Alternatives International

A Fascist Odor of the New Coalition

URI AVNERY — 2009-06-03T12:34:39Z

How lucky we are to have the extreme Right standing guard over our democracy.

This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and Democratic State.

The private member's bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev of the “Jewish Home” party, which sailed through its preliminary hearing, promises one year in prison to anyone who publishes “a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State”, if the contents of the call might cause “actions of hate, contempt or disloyalty against the state or the institutions of government or the courts”.

One can foresee the next steps. A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. And, in addition, there are also Jews who do not want Israel to be defined as a Jewish State in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders.

The consequences are inevitable. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted of this crime. There will be a need for concentration camps all over the country to house all the deniers of Israeli democracy.

The police will be unable to deal with so many criminals. It will be necessary to set up a new unit. This may be called “Special Security”, or, in short, SS.

Hopefully, these measures will suffice to preserve our democracy. If not, more stringent steps will have to be taken, such as revoking the citizenship of the democracy-deniers and deporting them from the country, together with the Jewish leftists and all the other enemies of the Jewish democracy.

After the preliminary reading of the bill, it now goes to the Legal Committee of the Knesset, which will prepare it for the first, and soon thereafter for the second and third readings. Within a few weeks or months, it will be the law of the land.

By the way, the bill does not single out Arabs explicitly – even if this is its clear intention, and all those who voted for it understood this. It also prohibits Jews from advocating a change in the state's definition, or the creation of a bi-national state in all of historic Palestine or spreading any other such unconventional ideas. One can only imagine what would happen in the US if a senator proposed a law to imprison anyone who suggests an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

* * *

THE BILL does not stand out at all in our new political landscape.

This government has already adopted a bill to imprison for three years anyone who mourns the Palestinian Naqba – the 1948 uprooting of more than half the Palestinian people from their homes and lands.

The sponsors expect Arab citizens to be happy about that event. True, the Palestinians were caused a certain unpleasantness, but that was only a by-product of the foundation of our state. The Independence Day of the Jewish and Democratic State must fill us all with joy. Anyone who does not express this joy should be locked up, and three years may not be enough.

This bill has been confirmed by the Ministerial Commission for Legal Matters, prior to being submitted to the Knesset. Since the rightist government commands a majority in the Knesset, it will be adopted almost automatically. (In the meantime, a slight delay has been caused by one minister, who appealed the decision, so the Ministerial Commission will have to confirm it again.)

The sponsors of the law hope, perhaps, that on Naqba Day the Arabs will dance in the streets, plant Israeli flags on the ruins of some 600 Arab villages that were wiped off the map and offer up their thanks to Allah in the mosques for the miraculous good fortune that was bestowed on them.

* * *

THIS TAKES me back to the 60s, when the weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus. Already as a youth he was a gifted poet with a promising future.

He told me that some years earlier the military governor of his area had summoned him to his office. At the time, all the Arabs in Israel were subject to a military government which controlled their lives in all matters big and small. Without a permit, an Arab citizen could not leave his village or town even for a few hours, nor get a job as a teacher, nor acquire a tractor or dig a well.

The governor received Rashed cordially, offered him coffee and paid lavish compliments to his poetry. Then he came to the point: in a month's time, Independence Day was due, and the governor was going to hold a big reception for the Arab “notables”; he asked Rashed to write a special poem for the occasion.

Rashed was a proud youngster, nationalist to the core, and not lacking in courage. He explained to the governor that Independence Day was no joyful day for him, since his relatives had been driven from their homes and most of the Musmus village's land had also been expropriated.

When Rashed arrived back at his village some hours later, he could not help noticing that his neighbors were looking at him in a peculiar way. When he entered his home, he was shocked. All the members of his family were sitting on the floor, the women lamenting at the top of their voices, the children huddling fearfully in a corner. His first thought was that somebody had died.

“What have you done to us!” one of the women cried, “What did we do to you?”

“You have destroyed the family,” another shouted, “You have finished us!”

It appeared that the governor had called the family and told them that Rashed had refused to fulfill his duty to the state. The threat was clear: from now on, the extended family, one of the largest in the village, would be on the black list of the military government. The consequences were clear to everyone.

Rashed could not stand up against the lamentation of his family. He gave in and wrote the poem, as requested. But something inside him was broken. Some years later he emigrated to the US, got a job there at the PLO office and died tragically: he was burned alive in his bed after going to sleep, it appears, while smoking a cigarette.

* * *

THESE DAYS are gone forever. We took part in many stormy demonstrations against the military government until it was finally abolished in 1966. As a newly elected Member of Parliament, I had the privilege of voting for its abolition.

The fearful and subservient Arab minority, then amounting to some 200 thousand souls, has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, its downtrodden national pride has raised its head again, and today they are a large and self-confident community of 1.5 million. But the attitude of the Jewish Right has not changed for the better. On the contrary.

In the Knesset bakery (the Hebrew word for bakery is Mafia) some new pastries are being baked. One of them is a bill that stipulates that anyone applying for Israeli citizenship must declare their loyalty to “the Jewish, Zionist and Democratic State”, and also undertake to serve in the army or its civilian alternative. Its sponsor is MK David Rotem of the “Israel is Our Home” party, who also happens to be the chairman of the Knesset Law Committee.

A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws – a framework designed to safeguard the wellbeing and the rights of its citizens – is reasonable. But loyalty to the “Zionist” state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ideology can change from time to time. It would be like declaring loyalty to a “capitalist” USA, a “rightist Italy”, a ”leftist” Spain, a “Catholic Poland” or a “nationalist” Russia.

This would not be a problem for the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews in Israel who reject Zionism, since Jews will not be touched by this law. They obtain citizenship automatically the moment they arrive in Israel.

Another bill waiting for its turn before the Ministerial Committee proposes changing the declaration that every new Knesset Member has to make before assuming office. Instead of loyalty “to the State of Israel and its laws”, as now, he or she will be required to declare their loyalty “to the Jewish, Zionist and Democratic State of Israel, its symbols and its values”. That would exclude almost automatically all the elected Arabs, since declaring loyalty to the “Zionist” state would mean that no Arab would ever vote for them again.

It would also be a problem for the Orthodox members of the Knesset, who cannot declare loyalty to Zionism. According to Orthodox doctrine, the Zionists are depraved sinners and the Zionist flag is unclean. God exiled the Jews from this country because of their wickedness, and only God can permit them to return. Zionism, by preempting the job of the Messiah, has committed an unpardonable sin, and many Orthodox Rabbis chose to remain in Europe and be murdered by the Nazis rather than committing the Zionist sin of going to Palestine.

* * *

THE FACTORY of racist laws with a distinct fascist odor is now working at full steam. That is built into the new coalition.

At its center is the Likud party, a good part of which is pure racist (sorry for the oxymoron). To its right there is the ultra-racist Shas party, to the right of which is Lieberman's ultra-ultra racist “Israel is our Home” party, the ultra-ultra-ultra racist “Jewish Home” party, and to its right the even more racist “National Union” party, which includes outright Kahanists and stands with one foot in the coalition and the other on the moon.

All these factions are trying to outdo each other. When one proposes a crazy bill, the next is compelled to propose an even crazier one, and so on.

All this is possible because Israel has no constitution. The ability of the Supreme Court to annul laws that contradict the “basic laws” is not anchored anywhere, and the Rightist parties are trying to abolish it. Not for nothing did Avigdor Lieberman demand – and get – the Justice and Police ministries.

Just now, when the governments of the US and Israel are clearly on a collision course over the settlements, this racist fever may infect all parts of the coalition.

If one goes to sleep with a dog, one should not be surprised to wake up with fleas (may the dogs among my readers pardon me). Those who elected such a government, and even more so those who joined it, should not be surprised by its laws, which ostensibly safeguard Jewish democracy.

The most appropriate name for these holy warriors would be “Racists for Democracy”.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)

2009-06-01T10:47:30Z

"Gaza today has become the test of our indispensable morality and common humanity."

The Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) calls upon freedom-loving students all over the world to stand in solidarity with us by boycotting Israeli academic institutions for their complicity in perpetuating Israel's illegal military occupation and apartheid system. We note the historic action taken by thousands of courageous students of British and American universities in occupying their campuses in a show of solidarity with the brutally oppressed Palestinian people in Gaza. We also deeply appreciate the decision by Hampshire College to divest from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation. Such pressure on Israel is the most likely to contribute to ending its denial of our rights, including the right to education.

In this regard, we fully endorse the call for boycott issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, PACBI, in 2004.

We emphasize our endorsement of the BDS call issued by more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in July 2005.

We also support the Call from Gaza issued by a group of civil society organizations in the second week of the Gaza Massacre (Gaza 2009).

Our goal, as students, is to play a role in promoting the global BDS movement which has gained an unprecedented momentum as a result of the latest genocidal war launched by Israel against the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. We address our fellow students to take whatever step possible, however small, to stand up for justice, international law and the inalienable rights of the indigenous people of Palestine by applying effective and sustainable pressure on Israel, particularly in the form of BDS, to help put an end to its colonial and racist regime over the Palestinians.

We strongly urge our fellow university students all over the world to:

(1) Support all the efforts aimed at boycotting Israeli academic institutions;

(2) Pressure university administrations to divest from Israel and from companies directly or indirectly supporting the Israeli occupation and apartheid policies;

(3) Promote student union resolutions condemning Israeli violations of international law and human rights and endorsing BDS in any form;

(4) Support the Palestinian student movement directly.

To break the medieval and barbaric Israeli siege of Gaza, people of conscience need to move with a sense of urgency and purpose. Israel must be compelled to pay a heavy price for its war crimes and crimes against humanity through the intensification of the boycott against it and against institutions and corporations complicit in its crimes. As in the anti-apartheid struggle in solidarity with the black majority in South Africa, students concerned about justice and sustainable peace have a moral duty to support our boycott efforts.

The Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)

Endorsed by:
Progressive Student Union Bloc; Fateh Youth Organization; the Progressive Student Labor Front; Islamic Bloc; Islamic League of Palestinian Students; Student Unity Bloc; Students Affairs (University of Palestine).

View online : www.alternativenews.org

The war on civilians

Paul Rogers — 2009-06-01T10:44:42Z

The extension of war in Pakistan - from the Afghan border regions to Lahore - is inflicting a terrible toll on the country's poor and displaced.

The car-bombing in Lahore of a police station and the local headquarters of Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency on 27 May 2009 is more than the seventh major attack on the city since January 2008 - and the third since March 2009, when the Sri Lankan cricket team and a police academy were targeted. The bomb, which killed twenty-seven people and and injured over a hundred, is a further indication of the systemic, interrelated and deep-rooted nature of Pakistan's internal-security troubles.

Lahore, after all, is Pakistan's cultural centre, a sophisticated city that lies close to India and is a long way from the intense fighting currently being waged in the Swat valley in North West Frontier Province (NWFP). If it can be repeatedly attacked with apparent impunity, it tells its own story about how the different parts of the country are becoming implicated in an all-consuming conflict (see Ayesha Siddiqa, "Pakistan: a country on fire", 24 September 2008).

The military machine

The exact link between the Lahore bombing - and the twin attacks that followed in Peshawar on 28 May that killed eleven people and injutred dozens more - and what is happening in Swat is not yet clear, but Islamist militants in western Pakistan had threatened attacks across the country in response to the army's operations in the NWFP. What is clear, though, is that those operations are massive and sustained and are having huge human consequences, whatever the belief in Islamabad that they are necessary to counter the increasing power of the Taliban and other militias.

A United Nations source has estimated the flow of internal refugees since mid-May 2009 as 2.4 million people; by 29 May, the UN Children's Fund (Unicef) calculated that the figure exceeded 3 million. There are few examples of such vast and sudden movements in recent history; the scale of what is happening recalls the traumatic events prior to the founding of Bangladesh in 1970-71, when many millions of people fled from the Pakistani army across the border into India.In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

Much of the destruction in Swat is because the Pakistani army is simply not constructed for counterinsurgency or counter-guerrilla warfare - and the conflict in Swat is a combination of this with an out-and-out civil war. Pakistan has a standing army of 550,000, equipped with nearly 2,500 main battle-tanks and over 4,000 artillery pieces, five times the size of the British army. That may be large by any standards; but the "threat" from India has long dominated the Pakistani military posture, and India commands well over a million troops, 4,000 tanks and more than 10,000 artillery pieces.

What is essentially a powerful land army geared to armoured battles and artillery bombardments on the plains of south Asia, is now engaged in a war against its own people in a bitter internal conflict that is being conducted under a blanket of tight media control. Because of this, every impression is being given of a successful campaign against weak opponents - the Taliban - who are being put to flight. Where foreign journalists can report at all, they do so under tight army control and the rare visits they are able to make are to towns that are firmly under the army's control (see Shaun Gregory, "Pakistan and the ‘AfPak' strategy", 28 May 2009).

The civilian impact

Even so, two issues are emerging. One is that the assault will be prolonged and very violent. The army is readily using its huge firepower advantage, but the militias that it is trying to defeat are proving highly resilient. Even army sources now speak of "steady progress amid stiff resistance" and acknowledge that the war has some time to run (see Robert Birsel, "Bombs seen stiffening Pakistan resolve on militants, Reuters, 29 May 2009).

In the city of Mingora, for example, there has been intensive street-fighting, yet the government security forces have gained control of just one quarter of the urban area. More generally, the militias are now avoiding conflict in exposed places and are dispersing to towns and villages across the valley. The army in response is using helicopter gunships, strike-aircraft and artillery, whose main effect is widespread destruction including the wholesale flattening of villages.

The second issue follows: the serious humanitarian consequences (both short- and long-term) of the conflict. The United Nations estimates that $450 million is needed for immediate aid to respond to exceptional displacement of peoples. An indication of Washington's concerns over the situation is the decision on 22 May to make an immediate commitment of $110 million in humanitarian aid. But this will barely touch the larger problem that many thousands of civilians are caught up in the fighting and prevented by a a Pakistani army curfew from escaping the conflict-zone.

Also on 22 May, the United Nations and several partner agencies launched an appeal for $543 million in aid; but by 28 May, the "humanitarian action plan" had reached only 21% of this total.

A leading Islamabad newspaper cites a report from Human Rights Watch's Asia director, Brad Adams: "Reports of civilians killed in the crossfire continued to flood in...as people break the curfew in desperate bids to find food and water for their families, or try and escape the aerial and ground bombardments" (see "Trapped civilians face catastrophe in Swat", Dawn, 26 May 2009).

The surge of over 2 million refugees who have fled from the area has overwhelmed the Pakistani government and agencies:

"The true dimensions of the refugee problem are apparent in Mardan, one of the primary destinations for civilians fleeing the battles in Swat and in neighbouring Buner and Dir. The city is studded with refugee camps consisting of endless rows of tan canvas tents that bake under the 110-degree skies. Schools are packed to capacity with families sleeping on concrete classroom floors, with each classroom housing 40 or more people" (see Griff Witte, "Pakistani Refugee Crisis Poses Peril", Washington Post, 25 May 2009).

A small proportion only of these refugees - 20%, according to Save the Children - is housed in government camps. Most are living outside them; half of the displaced are children.

The signal of war

The inability to cope with a crisis caused by its own military action means that Pakistan's government is ceding influence to others (radical groups in particular) that are quick to fill the vacuum:

"The army has warned that some Taliban fighters joined the fleeing residents and may have infiltrated the refugee camps... Outside the camps, radical Islamist agendas are rushing in to fill the void left by the paucity of government services. The Falah-e-Insaniyat foundation, the successor to a group known as Jamaat-ud-Dawa, has established a major presence near Swat, feeding tens of thousands of displaced people and providing them with quality medical care" (see "Foundation provides food to 275,000 IDPs", The News, 17 May 2009)

In the longer term there are indications that the physical damage done to settlements will take years to repair. Qamar Zaman Kaira, Pakistan's information minister, said that the authorities had started "initial satellite surveys for the rehabilitation of homes, businesses and cultivable lands". The very fact that the destruction demands satellite surveys gives some indication of the impact of the war after barely two weeks.

