Targets across the country included Vice-President Mohammad Karim Khalili, airfields and police stations in three eastern provinces. About 20 insurgents were killed in the attacks, which injured at least 15 police officers and nine civilians.

US ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker dismissed the Taliban’s claim of responsibility: “Frankly, I don’t think the Taliban is good enough,” leaving unsaid who is. Crocker commended the NATO-trained Afghan forces, whose capability was “proven today by their professional and highly effective response in restoring order”.

A warning came from New Delhi’s Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies Director Dipankar Banerjee: “We’re only going to see an increase in these attacks. It helps [the militants] ensure political dominance in the new order as they slowly take over.” Talha said that Sunday’s strikes were just a preview of the fighting season to come. “We want to engage smaller numbers of well-trained fighters to make attacks on significant government, American and NATO targets.” He said the mastermind of the operation was Hajji Lala, the insurgency’s shadow governor of Kabul and its eastern-front military chief.

One big difference, according to Talha and other Taliban sources, was that this time the Haqqani network did not play a significant role in the operation. Rivalry has developed between the Taliban and its eastern partner in insurgency, although Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin have in the past declared their loyalty to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Talha says he’s hopeful that the Taliban and the Haqqanis will work together in the future. “With this coordination we can double of number and size of attacks across Afghanistan.”

Sunday’s attacks confirmed the ease with which the Taliban are able to infiltrate fighters, suicide bombers, explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons into the capital and the main towns of the three surrounding provinces. The Kabul government’s 300,000-strong security forces actually make this easier, Talha explained. “The bigger the Afghan police, army, and intelligence services grow, the less effective they become. Kabul’s intelligence and police are weaker than ever, allowing us to carry out these stunning episodes.”

A senior Kabul-government official in eastern Paktia province confirms this: “I fear our intelligence and security forces are becoming less coordinated while the Taliban’s coordination is getting better.” The problem is that the intelligence service, the police, and the army, controlled by Tajiks, are riven by ethnic rivalries and mistrust between them, Pashtuns and Uzbeks. “They do not coordinate with each other. This provides a golden opportunity for the Taliban to infiltrate and penetrate wherever and when they wish.”

American, Afghan and NATO officials undoubtedly will call the Taliban assault a failed offensive. But that is small comfort to most Afghans.

British parliamentarian Lord Nazir Ahmed added a note of whimsy to AfPak’s ongoing tragedy, when he announced a reward for the capture of US President Barack Obama and his predecessor George W Bush at a reception in Lord Nazir’s honour held by the business community of Haripur, Pakistan on Friday. Nazir said that placing a bounty on Lashkar-e-Taiba Chief Hafiz Saeed was an insult to all Muslims, and by doing so President Obama has challenged the dignity of the Muslim Ummah. Lashkar-e-Taiba is held responsible for the 2008 Mumbai bombings and is on the US terrorist list.

“If the US can announce a reward of $10 million for the captor of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of 10 million pounds on President Obama and his predecessor George Bush,” Lord Nazir said. A terrorist tit-for-tat.

Their intent was quite innocent — to visit beleaguered Palestinians in the West Bank; in one case, to help locals build a school. But the fact that 2,000 such do-gooders were planning to do so en masse as part of the annual Flytilla was a red flag to the Israeli bull. The world might take notice, the Palestinians might take heart, and Israeli crimes might finally be stopped.

But Israeli refusal to allow these innocent visitors to the West Bank would prove once again that the West Bank is an open prison inside Israel, with access at the whim of the prison guards.

The prison guards rose to the occasion. Airports around the world were issued no-fly lists with 730 names, and airlines were warned they better kick them and any other suspicious passengers off their planes, or the airlines would be charged for the cost of deporting them. 650 undercover police swarmed Ben Gurion with their guns and tear gas, just in case.

The high tech planning against the low tech protesters mostly worked. Members of “Welcome to Palestine” say up to 200 of the 2,000 activists from 15 countries, a third of them from France, were prevented from flying to Tel Aviv from Paris, Brussels, Basel, Geneva and Zurich on Sunday. Apartheid-complicit airlines included Jet2.com, Brussels Airlines, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Swiss Air and Turkish Airlines.

At Ben Gurion, a Swedish citizen was forced to sign a hastily-composed document stating that she would have no contact with pro-Palestinian groups while in Israel. Shortly after, a new illegal procedure was instituted at the airport demanding select passengers sign a statement saying they will not be in contact or work with “members of any pro-Palestinian organisations” and “will not participate in pro-Palestinian activities”. The Prime Minister’s Office released a letter that was handed to deported Flytilla activists telling them to “Go to Syria”.

The Welcome to Palestine Campaign stated: “Those who wanted to welcome our visitors and were brutally assaulted will remember how the same Israeli police let right wing fanatics sing and disrupt at the airport. The whole world is now seeing Israel for what it is: a police state that fulfills all the requirements of being an apartheid pariah state per the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973)”, and charged that “those airlines and governments that acted as subcontractors for the Israeli apartheid regime are being challenged by their own people.”

Last year, around 800 people tried to join the campaign, 400 blocked from flying by the airlines. Another 120 were deported by Israel. The term “flytilla” recalls attempts by activists to reach Israeli-blockaded Gaza by boat, which have come to be known as “Freedom Flotillas”.

A 23-year-old French woman who made it into Israel to take part in the protest said about half her group of 50 was detained. “The security forces in France and Israel treated us like criminals,” she said. “It’s very frustrating and surprising that the authorities cooperated with the Israeli claims and propaganda.” The blacklist grows by leaps and bounds. The 270 people who made it to Tel Aviv in last year’s protest had pride of place on this year’s list and are banned from entering the country for 10 years. All those on this year’s will be added.

Israeli apartheid is not perfect. Two lonely voices in the Knesset denounced the crackdown. Meretz leader Zehava Gal-On said blacklisting pro-Palestinian activists only deepens delegtimisation of Israel. MP Haneen Zoabi said it proves that Israel violates human rights not only of Palestinians but of people from all around the world. An Israeli official admitted that 40 per cent of the names on Shin Bet security blacklist were not activists at all.

Included among the blacklisted were: a French diplomat and his wife looking for an apartment in Jerusalem; an Italian government official scheduled to meet her Israeli counterparts; and a member of the board of directors of German pharmaceutical giant Merck with 10 million euros for the Weizmann Institute of Science. In the mix-up, even Israelis were blacklisted. “We put people on the list who are as far removed from anti-Israel political activity as east is from west,” one Israel Foreign Ministry official complained. “We have insulted hundreds of foreign citizens because of suspicions, and have given the other side a victory on a silver platter.”

The daily stream of Jewish and Christian Disney-pilgrims continue to wail at one Wall or pass through another to visit a faux manger in Bethlehem, or a prettified Garden of Gethsemane. Only Egypt’s Coptic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church refuse to give permission to pilgrims to make these jaunts, which give tacit approval to Israel’s destruction of Jerusalem’s Christian and Muslim heritage.

The flytillers, today’s true pilgrims, are enduring their travail — bearing their cross — not to send home “I was there” pictures of Jesus’s tomb, but to provide truly Christian compassion to the suffering Muslims and handful of Palestinian Christians who desperately cling to their remaining bits of land, and to emphasise to the world how Israel crucifies innocent Palestinians every moment. For them — Arab or Christian — every day is Good Friday.

So it should not be surprising if the BDS movement itself experiences turmoil. For several years now, the UK Palestinian Soldarity Committee (PSC) has conducted a policy of calling leading activists such as Paul Eisen, Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir — all Jewish — anti-Semitic for daring to point out that those who persecute Arab Muslims and Christians are not just Zionists but are invariably Jewish. That the Jews who have opted to take Israeli citizenship are increasingly racist, belligerent settlers who use their new identity to dispossess, terrorise and murder Palestinians, with the intent of forcing them to leave even the remaining 12 per cent of the land once called Palestine.

These Jews have given Judaism a bad name, causing some “good Jews” to critique their own religious heritage and even disown it, such as American highschooler and winner of the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr Writing Award Jesse Lieberfeld, who came to realise, “I was grouped with the racial supremacists… I was part of a delusion.” For these Jews, Judaism today had been perverted by Zionism. Paying tribute to Jesse, ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon said, “Journeying from choseness is a life-struggle. From time to time you may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and humanism are there at your side — for all time.”

Atzmon, born and bred in Israel, with holocaust victims in his family, is the latest victim of the UK PSC, which earlier ostracised Eisen for his Der Yassin Remembered group honouring martyred Palestinian Muslims and Christians of the 1948 Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands made permanent refugees.

After being ostracised, Eisen and Shamir dismissed the “gatekeepers” in the movement, and carried on with their analysis and organising from the sidelines, sidelines which are growing just as fast as, if not faster than the mainstream and are now firmly centred on popularising a one-state solution to solve the Palestine-Israel problem.

Atzmon continued to lock horns with the UK PSC establishment, hoping to change it, though it is dominated by the likes of Tony Greenstein with his J-Big (Jews boycotting Israeli goods). No doubt Atzmon’s Sabra heritage steeled him for battle with those supporters of the Palestinians who see the movement as more a way to fight anti-Jewish sentiment (caused by Zionism) than to actually achieve victory for the Palestinians. He decided to write an analysis of his Jewish heritage and how it was transformed over the past century entitled The Wandering Who?¹ His book became a bestseller and he has been touring America and Europe regularly, speaking out bravely and making his gilad.co.uk a must read for all who care about both Palestine and “the plight of the Jews”.

Jewish intellectuals such as Ilan Pappe are following Atzmon’s footsteps and leaving Israel, disgusted with the cynicism and duplicity of the entire Israeli establishment. Atzmon has attracted many admirers — too many, it seems — from among the more mainstream critics of Israel. Richard Falk and John Mearsheimer — both Jewish — endorsed Atzmon’s book, Mearsheimer recommending that the book “should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike”.

On 13 March, near the end of Atzmon’s latest tour of the US speaking to pro-Palestinian groups, Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunimah published a letter at the US Palestinian Community Network (PCN) signed by 23 Palestinian activists, including Columbia University professor Joseph Massad and Omar Barghouti, a founder of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (currently doing an MA in philosophy at Tel Aviv University). The letter called for “the disavowal of the racism and anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon”. Abunimah effectively excommunicated Atzmon from participating in pro-Palestinian activities of the US PCN, as he was by the UK PSC. Atzmon wound up his tour the next day with an interview with (Jewish) history professor Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State University, at Washington’s Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, where he rebutted the charges against him.

But just as Muslims are loudly called on to disown Islamic terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, so must Jews disown their own Judaic terrorists, reasons Atzmon, who has been leading the way in this politically incorrect battle. Now that the dust has settled, and support for Atzmon has poured in, the letter in retrospect looks like an exercise in hasbara gone wrong. Conspicuous in their absence among signatories are leading Israel critics Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, The Progressive’s Matt Rothschild, Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, OpEd’s Rob Kall, and US Congress hopeful Norman Solomon.

It is possible to critique Atzmon for downplaying the imperialism behind Israel’s founding and support, which Abunimah does: “Our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.” However, there is nothing wrong with critiquing the problem from a cultural point of view, and the guilty culture just happens to be Jewish. Sadly, there is more than one way to skin the Palestinian cat.

Shamir took the debate a logical step further by posing the question, “To disavow or debate Abunimah”. He was attacked by Abunimah a decade ago, when he “hunted me out of the pro-Palestinian movement, saying that without Shamir, they will win sooner.” After a decade of unrelenting Israeli crimes, Shamir advised Massad, Barghouti and other Arab signatories, “Our Arab brothers will do well if they will stand out of this debate: let the Jews fight out the battle for their identity. As it happens, Gilad is their strongest champion on the Jewish side, they should cheer, not discourage him.”

Perhaps what prompted the letter was fear that BDS was just not mainstream enough. This was the implication behind a dismissal of BDS by Finkelstein, who just a few weeks before the Abunimah screed, called BDS a “cult” and admonished Palestinians to limit their struggle to the “two-state solution”. While himself exposing the “cult” of the holocaust, calling it an “industry” used to promote Israel’s aggressive colonial agenda, Finkelstein disappointed many admirers by suggesting that BDSers are conspirators intent on wiping poor Israel off the tattered old colonial map. “What is the result? There’s no Israel!”

But ironically, Atzmon and Finkelstein are on the same side this time. They are both pro-Palestinian activists and believers in free speech and open debate, not afraid to point the finger at machinations of their co-religionists. Before writing his ill-fated missive, Abunimah, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict, would have done well to ponder Atzmon’s defence of Finkelstein’s criticism of BDSers for their cultishness. “Finkelstein’s criticism of the solidarity movement is largely valid. The recent expulsion of Palestinians and academics from the UK PSC proves that we aren’t just dealing with a ‘cult’ discourse as Finkelstein suggests, far worse, we are actually dealing with a rabbinical operation that exercises the most repulsive Judaic excommunication tactics.”

“Finkelstein is correct when he suggests that the achievements of the solidarity ‘cult’ operations are pretty limited,” continues Atzmon. He looks beyond the gatewatched BDSers and critics such as Chomsky, Finkelstein, and himself — two-state or one — and predicts “that the solidarity movement is already a mass movement … that the Palestinians and the Arabs will liberate themselves.”

The Lobby is no doubt patting itself on the back, having through obvious pressure on prominent activists helped to weaken its foes for the nth time. This tactic is part of the age-old strategy by those in power of “divide and conquer”. Just as Britian and then the US and Israel have worked to divide up the Muslim world to weaken and control it — even mobilising “Islamic terrorists” (not to mention “Judaic terrorists”) in their schemes — so the domestic representatives of imperialism do the same on the homefront, manipulating soft anti-Zionists.

The tactic was used in the Cold War, using liberals and ex-Communists to isolate Communists from movements critical of imperialism. Now as then, it is necessary not to boycott each other, but to work together without responding to provocation. It is to be expected that the bad guys are going to infiltrate progressive movements and try to split them.

When Saudi Prince Faisal grilled Hamas Chief Khaled Meshaal about his alliance with Iran, the Hamas chief explained: “Yes, we have relations with Iran and will do so with whoever supports us. We are a resistance movement, open to the Arabs, to the Muslims and to all countries in the world, and we are not part of any agenda for regional forces.” BDSers may have their differences, but the goal is the liberation of Palestine. Let a hundred flowers blossom.

1. See Al-Ahram Weekly “Jezebel’s Legacy”; Dissident Voice‘s “Into the Mentality of the Occupier/Oppressor” and “Who Is Gilad Atzmon… and, Who Are We?.”

