23 Comments

1. Mark:

   Stan, I think you underestimate the power of Zionists to direct US policy. To say that Israel is dependent on the US is not to discount the possiblity that US aid to Israel may not be in the selfish interests of US capital. The US government is basically for sale to the highest bidder. Of course the bidding pool is made of the rich. The rich class has certain areas of common cause but they also fight amongst themselves. In contrast, the Zionist organization, though less wealthy and less numerous than other groups bidding with bribes, is internally stronger and operationally more effective.

   An analogy is a small well trained police force vs. a street mob.

   From the Mossad to the Israeli lobby to mutual business assistance amoung Jews to individual American Jews who from time to time “help” Israel by executing shady tasks, the international Zionist network has proven effective well beyond what their modest numbers should suggest.

   30 October 2005, 10:33 am

2. Stan:

   Inferential at best, and anti-Semitic at worst.

   The Israeli dependency on the US is empirically demonstrable.

   I will not turn this blog into a platform for racial conspiracies, so please be specific in your assertions. If you can show me how the Israeli state would survive in its current form and practice without US aid, I might change my tune. I can definitely show you how the US can surive without Israel.

   The system is imperialism, and it is not a conspiracy. The campaign finance system “for sale to the highest bidder” is not the root of American politics, but a mechanism to exclude the unwashed from the process. If that system were changed — say, through public financing of elections — the ruling class would adapt its political system to ensure their continued control in some other way. The dynamic of buying politicins is nto as clear-cut as many think. I worked in this field with an NGO for about five years, and what interviews showed is that the politicians shake down the contirubtors as aggressively as the lobbyists throw around checks. This notion that campaign finance is the root evil confuses a symptom with an etiology… though it is a very popular issue among white, middle-aged, middle-class men for some reason…. I think they all pine for the myth of Jeffersonian democracy… but I digress.

   If Israel were located near Uganda (0ne early Zionist scheme) we wouldn’t be seeing this relation.

   30 October 2005, 11:20 am

3. m.c.:

   This is cutting close to the bone. This is for the Advanced Class, no beginners please….

   1) Thanks for the first link above mentioning Rep. Earl Hilliard. He often doesn’t get the press that Cynthia McKinney gets. The guy who beat Hilliard, Artur Davis was asst. u.s. attorney for central Alabama who boasted of his 90% conviction rate as a law and order prosecutor.

   2) Apartheid South Africa had two consistent friends, the U.S. and Israel, who defied sanctions and did large-scale business with the white South African government. The rumor was that because S.A. didn’t have nuclear weapons capability of their own, Israel ‘loaned’ the S.A. military a couple of tactical nukes. When Nelson Mandela became President, the Israelis asked for their nukes back.

   3) When George Bush I was elected in ’88, AIPAC or the Israeli P.M.’s office asked some favor of the Bush administration. Bush and his inner circle were not known to be extra friendly to the Israelis. At the time they were & still are very cozy with the House of Saud. Anyway, whether or not the following is true or not is open to speculation: Sec. of State James Baker is some private meeting is claimed to have said something to the effect, “Screw them, they didn’t vote for us anyway.” This was circulated to the press and Governor Clinton became the recipient of organized support and money that Dukakis wasn’t able to get to the same degree.

   Now, here’s the kicker. Cheney and Rumsfeld saw what happened in ’92 and swore that they would never let the DLC get to the right of them on the question of being Israel’s #1 patron and friend.

   4) Before he died, Edward Said said that there is a greater variety of opinion and openness in the Israeli press with regard to the Palestinian question than in the U.S. press.

   The following took me a long time to figure out: Why can Noam Chomsky be critical of Israeli policy in the middle east and not be labeled an anti-Semite like Said(even though they disagreed in public, I would say that they were closer on policy than some of us have been led to believe) or Christopher Hitchens can rip into Henry Kissinger and not be labeled an anti-Semite? Hint: Hitch’s mother was Jewish.

   If a member of the Tribe of Israel criticizes another member, it’s considered legitimate in most cases unless its way out there then they are called a self-hating Jew. Chomsky like Hitch are in the Tribe.

   5) EXTRA CREDIT: Does amyone know who James Abourezk is? Did you know that Tom Daschele got his start in politics as an aide to Abourezk? Also, Abourezk was a close personal and political friend to liberal Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio.

   6) EXTRA CREDIT #2: I defy anybody out there to give me one positive/good/honest/modern/non-sexist/non-stereotyped Arab or non-Jewish Middle Eastern movie character out of any big U.S. film studio. NO:anyone from Lawrence of Arabia and Sallah/John Rhys-Davies in Raiders of the Lost Ark don’t count.

