Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Revolution or Upheaval?
‘Revolutions don’t happen out of the blue’: Egyptian protests grounded in decades of struggle
by Max Ajl on February 4, 2011
Egypt is throbbing with resistance. Cairo is cloven between the forces of revolution and those of counterrevolution. Hundreds of thousands of people - on Tuesday, February 1, well over a million - have been streaming each day into Tahrir Square, the largest plaza in the Arab world, located in the heart of downtown Cairo. Army tanks line the streets, helicopters and F16s buzz overhead, and pro-Mubarak demonstrators, many of them hired thugs, bloodied thousands of protesters yesterday in Tahrir and elsewhere. Yet the people keep pushing for Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's unconditional ouster, and not just in Cairo. Alexandria has been convulsed, while Suez, a small city abutting the Suez Canal, has been riven with some of the fiercest street battles between the police and protesters, while workers there have gone on strike, demanding that Mubarak step down from his palace in Heliopolis.
In response to rising rage, Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people on Tuesday, February 1, and promised to step down in September, stating that his "first responsibility now is to restore the security and stability of the homeland, to achieve a peaceful transition of power," assuring the crowds that he "was not intent on standing for the next elections" anyway.
Barack Obama, in reply to Mubarak's promise to slowly relinquish his grip on power, said that after his address he had spoken "directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place ... an orderly transition must be meaningful, must be peaceful and it must begin now." Clearly, Mubarak and Obama are coordinating their communications, as well as their strategies. They should be: Egypt receives $1.3 billion of military aid each year to make sure it follows American orders.
Cutting that aid went unmentioned, so the nature of the "change" to which Obama was referring was unclear - but it is quite unlikely to be the change the people massing in Tahrir Square demand. When they burn Mubarak in effigy, they show their disdain not just for the man but for the system for which he stands.
Mubarak and Obama are well aware of this, which is why, on Wednesday, February 2, Mubarak sent paid goons, demurely referred to in the Western press as "pro-Mubarak demonstrators," into Tahrir Square and other major centers of resistance to provoke chaos. With the streets racked by violence, state managers reason, Mubarak will have justification to set in motion an orderly, top-down transition to a new figurehead at the head of the same governmental system.
Early indications are that he will try to put in place his new vice president, Omar Suleiman. Perhaps Suleiman won't work out so well, and Mubarak will revert to another high-level officer from his inner circle. Notwithstanding the particulars, the general framework of Egyptian and American policy is clear: maintain the system. To that end, "pro-Mubarak demonstrators" swore on Wednesday to "liberate Tahrir Square with blood." "Liberation" has yet to be accomplished; there's been plenty of blood. The counterrevolution has begun.
Part of the work of preparing for this counterrevolution is in dismissing the protests as "spontaneous," a momentary outburst of rage that will be quieted by a bit of change at the top. In the Momentary Convulsion School of History, people briefly spasm in the streets in response to outside provocation but go home as soon as their masters throw them a few dry bones of change. Grievances are not deeply felt injustices rooted in economic and political structures, but more like itches to be briefly scratched.
In more advanced versions of this fantasy, the Egyptian protests are just ripples from the revolt in Tunisia, and, like any ripple, they will pass through Egypt, rock it lightly, and then it will be still again. History tells a different story. As Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy comments, "Revolutions don't happen out of the blue. It's not because of Tunisia yesterday that we have one in Egypt mechanically the next day." These are ripples, but they are big ones, set in motion long ago, and they originated in socioeconomic tremors that predate the Tunisian uprising by decades.
The January 25 protests that began the current stage of social revolt were organized by several groups, including the April 6 movement, a wide-based group with overwhelmingly young leadership that emerged to mobilize support for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra, a textile manufacturing center in the Nile Delta. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labor unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010. Stanford historian Joel Beinin calls it the "largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II."
The success of this campaign catalyzed other independent labor activity, spurring the formation of Egypt's first independent union in over a half century - the Independent General Union of Real Estate Tax Authority Workers. Beinin adds that the labor movements, alongside those organizing opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, "inculcated a culture of protest in Egypt. This has contributed to the formation of a consciousness of citizenship and rights in a far more profound manner than anything that has happened in the arenas of party politics or nongovernmental organization work."
Labor revolt emerged as a countermovement to the Mubarak regime's neoliberal economic reforms. Those reforms shattered the authoritarian populist model, put in place by former president Gamal Abdel Nasser, which protected basic living standards, often by controlling the prices of basic staples. Amidst rocketing inflation, stagnant wages - many in Egypt live on 400 Egyptian pounds a month, equal to around $70, or close to two dollars a day - and structural unemployment concentrated amongst the youth, this social compact broke down. The population is extremely polarized, split on the model of most societies in the global South: a sparse middle class, with a small wealthy sector living in Zamalek or Maadi, or in outlying suburbs like Heliopolis, suspended above their society, while masses of poor inhabit the slums of Cairo and struggle - literally - for their daily bread.
One cannot easily separate polarization of wealth from dictatorship. Wealth and proximity to political power are tightly intertwined in Egypt. Columbia historian Timothy Mitchell notes that the neoliberal reforms of the 1990's put public funds into fewer and fewer hands, diverting resources away from labor-intensive industrial and agricultural development. The state now "subsidizes financiers instead of factories, speculators instead of schools. Although the IMF [International Monetary Fund] has shown no interest in raising the question, it is not hard to determine who benefits from the new financial subsidies. The revitalized public-private commercial banks lend big loans (tax-free) to large operators. The minimum loan size is typically over $300,000 and requires large collateral and good connections." In a telling indicator of the sharply unequal nature of income distribution, Mitchell notes that perhaps three percent of the population accounts for 50 percent of consumer spending.
Unrest has not merely been a response to destitution, but also a reaction to the systemic foreshortening of the social horizon, a phenomenon that cuts across social classes. Seventy-five percent of the unemployed are below the age of 30, while those with the lowest levels of education have the lowest levels of unemployment. University graduates, on the other hand, have a 30 percent unemployment rate. The protests have cut across a wide cross-class segment of Egyptian society: workers, teachers, Islamists, women and youth, including some of the underemployed children of the middle and upper classes. Some of the upper-class anger at Mubarak is fury at a dictatorship fused with corruption that has crowded out magnates running businesses with poor connections to state elites. The common thread is an intolerance of anymore living under an authoritarian police state.
