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.

When Anna Hazare ended his second fast for the JLB in August, his followers and the media claimed that his campaign was an unqualified success. Hazare himself was more circumspect, but his promise that he would move on to campaign for the right to reject and recall candidates suggested that he too felt he had scored a victory. But has he? Most people thronging to demonstrate in support of his demands thought that the campaign was a straightforward one against corruption, but it was both more and less than that. More, because the demand of Team Anna was that parliament should pass their particular bill, the Jan Lokpal Bill, by a particular date; and less, because it defined corruption in a superficial manner.

Team Anna certainly won the first round, given the government’s inability to read the public mood. By first presenting a bill so weak that it made a mockery of the idea of curbing corruption, and then resorting to preventive arrests of Anna and his close associates, it helped to mobilise massive crowds against itself. At this point in the proceedings, it was easy for a casual observer to feel that the campaign was standing up not only for a strong law against corruption but also for freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly, which were being crushed by a government bent on negating all democratic rights and freedoms. Indeed, this is what many people out on the streets believed. Who would want to oppose such a campaign? But, ironically, as the government backtracked, giving permission for the fast and initiating a public consultation on the Lokpal Bill, it regained some legitimacy, while the Hazare campaign, as it became increasingly aggressive, lost it. The government wisely agreed to a formula that would allow Hazare to break his fast without losing face, but even a cursory examination of the terms of that agreement make it clear that it was a major retreat for India Against Corruption (IAC) from their earlier hardline stand. Why were they forced to back down?

An authoritarian bill backed by the extreme Right

Questions were raised about the dangerously authoritarian character of the bill they were backing, with its creation of an unaccountable, unelected body that would have the power to tap phones, intercept emails, and remove every government functionary from the Prime Minister and Chief Justice to the lowest cleaner.¹ Access to judicial review for those targeted by this all-powerful body would be meaningless, given its power to remove judges it did not like. By defining corruption as the disease rather than seeing it as merely a symptom of a deeper disease – power without accountability, power to commit crimes with impunity – the JLB was a formula to introduce a new source of corruption rather than eliminating it. It was also, potentially, an assault on India’s democratic institutions, one heightened by the demand that either the law should be passed by parliament by August 30, or the government should quit. This ultimatum ruled out any possibility of pre-legislative discussion and debate of the two bills, or consideration of other proposals like those of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), which had successfully campaigned for what has turned out to be the country’s most effective tool of transparency to date, the Right to Information (RTI) Act. And the demand that a parliament elected by hundreds of millions should quit because a few hundred thousand people claiming to represent ‘civil society’ were demanding it mocked the conception of democracy. Where the RTI Act had put power to combat corruption into the hands of ordinary citizens, the JLB seeks to concentrate this power in the hands of a super-powerful state institution.

The enthusiastic participation of the extreme Right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other members of the ‘family’ of organisations affiliated to it (the Sangh Parivar), also disturbed many. During the second fast in August, the backdrop of Bharat Mata (Mother India as a Hindu goddess) was replaced by Mahatma Gandhi and RSS members were kept away from the dais, but their cries of ‘Vande Mataram!’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ continued to be as frequent as before. Sushma Swaraj claimed openly that the RSS was mobilising for the protest² and the VHP told the media it provided free food – a major crowd-puller – for 20,000 protesters. These proclamations are discounted by some on the Left, who argue that the RSS would naturally try to claim credit for any mass movement. However, this isn’t true. Bigger crowds were reported at the protests against the nuclear tests in 1998, hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in protests against attacks on labour rights, but the Sangh Parivar did not try to claim credit for them because they did not identify with the cause. In this case they did, and the reason is not hard to find. A campaign against narrowly-defined corruption in a government not controlled by them, a demand that the government should either pass a law setting up a super-state they could easily control or else quit, suited them perfectly. They were not trying to capture the movement: it was tailor-made for them.

Both the authoritarian character of the bill and RSS backing for the IAC can be explained by the characteristics of the leadership of the movement and the movement itself.

The leaders

The ‘civil society’ panel that drafted and negotiated with the government over the Jan Lokpal Bill consisted of Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Santosh Hegde, Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan. Anna Hazare himself, projected as the leader of the campaign, hails from Ralegan Siddhi, a village in Maharashtra. As a detailed study of his village by Mukul Sharma reveals, he holds absolute power in it: there have been no gram panchayat elections for the last 24 years, nor even elections to cooperatives, and no campaigning is allowed during state or national elections. Just as a mother is entitled to slap her child (according to him), he feels he is entitled to use coercion or violence against those who infringe his rules. Alcohol is banned, and anyone taking it is tied to a pole and flogged. Although he opposes untouchability, dalits are supposed to follow the occupation dictated by their caste, and have been forced to adopt vegetarianism. In a streak of puritanism reminiscent of the Taliban, satellite dishes, cable TV and any music other than religious songs are banned.³ The comparison with Gandhi by dim-witted mediapersons is belied by Anna’s bloodthirsty calls for the death penalty.⁴

None of these journalists thought it fit to ask how he could campaign for the right to reject and recall candidates if he doesn’t recognise the right to elect candidates in the first place, and contemptuously dismisses the average voter as prone to being bought by liquor, saris or cash! Nor did they think to ask: If he is so keen on electoral reform, why not implement it in his village as an experiment? Why not propose reform in electoral funding, so that the disgruntled 10 percent can put up their own candidate, instead of rejecting all candidates and disrupting elections time and again at enormous cost to the tax-payer and political stability? What exactly should be the conditions under which candidates can be recalled?

The striking authoritarianism of Hazare’s outlook, the lack of any whiff of democracy in the village he rules as an absolute dictator, and his belief in caste hierarchy, all make him amenable to the politics of the Sangh Parivar. But the relationship goes much deeper. Some of his staunchest supporters were shocked when he held up Narendra Modi as a model for other chief ministers to emulate. He later clarified he was opposed to communalism, but this does not explain why he chose to praise a man who orchestrated the massacre of thousands of innocents. Bribery need not always take the form of money; it can also take the form of promotions, appointments to sinecures, etc. The promotion of police officers who had participated in the Gujarat pogroms and victimisation of those who had done their job by trying to prevent the slaughter are among the worst forms of corruption.

Even in the narrower sense of corruption adopted by Team Anna, Gujarat has a shameful record. As Mallika Sarabai pointed out in her letter to Hazare, ‘irrigated farmlands have been stealthily taken by the government and sold off at ridiculous prices to a small club of industrialists. There has been no Lokayukta in Gujarat for nearly seven years so hundreds of complaints against corruption are lying unheard. From the Sujalam Sufalam scam of 1700 crores to the NREGS boribund scam of 109 crores, the fisheries scam of 600 crores, every department is involved in thousands of crores of scams…The state is in terrible debt because of his largess to industry while 21 lakh farmers wait for compensation.’⁵

So what made Anna give Modi such a glowing character-reference? This cannot be explained simply by any apparent naivety. If Hazare was so effusive about Modi, it was because their world-views and agendas converged. Two points in particular are worth noting. One is the extremely complimentary comments by top RSS leaders about Ralegan Siddhi, likening it to Ram Rajya and organising tours of it for their activists, as well as organising programmes in support of him; and the other is the decision taken by the RSS in its all-India leaders’ meeting in March 2011 – before Anna’s fast in April – to launch a campaign against corruption.⁶ The impression of converging agendas is confirmed by L.K.Advani’s announcement of a rath yatra against corruption⁷ and Team Anna’s deafening silence concerning Modi’s patently corrupt attempt to appoint a Lokayukta who had acquitted all the accused in the Best Bakery massacre, and therefore could be trusted to toe the state government line.⁸

Two other members of the drafting team also have relationships with the Sangh Parivar. Arvind Kejriwal maintained close links with BJP MPs during the agitation as well as drawing in Hindutva gurus like Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. His association with the anti-reservationist Youth for Equality created revulsion among Dalits, as did his dismissal of their suggestion that there should be a Dalit on the drafting committee on the grounds that legal specialists were needed to draft a law (as though Dalits were incapable of drafting laws, regardless of the fact that the Indian Constitution was drafted by one!).⁹ And Justice Santosh Hegde, whose father was all-India vice-President of the BJP, just last year referred to L.K.Advani (of the infamous Ram Janmabhoomi rath yatra that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and slaughter of thousands of Muslims) as a ‘father figure.’¹⁰

The Right-wing bias of these three members of the JLB drafting committee explains why it leaves out NGOs from its ambit, since inclusion of NGOs would be a blow to massive outfits like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living (already accused of illegal land acquisition¹¹ ) and Baba Ramdev’s offshore financial transactions. It also explains why most Dalit, Adivasi and minority-rights activists stayed away from the movement, fearing that the JLB’s definition of ‘corruption’ would target the beneficiaries of affirmative action as well as members of the legislature and judiciary who supported attempts to level the playing field for sections of the population suffering discrimination.

