Sunday, February 3, 2013
On the latest raw Arab-hatred of Israel’s “centrist” political star Yair Lapid
From Ali Abunimah's blog, Electric Intifada
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sat, 02/02/2013 - 20:17
The first thing Israel’s “center left” star Yair Lapid did after his “Yesh Atid” list took 19 seats in Israel’s recent election was to declare that he’d never form a coalition with parties representing the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Now Lapid has expanded on his hatred of Arabs by invoking the memory of his late father Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, politician and former chairman of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial Israel uses to bolster international political support for Zionism.
The younger Lapid told Time magazine this week:
You know my father didn’t come here from the ghetto in order to live in a country that is half Arab, half Jewish. He came here to live in a Jewish state. And we have 3.3 million Palestinians now between the sea and the eastern border of Israel. If we don’t do something about it, her generation [nods toward a 15-year-old girl at our table] is going to spend her time with six or seven or eight million Palestinians. So doing nothing about it is shortsighted.
Don’t think this is raw bigotry? Just switch it around: imagine the reaction if any politician from any “democracy” declared that there were too many Jews, too many black people …. that their numbers needed to be reduced. It’s not that politicians never say those things; they do. But when they do they are labeled accurately as racists or worse, but certainly never “centrists,” “leftists” or “democrats.” But Zionism, as we know, is judged by lower standards.
Tommy Lapid compared Israel’s crimes against Palestinians to persecution of Jews
Tommy Lapid was certainly no great champion of human rights, let alone Palestinian rights. You can’t be and serve as Israel’s “minister of justice,” which he did. But Abu Yair was often lucid enough to draw a comparison between the ghetto he came from and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
In 2004, after Israel demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes in Rafah, in the occupied Gaza Strip, Lapid reacted to a widely circulated photo of an elderly Palestinian woman sitting in the rubble of her house:
In an interview with Israel Defence Forces radio, Mr Lapid revealed that the army was considering demolishing another 2,000 homes in Rafah to widen the so-called Philadelphi road on the border with Egypt.
The UN estimates at least 1,600 people have lost their homes Referring to the TV picture, Mr Lapid said he was “talking about an old woman crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made me think of my grandmother.”
“I said that if we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague,” Mr Lapid told Israel radio, describing his argument in cabinet.
On another occasion, in 2002, Lapid condemned the Israeli army for writing numbers on the foreheads of Palestinian prisoners, comparing it to the Nazi practice of tattoing concentration camp inmates. “As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable.”
Lapid also compared the routine harassment of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron to the anti-Semitism of pre-World War II Europe. “It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us,” he said in 2007, “but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn.”
It is interesting that unlike his father, Yair Lapid has not spoken out against the raging anti-Arab and anti-African bigotry consuming Israel. Instead, he is its most respectable and “centrist” champion.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Why the ideas of Karl Marx are more relevant than ever in the 21st century
Marxism enjoys new currency in economic crisis. But as Marx said, the point is not just to interpret the world, but to change it
Bhaskar Sunkara
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 January 2013 10.34 EST
German Political Philosopher Karl Marx Sitting
Although he did not explicitly use the phrase, Karl Marx is credited with explaining the 'creative destruction' of capitalism. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Capital used to sell us visions of tomorrow. At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, corporations showcased new technologies: nylon, air conditioning, fluorescent lamps, the ever-impressive View-Master. But more than just products, an ideal of middle-class leisure and abundance was offered to those weary from economic depression and the prospect of European war.
The Futurama ride even took attendees through miniature versions of transformed landscapes, depicting new highways and development projects: the world of the future. It was a visceral attempt to renew faith in capitalism.
In the wake of the second world war, some of this vision became a reality. Capitalism thrived and, though uneven, progress was made by American workers. With pressure from below, the state was wielded by reformers, not smashed, and class compromise, not just class struggle, fostered economic growth and shared prosperity previously unimaginable.
Exploitation and oppression didn't go away, but the system seemed not only powerful and dynamic, but reconcilable with democratic ideals. The progress, however, was fleeting. Social democracy faced the structural crisis in the 1970s that Michal Kalecki, author of The Political Aspects of Full Employment, predicted decades earlier. High employment rates and welfare state protections didn't buy off workers, it encouraged militant wage demands. Capitalists kept up when times were good, but with stagflation – the intersection of poor growth and rising inflation – and the Opec embargo, a crisis of profitability ensued.
An emergent neoliberalism did curb inflation and restore profits, but only through a vicious offensive against the working class. There were pitched battles waged in defense of the welfare state, but our era has largely been one of deradicalization and political acquiescence. Since then, real wages have stagnated, debt soared, and the prospects for a new generation, still wedded to a vision of the old social-democratic compact, are bleak.
The 1990s technological boom brought about talk of a light and adaptive "new economy", something to replace the old Fordist workplace. But it was a far cry from the future promised at the 1939 World's Fair.
The 2008 recession shattered those dreams, anyway. Capital, free of threats from below, grew decadent, wild, and speculative.
For many in my generation, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism have been undermined. That a higher percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism at least signals that the cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway.
At an intellectual level, the same is true. Marxists have gained a measure of mainstream exposure: Foreign Policy turned to Leo Panitch, not Larry Summers, to explain the recent economic crisis; and thinkers like David Harvey have enjoyed late career renaissances. The wider recognition of thought "left of liberalism" – of which the journal I edit, Jacobin, is a part – isn't just the result of the loss of faith in mainstream alternatives, but rather, the ability of radicals to ask deeper structural questions and place new developments in historical context.
Now, even celebrated liberal Paul Krugman has been invoking ideas long relegated to the margins of American life. When thinking about automation and the future of labor, he worries that "it has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism – which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is." But a resurgent left has more than worries, they have ideas: about the reduction of working time, the decommodification of labor, and the ways in which advances in production can make life better, not more miserable.
This is where what's evolving, however awkwardly, into the 21st-century socialist intellectualism shows its strengths: a willingness to present a vision for the future, something deeper than mere critique. But intellectual shifts don't mean much by themselves.
A survey of the political landscape in America, despite Occupy's emergence in 2011, is bleak. The labor movement has shown some signs of life, especially among public sector workers combating austerity, but these are at best rearguard, defensive struggles. Unionization rates continue to decline, and apathy, not revolutionary fervor, reigns.
Marxism in America needs to be more than an intellectual tool for mainstream commentators befuddled by our changing world. It needs to be a political tool to change that world. Spoken, not just written, for mass consumption, peddling a vision of leisure, abundance, and democracy even more real than what the capitalism's prophets offered in 1939. A socialist Disneyland: inspiration after the "end of history".
Friday, January 25, 2013
Normal racism: Election over, “centrist” kingmaker Yair Lapid shuns Palestinian citizens of Israel
from the electric intifada
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 01/23/2013 - 23:05
mu_je_00_10.jpg
A day after the Israeli general election, Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) list that won 19 seats, making him the kingmaker in coalition talks, hit the ground running with a direct attack on Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Responding to talk (video in Hebrew) that Israel’s so-called “center-left” parties would join forces to block the reappointment of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, Lapid ruled out the possibility of working with Arab parties:
“I heard talk about establishing a preventative bloc – I want to take this option off the table,” Lapid said Wednesday. “We will not establish a preventative bloc with (Balad MK) Hanin Zuabi,” Lapid said, referring to the fact that if he were to try to form his own center-left government he would have to include the Arab parties.
Lapid also said Israelis had voted for “normality.” Indeed the normality he was endorsing with this statement was to continue the racist exclusion of Arab parties from political power in Israel.
Israeli Jewish public overwhelmingly supports exclusion of Arabs
Reflecting the populism that fueled his rise, Lapid was expressing mainstream sentiments. The Israeli Democracy Institute found in an October 2012 survey (PDF) that “a considerable majority of the Jewish public (64%) opposes the inclusion of Arab parties in the coalition to be formed after the elections.”
Haneen Zoabi was one of three members of the National Democratic Assembly (Balad) reelected yesterday. She has been frequently vilified, attacked and threatened by Israeli politicians for challenging their racism and calling for all citizens to have equal rights, a demand that contradicts Israel’s self-definition as a “Jewish state.”
The electoral commission initially banned Zoabi from standing because she traveled aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010, and later banned a TV election broadcast from her party, but both decisions were overturned by the high court.
While four million Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip cannot vote in Israeli elections, 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel are eligible to vote, but because they are shunned by Zionist parties that form the government, they are almost as powerless as the rest of the Palestinian population.
Arab parties hold their ground
As Palestinian citizens of Israel face increasing hostility and racist laws many feared their turnout at the polls would fall even lower than the 53 percent it hit in 2009.
But in the end Arab parties won 12 seats in the 120 Knesset; 3 went to Balad, 4 to Hadash, the Communist Party – both unchanged from 2009, and the United Arab List gained one seat for a total of 5.
Leaders of Balad said their party had won more than 95,000 votes, an increase of 11,000 from the 2009 election and that 8,000 of those new votes were in the southern Naqab (Negev) region where the indigenous Bedouin population faces intensified ethnic cleansing by Israeli authorities and the Jewish National Fund.
