I find all of this bizarrely fascinating and even delightful. Insofar as it disrupts the national mythology of Zionism its a good thing. But even if we reject the historical basis of the attachment of the Jewish diaspora to ancient Palestine we have to contend with their modern attachment. The correct identification of Israel as a colonial-settler state doesn't automatically obviate that attachment any more than the colonial-settler character of the United States obviated the attachment of my family to the lands they stole from the Lakota.

The question of what to actually do with colonial-settler populations is not a simple one. Just identifying a people as settlers doesn't resolve the issue. In the case of Algeria, the French settlers, the pied noirs, were for the most part driven out and it seems that this example has animated the imagination of a large fraction of the Palestinian movement. In South Africa however, the ANC's vision of a "non-racial South Africa" beat out the PAC's less warm and fuzzy slogan of "one settler, one bullet." Major unresolved land questions in South Africa notwithstanding, I think on balance this was a good thing.

In the case of Israel, even if the unifying national mythology is a 19th century concoction, we are confronted with a colonial-settler population composed mainly of European Jews fleeing extermination and Sephardic or Arab Jews who were dispossessed in the wake of Israel's foundation, in other words people really without a home, who think of themselves as the descendants of the ancient occupants of the lands they now occupy.

This suggests strongly to me that we are dealing with a situation more akin to South Africa than to Algeria and that it is therefore of some importance to reject not just the explicitly vengeful formulations ("into the sea!") that the Zionist love to make such hay with, but also the idea that every Palestinian in possession of an old key has the right to push an Israeli family onto the street. We need to do this without undercutting the demand for the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to and to enjoy equal citizenship rights in Palestine.

The point here is that the attachment of Israeli Jews to the land doesn't disappear with this sort of debunking. Much as the return of some of the crazier ones to Brooklyn would probably be good for everybody (except the rest of us who live in Brooklyn who can probably deal), if the struggle is going to become one for a single binational state the primary task is not to try to prove to Israeli Jews that they aren't really the people God promised the land to.

here is a somewhat technical article on the same subject.

http://www.jogg.info/11/coffman.htm

I can't vouch for the science in the article or that it contains no hidden political agenda. Take it for what its worth.

Archaeologist Nadia Abu El-Haj (assoc prof at Barnard College &amp; Columbia University) has written a very compelling summary of that field of activity: <I><a HREF="http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Ground-Archaeological-Territorial-Self-Fashioning/dp/0226001954/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1233185027&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-
Fashioning in Israeli Society</A></I>

She has also published shorter papers on the subject. This is another example science as social practice -- subject to the same ideological contention as any other field of activity -- and hardly '100% pure' or ever-objective by dint of an empirical or deductive methodology. Science, in otherwords, bends to the will; historical science perhaps moreso.

El-Haj has noteed elsewhere that bulldozers are used quite regularly on archaeological sites in Israel/Palestine. A sharp contrast to the small camel's hair brushes and dental picks we associate with stratigraphic excavations. <I>Archaeology brut.</I>

Here is an excerpt from a paper she published in <I>American Ethnologist</I> earlier in her research. (I will hazard the guess that contention infused the referees' comments as well.)

El-Haj, N. A. (1998). "Translating Truths: Nationalism, the Practice of Archaeology, and the Remaking of Past and Present in Contemporary Jerusalem." American Ethnologist 25(2): 166-188.

------ excerpt ------

At the most straightforward level of analysis, to argue that an archaeological tradition is embedded in a nationalist project is to assert that it has a chronological focus in disciplinary debate and practice. Following the logic of the argument over "whose" archaeology (Israeli or Palestinian?) is truly more nationalistic, it is to maintain that archaeologists focus on eras of "national ascendance" and "glory" in the ancient or medieval pasts in relation to which the nation's present is imagined (see, for example, Silberman 1989; Trigger 1989). This emphasis on chronology, however, is only the most basic way in which archaeological traditions can be said to be "nationalist." As I illustrate through a consideration of these Jerusalem excavations, the discipline's nationalist politics goes well beyond the search for a Jewish national heritage at the expense of other pasts in the historical record. There are times when "other" remains are produced, recorded, and preserved, remains that come to be classified as someone else's heritage. In other words, there is a logic for classifying the past as heritage that surpasses the more specific commitment to seeing parts of it as the patrimony of the modern Jewish nation. Furthermore, there is a historiographical logic that informs disciplinary practice which transcends the search for one particular national past. Archaeologists at work are guided by a prior conception of what history is-of the significant events of which it is made and of the significant finds in which it is embodied.

It is out of a dialectic between scholarly debate and excavating practice that both conceptions and embodiments of history and heritage are made. Therefore, in approaching the work of archaeology I borrow what has become a basic tenet of the sociology of science: that science is practice-based. But I take that insight beyond its own concerns with questions of epistemology and the "cultures of science," addressing instead science's role in broader projects of cultural production (see, e.g., Latour 1990). Rather than tracing the relationship between the workings of science and particular social interests (see, e.g., Bloor 1991; Shapin 1982) or demonstrating the convergence between particular theories and narratives, images, and metaphors in specific scientific fields and the wider politics of colonialism, race, class, or gender in the society at large (e.g., Haraway 1989; Martin 1991, 1993), I want to understand how knowledge is power, how it actually helps to "change the reality we encounter" (Sturdy 1991:167). And in order to do so, I want to insist, we cannot focus primarily on the theories and debates that characterize (social) scientific disciplines, or on the concepts, images, or discursive practices that are fundamental to them. Rather, we must attend to the nature of disciplinary practice as a whole-to what else it is that (social) scientists also do in their laboratories, in the field, and elsewhere.

In the case of archaeology, it is not only historiographies or narratives of and for past and present that are made. Rather, in excavating the land archaeologists produce material culture-a new material culture that inscribes the landscape with the concrete signs of particular histories and historicities. It is through the making of those objects that archaeology most powerfully "translates" past and present, that it is able not simply to legitimize existing cultural and political worlds, but also to reinvent them. Thus, if we want to understand more fully the power of archaeology, we should pay attention not only to the stories that archaeology tells but, in addition, to the objects that it makes and to the new built environments that it helps to create. In order to do so we must cast our analytic net beyond what would normally be considered the work of archaeologists. Rather than maintaining the distinction between professional or scientific practices and representations on the one hand and popular ones on the other, I follow Bruno Latour's lead and understand the work of archaeology to be situated among a variety of actors and institutions that, together with archaeological practice and practitioners, have rearranged contemporary and historical reality in the Old City's new Jewish Quarter (for such approaches to the study of science see, e.g., Hacking 1990; Latour 1988).

----- partial notes to the above -----

* Bloor, David. 1991 [1976] Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
* Hacking, lan. 1990 The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
* Haraway, Donna. 1989 Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
* Latour, Bruno. 1988 The Pasteurization of France. Alan Sheridan and John Law, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* _____ 1990 Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern: Steps towards an Anthropology of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21(1):145-171.
* Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979 Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
* Martin, Emily. 1991 The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles. Signs 16(3):485-501.
* _____ 1993 Histories of Immune Systems. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 17(1):67-76.
* Shapin, Steven. 1982 History of Science and its Sociological Reconstructions. History of Science 20:157-211.
* Silberman, Neil Asher. 1989 Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt.
* Sturdy, Steve. 1991 The Germs of a New Enlightenment. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22(1):163-173.
* Trigger, Bruce. 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

<i>The primary reason it’s so difficult to discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job supporters of Israel’s control of the Occupied Territories — including Gaza, still under de facto occupation — have done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with a desire to see the destruction of Israel. It effectively conflates any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the specter of Jewish extermination.

</i>

This is partly true but I also think that the Palestinians tend to be less skillful at articulating the case for their political equality than South African blacks were. This MIGHT be because Americans (coming off the Civil Rights movement) intuitively understood the conflict between blacks and white better than they understand a conflict between Arabs and European Jews. But I also think that the ANC did a brilliant job at framing the issue. The Catholics in Belfast were never very good at it either. A lot of Americans still think it was a "crazy religious protestants vs. crazy religious Catholics" issue. This might be, once again, because there's never been a particularly virulent conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the USA.

<i>This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority — in the United States as well as Israel — who believe that God bestowed a “Greater Israel” — one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories — on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.

</i>

The thing is you can use the Bible to justify almost anything. I could easily quote Paul's epistles or the prophet Zechariah to prove that the Jews forfeited their claim to Palestine. And I could just as easily quote the later chapters of Isaiah to prove that they didn't.

I find this a very important post. Thanks, Mike.

As the author of the article puts it, Zand’s thesis “has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate.” In suggesting that Palestinian Arabs likely constitute a closer DNA match to the Judeans of pre-Roman Diaspora times than do modern European Jews, Zand challenges the assumption that the latter are somehow returning to an ancient “homeland.” That concept isn’t specifically religious, but in this country, in which 78% of the population identifies as Christian, it’s hard to disentangle it from the Old Testament concepts of a “Chosen People” and a “Promised Land.”

Those biblical concepts in turn are hard to separate from the widespread belief that the (non-biblical) concept of the “dispersion” (Diaspora) of Jews that happens following Jesus’ death. It supposedly produced the general flight of Jews from the area and their absence straight up to the 20th century. The Diaspora is supposed to have occurred after the Jewish Revolt of 66-70 (which resulted in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which some find predicted in Mark 13:2) or after the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-5.

But as Zand shows “[only] 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area.”

In other words, there never was a general dispersion of Jews from Roman Judea. Anyway, I’d add, there were already Jews dispersed all over the Roman Empire, including maybe one-quarter the population of the huge city of Alexandria, Egypt. There were about one million Jews living in Mesopotamia, that is, outside the Roman Empire but within the Parthian Empire. (Most of these probably embraced Islam eventually and lost their Jewish identity---but not the conviction that they were descended from Abraham if through Ishmael rather than Isaac.)

Zand skips quickly from Judea in 135 to the arrival of Islam in 614. In the interval, the people of the area, who already at the time of Jesus include Syrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and others as well as Judeans, maintained vigorous Christian and Jewish communities into the Byzantine period. (Eliya Ribak, Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina: The Relationship Between Judaism, Christianity and Islam AD 400-700. Oxford University Press: 2007)

Muslim conquest allowed the Christians and Muslims to go about their business in what had been Byzantine Palestine; indeed Muslim rule was popular and conversions when they occurred were on a voluntary basis. Jews, subject to severe discrimination within Christendom, could obtain high posts within the Muslim Caliphate; nevertheless, there were also material benefits to Muslim conversion and it is likely many Jews did convert, strengthening the case that Palestinian Arabs are descended from “ancient Palestinian Hebrews.”

At this point I want to disagree at bit with Mike’s comment in his introductory remarks:

“For progressive people and historical materialists it does not much matter who, exactly, inhabited Palestine millenia ago, and who today is their descendants.”

Obviously it does matter, in context.

On the one hand there is the mythological narrative in while the Creator of the Cosmos selects the Jews as his Chosen People, gives them Israel as the Promised Land, then expels them from it (for their sins) in the Diaspora and allows them to be abused for two millenia, especially in Christian society (the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust), then (in keeping with prophecy) reconstitutes Israel in 1948. That “sacred history” allows the believer (most significantly from a quantitative point of view, the tens of millions of Christian fudamentalists who wield a lot of political power) to ignore the suffering of the millions of Palestinians displaced by the Zionist project.

On the other is the real history, potentially painful for some, that Zahn apparently just touches upon in the book Holland discusses in his article. The whole heroic narrative about the “call of Abraham” etc. conceals a mundane reality: various Semitic tribes apparently settled down in Canaan around the tenth century BCE, perhaps forming a modest kingdom under David that subsequently split in two and was destroyed by the Assyrians in the eighth century. (No slavery in Egypt, no Exodus, no conquest of Canaan under Joshua, no walls of Jericho tumbing down, no David &amp; Goliath.)

Allowed to return and reconstruct the temple in Jerusalem under the first Persian king, Cyrus the Great, in the sixth century BCE, the Judean ruling class edited the Old Testament as we know it incorporating new religious ideas (heaven and hell, Satan, a messiah, an end of time, etc.) borrowed from Persian Zoroastrianism. The kingdom was never revived; the Judeans lived under Persian, Greek, and Roman rule until the Diaspora, and Roman rule thereafter.

The Jews of the Diaspora generally avoided, or were forbidden to, intermarry with Christians. Neverthless over centuries a lot of non-Semitic DNA crept into the European Jewish gene pool, and as Mike mentions, the 8th century conversion en masse of the Khazars, a Turkish people with a far-flung empire and trading network, produces a Jewish population with no historic connection to the Middle East at all clustered around the Black Sea and southern Russia.

The Zionist ideology is intrinsically outrageous, and the UN had it right when it maintained (until 1991 when John Bolton was able to armtwist the General Assembly into reversing Resolution 3379) that it is a form of racism. It’s outrageous to suggest that a Jew has a “right” to live in Israel as his/her “homeland” because Jews lived there 2000 years ago. I’d suggest it’s even more ridiculous to propose someone has a right to live somewhere on the basis of an IMAGINED connection not even based on lineage, especially when the greater claim of lineage can be made by the population in place (the Palestinians).

In the spirit of Kasama, let me write some tentative thoughts about painful contradictions.... with open admission that they are not yet knitted into a conclusion:

There are many reasons to dismiss the Zionist claim that Palestine belongs to the scattered Jewish people of the world (and not to the people who inhabited this land up until World War 2, which included Jews and Bedouin people alongside the Arab majority).

There is no god who could grant ownership of land for perpetuity. And if there was an all-powerful god, it is hard to imagine that he/she would act as a real estate agent arbitrarily favoring one human community over another.

And once we dispense with that -- by exposing the self serving religious mythology and the claims of a falsified history -- we are left with a discussion of actual claims to the land -- rooted in the experiences of living peoples.

And (as TNL points out) this is not a simple matter.

A key goal of the Israeli-Zionist project is to "create facts on the ground" -- to invent all kinds of false moral and mystical "right" to Palestine, but to rest their effort on military power (and the accumulated results of military power.)

