Janis Laizans/Reuters

Volunteers hold up baby clothes as they pack boxes of donated supplies for those impacted by the Hamas attack, at a logistical center run by the Brothers in Arms reservist protest group, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 16, 2023.

As he recounts the horrors he and his family witnessed at their home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz along the border with the Gaza Strip, Maor Moravia puts the thumb and index finger of one hand to his eyes, as if to blot out what they have seen.

But then the web programmer wipes his eyes and surveys the sunny garden, the children playing, the food and clothing free for the taking, all arrayed before him at his family’s temporary home at the Shefayim Kibbutz Hotel north of Tel Aviv.

“The people of Israel are great; they cradle us with a lot of love,” he says. “We will always, always be so grateful for what they are doing for us.”

Mr. Moravia and his wife and two children are the beneficiaries of an outpouring of support and care that Israel’s civil society mobilized within hours of the devastating Hamas terrorist attack Oct. 7 that left more than 1,400 people dead.

Organizations that succored Israel’s powerful pro-democracy movement this year, while also recognized for innovative humanitarian work outside Israel, quickly shifted to helping fellow citizens at a moment of excruciating loss.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Maor Moravia, a web developer who was evacuated with his family after surviving the Hamas attack on Kfar Aza, a kibbutz in southern Israel, is at the Shefayim Kibbutz Hotel north of Tel Aviv. All their needs are supplied by Israeli civil society groups and individuals.

Startups from the country’s vibrant tech sector have put their know-how to work tracking down those missing and reuniting families. Networks have sprung up to connect evacuees from around the Gaza and Lebanon borders with temporary housing in hotels, vacant apartments, and private homes.

Restaurants from humble kebab houses in Jerusalem to those of the top chefs in Tel Aviv’s trendy food scene are turning out thousands of meals a day for delivery to shelters, schools, and hotels-turned-refuges, including at Kibbutz Shefayim.

And very often this all-hands-on-deck mobilization of civil society and the private sector is highlighting a glaring government absence – prompting many Israelis to foretell deep political repercussions in the years ahead.

“We had nine months prior to this trauma where confidence in the government eroded to unprecedented levels, and then we had this. And now what you hear everywhere is a deep sense of abandonment and government incompetence,” says Nimrod Novik, Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum. The U.S.-based think tank promotes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that guarantees Israel’s security.

“In a very short time we had a civil society, the core of which is the younger generation, that replaced the government where the government doesn’t exist and began providing essential services,” he adds. “All this experience and technology being so visibly applied today will be put to use in a postwar protest movement determined to get rid of all those responsible for us reaching this very dire point.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Volunteers prep food at the Asif Culinary Institute of Israel in Tel Aviv, Oct. 18, 2023. “We want the thousands of meals we are delivering in a week to serve as comfort for the soul,” says Chico Menashe, director of Asif.

For the more charitably minded and cautious among civil society leaders, their work has freed up the government to focus on what everyone assumes is an imminent ground invasion of Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas.

But for the more critical, the government’s ineptitude at meeting average citizens’ needs in a crisis is the outcome of a coalition put in place more to protect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from judicial pursuit than to provide effective government services.

“A culture of corruption deformed the selection of who would serve in the key ministries, and that resulted in cronies of the prime minister rather than professionals and the most qualified being named to deliver essential services,” says Josh Drill, a leader in the pro-democracy movement, which has led opposition to the Netanyahu government’s proposed judicial overhaul.

“Then we have the most horrific experience in Israel’s history,” he adds, “and it’s the protest movement that is applying its muscle to do what the government should be doing but is apparently incapable of doing.”

The sense of government abandonment is a recurring theme among Israelis who were most directly touched by the attack.

“We’ve been here for exactly one week, and we have never seen one representative of the government,” says Nadiv Nassi, who with his wife, Viki, was evacuated from Kfar Aza and directed to the Shefayim hotel.

Asked if the army evacuating them to safety wasn’t the government in action, the couple respond with an emphatic “no.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Nadiv and Viki Nassi, evacuees from Kfar Aza, are at the Shefayim Kibbutz Hotel north of Tel Aviv, their home for the past week, Oct. 18, 2023.

“We don’t count the army as part of the government, or I should say the coalition government [of Mr. Netanyahu],” Viki Nassi says. “The army is brave kids who are out there trying to keep us safe.”