Predictably, Western media is misreporting the role of both labor and the Muslim Brotherhood, understating the role of the former and overstating the role of the latter. The agenda is to obscure socioeconomic grievances and promote the narrative that the choice is between an authoritarian but secular government, or a democracy that will bring Islamists - code for the Taliban - to state power. The corollary is that people are not in the streets struggling for social revolution but to put in place a variant of Islamofascism. Thus, people shrug, the revolt must be drowned in blood. This narrative is indefensible.
For one thing, the ideological makeup of the Muslim Brotherhood is different from that of the more regressive Islamist anti-imperial forces. Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood refrained from endorsing the initial call for January 25 to be a National Day of Rage. Scarcely any Islamist slogans have been voiced at the demonstrations. Most of the rhetoric has been secular and nationalist: "The crescent and the cross against murder and torture," for example, referring to unity amongst the Muslim majority and the Christian minority.
It's true that the Brotherhood would play a strong role in any remotely democratic post-Mubarak regime, as it is the largest organized political force in Egypt. But that is not something anyone should fear. The Muslim Brotherhood has eschewed violence over recent decades. Thousands of its activists languish in Mubarak's prisons, victims of state repression. Comparisons that evoke al-Qaeda are simply slander. If anything, the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood has been marked by its accommodationist and nonconfrontational stance vis-a-vis the regime in recent years, rather than the reverse, and to widespread consternation among dissidents.
Another underreported facet of the social mobilizations is that, on January 30, envoys from independent unions along with workers from the metal, chemical, automotive, textile, pharmaceutical, iron and steel industries announced that they were creating a new Federation of Independent Egyptian Unions. That same day, they endorsed an indefinite general strike until Mubarak steps down. Attention is centered on Cairo's momentous Tahrir uprising, but proportionally, smaller cities and towns like Mahalla and Suez are denser with protest. They are also centers for the Egyptian working class.
Before discussing how to proceed, Obama consulted with the US's key regional partners: Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and King Abdullah II of Jordan. They urged Obama to support Mubarak, while Netanyahu has urged Israel's Western allies to tone down criticism of Mubarak. They don't necessarily care about Mubarak, but about what he represents: continuity of policy. They are aware of what the future holds if there is a sharp and radical rupture: the quiet, swift click of falling dominoes as the regional system collapses, autocracy by autocracy.
The New York Times reported that, "Israeli officials expressed concern that Mr. Mubarak's abrupt exit could jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel." Translated from bureaucratese into English, their concern is neither with Mubarak nor his exit, but rather with managing the transition. For Israel, a hostile Egypt on its borders will provoke confrontation, and eventually, open conflict - conflict that will end in either regional conflagration, the cease of the occupation, or both.
Israel's main ally, America, is aware of this possibility, and, due to the influence of the Israel lobby in the US, will seek to prevent it. But the lobby is influential in promoting a bellicose foreign policy in part because Israel's foreign policy objectives - an Arab world peppered with dictatorships and destabilized states - line up with those of the arms manufacturers, who profit from regional arms races, and with those of the oil majors, who profit from the high prices associated with regional instability. A neutered, pacific Israel would no longer work as a regional juggernaut for promoting those sectors' interests. With Israel no longer protecting Western corporate interests, uprisings in the Arab sheikhdoms that stand astride a frothing river of petrodollars would be next. Too much is at stake: the profits of every Western oil company depend vitally on Middle Eastern fossil fuels and the financial system relies on recirculating and reinvesting the profits extracted from elevated oil prices, while the arms exporters count on regional conflict and the portion of the petro-profits that remain in regional hands to eventually flow into their coffers.
Simultaneously, Israel administers the region, creating free trade zones in Jordan, the Occupied Territories and Egypt that are highly profitable for American corporations. Egypt's domestic economy relies on normalization, or regular trade, with Israel - which it would cut if there were real political change - as well as incestuous deals cut between the state and "private" enterprise.
Revealingly, the Egyptian stock exchange and world markets alike have been sliding downwards in response to the threat the revolt represents to both domestic accumulation in Egypt and the interests of capital worldwide. In older parlance, the term would have been class war.
Within Egypt, the keystone of this system is the military and its control over the population, and, thus, its safeguarding of the social system from the threat of radical change. For that reason, Obama's spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, has promised that the American stream of military aid to Egypt will flow unhindered, an unmistakable signal to the generals: maintain the regional matrix, even if Mubarak eventually must go. Many have misinterpreted the Egyptian army's statement, which was released on Monday, stating: "The armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people.... Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirm that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody."
The army hardly needed to resort to force. Instead, it merely needed to stand by on Wednesday as hired thugs threw Molotov cocktails at peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, and as men on camels and horses rode into the crowd with batons, injuring people and hoping to sow chaos and, thereby, to ensure that people think that the Mubarak government must stay in place to endure an "orderly transition." Eyewitness reports from Al Jazeera correspondents show that many of the captured thugs have police IDs. Meanwhile, government propaganda asserts that it has been Muslim Brotherhood militants throwing firebombs on the people. The army "is calling on protesters to go and stay home for Egypt's security."
It is still unclear how this situation will play out. The US government would have preferred that Mubarak had stayed in power in perpetuity. A backup plan is a hand-picked successor to Mubarak who would maintain Egyptian collaboration with Israel, the quid pro quo for the $1.3 billion worth of aid the US remits yearly to Egypt, overwhelmingly to the military in the form of weapons and planes, ensuring that the money cycles back to the American military-industrial complex. The Egyptian people are unlikely to settle for such sops. As Nasser Abdel Hamid, a member of the National Association for Change, told Al-Masry Al-Youm, "We might have negotiated a diplomatic solution with the regime, but after today's developments, the fight will continue; what happened will not weaken it." The other option is to turn the revolt into mass slaughter: the Pinochet option. But to do so will probably require more repression than just street thugs can muster. The regime would require the services of the army.
Yet, as a Middle East Report editorial notes, "The army likely cannot fire upon the demonstrating crowds if the regime judges that necessary. The top brass has sworn not to; the Pentagon has echoed the White House in urging adherence to that policy; and, most importantly, the first bullet will shatter the shows of solidarity between the soldiers and the pro-democracy movement, as well as the army's honored place in Egyptian political culture." More likely is the palace coup option, as in the wake of the somewhat embarrassing - because unsuccessful - violence on Wednesday, Western officials called for acceleration transition within Egypt. The backup plan is in action. Should the protesters overcome the government's maneuvering for a palace coup, it is possible that the US has a final card in its back pocket: Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a name frequently bandied about by foreign media and analysts as a possible successor to Mubarak.