The secret Interior Ministry Koenig Memorandum, written shortly after the 1976 Land Day rallies, called for “diluting existing Arab population concentrations” to “ensure the long-term Jewish national interests”. This officially marked the implementation of Ben Gurion’s plans of ethnic cleansing to make Israel a de facto Jewish state. Treatment of native Arab Muslims and Christians ever since merely confirms this policy, with forced Jewish loyalty oaths and second class services and laws for non-Jews.

This year’s 36th annual Land Day rallies saw Israeli security forces shooting dead a 20-year-old man, and wounding 37 stone-throwers in the Gaza Strip and around Jerusalem, using live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades. Israeli forces were put on high alert on the frontiers with Lebanon and Syria, but there were no reports of anyone nearing the frontier fences. In fact, the Israeli Defence Forces were relieved at the relatively small numbers of protesters.

But there is little for them to cheer about. Israeli Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai said, “The Nakba and Naksa days are ahead of us, and that is where the challenge will be.” Nakba (disaster) Day, the day after Israeli independence day, is 15 May, and Naksa (retreat) Day, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, previously controlled by Jordan and Egypt, is 5 June.

During Nakba Day commemorations last year, thousands of Palestinian refugees from Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syria marched towards the ceasefire borders with Israel. Fifteen Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded, and more than a hundred protestors from Syria managed to breach the fence and enter the Golan Heights. One even made it all the way to Tel Aviv.

Land Day is now formally commemorated in a Global March to Jerusalem, protesting the Judaisation of East Jerusalem as Israel prepares to make Jerusalem its Jews-only capital. According to organisers, more than 600 institutions from 64 states were involved in planning the march. Protests also took place outside Israeli embassies in European and Arab countries. Backers of the march include former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammed and former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa Desmond Tutu. Organisers planned to send convoys of vehicles to Israel’s borders simultaneously from Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Jordan’s demonstration attracted 15,000, and included four rabbis from Neturei Karta. “We want the world to know that the Jewish religion does not accept the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people. It is against the views of Jews around the world who are true to the Torah,” said Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss. “We are here to mark Land Day, and tell the world not to blame Jewish people for the crimes of Zionism,” Rabbi Ahron Cohen said. “Judaism and Zionism are two different concepts.”

Numbers were smaller in Lebanon, as Lebanese security forces attempted to prevent a repeat of last year’s fatal border protests. About 200 foreign activists, including two more rabbis, arrived at Beaufort Castle to join the southern Lebanon rally. In Syria, despite the civil war, protesters rallied in Damascus in solidarity with both the Palestinians and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Egypt had planned demonstrations, but they were called off due to heightened security and the tense political situation there.

To mark Land Day, Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role during the Second Intifada, called on Palestinians to launch a popular resistance campaign against Israel and for the Palestinian Authority to stop peace negotiations and all coordination with Israel in the economic and security realms.

Land Day, of course, is all about land. Appropriately, 30 March 2012 is the first anniversary of the Stop the Jewish National Fund (JNF) campaign aimed at ending the role of the JNF in expanding illegal settlements by displacing Palestinians, stealing their property, and then covering this up with tax-exempt donations from diaspora Jews. The JNF uses greenwash to advertise itself as an environmental movement, planting fast-growing non-native firs on razed Palestinian villages to hide Israeli crimes. Israeli parks include a Leisure corner at Nesher Park, Canada Park, American Independence Park, JF Kennedy Memorial, and Coretta Scott King Forest.

The Stop the JNF campaign fights this, even doing “flash” actions in the Israeli parks, nailing notices to trees to identify the destroyed Palestinian villages, as well as lobbying foreign governments to end the JNF’s tax-exempt status. British Prime Minister David Cameron was successfully pressured to end his status as “Honorary Patron” of the JNF last year. Stop the JNF also has a “Plant a Tree” programme in Palestine to replant indigenous trees.

In the build-up to Land Day, throughout February and early March, student solidarity groups marked the 8th Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) at 120 universities in 40 cities around the world, from Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and Albuquerque to Yaffa and Zurich. At Boston-area universities Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak screened his 2006 documentary “Bilin Habibti” about Israel Defense Forces violence. Members of Brandeis University SJP marked their first annual Israeli Apartheid Week with a hunger strike to draw attention to Palestinian Khader Adnan’s 66-day hunger strike in protest of his detainment without charge. Good news: the international media spotlight on the case pushed Israeli officials to agree to free Adnan in April.

At the University of Amsterdam, Shir Hever, an Israeli economist at Jerusalem’s Alternative Information Centre, gave a series of lectures “Could the economic policies of Israel be considered a form of Apartheid?” At Glasgow University, Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, spoke on “Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS”. At the University of Liverpool, the Corporate Watch research group unveiled a new source book Targeting Israeli Apartheid. In London, a Beats Against Apartheid event included performances from hip-hop artists Lowkey, Mic Righteous and Awate.

British and Canadian politicians were furious. In Canada, the Ontario legislature unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week. “If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also attacking Canadian values,” Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life. “The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line.”

In the UK, thought police were called on to investigate comments made at Middlesex University’s Free Palestine Society IAW forum by Liberal Democrat Peer Jenny Tonge and former US marine Ken O’Keefe. O’Keefe is alleged to have incited racial hatred by comparing Jewish supporters of Israeli crimes to Nazis in their treatment of Jews. “The decent Germans of World War Two, what did they do when the Nazis came to power and instituted their policies? Did they do enough to stop the Nazis? No, they didn’t. What are the Jewish people doing right now? Are you doing enough to stop your racist, apartheid, genocidal state?” Baroness Tonge agreed with O’Keefe telling the audience that Israel would “not last forever” and would “lose support, and then they will reap what they have sown”.

But Santorum also won in Colorado (Romney won in 2008) and Missouri, riding a wave of distrust of Mitt’s conservative credentials and showing Romney’s one-percenter Achilles heel. Romney’s win in Maine last week was Pyrrhic, as there were no delegates, and he just edged out maverick Ron Paul. Romney and Santorum have each won four states, while Newt Gingrich has won only a measly South Carolina.

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator and favourite of evangelicals despite his papism, has hammered the former Massachusetts governor as being too moderate to satisfy conservative Republicans who distrust him on social issues such as abortion and gay rights which he has condoned in the past. Rick told CNN that the wealthy Mitt, a former venture capitalist, “had a great career in the private sector, but we’re not running for CEO of the country. We’re running for someone who can lead the country.” Romney was not the best candidate to take on Obama, who is “oppressing and taking away our freedoms, our political freedoms”.

Santorum smacks of populism, the little guy’s candidate, thumbing his nose at the rich and (horror of horror) capitalism itself. Hey, which party is this guy in? Never fear. Santorum is just making noises. He intends to gut social security, is a fan of deregulation and torture, and a hawk on Iran: “Islamic fascism rooted in Iran is behind much of the world’s conflict,” and “effective action against Iran” would require America’s fighting “for a strong Lebanon (what?), a strong Israel, and a strong Iraq”. Mind you that was in 2006 and he was opposed to actually attacking Iran, so this newspeak may indicate … nothing at all.

The bitter disillusionment of progressives in the past four years, under the absolute best the Democrats can come up with, once again confirms that there is no real difference anymore between the Republicrats. This is because left and right have been banished from the political dictionary, replaced by what has been called the “radical centre”. This oxymoron has been explored in many (mind-numbing) treatises to describe the post-Soviet era political playing field.

This latest Great Game features a unipolar empire asserting its financial and military hegemony on a newly “flattened” playing field (as coined by Thomas Friedman to evoke the joys of globalisation). The empire’s team captain is no longer a left wing or right wing, but an “extreme centre”, a term which entered the US/UK political lexicon with Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 1990s. These extreme centrists claim to be drawing on the best of both sides in a “post-liberal, post-conservative, post-socialist world”. UK Liberal Democrat leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wears the label proudly: “For the left, an obsession with the state. For the right, a worship of the market. But as liberals, we place our faith in people. Our politics is the politics of the radical centre.”

So socialism is apparently not concerned with people who are advised to put their faith in “liberals”/ radical centrists/ extreme fullbacks/ whatever. This bandying about and repackaging of ideological catchwords is the bane of our “postmodern” world, where there are no longer any truths, only interpretations. What we are left with are the Santorums on the “right” and the Obamas on the “left” fighting over divisive social issues, such as gay marriage, abortion, anti-piracy copyright laws, and just how minimal should be state support for health and education, where no candidate (except the court jester Paul) is allowed to question the fundamentals of the system.

And what is this playing field, really? Karl Polyani in the 1950s clearly saw that capitalism, by turning labour, land and money itself into commodities, was creating a soulless system which would need strong state control to prevent its inhuman nature from destroying the world. This advice was irretrievably lost over the past two decades with the fusion of left and right in the oxymoronic “extreme centre”, extreme in its implicit embrace of neoliberalism (which has very little to do with Clegg’s idol John Stuart Mills), where traditional solutions such as socialism or paternalistic conservatism are excluded.

Foreign (read: military) policy is also excluded, as the empire requires strict obedience by both its postmodern NATO halfbacks and its neocolonial goalkeepers, so that its market authoritarian team wins. The game has proved to be lethal for all concerned, with a change of strategy no longer possible via the electoral process, now the plaything of the so-called radical centre. According to Tariq Ali, democracy “is being hollowed out” in the West under neoliberalism, which is hostile to “even social democratic parties”.

Whether the Obamas and Santorums, both supporters of the spectacularly failing tactics of Team Empire, are “deeply” bad to begin with or merely corrupted by the lure of power and money is moot. They are blinkered by cheerleader Thatcher’s “TINA!” (There Is No Alternative). She meant “no alternative to capitalism” – bad enough – but to make matters worse, AIPAC et al have made sure that “and Israel” was added to the equation, making the enemy teams all those who protest the rigged game in the Middle East.

The Republican strategy to attack a Teflon Obama (besides gay/abortion charges) has been to suggest, as did Romney after New Hampshire, that Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness, and that, of course, Mitt et al do. That cheerleading is as close as a US politician gets to foreign policy these days. But that has been the tired Republican cheer since Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter.

Wiley and politically very correct Obama has both begun the withdrawal from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covered his flank by bumping off Osama Bin Laden and quite a few other “enemies”. Given the radical agreement among Republicrats on the essentials of empire strategy both at home and abroad, there is almost no scenario over the next six months where a Republican can trump this. The chauvinistic cheers fall on deaf ears.

Paul, and to a lesser extent Santorum, are better positioned to go for Obama’s one usable weak spot — his role as the big business/ banker darling. As Paul will never get the nomination, we can only hope that Santorum does and that Paul runs as an independent, making the 2012 presidential elections mildly interesting. But Obama is again trying to outflank Santorum, this week calling for a tax raise on the rich. Way to go, Team Empire.

The perennial Ralph Nader’s voice-in-the-Democratic-wilderness alone points to the only way out of the crisis: “If you agree that your Republican counterparts in Congress are the most craven, corporatist, fact-denying, falsifying, anti-99 per cent, militaristic Republicans in the party’s history, then why are you not landsliding them?” Well, it should be obvious by now, Ralph.

Sadly, following the US primaries, we can only conclude they have very little value for Egyptians now reconstructing their political system after a century and a half of colonialism. Hence, the startling events of the past few weeks in Cairo: even as the army, parliament and revolutionaries all attack each other as traitors, they all support the arrests of National Endowment for Democracy funded “activists”, in the first place, the Independent Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House.

In a recent Gallup poll, 74 per cent of Egyptians called for an end to all foreign financing of NGOs and 71 per cent called for an end to all US aid. In a front-page caricature in Al-Akhbar, a seedy Uncle Sam points a Foreign Aid pistol to a confident young Egyptian who calls to his Dignity cannon, “Let’s defend ourselves.” Apparently Egyptians have had enough of US political coaching.

Putin’s legendary role in rescuing Russia from the economic abyss in the 1990s, staring down the oligarchs, reasserting state control over Russian resource wealth, and repositioning Russia as an independent player in Eurasia (not to mention in America’s backyard) — these signal accomplishments assure him a place in history books. He and Dmitri Medvedev are considered the most popular leaders in the past century according to a recent VTsIOM opinion poll (Leonid Brezhnev comes next, followed by Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yelstin the least popular). He will very likely pass the 50 per cent mark in presidential elections 4 March, despite all the protests during the past two months calling for “Russia without Putin”. So why is he back in the ring?

It appears he was caught by surprise when the anti-Putin campaign exploded in November, fuelled by his decision to run again and the exposure of not a little fraud in the parliamentary elections in December. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opposition was able to unite and stage impressive rallies, one after another. Despite the chilling Russian winter, they keep coming — this week saw four gathering around Moscow, totalling 130,000.

The opposition poster children even include Putin’s minister of finance Alexei Kudrin. Presidential hopefuls are Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov (backed for the first time by the independent left forces), nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, A Just Russia’s Sergey Mironov and the oligarch playboy Mikhail Prokhorov — none of whom stand a chance of defeating Putin. This time there are 25 televised debates which began 6 February among the contenders, who are sparring with each other and “Putin’s representative”.

Is this quixotic march back to the Kremlin heights a case of egomania? Or is it a noble attempt to both cast in stone Russia as the Eurasian counterweight to an increasingly aggressive US/NATO, and shaking up the domestic political scene to make sure it will not slump into apathy when he himself passes the torch? And if things go wrong, is this Russia’s very own White Revolution, long feared by the Russian elite, and long covetted by Western intriguers?

Russian politics has always confounded Western observers, and continues to do so. Putin is famously imperious and gets away with it. He taunted the opposition by saying he thought the original demonstrations were part of an anti-AIDS campaign, that the white ribbons were condoms. But he nonetheless sanctioned the largest political opposition rallies in the past 20 years.

US democracy-promotion NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy — a key player in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution — are active in Russia’s opposition, but Putin is clearly gambling that Russians can see past US efforts to manipulate them. Besides, the winners in the Duma elections were the Communists and nationalists, with pro-Western liberals placing a distant fourth — hardly the results NEDers would have wanted.

He is also famously willing to tell US politicians they wear no clothes — the latest, last week in Siberia: “Sometimes I get the impression the US doesn’t need allies, it needs vassals.” Russian foreign policy is now firmly anti-NATO, both with respect to the West’s misguided missile system and its eagerness to turn Syria into a killing field. Rumours that a Russian Iran-for-Syria deal with the West have proved empty. There are even hints that Iran may still get its defensive S-300 missiles from Russia in exchange for Russian access to the downed US drone. Iran claims to have four already and recently announced they have developed their own domestic version.