Initiatives small and large

Some of the efforts to help Israelis in need are spontaneous pop-ups, some offshoots of long-established organizations. And they range from small individual gestures to large complex operations.

For two decades, IsrAid has been applying what the humanitarian organization calls “Israeli innovation and can-do spirit” to crises overseas, from earthquakes and hurricanes to conflict-driven internal displacement.

The events of Oct. 7 changed that.

“As we all watched these terrible events, it became clear that for the first time in 22 years we were going to launch a mission inside Israel itself,” says Shachar May, press officer at IsrAid. “With this crisis we saw that it was time to bring our expertise home.”

The group quickly set up training sessions for volunteers; mental health services for experts working with the families of the dead, missing, and hostages; and safe places for traumatized children to just play or talk out frightening memories.

Some initiatives are focused on getting soldiers coveted supplies that are in short supply.

In a donated space in the basement of his apartment building on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, Mordechai Botnick collects supplies ranging from socks and protective vests to toiletries and energy snacks for the thousands of soldiers who don’t have family in Israel to depend on.

About half are army reservists who in the past 10 days have returned to Israel from homes and jobs overseas to help secure the country and fight Hamas.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Mordechai Botnick, founder of the "Soldier to Soldier" aid organization, poses with volunteer Elena Sultan, a French reservist in the Israeli army who has no family in Israel, in the basement of Mr. Botnick's apartment building in Jerusalem, Oct. 17, 2023.

“We provide everything from underwear to a hug if that’s what’s needed,” says Mr. Botnick, himself a reservist who started Chayal el Chayal, or “Soldier to Soldier,” about a decade ago.

After Oct. 7, the organization ramped up to find protective vests for reservists arriving without one. Donations have poured in from the United States, France – and just down the street, he says.

Brothers in Arms

His basement mission is dwarfed by huge operations in Tel Aviv that have sprung up overnight, fueled by a steady stream of volunteers seeking to do anything to serve their compatriots.

At the city’s vast Expo convention center, the Brothers in Arms organization of army reservists that emerged in the pro-democracy movement has taken over a full floor of an underground garage. The mission: to receive, sort, and prepare for delivery donated supplies, from household goods and clothing to books, school materials, bicycles, and toys.

The volunteers range from the retired to the very young.

“I’m doing this for my country; I’m doing this for Israel,” says Jonathan Shwerling, a tween busy boxing up supplies for imminent delivery.

For some workers at Expo, the point of the operation is to free the government to focus on security.

“We are bringing together the people who can handle the civilian issues so that the government can do what it does, which is to fight a war,” says Terry Newman, a spokesperson for Brothers in Arms and a reservist who otherwise is a developer of hospitals.

“What we’re seeing here is confirmation that often the worst of things brings out the best in people,” he says.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Jonathan Shwerling, age 12, volunteers at the Tel Aviv Expo convention center, where there's a distribution center for donated goods, Oct. 18, 2023. "I'm doing this for my country," he says.

That truism is on display at the Asif Culinary Institute of Israel in central Tel Aviv, where volunteers are working under the direction of some of the city’s most celebrated chefs to deliver thousands of meals to newly displaced people, to kids cut off from school lunches, and to older people who no longer have a community center to count on for meals.

And it’s not just sustenance that Asif aims to provide.

“We want the thousands of meals we are delivering in a week to serve as comfort for the soul,” says Chico Menashe, director of Asif, a joint venture between the New York-based Jewish Food Society and Start-Up Nation Central, an Israeli nonprofit. “That’s why all of the dishes we prepare are homey style, tasty like what people might make for themselves at home.”

“Civilian power”

Mr. Menashe says he’s still a little amazed to think that just two weeks ago, the institute was focused on refined culinary arts – but now, here it is providing physical and spiritual sustenance for thousands.

That transition, he says, was made possible by what he describes as “the new Israeli civilian power” that blossomed from the mass-participation anti-government protests.

“We’re seeing already how this new civilian power is going to change the way things get done in Israel,” he says.

“When very good people recognize a vacuum in the response of the state, they don’t go out and protest that the state isn’t doing what it should. They act,” he adds. “That’s the new Israeli DNA.”

Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

A child looks through a car window as Palestinians, ordered by Israel to move to the south of Gaza, take shelter in a tent camp.

This war is different.

That message, a drumbeat from Israeli leaders ever since the savage Hamas attack on Oct. 7, refers to the unprecedented force and scale of their intended military response.

But it is also true on a deeper personal, psychological, and emotional level – not just for Israelis, but for Palestinians, too. The war is stripping back their conflict over a piece of land to its rawest essentials, leaving people on both sides feeling vulnerable and victimized, apprehensive and angry, to a greater degree than at almost any time since Israel’s founding in 1948.

That is raising the stakes of Israel’s latest conflict with Hamas immeasurably: how it is waged in the days ahead, and for how long it is fought. And how it ends.

The central question is whether this different war ultimately produces a different outcome – a path toward a political resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that both will be able to embrace.

And the answer will depend on a contest between two starkly opposed views of a future Middle East.

In one corner is Iran’s ambition to exert preeminent influence in the region, along with proxy forces, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, encircling, unsettling, and – if Tehran’s ruling theocrats are to be taken at their word – erasing the state of Israel.

In the other is the vision of the United States and its allies of a broad partnership involving Israel and Arab states. It would be rooted in shared economic and security interests and buttressed by a serious, sustained effort to negotiate a way out of the decadeslong Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s hope of seeing that vision survive the Gaza conflict is one reason he boarded Air Force One Tuesday, becoming the first American leader to visit Israel in time of war.

Miriam Alster/AP

President Joe Biden pauses during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas.

Yes, he wanted to demonstrate shoulder-to-shoulder support for Israel. But in also scheduling meetings with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, he wanted to keep alive the postwar prospect of a more stable, forward-looking 21st-century Middle East.

The Arab leaders canceled, however, amid protests on their streets following an explosion Tuesday that took hundreds of lives at a hospital in Gaza. Hamas blamed the blast on an Israeli airstrike, but the Israeli military published video and audio clips that it said proved a misfired rocket launched from within Gaza did the damage. President Biden said U.S. defense and national security experts concurred with that view.

Yet the intense political fallout demonstrated the tinderbox volatility of the Gaza war.

It also signaled something else to the U.S. president, and to administration officials shuttling from country to country to try to prevent a wider regional conflagration. The Mideast calendar no longer reads 2023.

It has gone back to 1948.

That date has always been central to both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ narratives of the conflict.

For Israelis, it signifies the birth of their state, with support from the United Nations, in the shadow of the Holocaust that had killed millions of European Jews – even as surrounding Arab armies tried to prevent it from being born.

Palestinians recall the naqba – the catastrophe – in which hundreds of thousands of their forebears fled their ancestral homes or were forced from them by the Israelis.

The events of the past 10 days have reawakened those memories on a painful, visceral level.

Over the years, since Hamas began ruling the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israelis have intermittently endured rocket fire on their towns and cities. Palestinian civilians have suffered the effects of periodic retaliatory strikes on Gaza by the Israeli military.

But the Hamas attack two Saturdays ago – the deliberate slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, young and old, and the abduction of 200 others back into Gaza – was different.

In a country that had come to believe it was powerful, well defended, and safe, the specter of marauding bands seeking out, cornering, and killing defenseless Jews awakened centuries-old memories of East European pogroms. And of the Holocaust.

The main difference this time for the Palestinians in Gaza has been the scale of their displacement in the face of fierce Israeli bombardment.

The echoes there are of permanent exile, a particular dread since most Palestinians in Gaza are the descendants of Palestinians who lived in what is now southern Israel before the Israelis beat back the Arab armies in 1948.

The prospect that hunger or force may push them to leave Gaza explains why neighboring Egypt and other Arab states have been so adamant in demanding the establishment of a safe haven for Palestinians inside Gaza instead.

The depth of these parallel Israeli and Palestinian agonies is apt to make resetting the Mideast calendar back to 2023 a slow, difficult challenge, no matter how this war ends.

But a decade of diplomatic neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has now ended. Those parallel agonies have focused U.S. and other Western minds – along with those of more moderate Arab regimes – on the urgent need to create a new narrative.

If it addresses the interlocking fears of both sides, it might lay the foundations for lasting peace.

