Bulletin N°263
Subject: ON HEBREWS, GOYS AND OTHER VICTIMS OF NATIONALISM IN
THE AGE OF EMPIRE: FROM THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN
INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE.
27 September 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The beginning of the semester is accompanied, as usual, by theses to
read and theses defense juries to organize. Meanwhile, classes have
resumed, and CEIMSA will soon be presenting a series of anti-war films,
beginning with Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film, Paths of Glory.
Strategies and tactics for the anti-war movement have been discussed at
CEIMSA since our April conference on Pacifist Movements in the
United States and France, the papers of which will be published
in the form of a 400-page book by presses universitaires at
l'Université de Savoie next December.
We are currently organizing another International Colloquium for next
spring on Patriarchy in American Institutions. We
will be telling you more during the following weeks about this program,
and we hope that you will be able to attend in early April 2007.
Over the past several weeks informations circulating around the wars
in
the Middle East have invited many radical commentaries. The
international context of these wars, and vibrant democratic movements
in Third World countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia offer a contrast
with "imperial democracy," as practiced in the United States and parts
of Europe, where, in the opinion of many, the "dictatorship of capital"
governs the managers of society, who are "driven by ideology and/or
personal greed."
We invite readers to visit the Democracy Now! broadcast
interview with Bolivian President Evo Morales to observe a vivid
contrast to the First World mode of governing, to which we have grown
accustomed.
The inhumanity of U.S.-Israeli imperialism in the Middle East, an
historical perspective.
Re-reading last week the very influential book by the
American-Palestinian scholar Edward Said, The
Question of Palestine (1979), was an illuminating experience. I
had picked up a copy of this book many years ago at the UC-Santa Cruz
book store. It was being used at the University of California in a
course on the Middle East, and I thought it would useful in my American
foreign policy readings. I was not disappointed. Written at the end of
the Carter administration, Said clearly shows why the United States of
America is not "on the wrong side" but rather "is the wrong side". To
demonstrate this fact, he necessarily adopts an historical perspective.
At the beginning of the first chapter he writes:
- Until roughly the last thirty years of
the nineteenth century, everything to the east of an imaginary line
drawn somewhere
- between Greece and Turkey was called
the Orient. As a designation made in Europe, "the Orient" for many
centuries
- represented a special mentality, as in
the phrase "the Oriental mind," and also a set of special cultural,
political, and even
- racial characteristics (in such
notions as the Oriental despot, Oriental sensuality, splendor,
inscrutability). But mainly the
- Orient represented a kind of
indiscriminate generality for Europe, associated not only with
difference and otherness, but
- with the vast spaces, the
undifferentiated masses of mostly colored people, and the romance,
exotic locales, and mystery
- of "the marvels of the East." Anyone
familiar with the political history of the late Victorian period,
however, will know that the
- vexing, mostly political "Eastern
Question," as it was called, tended then to replace "the Orient" as a
subject of concern.
- By 1918 it is estimated that European
powers were in colonial occupation of about 85 percent of the globe, of
which a large
- segment belonged to the regions
formerly known simply as Oriental. The romance of the Orient was thus
succeeded by the
- problems of dealing with the Orient,
first in competition with other European powers maneuvering there and
second with the
- colonial people themselves in their
struggles for independence. From being a place "out there," the
Orient became a place
- of extraordinarily urgent, and precise
detail, a place of numerous subdivisions. One of these, the Middle
East, survives today
- as a region of the Orient connoting
infinite complexities, problems, conflicts. At its center stands what I
shall be calling the
- question of Palestine. (pp.3-4)
The Western imperialist mission of the 19th Century was, of course, to
bring civilization and progress to a "benighted people" (to use
Kipling's term for the indigenous populations of the Third World). Lord
Arthur James Balfour, as British Foreign Secretary (1916-1919) and
architect of British Imperialist policy in the Middle East, commented
on
his famous "Declaration" of 1916 three years later in a memorandum
written in August 1919 :
- The contradiction between the letter
of the Covenant (sic) [the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 promising
the
Arabs of former
- Ottoman colonies that as a reward for
supporting the Allies they could have their independence] is even more
flagrant in the
- case of the independent nation of
Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in
