Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Growing US public support for one democratic state in Israel/Palestine falls on deaf ears

Jonathan Cook on December 17, 2018


Two years of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as a Middle East peacemaking team appear to be having a transformative effect – and in ways that will please neither of them.

The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians, according to a survey published last week by the University of Maryland.

And if a Palestinian state is off the table – as a growing number of analysts of the region conclude, given Israel’s intransigence and the endless postponement of Mr Trump’s peace plan – then support for one state rises steeply, to nearly two-thirds of Americans.

But Mr Netanyahu cannot take comfort from the thought that ordinary Americans share his vision of a single state of Greater Israel. Respondents demand a one-state solution guaranteeing Israelis and Palestinians equal rights.

By contrast, only 17 percent of Americans expressing a view – presumably Christian evangelicals and hardline Jewish advocates for Israel – prefer the approach of Israel’s governing parties: either to continue the occupation or annex Palestinian areas without offering the inhabitants citizenship.

All of this is occurring even though US politicians and the media express no support for a one-state solution. In fact, quite the reverse.

The movement to boycott Israel, known as BDS, is growing on US campuses, but vilified by Washington officials, who claim its goal is to end Israel as a Jewish state by bringing about a single state, in which all inhabitants would be equal. The US Congress is even considering legislation to outlaw boycott activism.

And last month CNN sacked its commentator Marc Lamont Hill for using a speech at the United Nations to advocate a one-state solution – a position endorsed by 35 percent of the US public.

There is every reason to assume that, over time, these figures will swing even more sharply against Mr Netanyahu’s Greater Israel plans and against Washington’s claims to be an honest broker.

Among younger Americans, support for one state climbs to 42 percent. That makes it easily the most popular outcome among this age group for a Middle East peace deal.

In another sign of how far removed Washington is from the American public, 40 percent of respondents want the US to impose sanctions to stop Israel expanding its settlements on Palestinian territory. In short, they support the most severe penalty on the BDS platform.

And who is chiefly to blame for Washington’s unresponsiveness? Some 38 percent say that Israel has “too much influence” on US politics.

That is a view almost reflexively cited by Israel lobbyists as evidence of antisemitism. And yet a similar proportion of US Jews share concerns about Israel’s meddling.

In part, the survey’s findings should be understood as a logical reaction to the Oslo peace process. Backed by the US for the past quarter-century, it has failed to produce any benefits for the Palestinians.

But the findings signify more. Oslo’s interminable talks over two states have provided Israel with an alibi to seize more Palestinian land for its illegal settlements.

Under cover of an Oslo “consensus”, Israel has transferred ever-larger numbers of Jews into the occupied territories, thereby making a peaceful resolution of the conflict near impossible. According to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that is a war crime.

Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the court in The Hague, warned this month that she was close to finishing a preliminary inquiry needed before she can decide whether to investigate Israel for war crimes, including the settlements.

The reality, however, is that the ICC has been dragging out the inquiry to avoid arriving at a decision that would inevitably provoke a backlash from the White House. Nonetheless, the facts are staring the court in the face.

Israel’s logic – and proof that it is in gross violation of international law – were fully on display this week. The Israeli army locked down the Ramallah, the effective and supposedly self-governing capital of occupied Palestine, as “punishment” after two Israeli soldiers were shot dead outside the city.

The Netanyahu government also approved yet another splurge of settlement-building, again supposedly in “retaliation” for a recent upsurge in Palestinian attacks.

But Israel and its western allies know only too well that settlements and Palestinian violence are intrinsically linked. One leads to the other.

Palestinians directly experience the settlements’ land grabs as Israeli state-sanctioned violence. Their communities are ever more tightly ghettoised, their movements more narrowly policed to maintain the settlers’ privileges.

If Palestinians resist such restrictions or their own displacement, if they assert their rights and their dignity, clashes with soldiers or settlers are inescapable. Violence is inbuilt into Israel’s settlement project.

Israel has constructed a perfect, self-rationalising system in the occupied territories. It inflicts war crimes on Palestinians, who then weakly lash out, justifying yet more Israeli war crimes as Israel flaunts its victimhood, all to a soundtrack of western consolation.

The hypocrisy is becoming ever harder to hide, and the cognitive dissonance ever harder for western publics to stomach.

In Israel itself, institutionalised racism against the country’s large minority of Palestinian citizens – a fifth of the population – is being entrenched in full view.

Last week Natalie Portman, an American-Israeli actor, voiced her disgust at what she termed the “racist” Nation-State Basic Law, legislation passed in the summer that formally classifies Israel’s Palestinian population as inferior.

Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s grown-up son, voiced a sentiment widely popular in Israel last week when he wrote on Facebook that he wished “All the Muslims [sic] leave the land of Israel”. He was referring to Greater Israel – a territorial area that does not differentiate between Israel and the occupied territories.

In fact, Israel’s Jim Crow-style policies – segregation of the type once inflicted on African-Americans in the US – is becoming ever more overt.

Last month the Jewish city of Afula banned Palestinian citizens from entering its main public park while vowing it wanted to “preserve its Jewish character”. A court case last week showed that a major Israeli construction firm has systematically blocked Palestinian citizens from buying houses near Jews. And the parliament is expanding a law to prevent Palestinian citizens from living on almost all of Israel’s land.

A bill to reverse this trend, committing Israel instead to “equal political rights amongst all its citizens”, was drummed out of the parliament last week by an overwhelming majority of legislators.

Americans, like other westerners, are waking up to this ugly reality. A growing number understand that it is time for a new, single state model, one that ends Israel’s treatment of Jews as separate from and superior to Palestinians, and instead offers freedom and equality for all.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Donald Trump, Lumpen Capitalist

from Jacobin
BY
SAMUEL FARBER
The most important thing about Donald Trump isn’t his psychological condition — it’s that he’s a capitalist. And a particular kind of capitalist at that: a lumpen capitalist.

Nobody is quite sure how to understand Donald Trump.

A group of twenty-seven American psychiatrists and mental health experts made a long list of personality disorders — narcissism, delusional disorder, paranoia, unbridled and extreme present hedonism, and more — shortly after he came into office. Some might be accurate. But psychological designations aren’t the best way to wrap your mind around Trump. To fully examine him as a political actor, we must root his personal characteristics in the US social structure.

Trump is a capitalist. That isn’t a surprise to anyone. But he is a particular kind of capitalist: a lumpen capitalist.


A Career of Skullduggery
In his Class Struggles in France. 1848–1850, Marx wrote that the finance aristocracy of that time “in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.” Marxist scholar Hal Draper clarified that Marx’s “finance aristocracy” did not refer to the finance capital that plays an integral role in bourgeois economy, but to the “vultures and raiders” who swing from speculation to swindling and who are the near criminal or extralegal excrescences from the body social of the rich just like the “lumpen proletariat” proper are excrescences from the poor.

Marx referred again to this upper-class “lumpen proletariat” after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, as enjoying their leisure in “the Paris of the Boulevards, male and female — the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary bohême, and its cocottes.”

The essence of Trump’s lumpen capitalism is expressed in many ways, beginning with his shady, illegal (or bordering on the illegal) financial operations. “Normal” capitalists will often take illegal shortcuts in pursuit of profit — like avoiding paying taxes, violating government regulations, illegally smashing union drives — all in the course of managing otherwise “normal” capitalist enterprises. For lumpen-capitalist Trump, however, those shortcuts are the principal strategy for his profit-making.

Examples of this abound, starting with the skullduggery that pervades his financial operations. “Normal” capitalists may regularly borrow money from banks and other financial institutions to run their businesses; they only resort to bankruptcy occasionally, usually as a last resort. But as the “king of debt,” Trump’s businesses have gone into bankruptcy no less than six times, five times for his casinos and once for New York’s Plaza Hotel.

According to business historian Gwenda Blair, in 1990, Trump secretly met with representatives of several big American banks to find a way out of his staggering $2 billion in bank debt that included personal liability on guarantees and unsecured loans amounting to $800 million, as well as more than $1 billion in junk bonds on his casinos. As Blair put it, in less than a decade, Trump had become what Marie Brenner in Vanity Fair called the “Brazil of Manhattan,” with annual interest payments of approximately $350 million exceeding his cash flow. Only two of his assets, his half of the Grand Hyatt Hotel and the retail component of Trump Tower, had at that time any chance of making a profit.

The lawsuits against his Trump University have further exposed the extent of his shady financial operations. He founded this for-profit “university” with a couple of partners in 2005 to offer courses in real estate and asset management among other subjects. It was not accredited; neither did it give grades, confer university credits, or grant degrees. A few years after it was founded, it was investigated by the New York Attorney General and sued for illegal business practices. Two class-action suits were also filed against it in federal court, alleging that its students were the victims of misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. After he was elected president, Trump paid the victims $25 million and settled the case, even though he had repeatedly promised not to do so.

Like Trump University, these types of institutions typically have very poor records in degree completion and job placement but are efficient machines for exacting profits off the fat of the federal government’s loans and subsidies to their overwhelmingly poor and minority adult students. After the Obama administration’s attempts to curb some of their worst abuses, Trump’s administration sharply went the other direction: under the direction of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, it has given them the green light to proceed with their fraudulent practices.

His Trump Foundation is another case in point. As the New York Times wrote in a recent editorial, “the Trump Foundation, is not a generous and ethical charity, but just another of his [Trump’s] grifts.” As the editorial pointed out, the largest donation reported by the foundation, for the amount of $264,631, was used to refurbish the fountain in front of Trump’s Plaza Hotel in New York City. Other questionable activities included its 2013 illegal contributions to the reelection of Pam Bondi, Florida’s attorney general.

On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published a devastating investigative report on Trump debunking his claim that his father Fred Trump had “only” lent him $1 million to start his business career. In fact, as the report shows, Donald Trump received from his father at least $60.7 million, ($140 million in today’s dollars). The report also details the numerous dubious and outright illegal ways in which Donald avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in gift and estate taxes.

Most telling of Donald’s character is the finding that he tried, in 1990, to take total control of his then-eighty-five-year-old father’s business and fortune behind his back. Donald’s attempt was foiled by Trump Sr himself, who, with the help of his daughter, federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, had him legally stripped from any attempt to take over his father’s businesses. According to sworn depositions by members of the Trump family, Fred told them that Donald’s takeover would put “his life’s work at risk,” and that he feared his son would use his father’s businesses as collateral to rescue his failing businesses.