   30 October 2005, 8:09 pm

4. Stan:

   Here’s how close to the bone it’s going to get. This will be the very last post that gets on this blog that even suggests some “Jewish” conspiracy. Judaism and the State of Israel are two different things, and this blog will not be a platform for anti-Semitism.

   30 October 2005, 9:03 pm

5. Neilcaff:

   As Engels once said, anti-semitism is socialism for idiots.

   31 October 2005, 8:52 am

6. Sam:

   Stan,

   Love your writing and your analysis. But this subject is not easy to discuss because anyone critisizing Israel or Zionism opens themselves to charges of anti-semitism.. so lets talk about the situation in black america..

   Here are facts that just cannot be defended and nevertheless they are not talked about or pushed under the rug. I have gotten into many discussions with friends who do not want to face the following..

   one out of seven young black men are in prison right now and there are more black men in prison than in college see here .. http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/252/jpistudy.shtml>

   and check this quote out..
   Equally startling, the risks of prison incarceration rose steeply with lower levels of education. Among blacks, 30.2 percent of those who didn’t attend college had gone to prison by 1999 and 58.9 percent of black high school dropouts born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in state or federal prison by their early 30s.

   Why don’t we hear such statistics on our news? (even the so called Black leaders don’t say anything about this. Lest they be called millitant by the main stream press.) I think it is because we as a society really want to believe that America is now a colorblind society and all racial problems are solved. “We can’t handle the truth” so we would rather not hear about the unpleasent things a la Barbara Bush who does not want to ruin her beautiful mind..

   here is more..
   “Prison is no longer just for the most violent or incorrigible offenders. Inmates are increasingly likely to be serving time for drug offenses or property crimes,” Pettit said. “While there is enduring racial disproportionality in imprisonment, we find that the lifetime risk of incarceration is increasingly stratified by education. Over the past 30 years the risk of incarceration has grown for both blacks and whites, but has grown the fastest among men who have a high school diploma or less.”

   “This has become increasingly important because we know ex-prisoners face a variety of challenges after incarceration,” said Western. “These range from employer discrimination in the job market to increased risks of divorce and separation in family life. The experience of imprisonment in America has emerged as a key social division, marking a new pattern in the lives of recent birth cohorts of black men.”

   So our country’s institutional policies are destroying not just the poor black (and hispanic) community but also the poor white community.

   Now a few things about Israel. everyone that defends Israel says the Palastinians (and the whole Arab middle east) want to destroy Israel. Ok fair enough they need to defend the country but what is up with the following which is never talked about in the mainstream media..

   non-jewish citizens of Israel do not have the same rights as the Jewish citizens. There are Jewish only highways. There is collective punishment of the palastinians dealt out by the state i.e. house demolitions of the family and friends of Arabs that commit crimes against the state. And land confiscations etc. etc.

   Again We in America want to feel good about defeating the Germans (and thereby saving the Jews..) and we just do not want to believe that the people we saved are not special but can be just as brutal as we are against blacks, native americans etc.

   The politicians will never lead on this issue (as they did not in the case of South Africa) We the people need to lead the way. But as long as the MSM will not report on such truths the American people will never change their view.

   Sam

   31 October 2005, 11:42 am

7. Josiah:

   Excellent post, Stan.
   The whole trumping up of Black conservatives like John McWhorter and Shelby Steele is part and parcel with a public relations strategy that evolved from Western dealings with oppressed nations. (Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism discusses this type puppetry in the Cold War-era African context, but it has been done everywhere). Many people on the left have been puzzled by the disparity of co-optation between Black and Jewish Americans, but the reasons are obvious, starting with the extension of white privilege to formerly reviled European ethnics. Jewish Americans like Norm Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky have been pointing this out for years, by the way. Your comparison of Black Americans to Palestinians is much more apt, particularly when we look at neighborhoods like North Philadelphia (where I am typing this) where the police are used to put a feared, impoverished, and highly segregated Black population through a revolving door of shitty schools and prisons.
   This paragraph really struck me:

   “It is no accident that both the Palestinians and the African American survivors of Katrina are demading the “right of return.” White capitalists, with the able assistance of Black comprador assistants (both entrepreneurs and politicians), are already figuring out how to steal formerly Black land in New Orleans and elsewhere, just as the Israelis have stolen the best lands (and the vast majority of the water) from the Palestinians.”
   This opens up a lot of comparisons between Israeli (and Africaner and Algerian “black foot” and Rhodesian) settlement policies and the gentrification of America’s inner cities, which Katrina is shaping up to be a prize example of. And just like the Democrats are committed to Zionism, you don’t hear a peep from Democratic mayors (many of them Black and Brown sell-outs like LA’s Antonio Villaraigosa and Philly’s John Street) about curbing gentrification.
   It’s food for thought, to say the least.

