The grip of this fiction on the American collective mind reflects a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt for Arabs and Muslims.

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse … Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

The justice of the Palestinian cause is increasingly recognized in the West, particularly at the grassroots level. This is due, above all, to the courage and persistence of the Palestinians themselves. But scholars—Arab, Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives also deserve credit. One such scholar is Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-born professor at the University of London and author of several books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

A smear campaign

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Henry Holt and Company, 2010), Achcar’s most recent book, is an ambitious attempt to present an accurate history of Arab attitudes toward Nazism, Jews, and the Holocaust. It refutes the story told by pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.

The book has been well received by Middle East and Jewish Studies scholars, and Achcar has been invited to give talks on many university campuses. This raised the ire of David Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which, according to its mission statement, “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country … The leftist offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center protects students from indoctrination and political harassment.”

Last November, an article in the web FrontPage Magazine, edited and published by Horowitz, launched a smear campaign against Achcar. Focusing on a presentation by Achcar under the auspices of Middle East Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, the article appeared on a host of kindred websites, such as that of Campus Watch, an organization founded by Daniel Pipes, a main purveyor with Horowitz of Islamophobic material and whitewashing of Israel.¹

Another attack, directed at Achcar’s lecture in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of California at Davis, came from BlueTruth, a blog devoted to “refuting the accusations and exposing the lies that are being told … about Israel, Jews and pro-Israel organizations …” One such lie, to judge by the article, is that Israel was “built on Arab land.”

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.

The Arabs and the Holocaust

In his talk at Berkeley, Achcar described the book’s main purpose as deconstructing the image, dominant in the West and Israel, of Arabs as pro-Nazi. Relying on an extensive array of primary sources and historical studies, Achcar presents an “Arab world” with a great diversity of beliefs and opinions, a multiplicity of evolving ideological currents—just as in the West. The many Arab countries are not peopled by an indistinct mass of millions animated by ancestral hatred of the Jews. “The Arabs,” Achcar writes, do not exist “as a politically and intellectually uniform group.”²

The first part of Achcar’s book covers the period from 1933, when Hitler acceded to power, until Israel’s foundation in 1948. At that time, “liberal Westernizers” and Marxists took a strong stand against both Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the various Arab nationalist movements, sympathy for the Axis varied but was overall low, and opposition to Zionism did not translate into hatred of “the Jews.” It is only among “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists” that significant anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.

Several recent studies confirm this. For example, Achcar’s book quotes Israel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, who wrote that in the 1930s:

the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices—in the political arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle classes and even in the literate popular cultures—rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”³ [a reference to “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a view which did create some support for Nazi Germany among Arabs living under the yoke of French and British colonization.]

Those painting Arabs as heirs to Nazism use as “proof” one particular episode: the 1941 Baghdad “pogrom” (the Farhud). In April 1941, Iraqi pro-German nationalists led a coup against Iraq’s pro-British regent. Propaganda by the German legation, reinforced by the presence of the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, had whipped up anti-Jewish feeling in Baghdad. British forces invaded Iraq, put the pro-German government to flight, and secured Baghdad, but their troops remained posted on the outskirts. Rumors circulated that the Jews were helping the much-hated British. There followed two days of killing and plunder; about 180 Jews were murdered. The rioters were stopped when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad and reestablished order, killing many of the mob.

Achcar notes that the vast majority of Muslim Iraqis condemned the violence and many protected their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives. Looters from Baghdad’s slums, driven by need rather than anti-Jewish sentiment, joined in the action. With the regent back in power, the Iraqi government granted compensation to the families of Jewish victims.

Achcar’s account of the Farhud agrees with that of several authors, such as Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer of Baghdadi origin.⁴ There is little evidence that the Farhud was indicative of widespread and deeply rooted hatred toward Jews in the whole of “the Arab world.” Note that no anti-Jewish rioting occurred in any other Arab country during WWII, despite the calls to jihad broadcast from Berlin by the Mufti from November 1941 on.

In fact, Arabs played a truly remarkable role in defeating Hitler, a fact so carefully suppressed by the French after the war that I did not learn of it in 15 years of schooling in France. As part of De Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Arab troops from French North Africa contributed massively to the liberation of Europe. They fought alongside the Allies from the landing in Sicily in July 1943 to the invasion of Germany in 1945, with great loss of life. For instance, 233,000 of the 550,000 Free French troops landing on the Mediterranean coast in Nazi-occupied France in November 1944 were North African Muslims.⁵

The second part of Achcar’s book traces the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world after the founding of Israel in 1948. Western anti-Semitic themes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found their way into public discourse. Achcar does not excuse or minimize Arab anti-Semitism. He deplores the “abysmal stupidity” of these “anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust.” But do these ravings indicate an Arab wish to exterminate the Jews, a project they supposedly inherited from the Nazis? These claims are absurd, according to Achcar and many others. Nissim Rejwan, for instance, writes:

Neither their religious culture nor their historical record lends credence to the claim that the Muslim Arabs of today are capable of the kind of historical consummation that found expression in Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps … Viewed in anything like the correct historical perspective, the idea of “Arab Auschwitz” is an absurdity.⁶

And, of course, there are parallel ravings in Israeli/Jewish political discourse: referring to Arabs by animal names, calling for their expulsion and annihilation, and so on. See Israeli General Rafael Eitan’s infamous statement: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”⁷

Achcar writes: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons” [emphasis mine].⁸ These historical reasons, which are indeed obvious, were they not again and again obfuscated by pro-Israel apologists, include: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948-1949 and its systematic destruction of 418 Palestinian villages to prevent the refugees’ return: creating 300,000 more Palestinian refugees in 1967; a brutal and tyrannical occupation accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing ever since; and atrocities against civilian populations in wars in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon.

Contemporary Arab anti-Semitism is not unmotivated, atavistic hatred. It is rooted in anger at Israel’s very real aggressive and destructive policies. Even Bernard Lewis, a historian favored by defenders of Israel, wrote “for Christian anti-Semites, the Palestine problem is a pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-Semites, it is the cause.”⁹ Remove the cause—that is, end Israel’s ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.

Achcar shows how Arab anti-Semitism is “reactive” and changeable—dependent on Israel’s actions, its violence, its propaganda (e.g., calling Arabs “Nazis”), and on the particular historical and political circumstances of the various Arab/Muslim countries. It is not “the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists.”¹⁰

I surmise that The Arabs and the Holocaust was written with an Arab audience in mind as well as a Western one. The book has been translated into Arabic and it is, among other things, an attempt to build bridges, a call for each side to listen to the other. He writes:

It is faith in human reason that justifies the hope that what counts as truth on one side of the Green Line or, rather, of the separation wall, will not forever count as error on the other.¹¹

In the conclusion, describing “statist Zionism” as “a Janus, one face turned toward the Holocaust, the other toward the Nakba, one toward persecution endured, the other toward persecution inflicted,” Achcar returns to the need for each side to acknowledge the sufferings of the other:

Only recognition of both of Janus’ faces—of the Holocaust and the Nakba—can bring Israeli, Palestinians, and other Arabs in genuine dialogue.¹²

Achcar’s book displays a formidable knowledge of the currents of thought on both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide as well as a brilliant analytic mind. By placing Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust in historical and psychological contexts, he opens up vistas to Western readers beyond the shallow, warped views of U.S. main media. He understands and has compassion for the historical wounds of the Jews. His integrity and openness shine throughout.

Hasbara

The authors of the FrontPageMag article, Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene, seem not to be concerned about historical context. They mix innuendo, distortion and falsehood, quote out of context and misquote, then add in one or another point of dogma. They do not at any point counter Achcar with contrary evidence. Instead, they speak in generalities, e.g., Achcar’s book “masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle East studies establishment.”

The “Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus” (hasbara is Hebrew for “public relations, “ or “propaganda”), published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students, gives advice on how to score points “whilst avoiding genuine discussion”: rather than addressing your opponent’s arguments, make “as many comments that are positive about Israel as possible whilst attacking certain Palestinian positions, and attempting to cultivate a dignified appearance”; repeat points again and again, “If people hear something often enough, they come to believe it.” The same tactics seem to be used in the writing of most FrontPageMag articles.

Nakba vs. Holocaust

Stillwell and Greene write: “Achcar concluded by drawing an asinine correlation between the Holocaust … and the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe,’ the Arabic term to describe the creation of the state of Israel: ‘The Shoah ended in 1945, but the suffering of the Palestinians is never-ending.’”

In fact, Achcar, in his talk characterized the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of ethnic cleansing.” He went on to say that real dialogue conducive to peace requires

the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of what Palestinians have suffered. Not only the ordeal of the Palestinians is continuing … But they went through … the worst kind of experience just recently in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009.

In his book, Achcar condemns making “no distinction between colonialist usurpation of a territory and the racist extermination of a whole population.”¹³ He quotes Edward Said: “Who would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”¹⁴ But he also states that Palestinian suffering is ongoing, and getting worse.

In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of either. Sixty-four years have elapsed since the Nakba, 64 years during which Palestinians have been subjected to further wars, expulsions, and dispossession. They have been denied political, economic, and human rights. At present, in Gaza, 1.5 million people, half of them children, are imprisoned behind a 25-foot high fence and regularly attacked by Israeli drones and Apache helicopters, killed by fire from tanks and snipers on Gaza’s borders; in the West Bank, Palestinians are evicted from their land to make way for Israeli settlers who harass and kill with impunity; and East Jerusalem is being “judaized,” i.e., emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?

Anti-Arab racism in Israel

Stillwell and Greene claim that, unlike anti-Semitism in the Arab world, “’anti-Arab attitudes in Israel’ are neither widespread, [nor] promulgated through state-provided education and other official means.” But all polls of Israeli Jews reveal deep anti-Arab feeling. For instance, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll in January 2011, which found that nearly half of Israeli Jews would not want to live next door to an Arab.¹⁵ Racism is strongest among the young: the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that civics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students.¹⁶

Nuri Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education and author of a book on Israeli school books,¹⁷ thinks “state-provided education” is a main culprit in promoting racism. Interviewed in the Guardian, she said Israeli school books describe Arabs “as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop… The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists.”

She added: “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the major reason for that is education.”

“Other official means” of promulgating racism include laws that are the very foundation of the Israeli state: the 1950 Law of Return and 1952 Citizenship Law, which allow every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. These same laws forbid the return of Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes from 1947 to 1952. This inequity may have made sense to those in the West who lived through the years after WWII, when the horrors of the Holocaust and general acceptance of colonialism blinded almost everyone to the injustice perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs. But it is much past time to look at the situation through Palestinian eyes.

More recent laws show racism becoming increasingly institutionalized in Israel. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that “the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and discriminatory bills.” One such bill legalizes “admission committees” operating in nearly 700 small towns, allowing them to reject applicants deemed “unsuitable to the social life of the community … or the social and cultural fabric of the town”—for “unsuitable applicants,” read principally “Arabs.”¹⁸

Holocaust denial, Nakba denial

Israel’s recent Nakba Law effectively forbids the public commemoration of the Nakba. Israel lodged a protest when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon used the word in a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Abbas on May 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, declared: “The Palestinians can celebrate an Independence Day if, on that day, they eliminate the word Nakba from their vocabulary.”

Speaking with her usual icy self-assurance, Livni was essentially telling the Arab minority to shut up about a fact no historian denies, not even Zionist historian Benny Morris, who said: “I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”¹⁹ Because she speaks as a government minister of a state with a very powerful military and several hundred nuclear weapons, her pronouncements are alarming.

Livni makes luminously clear that Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens. For the Jews, yes, although the rights of dissenters are increasingly restricted. In effect, “a Jewish and democratic state” is an oxymoron, no matter how much ink has been spent to deny it: a state so defined must privilege the Jews over other citizens. And being Jewish is unlike being, for example, French. One can become French by participating in the country’s communal life for five years, but there is no way to become Jewish and qualify for the Law of Return except by converting to Judaism, or by being “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.”

Israel: innocent, victimized, maligned …

Gail Rubin J.D. author of the BlueTruth article, waxes indignant at Achcar for describing Israel as a “’settler colonial project’ built on ‘Arab land,’” and “accusing Zionists of ‘ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.’”

That Israel was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable. As for “ethnic cleansing,” Benny Morris, who argued in his early books that the Palestinians had fled because of the war, now concedes the role of deliberate Zionist policy: “I have concluded that pre-1948 thinking had a greater effect on what happened in 1948 than I had allowed for…”²⁰

In any case, no one denies that Israel prevented the return of refugees, a violation of international law. It was Israeli policy to shoot as “infiltrators” Palestinians trying to return to their villages in the night. Hundreds of villages were destroyed to foreclose their former inhabitants’ return.

Arguments about the colonial nature of the Israeli state usually take the form of semantic nitpicking. Sociologist Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew who first broke the taboo against calling Israel a “colonial-settler state,” concludes his remarkable 1967 essay:

… the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically and politically. This is, moreover, an obvious diagnosis, and if I have taken so many words to state it, it is only because of the desperate efforts that have been made to conceal it.²¹

Stillwell and Greene recommend a review of Achcar’s book by “atypical professors” Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade. The lengthy review²² takes up the themes of Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11, such as: Islamist movements—al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s regime—originated in the lethal link between Islamism and Nazism; the Arabs have inherited “eliminatory anti-Semitism” from the Nazis; jihadism and jihadist anti-Semitism are the greatest threats to the world today. According to Achcar, his book is “a fantasy-based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and third-hand reports.”²³

In Küntzler’s view, responsibility for the Palestine-Israel conflict lies entirely with the Palestinians and Arabs:

… it is not the escalation of the Middle East conflict that has given rise to anti-Semitism; it is rather anti-Semitism that has given rise to the escalation of the Middle East conflict – again and again…. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb.²⁴

This is yet another version of the myth that Israel acts only in response to Arab aggression. In fact, following the conquest of land and expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants, Israel again and again inflicted great harm on Arabs and Muslims—primarily the Palestinians, but also those living in the border states—through actions that cannot be attributed to Israel’s need to survive. Consider the annexation of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Islam; the occupation of the Palestinian territories and of the Golan Heights; and wars such as that against Lebanon in 2006, supposedly a response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that resulted in 1,200 Lebanese deaths, almost all of them civilians.

One example provides strong evidence that Arabs have not inherited the Nazis’ exterminatory will. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, re-endorsed unanimously by the Arab League in 2007,²⁵ calls upon Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied since 1967, and for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab countries would then commit to establishing normal relations with Israel and provide security for all the states of the region. Israel is entreated to accept the initiative to “[enable] the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.” The initiative calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem,” but expresses support for any negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.

It is difficult to find exterminatory anti-Semitism in all this. Unsurprisingly, Israeli politicians have ignored the initiative.

All signs point to the fact that Israel has never wanted an equitable peace settlement. Israeli governments since Israel’s beginnings, including Labor governments, have all acted to further the goal of a Greater Israel empty of Palestinians.

The how and why of pro-Israel watchdogs on campuses

Pro-Israel propaganda outlets like Frontpage Magazine carry little weight with scholars of the Middle East, but they are significant actors in sustaining the upside-down view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America. They use intimidation to inhibit free speech on campuses, and poison the well of public discourse.

They advise students to take notes and report on professors, which especially intimidates junior, untenured faculty. They post on their websites telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of departments and faculties which get harassed by angry phone calls and swamped by hate mail.

Pipes and Horowitz encourage confrontation and creating disturbances, followed by complaints that their freedom of speech was curtailed. So here is Gail Rubin’s account of the Q&A part of Achcar’s talk at UC, Davis:

… challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A. I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room.

In fact, according to Jewish Studies Director, Professor Diane Wolf, Rubin was called on to ask her question, read a prepared script with no relation to Achcar’s talk, and then asked him whether he wasn’t blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. As he started to express that he was shocked and offended, she tried to re-read her statement. At this point, Professor David Biale and others told her to be quiet and Professor Susan Miller explained that in an academic environment, we wait for the speaker’s response to a question. She should leave if she could not abide by those rules. So the questioner was stopped only when she interrupted Achcar to repeat her statement.

In an interview after Achcar’s program, Professor Emily Gottreich, Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, commented that if these campus pro-Israel activists were truly interested in engaging in academic dialogue, they would express their disagreements directly to the scholar in a public forum or to departmental chairs or program directors; instead, they appeal directly to donors, who tend to be neither Middle East experts nor particularly well-versed in the rules of academic discourse, to withdraw funding; or they approach university presidents or chancellors with accusations of anti-Semitism and “biased” scholarship.

Campus Watch and Horowitz’ Freedom Center are only two pieces in a large network of pro-Israel pressure groups operating on campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition includes no less than 33 independent organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Anti-Defamation League (but not Horowitz’ or Pipes’ organizations, whose work may not quite fit the coalition’s image). The coalition works “to engage leaders at colleges and universities around issues affecting Israel, and to create positive campus change for Israel.”

Why this vast deployment of resources on campuses? The answer is straightforward. A recent document by the David Project, dedicated to ensuring that “effective support for Israel thrives on campuses and in our communities,” states: “AIPAC has had a successful track record in building campus ties to future members of Congress and campus leaders.”²⁶ To-morrow’s leaders are on campuses today, so the thinking goes, and they must be reached by Israeli propaganda as early as possible.

Changing Americans’ view of who Palestinians are

Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net, a website of news about Israel/Palestine, recounts a Skype-mediated “meeting” with youth in Gaza: “Most of the questions were from young men. They were smart but slightly abstract questions … Then Rawan Yaghi sat at the microphone and asked, What can be done to change Americans’ view of who Palestinians are?”

Weiss writes of being overcome with emotion by this “poised young woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses, 18 years old … There was such delicacy to her manner and her question … I struggled against upwelling emotions to answer her question. ‘`This is the biggest question of all, and I don’t know the answer.’”

For all of us living outside the prison of Gaza, this young woman’s question should come as a call to remember the immense harm created by prejudice, ignorance, and demonization. Voices like Gilbert Achcar’s must be heard on campuses and in larger public arenas.

1. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center for American Progress, August 2011.
2. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 33.
3. Israel Gershoni, “Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s” (EUI Working Paper no. RSC 20001/32, San Domenico, 2001, p.6.
4. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 years of history and culture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
5. Benjamin Stora, L’armée d’Afrique: Les oubliés de la Libération, ‪Volume 692 of Textes et documents pour la classe TDC. ‪C.N.D.P., 1995.
6. Nissim Rejwan, Arabs aims and Israeli attitudes. The Leonard Davis Institute, Davis Occasional Papers, No 77, 2000.
7. “Israel Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2005.
8. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 274.
9. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. Reissued with new afterword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. p. 259.
10. Achcar, p. 275.
11. Achcar, p. 273.
12. Achcar, p. 291.
13. Achcar, p. 130.
14. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 26.
15. “Israeli intolerance shows up on Internet, in Knesset, on the street,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2011.
16. Tomer Velmer, “Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs,” YNet Magazine, January 19, 2011.
17. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Library of Modern Middle East Studies, 2012.
18. “The Inequality Report,” Adalah, March 2011. See also “New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel,” June 2011. Both can be downloaded from Adalah.
19. “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” with 
Ari Shavit, Logos 3.1, Winter 2004.
20. Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 5.
21. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad Press, 1973.
22. “In the Straightjacket of Anti-Zionism,” on the website of Engage, “a resource that aims to help people counter the boycott Israel campaign.” Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-hatred, translated by Colin Mead, was published by Telos Press Publishing (2008).
23. Achcar, p. 169-170.
24. From a talk given at Yale University, “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.”
25. Arab Peace Initiative.
26. “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012.

Minister Kenney said in the prepared Press Release that “Canadians take great pride in the generosity and compassion of our immigration and refugee programs. But they have no tolerance for those who abuse our generosity and seek to take unfair advantage of our country.”

The new bill, is titled “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act” and proposes extensive changes to Canada’s refugee protection process that build on the changes to the asylum system passed in June 2010 as part of the Conservative government’s Balanced Refugee Reform Act.

The Coalition for Justice for Refugees and Immigrants, composed of nearly 60 national organizations across Canada, including Amnesty International (AI), the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) and the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL), and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), however, have attacked the proposed changes. They state the changes are “Unconstitutional” and undermine “Canada’s Humanitarian Traditions” and violate “Canada’s International Obligations.”

The Coalition, in a Press Conference held in Ottawa on March 26, 2012 said, “Bill C-31 is Bad Policy and Creates a Manifestly Unfair System That Will Fail to Protect Refugees in Canada.”

Peter Showler, a former Chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board and Director of the Refugee Forum at the University of Ottawa, characterized Bill C-31 as “a bill that fundamentally changes Canada’s immigration and refugee system and it is a bill that violates the Canadian Charter of Rights, international law and, frankly, common sense as well.”

On the behalf of the Coalition Showler stated, “this is not simply a matter of standing on the sidelines and criticizing the current bill, that we actually do believe that it is necessary to reform Canada’s refugee system but it’s important to do it in a way that has features that are fast, fair and effective. None of these features are contained in Bill C-31.”

Criticisms leveled at Bill C-31 by Nathalie Des Rosiers, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and also the former Dean of the University of Ottawa Law School Civil Section, include the fact that the “bill gives the power to a minister to designate a group and incarcerate them for 12 months without judicial review. On its face, this violates the Charter. It also violates the Convention on the Rights of Refugees, and it will be challenged. The ability to challenge detention in front of a court is at the heart of a judicial process and the rule of law. It is the right to habeas corpus. To have denied this to anyone on Canadian soil is a mistake. It’s an infringement of the rights and it is wrong.”

Des Rosiers also noted, “The Auditor General has come to the conclusion that this will cost at least $70,000 per person that will be incarcerated and that doesn’t cost – that doesn’t take into account the social cost and the cost to the proper integration of immigrants that will be incarcerated for 12 months.”

“The Minister has said well, that he will release them at his good pleasure if and when their circumstances warrant it or if people have their refugee status determined and refugee status accorded, but this is wrong. In a democracy, we cannot leave an unfettered discretion powers in a government to incarcerate people. We shouldn’t do it and we shouldn’t do it for people that come to Canada,” said Des Rosiers.

Heather Neufeld, a member of the executive of the Canadian Council for Refugees and a practicing immigration and refugee lawyer in Ottawa, offered the following critical comments on the provisions for family re-unification in the proposed Bill.

“Currently, individuals who are granted refugee status in Canada can immediately apply for permanent residence for themselves as well as for their dependants abroad. Now, under Bill C-31, individuals who are detained and who are granted refugee status are required to wait five years before they even become eligible to apply for permanent residence. The consequences of this restriction concerning family separation and family reunification are unthinkable,” Neufeld said.

The result of the proposed changes, according to Neufeld, are prolonged family separation that may mean: “Spousal relationships may break down. Children may arrive to parents they no longer even know and some children become too old to even bring to Canada.”

“So forcing anyone granted refugee status to wait five years before they even become eligible to being the process of family reunification is not only unconscionable, it is likewise cruel” said Neufeld.

Alex Neve, who is the Director General of Amnesty International Canada and a lawyer and a recognized expert on international human rights, also criticized Bill C-31. He said, “Among the many troubling provisions in Bill C-31 is the power given to the Minister of Immigration to designate a list of countries of origin that are supposedly safe. Refugee claimants who are nationals from these so-called safe countries will be treated very differently from all other refugee claimants and they will face discrimination and unequal justice in a number of very worrying ways.”

Neve stated, “First, their claims will be fast-tracked for processing, sending a clear signal to decision-makers that their cases are assumed to be doubtful and dubious.” Second, if turned down, claimants from designated safe countries of origin will have no access to an appeal before the Immigration and Refugee Board’s new Refugee Appeal Division — a crucial safeguard for people whose lives and liberty may be on the line.”

Neve continued, “And finally, even the last resort option of turning to the Federal Court for a review of a negative decision on technical grounds is rendered nearly meaningless as claimants from safe countries will almost always be deported before the court decides before – before the court decides whether or not they will even be granted a hearing.”

The representative for Amnesty International also further attacked the Bill for, “Introducing the safe countries of origin concept into the Canadian refugee system is unfair and problematic for so many reasons. First, there is simply no reliable, objective way to distinguish safe and unsafe countries when it comes to human rights protection. Where does the line get drawn? Human rights violations, unfortunately, occur in virtually all countries around the world — countries considered to be democratic, countries which have close economic, tourist and other ties with Canada, countries that may be safe for most people but countries which nonetheless may also be dangerous and discriminatory for many others.”

Neve added, “This is certainly the case with many countries commonly thought to be at the top of Minister Kenney’s safe list such as Mexico where a deepening human rights crisis has been the subject of a growing number of alarming reports from Amnesty International and others. Or the Czech Republic and Hungary where countless human rights experts have documented deep and longstanding violence and discrimination against Roma people.” Minister Kenney has frequently characterized Roma refugees as “bogus.”

The Federal Court of Canada, not known to be a bastion of judicial activism, has recently over turned two negative decisions involving Roma refugee claims. In one decision the Federal Court stated that, “there has been a severe upswing of extremism directed against Roma and further that there is extensive evidence of the government’s shortcomings in actually preventing violence against Roma.” In the second Decision, the Federal Court ruled that, “the evidence is overwhelming that Hungary is unable presently to provide adequate protection to its Roma citizens.”

Neve commented that, “Against that reality, it is particularly problematic that the decision to designate safe countries will rest entirely in the hands of the Minister, making it open to all manner of inappropriate political considerations. Tellingly, an earlier proposal to set up an expert committee to advise the Minister on this list has been scrapped.”

Neve further stated, “This approach also undermines one of the most fundamental principles of refugee protection, namely that refugee claimants should have their cases assessed individually, not on the basis of sweeping generalizations such as the countries from which they come from.”

The Representative from Amnesty International continued, “And finally, at its very core, it is discrimination — discrimination in something so essential as access to justice and the quality of that justice, justice meant to ensure that people will be kept safe from serious human rights violations. No justice for you because of where you come from.”

“The concept of safe countries of origin is a wrong-handed fiction. It contravenes the fundamental principle that refugee claims should be assessed individually. And it constitutes indefensible discrimination. It does not belong in Canada’s refugee system and should be abandoned” said Neve.

Mr. Lorne Waldman, President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and widely recognized as one of Canada’s leading experts on immigration and refugee law, also addressed what he described as “one of the most alarming features of the new legislation which is the time frames.” Waldman stated, “I want to make it clear: as a refugee lawyer who sees the harm that delays in the process have brought upon my clients, I support an expeditious process. I support a process that gives refugees a reasonable period of time to present the case and results in quick, fair decision-making.”

“But the new refugee procedure,” Waldman stated, “has created time frames that are so completely unrealistic as to make a facade of due process in the refugee determination system. Refugees will have 15 days from the date they make a claim — the date of their arrival — to file a form which sets out the basis for their case. And, as we all know, these forms then form the foundation for their entire claim. And if they make omissions, these omissions will be held against them. It will be impossible for refugees to obtain legal advice and to get counsel to prepare the forms in most cases given the very short time frames.”

The President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers continued, “If a refugee is on the designated country of origins list, he will then have to have a hearing within 30 days. As we know, refugees are required and expected to bring corroborating evidence. Given the time frames — be it 30 days for the expedited cases or 60 days for the unexpedited cases — it will be virtually impossible for refugees to get legal representation and for them to be able to get corroborating evidence. The time frames are so absurd and so unrealistic as to make the system completely devoid of any fairness.”

According to Waldman, “The appeal process is laughable. For years, refugee advocates have called for an appeal system and indeed when the refugee system was amended two years ago with the consensus of all the political parties, we rejoiced that the Conservative government was going to introduce an appeal. But the time frames that are now included in this new appeal process as so ridiculous as to make the appeal process a joke. Fifteen days to file a perfected appeal is virtually impossible. No one can file an appeal, obtain counsel, obtain the transcript and be able to realistically comply with those time periods.”

Continuing his critique, Waldman said, “The appeal is also made absurd by the fact that so many different groups are now being excluded from the right to have an appeal. You don’t get an appeal if you’re on one of the designated country lists. You don’t get an appeal if you’re designated as an irregular arrival. You don’t get appeal if they find your case has no credible basis. There are … six [grounds] for denying persons access to the appeal process. So in the end it’s doubtful that there will be very many people left who will be able to obtain access to an appeal and so one wonders why the government is going to the expense of creating an appeal process that will be used by and available to so many.”

Another serious criticism raised by Waldman is “the impact of this bill on permanent resident status for persons who’ve already been accepted as refugees. Under the new legislation, the Minister will be able to apply for cessation. What this means is the Minister will be able to apply for an order that a person is no longer a refugee because the conditions in their country have changed. This provision exists in the current legislation. But the significant change is under the new law if the Minister applies and if the Minister is successful in obtaining an order of cessation, that will immediately strip the person of their permanent resident status.”

Waldman gave the following example: “A refugee comes from Kosovo, a genuine refugee, accepted and brought to Canada by the Government of Canada as a refugee from Kosovo. Now we know that the situation in Kosovo has changed. Under the current legislation, the Minister can apply for an order saying that they’re no longer a refugee, but it doesn’t have any effect on their permanent resident status. Under the new legislation, the Minister applies for such an order and if the order is granted by the Board — which it will be because there’s no longer a dangerous situation in Kosovo — then that person immediately loses their permanent resident status, is inadmissible to Canada, and is subject to immediate deportation.”

“There are tens of thousands of people in Canada who came to Canada as refugees, and genuine refugees, have not done anything wrong and their status is now at risk because of this change in the legislation” said Waldman.

The Conservative Government has a majority in Parliament and can readily pass the legislation. Opponents of the Bill C-31 are calling for substantial revisions. In the end these issues may be determined in the Courts.

The plight of the Tamils is chronicled in Ron Ridenour’s book, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka (Chennai: New Century Bookhouse, 2011). The oppression and genocide experienced by the Tamils is not as well-known as the occupation, oppression, and genocide experienced by the Palestinians even though it is of much longer duration.

I had known that many Tamils lived in Canada having escaped persecution back home. However, in 1997, I became more intimately familiar with the civil war in Sri Lanka while working in Maldives. Many of the workers — and some of my colleagues — were from Sri Lanka. I heard complaints that Tamils were discriminated against because of their language and religion. Worse were the tales of bloodthirsty pogroms of Sinhalese against the Tamils, including torture, murder, rapes — all this committed by Buddhists, people supposedly seeking enlightenment.

Tamils are victims of Sinhalese, but one cannot escape the conclusion that they are also victims of themselves. This comes through in the details of Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka, although the author leaves this mainly for the reader to piece together. The solidarity of the Tamil people is underwhelming.

Ridenour holds, “The Tamils have every right and need to exist in peace and equality, and this is possible only if they have their own state.” The first clause is axiomatic from any human rights-observing person; however, the second part is more open to dissension. There are plenty of examples of different ethnicities eventually coming to a more-or-less peaceful co-existence within the same state. Sometimes autonomus regions can grant the equal human rights desired by all humans. However, circumstances certainly indicate that the Sinhalese were disrespectful of the rights of Tamils and tried to impose — violently, if need be — their nationalism, language, and religion into every nook and cranny of Sri Lanka.

Tamils, of course, had every right to resist and agitate for their rights. Would partitioning the geography of Sri Lanka solve the situation, as Ridenour alludes? Or would it have served as a durable cause célèbre for Sinhalese to reunite the island? As Ridenour notes, the Tamils had a de facto state. What if they had more earnestly negotiated from the strength of their position of de facto statehood toward securing an autonomous Tamil region within a Sri Lanka nation (as an acceptable fallback position from separation)?

Very importantly, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka provides a historical backdrop to the Sinhalese-Tamil civil war, starting with the first humans in Sri Lanka and working forward. Ridenour writes that a Tamil presence dates back many centuries in Sri Lanka. Both the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils have India as their origin. The European invasions and colonization of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) began in the sixteenth century, and were enabled by the lack of solidarity between Sinhalese and Tamils. During their colonial rule, the British brought over Tamil coolies to work the plantations.

The Tamils did economically better under British administration than Sinhalese causing envy and friction. The majority Sinhalese sought to exert themselves through making their religion, Buddhism, the sole national religion and their language, Sinhala, the sole official language. “The Tamils history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination.” These chauvanistic moves were followed up with bloody violence wreaked on the Tamils, which Ridenour argues, fit the legal definition of genocide.

Eventually, Tamils formed resistance groups that defended Tamils and pressed for a Tamil state where they felt they could be free from Sinhalese discrimination and violence. The best known group was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) who were no stranger to using extreme violence and were declared terrorists by many, although Ridenour puts this label into perspective.

“Really, if I starve the Tamils, the Sinhala people will be happy.” President Junius Richard Jayewardene was quoted in the Daily Telegraph in 1983. Strangely enough, many so-called terrorists are victims of genocide.

Tamils did not just fight Sinhalese military. Tamil rebel factions fought each other; Tamils fought the Indian “peacekeepers.” The Tamils were adept at finding enemies to fight, but what allies did Tamils find?

Lack of Solidarity

Even the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuṇa (People’s Liberation Front) was opposed to a ceasefire with the Tamils, calling it “part of a western conspiracy to destabilize, divide and re-conquer” Sri Lanka. Yet, if the reasoning proffered by Ridenour for Marxist reluctance to lay down arms is correct, then it exposes a gaping contradiction among the Marxists: they preferred to fight a divisive civil war to avoid being divided.

In the end, the deep divisions among the Tamils would be their very undoing. The egos of LTTE “leader” Velupillai Prabhakaran and Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan (Colonel Karuna) in the East split the Tamils further. Karuna disobeyed orders for the transfer of his fighters, and Prabharakan expelled him from the LTTE. Karuna went over to the Sri Lankan government side.

Now the LTTE was forced to fight the government troops and three Tamil paramilitary groups. It was a losing proposition for Tamils.

Ridenour attempts to answer the question: Why the Tigers failed? The question also implies why the Tamil people failed?

Among the reasons, Ridenour points to Karuna’s defection, Prabharakan’s authoritarian leadership, his reliance on conventional warfare rather than guerrilla warfare, and Prabharakan’s brutality.

The Tigers defeat was ultimately a defeat for the Tamil people. They were a house divided. There was no unity between Sri-Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils, no unity between Tamils and Muslims, and, of course, what unity can one expect from within an ethnicity that has an oppressive caste system? There was even divisiveness among Tamil fighters; they had to defend against each other as well as Sinhalese fighters. This is hardly a successful strategy for liberation.

A whirlwind of genocidal ferocity engulfed the Tamil people. The western media reported little of it; after all, it did not directly involve western fighters. The Tamils have lost control of areas they held in the north and the east. Ridenour writes of “enforced disappearances” of Tamils, maybe into the human trafficking market that opened. Sinhalese subsequently were being “settled” into Tamil areas and homes.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder spoke of the children’s “unimagineable suffering,” now no longer recruited as fighters are instead coerced into prostitution, sex trafficking, and alcohol smuggling.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called the devastation “… the most appalling scene I have seen …”

The Sri Lankan defense ministry triumphed its ”humanitarian operation” victory as one with zero civilian casualties. Ridenour pointed to the videos that appeared on UK’s Channel 4 which belie that defense ministry claim.

Where now?

There is a substantial Tamil diaspora that has begun to organize internationally. A young Tamil socialist, Sharmini Lathan, seems to know the way out of the morass. He told Ridenour: “We need to combine all our forces and struggles: Tamils, Arabs, Latin Americans… We need to help each other, [sic] because we have common problems and goals.”

That the United Nations accomplished nothing to protect humans from the scourge of war in Sri Lanka was unsurprising. Of some surprise was the non-solidarity not just among the Sri Lankans; it was among Arab states, leftist states such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia who abandoned Tamils. It leads Ridenour to a sad conclusion that “we are heading for moral collapse, and then fascism throughout much of the world.”

Clearly, the Tamils were discriminated against; they were persecuted; and they were forced to resist violently. They resisted largely with minimal support of leftists, communists, and revolutionaries elsewhere. Ridenour found out what he could about the Tamil struggle; he held to to his moral and ideological principles. This single person did not turn his back on the Tamils on the other side of the globe, and he called his fellow leftists out on their lack of solidarity.

Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka gives the background information necessary for the reader to become informed of what led to the civil war and its still unfolding aftermath. Ridenour criticizes the lack of leftist solidarity with the Tamil struggle, but how much of the blame do the Tamils themselves share? One surely would not go so far as to blame any people for a genocide against them, but part of the Tamil struggle was internecine. Readers of Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka will have a solid base to discuss, research further, and form their own conclusions.

1. Yes, even Arab nations unmindful of or insouciant to how that reflects on their Arab brethren in Palestine.

The medics were already sentenced by a military tribunal (a military tribunal!) to up to 15 years in prison after months of being held in illegal detention, denied legal counsel and subjected to torture.

Moving their case to a civilian court is presumably meant to signal a concession by the regime. But what it illustrates is that the Al Khalifa royal rulers of Bahrain are unreconstructed despots who are implacably set against accepting any kind of democratic reform.

The persecution of the majority Shia population – 70 per cent of the island – by an unelected Sunni elite is business as usual as epitomized by the vindictive targeting of medics whose only “crime” was that they treated hundreds of people injured in the state’s brutal crackdown against the pro-democracy movement.