The immediate problem of the Palestinian revolution has always been how to mobilize the strength and consciousness of the masses of Arab people in a revolutionary war against the Zionist entity and its expansion. They have attempted to raise popular wars from various areas of concentration (from the Jordan valley before Black September, from Lebanon before Sabra and Shatila, from the West Bank during the Intefadas, and so on.)

And there have been very sharp tactical and strategic questions: How to overthrow the "reactionary arab states" to turn the surrounding states (like Jordan and Egypt) into "frontline states" that serve as base areas. How to use the strengths of popular resistance to counter the tactical strength of Israel's hi-tech U.S. provided military machine. And politically there has been a sharp question of how to view the people of Israel itself -- the population of that part of occupied Palestine that has been integrated into a single Zionist settler state.

And, for those of us critiquing any notion of simple "models" -- it has been clear that simply upholding people's war has not meant that it was easy (or possible yet) to know how to apply that.

The immediate problem may be HOW to wage a popular war -- but that problem unfolds in the context of the other problem: what will an eventual "one state solution" look like, after the Zionist entity has been abolished, after a new state and society needs to be forged out of the peoples emerging from that great dislocation and revolutionary change.

And the problem is that then (when the power relations of the region will have shifted) the problem of "two peoples, one land" will remain -- to be finally resolved in a new context.

Put another way: One of the results of the ethnic cleansing of the 1940s events, where Israel was populated by migrant streams of European and Arab Jews. There have, right up until the present, been continuous waves of recent immigrants to Israel to whom one can say "Go back to Brooklyn" or "go back to Odessa, because this land is not yours to take." But clearly the whole Zionist entity is not simply recent immigrant: It is an artificial settler state, but like all settler states, the artificiality of its beginning (and the "original sin" of the forced displacement of Arab peoples) then stands alongside the fact on the ground: that there is now a Jewish-Israeli population with no place to go back to.

There is no question that the expelled Palestinian people have a right to their land, their orchards, their coast, Jerusalem, their waters.... but the Zionist project has created (and was intended to create) a new problem "What about the Jewish people who are now rooted in Palestine?" It may not be the problem of Palestinians to solve this problem, but it is a problem to be solved.

And in my opinion, it is a problem for progressive people: because our goal is not just to right wrongs (however important that is) but to do so in ways that open the doors to new and liberated societies.

And, while I do not think our revolutionary theory can rest itself mainly on a series of ethical assertions, I think our revolutionary project (by its nature and goals) does establish a sharp set of ethical considerations:

There are methods the socialist revolution cannot adopt because adopting them will change who the revolutionaries are and close the transition to socialism.

To give an example from history: The soviet revolutionaries believe that it was essential, for their revolutionary society to survive, to collectivize the land of the Ukraine (the Soviet breadbasket). But many of the landholders did not agree. And so in the early 1930s a virtual war was waged on the more stable family farmers (especially of the western Ukraine) who opposed collectivization.

And the conflict took a terrible cost -- first (obviously) on the "kulak" farmers themselves who were often suppressed, and (in many cases) imprisoned in large numbers for their resistance. but it also took a major cost on the revolution itself -- in what the revolutionaries became once their road came to rest on the forced suppression of so many people. The callousness, the stance of boss over the people, the habit of police measures, the structure of labor camps and machinery of mass deportation became embedded in the state and the ideology of the revolutionaries themselves.... with long term effects. And, as we know, those methods were not confined -- for use with "kulaks" only, but they were then handy for battering down any contradictions, any critiques, any oppositions to the dominant policy (which were repeatedly declared to be necessary policies for the defense and maturation of socialism.)

Similarly, I believe that it has a deep and negative impact if civilians are taken as targets of struggles against injustice.... if (in the name of liberation) the tactics aim at ordinary people, and the strategy aims at their mass displacement.

I raise this as a dilemma that I see only in fragments.

Here are the fragments:

first, the Palestinian people have a right to their land -- to return, to see the reversal of a great injustice.

second, it is hard to imagine a liberatory project emerging from a tactical approach that targets ordinary civilians (including children) in the course of war.

third, I see no way out except a one state solution. A two state solution is either impossible (because Israel "cannot accept" palestinian mini-states that will serve as base areas for the ongoing struggle) or else it possible only on the basis of the utter defeat and betrayal of the Palestinian people (with "their" government serving police against resistance, and "their" mini-state serving as a bantustan within a Middeastern apartheid.) but there are many different visions for a one-state solution. And the progressive one (which we have always put forward) has been for a single secular, multinational socialist state of Palestine. And that vision has always been more of a manifesto than a fleshed out plan -- since (so far) no forces have emerged within Israel to help create it (there are virtually zero forces within Israel who on a progressive basis oppose the Zionist state), and because the struggle of Palestinians cannot (and won't!) wait or strategically depend on that emergence.

all these theories about origins of nations are at best bizarre but often (when brought into politics) very dangerous

Nando I couldn't agree with you more, although am not sure there are "zero forces within Israel who on a progressive basis oppose the Zionist state." For years, there have been Israeli members of opposing progressive organizations, especially made up of women, who have been proposing much of what you are proposing, and who hold vigils and mini-demos on a weekly basis. And here's just another part of the dilemma in terms of "going back to Brooklyn or Odessa": several years ago there was a huge wave of Ethiopian Sephardic Jews who migrated to Israel--and am sure you remember the huge controversy against the Israeli government who treated the Ethiopians as 2nd or 3rd class citizens.

I am forever touting the following book, but think it is one of the most poignant books I've ever read--"Blood Brothers" by Elias Chacour, which documents (from his own experience--a Palestinian/Catholic) the takeover by the Zionists. And an old comrade was just today telling me about an incredible sounding video "Project 101" (damn, can't remember the exact title) that she saw just last night with a sweeping historical view. Will let you know the correct title ASAP.

I've talked about this a lot with friends (who are usually liberal).

As a side note, they tell me to "stop thinking outside of my revolutionary box" and to be more "open minded". Why do they say this? Because I have firm positions on such issues, and when I dont waver, they see that as rigidity and close mindedness. Whatever.

Anyways, I recently had a discussion with a good friend of mine and he was telling that he proposed that area to become an international zone manned by the United Nations. I kept attempting to explain that it doesnt do justice to those who it is due: the Palestinians.

Anything less than support for the Palestinian people means nothing. It means capitulation. How can one have the interests of humanity at heart and yet not recognize this?

Sorry that this post comes off as heated. When I hear people say these things I want to kick something or rip something apart (but I don't). It is very sensitive to me.

Are there any major marxist works (here or elsewhere) on the Palestinian question? I am going to go to a Students for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (on campus club) meeting next week and I want to present my view (modeled through a marxist lense).

And btw, that club is pro-Palestine.

Nando's observations are very sharp and have a great deal of thought in them. However, although this sounds like a MIM-esque statement, I have very strong doubts that there is an actual proletariat in Israel- or, at least, there is no section of the Israeli population that is winnable to the position of a secular socialist Palestinian state.

Israel is a settler-nation, which automatically gives the Israeli population enormous amounts of privilege. To call them "labor aristocrats" would be an understatement (to quote a 1988 article from <i>A World To Win</i> discussing the nature of Israel), and the idea that ANY section of the Israeli population has "nothing to lose but their chains" is utterly ludicrous. I cannot see any right-minded Israeli who knows where their interests lie ever going over to the side of the Palestinians if a people's war were to develop.

I realize that in the past, Jews and Arabs lived peacefully side-by-side (from the time of the Rashidun Caliphate up until the 1930's-1940's). However, my observations seem to give me the idea that the development of Israeli society has caused irreconcilable stratification.

How they will be dealt with in a time of revolution, I cannot say, and if I could be proven wrong, I'd love to, but from my observations the Israeli population cannot be trusted to carry out revolution.

Andrei:

I agree with your scepticism about revolutionary potential within Israel.

That is part of the dilemma I'm trying to pose. Clearly the revolutionary movements (rooted among Arab people in the surrounding regions) can't "wait" for something revolutionary to develop in Israel.

And yet, that observation doesn't solve the next question: "What does victory look like, and what does such a victory envision for the Israeli-Jewish people who populate the settler state?"

Well, frankly Nando, I think that Stalin had an idea when it came to population relocation during WWII, and with the Kulaks. You speak of "The callousness, the stance of boss over the people, the habit of police measures, the structure of labor camps and machinery of mass deportation became embedded in the state and the ideology of the revolutionaries themselves…"

Well, to quote Mao: <i>It is fine!</i> I think such measures are necessary to show the masses that "the sky has changed" and that oppression will not be tolerated. However, we musn't repeat the mistakes of the Soviets in using such measures for EVERYTHING, and only use it when absolutely necessary. While I can't make decisions for the Palestinians- especially ones that won't happen anytime in the near future- I can't say that this will be anything like a "peace process". After all, revolution ain't no dinner party.

When it comes to the question of revolutionary potential within Israel, remember that about 20% of the population (and growing) are Arabs. They have strong ties to the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and in the surrounding refugee camps, which makes the Zionists treat them as potentially disloyal. As the struggle for Palestinian national liberation heats up, large numbers of them can be won to a position of support for a secular, socialist Palestine.

Regarding comment #13:

SHOCKING, DANGEROUS AND IRRESPONSIBLE.

There are two ways of looking at the present. First, is to recognize the unpleasant reality of it and come to the conclusion that it has to be changed. And on that basis try to find a way of changing it.

Another way of looking at it is to see it as static and unchangeable, and project the present into the future and come up with "final solutions".

No; revolution is not a dinner party; nor is it a pretext for mass murder nor ethnic cleansing.

Where do you propose to "relocate" them to? Gaza strip?

Good grief, now we're using Stalin and his 'relocations' to deal with Jews again. Are we to use cattle cars, even though there aren't many railroads in that part of the world? Listen to where your dogmas and 'Mao quotes' and little stories about history have brought you!

Almost every state in the Western hemisphere, including your own, is a 'settler state,' so are we into mass 'relocations' here, too? At this point, it's the Zionists talking about 'transfer' solutions, but it seems the failure of imagination works on all sides.

You want a get-rich-quick scheme than will match a set of slogans so bad you're ready to talk like fascists.

People make history, but not just as they choose. The overall tragedy in the founding of Israel are crimes against two peoples--the extermination and mass displacement of the Jews in WW2 at the hands of fascism, along with US and European capital; and the mass assaults and attempted 'ethnic cleansing' in Palestine by the Zionists. We have two sides who don't want to listen to the narrative of 'The Other,' but a just solution, sooner or later, whatever form it takes, is going to require exactly that.

I put the main burden on Israel, since they are in the dominant, oppressor position. Neither people is going away, and one of them, has nukes, soon to be matched by the Shia Theocrats.

So unless you're into setting the stage for Armageddon and the Rapture, take a deep breath, and listen to yourselves. Try to imagine ordinary Jews and Arabs are listening to you. And remember, they have the last word on the matter, not you.

And if you want to fight settler states, go down to the Smokies, on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, right here at home, start knocking on doors to get the Cherokee their 'right to return.' When you get some experience there, then maybe you can speak to others on the other side of the globe.

In the meantime, the best way to help the Palestinians here, is to work to get the US money to Israel cut off. But this rap doesn't help one bit in that regard.

I personally found this thread to be very interesting and its topic of discussion necessary to debate. Likewise, I found the comments by participants rich in shedding light on different aspects of the questions involved.

I don't understand why Carl is using the plural when in fact one person and only one person has come up with such crazy ideas. Is he establishing guilt by association? Or what?

Maybe, just maybe, Peoples War isn't the tool for every job. Nando notes the many attempts by the Palestinian movement to establish a base from which to wage it, but from my vantage point, and with all due respect to the heroism of the attempts, it hasn't gone too well. If the ultimate goal here is a single state and if we reject Andrei's repugnant call for "transfer," and if we agree that the present forces among Israeli Jews ready to support a single state are quite feeble, it seems to me that an important question is how to win at least a fraction of Israeli Jews to such a position. The question isn't whether the Palestinian movement should be asked to "wait" for the emergence of such forces. The question is whether the Palestinian movement (or a fraction of it) can take any kind of action that might open up some deeper fissures in Israeli society.

If the military strategy isn't making advances and if it is important, as I think it is, to actually win over a fraction of Israeli society to a one state solution, maybe what is demanded of this moment is a political, rather than a military, initiative. The situation is, again, not unlike South Africa where the liberation movement maintained a military wing but ultimately its actions were a relatively minor part of ending the apartheid regime.

It seems to me worth asking why the liberation movement in South Africa was more succesful in winning over a section of the settler population than the Palestinians have been able to do. Here I think we have to face up to the truly poisonous effects of what can only be called a "revenge line" and very real expressions of anti-Semitism that of course the Zionists do everything in their power to amplify. While this shit is by no means universal, neither can it be said to be marginal to the Palestinian movement. Nor can it be claimed that there has been much in the way of concerted struggle against this stuff that calls it for what it is. And this has to have an effect on Israeli Jews who feel repugnance at what Israel is and I think what it does is drive them basically into pacifism rather than active participation in a struggle to overthrow the Jewish supremacist state of Israel.

I think it would be very powerful, for instance, if an attempt were made to organize an unofficial plebiscite, along the lines of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's "primary" or the zapatista's various "consultas" on the question of a "single democratic secular state of both peoples" with explicit language recognizing the individual and communal rights of Israeli Jews or something like that and to attempt to run it inside the Green Line, in the Occupied Territories and in the refugee camps and the rest of the diaspora and to make it open to both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Such an effort and Israel's utterly predictable efforts to shut it down would, I think, have a profound impact not just on international opinion, but among some Israelis. It would also, I think, force a needed reckoning with the poisonous anti-Semitism in the Palestinian movement.

Now that Carl has called Andreimazenov a proto-fascist, I have to object. While I think bringing up the mass relocations that took place under Stalin doesn't help with the particularity of the situation in Palestine, I can't imagine a just solution in Palestine without the dismantlement of the settlements in the West Bank. Nor can Palestinian refugees exercise their right of return without some dislocation of Israeli Jews. As part of an overall settlement to found a secular democratic state, these measures can win some support among non-fanatical Israeli Jews.