Palestine we do not propose
- even to go through the form of
consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though
the American Commission
- has been going through the forms
of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism
and Zionism, be it
- right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted
in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far
profounder import than the
- desire and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs
who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.(p.16-17)
Not everyone shared the callous imperialist view of Lord Balfour. The
distinguished French Orientaliste, Sylvain Lévi, representing
the Zionist delegation, gave testimony before The Supreme War Council
which was preparing the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, claiming
that :
- though the work of Zionists was of
great significance from the moral point of view, Palestine was a small
and poor land with
- a population of 600,000 Arabs, and the
[incoming] Jews, having a higher standard of living, would tend to
dispossess them.(p.20)
However, according to Chaim Weizmann, Polish Zionist leader and the
future first president of Israel in 1949, writes Edward Said, this
concern expressed in 1919,
- embarrassed the Zionists since, as he
was later to say, "the world would judge the Jewish state [and
presumably the Zionist
- movement] by what it shall do with the
Arabs." For indeed it was the world that made the success of Zionism
possible, and it was
- Zionism's sense of the world as
supporter and audience that played a considerable role in the struggle
for Palestine.(p.20)
The Zionist idea was that the Jewish people had the right to reclaim
a territory that had been promised them by their God. "The concealment
by Zionism of its own history," wrote Said, "has by now ... become
institutionalized, and not only in Israel." Theological representation
displaced real history, hiding the fact "that the entire historical
duration of a Jewish state in Palestine prior to 1948 was a sixty-year
period two millennia ago, [and] that the dispersion of the Palestinians
was not a fact of nature but a result of specific force and
strategies." (p.58)
- What all such material
partially screens is something totally intractable, something that
totally resists any theory, any
- one-plus-one explanation, any display
of feelings or attitudes. I refer to the plain and irreducible core of
the Palestinian
- experience for the last hundred years:
that on the land called Palestine there existed as a huge majority for
hundreds of
- years a largely pastoral, a
nevertheless socially, culturally, politically, economically
identifiable people whose language
- and religion were (for a huge
majority) Arabic and Islam, respectively. This people --or, if one
wishes to deny them any
- modern conception of themselves as a
people, this group of people
-- identified itself with the land it
tilled and lived on
- (poorly or not is irrelevant),
the more so after an almost wholly European decision was made to
resettle, reconstitute,
- recapture the land for Jews who were
to be brought there from elsewhere. So far as anyone has been able to
determine,
- there has been no example given of any
significant Palestinian gesture made to accept this modern reconquest
or to
- accept that Zionism has permanently
removed Palestinians from Palestine. Such as it is, the Palestinian
actuality is today,
- was yesterday, and most likely
tomorrow will be built upon an act of resistance to this new foreign
colonialism. But it is
- more likely that there will remain the
inverse resistance which has characterized Zionism and Israel since the
beginning:
- the refusal to admit, and the
consequent denial of, the existence of Palestinian Arabs who are there
not simply as an
- inconvenient nuisance, but as a
population
with an indissoluble bond with the land.
- The question of Palestine
is therefore the contest between an affirmation and a denial, and it is
this prior contest, dating
- back over a hundred years, which
animates and makes sense of the current impasse between the Arab states
and Israel.
- The contest has been almost comically
uneven from the beginning. Certainly so far as the West is concerned,
Palestine has
- been a place where a relatively
advanced (because European) incoming population of Jews has performed
miracles of
- construction and civilizing and has
fought brilliantly successful technical wars against what was
always portrayed as a
- dumb, essentially repellent population
of uncivilized Arab natives. There is no doubt that the contest in
Palestine has been
- between an advanced (and advancing)
culture and a relatively backward, more or less traditional
one. But we need to try
- to understand what the instruments of
this contest were, and how they shaped subsequent history so that this
history now
- appears
to confirm the validity of the
Zionist claims to Palestine, thereby denigrating the Palestinian
claims.
- In other words, we must
understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle
between a presence
- and an interpretation, the former
constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter.