Recently, Washington has been doing its PR best to present the monarchy in the Persian Gulf kingdom as being belatedly open to reform – this after a year of unrelenting repression against a largely peaceful pro-democracy uprising.

Bahraini grassroots activists are concerned that sections of the official opposition belonging to the Shia Al Wefaq political society are being groomed by the US State Department to accept a “compromise deal” with the royal rulers that would effectively see the monarchy remaining in power and the status quo merely being given a facelift.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has been praised in the US corporate media for overseeing “brave” moves towards political power-sharing and dialogue with the mainly Shia-led opposition.

Washington’s envoy on human rights Michael Posner and former national security advisor Elliott Abrams have talked up “important steps” by the Bahraini regime towards reform.

However, no amount of Washington spinning can conceal the facts of life: that the US-backed Bahraini regime will continue violating human rights and international law in order to maintain its stranglehold hold on political and economic power at the expense of the Shia majority.

For 280 years, the Sunni rulers, who invaded the country from neighbouring Qatar, have sat on the chests of the indigenous Shia, and they are not going to give up their privileged seats of comfort. The Al Khalifa dynasty has enriched itself through graft and corruption while the majority of Bahrainis struggle with unemployment and poverty.

The oil wealth of the tiny island has lined the pockets of the Al Khalifas, but for the ordinary Shia it has brought poverty, pollution and sickness. To add insult to injury, when the mainly Shia-led uprising last February peacefully demanded elected government to replace the unelected venal family dynasty, it was met with batons, bullets and brutality, with thousands incarcerated or fired from their jobs, several tortured to death while in prison.

Historically, to maintain this excruciating state of inequality, the Bahraini rulers developed a system of governance and state security apparatus that is “bullet-proof to reform”. Under American and British tutelage, the Bahraini rulers became adept at presenting the kingdom as a relatively benign monarchy. They may have acquired the modern semantics and appearance of political progressivism, such as referring to the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy with a (rigged) parliament instead of an absolute monarchy as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms. But not far below the surface, Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism was always the dominant reality.

For example, the kingdom’s prime minister is 78-year-old Prince Khalifa Al Khalifa, the uncle of the incumbent king. He is the world’s longest sitting prime minister, having first occupied the post in 1971 when Bahrain gained nominal independence from Britain. Prime Minister Khalifa – also known locally as Mr Fifty-Fifty – has never faced an electorate and is notorious for siphoning off Bahrain’s oil wealth to become one of the richest men in the world.

For decades, despite glamorous images of mirrored skyscrapers and Formula One Grand Prix, Bahrain has been run with an ironclad National Security Agency. The agency was, and is, a veritable “torture apparatus” headed up by members of the royal family and assisted in its nefarious conduct by ex-colonial power Britain.

Between 1968-98, the main architect of the NSA and its sectarian methods of repression against the Shia population was British colonel Sir Ian Henderson. Henderson, who had previously gained British government commendation for his role in efficiently, that is brutally, suppressing the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya during the 1950s-60s, oversaw the detention and torture of thousands of Bahrainis held for years without trial in the dungeons of Bahrain.

Former detainees told Global Research that one of Henderson’s sadistic methods of interrogation was to force them to sit naked on upright glass bottles, the necks of which had been roughly broken off to leave protruding jagged points. The detainees told how Henderson personally oversaw the torture of inmates.

Today, the British influence on Bahrain’s NSA continues. One of Bahrain’s senior police chiefs is Briton John Yates, formerly of Scotland Yard; another senior police chief is American John Timoney, who formerly ran the force in Miami, Florida. Both men have reputations of corruption and brutality from their previous commands.

Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism under a family dynasty is backed up with a military and police force whose ranks are filled by foreign expatriate Sunnis recruited from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Jordan. The regime forces serve their Sunni masters with a vicious hatred towards the Shia population.

This fact is attested by the daily and nightly attacks on Shia villages by Saudi-backed regime forces, with massive amounts of tear gas fired into streets and homes. At least 25 people have died from suffocation with tear gas over the past year since Saudi-led forces invaded Bahrain to crush the uprising. The victims range from a five-day-old baby girl to elderly men and women who are too weak or infirmed to escape from their smoke-filled homes.

In the past week, mourners attending the funerals for two men who died from tear gas exposure were themselves attacked by riot police who proceeded to fire more tear gas.

So, on the one hand, we see the Bahraini rulers wearing a velvet glove offering “dialogue” and “reforms”, with Washington and London providing the positive-sounding script; while on the other hand, what is felt is an iron-fist smashing down the doors of homes, firing tear gas into houses, dragging suspects away in the middle of the night, detaining them without trial and torturing to death.

And this is all happening in a supposed new era of reformism and dialogue in Bahrain that Washington assures is underway.

The continued persecution of the Bahraini medics is another fact on the ground to demonstrate the despotic nature of Washington and London’s “important ally” in the Persian Gulf.

The medics were sentenced for up to 15 years by a military court last September on a range of outlandish charges, including “attempting to overthrow the government” and “spreading defamatory information” about the royal rulers.

That verdict caused international protests from human rights groups, who denounced it as a travesty of legal procedure, not least because the sole basis for the prosecution were the confessions of the defendants – confessions that were obtained under torture.

Then, as now, the response from Washington and other Western governments and media was muted.

The medics include world-renowned surgeons Ali Al Ekri and Ghassan Dhaif and his wife, Zahra, and brother and sister, Bassim and Nada. Also sentenced was Rula Al Suffar, the former head of Bahrain’s Nursing Society. These are individuals of impeccable medical professionalism and ethics, who refused to close the doors of Bahrain’s main public hospital, Al Salmaniya, when the regime began butchering protesters last February-March. Global Research can bear witness to the dedication of these medics and countless others who struggled in the wards and corridors of the hospital to patch people up with the most horrendous wounds as wave after wave of injured were ferried in.

Dr Al Ekri was assaulted while performing surgery and hauled into detention by Saudi-backed forces who had smashed their way into Salmaniya Hospital – a crime against humanity, just one of many following the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain that was given the green light by Washington and London.

There was a faint sign that Washington’s recent talk of progress and reform in Bahrain may have somehow sent the hint to its favoured despots to quietly drop the embarrassing show trial against the medics. But with the continuance of the prosecution – albeit in a civilian court instead of a military tribunal – it seems that institutionalized barbarism cannot overcome its tyrannical instincts for power, even at the behest of its more PR-savvy patron in Washington.

One can only imagine the sanctimonious mouth-foaming reaction by Washington, London and the corporate media if such a travesty was perpetrated against medics in Syria.

But Bahrain is not Syria; it is an ally, therefore Western governments and media suddenly develop blindness and speech impediment in the face of blatant crimes against humanity.

In a press conference held on March 15, 2012, Gascon announced that he was “deeply concerned” that Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi might have plead guilty to a crime he did not truly believe he had committed. He explained that his office “is not in the habit of taking a guilty plea from somebody who is not guilty.” He continued: “If the defendant in this case believes he is not guilty then we should go to trial and let a jury decide.”

Anybody who has ever been within two miles of a courtroom would immediately recognize the utter hypocrisy of this statement. Gascon heads an office that accepts pleas from literally hundreds  of criminal defendants every day who are admitting guilt to offenses they did not commit so that they do not run the risk of going to prison for the rest of their lives for crimes they  also did not commit. Gascon’s office so over-charges most criminal defendants and conjures up accusations that are nothing short of ludicrous for the sole purpose of raising the stakes so high that the accused cannot afford to risk trial. Our judicial system not only acknowledges that this is a daily occurrence, but depends upon this coercive process in order to function. If even 10% of those who are arrested demanded a jury trial, the entire judicial system would come to a screeching halt. Courtrooms would be backed up for years within a month or two of the entry of defendants’ not guilty pleas.

That Gascon would dare to make such a disingenuous comment only underscores the daily unspoken collusion between trial courts and prosecutors to assure that innocent people go to prison, rather than fight their unjust arrests and prosecutions.

A few examples should suffice to demonstrate how obvious this is:

1.  In 1991, Franky Carrillo was convicted of murder, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.  His conviction was based upon the testimony of numerous witnesses, who had been coerced by the police, and coached by the District Attorney into giving false testimony to convict Carrillo. After 20 years in prison,  producing a letter from the actual perpetrator of the crime admitting to its commission, and presenting evidence from every witness who testified against him that their testimony was false and coerced, Carrillo’s conviction was overturned, and he was released from prison. The important lesson from this case is that not one police officer was prosecuted for coercing witnesses into testifying against an innocent man, not one District Attorney was disbarred or even disciplined for suborning perjury, and the trial judge who sentenced Carrillo to two life terms in prison has never been questioned as to why and how he could allow such a shameful process to take place in his courtroom.

Has any District Attorney been prosecuted for over-charging a defendant, for cooperating with the police in fabricating false evidence against an individual or for sending obviously mentally ill or innocent defendants to jail? Gascon’s shameful posturing about District Attorneys never accepting guilty pleas from innocent people scrapes the bottom of the bucket!

It would have been impossible for the witnesses who initially testified against Carrillo to get their stories straight in front of the jury unless the D.A. had coached them and worked with them in convicting an innocent man. This is par for the course, not an aberration.

2. Dennis Lawley spent 23 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He thought he was the Beast of Revelations from the Bible, and suffered from raging mental illness. He then killed himself in his cell this year. The trial judge allowed Lawley to represent himself at trial in spite of Lawley’s open and obvious psychosis.

During trial, the District Attorney presented the case to the jury, arguing that Lawley shot his victim with his own .357 gun and was the sole perpetrator of the crime. Lawley explained that the gun he was accused of using in the crime was not the one that killed the victim and was never used in the crime. He explained that his gun was actually buried in a field in Modesto in the Central Valley of California. The D.A. mocked Lawley’s argument, and ultimately obtained a  conviction for the crime. 20 years later, Lawley’s appellate attorney and a series of investigators went to the field and located the missing gun, which was right where Lawley had said it was.

Did the D.A. admit his error, and work to have Lawley released? Of course not, he changed his theory of the case to suggest that there were two guns used in the crime, and that Lawley was guilty under his new explanation for the crime.

Was the D.A., or the Attorney General who fought to keep Lawley in prison until he killed himself punished in any way for their blatant lies and fabrications? Certainly not – our city and state attorneys never are held accountable for their manipulation of the legal system.

Did the trial judge who upheld the jury’s sentence of death ever publicly acknowledge his shameful actions in allowing Lawley to represent himself in spite of his obvious mental illness. Unheard of!

3.  Ross Mirkarimi was elected sheriff of San Francisco County in 2011. He was to be sworn in as sheriff in 2012. But prior to assuming the role of sheriff, Mirkarimi was arrested for having assaulted his wife, an immigrant who swore that he had not abused her, and for intimidating their  two-year old child (Mirkirami, himself, was a serious candidate for the “Hypocrite Award” due to his dual role as S.F. County Sheriff as well as a suspected wife abuser.)

Mirkarimi plead not guilty to the charges, and demanded a jury trial. After weeks of reading about every aspect of the case in the local media, as presented to them by D.A. Gascon, Mirkarimi plead guilty to the misdemeanor offense of false imprisonment. For weeks before the pending trial, the people of San Francisco, from which the jury to try the case would be chosen, were treated to videos and pictures of the victim of the crime, to alleged testimony from numerous other victims of Mirkarimi’s misconduct, and to a daily barrage of information provided by Gascon’s office to assure a conviction in the case. Was this appropriate behavior on the part of the District Attorney? Did he get away with trying the case in the press insead of in the courtroom? Ah, but the District Attorney is an honorable man, who would NEVER accept a plea from an innocent person.

The Mirkirimi case has gone off the charts. District Attorney Gascon graciously shared with the city of San Fancisco, prior to Mirkarimi’s trial, the chronological history of every woman Mirkarimi had dated since the age of eight, along with a description of the inappropriate conduct he engaged in with each of them. The descriptions were bolstered by pictures, declarations and videos of each of his prior transgressions.

4. When Oscar Grant was murdered in cold blood by the BART police in Oakland in the early hours of New Yearve 2009, it was months before anybody could even hear what murderer Mehserle’s defense was. The District Attorney explained that an ongoing investigation was in process, and that it would be “unfair” for Mehserle’s to be tried in the press prematurely. How considerate of the D.A. in that case.

5.  In the case of the Davis police officers who blithely and openly pepper-sprayed non-violent demonstrators sitting on a sidewalk on campus, the District Attorney worked long and hard to protect the privacy rights of the police while an interminable investigation was pursued. Were the policeman’s actions discussed publicly by the D.A. prior to trial or was the case tried in the press? No. Are criminal charges even pending against the offending police officers? No.

When a police officer is the potential defendant, privacy rights come to the fore and foreshadow all other considerations; yet, when a poor person or someone the D.A. dislikes commits a crime, the person is so lambasted in the press that (s)he does not stand a chance if the case were ever to go to court.

The double standard that exists in this country regarding the forces of law ‘n order versus the citizenry, especially for minorities, is so blatant and outrageous as to bring chills to any law-abiding citizen. Gascon’s abuse of the system is only the tip of the iceberg.

Label (n.)— short classifying phrase applied to a person…

— Oxford Desk Dictionary

In the stratified, hierarchical marketplace which we inhabit daily, we encounter (but do not relate to) “food servers,” “store clerks,” “flight attendants,” and so on.  As “consumers,” we may even collaborate with their supervisors in rating their “service” on a scale of 1 to 10 (rather like the product ratings provided by the readers of Consumer Reports).  Since such service jobs require the display of a “friendly” demeanor and attitude, most such encounters are emptied of any human authenticity.  Not unlike traditional caste-systems, which reinforced hierarchical relations of dominance/subordination, such social-distancing promotes detachment and indifference on the part of  “customers.”

Such labels are de-humanizing because:

1) they reduce each person to a mere occupant of  an economic status/role (“housekeeper,” “peasant,” “unemployed baker’s assistant”); and

2) they expunge the value of each individual—his/her unique personality/subjectivity—within the generic category.

The term “peasants,” often used when referring to Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, lumped countless numbers of real, distinctive individuals into a de-humanizing, low-status, category.  Any possible identification with such “civilian casualties,” on the part of Americans, was thereby further obviated.  No doubt many Americans merely shrugged when told the estimated numbers of Vietnamese “peasants” killed by the American military.

Furthermore, the mainstream media continues to hold up a distorting lens, a cognitive filter which blocks any immediacy of human comprehension or identification with “the other.”  For instance: Palestinian “terrorists,” Iraqi “insurgents,” and so on.  (Oddly, the connotation of the word “rebels” varies widely, depending on whether the U.S. military supports them or kills them.)    With the imposition of such misleading (and fear-inducing) labels, any direct understanding of such individuals’ human experiences and outlook is blocked.  Such labels, once affixed, can result in grave distortions in the perception of social reality itself.  One need only consider the blanket term “enemy,” and the historical consequences of its imposition onto real people (such as families who happened to live in Hiroshima–or Falluja).

In striking contrast, a universalizing, egalitarian ethos is once more in the ascendant worldwide.   In the past decade or so, the anti-globalization and democracy movements, facilitated by new forms of interactive media, have promoted a wider sense of human solidarity as such. (And ultimately, as the Biosphere itself reacts to global warming, with all sentient beings as such?).  A growing “empathic-humanism,” as I would define it, means not necessarily “sympathetic identification,” but rather the developing capacity to “feel-into” (and thereby validate) the diverse experiences of others worldwide—regardless not only of ethnicity and culture, but also of class, status and occupational role.

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose
interests are most nearly touched, — criticism
of writers by readers, of government by those
governed, of leaders by those led,– this is the soul
of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.

– W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks, 1903

At first blush, the recent imbroglio between Professors Cornel West (Princeton) and Melissa Harris-Perry (Tulane) appears to have burst upon the political landscape sui generis, unexpected and unprecedented. Au contraire, however. There is deep history here of divisive, rancorous debate among Black leaders, including scholars, artists , writers, business types, and within the masses of Black people themselves. I’ll lightly plumb that history shortly. First, though, how did we come to this present juncture (impasse?) where two prominent Black professors seem to revel in calling each other everything but a child of God and in full public view?

The first salvo came when author Chris Hedges penned a Truthdig column and quoted West as saying that this First Black President is a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats.” West came thisclose to accusing President Obama of being an Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom or not, mascot or not, in West’s eyes Obama has shown himself to be a 21st Century version of an ever-present nemesis in the Black community – the common, ordinary sell-out. West offered as Exhibit A the President’s refusal to directly address record-levels of Black and poor peoples’ poverty, unemployment, and the sharply downward spiral of all Black socio-economic indicators except one: the unconscionable, blatantly racist, explosive rise in the mass incarceration of Black men. West allowed that both on paper and in the hard reality that is Black life today, these conditions have only been exacerbated since Obama took office.

Harris-Perry practically tripped over her outrage as she ran to her keyboard to defend the President. West, she wrote breathlessly in the Nation magazine, labored under obvious misconceptions about the President, the presidency itself, and most especially his (West’s) own (mis)understanding of his role in Obama’s 2008 election. The then President-Elect had failed to personally invite him to his history-making inauguration. Indeed, West, she said, felt personally aggrieved, personally slighted, personally snubbed, but even worse, publicly ignored and dissed. Well, in the Hedges piece West did admit that he totaled up the score of his 65 campaign events against his Dee Cee limo driver’s zero events. Yet, he lamented, the chauffeur, had received an inaugural invitation while he, the well heeled, well spoken, well traveled, socially conscious, and world renowned professor, had not.

West’s critique of the President broadened to include all “liberals” and “progressives”, black, white or otherwise, who continue to support the President’s silence and inaction on the poverty issue. West appeared on Ed Shultz’s MSNBC talk fest in April of ’11, and confronted the Right Reverend Al Sharpton about his role as the new H.N.I.C. (Head Negro In Charge) of the National Black or African American Nation-State (N.B.A.A.N.S.) and his coziness with the Obama Administration. West again hurled the “black mascot” sobriquet – this time squarely at Rev. Al. Actual sparks flew during that little tete-a-tete. Then West and best-bud talk show host Tavis Smiley promptly embarked upon a highly publicized “Poverty Tour” through several urban and rural areas, highlighting the deteriorating state of America’s poor and near-poor at each stop.

Both Rev. Al and Dr. Harris-Perry have since been awarded (rewarded?) by MSNBC with talk shows of their own. Unimpressed, West’s most recent indictment against Harris-Perry appeared in Diverse Issues In Higher Education magazine and conflated criticism of Rev. Al’s fledgling TV presence with Harris-Perry’s newborn show. In a sort of pre-review of her debut, he described the good doctor and her new media perch thusly: “She’s become the momentary darling of liberals, but I pray for her because she’s in over her head….She’s a fake and a fraud. I was so surprised how treacherous the sister was.”
This is getting deep. But it is not new.