But in Egypt, ElBaradei is hardly talked about. As Egyptian journalist Philip Rizk told me, "He is not the people's choice. He is the choice of the international community," adding, before Wednesday's repression, that he was "pessimistic."
"It's going to get violent," said Rizk, "and I think ElBaradei will get in no matter what. Too much is at stake for the international community, for the US, for the IMF." ElBaradei would likely keep in place the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, but would very likely open up Egypt's Rafah crossing into Gaza for large flows of goods and people, allowing for economic development and better lives for the Palestinians living there. Rizk added that, for Egyptians who have been living under the jackboot of dictatorship for decades, ElBaradei would be an improvement over the octogenarian Mubarak, who has outlasted four American presidents.
But there are those looking at more distant horizons, too, and who are less pessimistic about the possibility of Egyptian society reaching them. As el-Hamalawy comments, "The revolution for me is about radical redistribution of wealth and a government that will represent the will of the Egyptian people when it comes to civil liberties, in addition to a pro-resistance stand vis-a-vis the US hegemony on the region and Israel."
"ElBaradei," he adds, "is not the man for that."
This article originally appeared at Truthout.
by Max Ajl on February 4, 2011
Egypt is throbbing with resistance. Cairo is cloven between the forces of revolution and those of counterrevolution. Hundreds of thousands of people - on Tuesday, February 1, well over a million - have been streaming each day into Tahrir Square, the largest plaza in the Arab world, located in the heart of downtown Cairo. Army tanks line the streets, helicopters and F16s buzz overhead, and pro-Mubarak demonstrators, many of them hired thugs, bloodied thousands of protesters yesterday in Tahrir and elsewhere. Yet the people keep pushing for Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's unconditional ouster, and not just in Cairo. Alexandria has been convulsed, while Suez, a small city abutting the Suez Canal, has been riven with some of the fiercest street battles between the police and protesters, while workers there have gone on strike, demanding that Mubarak step down from his palace in Heliopolis.
In response to rising rage, Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people on Tuesday, February 1, and promised to step down in September, stating that his "first responsibility now is to restore the security and stability of the homeland, to achieve a peaceful transition of power," assuring the crowds that he "was not intent on standing for the next elections" anyway.
Barack Obama, in reply to Mubarak's promise to slowly relinquish his grip on power, said that after his address he had spoken "directly to President Mubarak. He recognizes that the status quo is not sustainable and that a change must take place ... an orderly transition must be meaningful, must be peaceful and it must begin now." Clearly, Mubarak and Obama are coordinating their communications, as well as their strategies. They should be: Egypt receives $1.3 billion of military aid each year to make sure it follows American orders.
Cutting that aid went unmentioned, so the nature of the "change" to which Obama was referring was unclear - but it is quite unlikely to be the change the people massing in Tahrir Square demand. When they burn Mubarak in effigy, they show their disdain not just for the man but for the system for which he stands.
Mubarak and Obama are well aware of this, which is why, on Wednesday, February 2, Mubarak sent paid goons, demurely referred to in the Western press as "pro-Mubarak demonstrators," into Tahrir Square and other major centers of resistance to provoke chaos. With the streets racked by violence, state managers reason, Mubarak will have justification to set in motion an orderly, top-down transition to a new figurehead at the head of the same governmental system.
Early indications are that he will try to put in place his new vice president, Omar Suleiman. Perhaps Suleiman won't work out so well, and Mubarak will revert to another high-level officer from his inner circle. Notwithstanding the particulars, the general framework of Egyptian and American policy is clear: maintain the system. To that end, "pro-Mubarak demonstrators" swore on Wednesday to "liberate Tahrir Square with blood." "Liberation" has yet to be accomplished; there's been plenty of blood. The counterrevolution has begun.
Part of the work of preparing for this counterrevolution is in dismissing the protests as "spontaneous," a momentary outburst of rage that will be quieted by a bit of change at the top. In the Momentary Convulsion School of History, people briefly spasm in the streets in response to outside provocation but go home as soon as their masters throw them a few dry bones of change. Grievances are not deeply felt injustices rooted in economic and political structures, but more like itches to be briefly scratched.
In more advanced versions of this fantasy, the Egyptian protests are just ripples from the revolt in Tunisia, and, like any ripple, they will pass through Egypt, rock it lightly, and then it will be still again. History tells a different story. As Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy comments, "Revolutions don't happen out of the blue. It's not because of Tunisia yesterday that we have one in Egypt mechanically the next day." These are ripples, but they are big ones, set in motion long ago, and they originated in socioeconomic tremors that predate the Tunisian uprising by decades.
The January 25 protests that began the current stage of social revolt were organized by several groups, including the April 6 movement, a wide-based group with overwhelmingly young leadership that emerged to mobilize support for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra, a textile manufacturing center in the Nile Delta. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labor unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010. Stanford historian Joel Beinin calls it the "largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II."
The success of this campaign catalyzed other independent labor activity, spurring the formation of Egypt's first independent union in over a half century - the Independent General Union of Real Estate Tax Authority Workers. Beinin adds that the labor movements, alongside those organizing opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, "inculcated a culture of protest in Egypt. This has contributed to the formation of a consciousness of citizenship and rights in a far more profound manner than anything that has happened in the arenas of party politics or nongovernmental organization work."
Labor revolt emerged as a countermovement to the Mubarak regime's neoliberal economic reforms. Those reforms shattered the authoritarian populist model, put in place by former president Gamal Abdel Nasser, which protected basic living standards, often by controlling the prices of basic staples. Amidst rocketing inflation, stagnant wages - many in Egypt live on 400 Egyptian pounds a month, equal to around $70, or close to two dollars a day - and structural unemployment concentrated amongst the youth, this social compact broke down. The population is extremely polarized, split on the model of most societies in the global South: a sparse middle class, with a small wealthy sector living in Zamalek or Maadi, or in outlying suburbs like Heliopolis, suspended above their society, while masses of poor inhabit the slums of Cairo and struggle - literally - for their daily bread.