There are strong indications that Trump’s serious financial difficulties have pushed him to the margins of the financial world and to money laundering as a source of capital. As John Feffer pointed out in “Trump’s Dirty Money,” there was only one institution left, Deutsche Bank, willing to give him credit — which led Trump to begin relying on questionable characters and networks, creating baroque financial arrangements involving shell companies, using pseudonyms on contracts, and hiding his tax returns. And, in financial activities highly suggestive of money laundering, Trump started to use large amounts of cash to purchase huge properties — as much as $400 million since 2006.

Much of this cash, Feffer wrote, came from the sale of his properties to Russian oligarchs. A 2017 Reuters investigation discovered that Russian buyers purchased nearly $100 million in condos in Florida from Trump, and a Russian-Canadian billionaire invested millions into a Trump property in Toronto, including the payment of a $100 million “commission” to a Moscow fixer to attract other Russian investors.

In 2018, a Russian oligarch paid $95 million to Trump for a Palm Beach mansion that Trump had bought four years before for $41 million. In addition, Feffer indicates, Trump has made similar deals with known Kazakh money launderers, corrupt businesses in India, and a shady casino operator in Vietnam. Even his Taj Mahal casino was on two different occasions — in 1998 and 2015 — accused of violating anti-money-laundering laws.


Trump’s Lumpen Friends
Trump’s lumpen-capitalist character is not only expressed in his pursuit of gain, but also in the kinds of friends and associates he has surrounded himself with, and to whom he is attracted by commonly shared activities and values evincing a predatory orientation to the world devoid of any consideration besides how to benefit oneself and one’s friends.

One example of Trump’s choice of friends is David J. Pecker, chairman of the tabloid company American Media Inc. (AMI) and publisher of the National Inquirer, the leading organ of the gutter press in the United States. Before the 2016 elections, AMI bought the rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story of her adulterous affair with Trump in order to ensure it did not ever see the light of day. Besides exposing Trump and Pecker’s shared predatory attitude towards women, this clearly violated campaign finance laws.

Another notable example was Roy Cohn, one of Trump’s best friends and avowed mentor, a veritable example of a lumpen bourgeois (since, strictly speaking, he was not a capitalist.) Roy’s notorious role as a legal hatchet man for Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red witch-hunting, may have distracted public attention from his subsequent nefarious activities. Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman cites one of his law partners describing him as “a person who was totally free of the rules,” so “whatever he wanted at any given moment was the right thing,” an expression of Cohn’s predatory lumpen make-up.

Von Hoffman and even Sidney Zion, a paid apologist for Cohn, have shown Cohn as a great manipulator of people for whom the exchange of favors was the currency of his realm. In addition to having legally represented the Mob, Cohn socially consorted with them. He was indicted for jury tampering in 1963 and was disbarred six weeks before he died in 1986 for unethical and unprofessional conduct that included, tellingly, misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and pressuring a client to amend his will. Typical of his lack of principles, he was a homophobic gay man (he died of AIDS) who publicly came out against allowing gays to be school teachers.

Trump knew all of this about Cohn. And yet he brought him into his inner life as friend and mentor. Business historian Gwenda Blair quotes Eugene Morris, Cohn’s first cousin and a prominent New York real estate lawyer, to the effect that “Donald was attracted by the fact that Roy had actually been indicted.” And he used Cohn’s legal services, tellingly, to sue the US government for damages in retaliation for having charged him with engaging in racially discriminatory rental practices in the apartment buildings he owned.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former close friend, personal attorney, and fixer is another case of Trump’s tendency to surround himself with lumpen-bourgeois associates and friends. Cohen’s life is a rich trove of what lumpen capitalism is about. After graduating from Cooley Law School in Michigan, he became a hard-edged personal-injury lawyer. His 1994 marriage brought him into contact with immigrants from the former USSR and into the taxi industry, where he made millions through the purchase and sale of medallions.

But a big break came from his buying and selling buildings in highly suspect circumstances. Just in one day, in 2014, he sold four buildings in Manhattan for $32 million in cash, three times what he had paid for them no more than three years earlier. The owners of the limited liability companies that bought the properties from Mr Cohen are unknown; so is the reason why they agreed to pay such high prices, although Cohen claimed that the sales were in cash to help the buyers defer taxes in other transactions. However, Richard K. Gordon, director of the Financial Integrity Institute at Case Western Reserve University law school, who once conducted anti-money-laundering efforts for the International Monetary Fund, stated that if he had been the bank, he would have either refused the transaction up front or rated Cohen as extra high risk.

Cohen then became involved in the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow with Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant friend with whom Cohen and Trump continued to work even after it was revealed that Sater was involved in a stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals. (Eventually, Sater pleaded guilty and became an informant for the FBI and other intelligence agencies.)

Cohen also had business dealings with companies that operated on the fringes of the medical field. Although it is unclear what role he played in those companies beyond having helped them to register with state authorities, two doctors listed in the incorporation papers as being involved in the businesses, Aleksandr Martirosov and Zhanna Kanevsky, were accused of insurance fraud with the different medical practices they operated. Martirosov was also charged with grand larceny and Dr Kanevsky with state racketeering charges, both as a result of an investigation into phony accidents and medical claims.

The above information about Cohen is based on an exhaustive investigative report published by the New York Times on May 5, 2018. This report also revealed that in 1993, Mr Cohen’s father-in-law pleaded guilty to evading federal reporting requirements for large cash transactions (because he cooperated in a related case, he was sentenced to probation.) Dr Morton W. Levine, Mr Cohen’s uncle, a family practitioner, provided medical assistance to members of the Lucchese crime family, which according to an FBI agent “aided their illegal activities.” Anthony (“Gaspipe”) Casso, a Lucchese underboss “regarded Levine as someone who would do anything for him.” Dr Levine also owned El Caribe, a Brooklyn catering hall — in which Michael Cohen long held a small stake before the 2016 election — that for decades was the scene of mob weddings and Christmas parties, while two of New York’s most notorious Russian mobsters kept their offices there.

The New York Times’s investigative report also pointed out that both of Mr Cohen’s taxi partners (Symon Garber and Evgeny Freidman) had a history of legal troubles. Each has been made to pay over $1 million for overcharging their drivers, according to the New York State Attorney General. Former business partners also accused them of forging signatures, stiffing lawyers, and dodging debt-collection efforts. Cohen’s taxi businesses in New York and Chicago owe more than $375,000 for a number of tax, insurance, and inspection problems, and fourteen of his fifty-four cabs were suspended.

Trump’s chosen retinue of friends also include celebrities whose personal characteristics reveal a great deal about who he is. One of them is rapper Kanye West, who Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote is, like Trump, a persistent bearer of slights, narcissistic, and shockingly ignorant; his remark suggesting that the hundreds of years slavery lasted were an indication of the slaves’ own preferences is emblematic of his (and Trump’s) contempt and lack of empathy for the victims of oppression. Another is former boxing champion Mike Tyson, a Trump hero known for his drinking, drug use, legal problems, and rape conviction. As Charles M. Blow averred in the New York Times, Trump counts his flirtation with rich rappers and athletes as proof of his egalitarianism. True to his lumpen make-up he takes up, as Blow writes, the coarser side of these celebrities whose thrall he is in and repackages their qualities behind a wealthy businessman’s face.


Trump’s Capitalist Friends
True to his lumpen predatory inclinations, Trump has an almost precapitalist, pre-democratic relation to government office, whereby his person and the office are merged into each other, and political office is there for him to benefit himself and his friends. Trump’s political conduct is as an impediment to the most important political function of the capitalist state: acting as a unifier and arbiter of the capitalist class.

Trump has been a chronic breaker of the “normal” rules of political comportment essential to the function of being a trusted and reliable arbiter to intra-capitalist conflict. He refused to publicize his tax returns and place his financial and real estate holdings in a so-called blind trust, routine rules of the system that both Republican and Democratic officeholders have adhered to for many years. He has ignored many of the political rules of the game, especially those that maintain the “civility” regarded as essential to political stability and the harmonious alternation in power between Republican and Democrats.

A blatant example of this lack of “civility” was his call for the imprisonment of rival candidate Hillary Clinton and the encouragement of his followers’ call to “lock her up.” All professional politicians lie, but Trump’s chronic and blatant lying in the most easily verifiable matters has broken the mold of regular politicking and subverted the moral authority of the presidency among large numbers of Americans. He has instilled a bullying atmosphere in politics, often justifying illegality and often resorting, as Joan Walsh pointed out in the Nation, to mobster language, as when he complained about the practice of “flipping witnesses” to implicate the top bosses in the criminal hierarchies and when he denied that White House Counsel Don McGahn was “a John Dean style rat.”

Capitalists mistrust Trump, not because they see him as morally lacking, but because they see him as an arbitrary, unpredictable, and unreliable wild-card president who, like his friend and mentor Roy Cohn, does not accept any rules except those that he finds expedient at any given moment. Even though US capitalists have for the most part benefited from his presidency, they see him not only as not part of them as a class, but also as an outside political actor with whom it is impossible to come to a mutual understanding of what to expect from each other, in contrast with previous presidents from whom they could predictably expect to abide by their mutually constructed relationship.

That is one of the major reasons why much of the elite media like the New York Times and Washington Post went into outright opposition to Trump, itself unusual in US politics except perhaps during Nixon’s Watergate period.

That is why, before it became clear that Trump had won the Republican primary race in 2016, most capitalists refused to support him. Many of these capitalists also refused their support because of his racist and anti-immigrant provocations which they saw as a threat to the economic and political system’s stability; or, as with the capitalists involved in agri-business and Silicon Valley, because they supported the legalization of at least short- term immigrant labor. (In fact, on August 22, 2018, dozens of American executives who are members of the Business Roundtable delivered a letter to the secretary of Homeland Security expressing their “serious concern” over the administration’s immigration policies, particularly those affecting the applications for, and renewal of, H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers and their spouses.) Large numbers of capitalists did not support him either because of his advocacy of protectionism, a policy advocated primarily by the executives of ailing industries such as coal and steel.

According to a 2018 study by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, in 2015 (the year before the 2016 general election) the Trump campaign attracted financial support from firms in ailing industries like steel, rubber, machinery, and others that expected to benefit from Trump’s protectionism. It also received, at that early stage, money from individual capitalists like corporate raider Carl Icahn, a virtual pariah to mainline firms in the Business Roundtable and Wall Street; and from a minority of Silicon Valley capitalists (who for the most part strongly supported Hillary Clinton) including Peter Thiel, a known figure in the industry, and several executives at Microsoft and Cisco Systems who contributed, respectively, more than $1 million and approximately $4 million to the Trump campaign.