Editor's note: This story corrects the day of the explosion at the hospital in Gaza.

Heinz Thomet is one of only two commercial rice farmers in Maryland. The other is Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics. Not one to accept the status quo, Mr. Thomet grows six varieties of rice on his farm in southern Maryland, where most fields are planted with soybeans and corn. Mr. Thomet didn’t start growing rice until sometime during the past decade. His explanation for why he added the crop is simple: “I eat rice.”

Walking his farm on a hot August day, Mr. Thomet leans down to examine a rice stalk. He wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his leathery hand. His dogs trail after him, diving headfirst into the field before reappearing on the other side, having lost the scent of a rabbit. Everything about Mr. Thomet – his beard, wild curly hair, ragged straw hat – makes sense against the backdrop of his fields, which follow the contours of the land more than a grid. 

He is the sort of person who has utter faith in natural processes but none in institutions. He’s always been a farmer, from growing up on a farm in Switzerland to working on a famed biodynamic farm in the United States as a young man. Since 2000, he’s farmed in Newburg, Maryland. There, in addition to the rice, he grows barley, Sichuan peppers, bananas, grapes, bitter lemons, oats, kiwis, sesame seeds, figs, and more, depending on the season. 

It’s difficult to make a profit on rice in Maryland. Farm-to-table was a natural concept for Mr. Thomet even before the movement expanded out of California in the early 2000s. And though small-scale, direct-to-consumer farming is difficult to justify commercially, Mr. Thomet’s main concern remains the quality of the food he grows and stewardship of his land. In this case, that means successfully producing rice – a crop grown by few others on the East Coast.

“Nothing of what I do makes sense for a cheap food system, but if you recognize a decentralized food system as food security, then I start to make sense,” says Mr. Thomet. “If you look at diversified farms as part of the resilience towards a global weather pattern change, then I start to make change.”

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

A ladybug lands on a stalk of cypress rice, one of the varieties grown by Heinz Thomet on his Maryland farm, Next Step Produce.

In an era of climate disruptions that are changing where everything from coffee and cacao to mustard and olives can be successfully grown, a decentralized food supply – like the one Mr. Thomet espouses – is getting a second look. After decades of factory farming and reliance on a global food chain that sends bananas, grapes, mangoes, and avocados thousands of miles to stores, returning to the idea that food should be grown where it is eaten is no easy task. And rice-growing is a useful case study.

An East Coast rice experiment

It’s unusual to find rice farmers anywhere on the East Coast, says Raghupathy Karthikeyan, Newman endowed chair of natural resources engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina. Rice production in the U.S. now takes place mainly on commercial farms in the Midwest and the South. But Mr. Thomet and fellow farmer Mr. Amen are holding on, despite the tight profit margin for small-scale, organic farmers.

Both Mr. Thomet and Mr. Amen grow upland rice, a method that doesn’t use water for weed control, instead requiring labor-intensive weeding. While both sell their rice, neither grows enough to register on the U.S. Department of Agriculture census. Historically, Maryland farms mainly grew tobacco, and South Carolina was rice country. But the end of slavery and changing weather patterns made rice-farming less profitable. At one time, about 225,000 acres in South Carolina were planted with rice. Today, it’s somewhere between 25 and 50 acres. In Maryland, it’s 2.

Agriculture in Maryland, as in most of the U.S., doesn’t supply much of the produce purchased in the state. Maryland farms produce more grain than other crops, and most of that is used for livestock feed and seed. 

Mr. Thomet’s interest is in locally grown crops for food, and he has a loyal base of customers, including restaurants. 

For Mr. Thomet, it’s not just about protecting the locavore movement. It’s also about stewardship. He quotes the motto of his family’s farm, Next Step Produce: “Committed to growing nourishing food in harmony with nature.” 

“If I don’t mess with [nature] very much,” he says, “the diversity comes in automatically.”

He eats what he grows and tries to grow whatever he wants to eat. In fact, Mr. Thomet has a nearly complete food system growing on the 30 acres he cultivates. The one thing he can’t grow is sugar cane, so he grows sweet sorghum instead, which is made into molasses. 

Day length, sun exposure, and night temperature in Maryland are all sufficient for rice to thrive, he says. Next Step Produce starts the rice in a greenhouse and then transplants it, allowing for more growing days so the farm can grow higher-yield varieties.