Tags: 2013 Israeli e
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 01/23/2013 - 23:05
mu_je_00_10.jpg
A day after the Israeli general election, Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) list that won 19 seats, making him the kingmaker in coalition talks, hit the ground running with a direct attack on Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Responding to talk (video in Hebrew) that Israel’s so-called “center-left” parties would join forces to block the reappointment of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, Lapid ruled out the possibility of working with Arab parties:
“I heard talk about establishing a preventative bloc – I want to take this option off the table,” Lapid said Wednesday. “We will not establish a preventative bloc with (Balad MK) Hanin Zuabi,” Lapid said, referring to the fact that if he were to try to form his own center-left government he would have to include the Arab parties.
Lapid also said Israelis had voted for “normality.” Indeed the normality he was endorsing with this statement was to continue the racist exclusion of Arab parties from political power in Israel.
Israeli Jewish public overwhelmingly supports exclusion of Arabs
Reflecting the populism that fueled his rise, Lapid was expressing mainstream sentiments. The Israeli Democracy Institute found in an October 2012 survey (PDF) that “a considerable majority of the Jewish public (64%) opposes the inclusion of Arab parties in the coalition to be formed after the elections.”
Haneen Zoabi was one of three members of the National Democratic Assembly (Balad) reelected yesterday. She has been frequently vilified, attacked and threatened by Israeli politicians for challenging their racism and calling for all citizens to have equal rights, a demand that contradicts Israel’s self-definition as a “Jewish state.”
The electoral commission initially banned Zoabi from standing because she traveled aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010, and later banned a TV election broadcast from her party, but both decisions were overturned by the high court.
While four million Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip cannot vote in Israeli elections, 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel are eligible to vote, but because they are shunned by Zionist parties that form the government, they are almost as powerless as the rest of the Palestinian population.
Arab parties hold their ground
As Palestinian citizens of Israel face increasing hostility and racist laws many feared their turnout at the polls would fall even lower than the 53 percent it hit in 2009.
But in the end Arab parties won 12 seats in the 120 Knesset; 3 went to Balad, 4 to Hadash, the Communist Party – both unchanged from 2009, and the United Arab List gained one seat for a total of 5.
Leaders of Balad said their party had won more than 95,000 votes, an increase of 11,000 from the 2009 election and that 8,000 of those new votes were in the southern Naqab (Negev) region where the indigenous Bedouin population faces intensified ethnic cleansing by Israeli authorities and the Jewish National Fund.
Tags: 2013 Israeli e
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Christopher HItchens, boorish poser, shallow court jester for neocons
from Jan 17 web edition of In These Times
Christopher Hitchens Stands Trial
With great vim and gusto, a new book dissects the ever-controversial Christopher Hitchens.
BY GREGORY SHUPAK
What emerges is a picture of Hitchens as an intellectually lazy poseur and a huffy racist—a man who, despite the remarkable breadth of his reading, “often lacked depth” and was “either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticize.”
By the time of his death in December 2011, Christopher Hitchens had built a status perhaps outstripping that of any contemporary intellectual: His passing was considered worthy of the New York Times’ front page, and he was mourned by Tony Blair, Sean Penn, David Frum and Patrick Cockburn, among others. It is from this altitude that he is yanked down by Richard Seymour in the clever, incisive Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. The slim critique of Hitchen’s ouevre focuses on his engagement with British politics and literature, his work on religion and his double-armed embrace of American imperialism.
Though only 35, Seymour has made a name for himself as a thoughtful political analyst, notably in his book The Liberal Defence of Murder, on how the language of humanitarianism helps camouflage imperialism, and on his blog Lenin’s Tomb, an indispensible source for analysis of neoliberalism, the War on Terror and Islamophobia. Ironically, Seymour’s literary style often evokes that of Hitchens at his best. Some of Seymour’s turns of phrase are positively Hitchensian, such as his opening salvo in the introduction toUnhitched: “This is unabashedly a prosecution. And if it must be conducted with the subject in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result.”
And when writing in the prosecutorial mode, Seymour has, like his subject, a gift for reeling off an entire firing squad’s worth of bullets in a single sentence: “Hitchens was a propagandist for the American empire, a defamer of its opponents, and someone who suffered the injury this did to his probity and prose as so much collateral damage.” Seymour is also a Trotskyist, as Hitchens once was. But there the comparisons end, because Seymour is plainly a caliber of intellectual that his subject is not.
Accuracy, Seymour demonstrates, was not a major hang-up for Hitchens. Hitchens referred to Hugo Chávez as “the General” even though the Venezuelan never held that rank; said that Muammar Gaddafi turned over a “stockpile of WMD” although Libya never possessed even one such weapon; claimed in February 2003 that an invasion of Iraq would be justified because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s presence in that country demonstrated a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda even though Zarqawi was an opponent of al-Qaeda at the time and it wasn’t clear that he was in Iraq at all; and asserted that Tunisians revolted against the Ben Ali regime because they did not have to fear violent repression on the same scale that Iranian protestors face despite the fact that 224 Tunisians were killed in their uprising as compared to the 72 killed in the Iranian dictatorship’s crushing of the Green Movement in 2009.
What emerges is a picture of Hitchens as an intellectually lazy poseur and a huffy racist—a man who, despite the remarkable breadth of his reading, “often lacked depth” and was “either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticize.” Here Seymour adduces Hitchens’ gross misreading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his travestying of Marx’s view of history, and his crude theological discussions: for example, Hitchens interprets the biblical Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as divine endorsement for the murder of children, an unpersuasive claim given that the story had precisely the opposite function in the historical context in which it was written and received.
Hitchens’ record on intellectual honesty is also rather blotchy. Seymour is not the first to note this; he points to John Barrell, who argued in the London Review of Books that sections of Hitchens’ Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man were lifted from other sources without proper attribution. Seymour contends that Hitchens’ The Missionary Position was a re-write of research done by an Indian author who does not receive credit in the original hardback, and demonstrates convincingly that Hitchens’ essay “Kissinger’s War Crimes in Indochina” borrows from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s The Political Economy of Human Rights without crediting the authors.
If Hitchens was a serial plagiarist who failed to get even the simplest of facts right, was allergic to nuance, and made no scholarly contributions, one might reasonably conclude that he ought to be ignored, and that a reader’s time and Seymour’s considerable talents be put to better use. But Hitchens matters precisely because of the inverse relationship that the quality of his work has to his status. His career reveals much about the function of the public intellectual.
The familiar narrative of Hitchens’ career has it that he made an abrupt turn from Left to Right in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but Seymour complicates this, noting that traces of Hitchens’ sympathy for empire could be detected much earlier in his career. As an example, Seymour cites Hitchens’ 1992 claim that European colonization of the Americas “deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto.” While Seymour notes that Hitchens did some important writing prior to his ideological shift, particularly in his opposition to the 1991 Gulf War, he says too little about the high-quality work Hitchens did in the 1980s on Palestine and Reagan’s wars in Central America.
That said, Hitchens’ later years and the enormous celebrity he enjoyed during that period are a case study of just how handsome the rewards are for those willing and able to serve as attack dogs for the dominant powers of their place and time. Hitchens’ main service to the American elite was to employ a combination of innuendo and character assassination to cast aspersion on virtually every high-profile figure critical of American foreign policy after 9/11—a roster that includes Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Michael Moore, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Cindy Sheehan, Oliver Stone and Gore Vidal.
Hitchens could never have amassed such a large following—and perhaps more importantly, such apowerful following—had he not so entirely embraced American power and its corresponding ideologies after 9/11. Would Hitchens have been invited on as many talk shows if, rather than writing fawning biographies of safely institutionalized figures like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, he had taken as his exemplary subjects two others he professed to admire even near the end of his life, C.L.R. James and Rosa Luxemburg? If, instead of levying facile criticisms of organized religion primarily at the United States’ enemies, Hitchens had selected neoliberal capitalism for his most ferocious late-career critiques, is it likely that 60 Minutes would have profiled him when he was ill with cancer, or that his audience would have been extended to readers of Newsweek, much less the Weekly Standard?
Seymour’s book makes clear that Hitchens provides the best evidence one can find for Chomsky’s hypothesis that as intellectuals achieve increasing degrees of power, “the inequities of the society will recede from vision, the status quo will seem less flawed, and the preservation of order will become a matter of transcendent importance.” Nor is there a more perfect embodiment than Hitchens of Said’s argument that “Nothing disfigures the intellectual’s public performance as much as … patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy.”
To put the matter another way, consider Seymour’s justifiable revulsion at Hitchens’ revealing shifts in political friendships after 9/11: “It is one thing to sell out Sidney Blumenthal to the GOP, but to exchange Edward Said for Ahmed Chalabi? To smear Noam Chomsky yet endear oneself to Paul Wolfowitz?” Hitchens’ is the logic of an intellectual opportunist, of a man who has figured out the benefits of taking a clear stance with the established order: Relationships with Said and Chomsky will impress in certain circles, but they won’t get you the ear of the President of the United States or help you become chummy with the Prime Minister of England.