Pro-Putin rallies are almost as large as the opposition’s, with an official count of 140,000 attendees at the festive gathering Saturday. The Putinistas even bill theirs as the Anti-Orange rally. “We say no to the destruction of Russia. We say no to Orange arrogance. We say no to the American government…let’s take out the Orange trash,” political analyst Sergei Kurginyan exhorted at Moscow’s Poklonnaya Gora war memorial park. Putin thanked organisers, commenting modestly, “I share their views.”

The real reason for Putin’s return is due to the failure during his first two terms of his “sovereign democracy” to limit corruption in post-Soviet Russia. Instead of producing a modernising authoritarianism along the lines of post-war South Korea, Putin’s rule deepened corruption — the bane of late Soviet and early post-Soviet society. Instead of trading political freedom for effective governance, he clipped Russians’ civil and political rights without delivering on this vital promise. Neither did he end collusion between the state and the oligarchs. That was the handle that bad boy Alexei Navalni used to catalyse the opposition around his slogan that United Russia is the “party of swindlers and thieves”.

This was the scene in the 2000s in Ukraine, where it was possible for the NEDers to undermine the much weaker Ukrainian state and install the Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko in 2004. However, instead of addressing the problems that led to the Orange Revolution, Putin focussed on foreign threats to Russian political stability rather than paying attention to domestic factors, creating patriotic youth organisations such as Nashi (Ours) and the 4 November Day of Unity holiday – the latter quickly hijacked by Russia’s nationalists.

But Russian fears of Western interference are hardly naïve. Russia was sucked into the horrendous WWI by the British empire, suffered devastating invasions in 1919 and 1941, and another half century of the West’s Cold War against it. Further dismemberment of the Russian Federation is indeed a Western goal, which would benefit no one but a tiny comprador elite, Western multinationals and the Pentagon.

Putin’s statist sovereign democracy – with transparent elections – might not be such a bad alternative to what passes for democracy in much of the West. His new Eurasian Union could help spread a more responsible political governance across the continent. It may not be what the NED has in mind, but it would be welcomed by all the “stan” citizens, not to mention China’s beleaguered Uighurs. This “EU” is  striving not towards disintegration and weakness, but towards integration and mutual security, without any need for US/NATO bases and slick NED propaganda. The union will surely eventually include the mother of colour revolutions, Ukraine, where citizens still yearn for open borders with Russia and closer economic integration. The days of dreaming about the other EU’s Elysian Fields are over. The hard, cold reality today has bleached the colour revolutions, making white the appropriate colour for Russia’s version of political change.

Of course, the big problem — corruption — is what will make or break Putin’s third term as president. At the Russia 2012 Investment Forum in Moscow last week, Putin outlined plans to move Russia up to 20th spot from its current 120th in the World Bank index of investment attractiveness, by reducing bureaucracy and the associated bribery. “These measures are not enough. I believe that society must actively participate in the establishment of an anti-corruption agenda,” he vowed. Reforming the legal system and expanding the reach of democracy will be key to fighting corruption, not just via presidential decrees, but through empowering elected officials and voters. He confirmed this in his fourth major pre-election address this week by promising to provide better government services by decentralizing power from the federal level to municipalities and relying on the Internet.

So far things look good. For the first time since 1995 there will be a hotly contested transparently monitored presidential election, with the distinct possibility of a runoff (unless the new US Ambassador Michael McFaul keeps inviting NED darlings to Spaso House). The sort-of presidential debates, large-scale opposition rallies and the new independent League of Voters intending to ensure clean elections are a fine precedent, making sure that this time and in the future there will be an opportunity for genuine debate about Russia’s future.

Despite all attempts to forestall Russia’s colour revolution, it has begun — Russian-style — with no state collapse, but with a new articulate electorate, wise to both Kremlin politologists and Western NGOlogists. Its final destination is impossible for anyone to predict at this point.

A boycott bombshell in January was dropped by an 11th-grade American Jewish teenager, Jesse Lieberfeld, who won Dietrich College’s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr Writing Award for his essay about his moral awakening when he realised his American Jewish culture was unavoidably identified with supporting Israel.

I once belonged to a wonderful religion,” says young Jesse. “I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. ‘Genocide’ almost seemed the more appropriate term… Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides… I felt horrified at the realisation that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists.” Finally, at the synagogue, he asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” and was told by the rabbi, “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it? But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” “I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back.

When American youth like Jesse are forced to give up being Jewish because of Israeli crimes, it cannot be long before Israel crumbles under the weight of its accumulated crimes.

2011 witnessed the rise of Internet attacks on Israeli government sites by public-spirited BDSers determined to enforce a kind of “cyber boycott”. While the Saudi government remains aloof from BDS support, an enterprising Saudi hacker disrupted several Israeli websites in January, prompting Israeli hacker Yoni (most likely a spin-off from the Israeli military’s IDF-TEAM, which brought down Saudi and Abu Dhabi financial exchange websites last year) to threaten war, including “mass credit card exposures, and denial-of-service attacks”.

“Yoni” piously told Ynet, “We do not operate against any specific nationality, and any person who operates against the group’s principles will be harmed, regardless of religion, creed or gender. In addition, I wish to note that the group regrets harm done to innocents and tries to avoid it as much as it possible.” Imagine if Israel adhered to such high standards in its relations with its neighbours — it would not need to hack and steal credit card information from anyone.

Another such anti-BDS feint is by the pro-Israeli Internet NGO Monitor, DPWatchDog and Israel’s Reut Institute, which called on Israeli government agencies to “sabotage” and “attack” the Palestine solidarity movement, and has claimed credit for “price tag” attacks on The Electronic Intifada by Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal, the Palestine Return Centre, the persecution of the Olympia Food Co-op, the Berkeley Daily Planet and the “Irvine 11”. In “2011: The Year We Punched Back on the Assault on Israel’s legitimacy,” Reut lauds the emergence of “our network” and gives credit to the Israeli government and “the Jewish world’s mobilisation against the political assault on Israel”.

This conflation of “Jewish” and “Israeli” is the Israel-firsters’ trump card, perversely stoking anti-Jewish sentiment where none exists, the so-called “new anti-Semitism”, a direct result of Israeli crimes. “Price tagging” is usually associated with Israeli settler terrorism, vandalism, tree-felling, mosque burnings and murder. A particular zealous advocate, Andrew Adler, suggested in the Atlanta Jewish Times in January that US President Barack Obama could be on the hit list. That the Reut Institute associates itself with such criminal activity is yet another sign of Israel’s drift towards outright pariah status, and fuel for the anger of the Jesse Lieberfelds “regardless of religion, creed or gender”.

Boycott activities are not just confined to Israeli products abroad or visits by Westerners to Israel, but are now taking place regularly on land, at sea and in the air, as activists surround Israel and invent ever new ways to break its siege of the Occupied Territories.

The Global March to Jerusalem held a conference in Beirut in January confirming 30 March, the 36th anniversary of Palestinian Land Day, as the date for their land action: “From all continents we will converge and gather along the Palestinian borders with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in a peaceful march towards Palestine.”

Plans for “Sailing for Freedom” by French and other European activists are moving ahead, aiming for a September yachting regatta in the Mediterranean, starting in Marseilles and proceeding to Tunisia, Egypt and Gaza. Other flotilla organisers have been discussing a new strategy of sending isolated vessels from various ports instead of high-profile flotillas, with the intent of actually breaking the siege, as opposed to merely attracting world attention to Israel (and Greek and US) sabotaging of flotillas.

In April 2012 a Flytilla is scheduled to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, to “again challenge the Israeli policy of isolating the West Bank”. “Welcome to Palestine” is a French-Belgian initiative, modeled on the Flytilla last July, when 500 people prepared to fly to Tel Aviv. Despite the nightmare that activists experienced both in European airports and in Ben Gurion Airport, 125 actually arrived, and this year, activists are determined to increase their numbers and continue to poke the Israeli watchdog.

“The Israelis have constructed enormous prisons for Palestinians. But prisoners have a right to visits,” says Adri Nieuwhof. The idea has spread to the UK, where towns are sponsoring people to risk Israeli wrath. European airlines are now more concerned with their image in the West than with Israeli authorities, and organisers predict that there will be less collusion to pre-screen flights arriving in Tel Aviv from Europe.

These particularly plucky activists continue the tradition begun in 2011 of a peaceful blitzkreig of Israel from all sides, risking life and limb, enforcing a kind of physical “citizens boycott” of Israel, complementing the spiritual one by the young Jesses. Their co-activists on the “homefront” are now combining the physical and spiritual by the now annual protest during the Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington DC. This year it is called OCCUPY AIPAC, scheduled for 2-6 March. Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, declared: “The time has come for the Occupy Movement to demand an end to the Occupation of Palestine.” OCCUPY AIPAC will provide a sneak preview of “Roadmap to Apartheid” narrated by Alice Walker (roadmaptoapartheid.org).

Legal actions against BDSers continue to plague activists. But there are principled judges. Twelve French activists from Boycott 68 were acquitted 15 December on charges of “inciting discrimination and racial hatred” for calling on French shoppers at Carrefour supermarkets to boycott Israeli goods. The court judgment is expected to put the kibosh on further persecution of activists.

UK’s National Union of Students endorsed campaigns targeting divestment in Eden Springs and Veolia on 6 January. Veolia suffered considerably from a robust BDS campaign across Europe last year for its light-rail project in Jerusalem, but is defiant in expanding its activities in Israel without regard to their legality. Subsidiaries of Veolia own and operate Tovlan landfill which processes Israeli waste in the occupied Jordan Valley. To sweeten the tons of garbage it dumps illegally on Palestinian land, Veolia recently offered three containers for free waste collection to Palestinians in Jiftlik. Comments Omar Barghouti, “As Desmond Tutu said, we do not need anyone to polish our chains; we want to break them altogether. This is beyond humiliating; it is racist and criminal. Derail Veolia!”

Sanctions — and their removal, in the case of the Palestinians — require foreign governments to stare down the powerful world Zionist lobby. Few states dare to do this, but there are more and more cracks in the walls that Israel puts up.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniya launched a historic tour of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Turkey, Qatar and Bahrain in January, welcomed throughout the region as a David to the Israeli Goliath.

Three Hamas politicians also left Gaza via Egypt to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Switzerland in January, the first time since Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. Switzerland does not belong to the European Union, which put Hamas on its list of terrorist organisations to please Israel.

“We also met with the Red Cross in Geneva, the vice-mayor of Geneva and with Islamic organisations in different cantons,” Mushir Al-Masri said. A meeting at the University of Geneva to commemorate the anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008, was attended by 500. “All persons who were complicit in the war crimes committed in Gaza should be taken to court,” Al-Masri told the packed hall. Socialist MP Carlo Sommaruga told the audience, “I was an activist against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Every person has a responsibility. Everyone can participate in the BDS movement.”

The problem is that decisions about these vital American policies are not for mere presidents or presidential hopefuls to mull over. The one principled decision that US President Barack Obama made, his first upon coming to office, was to announce that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. After all, he had voted against his predecessor’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, and it was on this basis that he was able to energise an otherwise disillusioned Democratic base and surge past the more acceptable white alternatives Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Obama’s record on foreign policy has been shocking in retrospect. His call from Cairo for a new dispensation in the Middle East soon after his vow to close Guantanamo, along with this vow, are now in history’s dustbin. His enthusiastic embrace of the worst of Bush’s policies, from drones, assassinations and mercenaries to Orwellian police-state security are frightening proof of the helplessness of US politicians these days.

No better evidence that this paralysis will make the next four years the most perilous in US history is found in the bloody news dripping out of Afghanistan. NATO soldiers, Afghan soldiers and police, resistance fighters, and, of course, women and children continue to be killed at alarming rates, even as the Taliban open an office in Qatar (originally denied by all parties). Peace negotiations came to a standstill last year after the assassination of High Peace Council chief Burhanudin Rabbani (Afghan president 1992-96) by a visitor posing as a peace messenger from the Taliban.

A total of 560 NATO soldiers, most of them Americans, were killed in Afghanistan in 2011, the second highest number in the 10-year war, down from a high of 711 in 2010 after the start of Obama’s surge, still higher than the 521 in 2009.

But according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “security-related events” were up by 21 per cent in 2011 compared to 2010. By this he meant attacks such as the car bombing of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy in Kabul last October which killed 17, the shooting down of a helicopter in Wardak south of the capital last August in which 30 US troops perished, and the explosion that killed at least 80 people in a shrine in Kabul on the Shia holy day of Ashura in early December. Many ISAF deaths are at the hands of Afghan soldiers. The recent Abu Ghraib-type scandal of US soldiers defiling Afghan dead merely ups this perverse ante.

Gung-ho military types like John Nagl, a retired lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army’s field manual on countering guerrilla warfare, push counterinsurgency, where the occupiers “protect” the civilians against violence from the rebels. This was the logic of the surge which Obama grudgingly (who cares what he thinks anymore?) approved last year.

The counterinsurgency hurt the Taliban if only because the occupiers killed thousands of them. It no doubt caused splintering of Taliban forces, and contributed to the seemingly random violence. But it did little to endear the occupiers to the native population, and, according to a WikiLeak from former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council Peter Lavoy, seems to have prompted a new, less benign strategy. “The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies,” he argues, the logic being to prevent Afghans from giving up entirely on their occupiers.

Nagl and the boys are not pleased by such candor. Aghast, he told the Guardian: “It just goes completely against the ethos of the American military not to take more risks in order to protect civilians. I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians.”

But he does admit the Taliban are effectively being forced by the occupiers to engage mostly in crude terrorism, stage one of Mao Zedong’s famous three phases of revolutionary warfare (phase two is larger teams of rebels taking on government forces, leading to full-blown conventional war in phase three). Still, he sees no nefarious intrigue on the occupiers’ part. “The Taliban have been knocked down to phase one and you see what you would expect to see, with the resulting risk of alienating the civilian population. If we can get the civilian population on our side in the south, in their heartlands, we can knock them back to phase zero,” enthuses Eagle Scout Nagl.

Such clever reading of Maoist tactics cannot hide the fact that US plans for Central Asia continue to stumble, stuck in the imperial groove. Looming large is Pakistan’s remarkable closure of the US drone base and its refusal to reopen supply routes after NATO killed 28 Pakistani soldiers last month. But equally foreboding is tiny Kyrgyzstan’s President Almazbek Atambayev’s quiet insistence that 2014 is the final final final date for US control of the Manas airbase, a key transfer point for Western troops and supplies to Afghanistan.

