The latest announcement from the Biden Administration is significant. That it is also weak sauce compared to the sort of announcement one might expect in the wake of genocidal conduct by most other nations does not refute the former point. Because, of course, Israel is not most other nations. Israel is a nation that has had a uniquely tight relationship with the USA for the last seven decades. Changing such a long-standing policy is like changing the course of a supertanker: it does not happen overnight. Despite the slow pace of the change, Israel’s self-inflicted reputational damage is starting to take its toll.
We are about to find out how many right-leaning justices are fascists and how many are just plain old conservatives. (I am reasonably sure we will find at least one fascist.)
Because really, there is simply nothing in American conservatism (conservatism, not fascism) compatible with deciding that a president should have basically unlimited power with no accountability under the law. Conservatism is all about conserving existing laws and institutions, such as a Constitution, a presidency with limited powers, and an independent judiciary.
A president with unlimited powers is a president whose will is above all written law. That is the Führerprinzip, a key aspect of fascist ideology.
And if there are enough fascists to sway the decision in favour of Trump, it will be game over for US democracy. Oh, formal elections and respect for their results may linger a while after the decision, but they won’t last long. All it will take is one fascist victory in the polls and it will become obvious to all that the corpse had been dead for some time, and it is only then starting to stink.
The anarchist site Crimethinc recently put out an analysis of what is going on with the campus demonstrations. Like most things from the anarchist subculture, it is a mix of spot-on analysis and inward-facing mindset.
After students began occupying Columbia in solidarity with Palestinians, student occupations and encampments spread like wildfire, occupying over one hundred universities around the world. Well over two thousand students have been arrested. Each day has seen new occupations and new tactics. Again and again, police repression has outraged students, professors, and community members, drawing larger numbers to more and more militant demonstrations. The movement for Palestinian liberation is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States as a consequence of the bravery of demonstrators and blockaders over the past six months—most recently, thanks to occupiers who have been willing to risk arrest, police brutality, defamation, doxxing, and expulsion.
This probably overplays the role of the demonstrations. The main thing that has instilled growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the USA is simply the facts on the ground in Gaza. Lots of news stories now paint Israel in a very bad light, and justifiably so. That sparked expressions of dissent with the US Empire’s policy, those expressions caused increased awareness of the issue, and the increased awareness caused more expressions. So yes, the demos did play a part, but initial spark was simply coverage in the media.
On the latter, one critical aspect is the growing relevance of social media. This has allowed the domestic gatekeepers of information, normally squarely behind the agenda of a US superpower empire, to get bypassed. Social media is a two-edged sword: it allows a lot of baseless garbage to get elevated to prominence, but it also allows valid information (that would have otherwise been suppressed to a significant degree) to get elevated.
Another is simply the level of badness here. Israel almost always retaliates disproportionately, but this time the proximate cause of the retaliation was abnormally bloodthirsty, which made for an abnormally bloodthirsty retaliation. This has at times tended to overwhelm even Israel-biased sources with its severity.
The demonstrations are now probably getting to the point where many are net counterproductive. Gratuitous vandalism, no matter how justified the rage that motivates it, turns Middle America off. A protest movement that does better policing of its own is needed. That is unlikely, however, given the inward-looking nature of much of the activist left, where espousing or defending the most extreme rhetoric and actions is a way of gaining in-group status.
Such it has long been. Struggles get waged using the activists that actually exist, not the activists that one might wish existed.
The basic demand to see Palestinians as human beings is incompatible with the agendas of the United States government and universities.
The US needs Israel as a strategic partner to maintain a foothold in the Middle East; universities rely on funding from and research relationships with the military, arms manufacturers, and Zionists. It is impossible to acknowledge that Palestinians are entitled to the universal human rights that form the basis of the US empire’s claim to moral legitimacy while continuing to supply the weaponry, funding, and diplomatic cover necessary for the Israeli military to continue killing civilians and destroying their homes. These protests reveal deep-seated contradictions between discourse and practice that the government, corporate media platforms, and universities are determined to conceal.