One cannot easily separate polarization of wealth from dictatorship. Wealth and proximity to political power are tightly intertwined in Egypt. Columbia historian Timothy Mitchell notes that the neoliberal reforms of the 1990's put public funds into fewer and fewer hands, diverting resources away from labor-intensive industrial and agricultural development. The state now "subsidizes financiers instead of factories, speculators instead of schools. Although the IMF [International Monetary Fund] has shown no interest in raising the question, it is not hard to determine who benefits from the new financial subsidies. The revitalized public-private commercial banks lend big loans (tax-free) to large operators. The minimum loan size is typically over $300,000 and requires large collateral and good connections." In a telling indicator of the sharply unequal nature of income distribution, Mitchell notes that perhaps three percent of the population accounts for 50 percent of consumer spending.
Unrest has not merely been a response to destitution, but also a reaction to the systemic foreshortening of the social horizon, a phenomenon that cuts across social classes. Seventy-five percent of the unemployed are below the age of 30, while those with the lowest levels of education have the lowest levels of unemployment. University graduates, on the other hand, have a 30 percent unemployment rate. The protests have cut across a wide cross-class segment of Egyptian society: workers, teachers, Islamists, women and youth, including some of the underemployed children of the middle and upper classes. Some of the upper-class anger at Mubarak is fury at a dictatorship fused with corruption that has crowded out magnates running businesses with poor connections to state elites. The common thread is an intolerance of anymore living under an authoritarian police state.
Predictably, Western media is misreporting the role of both labor and the Muslim Brotherhood, understating the role of the former and overstating the role of the latter. The agenda is to obscure socioeconomic grievances and promote the narrative that the choice is between an authoritarian but secular government, or a democracy that will bring Islamists - code for the Taliban - to state power. The corollary is that people are not in the streets struggling for social revolution but to put in place a variant of Islamofascism. Thus, people shrug, the revolt must be drowned in blood. This narrative is indefensible.
For one thing, the ideological makeup of the Muslim Brotherhood is different from that of the more regressive Islamist anti-imperial forces. Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood refrained from endorsing the initial call for January 25 to be a National Day of Rage. Scarcely any Islamist slogans have been voiced at the demonstrations. Most of the rhetoric has been secular and nationalist: "The crescent and the cross against murder and torture," for example, referring to unity amongst the Muslim majority and the Christian minority.
It's true that the Brotherhood would play a strong role in any remotely democratic post-Mubarak regime, as it is the largest organized political force in Egypt. But that is not something anyone should fear. The Muslim Brotherhood has eschewed violence over recent decades. Thousands of its activists languish in Mubarak's prisons, victims of state repression. Comparisons that evoke al-Qaeda are simply slander. If anything, the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood has been marked by its accommodationist and nonconfrontational stance vis-a-vis the regime in recent years, rather than the reverse, and to widespread consternation among dissidents.
Another underreported facet of the social mobilizations is that, on January 30, envoys from independent unions along with workers from the metal, chemical, automotive, textile, pharmaceutical, iron and steel industries announced that they were creating a new Federation of Independent Egyptian Unions. That same day, they endorsed an indefinite general strike until Mubarak steps down. Attention is centered on Cairo's momentous Tahrir uprising, but proportionally, smaller cities and towns like Mahalla and Suez are denser with protest. They are also centers for the Egyptian working class.
Before discussing how to proceed, Obama consulted with the US's key regional partners: Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and King Abdullah II of Jordan. They urged Obama to support Mubarak, while Netanyahu has urged Israel's Western allies to tone down criticism of Mubarak. They don't necessarily care about Mubarak, but about what he represents: continuity of policy. They are aware of what the future holds if there is a sharp and radical rupture: the quiet, swift click of falling dominoes as the regional system collapses, autocracy by autocracy.
The New York Times reported that, "Israeli officials expressed concern that Mr. Mubarak's abrupt exit could jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel." Translated from bureaucratese into English, their concern is neither with Mubarak nor his exit, but rather with managing the transition. For Israel, a hostile Egypt on its borders will provoke confrontation, and eventually, open conflict - conflict that will end in either regional conflagration, the cease of the occupation, or both.
Israel's main ally, America, is aware of this possibility, and, due to the influence of the Israel lobby in the US, will seek to prevent it. But the lobby is influential in promoting a bellicose foreign policy in part because Israel's foreign policy objectives - an Arab world peppered with dictatorships and destabilized states - line up with those of the arms manufacturers, who profit from regional arms races, and with those of the oil majors, who profit from the high prices associated with regional instability. A neutered, pacific Israel would no longer work as a regional juggernaut for promoting those sectors' interests. With Israel no longer protecting Western corporate interests, uprisings in the Arab sheikhdoms that stand astride a frothing river of petrodollars would be next. Too much is at stake: the profits of every Western oil company depend vitally on Middle Eastern fossil fuels and the financial system relies on recirculating and reinvesting the profits extracted from elevated oil prices, while the arms exporters count on regional conflict and the portion of the petro-profits that remain in regional hands to eventually flow into their coffers.
Simultaneously, Israel administers the region, creating free trade zones in Jordan, the Occupied Territories and Egypt that are highly profitable for American corporations. Egypt's domestic economy relies on normalization, or regular trade, with Israel - which it would cut if there were real political change - as well as incestuous deals cut between the state and "private" enterprise.
Revealingly, the Egyptian stock exchange and world markets alike have been sliding downwards in response to the threat the revolt represents to both domestic accumulation in Egypt and the interests of capital worldwide. In older parlance, the term would have been class war.
Within Egypt, the keystone of this system is the military and its control over the population, and, thus, its safeguarding of the social system from the threat of radical change. For that reason, Obama's spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, has promised that the American stream of military aid to Egypt will flow unhindered, an unmistakable signal to the generals: maintain the regional matrix, even if Mubarak eventually must go. Many have misinterpreted the Egyptian army's statement, which was released on Monday, stating: "The armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people.... Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirm that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody."
The army hardly needed to resort to force. Instead, it merely needed to stand by on Wednesday as hired thugs threw Molotov cocktails at peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, and as men on camels and horses rode into the crowd with batons, injuring people and hoping to sow chaos and, thereby, to ensure that people think that the Mubarak government must stay in place to endure an "orderly transition." Eyewitness reports from Al Jazeera correspondents show that many of the captured thugs have police IDs. Meanwhile, government propaganda asserts that it has been Muslim Brotherhood militants throwing firebombs on the people. The army "is calling on protesters to go and stay home for Egypt's security."