<i>I put the main burden on Israel, since they are in the dominant, oppressor position. Neither people is going away, and one of them, has nukes, soon to be matched by the Shia Theocrats.</i>

Soon?

The National Intelligence Estimate says that the Iranians are still over a decade from getting nukes and that they halted their atomic weapons program in 2003.

www dni gov/press_releases/20071203_release pdf

<i>It seems to me worth asking why the liberation movement in South Africa was more succesful in winning over a section of the settler population than the Palestinians have been able to do. </i>

Once again, there's no one to one correspondence between South Africa and Israel.

South Africa was founded on the idea of a small white minority exploiting a much larger black majority's labor. Israel was founded on the idea of European Jews eventually displacing all of the Palestinians. Arabs were shut out of the Israeli labor force from the very beginning. Even in the early 20th Century long before the Second World War, the early Zionists would actually go on strike to protest any use of Arab labor by Jewish businesses.

So, to be brutally honest, this has little to do with the Paletinians themselves and far more to do with the nature of the Israeli state itself.

There's a lot of facile one to one correspondence being set up by Carl between the United States and Israel but very little acknowledgement that in this one sense (complete expulsion of Indians from the labor force in America by the Anglo Saxons in the United States and complete expulsion of Palestinians from the labor force by Jews in Israel) Israel does in fact resemble the USA more than it does South Afica.

That's just the brutal reality.

I don't think Andrei's comment is so outrageous. We should not try and muddy the waters by equating Israeli protofascism with Palestinian hatred. That only serves as a disguise for Zionist apologetics, the way Hamas is regularly accused of using Palestinian civilians as human shields (as if Zionism is not using it's "civilians"/out-of-uniform soldiers as human shields).

As I see it, pretty much every nation that exists has some ethnic cleansing in its history. These are addressable in practical terms only insofar as the victims still have a demographic/political possibility of recovery (e.g. the Kurds). That's why the moral equivalence between the American settler state and the Zionist one breaks down: the population and culture of the Indians, at least in the heavily populated coastal and midwest areas have become virtually non-existent (there are parts of the U.S. where the reverse is true, but this does not fundamentally pose a challenge to the existing state). That cannot be said of Israel, where the demographic time bomb is clearly ticking, and where time favors an eventual military parity between Israel and its neighbors. Hezbollah has already shown that Arab infantry can match the Israeli in quality.

In that context, there seem to be only three possible outcomes: a democratic, secular state that communists "pray" for, forced expulsions of Jews, and genocide. Every day the first solution seems more remote, given the growing intransigence and rightward drift of Israeli society, and the increasingly religious hatred of Palestinians toward Jews. If this trend continues, it may well reach the point that we have to settle for forced expulsion as the most humane. This seems more like pragmatism than dogmatism to me. Odd that our resident pragmatist doesn't see it that way.

1) I object to being called an anti-semite. I am of Ashkenazi-Jewish descent and I have a deep love for Jewish culture(s) and history; I have had many Jewish friends across my life and regularly visit my Jewish relatives. My hatred is solely directed at Israel and its settler-oppressor population.

2) Jews should have the right to live wherever they wish-including in an <b>ARAB</b> Palestine, just like say, I, an American, have the right to live in Switzerland or Venezuela. However, the Israeli settler-oppressor population (who have been bought off economically and with the land) currently living there has essentially shown itself as unable to live there peacefully or equally with the Palestinian population. As to where these parasite-settlers would go after the creation of a secular, socialist republic of Palestine, well, that's their problem. Too bad for them.

3) The Arabs in Israel puzzle me; why were they not cleared out like the Palestinians were and why are they considered Israeli citizens? No all of them are Mizrahi Jews... most of them are Muslim and Orthodox Christian, in fact.

Regardless, yes, they are the only section of the Israeli population I can see ever being a part of a Palestinian communist revolution.

4) In my studies of the anti-occupation movements within Israel- the Refuseniks, the pacifists, etc., it seems they are really only wanting a "cleaner" Israel, and not an actual multinational state.

4) Like I said, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong. I love the Jewish people and I would love to have faith in the masses EVERYWHERE, but until I see evidence of such, my line of there being no Israeli proletariat (outside of settler-labor aristocrats) stands firmly.

<i>As I see it, pretty much every nation that exists has some ethnic cleansing in its history. These are addressable in practical terms only insofar as the victims still have a demographic/political possibility of recovery (e.g. the Kurds). That’s why the moral equivalence between the American settler state and the Zionist one breaks down: the population and culture of the Indians, at least in the heavily populated coastal and midwest areas have become virtually non-existent (there are parts of the U.S. where the reverse is true, but this does not fundamentally pose a challenge to the existing state).</i>

Yes. That is why I believe there is a proletariat within the U.S. that will not need to be cleared of what is historically occupied land, whereas Israel still has the material basis to be needed to be dismantled.

"Thats their problem."

Actually its not. Leaving aside the considerable practical problems involved, there is a deeper question of how the society we want to build will treat "problematic" people. The colonial-settler population of Israel has certainly behaved in a manner that makes them seem beyond possibility of redemption. But the same could be said of the German population at the end of WW2, white southerners at the height of Jim Crow, or the Afrikaaners. Without exagerrating the transformations that have occurred I think we have to acknowledge that all of these groups have undergone important shifts and fracturings in the face of historical events. My view is that the strident intransigence of so many Israelis is an expression of the ultimate brittleness of their situation. The increasingly obvious non-viability of the Zionist project has produced a seige mentality of sorts that should not be regarded as irreversible. Never underestimate the ability of the young to reject the ways of their parents when the winds of change are blowing.

Gee...Nando seems to have removed his added note to me about opposition in Israel and amongst the Israelis, who to varying degrees are for either one state or two, but are opposed to the Zionist gov't. in their treatment of the Palestinians, etc. So here are just a FEW mainly Israeli organizations that are progressive, and part of the reason I am listing them is to point out--there are differences, especially differences bet. the die-hard Zionists (harking back to the 40s)and amongst the larger population:

Bat Shalom (feminist org. of Jewish and Palestinian women)
Peace Now (founded in 1978)
Al-Awda
The Alternative Information Center (Palestinian/Israeli org.)
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Gush Shalom (The Peace Bloc--calling for 2 states, the right of the Palestinians to return to their homeland, and the Creation of a Regional Union)
B'Tselem ("In the Image of")--Human rights org.

I think it's worth pointing out that the Israeli peace movement has been in general decline since its heyday in the 1980s during the Lebanon war, along with the rise of the far right represented by Avigdor Lieberman, who openly advocates expulsion. I don't see much of a counter trend. Anyone have any stats on how draft-age Israelis view the Gaza war and the idea of expulsion?

I think the questions about the nature of the Israeli proletariat are almost moot, since regional and global events are far more likely to determine the outcome than the internal contradictions of Israeli society -- sometimes, forces pulling on tangled ropes have more effect than the knots themselves.

For instance, political/economic changes could end the blanket U.S. support for Israel. The emergence of Iran as a nuclear power means the end of Israeli military dominance. The Egyptian state could collapse and end up ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood and ally with Iran. Frankly, what happens with the Arab proletariat and democratic revolutions are probably much more important than the balance of forces inside Israel.

Probably the only thing that still makes a one-state solution even a possibility is that the Zionist movement can use its nuclear arsenal as a bargaining chip against genocide after some future military defeat. That seems more likely than the Israeli proletariat riding to the rescue. The Arab proletariat of the region is really only the long-term hope here, IMO.

Analogies with post-war Germany and the post-Jim Crow south seem irrelevant, since none of Germany's neighbors really wanted to liquidate Germany (excepting Poland's land grab in Prussia, of course), and southern whites had and have the whole U.S. power structure guaranteeing their properties rights.

I think you will find that the Israeli organizations you list do not have a revolutionary stand on Zionism.

There are contradictions within Israel (resistors, peace now activists, opponents of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, whistleblowers etc.). But the Jewish-Israeli organizations you list generally have a two-state solution in mind (that asserts "Israel's right to exist" and the practical necesity that it exist as a "Jewish state.") This is why the Peace Now forces suffered so badly (disorientation and loss of support) from the collapse of the 2-state oslo process (as BobH correctly points out).

When such forces oppose "occupation" they mean (generally) outside the 1967 borders, not the whole of Palestine (which as a whole is "occupied territory.") I.e. when they say "the occupied territories" they refer to the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza (not Israel itself).

Linda writes:

<blockquote>"Nando I couldn’t agree with you more, although am not sure there are “zero forces within Israel who on a progressive basis oppose the Zionist state.” For years, there have been Israeli members of opposing progressive organizations, especially made up of women, who have been proposing much of what you are proposing, and who hold vigils and mini-demos on a weekly basis."</blockquote>

In other words, I am pointing to the vast gulf between what the "Israeli Left" is proposing and what I am proposing. the difference runs deep -- it is the difference between a two-state solution and a one state solution, it is the difference between "peace between Israel and its neighbors" and the "overthrow of imperialism's settle state beachhead as a precondition for liberation."

This could change. I am not arguing that "what exists is all that is possible." but I do think this discussion should have a sober assessment of the real political landscape among Israeli Jews (who are overwhelmingly and almost exclusively on the wrong side of some very fundamental questions.)

I believe it is a fact (and this is not just my speculation) that there are no known forces politically active among Jewish Israelis (zero) who support the revolutionary position we are discussing here (one which has been put forward for forty plus years by sections of the radical, secular, communist forces among Arab and Palestinian people) -- i.e. a single, multinational, secular, socialist state of Palestine.

Which underscores one of Andrei's more correct point that you can't hinge the liberation of palestine on expecting the emergence of a revolution among Israel's Jewish population. (The Arab and Bedouin minority within Israel is a separate matter politically.) I believe Andrei is wrong to use the MIM/Sakai line of denying there is a proletariat -- for all kinds of reasons -- but basically because that terminology and analysis shifts from a materialist analysis to a nationalist one.)

And Andrei's point obviously doesn't appreciate the ethical and political problem of dealing with (what we can call) "reactionary nationalities."

There are sometimes, in the revolutionary process, sections of the people (and sometimes the bulk of a whole nationality) that, because of historical factors, "come down" against the revolution sweeping their world. To say that "they make their choices and we just deal with them as harshly as we need to" (and to even imply as Andrei does that the revolution can benefit from making an example of such forces) underestimate (i believe) the impact on the revolution itself when it becomes an armed and hostile force against whole civilian populations. It is the dilemma of the western Ukraine under stalin, the Crimean Tartars, and to some extent the Tibetan experience (even under Mao). And that impact back on the revolution (the impact of revolutionary forces becoming suppressive of large groups of people, even their deporters and prison guards in Russia) is something we need to evaluate deeply.

My argument here is that there is a real dilemma in Palestine: that there is a population here (an established population of Israeli jews) that is disinclined (to put it mildly) toward progressive solutions, and a great injustice that screams out for liberation (the robbery of Palestine from its people with the armed support of the great imperialist powers). And this presents revolutionary, secular forces with a real dilemma.... and I think we should discuss that (without quickly sliding into accusations of antisemitism and the adoption of Nazi methods.)

Clearly the issue posted is whether it is just (or unjust) to comptemplate some long term accomodation to the existance of a Jewish-Israeli population within a future liberated Palestine. (In answer to Linda: this has, historically, been the position of Fatah. I.e. the goal of a single multinational, secular, democratic state of Palestine has been their formulation, until the great changes accompanying each step of their journey along the "2-state" path. and there are other forces, associated with Habash and Hawatmeh who, one way or another called for an explicitly socialist one state solution.)

I have a confession--and I'm not Catholic. Some of the comments above are scaring me, or at best making me uncomfortable. And I have to agree with lots that Carl pointed out in his comment No. 17.

Do have a question for KaFrank, who I normally agree with in the main, when he was pointing out the potential in comment No. 14 of a realignment of forces, for a secular and "socialist" Palestinian state. Are the Palestinians calling for a socialist state, or is that just what we would like to see? And what about the fractured political orgs. and parties amongst the Palestinians themselves?

And what is our key role in all this? Shouldn't it be to expose and go up against the U.S. imperialists, who are the Zionists main ally--in funds, materiel, propaganda, et al. And why is that? as if the U.S. imperialists could give a shit about the Palestinians or Jews...As Iris pointed out: "Israeli Jews are not culturally, ethnically or politically monolithic."

Sorry if I'm taking some of AndreM's comments out of context but he said, "As I see it, pretty much every nation that exists has some ethnic cleansing in its history." Oh swell. And as communist revolutionaries, how do we view that "phenomena", and how do we put forward the opposite?

Since WW II, there has been an emotional, borderline hysterical, appeal to Jews worldwide for the establishment of the "State of Israel", promoted by the Zionists in cahoots with the imperialists and colonialists. But this emotional appeal is based on something very real, i.e. the Holocaust. Talk about ethnic cleansing. And until more recently, there has been little exposure of the political (and economic) machinations, and not all that much visible support for the Palestinians. On the other hand, these days even Jimmy Carter likened the Palestinians status to apartheid. With the massive outrage and demonstrations against the Zionists' treacherous and heinous attacks and murders in Gaza, are we witnessing a shift in people's political thinking and consciousness?

Mike,

While I agree with most of the rest of your critique of his position, to be fair to Carl, it was Andrei who quoted Mao in support precisely of what can only be called an ethnic cleansing of the present Israeli Jewish population. I'm quite willing to accept Andrei's insistence that his position is not grounded in any subjective anti-Semitism on his part, but that does not mean that it isn't objectively anti-Semitic, as evidenced by its concurrence with the support for a similar "solution" to the Jewish national question on the part of unabashedly anti-Semitic forces in the Palestinian movement and elsewhere. It is my understanding that, at least back in the day, the PFLP had an analysis of the Jewish national question within a secular socialist unified Palestine. Does anyone here have any of their statements on this?