The fourth member of the team, Shanti Bhushan, is a corporate lawyer whose most high-profile case in recent years has been that of Novartis versus the Cancer Patients Aid Association.¹² Novartis is attempting to prevent the production of generic versions of imatinib mesylate (an anti-leukemia drug) beyond the period of its original patent by a process called ‘ever-greening,’ whereby a minor change in the form of a drug is used to renew its patent. This particular case has attracted worldwide attention, because it would mean that the life-saving drug would only be available at the Novartis price of Rs 120,000 per month instead of being made available by Indian companies for Rs 8,000 per month: obviously a death sentence for all leukemia patients other than the super-rich. In other words, Shanti Bhushan was hired by Novartis to argue that a company’s right to profit trumps the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.¹³

Bhushan Sr.’s professional dealings with his corporate clients explains why corporates are left out of the Jan Lokpal Bill. This curious omission is also why companies like Jindal Aluminium, a company that tried to silence critics of its illegal mining activities with a false defamation suit,¹⁴ are willing to back the Anna movement with substantial donations.¹⁵ It is also why the corporate media could abandon any pretence of objectivity and play an active role in promoting the movement.¹⁶ . For all of these power elites (big business, mass media), the solution to corruption is to privatise everything, minimise state regulation of private capital, and terminate even inadequate social security and welfare schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. They would like to secure their privileges (for which they now have to pay bribes) without paying bribes. Anything that cuts into their right to make money constitutes ‘corruption.’

These neoliberal underpinnings of the JLB have been criticised by many left-wing commentators and one important trade union federation. As the New Trade Union Initiative points out, ‘the fight against corruption must include demands for legislation and effective implementation of the laws that govern capital alongside rigorous and stringent implementation of the laws that govern work, the provision of social security and social protection, and all laws that provide working people access to their basic needs. Corruption necessarily flows from above and is deeply rooted in how capital seeks to maximize profits and not merely a product of corrupt civil servants or a grasping political class.’¹⁷ While it might not be feasible for the Lokpal to monitor all NGOs and companies, in cases where a politician or bureaucrat has colluded with a company or NGO to rob the public (of land, revenue, etc.), it makes no sense to nab the junior partner-in-crime (the politician or bureaucrat) while allowing the major beneficiary of corruption (the company or NGO) to get away with it. In such cases, as suggested by the NCPRI, the Lokpal or Lokayukta should have power to investigate and prosecute any other person who is co-accused in the case before it.¹⁸

The involvement of the fifth member of the team, Prashant Bhushan, caused consternation among some of his former admirers, since he has been associated with social justice causes. But his fundamental similarity to the other members of the drafting team in terms of elitism and authoritarianism are evident in his vehement arguments that the issue of the JLB should be resolved by a referendum.¹⁹ If a referendum were held on each and every clause of the bill, it would cost the earth and take forever, so that is clearly not feasible. Instead, the bill will be (in fact has been) drafted by ‘experts’, and the public will only have the right to vote for one bill or the other. Ironically, far from being an expansion of participatory democracy, as he claims, this constitutes a much less democratic procedure than pre-legislative public debate on a bill, with the possibility of the public feeding into the drafting process.

Apart from leaving out the people who will be affected by the bill from the deliberations on it, a referendum can be framed in a way that elicits the result that is desired. In this case, for example, Bhushan Jr. made it clear that there would be only two options, the government Lokpal Bill or the JLB: no possibility of voting for the NCPRI or other proposals, and not even the option of rejecting both bills! (The hypocrisy of demanding the right to reject in elections while leaving it out in the proposed referendum is truly stunning!) Even if the intention is to get feedback on the JLB, there are two different ways in which a referendum could be framed. If the choice is between the government bill and JLB, as Bhushan wants, those who reject both would have to abstain; then it is possible that the majority of those who vote, knowing only that the latter is stronger, would vote for it. But if the choice is ‘the JLB: Yes or No’, many more are likely to vote, and the ‘No’ vote is likely to predominate, given the deep suspicion on the part of Dalits, Adivasis, minorities and workers that the JLB is designed to rob them of their rights.²⁰ No wonder referendums are favoured by dictators!

The JLB is marked by the elitist and authoritarian outlook of its drafters. While some of these features have been diluted since the first draft was put out, the marks of its parentage are still all too evident.

The followers

There has been a great deal of debate on the class composition of the crowds that came out in support of the JLB, but what is more relevant is the political character of the crowds; after all, there was a significant presence of plebeian elements in the mobs that brought down the Babri Masjid as well as the crowds that flocked to Hitler’s speeches, but this did not make them any less fascist.

Kiran Bedi’s slogan of ‘Anna is India and India is Anna’, with its disturbing echoes of the Emergency (‘Indira is India and India is Indira’) as well as Nazism (‘Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler’), was abandoned, but its spirit haunted the speeches of Team Anna, who repeatedly claimed that they spoke for ‘the people’ or ‘civil society’ as a whole. Equally revealing was the ubiquitous slogan ‘I am Anna’. What this conveyed was blind faith in Anna’s leadership, and a promise to follow wherever he went, do whatever he ordered. This abdication of the responsibility to think for oneself in favour of blind faith in a charismatic leader is typical of fascist movements. This does not mean that all those who wore ‘I am Anna’ caps or T-shirts were fascists, but that they could easily be manipulated by fascists.

If blind obedience to a leader is one side of the coin, the other side is intolerance of dissent or questioning of the stated goal. This too was very much in evidence. The good-natured and non-violent character of the assembly, noted by some who visited Ramlila Maidan, lasted only so long as questions were confined to ‘Where have you come from?’ and ‘What do you do?’As soon as even mildly probing questions were asked about the JLB, good nature vanished and the strong undercurrent of violence beneath the sanctimonious appearance of non-violence came to the surface.²¹ The most horrifying report of such violence was that of a student who was chased into a river by fellow-students and pelted with stones until he drowned because he refused to participate in the anti-corruption protests.²²

Finally, the aggressive waving of the national flag and frequent chants of ‘Vande Mataram!’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ conveyed a great deal about the character of the movement. As one journalist said, ‘Never in India’s history, not even during the freedom movement or war-time, has such aggressively patriotic fervour been unleashed… Democratic plurality, ideological diversity and argumentativeness were integral to our freedom movement… So here is the quibble. Once you produce the national flag, and Bharat Mata, all arguments cease… A democratic movement has to give space for disagreement, argue with those who have a different point of view, not wave the national flag and shut them up.’²³

All these characteristics – blindly following a leader, crushing dissent, and ultra-nationalism – are characteristics of fascism. Nothing could be more different from mass organisations of the labouring poor, with their openness to often heated argument and debate.²⁴

Some conclusions

Put together, these characteristics of the goal of the campaign, its leadership, and its mass following suggest that IAC, if it can be called a mass movement at all, is a populist movement which is similar in many ways to the völkisch (populist) movements that fed into the rise of Nazism. Norwegian right-wing mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had advised the Sangh Parivar that instead of attacking Muslims, they should focus their attacks on those whom he bizarrely described as ‘the Indian cultural Marxists’ – namely the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, with its commitment to the protection of minorities – and seek to overthrow it.²⁵ But it is the Sangh Parivar that could give some lessons to Breivik. It knew that the slaughter of Muslims, as in Gujarat in 2002, could gain votes for it; that this may be changing, hence their switch-over to carrying out terrorist attacks that are blamed on Muslims; and that a massacre of, say, young members of the Congress Party (analogous to the massacre carried out by Breivik) would simply backfire against it. Instead, its assault on the UPA is far more subtle, cashing in on the public revulsion that has built up over issues like rampant inflation and corruption. In the past, campaigns against corruption by Jaiprakash Narayan and V.P.Singh have been used by the Sangh Parivar to boost its popularity and bring it to power, and it is entirely possible that the Anna Hazare campaign could have the same result.

Whether regime change will result depends to a great extent on the reaction of the UPA government. Harping on about the supremacy of parliament in order to discredit popular protest is simply not convincing, because the legitimacy of parliament depends on the degree to which it upholds the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Why would the Constitution guarantee rights like freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly if democracy meant only the right to vote every five years? Obviously, these are also means by which citizens achieve some measure of control over their own lives, as well as communicate what they want from their representatives. If the UPA had taken more trouble to listen, rather than ignoring protests or all too often crushing them, it would not be facing a crisis.

It is not too late to start listening, beginning with the issue of corruption in the narrow sense. Some action against it has been taken, but belatedly and not enough. The best features of all the Lokpal proposals should be brought together and a strong set of laws enacted and implemented. If the government demonstrates that it is serious about taking action – and not just against its enemies – some of the damage done in the last six months could be reversed.

However, it is far more important to tackle the underlying disease that results in corruption: untrammelled power and impunity. For example, Anna’s fast unintentionally drew attention to Irom Sharmila’s decade-long fast against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Every time the repeal or even amendment of this law is mooted, Army chiefs (who seem to believe that the army cannot do its work without raping, torturing and killing innocents) objects. Yet this law is patently unconstitutional, since it violates the right to equal protection of the law (which is denied to the victims) and to equality before the law (since the perpetrators are effectively above the law). Armed insurgency is admittedly a serious problem, but impunity for state security forces only makes it worse by alienating civilians. AFSPA and other laws that allow security force personnel to commit crimes with impunity need to be repealed or radically amended if the most blatant and corrupt abuse of power is to be curbed.

There are other issues on which the UPA needs to listen to protesters rather than using its majority in parliament to ram through policies that are not only unpopular but also violate fundamental rights. The programme to provide biometric identity numbers to all residents and the nuclear power programme come to mind. The former is being pushed through without a proper debate and in the face of powerful arguments against it. And with wind and solar energy already cheaper than nuclear power and rapidly getting cheaper, the argument for nuclear power, which is hazardous, expensive, and will leave a deadly legacy of nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years, is extremely questionable. These policies reek of corruption, because they benefit a tiny elite while the rest of the population pays the price, either as taxpayers or because their human rights are violated. Unless they are put on hold while an informed, transparent public debate on their pros and cons takes place, the UPA is likely to suffer in the next elections.
More generally, the disease of untrammelled power, of which corruption is merely a symptom, needs to be tackled. If bureaucrats have the power to formulate or interpret legislation in a manner that deprives people of their rights or entitlements, then it is their power that must be curbed, not just the bribes they take from desperate people who have no other way of obtaining those rights or entitlements. If police have the power to torture innocents and threaten to kill them unless they confess to crimes they have not committed, then it is their power that must be curbed, not just the fact that they routinely use it to extort bribes. Responding to social movements by enacting legislation and carrying out measures that empower ordinary working people would be one way of tackling corruption at its roots; a massive increase in transparency, which is already mandated by the RTI Act, would be another.

