Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Great Hysteria

Posted by Andrew Bacevich at 6:10am, August 8, 2017.
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“Through the National Revolution its people were purged of alien diseases and America became American again.” So ends A Cool Million, Nathanael West’s now largely forgotten skewering of classic American rags-to-riches stories. Beginning like a pluck-and-luck Horatio Alger tale, West’s very own “Ragged Dick” -- Lemuel Pitkin -- is mercilessly brutalized over the course of 100 pages, losing his money, his mother’s home, his teeth, an eye, a thumb, a leg, his scalp, and by the end of the absurdist novella his life. My yellowed 1976 paperback of The Collected Works of Nathanael West calls it a “Candide-like satire,” but on recently rereading it, I was struck by how much of the story -- including that near-last line -- had age-of-Trump overtones to it.

So you can add A Cool Million to a list of older works, including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, that might have something to offer in grasping the nature of our present moment. “Obviously, no book is a perfect analogy for the complex events playing out in American politics and around the world,” Sophie Gilbert wrote in a January roundup of such books for The Atlantic. “But for readers, historical works can offer insight into recurring societal trends, as well as reassurance that this moment isn’t unprecedented.”

In his article today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich suggests another author worth revisiting -- novelist John Updike -- and a caution against worrying too much about President Trump and not nearly enough about the culture, the society, the country, and the people who put him in the White House. “Trump is not cause, but consequence,” writes Bacevich tellingly.

Toward the end of A Cool Million, Lemuel Pitkin scores a vaudeville gig in which he buys newspapers each day and fashions them into clubs. With them, nightly, two comedians “beat him violently over the head and body” while telling jokes, before finally employing a huge mallet (labeled “The Works”) to “demolish” him and bring down the house. “His toupee flew off, his eye and teeth popped out, and his wooden leg was knocked into the audience” to a chorus of guffaws, writes West of this sick form of entertainment for a deeply sick society.

Called upon to aid a rebellion he had helped foster in an earlier stage, Pitkin is soon publicly felled by an assassin’s bullet, becoming a martyr and so ushering the National Revolutionary Party, a fascist-style group, to power in America. Trump’s path to the presidency may have been slightly less absurd but, as Bacevich suggests, it also stems from an increasingly sick society. Luckily, Bacevich offers a possible remedy to the current age, although it’s one he’s not certain you’ll like. Read his piece -- and prescriptions -- at your own risk! Nick Turse

Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago
The Post-Cold-War Consensus Collapses
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us.

It was not always so. Millard Fillmore, the 13th president (1850-1853), presided over but did not personify the American republic. He was merely the federal chief executive. Contemporary observers did not refer to his term in office as the Age of Fillmore. With occasional exceptions, Abraham Lincoln in particular, much the same could be said of Fillmore’s successors. They brought to office low expectations, which they rarely exceeded. So when Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885) or William Howard Taft (1909-1913) left the White House, there was no rush to immortalize them by erecting gaudy shrines -- now known as “presidential libraries” -- to the glory of their presidencies. In those distant days, ex-presidents went back home or somewhere else where they could find work.

Over the course of the past century, all that has changed. Ours is a republic that has long since taken on the trappings of a monarchy, with the president inhabiting rarified space as our king-emperor. The Brits have their woman in Buckingham Palace. We have our man in the White House.

Nominally, the Constitution assigns responsibilities and allocates prerogatives to three co-equal branches of government. In practice, the executive branch enjoys primacy. Prompted by a seemingly endless series of crises since the Great Depression and World War II, presidents have accumulated ever-greater authority, partly through usurpation, but more often than not through forfeiture.

At the same time, they also took on various extra-constitutional responsibilities. By the beginning of the present century, Americans took it for granted that the occupant of the Oval Office should function as prophet, moral philosopher, style-setter, interpreter of the prevailing zeitgeist, and -- last but hardly least -- celebrity-in-chief. In short, POTUS was the bright star at the center of the American solar system.

As recently as a year ago, few saw in this cult of the presidency cause for complaint. On odd occasions, some particularly egregious bit of executive tomfoolery might trigger grumbling about an “imperial presidency.” Yet rarely did such complaints lead to effective remedial action. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 might be considered the exception that proves the rule. Inspired by the disaster of the Vietnam War and intended to constrain presidents from using force without congressional buy-in and support, that particular piece of legislation ranks alongside the Volstead Act of 1919 (enacted to enforce Prohibition) as among the least effective ever to become law.

In truth, influential American institutions -- investment banks and multinational corporations, churches and universities, big city newspapers and TV networks, the bloated national security apparatus and both major political parties -- have found reason aplenty to endorse a system that elevates the president to the status of demigod. By and large, it’s been good for business, whatever that business happens to be.

Furthermore, it’s our president -- not some foreign dude -- who is, by common consent, the most powerful person in the universe. For inhabitants of a nation that considers itself both “exceptional” and “indispensable,” this seems only right and proper. So Americans generally like it that their president is the acknowledged Leader of the Free World rather than some fresh-faced pretender from France or Canada.

Then came the Great Hysteria. Arriving with a Pearl Harbor-like shock, it erupted on the night of November 8, 2016, just as the news that Hillary Clinton was losing Florida and appeared certain to lose much else besides became apparent.

Suddenly, all the habits and precedents that had contributed to empowering the modern American presidency no longer made sense. That a single deeply flawed individual along with a handful of unelected associates and family members should be entrusted with determining the fate of the planet suddenly seemed the very definition of madness.

Emotion-laden upheavals producing behavior that is not entirely rational are hardly unknown in the American experience. Indeed, they recur with some frequency. The Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are examples of the phenomenon. So also are the two Red Scares of the twentieth century, the first in the early 1920s and the second, commonly known as “McCarthyism,” coinciding with the onset of the Cold War.

Yet the response to Donald Trump’s election, combining as it has fear, anger, bewilderment, disgust, and something akin to despair, qualifies as an upheaval without precedent. History itself had seemingly gone off the rails. The crude Andrew Jackson’s 1828 ousting of an impeccably pedigreed president, John Quincy Adams, was nothing compared to the vulgar Donald Trump’s defeat of an impeccably credentialed graduate of Wellesley and Yale who had served as first lady, United States senator, and secretary of state. A self-evidently inconceivable outcome -- all the smart people agreed on that point -- had somehow happened anyway.

A vulgar, bombastic, thrice-married real-estate tycoon and reality TV host as prophet, moral philosopher, style-setter, interpreter of the prevailing zeitgeist, and chief celebrity? The very idea seemed both absurd and intolerable.

If we have, as innumerable commentators assert, embarked upon the Age of Trump, the defining feature of that age might well be the single-minded determination of those horrified and intent on ensuring its prompt termination. In 2016, TIME magazine chose Trump as its person of the year. In 2017, when it comes to dominating the news, that “person” might turn out to be a group -- all those fixated on cleansing the White House of Trump’s defiling presence.

Egged on and abetted in every way by Trump himself, the anti-Trump resistance has made itself the Big Story. Lies, hate, collusion, conspiracy, fascism: rarely has the everyday vocabulary of American politics been as ominous and forbidding as over the past six months. Take resistance rhetoric at face value and you might conclude that Donald Trump is indeed the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, his presence in the presidential saddle eclipsing all other concerns. Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death will just have to wait.

The unspoken assumption of those most determined to banish him from public life appears to be this: once he’s gone, history will be returned to its intended path, humankind will breathe a collective sigh of relief, and all will be well again. Yet such an assumption strikes me as remarkably wrongheaded -- and not merely because, should Trump prematurely depart from office, Mike Pence will succeed him. Expectations that Trump’s ouster will restore normalcy ignore the very factors that first handed him the Republican nomination (with a slew of competitors wondering what hit them) and then put him in the Oval Office (with a vastly more seasoned and disciplined, if uninspiring, opponent left to bemoan the injustice of it all).

Not all, but many of Trump’s supporters voted for him for the same reason that people buy lottery tickets: Why not? In their estimation, they had little to lose. Their loathing of the status quo is such that they may well stick with Trump even as it becomes increasingly obvious that his promise of salvation -- an America made “great again” -- is not going to materialize.

Yet those who imagine that Trump’s removal will put things right are likewise deluding themselves. To persist in thinking that he defines the problem is to commit an error of the first order. Trump is not cause, but consequence.

For too long, the cult of the presidency has provided an excuse for treating politics as a melodrama staged at four-year intervals and centering on hopes of another Roosevelt or Kennedy or Reagan appearing as the agent of American deliverance. Donald Trump’s ascent to the office once inhabited by those worthies should demolish such fantasies once and for all.

How is it that someone like Trump could become president in the first place? Blame sexism, Fox News, James Comey, Russian meddling, and Hillary’s failure to visit Wisconsin all you want, but a more fundamental explanation is this: the election of 2016 constituted a de facto referendum on the course of recent American history. That referendum rendered a definitive judgment: the underlying consensus informing U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War has collapsed. Precepts that members of the policy elite have long treated as self-evident no longer command the backing or assent of the American people. Put simply: it’s the ideas, stupid.

Rabbit Poses a Question

“Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?” As the long twilight struggle was finally winding down, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, novelist John Updike’s late-twentieth-century Everyman, pondered that question. In short order, Rabbit got his answer. So, too, after only perfunctory consultation, did his fellow citizens.

The passing of the Cold War offered cause for celebration. On that point all agreed. Yet, as it turned out, it did not require reflection from the public at large. Policy elites professed to have matters well in hand. The dawning era, they believed, summoned Americans not to think anew, but to keep doing precisely what they were accustomed to doing, albeit without fretting further about Communist takeovers or the risks of nuclear Armageddon. In a world where a “single superpower” was calling the shots, utopia was right around the corner. All that was needed was for the United States to demonstrate the requisite confidence and resolve.

Three specific propositions made up the elite consensus that coalesced during the initial decade of the post-Cold-War era. According to the first, the globalization of corporate capitalism held the key to wealth creation on a hitherto unimaginable scale. According to the second, jettisoning norms derived from Judeo-Christian religious traditions held the key to the further expansion of personal freedom. According to the third, muscular global leadership exercised by the United States held the key to promoting a stable and humane international order.

Unfettered neoliberalism plus the unencumbered self plus unabashed American assertiveness: these defined the elements of the post-Cold-War consensus that formed during the first half of the 1990s -- plus what enthusiasts called the information revolution. The miracle of that “revolution,” gathering momentum just as the Soviet Union was going down for the count, provided the secret sauce that infused the emerging consensus with a sense of historical inevitability.