The war in northwest Pakistan may still be in its early stages, but it is already operating with an intensity that is not fully appreciated beyond the region. Pakistani army sources are presenting the operation as an extensive and determined effort to isolate a relatively small group of extremist militias. But three factors - the failure to cope with refugees, the ability of the militias to disperse, and the rapid provision of aid by radical movements - suggests that the long-term effects of the army's campaign could be to intensify Pakistan's divisions. The Lahore bombing and Peshawar attacks may be early signals of that.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001

View online : www.opendemocracy.net

The Dangers of False Optimism in the Middle East

MOUIN RABBANI — 2009-05-29T11:34:36Z

The recent announcement that Barack Obama will deliver a major address to the Muslim world from Cairo in early June has further heightened expectations that the new American administration is determined to achieve a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Obama met with Benjamin Netanyahu this week, the emerging consensus among politicians and pundits alike was that the new president is prepared to invest the resources required to translate ambitious rhetoric into concrete reality.

There is indeed some logic to these hopes: Obama is clearly committed to repairing America's international relations, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world, and he appears to understand that doing so will require meaningful and irreversible movement towards Palestinian statehood. The rapid appointment of George Mitchell as an envoy to the region and Obama's apparent desire to push for peace at the beginning rather than the end of his presidency have been taken by many observers as signs that the new administration is ready and willing to force the two sides to the negotiating table.

Even the election of Netanyahu, one of Israel's most prominent rejectionists, and the continued atrophy of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas have failed to dim a growing tide of optimism. The international press has been rife with reports of an impending confrontation between Washington and Tel Aviv and speculation about an American challenge to Israel's regional nuclear monopoly. Once Obama unveils his strategy and its implementation proceeds, it is argued, Abbas will be able to make short shrift of his Islamist rivals by garnering the legitimacy and consolidating the authority required to participate in an agreement.

All this optimism rests on the unstated premise that Israeli- Palestinian peace is ultimately a function of American political will; once Washington decides to throw its weight behind an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, it doesn't much matter what Israeli leaders think, because they will be left with no choice but to comply. By the same token, a reversal of American acquiescence in Israel's occupation is expected to produce a Palestinian leadership capable of implementing - and prepared to pay the price of - a two-state settlement.

But whether or not Obama is willing to twist arms to impose a settlement, a broader question remains unanswered. The conditions for peace processing may be better than they have been in the preceding eight years, but the reality on the ground is now eight years worse.

Even in the event of a transformation of American policy, the prospect for a viable two-state settlement has almost certainly been overtaken by reality. By waiting until 2009 to reverse the occupation of 1967, in other words, the United States and its partners chose to miss the boat.

For all intents and purposes, every Israeli under the age of 50 has grown up with the doctrine that the Green Line does not exist, that the West Bank is in fact Judea and Samaria, and that the latter - liberated rather than occupied territories - are the historical heartland of the Jewish people. Not a foreign possession or outlying province, but rather as Israeli as Tel Aviv, if not more so. The last time these territories were under Arab rule, Netanyahu was a teenager and Avigdor Lieberman was completing elementary school in the Soviet Union. For more than a decade, Israel's leaders have successfully persuaded their population that concessions to their adversaries produce not peace and compromise but rather more violence stemming from a fundamental Arab desire to eradicate Israel.

Currently, almost 10 per cent of Israel's Jewish population lives in settlements beyond the green line. Conservatively estimating that an additional 20 per cent of Israeli citizens would vote against a full withdrawal to the 1967 boundary, and that a significant minority of this total would seek to obstruct and engage in active opposition, some of it violent, to a government decision to implement such a withdrawal, it is difficult to see how the Israeli government could successfully engineer an end to the occupation, even under severe international pressure. In the foreseeable future a French withdrawal from Alsace-Lorraine or an American repudiation of Hawaii seems more likely. Seen from this perspective, it appears out of the question that an Israeli government could be capable of taking the decision to vacate the West Bank, and even less likely that one prepared to do so will retain sufficient legitimacy to carry out such a policy.

These domestic political constraints do not in and of themselves rule out the possibility of a forceful American effort to compel an Israeli withdrawal. But given Washington's own domestic calculations, and the centrality of Israeli interests to US regional strategy, it is all but impossible to envision circumstances under which Obama would compel Israel to accept the terms required for a viable two-state settlement: a comprehensive withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 boundaries (including East Jerusalem), the evacuation of all settlement blocs in the West Bank, meaningful Palestinian sovereignty over the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and a recognition (if not a full implementation) of the Palestinian right of return.

Indeed, in his big day at the White House, Netanyahu could not even bring himself to utter the phrase "Palestinian state". (He limited himself to the observation that he would prefer that the Palestinians "govern themselves".) Back home Israel announced the establishment of a new West Bank settlement - whose construction had previously been delayed in deference to opposition from the Bush administration.

The continued acceleration of Israeli settlement activity and the concomitant fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement have led many analysts and commentators to declare the impending demise of the two-state solution. Judging the point at which two states can no longer be carved out of the present reality is not an exact science, but it seems inconceivable that a realistic prospect for partition still exists.

To be sure, initiatives for Palestinian statehood are certain to enjoy renewed momentum in the months and years ahead, but they have been hollowed of content to the point where even Netanyahu could soon come on board. The formulas currently being floated would create an Israeli protectorate fragmented by settlement blocs rather than a sovereign state. Palestinians would have no possession of East Jerusalem and, needless to say, there would be no recognition of the right of return. Such proposals make no commitments to meaningful sovereignty - without which there is no "state" - and represent the antithesis of self-determination. Like the Oslo process, they therefore amount to little more than a recipe for renewed conflict.

Supporters of a two-state solution have taken to arguing that it must be implemented quickly, before it is too late. It is therefore surprising that so little thought has been given to preparing for its passing: for now, at least, false optimism is preferred to reckoning with the consequences.

In this respect, it has become increasingly common to argue that a one-state solution (whether a binational entity or unitary democracy) is the logical alternative to the disappearing two-state paradigm. Yet this outcome - while admittedly the closest approximation of a just peace - is even less likely to materialise than a two-state settlement.

Unlike white South Africans, Jewish Israelis are not a small minority who can be expected to conclude that providing equal rights to the indigenous population within a democratic framework represents their only salvation. To the contrary, the one conviction uniting almost every Jewish Israeli is a shared commitment to the preservation of a Jewish state. In recent decades, furthermore, most Palestinians have also come to subscribe to the notion of an ethnic polity.

The status quo is also increasingly untenable, and the more likely scenario for the coming decade, if not longer, is that Israel's determined efforts to perpetuate it will produce increasing - and increasingly existential, regionalised and bloody - conflict. With the train derailed, the light at the tunnel's end is liable to remain very dim for the foreseeable future.

Mouin Rabbani is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies.

Netanyahu Chooses Warehousing

Jeff Halper — 2009-05-28T10:46:41Z

Would Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say the magic words "two states" after his meeting with President Obama? All Israel held its breath. (He didn't). The gap between the two is wider than those words could ever have bridged, however. Obama, I believe, sincerely - perhaps urgently - seeks a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, a pre-condition, he understands, to getting on with larger, more pressing Middle Eastern issues. Netanyahu, who rejects even the notion of a Palestinian mini-state as grudgingly accepted by Barak, Sharon and Olmert, is seeking a permanent state of "warehousing" in which the Palestinians live forever in a limbo of "autonomy" delineated by an Israel that otherwise encompasses them. The danger, to which we all should be attuned, is that the two sides might compromise on apartheid - the establishment of a Palestinian Bantustan that has neither genuine sovereignty nor economic viability.

