I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for CounterPunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy. Among the critics of my CounterPunch article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.
I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness. A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study. I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute. And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.
At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang. I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out. We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states. The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted. [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]
We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East. Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran. We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome. The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war. Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security. As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason. The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin. U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking. Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power. Nor does China appear to be interested in power project. Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.
No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades. Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries. Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO. There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.
Border security is essential to Russian national security policy. By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.” Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.
When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation. When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago. The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries. We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war. It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.
The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West. In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.
When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.” Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions. A PERSONAL DISCUSSION OF RUSSIAN NATIONAL SECURITY
I correctly anticipated significant criticism of my last piece for Counterpunch, which argued that President Vladimir Putin’s was not “unproved,” that NATO expansion was a significant factor in the Russian use of force, and that our policymakers and so-called experts failed to understand the central national security aspects of Soviet/Russian policy. Among the critics of my CP article were Walter Slocomb who served in Clinton’s national security council and lobbied for NATO expansion, and a former colleague of mine at the National War College, Marvin Ott, who supported expansion and is anticipating a Russian victory in Ukraine to be followed by Putin’s aggression elsewhere.
I am not trying to minimize the Russian challenge to U.S. national interests throughout the Cold War, but there needs to be recognition of U.S. efforts to exaggerate the Soviet threat as well as the acknowledgment of systemic Russian domestic weakness. A further problem is that there are too few U.S. experts on either Russia or East Europe, and too few institutes devoted to such study. I benefitted from my graduate work at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute. And I benefitted financially as well thanks to the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Program and the generosity of Indiana University.
At the same time, the decline in expertise on arms control and disarmament also contributes to the decline in substantive exchanges with both Moscow and Beijing as well as Tehran and Pyongyang. I was fortunate to have served as the intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation in Vienna, where the SALT and ABM treaties were hammered out. We could be facing a nuclear confrontation because of the lack of political discussions with these four key states. The fact that we don’t even recognize Iran and North Korea shows how our diplomats have failed us and our policymakers have been so short-sighted. [Arms control not only led to Soviet-American detente, it fostered European detente, which allowed 380,000 Soviet troops to withdraw from East Germany without incident.]
We are at a serious juncture with two mindless wars in East Europe and the Middle East. Instead of developing a policy toward these two disasters, we are fixed on building so-called alliance relationships in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times even wants to form an alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia to combat Iran. We should be dealing with Iran directly in an effort to avoid such alliance building, which will have no satisfactory outcome. The expansion of NATO has weakened NATO politically, and contributed to a major war. Our efforts to contain China with a series of alliance arrangements has only made it more difficult to deal with China regarding political security. As a result of our efforts, we have pushed Moscow and Beijing into their closest relationship in their histories, and we are looking for ways to match and exceed their defense spending and nuclear modernization.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the United States sought to change the European theatre balance for no real reason. The continued effort to expand NATO and to deploy power in East and Central Europe preordained a Russian reaction no matter who was in charge in the Kremlin. U.S. planners thought the expansion of power in Europe would deter Russia from seeking advantages in the Third World, but this was another miasma in our thinking. Russia has never developed a sophisticated power projection force that would be needed for a significant expansion of Russian power. Nor does China appear to be interested in power project. Only the United States believes that it needs 700 military facilities around the entire world.
No industrialized country has been willing to place military goals ahead of social and economic welfare, which isn’t the case regarding Soviet and Russian leaders over the decades. Putin’s war in Ukraine has backfired on every level, not only in Ukraine itself, but has led to a revival of NATO that finds two additional members in Sweden and Finland as well as increased military spending in most of the NATO countries. Putin now justifies the war as an existential conflict with the United States and the European members of NATO. There is still strong support for the war with Ukraine throughout the country because it follows fromRussian fears of military vulnerability and even conquest.
Border security is essential to Russian national security policy. By comparison, think about what German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said about the border safety of the United States: He called the United States lucky for its foreign politics situation, saying that the “Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.” Compare that to the difficult situations on Russia’s borders.
When Russians themselves write their histories, these works are rarely triumphal but emphasize the horrors and loses of confrontation. When they write about their southern border, it is always described as the “sensitive” southern border because of battles fought long ago. The western border is particularly sensitive because of the Swedish, French, and German invasions over the past several centuries. We may claim the “greatest generation” for the success in World War II, but the war itself was fought largely by the Russians on the western frontier who were responsible for most German fatalities and casualties in the war. It is difficult to imagine the success of the Normandy invasion, if the best Germany troops were not preoccupied with Russia.
The United States ignored a major strategic opportunity when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In his containment writings in the late 1940s, George F. Kennan argued that, once Russia had demonstrated that it would behave in a moderate and conciliatory fashion in the world community, it would be essential to “anchor” or tie Moscow to the West. In our triumphal and exceptionalist mood, we did just the opposite.
When the United States expanded NATO in the Clinton and Bush presidencies, it ignored an old Russian proverb: “Don’t try to skin the Russian bear before it is dead.” Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama ignored this proverb, and the next American president will face a more difficult relationship with Moscow than the one that existed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. President Biden’s constant vilification of Putin will certainly make it more difficult to convince an American audience that it is time for compromise and negotiation, and to convince a Russian leadership that we are prepared to return to substantive discussions.
Battle between the USS Monitor and Merrimack – Public Domain
On the afternoon of July 13, a family member called me.
“They just shot Trump. This is how civil wars start.”
The family member is an ardent Trump supporter, and he believes, as many others in the Trump camp, that the shooter didn’t act alone. The glaring omission of leaving a roof in the line of fire unprotected fuels that belief, as do facts such as that the shooter was seen on the roof beforehand, and that he was somehow able to carry a ladder and rifle across a distance of around 200 yards from his van to the building without being challenged.
Whether this was a monumental set of screw-ups or something worse, a truism I long ago learned about politics is that perception is reality. And for that reason, if Trump had suffered more than a flesh wound, it would have legitimated violent response in the eyes of many. This is a reason that the sentiment all too widespread, “Too bad he missed,” is remarkably shortsighted. People who believe Trump is the problem, and not the symptom of something deeper, are just not getting it.
There is a growing division in the U.S. between what seem to be almost irreconcilable opposites. It is hard to see how that division will be resolved short of some kind of conflict. One can hope it will not be bloody, though the violent history of this country does not inspire confidence. In any event, whoever is elected this November, a vast segment of the U.S. population will be deeply unhappy, in fact feel existentially threatened. That is the recipe for divisive clashes.
I have been returning to this theme over the past several years. In this post I will review a number of pieces I have written that indicate reason for deep concern. About polling which shows widespread expectations of national breakdown, and even broad sentiment for division into separate nations. And reviews of several books which delve into the potential for its occurrence. Then in a follow-up post I will offer my own thoughts for how we navigate coming years in the most peaceful manner possible.
“Polls show broad support for secession across the political spectrum. A University of Virginia poll found support for breaking blue and red states into two separate countries at 52% among Trump voters and 41% among Biden voters. Asked if leaders from the other party are ‘a clear and present danger to democracy,’ 80% of Biden voters and 84% of Trump voters responded yes.”
The sense that the other side poses an existential threat is exactly what causes civil wars. The election of Lincoln in 1860 created that sense among Southern slaveholders, fearful of losing their property, and led to the secession of the Confederacy.
“Taken all together, one has to ask, is the U.S. as we have known it coming to an end? Will continuation in its current form become so unacceptable to one side or another that it will fly apart? If Democrats pull it out and win in 2024, will the strong tendencies toward secession in red states come to the fore? If Republicans win, and appear to cement in permanent minority rule, how will that play on the West Coast and in the Northeast?”
In 2022, I reported the results of a recent survey in a story, “New poll shows high expectations of civil war.” I wrote, “Around 40% of U.S. citizens believe a civil war will break out, 47% expect a total economic collapse, and 50% anticipate the end of the U.S. as a global superpower, all in the next 10 years. Those are the results of a poll of 1,000 U.S. citizens conducted Sept. 1-4 by YouGov and The Economist which asked people’s views on 15 catastrophic scenarios. Margin of error is 3%. Results demonstrate that the U.S., once the land of optimism, has sunk into deep pessimism over its future.”
The polling had one bright spot. “While many expect a civil war, few think it would be a good thing. Overall, 69% answered bad, and only 6% good.”
I also reported, “People who believe democracy will survive in the U.S. only marginally exceed those who expect it to end, 39% versus 38%. The end of U.S. democracy is considered very likely by 13%, but the number who think that very unlikely are not much greater at 18%.”
“He introduces his book, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, with these words. ‘It’s time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed. At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart. We cannot assume that a continent-sized, multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy can remain united together, and it will not remain united if our political class cannot and will not adapt to an increasingly diverse and divided American public.’
“He lays blame for increasing divisions precisely at the feet of that class. ‘The people who actually drive American politics and policy are committed to escalation, and as they escalate, they drive their committed followers to ever-greater frenzies . . . cultural and economic incentives align to time and time again grant the most fame and fortune to those who stoke the most rage.’
“In a nation too diverse to function any other way than as a pluralist order, the drive for domination puts unity at risk. Writes French, ‘ . . . the quest for moral, cultural, and political domination by either side of our national divide risks splitting the nation into two (or three or four).’
“French himself became a target, and a meme, for his advocacy of civility and traditional liberalism in the sense of respect for civil liberties, when New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari published an essay, ‘Against David French-ism’ that went viral. French says Ahmari typifies exactly what he warned against when the latter argued that politics was moving into a state of ‘war and enmity’ so civility and decency toward political opponents were ‘second-order values.’
“’That kind of “quest for domination is dangerous . . . Our nation’s angriest culture warriors need to know the cost of their conflict. As they seek to crush their political and cultural enemies, they may destroy the nation they seek to rule.’”
“Secession movements are rising around the world, notes Buckley. He cites the movement for Scottish independence, the breakup of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, and separatist sentiments in nations ranging from Pakistan and Indonesia to Turkey and Nigeria. ‘Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this?’ To prove his point, Buckley cites secession efforts in California and Cascadia, coming from the left, and Texas, coming from the right.
“’We’re now living in a secessionist moment in world history,’ writes Buckley.
“’Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided,’ he writes. ‘We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we’re already divided into two nations just as much as in 1861.’
“National divisions have caused political gridlock with divided government unable to meet in the middle of key issues such as health care and immigration reform. That has produced the first constitutional crisis since the Civil War. ‘And, as in 1861, that’s a recipe for secession.’
“While the idea of secession ‘has been consigned to the political loony bin since the Civil War,’ the idea is increasingly respectable, Buckley asserts. ‘The barriers to a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and if the voters in a state were determined to leave the Union they could probably do so.’”
“Writes Buckley, ‘I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches that might stop us have failed, and if we want to stay united we must learn how to slow the engine.” His recommended solution . . . is ‘a devolution of power to the states.’”
“While the movements that proclaim support for secession and independence are still relatively small, the potential support for the idea is surprisingly large. A poll conducted in July 2022 by Yahoo News/YouGov found:
+ 32% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats believe the U.S. would be better off splitting into “red” and “blue” countries.
+ 42% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats say things would be worse off.
+ As a whole, 21% of voters are in the better off camp compared to 46% replying worse off.
“Though the majority favors the status quo, the numbers speak to a large potential base of support for independence movements. A July-August 2021 University of Virginia poll found significant support for regional unions, at 66% among Southern Republicans and 47% among West Coast Democrats. (Results are shown in in the opening graphic.) Overall support for new regional unions was no less than one-third in any region.
“These numbers point to scenarios for a broad rearrangement in U.S. governance structures over coming years. If history indicates anything, it is that big changes often come unexpectedly, from the French Revolution to the break-up of the Soviet Union. As tensions long rising on an earthquake fault result in a sudden snap, the conditions that lead to such earth-shattering political events build up for a long time before the break comes. Divisions have been increasing in the U.S. for some time, and could be near a breaking point. Large segments of the population feel marginalized from a political system that seems increasingly unresponsive to all interests but those of big money.”
Secession from a progressive perspective
The best work on the centrifugal tendencies of the U.S. is by a progressive author, Richard Kreitner, Break It Up: Secession, Division and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Kreitner documents secessionist movements throughout its history, including a little known effort by slavery abolitionists to have the North secede from the South when the latter dominated U.S. politics. I wrote about it in 2022 this piece “Secession from the left.” Kreitner’s conclusions are worth quoting at length.
“If the radical abolitionists of the 1840s thought the Slave Power held such complete control over the government that no progress toward emancipation could be made within it, should we wonder whether we’re fast approaching that day – if it has not already arrived – when the Money Power’s control over our politicians has become so deeply entrenched, so ineradicable, that no remedy can be found in the existing political system?”
“How long will Americans rightly terrified by the coming climate chaos work within a system that appears utterly incapable of doing anything to wean our country off a way of life that has rendered human beings an endangered species? Our government appears to be irrevocably broken, and we are running out of time . . . The breakdown in constitutional government is nearly complete. At the federal level, every branch is mired in a legitimacy crisis from which the future offers little hope of easy extraction.”
“Our political discourse is civil war by other means – we sound as if we do not really want to continue to be me members of one country . . . There never was any guarantee that the country would survive, and there is none now . . . Say we can agree, despite all our differences, that we want to preserve the Union . . . significant changes in our political and even social behavior will be required. We cannot keep trying to bludgeon one another into submission or indulge fantasies of the sudden evaporation, wholesale extermination, or unconditional surrender of the other side.”
Progressive Kreitner here echoes the sentiments of conservative French. Or as Rodney King asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: “This is true, this is real!”
– Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought
+ Before Biden revealed his incompetence at the debate with Trump, he’d already lost his reelection bid by showing his gross immorality in arming the genocide in Gaza. Biden had been trailing Trump in the polls since last October and deservedly so. His withdrawal won’t redeem his reputation, which will forever be stained by the mounds of dead Palestinian children he helped kill and showed no remorse for.
+ As of last Saturday night, Biden remained firm that he wasn’t leaving the race, fuming to aides and family members that Pelosi was behind the plot to evict him from the ticket. Then Sunday morning his staff finally presented him with the internal polling he’d been shielded from for weeks showing the President losing in every swing state and collapsing in Virginia and New Mexico.
