Knocking on the Iron Wall

Knocking on the Iron Wall

Palestine, the UN and Australian Labor
 
by RICK KUHN
 
Dec 02, 2012
 
One week Australia’s Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard cheers on Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza, the next the parliamentary Labor Party caucus rolls her over recognition of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly.

In the United Nations, Labor foreign minister Bert Evatt pushed for the partition of Palestine and in 1948 as the President of the General Assembly in 1948 supported the new Israeli state. Ever since Australian governments, Labor and conservative, have been hardline backers of Israel.

Has the Australian Labor Party’s position on Israel really changed?

The shift does not mean that Labor is now hostile to Israeli apartheid. Labor has a slightly different view from Israel, the United States and the Coalition about how best to preserve Israel as a racist state. The current Foreign Minister Bob Carr understands that the Arab Spring means that minor concessions have to be made to prop up the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, which is Israel’s policeman on the West Bank.

The laws that define Israel as a Jewish state mean that its Palestinian citizens have second class status. They are not allowed to live in most areas, their separate schools are underfunded, they are ineligible for many welfare services and public sector jobs, Arabic is treated as inferior to Hebrew.

After living for decades under Israeli occupation, the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have no say at all over Israel’s policies. Jews, like me, have a right of ‘return’ to Israel so long as they can demonstrate their hereditary Jewishness through their mothers’ lines. Palestinian refugees born in what is now Israel and their children and grandchildren have no right to return.

Australia abstained in the General Assembly’s overwhelming vote to accept Palestine not as a member of the UN but just an ‘observer state’, like the Pope’s toy state of the Vatican. Gillard had wanted Australia to vote against the resolution, with Israel, the United States and a handful of its clients.

The General Assembly decision will not improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

At best, it gives the issue of Israel’s repression of the Palestinians a little more profile and will probably lead to cases in the UN’s International Court of Justice, which will also help publicise the issue. Neither the USA nor Israel accepts the authority of the Court. The USA’s veto on the Security Council still ensures that the UN’s executive body will not act against Israel and that Palestine will not become a member of the UN.

If we want to understand the main reasons for Labor’s marginal departure from the Israel/US script for the Middle East, we have to look to Palestine and the Arab world rather than the New York and the Hague where the UN and ICJ sit.

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has implemented the doctrine of the ‘iron wall’. This holds that the dispossession of the Palestinian people can only be maintained by armed force and that if the Palestinians ever accept the Jewish state it will only be because Israel’s military actions have made them give up hope.

The right wing Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky formulated the doctrine in 1923. But all Israel’s governments, including the Labour administrations of the country’s first decades, have pursued it.

Gillard’s support for Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ is an endorsement of the iron wall.

The Arab Spring is revolutionising much of the Middle East, including Israel’s neighbours Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The vast majority of Arab people want democracy and better living standards. And, unlike the dictators and kings who formally or informally came to terms with Israel, they have real sympathy for their Palestinian sisters and brothers.

Israel and the United States, which backed the dictators Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt and still backs Abdullah the absolute monarch in Jordan, are much more isolated in the Middle East today than two years ago. Israel is even more dependent on US military and diplomatic backing. The United States needs Israel more than ever, as its one really reliable, powerful and relatively stable ally in a region whose location and oil give it outstanding global strategic importance.

The Australian Labor government’s minor shift on Palestine recognises that it is necessary to prop up the dictatorial Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, his Fatah party and its allies, on the West Bank.

The PA is invaluable to Israel. Shawan Jabarin, director-general of Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, currently in Australia, this week said ‘To be honest, the PA serves the Israelis’. The PA’s ‘security coordination’ with Israel is coordination in the repression of Palestinians. Without consulting the Palestinians, Abbas recently gave up on the Palestinian right of return.

Particularly after the Palestinians of Gaza resisted the latest Israeli attacks and were even able to secure some concessions from Israel, the credibility of the PA is at a low ebb. The government of Gaza is run by Fatah’s equally dictatorial but less corrupt Islamist rival Hamas.

The success of the PA’s project of gaining observer state status at the UN will be a small boost to its prestige and the declining plausibility of the ‘two state solution’ of the conflict in Palestine, which the Israeli, the US and Australian governments claim to support. That ‘solution’ would leave Israeli apartheid in tact.