Hi there.
This is a very interesting debate. I have to say I don't agree with Andrei here.
1. As revolutionaries, we have to put class struggle in the first place. When we analyze something and we go around talking about ethnic cleansing and nationalities, but we loose track of class struggle, then we can get confused. I think that's what happening here.
2. Of course there are oppressed people in Palestine, or Israel what ever. Of course there are oppressed Jews too. The problem here is the intervention of Imperialism. So it is not that muddled. We have to fight imperialism here too. As in everywhere else.
I don't think the answer is just talking, we are like intellectuals theorists, but one thing we are missing: that the people there know how to solve the problem too. Mao taught us: the people are wise, they will find the way out.
Let's fight imperialism there armed with Marxism Leninism Maoism. Israel Palestine may even be a backward region, people may not yet understand. But they will learn. Perhaps all the schemes you are thinking of may not solve the problem, but the problem is not that complex.
The people who are suffering, who are victims of genocide, and the Jewish people themselves... they will know what to do.

Thanks for the point, 'Tell No Lies.' I have no idea who Andrei is, but the glib celebration of some of Stalin's outrages as 'revolutionary', back with a flippant quip from Mao, set me off.

As for the Cherokee, the sting in my comment, such as it was, was not aimed at them or the justice of their cause, and that of many other original peoples, which are still relevant. I've made it my business to visit the area, to go to the educational program set up at the small Cherokee museum and school on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, where a small number of them have returned, joining a few who never left. I circulate tapes on the 'Trail of Tears' to do some education. During my time in the Great Plains, I visited the Sioux areas, and learned some things from them, too.

What I meant to do was hold up a mirror. It's easy to denounce the 'settler states' and other legacies of history elsewhere; but what have you learned about dealing with the ones in front of your noses, where your own kin may be involved, even today, on the wrong side? Plus it's one thing to make pronouncements; it's another to knock on doors and engage the parties concerned. By all means, take up the cause of Leonard Peltier, sitting today, beaten in a PA prison, as well as the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Navaho and many others. But it helps to start by listening.

We can go on and on about one-state, no-state, no state, whatever. Tom Friedman the other day came out with a five-state plan. But for us, my view is that this misplaces our task. Our task is to work to cut off the support to Israel from our government. That is a tough and protracted battle. We can study and discuss all sorts of things, but the main point is that it's not our decision, and it's not our business, to be drawing lines of demarcation based on differences in program among the Palestinians. Some seem to feel at a loss if they don't have some 'team' to 'root' for in the area.

My point is that whatever you know, it's once or twice removed. But you're not once or twice removed from the tasks here, in regard to 'our own' players and structures of power, and our main duty is to engage ordinary Americans, especially those who do not yet agree with us, and help organize them into a political force that can make a difference in Washington.

Finally, of course there's an Israeli working class. Readers of the Israeli press will know they just released a report on the economic crisis there, showing one third of Israelis below the poverty line. Some of these are Israeli Arabs, but not all, by a long shot. And the settlers are ideologically motivated, not idler planters employing natives. Their seizure of Arab land could be called parasitical or worse, but no one doubts the toil they put into it.

TNL writes:

<blockquote>"While I agree with most of the rest of your critique of his position, to be fair to Carl, it was Andrei who quoted Mao in support precisely of what can only be called an ethnic cleansing of the present Israeli Jewish population."</blockquote>

In fact, you can't quote Mao in support of ethnic cleansing.

What andrei did was quote Mao "It is fine" from Mao's early report on a peasant uprising. But calling for ethnic cleansing and then adding three words from Mao "It is fine" -- well that is hardly an argument rooted in Maoism.

and CArl was not simply responding to Andrei -- he was taking Andrei's view of Stalin's methods and trying (as he always does) to use it as an argument against communist politics and theory <em>in general, and in particular, and in essence</em>:

He said:
<blockquote>"Listen to where your dogmas and ‘Mao quotes’ and little stories about history have brought you!"</blockquote>

<strong>Why Can't Communists say "Drive them into the sea"?</strong>

And in fact, Andrei's arguments don't come from anti-semitism, but from a far-too-uncritical assessment of the Stalin years. He thinks that if you kick enough ass, and put fear into the backward, that things will be better when everything settles down (if you keep a tight enough grip on everything).

Now there are layers of complexity here....

For one thing, any revolution does involve coersion (engel's point on <a href="/http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm" rel="nofollow">authority</a>, and it does involve (especially in its military stages) a beating down of organized counterrevolution.

Ka frank is exactly right (imho) when he implies that not all forced movement of civilians is wrong -- and he give the example of the ugly settlements of genocidal zionist "settlers" in the West bank. And I think he is right when he says:

<blockquote>"Nor can Palestinian refugees exercise their right of return without some dislocation of Israeli Jews. As part of an overall settlement to found a secular democratic state, these measures can win some support among non-fanatical Israeli Jews.</blockquote>

The first sentence is a fact, and the second sentence is a hope. and I agree with both.

However, like most revolutionary statements on this, Ka Frank also tactfully stops short of engaging what that means.

What are the implications of Ka Frank's phrase "some dislocation of Israeli Jews" -- Does it mean that the right of return is not absolute, and that many Israeli jews will keep farms, apartments, orchards, neighborhoods?

Obviously if Israel crumbles, if it starts to lose in this confrontation, there will be a mass exodus of Israeli Jews who have a place to go. (This has already been escalating over many years.) And those who stay will include (a) those with no place to go and (b) those who want to be part of the new palestine.

My guess is that such details will be settled in the course of the struggle -- and will rest on whether this wished-for force of "non-fanatical Israeli Jews" actually emerges -- as a force willing to concede major parts of tel aviv, the coast and Israeli agricultural lands. etc.

Again, no such force now exists. What exists is the shrunken remnants of Matzpen, peace now and similar left-labor forces etc who want a two-state solution (with all the assumed Zionism of that "solution") and want to withdraw settlements from the west bank, gaza and golan heights) and (perhaps at the extreme) are willing to consider a jointly ruled Jerusalem. i.e. their view of "concessions" does not go farther than 1967 borders.

The "drive them into the sea" approach was associated with the "reactionary Arab states" in the fifties and sixties, with the Islamists in the last twenty years for a reason -- the worldview concentrated in their politics is very different from a progressive one.

(It is also associated, as I've said, with a retro-kind of back-to-Stalin politics. In Russia today that kind of "anti-zionism" is functioning as a codeword for anti-semitism among some of the communist parties. In the case of Ray O. Light's forbearers -- Hammer and Steel -- it was tied to revenge politics and a fascination with brute force against corrupted social strata (from kulaks to labor aristocrats). Ironically Hoxhaism, one current back-to-stalin politics, had a strong PRO-Israel strain -- because albania's leader <a href="/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha" rel="nofollow">Enver Hoxha</a> himself, like other petty nationalists of small states, felt a real affinity and envy for the nationalist "fuck you" attitude and military strength of the zionist state.)

How is the "right of return" exercised (and envisioned) in ways that don't mean "reverse ethnic cleansing." Does it imply some necessary compromise ("two people, one land, one secular revolutionary state"?)

And if the right of return ultimately means (for some) the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews ("go back to Brooklyn or eastern Europe") -- I want to ask, (literally as a question) what happens to the revolution's view larger project of liberation, if acts of such sweeping expulsion are at the core of the revolution?

<strong>The Politics of the Possible: Black Cat, White Cat</strong>

Carl approaches all that with the outlook of "black cat, white cat -- who cares as long as it catches mice." Carl thinks "one state, two states, no state, who cares...." Nothing really matters other than the immediate politics of the possible.

And in Deng Xiaoping's famous original "black cat, white cat" quote -- the point really was "revolutionary? counterrevolutionary? who cares?" Let's look at "what works" -- as the only criterion, and lets separate the concept of "what works" in a decisive and permanent way from the concept of "what liberates."

Sure I suppose we can work for the U.S. to cut off aid.... thought I think that is unlikely for large strategic reasons. (An analogy: Demanding the withdrawal of all U.S. bases is a reasonable demand, but an unlikely reform. It will only happen as a result of U.S. defeat in either world war or revolution.)

Think about what this "politics of the possible" assumes, and what it rules out: It assumes that the choices posed by the world around us are all that matters. And it rules out any politics that requires forgoing those choices now, to prepare for better choices later. For Carl, there is only the possible (which is defined as the existing possibilities, and which are always defined by the system).

Revolution? Shmevolution!

Theory? Shmeory!

It is all just babble to Carl, or worse. And this is not aimed at Carl as a person, but at a kind of "give liberalism a chance" politics with real influence in this age of Obama!

And, for carl, this is rooted in world outlook at a very basic conceptual level, and it rules out revolutionary politics at that conceptual level.

This similarly comes out when Keith asks, "what is so revolutionary about selling papers and writing books?" In other words, he sees only the immediate, a world in which candidates are struggling for power but revolutionaries are not. To him, if "revolutionary" doesn't have some immediate meaning in form or impact, then what is it? To carl, if there isn't an immediate possibility of revolution, then what possible meaning can revolutionary politics have, other than "ultra-left" bullshit and the alienation of those not "ready" for revolution?)

Nando says:

<blockquote>Carl approaches all that with the outlook of “black cat, white cat — who cares as long as it catches mice.” Carl thinks “one state, two states, no state, who cares….” Nothing really matters other than the immediate politics of the possible.</blockquote>

If you want to quote me, or appear to do so, Nando, get it right, don't put words in my mouth.

I've made my own views on a preferred solution clear enough--secular democratic state with equal rights for all religions and special privileges for none. I've also made it clear that my preference doesn't mean much, since I don't have a voice or vote at this table, and shouldn't have one, if self-determination for Palestine is supposed to mean anything.

I'm not able to predict what settlement will be arrived at, but I certainly hope it's one that 'works' (or 'catches mice' as you put it). And to 'work,' both sides have to agree and see it as just and to their advantage. There's no sense in having a settlement that doesn't work, and you're not likely to suck a 'liberatory' solution out of something that doesn't work, either.

But for all your ferocity about 'authoritarian' solutions and decisive measures, it's almost amusing when you say:

<blockquote>"Sure I suppose we can work for the U.S. to cut off aid…. though I think that is unlikely for large strategic reasons. (An analogy: Demanding the withdrawal of all U.S. bases is a reasonable demand, but an unlikely reform. It will only happen as a result of U.S. defeat in either world war or revolution.)</blockquote>

That's an interesting case to make: to cut off cuts to Israel, we need either proletarian revolution or world war first. I'd like to see you make it. But the impact of 'sure I suppose' is that you think it doesn't matter all that much, since you have more important ways to show your solidarity, concretely, to Palestine.

Very well, what are they?

As to my treatment of 'theory' as 'babble,' I'm among those who take theoretical work quite seriously, and actually do it. In fact, there's more than a few action freaks or dogmatist who think my effort to re-examine Marxism from the view of cybernetics and cutting edge science, and whose eyes glaze over at some of our theoretical excursions into information theory, well, 'babble' is one of the nicer words they use to describe us.

I 'm not sure what 'politics of the possible' means to you, but I'd certainly plead guilty to it over the 'politics of the impossible' any day. You're welcome to share that corner of the world with the Surrealists.

No, I'll stick with Marx of the 'Theses on Feurbach, that revolution, when engaged, is a very practical matter. We can fancy it up a little, in you like, like Gramsci did, and link theory and practice, and call it 'Praxis,' but the bottom line is the same. If we're going to have cats, I want one that catches real mice, not 'possible' or 'imaginary' ones. And I prefer calico ones, but the color doesn't matter all that much to me.

<i>That’s an interesting case to make: to cut off cuts to Israel, we need either proletarian revolution or world war first. I’d like to see you make it. But the impact of ’sure I suppose’ is that you think it doesn’t matter all that much, since you have more important ways to show your solidarity, concretely, to Palestine.

</i>

Carl. Turn down the volume on the mockery a bit. Nando isn't being ridiculous or extremist. He's stating the obvious.

First of all, I can see where you're coming from. The elite of the Democratic Party is out of touch with its liberal base on the Israel/Palestine issue. At first glance, it seems pretty reasonable that "we" should be able to push the Democratic party towards what Howard Dean called an "even handed approach" or even the more radical idea of cutting off American aid to Israel altogether.

But it's not that easy. We're not in the Bush era anymore. The federal government is now controlled by liberal Democrats, but liberal Democrats who are to the right of Bush on the Israel Palestine issue.

George Mitchell's already announced that he's going to refuse to meet with Hamas. But, even worse, he's now saying he's not going to meet with the Prime Minister of Turkey (A Nato Country!!!) because the Turkish Prime Minister got into a conflict with Shimone Peres at Davos.

(BTW: You are going to be consistent and argue that the genocide of the native Americans disqualifies us from criticizing the Turks as much as it disqualifies us from criticizing the Israelis, right?)

Why does the liberal Democratic elite dismiss their liberal "base" out of hand on foreign policy? Do you really think "we" can lobby them to cut off aid to the Israelis when they won't even discuss the issue with the head of one of the most strategically placed states in the near East (Turkey)?

If you don't look at the Israel/Palestine issue from a "revolutionary" position, aren't you going to wind up looking at it from a fundamentally reactionary one. How would you justify cutting off aid to the Israelis? Some kind of abstract human rights argument? Or would it (by default) degenerate into an Walt Mersheimer American nationalist one (It's not in our "interests" to fund the Israelis)?

But once you start asking the question of why liberal Democrats like Obama, Pelosi, George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton are to the right of George Bush on the Israel/Palestine issue, don't you have to come to the conclusion that Israel is so important to American imperialism that only that proletarian revolution you mock has any chance of bringing any real "change"?

Nando (moi) writes:

<blockquote>"Sure I suppose we can work for the U.S. to cut off aid…. thought I think that is unlikely for large strategic reasons. (An analogy: Demanding the withdrawal of all U.S. bases is a reasonable demand, but an unlikely reform. It will only happen as a result of U.S. defeat in either world war or revolution.)"</blockquote>

Carl writes:

<blockquote>"That’s an interesting case to make: to cut off cuts to Israel, we need either proletarian revolution or world war first. I’d like to see you make it. But the impact of ’sure I suppose’ is that you think it doesn’t matter all that much, since you have more important ways to show your solidarity, concretely, to Palestine. Very well, what are they? </blockquote>

First, if you read the quotes above, you can see that I did not say what carl claims: I.e. I did not argue that "to cut off aid to Israel, we need either proletarian revolution or world war first."