+ Biden, true to character (or his lack thereof), didn’t even tell his staff he was withdrawing. They found on Social Media: “We’re all finding out by tweet. None of us understand what’s happening.”
+ It proved a fatal mistake for Biden to RSVP this invite…
+ For the last three years, Biden has been so befuddled and inarticulate that his staff has kept him from meeting with the House Democratic Caucus about legislative issues. The president’s deteriorated condition became obvious to House Democratic leaders in October 2021, when Pelosi invited Biden to the HIll to make the pitch for his infrastructure bill. But, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, “in 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers…After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say.”
+ In his resignation letter, Biden brags about having led the nation to “overcome Covid” … while having Covid.
+ Adam Tooze: “So monarchical is American conception of Presidency that Biden is feted as a ruler who ‘gave up power’ in favor of anointed successor, rather than a vain politician who misjudged his sell by date & has been belatedly persuaded to spare himself humiliation & give Dems a chance.”
+ The Biden team circulated memes this week saying that he was retiring from politics without ever having lost an election. True, if you don’t count his failed presidential runs in 1984, 1988, 2008 and the first three primaries of the 2020 campaign, until Obama cleared the field for him…
+ Ken Burns: “History recognizes actions that are bigger than self. Joe Biden will go down as one of the great ones, having led the country out of the disastrous term of his predecessor and quietly doing good things for all Americans, red state as well as blue, accomplishments that put him up there, in terms of legislative action, with LBJ and FDR. Joe, I can’t imagine where we’d be without your selfless service.”
+ This is precisely why Ken Burns should never have been given $$ to make documentaries, especially about baseball and jazz…
+ Eileen Curtright: “We’re 0 for 2 on second term Catholic presidents.”
+ Apparently, it wasn’t an “elite” coup after all…
+ Nikki Haley: “If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, we will get a President Kamala Harris. You mark my words. He cannot win a general election…He can’t get independents. He can’t get suburban women.” (Jan. 2024)
+ Biden in his adios address: “I’m the first president this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”
+ What world was he talking about? Only hours before Biden spoke, the Pentagon announced airstrikes in Yemen.
+ This will be the first US presidential election since 1976 without a Biden, Bush, or Clinton on the ticket. But we’re not an oligarchy, honest!
+++
+ Without saying a word (and maybe she shouldn’t), Harris is going to bring the latent racism and misogyny of the GOP into a full-scale abreaction (sorry for the Freudianisms). Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI): “A lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background.”
+ Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau warns that Kamala Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”
+ Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: “Donald Trump’s going to win in November, and we will be rid of all this DEI woke culture BS nonsense. I won’t use the word that America’s been subjected to.” What’s the word you’re alluding to, Lt. Gov.?
+ Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends this morning: “She [Harris] will not show up for the Prime Minister’s speech at the Joint Session of Congress. She’d rather address in the summer, a sorority, a COLORED sorority, like she can’t get out of that!” (Somehow escaped Kilmeade’s attention that JD Vance also skipped Bibi’s speech, perhaps to address a white frat.)
+ Kellyanne Conway on Harris: “She doesn’t speak well and doesn’t work hard.” “Doesn’t work hard” is FoxNews speak for the “lazy n-word.”
+ Trump couldn’t resist jumping into the fray, calling Harris: “Laughing Kamala,” “Crazy,” “Nuts,” “Real Garbage” and “Dumb as a Rock”…
+ Here’s how Alex Lace described Kamala Harris on Fox Business News: “There’s the DEI press secretary [Katrine Jean-Pierre] telling us the DEI Vice President is the future of the party here. The future looks kind of dim for the Democrats here. But this is no shocker either. Kamala Harris is the original ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl. That’s the way she got where she is and the party’s going downhill if it’s in her hands.”
+ For those of you who don’t follow what’s trending on TikTok, Hawk Tuah is a street euphemism for fellatio. The original “Hawk Tuah girl” was a blonde woman with a southern accent who after being asked in a street interview: “What’s the one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” responded, “Oh, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang.”
+ According to Kitty Kelly, this Hollywood backlot skill is how Nancy Davis hooked Ronnie Reagan.
+ JD Vance told Tucker Carlson that Kamala Harris is a “childless cat lady” who is “miserable” because she didn’t have children and not having children means that she doesn’t have “a direct stake” in America. George Washington didn’t have any children of his own either, at least none that he admitted to, though there were persistent rumors that like Jefferson he fathered at least one son after raping one of the women he and Martha enslaved at Mt. Vernon…
+ Does Vance have any idea how many “cat ladies” there are in the US? And that they vote…
+ One of them might well be Jennifer Aniston, who I’ve never heard make a single notable political statement. This week Aniston lashed out at JD Vance for his assertion that the Democratic Party is led by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States. All I can say is…Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
+ Vance even got a rise out of Meghan McCain: I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know – these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump-supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian. This is not who we are.”
+ When they tell you who they are, you should listen, Meghan.
+ Harris’ childlessness never seemed to bother Trump, who sent a $5,000 check to re-elect Kamala Harris as AG of California….
+++
+ The intractable problem for the Democrats is that no level of erudition can explain away the pro-genocidal policy they’ve endorsed as a party.
+ In order to be considered a legitimate candidate for ruling the Empire, Harris will be required to publicly pledge her willingness to kill on demand, which I assume she is more than willing to do. The big question is: Will her primary target be Russians or Palestinians?
+ Looks like we got the answer on Thursday, when Harris sent out this harsh condemnation of the anti-genocide protests in DC that took place when Netanyahu, a soon-to-be indicted war criminal, gave his lie-littered speech to an obsequious Congress…
+ This is no surprise, really. Harris was asked during an AIPAC conference in 2018, why she supports Israel. “It is just something that has always been a part of me. It’s almost like saying when did you first realize you loved your family, or love your country, it just was always there. It was always there.”
+ Harris has her own considerable baggage to carry in this campaign, compounded by carrying Biden’s as well. Hard to see her pulling this off, unless she’s willing to leave Biden’s behind at Union Station–which she’s just shown us she’s unwilling & likely doesn’t even want to do.
+ It was always a political fantasy that Harris would deviate too far from the AIPAC-approved policies on Israel and Palestine. But a more gifted politician would have fed the fantasy a little longer. As a friend told me, the honeymoon is over before the wedding.
+ Josh Shapiro, who is said to be considered for the VP spot, compared student protesters for Gaza to the KKK: “We have to query whether or not we would tolerate this if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who are African American in our communities.”
+ House Speaker Mike Johnson on Harris’s decision not to preside over Netanyahu’s speech: “I think it’s inexcusable. She professes to want to be the leader of the free world and our commander-in-chief and yet she can’t bring herself to sit on the rostrum behind arguably our most strategic ally in this moment at its most desperate time. So I think … these questions need to be asked of her and I don’t think she’s going to have acceptable answers.”
+ In fact, Harris met separately with Netanyahu on Thursday.
+ Harris emerged from her face-to-face with Netanyahu reiterating her “unwavering support” for Israel and its “right to defend itself” with the caveat that “how it does so matters.” Reading cautiously from a prepared text, Harris said:
I just had a frank and constructive meeting with PM Netanyahu. I told him that I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias. From when I was a young girl, collecting funds to plant trees for Israel, to my time in the United States Senate and now at the White House, I’ve had an unwavering commitment to the existence of the State of Israel, to its security and to the people of Israel. I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.
On October 7, Hamas triggered this war when it massacred 1200 innocent people, including 44 Americans. Hamas has committed horrific acts of sexual violence and took 250 hostages. There are American citizens who remain captive in Gaza. I have met with the families of these American hostages multiple times now. I have told them each time they are not alone and that I stand with them. And President Biden and I working every day to bring them home. I also expressed to the Prime Minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the deaths of far too many innocent civilians. As I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity. What has happened in Gaza over the last nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hunger people fleeing for safety, sometimes for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.
Thanks to the leadership of our President Joe Biden, there’s a deal on the table for a ceasefire and a hostage deal. And it is important that we recall what the deal involves. The first phase of the deal would bring about a full ceasefire, including a withdrawal of the Israeli military from population centers in Gaza. In the second phase, the Israeli military will withdraw from Gaza entirely and it would lead to a permanent end to the hostilities.
It is time for this war to end, and in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released; the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity and self-determination.
There has been hopeful movement in the talks to secure an agreement on this deal. And as I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done. So to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire, and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done.
So we can get a ceasefire to end the war. Let’s bring the hostages home. And let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people. And ultimately, I remain committed to a path forward that can lead to a two-state solution. And I know right now, it is hard to conceive of that prospect. But a two state solution is the only path that ensures Israel remains a secure Jewish and democratic state and one that ensures Palestinians can finally realize the freedom, security and prosperity that they rightly deserve.
And I will close with this then. It is important for the American people to remember, the war in Gaza is not a binary issue. However, too often, the conversation is binary, when the reality is anything but. So I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, the nuance, and the history of the region.
Let us all condemn terrorism and violence. Let us all do what we can to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians. And let us condemn anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and hate of any kind. And let us unite our country.
+ This pretty much follows the faux-humanitarian script the White House has been deploying for months now, public expressions of concern as the body count mounts, while the arms packages continue to flow unimpeded even as Netanyahu ignores every call for a ceasefire, even the one he supposedly told Biden and Harris he supported.
+ The only words Harris should have spoken to Netanyahu were these:“Stop your killing, withdraw your troops, return the detainees or the arms shipments will stop and I will back the ICC’s arrest warrants for you and your regime.”
+ Presumably, Harris is a more skilled politician today than she was when she called it quits in the 2020 primaries, after polling behind Andrew Yang in her home state.
+ The problem with Harris, if she’s elected, won’t be her incompetence to enact good things but, like Clinton and Obama, her competence to jam through bad policies that less persuasive or coherent politicians couldn’t.
+++
+ Ohio state Sen. George Lang at JD Vance’s rally: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country.” Young Republican snipers will have to improve their accuracy if they expect to win the next civil war…
+ JD Vance in his first major post-convention speech: “It is the weirdest thing to me, Democrats say that it is racist to believe–well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday. And one today. They’ll probably call that racist too.” Does he write his own material?
+ JD Vance in Virginia to Kamala Harris: “What the hell have you done other than collect a government check for the past 20 years?” This is, of course, a line that’s been regularly invoked by GOP politicians since Reagan, often by people, like Vance, who are currently “collecting” a government check.
+ Kamala Harris on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: “Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda… Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages. When you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare, give tax breaks to billionaires, end the Affordable Care Act, and more.”
+ Trump advisor Chris LaCivita to the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey on Project 2025: “It makes no sense to put all the crazy things you’ll be attacked for down on paper while you’re running.Who thinks, let’s put it all down on paper so we can get attacked in advance, even though we haven’t run it by the president?”
+ John Kenneth Galbraith: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
+++
+ On Tuesday, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) introduced impeachment articles against Vice President Kamala Harris. Being impeached & convicted may be the only way to free Harris from Biden’s genocidal policies, assuming she wants to be free of them…
+ In other performative legislative maneuvers, the House voted 220-196 to condemn Vice President Kamala Harris’ handling of the border, even though she wasn’t the “Border Tsar.”
+ Six Democrats joined Republicans in a theatrical condemnation of their own presidential candidate. They are:
Perez (WA)
Golden (ME)
Cueller (TX)
Peltola (AK)
Caraveo (CO)
Davis (NC)
+ In a couple of speeches she’s given this week, Harris seems intent on playing up her years as a former prosecutor, the same way Kerry emphasized his years as a Swiftboat gunner and with similar results, since tough-on-crime rhetoric will turn off her own base and be viewed with ridicule by the Trump-weary right voters she wants to win over.
+ Democratic Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) gave $7 million to Harris, then went on CNN to demand that she fire FTC Chair Lina Khan, who’s investigating the monopolistic predations of Big Tech. But more than a million small donors gave Harris $10 or more in the days after Biden’s withdrawal. Who do you think she’ll listen to?
+ According to the NYT, “[Harris] has expressed skepticism of Ms. Khan’s expansive view of antitrust powers, according to a donor who has spoken privately with the vice president.”
+ Eric Holder, who helped get Chiquita Banana off the hook for hiring death squads to kill union organizers in Colombia, is leading the search for Kamala’s Vice-Presidential nominee, hardly a reassuring choice for labor activists and human rights advocates.
+ Another of the leading candidates for the Veep slot is Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who has opposed organized labor’s top legislative priority, the PRO Act.
+ Harris is apparently also considering Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for VP. Mayor PeteBot is good at debating, but not so good at stopping train derailments, airport closures, doors blowing off Boeing jetliners, bridge collapses or cloud infrastructure mega-crashes…
+ Colorado Governor Jared Polis asked if he’d accept an offer to serve as VP for Harris: “Look, if they do the polling and it turns out that they need a 49-year-old, bald and gay Jew from Boulder, Colorado, they got my number.”
+ Marist/NPR just released a poll conducted Monday…
—Trump 46%-Harris 45%
—In the broader field, Harris and Trump tied at 42%
—Harris favorability: 40/44 —Trump favorability: 43/49
—87% say Biden made the right decision
+ Does the GOP really think this will alienate voters?
+ Meanwhile, Harris will be the first Democratic nominee from the West in the history of the party. She was the party’s first VP from beyond the 100th meridian, as well. Before Harris, the farthest-west Democrats were George McGovern from South Dakota (1972) and William Jennings Bryan from Nebraska (1896, 1900, 1908).
+ Kamala’s father Donald Harris, a Marxist economist from Jamaica, was a radical. He wrote on the war economy in 1967: “The current expansion has been variously described as ‘the greatest upsurge in economic well-being in the history of any nation.’” But since early 1965 “the major further impetus for expansion came with the announcement of escalation in the Viet Nam war.”
+++
+ Christopher Hale: “JD Vance is to Appalachia what Olive Garden is to Italy.”
+ According to a CNN poll, JD Vance is the least liked non-incumbent vice presidential nominee since 1980. He’s also the first to have a net negative favorable rating.