The Cold War itself had fostered notable improvements in computational speed and capacity, new modes of communication, and techniques for storing, accessing, and manipulating information. Yet, however impressive, such developments remained subsidiary to the larger East-West competition. Only as the Cold War receded did they move from background to forefront. For true believers, information technology came to serve a quasi-theological function, promising answers to life’s ultimate questions. Although God might be dead, Americans found in Bill Gates and Steve Jobs nerdy but compelling idols.

More immediately, in the eyes of the policy elite, the information revolution meshed with and reinforced the policy consensus. For those focused on the political economy, it greased the wheels of globalized capitalism, creating vast new opportunities for trade and investment. For those looking to shed constraints on personal freedom, information promised empowerment, making identity itself something to choose, discard, or modify. For members of the national security apparatus, the information revolution seemed certain to endow the United States with seemingly unassailable military capabilities. That these various enhancements would combine to improve the human condition was taken for granted; that they would, in due course, align everybody -- from Afghans to Zimbabweans -- with American values and the American way of life seemed more or less inevitable.

The three presidents of the post-Cold-War era -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama -- put these several propositions to the test. Politics-as-theater requires us to pretend that our 42nd, 43rd, and 44th presidents differed in fundamental ways. In practice, however, their similarities greatly outweighed any of those differences. Taken together, the administrations over which they presided collaborated in pursuing a common agenda, each intent on proving that the post-Cold-War consensus could work in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

To be fair, it did work for some. “Globalization” made some people very rich indeed. In doing so, however, it greatly exacerbated inequality, while doing nothing to alleviate the condition of the American working class and underclass.

The emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism improved the status of groups long subjected to discrimination. Yet these advances have done remarkably little to reduce the alienation and despair pervading a society suffering from epidemics of chronic substance abuse, morbid obesity, teen suicide, and similar afflictions. Throw in the world’s highest incarceration rate, a seemingly endless appetite for porn, urban school systems mired in permanent crisis, and mass shootings that occur with metronomic regularity, and what you have is something other than the profile of a healthy society.

As for militarized American global leadership, it has indeed resulted in various bad actors meeting richly deserved fates. Goodbye, Saddam. Good riddance, Osama. Yet it has also embroiled the United States in a series of costly, senseless, unsuccessful, and ultimately counterproductive wars. As for the vaunted information revolution, its impact has been ambiguous at best, even if those with eyeballs glued to their personal electronic devices can’t tolerate being offline long enough to assess the actual costs of being perpetually connected.

In November 2016, Americans who consider themselves ill served by the post-Cold-War consensus signaled that they had had enough. Voters not persuaded that neoliberal economic policies, a culture taking its motto from the Outback steakhouse chain, and a national security strategy that employs the U.S. military as a global police force were working to their benefit provided a crucial margin in the election of Donald Trump.

The response of the political establishment to this extraordinary repudiation testifies to the extent of its bankruptcy. The Republican Party still clings to the notion that reducing taxes, cutting government red tape, restricting abortion, curbing immigration, prohibiting flag-burning, and increasing military spending will alleviate all that ails the country. Meanwhile, to judge by the promises contained in their recently unveiled (and instantly forgotten) program for a “Better Deal,” Democrats believe that raising the minimum wage, capping the cost of prescription drugs, and creating apprenticeship programs for the unemployed will return their party to the good graces of the American electorate.

In both parties embarrassingly small-bore thinking prevails, with Republicans and Democrats equally bereft of fresh ideas. Each party is led by aging hacks. Neither has devised an antidote to the crisis in American politics signified by the nomination and election of Donald Trump.

While our emperor tweets, Rome itself fiddles.

Starting Over

I am by temperament a conservative and a traditionalist, wary of revolutionary movements that more often than not end up being hijacked by nefarious plotters more interested in satisfying their own ambitions than in pursuing high ideals. Yet even I am prepared to admit that the status quo appears increasingly untenable. Incremental change will not suffice. The challenge of the moment is to embrace radicalism without succumbing to irresponsibility.

The one good thing we can say about the election of Donald Trump -- to borrow an image from Thomas Jefferson -- is this: it ought to serve as a fire bell in the night. If Americans have an ounce of sense, the Trump presidency will cure them once and for all of the illusion that from the White House comes redemption. By now we ought to have had enough of de facto monarchy.

By extension, Americans should come to see as intolerable the meanness, corruption, and partisan dysfunction so much in evidence at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue. We need not wax sentimental over the days when Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen presided over the Senate to conclude that Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer represent something other than progress. If Congress continues to behave as contemptibly as it has in recent years (and in recent weeks), it will, by default, allow the conditions that have produced Trump and his cronies to prevail.

So it’s time to take another stab at an approach to governance worthy of a democratic republic. Where to begin? I submit that Rabbit Angstrom’s question offers a place to start: What’s the point of being an American?

Authentic progressives and principled conservatives will offer different answers to Rabbit’s query. My own answer is rooted in an abiding conviction that our problems are less quantitative than qualitative. Rather than simply more -- yet more wealth, more freedom, more attempts at global leadership -- the times call for different. In my view, the point of being an American is to participate in creating a society that strikes a balance between wants and needs, that exists in harmony with nature and the rest of humankind, and that is rooted in an agreed upon conception of the common good.

My own prescription for how to act upon that statement of purpose is unlikely to find favor with most readers of TomDispatch. But therein lies the basis for an interesting debate, one that is essential to prospects for stemming the accelerating decay of American civic life.

Initiating such a debate, and so bringing into focus core issues, will remain next to impossible, however, without first clearing away the accumulated debris of the post-Cold-War era. Preliminary steps in that direction, listed in no particular order, ought to include the following:

First, abolish the Electoral College. Doing so will preclude any further occurrence of the circumstances that twice in recent decades cast doubt on the outcome of national elections and thereby did far more than any foreign interference to undermine the legitimacy of American politics.

Second, rollback gerrymandering. Doing so will help restore competitive elections and make incumbency more tenuous.

Third, limit the impact of corporate money on elections at all levels, if need be by amending the Constitution.

Fourth, mandate a balanced federal budget, thereby demolishing the pretense that Americans need not choose between guns and butter.

Fifth, implement a program of national service, thereby eliminating the All-Volunteer military and restoring the tradition of the citizen-soldier. Doing so will help close the gap between the military and society and enrich the prevailing conception of citizenship. It might even encourage members of Congress to think twice before signing off on wars that the commander-in-chief wants to fight.

Sixth, enact tax policies that will promote greater income equality.

Seventh, increase public funding for public higher education, thereby ensuring that college remains an option for those who are not well-to-do.

Eighth, beyond mere “job” creation, attend to the growing challenges of providing meaningful work -- employment that is both rewarding and reasonably remunerative -- for those without advanced STEM degrees.

Ninth, end the thumb-twiddling on climate change and start treating it as the first-order national security priority that it is.

Tenth, absent evident progress on the above, create a new party system, breaking the current duopoly in which Republicans and Democrats tacitly collaborate to dictate the policy agenda and restrict the range of policy options deemed permissible.

These are not particularly original proposals and I do not offer them as a panacea. They may, however, represent preliminary steps toward devising some new paradigm to replace a post-Cold-War consensus that, in promoting transnational corporate greed, mistaking libertinism for liberty, and embracing militarized neo-imperialism as the essence of statecraft, has paved the way for the presidency of Donald Trump.

We can and must do better. But doing so will require that we come up with better and truer ideas to serve as a foundation for American politics.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, now out in paperback. His next book will be an interpretive history of the United States from the end of the Cold War to the election of Donald Trump.

from Al-Monitor
Author Daoud Kuttab Posted August 1, 2017

Archives belie Israel's narrative of Palestinian conflict
It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, an image can also be as dangerous as a cannon. This appears to be the conclusion reached by two women, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, who have dedicated most of their lives to researching images related to the conflict and their use and fate.

Summary⎙ Print Early members of the Zionist movement and later Israelis have consistently attempted to control the narrative of the conflict with the Palestinians, including by seizing photographic evidence of Palestine and the Palestinians' history.




Rona Sela, a curator and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, recounted to Al-Monitor how she first became involved with these images 20 years ago. “I was doing research in the mid-1990s,” she began. “My focus was an analysis of Zionist photography in the early stages of the state of Israel. I researched the way institutional Zionist propaganda departments from the 1920s to 1948 used visual images to construct a national identity to build people’s consciousness about national issues. As the Palestinian narrative was, in most cases, missing from the Zionist one, I started searching for Palestinian images.”

Early on in her research, Sela found a large group of images by the photographer Khallil Rasas, whose work was not known but had been looted from his studio in Jerusalem. Rasas’ images of Palestinian life during the first half of the 20th century, never made public, often contradicted the official Israeli narrative. Sela published a few texts about Rasas and his work as well as other Palestinian photographers active in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sela explained, “In the beginning, it was accidental that I came across traces of the looting, but then I started deliberating trying to find more material that was plundered and to understand what the meaning of these images was and how they fit into the larger narrative of the conflict.”

Another Sela discovery was a pre-state Zionist project called Village Files, Aerial Photos and Surveys. Sela went public with her research in 2009 and later published it in the Jerusalem Quarterly in 2013.

The project involved detailed documentation of pre-1948 Palestinian villages in which the Jewish underground was interested. The Village Files included photographs and surveys of most of the 418 Palestinian villages that have since been demolished or repopulated by Zionists after the Nakba. According to Sela’s published research, many of the images were taken from the air by young Jewish couples often posing as tourists taking romantic flights over the villages. In fact, they were documenting the area and providing the photos to the Jewish underground.

The images were to have been kept secret to prevent the possibility of comparisons between before and after photos. Sela believes that the secrecy behind Israeli efforts to hide the images is part of an attempt to protect the monopoly enjoyed by the Israeli narrative. She remarked, “From my experience, correspondents, talks and processes, it is very clear that Israel is interested in one narrative prevailing.”

Sela has published numerous articles on the subject, held exhibits and produced films detailing what she has unearthed. Sela’s publications and exhibits, as per her website, include “Photography in Palestine/Eretz-Israel in the 30s and 40s” (2000), “Six Days and Forty Years” (2007), “The Absent-Present Palestinian Villages" (2009), “Made Public — Palestinian Photographs in Military Archives in Israel” (2009), “Chalil Raad, Photographs, 1891-1948” (2010), “Effervescence (Unrest) — Housing, Language, History — A New Generation in Jewish-Arab Cities” (2013) and “Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflict” (2015).

