Israeli settlers beat up Palestinian woman posted by lenin

Watch this. One cannot help being reminded of the Klan here. As far as the colonists are concerned, this Palestinian woman overstepped the line merely by herding her sheep too near to their 'settlement' - thus refusing to accept that her land should be illegally annexed. And so they sent out a punishment squad, in masks, with sticks, and they beat her and her husband and her nephew.

Labels: colonialism, Israel, palestine, settlers, west bank, zionism

"National Socialists for Israel" posted by lenin

According to Ha'aretz:

Nazis against anti-Semitism? As bizarre as that sounds, a group of Germans which calls itself "National Socialists For Israel" launched its Web site in support of Israel.

"Stop the hatred of the Jewish people," the Web site reads. "The Jews are a healthy, strong nation."

The organization - whose members have yet to reveal themselves to the public - claims that Israel's right to exist is anchored in the principles of social Darwinism, the same principles which the Nazis adopted prior to the Second World War.

Labels: far right, Israel, nazi scum, zionism

IDF soldiers torture, choke, beat and murder Palestinians posted by lenin

As Israel continues to build new colonies in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank city of Hebron have confessed to numerous atrocities against Palestinian civilians. The full testimonies can be read here. Sometimes, what is striking is the pettiness of the causes that leads Israeli soldiers to beheave like this. For example, one IDF soldier tried to steal an old man's tobacco box during a house raid. The old man protested, calling him a thief, and they all started to beat him up heavily. The thief then took the old man's hand and wrapped barbed wire tightly round it, explaining that "He lifted a hand on me, he'll be punished." That's the deal - if the untermenschen even lift a hand to their oppressors, they get beaten and tortured. Another old man got too close to Israeli soldiers while out walking, so they shot him. "No reason, he just got close". And so on.

However, there are also calculated attacks with intent to kill everyone in sight, regardless of whether they are armed, or defend themselves, or are unarmed non-combatants. For example, there's the testimony about a great "honour" that soldiers were given, by being allowed to swoop on a refugee camp in Tul Karem. The IDF had found that whenever they tried to raid the camp on previous occasions, the residents huddled round campfires fought back, climbing to the rooftops to shoot at the invaders. So, they decided to sneak in:

The four lit campfires we spotted were quite near each other, and near the only two or three vehicle access routes into the camp. We were told to also post sharpshooters…Our firing orders were that each squatter around the campfires should be shot just like during a liquidation operation.

Without pretense? Without arms?

Yes, even unarmed people were to be shot.

Everyone around the campfire?

Yes, everyone present at the campfire during our entry at 2AM or 3AM was to be shot to death. Regardless whether…

Regardless whether or not he was armed?

Even if he was unarmed. That wasn’t considered of any consequence. Intelligence reported that there were about 10-15 people hanging around, regardless of age, regardless of anything, everyone that….

Boom?

Boom.

...

Clearly this mission was not described as an ‘execution’. If it were one, a projectile would have been fired (at the squatters). Rather, it is described a ‘Confrontational, or violent patrol’. (e.g.a patrol aiming to draw fire, or, in this case, to shoot) Let’s say everything went as planned, how would they explain it tomorrow to the press? ‘The IDF encountered a group of armed people, (as probably there were some armed people there), and someone got wounded’, and that’s the whole story. Did you understand? And that’s the end. No mention that we came to execute.

What were you told in the briefing?

It was not described as an execution mission. Absolutely not.

How then was it described?

Like I said. Firing orders for this particular mission: Entrance (into the camp) at 2:30AM. Anyone present in the alley at that time was to be shot. There are no innocent people there. That’s the mission. No one described it as an execution mission.

Another testimony has Israeli soldiers stationed outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and instructed to fire on worshippers as they exited. "We were supposed to shoot whoever came out – doesn’t matter if he’s armed or not." [Curious thing: while I've been writing this, the contents of the online testimonies have disappeared from the original website - literally everything, including text, images and videos, has been deleted. You can of course view some caches of older material here for as long as Google keeps them up, and the booklet can at any rate be read here.] Israel's latest enemy in Hebron is Palestinian orphans.

We are on the brink of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba, which Israel will be celebrating with the usual aplomb during Passover. To keep the celebrations safe, they will be keeping out the Arabs - an appropriate tribute, I think, to the garrison state that has emerged from the original purification of the territory. Its systems of segregation, expropriation, blockade, colonisation, airborne occupation, assassinations, demolitions, raids, checkpoint massacres, protest shoot-ups, shellings, curfews and kidnappings, has all been for the purpose of maintaining racial supremacy over the indigenous Palestinian population and eventually eliminating the very possibility of Palestine for good. So this is a logical interlude in the tortuous conquest. Lights out for the natives. Pull up the drawbridges. Man the frontiers. Fire at anything that moves. Nothing can be allowed to disturb the repose of the executioners.