Hitchens was what Antonio Gramsci called an “organic intellectual”: a person who claims to speak for the interests of either a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic class. And, despite Hitchens’ protestations and pretensions of working-class sympathies, Seymour’s book makes clear Hitchens sided manifestly with the ruling class, particularly those factions of it that are concerned with foreign affairs. The most concrete expression of this was probably his joining the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was initiated and headed by Bruce Jackson, a former vice president of Lockheed Martin. However, the primary task that Hitchens took up for America’s elite was to attempt to de-legitimize its opponents. In addition to his vicious but generally insubstantial attacks on critics of American empire, this took the form of him repeatedly asserting that all anti-capitalist movements were dead and that market forces are the world’s truly revolutionary force; of his sliming the alter-globalization movement and his justifying Arizona’s racist immigration laws (though these last two are among the few points that Seymour overlooks).
Hitchens thus stands in contrast to an organic intellectual of the counter-hegemonic kind—one who practices what Chomsky sees as the responsibility of intellectuals in Western democracies: to utilize “the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”
By no means is Seymour the first to call Hitchens a hack and a sell-out. In the aftermath of his full-throttled embrace of gunboat diplomacy post-9/11, unmasking Hitchens became almost a cottage industry for Left intellectuals. Among the finest of these are Tariq Ali’s chapter on his former comrade in Bush in Babylon, Clare Brandabur’s “Hitchens Smears Edward Said,” Norman Finkelstein’s “Hitchens as Model Apostate,” Glenn Greenwald’s counter-obituary, and more work by Alexander Cockburn and Terry Eagleton than I could list. But Unhitched offers a more thorough and in-depth discrediting of Hitchens than anything previously published. And in doing so, Seymour has made an important contribution to understanding the political role of the intellectual celebrity in our time.
--
Christopher Hitchens Stands Trial
With great vim and gusto, a new book dissects the ever-controversial Christopher Hitchens.
BY GREGORY SHUPAK
What emerges is a picture of Hitchens as an intellectually lazy poseur and a huffy racist—a man who, despite the remarkable breadth of his reading, “often lacked depth” and was “either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticize.”
By the time of his death in December 2011, Christopher Hitchens had built a status perhaps outstripping that of any contemporary intellectual: His passing was considered worthy of the New York Times’ front page, and he was mourned by Tony Blair, Sean Penn, David Frum and Patrick Cockburn, among others. It is from this altitude that he is yanked down by Richard Seymour in the clever, incisive Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. The slim critique of Hitchen’s ouevre focuses on his engagement with British politics and literature, his work on religion and his double-armed embrace of American imperialism.
Though only 35, Seymour has made a name for himself as a thoughtful political analyst, notably in his book The Liberal Defence of Murder, on how the language of humanitarianism helps camouflage imperialism, and on his blog Lenin’s Tomb, an indispensible source for analysis of neoliberalism, the War on Terror and Islamophobia. Ironically, Seymour’s literary style often evokes that of Hitchens at his best. Some of Seymour’s turns of phrase are positively Hitchensian, such as his opening salvo in the introduction toUnhitched: “This is unabashedly a prosecution. And if it must be conducted with the subject in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result.”
And when writing in the prosecutorial mode, Seymour has, like his subject, a gift for reeling off an entire firing squad’s worth of bullets in a single sentence: “Hitchens was a propagandist for the American empire, a defamer of its opponents, and someone who suffered the injury this did to his probity and prose as so much collateral damage.” Seymour is also a Trotskyist, as Hitchens once was. But there the comparisons end, because Seymour is plainly a caliber of intellectual that his subject is not.
Accuracy, Seymour demonstrates, was not a major hang-up for Hitchens. Hitchens referred to Hugo Chávez as “the General” even though the Venezuelan never held that rank; said that Muammar Gaddafi turned over a “stockpile of WMD” although Libya never possessed even one such weapon; claimed in February 2003 that an invasion of Iraq would be justified because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s presence in that country demonstrated a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda even though Zarqawi was an opponent of al-Qaeda at the time and it wasn’t clear that he was in Iraq at all; and asserted that Tunisians revolted against the Ben Ali regime because they did not have to fear violent repression on the same scale that Iranian protestors face despite the fact that 224 Tunisians were killed in their uprising as compared to the 72 killed in the Iranian dictatorship’s crushing of the Green Movement in 2009.
What emerges is a picture of Hitchens as an intellectually lazy poseur and a huffy racist—a man who, despite the remarkable breadth of his reading, “often lacked depth” and was “either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticize.” Here Seymour adduces Hitchens’ gross misreading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his travestying of Marx’s view of history, and his crude theological discussions: for example, Hitchens interprets the biblical Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as divine endorsement for the murder of children, an unpersuasive claim given that the story had precisely the opposite function in the historical context in which it was written and received.
Hitchens’ record on intellectual honesty is also rather blotchy. Seymour is not the first to note this; he points to John Barrell, who argued in the London Review of Books that sections of Hitchens’ Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man were lifted from other sources without proper attribution. Seymour contends that Hitchens’ The Missionary Position was a re-write of research done by an Indian author who does not receive credit in the original hardback, and demonstrates convincingly that Hitchens’ essay “Kissinger’s War Crimes in Indochina” borrows from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s The Political Economy of Human Rights without crediting the authors.
If Hitchens was a serial plagiarist who failed to get even the simplest of facts right, was allergic to nuance, and made no scholarly contributions, one might reasonably conclude that he ought to be ignored, and that a reader’s time and Seymour’s considerable talents be put to better use. But Hitchens matters precisely because of the inverse relationship that the quality of his work has to his status. His career reveals much about the function of the public intellectual.
The familiar narrative of Hitchens’ career has it that he made an abrupt turn from Left to Right in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but Seymour complicates this, noting that traces of Hitchens’ sympathy for empire could be detected much earlier in his career. As an example, Seymour cites Hitchens’ 1992 claim that European colonization of the Americas “deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto.” While Seymour notes that Hitchens did some important writing prior to his ideological shift, particularly in his opposition to the 1991 Gulf War, he says too little about the high-quality work Hitchens did in the 1980s on Palestine and Reagan’s wars in Central America.
That said, Hitchens’ later years and the enormous celebrity he enjoyed during that period are a case study of just how handsome the rewards are for those willing and able to serve as attack dogs for the dominant powers of their place and time. Hitchens’ main service to the American elite was to employ a combination of innuendo and character assassination to cast aspersion on virtually every high-profile figure critical of American foreign policy after 9/11—a roster that includes Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Michael Moore, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Cindy Sheehan, Oliver Stone and Gore Vidal.
Hitchens could never have amassed such a large following—and perhaps more importantly, such apowerful following—had he not so entirely embraced American power and its corresponding ideologies after 9/11. Would Hitchens have been invited on as many talk shows if, rather than writing fawning biographies of safely institutionalized figures like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, he had taken as his exemplary subjects two others he professed to admire even near the end of his life, C.L.R. James and Rosa Luxemburg? If, instead of levying facile criticisms of organized religion primarily at the United States’ enemies, Hitchens had selected neoliberal capitalism for his most ferocious late-career critiques, is it likely that 60 Minutes would have profiled him when he was ill with cancer, or that his audience would have been extended to readers of Newsweek, much less the Weekly Standard?
Seymour’s book makes clear that Hitchens provides the best evidence one can find for Chomsky’s hypothesis that as intellectuals achieve increasing degrees of power, “the inequities of the society will recede from vision, the status quo will seem less flawed, and the preservation of order will become a matter of transcendent importance.” Nor is there a more perfect embodiment than Hitchens of Said’s argument that “Nothing disfigures the intellectual’s public performance as much as … patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy.”
To put the matter another way, consider Seymour’s justifiable revulsion at Hitchens’ revealing shifts in political friendships after 9/11: “It is one thing to sell out Sidney Blumenthal to the GOP, but to exchange Edward Said for Ahmed Chalabi? To smear Noam Chomsky yet endear oneself to Paul Wolfowitz?” Hitchens’ is the logic of an intellectual opportunist, of a man who has figured out the benefits of taking a clear stance with the established order: Relationships with Said and Chomsky will impress in certain circles, but they won’t get you the ear of the President of the United States or help you become chummy with the Prime Minister of England.
Hitchens was what Antonio Gramsci called an “organic intellectual”: a person who claims to speak for the interests of either a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic class. And, despite Hitchens’ protestations and pretensions of working-class sympathies, Seymour’s book makes clear Hitchens sided manifestly with the ruling class, particularly those factions of it that are concerned with foreign affairs. The most concrete expression of this was probably his joining the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was initiated and headed by Bruce Jackson, a former vice president of Lockheed Martin. However, the primary task that Hitchens took up for America’s elite was to attempt to de-legitimize its opponents. In addition to his vicious but generally insubstantial attacks on critics of American empire, this took the form of him repeatedly asserting that all anti-capitalist movements were dead and that market forces are the world’s truly revolutionary force; of his sliming the alter-globalization movement and his justifying Arizona’s racist immigration laws (though these last two are among the few points that Seymour overlooks).
