Israel has a long history of awful treatment of the Palestinians, treating them in a way that has been compared to the apartheid system used by the white minority in South Africa to oppress the blacks. But Israel has got even worse in recent days. Ran Ha Cohen describes the rise of outright racism in Israel. Israeli police are even reported to be illegally arresting arrest five-year old Palestinian children.
The occupation of Palestinian is becoming so ugly that New Yorker editor David Remnick calls for it to end and has led even strong supporters of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg (who has served in the Israel Defense Forces) to speculate that Israel could soon no longer claim the label of being democratic. Ilan Pappé, a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK and director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, goes further and says:
Israel is definitely not a democracy. A country that occupies another people for more than 40 years and disallow them the most elementary civic and human rights cannot be a democracy. A country that pursues a discriminatory policy against a fifth of its Palestinian citizens inside the 67 borders cannot be a democracy. In fact Israel is, what we use to call in political science a herrenvolk democracy, its democracy only for the masters. The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is useless and meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the State, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level from official legislation through governmental practices, and social and cultural attitudes, Israel is only a democracy for one group, one ethnic group, that given the space that Israel now controls, is not even a majority group anymore, so I think that you’ll find it very hard to use any known definition of democracy which will be applicable for the Israeli case.
The growth of outright racist views often voiced by rabbis, and its tolerance by the Israeli government and higher echelons of society, is causing some concern within that country amongst people who fear the emergence of a theocracy: “Hundreds of rabbis sign a manifesto prohibiting Jews from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews, yet no response is heard from the justice minister. The chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliahu, continuously incites and no criminal or disciplinary procedures were commenced against him.”
As Juan Cole points out, the racism in Israel is already quite overt as can be seen in the restrictions on interfaith marriage.
Israel, like Lebanon and some Muslim countries, for the most part makes no provision for civil marriage, requiring individuals to marry within the religious law of their sect. Israel’s rabbinate opposes civil marriage in part out of fear it would encourage inter-faith marriage. At the moment, couples of different faith heritages in Israel must go to Cyprus or elsewhere abroad to marry, and have the marriage recognized on their return. Such a marriage cannot be performed in Israel itself.
It is no secret that Israel, and its lobby in the US, have been urging a military attack on Iran. US leaders routinely threaten Iran with the possibility of a nuclear attack by saying that ‘the nuclear option is not off the table’. Israel makes sure everyone is aware that it can and will attack Iran at a moment’s notice if given the green light by the US, and both countries have repeatedly and recently invaded other countries in that region. And yet it is Iran, which has not attacked any neighbor for over a millennium, that is portrayed in the media here as the dangerous extremist nation, while the US and Israel are the ‘moderates’.
I have been puzzled by Israel’s preoccupation with Iran since the leaders of Iran are not stupid and are not likely to use any nuclear weapons it manufactures because of certain and overwhelming retaliation. It seems pretty obvious to me that if they seek nuclear weapons at all, it is as a deterrent to attacks on them by the US and Israel. I am more fearful of the Israeli or US governments using nuclear weapons because they refuse to deny that they are willing to use them (and the US has used them in the past) and there is no deterrence to their use.
Juan Cole provides a possible explanation for Israel’s preoccupation with Iran, based on cables released by WikiLeaks. Apparently Israel is concerned that the rate of immigration is slowing down and that its demographic edge over the native Arab population might soon disappear.
The Jewish Agency, which was created to promote the immigration to Israel of Jews all over the world, has conceded that the era of mass immigration by Jews is over. This peaked in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of Jews — and many non-Jews — flooded into the country after the Soviet Union collapsed.
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This year, the Jewish Agency expects around 18,000 Jews to move to Israel from the United States and elsewhere and the number is likely to dwindle.Israel’s demographic makeup has undergone dramatic change in recent years. Out of a population of around 7 million, one-fifth are Palestinian Arabs. Another large minority is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are non-Jews as defined by Jewish religious law, or Halaka.
The rise in power of right-wing orthodox Jewish religious groups and their attempts to impose their absurdly restrictive lifestyle on the still significantly large secular population is causing tensions within the country. What is happening is that the new immigrants from Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries seem to be more anti-Arab, pro-settlement, and hard line nationalists. The Israeli government may be fearful that if Iran did manage to produce nuclear weapons, then its Jewish population that has been made so fearful of Iran would emigrate in even larger numbers, worsening the demographic problem. The government’s own polling says that one-third of Israelis would emigrate if Iran developed a nuclear weapon. The people who are most likely to leave are the more secular modernist elements, leaving the country even more firmly in the grip of its religious extremists. If this happens it will result in an Israel that looks like the Jewish equivalent of mullah-dominated Islamist states in which the religious nutters impose their crazy rules on everyone, whether they are believers or not. One Israeli Minister warns that Israel is already turning into Iran.