Just as Bush was boasting in 2008 of permanent US bases in Iraq, the recent Strategic Partnership agreement with the Afghan government to place permanent joint military bases in Afghanistan beyond 2024 is not a serious proposition.

Nor is the latest magic bullet — the Iron Man — being forged in NATO headquarters. The idea is to whip into shape an Afghan security force/ army and hand over nominal power by the end of 2014. But this force will be predominantly northern Tajik-speaking Afghans who make up only 28 per cent of the population and form the backbone of the current government. Less than 10 per cent of officers are Pashtun (vs 42 per cent of Afghans), and in any case the army attrition rate is 30 per cent, not to mention the infiltration rate of Taliban suicide martyrs.

Just as in 2012 in Iraq, we can expect some kind of handover in 2014 — the US people and economy simply cannot bear much more, but it will be to a chaotic police state, headed by the weak, discredited Hamid Karzai, with a confusing mix of army, police and mercenaries, much like the situation Afghanistan faced in 1993, at the end of the last US-Afghan love-in, in the 1980s. By 1996 a violent civil war had brought the country to a stand-still and the Taliban was the only way out. This scenario is about to repeat itself.

The Taliban are not the Vietnamese, with a clear, proven economic system and a powerful socialist sponsor able to help them heal. What post-2014 Afghanistan faces is less-than-friendly neighbours, including a very troubled Pakistan, with little to contribute to a post-occupation reconstruction. Perhaps the new Muslim Brotherhood governments in the Arab world will extend a more sympathetic hand, paid for by Gulf oil sheikhs. The Afghans have had quite enough of the kufars over the past three decades.

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape … who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Most recently we saw casual reference to native Christian and Muslim Palestinians as an “invented people”. US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich revived this insult, repeating Gold Meir’s quip in 1969 to The Sunday Times. At the time, Israel was basking in its devastating victory in the 1967 war, occupying all of Palestine and Sinai. The eternal Sinai Bedouin are fortunate that Meir didn’t have enough time — or gall — to claim that they too are a mere figment of some anti-Jewish schemer’s imagination. Their cousins in the Negev desert are now being expelled to make way for 10 Jewish settlements “to attract a new population to the Negev”.

Meir was extrapolating on her more famous phrase, also recorded in the same Sunday Times interview, that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Not only is this a cruel lie, one intended to justify theft of a people’s land, but it is a case of plagiarism, as it was Lord Shaftsbury, an early enthusiast of using a Jewish state in the Middle East as an imperial beachhead, who first used the phrase in 1839.

Meir surely knew this, just as she knew that it is not the Palestinians, a people who can trace their heritage back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed or further, but the Israeli people who are the “invented” ones. Israeli citizenship is barely 60 years old, and Israelis are a disparate lot, made up most of East European and Russian immigrants and Arab Jews, most of whom do not share a common language or even religious practice. The Russian immigrants, many of whom are not even Jewish, are defiantly secular.

Even worse than invented people are “unpeople”, a term George Orwell coined in 1984 (1948) to refer to the complete elimination of people by vaporising them, leaving no trace. Israel’s growing arsenal of nuclear and white phosphorus bombs actually bring this reality uncomfortably close for Palestinians and other Arab neighbours of Israel.

Noam Chomsky points out that in October, Western media applauded the release of IDF prisoner Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in 2006 — during an illegal Israel attack on Gaza — in exchange for a thousand Palestinians, kidnapped for, well, simply being unpeople in the wrong place at the wrong time. One almost thinks the Israelis like to randomly jail thousands of these unpeople as collateral to retrieve the few “real people” caught in criminal acts, and then pride themselves that one Jew is more precious than a 1000 Arabs.

What about the claim of the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations in May 1947, who said “‘Palestine’ was part of the province of Syria” and that, “politically, the Arabs of Israel were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.” Yes, the very notion of a nation state is a 19th century concept, and arose only as a result of imperialism spreading around the world, with the result that there are two kinds of nationalism — the empire’s, built on racism and exploitation of the Third World (hence “Rule Britannia” and “the Jewish State”) and the national liberation movements in the periphery (hence Palestine). So, when it comes down to it, we are all invented peoples, one way or another.

Another lexical sleight-of-hand that Palestinians have to fight is the now standard reference to “Jews versus Arabs”, which should be “Jews versus Muslims and Christians” or rather “diaspora Jewish colonisers versus native colonial subjects”, as many Jews are of Arab origin and “Jewish” in the first place refers to a religious affiliation. There is no Jewish nationality, despite Stalin’s decision to create one in the 1930s, just as there is no Muslim or Christian nationality, but rather a Jewish faith.

Even many Western Jewish critics of Israel such as Independent Jewish Voices say one thing and mean another. For them, fighting anti-Semitism is the primary goal. Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP) state that they “extend support to Palestinians trapped in the spiral of violence and repression” because they “believe that such actions are important in countering anti-Semitism”. In other words, even as they use words critical of Israeli atrocities, they effectively condone Israeli actions (as long as they are not too atrocious). Given that these critics are a tiny group, they act “to vindicate the Jewish people of crimes committed by the Jewish State in the name of the Jewish people”, says ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon.

So it is hardly any wonder that Egyptians are looking closely these days at the meaning of the word “peace”, as in “peace between Israel and Egypt”. An important part of the 1979 Peace Treaty was the clause that guaranteed “full autonomy” for the Palestinians within five years. For 27 years, Israel has been violating this clause. Instead of “full autonomy”, three decades on, the Palestinians are being called an “invented people”, and the US patron of this treaty is winking as Israeli leaders prepare to ethnically cleanse this imaginary people.

Following Egypt’s revolution last year, the treaty immediately became a political football, with just about all politicians talking about revising or cancelling it. The alarm bells rang in Washington and Tel Aviv and there are ongoing secret negotiations between the US and the Egyptian military demanding ironclad assurances that the treaty will remain in force before the generals hand over power to a civilian government. This was confirmed last week by Egypt’s most respected statesman and presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei, who told the Iranian news agency Fars, “The negotiations were completely secret and confidential … I believe that the Americans wanted to ensure that the deals signed between Egypt and Israel will remain intact if Islamists ascend to power.”

No Egyptians want a US-backed military coup in Egypt, especially the Islamists. Hence, Salafist Al-Nour Party spokesman Yousry Hammad was quick to tell Israeli radio that “the treaty is binding because Egypt has signed it,” while explaining that the Egyptian people want to amend certain articles to enable Egypt to better control Sinai, “and that we must be able to send aid to our Palestinian brothers in Gaza without problems.”

Interestingly, the Muslim Brotherhood is more nuanced in its political platform, referring to criteria for examining international agreements based on Sharia law and the degree of Israel’s compliance with the agreement. Re-examining the treaty is embedded in the Freedom and Justice Party’s (FJP) platform and calls for any decision on the treaty by the new parliament to be put to a referendum. Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Rashad Al-Bayoumi says, “We weren’t party to the peace treaty; it was signed away from the Egyptian people and thus the people must have their say.” FJP Secretary-General Mohamed Saad El-Kataany reaffirmed last week that the FJP respects all international treaties as long as they achieve their goals. Which, of course, leaves the fate of the Camp David Accords of 1979 very much in question, given Israel’s violation of it for the past 27 years.

Nobel Peace Prize winner ElBaradei is dismissed by some Egyptians as a liberal who served the US world order as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, though, in fact, he has called for former President George W Bush and his cabinet to be tried by the International Criminal Court for war crimes for the “shame of a needless war” on Iraq. We must do this, he writes in his memoirs The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, to answer the question, “Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the corrective measures needed, to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?” ElBaradei also warned Israel in April that as president he would consider taking the ultimate “corrective measure”: “If Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.”

If this liberal Egyptian politician is to be believed, then a Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist dominated parliament will most certainly support him, as would virtually all Egyptians. So all the US intriguing with the military behind Egyptians’ backs will not save Israel’s bacon. Nor will all the lexical sleights-of-hand about “settlers”, “invented people” and even soft Zionist criticism of Israel. And when the imperial project of colonising Palestine by the invented Israeli people inevitably ends, many of the latter will decide to dust off their European and American passports, brush up on their French, Russian or American slang, and rediscover their ethnic roots in the lands of their forefathers.

No less an Israeli icon that Theodore Herzl wanted just that. Herzl’s original idea about ending anti-Semitism is found in his diaries in a letter he wrote the pope offering to arrange a mass conversion of Jews in Hungary as the beginning of a total conversion to Christianity and complete assimilation of Jews into European secular society. When this didn’t pan out, he then turned to mass migration to Palestine as the fall back solution.

For all the lexical gymnastics employed by Israel lobbyists, Israel is really just the latest manifestation of the Jewish diaspora, a colony, the brainchild of British empire and Jewish dreamers, and is fated to remain so until it disowns its imperial origins and learns to speak the local lingo, which just happens to be Arabic, not reinvented Hebrew. Recall Humpty Dumpty’s fate, despite his clever use of words in the pursuit of power.

After a century of scheming in the Middle East and Central Asia by first Britain and then the US, the tables turned much faster than anyone could have imagined. As the pivotal 2011 draws to a close, it is the perfect moment to look at how we got here. The rollercoaster ride has been long and terrifying, and it is vital to understand where it is taking us.

From the 19th century on, it was clear to imperial strategists such as Cecil Rhodes and Halford MacKinder, motivated by the desire to conquer the world, that the “heartland”, Eurasia, was the key to securing the proposed world empire. WWI was supposed to clinch the deal, with the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate leaving the Levant “free” to be carved up and secured. The Indian Raj was the empire’s base for securing Central Asia and the Far East .

But the horrors of the war led to an unforeseen result: revolution in Russia, inspiring a growing anti-imperial movement across Eurasia. Inspired by Russian revolutionaries, the Raj seethed in discontent, demanding freedom from the British yoke, and Chinese patriots coalesced around their own rapidly growing Communist movement. Historic Turkestan was now off limits, part of the Soviet Union or in the case of Afghanistan, unconquerable.

WWII erupted as Germany attempted to snatch the world empire from the British and destroy its Russian nemesis, but this merely accelerated the decline of the Euro-imperialists, their schemes exposed as relying on mass slaughter and cold, calculating privilege for the elite of the imperial centre.

When the war ended, there were hopes that imperialism would end too. The empire had been forced to ally with the Communists to defeat the Germans, and to promise to dismantle the imperial system after WWII. This new world order was to be one of independent nations competing on a level playing field. But what should have been the last gasp of this inhuman system of “free trade” in the service of empire gained a new lease on life, as the US had escaped the 20th century’s cataclysms unscathed, and its capitalists were eager to take on the mantle of empire ceded by the bankrupt Brits.

Moreover, a new, subtle but key force in the new empire was the Jewish state established by the British and Americans in the heart of the Middle East, a blatant colonial entity which draped its imperial role in the language of anti-colonial liberation. This, despite the fact that it was created by dispossessing the native Arabs, even as neighbouring Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and North Africa were gaining nominal independence from their colonial masters.

This new playing field witnessed a long, bloody match, pitting the empire’s forces against both Communists and anti-colonial forces. After millions of deaths, it culminated in the defeat of the Communists in 1991, and a new game began, with world control once again the prize.

The dreams of revolution and an end to empire were dashed, and this new world order was once again baldly imperial, as planners accelerated their plans, epitomised by the rise of the neoconservatives with their Project for a New American Century, combining market fundamentalism and imperial aggression in a deadly cocktail where there were no longer any geographical limits.

The former Communist union, especially Turkestan, with its strategic location and oil wealth, was quickly brought into the imperial orbit. Even China was accommodated, as it acceded to the world economic order established by the empire after WWII.

But the baggage of empire continued to complicate the picture. The Islamists, so useful in the destruction of the Communist bloc, resisted imperial designs. Israel, also useful throughout the post-WWII struggle against both the Communists and the 3rd world liberation forces, established itself as an independent player and even posed as the new imperial coach, penetrating to the heart of the empire and asserting its own goals of expansion and hostility against its Muslim neighbours.

At its beheast, the resulting wars have been against the Arab and Muslim world, but two decades of attempts to subdue them have merely hardened Muslims’ opposition to empire, even as the devastation caused by imperial designs increases.

Hence, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the accession to power of Islamists via the ballot box across the Middle East . Hence, the unwinnable war against the Afghan people, that brought empire to its knees in fateful 2011, even as the slaughter of insurgents and civilians increased. Yes, the imperialists managed a clever ruse, invading Libya to depose the clownish Gaddafi, but the Islamists and fiercely independent tribes there are unlikely allies of empire.

The tsunami of resistance to imperialism surged throughout 2011 around the world, while the empire’s leaders put a worldwide “missile defence” system in place. But even as radars and missiles were installed in Europe, the rising tide reached the empire’s shores in 2011, as financial crisis led to rising poverty and unrest in the imperial centre itself.

Taking inspiration from the Arab Spring, mass demonstrations in Greece and Spain erupted and Wall Street, the empire’s “heartland”, was occupied. The “99 per cent” entered the political lexicon as the people vs the ruling elite (the 1 per cent who own half of the country’s assets). Even Israel and newly capitalist Russia witnessed mass demonstrations, as ordinary citizens began to realise how the system works, or rather doesn’t work for them. How increasing disparity of wealth is the logical result of market fundamentalism and control of the economy by financial capital.

2011 will go down in history as a year as fateful as 1917, when the blinkers fell away from the common people’s eyes in Russia and they rose up against their oppressors. But while 1917 witnessed a Communist revolution against capitalism and imperialism by a small corps of professional revolutionaries, 2011 has witnessed a mass, leaderless revolution facilitated by telecommunications, and in the case of the key Middle East, inspired by Islam.

There is no Lenin, not even a Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the one Arab leader who managed to slow down the imperial steamroller in the Middle East and is still revered for his defiance. Unlike Communist revolutionaries of yore, the new leaders in the Middle East of what must be called the Islamic revolution of 2011 are not the object of veneration, something that Islam as a religion warns against.

Revolutions always start in the weakest links. Thus, the Middle East has a head start on the revolutionary process over the West, though through the growing Palestinian solidarity movement, notably the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, the struggles of East and West are increasingly seen to be one and the same. What will be the decisive test for the new revolutionaries in the Middle East and the West itself is how well they can navigate the political shoals and landmines laid by a century of empire.