The ALP caucus deal no doubt also reflected other considerations much less directly connected with the Middle East. Bob Carr wanted to stay on the right side of some of the governments that voted for Australian membership of the UN Security Council in October. Although the Labor left initially wanted Australia to actually support Palestine’s observer state status, the caucus deal appeared to demonstrate that the left is not entirely irrelevant through a concession on an issue of quaternary significance. The decision might help Labor hold some seats in Sydney with substantial Arab and Muslim populations.

Finally, there has been a major shift in wider public attitudes in Australia to Palestine over the past three decades, as opposed to the solid bipartisan Zionism of the ALP and Coalition. But the government has been quite wiling to ignore overwhelming public rejection of some of its policies, even on issues like equal marriage where Australian national interests, that is corporate interests, are not at stake. Australia’s abstention in the General Assembly vote is part of a strategy that is intended to advance those interests. Whether it will succeed in strengthening the capacity of the US governments to impose their will on the world and hence Australia’s ability to call the shots in the south west Pacific and south east Asia is another question.



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Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!

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Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

By Chris Hedges

 Nov. 28th, 2012

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.

The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death, and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to keep this imbalance in place.

Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza, established in June 2007, is a brutal form of collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400 civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining 5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us, too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable. They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a world of barbarism.

“In disposing of man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Karl Polanyi wrote in “The Great Transformation.” “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”

There are 47.1 million Americans who depend on food stamps to eat. The elites are plotting to take these food stamps away, along with other “entitlement” programs that keep the poor from destitution. The slashing of trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, given the political impasse in Washington and the looming “fiscal cliff,” now seems certain. There are 50 million people considered to be living below the poverty line, but because the poverty line is so low—$22,350 for a family of four—this figure means nothing. Add the tens of millions of Americans who live in a category called “near poverty,” including all those families attempting to live on less than $45,000 a year, and you have at least 30 percent of the country living in poverty. Once these people figure out that there is no economic recovery, that their standard of living is going to continue to drop, that they are trapped, that hope in the future is an illusion, they will become as angry as protesters in Greece and Spain or the militants in Gaza or Afghanistan. Banks and other financial corporations, handed trillions in interest-free money from the Federal Reserve, meanwhile hoard $5 trillion, much of it looted from the U.S. Treasury. The longer this worldwide disparity and inequality is perpetuated, the more the masses will revolt and the faster we will internally replicate the Israeli model of domestic control—drones overhead, all dissent criminalized, SWAT teams busting through doors, deadly force as an acceptable form of subjugation, food used as a weapon, and constant surveillance.

In Gaza and other blighted parts of the globe we see this new configuration of power. What is happening in Gaza, like what is happening to people of color in marginal communities in the United States, is the model. The techniques of control, whether carried out by the Israelis or militarized police units in our inner-city drug wars, whether employed by military special forces or mercenaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, are tested first and perfected on the weak and the powerless. Our callous indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and the hundreds of millions of poor packed into urban slums in Asia or Africa, as well as our own underclass, means that the injustices visited on them will be visited on us. In failing them we fail ourselves.

As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back to the homeland. At the same time, the internal systems of democratic governance have calcified. Centralized authority has devolved into the hands of an executive branch that slavishly serves global corporate interests. The press and the government’s judiciary and legislative branches have become toothless and decorative. The specter of terrorism, as in Israel, is used by the state to divert gargantuan expenditures to homeland security, the military and internal surveillance. Privacy is abolished. Dissent is treason. The military with its mantra of blind obedience and force characterizes the dark ethic of the wider culture. Beauty and truth are abolished. Culture is degraded into kitsch. The emotional and intellectual life of the citizenry is ravaged by spectacle, the tawdry and salacious, as well as by handfuls of painkillers and narcotics. Blind ambition, a lust for power and a grotesque personal vanity—exemplified by David Petraeus and his former mistress—are the engines of advancement. The concept of the common good is no longer part of the lexicon of power. This, as the novelist J.M. Coetzee writes, is “the black flower of civilization.” It is Rome under Diocletian. It is us. Empires, in the end, decay into despotic, murderous and corrupt regimes that finally consume themselves. And we, like Israel, are now coughing up blood. 

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Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!

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