LENIN'S TOMB

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Israeli assault on Gaza posted by Richard Seymour

There has been, for some while now, a pattern of provocative strikes by Israel against various targets in Gaza. They killed six civilians in the process. Routine iniquities in and of themselves. Israel makes periodic bloodshed, punctuated by eye-rolling acquiescence in 'peace' negotiations, a business and hobby. Its whole form of state organisation is dependent on this constant hunt. It would almost be bored if there was no frontier to test, no problem population to molest, no moral red-line to cross. Lacking this raison d'etre, it would atrophy and die of malaise. But this time, they sought a definite response: rocket fire, hopefully in abundance, with the usual ineffectuality. It's not that they really care, they just need the pretext. Israeli propaganda reels off the list of rocket 'incidents', with resulting psychologically traumatised sheep and car alarms, with impatient listlessness.

Now, a full-scale bombing campaign, with a threat of invasion, appears to be afoot. We know what this means, and for whom. The news coming from residents is of constant bombing, electricity being lost throughout Gaza City. The IDF twitter account brags of the bodies it has already captured - they brandish the head of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Hamas leader who, they grin, has been 'eliminated', just as his son was when the IDF bombed Gaza in 2008. And they warn that any Hamas members, however high up or low down in the organisation, had better keep out of the way in Gaza for the next few days. Without succumbing to the murderous logic according to which Hamas membership is grounds for execution by the bullet, the bomb or the chemical burn, we remember how Israel unilaterally adjusts the concept of Hamas membership to fit the exigencies of its bombing campaigns. Aha - going to school are you? That's a Hamas stronghold. Death.

Russia Today reports that IDF reservists are being called upon for an invasion. At this point, the excuses for yet another sadistic gorefest in Gaza are looking care-worn. The same old tired, robotic half-sense: Hamas. Rockets. Sderot. Terrorism. Something something something, dark side. Something something something, complete. There will be some barbarous, nonsensical, infuriating things said in news broadcasts over the next few days. All uttered in that exaggerated American accent that high Israeli officials seem to learn.

Rather than waste time attempting to construct something coherent out of the by now traditional Zionist melange of hysteria and sniggering sadism (waaah look at their rockets, ha ha ha look at their bodies) something that can be addressed as a semi-rational argument, we should just focus on reconstructing what has happened to Israel's position since Operation Cast Lead, and particularly since the Middle East revolutions began. Just as importantly, we need to trace the links from this venture to the reconstitution of American power in the Middle East, which Obama's Pentagon is now attempting to secure by proxy. (Leaving aside, for the moment, the argument as to how successful they have been in their attempt to annexe national rebellions). For it is a crucial question how much the timing and nature of this assault is driven by domestic politics, (viz. the germinal threat posed by the Arab Spring within Israel itself, and the Israeli state's attempt to consolidate its political control over the population), how much by regional politics and Israel's need to recoup some of its losses through a demonstrative beating, and how much the tempo of the war on Hamas and Palestinian resistance is driving it directly. One part of this question can be answered immediately: Obama gave this venture the green light.

Labels: colonialism, gaza, Israel, middle east, racism, revolution, US imperialism, zionism

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Imperialist austerity posted by Richard Seymour

You'll remember Dov Weisglass's 'quip' about putting the Palestinians on a diet. As he put it:

“It’s like a meeting with a dietitian. We need to make the Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death.”

Now the cold calculus of Israeli near-starvation policy has been exposed in detail:

After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Gisha human rights organization, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has finally released a 2008 document that detailed its "red lines" for "food consumption in the Gaza Strip."

The document calculates the minimum number of calories necessary, in COGAT's view, to keep Gaza residents from malnutrition at a time when Israel was tightening its restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Strip, including food products and raw materials. The document states that Health Ministry officials were involved in drafting it, and the calculations were based on "a model formulated by the Ministry of Health ... according to average Israeli consumption," though the figures were then "adjusted to culture and experience" in Gaza.

....

In September 2007, the cabinet, then headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, decided to tighten restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from the Gaza Strip. The "red lines" document was written about four months afterward.

The cabinet decision stated that "the movement of goods into the Gaza Strip will be restricted; the supply of gas and electricity will be reduced; and restrictions will be imposed on the movement of people from the Strip and to it." In addition, exports from Gaza would be forbidden entirely. However, the resolution added, the restrictions should be tailored to avoid a "humanitarian crisis."

...

The "red lines" document calculates the minimum number of calories needed by every age and gender group in Gaza, then uses this to determine the quantity of staple foods that must be allowed into the Strip every day, as well as the number of trucks needed to carry this quantity. On average, the minimum worked out to 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be supplied by 1,836 grams of food, or 2,575.5 tons of food for the entire population of Gaza.

Bringing this quantity into the Strip would require 170.4 truckloads per day, five days a week.

From this quantity, the document's authors then deducted 68.6 truckloads to account for the food produced locally in Gaza mainly vegetables, fruit, milk and meat. The documents note that the Health Ministry's data about various products includes the weight of the package (about 1 to 5 percent of the total weight) and that "The total amount of food takes into consideration 'sampling' by toddlers under the age of 2 (adds 34 tons per day to the general population)."

From this total, 13 truckloads were deducted to adjust for the "culture and experience" of food consumption in Gaza, though the document does not explain how this deduction was calculated.

While this adjustment actually led to a higher figure for sugar (five truckloads, compared to only 2.6 under the Health Ministry's original model),
it reduced the quantity of fruits and vegetables (18 truckloads, compared to 28.5), milk (12 truckloads instead of 21.1), and meat and poultry (14 instead of 17.2).

Labels: free palestine, gaza, hamas, humanitarianism, imperialism, Israel, palestine, zionism

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Finkelstein on BDS posted by Richard Seymour

I suppose the least that could be said is that this wasn't a well thought out intervention by Norman Finkelstein. He knows this, which is why he asked for the original video of the interview to be taken down - a futile gesture on the internet, but a meaningful one inasmuch as he acknowledges the harm done, and also an important one inasmuch as Finkelstein will continue to be an asset to the pro-Palestine movement. However, as Finkelstein's position is inescapably 'out there', as it is already sending the pro-Israel commentariat into gyrations of pleasure, and as the air is already thick with the smell of burning bridges, I feel no compunction about adding to the blogorhoea generated by the interview. There are two basic points which I think are worth making. The first is that insofar as there is a substantive strategic argument, it is incoherent. And in saying so, I am not denying the presence of his usual strengths: forensic scholarship, moral commitment, and candour. The second is that insofar as it consists of invective, it is a hypertrophied manifestation of the worst aspects of Finkelstein's polemical style, and is a gift to the Zionists. These are not unrelated points, as will become clear as I unravel them.

Finkelstein's strategic posture is roughly as follows. If you are serious about engaging in politics, and building mass movements, you cannot go further in your demands than the public is willing to go. You have to calibrate your goals. You have to calculate what will be acceptable to a viable mass of public opinion. The public is presently willing to support a two-state settlement based on a rock solid international legal consensus. This would be a liveable settlement, acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians, and moreover is within reach because Israel's position makes it increasingly isolated in the international system. It would be possible to leverage the international legal consensus to force Israel to accomodate a Palestinian state based on the June 1967 borders. Any movement of solidarity which attempts to go beyond this isn't going anywhere, because the public is unwilling to accept a one-state solution. The BDS movement, despite having the correct tactics, leaves itself wide open to Israeli propaganda counter-offensives, because it has the wrong goal. Implicitly, it favours measures that in their totality would mean Israel would cease to exist (as a Zionist state): end the occupation, recognise full equality for Arab citizens of Israel, and respect and implement the 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees. By contrast with this 'leftist posturing', it should clearly and explicitly state that it favours a two-state settlement in accordance with international law. Otherwise it will be seen to be cherry-picking those parts of the law that it supports in order to smuggle in an agenda of destroying Israel, and as a consequence will squander an historic opportunity.

***

The first argument hits upon an important strategic consideration in any movement, which is how to pose demands that relate to the balance of opinion, forces etc. in wider society rather than to the minute doctrinal fissures among the movement's organised core. To this extent, Finkelstein is quite right. A participating group in such a movement can argue for their own position, but their orientation should be toward taking the movement forward, not simply taking themselves forward within the movement. So, I understand exactly what he means when he says that he evaluates his colleagues' positions not primarily in terms of their morality or accuracy, but above all in terms of whether they can be 'defended' in public. Having said that, this is exactly where Finkelstein's argument begins to collapse into messy self-contradiction.