   31 October 2005, 5:49 pm

8. Stan:

   One reason it is so important to separate out anti-Semitism (even smuggled in through conspiacy theorizing – about which I will post soon) from Zionism is precisely because Zionists have been so utterly goddamned shameless about conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. That is precisely why we have to constantly show the separation… that, and the fact that some anti-Zionists ARE anti-Semites.

   The state of Israel is a racist state, and Zionism is a racist political philosophy. Their practice is racist and expansionist to its very core. And it is not based on the Jewish religion. Jabotinsky was secular, and so is Zionism. US imperialism is equally secular, even though it too manipulates religious organizations for political purpsoes.

   I for one do not recognize the Israeli “right to exist” as a “Jewish (settler) state.” That is why I believe hypthetically in the one-state solution: a single, secular, democratic state that includes all residents, but with serious reparations and return of expropriated land, and a complete right to return for Palestinians. I doubt it will come out that way, so in the interim, I see not a single solitary reason to make excuses for the actions of an an imperially-allied Apartheid state.

   Divestment now! Cut ALL US aid to Israel!

   31 October 2005, 6:41 pm

9. m.c.:

   I realize my post ventured into sensitive territory. I admit Noam Chomsky was my main introduction into left-wing politics just as Kurt Vonnegut was my introduction to 20th century avante-garde U.S. literature. I saw Chomsky give a free lecture open to the public at NCSU in 1990 or 1991 and was completely blown away. He not I, has accused Israel of “guiding state terrorism” for selling weapons to apartheid South Africa, Guatemala in the 1980′s and the Contras in Nicaragua. He not I, has called the ADL, the “leading official monitor of anti-Semitism”, an organization which spied on the ANC for being communist and openly supportive of the PLO. According to wikipedia.com other groups the ADL kept tabs on included; the NAACP, the ACLU, ACT UP, Mother Jones magazine, Greenpeace, the Nation of Islam, and the National Lawyers Guild.

   I really get no satifaction for guessing right but I wish Edward Said was alive now so Chistopher Hitchens could apologize to him on national t.v. for supporting and lending intellectual credentials to this cabel of idiots whom one of their leaders Cheney was impressed and emamored by one of Bernard Lewis’ grand & super sophisticated ideas that arabs respect power and if you just hit them between the eyes with a big stick they will fall in line.

   Talk about anti-semitism….lol

   31 October 2005, 7:15 pm

10. DeAnander:

    A few random and not well developed thoughts…

    One thing that has always troubled me is the eagerness of many progressive US Jewish friends to identify Israeli Jews with, e.g. Native Americans — they are ’simply trying to return to their tribal homeland’. This worldview casts the Palestinians as merely a rival tribe and the conflict as “intertribal”, i.e. dodging the whole question of Israeli identity as an outpost of European or American power, US and Israeli Jewish identity as “White” and so on. It also falsely levels the two sides of the conflict, as if they faced each other in a fraternal squabble between equals, rather than heavily armed and subsidised colonists pursuing the long tradition of Euro/Anglo colonisation under a new banner. It also raises interesting questions about a statute of limitations on rights of return… 3000 years seems a bit excessive, though it would be great news for every indigenous people’s land-rights movement.

    There’s a book by Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks, which I am embarrassed to admit I have not yet read; but we can clearly see from social documents and from modern antisemitism that many Anglos did not in the past and some do not in the present consider Jews to be “White”. Popular literature of the 20’s and 30’s often played on the stereotype of the Jew as exotic, alien, sinister, foreign, dark, “oily”, wily, etc. — in high contrast to the alleged virtues of the AngloSaxon (whether male or female). In other words, very similar to the stereotype of Arabs (then and now); though British pop culture of the time was more likely to idealise the “noble Arab” (an icon of masculine toughness and honour) and to despise the worldly, commercial, “unmanly” Jew. [This may have reflected UK society at the cusp where cultural defining power still rested with an elite whose fortunes were rural and agrarian, i.e. landowners and aristocrats. Though mercantile and industrial interests were already taking control of government, cultural icons and memes seem slower to change and lag real power structures.]