Still, by the end of August 2016, by which time Trump had obtained the Republican nomination, no chief executive of a Fortune 100 company had donated to his campaign. This was in contrast with the 2012 presidential campaign, when according to the Wall Street Journal, nearly a third of Fortune 100’s CEOs had by then supported Mitt Romney Republican candidacy. As reported in Fortune magazine, during the 2016 primary season nineteen of the nation’s largest hundred companies had contributed to the campaigns of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. For her part, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had received twice as many donations from Fortune 100 executives than President Obama did in 2012.

It is true that after Trump won the number of delegates in the Republican primaries necessary to obtain the presidential nomination, an increasing number of capitalist firms began to contribute to his campaign hoping to propitiate Trump’s goodwill should he be elected president. Thus, according to Ferguson et al., the run up to the Republican Convention brought in “substantial new money, including, for the first time, significant contributions from big business.”

Apart from mining (especially coal companies, which continued to support Trump), the new contributors included Big Pharma, worried by Hillary Clinton’s talk about regulating drug prices; tobacco, chemical companies, oil, and telecommunications — particularly AT&T, which had a major merger pending with Time Warner. The Ferguson et al. report notes that money also started to come in from executives at big banks (Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo), and even from some Silicon Valley companies that had not previously supported Trump, like Facebook, that contributed $900,000 to the Cleveland Host Committee for the Republican Convention.

Yet, in the end, as reported by Ferguson et al., total spending on behalf of Trump’s election from all sources totaled a little more than $861 million compared with the $1.4 billion raised by the Clinton campaign. With the possible exception of 1964, the Clinton campaign surpassed any other campaign since the New Deal and obtained financial support reaching “far into sectors and firms that have rarely supported any Democrat.” Undoubtedly, Hillary Clinton, not Trump, was the presidential candidate supported by the majority of the capitalist class (notwithstanding Trump’s improved record in capitalist fundraising after the Republican Convention).

Capitalist support for Trump increased substantially after he took office. His right-wing tax policies and even more extreme right-wing policies of drastic deregulation in the key fields of the environment, labor, and consumer protection have won over large sections of the capitalist class. The American capitalist willingness to support Trump’s administration is not only due to his tax cuts and deregulatory policies, but because his regime coincides with a continued cyclical economic expansion.

While the majority of capitalists may be opposed to Trump’s tariffs and trade wars with China and the European Union, they are muted in their opposition to the administration because, and as long as, profits continue to rise. But they don’t trust him and cannot build with him a relationship with mutually agreed rules.

His extreme political behavior has forced them to at least take some distance from him, as happened in August 2017 after white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for a show of force that left one person dead and several others seriously injured at the hands of the white supremacists. Trump’s reaction, pointing to violence on “many sides,” provoked widespread indignation. Many CEOs felt forced to resign from Trump’s manufacturing council: Kenneth Frazier of Merck Pharmaceuticals, Brian Krzanich of Intel, Kevin Plank of Under Armour, Inge Thulin of 3M, and Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

Sophisticated pro-capitalist organs of information and opinion, especially those ideologically committed to laissez-faire economics, are uneasy with the support that American business are affording — grudgingly or ungrudgingly — to Trump. An emblematic example of this queasiness is a May editorial of the Anglo-American Economist, titled “The Affair” and subtitled “American executives are betting that the president is good for business. Not in the long run.”

Recognizing that for capitalists tax cuts, deregulation, and potential trade concessions from China outweigh the unclear costs of weaker institutions and trade wars, the Economist contends that “when it comes to gauging the full costs of Mr. Trump, America Inc. is being short-sighted and sloppy.” “The country’s system of commerce,” holds the editorial, “is lurching away from rules, openness and multilateral treaties towards arbitrariness, insularity and transient deals.”

As the Economist sees it, the expense of re-regulating trade could even exceed the benefits of deregulation at home. This might be tolerable except for the unpredictability of the Trump era, particularly Trump’s tendency to show off his power with “acts of pure political discretion.” It is this unpredictability that concerns the Economist most.


The Rise of a Lumpen-Capitalist President
How did it happen that a US president with such a problematic relationship with the capitalist US ruling class emerged, and managed to be elected, president? And even more so when paradoxically, he, a capitalist, had far weaker ties to the US capitalist class as a whole when he assumed office in January 2017 than had been the case of Obama, Clinton, Bush father and son, Reagan, and Carter.

The explanation goes back to the impact of the crisis created by the great economic recession of 2008. This recession came on top of the long-lasting effects of the growing deindustrialization that American workers suffered and about which the Democratic Party, whether under Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, did nothing significant to ameliorate their plight.

The paradigmatic case was West Virginia, a heavily Democratic state with a coal mining-based economy and the once politically powerful United Mine Workers Union (UMW), that was disregarded by the Democratic Party when the coal mining industry began ailing, bringing unemployment and underemployment and leading to a turn to the Republican Party. A similar pattern was followed in 2016 by states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The loss of these states sealed the defeat of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

By 2016, in the United States as a whole, millions of American families that had witnessed rising living standards and social mobility in the “glorious thirty years” between 1945 and 1975 no longer expected their children — saddled with heavy debts if they make it to college — to do as well as they did. Jobs had become increasingly limited to the low-wage, nonunion sectors such as logistics, call centers, hospitality, and health care, while the good, often technical jobs for the most part required postgraduate education. This situation is the economic and social background to the growth of the opioid epidemic within white and, increasingly, minority populations.

Donning the garb of authenticity in claiming to stand for the people — not a difficult task in confronting Hillary Clinton — Trump promised much-needed change to the victims of the crisis, including many of those who had voted for Obama and who were abandoned by him and his party. Trump offered protectionism as a solution to the problems of American workers. He courted the support of white Americans, sometimes dog whistling, sometimes openly espousing racist, nativist, and chauvinist views. Astutely, he assured voters he would leave Social Security and Medicare intact, social programs which more overtly neoliberal politicians like Paul Ryan have threatened to cut for some time. In doing so, he appealed to the large number of white Americans who erroneously thought that they had completely paid for these benefits through their lifelong individual contributions, in contrast to the “welfare” programs that the non-respectable poor supposedly get at the expense of the respectable middle and working class.

Trump also benefited from the Republican winner-take-all primary system originally designed to get an establishment candidate like Jeb Bush quickly selected instead of a prolonged period of competition that the Republican leadership feared might have hurt the party’s chances. In the absence of his Republican opponents uniting around one candidate, or of a runoff system to assure a majority for the winner, he was able to obtain the nomination with only a plurality rather than a majority of Republican primary voters.

Trump’s election and his presidency brings to the fore the old question of whether and how the capitalist class rules. Capitalists directly own and administer the economy, which they privately own. But they do so under circumstances any individual firm has little control over, such as national and international competition. That comes under the control of the state, which in light of the separation between the economy and polity that generally characterizes capitalist systems, particularly democratic ones, the capitalists don’t control directly but by means of complicated mechanisms.

In “normal” circumstances, these mechanisms include “tailing” after the political parties in power while trying to promote and defend their interests through a variety of means, both negative — the threat and reality of capital flight, refusal to invest, and other forms of capital “going on strike” — and positive, such as campaign contributions, lobbying, and media campaigns.

Crises imperil the complicated control that the capitalist class has attained in “normal” circumstances. They create the conditions that facilitate the rise of external class and political agents to run the political system, ultimately on behalf of the ruling class but not on ruling-class terms. Under extreme crisis, such as that of Germany in the late twenties and early thirties, Nazism — to a considerable degree rooted in German lumpen elements, although many of these were purged by Hitler in the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934 — was such a political agent protecting the survival of capitalism and its powerful capitalists, not in the capitalists’ terms but in the Nazi’s own terms. It is as if the Nazis had said to the capitalists: “We will provide you domestic political stability and let you make profits, but you have to pay the price of our barbaric rule.”

Trump is another political external agent. But he is not a fascist and has not tried to introduce fascism in the United States — his rule is not based on, among other things, fascist squads and the secret police seizing the unions, opposition media, and political parties, or eliminating elections. He has certainly carried out a set of vicious anti-working class, anti-poor, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and anti-environmental policies. The crisis that facilitated his election was not of the same dimension and significance as the German crisis of the thirties or Italy in the early twenties. By those standards, it was instead a mid-range crisis based to a considerable degree on the impact of the great recession of 2008 and the preceding decline of income, living standards, and substantial growth of inequality in the United States.

So far Trump has managed to retain the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The alliance of religious conservatism and white nationalism that Trump built may turn out to be more solid and enduring than the Republican neoliberal-religious alliance that preceded it. The irony is, of course, that Trump is more ruthlessly implementing a neoliberal program — certainly not in international trade where he deviates from the neoliberal Republican line, but in what counts a lot more: dismounting tax and regulatory policies, particularly in the areas of labor, environment, and consumer protection, accompanied, in his particular case, by the old racist emphasis on reducing civil and voting rights.


Friday, October 12, 2018

George Bisharat: Lawyer, champion of Palestinian rights and harmonica blues artist

from the San Francisco Chronicle


Big Harp George’ Bisharat goes from law school to the blues club
Andrew Gilbert October 10, 2018 Updated: October 12, 2018, 9:22 am




George Bisharat (a.k.a. Big Harp George) performs on stage with Kid Andersen and Friends for the album release of “Uptown Cool” at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland.
Photo: Sarahbeth Maney, Special to The Chronicle
Any journey that takes a man from the top ranks of the legal profession to headlining at blues joints is likely to be marked by unexpected twists. Even considering those divergent pursuits, Big Harp George walked a long and remarkable path from one world to the other.

Raised in Southern California and Sacramento in a prosperous Palestinian American family, George Bisharat played in rock bands as a teenager. Studying at UC Davis in the early 1970s, he decided to do his junior year abroad in Lebanon, following a family tradition of enrolling in the American University of Beirut. That’s where he truly discovered the blues.

In his first weeks on campus he decided to take a music class, “and I started hearing rumors about a blues band composed of a crazy mix of Arabs: Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians and Americans — all students at the university,” recalls Bisharat. (He is now celebrating the release of his third Big Harp George album, “Uptown Cool,” with a series of shows around the Bay Area, including Friday, Oct. 12, at Biscuits & Blues in San Francisco; Wednesday, Oct. 17, at Redwood City’s Club Fox; and Oct. 26 at Fremont’s Smoking Pig BBQ.)