First of all, it fails because Finkelstein is known to contribute ideas and polemical over-statements that neither could nor should be defended in public. He has been unfairly attacked, and just as vigorously defended by many of those now unfortunately labelled 'cult' members. His book The Holocaust Industry was mostly unfairly criticised in my opinion. But it is also true that he has sometimes said or done things that didn't help. So, if one is in this position, a little bit of humility - even for a thirty year veteran - is surely called for when strategy and tactics are under discussion. This is particularly so since the nature and tone of his intervention here is hardly calibrated to take the movement forward. It places his own sense of exasperation with the movement ahead of its success.

Secondly, and relatedly, it fails because of what it omits, or does not specify. It does not specify the relevant 'public'. In another discussion, he makes it clear that this public is construed either in terms of authority (human rights or legal bodies) or representation (the United Nations general assembly being esteemed the most representative political body in the world). I don't accept this way of construing 'the public'. The UN general assembly is not representative of anyone but national ruling classes. Pressed on this, I expect Finkelstein would grudgingly concede the point, but would insist that the isolation of Israel among global ruling classes is a strategic opportunity, particularly if Israel's traditional supporters are becoming uneasy. This may be true, but it doesn't follow that the 'publics' whom BDS activists want to reach are those represented at the UN general assembly, or in human rights bodies, or in the ICJ.

I would argue as a counterpoint that the relevant publics for the BDS activists he is addressing are those based in the states supporting Israel - the US, Canada, the EU, and so on. And in those societies, the public is not an undifferentiated, or unchanging mass. Those who are most inclined to be sympathetic to the Palestinians will have been relatively unaware of the situation some years ago, or perhaps indifferent or hostile. Public attitudes change, and sometimes you have to embark on an initiative without public support or legal backing, on the assumption that attitudes will begin to change in response to the struggle. This was as true if you were a civil rights advocate in the southern United States during the Jim Crow period, or a supporter of women's suffrage in 1920s Britain. Finkelstein has acknowledged this, but insists that they have changed 'within a framework', that of the two-state settlement, which legal framework has been static for decades. This is casuistry, as it illicitly shifts the terms of the argument from a problem of persuasion and mobilization within the field of 'public opinion' to one of intervention in an international legal system where the congealed 'interests' and perspectives of the world's ruling classes are at stake. There is no reason why the two-state idea has to be the final default of 'public opinion'.

Moreover, there's a conflict here between Finkelstein's insistence on reaching a public with a viable set of goals, and his insistence elsewhere on settling issues related to the conflict not by reference to the point of view of the oppressed, the Palestinians, but by reference to "justice and right". But he immediately qualifies this by saying that he means "justice and right", not "in the abstract", but in terms of how the conflict is concretely understood - ie by the international legal consensus. I'll return to this, but if you bear in mind that this - the final determination of justice and right by law - is the overriding political-strategic coordinate in Finkelstein's perspective, it helps to make sense of much else that he says.

Aside from attitudes changing, they have changed in an uneven fashion. The most pro-Palestinian sections of the public will also be the more politically conscious sections of the oppressed and the working class. Organising and educating those people is, I would suggest, the starting point for building any mass movement. It is therefore significant that Finkelstein also overlooks an important condition of building such a movement: unity among highly diverse political forces. There has to be some compromise within any movement. He notes that an explicit endorsement of a two-state settlement would split BDS down the middle. He is right. A large number of those who are most active in the pro-Palestinian movement, and most educated about the situation of the Palestinians, are in favour of a one-state solution and think it more viable than two-states. Not all of them are stupid, or less educated or insightful than Norman Finkelstein. Yet they have arrived at a fundamentally different strategic perspective. In this situation, suspending the question of whether the final settlement should be based on a one or two-state system is a compromise. Without such compromise, the movement, such as it is, disintegrates into rivalrous factions.

But this is exactly what Finkelstein has a problem with, because it is a compromise in favour of orienting toward a series of objectives that operate on and expose the antagonism between Zionism and liberal-democratic norms. He doesn't think that the movement should be focused on de-legitimising Zionism in this way, because a precondition for his strategic purview to be viable is that one must accept that Zionism - not merely a state called Israel in which some form of comity is achieved, but Zionism as such - will endure. He thinks that the language of the 'rule of law' is "the dominant language of our epoch"; coupled with the "language of human rights", it is the language which liberal American Jews, and other significant sections of the public, most understand. One has to work within the legal terrain, otherwise there is no possibility of advance. The law is 'unambiguous': a two-state settlement, an end to the occupation, and a just settlement of the refugee question. It means accepting Israel. If you use the law as a weapon, you are also bound by its restrictions, otherwise you are dishonest.

There is no need to get into hair-splitting arguments over whether the 'rule of law' is really as 'dominant' as Finkelstein suggests. Nor will I linger on the idea that liberal American Jews are the privileged demographic we need to be reaching. It suffices to say that Finkelstein's is partially a 'framing' argument, which works just as well against his position. After all, the implication of stressing a legalist framework is that the acceptability or otherwise of certain positions depends in part on how they are articulated. For example, the demand for the full equality of Palestinians in Israel with Israeli Jews may in the long-run not be consistent with Israel's 'right to exist' as a Zionist state - but then, as it happens, so much the worse for Zionism. Few people in the core pro-Israel societies are so committed to Zionist ideology that they are prepared to support an ongoing system of apartheid in its name. This is particularly true of those who are attracted by liberal-democratic and human rights arguments. Let's be honest: a large number of people, including even some antiwar activists and peaceniks supportive of the Palestinians, have not the first clue what Zionism is. This is a legacy of decades of disinformation, historical revisionism and the usual uneducating effects of the capitalist media. This is why it is important that BDS targets its specific injustices rather than simply targeting the label 'Zionism'.

***

But it is on the question of the law itself that I find Finkelstein's position most problematic. He insists that the law is not merely a terrain in which Israel is at a disadvantage, not merely one in which the public can be reached, but actually one in which there is no ambiguity. This is the real framework within which international politics is conducted, the 'real world of politics' as he puts it, and it is unambiguously in favour of a particular final status as regards Israel and Palestine. Accept it, or stop claiming to cite the law. He is extremely learned, versed in every relevant piece of legislation, a close reader of the UN resolutions, the ICJ judgments and so on. It is for this reason that he has annihilated Israel's vulgar apologists, time after time, making mince of the false controversies that they generate in the name of 'hasbara'. He is also wrong. First of all, as he himself acknowledges, several terms in the international 'consensus' are in fact highly ambiguous. For example, the 'thorny' question of the refugees, and what constitutes a just settlement of their situation, is not unambiguous. Second, ambiguity is not the same as dissensus. If 99% of the states in the UN general assembly support one particular interpretation of the law, that lends strong credence to that interpretation, but it does not resolve the fact of there being an ambiguity, of there being multiple possible interpretations, of there being indeterminacy. The only thing that does actually resolve this, is physical force: by this, I mean not merely violence, but all the material (economic, political, diplomatic etc) inducements or coercions that could be deployed.

I would like to return to this in a future post, but for now I would just ask the reader simply to be positively disposed toward the thesis that, in the last analysis, the law is congealed class power. In the international sphere, this is also imperialist class power, inasmuch as there is a chain of imperialist states and sub-imperialism whose ruling classes exploit a sequence of dominated formations. The juridical forms of equality between subjects of the law, and of enfranchisement through representation, are just the legal forms that this domination takes. I ask you to be positively disposed toward this thesis for now anyway, because it helps explain a set of concrete facts that are present in Finkelstein's case but nonetheless somewhat mystified. It explains, for example, the fact that the international legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers has never been efficacious in stopping Israel's expansion for a second. It explains why, contrary to all appearances, Israel is not remotely 'lost' when it comes to the law, and never has been. It explains why Israel does not simply reject the terrain of the law, but rather insists on forcefully prosecuting its case and remaining a member of the relevant bodies. It explains why the law can be made to ex post facto recognise, accept and protect a state of affairs that some years previously was considered legally dubious at best.

