America, Meet The Israeli Settlers

Abuses against the Palestinian people by Israeli Settlers


Keep your anger in check as you watch. It is important to know what is going on in this part of the world.
 

“To understand everything is to forgive everything” - Buddha

 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. - Plato

¹⁴If you forgive others for the wrongs they do to you, your Father in heaven will forgive you. ¹⁵But if you don’t forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.
Matthew 6:14-15

Caution: strong language, violence

American Liberals Fail To Stand for Human Rights

Israel's murderous attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has served to focus international attention on its longstanding, immoral siege of Gaza. Since the election of Hamas in 2007, Israel has tightened its hold on Gaza's borders, blocking essential goods from entering and Gazan products from leaving, effectively destroying Gaza's economy. Eight out of ten Gazans depend on international food aid to survive, and ninety-five per cent of its drinking water fails to meet safety standards for consumption. Seventy per cent of the population suffers from food insecurity. Thirteen per cent of the children of Gaza suffer stunted growth from malnutrition.

Do American liberals care about the fact that Gaza is a concentration camp? Some do. Some criticize Israel. But the prevailing image that continues to dominate is that of the vulnerable Jew, the perennial victim. Liberals are complicit in this myth.

The ostracism of Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, over her comment that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, America and elsewhere is revealing in several ways.

In spite of an apology, the 89-year-old has been summarily retired by the Hearst newspaper group, dropped by her agent, spurned by the White House, and denounced by long-time friends and colleagues.

Ms Thomas earned a reputation as a combative journalist, at least by American standards, with a succession of administrations over their Middle East policies, culminating in Bush officials boycotting her for her relentless criticisms of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the reaction to her latest remarks suggest that, if there is one topic in American public life on which the boundaries of what can and cannot be said are still tightly policed, it is Israel.

It is true, as she says, that Palestine was occupied and the land taken from the Palestinians by Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed.

But 62 years on from Israel’s creation, most Jewish citizens have no home to go to in Poland and Germany -- or in Iraq and Yemen, for that matter.

But Ms Thomas did apologize and, after that, a line ought to have been drawn under the affair -- as it surely would have been had she made any other kind of faux pas. Instead, she has been denounced as an anti-Semite, even by her former friends.

The reasoning of one, Lanny Davis, counsel to the White House in the Clinton administration, was typical. Mr. Davis, who said he previously considered himself “a close friend”, asked whether anyone would be “protective of Helen's privileges and honors if she had been asking Blacks to return to Africa, or Native Americans to Asia and South America, from which they came 8,000 or more years ago?”

It is that widely accepted analogy, appropriating the black and Native American experience in a wholly misguided way, that reveals in stark fashion the moral failure of American liberals.

In their blindness to the current relations of power in the U.S., most critics of Ms Thomas contribute to the very intolerance they claim to be challenging.

Ms Thomas is an Arab-American, of Lebanese descent, whose remarks were publicized in the immediate wake of Israel’s lethal commando attack on a flotilla of aid ships trying to break the siege of Gaza.

Unlike most Americans, who were half-wakened from their six-decade Middle East slumber by the killing of at least nine Turkish activists, Ms Thomas has been troubled by the Palestinians’ plight for much of her long lifetime.

She was in her late twenties when Israel ethnically cleansed three-quarters of a million Palestinians from most of Palestine, a move endorsed by the fledgling United Nations.

She was in her mid-forties when Israel took over the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria in a war that dealt a crushing blow to Arab identity and pride and made Israel a favored ally of the U.S.

In her later years she has witnessed Israel’s repeated destruction of Lebanon, her parents’ homeland, and the slow confinement and erasure of the neighboring Palestinian people.

Both have occurred under a duplicitous American “peace process” while Washington has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Israel’s coffers.

It is therefore entirely understandable if, despite her own personal success, she feels a simmering anger not only at what has taken place throughout her lifetime in the Middle East but also at the silencing of all debate about it in the U.S. by the Washington elites she counted as friends and colleagues.