Hitchens thus stands in contrast to an organic intellectual of the counter-hegemonic kind—one who practices what Chomsky sees as the responsibility of intellectuals in Western democracies: to utilize “the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”
By no means is Seymour the first to call Hitchens a hack and a sell-out. In the aftermath of his full-throttled embrace of gunboat diplomacy post-9/11, unmasking Hitchens became almost a cottage industry for Left intellectuals. Among the finest of these are Tariq Ali’s chapter on his former comrade in Bush in Babylon, Clare Brandabur’s “Hitchens Smears Edward Said,” Norman Finkelstein’s “Hitchens as Model Apostate,” Glenn Greenwald’s counter-obituary, and more work by Alexander Cockburn and Terry Eagleton than I could list. But Unhitched offers a more thorough and in-depth discrediting of Hitchens than anything previously published. And in doing so, Seymour has made an important contribution to understanding the political role of the intellectual celebrity in our time.
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Monday, January 21, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Palestinian citizens wearily eye Israeli elections
Opinion/Editorial
Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
Nazareth
18 January 2013
As Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority, gears up for the country’s general election next week, the most common poster in the city features three far-right leaders noted for their virulently anti-Arab views.
The posters, paid for by one of the largest Palestinian parties, are intended to mobilize the country’s Palestinian citizens to vote.
The most prominent of the faces staring down from billboards is that of Avigdor Lieberman, the recently departed foreign minister who is under police investigation for fraud but still heads Yisrael Beiteinu. His party wants to strip some of Israel’s 1.4 million Palestinians of their citizenship by redrawing the boundary with the West Bank, while the rest would be forced to take a loyalty test.
Alongside him, wearing his trademark grin, is Michael Ben Ari, a former leader of the outlawed Kach movement, which demands the expulsion of Palestinians from both the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and Israel. He won a parliamentary seat at the last election for the similarly racist Strong Israel party (Otzma LeYisrael).
Between them is the bearded Baruch Marzel, also a former Kach official who leads the extremist settlers occupying the center of the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank. He has repeatedly made headlines by organizing provocative far-right marches through Palestinian towns inside Israel. (He staged a special election one this week in the village of Musmus, close to Umm al-Fahm.) Marzel is expected to enter Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, for the first time, joining Ben Ari in Strong Israel.
The posters around Nazareth pose a blunt question in Arabic: “Who are you leaving it [the Israeli parliament] to?”
Dilemma
Polls suggest that on 22 January, Israel’s Jewish majority will elect the most right-wing Knesset in Israel’s history, returning prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power in a coalition packed with ultra-nationalists. For Israel’s Palestinian citizens, comprising nearly a fifth of the total population, the dilemma has been how to respond to this all-but-inevitable outcome.
Lieberman, Ben Ari and Marzel are part of ever-widening circle of right-wing politicians who want an “Arab-free” Knesset.
The share of the Palestinian electorate prepared to cast a ballot for one of the Zionist parties has shrunk dramatically over the past 15 years. In 1999, 31 percent still voted for a Zionist party; by 2009 the figure had fallen to 17 percent, with more than half that number accounted for by Druze and Bedouin communities that serve in the army.
Instead, the overwhelming majority vote for one of three Arab or Arab-dominated parties (two other Arab parties are not expected to pass the threshold). Over the past 15 years these Palestinian parties, though without influence in the political system, have grown increasingly noisy in demanding equal rights for their constituents. They may not be able to effect change, but they have shown a talent for embarrassing their Jewish colleagues by using the Knesset — and platforms outside it — to express truths Israeli Jews would prefer remained unspoken.
The continuing presence of Palestinian representatives in the Knesset is threatened by two related developments: a consensus among the dominant right-wing parties that the Arab factions are a “fifth column”; and an internal debate among the Palestinian electorate about the value of taking part in national politics given the current climate.
Silencing
The Zionist parties, especially on the right, have been formulating ways to silence the Arab parties, along with human rights groups and what is seen as the too-liberal Israeli high court. On the issue of the Arab parties, they have found support from Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, which has warned that the Palestinian minority’s demands for equal rights — encapsulated in its program for a “state of all its citizens” — constitutes subversion and that Israel should act in accordance with the principle of a “democracy defending itself” (“Democracy for Jews only,” Haaretz, 30 May 2007).
The three main parties vying for Palestinian votes can be described as loosely representing the communist, nationalist and Islamist streams, with each party historically winning three or four seats in the 120-member Knesset.
All have faced attacks from the Zionist parties and more widely from the media for what is seen as their “treasonous” behavior in supporting the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
But even in pursuing their domestic agenda — the campaign for equal rights — they have found themselves accused of acting as a “Trojan horse”: that is, seeking to undermine Israel as a Jewish state on behalf of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza. It has been this paranoid perception by the security establishment that has increasingly fueled demands from the Israeli government that the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership recognize Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for peace talks.
In the increasingly hostile climate in Israel, the Communist Front has fared best, even though its leader Mohammed Barakeh has been subjected to a series of dubious legal actions by the state and is currently on trial for allegedly assaulting a soldier during a West Bank demonstration.
The Communists have gained some protection from their status as a joint Jewish-Arab party, one that includes a Jew among its current four Knesset members. However, in line with the long-term collapse of the Israeli Jewish left, the overwhelming majority of the Front’s members are Palestinian; the rump Jewish caucus almost operates as a party within the party.
The Islamist stream, known as the United Arab List, includes, in practice, not only the southern wing of the Islamic Movement but socially conservative factions and the one-man Taal party of Ahmed Tibi, long vilified by Israel for his close connections to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
But the focus of Israeli politicians’ outrage has been the National Democratic Assembly party, which was established in 1995, in the wake of the signing of the Oslo accords. Its original leader, Azmi Bishara, who popularized the slogan of a “state of all its citizens,” treated the Knesset principally as “an arena of confrontation,” using it to expose the limits of Israel’s democracy.
Bishara has been living in exile since 2007, when the Shin Bet accused him, improbably, of having helped Hizballah target sites in Israel with its rockets during the Israeli attack on Lebanon a year earlier.
His place as Zionism’s public enemy number one has been usurped unexpectedly by Haneen Zoabi, who was elected to the Knesset on the NDA ticket at the last election, in 2009. She is the first Palestinian woman to sit in the Knesset for a Palestinian party.
Her main crime in the eyes of the Jewish parties was her participation in the aid flotilla that tried to break the siege of Gaza in May 2010. The lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, on which Zoabi sailed, was attacked by the Israeli navy in international waters, and nine humanitarian activists were killed.
Zoabi returned to Israel with an eye-witness account of Israeli brutality aboard the ship that gave the lie to Israel’s account of what took place and helped stoke international criticism of Israel’s action. As a result, she has been relentlessly hounded in the Knesset chamber; demonized by politicians and the media; and subjected to a wave of death threats from the Israeli public.
Banning
Questioning the right of the Palestinian parties, especially the NDA, to contest national elections has become an established feature of each campaign of the past decade. But the Zionist parties have been able to move beyond mere threats into concerted efforts to disqualify the parties and individual candidates.
This has been possible because a highly partisan body called the Central Elections Committee is charged with overseeing how the campaign is conducted. The committee, dominated by representatives from the main Zionist parties, is given a facade of legitimacy by having a high court judge sit as chairman.
In the 2003 and 2009 elections, the committee tried to ban the NDA, both times with the open support of the Shin Bet, and also targeted elements of the United Arab List. The committee’s decisions have always been overturned on appeal to the high court. But it is widely assumed that, were one of the Arab parties to be disqualified, the others would pull out of the running too.
It looked as though this election would run according to the same script. But while several motions from the right were proposed to ban the NDA and the United Arab List, they were ultimately rejected by the committee, narrowly in the case of the NDA.
Instead, the committee singled out the NDA’s Haneen Zoabi, barring her from running again for the Knesset. The decision was reached despite an advisory opinion from the attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, that there was “no sufficient, exceptional critical mass of evidence” to disqualify her.
The Basic Law on the Knesset makes disqualification of a party or individual candidate possible if they have: incited racism; denied Israel’s Jewish and democratic character; or supported armed struggle or terrorism against Israel.
The committee pointed both to Zoabi’s participation in the 2010 aid flotilla to Gaza, declaring it “support for terrorism,” and to her rejection of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
The case against Zoabi was so insubstantial that few observers doubted it would be overturned by the high court.
NDA officials pointed out that she had not personally chosen to take part on the Mavi Marmara. The High Follow-Up Committee, a body representing the whole community, had decided that the Palestinian minority should be represented, and her party had selected her. Similarly, her ideological positions about Israel’s character simply reflected the NDA platform.
The party vowed to boycott the election should she be banned.