How to dismantle apartheid Israel without it unleashing nuclear war on the world? How to put an end to US world financial blackmail centred on the dollar without the US strategists taking everyone else down with them? While the empire is on the defensive, it is still powerful and as its star wanes, it will only become more lethal.

The foes of empire are popping up faster than the empire’s drones can knock them off. They are found not only in Arab (and Persian) lands, or even in a skeptical Russia and still-Communist China. As the links in the system continue to fray, they are increasingly in the heart of the empire itself. Americans and Europeans will continue to develop alternatives to empire, financially, economically and politically, in their own communities and continue to link up with their comrades-against-arms in the heart of the supposed enemy in Eurasia .

More and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to capitalism. Some 130 million Americans are part owners of co-op businesses and credit unions. As Obama cuts funding to states, the latter considers establishing their own banks and use public pensions to fund state economic development.

There is a wealth of expertise in the “heartland” of the empire that can help show the whole world the way out of the imperial dead end. The new generation in America lacks the Cold War paranoia about socialism: Americans under 30 years old are “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism”, according to a 2009 Rasmussen poll.

Even as the world environment degrades, even as imperial arms continue to kill, maim and choke demonstrators and insurgents both at the heart of the empire and in the heart of the “enemy”, we can take heart in the new sense of human dignity which 2011 spawned, and fight the intrigues of empire with new vigour in 2012.

The uprising united the usually fractious liberals, nationalists and Communists, with slogans “Swindlers and Thieves!”, “Russia without Putin!” and “Churov Resign!” – references to United Russia (UR) and election commission chief Vladimir Churov. Russian expats in more than 20 countries also demonstrated in a show of solidarity outside embassies and consulates.

To date under Putin, rallies have been forbidden or limited to a few hundred. Unauthorised attempts bring beatings and arrests. But most of Saturday’s protests had official sanction; Moscow officials authorised a crowd of 30,000 and did not send riot police into action when 40,000 turned up, and the follow-up rally has been authorised for 50,000.

This new embrace of Western norms indicates that Putin is deeply concerned about his weakened position. 42 per cent of Russians in September said they would vote for Putin in the presidential election, but only 31 per cent by November. And that was before the 4 December debacle. Whether this new leniency shows yet another face for the inscrutable autocrat, or is a nod to advisers, who warn that a harsh crackdown could threaten the wobbly “Restart” button and even the precious 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, is a good question.

If the latter, this would be an especially cruel irony, as the last Russian Olympics in 1980 were boycotted by the West because of Soviet actions in Afghanistan, signalling the beginning of the end of that version of the Russian bear. Just as the Soviet Union let itself be seduced by Western human rights talk resulting in the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which became a weapon in clever Western hands, so Putin et al are forced to hold their noses (or plug their ears) faced with noisy, persistent protests if the Sochi Olympics are to be a successful showcase for the new Russia.

Uncharacteristically ploddingly, Putin charged Western interference: “They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work.” It was the protesters who showed wit and resourcefulness this time: “Are we here because Hillary Clinton texted us?” Some protesters carried badminton rackets, a reference to Putin and Medvedev’s squeaky-clean sportiness. A riot police officer was photographed holding a white flower, a symbol of the protest, behind his back.

The fact is there was blatant vote rigging in some areas. This was documented, especially in Moscow, central Russia and the North Caucasus. The FOM (Fund for Social Opinion) exit poll, the most comprehensive in Russia, estimated the UR vote in Moscow at 23.6 per cent, a full 23 per cent less than the official results. Similarly in the Caucasus, there was a difference of 20.8 per cent, and in Russia as a whole a gap of 6.3 per cent between official and exit polls. FOM’s regional breakdown was mysteriously removed from the FOM site, but not before it was saved by enough observers to verify its authenticity.

The North Caucasus is dominated by local clans who are part of the power structure, so vote rigging is to be expected. But fiddling with the vote in Moscow and other large cities, where an independent-minded middle class has the latest in communications gadgets is no longer acceptable. People were observed voting in a “carousel”, taking a bus to vote up to 15 times at separate polling stations. One voter was told that if he voted for Putin’s party, there was a present waiting for him outside the booth, a bottle of vodka and plastic cups inside a plastic bag. Moscow voting stations with electronic voting machines, which are hard to mess with, reported 30 per cent for UR vs the 46.6 per cent average. Communist headquarters received thousands of calls from regional offices about ballot-box stuffing and other violations. A flustered President Dmitri Medvedev finally agreed to ordered an investigation into reports of election fraud, according to his Facebook page.

It appears the fraud was indeed necessary to preserve UR’s majority, but unfortunately for UR, it was more that the 1-2 per cent that is the upper limit of acceptable fraud in close elections in, say, the US (remember Ohio’s cliffhanger vote in 2004, with a Republican controlling the voting and a Republican company providing the notorious voting machines, that gave George W Bush just enough extra votes to steal the election from John Kerry?). Or the 2006 Mexican presidential election, which almost all observers acknowledged should have gone to the socialist Obrador?

What Russians are now living through is the neoliberal version of democracy which Russia adopted after 1991, better described as polyarchy, where factions of the ruling elite allow for some cosmetic change of faces, but where elections are controlled by the corporatised state and commented on by the corporatised media, all in league. When a populist (or even a Kerry) tries to buck this formidable machine and his support approaches a danger zone, the necessary stops can be pulled, allowing an illusion of “almost” victory for the underdog but keeping the system intact.

Of course, the corruption charge is not just about stuffing boxes or bribing voters. It is about the entire post-Soviet economic and political structure, the result of massive economic theft of state resources and widespread official corruption, resulting in personal dynasties where the 22-year-old niece of the governor of Krasnodar owns a major stake in a massive pipe factory, poultry plant and other businesses, and the 18-year-old daughter of the governor of Sverdlovsk owns a plywood mill and a dozen other local businesses. “How does all this wonderful entrepeneurial talent appear only in the children of United Russia members?” asks rising opposition star Alexei Navalny.

What about claims of Western interference? Of course. Opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov’s World Movement for Democracy (WMD) is a veritable franchise of the National Endowment of Democracy’s WMD. Opposition stars recently attended the NED-funded seminar “Elections in Russia: Polling and Perspectives” along with sundry Soros groupies and USAIDers. Navalny is a co-founder of the NED-funded DA! (Democratic Alternative) activist movement, as stated in his Yale World Fellows bio.

But it is far worse in, for example, Egypt, where US aid has gone and continues to go to both sides — Mubarak/ the army and democracy activists — just in case. But even here, US interference can backfire. It is no secret that Egyptian revolutionaries were trained and inspired by Colour Revolutionaries from Serbia and American pacifist legend Gene Sharp. That, in itself, is not a sin, nor are all recipients traitors. Western media/election-savvy young people mustering all the latest technology and strategies and precipitated the toppling of their dictators. Who can possibly deny this was a good thing? And now disaffected Russians and even Americans themselves are taking inspiration from their Arab fellow-dispossessed. Wow.

Besides, the Russian state has full access to all the gadgets and pamphlets and is quite good at hacking computers and devising counter-strategies, and if all else fails, beating up and arresting (and possibly worse) gadflies who dare to defy authority. All’s fair in love and war.

But at the same time, whether or not Hillary’s twitters inspired the Russian unrest, it is clearly in America’s interest to keep Russia weak, and encouraging political unrest is the perfect vehicle. Russia’s defiance on Western plans to invade Syria and Iran infuriates Washington. Washington gambles that “democracy” will bring its flunkeys to power in the Kremlin, just as it hopes that pro-US Arab liberals can be put into power with a little scheming. Very risky politics, but this is clearly what’s going on, and NED is doing its part, as it did throughout eastern Europe in the 1990s. Putin has a point.

Protest organisers met on Sunday, trying to pull together some sort of leadership council. It is most unlikely, even if a few recounts are allowed, that UR will lose its majority, but the momentum of the demonstrations will make the presidential campaign in February very heated. Putin will now face at least four serious candidates: charismatic billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the perennial Communist Gennady Zyuganov, Sergei Mironov of the Just Russia Party, and rising star Navalny.

Those elections will be much harder to falsify with box-stuffing and vodka payoffs, and Putin will most certainly face a runoff. Again, it is unlikely that he will lose to the corrupt playboy oligarch, the dour Communist, the ex-Putin groupie who ran as token opposition to Mr UR in 2004, or the 35-year-old black sheep of the Yabloko Party, who was kicked out for racist threats. But he will have a rough ride.

The up side of this electoral tempest is that Russian politics have come back to life. Russians are taking electoral politics seriously, and new parties are in the works as the UR begins to unravel. The new middle class that Putin’s decade of one-man rule produced is on the march, much like in Pinochet’s Chile, where a new middle class also rose up against the strongman to demand their political rights. If Putin is a true statesman, he will see the writing on the wall, seize the opportunity to entrench honest elections, and retire early, leaving a legacy as important as his role in saving Russia from the predatory neoliberals a decade ago.

Egypt’s uprising, too, started not with the starving peasants (though they soon joined in). The result, which is still in process, despite much turmoil and many setbacks, is probably the freest election in modern history anywhere, as the corporatised Egyptian state, with its control of the media and elections, was pushed aside. This allowed what was, until a few short months ago, the illegal opposition — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis — to gain a constitutional majority virtually overnight, much like in Russia in 1917.

Russians, too, want to know that their dysfunctional state apparatus can be successfully challenged, so that real elections can take place. And how long will it be before Americans see the light and push their dysfunctional state apparatus aside and enjoy the “democracy” that the NED and Soros croon so beautifully about?

Among depositions, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza cited the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which prohibits “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This was just in time to honour the UN-endorsed International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, marked on 29 November to coincide with the anniversary of the UN vote for the Partition Plan, and first marked in 1976. Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists in 10 European countries staged more than 60 actions as part of a Day of Action calling on supermarkets and governments to “Take Apartheid off the Menu”.

In the UK, 26 November was declared a national BDS Day of Action targeting Britain’s largest supermarket chain Tesco, the only supermarket in the UK that is openly selling illegal settlement goods. Activities ranged from street protests, e-lobbying, re-labelling, flash protests and internet-working. While Agrexco may be kaput as Israel’s largest supplier of fresh produce to Europe, Mehadrin has taken its place and was the target of the European Day of Action Against Israeli Agricultural Produce Exporters.

Demonstrators in the US boarded buses run by Veolia to educate passengers about Israel’s apartheid policies. Boston activists launched a campaign challenging the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail Company’s contract with Veolia. In Baltimore, activists demonstrated at Penn Station during rush hour, singing a freedom song and drawing connections between the Palestinian and American struggles for equality, linking Veolia’s profiteering from racism and exploitation in Israel/Palestine to the City of Baltimore’s contracts with its own workers.

In a cynical rearguard bid to attract Christmas shoppers, Israel Lobby activists launched Buy Israel Week November 28, hastily put together to counter the growing BDS tide. Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel, called for two BUYcott days, featuring discount coupons, sponsored by StandWithUs, El-Al, the Jewish National Fund and other such pillars of Israeli apartheid.

While American sympathisers were politely tolerated in their protests against Veolia’s transport activities in Israel, their compatriots in Palestine proper were violently arrested for confronting Veolia and Egged, the two major culprits, and targets of BDS activists in Europe.

Inspired by their Western supporters, six Palestinian Freedom Riders emulated the legendary Freedom Riders of the American south of the 1960s, riding settler bus 148 near the illegal settlement of Psagot. Much like those courageous black and white Americans (including many Jews) of yesteryear, the Palestinians were forcibly removed and arrested.

This new generation of Freedom Riders will further inspire Westerners for whom “It is a moral duty to end complicity in this Israeli system of apartheid,” according to arrested Hebron resident Badee Dwak. Fellow arrestee Basel Al-Araj minced no words: “The settlers are to Israel what the KKK was to the Jim Crow South — an unruly, fanatic mob that has enormous influence in shaping Israeli policies today and that violently enforces these policies with extreme violence and utter impunity.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker wrote:

Board the buses to Everywhere. Sit freely. Go into Jerusalem with my blessing. Like many of my country people, I have witnessed this scenario before and know where it can lead. To a straightening of the back and a full breath taken by the soul. Some of us have shed blood, others have shed tears. Some have shed both. All sacred to the cause of the dignity we deserve as beautifully fashioned citizens and Beings of this Universe.

Sadly, as he honoured the Freedom Riders of the 1960s for their courage and dedication fifty years ago, President Barack Obama had no such words for the equally brave ones in Israel today.

In the Arab world, 29 November activities took BDS the logical extra step, with 7,000 Jordanians gathering in the Jordan Valley and marching to the Israeli border to condemn Israel’s settlement expansion, calling for the liberation of Al-Quds (Jerusalem), home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the second holiest site for Muslims. “We sacrifice our souls and blood for Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Quds,” the Jordanians chanted after noon prayers, calling on Jordanian authorities to scrap its peace treaty with Israel.

Even as 100,000s of Cairenes gathered to defend the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square 26 November, a rally co-sponsored by Al-Azhar and the Union of Muslim Scholars attended by 5,000 called on Muslims to fight “Jerusalem’s Judaisation”. Al-Azhar Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb said: “We are telling Israel and Europe that we shall not allow even one stone to be moved there.” Activists chanted: “Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgment day has come.”

In other boycott news, a victory for a clutch of brave and principled tennis fans arrested for protesting at the New Zealand Women’s Tennis Open last December, which featured Israeli Shahar Peer. After a year of trials, they were finally exonerated in a landmark decision by High Court Justice Paul Heath, who said “Disruption of an individual’s enjoyment of a sporting event was not the same as disruption of public order.” Quipped a free John Minto, “Annoyance is not a crime, annoyance is part of being in democracy.” The judge said it was clear the protest was meant to convey to the tennis player the concerns at the way Israel treated the Palestinian Territories.

In contrast to the tidal wave of Western artists now boycotting Israel-linked events (the Yardbirds just cancelled a scheduled Tel Aviv show), iconic singer and actor Barbra Streisand performed at a fundraising gala in Los Angeles for Friends of the IDF. Streisand supports OneVoice, which promotes a two-state solution that fails to address structural injustices and has long been discredited. Guests of honour included media magnate Haim Saban and former Israeli Military Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who commanded the attacks on Gaza in 2008-09 which killed 1,400 Palestinians. An Israeli propaganda video about Streisand’s appearance at the gala features armed Israeli soldiers running in a scenic sunset.  A shameful sunset in her own career.