Sela’s most recent essay, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure — Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives,” focuses on two archives: those of the Palestinian Research Center and the Film Center of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Media Department, both of which were stolen by the Israeli army after invading Beirut in 1982. Published in March 2017 in the “Journal of Social Semiotics,” Sela’s article reflects on what she calls a “characteristic of colonial archives,” describing “how the ruling state plunders/loots the colonized’ archives and treasures and controls them in its colonial archives — erasing them from the public sphere by repressive means, censor.”

According to Sela, she has a forthcoming article on the looting of the films in Beirut in the academic journal “Anthropology of the Middle East,” and an essay about Rasas is also in the works.

Researching and attempting to publicize looted Palestinian imagery has also been a passion of Azza el-Hassan. When the Israeli army looted the Palestinian film archive, Hassan, a Palestinian documentary filmmaker born into a PLO family, was 11. She recalled that Hiba Jawharia, daughter of the Jerusalem-born Hani Jawharia, who filmed much of the material for the PLO’s film unit, had been a childhood friend of hers in Beirut. Hani was killed on April 11, 1976, while filming in south Lebanon, leaving Hassan and her friend forever shaken.

Hassan went on to study at the University of Glasgow, where she obtained a BA in film in 1994, and a year later obtained an MA in television documentary from the University of London. After concluding her studies, she was able to move to Palestine with the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accord. She related to Al-Monitor how the story of the missing archives — including the footage shot by her childhood friend’s father — never left her. Hassan ultimately decided to trace what had happened to the films.

Before the Israelis arrived in Beirut, some of the films had been collected at the last moment and hidden in different homes and locations. Most, however, were seized by Israel and are now in its army's archives. Hassan decided to embark on a journey that would eventually take her to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel in search of the missing material. She documented her adventure and search in “Kings and Extras,” a 2004 German-Palestinian production.

A 2006 review of the film by the author Maymanah Farhat published by the Electronic Intifada touches on the historical and cultural importance of the search in Palestinian history. “'Kings and Extras' begins to gain importance not only with the documentation of a missing piece of history, but also as a portrait of a people resolved to maintain their community, culture and political struggle,” wrote Farhat.

The efforts by Sela, Hassan and others to search, document and present the public with hidden images of Palestine and the Palestinians flies in the face of the prevailing Israeli narrative, which aims to negate the Palestinians and therefore justify the continued occupation and colonization of the land and the people. Ongoing attempts to muzzle information and keep the truth hidden from a curious public will not succeed in erasing the memories and images that show what Palestine was before the Zionists and Israelis attempted to erase its history and with it the Palestinians' presence and rights in Palestine.



Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/08/israel-palestine-photography-narrative-conflict.html#ixzz4ocZuCIZM

The Crisis in Venezuela The Left and Venezuela

The situation in Venezuela is dramatic but this does not explain the centrality of the country in all the news reports. Situations of greater seriousness in other countries are totally ignored by the same media. In Colombia, since the beginning of the year, 46 social movement leaders have been assassinated and in the last 14 months 120 have perished. More terrifying is the scene in Mexico. Every day some journalist is added to the long list of students, teachers . . .
Claudio Katz
The Bullet
August 29, 2017

Supporters of President Nicolás Maduro participate in a rally in Caracas in support of the national Constituent Assembly.


During the last two months Venezuela has been faced with a terrible wave of violence. It has already resulted in more than 60 deaths along with looted schools, burned public buildings, destroyed public transportation and emptied hospitals. The major media, however, simply engage in a running stream of gruesome denunciations of the government. They have installed the image of a dictator in conflict with the opposition democrats.

But the statistics do not corroborate that narrative, especially when it comes to those who have fallen. When the number had risen to 39, an initial report pointed to only four who were victims of the security forces. The remainder had died in looting or shoot-outs within the opposition mobilizations.[1] Another assessment noted that 60 per cent of those killed had absolutely nothing to do with the clashes.[2]

These characterizations are consistent with the estimates that attribute most of the murders to snipers linked with the opposition. More recent inquiries report that most of the victims lost their lives through vandalism or settlements of accounts.[3]

There are numerous denunciations as well of incursions by paramilitary groups linked to the Right. And there are indications that much of the violence enjoys local protection from municipalities governed by the opposition.[4]

Those death tolls are consistent with the fascist brutality that led to setting afire persons associated with Chavismo.[5] Burning alive a partisan of the government is a practice more closely linked to the Colombian paramilitaries or the criminal underworld than it is to the traditional political organizations. Some analysts even estimate that out of a total of 60 deaths, 27 were of sympathizers of Chavismo.[6]

Others say that within the opposition marches there are some 15,000 persons trained as shock groups. They are using balaclavas, shields and home-made weapons to create a chaotic climate and establish “liberated territories.”[7]

Assessing the Violence
The assessments presented by the opposition are diametrically opposite, but have been refuted by detailed reports on the victims.[8] Since no one acknowledges the existence of “independent” assessments, it is appropriate to judge what is happening, bearing in mind the antecedents. In the guarimba of February 2014, 43 persons died, the great majority of them unrelated to the political clashes or police repression.

Similarly, we need to assess how the opposition reacted when faced with an equivalent challenge. Its governments finished off the “Caracazo” of 1989 with hundreds of deaths and thousands of wounded.

The situation in Venezuela is dramatic but this does not explain the centrality of the country in all the news reports. Situations of greater seriousness in other countries are totally ignored by the same media.

In Colombia, since the beginning of the year, 46 social movement leaders have been assassinated and in the last 14 months 120 have perished. Between 2002 and 2016 the paramilitary forces massacred 558 mass leaders, and in the last two decades up to 2,500 tradeunionists have been murdered.[9] Why no mention by any broadcaster of repute of this ongoing bloodshed in Venezuela’s nearest neighbour?

More terrifying is the scene in Mexico. Every day some journalist is added to the long list of students, teachers and social fighters who are assassinated. In the climate of social warfare imposed by the “anti-drug trafficking actions,” 29,917 people have disappeared.[10] Should not this level of killings attract more journalistic attention than Venezuela?

Honduras is another hair-raising case. Along with Berta Cáceres 15 other militants have been murdered. Between 2002 and 2014 the number of assassinated environmental defenders has risen to 111.[11] The list of victims of the horror who are ignored by the hegemonic press could be extended to Peru’s political prisoners. Moreover, very few know of the suffering confronted by the Puerto Rican independence leader Oscar López Rivera during his 35 years of imprisonment.

The majority of the Latin American population simply does not know of the tragedies prevailing in the countries governed by the Right. The media’s double standard confirms that Venezuela’s prominence on the television screens is not due to humanitarian concerns.

Forms of a Coup
The media coverage shores up the opposition’s promotion of a coup. Since they cannot carry out classic disturbances like those that led to Pinochet’s coup, they try to remove President Maduro through the dislocation of society. They repeat what was attempted in February 2014 in order to commit an institutional coup similar to the ones carried out in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2014) or Brazil (2016). They hope to impose through force what they will later validate in the ballot boxes.

The Right lacks the military force used in the past to return to government. But it is trying to recreate such intervention by staging skirmishes at military barracks, setting fire to police stations or marching on military headquarters.

Its plan combines sabotage of the economy with riots by armed groups which, in contrast to Colombia, act anonymously. These actions are mingled with the criminal underworld and they terrorize merchants.[12]

The actions include fascist methods sponsored by the most violent currents of anti-Chavismo. They appropriate the insurgent symbolism forged by the popular movements and present their pillage as a heroic gesture. Their leader Leopoldo López is not some innocent politician. Any court operating under the rule of law would have sentenced him to life imprisonment for his criminal liability.

The Right promotes a climate of civil war in order to demoralize the Chavista bases, affected by the lack of food and medicine. It is explicit in its call for foreign intervention and negotiates with the creditor banks an interruption in the country’s access to credit.

The opposition hopes to lynch Maduro in order to bury Chavismo. It takes its battle to the streets, in the conquest of public opinion and the collapse of the economy. It considers elections as nothing more than a simple coronation of this offensive.

But it is confronting growing obstacles. The predominance of the violence in its marches alienates the majority of those who are discontented and wears down its own demonstrators. As it did in 2014 the rebuff of the fascists undermines the entire opposition. Maduro’s steadfastness, moreover, deters attendance in the marches. They have not managed to penetrate the popular neighborhoods where they still confront the risk of an adverse armed conflict.[13]

The big bourgeoisie in Venezuela incites the coup with the regional support of Macri, Temer, Santos and Peña Nieto. For months it has been promoting a destabilizing plan in the OAS. But it has failed to get results in that area. Proposed sanctions against Venezuela have been unsuccessful because of the opposition of various foreign ministries; they have failed to achieve the unanimity with which Cuba was expelled from the OAS in the 1960s.

Notorious, as well, is the United States’ promotion of coups with the aim of regaining control over the major crude oil reserve on the continent. The State Department wants to repeat the operations it used in Iraq or Libya, in the knowledge that after overthrowing Maduro no one will remember where Venezuela is. It suffices to see how the media omit any mention in the news of the countries where the Pentagon has already intervened. Once the adversary is liquidated, the news turns to other issues.

The strategic goals of imperialism are not registered by those who highlight the flirtation of some U.S. newspaper with the Venezuelan president or the verbal ambiguities of Trump.[14] They imagine that those irrelevant facts illustrate the absence of any conflict between the United States and Chavismo. But it does not register with them that the immense majority of the press is maliciously attacking Maduro and that the multimillionaire in the White House denies each day what he said the previous day.

Trump is not indifferent or neutral. He simply delegates to the CIA and the Pentagon the implementation of a conspiracy that is designed through the Sharp and Venezuela Freedom 2plans. Those operations include espionage, troop deployment and cover for terrorism.[15] They develop in a stealthy way while the major media outlets discredit any condemnation of those preparations. They question especially the “exaggerations of the left” so that no one will disturb the conspirators.

Some analysts think the presence of Chevron in Venezuela – or PDVSA’s continued business in the United States – illustrate a tight association between the two governments.[16] They conclude from this relationship that there is no coup scenario. But those connections do not alter in the least the Empire’s decision to overthrow the Bolivarian government.

