As boycott pressure grows, Israeli business leaders plan to confront Netanyahu

Jan 20, 2014 01:51 pm | Philip Weiss
from mondoweiss.org


The circle is closing on Netanyahu. And the pressure is coming from the business establishment, which fears boycott.

Haaretz: “Settlements prompt European investors to review ties with Israeli banks”:

Three major European pension funds are reviewing their holdings in Israeli banks due to concerns they finance West Bank settlements, the Financial Times reported Sunday.

According to the report, ABP, a Dutch pension fund considered the world’s third largest, Nordea Investment Management, a Scandinavian firm, and DNB Asset Management, a Norwegian company, want more information about the Israeli banks’ involvement in Israeli settlements.

Ynet says boycott is biting in the Israeli establishment:

A hundred of Israel’s leading businessmen and businesswomen will fly to Davos next week, armed with a poignant message for the prime minister: Maintaining a growing and stable economy requires Israel to make peace with Palestinians, the sooner the better.

Leaders and businesspeople ranging from Strauss Group Chairwoman Ofra Strauss to Google Israel CEO Meir Bren and former UN ambassador Dan Gillerman will descend on the Davos Economic Forum to urge Israelis and Palestinians leaders to reach a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

An a-political group of Palestinians and Israelis, which includes names such as Palestinian energy mogul Munib Masri, tech mogul Yossi Vardi, Amdocs founder Maurice Kahan, Bezeq CEO Avi Gabai, industrialist Gad Propper, Israeli low-cost supermarket magnate Rami Levy and former ambassador to the US Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, have signed on an initiative called Breaking the Impasse (BTI)….

According to daily Calcalist, a week ago, some members of the group met Netanyahu in his office in preparation of the Davos meet. During the meeting, they warned him of the looming threat posed by boycotts.

Smadar Barber Tsadik, CEO of the First International Bank of Israel, said at the meeting that “the largest investment fund in Holland has already announced that it will not invest in Israel anymore because of its treatment of the Palestinians – and that’s a problem.”

No Place to Hide: We’re All Suspects in Barack Obama’s America

by Robert Scheer

from Truthdig


Posted on Jan 21, 2014

By Robert Scheer


Barack Obama’s speech Friday on surveillance was his worst performance, not as a matter of theatrical skill, though he clearly did not embrace his lines, but in its stark betrayal of his oft proclaimed respect for constitutional safeguards and civil liberty.

His unbridled defense of the surveillance state opened the door to the new McCarthyism of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who on Sunday talk shows were branding Edward Snowden as a possible Russian spy.

Instead of crediting Snowden for forcing what the president concedes is a much-needed debate, Obama bizarrely cited the example of Paul Revere and the other early American rebels in the Sons of Liberty to denounce their modern equivalent. But the “secret surveillance committee” Obama referenced that Revere and his fellow underground conspirators established was intended to subvert rather than celebrate the crimes of the British controlled government in power.

Somewhere in law school, Obama must have learned that the whole point of our Bill of Rights, inspired by American revolutionaries like Sam Adams, a Sons of Liberty co-conspirator, was to curtail government power as the main threat to freedom. Thus was Adams’ insistence on the Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment, banning the warrantless searches that Obama now seeks to justify.

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Obama had certainly acted as if he understood that when as a senator he railed against the surveillance power of the government. But now that he occupies the imperial presidency, dissenters like Snowden are the enemy to be hounded.

While modern town crier Snowden is judged guilty of a crime without trial, the folks in the NSA who have been spying on us are all depicted as honorable people to be presumed innocent, no matter evidence to the contrary. That includes James Clapper, the president’s appointed director of national intelligence who blatantly perjured himself in testimony to Congress.

When asked in March by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, whether the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” Clapper lied and said, “No sir.” Then he added, “Not wittingly.”