In a wonderfully shocking divestment move, Israeli powers-that-be are furious at BNP Paribas for shutting down its operations in Israel. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Banks Supervisor David Zaken believe the bank’s board of directors caved to pressure groups, in the first case in years of a foreign bank leaving Israel. BNP Paribas has had operations in Israel since 2003. The bank claims it sustained serious damage from the Greek crisis, yet the only foreign branch it is closing is its Israeli one.

Unfortunately, as yet, no international governmental sanctions against Israel have been imposed in the past few months. On the contrary, the US continues to oppose attempts to boycott Israel, putting great pressure especially on Arab League states, which officially support BDS. Under US anti-boycott legislation enacted in 1978, US firms are prohibited from compliance with any such boycott directly or for a third party, and are required to report any such request to the US Department of Commerce. The WTO is an accomplice, as Israel is supposed to be treated as a Most Favoured Nation by member states.

This pressure has unfortunately had its effect. Morocco and Gulf Coordination Council members, especially Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, acceded to US arguments that boycotting Israel harmed the “peace process” and turn a blind eye to third-party economic relations with Israel and even quietly conduct direct trade.

But the Arab Spring is forcing these truant governments to wake up to their people’s demands. And the US showpiece for its vision of the new Middle East — Iraq — doesn’t dare end boycott activities, which were the hallmark of Iraqi politics prior to the US invasion.

Post-Soviet Russian politics over the past two decades has been a rollercoaster. Until the founding of United Russia in 2001, a short decade ago, the Russian Communist Party was the largest political force in the country. By uniting the Westernisers and soft nationalists around his charismatic leadership, Putin was able to push the Communists aside and capture 1/2 the seats in 2003, UR’s debut. Within a few weeks an additional 78 MPs climbed on the bandwagon, giving UR the magic two-thirds. With this election, the Communists have now recovered, almost doubling their vote to 20 per cent, an underestimate of their real support, given who has the money and who controls media and election procedures. “The Communists are the only real party out there,” admitted one Western banker in Moscow, and are now attracting even liberals disillusioned with UR.

In his first two terms as president, Putin transformed Russia, with UR his political fig leaf, restoring state power in the economy, centralizing political control, guaranteeing a piece of the pie for almost all, while hiding the many deep social and political problems – corruption, violence, gangs, mafia, drugs, despair, and on and on. Relying on Soviet-era prestige and Russia’s vast material resources, UR has been the vehicle for creating a crude but powerful national force that keeps chugging alone, even as the West descends into financial chaos and self-inflicts wounds in pursuing will-o-the-wisp imperial wars around the world.

Of course, the Duma is not much more than a prestigious sandbox, an expensive talk shop which can’t take any real initiative without a nod from above. The whole electoral process is heavily in UR’s favour, with a brutal 7 per cent popular vote necessary for initiation into the club, and persistent rumours that the also-ran Communists, Liberal Democrats and Fair Russia quietly cut deals to divvy up the seats in less than transparent proportional elections. UR is able to mobilise the vast administrative apparatus, the fortunes of oligarchs, the private and public airwaves. It is for all intents and purposes invincible. The elections, however, are still an important barometer of public mood, and the almost daily opinion polls make too blatant vote-rigging a risk, given the Russian elite’s proclaimed insistence that Russia is “democratically” governed.

The general outlines of post-Soviet Russia as shaped by UR-Putin have now become clear: Russia will not join the West as a subservient “postmodern state”, the neocon version of Kant’s world order, where nations give up their sovereignty to a “higher” organisation in the interests of world peace. (Kant envisioned a neutral United Nations, as opposed to the unipolar imperial order established with the collapse of the Soviet Union.) The early post-Soviet Yelstin crowd seemed willing to join the US-led imperial order, but there were enough savvy patriots who were not duped by US professed intentions and who raised the alarm and put the breaks on this process in time.

It will do whatever is necessary for its security and national/federal sovereignty (Chechnya and Georgian wars, missile defence), and work with others to lessen dependency on the US order (Latin America, India, China, gas/oil deals with Europe). To pursue this, it is developing new international structures especially in Eurasia (SCO, CSTO, the new regional customs union and proposed Eurasian Economic Community) to counter-balance US-controlled structures and prepare for the inevitable collapse of US empire.

But at the same time, the new Russian political-economic elite is still very much a part of the US-led economic order, based on the dollar and the Bretton Woods financial institutions, with billions of dollars stashed abroad, and children attending elite foreign schools both in Europe and now in the heart of capitalist Russia. But US hopes to wipe Russia as a major force off the political map were dashed, and even the most Atlantophile Russians balk at becoming the latest Latvia.

In contrast to old Soviet-era policies, this Russian strategy is manageable in the face of hostile powers. It accepts the international framework the US established after WWII and even new additions like the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocols which the US rejects, and thus does not face the anti-communist reaction of Soviet years by Western liberals and conservatives. It no longer threatens the interests of the ruling elites of other countries, making Russia an attractive partner for many countries who seek to remain free from US imperial control. These polices enjoy a broad consensus inside Russia, ensuring UR-Putin’s continued domination of Russian politics for the time being.

For an objective outside observer, the Russia fashioned by Putin and UR plays a positive force in world politics and economics, though it is not above playing its own games; for instance, in Belarus, possibly in Kyrgyzstan, using its transit route to Afghanistan as a bargaining chip with the US, regardless of the justness of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan. It let down longtime ally Gaddafi in Libya, has jilted Iran on nuclear power and weapons sales in the interests of placating the US, not done much for the Serbs, especially in Kosovo (yet). If NATO pushes hard, Russia will back down, unless its direct and vital interests are threatened. The best Russia can do for countries threatened by US empire is support their appeals to international law and wield its veto at the UN Security Council.

It should no longer be “empire vs Communism”, the zero-sum game which the US fashioned in the 20th century to counter the “Soviet threat”, though just what the game adds up to now is entirely the responsibility of the empire to determine, rather than the non-empire independents like Russia, all of whom are trying to survive in the face of pressures to accept a subservient role as “postmodern states”. Russia has forfeited claims to be the gravedigger of capitalism and by extension imperialism, and just wants a fair shake in a fairer world order. At the same time, leaders in the Kremlin are under no illusion about the reality of US empire; that, for all their smiles, its leaders see Russia (along with China) as the enemy; and that “Western policies always aim at the eventual dismemberment and demise of Russia,” writes vineyardsaker.blogspot.

“They just don’t believe that the Soviet way to oppose the US was the correct one,” the Russian-American analyst continues. Rather than being an active midwife of a new world order opposed to imperialism (Soviet policy), Russia is playing a waiting game — the age-old policy of retreat used against the Mongols, the French and the Nazis. “Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess,” quips Spengler at Asia Times. Afghanistan looms large as another Vietnam, and the US is busily adding Libya, Syria, Iran, who-knows-where next to its overfull plate of indigestible goodies. At times, it is wise to sit back and wait for the straw that breaks the ogre’s (excuse me, camel’s) back. A fool’s mate comes about when your opponent is bankrupt, and it certainly looks like this is how the current game is shaping up.

UR will no doubt continue its slide, and even Putin himself come 4 March may find himself in a runoff with some dark-horse challenger, as it is also clear that UR-Putin are unable to face down the corrupt administrative minions who keep “the party of crooks and thieves” in power. However, the cautious, patriotic policies of the 2000s as sketched above have been set for the near future. Perhaps the world financial crisis will turn Russians back to their tried and at-least-partially true socialist heritage to make sure the country survives. But its domestic and foreign policies will not be too much different from the ones UR has put its (rubber) stamp on, policies which are effectively the work of Putin as Mr UR.

As a show of anger, Pakistan ordered the CIA to vacate drone operations at Shamsi Air Base in southwestern Baluchistan and closed both the Khyber and Baluchistan supply routes into Afghanistan, cutting off 70 per cent of NATO’s supplies. It was the worst such incident since 9/11.

This is not the first time NATO helicopters attacked Pakistani soldiers or that Pakistan closed the Khyber Pass. A US airstrike in 2008 killed 11 soldiers and last year two, prompting Pakistan to shut the Khyber Pass for 10 days in protest against the almost daily, illegal and unsanctioned US air strikes that, since 2004, have killed 2,780 people, 83 per cent civilians, among them 72 soldiers.

However, this time the rhetoric is full blast. Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani announced Pakistan would boycott the crucial Bonn II conference on Afghanistan this week, fatally undermining it. Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani call the attack a “blatant and unacceptable act”, and Interior Minister Rehman Malik insisted on Sunday that the “NATO supply line had not been suspended but permanently stopped.”

That is highly unlikely, but this could be the trigger for a political earthquake against a despised national government. MP Ahmed Khan Bahadur from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial Awami National Party told CNN, “This is the time to be united as a nation and to punch NATO with a fist. NATO could never dare if we were united.” Politically ambitious media star Imran Khan, who heads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party, said it was time for Pakistan to pull out of the US-led “war on terror”. Hundreds of thousands have rallied in Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi to protest government corruption and the alliance with the US.

To even begin to explain the mad “logic” of US world military strategy which resulted in this “blatant and unacceptable act”, we must look at the other recent NATO undertakings in the Middle East; namely, the invasion of Libya, the approaching invasion of Syria and the ongoing attempts to subvert Iran. The US-Israeli strategy of carving up the current regimes in order to leave Israel as the undisputed regional hegemon is well known. The plan is for the latest version of the Middle East to be unapologetically sectarian, based on conservative Islam and Judaism. No room for any real democracy, which could lead to socialism, or worse, nationalism, and the inevitable jihad against Israel.

The Muslim world could easily bury the Zionist state if the spark to light it were to spontaneously appear. So, just as forest rangers light strategic fires to clear brush and prevent uncontrolled fires from erupting, the US must light fires around Israel which burn themselves out. The tribes and conservative Islamists in Libya, and the Christians, Alawis and Sunnis in Syria will soon be tearing each other up, “part of the Turkish sphere of influence, aligned with NATO and non-hostile to Israel. In other words, another Pakistan,” quips analyst Come Carpentier.

The Arab Spring is the logical conclusion of the carving up of the Middle East following WWI and II, creating regimes which from the start were subservient, or, in the case of, say, Egypt under Nasser, brought into line after a brief rebellion. As for Pakistan, from the start, it too was very much an imperial-controlled forest fire. Britain’s most pressing problem following WWII was trying to control the march to independence in India, to prevent it from aligning with the Soviet Union. Sectarian India and Pakistan were created thanks to British intrigue, and the latter has been a faithful ally of empire ever since.

The 1947 founding of this unapologetically sectarian Muslim nation (just months before the founding of the sectarian Jewish nation of Israel) set the pattern that has unfolded in the region ever since: divide and rule, igniting civil wars where necessary to prevent any of these geopolitically vital nations exiting the US orbit or from threatening Israel. That millions died in the creation of these states, and in the neocon jihad against Communism from 1979 on, is not of the least importance. After all, few casualties are white Americans, and they are useful Heroes who protected Americans from Reds and Towelheads.

Thus, the cool reaction by the US to the Pakistani fury, which just barely hides the implicit racism of imperial fiat. That Pakistan is a failed state, its elite totally dependent on US handouts, means that the occasional closing of the Khyber Pass or even the attack on the US embassy in Kabul by a certain Pakistan-based (Haqqani) resistance group can be tolerated. US officials sometimes chide their Pakistani colleagues with “playing a double game”, a warning not to push the boundaries too far, but the planners on all sides know that all the players are playing at least several roles in the geopolitical play-off now underway, the winner being the one who sees that extra move ahead and is able to plan for it.

In a sense, the game has become incredibly complex, with supposed allies of empire — from Mubarak and Gaddafi to mujahideen and, increasingly, Pakistan soldiers — moving from ally to enemy in the twinkling of an eye. The Arab Spring is even now being subtlely and not-so-subtlely manipulated from Washington, with daily briefings and financial aid to Egypt’s ruling generals (“more democracy but not if it harms Israel”), daily bombings for others (Libya, Syria, Iran, Pakistan), or a blind eye to cruel autocracies which are able to crush their opposition and continue to faithfully serve the cause (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain). This apparent complexity and chaos is not complex or chaotic at all, but the realisation of contingent strategies in pursuit of clear goals. Egyptian analyst Mohamed Heikal calls it the new “Sykes-Picot agreement”.

The goals and rules of the game are, in fact, age-old. In the first place, the US dollar and profit, followed by military might and its transformation into political soft power, used to buttress the dollar and ensure the flow of profit from the colonial (now neocolonial) periphery to the imperial centre.

So the huffing and puffing of even generals in the periphery can be tolerated, since they must inevitably bite the imperial bullet so it doesn’t explode in their faces. Similarly, the tens of thousands of deaths resulting from “collateral damage” or the inevitable uprisings against the vicious reality of neocolonialism, now dubbed the Arab Spring.

Also very simple for the sports fan to understand is how the game will end. History shows conclusively that empires inevitably fall, the victims of overreach. Just as the US lost in Vietnam, leaving it bloodied and destroyed, so it will lose in Afghanistan and will eventually leave Pakistan, both devastated, but in the long run, beholden to empire. The Vietnamese communists supposedly triumphed — a rare win against empire — but three short decades later are now allying unashamedly with the empire against holdout China. The logic in AfPak is presumably to pack up and leave AfPak a series of sectarian, feuding entities (states?), whose new elites similarly will be reaching out to the empire in the face of holdout Iran.

But these holdouts — China the heir to the communist foe of yesteryear, Iran the Muslim heir to the anti-communists of yesteryear — are now key players in the game, the only ones who play to beat the imperialists, not just to a draw or stalemate. As the prospect of losing the game in Iraq and Afghanistan looms, Iran gains greater regional importance, without having to do much except survive the intense efforts by the empire to subvert it. From a distance, China similarly must only be patient, continuing to expand its economic might. Both these countries, unlike AfPak, Libya, Iraq and Syria, are much more united around a strong sense of historic destiny and national self-awareness — in the end, impossible for the empire to successfully subvert.

America’s increasingly unwilling Pakistan ally is increasingly turning to both. In the wake of the collapse of US-Pakistani relations, Pakistan confirmed its gas pipeline project with Iran would be online by 2013, flouting US pressures to nix the deal and instead wait for the trans-Afghanistan pipe dream (excuse me, pipeline). Iran need not drop bombs or invade its neighbours (it ended any imperial pretensions in the 17th century), but like China, seduce them economically. The pipeline will also export gas to Turkey, Armenia and even Iraq. Iran has excellent relations with nearby India, Russia and, of course, China. But, of course, Pakistan’s main lifeline is still the US.