    But by WWII already the cognitive dissonance was at work: for many people the real outrage of Hitler’s regime was that it treated Jews — white, “cultured” European people — the same way that white Euros had treated native peoples the world over: expropriation, imprisonment, exile, slavery, liquidation. Hitler’s crimes are remembered far more vividly than King Leopold’s… partly because Leopold never declared war on the US or UK, partly because the people of the Congo were not successful immigrants to the US with a strong presence in literature and film, and partly because the victims were Black agrarians, not White (?) metropolitans…

    I have always suspected that, just as paperless illegal Chicanos/as can earn citizenship by serving in Bush’s imperial legions in Iraq (earning pseudo-Whiteness or at least the right to live in a White-ruled country), so the Jews of Israel are “earning” White status for themselves and American disaporic Jews, by demonstrating their loyalty to Anglo imperial values and their willingness to be good Boers and keep the Kaffirs in line. Israel seems to me an outpost of the US/Anglo lifestyle, a country of swimming pools in a desert, of cars and freeways with no oil reserves, a “civilised” (i.e. technocratic, corporate, capitalist, industrialised, suburban) nation plunked down in an agrarian sericulture and nomadic indigenous environment… exactly like a US military base writ larger than usual… and it is this cluster of commercial/capitalist/cultural values that now mark Whiteness, an allegiance to the consumption patterns, development patterns, and cultural attitudes of the White bourgeoisie of the affluent West.

    As one US grunt said when interviewed in the early days in Iraq, he felt sorry for the Iraqi people, they didn’t even have a Burger King or a Carl’s Jr anywhere in the country. This to him clearly meant that they were “savages,” or at best sadly deprived.

    Anyway… imho in Israel we are seeing the confluence of a whole tangle of loyalties and processes: late-stage Enclosure and the war on self-sufficient agrarians required by late capitalism; the last Boer state, with an embattled minority striving to prove and uphold its White-ness by rigorously demonising and suppressing the Dark Other; America’s most expensive aircraft carrier and handiest money laundry (aid to Israel comes with the proviso that it must be spent on US-made weapons and other products); the programme of destroying the peasant farmer and the rural economy and replacing it with the fossil-intensive carburb and cash crop model; the (imho) lunatic religious fantasies that can make these programmes attractive to zealots of various Judeo-Christian stripes; and a frantic bid for warrior-masculinity by Jewish Israeli men compensating for the “emasculating” of Jewish culture and society by the Nazi atrocity (you have only to look at the content of popular Israeli porn to find how deeply Holocaust imagery is embedded in the sexual fantasies of male Israelis). Plus the sappy Norman-Rockwellesque fantasies of well-meaning Jewish sentimentalists the world over, dreaming of Eretz Yisroel as a physical place of safety and peace for all Jews always, happy-ever-after.

    This is a monstrous tangle of historical forces and human motivations to unwind… race, the requirements of capitalism and empire, gender, cultural identity, etc. — and a complex superstructure of ideology and religion to mask and justify all the above. How to get past the obfuscating factors I do not know, but drawing the clear parallels between the status of Blacks in the US and Palestinians in Israel and the OT may be a good start… if we can deal kindly but justly with the cherished memory of “brave Jewish liberals and their contribution to the Civil Rights effort.” Not that this memory is false; but it forges a sentimental attachment between US Blacks and US Jews, and I would think this makes it harder for (some) US Blacks to perceive the Boer aspects of Israeli culture and practise…

    Sorry this is so rambling… I’m kind of overloaded right now. I’m sure Stan and others can shoot all kinds of holes in these ad hoc musings. Just trying to say there is a lot more baggage here than meets the eye.

    31 October 2005, 8:01 pm

11. Stan:

    De,

    I thought your mind intimidated me before, but if these are ad hoc musings, I am feeling positively fetal.

    This business of whiteness is at the very core of that tangle you describe. Don’t be such a stranger to this blog (please).

    Whiteness is both a national and trans-national identity.

    It seems very important to point out that the fiercest Jewish radicals now advocating for the self-determination of African America are also soundly anti-Zionist.

    Moreover, Zionism itself has been pretty shameless about manipulating Jewish reaction to the holocaust, given that the actual Zionists of that era consrted with fascists and openly stated that the holocaust could be beneficial to Zionism. http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=64

    In 1938, Ben Gurion had already stated, “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.”