There were other obvious problems with the case. The attorney-general had closed the investigation into her participation on the Mavi Marmara in 2011, having found no evidence she broke any law. Furthermore, Israel had not declared the IHH, the Turkish group behind the Mavi Marmara, a “terrorist” organization at the time of the flotilla. In fact, one of her lawyers, Hassan Jabareen of the human rights group Adalah, surprised the court by revealing that the IHH had not been designated as such until a few weeks before the court hearing.
But as a Haaretz editorial noted, evidence was beside the point: “what we’re dealing with is a political crusade against all the Arab political parties” (“The Zuabi test,” 30 December 2012). An opinion poll in December showed 55 percent of Israeli Jews thought a ban on Zoabi would be justified.
The high court overturned Zoabi’s disqualification and did so unanimously. Following the decision, Zoabi observed that “this ruling does little to erase the threats, delegitimization and physical and verbal abuse that I have endured – in and outside the Knesset – over the past three years” (“Supreme Court: MK Zoabi can run for Knesset,” Ynet, 30 December 2012).
For dramatic effect, she had hoped to make her statement to the waiting media as she left the courtroom. But instead she had to be ushered out of a back door to safety as more than two dozen right-wing extremists, led by Michael Ben Ari, blocked her path and started shoving and threatening her escorts. Ben Ari and his Strong Israel party activists were left in charge of the courtroom to denounce the judges’ decision.
Legislators from other right-wing parties criticised the decision too. Yariv Levine of Netanyahu’s Likud party said: “Unless MK Zoabi blows herself up in the Knesset, the high court justices won’t understand that she has no place there” (“Right lambasts court after Israeli Arab MK cleared to run,” Israel Hayom, 30 December 2012).
The joint Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu party issued a statement saying it would introduce yet more legislation to restrict the rights of the country’s Palestinian citizens and their representatives: “any expression of support for terror should be grounds for disqualification for running for election in the Israeli Knesset. Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu will immediately act during the next Knesset to fix the existing laws” (“Supreme Court allows MK Zoabi to run for election,” +972, 30 December 2012).
Center-left’s flip
The Central Elections Committee’s decision not to ban the whole NDA list came as a surprise to observers, especially given the dominance of the right. Tel Aviv law professor Aeyal Gross suggested that committee members realized from their previous efforts that they were doomed to failure (“The Supreme Court has again rescued the shards of Israeli democracy,” Haaretz, 30 December 2012).
However, it is fairly difficult to believe that most of the committee members were capable of thinking so dispassionately. In any case, disqualifying Arab parties, whether ultimately futile, has other benefits for the right: it reinforces the message to Jewish voters that the Palestinian public is a fifth column, and it reminds them that the high court needs to be radically overhauled to make it more accountable to public opinion.
Awad Abdel Fattah, secretary-general of the NDA, offered a different reading of the committee’s behavior. He noted that the right-wing parties voted as feverishly for a ban of his party as ever. It was saved by a switch of positions among what has been termed the “center-left” bloc.
The so-called “center-left” — a term the bloc has embraced to signify its ability to become a genuine alternative to Netanyahu and the right — might in countries other than Israel be described as the “center-right.” Its three principal parties – Shelley Yacimovich’s Labor, Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah, and former TV anchorman Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid – are still heavily influenced by neoliberal economic doctrine; they have not challenged the ballooning defense budget or proposed a way to plug the resulting record deficit; and they have kept the Israeli-Palestinian conflict well in the background of their platforms.
In this case, the parties’ claim to left-wing or centrist credentials derive from their emphasis on reducing the tensions that Netanyahu has allowed to escalate between Israel and its sponsors, the US and the European Union. The center-left is concerned about Israel’s image abroad and making the necessary concessions — including reviving an endless peace process with the Palestinians — to prevent a further deterioration in Israel’s strategic position.
According to Abdel Fattah, the “center-left” is starting to panic, fearing that the momentum of the shift rightwards may soon prove unstoppable. Without concerted action to shore up a credible opposition to Netanyahu, Israel is hurtling towards full-blown fascism at home and pariah status abroad.
Far-right coup
The lurch to the right is discernible in two key developments during the election campaign.
The first was an effective coup by the far-right in the Likud’s recent primaries. The party’s last few “moderates” have now been replaced by ultra-nationalists, including religious settlers. Moshe Feiglin, this latter group’s controversial figurehead, won the 23rd slot on the joint list with Yisrael Beiteinu, ensuring his place in the parliament for the first time.
The second is the rapid rise during the campaign of the Jewish Home party, under its new leader Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s former chief of staff. Bennett has reinvented the faction, shedding its image as simply a settlers’ party. A hi-tech entrepreneur, Bennett has injected political glamour and won converts from the center by emphasising a “return to Jewish values.”
According to recent polls, Jewish Home, which has been plundering votes from Likud, could become the second or third largest party, after Likud-Beiteinu. Unlike the deceitful equivocation of Netanyahu on Palestinian statehood, Bennett is plain-speaking: “I want the world to understand that a Palestinian state means no Israeli state. That’s the equation.” He demands that Israel immediately annex most of the West Bank. (“Naftali Bennett interview: ‘There won’t be a Palestinian state within Israel’,” Guardian, 7 January 2013).
Faced with these trends, the so-called “center-left bloc” appears to have wavered. In the 2003 and 2009 elections, it voted with the right in the Central Elections Committee to ban the NDA. This time it switched to opposing disqualification. Rather than wanting a Knesset empty of Palestinian representatives, the “center-left” appears to have decided that a Palestinian presence may be in their interests.
This possibly explains the unorthodox, and patronizing, editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper this week that urged Palestinian citizens to participate in the election – and did so in Arabic. Its headline ordered them to: “Get out and vote!” (“Get out and vote!”, 15 January 2013).
Boycott calls
The cause for the concern expressed by Haaretz has been a steady decline in the Palestinian minority’s turnout at each election over the past decade. In 1999, amid the greater optimism of the Oslo period, three-quarters of the Palestinian electorate voted; 10 years later, in 2009, that figure had fallen to 53 percent, the lowest in the community’s history.
Surveys taken by Asad Ghanem of Haifa University indicate a likely scenario in which, for the first time, less than half the Palestinian electorate vote in a Knesset election (“What’s the point?” The Economist, 12 January 2013).
The falling interest in voting reflects various developments within the Palestinian minority.
Some of it can be attributed to a formal boycott movement initiated in 2006 by the small secular Palestinian nationalist movement the Sons of the Village (Abna al-Balad). The Popular Committee for Boycotting Knesset Elections has attracted backing from academics and intellectuals.
This weekend boycott activists were due to lead a day-long motorcade spreading their message through dozens of Palestinian villages and towns, starting in the central Galilee, passing through Nazareth and then ending in the Triangle area south of Umm al-Fahm.
A boycott has also been the default position of the northern Islamic Movement, led by the popular figure of Sheikh Raed Salah, since the movement split in 1996. The southern wing contested the election in the belief that an Oslo-inspired two-state solution was at hand. Salah has been the chief beneficiary of the gradual discrediting of the Oslo process.
But according to Mohammed Zeidan, director of the Arab Association for Human Rights in Nazareth, more significant than the boycott movement has been the much wider assumption in popular discourse that voting is a pointless activity and that the Arab parties are ineffective.
The alienation of Palestinian citizens from the political system was highlighted in a survey presented at Haifa University in December. It showed 79 percent had little or no faith in state institutions, including the Knesset, and 67 percent lacked confidence in the Arab parties (“On my mind: Arab voters,” The Jerusalem Post, 24 December 2012).
Zeidan pointed to a lack of campaigning in Palestinian communities, apart from the billboards. “It’s almost as if the [Palestinian] parties themselves are too embarrassed to show their faces by electioneering.”
He also noted a frankness among people stating that they would not be voting. “Among the youth this trend is especially strong. They are clear that the Knesset and the [Palestinian] parties do not represent them.”
This is an assessment even the parties themselves are prepared to concede. Jamal Zahalka, head of the NDA’s Knesset faction, said: “We’re trying to encourage Arabs to vote because it’s important, but you can’t blame them when they see how little power we have in parliament” (“Israeli Arabs unenthusiastic about Jan 22 vote,” The Huffington Post, 19 December 2012).
Mostly out of view, the parties have been deliberating how to deal with the rapid decline in turnout. The posters featuring Lieberman, Ben Ari and Marzel – part of the NDA’s campaign – were intended to play on the community’s fears of the far-right.
But according to surveys, the most likely way to increase voting would be for the parties to present a joint list for the Knesset. Back in October, when the election was announced, a campaign on social media was launched urging the parties to cooperate more closely so that they could win a larger number of seats and have a greater influence.
However, the Communist Front is reported to have vetoed the move, apparently worried that a union with the two other Arab parties would drive away Jewish support and end its tradition of being a Arab-Jewish party.
A more radical solution, again opposed by the Communist Front, would be to abandon the Knesset and set up an Arab parliament with direct elections. One of its first acts would be to demand cultural and educational autonomy.
The idea of a separate parliament has been under discussion, so far fruitlessly, for more than a decade. But a very low turnout this time may push it higher up the Palestinian parties’ agenda.
