Features
Four takeaways from the UN Security Council resolution on Gaza
By Uditha Devapriya
The recent UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – from which the US, not surprisingly, abstained – marks a crossroads in the history of Israel and the future of Palestine. The resolution was motivated, among other developments, by Israel’s massive military build-up and its impending invasion of Rafah, a narrow stretch of land by the Gaza-Egypt border where more than a million Palestinians, driven from their homes by the IDF’s ruthless attacks, lie huddled, uncertain of what may happen to them.
The resolution followed another, proposed by the United States, vetoed by China and Russia, and criticised by much of the Global South, which denounced Hamas and placed more prominence on the return of Israeli hostages. Beijing and Moscow argued that it did not go far enough, while Washington argued that China and Russia were “playing politics with the ceasefire” and conniving to “isolate the US internationally ahead of the interests of the Palestinians in Gaza.” The US itself had vetoed three resolutions before, mostly on the basis that these “did not mention Israel’s right of self-defence.”
The latest resolution is important, in that sense, for four reasons. First, and most important, it indicates the US’s growing frustrations with the Israeli government. Since October last year the US has been valiantly – or pathetically, depending on how you see it – batting for its main ally in the Middle-East, only to see that ally become more isolated on the world stage. The lack of a constructive response from Israel – it is, after all, headed by the most right-wing regime the country has seen since its founding – and the unwillingness to respond to and engage with its critics has only upended its relations with the West.
The US’s decision to abstain, in fact, followed weeks and months of confrontations between Jerusalem and some of its staunchest Western allies, including the European Union. These confrontations have taken place in the backdrop of some of the most vocal demonstrations against the Israeli government in decades. These protests have been joined by some of the most strident Jewish critics of Israel as well. Such developments have shifted the narrative so much that it is no longer possible to equate criticisms of Israel with anti-Semitism. The West, belatedly as it may be, has come to terms with this.
Second, the resolution reflects a turnaround in the liberal mainstream’s attitude to Israel and what it is doing in Gaza. The most belligerent, hawkish government Jerusalem has seen in decades may invoke its right to self-defence at every opportunity it gets, but even the most passionate defenders of Israel are rethinking that stance and wondering whether it is in Israel’s interest to defend itself so aggressively, undermining the norms of international law. This is more or less the sentiment of the US Democratic Party’s most pro-Israel Senator, Chuck Schumer, who not only has advocated for elections in Israel but also questioned the tenability, and feasibility, of its military offensives.
To be sure, the likes of Schumer are not questioning Israel’s right to self-defence. But they are wondering whether Israel’s interests can ever be served by a blind commitment to military action. That commitment has not helped its case. Israel had very few friends in the Global South before October 7; since October 7 it has lost quite a number of friends in the Global North too. The Israeli government’s rabid response to these developments – which, basically, amounts to badmouthing the slightest critique of Israel that Western governments, including the UK, put out – has only alienated and isolated it further.
Third, artists and intellectuals, even those critical of anti-Semitism, have sounded the alarm of Israel’s disproportionate response to the October 7 attacks. The situation has changed so much that a Jewish director of a film about the Holocaust can get up on stage at the Oscars and decry the situation in Gaza, and get a standing ovation. This is in stark contrast to, say, the 1977 Oscars, where Vanessa Redgrave – who won an Oscar for her role in Julia, an out and out anti-fascist and anti-Nazi film – was booed when she denounced “Zionist hoodlums” in her acceptance speech. The Jewish screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, by contrast, received a standing ovation when he criticised Redgrave in his speech.
Indeed, Hollywood’s shifting response to Israel and Palestine has been one of the more intriguing takeaways from the conflict in Gaza. During the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Hollywood rallied almost unconditionally around Israel. The most liberal and the most radical actors, directors, and screenwriters spoke in its support, organising marches, protests, and funds. This is because it was possible, at that time, to view Israel as a beleaguered, besieged smaller power – even when the US was rushing in millions of dollars of economic and military aid, and even when its Prime Ministers were denying the rights of Palestinians and advocating for territorial expansion.
Such sentiments no longer hold today. In the 1960s the West’s sympathy for Israel more or less centred on the Shoah, the Holocaust. Today, even Holocaust survivors and their children are decrying what the Israeli government is doing, supposedly “in their name.” It goes without saying that very few in Hollywood are as dogmatically supportive of Israel and of whatever it does as it used to be. Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars, for instance, provoked a rather puerile letter from certain Jewish figures in Hollywood, but also compelled much support from far more authoritative Jewish artists, including Tony Kushner. No less than Steven Spielberg, the grand old man of Hollywood, issued a statement critical of both anti-Semitism and “the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza.”
Underlying all these developments is a fourth, in my view the most critical: that even in terms of military superiority, Israel has lost the plot. As Nilanthan Niruthan, director of the Centre for Law and Warfare (CLAW) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, pointed out four days after October 7, the Hamas attacks “demonstrated a major failure of intelligence, but more importantly, it displayed an even larger failure of imagination.” It showed that not even the most lavishly funded security installations can keep a discontented people, and political and terrorist outfits speaking on their behalf, at bay.
Israel’s response to this has been to ramp up its offensive in Gaza, to force civilians into the most inhospitable surroundings and corners. That has only got it into a tight spot: a spectacular military failure followed by a spectacular moral failure. The US learnt what a combination of these failures would lead to in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Israel has not learnt that lesson, or if it has, has yet to indicate that it has.
The latest UNSC resolution, in that sense, is the most crucial crossroads in this conflict. As Stephen Walt puts it, the implications for the US are only too clear: “Instead of focusing on whether pressure on Israel would work,” he points out, “the real question to ask is simply whether it is in America’s strategic or moral interest to be actively complicit in a vast and worsening humanitarian tragedy.” He concludes on a rather terse note: “Even if the United States cannot stop it, it doesn’t have to help make it worse.”
Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.
by Kaushalya Perera
Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).
How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities
Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).
* Lecturer (Probationary)
– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.
* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.
* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.
State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.
Problem type 1
– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria
Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.
This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!
Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education
A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.
Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.
At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.
Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.
The problem is clear but what about a solution?
Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:
* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.
* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.
* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.
Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.
(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)
This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.
Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.
Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.
The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.
The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication
Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.
Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.
The musicians, who make up Talento, are:
Prabuddha Geetharuchi:
Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist
Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento
(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.
Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):
A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.
Chandana Perera (Drummer):
His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.
Harsha Soysa:
(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band
Udara Jayakody:
(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.
Aruna Madushanka:
(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.
Prashan Pramuditha:
(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..
The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’
In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!
‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.
This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.
It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.
Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.
Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:
Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial
TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic
Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers
YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins
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