A game but green harmonica player and vocalist, Bisharat joined the combo, which he dubbed the Bliss Street Blues Band, and got an education in the music’s foundational figures.

“Those guys knew much more about blues than I did,” he says. “They introduced me to the greats: Junior Wells, James Cotton, Little Walter. That was the year I grew the most as a harmonica player and started gaining an understanding of the genre.”


Bisharat, 63, is an accomplished musician as well as a commentator on Middle East politics and a law professor emeritus.
Photo: Sarahbeth Maney, Special to The Chronicle
If Bisharat’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he’s a widely quoted commentator on Middle Eastern politics whose columns and editorials have run in newspapers around the world, including The Chronicle.

A spokesman for the Palestinian cause, he’s a professor emeritus at UC Hastings College of the Law, where he continues to teach courses on criminal procedure.

While music remained a passion, he put performing on the back burner for decades while pursuing a legal career. Bisharat started to think about moving music to the foreground with encouragement from Beirut-born guitarist Otis Grand, a buddy from the Bliss Street days who came to town in the late 1990s to perform at the San Francisco Blues Festival.

“Otis took me aside and said, ‘Your playing is professional quality, get yourself a band, get out there and play!’” Bisharat says. “I told him, ‘I’m a law professor, living a comfortable life. I’m not living a blues life. What do I have to offer to the blues?’ He said, ‘You never know until you try.’”

Inspired by the dazzling chromatic harmonica playing of Paul deLay, he added the harmonically advanced harp to his arsenal. He was still teaching full time when he introduced his natty bandstand persona Big Harp George and released his 2014 debut album “Chromaticism,” a project designed to showcase the harp’s potential to expand the blues idiom and his personal take on the music.

“Up until 2012 I would have characterized my own playing as derivative,” says Bisharat, whose original songs often offer incisive commentary on the state of the society. “Why bother recording what other people have done before and done better? But when I started getting facile on chromatic, I heard my own musical voice emerge.”

Like so many other blues artists, he has found a home at San Jose’s Greaseland Studios, where he has recorded his three albums with many of the region’s top blues artists. Guitarist Kid Andersen, who owns and runs Greaseland, joins Big Harp George on the album release gigs.

“It’s been really cool to seem him growing musically. Each album is better than the last,” Andersen says. “It’s the beautiful thing about blues, you don’t have to be young to be a rising star.”

Big Harp George “Uptown Cool”: 7:30 and 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 12. $24. Biscuits & Blues, 401 Mason St., S.F. 415-292-2583. www.biscuitsandblues.com; 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 17. $7. Club Fox, 2209 Broadway, Redwood City. 877-435-9849, www.clubfoxrwc.com; 9 p.m. Oct. 26. Free, with purchase of food and drinks. Smoking Pig BBQ, 3340 Mowry Ave., Fremont. 510-713-1854. smokingpigbbq.net


Sunday, September 23, 2018

Time to Kill the Zombie Argument: Another Study Shows Trump Won Because of Racial Anxieties — Not Economic Distress

from the Intercept

Mehdi Hasan

September 18 2018, 7:00 a.m.

BURLINGTON, IA - OCTOBER 21: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets guests after speaking at a campaign rally at Burlington Memorial Auditorium on October 21, 2015 in Burlington, Iowa. Trump leads most polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Then-candidate Donald Trump greets guests after speaking at a campaign rally at Burlington Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 21, 2015 in Burlington, Iowa. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
DO YOU REMEMBER “economic anxiety”? The catch-all phrase relied on by politicians and pundits to try and explain the seemingly inexplicable: the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016? A term deployed by left and right alike to try and account for the fact that white, working-class Americans voted for a Republican billionaire by an astonishing 2-to-1 margin?

The thesis is as follows: Working-class voters, especially in key “Rust Belt” swing states, rose up in opposition to the party in the White House to punish them for the outsourcing of their jobs and stagnation of their wages. These “left behind” voters threw their weight behind a populist “blue-collar billionaire” who railed against free trade and globalization.

Everyone from Fox News host Jesse Waters to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders has pushed this whole “economic anxiety” schtick. But it’s a complete and utter myth. As I pointed out in April 2017, referencing both pre-election surveys and exit poll data, the election of Trump had much less to do with economic anxiety or distress and much more to do with cultural anxiety and racial resentment. Anyone who bothers to examine the empirical evidence, or for that matter listens to Trump slamming black athletes as “sons of bitches” or Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” in front of cheering crowds, is well-aware of the source of his appeal.

The problem, however, with trying to repeatedly rebut all this talk of “economic anxiety” is that it’s a zombie argument. As Paul Krugman has observed, these are arguments “that have been proved wrong, should be dead, but keep shambling along because they serve a political purpose.” Or as the science writer Ben Goldacre has put it, arguments that “survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down.”

To be clear: “Economic anxiety” has been shot down repeatedly by the experts over the past 18 months. Four damning studies, in particular, stand out from the rest. The first appeared in May 2017, a month after I wrote my original piece, when The Atlantic magazine and Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, published the results of a joint analysis of post-election survey data. Did poor, white, working-class voters back Trump in their droves? Was it the economy, stupid?

Nope. The PRRI analysis of more than 3,000 voters, summarized The Atlantic’s Emma Green, “suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.” Got that? Hillary Clinton over Trump. Meanwhile, partisan affiliation aside, “it was cultural anxiety — feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment — that best predicted support for Trump.”

In fact, according to the survey data, white, working-class voters who expressed fears of “cultural displacement” were three-and-a-half times more likely to vote for Trump than those who didn’t share these fears.

Surprise!

Second, in January 2018, a study by three Amherst political scientists — Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta — asked: “What caused whites without college degrees to provide substantially more support to Donald Trump than whites with college degrees?” Here’s their answer, based on survey data from 5,500 American adults:

We find that racism and sexism attitudes were strongly associated with vote choice in 2016, even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and other standard factors. These factors were more important in 2016 than in 2012, suggesting that the explicitly racial and gendered rhetoric of the 2016 campaign served to activate these attitudes in the minds of many voters. Indeed, attitudes toward racism and sexism account for about two-thirds of the education gap in vote choices in 2016.

Racism and sexism. Who’d have guessed?

Third, in April 2018, Stanford University political scientist Diana Mutz published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that observed how “living in an area with a high median income positively predicted Republican vote choice to a greater extent in 2016,” which is “precisely the opposite of what one would expect based on the left behind thesis.” Mutz found no evidence that a decline in income, or a worsening “personal financial situation,” drove working-class voters into the welcoming arms of a billionaire property mogul. Nor did a decline in manufacturing or employment in the area where Trump voters lived.

So what did she conclude?

In this election, education represented group status threat rather than being left behind economically. Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended—with whites discriminated against more than blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women—were most likely to support Trump.

Are you still not convinced? Do you still prefer to cling to a bogus claim that just won’t die? Well, the latest zombie-killing study was published last week by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group and co-authored by George Washington University political scientist John Sides (both the Democracy Fund and First Look Media, the Intercept’s parent company, were created by Pierre Omidyar). The VSG report concluded that the “prevailing narrative” of the 2016 election, focused heavily “on the economic concerns of Americans,” and especially “the white working class,” is “flawed” and “misplaced.”

Sides and his co-author Robert Griffin found that “economic anxiety was actually decreasing, not increasing” in the run-up to the presidential election and “what was distinctive about voting behavior in 2016 was not the outsized role of economic anxiety,” but “attitudes about race and ethnicity” that were “more strongly related to how people voted.”

According to their study (which focused on a much tighter concept of “economic distress” based on voters’ direct experiences with financial instability or hardship):

Contrary to the popular narrative, VOTER Survey results show that economic distress is not distinctively prevalent among the white working class. It is much more a fact of life for people of color. In part because of this, Trump voters in 2016 do not report more economic distress than do Clinton voters. If anything, the opposite is true. … The political implications of economic distress are mostly negative for President Trump. Among independents in particular, those experiencing economic distress are more likely to disapprove of Trump’s performance in office. Therefore, economic distress appears to function as a referendum on Trump’s presidency rather than a driver of support. Indeed, genuine economic distress may cost Trump support.

Do I really need to continue? Do I need to cite more studies? More surveys? How can this still be a matter for debate?

To be clear, and to repeat what I wrote last year, this isn’t to say that economic grievances are irrelevant, or that racial and cultural grievances were the only drivers of support for Trump. To quote the three academics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “it would be misguided to seek an understanding of Trump’s success in the 2016 presidential election through any single lens. Yet, in a campaign that was marked by exceptionally explicit rhetoric on race and gender, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that voters’ attitudes on race and sex were so strongly associated with their vote choices.”

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So why does this still matter, in 2018? For a start, as Mutz points out, “Trump’s victory may be viewed more admirably when it is attributed to a groundswell of support from previously ignored workers than when it is attributed to those whose status is threatened by minorities and foreign countries.” Plus, she adds, “elected officials who embrace the left behind narrative may feel compelled to pursue policies that will do little to assuage the fears of less educated Americans.”

This is the key point to consider for those on the left who have foolishly, if perhaps with the best of intentions, embraced the “left behind” thesis. They see economic and financial insecurity as the root cause of Trumpism, which they then feel justifies their support for policies such as a higher minimum wage or universal health care. These progressive economic and social policies, however, deserve our support because they’re morally and economically correct – and not because they might win over Trump voters in 2020. (Spoiler alert: They won’t and they may even further antagonize white working-class voters who see them as “handouts” for non-white working-class voters.)

Both race and class matter, and both have to be at the center of a left-wing, pro-poor, anti-Trump politics. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in 2016, race trumped class. The reality, as Mutz reminds us, is that the election of Trump “was an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance and by those in an already powerful and wealthy country to assure its continued dominance.”

This is what the left has to challenge. Of course the right wants to exonerate Trump voters from charges of racism, bigotry, and misogyny, but the left has to call it as it is. The Trump election was a “whitelash.” It’s time to slay this zombie of “economic anxiety” once and for all.

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Mehdi Hasan
@mehdirhasan

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Two State Hypocrisy

Mohamed Mohamed The Electronic Intifada 7 September 2018


Achieving justice means overcoming Zionism. JC ActiveStills
Imagine the following scenario: In response to the peaceful African-American civil rights movement in the United States, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s, a large segment of white Americans figured that the best solution to the issue would be to form a new country on a small part of US territory in the north, where African-Americans would be segregated and live on their own.

