Robert Hannigan

The United Kingdom government’s announcement last week that it will take greater powers to scrutinise and block foreign takeovers on national security grounds brings it closer to the approach of the US and other countries, including Germany and Australia.

It follows decades of peculiarly British vagueness about who had the responsibility for worrying about these security implications, still less the power to do anything. It is also part of an international trend, as Western nations wake up to the intellectual property they may be losing, or dependencies they may be inviting. Add to that the realisation in recent years that sophisticated cyber attacks are increasingly being delivered through the supply chain and buried deep within the Internet infrastructure, and Western jitters are understandable.

United States President Donald Trump’s castigation of Germany for supporting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and his defence of domestic steel production on national security grounds fit this recent pattern. Steel tariffs may be driven by protectionism, but Mr Trump is making a sensible point. Concern about over-dependence on a particular energy source or security of supply for key commodities is hardly new in foreign policy.

But Russia and China present very different challenges at the intersection of economic and national security. Russia’s limited leverage is old-fashioned energy rather than technology. As its unreformed economy declines, it will lash out and the West will aim to contain this. Viewed from the offices of Moscow’s securocrats, the Internet is a huge US conspiracy, albeit one which is conveniently open to asymmetric exploitation, whether through cyber attack or propaganda. But Russia’s misuse of the Internet is essentially tactical.

The challenge presented by China is radically different and brings both opportunity and risk on an entirely new scale. China manufactures an estimated 90 per cent of the world’s IT hardware, including some three-quarters of all smartphones. That has been true for many years, and it means the world economy is increasingly sitting on a global IT infrastructure manufactured in China.

Quantifying the risks involved in this dependency is difficult. Cyber space therefore presents traditional policymakers a novel challenge. In the past, we were used to disputes about who ruled and navigated the high seas, but never about who made the water.

Even this acknowledgment of the scale of China’s achievement misses the point. The real challenge for the West in this century is not that Chinese technology is ubiquitous, but rather that increasingly, it is world-leading. This has been best

illustrated in recent months in the mobile telecoms sector. Governments need to deliver faster broadband and next-generation 5G telephony for their data-hungry populations. The leading suppliers of this technology are all Chinese.

Short of creating domestic alternatives, which looks unrealistic, the options range from denying ourselves Chinese technology and investment in the name of a potential threat, or finding ways to manage the security risk.

Faced with this dilemma, governments have reacted in a variety of ways. The US has partially banned some Chinese firms and Australia looks set to do so as well. Others across Asia, Africa and Europe have welcomed them. The UK has taken a middle way, trying to assure itself on the risks by scrutinising the software and hardware installed by Huawei in UK networks.

The UK experiment has broken new ground in developing capabilities to scan vast amounts of code to achieve some level of security assurance. But it also illustrates the difficulty of understanding, let alone policing, the IT supply chain.

There are a number of reasons. Dependencies in IT are complex and not easily visible. The supply chain can be very long indeed. A software vendor may subcontract its code writing many times over. Even where hardware and software can be scrutinised, spotting the difference between an engineering mistake and a deliberate “backdoor” is often a matter of judgment. And the skills and resources needed to vet the global supply chain at scale are simply not there.

But telecoms firms are only the beginning. Over the next 20 years, China will emerge as pre-eminent in numerous areas of technology. President Xi Jinping has explicitly set the goal of leading the world in artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies by 2030. He has backed this up with an impressive and well-funded development plan.

Last year, there were more research papers on this subject published in China than in the US. We tell ourselves that Western liberal democracy is the key to creativity in technology, but it turns out that a centralised command economy can do innovation pretty well.

The West needs a policy response rooted in the understanding of technology as well as foreign policy. Some of that will be down to industry, a point acknowledged by Microsoft president Brad Smith this year. We must not cut ourselves off from the brilliance of Chinese technology, but we need a more mature assessment of the risks.FINANCIAL TIMES

• The writer is executive chairman of BlueVoyant Europe and a former director of GCHQ, the UK’s technical intelligence and cyber agency.

Sandeep Jauhar

Like most patients, mine wanted to live as long as possible. So when I brought up the option of a small implantable defibrillator for his failing heart, he said yes at once.