+ Palin was everything Vance claims to be but actually reviles. She exuded authenticity–until she became a prop for FoxNews and a reality show caricature of herself. But it doesn’t take long to see right through Vance. Too bad Opie couldn’t…
+ JD Vance’s favorability in his home region – IL, IN, MI, OH & WI – is just 28%, compared to 44% unfavorable. (CNN/SSRS poll).
+ Take heart, JD. Frederic Jameson has some interesting observations on the common man’s opinions about opinion polls in his new book from Verso, The Years of Theory:
What is public opinion, the object of public opinion polls? I would like to use an example which will be, for you, ancient history. In Eisenhower’s elections, his opponent was a former governor of Illinois named Adlai Stevenson, who was a very literate and very witty man. Nobody ever doubted that Eisenhower would win these elections, but the question was always raised: Stevenson’s speeches are so elegant–who’s going to understand them? Will the ‘common man’ understand them? That was a common term of the period, so please don’t blame me for using it in this form. So the pollsters went out and asked people who were precisely, on an economic definition, a common man. And the preponderance of common men said, “Well, I like his speeches, but the common man will never understand them.”
+ A CNN report documented how JD Vance repeatedly said in 2016 that he believed Trump committed multiple sexual assaults, found Trump’s accusers more credible than Trump, and Tweeted, “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?”
+ Vance: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of a chance to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality, if you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
+ Isn’t this the MAGA electoral version of the rightwing critique of so-called “welfare mothers,” who they charged were having more kids to add a few bucks to their meager government checks? Of course, Vance pathologizes the poor whites of Appalachia the same way the Gipper and Daniel Patrick Moynihan pathologized urban Blacks.
+ Adam Johnson: “Vance was a great pick, every day some old video of him giving a speech in a basement surfaces where it sounds like he’s reading the manifesto of a school shooter.”
+ Blake Masters: “Political leaders should have children. Certainly, they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters.”
+ The father (alleged) of the country had no (known) children of his own & neither did the primary author of the Constitution. But one of the worst presidents, John Tyler, had at least 15 he claimed as his own and probably one or two more he didn’t.
+ This makes me long for the days when Ralph Nader was asked about gay marriage during the 2004 elections and responded definitively: “I don’t do gonadal politics.”
+ Move over, Kim Jong-Un!
+ In his new memoir, Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, said that following a White House meeting with disability advocates, Trump told his nephew, whose son is disabled, “Maybe those kinds of people should die” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.” Later, Trump told his nephew about his son: “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe just let him die.”
+ FBI Director Christopher Wray testifying before Congress on the shooting at the Trump rally: “With respect to former president Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel [from the teleprompter] that hit his ear.” Close-ups of Trump’s post-shooting ear don’t show any hole that a doubting Thomas might poke his pinky finger in.
+ Since Monday, Trump and pro-Trump PACs have outspent Harris’ campaign on television and radio advertising, with the Republicans shelling out more than $68 million compared to just $2.6 million for the Democrats. Then on Thursday, Trump’s team suddenly announced he’s backing out of the scheduled debate with the “Marxist” Harris.
+ What a wimp. Does Trump really think Harris is a skilled debater or a “Marxist”? Gabbard destroyed her in the 2020 Democratic debates and set the template for how to do it. HRC was a more formidable debater, though she oozed off-putting arrogance with almost every line.
+ Laura Bassett: “Calling a woman ‘dumb as a rock’ and then being afraid to debate her is pretty funny.”
+ In an interview with Fox News Trump doubled down on his pledge to bomb Mexico, saying cross-border “strikes” against drug cartels are “absolutely” on the table. His running mate JD Vance chimed in: “It’s funny that people accuse of being bombastic for saying, the cartels, we need to go after them.”Vance blamed Mexico for his mother’s addiction to opioids, prescription drugs she acquired by stealing them from the hospital where she worked.
+ Trump on flag burning: “You should get a one-year jail sentence if you do anything to desecrate the American flag. Now, people will say, ‘Oh, it’s unconstitutional.’ Those are stupid people. Those are stupid people that say that. We have to work in Congress to get a one-year jail sentence. When they’re allowed to stomp on the flag and put lighter fluid on the flag and set it afire, when you’re allowed to do that — you get a one-year jail sentence, and you’ll never see it again.”
+ Has he seen the way people dress at his rallies? Talk about desecrating the flag.
+ Burning the American flag is one of the most American things an American can do. Even the Supreme Court agreed in the 1989 case of Texas v. Johnson. Martha-Ann Alito has even hung it upside down as a fuck you to her neighbors.
+++
+ A right that applies everywhere except on American college campuses, eh Chuck?
+ Jeff Stein at the Washington Post has written a very important piece about the US’s quiet warfare on nations it doesn’t like through the imposition of economic sanctions. According to Stein’s report, “The US is imposing sanctions at a record-setting pace again this year, with more than 60% of all low-income countries now under some form of financial penalty, according to a WaPo analysis.”
+ Here’s a list of countries under US sanctions ranked by the severity of the sanctions and the year they began:
High Severity
North Korea–1950 (Truman)
Cuba–1962 (JFK)
Iran–1979 (Carter)
Syria–1979 (Carter)
Zimbabwe–2002 (Bush 2)
DR of Congo–2006 (Bush 2)
Lebanon–2007 (Bush 2)
Somalia–2010 (Obama)
Nicaragua–2018 (Trump)
Mali 2019 (Trump)
Ethiopia–2021 (Biden)
+++
+ What an uplifting story from the NYT on the American dream in action. Most couples their age come to Manhattan, if they can afford the bus fare, with a combined $800,000 in debt from student loans and credit cards…
+ Since the wretched Grants Pass decision by the Supreme Court gave the green light for states and cities to criminalize the houseless, the Democrats, from Portland to NYC to the entire State of California, have moved the most swiftly and ruthlessly to “ethnically cleanse” homeless people from their encampments …
+ Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that most recent immigrants who have come across the U.S.-Mexico border are “garbage. They come from jails and prisons in other countries.”
+ On the other hand, Human Rights Watch just released a report documenting how thousands of people in the United States are being deported every year for drug offenses that in many cases no longer exist under state laws.
+ The U.S. Department of Labor found 10 Blaze Fast Fire’d Pizza locations in Las Vegas and Henderson had employed 23 children, ages 15-17, to operate industrial pizza dough mixers as late as 10:30 PM on school nights.
+ The Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that chicken wings advertised as ‘boneless’ can contain bones. The case, which constitutes yet another body blow to consumer rights, was brought by Michael Berkheimer, who had ordered his favorite dish, boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce, at a wing place in Hamilton, Ohio. Three days after the meal, Berkheimer, who’d been unable to keep any food down, went to the emergency, after developing a fever, where the doctor found that a thin bone from the “boneless” wing had lodged in Berkheimer’s throw, ripping his esophagus and causing a dangerous infection.
+ USA as Failed State Update…1 out of 4 cancer patients in America either declared bankruptcy or lost their homes to eviction or foreclosure as a result of medical debt in 2022.
+ JW Mason: “The business case against AI: Sure, it can replace writers. But it’s not like there’s any money in writing.”
+ After Tesla’s second-quarter net income tumbled 45% as the company’s global electric vehicle sales fell despite price cuts, Elon Musk said he was reconsidering his pledge to donate $45 million a month to the Trump campaign, apparently realizing that a reelected Trump, whose hostility to electric vehicles has become a cornerstone of his campaign, would kill off Tesla once and for all.
+ Already among the highest-paid cops in the country (world), San Francisco police could soon see their pay get bumped again with the average officer getting nearly $500,000 a year (not counting overtime).
+ James Baldwin: “A cop is a cop. And he may be a very nice man, but I haven’t got the time to figure that out. All I know is he’s got a uniform and a gun. And I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him at all.”
+ Sue Mi Terry, the wife of the Washington Post’s neocon national security columnist, Max Boot, was just arrested as a foreign agent…(“Sue Mi Terry” is a name right off the pages of a Tom Robbins novel.)
+++
+ Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. Monday was even hotter.
+ Oil production in the US has more than doubled in less than a decade.
+ Since the world started to get “serious” about global warming, coal demand has only increased–rising by 75% since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and by nearly 15% since the Paris Agreement in 2015.
+ Every six hours the world burns enough coal to build a new replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
+ On July 15, Chicago issued 16 tornado warnings, the most sent on a single day since 2004. In an average year, Illinois only experiences 50 tornadoes. This year it’s been hit more than 100, already.
+ The Park Fire outside Chico grew by 100,000 acres in a mere 24 hours. It ignited when someone lit a car on fire and rolled it into a forested ravine, but it blew up because the forest is parched bone-dry by year after year of searing summer heat.
+ Here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley we tied a record for the most consecutive 100F-degree days, which, sandwiched between an even longer string of 90+ days, prompted a “flash drought,” pushing the wildfire danger from “low” to “high” in the span of a few days. Oregon has effectively dried out. There are currently at least 27 wildfires burning in Oregon across more than 256,500 acres of land.
+A map of occupied bald eagle nests in Wisconsin in 1974 and 2019, largely a consequence of the implementation of the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, both of which are on the hit list from Project 2025.
+ A new study in Nature on Brazil’s Amazon found that “Indigenous territories reduced deforestation more between 2000 and 2010 relative to all other land uses, including strict protected areas and sustainable-use protected areas.”
+ This winter was the third deadliest yet for Yellowstone wolves in the decades since the wild canids were reintroduced to the park in 1995. Overall, at least 13 Yellowstone wolves were shot by legal hunters, caught by trappers, killed by poachers or died of suspected hunting-related injuries.
+ Oxygen levels in the midwaters of the Pacific off the California coast have dropped by a stunning 40 percent since 1960.
+++
+ Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was duped by a fake letter announcing Jimmy Carter’s death, which quoted the former president as calling his late wife a “baddie” and the “original Brat” who “throat goat Nancy Reagan had nothing on.”
+ According to a report in the Washington Post, RFK Jr. conferred with Trump only hours after the failed assassination attempt about endorsing his campaign and taking a position overseeing health and medical issues in a Trump administration. The Trump team declined the offer. Even they don’t want Bobby….
+ During a fundraising speech Minnesota State Sen. Calvin Bahr (R-East Bethel) blamed women for their own unwanted pregnancies: “If you’re going to party, you got to pay the consequences.”
+ The late, great Bob Newhart: Newhart: “At a Xmas gathering, my sister M.J. was seated next to my Mom. Mom’s memory was beginning to fade. My Mom said, ‘Is Dad with us?’ M.J. said, ‘No, Mom, Dad died a few months ago.’ Mom said, ‘There were times I could have killed him…I didn’t, did I?’”
+ Hey, kids, you still have a chance to indulge some pagan deities, buy a few graven idols, blow off the sabbath, and say, goddammit without getting any demerits!
+ The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Boy and the Heron): “I strongly feel that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an insult to life itself.”
+ The late Shelley Duvall planted her hook in me as Millie in Robert Altman’s neglected masterpiece 3 Women.
+ Pauline Kael on Shelley Duvall: “Shelley Duvall melts indifference. You’re unable to repress your response; you go right to her in delight, saying ‘I’m yours.’” (1976) And later: ‘There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone. She’s an original who has her own limpid way of doing things—a simplicity that isn’t marred by conventional acting technique.” (1980)
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is sort of an emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world •can• tell, what it is like to be alive.” – James Baldwin
Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – CC BY 2.0
I returned home from Wednesday’s anti-Netanyahu demonstration on Capitol Hill in time to watch the Israeli prime minister address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. The vilest thing about the event was not the speech itself, which was predictably bloodthirsty and mendacious, but the reactions of the assembled Congresspeople. Almost all of them stood and cheered lengthily while their invited guest smeared those protesting his appearance in the streets outside the Capitol as pro-Hamas “idiots” who “stand with rapists and murderers,” and whose protests are “paid for by Iran.”
Understand that almost all those protesting, including me, were Americans — a group that the members of Congress claim to represent. But never mind that. Benjamin Netanyahu is an experienced con artist who knows very well when he has an audience of suckers who will buy any Brooklyn Bridge that he feels like selling. I arrived home in time to watch him bedazzle the Congressional rubes by introducing wounded Israeli war veterans — who just happened to be people of color – in the visitors’ gallery. No one laughed or objected when he defamed the protestors, when he called the Israel Defense Forces the most scrupulously pro-civilian army in world history, or when he accused the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of disseminating an antisemitic “blood libel.” But his best trick of all was using the Book of Genesis to justify Israeli claims to all of 21st century Palestine.
“They call Israel a colonialist state,” he ranted, pounding the lectern. “Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah preached and where David and Solomon ruled?”
That grotesque non-sequitur evoked the loudest cheers of all! Netanyahu understands perfectly well that what sustains the remaining American support for Israel is a combination of Zionist political and financial pressure, evangelical Christian hopes for a Middle East Armageddon, and U.S. imperialism. He baldly presented Israel as a U.S. agent in the region obviating the need for American “boots on the ground.” His peroration, cheered on passionately by the yokels, called for an Abrahamic Alliance to make war on Iran and Hezbollah.
About half of the Democrats in Congress had the decency to absent themselves from this bellicose farce. Kamela Harris refused to attend and preside; Rashida Tlaib attended but held up a small sign that read “War Criminal.” Other Democrats like Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland were in the hall but behaving weirdly – sitting on their hands for some of Bibi’s more obnoxious pronouncements but rising to cheer at other moments of jingoistic bombast. No point in offending AIPAC and its supporters in an election year!
Most Republicans, of course, were in ecstasy throughout, especially when Netanyahu praised their Dear Leader. As I write this, he is on the way to Mar-a-Lago to pay him homage. So much for Donald Trump the “peace candidate.” The one useful result of this globally embarrassing event was the revelation – if one were needed – that the MAGA Republicans are united in support of a U.S.-financed “forever war” in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the world watches in disbelief as the clueless American Empire further isolates itself morally and politically from virtually all the world’s peoples. With friends like Netanyahu, as the old Jewish joke goes, who needs enemies?
In a shameful moment for U.S. history, an accused war criminal addressed Congress on July 24.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to plead for more arms for his war on Gaza, where the International Court of Justice has found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide. “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster,” Netanyahu said.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But instead of arresting him, Congress gave him multiple standing ovations.
To avoid complicity in war crimes and genocide, these shipments must end.