Whether the Western intervention in Libya and Syria will turn them into willing (if conservative Islamic) allies of imperialism a la Saudi Arabia, Morocco or, yes, Pakistan, is yet to be seen. But this is the game plan, and the seemingly bizarre friendly fire on its lapdog ally, as happened last week, is from Washington’s point of view merely a blip in the old-fashioned regional radar it inherited from Britain. Unless, of course, Pakistan has its 25 January moment.

The Arab Spring and public protests, organised by the 20 February youth movement and the Islamist Al-Adl wa Al-Ihssane, suddenly made genuine elections an important weapon in the king’s arsenal. King Mohammed VI immediately announced a process of constitutional reform and a promise to relinquish some of his administrative powers. Following a referendum in July with 70 per cent turnout and (a suspicious) 98 per cent approval, the new constitution was ratified in September, and parliamentary elections held last week.

In the new constitution, the king gives up his power to appoint the prime minister, agreeing to appoint the leader of the party winning the most seats in a parliamentary election. This independent PM in turn would now have the power to appoint senior civil servants, diplomats, even cabinet members, and the power to dissolve parliament — in consultation with the king’s ministerial council.

There were a total of 30 parties in this year’s race, the three leaders being the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, an eight-party pro-monarchy Coalition for Democracy, and the Koutla Alliance of Istiqlal, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces and the Party of Progress and Socialism, headed by incumbent Prime Minister Abbas El-Fassi, head of the Istiqlal Party.

The Majlis Al-Nuwab (lower house) has 395 seats, 305 elected from party lists, plus 90 from a national list with two-thirds reserved for women and the remaining third reserved for men under the age of 40. The Justice and Development Party won 107 seats, making its leader Abdelillah Benkirane prime minister designate.

While turnout (45 per cent) was up from the questionable 2007 elections, critics complain that the current registration system has left up to a third of eligible voters off the rolls. A remarkable 20 per cent of ballots were spoiled, indicating a strong protest vote.

Parallels with Egypt’s transition to democracy are strong: both youth movements strongly criticised their respective elections as window-dressing, leaving the real power (veto power over legislation, cabinet appointments, and control of security) in the hands of the king in the case of Morocco, and the army in the case of Egypt. Many youth have refused to vote as a result and continue to press their demands for a real transition of power to a civilian government. Unlike in Egypt, in Morocco the Islamic Al-Adl wa Al-Ihssane joined the secular youth in their boycott of the elections.

The distribution of seats now is: Justice and Development Party (107), Istiqlal Party (60), National rally of independents (52), Authenticity and Modernity Party (47), Socialist Union of Popular Forces (39), Popular movement (32), Constitutional Union (23), Party of Progress and Socialism (18), Labour party (4), other parties (13).

Word is that the Justice and Development Party, which promises to cut poverty in half and raise the minimum wage by 50 per cent, would govern in coalition with the leftwing nationalist-socialist Koutla bloc.

The popular perception is that the ordinary people have been living “beyond their means”, a false and invidious conventional wisdom which masks the real nature of the crisis. For it is the elites across Europe and the Americas who have benefited most from the European Union, built on Reaganite neoliberalism, which in turn was fashioned to meet the needs of business. The neoliberal policies of all Western governments, “left” or “right” during the past three decades are the direct cause of the current highly skewed income distribution – by some accounts, worse than in any previous era of human history.

The supposed generous patriarch of this big happy family is Germany, with its hard workers and tidy streets. But while the Aesopian Greek hares are told they must tighten their belts and make do with less health and education, the fact that the Greek arms imports continue to grow — importing German weapons and “defence” systems (against what threat?) — is not mentioned. And it is not only weapons, but consumer goods from Germany that have displaced Greek products in the anonymous Euro-market, as Greece increasingly becomes northern Europeans’ decadent playground, albeit with more than its fair share of un- and under-employed.

As long as banks were lending freely to governments to finance this fool’s paradise, the lower classes were not made to feel the pinch, and the system kept chugging along. Now that government debts and bank reserves have approached their limit and reckless banks are going bankrupt, the struggle is on over who should pay for the untenable system. Since the economic elites are also the political elites, naturally they want the broad people to pay with social service cuts, reduced and delayed pensions, regressive sales taxes and the like. The intense propaganda campaign now underway is to convince the poor in the Euro-laggards that they are the guilty ones, not their own elites or the Euro-elites in Frankfurt or Berlin or wherever.

The EU was a project to end the prospect of war in Europe and to gather the broken pieces of shattered empires into a workable collective economic-political force in the world. To a surprising extent it succeeded, but without facing hard choices and a frank debate about who benefits. As the problems sharpen, any sense of collective goodwill evaporates, and chauvinist, even racist parties gain rapidly in popularity, hearkening back to faux-halcyon days of distant imperial privilege. But as history shows, the ability of individual European countries to extract surplus from colonies is not guaranteed indefinitely. The same goes for the ability of Germany to lord it over its Euro-partners. As the knives come out, the very existence of the European project comes into question.

The rich standard of living that Europe has enjoyed over the past few decades is directly a result of first the import of Third World workers (to a large extent Muslim) and then the incorporation of the ex-Socialist bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the financial crisis plays itself out, these immigrant workers, the very ones who have served Europeans so well, are now targeted and racially profiled, as the elites try to deflect attention from their own hidden role in the ongoing crisis. This is the First World/Third World extension of the above argument about Euro-laggards, with the victims no longer the Greek hares, but Nigerian and Egyptian immigrants.

A similar tale can be told for the US , with its large immigrant population, its Tea Partiers and Islamophobes, unable or unwilling to face the underlying problems resulting from decades of neoliberal policies. In the Americas, it is China that provides the manufactured goods which are paid for by US treasury bonds piling up in Chinese bank vaults, and no one in particular is accused of being the carefree Aesopian hare — state governments merely use their deficits as the deus ex machina — but the pattern is the same.

As the people who have woken up to the reality are arrested and booted out of Trafalgar Square, Zuccotti Park, Chapman Square (Oakland) and dozens of other city commons around the world, the long cold winter of discontent sets in. However, the problems are going nowhere and the people are just waiting for the next opportunity to express their outrage.

The toppling of governments means nothing in this scenario. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Greece’s George Papandreou only handed over power on the explicit understanding that the “fresh faces” would carry out the austerity plans imposed by the EU heavyweights. Berlusconi’s replacement is 68-year-old, ex-EU commissioner Mario Monti, an economics professor steeped in the dogmas that brought Italy to its current impasse. Papandreou’s replacement is ex-European Central Bank vice president Lucas Papademos who immediately announced, “Our membership of the euro is our only choice.” Not much thinking outside the box from these folks, the very ones who got their people into their present fix.

Some Americans at the top are already awake. The 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” (0.005% of all US millionaires) have been lobbying President Barack Obama and congressional leaders for a year now pleading with them: “Please do the right thing, raise our taxes.” Not surprisingly, no response from a president and Congress beholden to the 3.1 million other millionaires — the proverbial 1%.

Occupy Washington DC published their no-brainer proposals 17 November: redistribute income through progressive taxation, end the wars, expand health care, democratise business. This will end the budget deficit overnight, create full employment through stimulating local demand, eventually ending the foreign trade deficit, making America strong and once again the envy of the world. But, of course, Congress is captive to the current military industrial complex, and can and will do nothing.

The slow-motion drift into oblivion is surreal. Clearly momentous changes are in store for both Europe and America, and the sooner thinkers and actors get to work coming to grips with hard, cold reality, the better for the people — and for the elites, who are living on borrowed time, too. How long before the revolution?

This time there were 27 activists, including Americans, Canadians, Irish, Polish, Greek, Palestinian and — for the first time an Egyptian, Al-Masri Al-Youm English Managing Editor Lina Attalah. For 27 years, Israel has been violating the 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt, which guaranteed “full autonomy” for the Palestinians within five years. So it was appropriate for an Egyptian to become the 27th member of the team of activists trying to break the Gaza siege.

Tahrir passenger Kit Kittredge said, “In our sails is the wind of worldwide public opinion which has turned against the illegal blockade.” Retired US army colonel Ann Wright said, “We carry inspiration from the Arab Spring and the worldwide Occupy movements. Where governments fail, civil society must act. We will not stand by and watch $30 billion of our tax money committed to buying Israel weaponry used to carry out this illegal occupation of Palestine.”

Attalah described how, as Israel warships approached, activists and journalists started throwing equipment into the sea, “fearing that the information stored on them could be used to implicate other activists who were not on board”. When the Israel military asked their destination, organiser Ehab Lotayef replied first, “The conscience of humanity”, and as the Israelis sprayed the peaceful protesters with salt water, “The betterment of mankind”. Attalah counted 15 ships, with “dozens of Israeli soldiers pointed their machines guns at us”.

Their communications system was jammed and they entered the Israel no-mans land. But not without an Israeli practical joke. The Israelis “offered to send one person to inspect for weapons, and if he found nothing, they would let us pass”.

But the ships were suddenly ordered to proceed to Ashdod in Israel, and when the order was ignored, the Israelis boarded the ships, brandishing guns, ready to shoot anyone resisting, and using tear gas and tasers. The Tahrir and the Saoirse were forced to crash into each other, crippling both ships, and their engine rooms flooded, exposing them to the danger of sinking.

What equipment had not been thrown overboard was stolen by the pirates. Israeli Mad Kayal said, “As a Palestinian, I was not surprised at how the IDF treated us; however, for the Canadians and other Westerners onboard, it was a complete shock.” President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek, who in the past called Israel “an indispensable partner for the EU”, refused to criticise his “partner” for the arrest and imprisonment of Irish Euro MP Paul Murphy for three days.

In contrast, Attalah was treated with kid gloves, and — without any exchange of Israeli spies — was taken by an Egyptian embassy official to the border at Taba. She was upbeat in her report, relating how they got much closer this time — 50 km as opposed to 100 km in the past, and how Jewish activists, preparing for the expected Israeli attack, helped translate slogans “This is piracy” and “This is kidnapping” into Hebrew to greet the Israelis.

Shamefully, US State Department official Victoria Nuland warned activists, they “could face civil and criminal penalties in their efforts to deliver resources to the Gaza Strip,” and the US consul in Israel advised them to sign an Israeli deportation agreement. The activists refused, as the statement said they entered Israel illegally and would not attempt another effort to break the Gaza blockade, thereby giving de facto credibility to the seige.

Absurdly, US House Resolution 3131 introduced last month would require the State Department to investigate “the sources of any logistical, technical, or financial support for the Gaza flotilla ships” and produce “a report on whether any support organisation that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organisation”.

The story did not end with the deportation of the plucky activists. Israel cyberwarfare expertise is well known, but so is that of computer hackers Anonymous. They decided to avenge the Freedom Wavers, warning the Israeli military hours before they seized the ships: “If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza, then you will leave us no choice but to strike back. Again and again, until you stop.”

A few days later, over a dozen Israeli government websites crashed, including Shin Bet, Mossad, the IDF, the Health, Justice, Housing, Science and Sports Ministries, the President’s Residence, the Immigration Authority, the Israel Land Administration and the Atomic Energy Commission. As Jewish philosopher Hillel the Elder said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Freedom Waves will continue to lap against Israeli gunships in their attempt to reach the shores of Gaza. There are tentative plans for a “Sailing for Freedom” yacht race next summer from Marseille France, a kind of Tour de Méditerranée, going to Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and on to Palestine. Turkey has committed itself to protect future naval convoys breaking the siege.

Land convoys are also being organised. The British group Long Live Palestine has called on people around the world to take part in a convoy of medical aid to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza, starting 27 December. Organisers are planning for Viva Palestina 6 – Return Convoy to be the biggest convoy of aid yet, and hope to involve Egyptians again and enter via the Rafah crossing.

Moderator Wael Gamal, a financial journalist, described how he and a core of revolutionaries after 25 January started the campaign with a facebook page DropEgyptsDebt. The IMF offer of a multi-billion dollar loan in June was like a red flag in front of a bull for Gamal, and their campaign really got underway after that, culminating in the formal launch this week, just as election fever is rising.

“Just servicing Egypt’s debt costs close to $3 billion a year, more than all the food subsidies that the IMF harps about, more than our health expenditures,” Gamal said angrily. “We are burdened with a $35 billion debt to foreign banks, mostly borrowed under the Hosni Mubarak regime, none of it to help the people.”

Ali explained the basis of the campaign, which does not call for wholesale cancellation of the debt, but for a line-by-line review of the loan terms and useage to determine: whether the loan was made with the consent of the people of Egypt, whether it serves the interests of the people, and to what extent it was wasted through corruption. He explained that the foreign lending institutions knew full well that Mubarak was a dictator conducting phoney elections and thus not reflecting the will of the people when they showered him with money, and they should face the consequences — not the Egyptian people.

These are the internationally accepted conditions behind the legitimate practice of repudiating “odious debt”, which were used by the US (though mutedly) in 2003 to tear up Iraq’s debt, and by Ecuador in 2009. “Ecuador had an uprising much like our revolution and after the next election the president formed an audit committee and managed to cancel two-thirds of the $13 billion debt,” noted Gamal, leaving the conferencees to ponder what a truly revolutionary government in Egypt could do for the health sector and for employment.

Al-Naggar told how the loans propped up the economy as it was being gutted under an IMF-supervised privatisation programme from 1990 on, allowing foreign companies and Mubarak cronies to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars and spirit them abroad. Meanwhile, what investment that trickled down from the loans went to financing prestige infrastructure projects like the Cairo airport expansion, which was riddled with corruption and serves only the Egyptian elite. Virtually all the loans from this period should be considered liable for writing off.

No government officials deigned — or dared — to come to the conference. On the contrary, Egypt’s Finance Minister Hazem Al-Biblawi told Al-Sharouk that it defames Egypt in the world’s eyes, saying, “like the proverb ‘It looks like a blessing on the outside, but is hell on the inside’.”

Both Gamal and Al-Naggar criticised Biblawi for distorting their intent, which is not to portray Egypt as bankrupt, like Greece, but to shift the burden of the bad loans to the guilty parties — the lenders, and thereby to help the revolution. “It is the counter-revolution that is discrediting Egypt. And they are the old regime that got the loans and misused them, and are now trying to discredit the revolution. The international community should willingly write off the odious loans if it wants the revolution to succeed,” exhorted Al-Naggar.

