Israeli housing protests: For Jews Only

The Wrong Struggle
The real victims of the state's housing policies are Arabs.

By Seraj Assi



Nearly three weeks ago angry young residents of Tel Aviv took to the streets to protest soaring housing prices. The protests have rapidly reached different sectors of the Israeli society. The Israeli media has propagated the event as a glorious democratic manifestation, while Western media rushed to compare it to the people revolutions in neighboring Arab countries.



Yet it must be recalled that by far the Tel Aviv protests are taking place within the Zionist consensus. For many Arab citizens, the protests are widely seen as a bourgeois distributional conflict over Zionist colonial spoils. No wonder the protests are directed against high housing prices per se rather than against the founding policies and fundamental causes behind the crisis.



We should remember that the real victims of the state's housing policies are not the middle-class Jewish Israelis longing for the exclusive and luxurious privileges offered by the Tel Aviv center. They are the poor Arab residents of Jaffa who have been pushed out of the city by decades of ethnic gentrification, urban exclusion and alienation.



In the meantime, the Israeli media reports the event as if the Arab population, the real victims of the state's economic policies, does not exist. The real narrative- the dispossession, the disempowerment, the unrelenting daily grind of injustice and discrimination, and the daily violation of human rights and dignity - does not fit into the format of the Israeli media's agenda.



When a year ago Arab residents of Jaffa took to the Ajami neighborhood to protest the new housing plan designed exclusively for Zionist-Jews, known as Be'emuna Jews-Only housing project, they were dismissed as subversives to the state's Jewish character. When they later marched to Jerusalem to demonstrate ahead of the High Court hearing over the project, they were widely presented as a punch of unruly Arabs. Requests and petitions by Ajami residents to stop work in the project have been unanimously dismissed by the Tel Aviv District Court and the High Court of Justice.



While the shortage of housing had been threatening Arab residents of Jaffa for decades, the Israel Lands Administration gave itself a right to sell public land to a construction company devoted to pushing Arab residents out of the city. Nothing has been done to stop Bemuna's attempts to dilute Arab neighborhoods by moving in religious Zionist Jews at the expense of local residents. Nor to address Be'emuna's repeated racist statements, discriminatory marketing methods and housing policies. The "domino effect" of the project has instead brought more and more racist housing projects to Jaffa.



The process of internal occupation of Arab lands is by no means confined to Jaffa. Judaization is expanding all over the country from the Negev region in the South down to the Galilee in the North, including the Arab Triangle in the center, and the major mixed cities of Haifa, Acre and Jerusalem. Policies of transfer, dislocation, land expropriation and housing demolition continue uninterrupted. Statics show that over the past few decades, Arab lands in Israel were rapidly diminished from nearly 19.5 million dunams (in 1947) to only 404 thousand dunams (in 2005). At the same time, Jewish settlements inside Israel has grown from 317 to 907, and they now constitute 96 percent of the country territory.



Moreover, we have not seen a single protest against the wave of fascist and racist laws directed against the Arab population, starting from the Nakba law through the loyalty law, and multiple bills regulating admission to "Jews-only" communities. Protests by Arab residents were rather rooted out by state violence and widely condemned by the Israeli society. Only when the state's economic policies began to threaten the narrow interests of the White Ashkenazi society did they draw attention and media coverage.



It can be argued that bourgeois Israeli Jews are now paying the prize that Arabs in Israel have been paying for decades. But we should remember that soaring housing prices in Tel Aviv are themselves the outcome of the racist policies that were originally designed to prevent Arabs and other poor Jewish communities from approaching the city center. We should also remember that those middle-class Israeli yuppies that came to live in Jaffa for an "oriental" experience are no less responsible for turning Jaffa into a fashionable neighborhood and making prices unaffordable for the local Arab residents.



The dirty secret of the Tel Aviv protests is that the bulk of those middle-class Ashkenazi protestors are moved by a racist hysteria. They are simply afraid of being moved to the city peripheries and the far less fashionable parts of the country. For when they complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, they explicitly express a racist desire to stay away from the development towns and neighborhoods populated by Arabs, poor Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews.