The activities of U.S. corporations in Venezuela (and of their counterparts in the United States) have persisted from the outset of the Chavista process. But Bush, Obama and Trump have sought to recover direct imperial control over the oil. They cannot get this through a strained relationship between partners or clients. They want to install the model of privatization that prevails in Mexico and to expel Russia and China from their backyard.

Attitude of the Left
If the diagnosis of a reactionary coup is correct, the position of the left should not give rise to disagreements. Our main enemies are the Right and imperialism, and to crush them is always a priority. This elementary principle must be reaffirmed at critical times when what is obvious can become confused.

Whatever our criticisms were of Salvador Allende, our central battle was against Pinochet. Similarly, we adopted a corresponding line of conduct toward the Argentine gorillas of 1955 or the saboteurs of Arbenz, Torrijos and the various anti-imperialist governments of the region. This position in Venezuela today points to the need for common action against the rightist escalation.

When a coup is on the horizon, it is indispensable to single out those who are responsible for the crisis. Those who cause a disaster are not the same as those who are powerless to resolve it.

This distinction applies in the economic field. The errors committed by Maduro are both numerous and unjustifiable, but those guilty of the present damage are the capitalists. The government is tolerant or incapable, but it does not belong on the same plane. Those who commit the monumental error of drawing a line of identity between both sectors[17] confuse responsibilities of a different nature.

The government’s mistakes have been demonstrated in the inoperative system of currency exchange rates, the unacceptable external debt, or in the lack of control over prices and smuggling. But the collapse of the economy has been caused by the affluent who manipulate the currencies, trigger inflation, handle imported goods and limit supplies of basic goods.

The Executive is unresponsive or acts mistakenly for many reasons: inefficiency, tolerance of corruption, protection of the bolibourgeoisie, connivance with millionaires disguised as Chavistas. That’s why it does not cut support to the private groups that receive cheap dollars in order to import dear. But the collapse of production has been carried out by the ruling class in order to overthrow Maduro. Not to recognize that conflict is to display an unwonted level of myopia.

This blindness prevents recognition of another key fact at this time: the resistance of Chavismo to the rightist onslaught. Albeit with methods and attitudes that are highly questionable, Maduro is not surrendering. He maintains the vertical structure of the PSUV, he favours the banning of the critical currents, and he preserves a bureaucracy that strangles responses from below. But unlike Dilma or Lugo he does not give in. His conduct is the exact opposite of the capitulation carried out by Syriza in Greece.

This stance explains the hatred of the powerful. The government has made the excellent decision to withdraw from the OAS. It has abandoned the Ministry of Colonies and carried out the rupture that the left has always demanded. This decision should arouse the overwhelming support that very few have expressed.

Like any administration under attack from the Right, the government has resorted to force in its self-defence. The establishment media denounce that reaction with unusual hysteria. Forgotten are the justifications habitually made by governments of another character when they face similar situations. But Maduro has also been challenged conversely for his relative indulgence toward the fascists. He has simply adopted guarded measures in response to the opposition savagery.

In its response the government has of course committed injustices. That’s the regrettable cost of any significant confrontation with the counter-revolution. These mishaps have been present in all battles with the reaction, from Bolívar to Fidel. There is a need to avoid self-indulgence in this delicate terrain, but without repeating the slanders propagated by the opposition.

Maduro is directing his fire against the Rightist brutality and not against the people. So it makes no sense to compare him with Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein. He has not carried out any massacre of left-wing activists or participated in war-mongering adventures instigated by the United States. The analogy with Stalin is more ridiculous, but it reminds us that the spectre of Hitler hovers over many of the opposition leaders associated with Uribe or nostalgic for a Pinochet.

Social-Democratic Positions
In recent months, as well, among the adversaries of the Right there has been an increase in views that blame Maduro for Venezuela’s agony. These opinions repeat the old social- democratic posture of joining with the reaction at critical moments.

They question the legitimacy of the government, using the same arguments as the opposition. Instead of accusing the CIA, the escuálidos [the squalid ones, a Venezuelan phrase for the filthy rich], or the OAS, they concentrate their objections against Chavismo. They do this in the name of a democratic ideal that is as abstract as it is divorced from the battle to determine who will prevail in the running of the state.

This position has affected various “critical left” thinkers [pensadores del post-progresismo] linked to autonomism. Not only do they accuse Maduro for the present situation, they say he has reinforced an authoritarian leadership in order to maintain the model based on hydrocarbon rents.[18]

This characterization is very similar to the liberal thesis that attributes all of Venezuela’s problems to populist politics, implemented by tyrants who are squandering the resources of the state. Only they use language that is more diplomatic in its diagnosis.

Other views of the same order point more categorically to the responsibility of the Chavista leader. They call on us as well to avoid “the conspiratorial over-simplification of blaming the Right or imperialism” for the country’s troubles.[19] But are the conspirators of the reaction imaginary? Are the murdered, the paramilitaries and the plans of the Pentagon paranoiac Bolivarian inventions?

Without answering this elementary question, that position also dismisses any comparison with what happened in Chile in 1973. However, it does not explain why that analogy is inapplicable. It takes for granted that the two situations differ without noting the huge similarities in respect to the shortages, the conservative irritation of the middle class or the intervention of the CIA.

The disputed parallels with Allende are, however, accepted in the case of the first Peronist government, which is viewed as a direct antecedent of Chavismo. But is the resemblance located in the years of stability or in the moments prior to the coup of 1955? The preoccupation with the escalation of violence suggests that the similarity is in relation to that latter period. And in a situation of that type what was the priority? Confront Perón’s authoritarianism or resist the gorillas?

The social-democrats and “critical left” point to the authoritarian Maduro as the main cause of the current situation.[20] That’s why they downplay the danger of a coup and reject the need to prepare some defense against the Right’s provocations.

But the consequences of this attitude are demonstrated whenever the oligarchs and their bandits return to government. The recent events in Honduras, Paraguay or Brazil do not even arouse alarm among those who demonize Chavismo.

They object as well to the extractivism, indebtedness and contracts with oil companies. But they do not explain if they are demanding anticapitalist and socialist alternatives to these obvious failings of Maduro. The same applies to the shortages and the speculation. Are they urging him to act with greater firmness against the bankers and the big commercial cartels? Do they propose confiscations, nationalizations, or direct popular control?

By adopting these initiatives one could imagine building bridges with the government, but never with the opposition. The detractors of Chavismo sidestep this difference.

‘Critical Left’ Appeals
The social-democratic viewpoint characterizes the urgent call for peace signed by numerous intellectuals. This statement promotes a peace process, rejecting both the authoritarian turn of Chavismo and the violent attitude of right-wing sectors.[21]

The call favours equilibrium to overcome the polarization and resorts to a language closer to that of the foreign ministries than to the popular activists. The tone is in conformity with the implicit attachment to a theory of two evils. Against both extremes it proposes to take the middle road.

But this equidistance was immediately belied by the fundamental responsibility it assigned to the government. And not only does it overlook the harassment of the Right, but imperialism is barely mentioned in passing.

The text was met with a powerful reply sponsored by the REDH [Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity] and signed by many intellectuals. This criticism rightly objected to the fascination with conventional republicanism and noted the pre-eminent gravitation of extra-constitutional forces in critical situations.[22]

The liberal relapse of the post-progressive or “critical left” thinkers recreates what happened with the social-democratic Gramcians in the 1980s. The animosity of that group toward Leninism and the Cuban revolution is comparable to the present hostility to Chavismo. A number of those who signed the call have passed through both periods.

But the present social-democratic variant is late and lacks the political reference once contributed by the Spanish PSOE. The social-liberal turn of that party has completely demolished its initial progressive imaginary. That it is now orphaned explains, perhaps, the present re-encounter with the old liberalism.

In some cases this evolution is the culmination of the division that has affected distinct variants of autonomism. The positions taken toward the Bolivarian process have triggered this fracture. Those who chose to line up with the opposition are suspicious of those who “cling to Chavismo.”[23]

But this latter sector has thought through the previous insufficiencies and has come to understand the need to fight for the state power with socialist perspectives related to Latin American Marxism.

In contrast, the other segment continues navigating in the ambiguity of generalities about anti-patriarchism and anti-extractivism without offering any concrete example of what is proposed. Absorbed by the liberal universe, their enigmatic vagaries no longer enrich left-wing thinking. Between their forgetfulness of the class struggle and their fascination with bourgeois institutionality, their denunciations of extractivism are becoming a picturesque curiosity.

Absent-Minded Dogmatism
A discourse that is convergent with social democracy is also disseminated using sectarian arguments. In this case Maduro’s is portrayed as a corrupt government, submissive and adaptable, that is consolidating a dictatorial regime.[24] On other occasions that same illegitimacy is described with more indirect or sophisticated categories (de facto president, Bonapartist chief).

But all the variants coincide in underscoring the fundamental responsibility of an authoritarian government that is tearing apart the country. The harmony of this focus with the media narrative is striking. The main problem, however, is not in the rhetoric but in the practice.

Every day there are marches of the Right and of the government. The champions of socialist rigour have to ask themselves: Which of the two mobilizations will we join? With whom will we identify? If they think the government is the main enemy they will have to make common cause with the escuálidos of the guarimbas.

In Buenos Aires, for example, they called last May for a mobilization demanding the ouster of Maduro.[25] All the passers-by who observed this march understood clearly who would immediately occupy Venezuela’s presidency if the present head of state were overthrown. And they noted the total coincidence between this demand and the messages issued daily by the news media.

This is not the first time that sectors of the left have so clearly converged with the Right. An antecedent in Argentina under the Kirchner governments was the presence of red flags in the soy farmers’ marches and the demonstrations of the caceroleros [middle- and upper-class opponents of the government banging pots and pans]. But what was pathetic in Buenos Aires can turn to tragedy in Caracas.

Other visions compare Maduro with the opposition, arguing that under the masquerade of an apparent contraposition hide huge coincidences. So they speculate about the moment when this convergence will become explicit.[26]

This curious interpretation contrasts with the pitched battles between both sectors that everyone else sees. So it is a bit difficult to interpret the guarimbas, assassinations and Pentagon threats as a fictitious quarrel between two relatives.

The sole logic of this presentation is to downplay the seriousness of the current conflict, to interpret it as a mere inter-bourgeois fight over the appropriation of the rent. That is why Maduro’s totalitarianism is seen as a danger equivalent to (or worse than) the opposition.

The major problem in this focus is not its absent-mindedness but the implicit neutrality that it promotes. Since everyone is equal, the self-coup attributed to the government is compared with the coup promoted by the Right.