Any of these African-Americans who lived for generations in the American South, but at some point had to flee to the American North (or to Canada or Mexico) because of violence and discrimination perpetrated against them, would not be able to return to their homes in the South. They would only be permitted to “return” to this new African-American state.

Any of the African-Americans already in the South could stay there, but would become second-class citizens, facing institutionalized discrimination in a country dominated politically, economically and socially by white Americans – much as was the case during the Jim Crow era following centuries of enslavement.

On top of this, any of the white Americans who recently colonized parts of African-American territory could stay and continue to exploit the natural resources, whether the African-American population liked it or not. This new country would also be demilitarized, landlocked (or denied a port) and would have no true sovereignty over its territory.

In other words, the fate of this predominantly African-American country would largely remain in the hands of the white American one.

Unless one is a racist or white supremacist, this scenario would sound preposterous not only to most Americans, but also to most people in the world. Sadly, this imaginary situation is very similar to the one that many Israeli, and more disappointingly, American Zionists would like to impose on Palestinians – the so-called two-state solution.

Leading to peace?
One might ask, what is the problem with a two-state solution, if it will lead to peace between Palestinians and Israelis?

For one, Israel is unwilling to fully evacuate from the West Bank territory that it seized during the 1967 war, despite its obligation to do so under UN Security Council Resolution 242. This is land that Palestinians would expect for their own state.

However, since 1967, Israel established more than 200 settlements on tens of thousands of hectares of Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with a total population of more than 600,000 Israeli settlers.

Due to these “facts on the ground,” Israel would demand to keep much of this occupied land in a two-state solution scenario. But according to international law, as outlined by the principle that territory cannot be acquired by force, Israel has no right to one square inch of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

In a two-state solution, Palestinians would expect their capital to be East Jerusalem, which was seized by Israel during the 1967 war. However, Israel considers the entire city of Jerusalem to be its “eternal and undivided” capital and it has remained firm on this position.

It has been reported that Israel would try to make the nearby neighborhood of Abu Dis the future Palestinian capital. This would be completely unacceptable to Palestinians as Jerusalem has tremendous religious, cultural and historical significance for them.

Neutered state
Another major problem with a two-state solution is that Israel would agree to a Palestinian state only under the condition that it is demilitarized. This has been emphasized by numerous Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even former US President Bill Clinton proposed in 2000 that Israel be able to maintain some military facilities in Palestine and to deploy military forces in cases involving a “national security” threat to Israel. In other words, Palestine would be a neutered state with no true sovereignty, and Israel would always maintain significant control over Palestinians.

Last but not least, a two-state solution would almost certainly be the final nail in the coffin for the issue of the right of return for Palestinian refugees. This right is a cornerstone of the Palestinian struggle.

Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee, both in 1948 and in 1967, have an inalienable right to return to their homeland as do their descendants.

This right is enshrined in international law. The UN General Assembly in December 1948 adopted Resolution 194, and in June 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 237, both of which call on Israel to allow the return of refugees.

Yet Israel continues to violate its obligations under international law. It has no intention of correcting its historic injustices that created the Palestinian refugee problem.

The right of return has been one of the key issues preventing a just settlement of the conflict. In the rare instances that Israel even considers Palestinian statehood, it regards the right of return as out of the question, save for return to a new hypothetical – and truncated – state of Palestine rather than to the areas where refugees once lived.

Inherently intolerant
The problems with a two-state solution mentioned above lead to an obvious question: Why not form one democratic state where both Palestinians and Israelis could live with equal rights?

This would be the most fair and equitable solution.

The answer to this question is quite simple. Zionism, the political ideology that is the basis of the state of Israel, is inherently intolerant of equality. Its main goal was to create a Jewish state in Palestine, where Jews would be the majority and dominate all others.

Jews would receive special rights and treatment. For example, a Jewish person from China who has no connection to Palestine has the right to emigrate there and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian refugee whose family lived there for generations has no right to do so.

If that seems racist or discriminatory, it’s because it really is.

One might assume that such a prejudiced ideology is primarily espoused by a small segment of hard-line, right-wing Jews. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.

A perfect example is J Street, which is a supposedly liberal lobbying organization that “mobilizes pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the Jewish people.” The organization indicates that its policies reflect the views of the majority of American Jews.

But J Street is not shy about its support of the discriminatory philosophy of Zionism, as can be seen in its official policy regarding the two-state solution:

“With the Jewish and Arab populations between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea at near-parity, demographic trends preclude Israel from maintaining control over all of Greater Israel while remaining a democratic state and a homeland for the Jewish people. As then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in November 2007, ‘If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’”

It might seem unbelievable, but J Street is in fact stressing that equality for Palestinians and Israelis would spell disaster for Israel. It also adds that “there is no such thing as a ‘one-state solution,’ only a ‘one-state nightmare.’”

If this is the “liberal” Zionist position, and the position of Americans who theoretically should be more democratically minded, one can only imagine how bigoted the hard-line conservative Zionist view is. Indeed, hardcore right-wing Zionists would like nothing more than to permanently annex the West Bank and proceed with the “transference” of Palestinians to Jordan.

These people do support a one-state solution, but it is one that involves ethnic cleansing and no equality whatsoever.

Ironically, President Donald Trump made a remark that fittingly illustrates why Zionists are so opposed to a one-state solution. During a recent meeting in June, Trump half-jokingly told King Abdullah of Jordan that a one-state solution would lead to an Israeli prime minister named Muhammad.

This is the “demographic threat” that motivated Netanyahu to warn Israeli voters in 2015 that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” And this is the nightmare scenario that a former director of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, referred to when he warned that the “Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are nearly equal, and Israel must act to separate itself.”

Zionism simply cannot stand the idea of equality between Jews and non-Jews.

The fact of the matter is that Israel was established at the expense of the non-Jewish indigenous Palestinian population – Muslims, Christians, and others – and it continues to subjugate and discriminate against them. This is precisely what Israel started in 1948, when at least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and denied their right to return.

Since then, it has methodically engaged in the near starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, occupied and oppressed those in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and imposed institutional discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Through other tactics, such as the confiscation of Palestinian property and the demolition of homes, Israel has forced many Palestinians to emigrate, resulting in subtle ethnic cleansing.

As long as Israel remains committed to this racist, Zionist system, there will never be a truly just solution, no matter the number of states.

Mohamed Mohamed is the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center in Washington, DC. Views expressed are his own.


Sunday, September 2, 2018

Saturday, August 18, 2018

One State: A view from Gaza

from mondoweiss
Ahmed Abu Artema on August 17, 2018

There are those who believe that Israel’s recently-passed Nation-State Law represents a failure of the one-state option, as it formalizes the exclusively Jewish nature of the dominant state in Palestine and with it, the disenfranchisement of the non-Jewish population.

The new law could also be viewed, however, as betraying a fear on the part of the occupying power that the de facto imposition of one state on the ground holds within it the seeds of the dismantling of the colonial project from the inside. Seen in this way, all of the decisions, laws and actions taken by the occupying power to insist upon the specifically Jewish character of the state are but desperate attempts to go against history and legitimize an order that is both unfair and unsustainable.

There are many reasons why the One State idea may never be realized: the tremendous imbalance of power, the rising racism in Israeli society, that Palestinian society itself may not not yet be fully ripe for embracing such an inclusive idea. These challenges, however, should not lead us to underestimate the intrinsic power of the idea itself. History shows that a prophetic vision can begin with few followers and still be carried forward by the intrinsic power of its message.

There are many arguments for One State. First, it is the most realistic option, as it is takes into account both sides of the human equation: on the one hand, the fundamental right of all Palestinians to return to their homes in freedom from occupation, oppression and second-class citizenship, and on the other, the reality of the existence of millions of Jews that live in Palestine.

Concerns about the fate of the Israeli Jews in a liberated Palestine have until now been a major reason for the weakness of international support for our cause. This dilemma is solved by a One State solution that clearly calls, not for “throwing them into the sea” (an idea that is as unfair as it is unrealistic), but for the recognition of full rights and equality for all.

It is true that there are people who came to Palestine with the intention of expelling Palestinians from their homes and taking their place, but guilt can only be ascribed to individuals, not entire nations; and children cannot be held responsible for the crimes of their parents. There are generations of Israelis who know only this land as their home, and they are not responsible for the fact that they were born here.

If my primary goal as a Palestinian is to return to my land, it is of less concern to me who else stays or goes. The most important thing for me is to regain my rights and see the era of displacement and oppression brought to an end.

The idea of One State is aligned with the spirit of our time. The global consciousness has evolved away from the idea of nationalism toward one of citizenship. Millions of Arabs today are citizens in Europe and America who enjoy the same rights as all other citizens of those countries. Why can’t Jews live in Palestine in exactly the same way – on the basis of citizenship and not of Occupation?

There are many Palestinians who have emigrated to the West whose interests have become linked to their new homeland. They – and still less their children and grandchildren – would not necessarily return to a liberated Palestine, because their new countries have become an integral part of their lives. It is also possible for new generations of Israeli Jews, who are similarly connected to Palestine, to have a way to live in this land without remaining in the unacceptable position as occupiers.

There are some who reject the idea of coexistence with Israeli Jews in a shared land out of a subconscious fear that sharing the same society with people of other ethnicities and religions means we will all become alike. Yet Palestinians in the West already live together with many other groups, including Jews and even Zionists, in one state and under one law. In a single multi-ethnic Palestinian state each group will still be able to maintain its shared bonds of religion and culture without having to live in walled ghettoes like the people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem today.

We Palestinians can have our full rights in a single state. We may still have to struggle for them using the tools of peaceful civil struggle, as Palestinian Member of the Knesset Haneen Zoabi and activist Raed Salah do today, but it will be far less costly and bloody than the struggle we face today in West Bank, Gaza and the Diaspora.

The truth is that we already live in a single state, governed by Netanyahu in coordination with the Palestinian Authority (as former PLO chief Saeb Erekat has publicly admitted), and we are left imploring the Israeli government to open its checkpoints to let patients out for treatment and medical supplies in for our hospitals. The Gaza Strip is a prison inside this one state, whose people are struggling to break down their prison walls. 1948 (“Arab Israeli”) and West Bank Palestinians also live in ethnic enclaves within this single state as second-class citizens and non-citizens in the land of their birth.