Labels: apartheid, Israel, palestine, zionism

Gaza posted by lenin

Labels: gaza, Israel, murdering bastards, palestine, zionism

The BNP, the far right, and Israel posted by lenin

The Guardian reported yesterday that the BNP is "trying to shed its antisemitic past as part of a drive to pick up votes among London's Jewish community". Plainly, this is misleading. The BNP have no more abandoned antisemitism than they have abandoned their phantasmagoric goal of a 'white Britain'. One example of evidence for The Guardian's claim is that the BNP website is described by a (disapproving) representative of the Board of Deputies as "one of the most Zionist on the web - it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel". More on that in a second. It also cites the BNP's own claim that there is "a growing dialogue between senior members of the Jewish community and the BNP". Supposing this were true, it wouldn't actually mean a great deal. The BNP is anti-trade union, though it says the opposite in some of its literature, and though it has trade unionists as members. It is homophobic, though I am sure that one of their recent candidates was a lesbian (and a trade unionist!). The BNP's London mayoral candidate Richard Barnbrook, though claiming that homosexuality is 'unhealthy', is reported as saying that you can be gay 'behind closed doors'. Of course, that isn't intended to woo gay and lesbian voters, but to soften the BNP's fascist aura for right-wing voters. In reality, BNP candidates regularly try to crack down on gay rights whenever elected. In public its candidates vaunt law and order, and in private they are often criminal scumbags. You could go on and on: subterfuge is structural to fascist politics in a way that it isn't for conventional bourgeois politics.

The current posture of the Nazis is in one sense a result of a few years of re-orientations in BNP propaganda. A few years ago, Searchlight magazine quoted the BNP chairman Nick Griffin addressing a Ku Klux Klan rally. In it, he told the audience that they should learn to speak the language of public relations. The slogan, 'freedom, security, identity, democracy', provided a soft packaging for a set of fascist policies, he explained. And, what is more, "no one can touch you for it". However, there's a lot more going on than that. In a 2005 interview with the right-wing Zionist website, Think-Israel, Griffin averred that the thesis of Bat Ye'Or about Eurabia was correct, and that the real threat was a plot by the French elite to Islamify the European continent. (The article also exulted that the BNP had a Jewish office-holder, namely then councillor Pat Richardson. It did not mention that while Richardson urged her voters to believe that the BNP is not antisemitic, her friend Tony Lecomber had been sentenced to three years in prison for participating in an antisemitic assault by a BNP gang). This tendency came particularly to the fore during the Lebanon war, in which the BNP explicitly backed Israel, I think for the first time. Griffin described the new regime as "moderately and prudently more sympathetic to the Israeli side", albeit the fascists are not inclined to be bewitched by a "Jewish mystique", whatever that is.

As cynical as this is, it is not just a cynical ploy on the fascists' part. It is true that part of Griffin's argument is that fascism will do better electorally if it drops the public ranting about Jews and focuses on Islam. And that is unmistakeably the case: the media are happy to collude in the venomous demonisation of Muslims; politicians from centre-left to hard right find it a convenient talking point; public opinion is much more prepared for an anti-mosque campaign than an anti-synagogue campaign; etc. But it also attests to an ideological shift which has taken hold of far right parties across Europe, a process which began long before 9/11. Pim Fortuyn had railed "Against the Islamicization of Our Culture" in 1997, and in August 2001 declared himself "in favour of a cold war with Islam". Le Pen's campaigns in the 1990s were often directed against Arabs and Muslims, and the supposedly pro-Arab Jacques Chirac, and he is no supporter of France's traditional Gaullist foreign policy. Although Le Pen has often made anti-semitic statements, when asked by Haaretz in 2002 if he understood Israel's plight, he reminisced about the good old days of colonial war, saying:

"Certainly. After all, I got a similar reaction during the war in Algeria, when I served in General Massu's 10th division. We were called upon to fight the terrorism of the FLN (the Algerian nationalist movement that fought against French colonialism). The intelligentsia at home criticized our actions. It's very easy to criticize from the armchair in the living room. I completely understand the State of Israel, which is seeking to defend its citizens."

The Austrian fascist Joerg Haider's campaign against Muslims had started in the early 1990s, not in 1999 when his party received 27% of the vote and was included in the national government, while Swedish NDP leader Ian Wachmeister asserted in 1993 that in his Sweden "there will not be many mosques". The Belgian Vlaams Belang has long been focused on generating anti-Muslim sentiment. In Italy, Gianfranco Fini's Mussolini-venerating fascist bloc are pro-Israel and reserve their most profound contempt for Muslims and gypsies. And in the UK, racism against 'Asians', exploited by the Nazis in the 2000 riots, has easily shaded into racism against Muslims.

This is partially due to the changing composition of Europe's immigrant communities, although in France it is related to the colonial era and the Algerian war of independence during which time the French far right publicly shed anti-semitism for the first time, as the OAS pursued an alliance with Israel and with Jewish residents of French Algeria. In the main, however, I think it is simply to do with a different global polarities. Fascists considered the USSR the culmination of a Jewish plot, or rather the first of many, and Israel could easily be integrated into that conspiratorial framework. The Soviet Union having been decisively finished off as a result of its own entropy, the main geopolitical foes of the fabled 'Anglo-Saxon civilization' to which the fascists cleave are states and movements whose legitimacy is wholly or partially derived from Islam. There is therefore no reason why the far right shouldn't back Israel, especially since Israel knows how to get things done. Why should a fascist find anything obnoxious about the policies of Avigdor Lieberman or Ehud Barak? What should offend them about racial supremacy? Ethnic cleansing? Why, they would understand the efforts to deny it or excuse it better than anyone! They probably empathise with the blood-and-soil nationalism that underpins Zionist ideology. After all, the idea that the Jews are not merely a single biological entity but a single ecological one, a people who belong to a determinate geography suffused with sacred power, is one that every antisemite in the world can appreciate.