Center-left’s anxiety
It is not only the Arab parties that are anxious about the expected low rate of participation. The Jewish “center-left” appears to have realised that it may harm them too, even though few Palestinian citizens now vote for Zionist parties. The damage is possible in two ways — one strategic, the other pragmatic — according to Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University.
The first is that, if the Knesset no longer represents Palestinian citizens, either through a successful boycott or because of a ban by the right, Israel’s rule over its Palestinian minority will look increasingly illegitimate, and more like a variety of apartheid. In such circumstances, the center-left’s role in defending Israel’s standing abroad — its chief selling-point to its shrinking constituency at home — is in danger of becoming irrelevant. The center-left could quickly find itself in vicious spiral of political and diplomatic marginalization.
The second, deeper concern for the center-left is one of “cold political calculation,” says Jamal. A low turnout by Palestinian voters will be reflected in a low number of seats. And that in turn will make the chances of building a credible Knesset bloc to challenge Netanyahu and the right even more hopeless.
Without a strong showing by the Palestinian parties, the center-left has no hope of tasting power. Instead they are more likely to end up squabbling with each other to be allowed to sit meekly on the margins of his coalition.
Jamal said: “Plenty of the members of the center-left parties have no real love of the Arab parties but still they understand that they need these parties strong to reduce Netanyahu’s power.”
Two weeks before polling day, the center-left parties made what looked suspiciously like a desperate, last-minute gesture towards Palestinian citizens to encourage them to vote. They signed a covenant committing to end inequality between Jews and Arabs within 10 years. Of the Arab parties, only the Communist Front attended.
The meeting received little coverage in the local Arab media. Of the few in the minority who were aware of it, most expected the covenant would become another quickly forgotten promise.
Ramez Jeraisi, Nazareth’s mayor and a member of the Communist Front that signed the document, summed up the mood: “We have experienced talk and declarations that were never implemented, and I don’t expect a change in reality.”
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.
Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
Nazareth
18 January 2013
As Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority, gears up for the country’s general election next week, the most common poster in the city features three far-right leaders noted for their virulently anti-Arab views.
The posters, paid for by one of the largest Palestinian parties, are intended to mobilize the country’s Palestinian citizens to vote.
The most prominent of the faces staring down from billboards is that of Avigdor Lieberman, the recently departed foreign minister who is under police investigation for fraud but still heads Yisrael Beiteinu. His party wants to strip some of Israel’s 1.4 million Palestinians of their citizenship by redrawing the boundary with the West Bank, while the rest would be forced to take a loyalty test.
Alongside him, wearing his trademark grin, is Michael Ben Ari, a former leader of the outlawed Kach movement, which demands the expulsion of Palestinians from both the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and Israel. He won a parliamentary seat at the last election for the similarly racist Strong Israel party (Otzma LeYisrael).
Between them is the bearded Baruch Marzel, also a former Kach official who leads the extremist settlers occupying the center of the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank. He has repeatedly made headlines by organizing provocative far-right marches through Palestinian towns inside Israel. (He staged a special election one this week in the village of Musmus, close to Umm al-Fahm.) Marzel is expected to enter Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, for the first time, joining Ben Ari in Strong Israel.
The posters around Nazareth pose a blunt question in Arabic: “Who are you leaving it [the Israeli parliament] to?”
Dilemma
Polls suggest that on 22 January, Israel’s Jewish majority will elect the most right-wing Knesset in Israel’s history, returning prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power in a coalition packed with ultra-nationalists. For Israel’s Palestinian citizens, comprising nearly a fifth of the total population, the dilemma has been how to respond to this all-but-inevitable outcome.
Lieberman, Ben Ari and Marzel are part of ever-widening circle of right-wing politicians who want an “Arab-free” Knesset.
The share of the Palestinian electorate prepared to cast a ballot for one of the Zionist parties has shrunk dramatically over the past 15 years. In 1999, 31 percent still voted for a Zionist party; by 2009 the figure had fallen to 17 percent, with more than half that number accounted for by Druze and Bedouin communities that serve in the army.
Instead, the overwhelming majority vote for one of three Arab or Arab-dominated parties (two other Arab parties are not expected to pass the threshold). Over the past 15 years these Palestinian parties, though without influence in the political system, have grown increasingly noisy in demanding equal rights for their constituents. They may not be able to effect change, but they have shown a talent for embarrassing their Jewish colleagues by using the Knesset — and platforms outside it — to express truths Israeli Jews would prefer remained unspoken.
The continuing presence of Palestinian representatives in the Knesset is threatened by two related developments: a consensus among the dominant right-wing parties that the Arab factions are a “fifth column”; and an internal debate among the Palestinian electorate about the value of taking part in national politics given the current climate.
Silencing
The Zionist parties, especially on the right, have been formulating ways to silence the Arab parties, along with human rights groups and what is seen as the too-liberal Israeli high court. On the issue of the Arab parties, they have found support from Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, which has warned that the Palestinian minority’s demands for equal rights — encapsulated in its program for a “state of all its citizens” — constitutes subversion and that Israel should act in accordance with the principle of a “democracy defending itself” (“Democracy for Jews only,” Haaretz, 30 May 2007).
The three main parties vying for Palestinian votes can be described as loosely representing the communist, nationalist and Islamist streams, with each party historically winning three or four seats in the 120-member Knesset.
All have faced attacks from the Zionist parties and more widely from the media for what is seen as their “treasonous” behavior in supporting the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
But even in pursuing their domestic agenda — the campaign for equal rights — they have found themselves accused of acting as a “Trojan horse”: that is, seeking to undermine Israel as a Jewish state on behalf of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza. It has been this paranoid perception by the security establishment that has increasingly fueled demands from the Israeli government that the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership recognize Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for peace talks.
In the increasingly hostile climate in Israel, the Communist Front has fared best, even though its leader Mohammed Barakeh has been subjected to a series of dubious legal actions by the state and is currently on trial for allegedly assaulting a soldier during a West Bank demonstration.
The Communists have gained some protection from their status as a joint Jewish-Arab party, one that includes a Jew among its current four Knesset members. However, in line with the long-term collapse of the Israeli Jewish left, the overwhelming majority of the Front’s members are Palestinian; the rump Jewish caucus almost operates as a party within the party.
The Islamist stream, known as the United Arab List, includes, in practice, not only the southern wing of the Islamic Movement but socially conservative factions and the one-man Taal party of Ahmed Tibi, long vilified by Israel for his close connections to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
But the focus of Israeli politicians’ outrage has been the National Democratic Assembly party, which was established in 1995, in the wake of the signing of the Oslo accords. Its original leader, Azmi Bishara, who popularized the slogan of a “state of all its citizens,” treated the Knesset principally as “an arena of confrontation,” using it to expose the limits of Israel’s democracy.
Bishara has been living in exile since 2007, when the Shin Bet accused him, improbably, of having helped Hizballah target sites in Israel with its rockets during the Israeli attack on Lebanon a year earlier.
His place as Zionism’s public enemy number one has been usurped unexpectedly by Haneen Zoabi, who was elected to the Knesset on the NDA ticket at the last election, in 2009. She is the first Palestinian woman to sit in the Knesset for a Palestinian party.
Her main crime in the eyes of the Jewish parties was her participation in the aid flotilla that tried to break the siege of Gaza in May 2010. The lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, on which Zoabi sailed, was attacked by the Israeli navy in international waters, and nine humanitarian activists were killed.
Zoabi returned to Israel with an eye-witness account of Israeli brutality aboard the ship that gave the lie to Israel’s account of what took place and helped stoke international criticism of Israel’s action. As a result, she has been relentlessly hounded in the Knesset chamber; demonized by politicians and the media; and subjected to a wave of death threats from the Israeli public.
Banning
Questioning the right of the Palestinian parties, especially the NDA, to contest national elections has become an established feature of each campaign of the past decade. But the Zionist parties have been able to move beyond mere threats into concerted efforts to disqualify the parties and individual candidates.
This has been possible because a highly partisan body called the Central Elections Committee is charged with overseeing how the campaign is conducted. The committee, dominated by representatives from the main Zionist parties, is given a facade of legitimacy by having a high court judge sit as chairman.
In the 2003 and 2009 elections, the committee tried to ban the NDA, both times with the open support of the Shin Bet, and also targeted elements of the United Arab List. The committee’s decisions have always been overturned on appeal to the high court. But it is widely assumed that, were one of the Arab parties to be disqualified, the others would pull out of the running too.
It looked as though this election would run according to the same script. But while several motions from the right were proposed to ban the NDA and the United Arab List, they were ultimately rejected by the committee, narrowly in the case of the NDA.
Instead, the committee singled out the NDA’s Haneen Zoabi, barring her from running again for the Knesset. The decision was reached despite an advisory opinion from the attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, that there was “no sufficient, exceptional critical mass of evidence” to disqualify her.
The Basic Law on the Knesset makes disqualification of a party or individual candidate possible if they have: incited racism; denied Israel’s Jewish and democratic character; or supported armed struggle or terrorism against Israel.