Thus, the One-State thesis does not call for the establishment of a new reality, but for a struggle based on the existing reality: a struggle to bring down the walls, end ethnic discrimination, and build in their place a state that insures equality, dignity and freedom for all people. This is more realistic than seeking the end of Israel or even the creation of a separate Palestinian state – and also more just.

Implementing a One-State solution will not be easy, and the Occupation will fight hard against it, but since when has a ruling elite’s refusal of change been a reason to give up the struggle for fairness and basic human equality? The power of the One State idea is not its amenability to the Occupier, but its intrinsic nature as both the least costly and the morally superior solution. That should make it worth our while to reimagine our struggle in the light of this vision.

Our problem is with the racism and the occupation of Israel, not with the existence of Jewish people in Palestine. Our goal is to topple the project of Occupation while allowing anyone born in Palestine to remain here based on equal human rights as citizens of a single state.

The simplicity and justness of this vision should compel us to reformulate our struggle toward its attainment.

This article was originally published in Arabic by arabi21.com. This translation was done by Denny Cormier, Rana Shubair and Peter Cohen.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

It’s time to talk about Zionism’s racism problem

from Mondoweiss
Middle East Peter F. Cohen on August 10, 2018

We seem to be hearing a lot these days about an “antisemitism problem” on the Left – and particularly, in the growing part of the Left that is starting to embrace the cause of Palestinian rights. Accusations of “antisemitism” are almost sure to arise whenever Israel is criticized, as we saw in January when pop singer Lorde was called a “bigot”in a full-page ad in the Washington Post and accused of “prejudice,” “antisemitism ” and “Jew-hatred” for canceling a performance in Israel after appeals from BDS activists, or in April when Israeli-American actor Natalie Portman was accused of “borderline antisemitism” by Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz for declining to receive an award in Jerusalem due to her privately-expressed discomfort with the massacres of unarmed protesters in Gaza, or in the UK right now with Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn being called a “f***ing antisemite and a racist” by Labour MP Margaret Hodge, as controversies swirl around his history of support for the Palestinian cause.

Corbyn’s record as a tireless crusader for peace, justice and universal human rights could hardly be longer, more consistent, or more clearly based in true ethical principles rather than political expediency. In High School he became involved in such organizations as the League Against Cruel Sports and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which he later vice-chaired). At 19, he spent 2 years working and teaching in Jamaica with Voluntary Service Overseas and on his return to the UK began working as a labor union organizer. He championed affordable access to healthcare in the 70s, took a vocal stance on LGBT rights in the early 80s, and served on the National Executive of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He was arrested protesting Apartheid in 1984 and protesting a trial of of IRA members in 1986, and went to court over his refusal to pay the Poll (flat) Tax in 1990. As a member of the Steering Committee for the Stop the War Coalition, he organized against the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. He is vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) on Human Rights and the Chagos Islands, where he has advocated for the Chagossians’ right of return after their forced removal in 1971, and has defended Black and Asian Party members, as well as the basic human rights of Kurds, Indian Dalits, Western Saharans, Northern Irish Catholics – and Palestinians.

Corbyn signed all 5 “Early Day” Parliamentary motions condemning antisemitism long before becoming Labour Leader and fought the holding of an event by Neo-Nazis in 2015. Islington North, his constituency for the last three-and-a-half decades, where has won up to 73% of the vote, has a large Jewish population. Corbyn has close ties to Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Socialist Group and is now being passionately defended by such Jewish groups as Jewish Voice for Labour. As he is nowhere on-record in his decades as a public figure saying, writing or doing anything antisemitic, most of the allegations against him concern attempts to tie him to the words and actions of others – including of Jews.

One example concerns a Facebook Group that Corbyn briefly joined several years ago called Palestine Live, many of whose members are Jewish, including a number of Israelis and at least one Holocaust survivor. A few of the thousands of posts made in the Group over the last 6 years are alleged to have included “links to Holocaust denial myths, allegations of Israel’s involvement in the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks and conspiracy theories involving the Rothschilds.” Corbyn denied having seen those posts and said he would have challenged them had he seen them – and it’s frankly hard to believe he would have had the time to go scouring through the posts the way the mole who gathered information on the group – a man by the name of David Collier, who had already been seen attending pro-Palestine events falsely posing as pro-Palestinian – obviously did. Elleanne Green, the Group’s founder, who is half Jewish and has not been accused of having said or done anything antisemitic herself, now faces expulsion from the Party. (Full disclosure: I’ve personally known Ms. Green since before the group’s founding and can personally attest that the allegations are – as the Brits say “bollocks.”)

Another recent allegation concerns Corbyn’s participation in a Passover Seder of the Left-wing anti-Zionist Jewish group Jewdas, which has been critical of Israel. The group has stated has vocal the allegations “the work of cynical manipulations by people whose express loyalty is to the Conservative Party and the right wing of the Labour Party.”

Perhaps the most outrageous accusation centers around Corbyn’s participation in a Panel entitled “Never Again for Anyone,” In which Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer drew parallels between his personal experience of the Nazis and of Israel today. This is thus not only a case of guilt by association (Corbyn was sitting right next to the 86-year-old Meyer and clearly failed to tackle him when he made the offensive remarks), but guilt by association with a Holocaust survivor.

It is not insignificant that, as Jewdas points out, cries of “antisemitism” often seem to come from the Right (in Corbyn’s case, largely from the Blairite Wing of the Labour Party which is about as pleased with him as the DNC is with Bernie Sanders). In the US, Israel is championed by the Trump Right and Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer calls himself a “White Zionist” and Israel a model for the sort of White Nation he would like to see. The only major party candidate to decline to speak at AIPAC – and the only one to raise the issue of Palestinian rights at all, was Socialist Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish), while the only candidate with a strong stance for Palestinian rights was Jill Stein of the Green Party (who is also Jewish).

The attacks on Corbyn should also be seen in light of the recent growth of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. South Africa decided to cut diplomatic ties with Israel in February and Ireland passed a BDS bill in July. In the US, Palestinian rights are already embraced by Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers, and many respected figures on the Left, including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Glen Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein, Angela Davis, Jill Stein, Alice Walker, Medea Benjamin and Amy Goodman (many of whom are Jewish). With a Pew Center poll at the beginning of the year – before the highly visible trial of Ahed Tamimi and the Great Return March – showing Democrats almost evenly split on Israel-Palestine and Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez all publicly questioning Israel’s killings of Palestinian protestors in recent months, support for Palestine is poised to enter the Democratic mainstream – a shift further enabled by the growing membership and visibility of Jewish pro-Palestine groups such as JVP and IfNotNow. Corbyn, who is ahead of Sanders in the struggle to reclaim his party from corporate-backed politicians, is also ahead on Palestine, and his ability to overcome the current attacks will be a sign to mainstream Democrats that criticism of Israel is no longer a political death sentence.

This brings us to one final last allegation against Corbyn: Labour’s merely partial adoption of the 11-point International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “antisemitism.” Under the IHRA definition – in which no less than 5 of the points are specifically focused on Israel – it is “antisemitic,” for example, to draw “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” Thus, while it is clearly acceptable to compare Hamas to the Nazis (as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has done), Iran to the Nazis (as Netanyahu has also done) and BDS activists to the Nazis (as Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett has done), it is apparently racist to do so in the specific case of Israel. Presumably this extends to very specific and factually-grounded comparisons, such as the counting of calories going into Gaza to the counting of calories in concentration camps by the Nazis, or the Nazi policy of “concentrating” Jews into ghettos (and later into camps) with the Israel policy of concentrating Palestinians into sealed Gaza and West Bank towns that are encircled by a tightening matrix of walls, settlements, outposts, bypass roads, closed military zones and checkpoints, or the use of the “Dahiya Doctrine” in the Shujjaiya and Rafah neighborhoods of Gaza in 2014 to the collective punishments used by the Nazis in retaliation for Resistance attacks. Are such comparisons really more unacceptable than the practices that elicit them?

It is one thing to suggest that criticism of Israel could in some cases be motivated by antisemitism and quite another to outlaw such criticism wholesale on the grounds that it could potentially be misused – a form of political censorship that could itself be compared to that of Fascist regimes like the Nazis. And the IHRA definition certainly appears to be at least as concerned with tamping down criticism of Israeli actions, policies, laws and institutions than with protecting Jewish people from racism. Furthermore, according to Jacqueline Walker, human rights activist who is herself of Jewish descent and has already been suspended from the Party for alleged antisemitism, “the aim of the pressure [to adopt the full IHRA definition] is “that it would be the presage for another set of mass suspensions and exclusions which might go up to, and include, many prominent long serving Labour figures.”

What we really should be concerned about is racism in all of its forms – including, but by no means limited to – anti-Jewish racism. The fight against racism is by its very nature about universal equality and inclusion, and not special protection of any one group – let alone a state. Keeping our focus on racism rather than only antisemitism also makes it easier to see the shocking prevalence of racism in the discourse of Zionists themselves. If the IHRA’s standards were applied to all people equally, all of the collective condemnation, dismissal, blame and dehumanization of “the Arabs,” “them,” in their millions, etc. (as in “they teach their children to hate” or “they refused the Partition Plan”) would be inadmissible, as would all the winking allusions to the chaos in Syria, Iraq or Libya that implicitly communicate and reinforce racist stereotypes of Arabs as violent, fanatical, hateful and unable to rule themselves and justify Israel’s violence as necessary because it’s in a “tough neighborhood.” Zionists who are also Anti-Arab racists know all about how criticism of a State can hide a veiled attack on an entire people, because they do it all the time.

If the same definitions of racism were applied to all, we would no longer tolerate such thoroughly racist statements as “if the Palestinians loved their children as much as they hate the Jews,” or Netanyahu’s electoral dog-whistling that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves,” or Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s collective condemnation of of 2 million trapped civilians, more than 3/4 of whom are women and children under 17 (“There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip”), or Naftali Bennett’s casual dismissal of the value of Palestinian lives), or Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s statement that “the entire Palestinian people is enemy” and call for the mass murder of “the mothers of the martyrs” and destruction of their homes lest “more little snakes” be raised there. These statements take on more weight when read against recent events, such as this week’s Israeli killing of a pregnant mother and her baby daughter and shooting of several medics and journalists.