For his part, Obama seems to understand the strong linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hostility towards the West so prevalent in the Muslim world. His administration has been quite candid about the need to move forward on Palestine in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue, and his ability to withdraw from Iraq, stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan and deal with the challenge political Islam poses to the "moderate" Arab states also depend, to a meaningful degree, on forging a new relationship with the Muslim world , which requires an end to the Israeli Occupation.

Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have already presented the outlines of their new "reframing" of the conflict:

(1) The Iran threat is preeminent, uniting the US and Israel into a strategic alliance and completely overshadowing the Palestinian issue;

(2) Such "slogans" (as Lieberman characterized them) as occupation, settlements, settlers, land for peace and even the "simplistic" two-state solution must be abandoned in order to "go forward" according to a new slogan: "economy, security, stability" - meaning improving the Palestinian economy while ensuring Israel's security. The stability that results (Lieberman invokes the "stable" situation between the Greek and Turkish populations of Turkish-occupied Cyprus as his model) will then somehow facilitate some future and vague peace process;

(3) Israel will continue to expand its "facts on the ground." Just the day before the Netanyahu/Obama meeting the building of a new settlement was announced - Maskiot, in the Jordan Valley, the first settlement to be officially established in 26 years. Two days after returning from Washington, Netanyahu further declared: "United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided." It then announced that it will continue building within the "settlement blocs." Just a month before, on the day Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell were to arrive in the country, the Israeli government announced that it would conduct massive demolitions of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. This "in your face" approach signals the Administration that Israel is not about to accept dictates, as the Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon put it, testing just how assertive Obama will be.

(4) Both the US and Israel seek broader involvement in the peace process by the Arab states, but once again, Israel has its own particular spin on that. While the US is formulating a comprehensive approach to peace and stabilization in the entire Middle East region (which King Abdullah of Jordan calls a "57-state solution" whereby the entire Arab and Muslim worlds would recognize Israel in return for a genuine end to the Occupation), Israel's formula of putting "economic peace" before any politically defined peace agreement tries to create a state of normalization between Israel and the Arab/Muslim world that would relegate the Palestinian issue indefinitely to the back-burner. Given the record of the so-called "moderate" Arab states, and given the opposition to a rising Iran they share with Israel, their involvement does not necessarily bode well for the Palestinians.

Then there all the mechanisms for delaying or undermining negotiations:

Creating insurmountable political obstacles, such as the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Netanyahu well knows that the Palestinians will not accede to that, the fact that such recognition would prejudice the equal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a full 20% of the Israeli population, being an important consideration. The fear of further ethnic cleansing ("transfer" in Israeli parlance) is a real one. When she was Foreign Minister, Tsipi Livni stated clearly that future of Israel's Arab citizens is in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel itself. And remember, last year the Israeli Parliament passed a law requiring a majority of two-thirds to approve any change in the status of Jerusalem, an impossible threshold. Similar legislation, supported by the government, will be passed on other issues such as dismantling settlements and ratifying any peace agreement.
Delayed implementation. OK, the Israeli government says, we'll negotiate, but the implementation of any agreement will wait on the complete cessation of any resistance on the part of the Palestinians. "Security before peace" is the way the Israeli government frames it. Since, however, there has never been any indication that Israel would agree to a viable Palestinian state, and since Israel views any resistance, armed or non-violent, as a form of terrorism, "security before peace" actually means "stop all resistance and you may get a state." The catch here is that if Palestinians do stop their resistance they are lost. Without Palestinian pressure, Israel and the international community would lack any motivation for making the concessions necessary for a genuine solution. And even if an agreement is reached, "security before peace" means that it will not be implemented until Israel unilaterally decides the conditions are ripe. This so-called "shelf agreement" erects yet another insurmountable obstacle before any peace process.
Declaring a "transitional" Palestinian state. If all else fails - actually negotiating with the Palestinians or relinquishing the Occupation not being an option - the US, at Israel's behest, can manage to skip Phase 1 of the Road Map and go directly to Phase 2, which calls for a "transitional" Palestinian state before, in Phase 3, its actual borders, territory and sovereignty are agreed upon. This is the Palestinians' nightmare: being locked indefinitely in the limbo of a "transitional" state. For Israel, such a situation is ideal, since it offers the possibility of imposing borders and expanding into the Palestinian areas unilaterally while seeming to respect the Road Map process.

Needless to say, all of this is to avoid a real two-state solution, the very idea of which is anathema to the Likud-led government. More than a decade ago Netanyahu set out his vision of Palestinian self-determination: somewhere between "state-minus and autonomy-plus." The best, if bleakest term for what Israel is intending for the Palestinians is warehousing, a permanent state of control and suppression in which the victims disappear from view and their situation, emptied of all political content, becomes a non-issue.

Although the Obama Administration may truly desire viable two-state solution and even understands all Israel's tricks, it is also clear that without significant pressure it cannot be achieved. And here is where the real problem arises. Israel's trump card has always been Congress, where it enjoys virtually unanimous bi-partisan support. And Obama's own Democratic Party, which received almost 80% of the Jewish vote in 2008, has always been far more "pro-Israel" than the Republicans. It may well be that Obama and Mitchell will try to take American policy in a new and more assertive direction and the leaders of his own party will balk, fearful of not being re-elected.

In this case, the "compromise" between the desire to resolve the conflict and the inability to move Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories so that a viable Palestinian state may emerge may be nothing less than apartheid. The difference between a viable Palestinian state and a Bantustan is one of details. Already signs are that the Obama Administration will allow Israel to keep its major settlement blocs, including a "Greater" Jerusalem, and prevent the Palestinians from having sovereign borders with the neighboring Arab states. Since few appreciate the crucial meaning of such details, Israel believes that it can finesse an apartheid situation in the guise of a two-state solution. Over the past decades the job of civil society has been to force governments to fulfill their responsibilities and enter into a political process that will actually lead to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Now that that process is upon us, our task is now to keep it honest.

(Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at .)

Only diplomacy can reverse North Korea's nuclear status

Siddharth Varadarajan — 2009-05-28T10:44:28Z

Given the impact a nuclear Korean peninsula will have on Japan and the rest of Asia, Beijing and Washington have an incentive to formulate a joint approach towards DPRK.

In the politics of international brinkmanship, nothing succeeds like failure or the fact that the world thinks one has failed.

The more Western analysts and governments sought to deride North Korea's ability to develop and deliver weapons of mass destruction, the greater was the determination of the “Korean masses” to demonstrate the robustness of their Beloved Leader's “deterrent”. On Monday, Kim Jong Il's nuclear scientists delivered a bomb that was considerably bigger than the 0.5 kilotonne yield they produced in 2006 but small enough to fit on the warhead of a missile.

The United States has condemned Pyongyang for brazenly defying the resolutions of the UN Security Council and India has described the test as a violation of North Korea's international commitments. Both these comments are slightly off the mark. North Korea has indeed defied the UN, but one may question the right of the Security Council to single out a country for censure when eight others already possess nuclear weapons, including three that are, like Pyongyang, not party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. As for violating its own commitments, North Korea, unlike India, never announced a test moratorium.

That said, the latest test is a provocative, desperate act that will increase tension in East Asia. North Korea's leaders are also guilty of violating good sense and reason in believing nuclear weapons will make them more secure. But condemning Kim Jong Il and his comrades is easy. Figuring out the right diplomatic strategy to deal with the fall-out is more difficult. The UNSC condemned North Korea in April after a rocket launch. That condemnation drew an explicit threat from Pyongyang that it would be “compelled to take additional self-defensive measures … includ(ing) nuclear tests”. The North Koreans have now delivered on that threat. Next will be the resumption of fissile material production. If the world's powers want to stop this needless escalation, it's time to take the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, as the country is formally called, seriously.