While she has many long-standing Jewish friends in Washington -- making the anti-Semite charge implausible -- she has also seen them and others promote injustice in the Middle East.

Doubtless she, like many of us, has been exasperated at the toothless performance of the press corps she belongs to in holding the White House to account in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine.

It is with this context in mind that we can draw a more fitting analogy. We should ask instead:

How harshly should Helen Thomas be judged were she a black professional who, seeing yet another injustice like the video of Rodney King being beaten to within an inch of his life by white policemen, had said white Americans ought to “go home to Europe”?

This analogy accords more closely with the reality of power relations in the U.S. between Arabs and Jews. Ms Thomas is not a representative of the oppressor white man disrespecting the oppressed black man, as Mr. Davis suggests.

She is the oppressed black man hitting back at the oppressor. Her comments shocked not least because they denied an image that continues to dominate in modern America of the vulnerable Jew, a myth that persists even as Jews have become the most successful minority in the country.

Obama Endorses Endless War

 

 Any hope at all?

Political Left

In discussing Obama’s expansion of the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is important not to focus on Obama as a personality but on the social system to which he is committed, specifically to the war-waging capitalist national state.

“War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne declared during World War I. It is what the national state is for, what it does, and why it still exists, despite the real trends toward international unity and worldwide coordination.

In an age of nuclear bombs, the human race will not be safe until we abolish these states (especially the big, imperial, ones such as those of North America, Western Europe, and Japan) and replace them with a federation of self-managing associations of working people.

After 3 months of consulations and deliberation, President Obama has announced that he is going to do what he had promised to do during his campaign for president—namely to expand the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This may not have been inevitable. But he'd already broken many of his campaign promises , such as ending overseas prisons, openness in government, ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a health care plan which covers everyone, an economic plan for working people, etc.

So it was probable that he'd maintain America's endless wars. It's the nature of the beast

As has been pointed out, his stated reasons for the war do not make much sense: in order to get out of Afghanistan, the US will send more troops into Afghanistan.

The US needs to fight Al Qaeda, even though there are now only about 100 Queda militants left in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda base is mostly in Pakistan (which Obama slurred over by speaking of “the border”) but the US will not be sending troops there (just secret attacks by drone missiles and CIA operatives).

More generally, the US supposedly has to strengthen the resolve of the government of Pakistan by sending more troops to Afghanistan.

The US hopes to win over the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan by sending more non-Muslim, only-English-speaking, troops, which is sure to antagonize the people of the region.

In 18 months, the US forces are supposed to transform the Karzai regime from one of the most corrupt, incompetent, and illegitimate states on earth, to a stable government (never mind a democracy).

The effects of the mistaken US policies of 8 years can be reversed in 18 months (on the assumption that US forces will really “start” to withdraw in 18 months; promises are cheap; the US is still in Iraq).

All of this is simply unbelievable and it is hard to think that an intelligent man such as Obama believes any of it.

Why then, really, is the US sending more troops into the region? Closer to Obama’s thinking are the expressions in his December 1, West Point, address, when he announced his program, where he spoke about the US as a global power with an economy which competes on the world market.

Thus he remarked that “competition within the global economy has grown more fierce….Our prosperity…will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the past.”

Implicit in these statements is an awareness that the US is no longer the economic power it was “in the past.”

While still having the largest national economy, the US is now a de-industrializing debtor nation, losing out in world competition to Europe and Asia.

This has been made worse by the global Great Recession, which has exposed the decay of the whole international capitalist system. The US ruling class, its layer of rich people, is not happy about this.

So they turn to the one asset they still have, which is the mighty military force of the US state—more powerful than any potential combination of opponent states. By throwing its weight around, the US hopes to re-achieve world dominance, or at least to slow its decline in world power.

Obama reminded his listeners that the US has long been the dominant world power. “Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs ….More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for six decades…”

This is modified by the hypocritical words,”But unlike the great powers of old, we have not sough world domination.”

He can say this because the US has not ruled through open “ownership” of colonies (leaving aside Puerto Rico and a few other places) but by economically dominating the world market, so that all must buy and sell on the US’ terms (“neocolonialism”).