Or, perhaps more urgently, it explains why the legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers was actually built on a series of ambiguities. UN Resolution 242, in which the US and European powers were important negotiating parties, deliberately adopted a certain terminological inexactitude as regards what constituted occupied territory; as regards how and when occupation should end (negotiations and secure frontiers first, then withdrawal, is the usual formulation - which basically means that occupation can proceed indefinitely); and as regards the final status of the frontiers and particularly of Jerusalem. This was not because the drafters liked to tease, but because the resolution reflected the emergence of a broad 'line' from the jostling and mutual struggle of the powers involved and because the US, as the dominant party framing the legislation, wanted a very wide space for manouevre on Israel's part. Israel has had that space, and made ample use of it. This is what "justice and right" means, not "in the abstract", but concretely.

So, there are two problems here. First, that in accepting the law as the only proper terrain of activism, he moralises and exalts it in wholly inappropriate terms, and avoids the power relations concentrated within the law. This leads him to gloss over the problems with the 'international legal consensus' and the gargantuan obstacles (the size of the US military arsenal) to achieving anything on that terrain, and also allows him to gloss over certain inconsistencies in his own position: as in, 'I am not imposing my own morality, merely siding with justice and right as instantiated in multiple resolutions'. Above all, it leads to a profound strategic and tactical conservatism: because the law is in fact congealed power, it follows that any consensus which emerges within it will reflect the priorities of those exercising power, rather than resisting it. That is what entering 'the real world of politics' means. Second, that in giving the law a spurious consistency and determinacy in his rhetoric, he fails to recognise that it is both a strategic stake and a strategic field of contestation, and that to fight within it there is no neutral, non-selective, non-partial way to interpret and decide between the relevant provisions and resolutions. One can attempt to be more or less reasonable, more or less objective, more or less serious about the material: but any serious, reasonable and objective study will acknowledge that indeterminacy is structurally built into the field of international law, and deliberately inscribed in the relevant bases for the 'consensus'. But construing the law as a consistent body of doctrine allows Finkelstein to belabour BDS for choosing to cite international law in its propaganda without explicitly endorsing the ongoing existence of Israel.

Now, you may say that this sort of argument is all very well, but is conducted in a sort of arid, academicist, or even cult-like, sphere. It may persuade some educated leftists, but there's no way to translate these sorts of arguments into slogans and demands for public consumption. That is, it may be correct, but it is practically useless. In fact, there's no difficulty here. I am merely outlining a very rough theoretical basis for explaining certain observations, the veracity of which almost anyone can be persuaded of in short order: the law, however much you may wish it were otherwise, is completely hypocritical, riddled with ambiguities, and close to impotent unless the US authorises something (obviously that's putting it crudely). For Finkelstein to depict the law as the source of justice and right is simply at odds with the evidence of one's senses. For the UN to be seen as the motor of liberatory change in the Middle East, amid a series of revolutions, is equally counterintuitive. Inasmuch as there is a strategically crucial conjuncture forming which could fatally weaken Israel, which is already weakening Israel, it is being significantly driven by the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, while the UN is playing its usual role of organising imperialist responses to the situation. It is not clear what agency or combination of agencies can be brought to bear to turn the 'international legal consensus' into an effective force other than those populations in the Middle East - and if they are already remaking the Middle East of their own accord, why on earth would they defer to this 'consensus' moulded by people who didn't have their interests in mind? In fact, the more you study this lynchpin of Finkelstein's strategic perspective, the less it looks like the solution, much less something we must defer to without qualification.

Some of Finkelstein's defenders say "well, he's just saying what he's been saying for a while, and behind the invective is a real argument which people need to take on board". In fact, it's true, he has been saying some of this for a while. And while it hasn't always been as pungently overdetermined as this intervention (rich with contempt for his maoist past), it has tended to display the same polemical weaknesses as are evident here: a tendency to moralise, to rhetorically over-reach, to hector a little bit, to caricature his opponents, and so on. It doesn't seem to be possible to disaggregate Finkelstein's position, and his arguments for it, from these tendencies. His arguments for a two-state strategy are moralistic and browbeating, if sometimes witty and insightful; yet they are not "serious about politics", because they omit sustained analysis of the field in which he proposes to conduct this strategy, or any but the most vague outlines of the agencies he thinks BDS activists should appeal to, or any critical reflection whatsoever on the concepts ('the public', 'justice', 'legal consensus', etc) that he is deploying so loosely.

Labels: Israel, norman finkelstein, palestine, zionism

Monday, September 26, 2011

Zero Authors' Statement on Gilad Atzmon posted by Richard Seymour

We are writing to express our concern that Zero Books, a vibrant, radical publisher, has made a terrible error of judgment in publishing a manuscript by the Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. The book, entitled The Wandering Who?, is a discussion of ‘Jewish identity’ in the light of global issues such as Israel-Palestine, and the financial crisis. But the nature of Atzmon’s political engagement on ‘Jewish identity’ makes him at best a dubious authority on such matters. His central concern is to describe and oppose “Jewish power”, as he sees it. Thus, in one piece complaining about the presence of Jews in the Clinton and Bush administrations, he argues:
“Zionists complain that Jews continue to be associated with a conspiracy to rule the world via political lobbies, media and money. Is the suggestion of conspiracy really an empty accusation? ... we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously … American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy.”[1]
This ‘control’ is, Atzmon argues, quite extensive. “Jewish power” is such that legitimate research into the Nazi judeocide (by which he means Holocaust denial) is impossible. The established history of the Holocaust is a “religion” that “doesn’t make any historical sense”. But Jewish power has “managed to prevent the West from accessing one of the most devastating chapters of Western history”.[2] Moreover, he blames the global economic crisis on Zionism and Jewish bankers:
“Throughout the centuries, Jewish bankers bought for themselves some real reputations of backers and financers of wars [2] and even one communist revolution [3]. Though rich Jews had been happily financing wars using their assets, Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, found a far more sophisticated way to finance the wars perpetrated by his ideological brothers Libby and Wolfowitz...”[3]
Elsewhere, he relates that Marxism is merely an expression of Jewish tribal interests, “a form of supremacy that adopts the Judaic binary template”.[4] Thus, Jews are held responsible by Atzmon for war, financial capitalism and communism. Being born to an Israeli Jewish family, he does not identify the problem, as he sees it, in terms of blood or DNA. Rather, he identifies a “Jewish tribal mindset”, a “Jewish ideology”, as the animus behind Jewish attempts “to control the world”. Yet, racist ideology has never been reducible to its ‘biological’ variants. It has often taken a ‘cultural’ form, predicated on an essentialist reading of its object (Islam, ‘Jewishness’) which is held to represent a powerful, threatening Other.
Atzmon’s assertions are underpinned by a further claim, which is that antisemitism doesn't exist, and hasn’t existed since 1948. There is only “political reaction” to “Jewish power”, sometimes legitimate, sometimes not. For example, the smashing up of Jewish graves may be “in no way legitimate”, but nor are they “’irrational’ hate crimes”. They are solely “political responses”.[5] Given this, it would be impossible for anything that Atzmon writes, or for anyone he associates with, to be anti-Semitic. This shows, not only in his writing, but in his political alliances. He sees nothing problematic, for example, in his championing of the white supremacist ‘Israel Shamir’ (“the sharpest critical voice of ‘Jewish power’ and Zionist ideology”[6]), whose writings reproduce the most vicious anti-Semitic myths including the ‘blood libel’, and for whom even the BNP are insufficiently racist.[7]
The thrust of Atzmon’s work is to normalise and legitimise anti-Semitism. We do not believe that Zero’s decision to publish this book is malicious. Atzmon’s ability to solicit endorsements from respectable figures such as Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer shows that he is adept at muddying the waters both on his own views and on the question of anti-Semitism. But at a time when dangerous forces are attempting to racialise political antagonisms, we think the decision is grossly mistaken. We call on Zero to distance itself from Atzmon’s views which, we know, are not representative of the publisher or its critical engagement with contemporary culture.

Robin Carmody, Dominic Fox, Owen Hatherley, Douglas Murphy, Alex Niven, Mark Olden, Laurie Penny, Nina Power, Richard Seymour & Kit Withnail. (Others to follow).

[1] Gilad Atzmon, ‘On Antisemitism’, Gilad.co.uk, 20th March 2003. This article has been edited so that the author has placed "Zionists" were he had written "Jewish people". This quote is true to the original.