The enthusiasm and sense of purpose at the conference was infectious. Indeed, this campaign is arguably the key to whether or not the revolution succeeds. But it requires a political backbone that only an elected government can hope to muster. The fawning of Al-Bablawi — this week he hosted another IMF mission — looks like the performance of someone from the Mubarak era, not someone delegated to protect the revolution. He welcomed the delegation and “the possibility of their offering aid to Egypt”.

Al-Naggar pointed out that the purpose of the IMF is not to aid the Egyptian people, but to tie the government to international dictate. Rating agencies are part of this, downgrading Egypt’s credit rating after the revolution. Why? Because Egypt is less democratic? Or because it will be harder to ply Egypt with more loans to benefit Western corporations, and to keep the Egyptian government in line with the Western political agenda. “Silence is golden,” Al-Naggar advised Biblawi, meaning, “If you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything.”

Chamkhi brought Tunisian warmth to the meeting, though he further incensed listeners as he explained how the Western debt scheming is directly the result of 19th century colonialism. He told how France colonised Tunisia, stole the best agricultural land, and then how the quasi-independent government in 1956 had to take out French loans to buy back the land that the French had stolen, thereby indenturing Tunisia yet again, in a new neo-colonial guise. The foreign debt really exploded with Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali’s kleptocracy, just as did Egypt’s under Mubarak. Shamati eloquently expressed how “debts are not for our development, but to make us poor. To create a dictatorship of debts.”

Tunisia’s first democratic elections brought the Congress for the Republic, which supports the debt revision campaign, 30 seats. So far in Egypt, according to organiser Salmaa Hussein, Tagammu, the Nasserists and Karama support their efforts, along with presidential hopefuls Hamdeen Sabhi and Abdul Monem Abul Fotouh.

There is an international campaign dating from the 1990s, the 2000 Jubilee debt relief movement, and the Cairo conference heard a report from London about efforts on behalf of many third world countries — now including Egypt and Tunisia — by public-spirited Brits. The Arab Spring success stories now have a determined and politically savvy core of activists who know what the score is and will be pushing their respectively revolutionary governments to repudiate the debts from the corrupt regimes they overthrew at the cost of hundreds of lives. As the fiery Independent Trade Union head Abbas cried, adding an apt phrase to Egypt’s revolutionary slogan: “Topple the regime, topple their debts!”

Atlas, who grew up in Belgium, is of Egyptian, Moroccan and Palestinian ancestry and has Jewish roots. She was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Conference Against Racism in 2001, which was boycotted by the United States and Israel, for raising issues about US treatment of African Americans and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

The flip side of cultural boycotts of Israel is to prevent Israeli cultural figures from presenting a false image of Israel abroad. Idan Raichel, “Israel’s most popular dread-locked musician,” according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, prominent in Masa (Journey) Israel tours to recruit young Jews from American and Europe to Israel, is more than just a musician, seeing Israel’s cultural icons as “ambassadors of Israel in the world, cultural ambassadors, hasbara ambassadors, also in regards to the political conflict”.

Raichel’s hasbara message prompted American Jews to protest a recent Masa “journey” across the US, using the Internet to coordinate leafletting at the concert tour sites. His recent album “Open Door” prompted signs at the demos entitled “Does ‘Open Door’ include Palestinians?” and “Don’t entertain apartheid.” “Idan Raichel can’t support apartheid,” countered one concert-goer, “He sleeps with a black woman!” Raichel is part of the Brand Israel campaign, which aims to bring arts to the world in order to, in the words of an Israeli foreign ministry official, “show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war”.

A Finnish campaign is under way to cancel a new deal to purchase Israeli drones. Like Canada, the US, Turkey and Russia, Finland has been attracted by Israeli know-how in lethal weapons. The Finnish Defence Ministry recently signed an agreement on drone purchases, in defiance of EU regulations. This prompted Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja to break ranks with his colleagues and declare, in reference to Israel, that “No apartheid state is justified or sustainable.” Earlier while in opposition, Tuomioja himself signed a petition calling for an end to the arms trade with Israel. As foreign minister, Tuomioja could demand the suspension of EU-Israel Association Agreement, which gives Israel special trade access to EU markets, but on condition that Israel respects human rights.

The EU’s “common foreign policy” has been a bitter disappointment, especially with respect to Israel, as consensus prevents principled nations within the EU from acting, and attempts to enforce EU regulations are easily buried in bureaucratese. For instance, the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) provides research funds for universities and companies from Israel as a result of the Association Agreement. Despite Israel´s consistent violation of the Agreement’s human rights clause, Israeli companies such as Ahava, “academic” institutions such as Technion, and worse, Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries receive European funding through FP7 on an equal footing with EU member states.

EU Scientific Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn insisted that there was no reason to exclude Israel’s Idan Raichel company from EU-related activities since she did not have “any information about any radar systems Motorola Israel might or might not have installed in the West Bank”. Geoghegan-Quinn is not reading her inbox, where she would have found reports to the European Commission by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and “Stop the Wall” documenting Motorola’s work in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

An ambitious boycott-divestment effort by the newly launched KARAMA (Keep Alstom Rail And Metro Away) and the ongoing “Derail Veolia and Alstom” campaign, celebrated an important victory. Alstom lost the bid for the second phase of the Saudi Haramain Railway project linking Mecca with Medina, worth $10 billion, due to its involvement in Israel’s Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR) project. Alstom also suffered when the Dutch ASN Bank and the Swedish national pension fund AP7 excluded it from their investment portfolios. Veolia has lost more than $12 billion worth of contracts following boycott activism in Sweden, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere.

A national conference of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) took place from 14-16 October at New York’s Columbia University, bringing together 400 American student activists from a hundred campuses. SJP activists have made famous their mock checkpoints, walls, and die-ins on campus, to bring home the reality of Israeli persecution of Palestinians.

Delegates brainstormed about divestment campaigns and how to counter the power of AIPAC. Codepink’s Medea Benjamin, who gained world celebrity status for interrupting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in May, explained how to lodge a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics against the American Israel Education Foundation Congressional trips to Israel, which violate Congressional Ethics Rules.

Columbia University grad student Dina Omar said the conference helped create a “solid network and apparatus to help protect students from being systemically targeted by institutional power.” A week before the conference, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported on the “growing strength” of SJP. Ironically, it was a 2010 ADL statement calling SJP one of the top 10 “anti-Israel” groups in the US that pushed 67 chapters to unite. Max Ajl said: “The timing was key – everywhere there was the buzz that we are part of a broader mobilisation, the Occupy Wall Street movement. There is now both the opportunity and the incentive to link these struggles.”

Interestingly, there is division in the anti-BDS ranks over how hard to crack down on BDSers by claiming that Jewish students might be made “uncomfortable”. While the ADL lauded the US Department of Education’s 2010 decision to expand the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment that crosses the line into anti-Semitism”, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) cautions Jewish groups against suppressing free speech by invoking civil rights laws. “Lawsuits and threats of legal action” should only be used “for cases which evidence a systematic climate of fear and intimidation coupled with a failure of the university administration to respond with reasonable corrective measures.”

Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian, argues that the ADL strategy is “inherently anti-Semitic because it assumes incorrectly and ahistorically that all criticism of Israel equals criticism of Jews”, and thus condemns all Jews for the racism practiced by Israel. “It seems that at least some in the pro-Israel community fear that this aggressive campaign of censorship and intimidation may do more to cast Israel’s defenders as thugs, than to improve Israel’s image on campuses.”

In interview with Time, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioned why sanctions are promoted by the US when dealing with Iran and Sudan, but are taboo with regards to Israel. Sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Israel would have resolved the issue of Mideast peace long ago, he said. “Until today, the UN Security Council has issued more than 89 resolutions on prospective sanctions related to Israel, but they’ve never been executed.” The reason the international community had stood by without sanctioning Israel was that the Quartet – which includes Russia, the United States, the European Union, and the UN – was not genuinely interested in resolving the Mideast conflict or “they would have imposed certain issues on Israel.”

If Barack and Mitt are the best the political elite can come up with, we can only conclude that the entire American ruling class is suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia — fearing commies-turned-Muslims under their beds, shedding tears over the odd child hit by a stray bullet in, say, Syria, while joyously bombing hapless Afghans, Iraqs and Libyans into the Stone Age, wiping out hundreds of thousands in the process.

Obama said Saturday that the US now must tackle its “greatest challenge as a nation” — rebuilding a weak economy and creating jobs — with the “same urgency and unity that our troops brought to their fight”. More like: with the “same cold-blooded disrespect for human life …” Is it possible Obama will promote a Swift-like “modest proposal” to unemployment, and exhort Americans to eat their children?

Despite overwhelming evidence that the chaos and destruction the US brings the world has induced only hate and disgust for America and its values, he preened himself for helping murder Gaddafi and for pretending to withdraw US troops from Iraq: “This week, we had two powerful reminders of how we’ve renewed American leadership in the world.”

Of course, there is an explanation for this raving. The chaos is caused by the logic of profit in the economy, and the rhetoric — by the need to control the political process to ensure profit’s uninterrupted flow. But Obama’s fine rhetoric is not even convincing Americans anymore, as Occupy Wall Street and demonstrations across the country show. As for Congress; just 6 per cent of registered voters think sitting members deserve re-election — the lowest percentage since CBS News Polls began 20 years ago.

What is the poor — literally, at this point — voter to do? There are stirrings, even in the ruling class. Warren Buffett is spreading a chain letter calling on citizens to demand “a constitutional amendment which would make all sitting members of Congress ineligible for re-election anytime there is a deficit of more than 3 per cent of GDP.” If only it were that simple.

As analyst William Cook puts it, “Representatives no longer serve the citizen seeking their consent to govern, they are servants of the corporations and lobbies that control the economic system. Presidents no longer lead, they are the obedient lackeys of their corporate overseers.” If Buffett’s amendment passed, it would merely bring in another crop of time-servers, with no noticeable effect except higher unemployment and more poverty.

Oblivious to the obvious, Libertarian Ron Paul is battling it out with the Mitts in Republican cuckoo-land to slash both the budget deficit and taxes. At least Paul wants less war. He is determined to end what he calls the “welfare-warfare state”, undeterred by the plight of the record 46 million Americans on food stamps (whose welfare expenditures are a crucial stimulus to local economies), and the fact that his very own campaign manager in 2008 died of pneumonia in 2011 from lack of medical insurance.

Then there is the perennial Ralph Nader, who is bowing out from a full-scale campaign so far, and working with left Democrats to field primary challengers to Obama in the desperate hope to move him to the left.

What about a third-party/ independent presidential campaign? The Green Party always fields someone, and Nader ran many times in the past as both the Green candidate and as an independent. There is a new such campaign this year — an Internet campaign called Americans Elect, intending to nominate “a competitive, nonpartisan ticket” that “answers directly to voters”. A Republican must team up with a Democrat. Give me a break.

It is impossible for such a dark horse to actually win, given the Republicrat control of the media and corporate financing of elections. However, American third-partiers, or rather non-partiers, have a venerable history in the US. Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive Bull Moose) captured 27 per cent of the vote in 1912, and Progressive Robert La Follette — 27 per cent in 1924. Billionaire Ross Perot created his own Reform Party, running on a confusing mix of balanced budget, war on drugs, gun control, trade protectionism and environmentalism, to gain almost 20 per cent of the vote in 1992.

If, say, the Green candidate miraculously takes off, s/he will at best be a spoiler, like Republican Party-pooper Roosevelt in 1912 (allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win), Ross Perot in 1992 (allowing Democrat Bill Clinton to win) and possibly Nader in 2000, whose 2.74 per cent of the vote might have been the cause of Al Gore’s loss to George W Bush.

Whichever Republicrat takes over in January 2013 will continue the failed policies of yesteryear as the US people continue to sink into poverty. But the end is already in sight, as the American long spring continues to gain momentum, both on the ground and in the ether. Ipads can distract from reality, but they are also a powerful tool to fight it, as Egyptians found out this January.

The bottom line is, of course, to dismantle the “reality of corporate control”, as Cook puts it. He rightly argues that “the rights of citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness require the government to ensure these rights”, which means universal health care, freedom from want; in short, a government that serves the people, not the corporations. While this may sound trite, it is the stark truth. “Rights before privilege.”

There is strong US precedent for this. In 1944, shortly before he died, president Franklin Roosevelt presented Congress with a new Bill of Rights, which included “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”, as well as farmers’ and businessmen’s rights “to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition by monopolies”. Of course, Congress being Congress, it dismissed out of hand this parting gift of FDR.

Another stark truth is that real change in America requires the defeat of America in its imperial wars. This uniquely happened in 1975, when the last helicopters carried panicked remnants of the US puppet regime in Saigon to safety. It resulted in a shift towards détente, exposure of CIA black-ops, limits on US promotion of regime-change and assassination, and on the presidential right to launch undeclared war. Alas, this reversal was short-lived. Memories are short. Rhetoric (then, it was the folksy Reagan) and the ease of spinning circles around do-nothing Congress (a truly worthy whipping boy) have brought us to the current impasse.

Obama’s attempts to paint Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as triumphs of “American leadership” ring hollow as the economy continues to sink under the weight of its military might. In 1944, America was on top of the world, and FDR’s wistful reminder of the dark 1930s was easily brushed aside. His vice president from 1941-44, Henry Wallace, ran as a Progressive Party candidate in 1948 largely on FDR’s wish list, but his third-party campaign of racial equality and socialism was greeted by boycotts and rotten eggs, and netted him only 2.4 per cent of the vote. America’s long journey into the imperial wilderness had begun in earnest.

To resuscitate FDR’s dashed dreams today means acknowledging, even welcoming, defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, as their peoples throw off their American shackles. Any thought that Libya will save the Yanks’ bacon is a pipedream. The smoke of civil war there will remain in the air for a long time to come, as a constant reminder of the follies of such imperial games.

The American pacifist Gene Sharp, author of Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential (2005), is credited with ushering in the so-called Coloured Revolutions in countries as disparate as Yugoslavia and Egypt during the past two decades. Ahmed Maher, one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement that sparked the Egyptian revolution, was inspired by Sharp, and is returning the favour by advising “our brothers”, the Occupy Wall Streeters, on Twitter. It is a nice touch that Sharp’s techniques for facing down police states (Congress be damned) are now being turned on the American police state itself, as the “99 per cent” of Americans try to pick up where FDR’s Bill of Rights left off.