I said that to force the dismantling of all U.S. bases around the world, would probably take either a revolution in the U.S., or a major U.S. defeat in world war.

And I said that was an ANALOGY to questions around Israel:

The question of Israel is embedded in major strategic interests of U.S. imperialism. It is not a matter of just some "policy" views at the margin.

And the importance of Israel is intimately connected with the strategic importance of the Middle East (which in turn is connected to the strategic military, economic and political importance of Mideastern oil).

In the specifics, there are conditions under which U.S. aid to Israel might be undermined -- having to do with major ruptures in the structure of imperialist alignments, or in the strategic value of oil, or in the very ability to support a distant client state. Certainly revolution or a defeat in world war are <em>among</em> the events that might make the U.S. unable to prop up the Israeli settler state (just like post WW2 France -- facing internal instability and recovering from occupation by Germany -- was unable to preserve its own euro-settler colonial domination over Algeria).

But here are three conceptions that do not (at their core) understand the nature of the problem:

(1) left liberal supporters of Obama lovingly tugging at his ear -- urging him to do justice. There may be an attempt to return to Oslo-like discussions now that the neocons are dispersed (with pressure to remove the West Bank settlements, and perhaps to acknowledge Jerusalems joint sovereignty).... but don't count on it. and that would be an attempt at a stablizing of Israel, and would demand an anti-resistance police state among Palestinians.

(2) Organizing Arab-Americans into a lobby (patterned on the envied "Jewish lobby") to swing the Washington establishment through a mix of vote swapping, bribery, and rational appeal to the "real" American national interest.

(3) Seeking to build a single-issue pressure movement (in congress and "in the streets") that would hope to "shift" American foreign policy on this matter.

I am not saying that political activity in support of Palestine (protests, educational work, work to sway public opinion) is not valuable... I think it is. I think at a very basic level we need to develop a movement among the oppressed in the U.S. that sees themselves as part of the oppressed of the world, and that (through real political work of many kinds) understands the issues at stake in Palestine, and sees the role of the U.S. as a lynchpin of the oppression, exploitation and robbery of Arab people (their labor, their sovereignty and their resources).

The problem with "black cat, white cat" is not that it focuses on 'catching mice" -- the problem is that it obscures the fact that there is no single standard for "catching mice." What the oppressors think is a fine solution, is just more oppression seen from our perspective.

I don't mock proletarian revolution; I've been working on it all my life.

but I do have some sharp sarcasm at times to those who want to act like it's on the agenda of mass action today, or like aspirin, you can take a dose and cure whatever ails you at the moment.

But we're not saying anything new here, just repeating ourselves.

I'll just note that I'm working on two points, for the purpose of aiding Palestine's self-determination and survival: winning Americans to cut of the military support to Israel, and demanding an end to the violence on their part, because there is no military solution here.

That is a tough and protracted task. Others here can define their work however they like; perhaps it will overlap with mine, perhaps not. We'll see.

<i>but I do have some sharp sarcasm at times to those who want to act like it’s on the agenda of mass action today, or like aspirin, you can take a dose and cure whatever ails you at the moment.</I>

But of course nobody's arguing this.

What's being pointed out is that due to the nature of the "military industrial complex" (Eisenhower originally wanted to use the term "Military Industrial Congressional Complex") your goal of cutting off aid to Israel is almost impossible without some sort of radical change.

On any other issue, this would just be "common sense." If, for example, I pointed out that "due to the nature of capitalism real action on global warming is unlikely without radical change" or "the issue of immigration will be very difficult to resolve within the current system of capitalism" I don't think we'd have a disagreement at all.

In other words, what is being argued is that "a reformist solution to the Israel Palestine issue is about as unlikely as a proletarian revolution."

And note, by "proletarian revolution" I'm talking as much about the Middle East as I am about the United States.

Were you following the massive strike wave in Egypt at the beginning of 2008?

I'm not sure what you thought in the middle 1980s, but had I argued that the Stalinist dictatorships in Eastern Europe were going to fall in a few years, wouldn't you have used a little "sharp sarcasm" on me?

How long is the dictatorship in Egypt going to last? And what's going to replace it? And how will this affect Palestine?

I don't think these are ridiculous questions.

One final point:

If you look at the current moribund state of the anti-Iraq-war movement (although "anti-Iraq-occupation movement" would be a better term), what are we to conclude except that it's evidence of how utterly disasterous reformist strategies can be.

I remember in late 2002 and early 2003 social democrats like David Corn and Michelle Goldberg savagely attacking the radical nature of some of the anti-war marchers. The argument was that the radicalism was alienating mainstream Americans from the anti-war movement.

So as the movement rebuilt itself after Bush's win in 2004, it also retooled its message to the mainstream.

1.) The focus was put almost exclusively on American soldiers and how many Americans were dying in iraq.

2.) The goal was the more realistic one of "pushing the democratic party to the left" and not the less realistic radicalism of the larger marches in 2002 and 2003.

So what happened? Once the US military managed to train and bribe enough Iraqi collaborators and to build their system of watertight security zones in Baghdad, once they managed to reduce the number of Americans dying, once they got the occupation out of the media, people just stopped talking about it.

Obama's shift towards militarism and the difficulty of the "left" in even restarting the debate on Iraq, don't the reformists have some responsibity for the current impasse? Had we all just said "I'm not going to stop counting Iraqi casualties" and "this occupation of Iraq can't be addressed within the current system" wouldn't we be in a lot better shape?

On the antiwar movement, you're mixing objective and subjective factors, and getting the latter wrong.

The idea was not to 'move Congress to the left,' but to grow a majority there willing to vote to end the war, whereever the Member of Congress was on the political spectrum. The method was to develop independent and organized antiwar majorities of voters in every CD, to either pressure the incumbent or have the forces to take them down, and to combine all of this with ongoing direct action in the streets, both local and national.

This remains a good approach for the progressive forces.

But the antiwar sentiment the movement rests on exists in the world, and responds to ongoing events. When the fighting on our part intensifies, it rises; when it ebbs, or other events take place, like the financial crisis, threatening Depression, or escalation in Afghanistan, the attention shifts, some new things rise and some earlier ones ebb.

These are objective factors, beyond our direct control. The task of leadership is to adopt new policies taking them into account as best as it can. That was the substance of the debate at the recent UFPJ Assembly, where a two-to-one majority decided to try something new, as opposed to the keep-on-repeating-the-same-formula of the March 21 events launched by ANSWER.

It's not that we opposing the ANSWER effort; it's that we've decided to put our energies and resources into trying something a little different, culminating around the April 4 events in NYC.

The task is to find the new forms of struggle that those opposed to the wars, who are on the cusp of taking action but have yet to do so, can embrace AS THEIR OWN, and mobilize accordingly. The objective here is the trade unions and community groups, not, as some claim, kissing butt in DC. It's to mobilize new forces to 'make them an offer they can't refuse.'

Carl.

Let's ask the question of why the question of Palestine has received the bulk of the comments on Kasama over the past week or so.

The typical Zionist of course would say it's because we're all anti-semitic and obsessed with Jews.

That's ridiculous but still, why are we discussing Israel Palestine more than we're discussing Iraq or even, as we've argued above, the native Americans?

Well, the most obvious reason is that there was a wave of protests in December and January against the attack on Gaza. Does this mean that there was nobody being killed by the US military in Iraq or Afghanistan? Nope. In fact, as the attack on Gaza was taking place, I was making mental notes to myself how many people were being killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Right in the middle of the attack on Gaza there was a huge terrorist attack in Baghdad that killed 40 people.

Why no protests? Once again, the Zionist response that it's because of anti-semtism is ridiculous.

Let me suggest a better explanation.

<b>The reformist approach of UFPJ and groups like Military Families Against the War effectively shut down the anti-Iraq-war movement when the Democrats took back Congress in 2006.</b>

Is it a good thing that the Democrats took back Congress in 2006? Yes. Is it a good thing that Obama beat Hillary based on Hillary's vote for the Iraq war in 2003? Yes. Is it a good thing that Obama beat McCain to a large extent because of McCain's overt militarism and Obama's more muted approach? Yes.

But the problem becomes self-evident. The anti-Iraq-war movement was effectively hijacked by liberal Democrats and used as a battering ram to take back Congress and the White House.

<b>The Israel Palestine issue, on the other hand, is an issue where liberal Democrats, social Democrats like Michelle Goldberg and David Corn and Republicans like John McCain largely agree. </b>

Oh, they disagree on methods. They disagree on the amount of racism they feel towards Palestinians and Muslims. But they agree on the idea that Israel should remain a Jewish state and they agree on a "two party solution."

So, in contrast to UFPJ's inability (or unwillingness) to mobilize people around Iraq, the more radical Palestinian solidarity movement put on the biggest series of demonstrations we've seen in awhile, modest (around 2000 people three weeks in a row in NYC) and very large in London and Toronto.

The fact that liberals and social democrats won't touch Palestine is part of the reason protests haven't been kept off the streets (unlike Iraq).

Nice point, Stanley W. When was the last time anyone on the US left called Israel a threat to world peace, like this courageous Israeli citizen? "Now a resident of London, Gilad Atzmon is a world-renowned saxophonist and the author of two novels, which have been translated into 22 languages.

He left Israel in 1994 after service in the Israeli military convinced him Israel had become a racist, militarised state that was a danger to world peace.

"I was born in a place that happens to be very strategically crucial to quite a few empires, and I was indoctrinated to take part in these idiotic wars and I managed to escape eventually. When I was there I started to see the scale of the atrocities that are committed on my behalf by the Israelis in the name of the Israeli state, with the support of the Jewish people around the world.

"Now and then you hear about one Jew here and one Jew there who is against it, but institutionally this war is supported by world Jewry inside-out."

While he believes people run a risk speaking out against Israel, Gilad Atzmon says he has no choice.

"I think we are under severe danger. We are fighting against the most powerful people on this planet. Seemingly the national state has proved in the last couple of weeks that murdering is not any concern to them, so we have good reason to be afraid or be aware, but I want to tell you something - this planet is at the moment in a devastated state. I have two kids who I love a lot and this is their planet. I'll be here another 20 years, 30 years, maybe tomorrow I'm gone. But they are going to stay here."

Just a few fragmentary thoughts that might help stimulate further study, discussion and debate.

The Palestine conflict is essentially an Arab-Zionism/imperialism conflict and any attempt at defining it as something else is not going to help resolve the issue. All through the history of this conflict, the Zionists, imperialists and Arab and islamist reactionary regimes and forces have tried to reduce it to something else for their own various reasons.
The immediate reaction of the basic Arab people in the region and beyond to the Zionist war in Gaza has made it clear that despite all the manoeuvres of the tripartite enemy, this has not changed.

To understand what is at stake in Palestine it is necessary to deeply understand what it meant to say “a land without a people for a people without land.”

Without understanding this central tenet of Zionism that has played a key role, to this date, in every stage of the conflict and can be traced in every tactical and strategic move of the enemy, the conflict will inevitably and eventually be reduced to one of a human rights issue albeit with different “solutions“ proposed by different forces.

The Palestine question is neither a land question nor a people (as in population) question on their own; it is a land-and-people question. Any attempt at resolving this conflict without understanding that Zionists want the land without A People, and that they are quite aware and have always been, right from the start, that Palestinians do form a people with land that is theirs, is doomed to fail. On the other hand it is at best questionable if the Jews are a people(nation) in the political sense of the word.

One way of getting the drift of what is meant by that Zionist key concept of “a land without people for a people without land”, is to consider what would the reaction of the Zionists be in the following unlikely scenario:

Suppose for a moment that the Palestinians in Gaza and the west bank pour into the streets in a peaceful demonstrations and ask the Zionists to annex the west bank and Gaza right now and that they would not mind to be treated as even the nth class citizens.
I personally have no doubt that such an event would be prevented and the demand rejected instantly.
As one of the architects of the Gaza disengagement put it: it’s the demographics stupid.
They can grab the land by military means anytime they want; but what would they do with the people? They always wanted and goaded Egypt and Jordan to formally annex the strip and the west bank so the population would be formally recognized as Egyptians and Jordanians. Then it would be “easier” to grab the land and push the Palestinians out into “ their country proper“.
I might as well add that creation of Bantustans will not be the end of the storey as far as the Zionists are concerned; they are on the record as having said that the conflict has lasted a hundred years so far, and there will be another hundred years of conflict to come. The Zionists admit that they and their entity are not wanted in the region and they are cunningly, as always, try to equate themselves with jews. They deliberately try to burry the fact that Arabs in Palestine did not react negatively to jews settling in Palestine until they heard the Balfour Declaration. This fact is totally buried under a pile of propaganda by the Zionists.
So, the problem was never a conflict between Arabs and Jews per se; it was and still is and remains to be the creation of the Zionist entity called “Israel”.

As much as the Zionists love to portray the conflict in terms of the possibilities of a nuclear Armageddon, and some people without really trying to deeply understand the issues involved repeating this, there is no such danger. To portray the reactionaries and zionists in the region as madmen who would rather go out with a bang is a racist stereotype that does not stand the light of day. But this is not the main problem with it; it’s a ruse to make people settle for imperialist concocted “solutions” to the conflict.

Interesting.

The NY Press did an article on Revolution Books and baited the RCP for rejecting a "two state solution".

Link deliberately broken to avoid the spam filter

<a href="/http://www.nypress.com/article-19318-book-marx html" rel="nofollow">www nypress com article-19318-book-marx html</a>

But here's the relevent quote:

<i>That means organizing and hosting such events as the “Rediscovering China’s Cultural Revolution” discussion at NYU, or the recent town hall meeting about Israel’s war on the Gaza strip. There, luminaries like Chris Hedges and Vanessa Redgrave decried what they considered the terrorization and oppression of the Palestinian people.

While the American political Left usually calls for mere temperance from Israel when criticizing the state, speakers at the town-hall meeting questioned Israel’s very existence. When audience members applauded, you could almost see them nervously glancing over their shoulders. </i>

So yeah, you can talk all you want about black and white cookies but you're going to be labeled as "rejecting Israel's right to exist" even if your Chris Hedges, who (as far as I know) DOES support a two state solution.