[2] Gilad Atzmon, ‘Zionism and other Marginal Thoughts’, Gilad.co.uk, 4th October 2009; Gilad Atzmon, ‘Truth, History and Integrity’, Gilad.co.uk, 13th March 2010

[3] Gilad Atzmon, ‘Credit Crunch or rather Zio Punch?’, Gilad.co.uk, 16th November 2009

[4] Gilad Atzmon, ‘Self-Hatred vs. Self-Love- An Interview with Eric Walberg by Gilad Atzmon’, Gilad.co.uk, 5th August 2011

[5] Gilad Atzmon, ‘On Antisemitism’, Gilad.co.uk, 20th March 2003

[6] Gilad Atzmon, ‘The Protocols of the Elders Of London’, Gilad.co.uk, 9th November 2006

[7] See Israel Shamir, ‘Bloodcurdling Libel (a Summer Story)’, IsraelShamir.net; and Israel Shamir, ‘British Far Right and Saddam : responses of Robert Edwards and LJ Barnes of BNP’, IsraelShamir.net, January 2007

Labels: antisemitism, gilad atzmon, Israel, racism, zionism

Friday, August 05, 2011

The choice for Israeli protests posted by Richard Seymour

The New York Times, of all publications, puts it bluntly:

But there is one issue conspicuously missing from the protests: Israel’s 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, which exacts a heavy price on the state budget and is directly related to the lack of affordable housing within Israel proper.
According to a report published by the activist group Peace Now, the Israeli government is using over 15 percent of its public construction budget to expand West Bank settlements, which house only 4 percent of Israeli citizens. According to the Adva Center, a research institute, Israel spends twice as much on a settlement resident as it spends on other Israelis.
Indeed, much of the lack of affordable housing in Israeli cities can be traced back to the 1990s, when the availability of public housing in Israel was severely curtailed while subsidies in the settlements increased, driving many lower-middle-class and working-class Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza Strip — along with many new immigrants.
Israel today is facing the consequences of a policy that favors sustaining the occupation and expanding settlements over protecting the interests of the broader population. The annual cost of maintaining control over Palestinian land is estimated at over $700 million.

Of course, the government will try to overcome the problem by continuing the colonization of the West Bank and encouraging more Israelis to participate. So, Israeli workers have a clear choice. They can continue to invest in Zionism, continue to uphold the chauvinism at the heart of Israeli society that validates the occupation and the repression of Palestinians, and hope to resolve their dilemmas at the expense of the oppressed. Or they can make that link which they have so far refused to make, between their situation and that of the Palestinians, and begin the work of undoing the Zionism which has hitherto held them hostage. I suspect that whatever decision they make in this respect will have a lot to do with what now happens to the Arab revolutions.

Labels: capitalism, class struggle, colonialism, gaza, imperialism, Israel, palestine, west bank, working class, zionism

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

A few observations on Israel's protests posted by Richard Seymour

There have been mass protests and strikes in Israel recently. There's even an attempt to replicate the Tahrir effect, with protest camps being set up in Jerusalem. Some on the Left are naturally very pessimistic about these events. After all, the Israeli left has very rarely shown any sign of wanting to seriously overcome the colonial/racial injustice at the heart of the Zionist project. The current protests show no sign of developing an anti-occupation stance, much less an anti-apartheid stance - far from it. For all sorts of reasons, the colonial issue is not even mentioned, even though it reaches right into the problems galvanising their protest. The greatest likelihood is that the Israeli state will try to resolve the social antagonism by displacing it onto the colonial plane - more settlements, more raw material robbery, possibly another war of expansion. And given the chauvinism and racism of the great majority of Israelis, surely, you might think, they would go along with that? The only way to properly analyse this is to base it on an understanding of Israel's class antagonisms and their relationship to the colonial project. For my money, the best analysis of the latter was supplied by Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr. The core of their argument is that, unlike in many other imperialist societies, the colonial dynamic predominates over domestic class antagonisms.

Certainly, every level of Israeli society, from trade unions to the education systems, the armed forces and the dominant political parties, are implicated in the apartheid system. That was true from the very inception, in the very germinal forms of the Israeli state built up in the British Mandate period. Israeli is a society of settlers, and this has enormous ramifications for the development of class consciousness. As long as it thrives on building colonial outposts, as long as people identify their interests with the expansion of settler-colonialism, then there is little prospect of the working class developing an independent revolutionary agency. Not only is it a settler-colonial society, it is also one supported with the material resources of US imperialism. It has enjoyed considerable advantages over all regional rivals in this respect, and has thus typically enjoyed a greater capacity to contain social antagonisms. Indeed, a certain kind of colonial welfarism was built into the foundations of Zionism. Even Jabotinsky, the saint of the Israeli Right, held that every settler should have a house, food, education, clothing and medicine - this was essential for as long as much of the society was made up of very recent immigrants. In the neoliberal era, this has been eroded and undermined, with some important consequences that I'll return to. Still, Israel is unique among the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in that it is a non-oil-exporting economy with a high per capita income. With one of the highest population densities in the region, it has the ability to satisfy the needs of every citizen, even if it chooses not to do so. In a region notorious for looming food insecurity and growing water shortages, Israel maintains a high-technology economy with a big financial sector and, for no small number of its citizens, a properous lifestyle. It also has a large share of the world's billionaires. Much of this wealth derives directly from the expropriation of the Palestinians, whether it's water or real estate. In such circumstances, with colonialism such a pervasive feature of Israeli society, so central to its legitimation, and not challenged by any major political party or media outlet, it is delusional to expect the Israeli working class to be the leading agency in overcoming the racialised capitalist system they are integrated into.

Important strategic consequences follow from Machover and Orr's analysis. If the class antagonism is dominant, then the Left should focus its activism first on organising the Israeli working class as the key to breaking the colonial project. The self-organisation of that working class would be central to the downfall of that colonial system. If the colonial dynamic predominates, then Machover and Orr are right to conclude that "as long as Zionism is politically and ideologically dominant within that society, and forms the accepted framework of politics, there is no chance whatsoever of the Israeli working class becoming a revolutionary class". In which case the only solution is a regional revolutionary upsurge.

Well, the miraculous beginnings of such a regional revolt have been evident since January this year. There's no question that these have weakened Israel's regional position. Internationally, it also led to the very pro-Israel Obama calling for a return to pre-1967 borders, in an attempt to save American dominance in the Middle East. This shouldn't be exaggerated. At the moment, it's quite germinal, and unless the revolution deepens and spreads further still, it's unlikely that the US will undertake serious material steps to curb its local watchdog. Nonetheless, the weakening of Israel's regional position is real. And this certainly raises the stakes of any escalation of regional aggression that it choosed to undertake. It's also important that the Arab revolt has set the precedent for the Israeli protests, and has been produced by some of the same circumstances in terms of global recession. But, of course, while the Arab revolution has so far had a powerful anti-imperialist dynamic (not uniformly, but broadly), any possible anti-imperialist or even 'peace' dynamic in the Israeli protests is at best latent. Still, there are aspects of Israel's colonial economy that are linked to the sharpening of social divisions within the society. Generally speaking, it is the Palestinians who are made to bear the costs of the occupation. However, there are some potential antagonisms that are of relevance here.

First of all, the Israeli state invests a lot in the development of settlements, which requires an unusual degree of investment in the repressive apparatus. That necessarily diverts resources from 'internal' development, even if the long-term payback for such colonization is expected to outweigh the costs. Investment in the military vs investment in welfare is one of the issues that has arisen in recent Israeli debates. Secondly, the concentrations of class power that develop in Israel are bound up with its colonial power. For example, the specific problem at the centre of recent protests is housing. Israel's public housing system was developed on a colonial basis - literally built on Palestinian land and property. The current system allows developers and contractors who have grown very rich from the whole colonial project (look up the Israeli real estate firm named 'Colony') are deliberately refusing to carry out approved building schemes in order to inflate prices. Netanyahu's decision to grant preferred development status to colonial settlements in the West Bank also helped diverted house-building activity into the frontiers.