That equivalence is obviously false, however. In Venezuela there are not two reactionary variants in contention like, for example, jihadism and the dictatorships in the Middle East. Nor is it the type of competition between troglodytes that in Argentina opposed Videla to Isabel Perón.

The clash between Capriles-López and Maduro resembles the confrontation of Pinochet with Allende, of Lonardi with Perón or more recently of Temer with Dilma. Similarly the triumph of the Right over Maduro, far from an engagement between equals, would entail a terrible political regression.

Confronted with this alternative, neutrality is a synonym for passivity and represents a huge degree of impotence in the face of great events. It means renouncing participation and commitment to genuine causes.

Since this attitude takes for granted that Chavismo is finished, it limits its entire horizon to writing a balance sheet of that experience. But the biggest failure in political action never affects unfinished or frustrated processes. The worst thing is narrow-mindedness in the face of major epic events.

Whatever one’s questions about Maduro, the outcome in Venezuela will define the immediate destiny of the entire region. If the reactionaries triumph, the result will be a scenario of defeat and a feeling of impotence in the face of the Empire. The end of the progressive cycle will be a fact and not a subject for evaluation among social science thinkers.

The Right knows this and for that reason is stepping up the campaigns against the intellectuals who defend Chavismo. The recent broadside attack in Clarín is a foretaste of the assault that is being prepared for a post-Maduro regional setting.[27] The sectarians do not register that danger.

Spurious Elections
In the immediate future there are two political options at play: the Right demands that the general elections be moved forward, and the government has called a Constituent Assembly. The opposition is only willing to participate in elections that will ensure it first place.

Of the 19 elections carried out under Chavismo, the Bolivarians won 17 and immediately recognized the two that they lost. In contrast, the Right never accepted their adverse results. They always claimed there was some fraud or resorted to a boycott. When they won in by-elections they demanded the immediate fall of the government.

In December 2015 they obtained a majority in the National Assembly and proclaimed the overthrow of Maduro. Then they attempted in various ways to disregard the constitution, even by swearing in deputies illegally elected and falsifying signatures on petitions to recall Maduro.

Capriles, Borges and López are now calling for spurious elections amidst the economic war and provocation in the streets. They want elections like those in Colombia where, in one election after another, hundreds of popular activists are murdered. They hope to gain at the ballot boxes as in Honduras under the pressure of the murder of Berta. They want the kind of elections that are held in Mexico over the dead bodies of journalists, students and teachers.

It would be a terrible error to join in elections designed to prepare a Chavista cemetery. Maduro is being asked to carry out elections in a climate of civil war that would be unacceptable to any government.

Venezuela is going through a situation that bears some resemblance to the scene in Nicaragua at the end of the first Sandinista electoral term in office. The military siege and shortages wore out an exhausted population who voted for the Right out of simple fatigue. In those conditions elections have a pre-established winner.

On the other hand, comparison with the scenario that led to the fall of the Soviet Union makes no sense. Venezuela is not a big power imploding internally at the end of a lengthy divorce between the regime and the population. It is a vulnerable Latin American country under attack from the United States.

Some thinkers take for granted the oppressive role of imperialism and suggest that this is not a decisive factor in the present crisis.[28] They assume that the persistent denunciations of that domination constitute “a fact already known” or a mere ritual of the Left. But they forget that it is never pointless to emphasize the devastating impact of aggression from the North on governments that have become enemies of Washington.

The entire spectrum of ex-Chavistas who are joining in the call for general elections confuse democracy with liberal republicanism. They have lost sight of the way in which the right to self-government is systematically blocked by bourgeois institutionality.

This impediment is why the great majority of constitutional regimes have lost legitimacy. It becomes more and more evident that the ruling class uses voting systems to consolidate its power. It uses this control to run the economy, the justice system, the news media and the repressive apparatus. Real democracy can only emerge in a socialist process of transformation of society.

It is true that Maduro cancelled the recall referendum, suspended regional elections and proscribed some opposition politicians. These measures are part of a blind reaction to the harassment. But the Chavista leader is confronting the hypocrisy of greater import exhibited by the defenders of the present electoral regimes.

It suffices to see how in Brazil the impeachment was carried out by a group of outlaws with the cover of the judges and parliamentarians who manipulate the system of indirect presidential selection. It never occurred to the OAS to intervene against that vulgar violation of democratic principles.

Nor did the establishment get indignant when the Electoral College anointed Trump after he had received a few million votes less than Hilary Clinton. A ruling monarchy in Spain or England seems natural to them, as do the clumsy schemes that are used to manipulate each election in Mexico. The sacrosanct democracy they ask of Venezuela is completely absent in all capitalist countries.

Possibilities of the Constituent Assembly
Obviously, the best opportunity for a transformative Constituent Assembly was lost several years ago. The present call is purely defensive and is an attempt to contend with an exasperating situation.

But it is useless to discuss only what has not been done. There is still time left for those balance-sheets. The important thing now is to determine how this call can reopen a road for popular initiative.

Before the call for the Constituent Assembly the government was limiting itself to developing a purely bureaucratic confrontation between one state power and another. It relied on a struggle from above by the Executive or the Supreme Court against the National Assembly. Now it is finally calling on the communal power and we will have to see whether this idea translates into a real mobilization.

There are numerous signs of weariness and skepticism within Chavismo. But no one chooses the conditions in which to fight and the main dilemma turns on whether to continue or abandon the struggle. Those who have resolved to dig in their heels are calling for a revival of the popular project.

Some left currents that are very critical of Maduro’s management think this convening of a Constituent Assembly could unleash a dynamic of communes against the bureaucratic operations.[29] They see the Constituent Assembly as an imperfect instrument to disentangle the dispute with corrupt bourgeoisified and bolibourgeois Chavismo.

The Constituent Assembly could also help to break the stalemate in recent months between guarimbas and pro-government mobilizations. If it is adequately tasked it could break down the opposition front, separating the discontented from the fascists.

But it is obvious that without drastic measures on the economic and social front the Constituent Assembly will be an empty shell. If the disaster in production is not attacked through nationalization of the banks, foreign trade and the expropriation of the saboteurs, there will be no recovery in popular support.

The palliative measures attempted in order to increase participation of the base organisms in the distribution of food are insufficient. Radical measures cannot be postponed.

Whatever the alternative, it will not be easy to redirect the economy after so many mistakes in regard to the debt, the creation of special investment zones or the tolerance of capital flight.

Chávez achieved a big redistribution of the rent through new methods of popular politicization, but he never managed to lay the foundations for a process of industrialization. He clashed with the opposition capitalists but not with the internal bolibourgeoisie and he was unable to deactivate the rentist culture that undermined all attempts to build up a productive economy. The hesitation to break with the capitalist structure explains the adverse results.

The present context is more difficult because of the sharp drop in oil prices and the blockage of regional integration projects under the conservative restoration. But it should also be noted that all revolutionary processes take off in adversity and the Constituent Assembly can provide a framework for regaining the initiative.

Some critics of this call object to the sectoral and communal form of election. They say that with this format the “assembly will be tricky, corporatist or illegitimate.”[30] And here they repeat the endorsement the Right makes (when it suits them) of conventional constitutionalism. That demand is not surprising when it comes from establishment commentators but it is disturbing when it comes from enthusiasts of the Russian revolution.

After three decades of post-dictatorial regimes, many have forgotten the duplicities of bourgeois democracy. It might be remembered how Lenin and Trotsky defended in 1917 the legitimacy of the soviets and withdrew recognition of a Constituent Assembly that rivalled the revolutionary power.

The context in Venezuela today is very different. However, the Bolshevik revolution not only taught us to note the social background, the class conflicts and the interests at stake, it also indicated a path by which to go beyond the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberalism and it confirmed that acts of force against the reaction form part of the confrontation with rightist barbarism.

The Left will have to determine whether it converges with the opposition in the boycott or participates in the Constituent Assembly. There is also a third option, with a very small audience: “yes, no and the very opposite.”

In the rest of the region the need is for solidarity. As in Cuba’s special period, we have to put our shoulders to the wheel in difficult situations. Let us hope that many compañeros adopt this approach before it is too late.

Intellectual Regroupment
Venezuela is not only giving rise to intense debates. It has also brought about significant regroupments of intellectuals that endorse counterposed appeals. This positioning has been more relevant than the controversial details of the distinct declarations. It has resulted in a great division between camps.

The REDH text refuting the social-democratic call was complemented by other compelling responses.[31] The political demarcation has been very rapid.

Despite the tension created by the manifestos, a number of signatories ask that the fraternal dialogue be maintained. That respect is indispensable but the indignant reactions are explained by what is at stake. If the Right prevails, there will be plenty of time for the lamentations and the seminars investigating what happened.

Since the social-democratic statement contains an appeal for peace, many thinkers rallied to it in the spontaneous hope of slowing down the violence. Taking a closer look at the contents of the document, some withdrew their support and others maintained it with defensive arguments. They highlight their continuing solidarity with the Bolivarian process or point out their differences with other signatories.

But most significant has been the rapid and generalized reaction that the anti-Chavista document aroused and the great rejection the social-democratic statement generated. That instinctive reaction led to a sudden convergence between left-wing intellectuals and radical nationalism. If this interface were to be consolidated, Venezuela will have awakened a re-encounter of critical thinking with the revolutionary traditions of Latin America. •

Claudio Katz is an economist, researcher with Argentina’s National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the Economists of the Left (EDI). His web page, where this article first appeared, is at katz.lahaine.org.

Translated from the original article by Richard Fidler (with assistance from Federico Fuentes) and first published in Life on the Left.

Endnotes

1. Marco Teruggi, “Radiografía de la violencia en Venezuela,” El Telégrafo 14-5-2017.

2. Pablo Siris Seade, “Las nuevas víctimas de las guarimbas en Venezuela,” Rebelion, 20-5-2017.

3. Guillermo Cieza, “La derrota política de la derecha venezolana,” Resumen, 7-6-2017.

4. Atilio Boron, “Venezuela sumida en la guerra civil,” Jornada, 26-5-2017; “La ‘oposición democrática’ en Venezuela: peor que el fascismo,” Cuba Debate, 25-4-2017.

5. Carlos Aznárez, “La cuestión es impedir que el fascismo se adueñe de Venezuela,” Resumen, 22-5-2017.

6. Manu Pineda, “La mentira como herramienta de guerra en Venezuela,” El Diario, 29-5-2017.

7. Marco Teruggi, “Análisis del esquema de la ofensiva paramilitar,” Hastaelnocau, 24-5-2017.

8. Luigino Bracci Roa, Lista de fallecidos por las protestas violentas de la oposición venezolana, abril a junio de 2017,” Alba Ciudad, 9-6-2017.