This should not be taken as an invitation for a common struggle between Arabs and poor Mizrahi, Ethiopian and Russian Jews. Nor should it let us forget that the struggle of Arab Palestinians with the state cannot be simply reduced from a struggle over land and existence to class and civil struggles. Indeed, nothing is more ironic than to see Arabs protesting against high housing prizes in Tel Aviv as if they were allowed to live in Tel Aviv at all.



Calls for Bedouins from the unrecognized villages of the Negev to join the protests are quite revealing here. For we know very well that the struggle of these Bedouin communities is primarily against the state not the government. Not surprisingly Israel is now suing Bedouin of al-Arakib village (which has been recently destroyed by the state more than twenty times) for NIS 1.8m for "illegal invasions" of state lands and "destruction expenses".



The struggle of Palestinians in Israel cannot be separate from politics colonization, ethnic discrimination and racism. That is to say that Palestinians in Israel have not to join the protests so much as to make sure they formulate their own struggle away from the Tel Aviv bourgeois protests that are now taking on racist Zionist formulations and being joined by racist settler movements like Yesha Council and Im Tirzu.



We are running out of time. Even as we speak, the circle of internal colonization is closing up. Palestinians in Israel should be fully aware that their struggle cannot be formulated within the Zionist framework, but only outside of it.



- Seraj Assi is a PhD Student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Rally and March to the UN, Thursday, September 15th

Palestinians Tell the World:
Sovereignty Means Securing ALL Our Rights!

Palestinians everywhere are mobilizing to remind the world of their right to self-determination. In New York we are marching to the UN because the world’s attention is focused on the vote on Palestine scheduled to take place there.

For over six decades, the UN has approved numerous resolutions promising Palestinians their basic rights, none of which have been implemented. We come to the UN to demand: Sovereignty, Equality, and the Right of Return for Palestinians NOW!

Rally and March to the UN, Thursday, September 15th!
End All US Aid to Israel!
End the Occupation!
Support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions!

4:30 pm: Gather at Times Square
5:30 pm: March to Grand Central and then over to the UN, as we say:
For more information, email palestineun@gmail.com

Sponsored by the Palestine UN Solidarity Coalition

Endorsed by: WESPAC, American Muslims for Palestine, Al-Awda NY, United National Antiwar Coalition, Adalah-NY, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, International Socialist Organization, Middle East Crisis Response, Women in Black Union Square, Women Against Military Madness: Mideast Committee, Minneapolis, Coalition for Palestinian Rights, Minneapolis, Labor for Palestine, New York City Labor Against the War

Will the Palestinian Authority collide with popular resistance in September?

The demand for a Palestinian State at the coming September UN session can cut two ways. It's important that it be pursued in a manner that doesn't preempt the rights of all Palestinians to equal rights in their own homeland--r congress

From Alex Kane's Blog
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Alex Kane

The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) bid for United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state remains on track, despite heavy pressure from the U.S. and Israel. But what has received scant attention is the possibility that the September bid may also result in a collision between popular, grassroots Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation and the PA’s preferred avenues to statehood.

Following imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti’s call for mass marches ahead of the September UN gambit for a state, the Palestinian Authority echoed Barghouti’s call.

“All of us are talking about resistance and it must be every day,” PA President Mahmoud Abbas said in late July. Al Jazeera English reported August 1 on the PA’s planned mass rallies:

Palestinian officials have said they will begin mass marches against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank on September 20, the eve of a largely symbolic UN vote expected to recognise their independence.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian official, said leaders hope to attract millions of people, and the protest will be the first of a prolonged effort.

He said the campaign would be called “Palestine 194″ because the Palestinians hope to become the 194th member of the UN.

“The appeal to the UN is a battle for all Palestinians, and in order to succeed, it needs millions to pour into streets,” Abed Rabbo said.