Netanyahu's solution is a 'free market' one - reforming the housing sector in a more privatized direction. The protesters have refused to accept his proposals, and as such the protests will probably continue. This points to the way in which, under neoliberalism, Israel's class antagonisms have been sharpened somewhat. Welfare has been run down and the rate of exploitation of Israel's working class has increased quite dramatically. A recent study within Israel found that "the average Israeli works 12 years before his or her cumulative pay equals the monthly salary of the CEO of a large firm". Unemployment is high in Israel, with the 'unproductive' the fastest growing sector of workers. Now, before these recent protests, the predominant response of Israeli workers to this situation was to become more right-wing, and more pro-Zionist. It was to kick the Palestinians hard. The far right grew in power, fuelled significantly by the support of Russian immigrants, while the overwhelming majority of Israeli workers could be counted on to support bestial acts of aggression such as Operation Cast Lead. The state became more obscenely authoritarian and racist, often without much sign of protest. There's nothing to say things won't continue in that fashion. As we have seen, the Right has means of racialising the transition to a more savage apartheid capitalism - consider this extraordinarily racist diatribe, published in the LA Times without irony or criticism, by a leading Israeli economist. The argument is that Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews are lazy, out-breeding the rest of the population, and acting as a drag on the economy. Welfare is allowing them to be lazy, he says - and one can well imagine policy being made on the basis of such arguments.

But these protests constitute a form of class struggle that has the potential to weaken the far Right and, if pushed to a certain extent, bring the polity to a crisis that weakens its grip over the Palestinians. The Israeli state will certainly try to resolve this by transferring the antagonism to the colonial plane, and may even launch another aggressive war. But such solutions may run up against quite serious limits, especially if the Arab revolt deepens and spreads (what's happening in Hama and Tahrir now is very important in this respect). Certainly, an Israeli attack on Iran could be suicidally stupid. So, the options are limited.

Moreover, another effect of neoliberalism has been the development of an autonomous 'business community', a more or less cohesive elite that owed little to the traditional institutions of Israeli society, looked increasingly outward for its revenues, and pushed the state to move toward direct negotiations with the PLO with the aim of reaching a settlement protecting Israeli supremacy. (The model of Palestinian 'governance' that emerged from Oslo thus constituted a neoliberal restructuring of Israeli colonialism.) Historically, the state took on the role of creating a Jewish bourgeoisie, since there was no such thing in Palestine prior to Israel's creation. For several decades, the state managed a corporatist settlement with the racist trade union federation Histradut incorporated into its development plans, and Labour enjoying electoral dominance. Substantial sectors of capital were developed on the 'Labour Zionist' model. The emerging crisis of this model was partly solved by the 1967 colonization project, which gave Israeli capital access to resources, cheap labour, and a larger domestic market. It further allayed domestic class conflicts by making occupied Palestinians the bottom rung of Israeli society. Still, Israel was not spared the globalised crisis of Fordism, and undertook a similar series of responses - privatizing state-owned industries, deregulating business, opening up import markets, pursuing export markets, and encouraging finance. The shift from state-led development to privatised, financialised accumulation was accompanied by a shift to Likud dominance, and consolidated in the 1985 Economic Stabilization plan. (See Adam Hanieh on this background).

This has allowed a private sector, business-oriented capitalist class to emerge, and has thus opened some potential fissures between different sectors of the Israeli ruling class. The IDF remains the supreme, dominant institution in Israeli society, and it continues to provide a great many profitable opportunities for Israeli capital. But its interests are increasingly at odds with those of the wider Israeli capitalist class. The second Palestinian intifada, for example - provoked by IDF incursions and the failure of the Palestinians to get a whiff of justice from the Oslo process - cost Israeli capital a huge amount of potential growth. Now, the IDF's reputation for military supremacy has meant that it could always promise to extirpate any problem. In reality, the limits of military power were illustrated quite starkly in Lebanon in 2006.

Because in Israel the colonial dynamic still predominates, and because the vast majority of Israeli workers have not begun to break with Zionism, and indeed many could reasonably claim to get some benefit from it, how these social antagonisms and elite fissures work out depends primarily on the regional context. If the Arab Spring continues and radicalises, the weakening of Israel's position, its usefulness to Washington, and its ability to sustain military policies that sections of its ruling class already find burdensome, then the prospects of major social struggles in Israel are increased. If not, then I suspect the Israeli ruling class can resolve its difficulties at the expense of the Palestinians and take a further lurch down the road to some sort of fascism.

Labels: colonialism, Israel, israeli arabs, middle east, racism, revolution, US imperialism, working class, zionism

Friday, February 11, 2011

Glenn Beck on the SWP posted by Richard Seymour

Glenn Beck exposes the SWP's role in the world socialist-Islamist conspiracy, from 26 mins, 01 secs. Followed by some ranting with Dore Gold and an explanation of the "red-green alliance" between "Trotskyites and Islamists" in Britain.

Labels: conspiracy theories, egypt, glenn beck, islamism, Israel, muslim brothers, revolution, swp, trotskyism, zionism

Monday, January 24, 2011

The end of the Palestinian Authority? posted by Richard Seymour

JamieSW's comprehensive summary of the Palestine Papers asks if the comprador regime's pandering to Israeli rejectionism means it is finished:

Most of the Arab world’s anger so far has been directed not at the Israeli government but at the PA. This makes sense: Arabs take Israeli rejectionism for granted. Unlike many liberals in Europe and America, they cannot afford the luxury of delusions about our ally’s role in the region. The PA’s collaboration has also long been clear, but the extent of the betrayal revealed in the documents is nauseating. They record Abbas greeting Condoleeza “birth pangs” Rice with, “[y]ou bring back life to the region when you come.” “I would vote for you”, senior negotiator Ahmed Qureia told Livni; Ariel Sharon was my “friend”, Abbas enthused. We already knew about the PA’s collaboration with the US and Israel to overthrow Hamas; its support for the Gaza siege; its close cooperation with the Israeli military; and its diplomatic manoeuvres to bury the UN inquiry into the 2008-9 Gaza massacre. These new leaks promise to reveal how PA “leaders were privately tipped off” in advance about the Gaza massacre – something previous leaks have already confirmed.

Again, none of this should come as a surprise. The PA is a product of the Oslo process, which was designed, as former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami put it, to groom a Palestinian leadership class to act as “Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the [first] intifada and… [cut] short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence”. The aim, another Israeli minister explained, “was to find a strong dictator to ... keep the Palestinians under control.” The PA is “almost wholly dependent upon American, European and Arab political and financial support, as well as security and economic cooperation with Israel” and so can only operate within limits dictated by Israel and its international backers. This was dramatically illustrated when Palestinians elected a government that didn’t enjoy the backing of their occupiers in 2006. The US, Europe and Israel responded by starving it of funds, isolating it diplomatically, kidnapping a third of the cabinet, killing hundreds of Palestinians, destroying Gaza’s only power station, and training and arming Fatah militias to overthrow it. It is a mistake, then, to focus overly on the corruption and venality of Abbas, Erekat, et al. The more important point is that the PA is structurally incapable of serving as an instrument of Palestinian liberation. Our takeaway lesson from the documents should be the need to end our government’s support for Israel’s occupation and Abbas’s quasi-police state in the West Bank.

The PA’s strategy as revealed in the documents is delusional, on the (perhaps unreasonable) assumption that its objective is to secure a negotiated settlement to the conflict. It appears to be under the impression that if it just offers Israel one more concession, cedes one more bit of territory, compromises on one more basic Palestinian right, then the U.S. will force Israel to accept a settlement. The reality of the American role hardly needs elaborating here; it is encapsulated well enough in Rice’s response to the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948: “Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time.” The gaping yawn wasn’t transcribed. When Palestinian negotiators objected to Israel’s insistence on annexing yet more Palestinian territory, Rice was blunt: “You won’t have a state… your children’s children will not have an agreement.”

It is still too early to predict how reaction to the leaks will play out. The PA is denying everything on the grounds that, paraphrasing Erekat, ‘we can’t have offered Israel virtually all of East Jerusalem, because if we had then obviously Israel would have accepted it’. What is the Arabic for ‘facepalm’? “We don’t hide anything from our brothers”, Abbas insisted as the PA threatened to shut down Al Jazeera. Abbas has accused Al Jazeera of declaring “war” on the Palestinians – Erekat is presumably drawing up an agreement to cede East Jerusalem to Riz Khan.
The popular legitimacy of the PA, already damaged, is surely now destroyed. In the long-term – possibly sooner - this could spell its demise. Certainly Palestinians will not achieve their liberation under its auspices.

