Today is Memorial Day in the US, which is meant to commemorate those killed in wars while serving in some military capacity, though over time people also use it to commemorate the deaths of any loved ones. While there are official events such a parades and flag flying and laying of wreaths at war memorials and in cemeteries, the day coincides with the onset of summer-like weather, and thus is seen as the beginning of the season for summertime activities. Since 1971, when the date was shifted from the fixed May 30 to the last Monday in May, people in the wintry regions of the country have seen this three-day weekend as the date to signal the emergence from their winter cocoons and organize barbecues and picnics and go to amusement parks and the like to take advantage of the warm weather.

This does not sit well with some people and without fail you can expect to see opinion pieces and editorials and letters to the editor of your local newspaper complaining that Memorial Day is not being treated with the solemnity it deserves.

I don’t understand these scolds who want to be able to dictate what other people should do and feel. If you want to treat the day solemnly and think deep thoughts about life and death, go ahead, knock yourself out. But if others want to use a holiday to enjoy themselves, let them be. As long as the fun-seekers don’t get in the face of the solemn ones and vice versa, there really should be no problem.

I remember as an adolescent feeling bored one Good Friday (which is a government holiday in Sri Lanka) after going to our church in the morning for the traditional three-hour service. I asked my mother whether I could go and see a film. Since I was a religious boy, I felt that I was asking for something not quite appropriate since it did not seem right to go and enjoy myself on the day that we were supposed to commemorate Jesus dying for our sins, which is a pretty big deal. So I fully expected her to say no but she cheerfully agreed. I think she had the healthy attitude that no one was genuinely grieving about an event that (supposedly) happened 2,000 years ago and that one should not overdo the piety. Having me mope around the house was not benefiting anyone.

I have grown increasingly impatient with these public grievings over past events by people who have no connection to the events or the people being commemorated. It seems to me to have become mainly occasions for hypocritical sanctimony by elected officials who try to outdo each other in public piety. We can expect to see an orgy of this on the tenth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.

In the US you will hear a lot of talk about the so-called peace process for the Middle East that never seems to go anywhere. You will also hear a lot about the two-state solution. But you rarely hear about the situation on the ground while this is going on. Take a look at this BBC map that shows how Israel has steadily encroached on the West Bank over the decades. (While Israel has relinquished formal control of Gaza, the harsh blockade they and Egypt imposed on that land means that they still dominate life there. Fortunately it looks like the new Egyptian authorities are going to lift the blockade.)

If you strip out the portions of land in the West Bank that are under Israeli control, this is what you are left with (via Balloon-Juice).

The areas in which the Palestinians are confined look like an archipelago, similar to the islands that comprise the Maldives or the Philippines. But it is much worse. At least in those other countries, people can freely go from one island to another, with only water as a barrier to travel. As a result of settlements and roads and walls that have been illegally built by Israel, the Palestinians are subjected to having to go around high barriers and pass through humiliating checkpoints as they go from one reservation to another. The splintering of land is even worse than the Bantustans for black people created by the white South African government during the worst days of apartheid.

It should be obvious why such maps are rarely published in the US media because it becomes immediately obvious that the so-called peace process has been a farce, meant to stall for time while successive Israeli governments steadily encroach on the West Bank while they and the US pretend that they want to strike a deal with the Palestinians. The Israeli governments have no intention of allowing a viable Palestinian state. Indeed it was in looking at these maps, that I came to the realization that the two-state option is already dead. The settlers who have encroached on Palestinian lands are the most extreme religious zealots who think they are fulfilling some divine mandate to occupy all the land and they want still more.

Those who try and argue that the periodic tiffs between the Israeli and US governments (like the dressing down that Netanyahu just gave Obama) is some kind of kabuki prior to advancing the peace process simply cannot see that Israel has been negotiating in bad faith and the US has enabled it. The US has long ago ceased to be the so-called ‘honest broker’ in the process.

As far as I can see, the goal of the Israeli government is to seek to either make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they will leave or at some point forcibly expel them from the occupied territories or keep them as a second-class people indefinitely. But such a strategy runs the serious risk of boomeranging. Jeffrey Goldberg argues that the Israeli government, by making a Palestinian state impossible, is actually creating the conditions to destroy itself as a Jewish state because time and demographics are on the Palestinian side. He says that the current policies will “hopelessly, ineradicably, entangle the two peoples wedged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” That will leave Israel with the following options:

Either the Jews of Israel would grant the Palestinians the vote, at which point their country would lose its Jewish majority and its identity as a refuge for the Jewish people, or it would deny them the vote, and become an apartheid state. The latter option is untenable, of course: Many Jewish Israelis would be repulsed by this thought; other nations that already consider Israel a pariah would now have just cause; and Israel would lose its last remaining friend, the U.S., because no American — including and especially young American Jews — would identify with a country reminiscent of pre-Mandela South Africa.

In my opinion, the two-state solution is rapidly ceasing to be viable. The question is what will happen as more and more people realize this.

It is no secret that the Israel lobby exerts enormous power over US policy in the Middle East. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt described the structure of the lobby, how it operates, and the results of its actions in their book The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy and you can read my three part review here and here and here. The power of the lobby is such that even the publication of such a book by two establishment scholars (Mearsheimer is at the University of Chicago and Walt is at Harvard University) caused controversy and their long article on this topic that was a precursor to the book was rejected by American publications that led to it eventually being published in England in the London Review of Books.
[Read more…]

Two of the enduring myths in American politics is that there is deep animosity between the two major parties and that the US Senate is the greatest deliberating body in the world. But as Glenn Greenwald points out, backroom bipartisanship is the norm when it comes to serving the interests of the one-party state, such as extending the USA Patriot Act. Public debates are either largely symbolic where the outcome has been pre-determined or involve issues that are not important to the pro-war/pro-business one party that rules this country. The idea of having a genuine debate on an important issue in which the outcome is not pre-determined is viewed with horror by the leadership of both parties.

The extent to which the Senate goes out of its way to avoid discussing major legislation in public is described well in this letter in response to the Greenwald post, in which Senator Rand Paul describes how little work is done by the Senate and how hard it is to get the Senate to debate important issues, such as war. The method of choice to prevent a debate on anything is what is known as a ‘fake quorum call’.