But this week, the form of the PA’s planned “resistance” became clear, and it will certainly not mark the end of coordination between PA security forces and the Israeli military, one of the most important–and disliked among Palestinians–results of the Oslo era.

Haaretz reported last Friday that:

The Palestinian Authority has ordered its security forces to prevent demonstrations planned for September from escalating into violent confrontations with Israel, especially in potential friction points like the roadblocks and settlements.

Senior Palestinian Authority figures issued the orders to the Palestinian security forces in recent weeks out of concern that there may be violent clashes between thousands of Palestinian demonstrators and Israel Defense Forces at the end of September, following a vote at the United Nations General Assembly for recognition of a Palestinian state

In similar messages relayed to the IDF, the PA made clear that it intended to prevent largescale violent protests which would heighten tensions and undermine security cooperation between the two sides.

Last week PA President Mahmoud Abbas called on all Palestinians to participate in non-violent marches which are part of a series of events planned by the Authority for late September. Earlier this week, the General Secretary of the PLO Executive Committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, announced that plans to hold a mass rally on September 20 when UN deliberations in New York begin.

The Palestinian demonstrations are scheduled to take place in the centers of Palestinian cities – and not in locations where they may lead to friction with Israelis. Moreover, the PLO is sponsoring the events and the security forces are charged with overseeing order.

The PA, it seems, intends to coopt Palestinian resistance against the occupation. But it is highly unlikely that will fly with grassroots activists involved in the popular committees that demonstrate against the illegal separation barrier and settlements in the West Bank every week. A confrontation between the PA and Palestinians seems likely, and is not without precedent. As Adam Shatz pointed out in a recent piece n the London Review of Books, the PA turned back protesters who attempted to march to the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus during the May 15 protests marking the Nakba.

In a statement sent to me by activists in the West Bank, a coalition of popular committees in the West Bank said July 29:

The popular committees against the wall and settlements confirms that next September is the immense popular battle for the recognition of the State of Palestine, number 194 at the UN.

The popular committees against the wall and settlements, in addition to the national committee for popular struggle and the popular struggle coordination committee, have discussed the issue regarding the intention of the Palestinian Authority to go the UN for the recognition of the Palestinian State.

All confirmed the right of the Palestinian people to have their state fully recognized with its capital Jerusalem through going to the UN, guaranteeing holding to the Palestinian fixed rights.

The committees consider the coming September a very important phase of struggle in the history of the Palestinian cause and calls upon the Palestinian people in its all categories wherever they are to actively engage and participate in such a phase. They also calls upon the Palestinian leadership not to tie going to the UN against going back to negotiations.

The committees commit themselves to initiate to work in order to develop intensive action and mobilize people to expand the struggle for recognition of a Palestinian State in the Palestinian and the international arenas using an immense popular struggle program.

Therefore, the committees call upon our Palestinian people in all their locations in Palestine and Diaspora, the fellow Arab countries and the International arena of supporters, solidarity movements and friends around the world to stand with us and act in their communities for the recognition of the Palestinian state to become the state number 194 in the United Nations.

Call on the International movements to mobilize with us on the 21 of September, to make the day a world wide day in support of the right of Palestian people to their own state in freedom, democracy and self determination.

While the popular committee statement expressed support for the UN bid, it is clear that popular struggle leaders are not going to simply gather in Palestinian cities and stay put, especially considering the fact that the popular struggle confronts the Israeli military head on every week. Come September, the PA’s statehood bid could lead to a confrontation with its own people.

Noam Chomsky: America in Decline

from In These Times


Views » August 5, 2011 » Web Only
America In Decline
By Noam Chomsky

The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.

The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s was mostly self-delusion.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

Corporate power’s ascendancy over politics and society—by now mostly financial—has reached the point that both political organizations, which at this stage barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

For the public, the primary domestic concern is unemployment. Under current circumstances, that crisis can be overcome only by a significant government stimulus, well beyond the recent one, which barely matched decline in state and local spending—though even that limited initiative probably saved millions of jobs.