Upland weeding and priorities 

Whether upland or lowland, rice is no longer profitable to grow in South Carolina – the historical center of U.S. rice-farming – unless it’s grown as a hobby, says Dr. Karthikeyan, who’s leading a study on climate-resilient rice production. The remaining commercial rice farms he’s aware of in the U.S. all grow lowland rice in paddy fields.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Starting certain plants in the greenhouse before transplanting them can lead to a higher crop yield, Heinz Thomet says.

Rice is a labor-intensive crop, even if you flood it, says Dr. Karthikeyan. The yield gap between upland and lowland rice is large, making it hard to turn a profit growing commercial varieties upland.

That extra labor limits how many acres of rice Mr. Thomet plants, since they’re weeded by hand. It’s also reflected in the price, he says.

Still, in his eyes, everything comes down to priorities and societal values. There’s no good reason everyone shouldn’t have access to nutritious, locally grown food, he says. Next Step Produce, which he runs with his wife and daughters, was certified organic for two decades until last year, when a red-tape snarl was the last straw for Mr. Thomet. But his customers don’t care about the label at this point, he says. They know his growing practices. 

Those stem from more than professional experience – they’re also part of Mr. Thomet’s life philosophy. “Is food just something to fill your belly, or is food something to nourish?”

Benjamin Lambert, the executive chef at Modena, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., has bought from Mr. Thomet since 2007, when he met him at a local farmers market. “As a chef, you look for good ingredients,” he says, standing in the restaurant, a James Beard Award hanging just behind him.

“As long as it tastes good, that’s the most important thing,” says Mr. Lambert, who cleared out Mr. Thomet’s stand at the market.

For over two decades now, Mr. Thomet has carefully tended his land, optimizing the conditions for the most nutritious yield he can produce, he says. He’s raised the organic matter by 2% to 3% depending on where he measures.

On his farm, Mr. Thomet balances his technical, agricultural knowledge with an intuitive sense about the land. Every growing decision has an impact on the rest of the natural system, he says. 

He bends over the edge of a field of flowering buckwheat to watch a pollinator at work before straightening up to explain: He grows buckwheat not just because people buy it, but also because it creates a pollinator habitat. “There’s nothing static here.” 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week launched a new phase of China’s massive global infrastructure and development program, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aimed at strengthening the country’s economic integration and influence with the rest of the world.

With an estimated $1 trillion in investments over the past 10 years, the initiative has focused heavily on big projects by Chinese state-owned firms to construct a network of railways, roads, ports, power grids, and pipelines across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Going forward, the initiative will shift to smaller, greener, and digital projects by commercial firms, a pivot that Mr. Xi called “a new stage of higher-quality and higher-level development.”

Speaking on a vast stage at the Belt and Road Forum before dozens of world leaders assembled in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Wednesday, Mr. Xi called for building “a new platform for international economic cooperation” among the more than 150 nations that have signed BRI agreements with China. 

“China can only do well when the world is doing well. When China does well, the world will get even better,” he said, adding that China is a main trading partner with more than 140 countries.

Mr. Xi first announced plans to build new intercontinental land and maritime linkages in 2013, describing them as the revival of ancient Silk Road trade routes. The initiative has won support from many countries since. It is especially popular in the Global South, where billions still lack basic infrastructure systems for drinking water, electricity, roads, schools, and internet. Now entering its second decade, the initiative also faces serious challenges, including rising debt among participating countries, China’s own groggy economy, and, recently, signs of regional competition. But after this week’s celebratory summit, analysts say the initiative is moving forward, as is China’s ability to shape the global development agenda.

The BRI was “very much based on China’s experience of infrastructure-led growth,” says Christoph Nedopil Wang, director of the Griffith Asia Institute and a professor at Griffith University in Australia. Basically, if you build a road, prosperity will follow.

“This is a strong view of the Belt and Road Initiative, to really copy China’s model internationally,” and to establish the initiative as a China-led alternative to Western development models, he says. Although China is adjusting that strategy in the initiative’s new phase, Dr. Nedopil Wang considers the first decade an overall success. 

“The BRI has increased China’s credibility to deliver projects,” in part by branding much of China’s overseas economic engagement with the BRI label, he says.