During slavery there were Black people content to remain slaves, who supported their white masters and mistresses in every way imaginable, including most especially “snitching” on those who sought to escape slavery altogether. Indeed, a major reason why there were never any successful slave revolutions in America is that the plans were betrayed by the masters’ most trusted Black slaves every time. And, complicating matters even further, there were a few Black slaveholders whose twisted logic and supremely cognitive dissonance allowed them to oppress their own people.

The separation-versus-assimilationist argument garnered its widest audience during an ongoing debate between the two most ardent Black abolitionists of the 19th Century: Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany. Douglass’ efforts for the abolition of slavery and full integration into the body politic are well celebrated and documented. Less well known is that Martin R. Delany, a free-born Harvard trained medical doctor and the highest ranking Black officer during the Civil War, was the major proponent, personification and putative father of what today is called Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. He, along with African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeil Turner and a handful of other “race men,” were unapologetic in their call for total independence from white America; for the establishment of an independent African nation-state; and/or for joining the already established “private” American colony on Africa’s west coast – Liberia.

Early in both men’s careers, Delany and Douglass had collaborated in publishing Douglass’ first newspaper, The North Star, later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper. But they soon fell out over whether to separate from this white American nightmare by emigrating en masse back to Africa or remaining here to fight the good fight, and keep the faith that the American white man and woman would someday come to their senses. Their disagreement descended into an ongoing, vociferous, personal fracas, every bit as loud and public as that of our own professors of today.

The epigraph which opens this essay is drawn from Dr. W.E.B. Dubois’ 1903 signature work, The Souls Of Black Folks. There his “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” answered virulent criticisms of his less than flattering comments about the then reigning H.N.I.C. – Booker T. Washington, creator and driving force behind what Dubois dubbed the “Tuskegee Machine.” The Washington/Dubois divide picked up where the Douglass/Delany schism had ended and indeed revolved around many of the same issues, particularly
assimilation/integration versus separation/emigration, and vocational/technical education versus “liberal arts” and the social sciences. Dubois promulgated that only the top “Talented Tenth” percentile of Blacks must be identified and groomed for leadership roles throughout the Black community, and thereby raise the intellectual consciousness and abilities of the whole race. (In today’s terms, think of this as a sort of a “trickle-down” of intelligence theory). But Dubois went further, much further. He demanded immediate political, economic and social equality with the white majority.

Washington was having none of it. He argued that the way forward was via agricultural and “industrial” education for the masses of Black folks in pursuit of more acceptable (by whites) occupations and vocations, which were, after all, more apropos of our needs – and abilities – at that time. “Equality,” most particularly political and social equality, were utterly anathema and had to wait until the Negro could support himself, his family and his whole people economically. And, yes, just like our own professors today, things got heated between Washington and Dubois… and very personal.

Washington died unexpectedly in 1915, but not before he had corresponded with a young Jamaican firebrand living in London named Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. Garvey arrived in New York in 1916, too late to meet his hero, but full of fury against all things white. He had been an editor, printer, writer and union leader in Jamaica and Costa Rica; and had long been an admirer of Martin Delany and Bishop Turner, as well as Washington. All three men were dead when he hit the street corners of Harlem.

The Supreme Court had declared in 1897 that Blacks had no rights which whites were bound to respect and established “separate but equal” as a matter of law. Plessy vs. Ferguson would reign supreme for the next 77 years. In 1916, the two best organized Black organizations – the church and the N.A.A.C.P. – had no real answer for Plessy or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan and its lynching pogrom throughout the South. America was on the verge of entering another “Great War,” this time in Europe, but still seriously pondered whether Black men were necessary, trustworthy enough or even intellectually and physically capable of taking up arms in her behalf. It was within this toxic climate that Garvey abandoned Washington’s gradualist-assimilationist-accomodationist approach and discerned a leadership vacuum among Black people. He began filling it by preaching a new twist on Delany’s old gospel: “Africa for the Africans!” Inexorably, ever larger crowds and eventually massive throngs of Black folks flocked to hear this black-as-coal foreigner alternately urge, admonish or shame them to rise “Up you mighty race! You can accomplish what you will!”

Beyond his oratorical skills, Garvey was the consummate “community organizer.” He had already established his Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.) and African Communities (Imperial) League in Jamaica and London. And Harlem was more than ready for Garvey’s message. The U.N.I.A. quickly eclipsed all other Negro organizations, including even the Black church and the N.A.A.C.P. (whose Crisis magazine had as its editor none other than Dr. W.E.B. Dubois himself who had also played a large role in founding the organization). At its height the U.N.I.A. claimed a worldwide paying membership of 4.5 million souls, half of them in the U.S., making it the largest mass movement in American history. There were branches in Central and South America, the West Indies, Canada, and Europe.

Garvey led massive protest meeting and marches against lynching in the South, petitioned Congress and the President for anti-lynching legislation, set up businesses of all types, including the Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line Steamship Company. One of its first ships, which actually did repatriate at least one shipload of Blacks to Liberia, was christened The Frederick Douglass.

Dubois was not impressed by Marcus Garvey, and in fact was resentful and jealous of his success. After waiting 25 years to step into Washington’s shoes after his death, Dubois felt upstaged by the young upstart Garvey. By virtue of his scholarly achievements and his prominence within the Black community, Dubois felt entitled to the premier role of leadership. The pattern of a single reigning Black “leader” had be set by Douglass’ triumph over Delany a generation earlier. Dubois felt it was his “turn.”

As petty as it sounds, he did not cotton to Garvey’s appearance. He just simply did not look like a Black leader was supposed to look. He did not have the regal bearing of a Frederick Douglass nor the steely-eyed military countenance and education of a Dr. Delany. Garvey was short, overweight, and much too dark to represent the likes of the cultured and sophisticated Dr. W.E.B. Dubois and his vaunted Talented Tenth. In street clothes, Marcus Garvey looked like a field slave. And when he donned his feathered, braided, and officious-looking “Provisional President of Africa” uniform, Dr. Dubois publicly called him a buffoon.

In the May, 1924 issue of The Crisis, Dubois had this to say about Marcus Garvey:

Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world. He is either a lunatic or a traitor…. The American Negroes have endured this wretch all too long with fine restraint and every effort at cooperation and understanding…. Every man who apologizes for or defends Marcus Garvey from this day forth writes himself down as unworthy of countenance of decent Americans.

Not to be outdone, Garvey called Dubois an over-educated, pompous mulatto, who was out of touch with Black people. He ridiculed Dubois’ Talented Tenth idea as elitist, and scoffed at the notion that white people would ever accept Blacks on equal terms no matter how educated or “cultured” they might someday become. In the February 13, 1923 issue of The Negro World, Garvey made his objections to Dubois clear:

It is no wonder that Du Bois seeks the company of white people, because he hates Black as being ugly…Yet this professor, who sees ugliness in being Black, essays to be a leader of the Negro people and has been trying for over fourteen years to deceive them in connection with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Now what does he mean by advancing Colored people if he hates Black so much?… [I]t is in the direction of losing our Black identity and becoming, as nearly as possible, the lowest Whites by assimilation and miscegenation.

I’ll leave the historical comparisons here. But surely my point is made.
Drs. Cornel West and Melissa Harris-Perry’s disagreement is actually a healthy development in this so-called post-racial or “colorblind” era. These are not, as some suggest, petty differences. And, their approaches are not mutually exclusive nor to be viewed as an on/off, binary dynamic. Rather, they complement each other in the sense that many Black people still question this First Black President’s “Blackness.” “Is he Black enough?” Obama’s presence, his “pedigree”, and our professors’ disagreement over just what it all means should cause us to re-think the meaning of Blackness, indeed, the very relevance of Blackness. As a group, and if we wish to remain a cohesive group, we must come to grips with Obama’s Blackness or lack thereof, and then move Blackness forward and into the 21st century, independent of him if necessary. Is it enough to simply have Black faces in high places? Didn’t we learn anything from the example of Clarence Thomas? Oh yes, we knew before Bush I nominated him that he was toxic, but no one imagined him to be as eager a destroyer of Black people as he has turned out to be. Look, we have suffered, struggled, survived and thrived under 43 presidents before Obama. We cannot… we must not allow his presence to accomplish what all those past presidents could not – complete destruction of “the Black Community.”

The question of his authenticity has been updated: “Will this First Black President reveal his “true” colors in a second term?” Entertainer and civil rights giant Harry Belafonte says it does not matter what he might do in a second term. This first term has been revealing enough.

Some appeal to Michelle Obama’s presence as evidence of Obama’s authenticity. Here in Chicago it is well known that Michelle and Jesse Jackson’s oldest daughter were best buds and schoolmates. So for a young ambitious Black lawyer-politician in Chicago during the ’80s, what better way to join Chicago’s Black political elite than to date and then marry the best friend of the daughter of the most famous Black man in America? We did hope that Michelle Obama would hold his feet to the Black fire through some strategic pillow talk. After more than three years as “First Lady,” what should we make of Michelle Obama? Has she visited any homeless shelters or soup kitchens in Dee Cee? Any jails or prisons? Any of Washington’s crumbling public schools? Chicago contains the second largest Black ghetto in the country. Yet, when either of them come “home,” they never seem to find time to get beyond their fund raisers in the big hotels downtown. Has either of these two shown any concern for their “own” people beyond lip service? Yes, of course we fully realize that he is President of the United States, and not President of Black America. But aren’t we Americans, too?

Finally, a word about the “lesser of two evils” argument. It’s true that any one of the current Republican Party presidential candidates would be worse than anything this First Black President might do. The Republicans are driving us all over a cliff at 100 miles an hour. President Obama, the Democrats and their Black and white enablers, sycophants and subalterns are doing so at “only” 60 miles an hour. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you’re on.

Class analysis is knowing who is there with you.

America has finally developed a movement for social change that seems conscious of political economic divisions that transcend race, sex or other very serious but sometimes overstressed problems. That movement offers the only solution to the inequality which grows more glaring and unjust. Calls for the 99% to take control from the 1% at the top of the financial pyramid are threatening to that ruling minority, its agents from the upper levels of the 99%, and the totally misinformed from the bottom. But those upper level agents represent the beneficiaries of divisive social policies that have brought personal gains for some, always at serious social costs to others.

This is according to the dictates of profit and loss, hardly free market capitalism. These agents often stand in strong support of socially divisive policies because those policies are good for “their” people. More often, those policies are good for “their” political and economic security.

Affirmative Action programs have enabled many previously shut out of the system to make progress and gain footholds within it, achieving professional, corporate and government positions that tend to make the upper strata look diverse, at least according to the limited definition that word has taken on in American culture.

Almost always overlooked are the shortcomings of AA programs which have set groups and individuals farther apart when action of an affirmative nature for some creates, as should be expected, action of a negative nature for those on the other side of the ledger. A system which creates profits on one side must always create loss on the other; there can be no profit without loss, as eloquently explained to his clients by a former great hero of finance capitalism, Bernie Madoff.

This basic structural truth of the system still escapes most because it is supposed to, having been taught out of reality by an education business that serves the production of individual consumers without social consciousness. This helps strengthen the competitive drive to personally consume while gulling us into thinking as first person singular egos only identifying with groups when they are minorities and thus powerless.

Though women and other minorities have benefited far more from them, the old criticism of AA programs when they were supposedly focused on so called blacks still resonates:

Send one to Yale and send ten to jail.

While the college population of African Americans is considerably higher than it was before AA programs, the population of black Americans in prison has skyrocketed far beyond that. Note also that the new upper and middle class members are called African American – despite the fact that they have been native to the USA  far longer than many, if not most, European descended people who are no longer identified with hyphenated labels unless they adopt minority status and defensive postures – while ghetto and project dwellers of the working and poorer class are still seen as “black”.

Both labels are among many used to disguise commonality among humans. They all serve to keep the divisions within society strong, even to separate alleged members of the same group ethnicity by class. The programs originated to do exactly what they have done; maintain, protect and strengthen consumer private capitalism by rewarding a minority at the expense of the majority.

We are presently seeing a struggle around Ethnic Studies programs at colleges and universities which relates to the same maintenance of minority power of the 1% over a divided 99%. What passes for academic diversity, cultural education and histories of subjugated and neglected people often turns out to be branding labels for cultural and ethnic marketing. It has served to keep groups divided into sub categories in order to prevent them from ever threatening minority power of the 1% on top.

Much neglected reality is confronted in Ethnic Studies courses, but the consumers of these studies are tracked into, and out of, programs as minorities, slated never to become anything more. By having previously unknown pains and joys of their groups preached to them they will hopefully strive to be just what their rulers want them to be: happy, proud, diverse identity groups who support the status quo by believing they are different from everyone else who lives under the same regime but can acquire professional class status within it and thus help their families and communities. In other words, stay divided from fellow citizens not seen as members of their own ethnic, racial, sexual or intellectual groups and remain democratically powerless in a class, not ethnic society.

And so we have programs in the marketplace to reward some members of some groups at the expense of most members of most groups with supposed meritocracy strengthened by success achievers allowed to rise to the upper middle strata: affirmative action. And in academia, the teaching of American history in balkanized form, with various groups ghettoized into special studies that make them separate from – but equal to, in some warped return to past racist policies ? – the great majority. Rather than teach American history as a subject in equal parts concerning settlers, invasions, discoveries, exploration, land theft, slavery, fights for survival, massacres of indigenous people and more, these become special areas only studied in special classes aimed at special groups. Result?  Warped, balkanized views of American history, divided groups and sects among Americans, and a stronger control by the 1% ruling class and its agent servants of the upper levels of the 99%.

American groups identified as minorities by virtue of their not being direct descendants of Europeans have been tracked into patterns of discrimination no longer officially acceptable. But alleged social changes that only transform certain individual members of an ethnic or other identity group and leave larger populations still operating as second class citizens while being manipulated into showing pride in the fact that they are hyphenated and not whole Americans is hardly social progress.

Ethnic studies classes were introduced as a means to allow “out’ groups to learn “their” culture and soon become “in” by having increased knowledge, pride and general academic acceptance that could lead to further affirmation, as long as action continued along officially prescribed system- enforcing lines. America’s professional class and upper middle strata has become a more diverse group in the look, sex and ethnic makeup of its component parts, but members of groups still identified as “minorities”  suffer many of the same injustices the ethnic studies classes teach them about, while instilling resentment to the society that commits the injustices and grossly mis-identifying the sources and power groups that profit from them. Which is exactly what they are supposed to do.

Thus we have “racial” animosities growing as supposed “diversity” increases, and this along class lines that do nothing to increase community, social cohesiveness and solidarity among Americans, but simply creates more division, individualism and hostility that maintains and expands animosity among the 99%.

While it is admirable to connect with sometimes ancestral cultures and often those merely a generation or two away, it can become a socially compulsive disorder to be forced into boxes of ethnic and alleged racial difference while a nation claims diversity and democracy as its credo, all the while infantilizing the first while making the second impossible.

Of course, electing a Chicano, or gay, or white, or black or Asian, or Jewish, member of congress, the city council or the presidency, can seem wonderful when reduced to minority consciousness. But from the standpoint of majority good, continuing the system of private profits accruing to ever smaller minorities at the expense of the great majority can only be seen as progress by the dim witted, the ignorant, the misinformed, or those who gather the profits: the 1%. And their agents, however racially, sexually, ethnically or intellectually diverse they may think themselves.

This has probably been more or less true of every country since the advent of democracy. Yet in Israel, this seems even truer. (Ironically, it could almost be said that the US has no foreign policy, only an Israeli domestic policy.)

In order to understand our foreign policy, we have to look in the mirror. Who are we? What is our society like?

IN A classical sketch, well known to every veteran Israeli, two Arabs stand on the sea shore, looking at a boat full of Russian Jewish pioneers rowing towards them. “May your house be destroyed!” they curse.

Next, the same two figures, this time Russian Jewish pioneers, stand on the same spot, launching Russian curses at a boat full of Yemenite immigrants.

Next, the two are Yemenites cursing German Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis. Then, two German Jews cursing Moroccan arrivals. When it first appeared, that was the last scene. But now, one can add two Moroccans cursing the immigrants from Soviet Russia, then two Russians cursing the latest arrivals: Ethiopian Jews.

That may also be true for every immigrant country, from the United States to Australia. Every new wave of immigrants is greeted by the scorn, contempt and even open hostility of those who came before them. When I was a child in the early 1930s, I frequently heard people shouting at my parents “Go back to Hitler!”

Still, the dominant myth was that of the “melting pot”. All immigrants would be thrown into the same pot and cleansed of their “foreign” traits, emerging as a uniform new nation without any traces of their origin.

This myth died some decades ago. Israel is now a kind of federation of several major demographic-cultural blocs which dominate our social and political life.

Who are they? There are (1) the old Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin); (2) the Oriental (or “Sephardi”) Jews; (3) the religious (partly Ashkenazi, partly Oriental); (4) the “Russians”, immigrants from all the countries of the former Soviet union; and (5) the Palestinian-Arab citizens, who did not come from anywhere.

This is, of course, a schematic presentation. None of the blocs is completely homogeneous. Each bloc has several sub blocs, some blocs overlap, there is some intermarriage, but on the whole, the picture is accurate. Gender plays no role in this division.

The political scene almost exactly mirrors these divisions. The Labor party was, in its heyday, the main instrument of Ashkenazi power. Its remnants, together with Kadima and Meretz, are still Ashkenazi. Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beytenu consists mainly of Russians. There are three or four religious parties. Then there are two exclusively Arab parties, and the Communist party, which is mainly Arab, too. The Likud represents the bulk of the Orientals, though almost all its leaders are Ashkenazim.

The relationship between the blocs is often strained. Just now, the whole country is in an uproar because in Kiryat Malakhi, a southern town with mainly Oriental inhabitants, house owners have signed a commitment not to sell apartments to Ethiopians, while the Rabbi of Safed, a northern town of mainly Orthodox Jews, has forbidden his flock to rent apartments to Arabs.

But apart from the rift between the Jews and the Arabs, the main problem is the resentment of the Orientals, the Russians and the religious against what they call “the Ashkenazi elite”.

Since they were the first to arrive, long before the establishment of the state, Ashkenazim control most of the centers of power – social, political, economic, cultural et al. Generally, they belong to the more affluent part of society, while the Orientals, the Orthodox, the Russians and the Arabs generally belong to the lower socio-economic strata.

The Orientals have deep grudges against the Ashkenazim. They believe – not without justification – that they have been humiliated and discriminated against from their first day in the country, and still are, though quite a number of them have reached high economic and political positions. The other day, a top director of one of the foremost financial institutions caused a scandal when he accused the “Whites” (i.e. Ashkenazim) of dominating all the banks, the courts and the media. He was promptly fired, which caused another scandal.