The Left – both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary – also has an important role to play. Most sections of the Left in India have little or no understanding of fascism; they do not seem to know, for example, that fascism is a mass movement before it seizes power. These sections are so intent on training their guns on the centre that they are often oblivious of the fact that they are doing it in a manner that strengthens the extreme Right. They have yet to develop the political skill of being critical of the government when it violates human rights or colludes in corruption, without providing support to Right-wing forces engaged in subverting democracy.

Postscript

If the IAC and the Sangh Parivar won the first round of this struggle, the second round was won by the legal experts, Left intellectuals and social justice activists who stayed out of the campaign and criticised both the government’s Lokpal Bill and the JLB. The third round has now been launched by Team Anna. In their press conference on September 11, there was no mention of Modi’s attempt to appoint a Lokayukta in Gujarat in violation of the core principles of the JLB, no mention of the murder of RTI activist Shehla Masood in Bharatiya-Janata-Party-ruled Madhya Pradesh; but Anna did promise to campaign in forthcoming elections against candidates who oppose the JLB.²⁶ In a subsequent interview, he said that he would not be campaigning for any party, and suggested that Advani should ensure that all BJP Chief Ministers appoint Lokayuktas before starting his yatra. However, given that the BJP has pledged support to the JLB, it has already gained from Anna’s campaign and would undoubtedly gain more in future. It remains to be seen who will win the third round.

1. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘At the risk of heresy: why I am not celebrating with Anna Hazare,’ Kafila, 9 April 2011.
2. Iftikar Gilani, ‘Is RSS running the Anna show?’ Tehelka, 18 August 2011.
3. Mukul Sharma, ‘The making of an authority: Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi,’ Kafila, 14 April 2011.
4. ‘Corrupt MPs should be hanged till death: Anna Hazare,’ News X.
5. ‘Mallika Sarabai’s letter of warning to Anna Hazare,’ NDTV, 14 April 2011.
6. Bhanwar Megwanshi, ‘India: The communal character of Anna Hazare’s movement,’ South Asia Citizens Web, 5 September 2011.
7. ‘Advani plans Rath Yatra against corruption,’ Zeenews, 8 September 2011.
8. ‘Why did Modi prefer Justice (retd) J R Vora for Lokayukta post?’ TwoCircles.net, 5 September 2011.
9. Bhanwar Megwanshi, ‘This is why Team Anna makes me nervous,’ Tehelka, 1 September 2011.
10. ‘Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde withdraws resignation,’ NDTV, 4 July 2010.
11. Imran Khan, ‘The Art of Living Illegally’, Tehelka, 10 September 2011.
12. ‘Novartis and Bayer appeals to be heard by the Supreme Court in the next 30 days’, Spicy IP, 5 July 2010.
13. Reghu Balakrishnan, ‘Novartis changes tack in patent law challenge’, DNA, 5 March 2007.
14. ‘Nelson Fernandes vs Jindal Aluminium Limited’, Human Rights Law Network.
15. ‘Hazare’s Lokpal Campaign cost over Rs 50 Lakh, Jindal Aluminium contributed 20 Lakh.’
16. Anil Dharkar, ‘The Topiwala Camera,’ Outlook India, 5 September 2011.
17. ‘NTUI statement on the fight against corruption’, 24 August 2011.
18. ‘Collective and concurrent Lokpal anti-corruption and grievance redressal measures.’
19. ‘Team Anna seeks referendum on Lokpal Bill’, CNN-IBN, 8 June 2011.
20. Seema Chishti, ‘Why the Ramlila surge worries minorities and those on margins,’ Jantantra, 14 September 2011.
21. Jay Mazoomdaar, ‘Everybody loves a good protest’, OPEN Magazine, 14 September 2011.
22. A.Selvaraj, ‘Student drowns after campus gang chases him into river’, Times of India, 31 August 2011.
23. Shekhar Gupta, ‘Annationalism’, Indian Express, 3 September 2011.
24. Anurag Modi, ‘Metro-Middle class, NGO and media: Trio at the crossroads’, Countercurrents, 22 August 2011.
25. ‘Norwegian mass killer Breivik’s manifesto hails Hindutva’, sify news,26 July 2011.
26. ‘Hazare asks people not to elect MPs who oppose Jan Lokpal Bill’, IBNLive, 11 September 2011.

That memoir was titled Fugitive Days and was written by former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.  It would become the fodder for a fight by the fascist right to put us all under their boot.  It was a fight that would be joined by cowering liberals and Democrats across the country.  The targets were the gains made by blacks, Latinos, women, gays and others during the 1960s.  It was the anti-imperialist understanding brought about by years of opposing the US war on Vietnam.  In his memoir, Bill Ayers did not express the proper type of regret.  Indeed, instead of regretting the actions of the Weather Underground and other militants in the antiwar movement of the Sixties, Ayers regretted that these folks did not do more to stop the US aggression in southeast Asia.

Very few New Yorkers in Manhattan had a chance to read the New York Times review of that book that day.  Most may have been on their second cup of coffee when the planes begin flying into the Towers.  If they were reading anything, it was a newspaper front page, their morning emails or a sports section.  I was getting ready to go back to Vermont after spending a couple days and nights with my friend A. My secondary (and somewhat ironic) reason for visiting Manhattan had been to speak about the history and meaning of political violence as practiced by those opposed to the state.  After kissing A. goodbye before she caught the bus for her job near Canal Street, I packed my bag, left her a note and headed out the door of her apartment building.  She lived between 9th and 10th Avenue.  As I approached the corner of 9th Ave., I noticed a rather large crowd of people looking south.  Naturally, my head turned that way, too.  There was a plane stuck in the tower and smoke was billowing forth.

While my mind attempted to assimilate what I was seeing, another plane crashed into the other tower.  An African-American guy that always hung out this corner listening to his boom box and asking for change said it all: “Holy shit!”  The crowd concurred.  I figured that I would not be leaving Manhattan that day.  I returned to A’s apartment and called the airlines.  All flights canceled.  I returned to the corner just in time to see the first tower collapse.

I walked east toward a Radio Shack store.  My plan was to buy a small transistor radio and walk south listening to the news as I walked.  Every single bar and restaurant along the street had set their television either on the sidewalk or in the front window and were broadcasting the unfolding events.  People walked by curious, shocked and scared.  I went into the second bar and ordered a beer.  I needed time to think about this.  The sound of sirens was now everywhere.  School buses filled with soldiers and cops were parking on 23rd Street, their passengers emptying out, receiving orders from their commanders and assuming various positions around the city.  While I waited for the beer, the second tower collapsed on the television and several blocks south from where I was.

A man dressed in several layers of clothing stood in the doorway and repeated that it was not the end of the world.  The Lord, he said, was giving us another chance to get along.  The bartender said fuck getting along, he wanted revenge.  I agreed with the guy in the doorway but said nothing.  I asked the bartender for some food and he called back into the kitchen.  Minutes later, he delivered a meatball sub and another beer.  The fellow in the doorway had moved on to the next open door.  Nobody bothered him and nobody ignored him.  New Yorkers were willing to listen to anyone who might explain what was happening in their city.

The sirens were louder and continuous.  People from the scene of the destruction were beginning to appear in the Chelsea neighborhood having made their way up from southern Manhattan.  None of these folks were saying much and some were visibly distraught.  I couldn’t help thinking that this was what the US military had done to to other peoples multiple times just in my lifetime.  Of course, I kept that thought to myself, knowing that expressing it was tantamount to asking for a beating.  After my second beer I decided to see if I could get into the Port Authority terminal.  Maybe I could get a bus out of here by tomorrow.  As I walked north, various people walked by.  Many were going about their business, but everyone with sight was keeping an eye on the activity south of them.

War was on the horizon.  Someone would pay for this mess, even if they weren’t responsible.  Bill Ayers and others willing to express their opinions against US imperialism would end up being among them, although they might not see it that way.  I finally ran into A. in Washington Square Park.  We hugged each other with visible relief and went to buy a beer or two.  After wards, we sat in the park listening, talking, watching, and smelling the chemical toxins released by the burning buildings.  Eventually, a peace circle was formed and people sang a couple songs.  Some frat boys threw epithets and rocks at the circle, demanding an immediate attack on someone, somewhere.  Meanwhile, anybody who looked like they hailed from the Middle East or Central Asia made themselves scarce.

By the time I was able to leave Manhattan two days later, the US government was rounding up men from those areas of the world and locking them up.  I had to show my ID three times before I boarded the train back to Vermont.  I had never shown it once in all of my previous train trips.  The police and military presence in Penn Station and on train platforms along the route reminded me of being in West Germany in 1972 during the first round of urban warfare by the Red Army Fraktion.