It is still unclear how this situation will play out. The US government would have preferred that Mubarak had stayed in power in perpetuity. A backup plan is a hand-picked successor to Mubarak who would maintain Egyptian collaboration with Israel, the quid pro quo for the $1.3 billion worth of aid the US remits yearly to Egypt, overwhelmingly to the military in the form of weapons and planes, ensuring that the money cycles back to the American military-industrial complex. The Egyptian people are unlikely to settle for such sops. As Nasser Abdel Hamid, a member of the National Association for Change, told Al-Masry Al-Youm, "We might have negotiated a diplomatic solution with the regime, but after today's developments, the fight will continue; what happened will not weaken it." The other option is to turn the revolt into mass slaughter: the Pinochet option. But to do so will probably require more repression than just street thugs can muster. The regime would require the services of the army.
Yet, as a Middle East Report editorial notes, "The army likely cannot fire upon the demonstrating crowds if the regime judges that necessary. The top brass has sworn not to; the Pentagon has echoed the White House in urging adherence to that policy; and, most importantly, the first bullet will shatter the shows of solidarity between the soldiers and the pro-democracy movement, as well as the army's honored place in Egyptian political culture." More likely is the palace coup option, as in the wake of the somewhat embarrassing - because unsuccessful - violence on Wednesday, Western officials called for acceleration transition within Egypt. The backup plan is in action. Should the protesters overcome the government's maneuvering for a palace coup, it is possible that the US has a final card in its back pocket: Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a name frequently bandied about by foreign media and analysts as a possible successor to Mubarak.
But in Egypt, ElBaradei is hardly talked about. As Egyptian journalist Philip Rizk told me, "He is not the people's choice. He is the choice of the international community," adding, before Wednesday's repression, that he was "pessimistic."
"It's going to get violent," said Rizk, "and I think ElBaradei will get in no matter what. Too much is at stake for the international community, for the US, for the IMF." ElBaradei would likely keep in place the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, but would very likely open up Egypt's Rafah crossing into Gaza for large flows of goods and people, allowing for economic development and better lives for the Palestinians living there. Rizk added that, for Egyptians who have been living under the jackboot of dictatorship for decades, ElBaradei would be an improvement over the octogenarian Mubarak, who has outlasted four American presidents.
But there are those looking at more distant horizons, too, and who are less pessimistic about the possibility of Egyptian society reaching them. As el-Hamalawy comments, "The revolution for me is about radical redistribution of wealth and a government that will represent the will of the Egyptian people when it comes to civil liberties, in addition to a pro-resistance stand vis-a-vis the US hegemony on the region and Israel."
"ElBaradei," he adds, "is not the man for that."
This article originally appeared at Truthout.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Friday, Feb. 4 NYC Rally and March for the Egyptian People
Egyptian Solidarity March
Friday, February 4, 2011
TIMES SQUARE, NYC ~ 3:30 pm
42nd St. & 7th Ave.
MARCH ~ 5:30 pm to:
Egyptian Mission to the UN
44th St. & 2nd Ave.
In Egypt this is called the
DAY OF DEPARTURE
On Friday, February 4: Come March in Solidarity with millions of Egyptian People in their struggle for democracy and human rights as they demand the immediate DEPARTURE of the repressive U.S. backed Mubarak regime.
DAY OF:
-------
For more information, please contact info@al-awdany.org or call 718-228-8636.
Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition - NY
http://www.al-awdany.org
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Egypt and Democracy?...Nah! says Israel
Egyptian Revolution, Israeli Exceptionalism
Wednesday, 02 February 2011 13:35 Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
When listening to Israeli responses to the uprising of the Egyptian people, the most striking aspect is the huge chasm existing between these responses and those of the remainder of the world. It appears that Israel exists on a totally different planet.
peresmerkel
Whether honestly or hypocritically, there is no leader in the world who didn’t express support for the demands of the Egyptian masses, and criticism (whether gently or harshly) of President Mubarak’s functioning over the past three decades. Not only President Obama, but also the spokespeople of the neo-liberal republicans were forced to express doubts about their Egyptian ally and suggest that he leave and encourage implementation of political and social reforms. The entire world understands, or at least declares, that Mubarak is responsible for the justified rage of his people and that he must go home or, like his Tunisian colleague, to go into exile. Only in Israel are the reactions different, the exact opposite, both on the street and within the establishment.
Concern and fear characterize the reaction of the Israeli street. Israelis suddenly remember that there exists a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and that this agreement is a “strategic asset”, that President Mubarak was an important ally, and that the Israeli-Egyptian “cold peace” saved millions of dollars for Israel’s Ministry of Defence. Moreover: if an average Israeli citizen can still somehow give credit (limited) to Arab leaders, primarily if they wear suits, ties and speak good English, the Arab masses frighten him. In his racist eyes the Arab masses are forever impassioned, “incited” and overflowing with hatred for everything considered cultured (Western) and of course, these masses are anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish. The Arab masses pose a strategic threat which can therefore inspire only fear, not empathy.
And concerning the Israeli establishment, with its numerous intelligence institutes, it completely forgot that in the Arab world there is something called “the street” which is capable of speaking, shouting, mobilizing and even overthrowing regimes. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is frantically looking for “who is behind the demonstrations” – the Muslim Brotherhood, Bin Laden, Iran… The former head of the General Security Services, Avi Dichter, even explained to us on television that the surprise of the Israeli intelligence authorities should not worry us…because they don’t possess the tools to predict popular uprisings (he even unashamedly reminded us that he and his friends did not predict either the First or Second Intifadas) or regime changes. The admission of the former GSS head is certainly encouraging, but if so why should they be paid salaries, and would it not be preferable to move the huge budgets of the intelligence divisions to the education and public housing sectors?