There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces under Netanyahu’s leadership have committed massive human rights atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza. And that’s against the backdrop of an illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory and apartheid, as another ICJ ruling confirmed recently.
Nonetheless, Congress invited Netanyahu to speak. He used this platform to deny any responsibility for the slaughter, famine, and catastrophic destruction in Gaza — and to denigrate Americans who are rightly horrified by their government’s support for his genocidal campaign.
Most Americans are disgusted that U.S-made bombs keep turning up at massacre after massacre. Over the past few weeks alone, Israel has repeatedly bombed so-called “safe zones” and at least eight schools in Gaza where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians were sheltering.
On July 9, the Israeli military murdered at least 30 Palestinians who were playing soccer at the Al-Awda school using GBU-39 bombs made by Boeing. Israel also dropped GBU-39s on another UN school-turned-shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp on July 6, killing at least 40, and before that on Palestinian families sheltering in plastic tents during the May 26 Rafah massacre.
On July 13, Israeli forces killed 90 people and injured hundreds more at the Al-Mawasi refugee camp that Israel had designated a “safe zone.” Children were reportedly found “in pieces.” Eight 2,000-pound bombs turned the civilian area into a “smoldering crater.” At least one of the munitions was a Boeing-made JDAM.
Despite these atrocities, the weapons continue to flow.
In May, President Biden announced that he would pause the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs ahead of Israel’s invasion of Rafah, which Biden had called “a red line.” However, Israel has still received destructive 500-pound bomb shipments despite invading Rafah, and the killing in Gaza continues.
These weapons shipments violate both international and U.S. law. The United States is legally obligated to withhold military assistance when U.S. weapons are used to violate human rights.
The UN Human Rights Council and various experts have called on all countries to end the sale and transfer of military equipment to Israel — or else risk complicity in crimes, including genocide. They called on arms manufacturers supplying Israel to do the same, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
Polls show that a majority of Americans support closing the arms pipeline to Israel. In advance of Netanyahu’s speech, seven major labor unions representing nearly 6 million workers called on President Biden to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel.”
The voices of the American people deserve more respect in Congress than Netanyahu’s lies and demands. An immediate end to all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel is long overdue, alongside a permanent ceasefire and larger pursuit of freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.
We must not allow ourselves to become a nation that applauds mass murder.
But Grossi has also simultaneously been increasing the risk of accidents, albeit inadvertently, by calling for building more nuclear reactors. This advocacy takes many forms. He has written op-eds in prominent outlets like Foreign Affairs. He has been trying to canvas countries to start nuclear power programs. For example, in March 2024. he went to Baghdad and committed to working with Iraq to help build a nuclear reactor “for peaceful purposes”. And as a way to deal with the unaffordable costs of nuclear reactors, he has pushed the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to provide funding for building nuclear plants.
None of this make sense. When viewed as investment advice to banks, Grossi’s promotion of nuclear power does not meet the laugh threshold. According to Grossi, the banks’ lack of funding for nuclear energy is “out of date, out of step with what is happening”. But it is Grossi’s advocacy that is out of step with happening to nuclear energy in the real world.
When nuclear energy is evaluated through how much it contributes to the world’s electricity production, the technology has been declining continuously for over 25 years, from 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. For reasons discussed later, this trend will likely continue. In other words, the importance of nuclear energy is diminishing. Investing more money into a technology that some scholars argue is “destined for decline” makes little sense.
When analyzing Grossi’s advice to these development banks, one should remember what these institutions are supposed to do. The World Bank’s mission is “to end extreme poverty and boost prosperity on a livable planet”. And the Asian Development Bank has a similar mission, with a regional focus on Asia and the Pacific. The World Bank’s mission, in particular, mentions the multiple, intertwined crises we are confronting and emphasizes both the need for “affordable energy” and how quickly these crises should be addressed, stating “time is of the essence”. Nuclear energy fails on both counts.
Expensive and Slow
Electricity from nuclear reactors is costly and does not provide affordable energy, especially when compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy. During the same period mentioned earlier, the share of all electricity generated by modern renewables has risen from just over 1 percent of in 1996 to 15.9 percent in 2023. Today, it is utility-scale solar photovoltaic power that provides the least costly option for generating electricity plants in many countries. This is why, in 2020, the International Energy Agency dubbed solar “the new king of the world’s electricity markets”. Money spent on nuclear reactors by banks would only divert funds away from investing in renewables and associated technologies and infrastructures.
Nuclear reactors have also almost never been on time. An astonishing 89 percent of all reactors that were connected to the grid between 2020 and 2022 were delayed: just two reactors in China were on schedule. In the United States, the two AP1000 reactors that just started operating in the state of Georgia ended up costing nearly $35 billion. In 2011, when the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. These cost escalations and delays are even more extreme than the historical pattern identified in an academic study that examined 180 nuclear power projects and found that 175 had exceeded their initial budgets, by an average of 117%, and took 64% longer than initially projected
That is not all. Around the world, 92 nuclear projects have been cancelled or suspended, usually after hundreds of millions, if not billions, have been spent. In the United States, the latest such cancellation was a project involving a small modular reactor from NuScale that the company advertised as “smaller, safer, and cheaper”. Cheaper, it certainly wasn’t, with a final cost estimate that was around 250% more than the initial per megawatt cost for the Vogtle project in Georgia. The earlier cancellation, of the V. C. Summer project involving two AP1000 reactors in South Carolina, was canceled after over $9 billion was spent—electricity consumers in the state will be paying for decades for this bad investment.
Necessary Conditions for Nuclear Power
It is not as though development banks have not considered nuclear energy. Back in 1959, the World Bank did invest in a nuclear project in Italy, based on a set of conditions, most importantly the unavailability of other cost-competitive alternatives. That project was not a success. More important for the present discussion is that with the reduced cost and increasing availability of solar and wind power, nuclear power no longer meets these conditions to be cost-effective.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB), too, undertook an analysis of various technologies and published an Energy Policy paper in 2009 that highlighted a number of barriers confronting nuclear power development, including “public concerns related to nuclear proliferation, waste management, safety issues, high investment costs, long lead times, and commercial acceptability of new technologies”. Thanks to these concerns, the paper declared that “ADB will maintain its current policy of non-involvement in the financing of nuclear power generation”. None of these barriers have disappeared.
The challenge of ensuring safety was reinforced just two years after the ADB’s paper when multiple reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant melted down spreading radioactive materials widely, and posing difficult technical, socio-political and economical challenges: including an estimated future bill of 35 to 80 trillion yen (around $322 to $736 billion). Fukushima served as a reminder that the nature of nuclear technology ensures “the inevitability of accidents”.
This is not for lack of precedence. Well before Russia occupied Zaporizhzhia, Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and, then in 2007, bombed the Al-Kibar nuclear facility where Syria was building a reactor. Iran and the United States have also attacked Iraq’s nuclear facilities. None of the attackers faced any consequences.
Grossi’s principles and calls for new regimes might also contradict other imperatives. In a recent paper published in The Nonproliferation Review, two scholars have examined the history of such attacks in detail and concluded that “attacks on nuclear facilities endure as a feature of the global nonproliferation regime because the international community—or at least some of the most influential members of the community—deem them a necessary option for the maintenance of that regime”. In other words, Zaporizhzhia is unlikely to be the last nuclear plant at risk of being attacked.
None of this information is new but they don’t appear to play any part in Grossi’s advocacy for nuclear energy. When advising the World Bank to invest in nuclear power, he doesn’t explain that the tens of billions of dollars the Bank might invest in a nuclear reactor could, within a matter of minutes, be converted into a cleanup project that would cost hundreds of billions. Or explaining to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that the small modular reactors he recommended that Italy build could be blown up and the result might, as with Zaporizhzhia, cause “enormous suffering”.
Grossi’s silence about this risk should be troubling at the best of times. But it is particularly inexcusable when he is, in parallel, emphasizing the risks of suffer a major accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. When he went to Iraq recently, he actively downplayed the legitimate concerns in that country thanks to its nuclear reactors being bombed by Israel and the United States. Grossi’s prescription is to simply call for “turning the page on this complex past”. Can he genuinely and credibly assure Iraq that such an attack will not happen again?
The deeper problem is a conflict of interest. As the head of the International Atomic Energy, Rafael Grossi, like his predecessors, tasked with two separate objectives: “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world” and to “ensure, so far as it is able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose”. The case for promoting nuclear energy was never very strong and has completely collapsed in recent years. It is past time to simply abandon the first objective and focus on the second.
Photograph Source: United States Senate – Public Domain
Trying to make sense of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and deification of Vice President Kamala Harris into the pantheon of great Democratic leaders, I reached out to someone on the inside and got back the following email.
“I am flattered that you think I know more than Morning Joe, even if the networks didn’t trust him to mutter homilies in the wake of the Trump shooting and pulled him off the air, lest he ask one of his guests: ‘Other than that, Mrs. Trump, what did you think of the rally?’
“No, I didn’t get a heads up from anyone in Rehoboth Beach that Joe Biden would be falling on his sword (although he’s been off his pins for several years), but the die were cast when George Clooney mailed off his nastygram to the New York Times to make the point that Joe failed to show the proper obeisance to the $30 million that all those Hollywood A-listers dropped into his lid. Money, after all, has to mean something.
“Deep down, despite all the comparisons between Joe and a Second New Deal, the truth is that Biden isn’t the sharpest tack in Washington. Yeah, he got ahead in the Senate, but that was only because he was one of the few Democrats who would carry Republican water, and occasionally mix it with Kool-Aid.
“Look at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and all those pubic hairs sticking to cans of Coca-Cola. Everyone who has spent more time in D.C. than your average tourist on an open double-decker bus knew that Thomas was guilty of far worse crimes than his crude, pornographic banter with Anita Hill, but Biden (remember, he was head of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary who approved Thomas?) gave him a hall pass so that on another occasion the Republicans might ‘remember him’ at the office.
“Obama picked Biden to be his vice president only because he was a southern senator dressed up as an East Coast liberal, and Barry figured he needed the votes of white men in suits who saw nothing wrong with frolicking at the deep end of the secretarial pool.
“As vice president, Biden had one job, which was to sing lullabies to anyone losing sleep over the fear that Obama might come for their Audis.
“Father Joe’s parish was all those wealthy Democrats who are worth millions, even billions, but who still become weepy over the warming climate, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and the syndicalist rights of the United Auto Workers (not that many donors are commuting to their hedge funds in an AMC Pacer).
“To them, Biden made sure that not one corporate icon went to jail over the 2008 financial crisis (all that watered stock and underwater paper that Wall Street laid off on Uncle Sam courtesy of Barack and Joe).
“In turn, they rewarded him with the Democratic nomination in 2020 (even after he finished fourth and fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire) and sufficient funds to defeat Donald Trump, provided that Joe understood his new job was to make sure that the federal budget functioned as the lender of first resort—there to make sure that corporate backhanders be christened as dispensations of the American Rescue Plan Act or the Inflation Reduction Act (in which about $783 billion in easy money was re-branded as fiscal and monetary prudence).
“I know it’s vogue to imagine Joe as the next FDR, stitching together safety nets for those juggling on life’s high wires, but it makes more sense to think of Biden the Elder as a croupier or maybe a floor manager in the American Casino—overseeing the roulette wheels to make sure that the high rollers come away with more than complimentary drinks.
“You name the problem—Ukraine, Gaza, the cost of insulin, etc.—and Biden threw money at the problem, although always first to his Democratic constituents.
“For example, in Ukraine, he didn’t send Zelensky blank checks. Instead he allocated credits so that the U.S. government could buy the weaponry direct from American factories and always at the full retail (marked up?) prices. Ka-ching if you’re Lockheed or Raytheon.
“What went wrong with this Oval Office confidence game is that the Democratic rentier class began to get the feeling that their pit manager (Biden) was losing track of the chips, the house odds on the slots, or the combination to the office safe.
“I doubt that the irony was lost on the casino owners (Barack Obama, the Clintons, Madame Speaker) that they gave the hatchet job to Danny Ocean (aka George Clooney) to tell Biden that his security badge was expiring and that his last candidate salary would be waiting for him at the window.
“On the talk shows, the Democrats are all about ‘the will of the people’ and ‘inclusivity,’ but in the back rooms votes are counted like pieces of eight, and Biden was coming up short.
“Mind you, the same crowd now giving him the bum’s rush were a month ago ‘ridin with Biden’, but party politics are little more than mob rule, the reason the U.S. Constitution makes no room for them.
“I am guessing that the party hierarchs figured that they could beat the serially- indicted Trump with Biden or even one of those inflatable dolls people used to blow up and put next to them in the front seat, when driving through a rough section of town.
“Then at the debate, even when Trump held a long conversation with himself (“sharks…shower heads…and the late, great Hannibal Lecter”), he still seemed more with it than Joe (no small achievement on Biden’s part).
“Biden wasn’t relieved of his command for political reasons akin to some argument in The Federalist Papers; he was run out of town for putting the Democratic capital account at risk, much the way auto execs with sluggish sales numbers are given the boot.
“So what does Kamala Harris bring to this wheel of fortune? Not a lot, sadly.
“For the moment, as she’s in the midst of a coronation (think of the applause meter on the 1950-60s game show, Queen for a Day), she has the winning look of a monarch waving from the balcony.
“But who knows if she can prevail in a campaign based largely on a letter of reference from the Clintons and all those temper tantrums to the effect that if she’s not given the nomination, she’ll take 100% of the black vote in 2024 and deliver it to Brother West’s Upper West Side revivalist tent, and swing the election to the Trump’s Hole-in-the Condo Gang. In politics, this is know as a ‘moral position’.
“Can Harris beat Trump? I cannot quite see it, despite all the staff-doctored polls showing her even with him in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“Trump is clearly psychotic, delusional, and criminally corrupt in everything he has done from porn-star accounting to trying to hang Mike Pence, but he’s not running in November as a political figure—with arcane views about the gold standard or Quemoy and Matsu.