Wyden, like Feinstein and others on the committee, knew instantly that Clapper had perjured himself, that the spying was quite witting, but he felt duty bound not to let the public in on it. Wyden has the grace to thank the Snowden revelations for initiating a public debate while Feinstein has from the beginning condemned the whistle-blower as a traitor.

It is a debate that Feinstein wants us to have in the dark, and she was critical of the very limited reforms that the president offered, sounding the national security alarm: “New bombs are being devised, new terrorists are emerging, new groups. Actually a new level of viciousness. And I think we need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people’s privacy rights.”

Well, she got that last part correct but privacy rights were never a concern of hers until Snowden came along, and even now she resists the president’s very limited moves in the direction of increased transparency.

Some will read my criticism of Obama and Feinstein and say trust these good liberal Democrats, who would never condone misusing government power to undermine individual freedom. It is a rationalization difficult to accept on a day when we celebrate the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., a man blackmailed with information collected by the FBI and the NSA when Democrat Lyndon Johnson was president.

“In the 1960s, the government spied on civil rights leaders and the critics of the Vietnam War,” Obama noted in his speech, before quickly abandoning that caution and falling back on the lame “trust us” refrain of every overreaching government.

The FBI’s intrusive surveillance of MLK, constantly bugging his hotel rooms, was designed to smear him as a Communist and a philanderer to end his career as a civil rights leader, and, as is quite clear from the blackmail letters planted by the FBI, even drive him to suicide. But it wasn’t until last year that we learned that the NSA’s “Minaret” program under the direction of President Johnson had spied on the communications of King, fellow civil rights leader Whitney Young, boxer Muhammad Ali, and journalists Tom Wicker of The New York Times and Art Buchwald of The Washington Post.

The NSA even spied on Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, who in 1975 had led the Senate investigation into the government’s illegal counterintelligence program, and his Republican counterpart from Tennessee, Howard Baker, who could never figure out how he got caught in the NSA’s dragnet. Someday Obama and Feinstein might be asking themselves that question.

Back in 1975, Church warned: “The [National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the NSA] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

That was before the Internet and supercomputers, biometrics and all the devilish means of data mining that can convert even one’s turned-off cellphone into an instrument of surveillance. We continue to ignore Church’s warning at our peril.

There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted and words more drained of content than Martin Luther King.

by Thomas J. Sugrue

from Jacobin

Every year, in January and April, we commemorate the extraordinary career of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. But there is probably no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted, whose message more bowdlerized, whose powerful words are more drained of content than King.

A few years ago, in preparation for a public lecture on 1968, I re-read the most important book on King and his politics to come out in the last decade: Thomas F. Jackson’s From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice. Jackson, a former researcher with the King Papers project at Stanford, has read King’s every last sermon, speech, book, article, and letter. What Jackson finds is that from the beginning of his ministry, King was far more radical, especially on matters of labor, poverty, and economic justice than we remember. In media accounts, King was quickly labeled the “Apostle of Non-Violence,” and, by the mid-1960s, portrayed as the antithesis to Malcolm X. While King adhered to nonviolence for his entire career, the single-minded focus of the media on the horse race between Malcolm and Martin led reporters to ignore King’s more radical pronouncements. They simply didn’t fit into the developing story line.

Black power advocates also distorted King, focusing on his ministerial style and arrogance (members of SNCC called him “de Lawd”). They branded King as hopelessly bourgeois, a detriment rather than a positive force in the black freedom struggle. White liberals, fearful of black unrest, embraced King as a voice of moderation, hoping that he could stem the rising tide of black discontent that exploded in the long hot summers of the mid- sixties. The representation of King as mainstream left observers unable to make sense out of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, his call for an interracial Poor People’s Movement, and his increasingly vocal denunciations of class inequality in America.