Stanley, I work in UFPJ. My local affiliate has an antiwar 'Out Now' action every week, and I take part in it. In addition, we're now in the process of organizing local meetings on Gaza. We're also supporting a statewide campaign to bring the Guard home. We haven't shut down anything.

Nationally, we organized antiwar protests at both national conventions, DNC and RNC. I took part in the one at the DNC, the 8000 marching with IVAW and Military Families. (They didn't 'Shut Down' either, but took the protest right to the Pepsi Center, quite effectively.)

With the Gaza crisis, we mobilized local affiliates in dozens of cities, under the anti-occupation coalition we're part of. No shutdown there either.

Now it's true that participation in mass action as the favored form of antiwar opposition ebbed during the Obama campaign. Hundreds of thousands of young people decided to oppose the war by working for Obama. They didn't ask permission from me, you or UFPJ. Most never even heard of us. They just did it, whether you and I thought it best or not. I'd guess the result would be basically the same even if every single UFPJ leader gathered under the banners of WCW or ANSWER. (Thank goodness, we had tje good sense not to, and engaged these young people instead in a variety of ways.)

As for 'highjacking' the antiwar movement, the local antiwar Democrats have been part of this movement from day one, marching in the streets with us and speaking at out rallies. How do you 'hijack' yourself, or at least your component of something?

The purpose of the united front is not to work with and mobilize those you agree with; it's mainly to work with and mobilize those you don't agree with on most things.

Anyway, that's enough for now. The superbowl is starting. Go Steelers!

Carl, UfPJ did not vote to "try something new." They voted to not confront Obama. The National Assembly already voted last June to call for a united antiwar mobilization on the 6th anniversary of the war, since UfPJ killed the one in 2008. We're not letting them kill the one in 2009 also. If for no other reason, because we need to say to the old and the Iraqi resistance that there are still Americans who oppose the occupation.

No, we have no problem 'confronting Obama' or anyone else who drags out these wars. But we are interested in finding the best ways to reach out to Obama voters who have yet to join a demo against the war and related issues, and find the best way to join with them.

That's apparently too complex for some in the 'left bloc,' but that's their problem, not ours.

<i>As for ‘highjacking’ the antiwar movement, the local antiwar Democrats have been part of this movement from day one, marching in the streets with us and speaking at out rallies. How do you ‘hijack’ yourself, or at least your component of something?

</i>

Maybe "hijack" was a bad word. But what you can do is get your intellectual thugs to go out into the media and demonize anybody taking a position more radical than "support the left wing of the Democratic Party".

Take intellectual thug David Corn (the one with the x ray vision)

www laweekly com 2002-11-07 news behind-the-placards

<i>At the rally, speaker after speaker declared, ”We are the real Americans.“ But most ”real Americans“ do not see a direct connection between Mumia, the Cuban Five and the war against Iraq. Jackson, for one, exclaimed, ”This time the silent majority is on our side.“ If the goal is to bring the silent majority into the anti-war movement, it’s not going to be achieved by people carrying pictures of Kim Jong-Il -- even if they keep them hidden in their wallets.

</i>

Or intellectual thug Michelle Goldberg

archive salon com politics feature 2002/10/16/protest/index html

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't criticize Stalinist sects on the left.

But when you combine attacks like this with the refusal of any Democratic politician save Dennic Kucinich to speak at anti-war rallies to the long term clout of organizations like the CP USA to the top down structure of a lot of the big DC mobilizations, you tend to push anti-war organizing to the center left and towards the Democratic party.

The anti-war rallies in 2002 and early 2003 were very radical, very vital, very spirited. They scared the crap out of the Democrats who were forced (in turn) to mimmick anti-war positions over the next few years.

The anti-war rallies in 2005 and early 2006 were largely and fairly conciously moderate, pro-troop, "patriotic" and, consequently, the Democrats didn't have to respond to them. They just shut them down when they took Congress back.

And YES UPFJ is consistently organizing, but there's a big difference between going through the motions and actually challenging the power structure.

Why, for example, didn't UFPJ just do massive Civil Disobedience in 2004 at the RNC, just send wave after wave of non-violent protesters to get arrested and clog the system. Why didn't they challenge Bloomberg's decision to shut them out of Central Park using direct action instead of legal challenges? Why didn't they organize anything in 2007 but pathetic go through the motions low energy events?

As I said though, in a way, the Israel/Palestine issue and the fact that liberals are terrified to speak out about it is as much of an advantage as a disadvantage. Yes, it keeps the rallies smaller. But Palestine is also a seam in the political debate that you can push on until it opens up. It's a fault line. It's a very obvious example of where liberal and conservative agree so completely that it almost forces you to take a radical position.

And that, in a way, is why neither of us really care in the end what the other person is saying. I know that UFPJ and the liberal dems are never really going to coopt the issue because they're never really going to mobilize on it. You know people like me are never going to move large numbers of people into acting. So it remains kind of the non plus ultra of mainstream American politics. Nobody who ever wants to have a career in the political mainstream is going to touch it. And that leaves the issue open to people on the revolutionary left.

<i>No, we have no problem ‘confronting Obama’ or anyone else who drags out these wars. </i>

Question. Obama has no problem with meeting with Nazi thugs like Charles Krauthammer.

Has the anti-war movement tried to get a luncheon with him? I know the anti-war vets in Denver were allowed to give a message to a proxy of a proxy of a proxy who probably sat down and e-mailed it to Valerie Jarrett's secretary's intern.

But has anybody tried to actually set up a meeting?

I have no thugs, Stanley, intellectual or otherwise. And the last thing I'd assume any responsibility for is what this or that 'Salon' writer has to say.

And I'm really not interested in meeting with Obama. I met with him a number of times, and helped set him up to speak at two mass antiwar rallies in Chicago, which he did.

I don't think these things are settled by 'getting a message' to those on top. They know what we think. What we have to do is organize the popular power from below to make them do it. And if they don't, we have to organize the power to take them down. That is a protracted and often tedious struggle, but there's no shortcuts around it, and it's past time to get on with it.

<i>I have no thugs, Stanley, intellectual or otherwise. And the last thing I’d assume any responsibility for is what this or that ‘Salon’ writer has to say.

</i>

I'm not talking about you personally.

I'm talking about a process on the "decent left" that wound up pushing the anti-war movement to the center and in the end neutering it. And I'm saying that staking out a "radical" position doesn't necessarily isolate you from the American mainstream. If we talk about the need for a secular state in Israel/Palestine, Americans (even the ones who currently disagree) will get it. If we start buying into the idea that we have to tack to the center and towards a "two state solution" then we wind up losing the narrative.

<i>And I’m really not interested in meeting with Obama. I met with him a number of times, and helped set him up to speak at two mass antiwar rallies in Chicago, which he did.

</i>

This was in Chicago before he was in the Senate?

But don't you think its worth pushing the issue? If Obama can meet with Charles Krauthammer, why can't he meet with Cindy Sheehan? If he can have David Brooks in his office, why can't he be photographed with Rashid Khalidi?

Why has Obama tacked so far to the right? Well, we all know why (and we can debate the specifics) but how do we get the message out to the mass of the American people that "it's the war economy stupid" and make them think about why Obama has so much money for bank presidents and nothing for the poor?

The first time we had Obama speak, he was a state rep. It was his now famous Oct 2, 2002 speech opposing the war before it started. The second was to a much larger crowd in Daley Plaza, as he was running for Senate, after the war began. That one isn't mentioned as much, although I got a nice picture of him speaking that day. He opposed the war there, too, repeating his earlier stand.

Obama has always been a liberal speaking to the center. That's why I first backed Kucinich and then Richardson, since they both had a better stand on the war. Later, they dropped out and Obama tacked to the left with his '16 months,' and the rest is history.

Obama, to those of us who know him, has always been fairly consistent, and hasn't shifted all that much to the right. Some folks liked to think he was more 'left' than he is, what with the right attacking him as a 'Marxist' and 'Socialist'--and me as one of his 'Marxist and Communist mentors,' I kid you not.

But he's always been with the 'soft power' wing of global capital, and an anti-neoliberal high-road neo-Keynesian capitalist, although working to define his own new brand of liberalism as more market-centric than state centric, more green and high tech oriented. And this is how we have always described him, 'we' being 'Progressives for Obama', and those of us on the Chicago left earlier.

This is also where he was as a lowly IL state senator. We worked with him then to get funding for afterschool learning centers, and he helped us out. Even had me come over to his house and donated two of his own computers. I had worked with him since, as a young community organizer, he came to the ACORN-related New Party, seeking our endorsement. I interviewed him for it, along with eight ACORN ladies. I recall thinking at the time, 'This kid is pretty smart. If he plays his cards right, he might even get to be a Chicago Alderman someday!' (For those of you who don't know, Chicago Alderman ranks higher in the politics of Illinois than almost anyone in the statehouse and most Members of Congress as well). Little did I know! Same with the antiwar rally. Getting Jesse Jackson to speak was our main goal, Barack was the second string.

Obama is what he is, no sense in prettifying or demonizing him. I work to press him to be better at what he claims to be, rather than demanding he become something he's not. My main task is to develop a strong, grassroots and independent left pole with the high-road alliance around a platform of immediate demands and structural reforms, and let the chips fall. On some, he will rise to the occasion; on others, we will have to fight him along with the neoliberal diehards. This includes Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. Our tasks are clear, 'Out Now' and 'Cut Off the Money.' And maintaining that orientation, will working to organize and mobilize the widest front to bust the Depression, win HR676 and get EFCA, is why we haven't surrendered our coalition effort's independence to anyone.

Progressive leaders can meet with him--if he agrees and if they wish. But I don't put much stock in such things, save for bugging your congressman. I'm one who believes that you rarely win at the top what you haven't organized and consolidated at the base. Once that work is done, then you can seek a meeting to make them an offer they can't refuse. You see, I really don't harbor very many illusions, either about the people or the process. As Lenin said, politics is 'Who, Whom?' , meaning who has the political power to do what to whom? I'd add that it's also about core values, but Lenin's point is well taken.

I know all this may sound like its hopelessly reformist or from outer space to many here, but believe me, if you want your politics connected to the working class and the minority communities, not to mention huge layers of young people, this is where the action is. But you have to break out of the 'left bloc' to see and engage it. And once there, you can also, step-by-step, develop a more revolutionary and socialist-minded current among the more advanced as well.

Re Obama:

I didn't vote for him in the primary against Hillary because I saw him as being politically identical to the Clintons. I've been proven right so far.

I DID vote for him in the general election but only to defeat the Southern Strategy Hillary used on him in April and May and that McCain used on him in the Fall. The Southern Strategy, amazingly enough, seems to be dead. So mission accomplished. Southern Strategy 1964 to 2008. Rot in Hell.

Going forward, however, I don't see much reason to think of him as anything more than the latest represenative of the American ruling class. He should be confronted exactly as Bush was confronted. I think Kathy Kelly has it exactly right by camping outside his house in Chicago exactly the way Cindy Sheehan camped outside Bush's ranch in Crawford. On the issue of Gaza, I think anybody should give him an inch because, God knows, he's not going to give the Palestinians an inch.

But anyway, this argument is played out. I appreciate your willingness to engage me on this issue. There will certainly be a lot more debates like this in the future.

I think this article by the highly respected and yet controversial professor Joseph Massad is relevant to the discussions on this thread.
***********


Israel and the politics of friendship
The Electronic Intifada, 3 February 2009

The status of Israel as the enemy of the Arabs has largely depended in the last six decades on its enmity or alliance with Arab regimes and not with the Arab peoples. Insofar as Israel threatened Arab regimes, it was depicted by them as the enemy, insofar as it did not, it was welcomed as a friend.

This was certainly the case in Israel's ambivalent position toward the Jordanian regime with which it has allied itself since the 1920s while at the same time working to undermine the regime when some of its strategies changed. This in turn explains why the Jordanian regime was historically ambivalent about whether Israel was an enemy or an ally. In 1967, some in Israel contemplated unseating King Hussein from the throne while in 1970 Israel sought to extend its military assistance to buttress his throne. While King Hussein became convinced that Israel's ambivalence had been resolved by the early 1990s in favor of an alliance, many Jordanian nationalists as well as Jordanian chauvinists were not. It is in this context that many anti-Palestinian Jordanian nationalists opposed the peace agreement that Jordan signed with Israel in 1994 and pointed to the continuing Israeli ambivalence towards Jordan. They correctly observed that Israel would sacrifice the regime in favor of establishing a Palestinian state in Jordan after expelling all West Bank Palestinians to the country, a project that Ariel Sharon had been proposing since the 1970s and that retains support among key people in the Labor Party. Indeed, Sharon wanted Israel to support the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1970 against King Hussein.

The recent indecisiveness of the Jordanian government regarding the best response to Israel's carnage in Gaza was on account of the regime's uncertainty of where Israel's strategy lies at present. At the outset of the carnage, Jordanian intelligence chief Muhammad al-Dhahabi, who reopened talks with Hamas a few months ago, was dismissed from his job, while at the same time the government allowed massive demonstrations across the country with limited but evident police repression. But US, Saudi, and Egyptian pressure on Jordan have clearly won the day, especially in their insistence that Jordan return its ambassador to Tel Aviv whom it had recalled for a few days in protest. These developments show that the Jordanian government has a different set of priorities and worries than its Egyptian and Saudi counterparts, but that it hopes and prefers that Israel remain a friend and not become an enemy.

The Egyptian regime, which considers Israel its most important ally in the region after the United States, believes correctly that Israel is not trying to undermine it, which is why Israel has not been an enemy of Egypt since the mid 1970s. The days when Israel tried to destroy the Arab nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser are over, and since his successor Anwar Sadat's capitulationist overtures, Israel has been a sure supporter of the Egyptian regime, which supports Israel in turn, sometimes as many have recently speculated, to the regime's own detriment.