    31 October 2005, 9:42 pm

12. DeAnander:

    *grin* Stan, don’t be too impressed, I can only rattle this stuff off ad hoc because I’ve been thinking about it for 20 years — since most of my elective family/community is Jewish American feminists — most of them either deeply conflicted or in some kind of cognitive limbo about Israeli apartheid. the “Boer” analogy I have to admit is from my brilliant buddy J Burke. hat tip.

    Norm Finkelstein is for my money one of the leading American Jewish critics of Zionism — his running firefight with the Abominable Dershowitz shows his stamina and courage, even if you take issue with him on details. I haven’t read Beyond Chutzpah yet but I am sure it will be worth the effort when I get around to it. His book on the Holocaust Industry was an eye opener and a ground breaker for me personally, particularly when I was “warned against it” by liberal Jewish friends who had never read it and had no idea what was in it, except that it was “antisemitic” and that he was “a self hating Jew.” Which shows that the ADL’s fatwas travel even into the progressive community, with the speed of gossip.

    A few years back I started assembling some reading material on the Question of Israel as I was wrestling with it myself… It is somewhat dated now as I have not been maintaining it actively, but there are two essays I have never forgotten: Dworkin’s “Whose Country is it Anyway” and Ellis’s “On the Future of Judaism and Jewish Life” in which he reflects on the creation of “Constantinian Judaism,” i.e. Judaism as a State Religion.

    A distinction must be made, I think, between the personal practise of religion and its adoption or ossification as an organ of the State. I take issue with what I see as a simplistic assertion, above, that religion has nothing to do with Israeli imperialism (or wtte) — I think it has a great deal to do with the case, but we have to understand “religion” in the sense that Ellis analyses it, as a tool of statecraft. Currently we see Constantinian Christianity re-emerging in the Bush regime’s public embrace of the radical far-right in American theology (if one can call the crude literalism of the bible-thumpers by so honourable a name), in the far right of Hindu nationalism, and of course in the theocratic impulse playing out in various Islamic states. I agree with Ellis that Judaism has gone from being an “outsider religion” with all that this implies, to being a State religion ditto. Israel is a schizophrenic demi-theocracy, its jurisprudence uneasily divided between rabbinical and secular law… as, de facto, is the US.

    Daniel Boyarin is another radical American Jewish scholar to watch — (bibliography)— he has written extensively on gender, race, and Israeli male identity. I have not read as much of his stuff as I would like, since it often appears in obscure papyrus venues but he offers intriguing titles like “The Colonial Drag: Gender, Zionism, and Mimicry” or “Mauschel and Monotheism: The Jew as Off-White Male”. He is a Talmudic scholar. I imagine he is high on Dershowitz’ purge list (which I imagine Dershowitz keeping by his bedside and updating in fits of insomniac rage at 0300, but I have a vivid and unscholarly personal dislike for the man).

    I’m rambling again, sorry…

    As to the Zionists consorting with the fascists, I think that’s classic Schadenfreude politics of the sort occasionally practised by radicals and hopeless outsiders of all stripes: things are gonna have to get really really bad and Then You’ll Be Sorry and Then You’ll Listen to Us and See How Right We Are. Like those “vanguardistas” who believe that the working class should be ground down into poverty as fast as possible so that revolutionary consciousness will magically develop, so hey, IMF and WB, bring it on! There’s something in all of us, I think, that longs to be vindicated even by dreadful events. Even green and fuzzy environmentalists sometimes wish that monster storms would wreck the entire SE coast of the US, “just to teach those idiots in DC (and my clueless neighbour who owns two SUVs) a lesson.” I have a feeling that the Zionist collaborators were Schadenfreudians [sorry] of a high order and believed that only by burning down the house could they get their “stupid” Jewish brothers and sisters to run outside and seek their “real” home. The early Zionists were hard men: the history of the Stern gang alone tells us that Israel, like most nation states, was founded by terrorists.

    Did I say I was rambling? sorry, gonna go burble quietly to myself now instead of taking up blog space. why isn’t there a Preview feature on this blog anyway?

    1 November 2005, 12:24 am

13. peggy:

    Dammit – Please delete both comments above and replace with this. I am not drunk, just really tired.

    A very large number of Israeli Jews, perhaps the majority, are opposed to the Israeli occupation of
    Palestine, just as the majority of Anglo-Americans are opposed to the US occupation of Iraq. That is what Said surely meant when he said (quoting from the paraphrase above) “that there is a greater variety of opinion and openness in the Israeli press with regard to the Palestinian question than in the U.S. press.”