Bill Clinton had the right approach when he finalized the Agreed Framework with North Korea during his presidency in 1994. Unfortunately, George W. Bush undermined and scuttled that agreement by falsely accusing the DPRK of running a hidden uranium enrichment programme. The U.S. scrambled to recover lost ground when North Korea activated its withdrawal from the NPT but the groundless imposition of financial sanctions again queered the pitch. Finally, in October 2006, thanks to the ineptitude of the Bush administration's diplomacy, a nuclearised North Korea was foisted on the world.

The nuclear test of 2006 had a very low yield and was variously described as a “dud” and a “fizzle”. However, once the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) detected noble gases, thereby confirming the non-conventional nature of the explosion, the world should have realized the world's ninth nuclear weapon state had arrived. But that never happened. Careless handling of the situation has allowed North Korea to now refine its weapon design and solve whatever “technological difficulties” it experienced in 2006.

Regardless of what one thinks of nuclear weapons and the states that have them, possession is nine-tenths of the law. And the laws of deterrence, diplomacy and realpolitik meant Pyongyang could no longer be treated the way it had been before 2006. Once it went nuclear, the DPRK became as much of a threat to international peace and security as the other eight nuclearised states. However, the U.S. managed to persuade the UN Security Council to single out North Korea and imposed sanctions on it. To be sure, the Six Party Talks were also revived around a new framework with Chinese assistance but U.S. leaders and military commanders, not to speak of their allies in Japan, still viewed the DPRK with condescension and even contempt.

As part of the verification process agreed to in the Six Party Talks in 2007, North Korea declared a modest plutonium stockpile of 37 kilos. On a visit to Pyongyang in February 2009, the American academic, Selig Harrison, was told that this plutonium had already been “weaponised” and would not be available for inspection, disablement or even denuclearisation until the wider issue of U.S.-North Korea relations was settled satisfactorily. Depending on design and yield, 37 kilos of Pu translates into anything from five to 10 nuclear bombs. Despite this reality, the U.S. continued to regard the DPRK as a non-nuclear weapon state. In the run up to its recent “satellite” launch, for example, Japanese and American officials and analysts openly spoke about their “right” to shoot down the North Korean rocket. Such threats are never bandied about so casually while speaking of a nuclear adversary.

For a state looking to protect itself from the threat of aggression and externally-induced regime change, this continuous ridicule meant only one thing: keep testing your nuclear weapons and missiles till the world is ready to take you seriously.

The explosive yield of Monday's nuclear test – which showed up at 4.7 on the Richter scale at monitoring stations around the world – should decisively settle the debate over North Korean technological capabilities in the WMD field. And even if the “satellite” the DPRK sought to launch never made it to orbit, the fact remains that the Taepodong-2 rocket it used succeeded in hitting an impact area in the Pacific Ocean more than 2,000 miles away exactly as planned.

For both the U.S. and China, the North Korean problem is something that cannot be ignored because its denouement could affect the strategic choices Japan and the wider Asian region takes. As a recent Congressional Research Service report notes, the nuclear status of the Korean peninsula will be a key factor in any future debate in Japan over that country's non-nuclear status. “Any eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula could further induce Japan to reconsider its nuclear stance,” the February 2009 report titled Japan's Nuclear Future noted. “If the two Koreas unify while North Korea still holds nuclear weapons and the new state opts to keep a nuclear arsenal, Japan may face a different calculation,” it said, citing some Japanese analysts as describing a nuclear-armed unified Korea as “more of a threat than a nuclear-armed North Korea.”

With an eye on Japanese doubts about the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence in the wake of the 2006 North Korean test, Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State at the time, stressed America's “will and capability to meet the full range, and I underscore full range, of its deterrence and security commitments to Japan”. But unlike China, which would see a nuclearised Japan as an unmitigated strategic nightmare, Washington's concerns vis-à-vis Tokyo are a by-product of its relations with Beijing. For some hawks on the fringe of the American debate, for example, a nuclear Japan could serve as a welcome pressure point on a China that is rapidly modernizing its armed forces. Other, more mainstream hawks believe the North Korean tests represent the failure of diplomacy and advocate greater coercion and even military pressure on Pyongyang to roll back its programme. Both of these approaches are foolish, especially given the renewed focus in Washington on Sino-U.S. cooperation.

In his Prague speech earlier this month, President Barack Obama used overly muscular language against the DPRK but all he achieved was another nuclear test. Today, there is no reason to believe louder condemnation and tougher sanctions by the Security Council will produce a different outcome.

There are two reasons to believe diplomacy will work. For one, China has a major incentive to bring the DPRK back into the dialogue process. Second, for all its petulance and irrationality, North Korea is the only nuclear weapon state that has expressed a willingness to give up its weapons in the context of regional denuclearisation. Israel refuses to even entertain such a bargain and India and Pakistan will not abandon their weapons till the Big Five are ready to do so. If the stalemate persists, the DPRK may well abandon the goal of a denuclearised Korean peninsula, thereby triggering a wider arms race. Instead of that outcome, the international community needs to act with restraint, avoid coercive steps and work towards reviving the Six Party Talks process. Which, at the end of the day, is still the only roadmap the world has for a peaceful resolution of the problem

Can China Save the World From Depression?

Walden Bello — 2009-05-28T10:34:58Z

Will China be the "growth pole" that will snatch the world from the jaws of depression?

This question has become a favorite topic as the heroic American middle class consumer, weighed down by massive debt, ceases to be the key stimulus for global production.

Although China's GDP growth rate fell to 6.1% in the first quarter — the lowest in almost a decade — optimists see "shoots of recovery" in a 30% surge in urban fixed-asset investment and a jump in industrial output in March. These indicators are proof, some say, that China's stimulus program of $586 billion — which, in relation to GDP, is much larger proportionally than the Obama administration's $787 billion package—is working.

Countryside as Launching Pad for Recovery?

With China's export-oriented urban coastal areas suffering from the collapse of global demand, many inside and outside China are pinning their hopes for global recovery on the Chinese countryside. A significant portion of Beijing's stimulus package is destined for infrastructure and social spending in the rural areas. The government is allocating 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) in subsidies to help rural residents buy televisions, refrigerators, and other electrical appliances.

But with export demand down, will this strategy of propping up rural demand work as an engine for the country's massive industrial machine?

There are grounds for skepticism. For one, even when export demand was high, 75% of China's industries were already plagued with overcapacity. Before the crisis, for instance, the automobile industry's installed capacity was projected to turn out 100% more vehicles than could be absorbed by a growing market. In the last few years, overcapacity problems have resulted in the halving of the annual profit growth rate for all major enterprises.

There is another, greater problem with the strategy of making rural demand a substitute for export markets. Even if Beijing throws in another hundred billion dollars, the stimulus package is not likely to counteract in any significant way the depressive impact of a 25-year policy of sacrificing the countryside for export-oriented urban-based industrial growth. The implications for the global economy are considerable.

Subordinating Agriculture to Industry

Ironically, China's ascent during the last 30 years began with the rural reforms Deng Xiaoping initiated in 1978. The peasants wanted an end to the Mao-era communes, and Deng and his reformers obliged them by introducing the "household-contract responsibility system." Under this scheme, each household received a piece of land to farm. The household was allowed to retain what was left over of the produce after selling to the state a fixed proportion at a state-determined price, or by simply paying a tax in cash. The rest it could consume or sell on the market. These were the halcyon years of the peasantry. Rural income grew by over 15% a year on average, and rural poverty declined from 33% to 11% of the population.

This golden age of the peasantry came to an end, however, when the government adopted a strategy of coast-based, export-oriented industrialization premised on rapid integration into the global capitalist economy. This strategy, which was launched at the 12th National Party Congress in 1984, essentially built the urban industrial economy on "the shoulders of peasants," as rural specialists Chen Guidi and Wu Chantao put it. The government pursued primitive capital accumulation mainly through policies that cut heavily into the peasant surplus.

The consequences of this urban-oriented industrial development strategy were stark. Peasant income, which had grown by 15.2% a year from 1978 to 1984, dropped to 2.8% a year from 1986 to 1991. Some recovery occurred in the early 1990s, but stagnation of rural income marked the latter part of the decade. In contrast, urban income, already higher than that of peasants in the mid-1980s, was on average six times the income of peasants by 2000.