The device would be inserted in his chest to monitor his heartbeat and apply an electrical shock if the rhythm turned into something dangerous. It was like the paddles in the emergency room, I told him, but it would always be inside him. In truth, I wasn’t sure if a defibrillator was really such a good idea. My patient was near the end of his life. He might live longer than a year, but certainly no more than five.

Patients with heart failure mostly die in one of two ways: either from

a sudden, “lights-out” arrhythmia that stops the heart, or from insidious pump failure, in which the heart increasingly fails to meet the metabolic demands of the body. The former, which the defibrillator would help prevent, is quick and relatively painless. The latter, which the defibrillator would make more likely, is protracted and physically agonising.

When the time came, wouldn’t it be better for my patient to die suddenly than to struggle for breath as congestive heart failure filled his lungs with fluid? It was a difficult thing to bring up with my patient – how he wanted to die – in part because his death wasn’t imminent. But with the rise of technologies like implantable defibrillators, this is a subject that doctors and patients will

increasingly have to grapple with: not the inevitability of death, but the manner of one’s demise.

Sudden cardiac death has always been something of a paradox. It is at once the most desirable way to die and the most feared. Abrupt life-threatening arrhythmia is a leading cause of mortality in the United States. Approximately 350,000 Americans experience it every year, and 90 per cent of the victims die before or soon after they get to a hospital.

My own grandfather was a victim of a sudden fatal arrhythmia on the morning after his 83rd birthday. He woke up complaining of abdominal pain, which he attributed to an excess of food and scotch the night before. A few minutes later, he emitted a loud groan and went unconscious. Just

like that, he was gone.He almost certainly had a

massive heart attack, but the heart attack wasn’t what killed him; it was the ensuing arrhythmia, which prevented his heart from sustaining blood flow and life. My mother always said she was sad that he died so suddenly. But she was thankful, too.

Sudden deaths like my grandfather’s may become less common. In 2015, about 160,000 defibrillators were implanted in Americans, more than double the number from the decade prior. The population of patients who are eligible for an implantable defibrillator has expanded drastically, too. You used to have to be a survivor of cardiac arrest to be eligible; now the eligible population includes those who have merely an increased risk of sudden death.

In America today, if everyone who qualified for a defibrillator were to get one, the costs could reach billions of dollars. But cost, even with skyrocketing healthcare

expenditures, is not the main issue. The main issue, in my view, is that

defibrillators may send the dying process down a long and winding path that it might not otherwise have taken. No one wants to die prematurely, but when it’s their time, most people want to go quickly and painlessly. Defibrillators can prevent this from happening. They help prevent sudden death, to be sure. But they also can take away the sudden-death option.

Of course, defibrillators offer many benefits. They are nearly foolproof and are highly effective. Studies have shown that they prolong life in a significant number of cardiac patients.

The procedure to implant them is safe. And defibrillators can, in theory, be compatible with a quick death: When a patient’s condition spirals downward, the patient can choose to deactivate the device. However, in my experience, few patients ever deactivate the device. We doctors rarely inform them of this option, and even when we do,

patients (and their families) are often reluctant to make a choice that may hasten death.

I discussed these issues with my patient. I explained that a defibrillator might give him a slightly longer life but that it might also take away what he wanted from death. He listened to the pros and cons. In the end, he said he wanted to proceed with the defibrillator.

We scheduled him to get his device the following week. When he was lying on the surgical table, I couldn’t help thinking of another patient of mine who had received a series of painful shocks from her defibrillator when she was in her late 60s. She didn’t want to turn off her device because she believed that it could give her another six months or a year of life. However, she told me: “I say to the Lord, if it’s my time, let me go in my sleep, please.” NYTIMES

• Sandeep Jauhar is a cardiologist and author of the forthcoming book Heart: A History.

Victor Kattan

For The Straits Times

Israel’s controversial Nation State Law has provoked indignation all over the world. The American Jewish Committee, one of the oldest and most prominent Jewish advocacy organisations in the United States, said it was “deeply disappointed” with the law because it puts “at risk the commitment of Israel’s founders to build a country that is both Jewish and democratic”. Famed orchestra conductor Daniel Barenboim was more explicit, writing in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that “we now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid”.

This view was echoed by Mr Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List, a political alliance of four Arab-dominated parties in Israel, who told Israel’s Parliament that Israel “has passed a law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens”.