9. Manuel Humberto Restrepo Domínguez, “46 líderes asesinados evidencian una política del horror,” America Latina en Movimiento, 22-5-2017.

10. TRIAL International, “Informe de seguimiento presentado al Comité contra la Desaparición Forzada,” 2-2-2017.

11. TelsurTV “Asesinan a Berta Cáceres, líder indígena de Honduras,” 3-3-2016.

12. Marco Teruggi, “Llegó la hora Venezuela,” Resumen, 28-5-2017.

13. Guillermo Cieza, La derrota política de la derecha venezolana,” Resumen 7-6-2017.

14. Simón Rodríguez Porras, “Nueve errores de Claudio Katz sobre Venezuela,” La Clase, 11-5-2017.

15. Ángel Guerra Cabrera, “Venezuela, situación de peligro,” La Pupila Insomne, 25-5-2017. Also Telma Luzzani, “El plan destituyente del Pentágono y el secretario de la OEA,” Tiempoar, 30-3-2017.

16. Simón Rodríguez Porras, “Nueve errores de Claudio Katz sobre Venezuela,” La Clase, 11-5-2017.

17. Simón Rodríguez Porras, “Nueve errores de Claudio Katz sobre Venezuela,” La Clase, 11-5-2017.

18. Edgardo Lander, “Sociólogo venezolano cuestiona la ‘solidaridad incondicional’de la izquierda latinoamericana con el chavismo,” La Diaria, 23-3-2017.

19. Maristella Svampa, “Carta Abierta al Campo Militante Prochavista de la Argentina,” La Tecla Ene, 5-6-2017.

20. Maristella Svampa and Roberto Gargarella, “El desafío de la izquierda, no callar,” Pagina 12, 8-5-2017.

21. VVAA, “Llamado Internacional Urgente a detener la escalada de violencia en Venezuela,” CETRI, 30-5-2017.

22. VVAA, “¿Quién acusará a los acusadores?,” REDH, 5-6-2017.

23. Maristella Svampa, “Carta Abierta al Campo Militante Prochavista de la Argentina,” La Tecla Ene, 5-6-2017.

24. Simón Rodríguez Porras, “Nueve errores de Claudio Katz sobre Venezuela,” La Clase, 11-5-2017.

25. Nuevo MAS, “Bajo la consigna “Fuera Maduro” escandaloso acto en Buenos Aires de un sector del FIT en apoyola derecha golpista venezolana.”

26. Jorge Altamira, “Constituyente ‘a la Maduro’,” 18-5-2017.

27. Gustavo Bazzan, “El reclamo de Atilio Borón a Nicolás Maduro para "aplastar" a la oposición en Venezuela,” Clarin Mundo, 30-5-2017.

28. Carlos Carcione, “Las “lecciones” de algunos intelectuales de la izquierda: ¿Quiénes son los sepultureros del proceso bolivariano?,” Question Digital, 16-5-2017.

29. Stalin Pérez Borges, “Movimiento EN LUCHAS: la convocatoria a la Asamblea Nacional Constituyente es un reto que debemos asumir,” Aporrea, 9-5-2017.

30. Gustavo Giménez, “Venezuela: una Constituyente trucha,” MST, 11-5-2017.

31. VVAA, “Declaración sobre Venezuela: Intelectuales en solidaridad con el pueblo bolivariano,” 5-6-2017. Also, “LUCHAS y otras organizaciones se pronuncian por una salida democrática, revolucionaria y socialista a la crisis venezolana.”



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New York Times ignores Israeli calls for ethnic cleansing

from the electric intifada

Michael F. Brown Media Watch 28 July 2017

A New York Times headline on 24 July is representative of why there is continued American ignorance regarding Palestinian efforts to secure their freedom.

“Mosque crisis and Jordan attack raise fears of escalating violence in Israel,” it declares.

Written by Isabel Kershner, the text places the violence “in and around East Jerusalem.” Yet the headline tells a false story, since, as the UN Security Council recently affirmed, East Jerusalem is part of the West Bank territory Israel occupied in 1967 – and therefore not part of an expanded Israel.

A New York Times news quiz takes a similar approach, referring in its headline to “Israel violence” – rather than “West Bank violence.” The quiz itself poses this question: “Deadly violence erupted in and around Jerusalem and in the West Bank on Friday when Israel placed metal detectors at entrances to what sacred site?”

The newspaper’s headline writers would be hard pressed to present matters in a more misleading manner.

The seven Palestinians and three Israelis killed since last Friday – after Israel installed metal detectors at the entrances to the al-Aqsa mosque compound – were all slain in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in the Gaza Strip.

Just as misleading, Kershner referred Wednesday to “Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem” with no mention of the fact that this is occupied territory or that the UN Security Council and all governments in the world reject Israel’s unilateral claim to have annexed the city.

(She did, however, note the world’s rejection of the annexation in an article published today.)

Basic geography remains an ongoing issue for the editors of a newspaper that presents itself as a powerful check on fake news.

Laundering Israeli land theft
In another recent article – effectively a PR piece for the Israeli army – the newspaper also apparently awards part of Syria to Israel: “This week, the Israeli military revealed the scope of the humanitarian aid project, which it calls Operation Good Neighbor and which began in June 2016 along the Israeli-Syrian boundary on the Golan Heights.”

This suggests that this is a border between Israel and Syria. It isn’t. It is a ceasefire line entirely within the occupied Golan Heights, which is Syrian territory. Again, Israel’s 1981 annexation of the territory, which it also occupied in 1967, was declared by the UN Security Council to be “null and void.”

Yet a caption accompanying the article refers to the “Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.”

At one point Kershner does mention that “Israel captured” the Golan Heights “from Syria in the 1967 war.”

The article also states: “The humanitarian effort is likely to burnish the reputation of the Israeli military, which is usually viewed as an occupying force and formidable war machine.”

This is the only mention of occupation and it presents it not as a fact, but merely as a perspective held by people who don’t like Israel and whose view ought presumably to be viewed with suspicion.

Kershner refers elsewhere to the “Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.”

All of this suggests that instead of reporting the facts about the international status of the territory, The New York Times seeks to launder and support Israel’s claims with deceptive language that explicitly omits references to occupation.

This puts into perspective Kershner’s use of the term “Israeli-annexed” to describe occupied East Jerusalem. Similarly misleading language about the West Bank can be anticipated. In fact, it’s already occurring.

“Brazen”
Most outlets have reduced their analysis of recent events to the past two weeks – starting with the killing on 14 July of two occupation police officers by three Palestinian citizens of Israel outside al-Aqsa mosque. All three Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces.

Lost or downplayed is 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank involving massive violence and discrimination against Palestinians. Media have largely ignored the constant threats and promises made by Israeli leaders and government-backed groups to take over the al-Aqsa mosque compound and replace the Muslim holy sites with a Jewish temple.

Kershner referred repeatedly in her articles to the “brazen” Palestinian attack outside al-Aqsa mosque.

She did not refer to the “brazen” Israeli theft of Palestinian land over decades, not only since 1967, but since the Nakba of 1948 when most Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland.

Violence in the eyes of too many journalists begins when Palestinians initiate it, and everything Israel does is presented as a “response.”

Whitewashing Israeli violence
Closely following the Israeli official line that Palestinian “incitement” – rather than the pervasive brutality of Israel’s occupation – is to blame for violence, Kershner stressed in the aftermath of the 14 July shootings, that the Fatah party of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had “whipped up emotions.”

She all but ignores the nonviolent character of the mass Palestinian resistance in East Jerusalem – though she did recognize it grudgingly on 27 July.

“Moreover, the Palestinian civil disobedience campaign was coupled with bloodshed – three Israelis were stabbed to death and four Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces – and the decision to remove the remaining metal railings and scaffolding occurred under the threat of further violence,” according to Kershner.

She was referring to Israel’s decision to remove the metal detectors and other installations it placed at entrances to al-Aqsa that Palestinians see as another step in Israel’s plan to eventually seize total control over the compound.

Kershner managed to emphasize violence by Palestinians while whitewashing Israel’s. Occupation forces are described as providing “security.” And as journalists habitually do, she attributed the Palestinian deaths to vague “clashes,” rather than to the fact that Israel routinely chooses to attack civilians in an occupied territory with live fire and other weapons that in the last two weeks have injured more than 1,000 people.

And she has ignored very real incitement from senior Israeli leaders.

Ignoring calls for ethnic cleansing
Not mentioned by The New York Times was the threat by Tzachi Hanegbi, a senior minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of a “third Nakba” against Palestinians – a reference to Israel’s previous bouts of mass ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967.

“You’ve been warned,” Hanegbi told Palestinians in a post on Facebook last week.

Similarly, readers of the newspaper of record would find no reference to the open calls for collective punishment and atrocities by Oren Hazan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party.

“It’s time to expel the families of terrorists,” Hazan said.

Hazan said he did not want to sound “too extreme,” adding, “if it was up to me, I’d enter the terrorist’s home last night, take him and his family with him and execute them all … A quick and simple execution.”

“The land of Israel is for the people of Israel and not for Ishmael,” he concluded.

Hazan has previously promised that if he becomes prime minister he will replace the al-Aqsa mosque with a Jewish temple.

It is perhaps his prime ministerial ambitions that are driving the current incumbent Netanyahu to echo Hazan’s demands for deadly revenge. This, of course, is not the first time the prime minister has voiced such violent sentiments.

Yet those who get their news from The New York Times will be misled into thinking that it is just Palestinian leaders who have “whipped up emotions.”

CNN and AP
The New York Times is not alone in misleading the public.

CNN’s Abeer Salman and Oren Liebermann wrote about a Christian man, Nidal Aboud, who joined Muslims praying outside al-Aqsa mosque: “He is urging all Christians to unite with Muslims against what he says is blatant unfairness, and even urged Jews to stand against Israeli occupation.”

The “even” leaps out here. Why should it be a surprise to anyone that Palestinians urge Jews to stand against the Israeli occupation? It’s as if CNN is surprised that Jews would stand for equal rights and an end to the oppression endured by Palestinians.

Meanwhile, in an article about five interfaith activists prohibited by Israel from traveling from Dulles Airport to Tel Aviv this week, Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press gives more credence to biased descriptions of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement than to what the movement itself says it seeks to achieve.