What was this
- presence? No matter how backward,
uncivilized, and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on
the land. . . . .(p.7-8)
Noam Chomsky's book, Fateful
Triangle (1983) is a comprehensive documentation of western
imperialist interests in the Middle East, and the use of theology to
preclude public debate on social issues such as war and economic
exploitation. Imperialist policies in the Middle East, protected by
taboos and surrounded by uncritical support and dogmatic denials, led
Chomsky to conclude:
- If current plans succeed, the
predictions of Israeli government Arabists in 1948 might be fulfilled:
the refugees would
- either assimilate elsewhere or "would
be crushed" and "die," while "most of them would turn into human dust
and the
- waste of society, and join the most
impoverished classes in the Arab countries." Apart from privileged
sectors that
- accommodate to the "neo-colonial"
settlement, those remaining in the territories can look forward to the
bright future
- of Haitians toiling in U.S. assembly
plants for a few cents an hour or the semi-slave laborers in China's
foreign-controlled
- export industries. And Palestinians
within Israel may expect to live as American Jews and Blacks would if
the U.S. were
- to become "the sovereign State of
Christian Whites" throughout the world (to paraphrase Israeli law), not
the state of its
- citizens.(pp.564-565)
Below, are 7 items we
recently received on war and anti-war strategies coming out of the
United States and England today.
Item A. is a 40-minute podcast
of British moral philosopher, Ted Honderich, who examines the moral
implications of Zionism and terror in the world today.
Items B., C., and D.
concern the alarming destruction of Palestinians in Gaza which
is under constant attack by the IDF.
Item E. is a critique of Zionist
strategies against an increasingly uncooperative reality.
Item F., from Robert Attorney
Robert Rivkin of San Francisco, offers a new view of the
anti-imperialist mobilizations in America, which now include a growing
number of Republicans.
Item G. is a copy of Daniel
Ellsberg's San Francisco speech on "new political realities" in the
United States, delivered on 9 July 2006, sent to us by San Diego
community organizer Monty Kroopkin.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3
http://www.ceimsa.org/
______________
A.
from Professor Ted Honderich :
Subject: Video Documentary on the philosophical meaning of terror.
25 September 2006
Can suicide bombers ever be justified?
Professor Honderich, Britain's leading moral philosopher, is unafraid
to tell the truth as he sees it. Taking what he says is the betrayal of
the Palestinian people as his starting point, Ted reveals who shares
moral responsibility for recent acts of terrorism, and points a finger
at the politicians.
_____________
B.
from Ed Herman :
Subject: Gaza's darkness
19 September 2006
http://www.haaretz.com/
Francis,
A picture of unilateral violence and disastrous abuse in Gaza, written
by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy--a picture you will not see in the NYT
or
Philadelphia Inquirer.
Ed
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif
Gaza has been
reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It
is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit,
and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense
Forces has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to
describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling,
indiscriminately.
Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn't
even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to
do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF
returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no
disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is
dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing
is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the
sublime and nonsensical talk about "the end of the occupation" and
"partitioning the land" now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater
brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the
occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the
intolerable living conditions of the occupied.
In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed
the only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity
supply will be cut off for at least another year. There's hardly any
water. Since there is no electricity, supplying homes with water is
nearly impossible. Gaza is filthier and smellier than ever: Because of
the embargo Israel and the world have imposed on the elected authority,
no salaries are being paid and the street cleaners have been on strike
for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage and obnoxious clouds of stink
strangle the coastal strip, turning it into Calcutta.
More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison. The Erez crossing is empty,
the Karni crossing has been open only a few days over the last two
months, and the same is true for the Rafah crossing. Some 15,000 people
waited for two months to enter Egypt, some are still waiting, including
many ailing and wounded people. Another 5,000 waited on the other side
to return to their homes. Some died during the wait. One must see the
scenes at Rafah to understand how profound a human tragedy is taking
place. A crossing that was not supposed to have an Israeli presence
continues to be Israel's means to pressure 1.5 million inhabitants.
This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment. The U.S. and
Europe, whose police are at the Rafah crossing, also bear
responsibility for the situation.
Gaza is also poorer and hungrier than ever before. There is nearly no
merchandise moving in and out, fishing is banned, the tens of thousands
of PA workers receive no salaries, and the possibility of working in
Israel is out of the question.