Whenever religion gains influence over a government, the results are bad. Religion is a menace and we would all be better off without it.
There is a legend that each outgoing president writes a letter to the person succeeding him and on his last day in office leaves it in the desk in the Oval Office for the new president to read. The contents of the letters are not revealed but based on the pattern of history, I think I have figured out what it says.
It consists of a single sentence: “Bomb another country.”
Glenn Greenwald discusses how the doctrine that the president is unconstrained by either the Constitution or the Congress is being advanced even more vigorously, that “the Obama administration is arrogating unto the President the unilateral, unrestrained right to start wars in all circumstances, whether or not the U.S. is attacked.” And Obama’s defenders are using the same arguments they criticized when Bush’s defenders used them when he similarly ignored the constitution.
Greenwald adds:
Then there’s the notion that Presidents in the past have started similar wars without Congressional approval. That’s certainly true, but so what? The fact that an act is commonplace isn’t a defense or justification. That “defense” was also a common refrain of Bush followers to justify their leader’s chronic unconstitutional acts and other forms of law-breaking: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and FDR interned Japanese-Americans, so why are you upset that Bush is acting outside the law? The pervasiveness of this form of thought underscores the dangers of learned acquiescence: once a government engages long enough or pervasively enough in a certain form of criminality or corruption, the citizenry is trained to accept it and collectively ceases to resist it, even learns to embrace it. What Obama is doing in Libya is either lawful or it isn’t on its own terms; whether other Presidents in the past have acted similarly (and they have) is irrelevant.
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One’s views on the desirability of the Libya war have absolutely nothing to do with whether Obama has acted legally and/or whether his theories of presidential power are valid. This, too, should have been decisively settled during the Bush years, when Bush followers invariably argued that Bush was justified in eavesdropping without warrants or torturing because of the good outcomes it produced (Keeping Us Safe) — as though Presidents have the power to violate laws or transgress Constitutional limits provided they can prove that doing so produces good results. The one and only safeguard against tyranny is that political leaders are subjected to the constraints of the Constitution and law (we’re a nation of laws or a nation of men, said Adams: you must choose). To argue that you’re supportive of or indifferent to lawless acts because of the good results they produce is simply another way of yearning for a benevolent tyrant (and is another way of replicating the mindset of the Bush follower).
Ayn Rand is a current favorite among the oligarchy and its serf-like tea party followers since she saw successful people as achieving things entirely on their own with no help from others or society, opposed all taxes as stealing by the government, called for the elimination of all government redistributive efforts, and attacked as weak those who need governments and others to help them in times of need. She called them ‘looters’ and ‘moochers’. The Randians are at the forefront of cutting government programs that do not benefit the oligarchy.
But a recent report reveals that Rand herself was a hypocrite. When she became ill with lung cancer late in life, she applied for and obtained social security and Medicare benefits under a different name name. It should not be surprising that she was a hypocrite and sought out government help when she needed it. They are all like that. Look at the way Wall Street rushed to the government for assistance when the financial system tanked. They only oppose government helping those who are not part of the oligarchy.
I have read only one of Rand’s books, The Fountainhead. I am aware that her magnum opus is Atlas Shrugged and it forms the basis for the Galtian fantasies of the oligarchy, but The Fountainhead was such an awful book that I have little stomach to read any other work by her, especially since they are so long. It was not only the politics of the book that I found objectionable but mainly her writing style which consists of characters who have no depth and are merely types, existing mainly to take positions and make speeches that advance her philosophy. Subtlety is not her strong suit.
We are witnessing the inevitable mission creep in Libya.
The original stated goal was to create a no-fly zone supposedly to prevent the Libyan government using their air power to attack innocent civilians. That quickly changed into destroying the Libyan air forces even while they were on the ground. Then the US-led NATO air attacks started targeting those Libyan forces that were fighting rebel forces and threatening to push them back. Then the air attacks started hitting those Libyan forces that were away from the fighting, even those in their barracks.
Now the air attacks are supposedly targeting munitions stores. We are also told that CIA operatives have been in Libya for several weeks already meeting with rebel forces and that Obama has authorized covert support for Libyan rebels, which likely means including supplying arms. This escalation in involvement has happened remarkably rapidly.
So what is going on? Obama says that Gaddafi must go but that regime change is not part of the mission. Taken at face value, what we seem to be seeing is the US acting as the de facto air force of the Libyan rebels, and slowly increasing its contribution to the war effort to balance ay success by Gaddafi’s forces. In other words, the goal seems to be to create either a stalemate or marginally tilt the balance in favor of the rebels.