Apart from its intelligence failure, the response of the Israeli establishment is characterized by an expression of deep sorrow for the fall of the Egyptian dictator, and even anger that he did not take the steps necessary to immediately supress the demonstrations. The former minister Ben Eliezer does not understand why his friend Mubarak did not order the shooting of demonstrations (apparently over 300 dead are not enough for the former military governor); Benjamin Netanyahu is angry at Obama – whom he has long considered a wimpy president who abandoned defence of the free world and flirts with Islam – who immediately cut off from his Egyptian ally and did not extend the assistance necessary to preserve his regime; and Ehud Barak keeps quiet as, again, he doesn’t at all understand what happened, as opposed to President Shimon Peres who knows precisely what didn’t work and what must be done. In Peres’ meeting with the German chancellor this week Merkel spoke, like all her European colleagues, of the need for reform, while Nobel Peace Prize winner Peres said that “the world must learn from what happened in Gaza. Democracy begins with elections – but does not end with elections. Democracy is civilization and if the wrong side is elected it brings democracy to an end…the world saw very well what happened in Gaza when there was pressure for democratic elections and a radical and dangerous movement was elected, which has not permitted even one day of democracy for the Gaza residents.”
The world according to Israeli President Shimon Peres: there is a cultured world, of which Israel is a part, which is worthy of a democratic regime and elections, and there is a failed and ignorant world which must not be allowed to determine its own fate, and which requires dictatorship to stop it from doing nonsense. Fact: the cultured Israeli people democratically elected Liberman and his friends – truly cultured intellectuals. We hope that the Egyptian parliament elected in democratic elections will bring to the Egyptian people more worthy representatives. It is certain that the Egyptians will not find officials more pathetic than those in Israel.
Translated to English by the Alternative Information Center (AIC).
Wednesday, 02 February 2011 13:35 Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
When listening to Israeli responses to the uprising of the Egyptian people, the most striking aspect is the huge chasm existing between these responses and those of the remainder of the world. It appears that Israel exists on a totally different planet.
peresmerkel
Whether honestly or hypocritically, there is no leader in the world who didn’t express support for the demands of the Egyptian masses, and criticism (whether gently or harshly) of President Mubarak’s functioning over the past three decades. Not only President Obama, but also the spokespeople of the neo-liberal republicans were forced to express doubts about their Egyptian ally and suggest that he leave and encourage implementation of political and social reforms. The entire world understands, or at least declares, that Mubarak is responsible for the justified rage of his people and that he must go home or, like his Tunisian colleague, to go into exile. Only in Israel are the reactions different, the exact opposite, both on the street and within the establishment.
Concern and fear characterize the reaction of the Israeli street. Israelis suddenly remember that there exists a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and that this agreement is a “strategic asset”, that President Mubarak was an important ally, and that the Israeli-Egyptian “cold peace” saved millions of dollars for Israel’s Ministry of Defence. Moreover: if an average Israeli citizen can still somehow give credit (limited) to Arab leaders, primarily if they wear suits, ties and speak good English, the Arab masses frighten him. In his racist eyes the Arab masses are forever impassioned, “incited” and overflowing with hatred for everything considered cultured (Western) and of course, these masses are anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish. The Arab masses pose a strategic threat which can therefore inspire only fear, not empathy.
And concerning the Israeli establishment, with its numerous intelligence institutes, it completely forgot that in the Arab world there is something called “the street” which is capable of speaking, shouting, mobilizing and even overthrowing regimes. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is frantically looking for “who is behind the demonstrations” – the Muslim Brotherhood, Bin Laden, Iran… The former head of the General Security Services, Avi Dichter, even explained to us on television that the surprise of the Israeli intelligence authorities should not worry us…because they don’t possess the tools to predict popular uprisings (he even unashamedly reminded us that he and his friends did not predict either the First or Second Intifadas) or regime changes. The admission of the former GSS head is certainly encouraging, but if so why should they be paid salaries, and would it not be preferable to move the huge budgets of the intelligence divisions to the education and public housing sectors?
Apart from its intelligence failure, the response of the Israeli establishment is characterized by an expression of deep sorrow for the fall of the Egyptian dictator, and even anger that he did not take the steps necessary to immediately supress the demonstrations. The former minister Ben Eliezer does not understand why his friend Mubarak did not order the shooting of demonstrations (apparently over 300 dead are not enough for the former military governor); Benjamin Netanyahu is angry at Obama – whom he has long considered a wimpy president who abandoned defence of the free world and flirts with Islam – who immediately cut off from his Egyptian ally and did not extend the assistance necessary to preserve his regime; and Ehud Barak keeps quiet as, again, he doesn’t at all understand what happened, as opposed to President Shimon Peres who knows precisely what didn’t work and what must be done. In Peres’ meeting with the German chancellor this week Merkel spoke, like all her European colleagues, of the need for reform, while Nobel Peace Prize winner Peres said that “the world must learn from what happened in Gaza. Democracy begins with elections – but does not end with elections. Democracy is civilization and if the wrong side is elected it brings democracy to an end…the world saw very well what happened in Gaza when there was pressure for democratic elections and a radical and dangerous movement was elected, which has not permitted even one day of democracy for the Gaza residents.”
The world according to Israeli President Shimon Peres: there is a cultured world, of which Israel is a part, which is worthy of a democratic regime and elections, and there is a failed and ignorant world which must not be allowed to determine its own fate, and which requires dictatorship to stop it from doing nonsense. Fact: the cultured Israeli people democratically elected Liberman and his friends – truly cultured intellectuals. We hope that the Egyptian parliament elected in democratic elections will bring to the Egyptian people more worthy representatives. It is certain that the Egyptians will not find officials more pathetic than those in Israel.
Translated to English by the Alternative Information Center (AIC).
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
A Response to Bernard Henri-Levi's Dishonest Smear of BDS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omar-barghouti/why-is-bds-a-moral-duty-t_b_816990.html
Why Is BDS a Moral Duty Today?
A Response to Bernard-Henri Levy
Omar Barghouti
Founding member, BDS movement
Huffington Post: February 1, 2011
In his angry attack on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Mr. Bernard-Henri Levy desperately attempts to smear the movement by presenting a number of patently false, regurgitated, and misleading premises and reaching, as a result, unwarranted, even illogical, conclusions. What Mr. Levy peculiarly tries to hide or obscure are the real objectives of the movement, who stands behind it, and the reasons behind its spectacular rate of growth lately, especially in France and other Western countries.
The fact is the BDS Call was launched by a great majority in Palestinian civil society on July 9, 2005, as a qualitatively new phase in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and self-determination. More than 170 leading Palestinian political parties, trade union federations, women's unions, refugee rights groups, NGOs, and grassroots organizations called for a boycott against Israel until it fully complies with its obligations under international law. Rooted in a century-old history of civil, nonviolent resistance against settler colonialism, occupation and ethnic cleansing, the effort recalls how people of conscience in the international community have "historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa," calling upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to "impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era."