And we still haven't mentioned the death, destruction and horror. In
the last two months, Israel killed 224 Palestinians, 62 of them
children and 25 of them women. It bombed and assassinated, destroyed
and shelled, and no one stopped it. No Qassam cell or smuggling tunnel
justifies such wide-scale killing. A day doesn't go by without deaths,
most of them innocent civilians.
Where are the days when there was still a debate inside Israel about
the assassinations? Today, Israel drops innumerable missiles, shells
and bombs on houses and kills entire families on its way to another
assassination. Hospitals are collapsing with more than 900 people
undergoing treatment. At Shifa Hospital, the only such facility in Gaza
that might be worthy of being called a hospital, I saw heartrending
scenes last week. Children who lost limbs, on respirators, paralyzed,
crippled for the rest of their lives.
Families have been killed in their sleep, while riding on donkeys or
working in fields. Frightened children, traumatized by what they have
seen, huddle in their homes with a horror in their eyes that is
difficult to describe in words. A journalist from Spain who spent time
in Gaza recently, a veteran of war and disaster zones around the world,
said he had never been exposed to scenes as horrific as the ones he saw
and documented over the last two months.
It is difficult to determine who decided on all this. It is doubtful
the ministers are aware of the reality in Gaza. They are responsible
for it, starting with the bad decision on the embargo, through the
bombing of Gaza's bridges and power station and the mass
assassinations. Israel is responsible now once again for all that
happens in Gaza.
The events in Gaza expose the great fraud of Kadima: It came to power
on the coattails of the virtual success of the disengagement, which is
now going up in flames, and it promised convergence, a promise that the
prime minister has already rescinded. Those who think Kadima is a
centrist party should now know it is nothing other than another
rightist occupation party. The same is true of Labor. Defense Minister
Amir Peretz is responsible for what is happening in Gaza no less than
the prime minister, and Peretz's hands are as blood-soaked as Olmert's.
He can never present himself as a 'man of peace' again. The ground
invasions every week, each time somewhere else, the kill and destroy
operations from the sea, air and land are all dubbed with names to
whitewash the reality, like 'Summer Rains' or 'Locked Kindergarten.' No
security excuse can explain the cycle of madness, and no civic argument
can excuse the outrageous silence of us all. Gilad Shalit will not be
released and the Qassams will not cease. On the contrary, there is a
horror taking place in Gaza, and while it might prevent a few terror
attacks in the short run, it is bound to give birth to much more
murderous terror. Israel will then say with its self-righteousness:
'But we returned Gaza to them.'
< http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/images/0.gif>
_____________
C.
from Truthout :
25 September 2006
The conflict in Gaza has attracted relatively little international attention, not least because for five weeks it was overshadowed by that in Lebanon. But
the death toll has continued to rise.
Gaza:
Children Killed in a War the World Doesn't Want to Know About
______________
D.
from Ed Herman :
10 September 2006
Subject: Genocide in Gaza--Ilan pappe
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-090406131307.htm
Francis,
The absence of a loud and passionate protest over this horror scene is
really distressing.
Ed
Genocide in Gaza
By Ilan Pappe
[Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts
and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the
Gaza Strip.]
A
genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another
three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit
Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will
be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli
attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed,
wounded and paralyzed.
The Israeli leadership is at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It
has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes
that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its
eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the
government, annexes the parts it covets - half of the West Bank - and
cleanses it of its native population, the other half would naturally
lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would not concern Israel.
This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the enthusiastic vote of most
of the Jews in the country. Such an arrangement cannot work in the Gaza
enclave - Egypt unlike Jordan has succeeded in persuading the Israelis,
already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will
never form part of Egypt. So a million and half Palestinians are stuck
inside Israel - although geographically the Strip is located on the
margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its midst.
The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and
one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables
the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had
imposed on them ever since 1967. There were relative better periods
where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed,
but these better times are gone. Harsher realities are in place ever
since 1987. Some access to the outside world was allowed as long as
there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but once they were removed the
Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically, most Israelis, according to
recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent alestinian state
that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge. The leadership, and
particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most dangerous
community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or another.
The conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing employed
successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine's population, and
against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are not
useful here. You can slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank,
and particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you cannot do it
in the Gaza Strip - once you sealed it as a maximum-security prison
camp.