These are just a few relatively recent examples from high-level Israeli government officials. For more exhaustive accounts of Israeli racism, one can consult the work of people such as Canadian-Israeli (and yes, Jewish) journalist David Sheen. Indeed, anyone who wants to see the torrent of racism, hate and abuse that pro-Palestinians have come to expect from Zionists has only to post this article in a space where there are good numbers of Zionists. The real point is: just as the relentless deaths of Palestinians are routinely ignored by Western media and politicians, just as the right of Palestinians to safety and security or to defend themselves are never mentioned, anti-Arab racism against Palestinians is considered a non-issue, even though it is Palestinians and not Jews who are actually experiencing the crushing and murderous effects of racism at the hands of a powerful state.

As Palestinians continue to suffer and die for the crime of being non-Jews in the land claimed by the “Jewish State,” we can no longer allow Zionists to use “antisemitism” to bludgeon anyone who dares to speak out against this intolerable – and yes, quintessentially racist – sit

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Israeli ‘nation-state’ law follows in footsteps of Jim Crow, Indian Removal Act, and Nuremberg Laws

from Mondoweiss
Susan Abulhawa on July 23, 2018

Roughly eighty years after Nazi Germany enacted what became known as the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, Israeli lawmakers in July 2018 have codified a new Jewish supremacy law, which effectively mirror the Nazi-era legislation of ethnoreligious stratification of German citizenry.



Rights exclusive to Jewish citizens

Dubbed the “nation state” law, its first clause stipulates that “actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” In other words, the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the native inhabitants who managed to remain in their homes when European Jews conquered Palestine in 1948, shall be without sovereignty or agency, forever living at the mercy of Israeli Jews.

One of the early anti-Semitic laws in Germany, the first of the Nuremberg Laws, was the Reich Citizenship Law, which likewise deemed citizenship privilege exclusive to people of “German or kindred blood.” Since there was no scientifically sound way to distinguish Jewish Germans from the rest of German society, as they were racially white Europeans and ethnically German, lawmakers looked to genealogy for Jewish grandparents. That will not be necessary for indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel because, since its creation in 1948, Israel put protocols in place to ensure that non-Jews do not assimilate into mainstream Jewish society.



Ethnoreligious purity

This brings us to the second Nuremberg Law: Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which sought to prevent mixing of Aryan blood, dubbed “race defilement.”

In Israel, anti-miscegenation laws are already in place, masquerading as traditional values where marriage can only be performed by religious officials. The Orthodox rabbinate has exclusive purview over Jewish marriages, where Jewishness is a narrowly defined bloodline and interreligious marriage is strictly forbidden.



Exclusivity of Jewish symbols

The Reich Flag Law, part of the Nuremberg Laws, established that black, red, and white were the national colors, and the swastika flag was the new national flag. The second clause of Israel’s nation-state law regarding national symbols indicates that “the flag of the state is white, two blue stripes near the edges, and a blue Star of David in the center.” Two days after it was passed, Israeli police and military soldiers arrested a Palestinian boy for holding a Palestinian flag outside al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.



Judaizing Jerusalem

The third clause of the nation-state law reiterates Israel’s illegitimate claim to the whole of Jerusalem as its capital, an illegal and internationally unrecognized claim that has been emboldened by Donald Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Interestingly, however, this new law does not define state borders and Israel remains the only country in the world without declared borders. This is not surprising, as Israel is a still expanding settler-colonial state, even though its admission to the United Nations in 1948 was based on its claim to only the 1948 armistice line, which does not include Jerusalem or any other part of the West Bank.



Erasing Arabic

This new law also marks the beginning of the erasure of Arabic from the land, as it decrees Hebrew to be the only official language of the state, while Arabic has “special status.” The fourth clause further explains that use of “the Arab language [sic]” institutionally “will be regulated by law.”



Colonizing the whole of Palestine, Ghettoizing and robbing Palestinians

As for the 4.5 million indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who do not have Israeli citizenship, the nation-state law alludes to their fate in the seventh clause, which states: “The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”

Simply stated, Israel will continue to work in earnest to build Jewish-only colonies on seized Palestinian land, ostensibly where a Palestinian state was to be formed per the Oslo Accords.

We can expect that more settlement will simply accelerate Israel’s ongoing displacement of Palestinians to replace them with imported Jews. We know from the past fifty-one years of settlement construction that this process is accomplished by systematic dispossession, marginalization, ghettoization and robbing of indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This process more closely resembles the Manifest Destiny removal and marginalization of First Nations in North America.

Western media should stop mincing words by calling the nation-state law “controversial” when in fact it is encoding the worst human impulses into law, the likes of which are found in Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, the Indian Removal Act and other abominable moments in human history.

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Shakira joins BDS boycott of racist Israel

Columbian star Shakira will not be performing in Tel Aviv this year following pressure from activists who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said in a statement yesterday that it “welcomes the announcement that Shakira will not be performing in Tel Aviv anytime soon, dashing Israel’s hopes to use her name to art-wash its latest massacre in Gaza.”

“Hundreds of Palestinian municipalities and cultural organisations, as well as thousands of fans and boycott activists, from Gaza and Lebanon to Colombia and the US, appealed to Shakira to cancel,” PACBI added in its statement.

Last week, on 24 May, Palestinian cultural institutions and local administrations urged the Grammy Award-winning singer not to hold a concert in Tel Aviv as was scheduled.

Read: BDS claims ‘massive victory’ after company reports $4m in losses

“Performing in an apartheid state, whether South Africa in the past or Israel today, in defiance of the voices of the oppressed always undermines the popular struggle of the oppressed to end oppression. Doing so on the heels of a full-fledged Israeli massacre against our people in Gaza is a morally reprehensible whitewash of the crime,” read an open letter than was signed by a number of Palestinian art entities and municipalities.

The letter appeared on the website of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Reporting on the progress made by the BDS movement, PACBI added in its statement, “International celebrities, including Lorde, Natalie Portman and Gilberto Gil, are increasingly refusing to associate with Israel’s far-right Netanyahu government and decades-old regime of oppression.”

“Portugal’s national theatre director Tiago Rodrigues and dozens of UK bands have recently joined thousands of artists worldwide who support the institutional cultural boycott of Israel, in solidarity with the peaceful Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.”


Thursday, June 28, 2018

NY insurgent who said ‘Dems can’t be silent anymore’ about Palestine clips AIPAC poodle in primary shocker


Mondoweiss Editors on June 27, 2018 12 Comments


There is only one political story today, the defeat of Democratic Party stalwart Joseph Crowley by insurgent socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, in a congressional district in the Bronx and Queens. The news has reverberations for our issue, U.S. policy in the Middle East. Ocasio-Cortez has called on the party to end its silence on Palestinian human rights.

Here is Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet from the May 14 massacre on the Gaza border, when Israel killed 62 Palestinian protesters even as the U.S. moved the embassy:

This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.


Crowley had supported the move of the embassy to Jerusalem, which detonated the killings, and catered to the Israel lobby group AIPAC. He is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, a ten-term congressman, the personification of the old guard. The party establishment has been wed to support for Israel even as the forces that Ocasio-Cortez represents, younger and more diverse, have demanded greater backing for Palestinian human rights.

Haaretz has more of the story:

Asked later why she chose to post the tweet, Ocasio-Cortez compared the Gaza protesters to civil rights activists in the United States.

“I think I was primarily compelled on moral grounds because I could only imagine if 60 people were shot and killed in Ferguson. Or if 60 people were shot and killed in the West Virginia teachers’ strikes. The idea that we are not supposed to talk about people dying when they are engaging in political expression just really moved me,” she said.

She told interviewer Glenn Greenwald that the “silence” around the Palestinian cause “has been a little interesting to me,” adding that her Puerto Rican roots her to relate to the Palestinian protesters.

“Puerto Rico is a colony that is granted no rights, that has no civic representation,” she said. “If 60 of us were shot in protest of the U.S. negligence in FEMA I couldn’t imagine if there were silence on that.”

Increasingly, she said, “People are separating the actions and status of Palestinians from even the greater geopolitics of the area. People are looking at Palestinians through a humanitarian lens.”

Just last week Democratic megadonor Haim Saban accused 13 senators who called for an easing of the siege on Gaza of being childish and uninformed.

Democrat Alan Dershowitz is apparently worried about the same trend. From Bernard Marcus, one of Trump’s biggest pro-Israel donors:

“I was just speaking to Alan Dershowitz who agreed that the Democratic party is turning against itself. We are frightened by so much anti-Israel, anti-Semitic sentiment. Look what’s happening in Germany, England, France…Jews have nowhere to go but Israel. You think Russia and Iran want to sustain Israel? We have to fight the fight!”

We have always predicted this battle inside the Democratic Party. It really seems to be coming at last.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

One Democratic State: an ongoing debate

from mondoweiss


Naji El Khatib and Ofra Yeshua-Lyth on June 25, 2018


“A gem cannot be polished without friction” – Confucius

As anger and despair grow exponentially among Palestinians and the world wavers between stupefaction, exasperation and outright complicity in the growing genocidal ideation of Israeli Zionists, the return to center stage of a simple concept, the ‘One Democratic State’ (ODS) in historic Palestine, is an encouraging development.

Today more than ever, people realize that the current regime of blatant ethnic discrimination will never end as long as the “Two States Solution” continues to be blindly repeated as the official, totally dishonest and irrelevant, mantra to ‘peace’. The violence, racism and ethnic cleansing, part and parcel of the Zionist State of Israel since its inception, can only be addressed by a political structure characterized by equal rights and full civil liberties for all the country’s long-suffering inhabitants, including those Palestinian refugees who should have been among its inhabitants throughout these last seventy years.

A recent piece in Mondoweiss by Jeff Halper, addresses this subject, albeit with an unnecessarily diluted and to our eyes, potentially dangerous vision, of the ODS program, that along with many others, we’ve been promoting for years. Before commenting however, a word about ourselves, the authors.

Both of us, an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian refugee, are active in “The Popular Movement for One Secular Democratic State (http://osds-‎movement.net/). One lives in the Ajami quarter of Jaffa and the other in the Palestinian diaspora, far ‎from Manshieh, another neighborhood of Jaffa where his family lived until the Nakba. We both ‎ aspire to live under a single secular and democratic state for all its citizens inside historic Palestine, alongside the ‎returning refugees, under a rule of law that permits no discrimination based on religion, language, ‎ethnicity or gender.