King, they contended, had been radicalized or, perhaps, was more calculating in his leftward move, changing his rhetoric to remain a legitimate leader in the eyes of younger, angrier blacks. But as Jackson shows, King was anything but a milquetoast racial liberal or a radical-come-lately. Through a close reading of King’s work, Jackson finds deep currents of anti-imperialism running through King’s thought, going all the way back to his days as a student. He finds a consistent thread of anti-capitalism in King’s speeches. And he finds that King was building alliances with the left-wing of the labor movement and allying himself with activists who called for structural change in the economy. King, in other words, was a radical well before he offered his prophetic denunciation of the Vietnam War in 1967 or joined the Memphis sanitation workers on strike in 1968.

King’s radicalism is lost to the obfuscating fog of memory. In American culture today, we have several Martin Luther King, Jrs: the Commemorative King, the Therapeutic King, the Conservative King, and the Commodified King. Each of these Kings competes for our attention, but each of them represents a vision of King that he himself would not have recognized.

First is the commemorative King. Only fifteen years after his death, King won an extraordinary recognition — he became the only individual (unless you count Presidents Washington and Lincoln, whose birthdays have been unceremoniously consolidated into President’s Day) with his own national holiday. That a man who was berated as un-American, hounded by the FBI, arrested and jailed numerous times, was recognized by a national holiday is nothing short of amazing. To be sure, the King holiday met with significant opposition, particularly from southerners like Jesse Helms, who contended that King was a tool of the Communist Party, and from John McCain, Evan Mecham, and other conservative Arizonans. But the King Holiday legislation was signed into law after overwhelming congressional approval by none other than President Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and who repeated his act by launching his 1980 election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a tiny place whose only claim to fame was that three young civil rights activists had been murdered there twenty years earlier.

But if there was anything at all subversive in King’s life, it is lost in the feel good celebrations of King Day, which has become a day for picking up litter and painting school classrooms. Not that community service is a bad thing, but it’s a long, long way from King’s vision for social change.

The therapeutic King: In American iconography, King is the great healer, the man who called America to be true to its “creed” of equality and opportunity. King’s message, bereft of its hard-hitting political content, is so anodyne that we can all support it, Republican and Democrat alike. The feel good, inspirational message of King’s life has moved front and center in our memories of King. A popular school curriculum intended to build student self-esteem, for example, calls for children to express their dreams. King’s message is to hold hands and join our voices together, ebony and ivory, in perfect harmony.

The conservative King: Devoid of the political content that drove his message, King has also become an icon of racial conservatism. Today’s most unlikely King acolytes are critics of civil rights policies such as affirmative action. King is the prophet of meritocratic individualism. The most articulate proponent of this version of King (and there are many) is Ward Connerly, the leader of nationwide anti-affirmative action campaign who drew from King’s own words to call for a dismantling of race-sensitive admissions. Only one King speech — King’s address to the 1963 March on Washington, matters to Connerly-type conservatives. And only one line in that speech matters: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

King speeches should be judged by their content. And there’s a lot in the “I Have a Dream” speech that would make McCain and Connerly squirm. King celebrated the “the marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.” And, speaking of the “fierce urgency of Now,” he encouraged the 250,000 strong gathered on the Mall to take more aggressive action. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” At a moment when conservatives (and many liberals) were denouncing the movement for going “too far, too fast,” King sent a clear message. Go further, faster. King went on to support aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws including affirmative action itself. And more than that, he demanded the fundamental reordering of the American economy.

Finally, in perhaps the most American of twists, we have the commodified King — efforts in the last decade, largely spearheaded by the King family itself — to market the words and image of the Reverend King. In classic American fashion, Martin Luther King, Jr. has become a consumer good. King’s family has engaged in an aggressive effort to market the image of the Reverend King, including a multi-million dollar deal with Time Warner for the rights to King’s speeches, writings, and recordings. The King family sued to prevent companies from using King’s image on refrigerator magnets, switchblades, and on “I have a Dream” ice cream cones. But they quickly turned to their own business in King kitsch. In the mid-90s, the Reverend King’s son Dexter King, who administered the King estate, took a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of another King, “THE KING,” Elvis at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee to pick up some marketing lessons. Since the mid-1990s, King’s estate has authorized, among other things, commemorative pins for the Atlanta Summer Olympics with the likeness of Martin Luther King Jr., porcelain statuettes of King, and, my favorite, checkbooks bearing King’s likeness.