As with the ethnic cleansing operations, the genocidal policy is not
formulated in a vacuum. Ever since 1948, the Israeli army and
government needed a pretext to commence such policies. The
takeover of Palestine in 1948 produced the inevitable local resistance
that in turn allowed the implementation of an ethnic cleansing policy,
preplanned already in the 1930s. Twenty years of Israeli occupation of
the West Bank produced eventually some sort of Palestinian resistance.
This belated anti-occupation struggle unleashed a new cleansing policy
that still is implemented today in the West Bank. The Gaza imprisonment
in the summer of 2005, which was
paraded as an Israeli generous withdrawal, produced the Hamas and
Islamic Jihad missile attack and one abduction case. Even before the
abduction of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army bombarded indiscriminately
the Strip. Ever since the abduction, the massive killing increased and
became systematic. A daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly
children is now reported in the internal pages of the local press,
quite often in microscopic fonts.
The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day now that
one of them is the General Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the
Israeli airforce issued orders to its pilots to abort missions if
within 500 square meters of their target they spotted innocent
civilians. Not that these orders were kept, but the pretense for
internal moral consumption was there. It is called in the Israeli
airforce, the "Lebanon Procedure" [Nohal Levanon]. When the pilots
asked a year ago if the "Lebanon procedure" is
intact for Gaza, the answer was no. The same answer was given to the
pilots in the second Lebanon war.
The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes
in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion
of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and
defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing
fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or
willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is
going to leave a few thousand dead each year. This is of course
different from genociding a million people in one campaign - the only
inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust
memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific
proportions and more importantly you may force a mass eviction in the
end of the day outside the Strip - either in the name of human aid,
international intervention or the people's own desire to escape the
inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be the
response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will be the Gazan
reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.
Much depends on the international reaction. When Israel was absolved
from any responsibility or accountably for the ethnic cleansing in
1948, it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national
security agenda. If the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal
policies would be tolerated by the world, it would expand and used even
more drastically.
Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and
divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza
Strip. There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave
pilots refused to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of
150 - do not cease to write about it, but this is it. In the name of
the holocaust memory let us hope the world would not allow the genocide
of Gaza to continue.
_____________
-- Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University
of Haifa Department of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma
Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include among
others The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York
1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A
History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East
(London and New York 2005) and forthcoming, Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine (2006)
_______________
E.
from Ed Herman :
12 September 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison09122006.html
Francis,
Powerful article,
though “coming collapse” may be doubted.
Ed
The Moral
Bankruptcy of Israel's Founding Idea
The Coming
Collapse of Zionism
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
(Former CIA Analyst)
I s it only observers outside the conventional
mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon
and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most
deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?
Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be
that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it,
those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist
principle that underlies it?
Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the
ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the
exclusivist state of Jews?
Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the
fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural
rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any
possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's
destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step
in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that
ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights,
it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no
territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to
accommodate those unlimited rights.
Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to
its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space
within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well,
extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen
fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no
demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always
outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural
resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This
was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that
neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah
should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges
Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this
effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity
except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that
is not Zionist is a potential threat.
In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to
destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism
would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves,
as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's last
occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the
first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid
of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and
water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British correspondent Robert Fisk
wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that "Beirut
is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive."
Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he
headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort
after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment
building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians,
mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take
Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern
third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly
destructive civil war.
The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake
Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab
population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy. Cluster
bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading
manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in
mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre
area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and
are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their
homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000
unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in
southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been
killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire
last month.
Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is
not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military
objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel's
cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian
coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire
took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was
in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt
intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area.
Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much
as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that
did vast damage to the nation's entire civilian infrastructure, that
crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and
benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian
coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential
apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars
flying white flags, Israel's war can only be interpreted as a massiv
act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.
In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to
return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or
unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been
cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except
incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S.
acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting
terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military
exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by
Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute
certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war
against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the
audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel's
will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are
not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.
Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another
since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's longest
suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists
thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the
problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the
flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in
the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state.
You can't have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish.
Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the
capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought
had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening
the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.