The Likud came to power in 1977, dethroning Labor. With short interruptions, It has been in power ever since. Yet most Likud members still feel that the Ashkenazim rule Israel, leaving them far behind. Now, 34 years later, the dark wave of anti-democratic legislation pushed by Likud deputies is being justified by the slogan “We must start to rule!”

The scene reminds me of a building site surrounded by a wooden fence. The canny contractor has left some holes in the fence, so that curious passers-by can look in. In our society, all the other blocs feel like outsiders looking through the holes, full of envy for the Ashkenazi “elite” inside, who have all the good things. They hate everything they connect with this “elite”: the Supreme Court, the media, the human rights organizations, and especially the peace camp. All these are called “leftist”, a word curiously enough identified with the “elite”.

How has “peace” become associated with the dominant and domineering Ashkenazim?

That is one of the great tragedies of our country.

Jews have lived for many centuries in the Muslim world. There they never experienced the terrible things committed in Europe by Christian anti-Semitism. Muslim-Jewish animosity started only a century ago, with the advent of Zionism, and for obvious reasons.

When the Jews from Muslim countries started to arrive en masse in Israel, they were steeped in Arab culture. But here they were received by a society that held everything Arab in total contempt. Their Arab culture was “primitive”, while real culture was European. Furthermore, they were identified with the murderous Muslims. So the immigrants were required to shed their own culture and traditions, their accent, their memories, their music. In order to show how thoroughly Israeli they had become, they also had to hate Arabs.

It is, of course, a world-wide phenomenon that in multi-national countries, the most downtrodden class of the dominant nation is also the most radical nationalist foe of the minority nations. Belonging to the superior nation is often the only source of pride left to them. The result is frequently virulent racism and xenophobia.

This is one of the reasons why the Orientals were attracted to the Likud, for whom the rejection of peace and the hatred of Arabs are supreme virtues. Also, having been in opposition for ages, the Likud was seen as representing those who were “outside”, fighting those who were “inside”. This is still the case.

The case of the “Russians” is different. They grew up in a society that despised democracy, admired strong leaders. The “whites”, Russians and Ukrainians, despised and hated the “dark” peoples of the south – Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Uzbeks and such. (I once invented a formula: “Bolshevism minus Marxism equals Fascism”.)

When the Russian Jews came to join us, they brought with them a virulent nationalism, a complete disinterest in democracy and an automatic hatred of Arabs. They cannot understand why we allowed them to stay here at all. When, this week, a lady deputy (though “lady” may be euphemistic) from St. Petersburg poured a glass of water on the head of an Arab deputy from the Labor party, nobody was very surprised. (Somebody quipped: “a Good Arab is a wet Arab”). For Lieberman’s followers, Peace is a dirty word, and so is Democracy.

For religious people of all shades – from the ultra-Orthodox to the National-Religious settlers, there is no problem at all. From the crib on, they learn that Jews are the Chosen People; that the Almighty personally promised us this country; that the Goyim – including the Arabs – are just inferior human beings.

It may be said, quite rightly, that I generalize. I do, just to simplify matters. There are indeed a lot of Orientals, especially of the younger generation, who are repelled by the ultra-nationalism of the Likud, the more so as the neo-liberalism of Binyamin Netanyahu (which Shimon Peres once called “swinish capitalism”) is in direct contradiction to the basic interests of their community. There are also a lot of decent, liberal, peace-loving religious people. (Yeshayahu Leibovitz comes to mind.) Some Russians are gradually leaving their self-imposed ghetto. But these are small minorities in their communities. The bulk of the three blocs – Oriental, Russian and religious – are united in their opposition to peace, and at best indifferent to democracy.

All these together constitute the right-wing, anti-peace coalition that is governing Israel now. The problem is not just a question of politics. It is much more profound – and much more daunting.

Some people blame us, the democratic peace movement, for not recognizing the problem early enough, and not doing enough to attract the members of the various blocs to the ideals of peace and democracy. Also, it is said, we did not show that social justice is inseparably connected with democracy and peace.

I must accept my share of the blame for this failure, though I might point out that I tried to make the connection right from the beginning. I asked my friends to concentrate our efforts on the Oriental community, remind them of the glories of the Muslim-Jewish “golden Age” in Spain, of the huge mutual impact of Jewish and Muslim scientists, poets and religious thinkers throughout the ages.

A few days ago, I was invited to give a lecture to the faculty and students of Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva. I described the situation more or less along the same lines. The first question from the large audience, which consisted of Jews – both Orientals and Ashkenazim, and Arabs – especially Bedouins was: “So what hope is there? Faced with this reality, how can the peace forces win?”

I told them that I put my trust in the new generation. Last summer’s huge social protest movement, which erupted quite suddenly and swept [“along”?] hundreds of thousands, showed that yes, it can happen here. The movement united Ashkenazim and Orientals. Tent cities sprang up in Tel Aviv and Beer Sheva, all over the place.

Our first job is to break the barriers between the blocs, change reality, create a new Israeli society. We need blockbusters.

Yes, it is a daunting job. But I believe it can be done.

“I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time,” says young Jesse. However, it seems that it didn’t take too long before Jesse found out for himself that what he was part of was neither flattering or glorious.

Jewish tribal cultural indoctrination is a full-on, comprehensive process. “Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up”, says Jesse. “It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives.”

Inherent to the culture and its maintenance is self-love. “I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.”

Jewish ideological and cultural ‘programming’ is rather sophisticated. It is a unique dynamic pattern practiced in both a collective and an individual way. But those who carry the message aren’t themselves fully aware of their role within the tribal ideology they aim to maintain.

Of course Jews hold many different, and even contradictory, political beliefs. But however diverse their views may be somehow, those who are identified as Jews politically always unite against any attempt to criticise the cultural and ideological foundation of their tribal bond. Young Jesse is clearly aware of this. On the surface, it was the crimes against the Palestinians that provoked his ethical sense. “I grew more concerned. 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, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms.”

One of the most sophisticated tribal aspects of Jewish culture maintenance is the gradual manner in which criticism is silenced. “Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” This common Hasbara argument on the surface sounds reasonable but it ignores the fact that in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there is a clear distinction between the aggressor and the victim. The Israelis are the ethnic cleansers and the occupiers. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are the expelled, the racially discriminated, the abused, deprived, locked behind walls and barbed wire in open air jails and, in some cases, even starved.

But Jesse seems to be made of the stuff of honesty. Unlike some of the Jewish leftists who presents a pseudo-moral argument only to gain credibility so that he/she can then vet the discourse, young Jesse presses on, stripping himself of any trace of choseness and exceptionalism. “It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.”

This “We need to defend our race,” is a common excuse Jewish activists use amongst themselves. Although Jews do not form a race, Jewish identity politics is still overtly racist. In fact, any form of Jewish secular identity politics is racially driven and fuelled with racial exclusivity. This applies not only to pro Israeli Jews but unfortunately also to Jews-only ‘anti’ Zionist groups.

I guess it is obvious where Jesse is heading. He clearly sees an ideological continuum between the civil right movement in America and the Palestinian liberation struggle. In both struggles, there is clearly a racially driven oppressor and a victim collective — and Jesse draws the necessary conclusion, “I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.”

Jesse has obviously identified the Jewish politics and culture of which he was a part, as a form of ‘racial supremacy.’ He never mentions Zionism, in fact, the word Zionism is not mentioned once in his sincere award-winning post. He simply speaks about his Jewish upbringing, the culture and the ideology.

Young Jesse has already grasped that an appeal to his Jewish friends is not going to lead anywhere. He writes, “I decided to make one last appeal to my religion… The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion… When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, ‘I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?’ I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.’ I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a ‘fact of life’ was simply too much for me to accept.”

It seems that Jesse has the courage to redeem his soul. “I thanked him (the Rabbi) and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back…. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience.… I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.”

Surprisingly, Jesse wasn’t compelled to apologise for telling truth. He didn’t have to retract for telling things as they are. In fact he won the most prestigious humanist award for his essay. But I’m wondering how long will it take before ADL’s Abe Foxman and infamous Ethnic-cleansing advocate Alan Dershowitz launch a campaign to destroy the awarding college.

Being a person who oscillates continuously between being an ‘ex-Jew’ and a ‘proud self hating Jew’, I embrace young Jesse and hold him close to my heart. My dear young twin brother, 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.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees — in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world — according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law — like their predecessors in the 1950s — have drawn a very different conclusion from history.

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state” — and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.

Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.

The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex – or, at least, not yet.

The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarised in the world — as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.

The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.

In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel — “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.

The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.

Israeli politics is not moving against history only but is challenging world politics as well. Although the first Knesset of the newly born “state of Israel” voted on December 13, 1949 to move the seat of government from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and despite Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem on June 27, 1967, which the UN Security Council declared “null and void,” both unilateral declarations have never been accepted and recognized by the international community, not even by the U.S., Israel’s strategic guardian.

More recently, while millions of Christians were celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, and the birth of Christianity in Jerusalem, the scene of Jesus’ resurrection following his death by crucifixion, which is the cornerstone of Christian faith, the Knesset was, on Christmas day, scheduled to consider a draft law that would declare Jerusalem “the capital of the Jewish people” and the capital of Israel at the same time.

The fact that the ruling elite in Tel Aviv has made a prior recognition of Israel as a “Jewish” state a precondition for making peace implicitly and consequently applies to Christians as well, otherwise how could any observer interpret the still simmering crisis with the Vatican over the holy places in Jerusalem. The “Fundamental Agreement” signed by both sides on December 30, 1993, as well as an agreement on the recognition of the civil effects of ecclesiastical legal personality, signed on November 10, 1997, have yet to be ratified by Israel’s Knesset. Some in the Israeli media has been recently accusing the Vatican of seeking to hold control of “Jewish holy sites” in Jerusalem.

The Vatican in the past supported making Jerusalem a corpus separatum, an international city in accordance with the UN Resolution 181 of 1947; Israel’s non-compliance delayed Vatican’s formal recognition of Israel until 1993.

More recently, the Vatican renewed calls for an internal agreement to protect the holy places in Jerusalem. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and Vatican’s former foreign minister, declared:

There will not be peace if the question of the holy sites is not adequately resolved. The part of Jerusalem within the walls – with the holy sites of the three religions – is humanity’s heritage. The sacred and unique character of the area must be safeguarded and it can only be done with a special, internationally-guaranteed statute.

The only perceived threat to the holy places against which the Vatican is seeking protection comes from the Israeli politics of exclusion. Rabbi David Rosen, member of the Israeli delegation to the negotiations with the Vatican told the Israeli daily Haaretz on January 17, 2010 that Israel “has not been faithful to the pacts of 1993.”

The precondition of recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” is rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel’s partner in peace accords, and its self-ruled Palestinian Authority, the 22-member League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); in a statement he issued on December 26, 2011, the Secretary-General of the 57-member states of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, condemned the Israeli draft law that declares Jerusalem “the capital of Israel and the Jewish people” as “a direct assault on the Palestinian people and their inalienable and clear rights” and “a flagrant violation of international law and international legitimacy resolutions,” which affirm that Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967. PLO representatives considered the Israeli draft law a “declaration of war” and a recipe for igniting a religious conflict. The Islamic–Christian Commission in Support of Jerusalem, in a statement, said if the Israeli draft law is passed it would make Jerusalem “for Judaism and Jews only, which means there would be no freedom of worship in the land of worship.”

Israeli attorney and founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, a Jerusalem-based NGO, Daniel Seidemann, wrote on November 30, 2011: “Cumulatively, Israeli policies in East Jerusalem today threaten to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a bitter national conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise, into the potential for a bloody, unsolvable religious war. This threat derives from Israel’s dogged pursuit of the settlers’ vision of an exclusionary Jewish Jerusalem.”

“… Today, Israel must choose between two visions of Jerusalem. On the one hand, it can continue pursuing an exclusive, largely fictitious rule over an already divided, bi-national city — exposing Israel to virtually universal censure and imperiling the two-state solution. On the other hand, it can pursue policies that can make Israeli Jerusalem, Yerushalayim, a thriving national capital, recognized by all, existing side-by-side with but politically divided from the Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, al Quds. To those who cherish Israel and understand what is truly at stake, the choice is clear,” Seidemann concluded.

What is much more important than excluding “a conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise,” is that the Israeli politics of exclusion in Jerusalem, which could be summarized by Judaization of the holy city, is a roadmap to de-Arabizing, de-Islamizing, de-Christianizing, de-historizing and de-humanizing Jerusalem, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and this could not be anything but a roadmap to hell.

Absolutely this is unsustainable Israeli politics.

Given that the governments of Greece and Italy are apparently being seized for direct political rule by the financial system, one might suggest that dispensing with democratic niceties is the international order of the day. Perhaps, then, Israel won’t find itself all that isolated after all. But it might. In any case, developments in Israel and the commentary that they have triggered should provide the opportunity to forcefully brush aside any lingering illusions about Israeli establishment ‘moderation’. Such illusions are little more than an unfortunate hangover from years gone by, when Israeli colonial rule found unlikely allies even among ostensible Western progressives.

The authoritarian challenge to Ariel Sharon’s democracy

The English-language webpage of Ha’aretz, Israel’s daily ‘newspaper of record’, offers an interesting view of the sinking ship that is liberal Israeli hypocrisy. The site currently features a section titled ‘Project Black Flag’, borrowing the imagery from the Israeli legislature’s Kadima opposition, whose representatives demonstratively waved black flags in the Knesset earlier this month in protest against the current wave of authoritarian legislation being pushed through by Israel’s governing coalition. (Kadima, recall, is the party launched in 2005 by Ariel Sharon and continuing to champion his legacy.) Below, I’ll turn to some of the noteworthy associated commentary. First, its ideological and strategic context deserves some sustained attention.

Historically, the ample Western arms, economic backing and political-diplomatic cover that have enabled Israeli actions were given to an Israel that was widely understood to ‘shoot and cry’. Wars were forced upon it by nefarious enemies, and whatever abuses occurred during Israel’s valiant self-defence were committed with a pained restraint. ‘We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,’ Golda Meir is quoted, ad nauseam, as explaining to the world. ‘We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.’ Incidentally, that ‘the Arabs’ (or the IHH, or whatever other designated enemies of Israel) are to blame even for Israeli atrocities remains a familiar theme of Israeli diplomacy – and maddeningly, variations on this theme are often echoed by many people who really ought to know better. Israel, anyway, internally distraught at what it was being forced to do, featured in this story as a brave but enlightened character beset by difficult dilemmas, both strategic and moral.

An exaggerated and idealized projection of the pluralism internal to the Jewish Israeli political system has been internationally exploited to destructive effect for many decades. This has been widely observed by critical observers of the US and Israeli political scenes. In his 1983 tome concerning US policy and the Palestine question, Noam Chomsky, for example, expressed his usual understated disgust at this spectacle. In the aftermath of the horrendous massacres in 1982 Lebanon, Chomsky observed, US Congressional liberals leveraged signs of dissent within Israel (which were largely driven by the tactical opposition of the Israeli Labour Party) to justify further increases in US aid to finance Israeli military power and settlement construction.

Israel, so the logic went, was proving itself to be a vibrant democracy. Chomsky wrote: ‘Presumably there is … a lesson here as to how to obtain further victories in Congress. It would be interesting to know how the reported 400,000 people who demonstrated in Israel in protest over the massacres will react to the fact – and fact it is – that the practical outcome of these efforts, given the way things are in the United States, was to accelerate the militarization of Israeli society and its expansion into the occupied territories.’¹ Unfortunately, judging from recent Israeli ‘moderate’ commentary, there is reason to suspect some may have been quite satisfied.

Idealized exaggeration of Israeli pluralism has long been very widespread indeed, even in critical circles. For example: ‘One often hears statements,’ as the late Tanya Reinhart observed, interpreting the detailed accounts of state policy available in Israel’s press ‘as signifying that the Israeli media is more liberal and critical of Israel’s policies than other Western media. This, however, is not the explanation.’ More to the point, she explained, it has less reason to be inhibited: ‘Things that would look outrageous in the Western world are in Israel considered natural daily routine.’² Nonetheless, so suffocating are the terms of discussion of Palestine in the West that critics are sometimes tempted to latch on to even the most morally bankrupt tactical dissent within the Israeli establishment to legitimize their own opposition.

This reflex serves to build up unrealistic expectations concerning prospective challenges to Israeli colonial rule from within the Jewish Israeli political system, to derail serious analysis and principled strategy, and sometimes to downplay the need for international action. Worst of all, it can take the form of ‘moderate’ opinion in the West demanding that Palestinians simply try to partner with ‘moderate’ Israeli establishment opinion – in other words, demanding Palestinian acquiescence to colonial rule (in thinning ‘peace process’ packaging) in a spirit of false internationalism. Palestinian resistance politics can then be dismissed if they fail to orient themselves towards dialogue with the increasingly elusive force that is the Israeli ‘peace camp’.

For at least some leading Israeli intellectuals, the strategic value of such distortion is apparent. An Israel that appears to ‘shoot and cry’ is understood to be better positioned to keep receiving the arms, economic backing and diplomatic cover necessary to keep firing than one that shoots and cheers. Hence the current dilemma.

Ilan Pappé, identified from the late 1980s as one of the Israeli ‘new historians’ who challenged established Zionist orthodoxy, recounts an instructive exchange he had in the ’90s with a colleague at Haifa University, Arnon Sofer – a rather iconic ‘organic intellectual’ for the forces of racist Israeli demographic management. Pappé cites Sofer as explaining: ‘Between you and me, within four closed walls, you are one of us. But it is good that you are beautifying Israel’s image abroad.’³ In Pappé’s case, such exchanges were predictably and definitively cut off by his political record in the ensuing years. They nonetheless reveal much about the outlook of advocates (à la Sofer) of an internationally palatable Israeli colonialism.

The visible rightward shift of Israeli politics is causing considerable unease in such quarters (as expressed in the recent commentary of Ari Shavit, sampled below).

A fight that liberals can’t easily win

The political dynamics that have set Israel on its current political trajectory deserve serious consideration. Indeed, within the Jewish Israeli political arena, on purely logical grounds, one can understand why the contest between unapologetic ethno-religious chauvinism and liberal Zionist hypocrisy is gradually being resolved at the expense of democratic pretense.

People interested in this contest (and prepared to plug their noses while facing an icon from each side) ought to watch the 1985 debate, available online, between Harvard University’s Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Meir Kahane. For those without the nose plugs or stomach for the video, I’ll review a few relevant highlights.