The BNP aren't alone in their current manouevering. The Belgian far right is strongly pro-Israel and has been pitching for the Jewish vote. Despite Joerg Haider's long-standing anti-semitism, he and his party are more than happy to court Israel. Le Pen has been trying to use Islamophobia to get a sector of French Jews to back him. Just because this isn't a sudden outburst of philosemitism doesn't mean that the strategy can't work. It doesn't matter if large numbers of Jewish voters don't bite, although some may - reactionary voters who might otherwise be put off by explicitly anti-Israel politics will respond to the message.

Labels: antisemitism, fascism, islamophobia, Israel, racism, zionism

One Palestine, One State posted by lenin

Labels: fatah, hamas, Israel, one state, palestine, two states, zionism

The roots of Israeli barbarism posted by lenin

Labels: colonialism, ethnic cleansing, Israel, palestine, zionism

Israel threatens "holocaust" of Palestinians posted by lenin

Israel's defense minister threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians on Israeli Army Radio:

An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a "holocaust".

"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told Army Radio.

Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.

The Israeli government are not Nazis. They just do a good impersonation.

Labels: genocide, Israel, palestine, zionism

The Israel Lobby and its Discontents posted by lenin

Let me see if I can get this straight. In Palestine, there is a state that was created out of the murder and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of the original inhabitants, which is fuelled by racism and religious fanaticism, and which has consistently murdered Palestinians and imposed forms of segregation on them in lieu of a just settlement. If you criticise this from any prominent position, you're likely to be called an anti-Jewish racist - and there's no Israel Lobby? Conversely, there is in the United States a powerful coalition of energy interests and finance-capital, interlocked with a state which has been engaged in the serious business of empire for over a century. It has built a coalition of popular support involving hard right Christians, racist crackers and militaristic gun nuts, behind a hard-right administration. But if it attacks an oil-rich country in the Middle East, it needs the permission of a small country in the Levant? Only theory can resolve this dreary deadlock. Grey is the tree of life, but theory is plush and radiant in whatever colour.

For its critics, the Israel Lobby thesis is a 'conspiracy theory' whose terms are drawn from the lexicon of the hard right. Such is the case made by the Decentist Alan Johnson in a disreputable attack on Perry Anderson. Johnson is an ex-marxist, a liberal, and an 'antitotalitarian'. He edits Democratiya (the wags call it Decentiya - or, as it gets better with age, Dementiya), a quarterly online magazine which promotes the virtues of such inspiring figures as Tony Blair, Paul Berman, Joshua Muravchik and Kanan Makiya. He has a theory about Anderson that begs for the coherence of the average 'conspiracy theory'. Apparently, Anderson's support for the thesis, which is shared by a number of people on the Left - quite mistakenly in my view - is an indication of his unwillingness to get a life, move on, forget about the failures of communism and embrace the democratic revolution. In persisting with his scathing critique, without the accompanying socialist vision, Anderson has apparently gone all nihilistic. He don't believe in nothing no more. Anderson was never what you would call jolly, and he does appear to have resigned himself to capitalism for the rest of his natural existence - but what has this to do with the 'Israel Lobby'? Further, if Johnson wants to put Anderson's comments into some kind of intellectual context, it is neither charitable nor sensible to invoke Pat Buchanan when Johnson knows of a far more worthy intellectual inspiration - namely, the recent brick-sized book by two realist scholars in International Relations who decry the power of precisely such a Lobby. But the relevance of Buchanan is obviously that is widely regarded as an anti-semite. Johnson is not stupid enough to accuse Perry Anderson of anti-semitism. On the contrary, he asserts that "Anderson is no anti-semite". But he certainly implies that the 'Israel Lobby' thesis is anti-semitic. Is it?

You would have to be an ostrich to miss the peculiar influence and power of that community of organisations and individuals which supports Israel - particularly in the United States, but also in France, for example, where a spate of court cases erupted in 2002, with various respected figures accused of anti-semitism. The hysterical slanders, the concerted attacks on academic institutions, the attempts to regulate what future generations are permitted to think, are serious. This is not a marginal matter of energetic 'lobbying' for a potentially unpopular cause. It is about shoring up a consensus. For example, HR 3077 was not passed by the Senate, but it was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives in October 2003. What, you ask, is HR 3077? Well, following testimony to Congress by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institute, in which Kurtz regaled horrified Congresspersons with tales of Edward Said's evil (based largely on what he had been told by his neoconservative pal Martin Kramer), a law was devised with the specific intention of forcing universities to take a more supportive view of US Middle East policy or risk losing federal funding. It was defeated in the Senate after a massive academic backlash. Clearly, that is not solely about defending the reputation of little Israel, but that fact is germane to my broader argument - the idea that you can separate the influence of pro-Israeli opinion and lobbying from broader US policy designs, particularly those of the hard right, is incoherent. But you get the point - these efforts to discipline expressible opinion are no small beer.

What is less persuasive is the idea that the United States can't do what it wants with the Middle East because of Israel's local Greek Chorus. And that is what is at the heart of the 'Israel Lobby' thesis. Anderson offers one example, that of the failure to provide a state for Palestine, which (so the argument runs) the US could have enforced decades ago to no great strategic loss and some benefit. For Walt and Mearsheimer, there is hardly a mis-step in US Middle East policy whose origins do not lie in the fateful lobby - and practically every step has been a mis-step, in their view. And the pair may have felt vindicated when the very same retinue of neoconservatives and Zionists and reactionaries launched several jets of scalding projectile invective their way, while the ubiquitous 'Lobby' ensured their speeches were cancelled and their names irreparably associated with the word 'anti-Semite'. But still, their case is unpersuasive. One example given by Walt & Mearsheimer is when, in 2002, the Bush administration told Israel to stop re-invading the West Bank and withdraw immediately. "Now," they declared with a force that would never have come from the Clinton administration, "means now." Shortly, Colin Powell - who was sent to Israel to convey this message - was dumped on by every neocon crank in the land. Those furthest to the right in the US spectrum, including Tom Delay and others, harried Bush over his alleged 'betrayal' of Israel. Public rallies, senior flak, newspaper editorials - so much egg-throwing and booing from a disgruntled audience. But the Lobby, resourceful to the end, was also at work pressuring Congressmen and women to support an increased stipend for Israel - an increase that Powell was opposed to, and that he tried to pressure against, to no avail. President Bush thus "reluctantly" signed the legislation.

