Israeli: the Pirate State

The president of Turkey today accused Israel of state terrorism for its totally illegal, immoral, and unjustified assault and massacre on the Free Palestine Movement's flotilla of ships trying to bring material aid to Gaza despite the Israeli blockade. State terrorism is an appropriate term, but, given the circumstances, I prefer the term piracy. This is by no means Israel's first act of piracy. The Israeli nuclear weapons program obtained its first  supply of uranium by hijacking a ship at sea with a cargo of uranium. Then they signed their1976 agreement with apartheid South Africa to help them with counterinsurgency, to harden their military vehicles, and to jointly develop nuclear weapons in exchange for a supply of yellowcake uranium from South Africa. Secret details of that agreement have just been published in the UK. Israel also conducted the first airplane hijacking, the first car bombing, and the kidnapping of antinuclear whistleblower Morcechai Vanunu from Rome. The state of Israel has no respect for the laws of nations. Its army  has no honor or respect for human rights. This has been true since 1947. Israeli spokesmen announce that their soldiers were "attacked" when they landed on the Free Palestine Movement's ships in uncontested international waters. Even if that is true (and Israeli accounts of such affairs are routinely proven to be falsified), since when is there something wrong with the use of force to repel pirates on the high seas. Israeli propaganda exists in a netherworld of illogical and unrealistic fantasy which nobody believes in with the exception of a few diehard supporters of Israel in the United States (which unfortnately always includes the US government executive and legislative branches). The use of piracy, defiance of international law, state terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and the other tools of out-of-control rogue states is no accident. It derives from the essential nature of the Israeli state, which is to defend at all costs the spoils of colonial conquest and to extend them as far as they can possibly go.

For five decades, Israel with the reprehensible support of foreign governments, most notoably that of the United States, has ruled its region t itwith naked force and repression. Now, that is finally beginning to reverse. The feeble forces of Hamas resisted Israel's brutal attack on Gaza. Hezbolleh in Lebanon threw back an Israeli invasion and now promises to respond to any future attack with a fullscale attack against Israel. Everyone takes that seriously, including Israel's government, which knows that Hezbolleh's leader does not make false promises and that he has the force to back it up. Secondly, American public opinion is finally waking up to Israel's reality. What has begun with student governments is spreading further. Of course, the American public is alienated with its government over many, many issues: health care, bank bailouts, pointless wars, etc. Let us hope that increasing hostility to Israeli policies will find a way to express itself in this mix.

Israel: The Anti-Jewish State

I have covered this theme before, but now I am looking at it from a slightly different angle and a profoundly Jewish angle. Israel claims to be the state of the Jews, the state of the "Jewish people." But how could such a state, even if there were such an entity as the Jewish people, be founded on an ideology which is profoundly racist against Jews. A state for Jews would have used its resources to help Jews in Argentina. Israel armed the anti-Jewish regime. A pro-Jewish movement would have used its resources to help European Jews to escape from fascism during World War II. The Zionist movement refused to do so. Let us remember that Zionism was born in Europe in the 19th century amidst a swirl of political movements ranging from socialism to the most perverted forms of racist nationalism. The Zionists had nothing in common with the socialists. To be sure, they represented a range of views, from the unapologetic fascists of Jabotinsky to the pro-Imperialists like Weizmann and Ben Gurion. But what they agreed on was that Jews did not belong in Europe, should leave, and create their own state. In other words, they internalized the program of the European anti-Semites,  made it their own, and called it Jewish. But that is a profoundly anti-Jewish program, an assault on Jewish self-respect and integrity. It is hardly surprising that such a movement did not draw many supporters, especially in the United States, where most Jews saw Zionists as crazy. A history of the Zionist movement in the United States praised Justice Brandeis for keeping the movement going when nobody would support it. The Zionists fought to establish a foothold in the rabbinical seminaries of the 1930s and 1940s, but they did not even manage to garner significant Jewish support in 1948. Ironically, it was Israel's war of aggression in 1967 which engendered the first significant support from American Jews and, much more importantly, from the US government. There are many signs that American Jewish support for Israel is in steep decline. I doubt that this results from a full or conscious understanding of the deeply anti-Jewish basis of the Israeli state, but I would not be surprised if there is a subtle psychological rejection of Israel's blatant identification with everything Jews learned to despise during centuries of persecution in Europe. The psychosis of 1967 has begun to heal, and let us hope that an awakening about the anti-Jewish nature of Israel will occur.