Dershowitz (now here’s a real shock) offers little of original interest. Kahane, on the other hand, represents an interesting phenomenon. Since this debate finds Kahane in what for him constitutes good form, and at what for him most closely approximates good behaviour, I feel compelled to emphasize that this is a man who really does personify caustic, fascist venom (videos where he quite transparently expresses a visceral, hateful glee at the mass killing of Palestinians are also widely available). An open advocate of theocracy, violent expulsions and indiscriminate killing of civilians, Kahane explicitly urged his adherents to carry out paramilitary attacks against Palestinians along these lines, and many did and do (for his part, Kahane was assassinated in late 1990).

What is interesting about Kahane for present purposes is the way, rare if not unique, in which he presents the unapologetic Zionist case against liberal hypocrisy to an English-speaking audience. Notably, one can see – not in Kahane’s career or organizational work, which I won’t dwell on here, but in the logical course of the argument – the way in which he uses the consensual political Zionist demand for a Jewish majority state in the former Palestine to undercut the principled political basis for any genuine democratic opposition. While I do not wish to simply conflate the two, it is precisely the congruence of Kahane’s politics with Israel’s established political mainstream that makes the former at once dangerous and revealing.

I’ll confine this brief review of Kahane’s comments to two issues: (1) the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians and (2) the contradiction between democracy and the consensual political Zionist commitment to racist demographic management.

(1) Asked about instances in the preceding period in which his adherents indiscriminately killed Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Kahane positions these actions within (albeit towards the right of) the established Zionist canon. He explains: ‘Innocent people? This is a picture of a man named David Raziel [Kahane shows a portrait of Raziel]. He’s a national hero in Israel. There is a village named after him, Ramat Raziel. Streets in Jerusalem, in Haifa, in Netanya, named after Raziel. Do you know who this hero was? There’s a stamp – a stamp! – in Israel with his picture on it. You know who David Raziel was? He was the head of the Irgun in the 1930s … David Raziel, the national hero of Israel, planted a bomb in the Arab marketplace in Jerusalem. It went off and it killed 27 Arabs.’ Those who continue in this tradition, Kahane later urges, should be fully supported by state forces: ‘it’s a tragedy that those Jews took the law into their own hands. It was the job of the government of Israel to do what they did. … those so-called “terrorists” were attempting to put the fear of God into the Arabs. Because the only thing that the Arab will ever understand is fear.’ (Consider: to what extent does this sentiment fundamentally differ from official ‘deterrence’ thinking?)

(2) More revealing, in many ways, are the exchanges between Kahane and Dershowitz on Arnon Sofer’s intellectual stomping ground: state management of the demographic balance in territory governed by Israel. This is among the central defining axes of Israeli politics, and its treatment during the debate is extremely illustrative.

In short, Dershowitz’s rhetorical flailing and Kahane’s forthright rebuttal stand together as a telling display of the pummeling that ostensible liberalism is likely to face in honest, principled debates that assume shared political Zionist premises (especially on the question of ‘demography’).

The debate moderator poses (1:00:49-) a basic question: Do ‘the Arabs’ have the right ‘to become the majority in Israel’ and ‘by democratic and peaceful means’ to challenge the state’s Jewish character?

Loathe to really admit Palestinians into such important ‘in-house’ debates, Dershowitz responds by immediately reframing the matter. Dershowitz begins: ‘We don’t even have to reach that issue: what if Jews decide by democratic principles to vote against principles that Rabbi Kahane holds sacred? What if Jews tomorrow were to vote to repeal the Law of Return [which guarantees any Jew defined as such by the state to gain immediate citizenship and residency rights]? I would fight tooth and nail against that … But Israel is a democracy. And if Rabbi Kahane and I, together, fail in our efforts to persuade Jews to maintain the Law of Return then we will have lost our fight for democracy. … We have to fight that [demographic] battle, we have to look at it as a challenge.’ In facing this challenge, Dershowitz suggests that it is actually Kahane who undermines the Judaization of Palestine by advocating a Halachic (Jewish theocratic) regime which will dissuade Jewish immigration and settlement from abroad. Thus, Dershowitz asserts, a liberal democratic Zionism provides the sturdier defense against the threat posed by indigenous Palestinian demography (i.e., resident existence).

Kahane replies: ‘I must say that was impressive. Dr Dershowitz took four minutes brilliantly not answering the question. The question wasn’t whether it was a challenge. Of course, it’s a challenge; agreed, it’s a challenge. The question was: Assuming the Arabs “beat” us, would you be willing to accept that? The question is, Do they have a right to be a majority, in theory? Under democracy, of course they have that right! Under Zionism – not religious Zionism, but the Zionism of a man named Herzl, who wrote a book called The Jewish State – of course they don’t have that right.’

Underpinning Kahane’s polemical strength are the basic points of contact between his caustic calls for anti-Palestinian action and the policies of Israel’s founding Labour Zionist mainstream. ‘We have,’ Kahane declares to the audience, ‘to face up to truth. We have to face up to so many truths. Among which is that Ben-Gurion, when he was the prime minister, didn’t allow an Arab to leave his village at night without a special pass [recall that Palestinian citizens of Israel faced military governance from 1948 through to 1966]. Which I think is a magnificent example of democracy.’

Likewise, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way, Kahane reminds the audience that debates about demography, ‘population transfer’ and exclusion of Palestinian refugees were not simply triggered by post-1967 Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza or the associated fundamentalist settler camp. ‘There’s not one Arab refugee living in Lebanon who comes from the West Bank,’ he emphasizes. ‘Every single one comes from the Galilee, from Haifa. There’s not one Arab refugee in Gaza who comes from the West Bank. Half of them come from Jaffa, and from Ramle, and from Lydda, and from Be’er Sheva, and from what is now Ashdod and Ashkelon [all locations from which Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948].’ Kahane’s point, for all the nominally defensive rhetoric with which he packages these remarks, is that if Israel accepts liberal democratic premises ‘there will be a Law of Return for Arabs – and rightly so, under democracy.’ Therefore, pursuit of consensual political Zionist aims is taken to require a rejection of democratic norms.⁴

The relative coherence of Kahane’s politics in this debate when compared to the rearguard tactical arguments made by Dershowitz is, in strategic terms, more apparent than real. Kahane’s doctrinal rigidity (especially combined with articulate Brooklyn English) involved an assault on the enlightened liberal pretenses that have greased Israel’s arms procurement machinery in the West since the state’s inception. In an earlier era, Ben-Gurion famously derided the politics of the Zionist right – specifically, those of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky and his Revisionists – as ‘verbal maximalism’. To speak publicly of aggressive objectives at the expense of building the international support needed to realize them was, for Ben-Gurion, a novice move and a marker of political naivety.

Nowadays, concern for the possible ideological discomfort of Western patrons is apparently weakening as a constraint on the terms of Jewish Israeli political discussion, and the genuine sway of liberalism is eroding even more visibly.

‘Kahane is smiling’

Gideon Levy is one of those rare Israeli journalists who has staked out a position of genuine democratic opposition to state policies. Among his many periodic pieces with a standard unifying theme – ‘damn, mainstream Jewish Israeli politics are a disaster that just keeps getting worse’ (I paraphrase) – was an article published during Israel’s most recent elections and titled simply, ‘Kahane won’. A recent Ha’aretz news report (November 16) picks up on the same theme.

Describing this month’s Jerusalem rally marking the anniversary of Kahane’s assassination, where ‘euphoria gripp[ed] the massive crowd’, the reporter samples some of the video entertainment charging the ‘jubilant’ atmosphere:

Clip after clip that had aired on Israel’s commercial television stations over the last year was shown on the big screen of the Heichal David hall in Jerusalem’s Romema neighborhood. There was a report broadcast by Channel 10 just two days ago about Ariel Zilber’s new song, “Kahane was right.” A Channel 2 report that praised longtime [Kahanist] activist Itamar Ben-Gvir as a “skilled media machine and as “a kind of celeb” … Then back to Channel 2, which showed [National Union MK Michael] Ben-Ari explaining how he would respond to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip: “24 hours, and there would be no more Beit Hanun [a city in northern Gaza which has been especially hard hit by indiscriminate Israeli artillery fire].” The crowd went wild. “Today, Rabbi Kahane is sitting in heaven and smiling,” Ben-Gvir told the audience. … “Today, it isn’t just Ben-Ari,” Ben-Gvir noted. “In Yisrael Beitenu, in National Union, even in Likud they understand that Kahane was right.”

In earlier decades, the idealized international image of internal Israeli politics helped to colour perceptions of such displays. Consider the best known massacre of Palestinians by a follower of Kahane’s teachings: Israel Defense Forces (IDF) physician Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 shooting spree in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque, which killed 29 Palestinians and wounded another 150. An important poll, relayed by an Israeli commentator in the immediate aftermath of the killings, ‘established that at least 50 per cent of Israeli Jews would approve of the massacre, provided that it was not referred to as a massacre but rather as a “Patriarch’s Cave Operation,” a nice-sounding term already being used by religious settlers.’ The commentator noted that this exposed as false mythology the notion that ‘with the exception of a few psychopaths, the entire nation, and its politicians included, has resolutely condemned Dr Goldstein, even though, luckily for us, all major television networks in the world were last week deluded by this untruth.’⁵ But crucially, the myth for the most part held.

Following the 1994 massacre, the Yitzhak Rabin government sealed the occupied West Bank and Gaza, repressed the ensuing wave of Palestinian protests (killing 33 Palestinians in the process), and put the Palestinian population of Hebron under a nearly six-week curfew to protect the settlement of Kiryat Arba (the messianic scourge which terrorizes Hebron, and in which Goldstein had resided); Rabin then moved on to join in accepting the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.⁶ This is a balancing and juggling act for which the Israel of Binyamin Netanyahu is less well suited.
Today, the main organizations of the Jewish Israeli establishment ‘left’ are not only weak on principle (recall Labour Party leadership of the Defense Ministry that managed the assault on Gaza in 2008-9, and Meretz Party support for the Israel Air Force massacres that opened the campaign), but are also in disintegrating electoral freefall and facing a striking loss of their public influence. The implications of the possible collapse of the liberal Israeli establishment’s domestic political sway are too numerous to even try to list here. (Those interested in details can peruse Haaretz’s so-called ‘Project Black Flag’.) Here I’ll wrap up by sampling some strategic concerns expressed by veteran commentator and Ha’aretz editorial board member Ari Shavit.

Shavit, in his way, is attuned to global power relations and Israel’s place within them. Early this year, as Egyptian popular rebellion challenged the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship, Shavit mused: ‘Following half a century during which the Arab world has been governed by dictators, the rule of tyranny is cracking at the seams. The Arab masses are no longer willing to suffer.’ That the Obama administration did not rigidly support Mubarak’s rule in the face of this crisis was, for Shavit, a ‘betrayal’. ‘It could be that the American empire was evil’ in its reign over the past several decades, Shavit explained, but it has been beneficial for many and relied on a base of Third World ‘fear’ and ‘obedience’ that the US leadership is not doing a good enough job of maintaining.

Only time will tell whether the Obama administration’s attempt to maintain basic strategic military and political-economic continuity in Egypt without Mubarak’s personal participation will succeed in the face of the impressive popular resilience and courage on display in Egypt’s streets and factories, but one needs to be a truly callous hack to consider these developments from the vantage point of imperial strategy. Just to give a sense of where Shavit’s coming from.

This month, with the Israeli far right on a triumphant and internationally visible march through the Israeli mainstream, Shavit decries the fact that ‘Israel’s enlightened elite’ seems to have ‘lost its public hegemony’. While the forces of populist chauvinism may revel in this turn of events, Shavit pleas, their international implications cannot be ignored. ‘Israel’s alliance with the United States and Europe is based on shared values, and harming these values will erode the alliance.’

Shavit continues: ‘…without the elite of Rehavia, Ramat Aviv and Ra’anana, Israel would have no existence. Without left-wing scientists, left-wing intellectuals and left-wing high-tech entrepreneurs, Israel would be a backward country, weak and pathetic. It would not be able to rule over Judea and Samaria [the biblical designation for the West Bank], it would not be able to defend itself [!] against Iran, and it would not survive in the storms of the Middle East.’

Standing on such fine and noble principle, it’s no wonder that politics the likes of Shavit’s are facing a possible domestic collapse.

Conclusion

Internationally, we also need to face up to some obvious truths. One of which is that the problem is not merely the Meir Kahanes and Avigdor Liebermans. There exists a grim and ominous continuity running from the explicit articulation by legal representatives of Israel’s Kadima-Labour coalition of ‘economic warfare’ against the people of Gaza at the outset of 2008; through to the spoiling of 50,000 infant vaccines in April of that year, as even the general storage unit of Gaza’s Health Ministry was starved of fuel; and on to the deployment against Gaza at year’s end of soldiers among whom t-shirts soon circulated featuring a veiled, pregnant woman, her belly targeted in the crosshairs of a rifle, alongside the slogan ‘one shot, two kills’.⁷

That ongoing shifts in Jewish Israeli politics are increasing the clout of unabashedly genocidal political forces is very dangerous. The upsurge of democratic resistance to the regional order that has developed since the ‘Arab spring’ is, for its part, being variously interpreted in Israel (to take another pair of Ha’aretz articles from the past week as examples) as a deterrent to aggressive Israeli action and a possible trigger for it. But however these dynamics play themselves out, the burden of containing the Israeli threat cannot be forced solely upon those targeted by Israeli nuclear warheads. For Israeli planners, the prospect of an erosion of Israel’s base of support in the West continues to function as a deterrent to escalating crimes – albeit, for now, a fairly weak and unreliable one. For those of us in the West, ongoing efforts to attach tangible social costs to the current course of Israeli policy are thus the priority.

The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions has done much to expand and enrich efforts in this direction. I’ll not contribute much of substance here to the necessary accompanying strategic discussions, but will briefly point out a couple of political traps that should be avoided.

The first, in light of the above, is an exaggeration of the pluralism of the Jewish Israeli political scene or excessive reliance on the dissidents within it. In earlier decades, critics in the West often suggested that identification with Jewish Israeli peace forces was an advisable means of engaging with the Palestine question (a politics that partially overlapped with the prominent public role of high-ranking dovish veterans of the Israeli military establishment in countering right-wing opposition to the ‘peace process’, especially in the US). There are of course genuine democratic movements doing important work under difficult circumstances in the Jewish Israeli political arena, mostly outside of the established ‘peace camp’. But those oriented towards the deteriorating terms of Jewish Israeli political discussion are, in the main, not positioned to constructively set the tone for critical international debate.

The second possible trap is an unhealthy fixation on Jewish dissent in the West. This is an awkward issue which I will only touch on briefly here. But the flip side of ongoing attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel as fundamentally external to the Israeli polity is the state’s orientation towards those, abroad as well as resident, whom it defines as Jewish. Whether or not the current proposed legislation codifying ‘Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people’ passes, this is part of the Israeli political system’s basic orientation. Some quick points: It is necessary to develop a political climate of organized opposition that challenges both established Israeli state structures and the international organizations attached to them (e.g., the Jewish Federations of North America). Such opposition needs to be guided by an understanding that these formations do not truly represent the constituencies in whose name they claim to act (i.e., Jews everywhere; in this regard the overlap between predominant Zionist and anti-Semitic doctrine is striking). However, while specifically ‘Jewish’ oppositional politics will be a necessary part of this process, they are best positioned as a very narrow part of the broader challenge that is required.

On principle, a careful approach here is necessary. If we reject, as we ought to, the idea that Jewish identity (as defined by whatever clerics) should bestow upon an individual social and political rights in Palestine/Israel that trump those of the country’s indigenous people, then we ought also to challenge the legitimacy of any political weight that accrues to an individual’s political positions by virtue of this definition. And anyway, for good reasons, this particular kind of identity-based oppositional politics suffers from some basic strategic weaknesses that will inevitably limit its strength. Fixation on Jewish dissident politics can thus simultaneously skew dynamics within our movements, limit the scope and integrity of oppositional work on the Palestine question, and reproduce a new dead end in the tradition of automatic deference to the Israeli ‘peace camp’. Discussion of how to avoid this trap needs to be pursued seriously, but elaboration of the issue is for another place.

The fundamental point is this. The ‘almost total silence about Zionism’s doctrines for and treatment of the native Palestinians’ in ostensibly enlightened Western circles was, as Edward Said put it, ‘one of the most frightening cultural episodes’ of the 20th century.⁸ Broad and coordinated effort will be required to overcome its effects. In the face of the ongoing surge of unapologetic chauvinism within Jewish Israeli politics, no illusions about Israel’s internal political scene should linger or be allowed to calm international concerns. Given the established character of the Israeli leadership, the character of the domestic pressure it faces, and the balance of power between Israeli state forces and the Palestinians, intense concern is called for. At the very least, this moment should prompt some left ‘house-keeping’ through which allied hesitation in challenging the Israeli political system, as a system, is cleared away.

There are hopeful signs that the growing movements against austerity and for an expansion of social and democratic rights are incorporating critical engagement with the Palestine question within their development. No advocate for equality can support an Israeli state drifting towards theocracy and employing battlefield techniques against civilian populations in ‘defense’ of an anachronistic colonialism. The international political space opened by the crumbling of liberal Israeli mythology should be filled with unflinching popular demands for equality, in Palestine as elsewhere.

1. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1983 & 1999), p. 110.
2. Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (London: Verso Books, 2006), p. 9-10.
3. Ilan Pappé, Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2010), p. 30.
4. For context and details on the politics of ‘transfer’, in particular, see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1928 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) and A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96 (London: Faber & Faber, 1997); and Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
5. For further citations and details see Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 99-108.
6. Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Political Independence after Oslo (London: Pluto Press in association with the Transnational Institute and the Middle East Research & Information Project, 1995), p. 20.
7. Michele K. Esposito, ‘Quarterly Update on Conflict and Diplomacy, 16 February-15 May 2008’, Journal of Palestine Studies (vol. 47, no. 4), p. 124.
8. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979 & 1992), p. 113.

On November 14th, two water wells were demolished in Baqa’a, east of Tammun, robbing hundreds of families of the ability to irrigate their land. On October 13, farmers received demolition orders on several water wells in Kufr al-Deek, a village in the town of Salfit near Nablus. In September, Israeli military forces demolished 6 water wells belonging to Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, and have threatened to demolish six more. In all these cases, the unilateral IOF actions are explicitly illegal because these wells were built with full permission from the Palestinian Authority, in areas of the Valley supposedly under exclusive Palestinian civil and military control.

The injustice is especially pronounced in the Jordan Valley. On the 8th of September, 50 military jeeps, trucks and bulldozers sealed off Al Nasarayah as a closed military zone, and proceeded to illegally destroy 3 water wells and confiscate the attached water systems, the pumps of which cost $40,000 each to install. Five days later, the IOF returned to Al Nasarayah to demolish 2 more wells, stopping along the way to destroy another well east of Tamoun. The next day, IOF soldiers entered the village of Al- Fa’ara, near Nablus, to photograph and record the GPS coordinates of 6 more wells intended for demolition.