The roundups continued and an omnibus law that had obviously been sitting somewhere in the national security state’s bureau was passed almost unanimously.  That law is known as the PATRIOT Act and did more to restrict human and civil rights in the United States than any other law passed in the previous fifty years.  We have grown used to its restrictions, just like we have grown used to wars that never end.  To pretend that wars of aggression and false security prevents political attacks on a system designed to dominate the world is more than folly.  It is suicidal.

Despite opposition from the imperialist countries led by the US, the 2001 WCAR became a flashpoint for focusing international attention on two issues: reparations for slavery and the liberation of Palestine. It involved a convergence of several events: the official meeting of member states that adopted the DDPA; the NGO Forum that approved a substantially stronger document (the WCAR NGO Forum Declaration); a two-day general strike led by COSATU against the privatization of social services in South Africa/Azania; and daily protest marches outside the conference venue regarding land reform, Palestine, and reparations. The government meeting was marked by a walkout of the US, Canadian, and Israeli delegations.

A 2009 review conference took place in Geneva, Switzerland following the 2001 WCAR and reaffirmed the DDPA. The US, Canada, Israel, and seven other rich countries boycotted this meeting as well.

Now, ten years after the Durban conference, delegates representing the member states of the UN will discuss the DDPA again – this time in Midtown Manhattan. The Obama administration, along with the governments of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands, have already announced plans to boycott the gathering. Combined with this boycott, the lackeys and mouthpieces of the US ruling class are already working to derail the conference with false charges of anti-Semitism and jingoistic references to the 9/11 attacks (see for example the 6/3 New York Daily News editorial “President Obama must organize an international boycott of obscene, anti-Semitic Durban III confab” which contains blatant falsehoods about the content of the DDPA).

Why Is the US Empire So Afraid?

The Obama administration’s decision to boycott the September 2011 conference in NYC was announced in a June letter from Joseph E. Macmanus, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, addressed to some members of Congress. The letter claimed that the US was boycotting, because the Durban and follow-up conferences have “included ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism.”

Two years ago, the Obama administration released a more detailed press statement regarding its decision to boycott the 2009 review conference in Geneva. Titled “U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and Participation in the UN Human Rights Council,” the statement opposed the reaffirmation of the DDPA and outlined the conditions for a document that would be tolerable to the US:

It must not single out any one country or conflict, nor embrace the troubling concept of “defamation of religion.” The U.S. also believes an acceptable document should not go further than the DDPA on the issue of reparations for slavery.

The Obama administration’s reasons for boycotting the September 2011 conference in NYC and the 2009 review conference in Geneva are pretenses for shutting down criticism of Israel. Out of 341 paragraphs, the DDPA contains four paragraphs on Palestine, hardly any “singling out” of the Zionist entity. To protect its attack dog in the Middle East, the US is once again resorting to the usual tactic of equating criticisms of Israeli settler-colonialism with anti-Semitism.

The Obama administration’s non-participation is not surprising or exceptional. It exposes the fact that this administration continues to carry out the strategic interests of the US ruling class in maintaining white supremacist national oppression inside the Empire and in dominating the people of the world.

The Bush administration deliberately sent a low-level delegation to the 2001 WCAR, which did not include secretary of state Colin Powell, and then recalled it in the middle of the conference. During the Carter and Reagan administrations respectively, the US boycotted the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in Geneva, where UN member states condemned apartheid in South Africa/Azania as a crime against humanity and denounced Israel’s collaborative relationship with the apartheid regime.

Why is the US Empire so afraid of participating in UN-sponsored conferences on racism and racial discrimination? While the one-country-one-vote forum of the UN General Assembly is certainly more difficult to control than the UN Security Council or an exclusive gathering of the imperialist countries, most of the countries in the General Assembly are neocolonial states, run by local elites that play varying roles in administering imperialist relations. Thus, why does the US have such a record of non-participation?

First, there exist real contradictions in foreign policy between the US ruling class and certain dependent countries, even while the latter do not break fundamentally with the imperialist system and are not reliable allies of the peoples’ movements. Second, each of these UN-sponsored gatherings is a forum for shaping the views of people around the world, where peoples’ movements have the opportunity to influence international public opinion through militant street mobilizations outside conference venues.

Both of these factors contribute to the possibility of embarrassment and isolation at any UN function for the US ruling class, which sits at the head of a country with racism in its DNA. To paraphrase Mao, here is one arena where it is not the people who fear US imperialism, but it is US imperialism that fears the people of the world.

A Hard Look at the Text of the DDPA

The DDPA is not legally binding or enforceable under international law. It derives its authority from moral recognition and the commitment of UN member states to implement its provisions. As such, the struggle over the DDPA’s language is primarily an ideological struggle over how to understand history and our present conditions. Viewed in this way, it is a compromised text. The DDPA contains a few provisions that could be advances in the fight against racism if seized by the peoples’ movements, but embodies a capitulation to the imperialist countries in some other important ways.

The most important advance made in the text is the acknowledgement in Paragraph 13 that “slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade.” The term “crime against humanity” carries weight under international law and the recognition of slavery as such may have given a boost to reparations litigation. Yet, at the same time, the DDPA does not contain any language advocating reparations for slavery. It only expresses profound “regret” for slavery and states in Paragraph 100 that “some States have taken the initiative to apologize and have paid reparation, where appropriate, for grave and massive violations committed.” Beyond that, there are only general provisions discussing the right of all victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance to seek “just and adequate reparation.” Furthermore, the DDPA fails to similarly characterize colonialism as a “crime against humanity.” There is much further to push.

The four paragraphs discussing Palestine in the DDPA are even more timid. Paragraph 65 discussing the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties provides no indication that it is addressing Palestinian refugees in particular. This should be contrasted with the declaration and programme of action adopted at the 1978 World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination which referred explicitly to the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe” – the name given to the 1948 mass expulsion): “the cruel tragedy which befell the Palestinian people 30 years ago and which the[y] continue to endure today – manifested in their being prevented from exercising their right to self-determination on the soil of their homeland, in the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the prevention of their return to their homes, and the establishment therein of settlers from abroad.”

The leading provision Paragraph 63 simultaneously recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state alongside “the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel.” The previous declarations and programmes of action adopted at the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism did not condition the Palestinian right to self-determination on Israel’s security. In that respect, the DDPA is a step backward. Further, note that the text discusses the right of States to “security,” not people or populations, in effect codifying the existing states in the region. This is a predictable gesture in a document adopted by the UN member states, yet ironic in light of the North African and Arab democratic revolts. Finally, of course, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which correctly identified Zionism as a form of racism and remained in place from 1975 to 1991, continues to set the bar in the struggle within the UN over the proper characterization of Israeli settler-colonialism and its ideology.

Build the People’s Movements; Isolate the US Imperialists

As September 22 approaches, working and oppressed people in the US Empire can draw lessons from past historic campaigns to bring the crimes of the US ruling classes before the UN. In 1951, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson presented a petition to UN officials titled “We Charge Genocide” condemning the oppression of Black people in the US, reflected in the widespread practice of lynching. Malcolm X would again raise the call during the 1960s for Black people to use the UN as a forum to expose their oppression in the US. In 1970, the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Student Union organized a march of 10,000 people to the UN demanding independence for Puerto Rico, the release of political prisoners, and an end to police violence. In 1979, the National Black Human Rights Coalition organized a 5,000-strong march to the UN, with the slogans “Black People Charge Genocide” and “Human Rights is the Right to Self-Determination.” There should be a renewed focus today on the UN as an important site of struggle for working and oppressed people in the US.

COSATU’s two-day general strike against neoliberal policies on the eve of the 2001 WCAR in Durban provides a powerful example of how peoples’ movements can utilize such international gatherings to their advantage. The September 22 meeting is taking place not only in the country that is the home base of the Empire, but in the city that is the heart of US finance capital. It is crucial for all working and oppressed people to mobilize for the Durban + 10 Coalition activities from September 18 through 22, especially any protest marches that are planned.

The movement for reparations in the US can broaden and deepen its forces by highlighting the survivals of slavery in the foundations of US society today and the failure of Reconstruction to fully uproot them. Mass incarceration. Racist policing. Schools that operate like jails. Disproportionate unemployment. Enduring Black poverty throughout the country and in the Black Belt south.

In the weeks leading up to the conference and during the days of scheduled activity, we must make clear that reparations for slavery, as well as one hundred years of semi-slave sharecropping and national oppression that continues to this day, is a just demand that exposes the true character of the US Empire. It is a demand that is central to the liberation of the Black nation and the right of Black people to self-determination everywhere. It is a demand for the global redistribution of wealth stolen by the Empire. Without it, socialism is impossible.

We’re told that the trouble began last Saturday night 6th August. According to a BBC report, about 300 people gathered outside a police station that night and “demanded justice”. Their protest quickly spiralled out of control.

The justice the crowd were demanding followed the killing by police of a young black man, Mark Duggan. Details of the killing are sketchy, to say the least; but according to the first report issued by the “Independent” Police Complaints Commission there is no evidence to suggest that Mr Duggan shot at the police. However, a starter’s pistol that had been converted to fire live rounds was supposedly discovered near his body.

Although it seems that Mr Duggan had been involved with local gangs, his family and friends strongly refute the suggestion that he is likely to have become involved in a shoot-out with armed police; and according to the Guardian, although he had previously been held on remand, he had never before been convicted of any crime. The inquest into the shooting is scheduled for December; but if numerous previous inquests into the actions of the police are anything to go by (Stephen Lawrence, Jean Charles De Menezes, Bloody Sunday, Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, for example), anyone expecting justice would be well advised not to hold their breath.