“Trump isn’t running for anything: he’s choreographing a coup, but instead of seizing the radio station or nationalizing the copper industry, he’s appearing in a one-man Gilbert-and-Sullivan musical that has the implausible storyline of a failed hotelier and small-time racketeer taking over the free world. Except outside his venues, the posters announce: ‘BASED ON AN ACTUAL TRUE STORY – IT REALLY HAPPENED.’
“Now for Kamala Harris to show up at intermission and complain about the libretto makes about as much sense as someone fact-checking Evita to ascertain whether Eva Perón ever did sing, ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina.’
“It misses the point that everything in Trump’s dark underworld is cleaned up in post-production, so you come away with the impression that he might be normal (which, I assure you, he is not).
“Normal isn’t groping and violating more than twenty women, defrauding the investors and lenders in a string of public and private companies, conspiring to overturn an election with goons and fake electors, or stealing state secrets and hiding them in a country club locker room.
“To me, the Harris campaign will evolve into one long shout into the Donald Trump void, Kamala as the fact-checker-in-chief.
“Yes, she might well be right, but the sad fact of 2024 is that the electorate only wants its politics to be those of a bizarre, slightly satanic reality show (which has extramarital sex, gun violence, Russian intrigue, and as many bad checks as Bernie Madoff circulated). It doesn’t want a Whig politician campaigning against the injustice of the Enclosure Acts or the Corn Laws.
“Circle back to me after the convention, when they kiss her ring.
Photograph Source: Muhammad Sabah, B’Tselem – CC BY 4.0
The International Court of Justice released its historic advisory opinion on 19 July 2024 just as I was finishing my essay on Israel’s theft and abuse of the water resources of Palestine.
The 80-page opinion, “Legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” unequivocally states that “the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful” and should come to an end “as rapidly as possible.”
The “Exploitation of natural resources” section (V/B.4, 124-133) was of particular interest to me. In it, the Court confirmed what I had set out to disclose, that Israel has used, misused and abused its illegal control over the water resources of Palestine to gain a permanent hold over all of the land.
The Court concluded that the occupied West Bank (especially Area C), rich in natural resources, has been used by Israel to the exclusive benefit of its own population, while disadvantaging Palestinians and their communities. Area C covers 61 percent of the West Bank and is under the complete control of Israel.
Furthermore, the ICJ determined that Israel must relinquish control over all aspects of Palestinians’ lives, including its most vital natural resource, water.
The concept of water is deeply etched in the culture, politics, religion and mythology of the Middle East. For example, it is a tradition, in the extreme summer heat, to leave a jug of water outside the front door or gate in neighborhoods as an offering to the thirsty.
In Islam, water is a treasured resource. It played a central role in the birth of the new religion, in its narratives and rituals. Extreme drought may have been decisive in contributing to the upheavals in ancient Arabia and in the societal change from which Islam emerged in the early 7th century.
Water is central to the mythology of Islam. In Muslim lore, it was the bubbling waters of the Well of Zamzam in the Arabian peninsula that kept the young prophet, Ismael (son of Abraham and Hajar) alive. The well, located in the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, continues to miraculously generate water after 4,000 years. Water from the well is also distributed to the Prophet’s Mosque, Masjid al-Nabawi, in Medina, the resting place of the Prophet Mohammad.
Muslims in Gaza, much like the world over, stand prayerful in the direction of the two venerated mosques five times daily. However, Israel’s relentless bombing campaign since October 2023 has made access to ablution water impossible.
To fully understand the gravity and pain that Palestinians have endured it is essential to remember what they have lost.
Since European Zionist migration to Palestine in the early 20th century, life for its indigenous people has been changed.
Israel’s founders were mindful that their colonizing dream in Palestine was sustainable only if they secured hegemony over the water that flowed above and beneath the land.
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, ending World War I, Zionist leaders stated that a future Jewish state depended upon dominion over the Naqab (Negev) Desert, Syrian Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, Litani River in Lebanon and the West Bank.
The Mount Hermon basin—whose mountain range is located on the border between Syria and Lebanon—was seen as essential to their colonizing ambitions. It is in this basin that its streams and rivers merge to become the Jordan River.
In December 1919, Russian-born Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president (1949-52), wrote to the British prime minister, Lloyd George, that “the whole economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water supply for irrigation and for electric power, and the water supply must mainly be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon, from the headwaters of the Jordan and from the Litany [Litani] River.” The Latani is the primary and largest watershed in Lebanon.
After seizing 78 percent of historic Palestine in the 1948 war, Israel moved quickly to implement its prepared plans to control the water resources of Palestine, which were nationalized and rationed in 1949.
The Arab-Israeli War of 1967 also had its origins over water. Israel began work in 1953 to build an elaborate water system, the National Water Carrier (NWC), to transport water from the Upper Jordan River in the north to the center of Israel and to planned colonies in the arid South. And in 1963, it began pumping water from the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberius) into the NWC, which posed a grave threat to Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian water resources. As a consequence, Israel and the Arab states engaged in numerous clashes in what came to be known as the “War over Water” (1964-1967).
To thwart Israel’s scheme, in 1965, Syria and Lebanon implemented the Arab League plan to divert water from Jordan River sources (Banias and Hasbani Rivers) to their own territory.
In his memoirs, Israeli general and former prime minister (2001-2006), Ariel Sharon, revealed that the 1967 war was launched in response to Syria’s plan to reroute the headwaters of the Jordan. Israel attacked construction sites inside Syria that same year, leading to the war.
Completed in 1964, the National Water Carrier diverts 75 percent of the waters from the Jordan River to Israel, while Palestinians are prohibited from using any of it.
Israel’s military victory in June 1967, had the effect of placing much of the Mount Hermon basin, the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli control. It then declared the water resources of the captured land to be property of the state, putting them under complete military authority.
When it illegally annexed the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in 1981, Israel secured direct dominance over the headwaters of the Jordan River, fulfilling its early Zionist designs.
Israel has also coveted and remains determined to seize the water of southern Lebanon—the Litani River and the Shebaa Farms. The Shebaa Farms area has abundant ground water that flows from the slopes of Mt. Hermon.
Historical records from the 1950s indicate that then chief of staff of the Israel “Defense” Forces, Moshe Dayan and others, favored conquering and annexing southern Lebanon up to the Litani.
For that reason, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 (Operation Litani) and again in 1982. The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon continued until its forces were driven out by Lebanese Hezbollah in 2000.
Claiming that the Shebaa Farms are part of the Golan Heights, Israel annexed it in 1981. Hezbollah continues to battle for the liberation of this 16 square miles on the western slopes of the Hermon Mountain range.
The Occupied West Bank
Israel’s objective has always been to decrease the supply of water to Palestinians so that they will inevitably have to leave.
Tel Aviv’s apartheid water policies were set in motion by the interim Oslo peace accords of the 1990s, which gave Israel control over 80 percent of the West Bank’s reserves. Under the Oslo II Accords, division of water resources was designated as an issue for “final status negotiations.” Final status and a future Palestinian state were never reached, as Israel continued to illegally appropriate Palestinian land and water resources.
The 1995 accords, meant to last five years, have remained entrenched. As a result, Israelis have access to water on demand, while Palestinians receive predetermined allocations set out in the “peace agreement,” that do not reflect population growth, climate change or average daily water consumption needs.
As the occupying power, Israel has defined responsibilities under international human rights law to respect Palestinians’ right to safe, sufficient and accessible water. Israel has never ended its illegal occupation or lived up to its obligations.
Israelis consume ten times the amount of water than West Bank Palestinians. Israel and its colonies (settlements) consume 87 percent of the water from West Bank aquifers, while Palestinians are allocated just 13 percent. And while they do not have enough water to bathe their children, Jewish children splash about in community pools.
The national Israeli water company, Mekorot, has forced Palestinians to depend on Israel for their water needs. It has systematically tapped springs and sunk wells in the West Bank to supply its population, including squatters, with a continuous supply of water, while Palestinians receive water sporadically. The company routinely reduces the Palestinian supply and shamelessly, sells them their own water at inflated prices. To counter the chronic water shortage, 92 percent of Palestinians store water in tanks on their rooftops.
Since 2021, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli authorities have demolished nearly 160 Palestinian reservoirs, sewage networks and wells across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While Israel continues to dig more wells, it has denied Palestinians’ drilling rights and blocks them from harvesting rainwater.
The expansion of Jewish colonies, Israeli industrial and military zones have contributed to water contamination, which has severely undermined the Palestinian agricultural sector. As Palestinian farms wither from a paucity of water, Israeli farms receive unlimited amounts, often to produce such water-guzzling crops as tomatoes, oranges and cotton.
The Gaza Strip
The catastrophic water crisis in Gaza today predates the October 2023 war. Israel’s 16-year blockade contributed to severe water shortages. And potable water was hard to find after decades of Israeli invasions.
With no surface sources of water, the coastal aquifer, on the brink of collapse, provided 81 percent of the enclave’s supply. Three desalination plants and three Mekorot pipes provided the remainder. Families had to buy often questionable drinking water from street vendors at high prices. On 9 October 2023, Israel cut off the piped water it had been sending Gaza.
Since Israel withdrew in 2005, it has conducted five major wars on the small densely-populated Strip, destroying much of its infrastructure. And for years, Gazans have lived with depleted, contaminated and salinated water because Israel has restricted the entry of construction and other materials like cement and iron needed to repair, maintain or develop the enclave’s water infrastructure.
The United Nations currently estimates that 70 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation plants have been destroyed or damaged, including all five wastewater treatment facilities, water desalination plants, sewage pumping stations, wells and reservoirs. Those remaining are short on fuel to continue operating. Tons of untreated sewage have seeped into the ground or has been pumped into the Mediterranean Sea.
According to the UN, 95-97 percent of the underground water is not fit for human consumption. Most people are now getting drinking water from private vendors who operate small desalination facilities powered by solar energy.
According to Euro-Med Monitor, Palestinians have access to just 1.5 liters of water per person per day for all needs, including drinking and personal hygiene. It is worth noting that the established international emergency water threshold is 15 liters per person per day.
The inability to dispose of garbage, treat sewage and deliver uncontaminated water, in sweltering 90 degree (Fahrenheit) heat, has produced disastrous health consequences, including Hepatitis A, cholera, typhoid, diarrheal and skin diseases, and a stench that has made Gazans ill. Crowded together in tent camps, Palestinians are finding it difficult to sleep because of flies, cockroaches and fear of scorpions and rodents.
Conclusion
Ten months of unabated bombing has ravaged the ecosystem of Gaza and its population.
The recent advisory opinion of the UN’s highest Court has unequivocally confirmed that Israel’s presence in occupied Palestine is unlawful and must end, that it must cease “settlement” expansion and evacuate all “settlers,” that reparations are owed Palestinians and that nations are obliged not to “render aid or assistance” in maintaining Israel’s presence in the territory.
Most UN member states honor their obligations under international law. There is little reason to believe that Israel and its chief enabler, the United States, will comply, since both have a history of disregarding UN resolutions, including an ICJ ruling in 2004 that Israel tear down a concrete barrier wall it had erected in the West Bank to separate itself from Palestinian cities and towns.
For half a century, Israel, with U.S. support, and the mercenary corporate media, has had free rein to expand and grow economically fat on the stolen natural resources of Palestine.
It is as simple as drinking a glass of water; so the saying goes. But not in Palestine, where the people have been imprisoned between birth and death—for now. There are finally signs, however, of an epilogue to the tragic Palestinian al-Nakba (the catastrophe).
An Israeli soldier checking the IDs of Palestinians at the Huwara checkpoint. Photo by Gary Fields.
Lost in Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Presidential election, and the now-likely accession of Kamala Harris to Democratic nominee, is the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last week on the legality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.* In a searing rebuke to the State of Israel, the Court in its 83-page brief refuted Israeli claims that the Palestinian territories under its control are “disputed,” not occupied. More to the point, the Court determined that the occupation regime established by Israel in these three areas, which it considers to be “a single territorial unit,” [p. 27] is in violation of innumerable statutes of international law.
From restrictions on basic rights of free movement, to special pass laws for Palestinians, arbitrary and systematic demolitions of Palestinian homes, and overt discrimination against Palestinians as a group, the ICJ Opinion catalogs a widespread pattern of abuses by the State of Israel as an occupier and violator of the most fundamental human rights of Palestinians over whom it rules. In conclusion, the Court notes, “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Territories is illegal.” [p. 72ff].
From this ruling, Israel emerges as nothing other than a pariah state, similar to that other notorious violator of human rights, the apartheid regime of South Africa.
According to the Court, in the Territories under its occupation, Israel has created a system of laws, policies, and practices resulting in physical segregation and differential legal treatment for Palestinians. By these measures, such a system is akin to an apartheid system, that is, a regime that subjects people to different sets of laws, policies, and practices according to race, ethnicity or religion.
For several years now, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights have condemned Israel as an apartheid state.
Now, for the first time, the World Court adjudicating the conduct of States, has affirmed this contention about Israeli apartheid, writing in its Opinion of four days ago “that Israel’s legislation and measures constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD” [the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Segregation]. Article 3 of CERD makes reference to the illegality of “racial segregation and apartheid” and obligates state signatories to the Convention to “undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature.” [pp. 64-65] A breach of Article 3 of CERD means that the country is in violation of the international convention on segregation and apartheid.
It is this part of the ICJ ruling that is undoubtedly the most vexing for the U.S. If, according to the world’s preeminent international legal authority, Israel has entered the legal terrain once occupied by South Africa, then members of the international body under its jurisdiction, UN member states are obligated not to aid and abet such regime as was the case with South Africa. The problem for the U.S. is obvious. America is deeply entangled in the probable genocidal activity of a now-designated apartheid regime. At the same time, there is an even more immediate, and in many ways more deeply troubling problem for the U.S.
This week, the embattled Prime Minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu addressed lawmakers in the U.S. Congress. The Israeli PM has performed this role on multiple occasions previously and, as in past appearances, he was feted by a cast of mostly adoring and compliant legislators who accorded him saintly status with multiple standing ovations and raucous calls of approval. There is something truly sordid in all of this. Imagine the leader of a State now carrying the legal designation of a pariah regime and violator of the apartheid convention, who is at helm of a military plausibly committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza – with a possible indictment over his own head as a war criminal – being feted and applauded as if he were Mother Teresa. It is difficult to imagine a more macabre kind of spectacle.