“Supporters of BDS … say they are using nonviolent means to promote the Palestinian independence efforts,” Zoll states. She provides a brief reference to ending the occupation, but says nothing about equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the right of return for Palestinian refugees, two of the fundamental goals of the BDS movement.

But she gives prominence to Israel’s claims that BDS “masks a more far-reaching aim to delegitimize or destroy the Jewish state.”

Faithfully reproducing Israeli government talking points, Zoll asserts that “Some critics accuse the BDS movement of anti-Semitism because it singles out Israel for boycott while overlooking the Palestinian part in the conflict and ignoring countries with poor human rights records.”

Claims of singling out Israel in a Palestinian-led movement are as absurd as claims of South African anti-apartheid activists – and their allies – singling out the apartheid South African government.

Nor does Zoll balance the criticism of unnamed critics by pointing out that the Palestinian leaders of the BDS movement explicitly oppose all forms of racism and bigotry, including anti-Semitism.

By giving more space to the anti-BDS position of those who oppose equal rights for Palestinians, the AP – like The New York Times – launders Israel’s political positions as neutral and uncontroversial descriptions.

Activists moving on Palestinian rights
I first met Rick Ufford-Chase, one of the interfaith activists denied permission to board the Dulles flight, in 1990. He is now with the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and was moderator of the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). We met in Arizona when he was focused on labor and human rights violations against Mexicans and Central Americans.

Israel is presumably concerned that its violations of Palestinian rights are now attracting the attention of American activists who, like Ufford-Chase, have in the course of their lives addressed human rights violations in Central America, Mexico, the US and South Africa – many of them participating in boycotts along the way.

Activists who started with the Nestlé boycott, California table grape boycott and South Africa apartheid boycott are now holding Israel to the same standard as other major rights abusers.

Israel and its surrogates are deploying false accusations of anti-Semitism and other smears in an effort to silence those raising the alarm about Israel’s racist “two-tier system” for Palestinians and Israelis.

Israel is also being helped in its effort to stave off justice by journalists who continue to present a grotesquely false picture where Israel – which has imposed a system of apartheid on millions of Palestinians – is the victim and Palestinians are to blame for the ongoing strife.

These are the Israeli leaders who want to destroy al-Aqsa

Dan Cohen The Electronic Intifada 24 July 2017

Temple Institute head Yisrael Ariel, who has called for the destruction of churches and mosques and the mass slaughter of those who refuse to accept his extreme version of Judaism, at the al-Aqsa mosque compound in June. (via Facebook)
Since the gun battle at the al-Aqsa compound on 14 July that ended in the deaths of three Palestinian citizens of Israel and two Israeli police, Israeli media have largely focused on outrage that anyone would carry out an attack at a holy site, while praising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s collective punishment against the Palestinian population.

“They are the strife mongers,” Yedioth Ahronot columnist Ben-Dror Yemini wrote. “They are harming the justified struggle for equality. They are spreading lies and nurturing incitement. For our sake, for their sake, Israel’s Arabs should also get rid of this nuisance.”

“Netanyahu and [PA leader Mahmoud] Abbas both acted responsibly to prevent a holy war; but the Arab world’s condemnation of Israel is a reason for concern,” read the subheading of an analysis by Haaretz’s Barak Ravid.

Missing from commentaries across the board has been any acknowledgment of the role played by fanatical settlers intent on wresting control of the al-Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem and eventually destroying it as part of an apocalyptic vision.

The compound, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, includes the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. It is one of the holiest shrines for Muslims all over the world, as well as a touchstone of Palestinian identity.

Israelis who seek to take over al-Aqsa see the 14 July attack and subsequent violence as an opportunity to advance this agenda. Immediately after the incident, the Temple movement’s official body released a statement calling to expel Palestinians from the compound: “We must liberate the Temple Mount from the murderous Islam and return it to the people of Israel.”

“Looking forward to building the Temple this year and hope that you will soon see the face of our righteous Messiah,” Baruch Marzel one of the most extreme leaders among Israel’s West Bank settlers, wrote last week in an open letter to the mufti of Jerusalem – the top Muslim official in the city.

Bezalel Smotrich, a Jewish Home party lawmaker, does not want to wait that long. “I would set up a synagogue on the Temple Mount today, this morning,” he said on Monday.

Under Israeli military protection, these settlers and extremists tour the grounds on a daily basis, hoping to provoke violent reactions from Palestinian worshippers by shouting and singing nationalistic anthems.

This then provides occupation forces with the necessary pretext to enact harsh measures, with the eventual goal of cleansing non-Jews and replacing the Muslim holy sites there with a Jewish temple, thus triggering a civilizational clash with Islam.

Yehuda Glick, a longtime leader of the Temple movement, now a Likud Party lawmaker, last week welcomed Israel’s ban on Muslims entering the al-Aqsa compound in the days following the shootings.

“This is an enormous game changer,” he said. “Everything is part of the redemption process but the things that happen on the Temple Mount are especially so.”

“Radical Muslims who desecrate with blood the holiness of the Temple Mount, the holiest place to the Jewish people, have no right to be there,” Glick and the Jewish Home party’s Shuli Moalem-Refaeli said.

Last week, Glick held a Temple movement emergency session in the Knesset building, Israel’s parliament. Attendees included genocide advocate Rabbi Yisrael Ariel and Bentzi Gopstein, leader of the anti-miscegenation youth movement Lehava.

Genocidal ideology
Yisrael Ariel, the chief rabbi of the Temple movement, articulated an apocalyptic end times scenario in 2015.

“[God] is the one who commanded us to go from city to city conquering them, and to impose the seven laws [of the Sons of Noah] throughout the world,” Ariel said.

Ariel added that if Muslims and Christians “raise the flag of [surrender] and say, ‘From now on, there is no more Christianity and no more Islam,’ and the mosques and Christian spires come down,” then they would be allowed to live. “If not,” he warned, “you kill all of their males by sword. You leave only the women.”

“We will conquer Iraq, Turkey [and] we will get to Iran too,” Ariel proclaimed.

Ariel is the founder and head of the Temple Institute, the government-funded group that has published detailed blueprints and a computer animation of what the Temple, to be built over the ruins of al-Aqsa, will look like.

The Temple Institute has received funding from Israel’s education ministry to develop a curriculum to instill “longing for the Temple” in children as young as those attending kindergarten. In 2013, Israel’s mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, presented Ariel with an award for his organization’s work.

This genocidal ideology is rooted in religious Zionism and its political wing is represented by the Jewish Home party.

In 2012, Zevulun Orlev, one of the party’s lawmakers in the Knesset, called for the construction of a temple at the compound, saying that removing the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque would mean that the “billion-strong Muslim world would surely launch a world war.”

This messianic extremism has taken hold in the Likud Party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well.

In 2014, Likud’s Moshe Feiglin, then deputy speaker of the Knesset, explained the fanatical worldview. “We are in the major front of the fight for the free world against the evil forces of the most extreme Islam,” Feiglin asserted. “Behind the violence, there is a spiritual battle, and the core of that battle is that place – the Temple Mount.”

Pretext of “religious freedom”
Many other Israeli politicians are following the Temple movement’s lead.

A Likud Party website has launched a petition to “raise the Israeli flag on the Temple Mount.”

“The Temple Mount is not in our hands,” the petition declares. “We must change this absurdity.”

Transport minister Yisrael Katz has vowed that Israel “will not cede sovereignty” over al-Aqsa.

“We need to close the Temple Mount to Muslims for an extended period of time,” Jewish Home lawmaker Moti Yogev said.

Incitement from Israeli officials has become commonplace in recent years. Dozens of Knesset members have given verbal, and even material, support to the Temple movement.

While their statements occasionally elicit a headline, they are rarely taken into consideration in analysis of the explosive situation at the al-Aqsa compound.

This incitement is often couched in calls for Israel to unilaterally change the status quo and allow Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa, citing a lack of religious freedom at the occupied holy site.

But Israel’s official chief rabbis have long formally prohibited prayer by Jews at the compound for theological reasons – out of concern that Jews could inadvertently desecrate places that must remain ritually pure.

In keeping with this tradition, leaders in Israel’s Orthodox Jewish community blame those who insist on going to the al-Aqsa compound for the resulting bloodshed. The prohibition on visiting the Temple Mount is firmly upheld by leading Orthodox rabbis.

“Those who visit the Temple Mount are turning the Israeli-Arab conflict into a religious conflict,” the Eidah Chareidis, a major anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish organization in Jerusalem, has warned.

“The true story”
However, as Feiglin revealed at a Knesset session in 2013, the call for Jews to be allowed to pray at the compound is a pretext for an Israeli seizure of the site.

“Let’s be truthful. The struggle here in not about prayer,” Feiglin admitted. “Arabs don’t mind that Jews pray to God. Why should they care? We all believe in God. The struggle is about sovereignty. That’s the true story here. The story is about one thing only: sovereignty.”

To make the job of journalists covering events at the al-Aqsa compound easier, I have compiled below this article a list of current and former Knesset members and ministers who have supported the Temple movement’s apocalyptic goals in varying degrees.

Some of the Israeli politicians identify with the movement themselves, while others understand it is politically expedient to make public statements in support of Israeli sovereignty at al-Aqsa.

Likud lawmaker Avi Dichter, for example, is a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet secret police. Dichter appeared in the 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers, which marketed him and five other former Shin Bet chiefs as tough but pragmatic security types who have become “doves.”


Israeli lawmaker and former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter posted this photo of himself at the al-Aqsa compound with a call to open it to Jewish prayer. (via Facebook)
But last week, Dichter posted on Facebook a photo of himself in front of the Dome of the Rock with text reading, “Open the Temple Mount for Jews.”

Provocation and bloodshed
Given the level of incitement regarding the most sensitive site in the country – on top of the climate of desperation created by Israel’s deadly siege of Gaza, expanding colonies in the occupied West Bank including Jerusalem and the erosion of rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel – attacks like the one on 14 July should come as no surprise to informed observers.

As Dichter said in 2013 when he was public security minister – before embracing the Temple movement’s agenda – Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa, “will serve as a provocation, resulting in disorder, with a near certain likelihood of subsequent bloodshed.”

That may be precisely what many Israelis hope for. Following a stabbing attack by a Palestinian on Friday that left three Israelis in the illegal settlement of Halamish dead, Tzachi Hanegbi, a senior Likud minister and close ally of Netanyahu, threatened Palestinians with a “third Nakba” – a reference to Israel’s mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.