The Cancer of Zionism

I had a discussion recently with a friend which made clear to me that most people still don't understand the essential nature of the state of Israel. I commented that the only workable solution was a democratic one as in South Africa. My friend thought that would mean the death of the Jews living in Israel. I think that is far-fetched, no more likely than that the black Africans of South Africa would slaughter the whites of European descent there, which, of course, they did not. More importantly, it perpetuates the myth that Israel exists to protect Jews from something. To understand this conflict, you need to take that myth and put it through the mirror. Israel exists to expel Palestinians from Palestine. That is its fundamental organizing principle since 1947 and still today. Palestinians can have no security as long as a state exists which is designed to remove them from their homes. In that sense, the State of Israel is like a cancer. If you let a cancer grow, it takes over the body and kills it. If the State of Israel continues to exist, it will metastasize throughout the West Bank until Palestinian life there is even more untenable than it is now. Israeli leaders have been clear about that since 1947. The only thing stopping or slowing them is limited resources and international opposition. When a cancer is growing in your body you either have it cut out or you kill it with radiation. Let us hope that nobody tries radiation treatment. The racist, expansionist strategy of ethnic cleansing which is inherent in the present State of Israel must be cut out of it for any just peace to be possible. If the State of Israel were to become the democratic state of its citizens, it would not matter if there were one or two states in Palestine. So long as it is a state determined by political Zionism, it will be a major obstacle to peace.

The Logic of Zionism

Many years ago, I wrote about what I called the "Logic of Occupation." When you occupy someone else's country and view the inhabitants as your enemies, you inexorably follow certain policies which lead to arbitrary arrests, torture, execution of civilians, land and property seizure, etc. These are not particular to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza but are characteristic of all such occupations: think of the American/European occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Israeli case, where they settle their civilians on occupied land (in violation of the 1949 Geneva accords which outlawed that practice, so common by the Nazis), there are additional measures taken.

In the case of Israel, however, that way of viewing what is going on needs to be modified and extended. I have been reading what I consider to be the best by far book on this subject, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Pappe focuses on what happened in 1947 and 1948 using all available sources, and his book towers over other such efforts, such as that of Benny Morris, who used only Israeli military sources. What Pappe documents is that David Ben-Gurion and his cohorts came to the conclusion that they could only get the state they wanted if they drove most Palestinians out of it. They kept that decision fairly secret, even from most of their own followers and they made many public statements which contradicted it, but in their internal discussions and in the orders they gave to their military forces, they followed it. They used military terror, mass executions primarily of men but sometimes of women and children, too, systematic rape of women, looting, physical destruction of villages, and many more practices detailed by Pappe. Rarely was anyone punished for these acts. When they were, the punishment was very mild and, more often, those who committed atrocities advanced to high positions in the Israeli army and state.

Is that just the sordid history of the creation of Israel or is it relevant to today's policies? Pappe contends, and I agree, that the logic of Zionism continues today along pretty much the same lines as in the late 1940s. Israeli leaders are still pursuing every possible avenue to remove Palestinians from Palestine and to extend the areas they own and control.

What does this fact tell us about the possible solution? It clearly means that the so-called two-state solution is a mirage. So long as the Israeli state pursues this logic, there will be no peace and security for the Palestinians and thus for the rest of us in the world. Israel must not only be stopped from expansion; its expansion must be reversed and the nature of its state must be fundamentally changed. It has to abandon the logic of Zionism. The forests which cover destroyed Palestinian villages must be bulldozed, and the descendants of those who lived in those villages need to be allowed to return and rebuild if they wish to do so. Israel must become the state of its inhabitants, i.e., a secular, democratic state, and there would be no reason why such a state could not merge into a larger state of Palestine.