Phoonsab Thevongsa/Reuters/File

A train is ready on the station during the handover ceremony of the high-speed rail project linking the Chinese southwestern city of Kunming with Vientiane, in Vientiane, Laos, Dec. 3, 2021. The $5.9 billion railway helped link the landlocked nation to global supply chains, but it has also worsened Laos’ debt burden.

Weighing the debt burden

The world will face a $15 trillion gap between projected and needed global infrastructure by 2040, according to the Global Infrastructure Hub.

“Together, with the contributions of the Belt and Road Initiative, we can turn the infrastructure emergency into an infrastructure opportunity” and “supercharge the implementation of the [United Nations] sustainable development goals,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told the Beijing forum on Wednesday.

Indeed, many countries remain eager for China’s help in fast-tracking development.

As he waits to hear Mr. Xi’s speech, Nepal’s ambassador to China, Bishnu Pukar Shrestha, says his country wants Beijing to help build a railway between Shigatse, Tibet, and Kathmandu. “We need big projects; we need connectivity,” he says. “It’s not more than 100 kilometers [62 miles] on the Nepal side, so they can do this; they can grant us,” he says.

But initiative infrastructure projects have also relied on debt financing, adding to the debt burden of developing nations, as China has emerged as the world’s biggest bilateral creditor to low- and middle-income nations. Mr. Guterres stressed the need for “actions right now to promote effective debt relief mechanisms.”

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bishnu Pukar Shrestha, ambassador of Nepal to China, attends the opening ceremony of the two-day Belt and Road Forum in the banquet hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct.18, 2023

Over the past 10 years, some of the countries that received large amounts of finance and investment from China under the initiative include Pakistan, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. 

In Pakistan, which has received some $52 billion in construction and investment, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has built several major highways covering about 500 miles and also prioritized hydropower and coal-fired power plants.

“When this initiative was launched, we were facing severe electricity shortages” and problems with connectivity, says Zafar Uddin Mahmood, the special envoy for CPEC in Beijing from 2014 to 2017. In three years, BRI projects produced nearly 8,000 megawatts of electricity, or 33% of the country’s total energy requirements, he says. “We were able to overcome the shortage of electricity in this short period of time,” says Mr. Mahmood, an assistant to Pakistan’s prime minister on the BRI from 2022 to 2023.

The large projects added significantly to Pakistan’s debt problem. “We are a heavily indebted country; we have more than $100 billion, and the Chinese are a major part of that, but ... not the entire part,” he says.

“When you compare [the debt burden] with the benefits, we don’t have any major issues,” he says. Chinese interest rates are on average below 3%, he says, and China has been “very generous in rescheduling the debts when we were unable to pay.”

Pakistan is not alone. In Laos, China built a $5.9 billion railway connecting the two countries that opened in December 2021, helping create jobs, fuel trade, and link the landlocked nation of 7 million people to global supply chains. The project is the first leg of China’s ambitious plan to expand its rail network through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia to Singapore. But the project has also worsened Laos’ debt burden – in turn, creating problems for Beijing, experts say.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Zafar Uddin Mahmood, the special envoy to Beijing for Pakistan’s China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project from 2014 to 2017, attends the opening ceremony of the two-day Belt and Road Forum in the banquet hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 18, 2023.

“If anything, BRI becomes a debt trap for China,” says Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions.” 

“It’s a problem when foreign sovereigns can no longer pay,” Dr. Liu adds. “It’s a lose-lose situation. ... China on one hand suffers from reputational damage, and delayed payment is the best-case scenario.”

China corrects course

China has begun joining with other foreign creditors to negotiate debt relief – such as for Zambia this summer – although Dr. Liu says Beijing prefers to extend the period of repayment rather than engage in debt forgiveness, the latter being known as a “haircut.”

Besides adding to debt issues, BRI projects have sparked criticism for having a lack of transparency, contributing to environmental problems, and employing Chinese goods and workers rather than local ones.

On Wednesday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo told the forum that initiative projects should stress giving countries “a sense of ownership,” rely on local employment and products, and “must not complicate their fiscal conditions.”

Italy, the only Western European country to have joined the BRI, has indicated it may not renew its participation when its five-year BRI memorandum of understanding with China expires in March next year.