Finally, this invitation to the Israeli leader and the relationship with Israel in general poses a daunting problem for the now-likely Democratic Presidential nominee.
Kamala Harris is a lawyer and former prosecutor. She is no doubt familiar with at least the broad outlines of the legal entanglements now gripping America’s most ironclad ally. As a prosecutor, Harris seems certain to grasp the ramifications of aiding and abetting entities and individuals designated as criminals. At certain times, the Vice President has shown that she does have a conscience and some compassion for those abandoned by good fortune. On the moral dimensions of the carnage in Gaza, however, Kamala Harris has been largely silent. Her conscience and sense of moral righteousness are going to be tested in the coming days as this spectacle in the U.S. Congress unfolds as a prelude to November, and perhaps if fate and fortune align in a certain way, into the future as well.
All references come from the ICJ Opinion accessible at this link.
Popular struggle for national independence under socialism has regularly provoked U.S. war or hostile interventions, as with Cuba, North Korea, China, Vietnam and other nations. We explore both the extreme danger of possible U.S. war with China and also the changing U.S rationale for fighting wars. This shows in the difference between why the U.S. war in Vietnam was fought and why U.S. war with China may be on the way.
Vietnam recently commemorated agreements reached 70 years ago in Geneva that on July 21, 1954 ended war between Vietnamese revolutionary forces and the French military, defeated two months earlier at Dien Bien Phu. According to official media, the object of a “scientific conference” held on July 19 was “to emphasize the historical importance of the agreements for the struggle for national liberation of the Vietnamese people and the peoples of the world.”
Also on July 19, Nguyen Phu Trong died. Once chairperson of the National Assembly and president of Vietnam, this paramount leader, a student and teacher of Marxist theory, had long served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. His death is a reminder, if such is needed, that for Vietnam revolutionary socialism and national liberation were kindred struggles.
To prevent the unification of Vietnam as a socialist nation, the U.S. government went the last mile, first diplomatically and then militarily – from the 1954 Geneva agreements that established Vietnam’s national independence to the departure of defeated U.S. troops on April 30, 1975. The U.S. leadership class, involved in spreading U.S. power and influence across the globe, created and then defended South Vietnam, while attempting to defeat Vietnam’s Revolution, all at enormous human and material cost.
The enclave remaining after a U.S. victory might have ended up as a beachhead for counter-revolution and U.S. control in Southeast Asia. In their various situations, that’s the role performed by South Korea, Taiwan, and even Ukraine in relation to Russia, and Israel vis-a-vis the rest of the Middle East.
U.S. planners, in thinking about what to do about Vietnam, were not entirely devoid of reason. For U.S. imperialists, to beat back Vietnamese Communists – think “domino theory” – and heat up the Cold War against the Soviet Bloc had a certain logic, according to their own lights.
After the Vietnam disaster, official U.S. planning for war has built upon a variety of ostensible reasons for fighting. Having emerged from World War II well-resourced and strong, the U.S. government consistently demonstrated limited tolerance for the risings of oppressed, colonialized peoples. However, once newly formed independent states showed signs of strength, regional prominence, or even strategic rivalry, U.S. strategists turned to action.
War materialized as the ultimate U.S. fix, no matter the circumstances and under a variety of pretexts, as shown with U.S. war-making in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The rationales for fighting were often imprecise. The threat of U.S. war now looms over Iran and, more ominously, over China. Each is under the gun because they are strong, assertive states.
Anti-communism was a safer and clearer kind of rationale. Vietnam won its “American War,” and the U.S. government backed off. That’s the story. Incidentally, the Vietnamese people scored a clear win. They live according to plans and socialist purpose in a free and independent nation.
Vietnam has established diplomatic relations with 190 countries. A Vietnamese writer cites “important achievements with infrastructure gradually meeting the needs of industrialization and modernization.” Since reforms in the 1980s, an economy resting mainly on foreign direct investment in manufacturing and tourism has expanded. Economic growth ranged between 9.5 and 5.5 percent between 1993 and 2022, save for sharps drops in 2020 and 2021. GDP rose 5.05 percent in 2023. By 2022, the poverty rate was down to 4.3%.
Vietnam’s government since 2008 has spent 20 percent of its budget on education. The same report mentions “high primary school completion rates, strong gender parity, low student/teacher ratios,” and school attendance rates that are high. The British medical journal Lancet indicates that, “Along with the economic growth, the health of the Vietnamese people has significantly improved between 1990 and 2020, whereby the life expectancy grew from 69 to 75 years, and the under-five child mortality rate decreased from 30 to 21 per 1000 live births.”
Socialist China restored dignity to the vast majority of its citizens, has afforded them decent lives, and created a well-functioning state that responds effectively to the climate crisis and other challenges. It too warrants a pass from the U.S. government.
That’s not happening: the U.S. government, in the hands of a divided leadership class, deals only haphazardly with major problems afflicting U.S. society and the world. It satisfies the material wants of the upper echelons, and presides over war preparations as part of what has become, in effect, a new Cold War.
Indeed, the USA has accumulated over 750 bases in 80 countries and posted 173,000 troops in 159 counties. The U.S. share of global arms exports in 2019-23 was 42 percent, up from 34 percent during the previous four-year period, according to sipri.org.
In the Pacific waters surrounding China, the United States has expanded the capabilities of its bases; it operates nuclear-equipped naval vessels, arranges for multi-national naval exercises, has vessels engaging in provocative “freedom of navigation exercises,” and will be introducing nuclear-powered submarines.
The offering of multiple and varied reasons for fighting wars, the practice of recent decades, fits within the overarching notion of a new Cold War, something that by nature is ambitious, far-reaching, and long-term. Where is the justification for that?
Here is a guess: The United States has taken on a great variety of activities related to military preparations, the financing, and recovery from wars. These now intrude massively in the U.S. economy and in society itself, so much so that the economy needs them. Such a state of affairs does require explaining, but on grounds other than economic need.
War provides meaning. Without wars the whole apparatus might not have existed, or might disappear. What then of the economy and of the collective experience of a U.S population variously oriented to the military?
The Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute of Brown University weighs in. Author Heidi Peltier points out that:
Federal spending on the military and on veterans makes up more than half of the federal discretionary budget. Employment in the federal government is dominated by civilian defense workers and uniformed military personnel. Because the majority of taxpayer dollars and federal resources are devoted to the military and military industries, and most government jobs are in the defense sector, the political power of this sector has become more deeply entrenched and other alternatives have become harder to pursue. Instead of having a federal government that addresses various national priorities … the U.S. has a government that is largely devoted to war and militarism.
Unfortunately, protecting both the U.S. economy and habituation to the military has its downside, specifically extreme danger to humanity itself. Writing in the most recent issue of Monthly Review magazine, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark explain, pointing to China. Discussing “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific,” they state that:
“Most U.S. strategies for winning the New Cold War directed at China are aimed at a strategic-geopolitical defeat of the latter that would bring down Chinese President Xi Jinping and destroy the enormous prestige of the Communist Party of China, leading to regime change from within and the subordination of China to the U.S. imperium from without … (It) is the United States, which sees China’s rise as a threat to its own global preeminence, with the Indo-Pacific super-region increasingly being viewed as the pivotal site in the New Cold War, that is propelling all of humanity toward a Third World War.”
Why has NATO been so generally accepted in Europe by almost all the major political parties and especially puzzling, the social democratic ones? Its economic costs, illegal aggressive wars, environmental damage, and the risks of nuclear annihilation would seem to make it a prime platform item. Well-informed political activists are unlikely to believe that an invasion of Switzerland or Denmark is imminent. There are significant anti-NATO movements, such as No to War No to NATO, but so far they haven’t been able to turn the tide.
Some reasons are fairly obvious. The US military connections to European defense and foreign ministries began during World War II. These strong ties have continued, now with an emphasis on NATO’s newly acquired feminist face, the Women, Peace, and Security agenda.
The photo above, taken at the 2022 NATO summit in Madrid, depicts women Foreign Affairs and Defense ministers, from Canada, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, Iceland, Slovenia, Germany, and Belgium.
Promotion long and wide has been carried out by overtly pro-NATO lobbies such as the Atlantic Council and national think tanks, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations (US), the British Royal Institute of International Affairs, and their counterparts in many nations. There is also a Youth Atlantic Treaty Association, a network of national organizations of young professionals, university students and researchers.
The secretive Bilderberg group harnesses the political, economic, academic and journalism elites of NATO nations. Operation Gladio, Operation Paperclip and others have sustained firm links with military and intelligence agencies. There has also been covert and overt interventions in political parties and nongovernmental organizations, such as the CIA funding of Christian Democratic party in 1948 to defeat the Communist Party and meddling in the British Labour Party to minimize the influence of the Committee on Nuclear Disarmament. These have also cleared the path for NATO. Eastern Europe was even more easily penetrated by NATO, after the devastation of its economic, cultural, and scientific institutions.
There have been constant protests against NATO bases, yet their less vocal sympathizers appreciate the economic benefit. At first, in war-torn Europe both the liberated and the occupied nations saw little economic activity. Now the European economy is increasingly militarized, having outsourced much of its civilian industry and facing declines in its tourist industry due to pandemics, protests by local residents, and environmental costs. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Fact Sheet of 2024, weapons production has greatly accelerated in many European countries, even though NATO and national militaries also equip themselves royally with US products. Sales to the Middle East and other violence inflicted areas are good business.
Now workers, many unionized and some even socialists and communists, have secure jobs in war industries and in the burgeoning military-civilian industries. As the Erikssons have documented:
The defence industry is undergoing rapid change, particularly regarding the development of dual-use technology and transfer of technology between military and civilian domains. . . The blurring of the military-civilian divide is particularly noticeable with the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), digitalization, satellite technology, integrated quantum, photonics, high-capacity wireless communications, and “big data” networking through 5 G – developments which have been referred to as “the fourth industrial revolution. . .”
Just as its military bases need everything, NATO institutes, operations, conferences, war games, and its supersized headquarters in Brussels equip and maintain from every kind of business. Much information is available on the NATO website; it also has a presence on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter). The NATO Support and Procurement Agency contracts database for 2023 lists only orders valued above €80,000. It includes “consumables” from a firm in Luxembourg, transport of tents and conference center equipment from Belgium, winter clothing from France, “civil and mechanical” from Albania, medical equipment from Sweden, waterproof bags from Great Britain, and spare parts from vendors in many countries. Undoubtedly, even smaller businesses supply a wide range, and, as in the US, provide economic survival for owners, workers, and communities (see The Trillion Dollar Silencer). A listing of bids above €800,000 includes medical treatment structures from a firm in Italy, training services (Netherlands and Spain), and military cots and mosquito nets (Italy and Turkey). Although the largest in both lists are expenditures for weapons, firms that are often the economic lifeblood—rather the deathblood—of their communities, the smaller (but not piddling) purchases can influence many citizens and their elected representatives.
NATO training and research operations involve civilian universities, which increasingly have military departments, as well as national military academies. There are even public high school training programs, e.g., in Sweden, Germany, and France (Defence Cadets). In addition, the US Department of Defense has direct contracts with universities and scientific institutes worldwide, especially for weapons development, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
NATO also has several layers of its own training entities. One is the Partnership Training and Education Centres, in 34 member and partner (i.e., not full member) countries. Some examples are Switzerland, Geneva Centre for Security Policy; Israel, IDF Military Medical Academy; Serbia, Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Training Centre; Mongolia, Peace Support Operations Centre; Colombia, International Demining Centre; Italy, The International Institute of Humanitarian Law; and United Kingdom, United Kingdom Defence Academy.
Another NATO network is the 28 Centres of Excellence which are “international military organizations that train and educate leaders and specialists from NATO member and partner countries.” They are funded nationally and accredited by NATO. Some of these are Civil-Military Cooperation, one of two in the Netherlands; Crisis Management and Disaster Response, Bulgaria; Modelling and Simulation, one of several in Italy; Strategic Communications, Latvia; Climate Change and Security, Canada; and Maritime Security, Turkey. The latter is described as:
[P]roviding expertise both as a centre for academic research and as a (multinational) hub for practical training in the field of maritime security, along with relevant domains (maritime trade, energy security, maritime environment, maritime resources, public health, maritime transport-logistic). The Centre strives to achieve the necessary collaboration among stakeholders from government, industry, academia and the private sector.
NATO’s enormous Civil Diplomacy department works through all print and electronic media. Its Press Tours enable reporters to “sail aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush on the Adriatic Sea” and “mingle with counter-terrorism experts in a metro station in Rome, Italy.” The department also welcomes grant applications from think tanks, universities, NGOs, and other civil society organizations “ranging from out-of-the box, non-traditional ideas to more institutional formats. Particular focus should be placed on outreach to youth audiences, female audiences and key opinion formers, including those who have not connected with NATO before.”
In addition to NATO’s own public diplomacy division, the alliance’s message is produced and projected through a host of NGOs that collaborate with NATO but are not affiliated with it. Funded through national foreign and defense ministries, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, and private companies, they organize a wide range of activities designed to popularize NATO within and beyond its member states.
NATO’s less obvious influence may derive from its accelerated penetration of civilian institutions: education, entertainment, teenage “influencers,” festivals, nongovernmental organizations, even progressive and human rights movements. NATO portrays itself as simply the prime association of democratic nations, which was apparently very persuasive in Eastern European regimes trying to divest themselves of the “totalitarian” label.
In January 2018, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg held an unprecedented press conference with Angelina Jolie. While InStyle reported that Jolie “was dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sheath dress, a matching capelet and classic pumps (also black)”, there was a deeper purpose to this meeting: sexual violence in war. The pair had just co-authored a piece for the Guardian entitled “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”. The timing was significant. At the height of the #MeToo movement, the most powerful military alliance in the world had become a feminist ally. “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace and security as well as of social justice,” they wrote. “NATO can be a leader in this effort.”
A study by Katharine AM Wright, exploring the legitimacy given to NATO by the surprising participation of women’s rights groups in its activities, found some activists who argued that it enabled feminists to “advise” NATO, “to get it to hear things that they don’t usually hear,” and to “speak truth to power.”