Will it be easy to achieve such a solution? No, of course it won't. But it is the only solution which can work. The key to achieving it is to remove the billions of dollars per year that the USA gives to Israel. The other key, though, is to understand that this is the solution, the only way to go.

Talkin' Global Warming

This is a talking blues in the style of Chris Bouchillon or Woody Guthrie:


You say it's getting hotter and the world is just a stew
And your CO2 is rising and you don't know what to do
Well, all that means is the devil's got a ruse
And you're just suffering the global warming blues.
all a boilin', a drownin', a swelterin', sweat drippin' down

And you say your politicians are so afraid
of anything else but a carbon trade
or maybe a nuke plant or fake clean coal
And meanwhile the ice melts on both your poles.
no polar bears, no penguins, no islands in the wide Pacific

So, you take the situation in your own two hands
And you send the politicians to a peanut stand.
You make the big bosses turn their dampers down
and you sweep their carbon footprints out of town.
no pollutin', change your ways, cool it down now or be replaced.

Finance Capital and Class Society

Karl Marx explained how capital works in Das Kapital. An industrialist takes money (M), makes a commodity (C), and sells it for more than it cost him to make (M'). So, industrial capital grows by M-C-M'. A finance capitalist takes money, loans it, and gets back more money. Thus, finance capital grows by M-M'. Marx predicted that finance capital would eventually take control, and Lenin documented that that was happening a century ago. Today, finance capital has completely consolidated its control over the world economy. Naturally, it's preferable to make money without having to deal with messy commodities or large work forces so finance capitalists essentially outsource commodity production to industrial capitalists whom they control because they control the flow of capital. Unfortunately, finance capitalists are so rapacious that they wreck the economy as occurred in 2008. In the USA, they funded the export of industrial jobs to countries with cheaper labor forces and laid the basis for the decline of the US economy.

In our increasingly global economy, finance capitalists are the ruling class. Like all ruling classes, they will do everything in their power to stay in power, no matter how destructive that is for everone else. They are so destructive that they are capable of bringing down capitalism itself. Unfortunately, they probably won't do that in time to prevent global warming, peak petroleum, and an array of other looming threats that humanity faces.

If there were any doubt which class Barack Obama answers to, consider only 3 names: Summers, Geitner, and Bernanke. These are the leading representatives of finance capital of our time. When they were appointed and confirmed, the message was crystal clear. Finance capital calls the shots, just as it always has. These men played key roles in causing economic catastrophe and in making sure that finance capital did not pay the price. In fact, they rewarded exactly those who caused the current crisis.

So, there is no shift in policy by the Obama administration. There are stylistic differences, small concessions, but no major changes in economic, foreign, or military policies. Finance capital is still firmly in charge, and the US Supreme Court delivered them even more power.

This is certainly a pessimistic view but one based on reality. It seems ironic that our species could perish because we lack the political skills to implement real solutions to the many problems that face us. As Mark Graham's song describes intelligent cockroaches of the distant future reflecting on humanity, "Their Brains Were Small, and They Died."

Reading Tea Leaves

It is highly embarrassing for the left supporters of Barack Obama to be feverishly searching for good works from his administration. One friend of mine sees minor nuances in Obama's statements about Israel/Palestine as signs of hope rather than seeing the backing of the most fascist Israeli government to date as a sign of the same old policy. It's very much like reading tea leaves. If it weren't for the animal rights movement, they would probably be reading entrails. The problem is that there is nothing there to point to. Health care? Looks like Obama will make it worse. The environment? No substance. The economy? Total capitulation to finance capital. I call this Obama denial. The longer they take to awake from it, the longer it will take to rally the millions who really do want progressive chance and believe that we can. The Obama administration is a cul de sac, a dead end. Time to do a U-turn and face reality.