The committee pointed both to Zoabi’s participation in the 2010 aid flotilla to Gaza, declaring it “support for terrorism,” and to her rejection of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
The case against Zoabi was so insubstantial that few observers doubted it would be overturned by the high court.
NDA officials pointed out that she had not personally chosen to take part on the Mavi Marmara. The High Follow-Up Committee, a body representing the whole community, had decided that the Palestinian minority should be represented, and her party had selected her. Similarly, her ideological positions about Israel’s character simply reflected the NDA platform.
The party vowed to boycott the election should she be banned.
There were other obvious problems with the case. The attorney-general had closed the investigation into her participation on the Mavi Marmara in 2011, having found no evidence she broke any law. Furthermore, Israel had not declared the IHH, the Turkish group behind the Mavi Marmara, a “terrorist” organization at the time of the flotilla. In fact, one of her lawyers, Hassan Jabareen of the human rights group Adalah, surprised the court by revealing that the IHH had not been designated as such until a few weeks before the court hearing.
But as a Haaretz editorial noted, evidence was beside the point: “what we’re dealing with is a political crusade against all the Arab political parties” (“The Zuabi test,” 30 December 2012). An opinion poll in December showed 55 percent of Israeli Jews thought a ban on Zoabi would be justified.
The high court overturned Zoabi’s disqualification and did so unanimously. Following the decision, Zoabi observed that “this ruling does little to erase the threats, delegitimization and physical and verbal abuse that I have endured – in and outside the Knesset – over the past three years” (“Supreme Court: MK Zoabi can run for Knesset,” Ynet, 30 December 2012).
For dramatic effect, she had hoped to make her statement to the waiting media as she left the courtroom. But instead she had to be ushered out of a back door to safety as more than two dozen right-wing extremists, led by Michael Ben Ari, blocked her path and started shoving and threatening her escorts. Ben Ari and his Strong Israel party activists were left in charge of the courtroom to denounce the judges’ decision.
Legislators from other right-wing parties criticised the decision too. Yariv Levine of Netanyahu’s Likud party said: “Unless MK Zoabi blows herself up in the Knesset, the high court justices won’t understand that she has no place there” (“Right lambasts court after Israeli Arab MK cleared to run,” Israel Hayom, 30 December 2012).
The joint Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu party issued a statement saying it would introduce yet more legislation to restrict the rights of the country’s Palestinian citizens and their representatives: “any expression of support for terror should be grounds for disqualification for running for election in the Israeli Knesset. Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu will immediately act during the next Knesset to fix the existing laws” (“Supreme Court allows MK Zoabi to run for election,” +972, 30 December 2012).
Center-left’s flip
The Central Elections Committee’s decision not to ban the whole NDA list came as a surprise to observers, especially given the dominance of the right. Tel Aviv law professor Aeyal Gross suggested that committee members realized from their previous efforts that they were doomed to failure (“The Supreme Court has again rescued the shards of Israeli democracy,” Haaretz, 30 December 2012).
However, it is fairly difficult to believe that most of the committee members were capable of thinking so dispassionately. In any case, disqualifying Arab parties, whether ultimately futile, has other benefits for the right: it reinforces the message to Jewish voters that the Palestinian public is a fifth column, and it reminds them that the high court needs to be radically overhauled to make it more accountable to public opinion.
Awad Abdel Fattah, secretary-general of the NDA, offered a different reading of the committee’s behavior. He noted that the right-wing parties voted as feverishly for a ban of his party as ever. It was saved by a switch of positions among what has been termed the “center-left” bloc.
The so-called “center-left” — a term the bloc has embraced to signify its ability to become a genuine alternative to Netanyahu and the right — might in countries other than Israel be described as the “center-right.” Its three principal parties – Shelley Yacimovich’s Labor, Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah, and former TV anchorman Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid – are still heavily influenced by neoliberal economic doctrine; they have not challenged the ballooning defense budget or proposed a way to plug the resulting record deficit; and they have kept the Israeli-Palestinian conflict well in the background of their platforms.
In this case, the parties’ claim to left-wing or centrist credentials derive from their emphasis on reducing the tensions that Netanyahu has allowed to escalate between Israel and its sponsors, the US and the European Union. The center-left is concerned about Israel’s image abroad and making the necessary concessions — including reviving an endless peace process with the Palestinians — to prevent a further deterioration in Israel’s strategic position.
According to Abdel Fattah, the “center-left” is starting to panic, fearing that the momentum of the shift rightwards may soon prove unstoppable. Without concerted action to shore up a credible opposition to Netanyahu, Israel is hurtling towards full-blown fascism at home and pariah status abroad.
Far-right coup
The lurch to the right is discernible in two key developments during the election campaign.
The first was an effective coup by the far-right in the Likud’s recent primaries. The party’s last few “moderates” have now been replaced by ultra-nationalists, including religious settlers. Moshe Feiglin, this latter group’s controversial figurehead, won the 23rd slot on the joint list with Yisrael Beiteinu, ensuring his place in the parliament for the first time.
The second is the rapid rise during the campaign of the Jewish Home party, under its new leader Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s former chief of staff. Bennett has reinvented the faction, shedding its image as simply a settlers’ party. A hi-tech entrepreneur, Bennett has injected political glamour and won converts from the center by emphasising a “return to Jewish values.”
According to recent polls, Jewish Home, which has been plundering votes from Likud, could become the second or third largest party, after Likud-Beiteinu. Unlike the deceitful equivocation of Netanyahu on Palestinian statehood, Bennett is plain-speaking: “I want the world to understand that a Palestinian state means no Israeli state. That’s the equation.” He demands that Israel immediately annex most of the West Bank. (“Naftali Bennett interview: ‘There won’t be a Palestinian state within Israel’,” Guardian, 7 January 2013).
Faced with these trends, the so-called “center-left bloc” appears to have wavered. In the 2003 and 2009 elections, it voted with the right in the Central Elections Committee to ban the NDA. This time it switched to opposing disqualification. Rather than wanting a Knesset empty of Palestinian representatives, the “center-left” appears to have decided that a Palestinian presence may be in their interests.
This possibly explains the unorthodox, and patronizing, editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper this week that urged Palestinian citizens to participate in the election – and did so in Arabic. Its headline ordered them to: “Get out and vote!” (“Get out and vote!”, 15 January 2013).
Boycott calls
The cause for the concern expressed by Haaretz has been a steady decline in the Palestinian minority’s turnout at each election over the past decade. In 1999, amid the greater optimism of the Oslo period, three-quarters of the Palestinian electorate voted; 10 years later, in 2009, that figure had fallen to 53 percent, the lowest in the community’s history.
Surveys taken by Asad Ghanem of Haifa University indicate a likely scenario in which, for the first time, less than half the Palestinian electorate vote in a Knesset election (“What’s the point?” The Economist, 12 January 2013).
The falling interest in voting reflects various developments within the Palestinian minority.
Some of it can be attributed to a formal boycott movement initiated in 2006 by the small secular Palestinian nationalist movement the Sons of the Village (Abna al-Balad). The Popular Committee for Boycotting Knesset Elections has attracted backing from academics and intellectuals.
This weekend boycott activists were due to lead a day-long motorcade spreading their message through dozens of Palestinian villages and towns, starting in the central Galilee, passing through Nazareth and then ending in the Triangle area south of Umm al-Fahm.
A boycott has also been the default position of the northern Islamic Movement, led by the popular figure of Sheikh Raed Salah, since the movement split in 1996. The southern wing contested the election in the belief that an Oslo-inspired two-state solution was at hand. Salah has been the chief beneficiary of the gradual discrediting of the Oslo process.
But according to Mohammed Zeidan, director of the Arab Association for Human Rights in Nazareth, more significant than the boycott movement has been the much wider assumption in popular discourse that voting is a pointless activity and that the Arab parties are ineffective.
The alienation of Palestinian citizens from the political system was highlighted in a survey presented at Haifa University in December. It showed 79 percent had little or no faith in state institutions, including the Knesset, and 67 percent lacked confidence in the Arab parties (“On my mind: Arab voters,” The Jerusalem Post, 24 December 2012).
Zeidan pointed to a lack of campaigning in Palestinian communities, apart from the billboards. “It’s almost as if the [Palestinian] parties themselves are too embarrassed to show their faces by electioneering.”
He also noted a frankness among people stating that they would not be voting. “Among the youth this trend is especially strong. They are clear that the Knesset and the [Palestinian] parties do not represent them.”
This is an assessment even the parties themselves are prepared to concede. Jamal Zahalka, head of the NDA’s Knesset faction, said: “We’re trying to encourage Arabs to vote because it’s important, but you can’t blame them when they see how little power we have in parliament” (“Israeli Arabs unenthusiastic about Jan 22 vote,” The Huffington Post, 19 December 2012).
Mostly out of view, the parties have been deliberating how to deal with the rapid decline in turnout. The posters featuring Lieberman, Ben Ari and Marzel – part of the NDA’s campaign – were intended to play on the community’s fears of the far-right.
