Israel: The Last Colonial State

Exeter historian Ilan Pappe draws on Gabi Piterberg's new book, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, to analyze the violence in Gaza. In that book Piterberg

explores the ideological origins and historical progression of this righteous fury [Zionism]. Today in Israel, from Left to Right, from Likud to Kadima, from the academia to the media, one can hear this righteous fury of a state that is more busy than any other state in the world in destroying and dispossessing an indigenous population.

And if one does not want to endorse violence as the means of opposing it, there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically [emphasis added]. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.

Columbia historian Joseph Massad similarly diagnoses the origins of the current violence in the Zionist settler colonial project and the ideology that has legitimized that historical project:

The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of crushing Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its collaborators has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel's crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.

Saree Makdasi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation explains what the

slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess population... This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology that spawned it—when those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.

Obama and the "Graveyard of Empires"

Historian Gary Leupp on pentagon plans to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan:

this will increase the total number of foreign troops in Afghanistan to 93,000, which is just shy of the 100,000 that the Soviets had in Afghanistan at their peak in 1987. He points out that the Soviets had the advantage of supply lines from the immediately neighboring USSR, and including numerous ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who could speak local languages and had some understanding of local culture, could not repress the rag-tag CIA-supplied guerrillas and secure control of the country... Does Obama, often described as lacking knowledge of foreign affairs, and praised (by all the wrong people) for reaching out to (all the wrong) “experienced” foreign policy wonks, really believe that he can succeed in Afghanistan where so many others have failed?

And he points to the real objective behind the troop increase:

Most importantly, it can finally get that oil pipeline done---the one that’s to run from the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the Indian Ocean bypassing Russia and unfriendly Iran. The deal was signed in December 2002 but construction has been stymied by the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. That pipeline is, I believe, the big prize.

The war on Iraq has been in my opinion less “a war for oil” actually promoted by Big Oil than a war engineered by neoconservative ideologues to reconfigure Southwest Asia for longterm U.S. and Israeli geopolitical advantage. But it’s in fact been disastrous for the interests of U.S. imperialism, and bitterly divided the ruling class. It’s produced the highly unusual situation where one faction of that class has bet its money on an African-American named Barack Hussein Osama (accused of “socialism” by his right wing critics) to rectify the situation. While I don’t expect a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq under what will in fact be a center-right administration, the focus will be on the competition for control over Central Asian oil and gas. That means a degree of control over Afghanistan that has eluded Washington since the invasion of 2001.

The Power of "No Comment"

When Obama visited Middle East in July these were his sentiments:

"He said then that when bombs are raining down on your citizens, there is an urge to respond and act to try to put an end to that. That's what he said then. I think that's what he believes." [Axelrod quoted on Face the Nation].

Which side of the line do you suppose he was standing on? Does one suppose that Obama might have venture into Occupied Gaza to witness first hand the human suffering caused by Israeli cruelty and American supplied war planes? No, he was not referring to a Palestinian "urge to respond" to Israeli bombs, though one would assume that Palestinians, as humans, would have such an "urge."

Radical journalist Joshua Frank reprints Axelrod's comments:

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Obama’s Senior Adviser David Axelrod explained to guest cost Chip Reid how an Obama administration would handle the situation, even if it turns for the worst.

“Well, certainly, the president-elect recognizes the special relationship between United States and Israel. It’s an important bond, an important relationship. He’s going to honor it ... And obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded. But it’s something that he’s committed to."

Such feckless adherence to orthodox thinking, and such cold indifference to a human tragedy of this magnitude gives lie to the notion that once Obama's actually in power, he'll be able to put some distance between himself and his AIPAC puppetmasters- even Obama suggested something of the sort when he told 'Ali Abunimah in 200o:

"Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."

Is Obama victim of his own naivete? Or did he simply pay lip service to Arab-Americans when it was in his political interest to do so (I of course think it is the latter). Did he actually think that once he got closer to the levers of power he'd have more freedom of action? Perhaps he should dust off Ferguson's The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. A little more attention to how power in America actually works would have disabused the young state senator of such naive assumptions. Had he read that book he might have a better understanding of just how long it would take to repay all those who put him in power- I don't like predictions, but if i had to venture, i predict that he'll be prostrating himself before his AIPAC puppetmasters for as long as the corrupt and defunct political system for which he serves as chief executive remains in tact.

The problem is strucutual, it's systemic. Obama is now part of the death machine - and has to be opposed as such. The wicked system over which he presides is doomed. Too bad Obama didn't the memo.