Part of the trouble with Mearsheimer and Walt is that, where they do not rely on impressionism, they assume what they are supposed to be proving. An obvious question here is exactly what was so "reluctant" about Bush's signature. It isn't as if he generally allows press flak, hostile commentary, public rallies, and even widespread Congressional opposition, to stop him doing what he wants. Just how committed was Bush to taking a more "even-handed" approach? The assumption is that the administration coolly and rationally considered US interests, realised that the 'war on terror' could lose some of its international support if Israel was permitted to ravage the West Bank - but somehow the Lobby carried far greater social power than the Bush administration, and "humiliated" him. This raises questions about what constitutes a 'rational' appreciation of American interests, about what social forces are actually involved, and about the role of ideology. Before considering that, however, it is worth pointing out that Israel was doing exactly what the US was doing in Afghanistan. Similarly, Israel did carry out some assassinations in 2003, but the CIA was already doing the same thing. The 'war on terror' was a gift to every power-system in the world, including Russia, which - though it doesn't have a vocal and efficacious lobby - won Bush's support during and after some bloody moments in Chechnya.

Walt and Mearsheimer's model presupposes the primacy of the state as a unit international relations. I don't just mean that they assume the state to be very important, and more important than other agencies: it is that the state is the global actor, whose essential purposes and drives are the same throughout history. The state, whether it is a Northern Italian city-state or a North American federation, is a power-maximising unit, which deploys such strategies as 'balance of power', and which embodies an elemental psychic drive to dominate. From this purview, ideologies and moralities are superfluous, cognitive scripts, at best enabling devices and at worst dangerous nonsense that tempts one to hubris or constrains one in a moment that demands boldness. Transnational networks are considered relatively unimportant, and where they are important it is usually as a derivative function of one state, or several. They can only carry out the functions of states or obstruct them. And class power is simply invisible. So, the structure of rationality that they assume for a state pursuing its 'national interests' is already a highly bowdlerised, reductionist one. They devote a short passage near the end of their book to defining US national interests: "The overriding goal of US foreign policy is to ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people." On such implausible premises is a whole provocative theory based. We might consider another way of looking at it. The American state, the US one I mean, is one with a deep overlap in personnel between the top Wall Street financial and legal firms. It is one in which the state apparatus is interpenetrated with high-tech manufacturing through the Department of Defense and other similar systems. It is one in which cash circulates from high-profile sectors of US capital, including energy, telecommunications, finance and so on. There are class interests involved here, and these aren't only expressed through various lobbies. But these class interests also contain schisms of their own, with sectional and regional divisons, and corresponding ideological ones. In a way, the US state is redolent of the Italian one after unification, with most of the population excluded, and divisions largely organised around differences within the ruling class rather than ideological programs.

If that's a roughly accurate depiction, then either Israel manages to hypnotise substantial sections of the ruling class, or they strongly identify Israel's long-term interests with their own, and value its continued domination in the Middle East more than the need to 'win over' a bunch of already subservient Arab states. And with that commitment comes an unwillingness to compromise Israel's effectiveness over its rivals, particularly when they are frequently also America's rivals. It also has, as its logical corollary, a commitment to allow Israel to manage its 'demographic' problem. After all, a post-Zionist state wouldn't be half as useful to the United States, since it would not be a military garrison state locked in perpetual enmity with those noisome Arab populations. And it also entails a much more sympathetic attitude to Israel's claims with respect to negotiations, settlements, expansion and so on, than might be the case from a disinterested perspective. It is true that not every shoe-maker or plant owner in America has a deep vested interest in keeping control of the Middle East in that way. But most sectors of American capital have an interest in long-term US hegemony, and the Middle Eastern oil bonanza is one of the greatest prizes in history, permanently threatened by the possible insurgency of local populations. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the US has three 'national interests' in the Middle East - to frustrate the emergence of a regional hegemon, and ensure world market access to its oil; to stymy the development of weapons of mass destruction; and to reduce anti-American terrorism. It is conceivable that a US government would consider these to be serious priorities and really believe that they are for the benefit of the whole population. However, it is also conceivable that competing priorities - the very real benefits for the ruling class of pursuing policies that generate terrorism, WMD proliferation, and protectionism in the oil market as necessary corollaries - would take precedence. After all, Halliburton has more clout than the average voter, and the average voter can always be persuaded that the consequences of US policy are actually manifestations of Muslim irrationality or Arab fanaticism or something else of the kind.