Since the Reagan years, Israel has also become the friend of the Saudi regime and later the rest of the Gulf monarchies, not to mention its longstanding friendship with the Moroccan kings. The Tunisian regime of Habib Bourguiba also refused to consider Israel an enemy since the 1960s as had fascist Christian forces in Lebanon which considered it and still consider it a friend. Most important in this context is how the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas no longer considered Israel an enemy, except briefly under Arafat before he died and when he realized that Israel was out to unseat him. Otherwise, both Arafat and Abbas, whose term as PA president expired on 9 January, could not and cannot get enough hugs and kisses from Israel's war criminal leaders.

This is a far cry from the 1950s when the Shah's Iran, Turkey, and Haile Selassie's Ethiopia were key allies of Israel and the US and the first two sought alliances then with the Hashemite regimes in Iraq and Jordan. The Arab regimes consensus then was that the alliance between Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia and Israel was a pro-imperialist anti-Arab alliance. The fact that today it is Iran and Turkey's political leadership that are the only regional forces insisting on regional and local sovereignty against imperial invasions and occupations has reversed this trend.

It is now Arab regimes that push for imperial and colonial sovereignty in Palestine, Iraq and Iran, while Iran and Turkey are in the forefront of resisting it. That popular forces across Arab countries and in Iran and Turkey continue to oppose US imperialism passionately leaves most Arab regimes as the major pro-imperial forces in the region. It is in this context that Saudi-, Egyptian-, Jordanian-, and even the Palestinian Authority-sponsored anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite chauvinism (launched at the behest of Israel and the US) have failed to sway the Arab masses from their anti-imperial and anti-colonial position. The entry of Turkey into the camp that supports local and regional sovereignty has complicated the hate-mongering of the Arab regimes allied to the US, on account of Turkey's Sunnism, or at least its non-Shiism. As a result, the only regime that Israel continues to threaten openly is the Syrian regime, despite its ongoing secret negotiations with it. This is why Israel remains an official enemy of Syria.

The most dangerous enemy for any Arab regime today is any local opposition that seeks regime change while offering the range of services to the US that the current regime offers. This is why the Muslim Brothers are considered the biggest threat to the Egyptian regime. The regime would have been unperturbed had the Muslim Brothers been anti-imperialist and were they to refuse to provide services to the US. The regime, in fact, would have loved for them to be more radical, as this would have proved to the US that the current regime is the only one that could offer obedient services to its imperial white, or in the case of Obama, half-white master.

That the Muslim Brothers are willing to serve the US is precisely where their danger to the regime lies, as the US could easily abandon the current regime if it becomes a liability and switch support to the Brothers. Herein lies the enmity that the regime has shown and continues to show toward Hamas, and why regime allies in Egypt, including liberals and leftists, support it in its hostility to Hamas, which they see as an extension of the Brothers. The problem here is that in conjunction with Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas, unlike the Brothers, is the biggest opponent of Israeli colonialism and US imperialism. In the Palestinian context, it is the PA under Arafat and Abbas that established an alliance with Israel and the US and not Hamas. Indeed, the competition between Hamas and the PA is not over services to the US but rather over serving the interests of the Palestinian people. By contrast, the sometimes tense relationships between the PA and Egypt or the PA and Jordan have been based on precisely the former chipping away at some of the latter's role in serving US interests and in wanting a piece of the pie.

West Bank-based Palestinian intellectuals, like their liberal counterparts across the Arab world, have been active in the last several years in demonizing Hamas as the force of darkness in the region. These intellectuals (among whom liberal secular Christians, sometimes referred to derisively in Ramallah circles as "the Christian Democratic Party," are disproportionately represented) are mostly horrified that if Hamas came to power, it would ban alcohol. Assuming Hamas would enact such a regulation on the entire population were it to rule a liberated Palestine in some undetermined future, these intellectuals are the kind of intellectuals who prefer an assured collaborating dictatorship with a glass of scotch to a potentially resisting democracy without. This is not to say that Hamas will institute democratic governance necessarily; but if democratically elected, as it has been, it must be given the chance to demonstrate its commitments to democratic rule, which it now promises -- something all these comprador intellectuals were willing to give to Fatah, and continue to extend to the movement after it established a dictatorship. Indeed, much of the repression that took place in the West Bank during the carnage in Gaza had been legitimized by the ongoing efforts of these intellectuals just as they previously legitimized the "peace process" launched by the Oslo Accords and during which Israel continued its massive colonization of Palestinian land while the PA suppressed any resistance. The scene in the West Bank, except for Hebron, was indeed a scandal. Arab capitals like Amman and Beirut, not to mention Palestinian cities and towns inside Israel, saw massive demonstrations that were at least a hundred times more numerous than the couple of thousands who tried to march in Ramallah but were beaten up by the goons of the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA).

Palestinians in the West Bank were watching Al-Jazeera instead of demonstrating in solidarity and refused to challenge Israel's PCA agents who rule them. While the repression by the PCA and the Israeli occupation army is an important factor, the quiescence of the West Bank was also on account of the psychological warfare of demonizing Hamas to which the PCA and its cadre of comprador intellectuals have subjected the population for years. Moreover, the fact that a quarter of a million West Bankers work in the bureaucratic and security apparatus of the PCA and receive salaries which feed another three quarters of a million West Bankers, makes them fully dependent on the continuation of PCA rule to ensure their continued livelihood. This structural and material factor is indeed paramount in assessing the contemptible quiescence of West Bankers during the recent carnage in Gaza. Indeed, some of the staged Fatah participation in demonstrations in Ramallah (where the PCA women's police beat up Hamas women demonstrators) included people who openly suggested that the demonstrators march by the Egyptian embassy in Ramallah to show support for Egyptian policies toward Gaza and Hamas.

The journey of West Bank liberal intellectuals, it seems has finally come to this: after being instrumental in selling out the rights of Palestinians in Israel to full equal citizenship by acquiescing to Israel's demand to be recognized as a racist Jewish state, and the rights of the diaspora and refugees to return, they have now sold out the rights of Palestinians in Gaza to food and electricity, and all of this so that the West Bank can be ruled by a collaborationist authority that allows them open access to Johnny Walker Black Label (their drink of choice, although some have switched to Chivas more recently). In this context, how could Israel be anything but a friend and ally who is making sure Hamas will never get to ban whiskey?

In the meantime, the coming Israeli elections are being awaited with much trepidation. PCA strategies will be of course different depending on who wins. If Netanyahu wins, and he was the spoiler of PA rule and the Oslo understanding in 1996, Abbas can try to sound more nationalist in opposing Israeli practices in the hope that the Obama administration would support him against the Israeli right wing. The PCA hopes that Obama can put pressure on Netanyahu that he would not be able to in case Labor Party leader Ehud Barak wins. If Barak wins, then the PCA would be happy as they can go back to business as usual. As a close friend of the corrupt Clintons, Barak will also be a friend of his namesake in the Oval office, and Hillary Clinton will make sure that no pressure goes his way. Of course as far as the Palestinian people are concerned, it makes no difference who is at the helm of Israeli politics, a right-wing war criminal or a left-wing war criminal. As for those who still have hope in the Israeli public, the latter's overwhelming support for the carnage in Gaza should put this to rest. If Germans spent the day on the beach when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and Americans cheered in bars and at home the fireworks light show the US military put up over Baghdad while slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in 1991 and in 2003, Israeli Jews insisted on having front row seats on hills overlooking Gaza for a live show, cracking open champagne bottles and cheering the murder and maiming of thousands of civilians, more than half of whom were women and children.

The Obama government as well as the Israelis and the Arab regimes have only one game they are willing to play, and it is hardly original. Ignoring and delegitimizing Hamas is a repetition of the delegitimization of the PLO when it represented Palestinian interests in the 1960s, 1970s, and part of the 1980s. At the time, the Jordanian regime was entrusted by the Israelis and the Americans with speaking on behalf of West Bank Palestinians until the PLO pledged to be a servant of Israel and US interests and began to view both as friends, and not as enemies. While this strategy has worked superbly in ending the enmity between most Arab regimes and Israel, it has failed miserably in convincing most Arabs that Israel is not their enemy. Israel's recent military victory in slaughtering defenseless Palestinian civilians and its losing the war against Hamas by failing to realize any of its military objectives have hardly endeared it or its Arab supporters to the Arab peoples at large or to Muslim regional powers who are not fully subservient to the US. The Israeli settler-colony might have become the friend of oppressive regimes across the region, but in doing so it has ensured the enmity of the majority of the peoples in whose midst it has chosen to implant itself.

Gaza 2009: Culture of resistance vs. defeat

Dr. Haidar Eid,*

The Electronic Intifada, 11 February 2009

The ongoing bloodletting in the Gaza Strip and the ability of the Palestinian people to creatively resist the might of the world's fourth strongest army is being hotly debated by Palestinian political forces. The latest genocidal war which lasted 22 days, and in which apartheid Israel used F-16s, Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks and conventional and non-conventional weapons against the population, have raised many serious questions about the concept of resistance and whether the outcome of the war can, or cannot, be considered a victory for the Palestinian people. The same kind of questions were raised in 2006 when apartheid Israel launched its war against the Lebanese people and brutally killed more than 1,200 Lebanese.

At the beginning of the Gaza war, we were told by certain sectors of the Palestinian political leadership that "the two sides are to blame: Hamas and Israel" and that "Hamas must stop the launching of the rockets from Gaza." Resistance in all its forms, violent and otherwise, was considered, by these same people, "futile." Now that there are fewer bombs raining down on Gaza, the conflict focuses on whether the outcome of the war was one of victory or defeat. For the Israeli ruling class the answer is clear -- in spite of the fact that none of the objectives announced at the beginning of the war have been achieved. It is clear because they, like the defeatist Palestinian camp, simply use the numbers of martyrs, disabled and homeless to determine victory and defeat.

This approach fails to acknowledge that none of the so-called "objectives" of the war have been achieved: Hamas is still in power; rockets are still being launched; no pro-Oslo forces have been reinstated in the Gaza Strip. The question now being raised by some Palestinian intellectuals and political forces, after the (un)expected brutality of the Israeli occupation forces, is "was it worth it?" The "it" here remains ambiguous depending on the reaction of the listener/reader. What is of interest here is the radical change that some national forces, especially the left and their intellectuals, have gone through in their mechanical, as opposed to dialectical, interpretation of history and their role, thereafter, in its making.

The war on Gaza has emerged as a political tsunami that has not only put an end to the fiction of the two-state solution and brought liberation rather than independence back to the agenda, but it has also created a new Palestinian political map given the intellectual debate vis-a-vis the outcome of the war. This new classification of the Palestinian intelligentsia and ruling classes has led to many ex-leftists joining the right-wing anthem of Oslo and its culture of defeatism. Not unlike the Oslo intelligentsia, the new pragmatic left is characterized by demagogy, opportunism and short-sightedness. The conduct of these NGOized intellectuals (those emerging from western-funded "nongovernmental organizations" -- NGOs) does not show any commitment to their national and historical responsibility.

Michel Foucault's famous formulation, "where there is power, there is resistance," helps us to theorize the political and, hence, the cultural resistance, represented in some of the (post)war discourse. Within the context of resistance, it is worth quoting Frantz Fanon's definitions of the role of the "native intellectual" during the "fighting phase": "[T]he native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will ... shake the people ... [H]e turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, and a national literature."

On the other hand, there are intellectuals who, according to Fanon's theorization, "give proof that [they] [have] assimilated the culture of the occupying power. [Their] writings correspond point by point with those of [their] opposite numbers in the mother country. [Their] inspiration is European [i.e. Western] ..." Hence the adoption of the Israeli narrative by some intellectual sections, including NGOized leftists, whereby Israel was exonerated of its crimes: "we are to blame for what happened;" "we were not consulted when Hamas started the war!" and "the people are paying the price, not the resistance movement;" "Hamas should have renewed the truce;" "we cannot afford to lose so many lives; Hamas should have understood this;" "there was no resistance at all on the streets of Gaza; resistance men ran away as soon as they saw the first tank."

By the same token, one would also condemn the Algerian, South African, French, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Egyptian resistance to occupation. The same logic was used by the Bantustan chiefs of South Africa against the anti-apartheid movement, by the Vichy government of France, the North Vietnamese government, the reactionary Egyptian Forces against the progressive regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956, and even by the Siniora-Jumblatt-Geagea-Hariri March 14 coalition in Lebanon in 2006.

Obviously, these intellectuals' assimilation of the Western mentality, through a process of NGOization, and hence Osloization, makes them look down upon the culture of resistance as useless, futile and hopeless. Resistance, broadly speaking, is not only the ability to fight back against a militarily more powerful enemy, but also an ability to creatively resist the occupation of one's land. The Oslo defeatists and the neo-left camp fail to use people power creatively or even to see that it exists. They are defeated because they want to fight the battle on Israel's terms -- through the adoption of an Israel-Hamas dichotomy, rather than apartheid Israel vs. the Palestinian people -- instead of looking at their strengths: that they are the natives of the land, they have international law supporting their claims, they have the moral high ground, the support of international civil society, etc.

One good lesson from the South African struggle is the way it tried to define resistance and its adoption of what it referred to as "the four pillars of the struggle" to achieve victory over the apartheid regime: armed struggle, internal mass mobilization, international solidarity, and the political underground. Alas, none of these pillars seem to fit within the paradigm of the Palestinian neo-left.

The principled critical legacy of the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon is no longer the guiding torch of the NGOized left -- the secular democratic left which is supposed to be, as Said would argue, "someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations [or donors], and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug." A fascinating, and timely, remark by Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs points the way that the NGOized left should be talking right now: "When the intellectual's society reaches a historical crossroads in its fight for a clear definition of its identity, the intellectual should be involved in the whole sociopolitical process and leave his ivory tower."

Decolonizing cultural resistance insists on the right to view Palestinian history as a holistic entity, both coherent and integral. It also reflects a national and historical consciousness that Palestinians are able to be agents of change in their present and future regardless of the agendas of western donors, the Quartet and other official "international" bodies. Yet we see that the neo-democrats of Palestine are unable to acknowledge Palestinian agency because they refuse to respect the will of the people as expressed through the ballot box. This position is meant to synergize with that of their donors and international bodies who have worked hard over the last two years to delegitimize Palestinian agency.