The media coverage of the current urban unrest is unsurprisingly one-sided. Our TV screens have shown hours of coverage of those whose property has been damaged, stolen or destroyed. Many of these people are understandably angry and scared. Many others have been shrill in their demands for tougher policing, and there have been calls to use the army. All of our trusted leaders are unsurprisingly unanimous in their condemnation of the rioters, and their support of the police. We’ve heard stiff-lipped politicians and steely-eyed chief constables angrily asserting there cannot be any possible justification for the violence, and firmly promising the full retribution of the law. In the media’s ceaseless desire to provide “balanced” reporting, we’ve even seen numerous young people, many of whom are black, stridently condemning the trouble – although one or two have alluded to police oppression. We’ve seen dozens of angst-ridden commentators with puzzled frowns asking “why do they do it?” (which reminded me of George W Bush famously asking “why do they hate us?” in his apparent bewilderment at the Moslem world’s dissatisfaction with the outrages perpetrated against it by Bush’s government).

I don’t presume to speak for a single rioter. No doubt there are some who are opportunist small-time criminals. However, if one tries to take a reasonably objective view of today’s political landscape in Britain, it’s pretty difficult not to believe that most of the responsibility for the rioting lies in exactly the same place as with all civil unrest of this kind since the beginning of “civilisation”: our trusted leaders.

1. Over the last thirty-odd years our trusted leaders have killed-off British manufacturing – the primary source of the nation’s wealth. They have also colluded with international banksters, trans-national corporations and foreign governments to sell-off Britain’s publicly owned infrastructure: energy and water supplies, communications and transport. Then they sold off essential public services such as health and education. They indebted the nation’s future generation to the tune of hundreds of billions (possibly trillions) of pounds with their nefarious Private Finance Initiatives. Throughout all this a very tiny handful of people have become unbelievably wealthy, whilst the vast majority of Britons have seen their wages decline, or watch their jobs disappear altogether. When they can find employment (which is not an easy thing to do) the vast majority of young Britons must now work longer hours for less money and in worse conditions than their parents did. They cannot hope to retire at the same age as their grandparents did, and they cannot hope to receive as good a pension as their grandparents had.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

2. Britain looks more and more like a police state than it has done since the Civil War. The police who, until not very long ago took pride in walking the streets carrying nothing more dangerous than a short truncheon and a pair of handcuffs – even when the nation was at war, now strut around in suits of armour with a small arsenal of various lethal weapons at their fingertips. They can, and do, imprison people without charge for up to two weeks. It’s impossible for people to use an airport without being subjected to rigorous, intrusive, and perfectly ridiculous, “security” checks (a direct consequence of our trusted leaders’ repulsive foreign policies); and we routinely send our young people off to distant countries dressed up as soldiers of one kind or another where they are ordered to commit acts which, if any form of real international justice existed, would undoubtedly be condemned as war crimes.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

3. Then, of course there is the killing of Mr Duggan itself – the supposed trigger of the current unrest. Directly pertinent to the police state which Britain has become, the killing of this young man is indicative of the total impunity with which the police believe they can act. Violent police raids are a routine daily occurrence in underprivileged neighbourhoods throughout the UK. The raids are nearly always destructive, and terrifying, and often prove utterly fruitless. And numerous completely innocent people have been killed or wounded by the police, with the subsequent “inquiries” routinely exonerating the perpetrators.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

Whilst it’s most probable that none of these factors are consciously passing through the mind of some young person as he loots a store or sets fire to it, it’s equally probable that at least one of these reasons explain the daily living conditions of that young person. So far we haven’t seen a lot of rioting in the streets of South Kensington or Chelsea say, or any of the leafy suburbs or gated communities where the sons and daughters of politicians, banksters, corporate executives, lawyers and company accountants while away their comfortable lives. No doubt they’re too busy studying to become the next generation of trusted leaders.

However, there might be cause for some young people to feel a little discontent with that situation.

As the date approaches I can’t help but contemplate what all of this should mean to the original people of Louisiana and to my tribe, the Houma, specifically. What should our view be of American statehood? What can we learn from the history behind this event and how is that history relevant to us today?

Trade, Commerce, and Profit

At the end of the eighteenth century the enfant American empire set itself on a path that would come to be articulated as Manifest Destiny. As it sought to expand its economic base and political influence the newly United States quickly set their sights on the economic jewel of the continent, New Orleans.

The geographical location of the “Isle of Orleans” gave New Orleans control of the commerce of the lower Mississippi River and access to the vast markets of the Caribbean.

In 1795 the United States and Spain (who had controlled Louisiana since 1763) signed the Pinckney Treaty that gave the American merchants the “right of deposit” in the city, allowing them to store their goods for export. The treaty also gave them the right to navigate the Mississippi. With these rights in place the fledgling American economy expanded and the wealthy business class began to consolidate its base.

For almost three years the merchant class saw their fortunes rise to new heights till 1798 when new Spanish officials suddenly slammed the door by revoking the Pinckney Treaty. Though Spain would restore the treaty in 1801 the U.S. would not soon forget the economic price paid for its inability to control New Orleans and the trade that flowed through its port.

Thomas Jefferson would see an opportunity when he learned that Spain had transferred Louisiana back to France with the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1801. He quickly sent a representative to Paris to begin negotiations with Napoleon’s government for the purchase of New Orleans. To the surprise of many, after months of talks, Napoleon offered to sell not just New Orleans but rather the entire Louisiana Territory.

The process would come to a close on April 30th, 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase Agreement was signed in Paris. For fifteen million dollars the United States acquired over eight hundred thousand square miles, effectively doubling the physical size of the American empire.

For the population of Louisiana the visible reality came in December when the French tri-color was lowered for the last time in the Place de Arms and in its place was raised the stars and stripes.

American Indians?

The original colonial claim on Louisiana was made by France in 1682 when Rene-Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle, standing on the banks of the Mississippi near its mouth, expressed ownership in the name of his king. When the United States wrote a fifteen million dollar check for the same piece of real estate one hundred and twenty-one years later there would be one common denominator between the two events; nowhere in the process were the people of the land, the indigenous people of Louisiana consulted or their opinions or concerns considered.

For the Houma the early territorial, period brought a new colonial reality and new challenges. In 1806 and 1811 Houma chiefs met with W.C.C. Claiborne, the U.S. Territorial governor. Gifts and pleasantries were exchanged but the Americans would make no guaranties of Houma sovereignty or land rights.

Attempting to navigate the new colonial system the Houma sought to secure their survival through a variety of efforts. While Houma warriors were fighting with the privateer Jean Lafitte to defend New Orleans against a British invasion force in 1815 the tribe was also fighting its way through the American territorial bureaucracy.

Houma leaders understood that the Louisiana Purchase Agreement obligated the United States to respect the relationship between the tribe and the colonial governments that preceded the Americans. So in hopes of securing the land base that had been respected by both the French and Spanish the Houma filed a claim for twelve sections of land adjacent to the village at Pointe Ouiski (located near the modern city of Houma, Louisiana). The response of the federal land office was a refusal to recognize the tribe’s rights to the land. There would be no federal protection of those rights, a status of non-recognition that continues to the present day.

Louisiana statehood did little or nothing to secure the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Louisiana; for the Houma those ghost of colonialism would to haunt the present and the future.

The Cost of Colonialism

In 2005 the Houma community was impacted by two major hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. Over half of the tribes 17000 citizens were affected by one or both of the storms. As the tribal government struggled, without direct federal assistance, to aide their people in recovery one question was asked of us over and over again by people unfamiliar with the tribe and its history.

“Why do your people live in communities so at risk from the forces of nature?”

The answer is both simple and complex; the simple answer is that the effects of coastal erosion have left the Houma communities along the south Louisiana coast at risk from any storm that enters the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana, as a whole, has lost nearly 2000 square miles of coast since 1930 and a large part of that has come from the lands of the Houma.

The complex answer goes to the root causes of this dilemma and examines the motivating forces that continue to perpetuate the problem. Much of this has been debated for years and the blame has been categorized and fractionalized but for the Houma the answer is quite clear. Our homeland has been subjected to a century of unchecked economic development. The pursuit of profit that motivated the American traders at the end of the eighteenth century energized itself with twentieth century technology and began to devour the resources of the land.

Neo-colonialism is a twentieth century term used to describe the relationship of former colonial powers to their former colonies. The term examines how resource colonies continue to be subjected to imperial aggression and control even after their declared independence. The term has great resonance here in the fast disappearing marshlands of coastal Louisiana.

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world.

– Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965

The early years of statehood saw the Houma forced out of their village at Pointe Ouiski by the expanding settlement that would become the town of Houma in 1834. Ironically the settlers would name the town after the band of Indians living at Pointe Ouiski while they were in the process of forcing them to surrender their land.

The Houma moved south to their seasonal villages in the lower bayous and found a degree of security in the swamps and marshlands along the coast. In relative isolation the tribal population rebounded and they grew strong as hunters, trappers and fishermen. The twentieth century would dawn on a Houma tribe occupying settlements from Mauvais Bois in the west to lower Bayou Lafourche in the east, all with a twenty-five mile radius of the central settlement at Point Barre.

With the twentieth century came first the academics (ethnologist, anthropologist, etc.), then Protestant missionaries, followed by land speculators, and finally the oil companies. The economic exploitation that would come to be defined as neo-colonialism was as much at home in south Louisiana as it was in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East. The second century of statehood would continue to see coastal Louisiana more closely resemble the neo-colonial resource colony rather than an equal member of the United States.