Another former public security minister, Hanegbi promised back in 2003 that Jews “soon, very soon” would be able to pray at the al-Aqsa compound.

Israeli leaders and politicians who support the Temple movement
Eli Ben-Dahan

Deputy defense minister Eli Ben-Dahan of Jewish Home personally donated $12,000 to the Temple Institute, which spearheads efforts to replace the Muslim holy sites with a Jewish temple.

“We have to call upon the government and Knesset to permit Jewish prayer, to make Jewish prayer something normal and permitted,” Ben-Dahan told a conference in the Knesset last November.

Ben-Dahan has previously described Palestinians as “beasts” who “aren’t human.”

Tzipi Hotovely

In a recent speech to supporters of the Temple movement, deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely of Likud called on Jews to go to the al-Aqsa compound.

In 2015, Hotovely made headlines when she said her dream was to see an Israeli flag over the Temple Mount and insisted Jews be able to pray there.

Zeev Elkin

Jerusalem affairs minister Zeev Elkin of Likud has said that a full takeover of the compound should be Israel’s national goal.

“It is important to remove it [the Temple Mount] from the purview of the wild-eyed religious,” Elkin stated. “We must explain to broad swathes of the people that without this place, our national liberty is incomplete.”

Oren Hazan

Likud lawmaker Oren Hazan told the “Students for the Temple Mount” group that he would build the temple if he became prime minister.

When asked by this reporter how he would carry out the demolitions, he responded, “It would not be responsible at this point in time to tell you how we would do it, but I will say it clear and loud: when I have the opportunity to do it, I will.”

Yuli Edelstein

Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein of Likud said in 2012, “My job is to deal with the daily process, connecting and building the people of Israel, which leads to the Temple.”

Miri Regev

Culture minister Miri Regev of Likud proposed a bill to implement something similar at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa compound to what Israel has imposed in Hebron.

Following the 1994 massacre by an American Jewish settler of 29 Palestinian worshippers at Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque – another site sacred to Muslims and Jews – Israeli forces partitioned the mosque and turned the Old City into a ghost town.

Regev again called for a new arrangement immediately following the 14 July attack.

Ayelet Shaked

Justice minister Ayelet Shaked of Jewish Home, who published a genocidal call to kill Palestinian mothers just before the 2014 offensive on Gaza, has also called for unilaterally changing the status quo to allow Jews to pray at the al-Aqsa compound.

Uri Ariel

Agriculture minister Uri Ariel of Jewish Home is a leading figure in the Temple movement and has repeatedly called for the construction of a Jewish temple.

“We’ve built many little, little temples,” Ariel has said, “but we need to build a real temple on the Temple Mount.”

Gilad Erdan

Public security minister Gilad Erdan of Likud has also lent his support to this effort. “In my opinion, our right to the Temple Mount is unshakeable,” Erdan said at the Seekers of Zion conference in the Knesset in November.

Erdan is also in charge of Israel’s effort to fight the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Danny Danon

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, former deputy defense minister Danny Danon of Likud, has called to allow Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa.

Yitzhak Aharonovitch

A former public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch of the Yisrael Beitenu party also came out in support in 2014. “It is important to open the [Temple Mount] to Jews, tens of thousands of worshippers come here,” he said.

Yehiel Hilik Bar

Deputy Knesset speaker and a former secretary-general of the nominally leftist Labor Party Yehiel Hilik Bar initially co-sponsored a bill with Miri Regev altering the status quo at al-Aqsa, however he pulled his backing after receiving criticism.

Bar said that he and the Labor party “are part of the Zionist center-left that sees our holy sites as the basis of our existence and the essence of our history.”

David Tzur, a former lawmaker for the ostensibly “dovish” Hatnua party, led by Tzipi Livni, has also called for Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa compound.

Michael Ben-Ari

Among those who have led Israeli incursions into the compound is former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari, a leading inciter against Africans and Palestinians who once destroyed a copy of the New Testament on video.

Build Temple “as soon as possible”
Other lawmakers who have demanded that Jews be able to pray at the al-Aqsa compound include former Knesset member Zvulun Kalfa of Jewish Home and Likud’s Ofir Akunis, who serves as science minister.

Smotrich, Shuli Muallem-Refaeli and Nissan Slomiansky of Jewish Home, and Miki Zohar, Avraham Neguise and Hazan of Likud signed a bill supporting Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa.

Yinon Magal of Jewish Home told the Knesset that Jews must be able to pray at the al-Aqsa compound and that a temple must be built as soon as possible.

Tourism minister Yariv Levin of Likud said, “It seems to me that when Jews for so many years sat in exile and prayed for a return to Zion, they did not mean Tel Aviv, but Jerusalem. They did not dream of returning to the Knesset building and the Prime Minister’s office, but to someplace else – to the Temple Mount.”

Minister for social equality Gila Gamliel of Likud has said, “the Temple is the ID card of the people of Israel.”

Lawmaker Arieh Eldad has gone up to al-Aqsa in demonstration of Israeli control.

A host of other lawmakers, including Amir Ohana and Anat Berko of Likud, have participated in conferences in support of the Temple Movement.

Dan Cohen is an independent journalist and filmmaker.

Israel’s other “demographic threat”

Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 18 July 2017


The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others, Mya Guarnieri Jaradat, Pluto Press (2017)

Beginning with the first intifada in the 1980s and during the 1990s, Israel initiated a policy of replacing Palestinian day laborers from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip with migrant workers.

Nearly 50 percent of Israel’s construction workers were Palestinian at the time, and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza made up more than 40 percent of Israel’s agricultural workers. The 2000s also saw a dramatic increase in Eritrean and Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel.

In The Unchosen, journalist Mya Guarnieri Jaradat examines Israel’s treatment of migrant workers and asylum seekers. Her findings lead her to the conclusion that Israel’s claims of being a democratic state are belied by its callous mistreatment of both groups.

She further concludes that this mistreatment mirrors Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians and contradicts Israel’s claim that its policies towards Palestinians are based on “security concerns.”

She writes that the experiences of African refugees and migrant workers – many from the Philippines and Thailand – expose the fact that the Israeli government “considers all non-Jews to be a demographic threat.” As a result, the experiences of these new “Others” shed more light on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

“Just as Israel’s treatment of Palestinian citizens of the state calls into question its ability to be at once Jewish and democratic,” Jaradat notes, “so also does its handling of migrant workers and asylum seekers, exposing a fundamental contradiction in the phrase ‘Jewish and democratic.’”

A demographic threat
She first encountered this issue not as a journalist, but when she joined a “left-leaning volunteer program.” The book opens with her experience working with Filipino women in charge of “black market kindergartens” that are necessitated by the lack of daycare for the children of migrant workers.

Her writing is notable for its empathy, a trait clearly discernible in the extensive interviews she conducted with migrant workers and asylum seekers. An interview with Sunday Dieng, 26, an asylum seeker from Sudan, for example, reads as follows:

Dieng had been an orphan for more than half his life; for over a decade, he’d been unable to find a country to call home. We discussed the 14 months he spent in an Israeli jail. I asked him about the conditions. Did he get enough food?

He smiled. Later, I understood his reaction – my question was ridiculous. Prison isn’t about breaking the body. It’s about the spirit.

Insights such as these appear throughout the author’s narrative, along with detailed factual background that further illuminates the situation faced by migrant workers and asylum seekers.

Some of the stories shock the conscience, such as the Israeli farmer who failed to provide housing for his migrant Thai workers and instead dug holes in the ground for them to sleep in.

Until 2012, when Israel and Thailand signed a bilateral agreement, most Thai workers came to Israel heavily in debt to labor management agencies because they had to pay exorbitant fees just to find work – in some cases as much as $10,000.

Their debt bondage meant they were susceptible to super-exploitation, such as being paid less than the minimum wage in violation of Israeli law and having “service fees” deducted from their paychecks.

Even with the new bilateral agreement that resulted from pressure from labor rights groups, Jaradat found that while “this all looked good on paper … on the ground, little has changed for Thai workers.”

Israel’s restrictions on migrant workers reflect the government’s fear of them as a demographic threat, the author argues.

Israeli policy prevents migrant workers from bringing a member of their immediate family with them. Migrant workers are not allowed to have children or even romantic relationships. Until an Israeli high court ruling in 2011, infants as young as three months old could be separated from their mothers and deported.

African asylum seekers, who, at the peak, numbered as many as 60,000 in Israel at one time, faced infiltration laws originally used against Palestinian refugees. Refugees were not allowed to apply for asylum and were held in prisons and desert tent camps for terms that arbitrarily ranged from days to years.

Although Israel signed the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, in the more than 60 years since, it has granted refugee status to fewer than 200 people, according to the author.

A xenophobic society
The Unchosen is about much more than the heartbreaking accounts of migrant workers seeking a decent life and refugees escaping genocidal wars and brutal authoritarian regimes. It also documents the resistance waged by both migrant workers and asylum seekers and the gradual awakening of Jewish Israelis to the nature of their government.

For a small group of Israelis, the author notes, witnessing the treatment of Israel’s new “Others” “opened the door to questioning everything about Israel. For some, these issues became their ‘breaking point with Zionism,’” which she defines as a “state where Jews have the majority and hegemony.”

The author herself relates to this questioning. Working with leftist Israeli groups seeking to reform Israel’s treatment of migrant workers and refugees, she questioned why no one was making the connection with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“Why weren’t we talking about the first expulsion” of the Palestinians in 1948, she asked herself. Why wasn’t the connection being made between night raids on migrant worker homes and night raids on Palestinian homes?

She approached the leader of a group called Israeli Children and got this reply: “I do see a connection … But I don’t want to talk about it. One of the big reasons this fight is succeeding is because we’re trying not to be political.”

Ultimately, however, the “fight” was not succeeding. As the years wore on, in the author’s view, Israeli society turned ever more right-wing and xenophobic.

In 2015, an Eritrean refugee was mistaken for a Palestinian assailant during an attack that killed one Israeli soldier and injured several bystanders. The Eritrean man, Haftom Zarhum, was shot by a security guard, and then a lynch mob kicked and spat on him, contributing to his death.

Jaradat was aware that every year her husband, a Palestinian from the West Bank, needed to apply for a permit just to live with her in Israel. She reached a final conclusion: she got out.

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is active with the Occupation-Free Portland campaign.