    We are buying into racist/nationalist logic when we talk about the government of any country as though it were equivalent to the people of that country.

    1 November 2005, 2:04 am

14. L Crow:

    Thank you DeAnander,

    Your post was easy to read and understand. You shed light on many things that the “common” white of this country doesn’t have understanding of.

    Thank you, again, for this wonderful post!!!!

    1 November 2005, 8:55 am

15. Stan:

    I gladly accept your cirticism, De, on my simplistic assertion that Zionism is not religious. Having made that assertion to bend the stick, so to speak, I’m glad you’ve opened this discussion up to more nuance and complexity.

    My point in bending the stick too far is to highlight precisely what is missing from popular discourse in the US on this whle question of Palestine — and that is the uniquely expansionist nature of Zionism, and what that means for Palestinians, who have been successfully demonized or marginalized in the US. Most people still buy the whole “Exodus” narrative, and few have ever heard of places like Deir Yassin.

    http://www.deiryassin.org/

    Thanks again, and I am extremely happy to see so much participation from sisters today.

    1 November 2005, 12:47 pm

16. DeAnander:

    @peggy your comment is well taken. There is more open dissent against Likudism within Israel than in the US diasporic community. Articles critiquing the Occupation are easier to publish in Ha’aretz than in most any major daily in the US. The NYT, alleged bastion of liberalism (even Juan Cole had to say a few kind words about it recently), is sometimes called “The Jerusalem Post West” by frustrated American anti-imperialists Israeli public discourse, ironically, is more divided and contentious, freer, more open, when it comes to the question of Palestine than US liberal or conservative discourse. It is safer to stand on a street corner in Jerusalem and shout “Down with the Occupation, Sharon is a War Criminal” than in Times Square. Or so I am told.

    But whether a majority of Israelis actively disapprove of the Occupation is an open question to me. It’s not as if every person were an Uri Avnery. There is a lot of acceptance and silence. Gila Svirsky speaks to this in her moving article (2003) The Great Wall of Denial: Why, I am trying to understand, are we Israelis so blind to this brutality? Where are the expressions of revulsion by decent Israelis? [...] Why didn’t a single Jewish political party in the recent election criticize the government for its policy of collective punishment? Why are the brave young men and women who refuse to carry out these crimes disparaged in the media, while even Peace Now and the Meretz party don’t come to their support? Why are only a handful of people willing to apply the label ‘war crime’ to the deeds of the army–deeds that merit this designation under any objective reading of the international instruments of law? The lack of outrage and compassion in Israel is difficult to understand. Is it a reflection of the fact that Israelis are uninformed? Or are they aware and indifferent?

    We might ask the same of Americans; even if polls (never wholly reliable) indicate that a majority disapproves of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that majority is largely silent. We do not see general strikes, mass demonstrations, revolt at the voting booths, the ouster of the warmongers in a sudden spasm of citizen outrage. Does a majority actually disapprove actively enough to do anything about it? If not, how do we distinguish them (or ourselves) morally from, say, those who watched Kitty Genovese murdered in the street, from the safety of their apartment windows, without picking up the phone to call the police? This is a vexed issue for me personally. I should be doing more to challenge this criminal regime and oppose their program of perpetual war and perpetual looting [but I repeat myself]; by not doing as much as I could or should, I feel implicated in their crimes.

    It is true that we cannot blame every citizen for the actions of the government; for one thing, in a democracy without proportional representation some citizens may be in a minority that didn’t vote for this government; and even in a proportional parliamentary democracy a group of people may be so far out on the fringes (ideologically) that their representatives are not even in coalition or opposition, but totally isolated and unable to influence policy. However, the position and policies of the Likudniks within the Israeli government are clearly approved of or tolerated by enough Israelis that there’s no mass movement to throw the rascals out, and other political parties find them a legitimate coalition partner.

    Much as ordinary Americans may (a) try to remain unaware of and (b) try to explain away and then (c) try to keep in the background of consciousness the racist outrages committed daily w/in the States, I think a majority of ordinary Israelis may be aware that the Occupation is “bad” or “unfortunate,” yet not be motivated enough to do much about it except feel sad or
    conflicted or slightly guilty. Another parallel between the two countries…

    To what extent we can blame ordinary people for simply wanting to be comfortable and not disrupt their personal lives for the abstract cause of Justice, I dunno. We sure blamed the “good Germans” for what their government did — with their passive toleration, or connivance, or wilful ignorance, or terrified acquiescence. I think history, unless it is written exclusively by Whitefolks, will blame both Israelis and Americans for what their respective governments have done. After all, both countries claim to be democracies; we cannot really have that cake and eat it too, can we?