This is the crux of the matter.
There has been much rhetoric about an “existential crisis” by Israel’s supporters since the attacks of October 7th. This is false rhetoric. The attacks, awful though they were, did not constitute an existential crisis for Israel. The latter has a nuclear arsenal and the most powerful military in the region. The continued existence of Israel is not in doubt. Rather, it is Palestine that is experiencing the existential crisis (and has been for approximately 75 years and counting). But I digress.
There is another existential crisis here, one posed by the demands of those dissenting from US policy with respect to Israel: an existential crisis of the US empire. Not the US itself, but the US as the overseer of a global empire. In order to run an empire, one has to be brutal at times. An empire whose citizenry is strongly concerned about its subject peoples cannot long remain an empire.
A successful empire must either be an authoritarian dictatorship or have a citizenry that is uninterested in (or downright hostile to) the well-being of its subject peoples. A successful empire must value order and obedience, and find dissent threatening. A successful democratic empire must have a populace that values order and obedience, and finds dissent threatening.
The latter could end up being a truly complicating factor for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. If a majority of Americans simply don’t care very much about the Palestinians, and don’t want to ever care, then any movement to change this is doomed. The protestors will just be seen as the loony left, whose eccentricities place them outside the bounds of politically acceptable thought. It won’t matter how good a job the movement does in policing its rhetoric; there simply is not enough public support for the policy changes it advocates.
One of the many evils of empires is that they tend to morally corrode themselves from within. I have written recently of how the protest might damage Biden’s chances of winning a second term and therefore put Trump in office. If this happens, a transition to a significantly more authoritarian form of government is likely in the USA.
If that happens, expect the so-called “responsible” left to chide empire’s critics for destroying democracy via their intransigence. They will actually have a point from the standpoint of the proximate cause, but the root cause is that the USA’s status as an empire had by this stage so corroded its morals that it had reached the point where its liberal democracy status became fundamentally incompatible with its empire status. As such, a transition to a more compatible authoritarian order then occurred.
Things have, in fact, been trending this way for some time. It was one reason why George W. Bush’s war of choice, backed by lies, against Iraq, upset me so much, and the lack of any real accountability for it upset me even more: it indicated a very high level of moral decay that was incompatible with the USA’s status as a functioning political democracy with basic human rights.
Accusations of anti-Semitism are cynical lies coming from administrators and politicians who have already showed that they could not care less about protecting students from actual white nationalists.
The same university administrators who used “free speech” as an excuse to vilify and arrest students for protesting against white nationalists speaking on campus are now attacking and brutalizing anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian protestors in the name of protecting Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Free speech and student safety are both false pretenses: the truth is that university administrations and police will seek to destroy any force that actively challenges their power. This explains the previously unthinkable alliance between Republicans who refuse to disavow white nationalists in their own party, Democrats who champion genocide in the name of resisting anti-Semitism, and university administrators.
I was going to come out with examples of antisemitism at pro-Palestine rallies… but I couldn’t find any good ones. Not of actual, overt, all-Jews-are-evil antisemitism. There’s plenty of anti-Israel rhetoric to be found, but that’s only to be expected at rallies against what the State of Israel is currently doing. I even went to pro-Zionist sources like the StopAntisemitism twitter account and the Times of Israel and couldn’t come up with any truly juicy examples. That strongly suggests there basically aren’t any. Propaganda can be true, and truthful propaganda is in fact typically the most effective propaganda. Yet even those with a personal motive in finding dirt on the protest movement can’t seem to find any truly nasty anti-Semitic dirt on it.
Yes, some protest rhetoric can be teased into anti-Semitism, such as implying that Israel ought not to exist while Palestine ought to (why? is one side less human and thus less deserving of national aspirations?).
I myself avoid such rhetoric. But I also find it not that impressive as a demonstration of anti-Semitism. If anti-Semitism is the actual motive behind the protests, wouldn’t actual overt anti-Jewish rhetoric be easier to find? A far better explanation for it is simply people repeating slogans without stopping to think of the implications behind them. That’s evidence for mindless sloganeering, not evidence for anti-Semitism (and mindless sloganeering exists in every political cause).
Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer.
It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality. And it could: the the [sic] George Floyd Uprising is still alive in the memories of the millions of people who participated.
I’d love for radical politics to become more popular in the USA (to the point where it becomes the norm), but I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m reasonably sure that things like gratuitous vandalism do more to turn Middle America away from the cause than towards it (and if radical politics are to become the norm, we must recruit from the ranks of Middle America).
I mean, really now, what did they expect to happen on campuses?
Israel takes it to the Nth level with disproportionate retaliation, rising to levels that many consider genocidal (of which ample evidence now exists).
The iron triangle that is the US/Israel alliance remains basically unquestioned. Ukraine may struggle for military aid, but never Israel.
The taboo against criticizing Israel does suffer some damage.
But only some. Campus demonstrations against what Israel is doing are still repressed harshly.
Per the latter, choose to escalate, and the other side then also chooses escalation. Surprise, surprise. Encampments become building occupations.
And no, this is not a defence of everything that has been done by the protestors. There has been actual anti-Semitic rhetoric. There have been pro-Hamas statements. There has been gratuitous vandalism of campus property. Such things are bad.
But keep some perspective here. A building at Columbia University is not as important as the US Capitol. While the last election was not stolen from Trump, Gaza is actually suffering. Outrage against a relatively unimportant target, one that does not threaten the basic nature of an open, democratic society, motivated by an actual grievance, is rather different from wanting to kill the Vice-President and create a fascist state because of an imagined grievance.
Much is starting to be said about the harm the demonstrations do. And they do harm Biden. Biden now has the black mark of domestic unrest against him, and such black marks count in the calculus of whether or not a president will be reelected.
Per the latter, the only real question is whether or not the unrest will become “sustained.” My money is on no. The reason is the venue and timing: on university campuses, in late spring. Classes are about to let out. That will let the air out of the protests. Moreover, it looks like a deal between Israel and Hamas might be in the works. If such a deal is cut, the conflict will de-escalate, and be a distant memory by Election Day, since (like it or not) most Americans don’t give a shit about foreign policy and couldn’t even point to Israel/Palestine on a map, even if their lives depended on it.
What’s being overlooked is the good the protests accomplish. What’s being done in Gaza is pretty serious, and it is being done in no small part with US tax dollars. People should be upset! There should be unrest! That there is, is a sign of a healthier society than one that would passively accept such atrocities.
Practically, the unrest, plus the principle that unrest harms an incumbent, helps butter Biden’s toast on the side of pushing Israel to cut a deal with Hamas to end the immediate hostilities. Absent such a thing, there would only be the Establishment politics maxim of “thou shalt never criticize Israel or deviate from supporting Israel 100%” at play.
In other words, it may change from unqualified support to conditional support. (It will not change any more, at least not at first. Sorry. This is like turning a large ship; big changes in course happen slowly.)
Why do something that is likely to be a blunder, even when viewed in purely self-interested terms? What I call cognitive shorthand. In planning the next day’s activities, one does not spend much time pondering if the sun will rise and set, and when it is likely to. It is taken as a given that this will happen, and at almost exactly the same times it did today. Mental energy is to be spent pondering the variables that are actually variables, and taking the constants as givens.
For the entire time that I have had any degree of political awareness, since approximately my early teen years, the USA has supported Israel no matter what. It has been taken as virtually mandatory that all officeholders profess their unwavering support for Israel.
This has always struck me as odd, given that also for the entire time I have been aware of politics, Israel has been colonizing land seized in warfare, in contravention of international law. That almost never got criticized by any US figure with any degree of political power, and if any such individual did make the criticism, it was usually very weak and qualified, and there was almost always blowback for making the criticism. The blowback often ended in apology and a proclamation of unwavering support for Israel. Departures from this norm were taken as departures from respectable, mainstream politics.