The stagnation of rural income was caused by policies promoting rising costs of industrial inputs into agriculture, falling prices for agricultural products, and increased taxes, all of which combined to transfer income from the countryside to the city. But the main mechanism for the extraction of surplus from the peasantry was taxation. By 1991, central state agencies levied taxes on peasants for 149 agricultural products, but this proved to be but part of a much bigger bite, as the lower levels of government began to levy their own taxes, fees, and charges. Currently, the various tiers of rural government impose a total of 269 types of tax, along with all sorts of often arbitrarily imposed administrative charges.

Taxes and fees are not supposed to exceed 5% of a farmer's income, but the actual amount is often much greater. Some Ministry of Agriculture surveys have reported that the peasant tax burden is 15% — three times the official national limit.

Expanded taxation would perhaps have been bearable had peasants experienced returns such as improved public health and education and more agricultural infrastructure. In the absence of such tangible benefits, the peasants saw their incomes as subsidizing what Chen and Wu describe as the "monstrous growth of the bureaucracy and the metastasizing number of officials" who seemed to have no other function than to extract more and more from them.

Aside from being subjected to higher input prices, lower prices for their goods, and more intensive taxation, peasants have borne the brunt of the urban-industrial focus of economic strategy in other ways. According to one report, "40 million peasants have been forced off their land to make way for roads, airports, dams, factories, and other public and private investments, with an additional two million to be displaced each year." Other researchers cite a much higher figure of 70 million households, meaning that, calculating 4.5 persons per household, by 2004, land grabs have displaced as many as 315 million people.

Impact of Trade Liberalization

China's commitment to eliminate agricultural quotas and reduce tariffs, made when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, may yet dwarf the impact of all the previous changes experienced by peasants. The cost of admission for China is proving to be huge and disproportionate. The government slashed the average agricultural tariff from 54 to 15.3%, compared with the world average of 62%, prompting the commerce minister to boast (or complain): "Not a single member in the WTO history has made such a huge cut [in tariffs] in such a short period of time."

The WTO deal reflects China's current priorities. If the government has chosen to put at risk large sections of its agriculture, such as soybeans and cotton, it has done so to open up or keep open global markets for its industrial exports. The social consequences of this trade-off are still to be fully felt, but the immediate effects have been alarming. In 2004, after years of being a net food exporter, China registered a deficit in its agricultural trade. Cotton imports skyrocketed from 11,300 tons in 2001 to 1.98 million tons in 2004, a 175-fold increase. Chinese sugarcane, soybean, and most of all, cotton farmers were devastated. In 2005, according to Oxfam Hong Kong, imports of cheap U.S. cotton resulted in a loss of $208 million in income for Chinese peasants, along with 720,000 jobs. Trade liberalization is also likely to have contributed to the dramatic slowdown in poverty reduction between 2000 and 2004.

Loosening the Property Regime

In the past few years, the priority placed on a capitalist transformation of the countryside to support export-oriented industrialization has moved the party to promote not only agricultural trade liberalization but a loosening of a semi-socialist property regime that favors peasants and small farmers. This involves easing public controls over land in order to move toward a full-fledged private property regime. The idea is to allow the sale of land rights (the creation of a land market) so that the most "efficient" producers can expand their holdings. In the euphemistic words of a U.S. Department of Agriculture publication, "China is strengthening farmers' rights — although stopping short of allowing full ownership of land — so farmers can rent land, consolidate their holdings, and achieve efficiencies in size and scale."

This liberalization of land rights included the passage of the Agricultural Lease Law in 2003, which curtailed the village authorities' ability to reallocate land and gave farmers the right to inherit and sell leaseholds for arable land for 30 years. With the buying and selling of rights to use land, the government essentially reestablished private property in land in China. In talking about "family farms" and "large-scale farmers," the Chinese Communist Party was, in fact, endorsing a capitalist development path to supplant one that had been based on small-scale peasant agriculture. As one partisan of the new policy argued, "The reform would create both an economy of scale — raising efficiency and lowering agricultural production costs — but also resolve the problem of idle land left by migrants to the cities."

Despite the Party's assurance that it was institutionalizing the peasants' rights to land, many feared that the new policy would legalize the process of illegal land grabbing that had been occurring on a wide scale. This would, they warned, "create a few landlords and many landless farmers who will have no means of living." Given the turbulent transformation of the countryside by the full-scale unleashing of capitalist relations of production in other countries, these fears were not misplaced.

In sum, simply allocating money to boost rural demand is unlikely to counteract the powerful economic and social structures created by subordinating the development of the countryside to export-oriented industrialization. These policies have contributed to greater inequality between urban and rural incomes and stalled the reduction of poverty in the rural areas. To enable the rural areas of China to serve as the launching pad for national and global recovery would entail a fundamental policy shift, and the government would have to go against the interests, both local and foreign, that have congealed around the strategy of foreign-capital-dependent, export-oriented industrialization.

Beijing has talked a lot about a "New Deal" for the countryside over the last few years. But there are few signs that it has the political will to adopt policies that would translate its rhetoric into reality. So don't expect Beijing to save the global economy any time soon.

Walden Bello is a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, a senior analyst of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, and a columnist with Foreign Policy In Focus. The issues touched on in this commentary are discussed in greater depth in the author's book The Food Wars, published by Verso, which will be available by July 2009.

A Logical Defeat for the Left

Economic & Political Weekly — 2009-05-27T02:01:01Z

There is a certain irony in the defeat of the Left, in particular of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), in the recent general elections. It was among the handful of communist parties in the world that survived the fall of the then existing socialism in 1989-91 and it actually grew in size in the following years. Today when capitalism is in crisis the world over, the CPI(M)-led Left in India faces its worst defeat ever.

Predictably, the Left Front (LF) and CPI(M) will bring forth contingent and immediate exigencies to explain the electoral rout. One view blames state-level mistakes like Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal and factionalism and cyclical voter swing in Kerala for the debacle. Other factors like the neglect of education, public health and transport and the stepmotherly treatment of minorities in West Bengal (where fewer Muslims are in government service than in Gujarat) are also being held responsible for the loss. After more than three decades in power it is not possible to blame a lack of funds from the centre for the inadequate coverage and level of social services in at least Ben¬gal. Moreover, the double-speak between CPI(M) positions in Delhi and Kolkata, especially on economic policies, also turned voters away. Lastly, there are clear indications of complacency and arrogance, not to mention an arbitrary and even illegal exercise of power at the local level, in the behaviour of the Left in Bengal. The other view considers the rigid stand on the nuclear deal and the tactics of the “Third Front” to be primarily respon¬sible for the electoral rebuff. It castigates the rigid opposition to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) for bringing the Congress and Trinamool together in Bengal and the alliance with “unsa¬voury” regional parties for driving voters towards the Congress grouping in other states.

The CPI(M) saw a fall in vote share in 15 out of the 22 states in which it contested. Even in those states where its vote share has gone up, it is largely because the party contested more seats. Overall, despite contesting 13 more seats (a total of 82 nationally), the CPI(M)'s vote share declined and the LF's tally fell from 61 in the 14th Lok Sabha to just 24 in the new Parliament. In fact, five seats in West Bengal could even be seen as a gift from the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose candidates divided the anti-left votes in these constituencies and helped the LF candidate win. Yet, despite these reverses, it is undeniable that the core of the LF's support still remains loyal in Bengal and Kerala.