Labels: colonialism, east jerusalem, gaza, Israel, israeli terrorism, palestine, US imperialism, west bank, zionism

Saturday, December 18, 2010

John Pilger - The War You Don't See posted by Richard Seymour

John Pilger - The War You Don't See from The War We Don't See on Vimeo.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, imperialism, iraq, Israel, pilger, US imperialism, zionism

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Racist patriarchy in Israel, updated posted by Richard Seymour

In July, I discussed the story of an Arab man from East Jerusalem who was initially charged with the rape and indecent assault of a Jewish woman but who, in the end, was actually convicted of 'rape by deception', meaning that he had had consensual sex with the woman in question but that the consent was obtained by the Arab man falsely claiming to be Jewish. The judge in the prosecution made the racist basis of this verdict about as explicit as he lawfully could. I am now told that there has been an update to this story in "the left-wing newspaper" Ha'aretz. In fact, it is an update that, I am assured, completely changes the complexion of the whole story. I have been asked by the editor of the F-word, which also covers the new claims, to publicise this information - so I'll oblige. The story is not published in the English-language version of Ha'aretz, so we have to rely on Google Translate, or this translation which is fairly close to Google's version.

The story contains edited highlights from the 100 page declassified testimony of the woman, 'B', who alleged that she was raped by Sabbar Kashur. The testimony was apparently declassified at the request of a local Ha'aretz affiliated newspaper. This forms the bulk of the article's actual content, which details the experiences of 'B' from childhood until shortly after the alleged rape. But the 'expose', as it has been called, depends on another source - the prosecution. The defence, though depicted in a rather unsympathetic light, (sadistically tormenting a rape victim, smiling through it all), is not directly quoted once in the article. The spin on the negotiations leading to a plea bargain is exclusively supplied by the prosecution, who alleged that they opted for a plea bargain - that is, an agreement on a lesser charge of 'rape by deception' - to protect their witness from the traumatic experience of being cross-examined by the defence on her past, with specific regard to previous allegations of rape against her father, and her career in prosecution. Thus, so the article has it, the defence sought to subject a vulnerable victim of rape to an emotionally lacerating attack on her credibility as a witness. It was not out of racism, the prosecution maintains, but out of humanitarian concern for their witness that the state decided to cut a deal with Sabbar Kashur, to allow him to serve a much lesser sentence for a much lesser crime.

The article comes amid a legal process, in which Kashur's defence is appealling to the Supreme Court, to the effect that the facts agreed in the original trial ought not to be the basis of a sentence. They say that his behaviour was at most 'immoral' in the sense that, per the court's verdict, he had sex with a woman while he himself was married with children, and allowed her to believe that he was a single Jewish man. The Prosecutor's Office has responded with fury to the appeal, according to the Israeli daily's account. If it is true that the criminal justice establishment is so deeply unhappy about an appeal which may further undermine their credibility and further shame them before the whole world, then this may be one reason why the court chose to release the testimony of 'B' - and, if I judge right, only that testimony. I have difficulty believing that they simply release the details of closed trials to any newspaper for the asking. I'll leave it to you to consider why Ha'aretz's local affiliate asked only for that testimony. I have also mentioned that the prosecution is quoted in the Ha'aretz article, though the defence is not. The prosecutors have good reason to cooperate with the media. Their argument is, after all, that the media's coverage of this case has been positively beneficial to the defence team. This article, which concurs with the prosecution's charge that its account of the nitty gritty of the trial was not taken seriously by the Israeli media, would therefore be a part of the prosecution's counterblast in anticipation of the Supreme Court's decision.

And this is the trouble with the over-hasty responses, such as that published on the F-Word, which treat this as a case of a victim unfairly maligned, abused in the media, which is "only too keen to pick up on stories of women supposedly ‘crying rape’". The prosecution - the Israeli state in other words - is engaged in a public relations offensive in advance of a court case, in which its single greatest asset is sympathy for a woman who, whether or not she was raped, is clearly vulnerable and in great distress. Is it not basically irresponsible to uncritically regurgitate the claims of an article that is for all intents and purposes, a puff piece for the prosecution before a major appeal? Is it not doubly irresponsible to instantaneously discount the claims of racism in this case, and trivialise the horrified responses as mere "chin scratching"? After all, it is true that the media is generally all too "keen to pick up on stories of women supposedly 'crying rape'" - but it is not true that the media is at all keen to discount stories of black or Arab men raping 'white' women. The facts of epistemic injustice, wherein someone's account is automatically devalued on account of their being black or female, do not neatly favour one interpretation or other here.

It may yet turn out that Sabbar Kashur is a rapist, though it has not been proven that he is. The Ha'aretz article, surprisingly enough for an 'expose', does not add to or subtract from the evidence one way or the other. The only evidence it deals with at all is the testimony of 'B', which might not be accurate, and which at any rate did not stand up in court. Still if it does turn out that Kashur raped 'B', then the original outrage at the state should be multiplied rather than muted, because in that case it would have taken an instance of patriarchal aggression and used it to further bolster racist patriarchy (the kind that 'protects' Jewish women from Arab men), which is unmistakeably and unavoidably what the verdict did. The interpretation of the judges ruling on the matter still says that it is a crime for an Arab man to 'pass' as a Jewish man in order to have sexual relations with a an Israeli Jewish woman, and that legal outcome is still inserted into a national context in which relations between Jews and Arabs are strictly taboo.

For these, among other reasons, I am far from convinced that the Ha'aretz article should place a whole new complexion on this story and our response to it, and am extremely dismayed by some of the incautious and uncritical responses to this story.

Labels: colonialism, gender, Israel, patriarchy, racism, rape, sexism, zionism

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

This is Zionism. posted by Richard Seymour

"An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

"The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.

"The manner of Iman's killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died."

Labels: gaza, Israel, murder, palestine, war crimes, west bank, zionism

Friday, August 13, 2010

Capitalism's ground zero posted by Richard Seymour

This furore about the 'ground zero mosque' - actually a mosque being built in a former business site four blocks away from 'ground zero' - reflects the fact that the Republican right's kulturkampf against 'socialism' has run out of steam as a mobilising tool, and they're now turning back to a trusted technique of whipping up hysteria about Islam. This was the other side of the race-baiting that McCain and Palin engaged in during the 2008 election. As you'll recall, the story had it that Obama was a Muslim terrorist from Kenya, and he was going to give people with brown skin the run of things. Across America, local bigots are organising against mosques, just as they are in the UK and much of Europe (other parts of Europe are prioritising a murderous purge against Roma). The GOP doesn't really give a shit about this, but knows how to throw red meat to its base. Hence, as Jamie points out, Republicans are going all out to capitalise on this, with Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas fulminating about terrorist babies - a dehumanising trope which, he also points out, has its origins in Department of Defense-Hollywood propaganda:

Not that this is a purely 'red state' phenomenon. A correspondent points out that naked anti-Muslim racism is emerging in liberal redoubts such as Seattle, where local sex columnist Dan Savage has engaged in vitriolic attacks on 'Muslim culture'. Here, traditional American nativism, imperial ideology, and pro-Israel doctrine are fusing into a vicious racist brew that, incubated by the 'war on terror', is now being used to buttress the prospects of the most reactionary class warriors for the rich, as a new recession looms. For this racist hysteria about the 1 or 2% of Americans who are Muslim is, while it has a lot to do with bolstering support for a flagging empire, certainly also a weapon of class struggle. As always when capitalism experiences a crisis, it regurgitates all existing barbarisms into a toxic new formula for bludgeoning the working class. In Arizona, the victim is immigrant labour, elsewhere it's the Muslims.

The big struggle today is no longer over healthcare - that's dead, killed for the second time by the Democrats and their allies in big capital, not least the pharmaceutical and insurance giants. The struggle now is over social security, which the Obama administration is going after: more of that accumulation-by-dispossession. Bush was soundly defeated when he tried this, but Obama is the 'progressive' president. Liberals will defend him to the bitter end. If the Republicans win big in the mid-terms, as they are expected to, they will provide a stronger bulwark of support for cuts to social security than even the most right-wing Democrats would. It will provide him with the alibi he needs - the country is right-wing, we can't risk running liberal programmes any more, we just have to save what we can, etc. So much for hope. So much for the small change you could believe in.