This exploitation would quickly establish the earliest causes of coastal erosion. Seeking to enhance commerce and protect rich plantation lands along the lower reaches of Bayou Lafourche it was dammed at its source in 1904. This effectively shut off the natural land-building flow of sediment laden fresh water that had replenished the swamps and marshlands for centuries.

By the 1930s the exploration of oil had begun and the industry began to dig a massive network of canals into the south Louisiana coast to facilitate access for their drilling equipment.

The effect was predictable; the loss of fresh water and sediment along with the introduction of marsh-killing salt water which poured in from the Gulf through the access canals began to eat away at the fragile estuaries. Added to this toxic combination was the industry pulling billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas from beneath those same estuaries. This caused a level of subsidence that scientist have only recently began to acknowledge. For the Houma the result is the land beneath our feet is literally washing away as the days go by.

We’ve lived in our coastal settlements for generations; most of our people still make their living as commercial fishermen. When the land speculators and oil drillers came to our lands they found an indigenous population that was illiterate in English and uneducated in the ways of American society. Indeed local governments had made a concerted effort to maintain that imbalance by refusing to allow Indian children to attend public school in the parishes of LaFourche and Terrebonne (home to the majority of the Houma people). A lawsuit and the Civil Rights movement finally opened the door to public education for the tribe but it was not until 1964 that the first Houma student breached those barriers.

College educated leaders were generations away; with few rights and little resources the effects of oil fueled neo-colonialism were beyond the ability of the tribe to stop. It continues into the present and is easily seen if anyone cares to look.

Coastal Louisiana provides nearly thirty percent of U.S. energy production and transports nearly forty percent with its network of pipelines, transfer stations and refineries. A large portion of this infrastructure sits atop the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, the estuarine system between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River basins that has been the homeland of the Houma for centuries.

The price paid for this resource extraction can be easily calculated with the nearly 500 square miles of land lost in this estuary alone in the last eighty years, an area of land comparable to the size of New York City.

With the loss of land comes increased vulnerability to the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes. Healthy marshlands that had once protected Houma settlements from storm surges are now gone and the people now exist on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. Storm centers that pass a hundred miles away can still bring catastrophic flooding. Since 2005 the Houma have been impacted by four major storms.

This situation also leaves portions of the oil industry exposed as well. In 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged pipelines and platforms and caused numerous spills totaling millions of gallons of oil. The industry claims the loss, collects their profits and rarely pays any compensation to the people of the land.

This would be amply illustrated on April 20th, 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig would explode off the Louisiana coast initiating the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

BPs World

For those who take the time to look and examine carefully the words and actions of the U.S. Government and the oil industry during the heated days of the summer of 2010 the reality of “colonial Louisiana” in the 21st century is easily seen and understood.

Louisiana politicians were in quite a dilemma in those days. With the effects of the BP spill multiplying by the minute and the population of Gulf Coast becoming more desperate, state and local leaders were caught in between opposing camps. They had to face up to the real needs of their constituency without alienating the largest source of campaign funding available to them.

If you lived outside of the region you may have had some difficulty understanding the scope of their problem. Most people in this country have a basic understanding of an elected official’s responsibility to those whom they are tasked with representing. What is hidden from sight is the other side of the equation, the level of influence and control that big oil exerts on the Louisiana political structure. If we lived in an open and honest society then Louisiana politicians would be forced to decorate their clothing to the level of their corporate sponsorship, with some of them looking a lot like NASCAR drivers.

In the real world they go out of the way to disguise their financial motivators which, in turn, give us some interesting mental exercises and verbal acrobatics. Watching politicians who both opposed and defended big oil simultaneously was quite a show.

Consider the rhetoric of Michel Claudet, President of Terrebonne Parish. As the tentacles of oil slowly crept into the bayous below Houma threatening the fishing grounds and settlements of the Houma People his major focus seemed to be on the economic impact of the drilling ban proposed by the Obama administration. According to Claudet commercial fishing accounted for only 20 % of the parish economy while oil and gas brought in 60%. In the press he was adamant about the economic benefits brought to the parish by big oil.

This of course was an interesting point of view expressed by an administration that filed suit against 29 oil companies in August of 2009. The suit alleged that the companies failed to report the ownership of tens of millions of dollars of property resulting in a loss of tax revenue to the parish. The parish is seeking the payment of delinquent taxes as well as penalties and interest accrued.

The parish had also filed suit against BP for projected damages from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Any awards from the suit were slated to be split between the State Conservation Fund and the Terrebonne District Attorney’s Office.

Despite the expressed appreciation of the oil economy there seemed to exist a great degree of mistrust and animosity between the industry and local government.

On the state level we were subjected to an unending string of photo ops and press conferences by Governor Bobby Jindal. He had been from Venice to Grand Isle and back extolling his own ability to understand the severity of the problem and the Obama administrations ineptitude. From helping to deploy oil boom to operating an oil suction truck he endeavored to prove he was a “hands-on” guy. Walking that same political tight rope his sound bites were full of condemnation for democratic opponents and light on real criticisms of big oil. Indeed most of his venom was reserved for the proposed ban on offshore drilling.

On the federal level we witnessed an American administration providing an amazing amount of cover to a “foreign” company. To the extent that Homeland security personnel were physically restricting press access to contaminated area not in the interest of U.S. security but because BP wanted to protect its public relations front.

As to the drilling moratorium, the truth of the matter was there was some substance to all of their economic arguments concerning the ban. It had a detrimental effect on employment in the local oil industry but the story is not as simple as it was portrayed.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimates that nearly 50,000 people are directly or indirectly employed by the offshore drilling industry on the Gulf Coast. U.S. Government figures were estimating that as many as 150,000 people nation-wide could be effected in some form by the proposed moratorium on offshore drilling.

The other side of the argument was that the federal government wanted a six month moratorium to determine if the industry was in compliance with current safety regulations in hopes of preventing another Deepwater Horizon-type accident.

Beneath the surface of this supposed conflict between government and industry lies the reality of neo-colonialism in the heart of Houma Indian territory for almost a century.

Like all poor and indigenous communities dealing with economic exploitation the magic cure for everything is money and jobs. Living amidst a depleted ecosystem we are cautioned to value the employment the oil industry brings. Politicians like Claudet, Jindal and others, both Democrat and Republican extol the economic benefits the state enjoys from big oil.

We must understand that to the neo-colonial politics of big oil we are pawns, a tool in their efforts to control government influence of corporate finance. Every attempt made by government to control the industry is met by the same response; it will cost jobs and raise fuel cost. The moratorium was a perfect example of this principle; though it affected only a fraction of the activity in the Gulf there was disproportionate layoff of personnel and heighten gas prices. This, of course, was not people employed directly by Exxon, BP, Shell, etc. but rather it was primarily support industries and lower paying jobs for the most part. This is not to say that there was no real economic downside to the moratorium but rather that the industry did its best to magnify the affect for political gain and cover its real neo-colonial relationship to coastal Louisiana. So for the families dependent on a job at the fuel dock or in a fabrication yard their financial stability could fail because of an ongoing power struggle between Washington, Wall Street and the Energy Corporation boardrooms.

A year after the spill corporate profits were in the stratosphere and the propaganda machine was telling the world that the oil is gone, a neo-colonial economic happy ending. For the Gulf Coast and the Houma communities the reality is, of course, not so neat and tidy.

The Endgame

For the Houma People this is more than just an academic exercise or a political critique, this is a sober assessment on where we are as a people and what does this century have in store for us.

We have survived three centuries of colonization and we still exist as an indigenous community despite all that we have endured. I have the greatest confidence in the strength and tenacity of Houma People which fuels my hope for the future. But to face that future we have to acknowledge the harsh realities of the present so that we may clearly see the path ahead. We must face the consequences of neo-colonialism and understand what it has done to our homes, our families, our communities, our homeland, our tribe.

After decades of oil exploration and production the 3rd Congressional District (in which all of the major Houma settlement reside in2010) ranked 403rd out of 436 U.S. Congressional districts according to the Human Development Index. The American dream or the colonial reality? It would seem that for all of the billions of dollars extracted from the land there is not much trickling back down to the people of the land.

And as the resources continue to be consumed the land is leaving with them, washing away at an ever increasing rate. A couple of years ago coastal scientist drew a horizontal red line across south Louisiana and proclaimed that everything south of that line was endanger of disappearing in the coming decade if the economic and political will could not be produced to tackle the problem of coastal erosion in the next ten years. This statement drove deep into the heart of the Houma People, every major Houma community is below that red line.

What about the industry at the center of the coastal erosion controversy, has the BP spill and the drilling moratorium it inspired shown a more critical light and highlighted its responsibility to the land and people? If we are to look to the recent past there is little to inspire hope. Less than four percent of the oil and gas permits issued require the companies to perform any mitigation to offset the damages caused by their activities. Between 2005 and 2009 some 4500 permits were applied for and not a single one was declined, indeed over one hundred were issued after the fact. Neo-colonial resource extraction continues unabated.

For the Houma who continue to live in the traditional communities existence becomes more difficult as time goes on. The penalties for coastal erosion are not allocated to the industries that bare most of the responsibilities but rather to the people of the coast who can little afford to pay them.

They come in the form of ever increasing insurance rates, the inability to get financing for a new home or the cost of elevating an existing home all of which continue to rise above the means of a Houma fishing family. Though the Houma have done nothing to cause the ecological devastation that surrounds them and have not profited from it they must continually absorb the cost.