    2 November 2005, 1:07 am

17. rootlesscosmo:

    I’m the J Burke so gratifyingly cited by De above… just a quick note on “the socialism of fools.” The original reference–I don’t think it was Engels, more likely Karl Kautsky or Victor Adler–was specifically to the political antiSemitism of the pre WWI Austrian Social Christian Party, whose voter base was among small farmers, shopowners, the lower middle classes generally. The meaning (as I understand it) was that social anger that ought to have rallied to the workers and their cause, i.e. Socialism, was being displaced onto the wrong enemy: not Capital but “Jewish Capital” or more simply “the Jews” who were seen as the equivalent. Of course this ideology drew on older stereotypes and prejudices, the legacy of centuries of “cultural” antiSemitism; but it was a new phenomenon, peculiar to the mass democratic politics of fin-de-siècle Europe (France as well), and it’s risky to generalize from it, and from its critics, to our very different situation.

    2 November 2005, 1:28 am

18. DeAnander:

    JB delighted to see you here. I think this flavour of antisemitism (“Jewish Capital”) is a specific instance of “foreignising,” a universal human denial mechanism. Let me offer a few tangible examples:

    A domineering husband faced with a resistant wife will sometimes say, “Who have you been talking to?” or “Who’s been putting these stupid ideas in your head?” Both governments and plebeians like to blame disease on “dirty foreigners” or “immigrants”. The classic example is syphilis, which the English of C17 and later called “the French Pox” but the French claimed was an English disease. Homophobia in the US Black conservative community is sometimes expressed by th3 claim that “that’s a White thing.”

    The Bush regime, faced with nationalist and sectarian resistance in occupied Iraq, petulantly maintains that the insurgents are “foreign fighters.” Individuals have a hard time accepting that sexual assault comes mostly from first-name acquaintances, and persist in their fear of “stranger danger” (whether to kids or adult women).

    There’s a tendency in all communities (a) to take what is “bad” or “evil” and try to expel it, or more easily (b) arbitrarily to c.aim that anything bad or evil must come from Outside. Political dissent must be fomented by foreign agitators; if my wife disagrees with me it must be due to a foreign influence “infecting” her. And if there is wickedness in the wealthy, then let us project it onto the Other wealthy, the Rich Jew, not onto the wealthy who are Like Us — people we might aspire to marry into or become.

    Antisemitism exists, imho, as a particularised flavour of racism, xeonophobia, “foreignising”… the displacement of Taint (hat tip to Peggy Gannon) onto the Other, a kind of ideological and moral exorcism.

    BTW the same “foreignising” can be seen in rightwingnut populist tirades against “Hollywood” or “New York” as the foreign influences undermining the moral fibre of youth, etc. Incidences of battery, incestuous assault, etc. which happen natively in small town and rural life are easier to ignore (hence less disruptive to the social fabric and the collective myth) than “sinister outside influences” like drugs, movies, MTV, rap music, or whatnot.

    Ironically of course, the hardcore antisemitic Right never gets tired of reminding itself that Marx was a Jew. Communism is evil, you see, and evil always comes from the Other, the foreigner…

    2 November 2005, 3:51 pm

19. peggy:

    De – Thanks for acknowledging my comment. I think the reason why Israeli Jews who oppose the occupation of Palestine, and anglo-Americans who oppose the occupation of Iraq, do not act more forcefully upon their views is that they have much to lose, and little if anything to gain, by such action, either individually or in small groups. They are not organized as a collectivity, and there are strong forces acting against such organization. If you become a leader, or a potential leader of a strong resistance, you are killed, and that’s that.

    3 November 2005, 4:40 am

20. L Crow:

    Again – I want to say a BIG thanks to De and Peggy.

    I appreciate your posts and viewpoints. For myself, I think it boiled down to this.

    Evil is NOT always from the other and WE need a STRONG leader for a STRONG resistance!!!!

    4 November 2005, 3:59 pm

21. DeAnander:

    L Crow: I have just watched a short documentary on the career of Fidel Castro (film is called ‘Fidel’ and you can rent it from Netflix if you use that service, I assume it is also available from other rental outfits).