Labels: accumulation, barack obama, capitalism, capitalist crisis, imperial ideology, islamophobia, recession, social security, US imperialism, zionism

Friday, August 06, 2010

HP Sauce in racist harassment shocker posted by Richard Seymour

You all know that Harry's Place are meshuggeneh. Their McCarthyism, witch hunts against trade unionists and the Left, hounding of Muslims whom they take a dislike to (99% of them), and slavish devotion to rationalising every outrageous crime perpetrated by the state of Israel, marks them out as pure prime time crazy. Their Islamophobia and gravitation toward far right territory led to a break with their former star writer on the left's alleged crimes and complicities in Yugoslavia: one Marko Attila Hoare for whom, I am glad to see, there are limits.

Lately, Harry's Place awarded posting rights to the deranged racist Terry Fitzpatrick, who has established himself at the Socialist Unity blog as an unpleasant and dangerously deluded man with a persecution complex. Apparently, Andy Newman tolerated him because of his glorious past as an anarchist bank robber and anti-racist, sometime back in the 1970s. It transpires that Fitzpatrick has been engaging in a campaign of racist harassment against Lee Jasper for some years now. He accuses Jasper of crack dealing and pimping, and calls him, among other things, a "fucking n*****r ponce". Under Socialist Unity's post on the subject, Fitzpatrick is allowed to repeat his charges.

Lately, Harry's Place launched one of their routine psycho-ceramic campaigns to vilify an opponent as antisemitic - an accusation that Fitzpatrick is handy with too, which is why he was welcome at Harry's Place. Their target was Operation Black Vote, which criticised a heavy-handed police raid on a Nation of Islam mosque in Brixton (the police alleged that they believed it was a "cannabis factory"). The accusation was a variation of the 'Links' game that Justin Horton described on this blog a few years ago. OBV sided with the Nation of Islam, which is antisemitic, so therefore OBV must be antisemitic too. That particular attack was composed by Edmund Standing, whose bilious attacks on Muslims, Muslim organisations, the Quran, political correctness, the left (etc etc) have now spilled over into a libel against a moderately left-of-centre anti-racist organisation.

Lee Jasper, of OBV, wrote a rejoinder to the attack, while also pointing out that Harry's Place hosted an outright racist crank among its writers. He pointed out that Fitzpatrick had been stalking him and subjecting him to the most vile racist abuse. The usual Harry's Place dirt piled on, refusing to take his claims seriously, minimising their import, changing the subject, denouncing the victim of said racism. For such people, the only real victims of racism are Israeli war criminals. As Andy Newman puts it, "Jasper was then not shown solidarity as a victim of racism, but further harassed, and harried over unrelated issues of what his views are on Louis Farrakhan. ... Jasper was accused of being a liar, and being obsessed with race."

Lee Jasper himself writes that "Harry’s Place refused to take my complaint seriously. They trivialised that compliant, they denigrated me as a victim of serious racist abuse and they sought to obscure that compliant by constant counter accusation and showering me with personal abuse." Evidently, some of Fitzpatrick's grotesque racist abuse was allowed to appear on the HP blog itself. Jasper notes that the blog sought to cover for Fitzpatrick, since as soon as Fitzpatrick's racist harassment was reported to the police, and he was charged, "all of his most rabid and racist comments were removed by Harrys Place overnight". Finally, reluctantly, Harry's Place withdrew Fitzpatrick's posting rights, and barred him from the blog. Their final act of arse-covering was to note that Fitzpatrick has long had an association with the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine, for which he has written articles in the past. Searchlight, Jasper notes, has been curiously, sadly silent on this issue. They too migh wish to consider why Fitzpatrick has been allowed to draw on Searchlight's immense bank of credibility long after it had become clear that he was a delusional bigot.

Labels: bnp, cruise missile liberals, hp scum, islamophobia, lee jasper, liberal imperialism, operation black vote, racism, zionism

Friday, July 23, 2010

Lynching posted by Richard Seymour

Ramifications of the criminal conspiracy discussed below:

'Arab man attacked for talking to Jewish girl'

Twenty-three year old rushed to hospital unconscious after being beaten with heavy metal object at Tiberias gas station, sustaining serious injuries. Suspect yet to be apprehended.

Labels: colonialism, imperial feminism, jim crow, palestine, patriarchy, racism, segregation, zionism

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Racist patriarchy in Israel posted by Richard Seymour

This is an example of racist patriarchy. A man, Sabbar Kashur, has been imprisoned for doing nothing more than having consensual sex with a woman, whose name has not been disclosed. Both parties were of age, and no one alleges that the transaction took place without consent. Initially, this was not clear, as the original complaint suggested that there had been some coercion. But as the woman's testimony in the course of the trial made clear, the only crime that Kashur, now convicted of rape, committed was to have allowed the woman to believe that he was Jewish, when in fact he was an Arab. He did not even actively perpetrate a deceit, merely chatted the woman up and didn't say "by the way, I am an Arab". And that has earned him 18 months in prison, on the basis of a plea bargain. Judge Tzvi Segal explained:

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls."

Are you getting it yet? Sex with an Arab constitutes a violation of the sanctity of body and soul - an "unbearable price". This is not a freakish opinion in Israeli society. For example, half of Israeli Jews believe intermarriage between Arabs and Jews is equivalent to national treason (that demographic 'timebomb', you see). Some are determined to enforce this sexual separation through violence or policy. Gangs of men in a Jerusalem neighbourhood roam around, behaving as a de facto vice and virtue squad, to 'protect' young Jewish girls from Arabs. One local authority has set up a squad of counsellors and psychiatrists to 'rescue' Jewish girls who are dating Arabs.

Hostility to inter-marriage and cross-ethnic dating pervades Zionist culture, and is reproduced at structural and institutional levels from the cradle to the grave. There has been a raft of legislative measures since 1948 that are designed to frustrate socialisation between Jews and Arabs, and the existing structures of segregation in education and housing ensure that intermarriage is already very rare. Jonathan Cook, quoting the Israeli sociologist Dr Yuval Yonay, points out that Israel's education system, designed to inculcate Zionist principles in Israeli Jews, largely succeeds in foreclosing Jewish-Arab relationships. The Israeli far right has long wished to enforce the stigma on such relationships with legislation. Meir Kahane, before he was thrown out of the Knesset in the 1980s, attempted to do just that. The current political climate in Israel, with the most racist Knesset of all time and a host of discriminatory measures in the pipeline, will tend to compound this trend.

The woman who filed the charge can hardly be burdened with most of the responsibility. Who knows what pressures she was under? Perhaps no pressures other than the racist ideology that she will have internalised if she is a normal product of the Israeli education system. But perhaps it was put to her that her honour as an Israeli Jewish woman, and that of her family, had been sullied by her treasonous intercourse with an Arab from East Jerusalem and that, if she wished to expiate her crime, she should say that she had been raped. Whatever the case, without the backing of the forces of racist patriarchy her complaint would not have resulted in a conviction. It's not as if it's easy for women to get their complaint heard and a conviction obtained when a rape really has occurred. It's not as if the criminal justice system throws its weight behind women every time they experience domestic violence, harrassment, or sexual violation. This was a complaint that, with its obvious paucity of evidence of any kind of violation or assault, could easily have been dealt with outside of the courts. Instead, they devoted their considerable resources to keeping this man in lockdown - he was under house arrest for almost two years while the case was brought to trial - and so loading the scales against him that even when no evidence of rape emerged, he still ended up 'guilty'.

The court has therefore come down on the side of racist patriarchy, effectively joining those vice and virtue squads in 'protecting' Jewish women from any desire they may have to have sex and romance with Arab men, conserving the sanctity of the Jewish body and soul, and ensuring that the female body is strictly harnessed to the urgent task of perpetually regenerating the race. The criminal justice system itself, from the police to the prosecution and the judges, conspired to deliberately frame a consensual sex act as a violation. The fact that the verdict was secured with a plea bargain suggests that the defence also participated in this charade, intimidating and gaslighting Kashur so thoroughly that he ultimately 'confessed' to having committed a 'crime' and officially expressed a desire to be reformed. This is a calculated deterrence of inter-racial love, sex and solidarity. Perhaps it was seen as a necessary move due to the disproportionate presence of women among the Israeli peace movement, and the fear that their fraternising with the enemy is undermining militarist-nationalist morale. More likely, I think, such judgments are a logical corollary of founding a polity on the creation and maintenance of a demographically preponderant oppressor group through sheer military violence. A militarised colonial state, even one with a thin liberal democratic veneer, is necessarily a racially supremacist patriarchy, and would be so even without outlandish stunts like this conviction.