For financial institutions the primary concern is the deficit. Therefore, only the deficit is under discussion. A large majority of the population favor addressing the deficit by taxing the very rich (72 percent, 27 percent opposed), reports a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Cutting health programs is opposed by overwhelming majorities (69 percent Medicaid, 78 percent Medicare). The likely outcome is therefore the opposite.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed how the public would eliminate the deficit. PIPA director Steven Kull writes, “Clearly both the administration and the Republican-led House (of Representatives) are out of step with the public’s values and priorities in regard to the budget.”

The survey illustrates the deep divide: “The biggest difference in spending is that the public favored deep cuts in defense spending, while the administration and the House propose modest increases. The public also favored more spending on job training, education and pollution control than did either the administration or the House.”

The final “compromise”—more accurately, capitulation to the far right—is the opposite throughout, and is almost certain to lead to slower growth and long-term harm to all but the rich and the corporations, which are enjoying record profits.

Not even discussed is that the deficit would be eliminated if, as economist Dean Baker has shown, the dysfunctional privatized health care system in the U.S. were replaced by one similar to other industrial societies’, which have half the per capita costs and health outcomes that are comparable or better.

The financial institutions and Big Pharma are far too powerful for such options even to be considered, though the thought seems hardly Utopian. Off the agenda for similar reasons are other economically sensible options, such as a small financial transactions tax.

Meanwhile new gifts are regularly lavished on Wall Street. The House Appropriations Committee cut the budget request for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the prime barrier against financial fraud. The Consumer Protection Agency is unlikely to survive intact.

Congress wields other weapons in its battle against future generations. Faced with Republican opposition to environmental protection, American Electric Power, a major utility, shelved “the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming,” The New York Times reported.

The self-inflicted blows, while increasingly powerful, are not a recent innovation. They trace back to the 1970s, when the national political economy underwent major transformations, ending what is commonly called “the Golden Age” of (state) capitalism.

Two major elements were financialization (the shift of investor preference from industrial production to so-called FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) and the offshoring of production. The ideological triumph of “free market doctrines,” highly selective as always, administered further blows, as they were translated into deregulation, rules of corporate governance linking huge CEO rewards to short-term profit, and other such policy decisions.

The resulting concentration of wealth yielded greater political power, accelerating a vicious cycle that has led to extraordinary wealth for a fraction of 1 percent of the population, mainly CEOs of major corporations, hedge fund managers and the like, while for the large majority real incomes have virtually stagnated.

In parallel, the cost of elections skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper into corporate pockets. What remains of political democracy has been undermined further as both parties have turned to auctioning congressional leadership positions, as political economist Thomas Ferguson outlines in the Financial Times.

“The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.

Before the 2007 crash for which they were largely responsible, the new post-Golden Age financial institutions had gained startling economic power, more than tripling their share of corporate profits. After the crash, a number of economists began to inquire into their function in purely economic terms. Nobel laureate Robert Solow concludes that their general impact may be negative: “The successes probably add little or nothing to the efficiency of the real economy, while the disasters transfer wealth from taxpayers to financiers.”

By shredding the remnants of political democracy, the financial institutions lay the basis for carrying the lethal process forward—as long as their victims are willing to suffer in silence.

Is Obama weak? or is he carrying out his real policy?

from Truthdig.com

The Bizarro FDR

By David Sirota

Barack Obama is a lot of things—eloquent, dissembling, conniving, intelligent and above all, calm. But one thing he is not is weak.

This basic truth is belied by the meager Obama criticism you occasionally hear from liberal pundits and activists. They usually stipulate that the president genuinely wants to enact the progressive agenda he campaigned on, but they gently reprimand him for failing to muster the necessary personal mettle to achieve that goal. In this mythology, he is “President Pushover,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently labeled him.