The IOF’s actions are illegal under Israeli, Palestinian and international law because these 6 water wells had permits from the Palestinian Authority, and operated in the 5% of the Jordan Valley designated after the 1994 Oslo Accords Area A, under full Palestinian civil and military control. The motives behind Israel’s actions on the ground, however, emerge into the light of day when seen in the context of other recent Israeli policy resolutions — a plan announced in September to uproot and transfer some 27,000 Bedouin out of Israel-controlled Area C in the West Bank (most Area C Bedouin live in the Jordan Valley), and a decision by the Settlement Division in early July to increase by 130% the land given to settlers for farming in the Jordan Valley, and to increase from 42 to 51 cubic meters per year the amount of water given to settlers to irrigate such farmland.

What do the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin water wells in the Jordan Valley, the transfer of Palestinian Bedouin citizens out of the Jordan Valley, and the expansion of land and water given to settlers in the Jordan Valley, all have in common? Together, they highlight the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley that has typified Israeli policy since the Valley became occupied territory in 1967.

A focal point of this oppression — and a crucial locus of the Palestinian Bedouin struggle to resist the occupation and remain in their homeland — is the issue of water. For as Israel has seized absolute control over allocation and distribution of the resources of the 3 water aquifers under the West Bank for use on both sides of the Green Line, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, and especially the Bedouin population of the Jordan Valley, have seen the steady drying-up of the once-flowing springs around which they have built their villages, have found themselves unable to dig sufficient wells of their own because of crippling Israeli regulations, and have watched themselves become dependent on the exorbitant prices of their oppressor for access to so basic and indispensable a human right.

Far more than in the rest of the West Bank, the struggle over water for the Jordan Valley Bedouin is a struggle between life and death. The ‘draining away’ of Palestinian water rights in the Jordan Valley — to borrow the title of a 2010 report by Ma’an Development Center — has a long and tumultuous history. When the West Bank became occupied territory in 1967, the Israeli army established a military order to the effect that all West Bank water came under control of the state, and Israel’s national water carrier, Mekorot, seized water aquifers and developed wells throughout the West Bank to serve Israel and its newly expanding settlements. Between 1967 and the 1994 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley saw first their land, and then their water, disappear behind the heavily-guarded gates of settlements, where settlers were granted ample supplies of the latter in order to make the former bloom.

The situation grew increasingly dire until a brief ray of hope in 1995, when Article 40 of the Oslo II agreements set an interim agreement, designed to be revised within five years (but still in effect to this day), whereby approximately one quarter of West Bank water resources would come under Palestinian Authority control, and a Joint Water Committee would be established, in the words of the 2009 World Bank report ‘Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Development: West Bank and Gaza’, “to oversee management of the aquifers, with decisions to be based on consensus between the two parties.”

However, Oslo brought with it new institutionalized systems of oppression. Since Oslo 1 in 1993 consigned 95% of the Jordan Valley to Area C status (under full Israeli and military control), neither the Area C Bedouin communities themselves, nor the Palestinian Authority, nor the constant swarm of international NGOs, can commence with unregulated construction of their own initiative, because, in the words of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement, “across Area C, access to basic services such as water is restricted through the debilitating permit system which is regulated by the Israeli Civil Administration. Obtaining a permit for any form of construction –even for water- is notoriously difficult, nay impossible. This prevents Palestinians from building new infrastructure, or from making improvements to existing facilities.”

Atop this blanket layer of oppression, which effectively and intentionally squelches all trace of community autonomy, the Palestinian Bedouin in the 95% of the Jordan Valley which is Area C are deprived of the ability to improve their access to water resources through three interlocking buereacratic systems of control — the Joint Water Committee, where a group of Israeli and Palestinian decision-makers permits or denies water access or rehabilitation projects proposed by the Palestinian Water Authority (for Areas A, B and C); the Israeli Civil Administration, which, if an Area C project is permitted by the Joint Water Committee, pulls that project through a thicket of bureaucratic, technical limitations and scrutinies, effectively crippling its implementation if not grinding it to a halt completely; and, last but not least, the Israeli army, which ceaselessly continues, as it sees fit and irregardless of law, to demolish water wells, tankers, and infrastructure on the ground in Bedouin communities across Areas A, B and C, even if the proper permits are possessed.

Thus, what was promised under Oslo II to be consensus decision-making regarding water resources is in reality institutionalized unilateral control of the oppressor over the oppressed, and due to this matrix of Israeli control, it becomes nearly impossible for the Palestinian Authority, as well as most NGOs, to commit themselves to meaningful, sustainable infrastructural development in Area C of the West Bank.

At the level of the Joint Water Committee, details Ma’an’s ‘Draining Away’, “the fact that decisions are arrived at through consensus effectively means that Israel can veto Palestinian projects… [also], the PWA is not consulted regarding extractions from the aquifer for Israeli use (settlers or otherwise), which is not in accordance with the governance rules under Article 40. Nor does the Palestinian Authority have the right to access data on Israeli use of water resources, whereas Israel reserves the right for continual access to water resource data in the West Bank… around 150 water and sanitation projects are still pending JWC approval for “technical and security reasons”, while only one new Palestinian well project for the Western aquifer has been approved since 1993. In contrast, Israel is able to construct pipelines to its illegal settlements without going through the mechanism of the JWC. Thus Israel effectively has full control of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

The World Bank’s 2009 report confirms the non-consensual reality of the Joint Water Committee’s supposed ‘consensus decision-making’ — “[the] JWC has not fulfilled its role of providing a supportive governance framework for joint resource management and investment… politics and policy issues have limited the number of project approvals…fundamental asymmetries — of power, of capacity, of information — put into question the role of JWC as a “joint” institution…Israel takes unilateral water-related actions outside the JWC… only one third (by value) of projects presented to the JWC 2001-8 have been implemented… (1) the process is in general slow; (2) the rate of rejection of PA projects is high; (3) the PWA has almost never sought to reject Israeli projects (only one has not been approved); and (4) well drilling projects and — until very recently -wastewater projects have had very low rates of approval… in order to solicit approvals on vital emergency water needs, the PA is forced into positions that compromise its basic policy principles. Such an asymmetrical power balance (one party, Israel, has virtually all the power and is not driven by emergencies), together with the observed track record of the JWC, have contributed to a loss of trust and confidence and to very poor outcomes (for Palestinians) that undermine the rationale for the committee as a de facto “joint” approach to water sector management.”

Deeb Abdelghafar, Director of Water Resources for the Palestinian Water Authority, relates how “we submitted our application two years ago to build two new production wells in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, [to supply] water for domestic and agricultural purposes, and we know that they have reviewed it, but up to now we have not gotten any response, and we are not optimistic… we have more than 80 agricultural wells that need to be rehabilitated in Jordan Valley, and we have had these wells in the JWC for more than 4 years, but unfortunately we could not get final approval from Joint Water Committee.”

Even if the Joint Water Committee approves a project, its effective implementation is crippled by the red tape of the Israeli Civil Administration. Abdelghafar continues: “the most difficult step in the process for us is the Civil Administration because there are more than 14 departments, and each department must approve on the project. So we can never get a project through the civil administration, because some departments approve and some do not.” Ayman Rabi, Assistant Director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environmental Resources Development, an NGO working to improve access to water and sanitation services in the Occupied Palestinian territories. echoes Abdelghafar’s frustrations that “there is a big problem now in implementing anything in Area C, and that is one of the major hindrances right now to our work in that area….we have to ask [for a] permit and this generally we do through Palestinian Authority, and then they are applying through the Joint Water Committee… [but] even if the Joint Water Committee approves any intervention or project, the Israeli Civil Administration requests more documentation procedures, the process is longer, they put more conditions for implementation in Area C, so you might end up not implementing any activity because of this long and complicated procedure.” The World Bank report quotes an anonymous donor who reports the same difficulties- “first thing we request is a letter from PWA approving the project. Then we go to the JWC. But then we have to go to the Civil Administration – and there delays of 2-3 years are normal. In fact, we have no positive outcomes for Area C.”

Since nearly every proposal for the construction of water infrastructure in Area C is shut down by the twin juggernauts of the Joint Water Committee and the Israeli Civil Administration, NGOs must focus their efforts, to quote Abdelghafar, on “civil emergency intervention — by delivering small water tankers, by supplying them with water tanks, by constructing rainwater cisterns — it’s emergency humanitarian relief.” While important, this small-scale aid is carried out in lieu of large-scale, long-term projects that would strike at the root of the problem, rather than merely seeking to alleviate its effects. Says the World Bank report, “in the light of the difficulty of implementing major projects, the reasonable response has been short term emergency projects, often small projects with NGOs, and these smaller projects have become a very large part of water sector development… however, the multiplicity of small donors and multiple projects are more difficult to fit within a planning framework… NGOs have a comparative advantage in a grass roots field presence and a certain demand-driven character…[they are] nimble… but are small scale and short term” (p.63).

In the village of Hamsa, near the Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, Abu Riyad, who has been living in Hamsa with his family for thirty years, must now travel long distances to get water for drinking and irrigation, after two huge water wells constructed for nearby settlements have dried up the springs upon which for generations the community of Hamsa has relied. Says Ma’an’s report ‘Draining Away’: “unconnected to the water network, Abu Riyad must now travel to Ein Shibleh for his water. Nor does the family know the quality of the water and if it has been treated. While he is fortunate not to have to pay for this supply, it costs 200 shekels to transport 10 cubic metres of water. As the water covers all of the family’s needs, from drinking, washing and drinking water for the animals, Abu Riyad must transport this amount every four days. With the price of fuel rising, this means that water represents an increasing financial drain for the family…the community receives little support. While several tanks and water coupons have been donated from local and international NGOs, this is only ever for limited amounts of time, and thus provides only temporary relief.”

Indeed, Abu Riyad is fortunate to receive water for free. Ayman Rabi of the Palestinian Hydrology Group laments that, regarding many of his organization’s aid initiatives, “[the recipients of water] are asked to contribute, unfortunately. Although we do not like this, it is something that has been agreed on by the [Palestinian] Water Authority. They have been asked to contribute by 10 shekels, though we are not happy with this arrangement, for each cubic meter. and then we refill them whenever they ask us to.”

Many organizations, instead of delivering water, deliver water tanks to imperiled communities, so that Bedouin may transport water from filling points. However, by delivering water tanks, instead of connecting communities to water networks, these NGOs, though well-intentioned, often compound the problem by forcing the Bedouin to drive long distances, through a myriad of checkpoints, to filling points in Areas A or B, in order to maintain a constant water supply. The World Bank report decries that “occupation checkpoints and curfews severely limit tanker access to communities… there are 36 fixed checkpoints across the West Bank, including the gates of the Separation Barrier, that seriously affect access of water tankers and maintenance teams to communities…. Given the risks faced by drivers for their physical safety coupled with the longer routes, the price of water through tankers has increased exponentially”.

The case of Abu Riyad illustrates how expensive this practice can become for Bedouin faced with no alternative. According to Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, “to use water tankers in this way costs the Bedouin 30 shekels per cubic meter of water, while their neighbors in Areas A or B pay on average between ½ and 3 shekels per cubic meter of water.” The perpetuation of this inequality works in the occupation’s favor, by encouraging Bedouin to move out of Area C into Areas A or B.

In addition, mobilizing short-term emergency relief is much more expensive for the NGOs than would be a project to install permanent pipelines linking the Bedouin to water sources. Fathy Khdirat estimates that a recent $700,000 initiative to accomplish the former could have achieved the latter with 10% of the budget. Between the Joint Water Committee, the Israeli Civil Administration and the IOF, however, the possibility of installing permanent water infrastructure for the Bedouin is practically foreclosed from the beginning, so that aid initiatives are forced to work within the restricting, oppressive parameters of Israeli law. Says the World Bank report, “at best, the PA role is reduced to improving water and sanitation services to Palestinian communities within the constraints laid down…stakeholders recognize the inefficiency and high costs of such fragmented and contingency development but see no alternative.”

The bueraucratic matrix of corruption and control, in which both Israeli and Palestinian political and civil organizations are enmeshed, causes on-the-ground human rights abuses in clear violation of The Right To Water, enshrined in General Comment no. 15 of articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, in November 2002. The document stipulates that “the right to water contains both freedoms and entitlements. The freedoms include the right to maintain access to existing water supplies necessary for the right to water, and the right to be free from interference… by contrast, the entitlements include the right to a system of water supply and management that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the right to water.” The covenant goes on to list specific water entitlements — the right of “physical accessibility: water, and adequate water facilities and services, must be within safe physical reach for all sections of the population. Sufficient, safe and acceptable water must be accessible… within, or in the immediate vicinity, of each household, educational institution and workplace…”; the right of “economic accessibility: water, and water facilities and services, must be affordable for all. The direct and indirect costs and charges associated with securing water must be affordable…”; and the right of “non-discrimination: water and water facilities and services must be accessible to all, including the most vulnerable or marginalized sections of the population, in law and in fact, without discrimination”.

Ma’an’s report, ‘Draining Away’, clarifies that, in regards to the Right to Water enshrined in this document, that “while this right does not entitle people to unlimited use of free water or to household connection, it does mean that water and sanitation services should be affordable, that water and sanitation facilities should be in the immediate vicinity of the household, and that water should be used in a sustainable manner. This right exists irrespective of an individual’s ethnicity, gender, age, religious or political beliefs… it also stipulates that individuals and communities can participate in, and influence, decision making relating to water and sanitation services on national and local levels.”

Here are some quick facts taken from ‘Draining Away’, which should be measured against the UN-enshrined Right to Water-

In October 2009 Amnesty International noted that “180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water, and even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.”

According to the WASH monitoring project, the cost of private tankered water in 290 communities in the West Bank has increased between 100-200% for one cubic meter since the start of the intifada.

40% of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization, which is set at 100 liters cubed per day.

56,000 Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 Million Cubic Meters (MCM) of water per year, as compared to an average of 41 MCM for only 9,400 settlers.

Palestinians are charged more than their counterparts in Israel for water: Mekorot charges Israelis NIS 1.8 per cubic metre, compared to an average of NIS 2.5 per cubic metre for Palestinians.

There is near-universal consensus that there exists in the Jordan Valley a systematic policy of oppression and ethnic cleansing, touching upon not only water but all aspects of life for the 15,000 Bedouin who are unconnected to any water network in the 95% of the Valley designated Area C. Says Deeb Abdelghafar of the Palestinian Water Authority, “the Jordan Valley is a unique area from the Israeli point of view. They are trying to [establish] control over this area, and they are trying to prevent any permanent water infrastructure in order to prevent the people to be there… they don’t want to support the existence of these people, they want to immigrate the people outside of this area.”

Advocates like Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement that works to build infrastructure for the Bedouin of the Valley, are determined to encourage those under occupation to resist the oppression, and remain in their native land. “I spent all my life under the Occupation,” insists Fathy, “and I want to see a better future for my children. I am from there, and I will not shut up.”

The nativists, xenophobes, racists, and Republican Party activists and legislators who support the harsh new immigration bill (HB 56) targeting undocumented migrants in the state are delighted.

The flight of thousands of Latinos from the state regardless of legal status is not an unforeseen consequence of the legislation — it’s the entire point. As Lindsey Lyons, the mayor of Albertville, Alabama, put it in an interview with National Public Radio: “[W]e’re going to see an exodus of those moving to other states that don’t have any pending legislation.” The point is not immigration reform; the point is to make the growing Latino population go away.

For the law’s authors and backers, the state of Alabama is living a fantasy they have long wished, and worked, to see play out on a national level. Importantly, the fantasy of a vanishing Latino population is not strictly a legal one. It is, in fact, a cultural project, and it has a long history.

Culture, Power and Illusion

How do you make tens of millions of Latinos disappear from the national public sphere? This is a spectacular trick, on the order of illusionist David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of a live television audience. Copperfield’s 1983 deception relied on the cover of darkness and strategic manipulation of the audience’s perspective. The trickery that seeks the relative public invisibility of Latinos in the U.S. is performed in broad daylight using a combination of rhetorical manipulations and legislative measures.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric by now. The constant, drum beat-like association by anti-immigrant nativists of the terms “illegal” and “Mexican” and “immigrant,” amplified and reproduced in the news media and in demagogic political discourse, has created a semantic cloud obscuring the presence, in plain view, of diverse millions of Latinos in American public life.

A restaurant owner in my Minneapolis neighborhood who had emigrated (legally) from Ecuador told me about being questioned by police while taking a summer walk with his son. The police officers’ dogged assumption was that he was Mexican, and they seemed to believe that he had entered the U.S. illegally.

“I am from Ecuador,” he told me, “but all they could see was an illegal Mexican.” The Statue of Liberty, one might say, disappeared before his very eyes.

The public illusion in this instance results from cultural messaging that denies Latinos full cultural citizenship – the right to be different and to bring that difference into the public process. Theoretically, all citizens have equality under the law. In practice, however, public cultural norms are structured by an often unspoken hierarchy of values that privileges some citizens over others.

Think about how in a public meeting the fellow citizen who speaks an English accented by non-English phonetics might carry less moral authority with her audience than the fluent English speaker, despite being equally understandable and possessing the same legal rights. Or think of how a man wearing a West African dashiki might be assumed by many in a U.S. audience to be a non-citizen. Social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and age are reflected in recognition, or denial, of full cultural citizenship to different social groups.

Markers of cultural difference in the body politic can be, and often are, converted into signs of second-class status. This is an important intersection of culture and politics in the U.S., and one exploited actively by those who would make Latinos disappear from the public sphere.

The targeting of immigrants with the rhetorical hammer of “illegal,” pounds into place a chain of equivalences in the public mind. Where Latinos are concerned, the anti-immigrant anvil and hammer of “illegal” and “Mexican” seek to remake brown skin, the Spanish language, and other markers of Latino visibility as signposts of the outer boundaries of American public life. “They,” non-Latinos are being told, are not like “us.”

Behind the media sensationalism and electoral campaign posturing lays a politics of cultural containment and subordination, and of civic divisiveness. As the facile external markers of Latino identity are transformed into the civic equivalent of scarlet letters, Latinos are implicitly rendered less legitimate as public actors, and less visible as fellow citizens. In the process, any resources particular to their cultural heritage that they might bring to the national project are categorically segregated and expelled from the public sphere.

Spanish is preempted as a language of legitimate civic engagement. Regions of the country are subtly (and not so subtly) dispossessed of their rich Hispanic heritage in the minds of many Americans, who are encouraged to forget the pluricultural history etched into Spanish-language place names like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

The U.S. public’s ignorance about Puerto Ricans — who are born United States citizens since passage of the Jones Act in 1917, although without the right to vote in U.S. elections — is deepened and extended to another generation. Bilingualism becomes suspect, rather than being recognized as a tremendous national economic and cultural resource and a civic virtue. Important forms of public culture — murals, corridos, pachangas — are marked as Other. Voices critical of U.S. foreign policy — with personal experience of the human rights implications for Salvadorans, for Guatemalans, and others, of military funding or trade agreements — are silenced.