Labels: colonialism, imperial feminism, Israel, misogyny, palestine, palestinians, patriarchy, racism, rape, sexism, zionism

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Chutzpah and hasbara posted by Richard Seymour

You know how it is. For days, it's been impossible to log on to Twitter without some frantic Israeli apologists urgently messaging you to say - no, look, it's really clear, these so-called 'humanitarians' attacked Israeli soldiers who merely responded, yadda yadda yadda. They lynched those servicemen... Or, better still - peace activists don't carry weapons, they were there to get themselves killed... Rarely has such a toxic mixture of the desperate, the cowardly and the callous been compressed into 140 characters or less, and almost all of it is directly inspired by the carefully crafted tweets of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (Anyone who doubts the Israeli government's online virtuosity should check out what they can do with Flickr).

Israel, as noted before, never has any agency in any of this. Not one of Israel's apologists can contemplate for a second that the IDF, and the commando outfit Unit 13 that perpetrated the massacres, made a choice at every step leading to the murder of those aid workers - each of whom was deliberately executed with several bullets from close range. Their solidarity with the murderers is complete: "We are all Unit 13", as the Israeli protesters have reportedly taken to chanting. This is a pretty pathetic position to be in. Just as well Max Blumenthal has taken the trouble of trawling through the Israeli media's build-up to the attack, and documented that the attack was planned down to every detail, and that the use of lethal force was planned on the pretext that the flotilla's occupants were "terrorists".

Now, the 'Rachel Corrie' has also been hijacked, though as yet the Israelis haven't got round to murdering anyone on board. Predictably, it has been vilified as a jihadi vessel with links to global terrorism. The hasbara merchants have been out in force again, demanding to know why the aid workers didn't accept Israel's "offer" to dock at Ashdod port. Well, as before, it's very simple. The Israeli blockade has wilfully destroyed the Gazan economy. Destroying the power generation systems, and the sewage and other vital infrastructure that depended on it, the blockade has resulted in a process of de-development. The blockade, restricting Gaza's ships to operation within three nautical miles, has also destroyed the fishing industry. It has put almost half of agricultural land out of productive use. Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, described how Gaza's "whole civilisation has been destroyed" by the blockade, though in fact Gazans are more resilient than this diagnosis would allow. But people are dying in large numbers. Poor nutrition, hardly any medicines, and lack of sewage processing means that Gazans are dying from preventable and treatable diseases. Diarrhoea alone is responsible for 12% of young deaths.

And here's the punchline. The blockade has left most Gazans wholly or partially dependent on food aid. However, the blockade has also placed a stranglehold on the amount of aid actually getting to Gaza. The amount entering Gaza in mid-2009 was 25% of that entering in 2007. This has resulted in nine out of ten residents living below the poverty line of a dollar a day. Even such aid as is devoted to Gaza can't be spent because of the blockade, according to Amnesty and the ICRC. Israel has consistently blocked food shipments, only allowing them through when it became an embarrassing political incident. It has held up medicines until they have expired. 80% of all imports to Gaza come through the tunnels. Israel has deliberately turned Gaza into a ghettoised economy, dependent on smuggling from outside fences, walls, and boundaries enforced by military violence. The tunnels, of course, are routinely attacked by aerial bombardment, on the pretext that they are being used to smuggle weapons - because Gaza, this tiny land mass with no navy or standing army, might get a few guns to defend itself the next time Israel decides to invade.

So, going through Israel is not an option. Attempting to get aid through the port at Ashdod means that little if any of the aid will reach the intended recipients. Israel has proved this time and again. The blockade is a premeditated act of savagery and sadism, and Israel does not intend to allow international aid to disrupt its calculated cruelty. Israel insists on its 'right' to hijack vessels in international waters that might actually disrupt this barbarism-by-design. Now it insists that if activists resist such hijack efforts, even with the most elementary, non-lethal weapons, as is their right, it can murder them with impunity. The Israeli state has thus proven, not only in its actions, but in the audacious, brazen propaganda campaign it has since initiated (a truly disgusting example of which), that it is not susceptible to reasoning or moral pleading. In addition to this, Israel's pied-noirs broadly approve of these colonial atrocities, differing only with the far right foreign affairs minister Avigdor Lieberman on the precise method for maintaining the stranglehold. So, relying on persuasion and heartfelt humanitarian appeals with a population that has been complicit in the colonial project from the start, and is displaying signs of rapid moral and political degeneration, is a complete waste of time. There is no alternative but to forcibly break the blockade. Israel's apologists bleat about a few knives and sticks found aboard the hijacked vessels, but if it were not tactically suicidal, it would be perfectly reasonable and appropriate for any future flotilla to proceed fully armed.

Labels: colonialism, flotilla, gaza, gaza freedom march, Israel, palestine, propaganda, war crimes, zionism

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Interview with flotilla survivor posted by Richard Seymour

Kevin Ovenden explains:

"At 4.25am the attack began. The warship had neared and commandoes were lowering themselves onto the deck from helicopters. There were two motorised dinghies, carrying 14-20 commandoes, on either side of the boat.

"It was clear they were armed – it was the equivalent to an SAS raid. They were all wearing paramilitary style balaclavas.

"The first soldiers landed on the roof of the ship, people responded instinctively with their bare hands and things you would find on a ship – pieces of wood and piping and so on. No sharp objects were used.

Two soldiers were overpowered and pushed below deck. They were disarmed to prevent further injury or death.

"The attack opened with percussion grenades.

"These don’t just make a noise but send shockwaves of heavy vibration. They were trying to create terror and panic.

"They also used rubber coated bullets in the earlier stage. But very quickly they turned to live rounds and we were taking heavy casualties.

"Niki Enchmarch was on the top deck standing next to a Turkish man who was holding a camera. An Israeli soldier shot him in the middle of the forehead. It blew off the back of his skull and he died.

"I was on the second deck. A man standing a metre in front of me was shot in the leg, the man to the right of me in the abdomen. There was pandemonium and terror.

"The youngest person on the ship was not yet a year old, the eldest 88. The crew included German and Egyptian parliamentarians, NGO workers and representatives from various charities. This is who Israel was targeting.

"While they opened fire we struggled in our defence and to limit the massacre.

"They attacked with lethal force to terrorise the movement for the end of the siege of Gaza and the wider movement of solidarity with Palestine. They used violence to instill terror for political ends. This is the definition of terrorism."

Labels: blockade, flotilla, free gaza, gaza, gaza freedom march, Israel, palestine, zionism

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Israel: marionette or schlemiel posted by Richard Seymour

Don't get me wrong. I think the attack on the Gaza Freedom flotilla was an insane adventurist provocation that may turn out very badly for Israel. But there are two narratives developing in the media, and among the commentariat, in which Israel is either a bungling, Frank Spencer-style dolt, well-meaning but overly eager, or a sort of mannequin with no animus of its own, pushed into action exclusively by external forces. The former narrative is most popular. Note the ubiquity of the phrase "botched raid" in the reporting. As if Netanyahu's cabinet didn't send the notoriously violent Masada unit (whose crimes against humanity usually take place in the locus of one of Israel's political jails, or in the vicinity of a peaceful Palestinian protest) to storm the Mavi Marmara on purpose. As if the whole thing wasn't planned for weeks in advance, in detail, from inception to denouement. As if the probability of murders wasn't accounted for.

The second narrative, the marionette tale, is more specialised fare, and it is perhaps telling that two of Israel's liberal "critics" should purvey it in different versions. Example one: Turkish Islamists used humanitarians as bait to "lure Israel into a trap, precisely because it knew how Israel would react, knew how Israel is destined and compelled, like a puppet on a string, to react the way it did." Example two: Israel had "no choice" but to murder the aid workers because they had "issued threat after threat against the IDF in the days building up to this morning's clash" and on the day used "iron bars and other weapons to assault the troops and giving the IDF carte blanche to respond with force against them". The aid workers compelled Israeli troops to kill them, gave them no options. Their every action was pre-determined from start to finish, and even if the results are regrettable, and even if Israel initiated the aggression and pulled the trigger, it bears no responsibility.

It has a venerable history, this idea. Golda Meir expressed it most pithily when she said that she would never forgive the Arabs for making Israel kill their children. In whatever variant it takes, it is surely revealing that the best defence (or least worst criticism) of Israel that such people can muster is that Israel is not a responsible agent.

Labels: flotilla, free gaza, gaza freedom march, Israel, massacre, palestine, zionism