Whether commodity or conservative icon, suffice it to say that each of these visions of King is flawed. The commemorative King, celebrates heroism and courage, but risks the creation of a one-dimensional character that glosses over King’s subversive, challenging, and upsetting messages. The therapeutic King stands in sharp contrast to a political strategy that demanded the overthrow of American apartheid and demanded great sacrifices from blacks and whites alike. The conservative King is based on a very selective appropriation of King’s words — largely from a single speech — in service of a cause that King found abhorrent. And the commodified King creates comforting images that are wholly drained of their ability to provoke and challenge — and, moreover, stand in sharp juxtaposition to King’s penetrating critique of American capitalism and his deep-rooted anti-materialism.

Above all, King’s contribution was to unsettle power, to challenge the status quo, something that a porcelain statuette or an Olympic pin or an anti-affirmative action law will never do.

2014 January Limerick # 2

There once was a guy named Sharon, who finally is as dead as a stone
those who think him a hero have IQs of zero, he was at minimal a war criminal to the bone.

Swearing in speech by Kshama Sawant, Socialist elected to Seattle City Council

from Portside Monitor

[Editor's note: At a ceremonial swearing-in on Monday, Kshama Sawant became Seattle's first socialist city council member in almost a century. The full text of her inauguration speech is below.]

My brothers and sisters,

Thank you for your presence here today.

This city has made glittering fortunes for the super wealthy and for the major corporations that dominate Seattle's landscape. At the same time, the lives of working people, the unemployed and the poor grow more difficult by the day. The cost of housing skyrockets, and education and healthcare become inaccessible.

This is not unique to Seattle. Shamefully, in this, the richest country in human history, fifty million of our people - one in six - live in poverty. Around the world, billions do not have access to clean water and basic sanitation and children die every day from malnutrition.

This is the reality of international capitalism. This is the product of the gigantic casino of speculation created by the highway robbers on Wall Street. In this system the market is God, and everything is sacrificed on the altar of profit. Capitalism has failed the 99%.

Despite recent talk of economic growth, it has only been a recovery for the richest 1%, while the rest of us are falling ever farther behind.

In our country, Democratic and Republican politicians alike primarily serve the interests of big business. A completely dysfunctional Congress DOES manage to agree on one thing - regular increases in their already bloated salaries - yet at the same time allows the federal minimum wage to stagnate and fall farther and farther behind inflation. We have the obscene spectacle of the average corporate CEO getting seven thousand dollars an hour, while the lowest-paid workers are called presumptuous in their demand for just fifteen.

To begin to change all of this, we need organized mass movements of workers and young people, relying on their own independent strength. That is how we won unions, civil rights and LGBTQ rights.

Again, throughout the length and breadth of this land, working people are mobilizing for a decent and dignified life for themselves and their children. Look at the fast food workers movement, the campaigns of Walmart workers, and the heroic activism to stop the Keystone XL pipeline!

Right here in SeaTac, we have just witnessed the tremendous and victorious campaign for fifteen dollars an hour. At the same time, in Lorain County, Ohio, twenty-four candidates ran, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as `Independent Labor' and were elected to their City Councils.

I will do my utmost to represent the disenfranchised and the excluded, the poor and the oppressed - by fighting for a $15/hour minimum wage, affordable housing, and taxing the super-rich for a massive expansion of public transit and education. But my voice will be heard by those in power only if workers themselves shout their demands from the rooftops and organize en masse.

My colleagues and I in Socialist Alternative will stand shoulder to shoulder with all those who want to fight for a better world. But working people need a new political party, a mass organization of the working class, run by - and accountable to - themselves. A party that will struggle and campaign in their interest, and that will boldly advocate for alternatives to this crisis-ridden system.