In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely
directed -- with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon -- toward
making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic
cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and
resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce,
home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation,
arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction,
destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies,
starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of
the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in
all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow
strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are
crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island,
Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a
month's time -- killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure,
making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered
at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the
value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.
Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada,
September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to
Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an
ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in
Israel that Pappe says "the daily business of slaying Palestinians,
mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local
press, quite often in microscopic fonts." His prediction is that
continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or,
if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far
more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe
recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any
accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to
turn this policy "into a legitimate tool for its national security
agenda." If the world remains silent again in response to the current
round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more
drastically."
And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this
horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its
wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total
bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the
Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see
this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to
turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the
name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?
Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed
observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted
the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual
degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing
Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of
Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi,
writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the
"indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that
cannot be assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch,
August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is
anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat its neighbors as an
existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial
character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be
starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March
2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing and
institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the West
and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in
violation of all purported enlightenment values."
Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running
amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a
natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the
neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the
Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of
the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the
"full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one is not fighting a
policy, a government or specific targets, but a 'threat' identified
with a community" -- or, in Israel's case, with all non-Jewish
communities.
The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted
both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale
for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading
Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram,
August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is
divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is
accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double standard loses
all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This
has always been Israel's natural order of things: in Israel's world and
that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture
are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures
is the very basis of the state.
In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a
sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of
the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance
has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited.
The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski
speaks of -- the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new
high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes
Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash
between the "civilized" West and a backward, enraged East -- has been
seen for what it is because of Israel's mad assault on Lebanon. What it
is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing
absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime
in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony.
As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with
Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and
Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of
hegemony, are the political response of populations "that have been
degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly
by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence,
or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States."
Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much
Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and
Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of
Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence
that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have
been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's best
designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their
existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is
taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.
Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States
supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and more
commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice
this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort
of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now
exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the
sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated
psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping
its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish
racial/religious domination over other peoples.
Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout
the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for
Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their
imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but
others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in
which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an
ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees
Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls
global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is
the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says,
who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism," while
Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more
Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the
Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, "an
historic event" and a "dead entity."
Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the
possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated,
going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership
somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of
humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and agrees that
Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state.
British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees
the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in Israel and among
its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a
"critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of the previously
invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring
power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less
favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to
resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway along with
many others -- sees only "war, war and more war, until one day it is
Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings
the whole state down on their heads."
This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel
and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism's
most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in
Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or
the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.
Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed
by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before
their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine.
By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the
colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That
vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means
ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling
with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not
a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single
state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again
seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and
ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has
not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.
We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined by
Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate,
only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world
that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable.
Justice can ultimately prevail.
________________
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has
worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
____________
F.
from Robert Rivkin :
18 September 2006
Hello Francis,
My article, "Bush's Paltry
Excuse for Subverting Geneva Convention," was published on September
19, 2006. You can find it at: www.commondreams.org
Bob
P.S. There's a terrific rumination about
Franz Kafka's relevance to our times by Christy Rodgers , also
published on September 19th, on www.dissidentvoice.org
P.P.S. Another well-documented one is Chuck
Almdale's August 29, 2006 piece, "Fascist Propaganda Principles and the
Bush Administration," on www.crisispapers.org
P.P.P.S Read them and
weep -- but pass them on!
BR
____________
G.
from Monty Kroopkin :
Subject: Daniel Ellsberg speech 9-7-06
20 September 2006
http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php
Francis,
Here is a copy of Daniel Ellsberg's speech in San Francisco. His
analysis of the fascist movement here today, comparisons with Germany
in 1933, the effects of the 3 Vietnam War Moratoriums in 1969 (general
strikes, not called that) and the current resistence and threat of even
wider war and attack on Iran.
Ellsberg has joined 5 members of Congress, Jesse Jackson, Jr., and
thousands of others calling for a walkout from work and school on
October 5.
The World Can't Wait ran full-page ads in the New York Times,
the LA Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Chicago
Reader, and DC's weekly paper. It may also run this week in
USA Today. Radio ads are running on Air America.
Yours in solidarity from my (now officially illegal) NSA party line,
Monty