Since 2008, the BDS movement has been led by the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations inside historic Palestine and in exile, the BDS National Committee (BNC). Anchored in deep respect for international law and universal human rights, the movement has spread across the world, empowering and mobilizing creative energies and emphasizing sensitivity to the particularities of each context. BDS activists anywhere select their own targets and set the tactics that best suit their political and cultural environment. The fact that BDS categorically rejects racism of all sorts, including anti-Semitism, has further increased its appeal among liberal and progressive movements everywhere.
While several leading BDS activists openly endorse the unitary state solution, most of the members of the coalition leading the movement still subscribe to the two-state solution. This is, however, an irrelevant issue, as the BDS movement, being strictly rights-based, has consistently avoided taking any position regarding the one-state/two-states debate, emphasizing instead the three basic rights that need to be realized in any political solution. Ending the Israeli occupation that started in 1967 of all Arab territories, ending Israel's system of legalized and institutionalized discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens, and recognizing the UN-sanctioned rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin are the three basic principles of the movement. Everything else is secondary and tactical.
Mr. Levy completely misrepresents my position on the matter. Citing a 2003 article of mine, he outlandishly claims that I endorse a "two-Palestines" solution. Here are my exact words: "... one must not deny that the right of return of Palestinian refugees does contradict the requirements of a negotiated two-state solution. Israel simply will never accept it, making it the Achilles' heel of any negotiated two-state solution, as the record has amply shown." The point was that a negotiated two-state solution will de facto exclude the right of two-thirds of the Palestinians, the refugees, to return to their homes, as all refugees are entitled to according to international law.
For more than 27 years, I've consistently and openly advocated a secular, democratic state in the entire area of historic Palestine, where everyone enjoys equal rights, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or any identity attribute. This, to my mind, is the most ethically-consistent formula that can accommodate the inalienable Palestinian right to self determination, including the return of refugees, with the rights of all the inhabitants of the land to justice, peace, dignity and democratic rights. Regardless, even if my real position on this issue were presented by Mr. Levy, extrapolating from this alleged position of mine to implicate the entire BDS movement not only lacks intellectual honesty; it is logically equivalent to claiming that the anti-war movement in France, say, is plotting to replace the capitalist system with a socialist order based on having a communist (or one merely claimed to be a communist) among its leaders.
Like any large, democratic coalition of groups that is built on common principles but espouses and dearly respects pluralism, the BDS movement, as anyone can conclude from examining the huge record of official statements and documents issued in the last five years, does not endorse any specific political solution to this colonial conflict. The common denominator of the movement is upholding Palestinian rights in accordance with international law.
Another serious fallacy in Mr. Levy's article is his rhetorical characterization of Israel as a "democracy." South Africa was also the only "democracy" in Africa during apartheid. The U.S. was a "democracy," as well, when in the South millions of African-Americans were thoroughly segregated and racially oppressed. An ethnocentric state, like Israel, that discriminates by law against people who are not Jewish and that occupies, forcibly displaces, colonizes and commits what leading international law experts and human rights organizations describe as war crimes, cannot remotely be called a democracy. If France were to adopt laws discriminating against its Jewish citizens and favoring its Catholic citizens, would we call it a democracy?
Former South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils and British author Victoria Brittain addressed this point quite well. They wrote:
The desire for an ethnic-religious majority of Israeli Jews has seeped across from the occupied territories to permeate the Israeli 'national' agenda... The Palestinian minority in Israel has for decades been denied basic equality in health, education, housing and land possession, solely because it is not Jewish. The fact that this minority is allowed to vote hardly redresses the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights. They are excluded from the very definition of the "Jewish state", and have virtually no influence on the laws, or political, social and economic policies. Hence their similarity to the black South Africans.
Furthermore, at a time when a wave of popular uprisings is sweeping the Arab region, demanding freedoms, social justice and democracy, it is quite telling, if largely expected, to see Israel -- and the US government -- in such a panic and uproar, standing on the wrong side of history, with despots and authoritarian regimes against the people. Unnerved by the storm of criticism, albeit polite, of the Egyptian dictatorship by its hitherto European allies and even some in the US administration, Israel has launched a diplomatic campaign to convince key capitals to support Hosni Mubarak lest stability is lost and Israel's other despotic friends in the region feel abandoned.
In Tunisia, as well, the vaunted electronic surveillance apparatus of the former dictator Ben-Ali was run in close cooperation with Israel, as Tunisian civil society organizations systematically reported. With more of Israel's friends in the region being dethroned, it is becoming abundantly clear how much Israel and its Western partners have invested in safeguarding and buttressing the unelected, autocratic regimes in the Arab world, partially to make a self-fulfilling prophecy of Israel as the "villa in the midst of the jungle" -- the myth often repeated by Israel's lobby groups.
The fact that Israel was for decades apartheid South Africa's best friend, helping it to develop nuclear weapons, to crush popular resistance by the black majority, and to dodge the widespread boycott against it has not helped Israel's case in projecting a deceptive brand of democracy and enlightenment either.
Finally, regarding the patently misleading and unfounded claim that a boycott of Israeli products is tantamount to boycotting "Jewish merchandise," one can only ask whether a boycott of Sudan, or Saudi Arabia, for that matter, would be considered Islamophobic? Was the boycott against South Africa anti-Christian? Why the double standard when it comes to Israel? The BDS movement against Israel could not care less whether it is a Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or Hindu state; all that matters is that it is a colonial oppressor that persistently denies the Palestinian people their basic rights. Is this too difficult to understand? A boycott of Israel today is a moral duty for all those who care about the rule of law and universal rights for all humans, equally.
Omar Barghouti is a founding member of the BDS movement and author of " Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights," (Haymarket, 2011).
Why Is BDS a Moral Duty Today?
A Response to Bernard-Henri Levy
Omar Barghouti
Founding member, BDS movement
Huffington Post: February 1, 2011
In his angry attack on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Mr. Bernard-Henri Levy desperately attempts to smear the movement by presenting a number of patently false, regurgitated, and misleading premises and reaching, as a result, unwarranted, even illogical, conclusions. What Mr. Levy peculiarly tries to hide or obscure are the real objectives of the movement, who stands behind it, and the reasons behind its spectacular rate of growth lately, especially in France and other Western countries.