But according to surveys, the most likely way to increase voting would be for the parties to present a joint list for the Knesset. Back in October, when the election was announced, a campaign on social media was launched urging the parties to cooperate more closely so that they could win a larger number of seats and have a greater influence.
However, the Communist Front is reported to have vetoed the move, apparently worried that a union with the two other Arab parties would drive away Jewish support and end its tradition of being a Arab-Jewish party.
A more radical solution, again opposed by the Communist Front, would be to abandon the Knesset and set up an Arab parliament with direct elections. One of its first acts would be to demand cultural and educational autonomy.
The idea of a separate parliament has been under discussion, so far fruitlessly, for more than a decade. But a very low turnout this time may push it higher up the Palestinian parties’ agenda.
Center-left’s anxiety
It is not only the Arab parties that are anxious about the expected low rate of participation. The Jewish “center-left” appears to have realised that it may harm them too, even though few Palestinian citizens now vote for Zionist parties. The damage is possible in two ways — one strategic, the other pragmatic — according to Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University.
The first is that, if the Knesset no longer represents Palestinian citizens, either through a successful boycott or because of a ban by the right, Israel’s rule over its Palestinian minority will look increasingly illegitimate, and more like a variety of apartheid. In such circumstances, the center-left’s role in defending Israel’s standing abroad — its chief selling-point to its shrinking constituency at home — is in danger of becoming irrelevant. The center-left could quickly find itself in vicious spiral of political and diplomatic marginalization.
The second, deeper concern for the center-left is one of “cold political calculation,” says Jamal. A low turnout by Palestinian voters will be reflected in a low number of seats. And that in turn will make the chances of building a credible Knesset bloc to challenge Netanyahu and the right even more hopeless.
Without a strong showing by the Palestinian parties, the center-left has no hope of tasting power. Instead they are more likely to end up squabbling with each other to be allowed to sit meekly on the margins of his coalition.
Jamal said: “Plenty of the members of the center-left parties have no real love of the Arab parties but still they understand that they need these parties strong to reduce Netanyahu’s power.”
Two weeks before polling day, the center-left parties made what looked suspiciously like a desperate, last-minute gesture towards Palestinian citizens to encourage them to vote. They signed a covenant committing to end inequality between Jews and Arabs within 10 years. Of the Arab parties, only the Communist Front attended.
The meeting received little coverage in the local Arab media. Of the few in the minority who were aware of it, most expected the covenant would become another quickly forgotten promise.
Ramez Jeraisi, Nazareth’s mayor and a member of the Communist Front that signed the document, summed up the mood: “We have experienced talk and declarations that were never implemented, and I don’t expect a change in reality.”
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Don’t You Dare Conflate MLK and Obama
from Black Agenda Report
Wed, 01/16/2013 - 15:22 — Glen Ford
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
If Dr. King were alive today, there might be a Black president, but he or she would certainly not get MLK’s support if he behaved like Barack Obama. Dr. King would oppose Obama’s wars, “make Wall Street scream, and attempt to render the nation ungovernable under the dictatorship of the Lords of Capital.”
“Had King survived, his break with Obama would have come early.”
Back in 1964, under prodding from a BBC interviewer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted that a Black person might be elected president “in 25 years or less.” Four years later, shortly before his assassination, King confided to actor/activist Harry Belafonte that he had “come to believe we're integrating into a burning house." We now see that the two notions are not at all contradictory. At least some African Americans have achieved deep penetration of the very pinnacles of white power structures – integrating the White House, itself – while conditions of life for masses of Black folks deteriorate and the society as a whole falls into deep decay.
The fires lit by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” that Dr. King identified in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence” speech are consuming the world, now stoked by a Black arsonist-in-chief. Domestic poverty hovers only a fraction of a percentage below the levels of 1965, with “extreme poverty” the highest on record. Black household wealth has collapsed to one-twentieth that of whites. Today, more Black men are under the control of the criminal justice system than were slaves in the decade before the Civil War, according to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow.
The intervening years have shown that Dr. King’s 1960s visions were not in conflict: the rooms at the top floors of the national house may have been integrated, but the building still burns.
The deepening crisis of capitalism, the triumph of Wall Street finance over industrial capital, the increasing imperial reversion to international lawlessness in a desperate bid to maintain global supremacy – all this was predictable under the laws of political economy. Had the assassin’s bullet not found him, Dr. King would have continued his implacable resistance to these unfolding evils, rejecting Barack Obama’s invasions, drones and Kill Lists with the same moral fervor and political courage that he broke with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. Absolutely nothing in King’s life and work indicates otherwise.
“The very notion of a grand austerity bargain with the Right would have been anathema to MLK.”
One school of thought holds that corporate servants like Obama could not have taken root in Black America if Dr. King, Malcolm X and a whole cadre of slain and imprisoned leaders of the Sixties had not been replaced by opportunistic representatives of a grasping Black acquisitive class. In any event, had King survived, his break with Obama would have come early. Surely, the Dr. King who, in his 1967 “Where Do We Go from Here” speech called for a guaranteed annual income would never have abided Obama’s targeting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the weeks before his 2009 inauguration. Forty-five years ago, King’s position was clear: “Our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes.” The very notion of a grand austerity bargain with the Right would have been anathema to MLK.
Were Martin alive, he would skewer the putative leftists and their “lesser evil” rationales for backing the corporatist, warmongering Obama. As both a theologian and a “revolutionary democrat,” as Temple University’s Prof. Anthony Monteiro has described him, MLK had no problem calling evil by its name – and in explicate triplicate. His militant approach to non-violent direct action required him to confront the underlying contradictions of society through the methodical application of creative tension. He would make Wall Street scream, and attempt to render the nation ungovernable under the dictatorship of the Lords of Capital. And he would deliver a withering condemnation of the base corruption and self-serving that saturates the Black Misleadership Class.
He would spend his birthday preparing a massive, disruptive action at the Inauguration.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Wed, 01/16/2013 - 15:22 — Glen Ford
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
If Dr. King were alive today, there might be a Black president, but he or she would certainly not get MLK’s support if he behaved like Barack Obama. Dr. King would oppose Obama’s wars, “make Wall Street scream, and attempt to render the nation ungovernable under the dictatorship of the Lords of Capital.”
“Had King survived, his break with Obama would have come early.”
Back in 1964, under prodding from a BBC interviewer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted that a Black person might be elected president “in 25 years or less.” Four years later, shortly before his assassination, King confided to actor/activist Harry Belafonte that he had “come to believe we're integrating into a burning house." We now see that the two notions are not at all contradictory. At least some African Americans have achieved deep penetration of the very pinnacles of white power structures – integrating the White House, itself – while conditions of life for masses of Black folks deteriorate and the society as a whole falls into deep decay.
The fires lit by the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” that Dr. King identified in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence” speech are consuming the world, now stoked by a Black arsonist-in-chief. Domestic poverty hovers only a fraction of a percentage below the levels of 1965, with “extreme poverty” the highest on record. Black household wealth has collapsed to one-twentieth that of whites. Today, more Black men are under the control of the criminal justice system than were slaves in the decade before the Civil War, according to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow.
The intervening years have shown that Dr. King’s 1960s visions were not in conflict: the rooms at the top floors of the national house may have been integrated, but the building still burns.
The deepening crisis of capitalism, the triumph of Wall Street finance over industrial capital, the increasing imperial reversion to international lawlessness in a desperate bid to maintain global supremacy – all this was predictable under the laws of political economy. Had the assassin’s bullet not found him, Dr. King would have continued his implacable resistance to these unfolding evils, rejecting Barack Obama’s invasions, drones and Kill Lists with the same moral fervor and political courage that he broke with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. Absolutely nothing in King’s life and work indicates otherwise.
“The very notion of a grand austerity bargain with the Right would have been anathema to MLK.”
One school of thought holds that corporate servants like Obama could not have taken root in Black America if Dr. King, Malcolm X and a whole cadre of slain and imprisoned leaders of the Sixties had not been replaced by opportunistic representatives of a grasping Black acquisitive class. In any event, had King survived, his break with Obama would have come early. Surely, the Dr. King who, in his 1967 “Where Do We Go from Here” speech called for a guaranteed annual income would never have abided Obama’s targeting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the weeks before his 2009 inauguration. Forty-five years ago, King’s position was clear: “Our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes.” The very notion of a grand austerity bargain with the Right would have been anathema to MLK.
Were Martin alive, he would skewer the putative leftists and their “lesser evil” rationales for backing the corporatist, warmongering Obama. As both a theologian and a “revolutionary democrat,” as Temple University’s Prof. Anthony Monteiro has described him, MLK had no problem calling evil by its name – and in explicate triplicate. His militant approach to non-violent direct action required him to confront the underlying contradictions of society through the methodical application of creative tension. He would make Wall Street scream, and attempt to render the nation ungovernable under the dictatorship of the Lords of Capital. And he would deliver a withering condemnation of the base corruption and self-serving that saturates the Black Misleadership Class.
He would spend his birthday preparing a massive, disruptive action at the Inauguration.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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