This brings us to the matter of ideological hegemony. Hegemonic appeals are necessarily universalist, not particularist. Israel doesn't appeal to America in public as "a friend and ally" simply because of shared interests - no, shared values are at stake here. As nebulous as appeals to values usually are, there is nothing mysterious about this appeal. Explicitly, Israel says 'we are a pro-American state, we have women in high-profile positions, we value different religions and cultures, we stand up for democracy against terrorism, and we believe in markets' etc. There is an illicit set of racist and militaristic assumptions attached to this, of course, but the explicit appeal is one that would have great force among intellectuals and educated opinion, particularly those processed through moribund social sciences programmes, with their only slightly updated Cold War orthodoxies. This is a point that Mearsheimer and Walt tacitly acknowledge when they refer to the neoconservative argument that Israel shares "liberal democratic values" with the United States. The 'national interest' is a field of contest, not something that can be deduced from a set of givens. Therefore hegemony matters, which is why there is such an effort to discipline opinion. This is what is so incongruous about Mearsheimer and Walt's contention that Israeli policies militate against "certain core US values", as if America's own policies didn't do the same wherever its influence was felt, whether in Panama or Somalia. State policy is almost always an affront to its declared 'values'. That is half the fun of it. If you can murder and repress in the name of humanitarianism and democracy, you know you're in control.

And if you think that Israel's propagandists could get as far as they have without being adopted by powerful US constituencies, then you have to explain how such a belligerent and forceful state turned out to be so pliable. As Daniel Lazare points out:

If "Israel has earned the respect of the American people," it is because the United States, devastated by its experience in Vietnam and humiliated by the embassy takeover in Tehran, watched with growing envy as Israel racked up stunning military victories in 1967 and 1973 and then sent specially outfitted jets streaking across the desert to bomb Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 (a feat the White House would dearly like to emulate in Iran). The Israel Defense Forces were everything that aggressive imperial elements in Washington wanted America's traumatized military to be. Hence, in their bipartisan struggle to overcome "the Vietnam syndrome," the Republicans and Democrats set about remodeling themselves as overseas branches of Israel's hawkish Likud Party. Groups like AIPAC did not grow of their own accord. Instead, the war party in Washington encouraged them to grow to help it win its battles on Capitol Hill.

The American Right has latched onto Israel precisely because it helps them regulate discourse and win hegemonic battles. It facilitates the repackaging of an aggressive programme of imperial domination and extreme global violence as the defense of the ideals of democracy against - what do you know? - anti-Semites. Just as in the case of HR 3077, people who are primarily concerned with stifling internal left-wing dissent, and critical analysis of US policy, have used Israel as a crucial alibi in that struggle. And these lobbies and think-tanks, like the Hoover Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, are recipients of huge amounts of corporate cash. When it comes to corporate America, Israel can't compete in terms either of dollars or ideological reproduction. And this is a problem for Mearsheimer and Walt throughout their book. They list people and institutions as belonging to an 'Israel Lobby', even where their activity isn't really lobbying, even where they aren't funded by Israel, even where their motive has rather little to do with Israel. The neoconservatives support Israel, but the key institutions in which they work are auxiliaries of US capital, not of the Knesset. They are unable to explain anywhere why these pro-Israel neoconservatives have the weight that they do (and why being pro-Israel matters to US capital). This is because they have no conception of class power, a reductionist conception of the 'national interest' and a flimsy account of ideology.

Perhaps the least persuasive of all examples is that of Iraq. Although, Mearsheimer and Walt concede that the US had powerful motives to invade Iraq, they insist that the Israel Lobby was the element without which it would not have happened. It is undoubtedly true that supporters of Israel were also strong supporters of the invasion of Iraq. It is true that Israel has also regarded Iraq as an enemy. It is true that Israeli interests were involved here. It is true that pro-Israel organisations 'lobbied' or simply vocalised hard on behalf of war with Iraq. Yet, if this is supposed to trump - not merely complement - US 'national interests', it is necessary for Mearsheimer and Walt to minimise the benefits of war. Their dismissal of the reasoning that holds control of the oil spigot to be a key goal is roughly as follows: if they wanted oil, they could have invaded Saudi Arabia, and anyway the oil companies would rather have traded with Saddam than overthrow him. This part of the argument is dealt with in a rather perfunctory fashion, but it demands considerably more attention than they are prepared to allot it. For example, it would appear as if the authors did not realise that Saudi Arabia is already subordinate. There is no need for an invasion force to trundle across the Nejd. Actually, one of the problems that Iraq solved was to enable America's troops to move out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence caused some trouble. Saddam Hussein represented, by contrast, the last outpost of Arab nationalism. Successfully conquering Iraq and installing a pro-American client state with a thin veneer of democratic rule, which must have looked incredibly easy after the initial cake-walk in Afghanistan, would have decisively altered the regional balance of power in America's interests. It would also have provided a model for further expansion. The aggressive right-wingers who contrived this policy explained their rationale: in the absence of a serious superpower rival, there was a brief window in which the US could powerfully assert itself as the next century's sole power, demonstrate its ability to fight and win multiple wars, and secure its dominance for the long-term.

And why so glib in the dismissal of oil interests? After all, most leading figures in the administration have long experience in the energy sector up to and including the President. Neoconservatives had argued for some time that the US should take control of Iraq's oil and break up OPEC. Many of the energy companies that have so handsomely funded the GOP were primary beneficiaries of the invasion. Nor were high oil prices bad for them - actually, they're making record profits. The Bush cabinet agreed in April 2001 that "'Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East' and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US 'military intervention' is necessary". The Times reported in 2002 that: West Sees Glittering Prizes Ahead in Giant Oil Fields. The Ministry of Oil immediately secured upon taking Baghdad. Several US oil companies were immediately involved in negotiations over the future of Iraq's oil industry, and former Shell CEO Philip Carroll was appointed to manage the process of privatisation. When the US oil companies argued that privatization would actually be seriously damaging to US interests and potentially freeze out foreign energy companies, the State Department devised a plan to keep it nationalised with US access assured. It doesn't seem as if the oil industry was a marginalised opponent of Bush's strategy, and the sole basis for this claim by Walt and Mearsheimer is a quote from a column by the pro-war liberal Peter Beinart, who was busy trying to persuade liberal opinion that war with Iraq was anything but a right-wing obsession and an imperialist venture.