A ‘bi-national state’ by any other name…
Whatever he chooses to call it, Halper’s ‘multicultural’ ODS is in fact a cleverly disguised package of bi-nationalism. His article focuses on “multiculturalism”, “constitutional democracy”, “bi-national state” and “collective rights” – all themes meaningful and pertinent to the ‘communities’ he sees as composing the social corpus of this future state’s civil society, but of no value or relevance to individuals. He proposes “to protect the “collective rights” of groups to maintain any type of community they wish within the framework of a multi-cultural democracy” – without defining what this would entail precisely and pragmatically.

Muddying the picture even further, he proposes a “de facto secular state”, but refuses to name it as such in the ODS program. Secularism clearly unnerves Halper who sees it as “a red flag” provoking the resistance of communities whom he describes as permanently and statically religious, nationalistic and immovable.

Aside from the orientalist mindset implicit to this attitude, we also find it puzzling from someone who grew up in a country that proclaimed the ‘separation of church and state’ loud and clear from its beginning, alongside a religious sector that’s thrived throughout the last two centuries. Secularism is not the negation of religious beliefs, nor is it ‘against’ religion. Secularism is the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis those religious matters that are strictly and only relevant to the citizen’s personal ‎freedom of beliefs, religious and/or philosophical.

Moreover, this view is shortsighted. If Halper ‎perceives the future electorate majority as so inevitably anti-secular, where does he expect to find the votes needed to put secular measures into place in a supposedly ‎’democratic’ state? A constitutional democracy accords any constituent minority the legal authority to block legislative measures perceived as ‎contrary to its opinion and/or interests. If his objective really is a secular state, then this approach is clearly flawed and self-destructive.

In our view, true democracy can only be achieved, or even aspired to, through the complete separation between religious institutions (mosque, synagogue, ‎church) and the state. This is the single best regulation of relations between central government and civil society. It is precisely the so-called ‘Jewishness’ of the State of Israel that has never allowed it to become a true democracy. Replacing it with potentially Muslim, Christian or Jewish ‘communities’ would be equally disastrous.

Moreover, the bi-national/multicultural system is replete with other potential pitfalls. A few examples:

* A bi-national constitutional state allows a ‘national community’ to secede from the state if parliament is perceived as having failed to protect it from another.

* The state’s undivided sovereignty is not possible once the heterogeneous mixture of multiple ‘sovereignties’ within the state and civil society is recognized. Each community would have its own sovereignty, functioning with its own cultural, religious and social institutions along the lines of national cantons, semi-independent, federated in a supra-structure of a formal state.

* What of the potential for bitter internal friction within these very communities? If communities with a strong religious component are accorded any type of legal authority, which Judaism, which Islam will actually prevail?

In such a context, it is all too easy to imagine a simple spark lighting the re-emergence of an ethno-religious state, to say nothing of the potentially crippling impact on everyday functions of the state. At best we would likely end up with yet another perpetually handicapped, confessional state along the lines of the government of the Lebanon.

Individual liberties at risk
From an anthropological point of view, the individual, regardless of political power, is attached by “organic” links to a given community. This attachment is cultural, not legal. A secular state does not attribute a legal status to ancestral cultural practices. For example, the law of the state should neither prevent nor encourage marriage either within or outside the ‘community’ nor should it forbid communitarian expressions, but it is duty-bound to take away the monopoly of confessional institutions over areas such as marriage and family law (divorce, custody, child and spousal support and inheritance). These inherited institutions would no longer have the exclusive right to celebrate and register marriage contracts.

While celebrating cultural expression of all kinds, including communitarian, we see decreeing community affiliation as part and parcel of one’s status vis-à-vis the state, as incompatible with true democracy. Using ‘community’ as a defining sociological basis for citizenship, rather than only the individual person, directly contradicts the concept of ‘citizenship of person’ defined as ‘a legal member of a sovereign state or belonging to a nation.’ ‎Citizenship is an entirely different concept than that of belonging to a community and the two must be distinguished legally in the clearest possible terms. How is this to be accomplished in a state organized around national, ethnic and religious ‘communities’?

Moreover, if we do not clearly establish the legal dominance of the secular, civil state from the start, how are we to avoid seeing religious laws maintain their authority within religious communities? According to Halper, “what is left unsaid is that religious law (halakhah, sharia, ecclesiastical law) may continue to pertain within its religious communities, …. but will accompany, not displace, civil law where people choose to observe it.” But where will the lines be drawn? This becomes doubly problematic for a state which refuses to identify itself as secular and doubly dangerous because we know that religious ‎communities and their political parties are infected by the germ of totalitarianism (see the recent extension of ‎the competences of the rabbinic courts)?

Our fear is to see communitarian and religious institutions dominating the daily life of their individual members in the name of ‘community rights’. This would be purely and simply liberticidal for the individual citizen who does not want to be held “prisoner” by his or her community ‎and would be especially dangerous for women, the first victims of misogynist and patriarchal laws. Endowing local communities with “state powers” means potentially sanctioning discriminatory regulations and attitudes towards women. Is this a risk we want to take?

This is just one reason why a fully democratic state must be clearly and unashamedly secular and why we believe that any state that is not defined as such, is quite simply not a democracy. Only a secular state provides lasting protection and guarantees fundamental freedoms for the individual. On the one hand, it provides balance between the civil rights of each and every citizen, without particular attributes and equal to every other, all the while belonging (or not) to a particular community and living according to his or her personal convictions on the other.

Secularism as a means of dismantling Zionism’s hold over Judaism
In parallel with the project of “expropriating” the land of Palestine, Zionist ideologues transformed Judaism ‎into a national myth so as to provide the Zionist-colonialist project with a ready-made pretext for establishing a “Jewish nation-‎state” on the “heavenly promised land”. By assigning an imaginary “national” geography to Judaic religious symbols, the Zionists ‘cloning’ of the European national model (with its colonial and racial discourse) became complete.

We see the politicization of religion and its spiritual dimensions, the transformation of a spiritual faith (whether of Judaism or any other religion) into a “nationality” as a perversion ‎of religion. The reversal of this process is also what we expect from the OSDS movement. A secular state of ‎non-nationalist citizenship would restore to the Jewish religion its basic inclinations and ‎vocations by “depoliticizing” it and simultaneously allow civil society of that country to unify around a coherent and single identity, thus breaking with the last seventy years of perpetual conflict along contrived, communitarian lines.

By proposing to formalize ‘Israeli Jews’ as a community based on this ‘religious nationality’, Halper falls, however inadvertently, right into that same old Zionist trap. A “bi-national state” for two “nations” (even when dressed up with the more ‘politically correct’ title of ‘multicultural’) amounts to little better than a re-branded version of the moribund ‘Two States’ of Oslo infamy. Enshrining these divisive definitions anew into the institutions of the ODS amounts to the same. The political programs implicit to the concept of ‎a bi-national state are simply one more, refashioned variant of the previous Nation-state recipe, but this ‎time with a double nationalism, bound to only aggravate tensions rather than alleviate them.

We see a future secular and democratic State in historical Palestine ‎for all its citizens as the achievement of a double-edged process of decolonization: ‎decolonizing Palestinians from the apartheid bi-national State of Israel and decolonizing Israeli Jews from the Zionist mindset of nationalistic ideology and domination. We see it as essential that the ODS take a new path, towards the creation of an entity that unifies its citizens under one cohesive identity. This alone gives us a chance of lasting future resolution.

This ‘One Secular State’ of non-nationalistic citizenship will be a Palestinian ‘state’ but not a Palestinian ‘nation-state’ according to the imported western state’ concept.‎ We see this as way of ‘re-inventing’ politics by adopting new ‎types of paradigms that render obsolete the colonial, nationalist and racist concepts characterizing Europe ‎at the end of the 19th century. The bi-national state, the ‘State-of-Two-Nations’, is the opposite of the post-national and ‎non-nationalist ‘One Secular Democratic State’ that we envisage and would have only one secular legal system for all citizens. Religious affiliation and practice would remain a purely private matter, rather than a public and collective ‎issue.

So how do we get there?
Halper’s claim that his peculiar version of democracy is the best way “to sell” the ODS proposition to Israeli Jews is particularly disturbing. It implies that the question will be resolved simply through “bargaining”, as if our goal as activists is only to convince through discussion, rather than to target the balance of power by every means possible through the hard work of political activism.

It’s clear to us that a real lasting “political settlement” will necessarily reflect an evolution of the balance of power in the field. This alone will be the conflict’s final resolution and mark the end of the wars, the repression and the suffering. ‎We agree with Halper that “we need a plan, a vision of the future, and an effective strategy for getting there”, but the One Democratic State also demands clarity, ‎factuality and determination – not ambiguity or equivocation.

Rather than bargaining or maneuvering so as to ‘sell’ the most easily palatable offer, we must create both conditions that call into question the ‘evidence’ used to validate the ‎dominant Zionist-national narrative and ideology and the means to provoke the beginning of awareness of ‎facts on the ground: The land of Palestine has now been completely annexed by the Zionist state, but Israel has yet to figure out what to do with ‎Palestine’s people. So far, mass deportations, population transfer, ethnic cleansing, massacres, forms of genocide and an apartheid ‎system of domination have all been tried and have yet to resolve this dilemma… What next?

Linking the Palestinian struggle for rights and justice, with a secular ODS political program could make the difference. Palestinians and non-Zionist Israeli Jews are invited to join in a ‎common struggle against Zionist domination of the land and of the “mindset” prevalent among its ‎Jewish population. ‎ What’s needed is to redefine the parameters and dynamics that have proved so destructive in the past, rather than simply repackaging them into an updated version of the same. Pragmatically speaking, Halper’s vision effectively resembles nothing so much as prophesy. It has no need for political struggle, it simply skips this step and jumps right to the desired result: ‎settlement. But what kind of settlement?

As a final note, we think it’s worth mentioning that the One Democratic State Campaign‎ is still in the process of consultation and opinions are as diverse as its members. Halper’s implication that his version has reached consensus could be mistaken as an attempt to impose his vision of a Bi-national State under the cover of One Democratic State. Please be aware that the debate is ongoing and open!

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About Naji El Khatib
Naji El Khatib (b.1954) Originally from Jaffa, Naji grew up in a Palestinian refugee family exiled to Lebanon. He was active in the Palestinian national movement as of an early age and later worked as an assistant professor at An-Najah National University in Nablus. His most recently published books are " The Plurality of Thought Versus the Monolithic Obscurantism" (2016) and " The Gender and the Globalization of Concepts- Deconstructive Analysis"(2015).