As climate change is among NATO’s catalog of serious threats to security, environmentalists speak at NATO conferences and vice versa, serve on advisory boards, and formally interact in many ways. For example, the 2020 meeting of the Brussels Dialogue on Climate Diplomacy and the Environment & Development Resource Centre was hosted by the Policy Planning Unit in the Office of the NATO Secretary-General.
In addition to the more traditional Youth Atlantic Treaty Association, NATO has more recently created youth activities that are more cuddly. Its 2022 “Protect the Future campaign” recruited:
12 young online creators [teenage “influencers”] from Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. To discover more about the Alliance’s work, the creators met with the Secretary General in May; travelled to the Madrid Summit in June; visited the US aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in October; and went on an AWACS training mission in November.
The outcome, NATO reported, was 300,000 social media engagements that reached more than 9 million young people.
In another wing of this campaign, “young artists from across the Alliance took part in an open competition to help create NATO’s first-ever graphic novel, ‘Protect the Future.’ Six young artists were selected to work with professionals to produce the book.” For the multitude, a Youth Summit was held that included 35,000 people from 99 countries.
At the [2023] NATO Gaming Tournament in Warsaw, Poland, thousands of gamers from across the Alliance and around the world gathered to play online games and chat with experts from NATO Headquarters. The vibe in the room is casual and relaxed. Young gamers from Warsaw mingle with artists, soldiers and NATO experts. In one corner, troops from NATO’s multinational battlegroup in Poland play vintage console games, including Street Fighter and Super Mario. In another area, gamers mash buttons on old arcade games like Pac-Man.
The arts are not neglected. NATO sponsors exhibits, murals, and competitions:
Are you an artist under 35? Do you have a creative mind and want your artwork to be displayed at a permanent location in Washington D.C. where NATO will mark the 75th anniversary of the Alliance? Submit your work to the NATO mural competition – an opportunity to showcase your talent and artistic vision of the future. The winner will get to work with a local street artist to feature their mural permanently on a wall in the city.
The NATO mural competition will give young talents a chance to produce a signature image for NATO’s anniversary as part of its “Protect the Future” campaign.
In our era of network governance it is not surprising that NATO has close connections with the European Union (including its Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and European Defense Agency), the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and many other intergovernmental organizations. These in turn are interwoven with international (e.g., World Economic Forum, Amnesty International) and thousands of national nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Council on Foreign Relations), foundations, and business corporations. Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in The Grand Chessboard:
As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial setting for the exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony involves a complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power and influence. (p.27)
The staffs of intergovernmental organizations are required to be politically neutral. However, there is also pressure on progressive or left wing nongovernmental organizations to avoid confrontation or strong dissent with conference participants or any member of the “partnership.”
The very size of this monumental hive of associations, including representatives, staffs, task forces of university and other experts, NGOs, and contractors may in itself affect the complexion of European political parties. Although I have found no evidence so far, perhaps there has been a “brain drain” of progressive activists into the more promising, interesting, and often paid work of these institutions, compared with the scant rewards of local political parties. It could be yet another factor in the passive or active support for NATO in Europe. Might there be scholars, journalists, or activists exploring this possibility?
Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from the NATO website.
I get it: in order to induce the declining, cognitively crippled Joe Biden to admit that he’s a catastrophic loser bringing down his party and greatly increasing the likelihood of full Republi-fascist takeover in 2025, Democrats have had to kiss the president’s ass. The only way to get Bernie Sanders’ “good friend” “Genocide Joe” Biden to give up his delegates and allow them to go to someone with (perhaps) a better shot at beating Adolph Trump (the man Trump’s 2024 vice presidential running mate JD Vance called “America’s Hitler” in 2016) was to praise the incumbent as “a man of great integrity with a long and noble record of service to America and humanity including his heroic defeat of Trump in the 2020 election.”
There are three key things missing from this big Biden butt smooch.
First, Biden’s career has not been remotely exemplary, honorable, and virtuous. It been a moral and humanitarian disgrace. Please read this 2019 CounterPunch exposé I wrote on then presidential candidate Biden’s long record of lying, cheating, and dutifully serving finance capital while pretending to be “Blue Collar Joe” and advancing the bloody US empire: “No Joe: On Character, Quality, and Authenticity,” CounterPunch, September 6, 2019.
Consistent with my warning, the Biden presidency has been a Weimar-like capitalist-imperialist nightmare. The Biden administration has:
+ intensified the climate catastrophe.
+ preserved the savage economic insecurity of masses of ordinary Americans living from paycheck to paycheck.
+ swung far to the nativist right on immigration.
+ made no serious effort to stem a horrible eviction crisis.
+ made no serious effort to stop the continuing plague of racist police killings.
+ cost tens of thousands of lives in Ukraine and Palestine.
+ pushed the world closer to nuclear war than it has been in decades.
+ backed horrific genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
+ appeased a women-hating Christian Fascist Supreme Court on abortion rights and more.
+ failed to prosecute Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump in a timely way for trying to overthrow previously normative American bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy.
+ failed to seriously address the nation on the homegrown white supremacist, sexist, nativist, and fascist menace that stalks and the land.
+ let Amerikaner Trumpism-fascism run rampant without calling it out or making any serious effort to seriously wield government power and mobilize masses against it.
Like his Democratic president predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton but without any of their telegenic eloquence and charisma, President Biden is a monument to the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s memorable description of the Democrats as “the inauthentic opposition…Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied in his book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, 2007), they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The dismal, dollar-drenched Dems would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”
That was an apt characterization of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden presidencies. And since Wolin wrote those words, the Republican Party that Biden and his party have failed to authentically oppose has gone full-on MAGA – something Biden once haltingly described to wealthy donors as “like semi-fascism.” He could have dropped the “like” and the “semi-.” (Trump and the party of Trump check off one fascist box after another, as I have been arguing for years. For starters, see the first three chapters of my latest book).
A second problem with the big Biden butt kiss is that Biden did not heroically defeat Trump in 2020. He didn’t really defeat Trump at all. Covid-19, the racist Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd, and Trump himself defeated Trump in 2020. But for the coronavirus, the George Floyd Rebellion, and Trump’s terrible response to both, Biden would surely have lost the last presidential election.
Bear in mind that the only reason Biden has made it to the center stage of American and world history is Barack Obama’s cynical 2008 choice of him as a conservative old white male running mate who would help alleviate moderate voters’ fear of supposed Obama’s supposed (and mythical) Black radicalism. Biden’s two previous presidential campaigns were complete fiascos (kind of like Kamala Harris’s quickly aborted 2020 run). Obama helped rig the Democratic Party presidential nomination for Biden over Sanders in 2020. (For that unpleasant history see the fifth chapter, titled “Joe Biden? Thanks Obama” in my 2020 book Hollow Resistance: Obama Trump and the Politics of Appeasement [CounterPunch Books, 2020]).
Third, here’s something else you didn’t hear in the efforts to kiss Biden’s ass out of the 2024 race: a considerable number of establishment Democrats (and some non-Trump Republicans) were concerned not merely with Biden’s viability and “down ticket” drag on the party but also with his abject fecklessness atop the US American Empire. Consider:
+ Biden’s pathetic oil-begging fist-bump with the Saudi crown prince MBS, head of an arch-reactionary absolutist state that Biden had in 2020 called a “pariah” nation – a meeting which hardly deterred Riyadh from continuing to sell oil to Washington’s geopolitical rivals.
+ Biden’s ongoing reckless and ridiculous refusal to negotiate some kind of humane settlement of the mass-murderous meatgrinder of an inter-imperialist war he helped spark in Ukraine. It’s a criminal war that never would have happened if a newly elected Biden could have picked up a telephone and told Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would never be invited to the US-led and imperialist North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
+ Biden can warmonger all he wants but Russia is not giving back the territory it has seized. He is by all accounts not even seriously involved in efforts to find a settlement, a telling sign of Washington’s waning power under Biden.
+ Biden’s sloppy and sickening post-October 7 embrace of the Zio-fascist Israeli tyrant Bibi Netanyahu and Biden’s continued funding and equipping of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The support continues as Biden lamely pretends to be concerned about Palestinian civilians. Netanyahu has brazenly thumbed his nose at Biden’s pretend “humanitarian concerns,” showing open contempt for the doddering US president and his calculation that Bibi’s fellow fascist Trump (who’d be happy with a million Gazan deaths by now) will be back in power next January. How pitiful.
The world sees both the weakening of US power and influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East under Biden and the grotesque hypocrisy inherent in the contradiction between (a) Biden’s outrage over the US Empire’s enemy Russia’s bloody invasion of the US imperial ally Ukraine and (b) Biden’s embrace of US imperial asset Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. (The racial dimension of this seeming double standard is not lost on the global South.)
Adam Schiff et al won’t say it in public but they see Biden not only as an electoral liability and as therefore likely to open the door to the white nationalist/neofascist takeover of the imperial homeland; they also see him as a badly failed steward and agent of the American Empire, which they think is best and most effectively managed and advanced by Council on Foreign Relations and Brookings Institution Democrats, not supposedly isolationist Heritage Foundation nationalists.
As Biden signs off to the nation later this week, he should think about one possible act of decency: tell Americans the truth about the fascism that he has helped near consolidation across all three branches of the US government early next year and call for Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump to join him in retiring from politics. After all, Noam Chomsky was on to something in January of 2020 when he told an interviewer that the orange menace was “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”
“If NATO nations are willing to donate aircraft to Ukraine and train pilots, why not let those same freshly trained pilots fly sorties from bases on NATO territory—and refuel, rearm and repair these jets there as well?”
– Washington Post oped, July 2024.
In the mid-1990s, I was a professor of international relations at the National War College and a member of the Brookings Institution’s Russian Study Group that held regular off-the-record discussions of key issues. This was an important time when the leading subject for the study group was the question of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The group had rather high level membership from the National Security Council, the Departments of State and Defense, and the intelligence community, particularly CIA and INR, the intelligence arm of State. These individuals were for the most part supporters of the absurd idea that we had won the Cold War and there was a mood of triumphalism and exceptionalism that was obvious in their support for NATO expansion.
Some of the leading cheerleaders in this respect were Nicholas Burns, currently our ambassador to China, and the late Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the Counselor at State who worked closely with Henry A. Kissinger during the key events in the 1970s that led to arms control and detente. Brookings scholar Fiona Hill, who went on to serve in Donald Trump’s NSC, and James Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser and deputy at the State Department, were members who actively supported the expansion.
I was essentially an outlier at these meetings because of my strong opposition to any expansion of NATO, and I had strong support from a leading Sovietologist, Ray Garthoff, a former ambassador and the major actor in the negotiation of the SALT and ABM treaties.
Our opposition was based on the danger of expanding an alliance that formerly had a common perception of the threat into a wider organization that would be divided into its east and west wings, which is currently the case. But our major opposition was that Russia in the 1990s was a failing state in no position to argue against the expansion, but that Russia would not be failing forever or even for long. And that Russia-which is a national security state in so many ways—would never tolerate having NATO members in the east and surely would not tolerate NATO members on their entire border.
It should be understood that in 1990, when we were trying to negotiate the Soviet troop withdrawal from East Germany, we told the Soviets at the highest level that, if their troops left, we would never “leap frog” over East Germany to go into East Europe. Former secretary of state James Baker said that to the Soviet foreign minister, and President George H. W. Bush delivered a similar message to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. I interviewed Baker for my book on Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and Baker confirmed the use of the words “leap frog.” He even had his assistant look up the notes of his meetings with Shevardnadze to confirm the use of the words “leap frog.” Unfortunately, nothing was put into writing. Baker wanted to write a policy statement with the Soviets, but national security adviser Brent Scowcroft blocked that effort. The conventional wisdom was that Scowcroft was a moderate; he wasn’t—he was more of a hard-liner than was understood at the time, and so was President Bush who opposed Ronald Reagan’s disarmament policies.
Frankly, anyone who has spent any time working on the Soviet/Russia problem should understand the great Soviet/Russian fear of encirclement and their fears of war on their vulnerable borders. Nevertheless, a huge group of so-called specialists over the years enthusiastically supported going further, expanding NATO into former Soviet republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), employing a so-called defensive weapons system in Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic against Iran of all places, deploying German troops into the Baltics, and creating U.S. bases in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. Fortunately, we were spared the thought of a Camp Trump in Poland, but I don’t know who was responsible for that.
So here were are in the midst of two and a half years of war in Ukraine, which is not going well for Ukraine and really hasn’t give Russia a lot to brag about in view of its sadistic war crimes. But for politicians and pundits to chortle that Putin’s war was “unprovoked” is simply wrong. We clearly played a role in provoking this war and only the United States could provide the security guarantees to both Ukraine and to Russia that would end it. Meanwhile, our politicians and pundits argue that if Putin can’t be stopped in Ukraine, he will move on. Move on to where, which one of the many NATO countries that surround him. His conventional tactics failed against a small backward state on his border, so he resorted to a war of terrorism. I don’t believe Russia is in a position to attack a NATO country.
My next article will deal with the role that the United States could play if we had a president who could throw himself into such a difficult task as well as having a Department of State that understands the strategies and processes of such an endeavor. Sadly, we don’t have either one. The prospect of a Trump-Vance administration doesn’t offer any hope. Trump says that he doesn’t “give a shit” about NATO, and Vance says that he does not care in any way about Ukraine.
Unfortunately, the United States has no plan for Ukraine, let alone for ending the war, let alone negotiating the peace. We’re simply in a tit-for-tat spiral raising the ante as we go. The latest suggestion in a Washington Post oped from a former Naval officer is indicative of the kind of sleepwalking that we are engaged in that will possibly lead to wider war. He wants to “Let Ukraine fly its jets from ‘sanctuary bases’ on NATO territory. This cockamamie scheme is supposed to scare the Russians in the same way that the Russians scare us with threats of using tactical nuclear weapons. The author says not to worry about any of this because “strict rules of engagement” would be established. You can’t get more obtuse than that.