This lack of political consciousness and the search for individual solutions -- the major characteristics of defeatist ideology -- contradict the collective national reality of the colonized Palestinians. Political consciousness must begin with a rejection of the conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation and the Quartet (Russia, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union) on the majority of Palestinians and even more crucially, a rejection of the crumbs that are offered as a reward for good behavior to a select minority of Palestinians. Indeed, class consciousness is dialectically related to the struggle for national liberation. It is the interests of some NGOized groups, ex-leftists, and neo-liberals, whose defeatist perspective on the outcome of Gaza 2009 is being disseminated with the help of some unpopular media outlets, which is at stake here -- not the interests of the Palestinian people who have gained even more legitimacy through their steadfast resistance to the Israeli bombardment.

Osloized and NGOized classes argue that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict is the establishment of two states which basically means the creation of an independent Palestine on 22 percent of Mandate Palestine. They maintain that the only way to reach independence is through negotiations, though more than ten years of negotiations have not moved the Israeli position at all. The establishment of a Palestinian state is not mentioned in any of the clauses of the Oslo agreement, thus leaving the matter to be determined by the balance of power in the region. This balance tilts in favor of Israel, which rejects the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, in spite of its recognition of the Palestinian people and its national movement the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). No Israeli party, neither Labor, Likud nor Kadima is ready to accept a Palestinian state as the expression of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The impasse negotiations have reached has proven the oppositional camp correct.

Hence the "shocking" results of the 2006 elections, in which Hamas won the majority of the seats of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Both liberals and leftists were "surprised" and even felt "betrayed!" Accusations of the "immaturity" and even "backwardness" of the Palestinian people have been thrown around since then. Nothing was mentioned about the failure of "the peace process;" nor the end of the two-state solution, and thereafter, the necessity and need for a new national program that can mobilize the masses; a program that is necessarily democratic in its nature; one that respects resistance in its different forms and, ultimately, guarantees peace with justice.

It is this lack of a political vision and a clear-cut ideological program that allows for the contortions of the Osloized classes. It is this lack that makes it prepared to recognize a "Jewish state" alongside a Palestinian state, including the legitimization of discriminatory practices applied by Israel against its non-Jewish, i.e. mainly Palestinian citizens and residents since 1948, and the end of the right of return of more than six million of refugees. What we are constantly told, is either accept Israeli occupation in its ugliest form -- i.e. the ongoing presence of the apartheid wall, colonies, checkpoints, zigzag roads, color-coded number plates, house demolitions and security coordination supervised by a retired American general -- or have a hermetic medieval siege imposed on us, but still die with dignity. The first option seems to be the favorite of some NGOized "activists."

The new, much-needed program, however, must make the necessary link between all Palestinian struggles: the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel's ethnically-based discrimination and rights violations of more than one million Palestinian citizens, and the 1948 externally displaced refugees. Gaza 2009 was not a defeat but a victory, because in Gaza the Israelis shot the two-state solution in the head; it is a victory achieved with the blood of those children, men and women who sacrificed their lives so that we could live and continue to resist, not surrender. Those Palestinians that are mourning the demise of the two-prison solution are out of step with new facts on the ground: there can be no going back to fake solutions and negotiations; it is time for a final push to real freedom and statehood. They can join other Palestinians, and internationals, in their demand for a secular, democratic state in Mandate Palestine with equality for all or they can walk into the dustbin of history.
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* Dr Haidar Eid is an independent political commentator and activist residing in Gaza.

I post this so readers become familiar with some islamic nationalist views and perspectives on resistance in Palestine.
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The Mossad's Arab Writers

By Khalid Amayreh*

15/02/09



“I call on the Israeli army to crush these Palestinian terrorists who are at Iran’s beck and call; chase the rebels of Hamas, annihilate its lunatics and demented leaders who are disguised as men of faith, crush them and exterminate them and teach them a lesson which they will never forget just as you taught the terrorist Hizbullah a harsh lesson in 2006….So deliver Gaza from the grip of Hamas. These Palestinians, wherever they go, they take with them terror, corruption, trouble l, tumult and ingratitude…..!”

These words were not written by Israeli propagandists or Zionist apologists seeking to justify the recent Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza. They are actually the words of a Kuwaiti Arab columnist who has apparently sold his soul to the devil.

I say “sold his soul to the devil” because when a human being transforms himself into a willful liar in the service of evil, that person, knowingly or unknowingly, loses his morality and eventually loses his humanity as well.

I don’t know for sure what makes such people undergo such a diabolical metamorphosis. It could be mental weakness, or a certain psychological defect that they have failed to overcome, or even a mental dysfunction. However, treachery always goes hand in hand with moral depravity and lack of self-esteem.

Needless to say, a writer, or even a commoner, who gleefully rejoices over the extermination of children, as we saw recently in Gaza, has obviously banished himself from the realm of humanity.

Unfortunately, there is a number of so-called Arab writers who seem to have devoted themselves to besmirching and vilifying Hamas and other Arab resistance movements, as if the right thing to do were to succumb to Zionism, the Nazi-like movement that has been murdering Palestinians, destroying their homes, stealing their land and dispersing them to the four winds.

Indeed, instead of standing up for justice and identifying with the oppressed against the oppressor, as every noble human being should do, these wicked mercenaries have decided to curry favor with the Nazis of our time probably in the hope of receiving a certificate of good conduct or a citation of honor from Zionist entity. Or perhaps they hope that international Zionist circles might press award-granting bodies in the West to reward them for their treasonous behavior.

Well, they have. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has already prepared a list of “honor” of Zionized Arab writers who are doing a “marvelous job” on Israel’s behalf.

Just watch the Zionist media these days and see how often these lowly traitors are quoted by Zionist spinners and hasbara operatives.

This shows beyond doubt that these gullible little men have fully swallowed up the Zionist narrative, bait, hook, line and sinker.

I understand that many of these writers are shockingly ignorant of the facts. However, there are others who know the facts very well but lack the intellectual honesty and moral rectitude to stand up for the truth. It is the cheapness of character that makes them what they are, vile hypocrites swinging right and left depending on the instructions they receive from their paymasters and benefactors.

A few years ago, one of these so-called writers based in London was quoted heavily by much of the American and Israeli media when he claimed that “not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Well, I don’t know what was this so-called writer was smoking or drinking when he uttered this colossal mendacity, a canard that has more to do with mental diarrhea than with any genuine intellectual activity.

Didn’t that little man learn in school in Saudi Arabia that “defending one’s home, country and honor is a duty binding on all Muslims”? Couldn’t he bring himself to understand that a foreign occupation is actually an act of rape, and that just as rape victims have every right to fight and resist their attackers, so do people languishing under occupation have a similar right to resist their occupiers, oppressors and tormentors? Did he forget that even in America, his real god, or more correctly the god of his god, they say “give me freedom or give me death.”

More to the point, couldn’t that weak-minded charlatan realize that the invasion, occupation and destruction of sovereign nations by the US, along with the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, represented and embodied terror in its ugliest forms?

I understand that certain Arabs dislike Hamas because of ideological hostility. However, I never thought in my life that an Arab and Muslim bearing the name of Abdullah or Abdul Rahman would urge Israel to annihilate Palestinians and express the wish he was an Israeli soldier slaughtering Palestinian and Lebanese children.

Well, moral depravity, it seems, has no limits.

I do know that the vast majority of Arabs are men and women of honor who stand soul and heart with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. This graceful solidarity manifested itself in the massive demonstrations which took place recently from Mauritania to Bahrain, mostly against the wishes of the tyrannical regimes.


In fact, it was this huge show of support and identification with our struggle that kept us going all these difficult days, facing and absorbing the genocidal onslaught by the Nazis of our time.

Some primitive Sheikhs in certain countries issued edicts against organizing demonstrations to protest Israeli atrocities in Gaza. They shamelessly argued that holding demonstrations constituted an imitation of non-Muslims and was therefore incompatible with the Islamic Sharia.

Well, what kind of Sharia are these ignoramuses talking about? Don’t they know that it was the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) and his companions who held the first demonstration in Islam in order to challenge the hegemony of the idolaters of Quraysh?

Moreover, if these pseudo-Ulema are really concerned about “Halal and Haram,” (virtue and vice), why don’t they speak up against the rampant promiscuities in their respective countries? Why don’t they speak up against the hundreds of pornographic and semi-pornographic TV stations which are owned and operated by decadent emirs who claim to be Muslim while doing the works of Satan?

Why don’t they speak up against their respective regimes’ disgraceful submission and subservience to Zionist-controlled America?

Is spreading moral permissiveness and pornography compatible with Islam? Is subservience to the US, Israel’s guardian-ally, compatible with the laws of the Sharia?

Answer me if you can, or just shut up, you hypocrites. You, your ignorance, stupidity and cowardice are a cancer upon the conscience of Islam and Muslims.

But, thanks to God, we have many authentic, God-fearing Ulema, such as Sheikh Yosuf Qaradawi, who won’t flinch from standing on the side of the Umma and supporting the forces of resistance, without worrying about alienating the Tyrants.

It is such Ulema that we respect and salute. May they live to see the demise of Arab dictatorships.

In conclusion, I say we must isolate and expose these treacherous writers and mouthpieces of Zionism. In fact, they are being exposed, not the least by Israel which enthusiastically publishes their silliness and trivialities.

Well, if Israel is your ultimate admirer, then you don’t need to tell us who you are. The tree is known by its fruit.
_______________________________________

*Khalid Amayreh is a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura.

Oops!
I should have probably posted this at the Chomsky thread.

It's Time To Rethink Zionism

By Daphna Baram
February 18, 2009 "The Guardian"

The results of last week's parliamentary elections in Israel brought to the surface some of the most rotten fruits of a debate that has been going on throughout the state's existence: the idea that a mono-ethnic Jewish state is feasible, legitimate and desirable. In other words, it enhanced the predicament of the moral and practical consequences of the Zionist state ideology.

In 1948, during its war of coming-to-be, Israel had driven out of its territory 750,000 Palestinians; another 250,000 were pushed out during the 1967 war. Ever since then, the Israeli left-right division has been marked by the desire for territorial expansion, promoted by the right, and the aspiration for ethnic purity, propagated, curiously, by the Zionist "left".
It has always been the "left" that pushed for "division" of the land and "separation" between Jews and Arabs in order to secure a big Jewish majority inside Israel.

The right, historically, seemed unconcerned by and large with the consequences of having a large number of Palestinians living under Israel's occupation, as long as they do not get to enjoy citizens' (or other, civil) rights.

The Labour party always had a leg in both camps. It had agreed to partition in 1947, seeing it as a chance to get as much Arab-free land as possible, and recognising the opportunity to ethnically clear it off most remaining Arabs during the following war. It was the same Labour party, however, that was responsible for Israel's great victory in the 1967 war, which led to vast territorial expansion and at the same time to the inclusion of millions of Palestinians in the territories under Israel's rule.

An annexation of these territories, known as Gaza Strip and the West Bank, has always been unthinkable for the Labour party and its satellites on the left, as it would involve granting citizenship to the Palestinians who live in them, hence compromising the majority of Jewish citizens in Israel.

The right had toyed with the idea of annexation, but was deterred by the same dilemma. The temporary solution had been to keep building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, while hoping that somehow, miraculously, the Palestinians would disappear, or that a huge influx of Jewish citizens would somehow flood the country and tip the balance in a conclusive way.
In the fringes of the left there were always voices calling for a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. To its left, there was an even smaller group calling for what nowadays can be described as the South African solution: one state, with equal rights to both Jews and Palestinians living in it.

The latter idea had never become popular among Jewish Israelis, but over the last 10 years it had turned into a threat that haunts the dreams of all Zionists.
The phrase "the demographic danger" became a legitimate part of the discourse calling for a two-state solution.

What started as a lefty support for Palestinian national self-determination had turned in this century into a tool for propagating apartheid. From that point, it was easy for anybody on the right, from Ariel Sharon to Tzipi Livni and Binyamin Netanyahu, to adopt it, and for George Bush's administration to embrace it. Accordingly, that obscure entity the "Palestinian State" was to be of crippled borders that would compromise its already questionable viability. It was to be a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan Bantustan.

The Arab citizens of Israel, traditionally ignored by left and right Zionists as a "barely tolerable" minority, embody the impossibility and futility of the attempt to achieve ethnic purity by means of division. A few years of rising racism inside Israel turned its Arab citizens into a "ticking bomb" of the "demographic danger", and unleashed unprecedented attacks against them by the right wing, with little to no response from the Zionist left.
Avigdor Lieberman gained his startling achievement in Tuesday's elections by riding this wave to its natural conclusion. His revolutionary idea – giving up not only territories in the West Bank and Gaza but even territories of Israel proper, in order to get rid of as many Arabs as possible – confused and embarrassed the Zionist left. It had also exposed the absurdity and moral unacceptability of the whole Zionist idea by taking it to its only rational conclusion.
If having a Jewish state is the most desirable goal, than getting rid of the non-Jewish citizens is the only rational way to go about it. And hey, it is all to take place in a very benign way: no more talks of "transfer", but an adoption of the "lefty" slogans of division. And all this under the new sinister banner "No loyalty – No citizenship".

Sorry. The last paragraph of the article was omitted from the last post.
Here it is:


The fact that Lieberman can easily claim to be a genuine successor of Israel's founder, Labourite David Ben Gurion, should be an alarm bell in the ears of any Israeli liberal. It is time for any Israeli with an enlightened self-image to look at the mirror and see Avigdor Lieberman staring back. It is time to stop the procrastination over the question whether Israel can be both Jewish and democratic. Lieberman provided the answer loud and clear: it cannot. At this late hour, when the shadow of proto-fascism is hovering over the land, it is time to join forces with Palestinian citizens in the battle against ethnic purity, and for a true democracy. It is time to stop fidgeting, and to admit that mono-ethnicism cannot be a framework for liberal values. It is time to apologise to MK Azmi Bshara, who was dabbed "an Arab nationalist" by Israeli liberals because of his call for "a state of all its citizens". It is time to rethink Zionism.
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Azmi Bishara is an Arab Member of the kneset.