Houma communities are edging towards extinction as businesses leave and local governments transfer resources north, effectively abandoning the Houma families. Between 2000 and 2010 the town of Dulac, which has the largest concentration of Houma people, has lost 40% of its population.

Houma fishermen contend with ever decreasing prices for their catch and ever increasing cost for fuel and supplies. Added to this is the lingering effects of the BP spill and the unknown long term damage the five million barrels of oil released into the Gulf has had and will have on the already fragile coastal estuaries that are the foundation of the Houma life ways.

The parameters of the Houma situation has a closer resemblance to the predicaments faced by the Indigenous Peoples of the Nigerian delta or the Ecuadorean Amazon than to those on the list of tribes seeking federal recognition from the U.S. Government.

The answers for the Houma will be found when they begin to acknowledge this common ground with international indigenous struggles and stop looking for salvation from the potential largess of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

After two centuries of living within the borders of the American state of Louisiana they are still on the outside looking in. The Houma exist today in the same state of federal non-recognition that they were assigned to in the early years of the nineteenth century. They would do well to heed the admonition of the great anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon.

“He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me.”

Rather, one of Sheehi’s primary aims was to challenge the Left, so-called “progressives” and liberals to face an uncomfortable truth, their own Islamophobia. “When people ask me at conferences, ‘What should be done?’ I tell them to stop asking questions about Islam. Just stop. It is racist to ask ‘Why are the Muslims different?’ or ‘I want to understand the Muslims so I am going to read the Qur’an’,” said Sheehi in Beirut.

Indeed, as if people read the Vedas to understand militant Hinduism, the Torah to comprehend the mindset of Jewish colonial settlers in the West Bank or the Bible to make sense of the Tea Party movement. But such seemingly well-meaning questions about Islam by leftists and liberals of all stripes just goes to reinforce the notion of Muslims as the “Other,” set apart in need of “tolerance” and “understanding.”

“Despite the genuine and scholarly research into the topic, the questions must stop being about Islam and democracy, Islam and modernity, Islam and human rights, Islam and women, and so forth,” writes Sheehi. “We must stop searching for answers, or making accusations for that matter, based on the binaries of Islam and the Whatever. We must reach beyond the Jihad vs. McWorld dichotomy.”²

Coming to terms with the widespread prevalence of Islamophobia in the US mainstream and how it has been adopted consciously and unconsciously by the populace, the unsaid fears of Anglo-Saxon America of “brown people empowering themselves”, as Sheehi put it, and the myth of US exceptionalism all plays into the lengthy history of America’s racism, from the days of slavery to the Monroe Doctrine to the current racial profiling. “The US has to look at itself and ask, why are we so racist?” said Sheehi.

He writes that “Islamophobia is the ideological foil that allows the state to control its population, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, as well as institute military and political policies abroad (if not at the US’s own southern border).”³ Sheehi goes on: “Cultural Islamophobia and legislation are two of these mechanisms. The plight of non-American Muslims and Arab defendants is a more severe version of the plight of Muslims and Arabs in America.”⁴

For behind this foil is systemic racism and symbolic violence towards the minority, such as through structural exclusion or marginalization of those that do not embrace hegemonic ideologies.

As Sheehi observes in his work, this was manifest in the number of non-Muslims beaten up, abused and profiled in the wake of 9/11 because they “looked” Arab or Muslim. “In the end, Islamophobia is not about Muslims, for next up is Latinophobia,” said Sheehi.

So-called liberals always look for a scapegoat to justify Islamophobia and cling to the notion that it isn’t “us” perpetuating this divisiveness and ideology, it is someone else, another group, the right wing, the Neo-Conservatives, the Jews, Evangelical Christians and so on. Indeed, some presumed Sheehi would put the blame for Islamophobia squarely on the shoulders of the pro-Israel lobby.

The pro-Israel lobby and Zionist political action groups are of course a factor in shaping the discourse and ideology of Islamophobia, but that gives them too much credit. Islamophobia is more insidious, more widespread than that, and blaming “the Jews” is too easy as well as being off the mark. The same goes for lumping all the blame on the right wing. Sheehi doesn’t want the liberal conscious to be soothed as they are in fact a part of the problem.

“The Neo-Cons, the Republicans and the rampant racists got a raw deal with regard to Islamophobia, because they are a comfortable container of white liberal America to cordon off their own prejudices. Liberals state that they are “not against Muslims but only terrorists,” yet at the same time supporting the renewal of the Patriot Act, supporting the war in Afghanistan and believing Iraq is no longer occupied as the number of troops was reduced,” said Sheehi.⁵

The spirit of Islamophobia

Sheehi argues that Islamophobia was around well before 9/11 and Bush Jr’s administration, but the 2001 attacks proved to be a catalyst for Islamophobia to run wild. “9/11 allowed views that were on the fringe during the 1980s and even the 1990s to be seamlessly inserted into the American mainstream,” writes Sheehi. Pseudo-scholar Daniel Pipes “demonstrates how old racist and Orientalist tropes can be re-invented and inserted into a new political atmosphere with newness and urgency. In effect, the rants of the right create the conditions by which these diatribes then become relevant and lose their air of bigotry, if not lunacy.”⁶

One reason there are 54 pages of footnotes accompanying the 227 page text is that Sheehi, like hounded academic Churchill Ward, who wrote the foreword (the preface is by Mumia Abu Jamal), is to back up research in the face of legal action over opinions on Islamophobia and Islamophobes. Such are the times American academia is living in, superbly illustrated in chapters “Teaching and Activism in the Teeth of Power,” and “Living in a State of Fear.”

It was the post-Cold war era, global financialization and 9/11 that brought Islamophobia truly into the collective consciousness. Sheehi writes, “Ideological Islamophobia arises from the global era. Not only does it arise from the US desire to control global oil resources but also from its cultural Islamophobia and the willingness of the American public to stereotype, target, and violate the rights and humanity of Muslims and Arabs. American culture has evolved from a settler culture to become an imperial culture. Arabs and Muslims are perceived as the latest cultural holdouts that are resistant to its global hegemony, which the US purveys as offering modernity, democracy and capitalist prosperity.”⁴

This is a crucial point and one that many liberals and Leftists frequently overlook. This is not to suggest – and Sheehi doesn’t – that the Left make strategic alliances with, or vocally support, Islamist political groups because they are also resisting globalization and US imperialism. That would be akin to saying that you have to be pro Hamas, Fatah or Hizbullah to support the Palestinian cause and oppose Israel.

As Sheehi observed: “Critics will say that the arguments of this book exonerate those who are involved in truly terrorist action against civilians, whether they live in North America, Europe or the Middle East. They prefer to cast such aspersions rather than understand the historical and political motivations behind desperate and violent acts such as the bombings of 9/11, the public transportation bombings in London and Madrid, or the car bombing of an apartment complex in Riyadh in 2003, which killed not US soldiers but largely expatriate Arab and Asian families and workers.”⁷

That many liberals and leftists fall for Islamophobic ideology is reflective of how many people bought into Samuel Huntington’s racist notion of the “Clash of Civilizations.” Rooted in this Islamophobia is blatant ignorance, a lack of understanding of history and an unwillingness to understand political Islam.

“A critical misunderstanding of political Islam often comes from the inability to differentiate between political Islam’s many strains that materialized as a component of modernity rather than strictly as a reactive gesture to it…The problem comes from the fact that the American commentators have no understanding of the force and meaning of modernity as it impacts the developing, colonized world. A critical understanding of political Islam as a complicated and multifaceted social, historical, economic and political phenomenon would not apologize for political violence but instead, serve to clarify its origins, logic and inspirations,” writes Sheehi.⁸

Islamophobia reinvents itself

“Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden became a vessel, a psychological manifestation that is part of the Islamophobic world paradigm for the US to justify its policies. The whole point of Islamophobia is that the image of Bin Laden is a manifestation of Islamophobic stereotypes that were reproduced and grafted onto every Muslim as US foreign policy needs that,” said Sheehi.

Bin Laden’s assassination in May in this sense is irrelevant to keeping the stereotypes and Islamophobia alive. But the overwhelming jubilance of the American population’s reaction to his demise, and the name of the operation itself – Geronimo – speaks volumes about how deep Islamophobia has penetrated America, how it was symbolized in the burning hatred of one man, as well as the establishment’s ongoing disregard of America’s indigenous culture and people.

The ability of the ideology of Islamophobia to adapt is similar to capitalism’s ability to re-invent itself despite systemic setbacks and how factors change on the ground. This is not surprising as the two are inter-related, Islamophobia used to justify imperialist and capitalist ventures.

The uprisings in the Arab world this year are a case in point, as the revolts discredit the vitriol of Bernard Lewis and Fareed Zakaria when they say things like there is no civil society in the Arab world (both writers come in for substantial criticism in the book).

“The “Arab Spring” discredits the Lewis style stereotypes of the “Arab Street,” of a complacent, dormant, passive mass led by emotion and reliant on the rentier state system. It shows that this is completely false. Yet you hear the other side, of ‘Oh my God, there’s a bunch of Arabs in the streets, what shall we do?’ There is this fear of instability as the dictators were always convenient for providing security. There is a fear of brown people empowering themselves,” said Sheehi.