Here in Seattle, political pundits are asking about me: will she compromise? Can she work with others? Of course, I will meet and discuss with representatives of the establishment. But when I do, I will bring the needs and aspirations of working-class people to every table I sit at, no matter who is seated across from me. And let me make one thing absolutely clear: There will be no backroom deals with corporations or their political servants. There will be no rotten sell-out of the people I represent.

I wear the badge of socialist with honor. To the nearly hundred thousand who voted for me, and to the hundreds of you who worked tirelessly on our campaign, I thank you. Let us continue.

The election of a socialist to the Council of a major city in the heartland of global capitalism has made waves around the world. We know because we have received messages of support from Europe, Latin America, Africa and from Asia. Those struggling for change have told us they have been inspired by our victory.

To all those prepared to resist the agenda of big business - in Seattle and nationwide - I appeal to you: get organized. Join with us in building a mass movement for economic and social justice, for democratic socialist change, whereby the resources of society can be harnessed, not for the greed of a small minority, but for the benefit of all people. Solidarity.

Joe Arpaio Shoud Find a Job with Israel's Immigration Agency

by Akiva Eldar

African refugees teach Israeli society lesson in civics

On Dec. 17, when a dazzling blanket of snow still covered the open space adjacent to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, they got off the bus and walked silently in two lines. Some of them held cardboard signs bearing slogans in English such as “Freedom” and “No More Prison.” That setting only added to the surreal spectacle: Rows of dark-skinned men, some with tears streaming down their faces, marched past chanting, “We are human beings!”
Summary⎙ Print After years of ignoring the fate of African asylum seekers, the human dilemma has risen to the top of Israel's public discourse, forcing the authorities to confront it.
Author Akiva Eldar Posted January 8, 2014
Translator(s)Danny Wool

Most Israelis and the media still refer to them as “infiltrators.” Those with a more lenient attitude prefer to call them “illegal residents.” Human rights organizations consider them to be asylum seekers and demand they are recognized as refugees — as people whose homeland has become a desolate wilderness. In many cases, it more resembles a killing field.

Two days had passed since they left Holot, an “open detention center” that the government set up in the southern Negev region after the Supreme Court invalidated a law, which would have allowed it to keep the asylum seekers in prison for up to three years. The facility's guests are expected to appear before the authorities to be counted three times a day. At night, they are shut in behind locked gates. It was from there, deep in the desert, that these asylum seekers began their protest march to Jerusalem, a city that the vast majority of them had never even seen. They hoped that once they were there, standing face to face with the government's institutions, they would be able to ask that the gate to freedom be opened for them.

After spending many long hours marching in an exceptional orderly fashion to the gates of the Knesset, and after standing for an extended time in frigid temperatures, the immigration authorities determined that the 48 hours in which they could not be arrested were up. In a swift action, using excessive force, the 307 Africans were forced onto buses and police vans. Some of them spent the night in Holot, while others were moved to Saharonim Prison.

The violent conclusion of what was called the “Freedom March” was just the first in an unprecedented series of protests that took place throughout the country. After the protesters were imprisoned, and following a series of raids by the immigration authorities in south Tel Aviv, which led to the arrest of about 150 more people, the weakest community in Israel launched a series of demonstrations. Hundreds of demonstrators soon turned into thousands, and then into tens of thousands. Marches in south and central Tel Aviv led to a huge strike, which was impeccably organized.

According to police estimates, the number of demonstrators at the second rally held in Rabin Square — a symbolic site of demonstrations for Israelis — exceeded 20,000. Thousands of workers left their restaurant sinks to experience and offer a lesson in civil action. A community accused of being little more than immigrants seeking work — of having snuck across the border just to earn a living — chose to risk any modest economic security that they had acquired and demand to be recognized as refugees.

The images were broadcast and described to people around the world. Millions of Europeans watched desperate asylum seekers being persecuted by Israeli police. Senior politicians flooded Knesset debates and the media with venomous statements about the asylum seekers. And all this was done under the title of protecting the Jewish majority in the State of Israel.