The Nation State Law is a Basic Law, which makes it part of Israel’s Constitution. The law was passed narrowly after a heated eight-hour debate during which opposition and Arab members of the Knesset tore up the printed text of the law, waved black flags, and shouted

“apartheid”. Even Mr Benny Begin, son of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud, abstained from the vote, warning of the party’s growing disconnect from human rights.

UNIQUE OR EXCLUSIVE?But what does the law actually say and why is it so controversial?

An authorised English translation of the The Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People is not yet available, but already there appears to be some discrepancies in translations of the law, with different versions being referred to.

Take Section 1 (C). The translation of this provision that is most frequently cited in newspapers such as The Jerusalem Post provides that: “The actualisation of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”. However, other translations refer to self-determination as being exclusive to the Jewish people.

Although the Hebrew word used in this provision is ambiguous, I have been reliably informed that an accurate translation of the Hebrew text in the context in which the word is being used is, in fact, “exclusive”. This is because the Hebrew word is close to the singular that can be assigned only to one group and not to others. Accordingly, the

Nation State Law provides that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel. No wonder the law has provoked a storm of protest in Israel, given that 1.8 million of its citizens are Arab.

But it gets worse. What most commentators have overlooked is that the law does not apply only to Israel. It also applies to the occupied West Bank.

The new law will not surprise Palestinians who have been arguing for years that Israel treats the West Bank as an extension of its own territory, where the 1949 ceasefire line that ended the 1948 war has long been blurred.

This complaint was graphically illustrated in a recent video of a student on a tour organised by Israel Birthright, a not-for-profit educational organisation that sponsors heritage trips to Israel for young Jewish adults, which subsequently went viral on social media.

In the video, Mr Elon Glickman complained to his tour guide that their trip to the West Bank felt “like the equivalent of going to the Jim Crow south during segregation”. (Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern US until 1965).

What concerned Mr Glickman was that the maps that Birthright was handing out to participants did not show the West Bank: “Literally if I hadn’t asked anything, like, how would anyone know where the West Bank was because this map doesn’t say anything?”

And this is why the Nation State Law is so controversial. It does not

define the “Land of Israel”. But “Eretz Israel” has always included Judea and Samaria, the biblical term for the West Bank, where most Palestinians live.

And this brings us to another problematic part of the law: Section 7, which states in no ambiguous terms that the State of Israel “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation”. By Jewish settlement, the law is not only referring to Jewish settlement in Israel, but also to Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

The establishment of settlements in the West Bank has been consistently condemned as “a flagrant violation of international law”, in successive United Nations Security Council resolutions. Moreover, the settlements make it less likely, if not impossible, for the Palestinians to establish an independent state of their own beside Israel.

POWER OF SETTLERSLiberal Israelis have long complained that their country has been hijacked by the settlers (some 600,000 people, including those in East Jerusalem), who have swung every election in the right’s favour since the assassination of Mr Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, except for the 2001 election of Mr Ariel Sharon.

The Nation State Law is just the latest example of a slew of laws targeting Arabs in Israel, such as those that allow Jewish municipalities and smaller settlements to deny Arabs access to their recreational centres and in some cases exclude them from living in Jewish communities.

The Nation State Law is going to make it harder for Israel to weather criticism that it is replicating South Africa’s once notorious apartheid system of racial segregation and discrimination that is now universally condemned.

For it is one thing to enshrine a discriminatory legal system that covertly annexes the West Bank in obscure military orders; it is another to enshrine the system in a Basic Law for the whole world to see.

stopinion@sph.com.sg

• Victor Kattan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, an autonomous research institute of the National University of Singapore.

China’s technological dominance presents opportunity and risk

How do you want to die?

Move to give Jews special status sparks controversy

China manufactures an estimated 90 per cent of the world’s IT hardware, and quantifying the risks involved in this dependency is difficult.

Demonstrators at a rally to protest against the Nation State Law in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv on July 14. The Nation State Law is going to make it harder for Israel to weather criticism that it is replicating South Africa’s once notorious apartheid system, says the writer. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Israel’s Nation State Law said to entrench discrimination against Arab citizensand promote cause of Jewish settlers

| MONDAY, JULY 30, 2018 | THE STRAITS TIMES | OPINION A15