There is a large element of truth to be found in each of these explanations and still they remain, in their sum total, empirical and empiricist apologies for the loss suffered by the Left. Such a rout cannot be explained only in terms of momentary exigencies. Regrettably, the first steps at self-assessment and review of the results indicate that rather than confront these stark realities and encourage a thorough self-criticism from the rank and file, the left parties are either trying to find short-term, localised, answers to the defeat or are indulging in an internal blame game being aired publicly and with much rancour

It was in the 15th Congress of the CPI(M) in Chandigarh in the mid-1990s that a startling fact came to light. More than half the members of the party came from non-working class and non-peasant backgrounds, or what is loosely called, the middle class. This was primarily due to the inability of the CPI(M) to mobilise working people in mass movements while retaining its attraction towards young educated radical sections of society. This member¬ship skew, unaddressed as it has remained since then, has led to a situation where today the students, youth and women's fronts of the party supply almost all the top leaders of the politburo and Parliament and there is perhaps not a single young leader who has emerged from trade union, peasant or other mass struggles. Harkishan Singh Surjeet and Jyoti Basu had emerged from peasant and working class movements, while Prakash Karat and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya emerged from the classrooms of elite universities. This dominance of members from the educated prop¬ertied classes has resulted in what can only be called “a politics of logical principles”.

The scholars and wordsmiths who lead the CPI(M) today, draft its documents and lay down the line are no doubt masters at drawing logical conclusions from first principles. Textual criti¬cism and deconstruction of reality seem to have replaced actual mass mobilisation and movements.
Even on the nuclear deal issue, hundreds of thousands of words were produced while only one hurried bus ride along India's eastern coast filled in for mass mobilisation on this issue. Today the Left, led by its largest mem¬ber the CPI(M), has made erudite critiques of government acts, policy lobbying and administration into its prime political work.
It seems at a loss when confronted by mass action. The Left re¬mains on the sidelines of most popular mass movements being waged by peasants, tribals and workers in India today and, wor¬ryingly, sometimes it is ranged against them. The few mass move¬ments which it initiated, as in Rajasthan or Andhra Pradesh, re¬mained localised, not only in the geographical sense which they had to, but crucially in terms of political import because the party did not know what to do with them.

The Left theoreticians have been found wanting even in the theoretical task of building a new praxis of radical mass move¬ments. Lurching from one issue to another, on agendas set by others, the CPI(M) leadership often appears to be, what Ashok Mitra termed recently, “philosophers of the short term”.

Beyond the fortunes of this particular election, the world today is passing through one of the greatest crisis of capitalism. Neoliberal dogmas, which till recently seemed unshakeable, are facing unprecedented opposition from people at large while gigantic corporations are teetering on collapse. It is at moments like these that ideas and solutions that lead to radical egalitarian transformation of society can become popular and can be rooted in social institutions and state structures. In India, democracy has struck deep roots and is empowering millions to demand a better life and greater dignity for themselves. By denying the CPI(M) and the LF any major parliamentary stake, the people of India have, inadvertently, thrown them out of parliamentary politics too. The question, unfortunately, remains whether any¬thing is left in the Left to take advantage of this opportunity. There is no logical answer to this question, only the possibility of returning to its natural politics.

Obama and two States

Ellen Cantarow — 2009-05-26T11:34:24Z

A false claim is wafting through the press: Obama is hanging tough with Benjamin Netanyahu, he's going to "twist Israel's arm" and at long last force the Jewish state into a two-state agreement, settling the Israel-Palestine question for good. There's even talk that Obama backs the Arab League's 2002 peace initiative, complete with its main demand: Israel's withdrawal to its 1967 borders.

There's no proof for any of this. Obama has said nothing about when, where, and with what boundaries a Palestinian state might be established. Neither did George Bush. The slide from one regime to the next has been seamless on the score of Israel and Palestine as on much else.
In regard to a critical document invoked by Obama in his first policy speech about the region last January — the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative — Obama has not changed an iota, at least publicly. He gave the speech before State Department employees last January, announcing George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy. Most important, the speech delineated the clear outlines of Obama's Middle East doctrine, as I described in my "The Problem Isn't Avigdor Lieberman."
Obama's reference to the Arab Peace Initiative was crucial for what it omitted

Obama's reference to the Arab Peace Initiative was crucial for what it omitted

— the proposal's first part, the precondition for everything that follows: "Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon." Only after these preconditions have been laid out does the document continue: "Consequently, the Arab countries affirm the following...." In "Consequently," the intent is unmistakable: Once Israel fulfills the crucial condition requiring Israel's withdrawal to the 1967 lines, the Arab countries will do x, y, and z. One of the corollaries following the "Consequently" clause reads: "Establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace [emphasis mine]". Nothing could be clearer. Moreover, the Arab League's request of Israel, "the context," expresses the international consensus for the past 30 years, routinely blocked by the US and Israel.
Obama deliberately ignored all of this in his speech. Instead, he patted the Arab League on the head ("The Arab peace initiative contains constructive elements"), calling on Arab states to take "steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and [stand] up to extremism that threatens us all." To construe Obama's remarks as a slip or "mistake," to suppose that this literate, lawyerly President didn't actually read the document, would be preposterous. Obama's choice was a deliberate policy declaration: Israel will continue to do what it is doing, with US protection. The US has found a proxy (and armed it — more on this below). Hamas must "bow its head" to the master's will. Between the lines that refer to Arab states "normalizing" their relations with Israel, read: the US's most powerful Arab clients, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, hopefully (though not surely) with Syria in tow.
As for the "peace" which Obama professes to cherish, it would be easy to get to it through negotiation along the real Arab League proposal lines, the international consensus. But three-plus decades of US-Israel rejectionism have fostered only Israel's expansion
three-plus decades of US-Israel rejectionism have fostered only Israel's expansion

and the US's regional hegemony, through brutal occupation and wars, with the consequences in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon (and, if one includes Iraq in the Gulf War, sanctions and Bush periods, Iraq) well-known to readers of this publication.
What has Obama had to say — let alone do about — all of the Palestinian suffering? He has somewhat tempered his if-rockets-were-falling-on-my-daughters expression of sympathy for Israel with words of the "both sides suffering" variety, taking a slight bow to Gaza's "humanitarian" crisis (a topic that deserves its own commentary). It's a mistake to think his intellect — and reverse racism to think his skin color — will serve the dispossessed across the American empire. (Among the "cool" and "aloof" moments which increasingly anger Obama's voting base was his silence at the UN's elimination of Israel-Palestine from the Durban Anti-Racism Review Conference). Obama is a President skilled in oratory, with an admirable public relations machine, who can be counted on to exert all the savageries of imperial management. John F. Kennedy was just such a President, with charisma, intelligence, and a slick propaganda mill that still leaves liberals revering "Camelot." In reality, however, his administration was among the US's most brutal.
What's surprising is that left publications have focused so little on Obama's clear statement of intent in the Arab League proposal reference. It is also surprising that the left press has seldom commented (if at all) on a March 4 address to the Brookings Institution's Saban Center by Senator John Kerry. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry made very clear the Administration's "peace" plans:

"To start with, we need to fundamentally re-conceptualize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a regional problem that demands a regional solution. The challenges we face there — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Middle East peace process — form an interconnected web that requires an integrated approach . . . . That's why it is vital that we move quickly, with the Arab world and the Quartet, to build Palestinian Authority capacity." [Thanks to Noam Chomsky for drawing my attention to his discussion of Kerry's role in his "Exterminate All the Brutes."]

The US, together with "the Arab world" (meaning the US's most powerful Arab clients, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) is to become a united front with Israel against, of course, Iran. The "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" will thus be integrated — or sidelined — within the wider spectrum of the US's imperial dominance
The "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" will thus be integrated — or sidelined — within the wider spectrum of the US's imperial dominance

throughout the region. As for the Palestinians, Kerry reiterates that the Administration has found "a legitimate partner for peace" in Abbas — of course there have been no "legitimate" partners to date, Arafat's compliance at Oslo and his pre-Oslo overtures to Israel being so much disposable trash in the dustbin of history. (Hamas's repeated overtures to Israel — these have guaranteed truces as long as 30 years in exchange for Israel's retreat to the '67 borders, the same requirement as in the Arab League proposal — have been rebuffed by targeted assassinations and last winter's butchery in Gaza.) Abbas is now shored up with an army. Here's Kerry at Brookings again:

"For years, everyone has talked of the need to give the Israelis a legitimate partner for peace . . . . We must help the Palestinian Authority deliver for the Palestinian people, and we must do it now. . . . Most importantly, this means strengthening General Dayton's efforts to train Palestinian security forces that can keep order and fight terror. Recent developments have been extremely encouraging: during the invasion of Gaza, Palestinian Security Forces largely succeeded in maintaining calm in the West Bank amidst widespread expectations of civil unrest."