Given that level of decades-long support, it was natural for Israelis to engage in cognitive shorthand, and take it as a given. And for decades, this worked perfectly. Israel would do whatever it wanted, and the USA would publicly back Israel. If you are a small country, it is great to have that sort of power, particularly if you have larger, hostile neighbours.
Old habits can die hard, and it seems that the Netanyahu regime is failing to revisit its cognitive shorthand, despite all the recent evidence that some assumed constants have now become variables. Maybe they are focusing on the weakness in Schumer’s latest speech, instead of the more significant fact that he made the speech at all.
It won’t be the first time a regime’s hubris ends up costing it, and it won’t be the last time, either.
This is actually quite significant. Congress’ most powerful Jew, and one of Israel’s staunchest allies there, is issuing criticism of Israel far harsher than anything he has done so far in his entire (and lengthy) political career.
One could focus on how far it falls short, and I am certain most Left sources will. Yes, his proposal that Netanyahu step aside once the war is over is both weak sauce and incredibly naïve; it merely puts Netanyahu on notice that he can remain in power so long as he prolongs the war. It is pretty obvious what that will accomplish in the short term.
But it doesn’t matter so much. What is important is that a politician who never previously let any daylight show between his public stance and Israeli state policy now feels free to criticize Israel and Israeli imperialism.
The reputational decline of which I wrote earlier is, in fact, accelerating more rapidly than I thought it would. Criticize Schumer for making a baby step if you wish (I just did above), but realize it is a larger baby step, and it happened sooner, than many would have thought possible.
Either Netanyahu’s days are far more numbered than many think, or the days of the US-Israel alliance are far more numbered than many think, or perhaps both. Which it is, is largely up to an Israeli public that increasingly leans right.
If they choose to follow apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia into the wilderness of international isolation, Israel will end up like those two apartheid regimes did. If money talks, and they want to remain part of the Western world, with Western affluence, for the Palestinians it doesn’t matter so much that it was done grudgingly and for self-interested reasons instead of enthusiastically and altruistically. Progress is progress.
Yes, significant progress on the Palestine issue may be likely, and far sooner than many think.
Update:Yet more evidence emerged today of the damage Israel is inflicting upon itself.
In quotes only because it, and not the Israeli offensive that provoked it, will end up being labelled “terrorism” in the Establishment media. Because of course this will happen. “Terrorism” is, and always has been, a subjective label, used for propaganda purposes to delegitimize violence with which one disagrees.
And yes, I have used the term in these pages before. Which, yes, means I was posting propaganda to delegitimize violence with which I disagreed. Because of course I post propaganda here. Pretty much everyone with a set of political beliefs (which means pretty much anyone who cares about things political) makes propaganda.
Propaganda per se is not evil or immoral. What is dishonest is to paint propaganda as if it were impartial news.
But I digress. A big new round of acts of political violence on the part of the Arab and Muslim world, particularly the Palestinian subset of it, against the West, particularly Israel and the USA, is coming.
Why wouldn’t it be, seeing as how brutalized Gaza has been in recent months? I really can’t think of any examples of comparable brutality that have passed without further cycles of retribution to some degree. Anyone who believes Israel’s disproportionate retaliation for the events of October 7th will be the final word in what is now a near century-long ongoing conflict is a fool.
And it seems as if the intelligence community, whatever its faults, is not run by fools. So it’s hardly just me that can see it.
Really, it is hard to call this anything but pure, unvarnished barbarism. Probably the most damning part of the article is this bit:
Dr Husam Abu Safyia, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the majority of the injured taken there had gunshot wounds in the upper part of their bodies, and many of the deaths were from gunshots to the head, neck or chest.
So they deliberately opened fire on starving civilians and shot to kill. Pure barbarism.
And I think it is important to use the b-word to refer to what the Netanyahu regime is doing. That term has historically been used as part of gaslighting propaganda by Western nations to justify their own imperialist barbarism, by accusing those they are “civilizing” as being saved from it.