“Trade-wise, it was a disaster for Italy. We didn’t get anything out of it,” says Alessia Amighini, co-head of the Asia Center and a senior associate research fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. Italy’s trade deficit with China grew from $20 billion in 2019 to $48 billion in 2022, she says.

“BRI is very effective for China’s connectivity with the rest of the world, but it’s not a win-win game,” says Dr. Amighini, an associate professor of economics at the University of Piemonte Orientale.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

A vehicle passes the Abbottabad Tunnel No. 2, which is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor along Hazara Motorway in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Oct. 15, 2023.

Beijing’s recalibration of the initiative is in part a response to such concerns, experts say. 

In contrast with big infrastructure projects loaded with debt, the next phase will emphasize smaller-scale business investment with profit potential. Focus areas will include digital connectivity and the transition to renewable energy, an industry where China enjoys a competitive advantage.

China’s overall BRI investments and construction have declined since a peak in 2018, and the average deal size has fallen by nearly half. It has boosted green energy investment in areas such as solar, wind, and hydropower. Yet China also continues work on new coal-fired power plants overseas, despite a pledge not to do so, according to Dr. Nedopil Wang, the Griffith Asia Institute director.

“The original BRI relied very much on this debt financing and using Chinese infrastructure firms to build out public infrastructure,” says Dr. Nedopil Wang. China has realized that “roads don’t generate any revenue, particularly in developing countries,” he says, so it is moving toward “commercially viable projects.”

This week’s forum, which attracted about 10,000 officials, executives, and journalists, included a CEO conference in which some 300 Chinese and foreign business executives signed cooperation contracts worth $97 billion. Ben Okoye, executive vice chair of Brass Fertilizer & Petrochemical of Lagos, Nigeria, holds a freshly signed contract in a shiny red folder for a project connected to a new methanol plant. 

“This is the first [BRI] contract for our company,” he says, but it plans to bid for more. 

Reuters

Members of the Egyptian Red Crescent pose in front of a truck loaded with humanitarian aid for Palestinians, in the city of Al-Arish in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, Oct. 15.

Israel and Hamas have had violent conflicts for 17 years, but this latest one has captured the world’s attention like none in the past. That’s because many civilians, first in Israel and then in Gaza, have been killed or harmed, or remain in harm’s way. That heightened global concern for the innocence of noncombatants may finally be shaping the conflict.

On Friday, the first trucks carrying water, food, fuel, and medicine are expected to cross from Egypt into Gaza to partially relieve what the United Nations calls an “unprecedented human catastrophe.” Nearly 1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza have fled to the south under threat of an Israeli invasion to uproot Hamas, which governs the enclave. Many of the displaced people are living in desperate conditions and vulnerable to military actions.

The aid, however, could be cut off at any moment if Israel and the United States detect it is being diverted to the militant Islamist group. “If Hamas confiscates it or doesn’t let it get through ... then it’s going to end, because we’re not going to be sending any humanitarian aid to Hamas,” President Joe Biden said.

That prospect has led to a second international reaction. Many countries are now debating whether to offer asylum to any Palestinian from Gaza – not affiliated with Hamas – who wants a temporary, safe home. The Israeli military has said Palestinian civilians who followed its order to flee the northern part of the Gaza Strip would be allowed to return once the war ends.

On Tuesday, the first Western leader called for countries to offer such a refugee resettlement plan. Once a plan is set up, said the first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, then “Scotland is willing to be the first country in the UK to offer safety and sanctuary to those caught up in these terrible attacks.” Mr. Yousaf’s brother-in-law works as a doctor in Gaza.

For a number of reasons, both Jordan and Egypt have rejected the idea of taking in Gazan civilians. One is a suspicion that Israel may not let them return, as happened after the exodus of Palestinians following wars in 1948 and 1967. Another is a fear that Hamas radicals will slip into those countries and jeopardize peace, both internally and with Israel.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has asked Egypt and Jordan for support in evacuating civilians from the Gaza Strip. Egypt’s support is especially needed because Hamas may not allow civilians to leave, just as the group tried to block the flow of civilians from the north to the south.

The Israel-Hamas war may escalate in coming days. But so, too, have demands for the two sides to honor international rules on protecting the innocent. The war in Gaza is not only a battle of weapons but also one for conscience.