This storyline is a logical fallacy. Most agree that today’s imperial presidency almost singularly determines the course of national politics. Additionally, most agree that Obama is a brilliant, Harvard-trained lawyer who understands how to wield political power.

Considering this, and further considering Obama’s early congressional majorities, it is silly to insist that the national political events during Obama’s term represent a lack of presidential strength or will. And it’s more than just silly—it’s a narcissistic form of wishful thinking coming primarily from liberals who desperately want to believe “their” president is with them.

Such apologism, of course, allows liberals to avoid the more painful truth that Obama is one of America’s strongest presidents ever and is achieving exactly what he wants.

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Obama is not a flaccid Jimmy Carter, as some of his critics insist. He is instead a Franklin Delano Roosevelt—but a Bizarro FDR. He has mustered the legislative strength of his New Deal predecessor, but he has channeled that strength into propping up the very forces of “organized money” that FDR once challenged.

On health care, for instance, Obama passed a Heritage Foundation-inspired bailout of the private health insurance industry, all while undermining other more progressive proposals. On foreign policy, he escalated old wars and initiated new ones. On civil liberties, he not only continued the Patriot Act and indefinite detention of terrorism suspects but also claimed the right to assassinate American citizens without charge.

On financial issues, he fought off every serious proposal to re-regulate banks following the economic meltdown; he preserved ongoing bank bailouts; and he resisted pressure to prosecute Wall Street thieves. On fiscal matters, after extending the Bush tax cuts at a time of massive deficits, he has used the debt ceiling negotiations to set the stage for potentially massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare—cuts that would be far bigger than any of his proposed revenue increases.

As hideous and destructive as it is, this record is anything but weak. It is, on the contrary, demonstrable proof of Obama’s impressive political muscle, especially because polls show he has achieved these goals despite the large majority of Americans who oppose them.

Importantly, though, Obama himself has not suffered from equally negative polling numbers. While his approval rating is not terrific, he is in decent shape for re-election—and, more significantly, he has suffered only a minimal erosion of Democratic support. He is relatively popular, in other words, despite advocating wildly unpopular policies. Thanks to that reality, every one of his stunning legislative triumphs now has the previously unprecedented imprimatur of rank-and-file Democratic support.

In forging such bipartisan complicity with what were once exclusively right-wing Republican objectives, Obama has achieved even more than what he fantasized about when he famously celebrated a previous Bizarro FDR. In a 2008 interview with a Nevada newspaper, Obama lauded Ronald Reagan for “chang[ing] the trajectory of America” and “put[ting] us on a fundamentally different path.”

Reagan was a truly strong executive—but the Gipper was nothing compared to our current president.

Israeli Housing Protests: no return of the "Zionist Left"

from Promised Land blog by Noam Sheizaf

Posted: August 2nd, 2011

What is it that makes so many American reports on events in Israel end up with the question of “the return of the Zionist Left?” Ethan Bronner’s recent story on the cost of living protest in Israel is yet another example of this trend. By cherry picking a few comments and mixing them with the warm memories of Rabin’s government, the recent social justice movement becomes for Bronner the vessel of “a possible opening for the defeated left.”

I can’t help but think that those American who are so obsessed with this question recognize “their Israel” in a certain image that the Israeli left has projected, one which very rarely had anything to do with its politics. Like a constant search for something that was never there. After all, you won’t see so many stories in American press about “a return of the revisionist Right” in Israel, or about Shas.

It’s time to face facts: Rabin’s second government was an historical accident, no more. This was the only time in 35 years that the left won a Knesset majority – and even then, it wasn’t even close to a majority of the Jewish public. Liberalism, in the American sense, never took real hold in Israel.

The current social protest is a unique event with tremendous potential, but if it’s a return to the Jewish democracy dreamland that Americans hope for, you are up for a major disappointment. There won’t be a “return” – all we can and should hope for is something completely new.

Islamophobia, Zionism and the Norway massacre - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Islamophobia, Zionism and the Norway massacre - Opinion - Al Jazeera English