Mearsheimer and Walt's book and the whole uproar about the 'Israel Lobby' is a long overdue challenge to a stifling taboo, but it challenges it in the most inefficient way. The authors frequently rely on the impressionistic statements of others (as in "Sharon didn't look like the subordinate today...") to dramatise and pad out what might otherwise be a slender and somewhat messy polemic. The 'Lobby' paradigm cannot begin to cope with the evidence, and as a result demands a very narrow perspective. Of course, contrary to the whining of the pro-Israel commentators, it is not an anti-Semitic book. It lacks even the spurious coherence that an anti-Semitic tract would evince. Nor is it an anti-Israel book, and in general it maintains that the 'Lobby' is unwittingly damaging Israel by tying it into a damaging long-term conflict with Palestine, where settlement would be more profitable in the long-run. The book is essentially a reaction to the shrill efforts to buttress a pro-Israel consensus, and protect it from growing criticism. It is also a reaction to an increasingly extreme and adventurist US policy, and the paucity of serious opposition within the US political class. Theirs is a moderate and reformist account of US foreign policy, which reduces its manifest brutality - there's a disavowed moral revulsion here, dressed up as an appeal to the 'national interest' - to the deviant influence of an atypically powerful interest group. Nothing fundamental need change. We need simply become aware of the 'Lobby', confront it, and cease answering to its siren call. This is a problem with the 'Israel Lobby' thesis that pro-war apologists for Israel, such as Johnson, are not in a position to consider. They share too many of its premises to be effective critics, which is one reason why they cut such a strident figure. The other reason, of course, is that they're part of the Lobby.

Labels: free free palestine, international relations, Israel, israel lobby, mearsheimer and walt, US imperialism, zionism

Israel blocks aid to Gaza posted by lenin

Of course, in this case, they're more worried about the public appearance of solidarity than the aid itself.

Labels: gaza, gush shalom, Israel, palestinians, zionism

Getting away with murder in Gaza posted by lenin

It turns out that this is stupendously easy. The magic word is "Sderot". Poor old Sderot. Poor, wretched Sderot. Gaza is a place where "rage" boils and bubbles over, especially since the "Hamas takeover" (the failed Fatah putsch, in other words), and Sderot pays the price. Rockets, empty streets, fleeing mattresses, the dog not getting walked. Poor, miserable Sderot.




Gaza has been under Israeli siege for some time. It is starving. Aid can't get in, because of Israel's blockade. Israel continues to ravage the territory with air strikes. As usual, Israel's imposition of its preferred racial order in the Middle East regionally intersects with its domestic racial order. The daily massacres in Gaza coincide with the the internal campaign against the Bedouin of the Negev, the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and property, the 'Judaising' of annexed territory, the construction of segregated roads, all the usual. In the West Bank, a Fatah fiefdom since June, attacks are frequent. It doesn't matter how much Abbas connives - even his allies are not safe from Israeli assassination.




Gaza, elevated to the happy status of an open air prison since Israel's 2005 redeployment, a move designed to reproduce Israel's "Jewish-democratic character" (Israel can't absorbe too many Arabs, as its political and military leadership is often at pains to point out), is now in full lockdown. Long before Hamas was elected in 2006, Israel was busily establishing "facts on the ground" across Palestine, with repeated attacks to back them up, and with a feckless and increasingly coopted Fatah incapable of doing anything much about it. One notorious attack in Gaza was launched against a refugee camp. From 2000-2006, Israel killed 2,300 Gazans, mainly civilians (whom it deliberately targets). Ever since, it has been using a combination of Quartet-supported blockade and routine attacks to ramp up the terror and suffering. The imposed power cuts and fuel shortages have entailed a shortage of clean water, with predictable effects. The seige launched in mid-2006, with extensive use of human shields, power stations bombed, and hundreds killed, was eclipsed by an all-out war on Lebanon. But the attacks on Gaza didn't stop. A single Israeli bomb killed two families, eighteen Palestinians, in Gaza in November 2006. In the same month, the IDF distinguished itself with a public massacre of female demonstrators outside a mosque. Shells were deliberately fired at Palestinian homes. In 2006 and 2007, Israel killed 816 Palestinians, including 152 children. Almost every child in Gaza has witnessed shootings, attacks, had their homes bombarded. 99.4% of Gazan children suffer trauma. The response from Palestinian groups, even with the determined effort to inflict some damage after the murder of the Ghaliya family, has been pretty low-key. Qassam rockets, smarties-tubes packed with gunpowder and sherbert, pathetically inept devices that rarely hit their intended target, or even any target at all. Since Israel's strategy of promoting civil war culminated in the loss of Gaza, it has been threatening to attack the strip. This attack has now begun in earnest.

Oh, but the luckless Sderot happens to be located nearby, thus copping a few miserable Qassam rockets that leave potholes in the streets and damage the walls. Poor, woebegone Sderot.

