abruptly that confirms that it is not!.
Writing In The Fateful Alliance, a study of French-Russian diplomatic relationships in the period 1890-1914, George Kennan identified a “whole series of . . . aberrations, misunderstandings, and bewilderments.” He concluded: “One sees how the unjustified assumption of war’s likelihood could become the cause of its final inevitability…. One sees how the myopia induced by indulgence in the mass emotional compulsions of modern nationalism destroys the power to form any coherent, realistic view of true national interest. One sees, finally, the inability of otherwise intelligent men to perceive the inherent self-destructive quality of warfare among the great industrial powers of the modern age.”
© 2024 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved
These piece are co-published by the New Indian Express Online and NakedCapitalism.com