And when it comes to other portrayals of the Arab uprisings – depending on who the official enemy is, Bahrain no, Libya, Syria etc. yes – it is easy to play into stereotypes, such as the ludicrous story about Muammar Gaddafi ordering a container load of Viagra so his soldiers could rape women. The story was picked up worldwide as a sensationalist example of Gaddafi’s despotism and even cited by the International Criminal Court to indict the Libyan leader despite there being no credible evidence. Indeed, a senior crisis response officer for Amnesty International that spent three months in Libya said last month there was no evidence at all of soldiers using Viagra — indeed, when have soldiers ever needed sexual stimulants to commit rape? “The Viagra story played into the racial stereotype of over-sexualized brown men,” said Sheehi.⁹

Essentially, Sheehi is saying that liberals, leftists etc are not willing to challenge some of their conscious or unconscious racist feelings of not just the US being undermined on the world stage, but that the white man will no longer rule the planet. That President Barrack Obama is not white is not relevant in this regard, argues Sheehi, as he is just a new face, a more acceptable front man of American imperialism than Bush Jr. was (Sheehi’s analysis of Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo in June, 2009, and the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech are especially biting).

“It has never been about whether, say, the Egyptians are capable of ruling themselves or not, it is about if the Egyptians can be managed under the same economic and political system as before,” said Sheehi. “The US would throw the Bahraini royal family under a bus quicker than you could sneeze if the monarchy lost their relevance to the US. If all the Sunnis and Shias suddenly get along there would be no need for the US Fifth Fleet [to be in Bahrain]. That is the point and how the US stays relevant in the Middle East.”

Just as America has actively worked with the Saudis and the region’s monarchies to perpetuate discord between the Sunni and Shia on a macro Islamic level – what some on the Hill off-handedly call the “Sushi war” – Islamophobia creates a further wedge between the left on how to effectively tackle issues like the erosion of civil liberties, women’s rights, classism, and imperialist wars.

The US’s cultural, economic and military hegemony also enables the ideology of Islamophobia to be adopted on a wider level, as witnessed in the rest of the West, India and anywhere Islamophobia can be used as a political tool, and must be challenged as much as in the US.

This was glaring apparent as news broke on July 22 of the attacks in Norway. The immediate suspect in European and American media was Al Qaeda, with journalists scrambling to make a tangible link to “Islamic terrorism” and garner quotes from pundits as to why this was likely. Islamophobes had a field day. As we know it turned out to be a right-wing Norwegian apparently operating solo, but it took time for the discourse to switch away from the bogeymen of our time, particularly in the US.¹⁰

The late Edward Said taught us about Orientalism in literature and the need to de-colonize our minds. Sheehi in his work challenges us to intellectually confront Islamophobia and wake up to its prevalence in the mainstream as well as in “alternative” movements.

1. Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and Director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina.
2. Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Stephen Sheehi, Clarity Press, Atlanta (2011), p 225.
3. P. 222.
4. P. 166.
5. Indicative of this is that in Iraq, while US troop levels have dropped since 2008, private military contractors actually increased by 39 percent, or 3,500 personnel, by the end of 2010 to reach approximately 13,000 personnel, or 18 percent of all contractors, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.
6. P. 140.
7. P. 170.
8. P. 23.
9. “What’s really at stake in Libya,” Pepe Escobar, June 30, 2011.
10. See “Blaming Muslims – Yet Again,” D Parvaz, June 23, 2001.

Shifting to the topic of music for a moment, here are two observations:  First, given the generosity of today’s rock music fans, coupled with the extent to which “cross-over” country music has come to resemble edgy pop or centrist rock, would it be farfetched to expect the Rolling Stones to play at the Grand Ole Opry?

They’ve played everywhere else, why not Nashville?  Think about it.  If the convergence and mongrelization of musical genres continues at its present rate—if the genres continue to spill over and cross-pollinate—we’ll soon see every manner of music all bunched up together in the middle.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  Arguably, the day will come when the polar extremes are staked out by thrash metal on one side, and Alpine yodeling on the other.

How cool would it be to see Mick Jagger standing on the exact same spot where Minnie Pearl, Grandpa Jones and Ferlin Husky once stood?  Ideally, Mick, who is now a 68-year old grandfather himself, would submit good-naturedly to being dressed up in bib overalls, Junior Samples-style, before wowing the audience with his signature rooster strut—the pesky drug rumors and counterculture weirdness instantly forgiven (if not forgotten) by an adoring redneck audience.

And, second, do we agree that, had we been a fly on the wall in the Stones’ dressing room, we would have heard Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood screaming at drummer Charlie Watts, urging the man to dye his goddamn hair?  “What the hell are you thinking, Charlie?  Put some shoe polish on it like the rest of us.”

Watts is now 70 years old.  His hair, unlike that of the other band members—but befitting that of an elderly gentleman—is now snowy white, as white as an egret’s feathers, which, alas, in group photos, is a stark reminder to rock audiences of just how old the Stones are.  Indeed, the group celebrates its 50^th anniversary next year.  When the Stones were formed, in April, 1962, Barack Obama was eight months old.

Back to labor unions.  When middle-aged employees were laid off, the Local tried to supply them not only with leads on where to apply for work, but with a short list of job-placement tips, most of which they’d probably already figured out.  Lose weight, dye your hair, dress “young,” look hip, make no references to old-fashioned stuff (because the personnel manager is likely to be in his or her thirties), and appear energetic and eager to learn.

While there are lots of things people can do to enhance their job interview, there’s no way they can fake their age, so they should forget about trying.  Although the employer can’t come right out and ask how old you are, they will definitely ask you what year you graduated from high school.  Simple arithmetic does the rest.

Also, if you falsify your application—if, for example, you lie about your graduation date—you risk not only being fired when they find out, but if you happen to contract a serious (and expensive to treat) medical problem, companies have been known to pore over your job application, looking for discrepancies, no matter how minor, to avoid paying your medical expenses.

Companies have been known to disqualify people for something so minor as inadvertently jotting down the wrong numerical street address of a former residence.  If they find out you fibbed about your age—even if they subsequently hired you and you turned out to be an exemplary employee—they’ll pull the plug on you in a heartbeat, refuse to pay any of your medical, and you’re sunk.

The frustrating part of all this is that older people, despite the conventional wisdom, tend to make outstanding employees.  All that youthful nonsense—the uncertainties, the mischief, the searching for one’s identity, etc.—is behind them.  In most cases, maturity has supplanted squirreliness.

Also, clearly, fifty isn’t what it used to be.  The world is full of nimble-minded senior citizens.  Haven’t the Rolling Stones proven that?  Fifty-year old new-hires, whether working in a factory or office setting, can turn out to be extremely valuable resources.  Unfortunately, not many American companies see it that way.

Until 2010, Social Security had always been a net gain, meaning that money contributed by workers had always exceeded the amount sent to retirees. This surplus means that Social Security, as is, should be sustainable until 1936, but that’s assuming the economy won’t seriously unravel, but even if it will, Social Security should be the very last program to be tampered with. Waste is needless wars and bank bailouts, not money spent on the old and the disabled.

In a traditional society, one must take care of one’s aging parents, and let’s not sugarcoat this. There is a Vietnamese proverb, “One mom can feed ten children, but ten children can’t feed one mom.” In Saigon, an old lady also confided to me, “My daughter pinched my inner thigh out of spite the last time she gave me a bath, so I said to her, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and kill me already?’”

In the Republic of Goldman Sachs, NASCAR, and Lady Gaga, however, most kids won’t be around to pinch our inner thighs as we fade into senility. Also, more American women won’t have any children. In 1970, it was only one in ten. Today, it’s one in five. Fewer of us are also getting married. What you have, then, is a huge aging population without any income beyond the Social Security check that arrives each month.

Substituting for the missing children, three workers now support each retiree, but this is only fair, since for decades, these old people were the de facto filial sons and daughters of other senior citizens.

As working citizens, we have no choice but to participate in Social Security, but this has never been a problem, since the vast majority of us has always recognized its necessity. Who’d want to be old and curled up under a bridge?

At $1,177, your average social security check will pay for a one bedroom apartment in a semi-slum neighborhood, plus enough leftover for discount groceries, bought with several fistfuls of coupons. It’s not much, but it’s survival, and not something to be messed with, unless, of course, you belong to the very rich.

The wealthy hate Social Security because they don’t need it. Even the concept of surviving on a grand a month boggles their minds. That is so pitiful! Such chump change won’t even get them three bottles of Pinot Noir at Bistro Bis, a favorite of belt-tightening advocate, Paul Ryan. Never been there, but if I go, I’ll order a Spam musubi. Can I have an extra plate, please? Me and the wife will share.

For the wealthy, for people whose earnings derive mostly from investments and dividends, and not grunting work, it is somehow scandalous that we should get a thousand a month after a lifetime of honest labor. They can steal from us to finance their endless war and banking shenanigans, but it’s not OK for us tapped out lumpens to have a minimum income in old age? Instead of gutting Social Security, we should wipe out the superfluous Department of Homeland Security.

This vicious campaign against Social Security is nothing but class warfare, pure and simple. Unless we do something about it, and soon, the ruling class will continue to rip us off as we sweat, and starve us when we’re no longer useful. They and their enablers, Bush, Obama and Boehner, et al., are not of us or among us. Never on the streets except when hustling votes, they never see the senior citizens already sprawling on our sidewalks.

Old people of limited means are a drag, really, since they can’t be sent to war, and you may have to clean up after them, instead of the other way around, as is customary with the poor. What good is a poor person who won’t clean your toilet, give you a sensual massage or kill and die for the empire?

According to Japanese legends, Ubasuteyama is a mountain where old people are abandoned to die. With each cut to Social Security, we will be erecting our own Ubasuteyama.