Labels: fatah, gaza, hamas, Israel, occupation, palestine, sderot, zionism

Holocaust survivor speaks on Palestine posted by lenin

Via Angry Arab, the story of Hedy Epstein:

Hedy Epstein, is a German Jewish Holocaust survivor, born in 1924, whose parents were sent to Auschwitz in 1942, where they perished. In 1948, Hedy Epstein went to live in United States. In 2003, she decided to make a trip to Palestine. Shocked by the oppression that the Israeli government is imposing on the Palestinians, she is, since then, devoting herself to make it known to the world. In the interview she gave to the Swiss journalist Silvia Cattori, Hedy Epstein speaks, with her gentle and mild voice, about her last travel to Palestine after a moving visit to one of several concentration camps to which her parents were deported. And she said: "I would like to dedicate this interview to the children of Gaza, whose parents cannot protect them or send them away to safety as my parents did when they sent me to England in May 1939 on a Kindertransport”

More

Labels: holocaust, Israel, palestine, zionism

Which ones are the Nazis again? posted by lenin

A small clarification: who can be compared with Nazis? Or, more appropriately, for whom is it a bragging matter that "we are not as bad as Nazis"? We obviously take it for granted that equating any group or statesman that isn't fascistic with the Nazis is at least problematic, and can be worse than problematic. Furthermore, there are those who think that even making a comparison, for the purposes of drawing out similarities, is outrageous in the event that someone makes that comparison with Israel. There are others who don't understand the difference, but we can forget about them.

However, there is a long tradition of propagandistic use of Hitler/Nazi comparisons and outright equations in circumstances that are certainly ridiculous and offensive, but nevertheless this is generally tolerated even where it is an attempt to legitimise mass murder. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussein was a new Hitler, and didn't cease being so until hanged, but at least he bore a few of the qualifications necessary. The Iranian President is routinely compared to Hitler with considerable stridency. Slobodan Milosevic was a Hitler until he died in ICTY custody. Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, insisted that it was not unfair to compare Hezbollah to the Nazis while Israel was pounding Lebanon in 2006. We know that Nasser was commonly referred to as a fascist in the British press, and compared by Anthony Eden to Hitler. We also know that the Chinese were compared to Nazis during the American war on Vietnam, on the grounds that they were a similarly aggressive power. None of these comparisons, whatever their respective merits, was made in good faith or with much precision: they were all designed to evoke a threat that could justify colossal international violence. The Enemy of the Month is always Hitler. In fact, this is the whole purpose of 'totalitarianism' theory as usually espoused in its Cold War version: every enemy is in some sense like the Nazis. Ask Nick Cohen or Paul Berman. It is perfectly normal conduct. It is mainstream and moderate. It is the way one constructs the friend/enemy distinction.

Here's an interesting example: Yasser Arafat in particular, and the Palestinians in general. Yasser Arafat has been cast as Hitler in so many columns and articles and opinions that Lexis Nexis doesn't know what to do with them all. Menachem Begin compared Arafat to Hitler at precisely the moment that he was sending Israeli tanks into Lebanon to murder people. In 2002, the Czech Prime Minister got into a minor controversy for having made that comparison, and for having said that the Palestinians should be expelled from their land (in a cowardly fashion, he denied saying what reporters heard him say, but didn't deny the bit about expulsions). In the same year, the large pro-Israel rally that occurred in Trafalgar Square saw Binyamin Netanyahu compare Arafat to Hitler. Routinely, Hamas are described as (equated with) Nazis, as are the PLO, Hezbollah, and any other group or state that Israel doesn't find amenable to its purposes. So, the people that Israel oppresses and murders are Nazis, and if anyone reverses the comparison as some are tempted to do given the obvious echoes, then they are also Nazis. Meanwhile, the claim that every Enemy of the Month is Hitler incarnate is moderate and mainstream political discourse, while to reverse the charge and say, for example, that "the American government is fascist", is extremist. The United States government, the world heavyweight champion of white supremacy, as the historian Gerald Horne once dubbed it, can only be understood as an opponent of Nazis in official discourse. Only it's victims are Nazis. Anything else is vulgar, calumnious, in poor taste, typical far left Chomskyite boiler-plate rhetoric etc etc.

Wouldn't it be simpler to officially and formally re-define Nazism to mean any designated foe of the United States and Israel, and that way we can avoid the confusion that leads people to take the comparisons/equations seriously?

Labels: colonialism, Israel, nazism, racism, zionism

Libel, blood and clot. posted by lenin

I'll be back with protest pics and footage in a moment (we defeated the ridiculous ban). However, I thought this was worth vomiting over. The issue is this: recent moves to debate the possibility of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in the UCU were shut down when Sally Hunt apparently received legal advice that any such discussion would be against the law. Because of this decision, the usual crowd of warmongers have been crowing about a great victory. They won a victory, that is, against a democratic vote in the UCU, which they had been hysterically misrepresenting for months. This isn't the end of the world. However, I think we have to notice when the tactics of the American far right are imported into the UK by people who consider themselves liberals. In the United States, of course, websites are maintained by the likes of David Horowitz that encourage students to rat on teachers who are insufficiently supportive of the official pro-Israel position. In the UK, we have already had the disgraceful hounding of Nasser Amin, who had his name dragged through the mud in parliament in the media. In light of the debate over a potential UCU boycott of Israeli institutions, a "UCU whistleblower" who isn't in fact a member of the union, (ie, it's some Zionist activist who happens to converse with the scum at HP Sauce), sent David Toube, or 'David T' as he prefers to be known, a list of bad things said by naughty academics.