The fact is the BDS Call was launched by a great majority in Palestinian civil society on July 9, 2005, as a qualitatively new phase in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and self-determination. More than 170 leading Palestinian political parties, trade union federations, women's unions, refugee rights groups, NGOs, and grassroots organizations called for a boycott against Israel until it fully complies with its obligations under international law. Rooted in a century-old history of civil, nonviolent resistance against settler colonialism, occupation and ethnic cleansing, the effort recalls how people of conscience in the international community have "historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa," calling upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to "impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era."
Since 2008, the BDS movement has been led by the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations inside historic Palestine and in exile, the BDS National Committee (BNC). Anchored in deep respect for international law and universal human rights, the movement has spread across the world, empowering and mobilizing creative energies and emphasizing sensitivity to the particularities of each context. BDS activists anywhere select their own targets and set the tactics that best suit their political and cultural environment. The fact that BDS categorically rejects racism of all sorts, including anti-Semitism, has further increased its appeal among liberal and progressive movements everywhere.
While several leading BDS activists openly endorse the unitary state solution, most of the members of the coalition leading the movement still subscribe to the two-state solution. This is, however, an irrelevant issue, as the BDS movement, being strictly rights-based, has consistently avoided taking any position regarding the one-state/two-states debate, emphasizing instead the three basic rights that need to be realized in any political solution. Ending the Israeli occupation that started in 1967 of all Arab territories, ending Israel's system of legalized and institutionalized discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens, and recognizing the UN-sanctioned rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin are the three basic principles of the movement. Everything else is secondary and tactical.
Mr. Levy completely misrepresents my position on the matter. Citing a 2003 article of mine, he outlandishly claims that I endorse a "two-Palestines" solution. Here are my exact words: "... one must not deny that the right of return of Palestinian refugees does contradict the requirements of a negotiated two-state solution. Israel simply will never accept it, making it the Achilles' heel of any negotiated two-state solution, as the record has amply shown." The point was that a negotiated two-state solution will de facto exclude the right of two-thirds of the Palestinians, the refugees, to return to their homes, as all refugees are entitled to according to international law.
For more than 27 years, I've consistently and openly advocated a secular, democratic state in the entire area of historic Palestine, where everyone enjoys equal rights, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or any identity attribute. This, to my mind, is the most ethically-consistent formula that can accommodate the inalienable Palestinian right to self determination, including the return of refugees, with the rights of all the inhabitants of the land to justice, peace, dignity and democratic rights. Regardless, even if my real position on this issue were presented by Mr. Levy, extrapolating from this alleged position of mine to implicate the entire BDS movement not only lacks intellectual honesty; it is logically equivalent to claiming that the anti-war movement in France, say, is plotting to replace the capitalist system with a socialist order based on having a communist (or one merely claimed to be a communist) among its leaders.
Like any large, democratic coalition of groups that is built on common principles but espouses and dearly respects pluralism, the BDS movement, as anyone can conclude from examining the huge record of official statements and documents issued in the last five years, does not endorse any specific political solution to this colonial conflict. The common denominator of the movement is upholding Palestinian rights in accordance with international law.
Another serious fallacy in Mr. Levy's article is his rhetorical characterization of Israel as a "democracy." South Africa was also the only "democracy" in Africa during apartheid. The U.S. was a "democracy," as well, when in the South millions of African-Americans were thoroughly segregated and racially oppressed. An ethnocentric state, like Israel, that discriminates by law against people who are not Jewish and that occupies, forcibly displaces, colonizes and commits what leading international law experts and human rights organizations describe as war crimes, cannot remotely be called a democracy. If France were to adopt laws discriminating against its Jewish citizens and favoring its Catholic citizens, would we call it a democracy?
Former South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils and British author Victoria Brittain addressed this point quite well. They wrote:
The desire for an ethnic-religious majority of Israeli Jews has seeped across from the occupied territories to permeate the Israeli 'national' agenda... The Palestinian minority in Israel has for decades been denied basic equality in health, education, housing and land possession, solely because it is not Jewish. The fact that this minority is allowed to vote hardly redresses the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights. They are excluded from the very definition of the "Jewish state", and have virtually no influence on the laws, or political, social and economic policies. Hence their similarity to the black South Africans.
Furthermore, at a time when a wave of popular uprisings is sweeping the Arab region, demanding freedoms, social justice and democracy, it is quite telling, if largely expected, to see Israel -- and the US government -- in such a panic and uproar, standing on the wrong side of history, with despots and authoritarian regimes against the people. Unnerved by the storm of criticism, albeit polite, of the Egyptian dictatorship by its hitherto European allies and even some in the US administration, Israel has launched a diplomatic campaign to convince key capitals to support Hosni Mubarak lest stability is lost and Israel's other despotic friends in the region feel abandoned.
In Tunisia, as well, the vaunted electronic surveillance apparatus of the former dictator Ben-Ali was run in close cooperation with Israel, as Tunisian civil society organizations systematically reported. With more of Israel's friends in the region being dethroned, it is becoming abundantly clear how much Israel and its Western partners have invested in safeguarding and buttressing the unelected, autocratic regimes in the Arab world, partially to make a self-fulfilling prophecy of Israel as the "villa in the midst of the jungle" -- the myth often repeated by Israel's lobby groups.
The fact that Israel was for decades apartheid South Africa's best friend, helping it to develop nuclear weapons, to crush popular resistance by the black majority, and to dodge the widespread boycott against it has not helped Israel's case in projecting a deceptive brand of democracy and enlightenment either.
Finally, regarding the patently misleading and unfounded claim that a boycott of Israeli products is tantamount to boycotting "Jewish merchandise," one can only ask whether a boycott of Sudan, or Saudi Arabia, for that matter, would be considered Islamophobic? Was the boycott against South Africa anti-Christian? Why the double standard when it comes to Israel? The BDS movement against Israel could not care less whether it is a Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or Hindu state; all that matters is that it is a colonial oppressor that persistently denies the Palestinian people their basic rights. Is this too difficult to understand? A boycott of Israel today is a moral duty for all those who care about the rule of law and universal rights for all humans, equally.
Omar Barghouti is a founding member of the BDS movement and author of " Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights," (Haymarket, 2011).
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