Juan Cole puts the Israeli massacre in perspective:

Since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, Israelis have killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly a thousand of them minors. Since fall of 2007, Israel has kept the 1.5 million Gazans under a blockade, interdicting food, fuel and medical supplies to one degree or another. Wreaking collective punishment on civilian populations such as hospital patients denied needed electricity is a crime of war.

The Israelis on Saturday killed 5% of all the Palestinians they have killed since the beginning of 2001! 230 people were slaughtered in a day, over 70 of them innocent civilians. In contrast, from the ceasefire Hamas announced in June, 2008 until Saturday, no Israelis had been killed by Hamas. The infliction of this sort of death toll is known in the law of war as a disproportionate response, and it is a war crime.

“I inhaled frequently, that was the point.”

--Barack Obama, November 2006

(article here)

The Heart of Darkness

Chris Hedges offers a penetrating review of Joseph Conrad:

Conrad saw cruelty as an integral part of human nature. This cruelty arrives, however, in different forms. Stable, industrialized societies, awash in wealth and privilege, can construct internal systems that mask this cruelty, although it is nakedly displayed in their imperial outposts.

Those who believe that history is a progressive march toward human perfectibility, and that they have the moral right to force this progress on others, no longer know what it is to be human. In the name of the noblest virtues they sink to the depths of criminality and moral depravity... The great institutions of European imperial powers and noble ideals of European enlightenment, as Conrad saw in the Congo, were covers for rapacious greed, exploitation and barbarity.

Obama and the War of Position

Brown University Africana scholar C.D.B. Walker draws insights from Gramsci to analyze the current situation:

The broad left often fails to realize that civil society is, as Gramsci reminds us, a “dialectical unity” with political society. That is, political actors and organizations in civil society do not operate absolutely outside of the social, economic, and ideological dictates of political society [eg The Audubon Society's support for Vilsack]. Is there any reason why over the last three decades we have witnessed the delegitimation of the state as well as state initiatives by those forces on the left in concert with the rise of the conservative assault on a nominal American welfare state? [I think he means that within Civil Society the idea of "shrinking the size of government" has enjoyed as much hegemony as within the hallowed halls of the Club For Growth, AEI, Heritage, CATO, etc]

He calls for the decolonization of American political society, and adds:

"a people’s agenda for change catalyzed by the politics of freedom recognizes that US domestic policy cannot undergo a revolutionary transformation without an end to the policies and practices of American empire abroad. Such a political transvaluation is not effected by renewed calls for “American leadership” – a convenient euphemism for the continuation of American dominance – but by a new vision of an interrelated world community that prioritizes the lives of people over power based on the principle of cooperation and not competition.

Tufts historian Gary Leupp skips Gramsci and goes directly to Marx to analyze the situation:

A lot of liberal Democrats---people who believe in the system (although maybe less so day by day, since it isn’t being very good to them)---are echoing the complaint from David Corn of Mother Jones: “This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Pictured.” Perhaps they feel, to put it in Marxian terms, that he exploited their labor power during the election campaign, and now for all their efforts on his behalf he’s slapping them in the face.

maybe what we’re seeing is a war within Obama’s own mindset. Not a war, mind you, about whether or not to champion U.S. imperialism; if he had doubts about that he wouldn’t be a U.S. politician, or at least a highly successful one attracting the money and endorsements that he has. He is plainly a creature of U.S. capitalism and seeks to enhance its geopolitical advantages; that is a big part of his job description.

I think Leupp has tapped something very important below. One of the hallmarks of Empire is its ability to recognize, recruit and retain talent from throughout its diverse realms (that is scribes, artists, architects, etc. of all races and creeds). But what characterizes all would-be Project Managers for Empire drawn from marginal social groups is their deep seated desire to for acceptance from the existing power structure. He elaborates:

Obama’s staff and cabinet picks suggest a deep desire for acceptance by the existing power structure. It’s as though he’s bending over backwards to disabuse anyone of those nasty campaign rumors that he’s a cypto-Muslim, Arabophiliac, quasi-socialist or closet Marxist. It’s as though he’s actively soliciting the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from Joe Lieberman, Karl Rove, Henry Kissinger, Lindsay Graham, Michael Goldfarb, Richard Perle and the other extreme reactionaries expressing their delight at his cabinet choices, and viewing such support as recognition of his own special gift as a healer and uniter. But how can he possibly expect to unite his antiwar base with his rightwing foreign policy team?

The question now becomes: which villages will be pummeled by American bombs in the name of "credibility" and "national unity."