The article is prefaced by a wierd homily in which Toube makes a comparison between those who favour a boycott of Israel to the Nazis, and states that his informant's information shows that "criticism of Israel crossed red lines," "the tone and content of debate became unacceptable" and constituted "a menacing tide of assumptions" and "threatening behaviour". The statements cited as part of this apparently ominous checklist include the claim that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians created the Palestinian refugee problem; that Israel doesn't have an innate right to exist; that the situation of the Palestinians can be fruitfully compared to that of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto; that several components of the Genocide Conventions clearly apply to the situation of Palestinians; that Israel is a European colonial/settler state; that Israel is imperialist and racist; that Israel is comparable with apartheid; that Israel is undemocratic in its treatment of non-Jewish residents; that there is something called an 'Israel Lobby' or a 'Zionist Lobby'; that accusations of anti-semitism were being used to shut down debate; that those who favoured boycott were being smeared. Some of these claims are obvious and acknowledged in the best academic literature on the history of Israel and Palestine, including by pro-Israel authors. Some of them are polemical. Some of them are disputable. And I'm not one to raise dissension in the warmongers' house, but many of them remain the public position of the recently waxed Christopher Hitchens. But since David Toube does not anywhere explain why he considers these claims "threatening" or "extreme" or meriting comparison with Nazism, you might reasonably assume that the post is simply one HP Sauce's more eccentric outburts of stupidity.

However. The list of bad things is followed by a list of bad academics with their university homepages linked. Toube reassuringly suggests that they shouldn't be sacked for holding their "extreme" views, but he does clearly set out to impugn their professional conduct. A former academic himself, Toube suggests that academics are supposed to be "calm, rational and intelligent, willing to listen to different points of view", whereas he encourages readers to act on the assumption that these academics have engaged in "menacing", "threatening" conduct, somehow redolent of Nazism. He also implies that they have smuggled Jew-hatred into the discussion. Though he claims he would oppose the sacking of these academics, I think he is aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences for one's professional career of being accused of anti-Semitism, as well as of "menacing" or "threatening" behaviour. And I doubt he would be the first to protest if one of the named academics were to be put through a ridiculous investigation due to a flood of complaints from sub-literate Harry's Place readers, which is clearly what he intends. By making these delirious claims and providing contact information, he is engaged in a spurious attempt at professional bullying, borrowing the tactics of David Horowitz and the nutters associated with him. Toube is a clot, of course, or a synonym thereof. But how dizzying has been the descent of defenders of academic freedom, and free speech. How mean and vindictive they prove to be in their illusory moment of triumph. We will be entitled, when we next hear the words 'free speech' raised in defense of Zionism, to remember how these people behaved when they thought they had the upper hand.

Labels: boycott, Israel, zionism

That "Israel Lobby" again. posted by lenin

U.S. support backed by a vocal and politically powerful Jewish lobby has been a key feature of the Jewish state's success since its founding in 1948, an event that is widely backed by U.S. Jews and non-Jews.

But the study found that "feelings of attachment may well be changing as warmth gives way to indifference, and indifference gives way even to downright alienation."

The study found only 48 percent of U.S. Jews under age 35 believe that Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy for them, compared to 77 percent of those 65 and older.

In addition, only 54 percent of those under the age of 35 are "comfortable with the idea of a Jewish State" as opposed to 81 percent of those 65 and older.

Labels: Israel, the 'lobby', zionism

Working for the clampdown in American academia. posted by lenin

After De Paul University decided to, er, boycott Norman Finkelstein (and also one of his former colleagues, Mehrene E. Larudee, another Jewish academic who doesn't support Israel's inalienable right to knock off Arabs), there has been interesting set of developments. The US Commission on Civil Rights, an agency of the United States government whose director is appointed by the United States president and which is currently dominated by Republicans, is engaged in a 're-orientation' - check that out for a euphemism - putatively aimed at ending 'campus antisemitism'.

As the Middle East Studies of North America Association points out, "the briefing report and findings
issued by the Commission may actually weaken efforts to combat anti-Semitism by expanding its definition to include an indefensibly broad range of legitimate speech and conduct". How does the definition of antisemitism, thus expanded, include legitimate speech and conduct? Well, how do you think? By blurring the distinction between criticism of Israel (or even US policy) and antisemitism. The Commission's findings include a serious of claims about the American academia being hideously one-sided and biased in favour of the Ay-rabs which, as MESA notes, is completely unsupported with any evidence. The commission conducted its inquiries in a one-sided polemical fashion, accepting insinuation and slander as fact. The result is that:

By adopting a vague and politicized definition of this insidious form of hate speech, the Commission increases the risk that attention and resources that are better directed toward combating real anti-Semitism will instead be diverted to politically-motivated efforts to censor unpopular or controversial views expressed by university faculty.

Now, as the Heathlander notes, there is growing attention to the fact that many of the supporters of a boycott against Israeli institutions are in fact Jewish. Perhaps we will hear that this too is antisemitic, and that, in the ultimate of ironies, a cabal of antisemitic Jews conspires against Israel. Don't rule it out. As Ernie Halfdram points out, Israel is mistreating an awful lot of Jews these days. And, as he also relates, Alan Dershowitz is working hard to discipline the ones who don't live in Israel. And of course Israel is working very hard to overturn the UCU's support of a boycott, while Histradut has sent a letter to Unison demanding that 'cancel' a boycott motion. It has been said before, and it needs saying again: it is about time we had free speech for Jews.

On a related note, Finkelstein has had an interesting experience with Memri.

Labels: de paul, Israel, norman finkelstein, zionism