Was the situation really so dire? Ever since the border fence with Egypt was completed, the number of people who have managed to cross it and enter Israel from the Sinai Peninsula are very few. According to figures released by the Population and Immigration Authority, there were 53,636 asylum seekers (“infiltrators”) in Israel last October. If that group was allowed to run in the election and if its members voted unanimously for their own party, it still would not pass the voter threshold. At the same time, however, there are some 93,000 “tourists without valid visas” in Israel, about half of them from the former Soviet Union. Needless to say, the government is not building special detainment centers for them. The number of people requesting asylum is also significantly lower than the number of legal guest workers in Israel (approximately 70,000), much to the relief of those companies that arrange to bring them to the country and employ them.

To anyone who objects, the government is quick to point out that Israel is the only Western country that shares a land border with Africa. This obligates the government to be especially cautious about maintaining the ratio between asylum seekers and the country’s citizens, more so, for instance, than European nations. It sounds reasonable, but the Knesset’s Center for Research and Information site reports that there are 10 countries in Europe in which the ratio is “worse” than it is in Israel. While in Israel there are 6.9 asylum seekers for every 1,000 residents, the ratio in Latvia is 151 for every 1,000 residents; in Estonia, 94.3; in Malta, 21.4; in Sweden, 12.6; in Norway, 10.8; in Switzerland, 9; in Austria, 8.8; in Germany, 8.3; in Luxembourg, 8.1; and in Cyprus, 7.3.

Some 26,000 Eritreans submitted requests for asylum to various countries around the world in 2012 alone. About 20,000 obtained refugee status, and another 1,500 received complementary protection. At the same time, by August of last year, a committee created by the Israel Immigration Authorities discussed just 80 out of 11,000 requests for political asylum submitted by African refugees. Every last one of them was rejected.

This does not mean that Israel has disregarded its commitment to the UN’s Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, at least not since Israel decided to freeze the ''immediate coordinate return procedure'' of the infiltrators back to Egypt. As of that decision, not one of the asylum seekers was forcibly expelled back to his country of origin. But a source who is intimately familiar with the issue told Al-Monitor that instead the government is causing the Africans to leave of their own accord. He recalled how former Interior Minister Eli Yishai promised to make the lives of the asylum seekers so miserable that they get fed up with life in Israel. This was done by denying them work permits, forbidding them to open bank accounts and a whole series of similar decrees. As a result, some 2,600 people to date signed papers stating that they were “leaving of their own volition.”

Both the prime minister and the interior minister have shown how determined they are to expel all the "infiltrators," much to the satisfaction of the people living in south Tel Aviv. After all, they saw these asylum seekers cast at their doorsteps so unjustly, with utter indifference. At the same time, however, islands of solidarity with the asylum seekers have been popping up throughout Israeli society. Restaurant and cafe owners in Tel Aviv have been serving their food on paper plates in a show of solidarity with the demonstrating and striking workers. Some establishments have even closed their doors and put up signs announcing that their staff has gone to demonstrate alongside their African co-workers. At night, immigration inspectors continue to arrest these asylum seekers and ship them off to containment centers in the desert. In the day, the police may watch the marches taking place along the main streets of the city, but they do so with utter apathy.

For many years, Israeli society has ignored the black-skinned men and women who clean their stairwells and wash their dishes. The rousing demonstration by local civilians, standing shoulder to shoulder with people who were invisible until now, evokes a sense of pride and hope.

Akiva Eldar
Columnist

Akiva Eldar is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Israel Pulse. He was formerly a senior columnist and editorial writer for Haaretz and also served as the Hebrew daily’s US bureau chief and diplomatic correspondent. His most recent book (with Idith Zertal), Lords of the Land, on the Jewish settlements, was on the best-seller list in Israel and has been translated into English, French, German and Arabic.
Original Al-Monitor Translations