    Here is an example of the strong and charismatic leader, and it’s remarkable to me to see how little Fidel resorted to the cowboy swagger typical of American “leadership” style. He was a brilliant student who became a lawyer: a somewhat pudgy young fella with thick glasses and a hesitant manner of personal speaking, sometimes overwhelmed by emotion in public speaking, yet capable of extraordinarily prolonged extempore lectures. His manner was always that of a teacher or a lawyer (think Atticus Finch in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird”), more than a desperado or a warrior. His manner on the podium was that of a colourful, fiery trial lawyer, not (to my ear anyway) the tedious ranting of a despot.

    It’s an interesting film and should be required viewing in US schools imho. For one thing, it would be terrific for students of colour to see the many literate, scholarly, charming Black and mestizo Distinguished Persons who are interviewed or shown in film clips, throughout the production: Alice Walker, Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis, a professor from a university in the West Indies whose name now escapes me, Nelson Mandela and other African heads of state — and of course the entire cast of friends and compadres and commadres around Castro. Whiteboys seem like a minority on the screen in this movie and it’s a refreshing change. Those who are onscreen are interesting too — Phil Agee puts in a brief appearance testifying to the many CIA plots against Fidel.

    I was hoping there would be more in the film about the sustainable ag revolution in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, but this got no screen time alas. What did get very effective screen time was the psychopathic, frothing hostility of the Old US Whiteboy Establishment to Casto’s Cuba: the unrelenting blockade, the assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs idiocy. It was more clear to me than ever, watching the history unfold again in synopsis, that Castro to these Anglo-American elites was “an uppity n*gg*r” to be slapped down, and so by extension was all of Cuba.

    Also vividly expressed was the persistent imperial inability to understand the nationalistic impulse in the occupied people. As a rueful ex-State Dept apparatchik reminisces, the US persisted in seeing as a Communist Threat, an ideologically synthesised or induced aberration, what was in reality a perfectly predictable and legitimate People’s War against a foreign occupier and looter. Apparently they/we have learnt absolutely nothing since…

    Word in the blogosphere is that the Pentagon is thinking about war with Venezuela, where once again uppity darkfolks have dared to stand up to Mr Businessman and his cousin Mr Usurer (aka Wall Street and the IMF). Money, race, gender, nationalism… you can’t ever distill out just one theme.

    Anyway, this film reminds me what extraordinary qualities are required to provide real leadership and what a dangerous business it is.

    4 November 2005, 6:47 pm

22. L Crow:

    When reading this post, I was reminded of my Dad. He had a great respect for Fidel Castro. Of course at that time he could make no comment about this except at home. My Dad was your typical “Southern Man’s Man”, but, in his own way recognized the abilities of this strong leader.

    Mr. Castro has always held his own, and to his credit, he has not let the “Whiteboys” push him around.

    P.S. I will try to find this film!! Thanks

    5 November 2005, 8:43 am

23. DeAnander:

    More on Israel’s schizophrenic national culture — Halper explores the tension between the warring threads of Eastern European Jewish social radicalism and Wannabe European whiteboy colonialism — how a nation with strong socialist and secular humanist tendencies at foundation was hijacked by the Rightists and then made a poster child for rightwing religious nuttery.

    Although the country was founded on the “original sin” of exclusivity and the expulsion of the refugees, it nevertheless had (has?) the potential to develop into a normal, even progressive society. Many of the socialist principles that accompanied the Zionist program led in those directions. Israel always talked of democracy, even extending citizenship to its Arab population in 1948, even though the underlying concept of a “Jewish democracy,” coupled with a deep-based fear of demographics only exacerbated by the Occupation, has emptied that of much of its content. It constituted itself as a welfare state, only to see that largely dismantled as the Israel-Palestine conflict gave dominance to the right whose agenda, together with expansion, was anti-socialist and pro-privatization. Israel became a member of the Socialist International and engaged in constructive development work in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but its need for military strength, coupled with a self-serving “alliance” with the US, has led to become a major arms dealer on a global scale, a subverter of progressive civil society elements throughout the developing world.

    Israel might have been Cuba, in other words — a sovereign socialist nation ostracised and embargoed by the US; but instead it took the path of expedience or capitulation or historical accident and became an obedient US satellite and puppet state somewhat comparable to Bautista’s Cuba… well that may be a weak analogy, but both nations are the centre of sociopathic emotional intensity on the part of US elites; both nations have a strong revanchist/rightwing power bloc of exiles within the US lobbying nonstop for US policy favourable to the Right; both nations are strangely tiny in proportion to the amount of American propaganda space they occupy…

    7 November 2005, 4:01 pm

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