What is the point of this? After all, a protracted civil war causes immense pain for ordinary people and results in the destruction of a country’s infrastructure, causing long term hardships.
And what if Gaddafi stays in power and his forces can withstand the current NATO campaign? The US is far too deep into the conflict now to allow that to happen. So expect to see the next stage of ratcheting up, with bombings of supposedly military targets in cities as a sign to the Libyan people who still support him that his government is incapable of protecting them and thus pressuring them into rising up against him and join the rebel forces. Then we will begin to receive the inevitable reports of a hospital or a school or a mosque or marketplace being hit, resulting in civilian casualties, which will of course be regretted as unfortunate ‘collateral damage’.
So we will end up with civilians killed, the very thing that the US action was supposed to prevent. No doubt the dead and their families will be pleased that they were killed by a ‘humanitarian’ military force rather than by their own government.
And that will set the stage for the final step, sending in US troops or surrogates from other countries or mercenaries.
Russian Television tallies the real cost of America’s many wars.
The Daily Show points out that even paying no taxes at all is not enough for the oligarchy.
Stephen Colbert reports on the attacks on working people by state governments. The state governments want to roll back all the benefits and protections that labor unions have given us, and allow employers to have unfettered power over their employees. Collective bargaining has been the way that individuals who have no economic or political clout could gain some bargaining power.
Michael Moore on The Colbert Report points out that just 400 people in America have more wealth than 150 million. And that is still not enough for them. They want to have as much as 250 million and are aided in their greed by the federal and state governments that they have bought, and the dupes amongst the tea party crowd who have no idea that they are being used as fodder for the further enrichment of the oligarchy and will be tossed aside as soon as they have served their purpose.
The country has long been engaged in a one-sided class war that has been waged by the oligarchy on the rest of us. Now people are beginning to fight back as the nakedness of the greed and power grab becomes apparent.
Paul Krugman is a politically savvy man so it surprises me that even he thinks that the reason that the Republicans and the oligarchy are getting their own way so easily on fiscal issues is because Obama is a lousy negotiator.
As I have said over and over again, the Democrats negotiating strategy is to betray the middle and working classes that support them and give the oligarchy as much as they can while acting as if they were forced into it or were outmaneuvered. Since even people like Krugman and other liberal commentators seem to have bought it, it means that they have succeeded.
The Democrats behavior is perfectly understandable if you bear this simple rule in mind: When it comes to any policy that the Democrats say they espouse but which hurts the interests of the oligarchy, the Democrats do not want a strategy that will win, they seek one that will lose.
Glenn Greenwald has another excellent piece on how the US oligarchs, as represented by the Koch brothers, are so greedy as to be delusional, seeing themselves as the oppressed ones, fighting against a President Obama who in their eyes is a ‘dedicated egalitarian’ who has ‘internalized Marxist models’ and is ‘the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation’ because he has had ‘antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life’.
Greenewald contrasts this with the reality:
Since Obama was inaugurated, the Dow Jones has increased more than 50% — from 8,000 to more than 12,000; the wealthiest recieved a massive tax cut; the top marginal tax rate was three times less than during the Eisenhower years and substantially lower than during the Reagan years; income and wealth inequality are so vast and rising that it is easily at Third World levels; meanwhile, “the share of U.S. taxes paid by corporations has fallen from 30 percent of federal revenue in the 1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.” During this same time period, the unemployment rate has increased from 7.7% to 8.9%; millions of Americans have had their homes foreclosed; and the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased by many millions, the largest number since the statistic has been recorded. Can you smell Obama’s radical egalitarianism and Marxist anti-business hatred yet?
Then there are those whom Obama has empowered. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a business-revering corporatist who made close to $20 million in 3 short years as an investment banker, while his second, Bill Daley, served for years as JP Morgan’s Midwest Chairman. His Treasury Secretary is undoubtedly the most loyal and dedicated servant Wall Street has ever had in that position, while Goldman Sachs officials occupy so many key positions in his administration that a former IMF and Salomon Brothers executive condemned what he called “Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs.” Obama’s former OMB Director recently left to take a multi-million-dollar position with Citigroup. From the start, Obama’s economic policies were shaped by the Wall Street-revering neo-liberal Rubinites who did so much to serve corporate America during the Clinton years. Meanwhile, the President’s choice to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness — General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt — heads a corporation that “despite $14.2 billion in worldwide profits – including more than $5 billion from U.S. operations – [] did not owe taxes in 2010”: an appointment the White House still defends.
Yes, these are definitely the actions of a doctrinaire egalitarian determined to destroy the capitalist system in the US and usher in a Marxist dictatorship.