But whenever “necessary,” this has been backed up by military force, as shown in two imperialist world wars and a large number of invasions of smaller, weaker, nations.

Therefore it cannot accept being kicked in the teeth by small groups of terrorists living in caves, nor let petty dictatorships thumb their noses at the US.

Nor can they afford to let regions which dominate the world petroleum supply fall into chaos, or at least outside of US rule, given the centrality of oil for the capitalist industrial economy.

This includes both the Middle East and Northwest Asia (which may have important oil pipelines go through it).

Irrational behavior will result from being in situations which cannot be rationally dealt with. The US ruling class must try to dominate the world, economically and therefore politically and militarily, due to world competition.

But it cannot dominate the world and is losing out in international competition. It must try to control the oppressed nations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but it cannot control them.

The result is a contradictory and irrational foreign policy. This was apparent under the stupid George W. Bush, with his ideologically fanatic advisors. It is still obvious under the intelligent and reasonable Barack Obama.

The result is likely to be disastrous (as it was in the Vietnam war, also waged by moderate Democrats—in fact most US wars have been waged by Democrats, starting with World War I).

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, many people have been killed or wounded or their lives disrupted—mostly the nationally-oppressed people but also many US soldiers.

Now very many more will be killed. Not to speak of the wealth which will be destroyed, both in the attacked countries and in the US (Obama says the war will cost $1 trillion).

And in the background is the threat of nuclear war—not only does the US have nuclear weapons but so does Pakistan and its long-time opponent and neighbor India.

Also, in the same region, the US is threatening to attack Iran, for supposedly working toward nuclear weapons, and there are similar threats by the US ally Israel, which does have nuclear weapons.

Will nuclear bombs be used in the near future? I doubt it; but time marches on and sooner or later they will be used. (The Bush administration made an effort to make smaller “bunker-blasting” nuclear bombs, which could be used in small wars such as in Iraq.

These would have erased the gap between nuclear and conventional weapons. I do not know where this stands at the moment.) Liberals have called on the US to lead a world-wide crusade to abolish all nuclear weapons.

Obama has given lip service to this idea, but nothing will come of it because the US state cannot give up any of its power to threaten the rest of the world.

Those on the 'real' left must oppose these wars will all our might. While the system cannot stop making wars, it can be forced to end particular wars. This can be done by raising the price which the state must pay for that war.

If the capitalist politicians feel that young people are becoming radicalized and militant, that labor is becoming restless, that soldiers are potentially mutinous, and that the local peoples will not stop resisting--then they will finally decide to end the war (as in Vietnam).

We should participate in broader “peace” movement, joining it in its mass marches and demonstrations. Often we radicals get tired of demonstrations, seeing how little they accomplish; but we should not forget how exciting they can be for newer layers of antiwar activists.

However this does not mean that we cover up our program. In particular we must oppose the leaders of this movement (liberals and progressives) for their capitulation to the Democratic Party.

For years now, they have held back the movement by focusing on electing and supporting liberal Democrats.

We need to point to those who have the real power to end the war: the soldiers and other military forces and the working class.

There has been increasing discontent among rank-and=file military and their families about the war.

We should have a positive attitude toward this, as opposed to a moralistic superiority toward ordinary soldiers, who are usually victims of the poverty draft.

Similarly, there has been much discontent with the wars among working people and their families. We can at least support the idea of strikes against the war, war production, and the transportation of war material. We should oppose any use of the war as an excuse for union-busting or wage-lowering.

The force most directly opposing US imperialism in these regions are the people. We should make clear our solidarity with the nationally oppressed people (who are mostly workers, peasants, and small businesspeople).

We should defend their right to resist US aggression. We should not be “neutral” between the mightiest imperial power and the oppressed people of Afghanistan.

But this does not require any support or endorsement for any particular organization or leadership.

We should be willing to work with anyone who will oppose the wars, while openly expressing our own program: the end of the state, of international capitalism (imperialism), and of all forms of oppression.