And my Ecuadorian-American neighbor finds himself caught up in a mass cultural deception that denies him full cultural citizenship, despite his undeniable legal rights. He is denied the power to define his own public presence, his own identity as a fellow citizen, and to be recognized as fully American.

Laws, Politics, and Culture

The dark magic worked by manipulative public rhetoric has its limits, thankfully. People can endure, and respond to, name-calling. And public discourse is never a one-sided affair. My Ecuadorian-American neighbor, for example, has undoubtedly told his story to many of his fellow local citizens, generating a retail-level awareness that counterbalances in some measure the wholesale misrepresentation of national realities by anti-immigrant sensationalism. Educators continue to teach Spanish, and student interest in the language has grown alongside the growing number of Americans who understand the political and economic and cultural value of bilingualism.

And at some point, the anti-immigrant talk begins to say more about the speaker than about the object of the speaker’s rancor. Of the 308 million heads counted by the 2010 Census, more than 50 million, or greater than 16%, identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. At some point, talking as if 16% of the nation doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist becomes a fool’s strategy.

This is where the policy mechanisms of the cynical anti-Latino vanishing act come into play. A confluence of xenophobic, nativist and Republican Party interests — having watched demographic changes unfold over the past two decades, and their electoral consequences begin to take hold — see an even greater need to contain Latino culture and subordinate Latino public involvement. They have learned that rhetoric alone will no longer do the trick.

Predictably, after the 2008 elections resulted in convincing victories for the Democratic Party with sizable margins of support among Latino voters, several Republican state legislatures have approved laws targeting undocumented immigrants in several states.

The Arizona state legislature in 2010 approved SB 1070, a law that criminalizes the failure to carry immigration documents and allows police to detain anyone suspected of being an undocumented migrant. (In order to make clear that the political and cultural target included Latino citizens, the Republican majority also passed a law banning the teaching of Ethnic Studies in the public schools.) In 2011, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, and South Carolina subsequently passed their own versions of the Arizona law, similarly promoting racial profiling and criminalizing social and economic interaction with undocumented immigrants.

Not to be outdone, Alabama passed HB 56, a law that, among other things, bars undocumented immigrants from attending state colleges, criminalizes “transporting, harboring, or renting property” to them, and requires public schools to verify the legal status of their students.

The laws bring state power — in the form of racial profiling — to bear on the cultural messaging that subordinates and marginalizes Latinos’ presence in the public arena. One measure of the cultural effect of the Alabama law: those Latino children who haven’t disappeared from the public schools now report they are bullied for being “illegals.”

All of these states share two key elements: First, state government is controlled by the Republican Party, and second, the 2010 Census found a dramatic growth rate among the Latino/Hispanic population that sooner or later could jeopardize Republican political dominance in the state.

Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama saw eye-popping growth rates for the Latino/Hispanic population, 96.1%, 147.9%, and 144.8%, respectively. Indiana’s growth rate for the Hispanic or Latino category was 81.7%, and Utah’s was 77.8%, nearly double the national growth rate for that sector of the population. In the case of Arizona, population growth among Latinos/Hispanics was a “mere” 46.3%, but what was likely more troubling for Republicans, racists and xenophobes, the Latino/Hispanic population had grown to represent approximately 30% of the state population.

It is difficult not to view these states’ anti-immigrant legislation as a preemptive effort to change the demographic facts for future elections, and prior to the inevitable moment in which comprehensive federal immigration policy reform provides a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million or more undocumented immigrants nationwide, principally from Mexico and Central America.

At the same time, the state-by-state anti-immigrant legislation can be viewed as a desperate effort to use the law to leverage an extended life for the cultural politics that has long sought to subordinate and diminish Latino participation in the public sphere.

Redefining America

The stakes of the present conjuncture are not just electoral and legal. The cultural parameters of U.S. public life are also in play. The long-term stakes are nothing less than the means and meaning of democratic public life in America, i.e., the question of who is allowed to speak, and how, and about what.

It is important to remember (and remind) that the cultural politics that denies Latinos equality in American public life has a long history. Current efforts to drive Latinos out of public life find common parentage in the assaults on Mexican-Americans that occurred after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexico war and called for Mexico to relinquish roughly half of its national territory to the U.S.

The 1848 Treaty included an option for U.S. citizenship for the many Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in U.S. territory, but xenophobic and racist sentiment conspired with economic interests to drive Mexicans off their land throughout the region, and to strip them of their mining stakes in California. One of the myriad ways these interests operated on the social body to excise the Mexican-American presence was the passage of legislation that directly targeted these would-be citizens.

The “Greaser” laws (as they were called by their proponents) included an 1855 anti-vagrancy statue in California that explicitly applied to “All persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood… and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.” This legislative assault on the public presence of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans was preceded by the 1850 Foreign Miner’s Tax, which levied an exorbitant monthly license fee on the mining claims of the foreign-born, with the practical effect of driving Mexicans and Latin Americans (and French and Germans) off their claims in the context of the Gold Rush. Of course, the xenophobic hostility stoked against Spanish-speakers made no distinction between native-born Californios and Mexicans.

The cultural politics that aims to make Latinos disappear cannot overcome the blunt object reality of a growing population. David Copperfield could make the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear, but when the sun came up the next morning, there it was. The difference is that Copperfield wasn’t attempting to change the meaning of Liberty.

Recent nativist attempts to update the 19th century “Greaser laws” for the 21st century will not, ultimately, make Latinos literally disappear. But the trickery in this instance changes the potential meaning of America, diminishes democratic possibilities, preempts current and future potential dialogue and social relationships. Cultural resources and perspectives that Latinos could bring to the common table are diminished and sidelined. Efforts to counter the inequality these laws promote must systematically engage the cultural dimension of the struggle over American democracy.

An overnight curfew was lifted on Monday but scores of people have been arrested, and a heavy security presence remained on the streets near Tahrir Square (the iconic landmark that witnessed the glorious days of the Egyptian revolution).

Sunday clashes followed Egypt Christians (Copts) protests over the recent destruction of a church near the southern town of Aswan, but actually there was more to these protests than just another case of demolishing or setting a church on fire (this was the third incidence in a row, of demolishing Coptic churches, in less than 8 months after Mubarak was toppled).

Barely a few weeks to the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections and after months of political debate and turmoil, it has become obvious that the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-conservative Islamists (Salafists) are bound to gain the lead in the upcoming vote, thus devouring the biggest chunk of the next parliament seats and tightening their grip over the legislative house.

And since the Islamists front, which obviously struck some sort of a deal with the military, has made no secret of their intention to apply the Islamic Sharia law that could undermine the citizenry of the Copts and reduce them to second class citizens, the Coptic community grew not only insecure but also frightened of the perilous prospects of a gloomy future.

So the thousands of Copts in Sunday’s rally were not expressing their anger over the demolition of yet another church; rather, they were expressing their fears over threatened belonging and identity and over the failure of the interim government to protect them and their places of worship.

Never throughout the 1400 years of co-habitation with Muslims in Egypt had any church or monastery been attacked before.  That’s why this whole new cycle of persecution and discrimination against the Christian minority has been a very alarming precedent for all the Coptic community in Egypt.

What went wrong?

Copts of Egypt are enduring through threatened identity crisis for years now.

Many no doubt wondered what on earth had happened to the celebrated Tahrir revolution of civility, nonviolence and solidarity as they watched the violent late collisions between Egypt Copts and the soldiers of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).

Disturbing scenes certainly, but they were neither unexpected nor totally spontaneous as some like to portray them. In the historical course of most revolutions, moments of exceptional unity and sacrifice do not last long. Once the common enemy is gone, unity gives way to the reassertion of differences and sectarian interests; old coalitions collapse, new solidarities and ideological differences emerge and even plots and schemes by another enemy begin to play out.

At such times of political instability, the challenge, of course, is how to handle the old demarcations and emerging differences. In post-Mubarak Egypt, the rise of radical Islamists, a security vacuum and sectarian violence have always been the most feared obstacles to a smooth transition to a democratically elected government, whatever that means.

But with SCAF siding with the Islamist front while dragging its feet on getting the police forces back on the Egyptian street and properly functioning again, the Christian minority (10% of the Egyptian population) remains in limbo.

Copts in history

Egyptian Christianity, of course, predates Islam – which was brought by the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639 AD, and became the majority religion. Some Egyptians embraced Islam voluntarily for its promise of justice, many did so to avoid jizya (taxes) while still others to acquire equal social and political status with Muslims.

By the 10th century, Muslims outnumbered the Christian population, and Arabic replaced the Coptic language as the official governmental language. In the 12th century, the church adopted Arabic as the official clergical language.

“Like or not, we are the true landowners,” yelled the protesting copts.

Hardline Copts, in exile and at home, consider themselves a distinct ethnicity – with a unique ancestry, religion and way of life – that are now being treated as a second class population and suggest, moreover, that they are, in fact, the “true, original Egyptians.”

With that hardline concept and reasoning in mind that the Copts never dared or allowed, if you will, to take it outside the church premises, the Coptic protesters in their Sunday march defiantly roared, “Like or not, we are the true land owners.”

This was the first time for Egypt Copts to let go of their prudence and discretion and maybe also their long buried hostility.  Frustrated by SCAF lax handling of the violence and frequent targeting of the Coptic churches, and since no one was prosecuted or held accountable for the previous two attacks, the Copts set off this huge rally with a bit of a grudge against SCAF.

Left out

In Egypt today, the key responsibility to ensure sectarian peace lies with the country’s elite (the military council, the intelligentsia, the remnants of Mubarak’s regime, Islamists, and Coptic leaders) … and, of course, regional and international players, namely Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel.

As for the intelligentsia and the liberals who have being outweighed by the rise of the well organized and obscenely financed Islamists, thanks to the Wahabbist Saudis, and are so busy and exhausted trying to secure, by any stretch, the minimum number of parliament seats even if that meant some secret deal with the Muslim brotherhood, they actually have no time for the Copts’ dossier.

The Coptic leaders, feeling insecure after Mubarak’s stepping down and also feeling left out while the Islamists and the remnants of the old regime split the booty of the transitional period, had no choice but to consider asking, or, rather, begging for international protection, an option long advocated by hardline Copts in exile especially in the United States and aided by Zionist organizations … and that required nothing more than some bloody confrontation with the Egyptian security forces during which Coptic victims would fall down in front of the whole world.

Judging from the latest statements of SCAF in which they explicitly announced that the council will not approve of a civilian president to be the future supreme commander of the military forces and with Field Marshal Tantawy insinuating that he might consider running for the presidency, we can understand SCAF’s need for more escalation of riots and unrest as a pretext to sort of prolonging the interim period for may be another two years during which they could cling to power and shift the country into military rule.

For the time being, both the United States and Israel prefer the military council being in command rather than to hand over the rule of Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood with their known pro-Palestine agenda and their unpredictable stance on the Camp David peace accords, even if that means turning a blind eye to SCAF security forces getting so out of control as to run over peaceful protesters with their armored vehicles exactly as Mubarak’s security apparatus used to do.

False flag

When it comes to Egypt, the Israeli role doesn’t stop at the wishful thinking of an observer but extends into deep and covert involvement. I mean, we all remember the state of bewilderment and confusion that followed the Alexandria church bombing last Christmas night that left around 20 dead and 90 wounded, but the classified documents found in the headquarters of the raided state security apparatus proved that the whole thing was a false flag operation pulled to implicate some Gaza-based militants and help Israel tighten its siege on Gaza and incriminate Hamas as a terrorist organization.

What is similarly puzzling about the peaceful Coptic march that suddenly turned violent is the testimony of various eyewitnesses that confirmed that plain-clothed unknown assailants managed to infiltrate the rally and on reaching the final destination of the march they were the ones who started throwing stones, Molotov cocktail bottles and even shooting live ammunition at the military security forces taking down two soldiers — and from then on the scene turned into the chaos and violence we have all witnessed.

Obviously those were trained agent provocateurs that easily infiltrated the peaceful Coptic march and orchestrated this whole mess. What consolidates this thesis is the swift and widespread rumor that followed on the internet social media and on the Egyptian street stating that Hillary Clinton, the American foreign secretary, has declared that the United States is willing to help the Egyptian military council to protect the Christian minority in Egypt.

Of course, the next day this breaking news was refuted as false statement, but still this whole thing, regardless of the hidden motives of both the Copts and the Egyptian military, smells so much like a false flag.

Predictably, while many Americans suffer the consequences of no medical care, it is the poor and disabled who suffer the most; yet, this past week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments that will make it legal for the state of California to cut fees to Medi-Cal providers, affecting 7.6 million poor people using the program.

One would expect that the public could turn to the court system for some kind of remedy. The old adage “I’ll have my day in court,” or “See you in court,” seems appropriate: Take the state of California and Governor Brown to court to stop them from wreaking havoc on people’s lives. Governor Brown and the Legislature approved a 10 percent, $620 million Medi-Cal cut to help balance the 2011-12 state budget. The outright injustice of denial of medical care for the poor has become mainstream and acceptable.

A day in court to argue that it is unconscionable to deny medical care to the poor? It would seem so American, so just, and so obviously right; but Americans should realize that getting a day in court requires a little quirk of the law, unbeknownst to many, that an American citizen must have “standing”¹ to argue a case before the bench. Standing is one of the most transparent ploys that the Supreme Court uses to deny justice to the poor and empower the rich. Indeed, the court has a panoply of vehicles and obstacles to employ in preventing access to the courts. They are all designed to disenfranchise the poor.

We don’t usually think in terms of the legal obstacles that keep American citizens from having their day in court; yet the obstacles reach far beyond even the courts. Think of it as just another ploy in the armamentarium of the rich. The mean-spirited and spiteful republicans, for example, are trying to change the voting rights affecting mostly the elderly; i.e., to preclude them from voting for Democratic Party or progressive candidates. One only has to consider the republicans’ successful attempts to block a 96-year Afro-American Chattanooga woman from voting because she does not have an identity card. Limiting access to the courts is not so far from limiting people the access to their right to vote.

The Medi-Cal case, Douglas vs. Independent Living Center, 09-958, raises the limited issue as to whether the Supreme Court will allow doctors, nurses, hospitals, and patients to challenge the cut-off of  health care to indigent Californians. Although this a matter of life and death, the irony here is that the Supreme Court is not going to address the issue of whether Americans have the right to adequate medical care; but rather, only the procedural question of whether they can even argue in a courtroom that health care is a right and not a privilege.

1. “The legally protectible [sic] stake or interest that an individual has in a dispute that entitles him to bring the controversy before the court to obtain judicial relief…. Standing, sometimes referred to as standing to sue, is the name of the federal law doctrine that focuses on whether a prospective plaintiff can show that some personal legal interest has been invaded by the defendant…. It is not enough that a person is merely interested as a member of the general public in the resolution of the dispute. The person must have a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy…. The standing doctrine is derived from the U.S. Constitution’s Article III provision that federal courts have the power to hear “cases” arising under federal law and ”controversies” involving certain types of parties. In the most fundamental application of  the philosophy of judicial restraint, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted this language to forbid the rendering of advisory opinions …. Once a federal court determines that a real case or controversy exists, it must then ascertain whether the parties to the litigation have standing. The Supreme Court has developed an elaborate body of principles defining the nature and scope of standing. Basically, a plaintiff must have suffered some direct or substantial injury or be likely to suffer such an injury if a particular wrong is not redressed. A defendant must be the party responsible for perpetrating the alleged legal wrong.”

Fortunately there is a book, Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine by William Parry, that pictorially deflates monopoly media disinformation and complicity.

Against the Wall indisputably drives home the dispossession, brutality, racism, and oppression that one group — Israeli Jews — inflicts daily on another group — Palestinians.

Although text accompanies the evocative photographs, the photos speak for themselves. Against the Wall depicts Palestinian families being separated from one another, being prevented from tending to their crops, Israelis inflicting economic deprivation on Palestinians, Israelis targeting of school children, and Israelis intended humiliation of Palestinian workers passing through checkpoints in the wall.² Against the Wall reveals the spirit, art, and determination of the Palestinian resistance, the anger of the occupied people, messages to the world, etc.

One message reads, “The only peace Israel wants is a piece of my land.” Given the de-Arabization of East Jerusalem and the growing Jewish colonies in the West Bank, in contravention of Israel’s obligations under the Oslo Accords, and given that the Wall (deemed illegal by the World Court) encroaches inside the Green line from the 1967 War further stealing Palestinian land³ — there is no denying the truthfulness of the message. This has not caused the US government to stop giving $3 billion+ a year to an OECD member (historically an economically elitist grouping of states) that openly engages in the occupation and the siege of an indigenous people.⁴

Usually when there is an occupation, and especially when that occupation is oppressive, there is resistance. Much of the artful resistance and messages on the Wall come from non-Palestinians, and Parry acknowledges that not all Palestinians support the wall being used as a medium for artful resistance. Parry relates an exchange between British street artist Bansky, who supports the Palestinian resistance, with a Palestinian elder:

OLD MAN: You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful.
BANSKY: Thanks.
OLD MAN: We don’t want it to be beautiful. We hate this wall, go home.

Against the Wall answers the question: what does occupation, apartheid look like? It appears somewhat like a coffee table book. Unlike the usual coffee table book, however, the photos and text in Against the Wall convey a message of grave importance. It is a book hard to put down. One can stare at the photos for long periods of time and return again to the photos a short while later. It is not a book that is read and placed on a shelf. It invites you back time and again. Against the Wall should be on the coffee tables, in the libraries, and on the gift lists of every person who cares about human rights for all humans.

Where words — despite their sincerity, truthfulness, and morality — alone cannot convince, the pairing with authentic photography creates a vividly more powerful impact. That is Against the Wall. Get this book and share it!

1. Yes, supporters. If one is actively against non-violent resistance to occupation and oppression, then one is undeniably supporting the aims of the occupiers.
2. I write “intended humiliation” because, in fact, it portrays the dignity of Palestinian workers who day-in and day-out withstand the indignities to support their families – an honourable act – and it is rather a self-humiliation for the Israelis that people in positions of power would lower themselves to behave so inhumanely to other humans.
3. If land acquired through violence is wrong, and unless the United Nations has a moral right to dispossess peoples of their homeland, then arguably all the land of Israel and Palestine is Palestinian land. This principle holds for all lands acquired through violence, including Canada, the United States, etc.
4. Although preponderantly responsible for helping Israel maintain its occupation, the US is not alone, as many western states, and Arab dictators are complicit in the occupation of Palestine.