Given the US's "help" to similar client regimes throughout the world, the "help the Palestinian Authority deliver" phrase is chilling. While one part of the "experiment" with a final solution to the Palestinian problem was underway — Israel's bombing and shelling of Gaza, possibly as a test for future US strikes in the Middle East in densely populated areas — another part, equally critical, was underway in the West Bank. To protect the population's "human rights" the "truly professional" Palestinian National Security Force (N.S.F.) crushed West Bank demonstrations, averting the worrisome possibility that in the face of Israel's slaughter of their sisters and brothers in Gaza, there might be unwelcome disturbances. According to reliable reports, Abbas also has CIA-run forces, Preventive Security and General Intelligence, which promise to be far more brutal than Dayton's paramilitaries (these fall under State Department aegis).
Thomas Friedman, the US-Israel's press proxy, reported in the New York Times this past February that after Hamas "took over Gaza in 2007," the US gave funds to Keith Dayton to do proxy-army training of Palestinians in Jordan: "Schooled in everything from riot control to human rights [sic], the N.S.F. [Palestinian National Security Force] is the only truly professional force controlled by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas."
Only a few of Abbas's "truly professional" proxy-ancestors are Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, Suharto in Indonesia
Only a few of Abbas's "truly professional" proxy-ancestors are Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, Suharto in Indonesia

, and the proxy forces, professionals in massacre, looting, rape, and assassination, which operated under them. There is, needless to say, no unified Palestinian resistance movement to parallel the FMLN in El Salvador let alone Nicaragua's Sandinistas. In a Palestine weakened by decades of savage occupation, the US succeeded in fomenting maximal strife between Hamas and Fatah.
As for the "two states" that get Obama's lip-service, there are only two possibilities. One is the Lieberman-Kadima proposal (Tzipi Livni, among others to Lieberman's "left," has endorsed it). It would annex to the West Bank parts of the Galilee containing large Arab populations and call the result a "Palestinian state." This is the racist solution, which has sometimes been termed "soft transfer", as I described it.
The other is the land-swap option proposed at Taba, Egypt in 2001 at the end of Clinton's administration. (There is also the land-swap option of the Geneva Accord crafted by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, after PM Ehud Barak pulled out of the Taba talks.) Israeli security and foreign policy expert Zeev Maoz quotes the joint Israeli-Palestinian January, 2001 statement after Taba:

Israeli attacks on Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Barak Obama has somewhat tempered his sympathy for Israel with words of the

"The sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections."

The Brzezinski-Scowcroft proposal savaged by Bill and Kathy Christison contains a sentence referring to Taba: "Indeed, the outline of an Israeli-Palestinian accord was crafted during the dying days of the Clinton administration." After the sentence about Taba the authors demur about the difficulties of getting "to yes," but the allusion is still in the document.
What is the alternative to Taba? Or to the Geneva initiative (in the very unlikely event that the Obama administration were to take it up again)? In the ruins of Gaza people hover on the edges of bare survival (among other ravages of the siege alone, which continues unremittingly, is stunted growth in young children, noted in a recent Lancet report) in the West Bank, California-like suburban settlements ravage the former beauty of Palestine's hills, slicing and dicing what remains of Palestine's villages and cities; two armies and brutal vigilantes attack any form of resistance, however peaceful, and the usual suffering (evictions, home demolitions and more) goes on under US-Israel rule.
It is difficult for those who have long yearned for justice for Palestine to admit that the US-Israel are winning. But the conclusion is inescapable.
To recognize this doesn't mean stopping our condemnation of the ongoing daily savageries against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; or stopping educational work among Americans ignorant of the facts; or valuable "sister city" projects and other person-to-person work underway in, for instance, Cambridge, Massachusetts; or boycott and divestment activities of the sort recently achieved at Hampshire College. But none of that work should cloud our understanding of the very narrow real-world options possible under Obama.

Ellen Cantarow has written since 1979 on Israel and Palestine. She can be reached at ecantarow@comcast.net This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

View online : www.crisismagazine.org

Israeli Government Obstinance Following Netanyahu's Return from Meeting in US with Obama

Brian Atkisnky — 2009-05-25T10:47:16Z

Now that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has arrived back from his first meeting in Washington D.C. with US President, Barack Obama, the pundits are out on both sides, either filled with exuberance about the meeting as a new opening for real change and the possibility of long-term peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, or dread that it was the first step on the road to Israel's ruin.

What are the substantive results of the meeting? From the US side, we won't know until we see how Obama's administration reacts to the actions, or more properly, inaction, of the Israeli government.

So far from the Israeli side, the situation looks anything but promising.

As a preemptive move against the argument that Israel has been doing nothing to make the situation more amicable for negotiation with the Palestinians, in the week before Netanyahu's trip to the US, Israeli Defense Minister and head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, has been pushing the issue of evacuating “illegal settlement outposts.” He argues that the outposts must be evacuated one way or the other, and that "if this is not done through negotiations, it will be done with swift and firm enforcement.”

Cynically pushing the issue of the outposts as a singular and dangerous threat to the rule of law in Israel, the defense minister declared that “law enforcement cannot be compromised. A sovereign, viable state must enforce the law and exercise its authority over its citizens."

Would that Barak had as much enthusiasm for the rule of international law as he professes to have about Israeli state law.

In order to show the world that they mean business, yesterday, 21 May, Israeli authorities dismantled one small West Bank settlement outpost, called Maoz Esther, where approximately four families were living. No more than six hours after the Israeli authorities left the site, settlers began rebuilding the outpost.

What must be kept in mind here is that this whole hullabaloo concerns only tens of unauthorized outposts, leaving aside the issue of the more than 460,000 settlers presently living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In fact, Defense Minister Barak framed the issue of the removal of the outposts as a way to support the settlement movement in general, stating that the outposts were hurting Israel on the international level and undermining the settlement movement. And, if Barak's past actions are any predictor of his future behavior, any deal for the evacuation of outposts will be tied to an expansion of existing settlements.

Moreover, use of the term “Illegal settlement outposts,” is a purposeful political and strategic sleight of hand, employed by the Israeli government as a way to legitimize the wider settlement project by differentiating between the settlements themselves, and the “illegitimate” construction of settlement outposts. By force of the illogical logic created by this use of this term, if the outposts are “illegal” this must mean that the other settlements are “legal.”

While Prime Minister Netanyahu, for his part, has repeatedly demanded that any potential Palestinian negotiation partner not only first recognize Israel as a country, but specifically as a Jewish state, he has so far refused to publically accept the notion of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Ron Dermer, a senior Advisor to the Prime Minister, went so far as to say, “This idea of two states for two peoples is a stupid and childish solution to a very complex problem.”

And, while President Obama, in his visit to Cairo next month, is expected to reveal his proposal for a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, including support for the Arab demand that Palestinians be permitted to establish their capital in East Jerusalem, Netanyahu has been doing what he can to quash any hope of this actually coming about. Only one day after the Prime Minister returned to Israel from his meeting in Washington D.C., he vowed, during a speech in Jerusalem (21 May), that “United Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Jerusalem has always been—and always will be—ours. It will never again be divided or cut in half. Jerusalem will remain only under Israel's sovereignty.”

During the same Jerusalem Day celebration, Israeli President Shimon Peres, seconded Netanyahu, stating “It has and always will be Israel's capital. We never had another and it has never been the capital of any other people. “

One thing is certain, without significant international pressure to hold Israel accountable for its actions, the present Israeli government will never make the moves necessary to end the occupation and for a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis

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