And Zionism is hardly exempt from this. From Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State):
We should there [in Palestine] form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.
Needless to say (but I have to say it, else some stooge for Israeli barbarism might bring it up) “but October 7th” is not a valid answer to this. Yes, what Hamas did on that day was barbarism, too. So what? As I wrote last November two wrongs don’t make a right.
Israeli barbarism is now causing more death and suffering than Palestinian barbarism ever did. It is the greater problem, and it is logical to spend more political energy on addressing it.
One of the things I did when packing up and cleaning out in Bellingham was listen to NPR. You see, I live just below a ridge to my south, so my home is blocked by that ridge from receiving FM radio signals from the USA. It’s one of the mildly annoying features of my home.
One of the things I heard was a segment from On Point about the problems some US military barracks are having with mold infestations. So far, so good: the government is responsible for the housing needs of those enlisted to serve, and it is a dereliction of duty to fail to supply safe, hygienic housing.
The problem comes at the end when privatization was sold as a silver bullet. Not study to uncover the root causes of the problem. Not spending money to exterminate the mold and rectify those causes. Privatization.
Changing the ownership of a mold-infested building does absolutely nothing to make the mold go away. In fact, it can easily make it harder to get rid of the mold. Before, the Army owned the building. Issue the necessary orders and spend the necessary money to remove the mold and rectify the defects that let the mold fester. Now, someone else owns the building; everything is at an arm’s length. Not so easy to issue orders to a private business over what that business is to do with its own property.
The military already has plenty of problems overseeing private contractors, to the end that such contractors are already routinely implicated in wasteful spending. I once, long ago, worked in that sector, and from personal experience, private defence contractors combine the avarice of private enterprise, the insulation from market forces of government bureaucracy, and the secrecy of the national security establishment. Approximately as good an incubator of corruption and waste as those unsanitary barracks are of mold.
The arguments offered for privatization were very weak. So weak, in fact, that if you look into those arguments, you find that they are actually arguments against privatization. First was the (totally unsupported) assertion that “this cannot be solved through the traditional military construction process.” Then there was some mumbling about how “Congress just won’t appropriate” and “We’ve got to use the capital markets to do this.”
Well, if Congress won’t spend money fixing up those barracks, why will private businesses? Just to altruistically be nice? It is to laugh: Capitalists are in business to make money. No, that money will have to come from the government, via the fees it pays to the contractors. Go look up cost-plus and get back to me.
If Congress won’t spend money on fixing up those barracks directly, why would it spend money on hiring private businesses to fix them up? Once again, capitalists are in business to make money. Now you not only have the labour and materials costs of construction to contend with, you have the profits of a capitalist as well. Those profits are not going to come from some secret orchard of money trees the capitalist knows about. They are going to come out of money the government pays the capitalist. In other words, costs to the government will go up, not down, if the traditional military construction process (done at cost) is privatized. Congratulations! The gap between available funds and necessary funds has now grown wider.
So far as the “capital markets” go, again, the problem is worse with privatization. Capitalists get to borrow money from the private capital markets. Banks charge borrowers rates in excess of interest paid to savers. Of course they do: bankers are capitalists, too, and have to get their profits from someplace. You can cut the bankers out of the picture with bonds, of course, but the government can do this as well. And since government bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the government, while private businesses can and sometimes do go bankrupt, the government can get away with paying bondholders less interest, because it doesn’t have to reward them for accepting the additional risk of private bonds. Again, congratulations! You are now spending more to borrow money.
It all makes me wonder who is paying the two “experts” this show interviewed. I would be very surprised to learn that they and/or their spouses are not in some way invested in businesses likely to be hired as contractors under the privatization schemes they are arguing for.
None of the above downsides of privatization were, of course, mentioned in the program. It just ended on a high note of free-market pixie dust being able to work its magic, if only the bad old Congress would allow it to.
And this was on NPR, the allegedly left-leaning public radio network that is supposed to be at the best capitalism-sketpical. No wonder the parameters of public dialogue are so badly skewed in the USA.