One final note regarding this tragic cycle of events that will create a permanent cold war and possibly a wider war in Europe. President Bill Clinton didn’t come up with the idea of NATO expansion, but he was responding to his opponent, Senator Bob Dole, who had said that he would use the lack of expansion to criticize Clinton for missing an opportunity. Neither Dole nor Clinton was thinking about U.S. interests and U.S. foreign policy; they were thinking about the ethnic votes in important states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So Clinton—the master of triangulation—expanded NATO to win an election, and now the upcoming election will introduce greater uncertainty into the entire European geostrategic picture.The only certainty is that Ukraine has no road to victory.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
When President Joe Biden said in a phone call to MSNBC’s Morning Joe recently, “I’m getting so frustrated with the elites… the elites of the party. I don’t care what the millionaires think,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote that, “It was the first time any modern president has admitted that the elites of the party are the millionaires (and billionaires) who fund it.”
While Biden’s comments were in reference to the movement to oust him from the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, it was an important admission about who really wields power in our democracy.
We may think of elections in terms of one person, one vote. But, not only do undemocratic structures such as the electoral college dilute our votes, the money that elites flaunt places a hefty thumb on the scales of who represents us. Yet, we hear more about the threat of, say, immigrants than the threat of billionaires, to our democracy.
Billionaires have tried very hard to buy influence and political power. For example, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg donated $20 million toward efforts to reelect Biden this year alone. Four years ago, Bloomberg spent a whopping $1 billion in just four months in an attempt to be the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In a testament to the fact that we have a modicum of democratic accountability left within the system as it stands, he failed spectacularly, as others have often done. Voters seem to have a distaste for electing the ultra-rich but have yet to disavow the de facto proxies that their money helps elect.
While billionaires remain influential within the Democratic Party, the last election for which spending records exist shows that moneyed elites overwhelmingly prefer the Republican Party. The nation’s 465 wealthiest people collectively donated $881 billion to influence the 2022 midterm elections, most of it to the GOP.
Now, the richest person in the world—not just in the United States—Elon Musk, has jumped into the 2024 race. His proxy, Donald Trump, in surviving an assassination attempt, earned Musk’s endorsement, as if that was somehow a qualification to run the nation. Musk has vowed to pour $45 million a month into a new Super PAC that’s working to elect Trump. The amount is pocket change for someone currently worth nearly $250 billion. Musk could spend $45 million a day every day this year and it would barely make a dent in his bottom line.
According to a New York Times analysis, Musk went from supporting Democrats to Republicans because he was “[a]ngry at liberals over immigration, transgender rights, and the Biden administration’s perceived treatment of Tesla.” At a meeting earlier this year that embodied the specter of a secret cabal of billionaires seeking to buy an election, Musk reportedly conversed with his fellow wealthy elites about Republican control of the U.S. Senate. At that meeting, he reportedly worried that “if President Biden won, millions of undocumented immigrants would be legalized and democracy would be finished,” as per the Times.
He’s not the only one. The Republican Party as a whole has decided that undocumented people voting in U.S. elections is the single biggest threat facing the country—not billionaires like Musk raining down dollars to drown our democracy.
Undocumented immigrants are human beings, not dollar bills. And yet they hold far less sway over elections than Musk’s money. There is no mass amnesty for undocumented people in the U.S. currently—this isn’t Ronald Reagan’s America after all. And even if there was, there is a long, complicated path from legal status to the voting status that citizenship allows.
I should know, I’ve been there personally, having entered the U.S. as an immigrant on a student visa before obtaining legal residency and then citizenship. My journey was far more straightforward than that of Melania Trump and still, it was 18 years before I could legally vote after first stepping on American soil.
And yet every four years, immigrants become political footballs, flayed at the proverbial whipping posts of democracy for merely existing—usually by both political parties. Right-wing voters waved signs saying “Mass Deportations Now” at the Republican National Convention, while Democrats took a less vulgar approach by appeasing anti-immigrant forces with asylum restrictions, hoping it would garner voter support.
Sean Morales-Doyle, writing for the Brennan Center for Justice, asks us to imagine being an undocumented immigrant in the U.S.: “Would you risk everything—your freedom, your life in the United States, your ability to be near your family—just to cast a single ballot?” Not only are there harsh penalties, including prison time, for illegally casting ballots, but even the rabidly far-right Heritage Foundation has found only 85 cases of supposed undocumented voters out of 2 billion votes cast from 2002 to 2023. That works out to a 0.00000425 percent of the vote.
Let’s compare this to the influence of money on elections. The nonpartisan group Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics, finds that “the candidate who spends the most usually wins.” In 2022, about 94 percent of the candidates for the House of Representatives who spent the most money won their race, while 82 percent of those running for the Senate who spent the most money won their seats. Much of their donations come from Super PACs, which bundle high-dollar amounts from wealthy Americans.
While billionaires such as Bloomberg have had trouble getting themselveselected, they have had little trouble getting others elected—or unelected as the case may be. Already this year, moneyed interests in the form of the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, defeated progressive congressional representative Jamaal Bowman of New York in his primary election, and have their sights set on representative Cori Bush of Missouri next.
Should we be concerned about the imagined influence of undocumented immigrants or the actual influence of billionaire dollars on our elections? In a 2020 poll, Pew Research found that most Americans felt billionaires were neither good nor bad for the nation. Only about a third felt they were bad for the nation—roughly the same percentage that fears there is an effort to replace U.S. voters with immigrants for the purposes of electoral power.
USA Today writer Marla Bautista captured Musk’s role succinctly in asking, “Can Elon Musk buy Trump the White House?” It’s a valid question, one that we should be centering as election season heats up.
Think of the U.S. democracy as an old, large, sailing ship attempting to cross a vast ocean with all voters on board working to steer it across to shore. Every hole in its sail, every shark circling it, impacts its ability to succeed. In such a scenario, an undocumented person attempting to vote is akin to a speck of dust on the hull. Every million-dollar donation is a wave buffeting the ship. Enter men like Musk, whose money becomes a veritable tsunami aimed directly at democracy to overwhelm and topple it, destroying everything and everyone on board.
Sure, we may have sailed successful voyages most of the time (with the years 2000 and 2016 being among the worst exceptions). But with billionaire influence becoming larger every election, there’s an ever-increasing chance that democracy may not reach the shore. Will we be distracted by the dust on our hull or the massive wave rising before us?
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Photograph Source: Rory Arnold/No10 Downing Street – CC BY 2.0
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address a joint session of Congress on July 24. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson took the lead in extending the invitation last March. With the participation of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, it soon became a bipartisan invitation. This won’t be the first time an Israeli leader has used an address to Congress to strengthen Israel’s already powerful relations with America. In 2015 Netanyahu bypassed the White House to deliver an address that attacked U.S participation in the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. Although the Prime Minister’s visit deeply embarrassed then President Obama, a year later he overlooked the slight to commit $38 billion in arms aid to Israel over ten-years.
As distasteful as the planned Netanyahu visit may be to some in the Democratic party, it is hardly surprising. Pro-Israel lobby organizations have donated significant sums to members of Congress in their most recent elections. AIPAC reportedly committed $100 million to defeat those progressive House Democrats who called for a ceasefire and opposed the transfer of U.S. weapons to Israel. Not even the highly visible genocide in Gaza and settler attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank have diminished U.S. enthusiasm for Israel in the executive and legislative branches. Pro-Israel members of Congress have even condemned the recent protests on university campuses as “antisemitism.” Despite the rising toll of dead and injured Gazans and International Court of Justice (ICJ) warnings against “genocidal acts,” the Israel narrative that blames Hamas for Palestinian casualties and accuses pro-Palestinians of antisemitism has taken root in America.
It is not an overstatement to say that U.S. policy in the Middle East is mostly if not entirely dominated by Israel; that the White House and Congress have combined to provide bombs and missiles that fuel the IDF’s war on Palestinians in Gaza; and that so long as unlimited PAC funds are available to politicians, nothing is likely to change in America’s cozy relationship with Israel. As a result, we can expect much applause and many standing ovations when Netanyahu speaks to Congress next Wednesday. The expected boycott by a small number of members is unlikely to lessen Congress’ love affair with Israel.
We know that the loudest supporters of Israel receive the most money from the Israel lobby and that the lobby’s donations to members of Congress (MOCs) have increased since October We know that candidates for House or Senate seats face a Hobson’s choice: accept the lobby’s money or see it go to their opponents. No wonder that senators and congressmen of both parties mindlessly follow President Joe Biden’s lead in giving the IDF all the lethal weapons it wants for its ongoing war on Gaza. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, some MOCs called for sanctions against the prosecutor. Meanwhile, the U.S vetoed repeated resolutions that called for a ceasefire in Gaza. When Biden recently announced a three-phase plan to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas, he secured a UN Security Council resolution to that effect. Yet Netanyahu has continued to insist that Israel’s onslaught on Gaza will not end until all of his war goals are met. The U.S. now appears tethered to Israel, while its Prime Minister is yoked to the fascist members of his war cabinet. Who or what can break these gordian knots?
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a preliminary decision in January stating that “all measures” must be taken to prevent acts of genocide. We can expect that the Court will ultimately rule that Israel’s many war crimes, including the use of starvation as a war tactic, do indeed constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948. In disregarding and denigrating both the ICJ and the ICC, the U.S. undercuts both institutions and the international rule of law.
The upcoming Netanyahu address to Congress should be viewed as an inflection point in U.S.-Israel relations. As Biden’s future as the Democratic nominee for the presidency hangs in the balance, now is the time for prospective candidates to call for a reset of America’s relations with Israel. More immediately, the failure to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza risks a major war with Hezbollah in Lebanon that would likely draw in U.S. troops.
What is to be gained by joining hands with an extremist regime that commits genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank? This moment is a time for policymakers to consider more broadly the pros and cons of the U.S. security state, with its hundreds of military bases around the world.
The coming visit of Netanyahu should prompt a serious assessment of U.S. relations with Israel. It should also cause citizens to question the financing of U.S. elections by lobbyists, corporations and billionaires, who corrupt democracy with their money.
Atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right): Wikipedia.
Three Weeks After the first Atomic Bomb Test, They Used It on Two Japanese Cities
Teen physicist Ted Hall, who helped perfect the plutonium bomb, passed its secrets to the Soviet Union hoping to prevent the US from ever using it again. For the past 79 years that courageous act has accomplished what he hoped it would.
Just before sunrise 79 years ago at 5:29 Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945 the Journado del Muerto desert in New Mexico instantly and in total silence flashed as bright as day. As a group of several hundred scientists peered from six miles away at a 100-foot steel tower holding the world’s first atomic bomb, the sky turned brighter than day and the tower and bomb vanished in a brilliant flash of light that erased the stars of the night sky, They were replaced by a fiery turbulent cloud of smoke and dust. A powerful shock wave and the roar of the explosion followed he flash as a mushroom cloud rose 38,000 feet into the stratosphere.
The Nuclear Era had begun with a 25-kiloton bang.
Watching from 20 miles away along with over a hundred-fifty other soldiers of the Army Special Engineering District tasked with guarding the top-secret Los Alamos bomb design and fabrication center was 18-year old physicist Ted Hall. The youngest physicist in the Manhattan Project had significantly helped with the design, testing and success of the implosion system needed to successfully detonate the 3.6” sphere of 13.6 lbs. of plutonium at the core of what was called the “Gadget.”
His job during this first atomic bomb test though, was was to be ready to race off with other soldiers in a bunch of waiting army trucks to evacuate any indigenous residents of the region who might be at risk of radioactive fallout should the winds change from what had been predicted. (As it happened, the winds did shift but Hall and the other SED soldiers were never ordered to make those evacuation runs. As a result, the first nuclear test dubbed “Trinity” by Manhattan Project Director Robert Oppenheimer, which did produce massive fallout to the east of the explosion, wound up causing early deaths, cancers and deformed infants victims in that region. Those native people where the fallout came down were the first victims of the atomic bomb, even predating the Hibakusha — the Japanese survivors of the two atom bombs dropped three weeks later by the US on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
Ted Hall, at 18 the youngest physicist hired in January 1944 onto the Manhattan Project right out of his junior year as a physics major at Harvard, recalled in a interview in 1998, a year before his death from kidney cancer, that the Trinity explosion was a “stunning success” but added that he did not share in the jubilant celebration of most of the scientists who had witnessed it. As most of the scientists returned to the Los Alamos “camp” where thousands of scientists and engineers had labored frenetically to develop the bomb, to a day and night of celebrations, Hall said he returned instead to the barracks where he was lodged and listened to some of his 78 rpm recordings of Mahler and Beethoven.
While the huge blast that he had just witnessed was deeply depressing, viewing the awesome power of the atomic weapon he had helped to create hardened his resolve to complete the other job he had been “moonlighting” at in secret since mid-October of 1944 while he was diligently working on the plutonium bomb.
That other job, which he had volunteered for in mid-October 1944, was gathering up all the details he knew about the construction of that bomb and supplying the information to the NKVD, the Soviet spy agency. He was about to provide the full schematics of the bomb and full details about its construction to courier whom he had arranged to meet up with three weeks later, right between the dropping of the Hiroshima “Little Boy” uranium bomb on August 6 and the Nagasaki “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on Aug. 9.
By the time of the Trinity Test, Japan was frantically attempting to get the US to accept a Japanese surrender and an end to World War II in the Pacific. But, as I detail in my new book Spy for No Country (Prometheus Books, 2024) on Ted Hall’s spying and its impact on nuclear history, at the same time, the US was instead trying to delay an end to the violence. Indeed, on the very day of the explosion at Alamogordo, NM, the uranium bomb was being loaded at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard onto the Navy cruiser USS Indianapolis for delivery to Tinian Island. There the U235 explosive would be placed inside the bomb called “Little Boy” for mission against the doomed city of Hiroshima.
At the same time, a second plutonium bomb, almost identical to the “Gadget” used successfully in the Trinity Test, was being prepared for shipment by air to Tinian in two B-29s to, be assembled there and armed with its plutonium “pit.”
The official US version of the story of the nuking of two Japanese cities remains that the two bombs were deemed necessary by President Truman and his advisers to convince the Japanese to end the war and “save American lives” by avoiding a land invasion. In truth, it later became clear, though it is still not common knowledge among most Americans, that Truman and his military and national security advisors were in no hurry for the war to end as they wanted a chance to test their two new weapons in a real war setting to “send a message” to the Soviet Union and the world that Washington had the atomic bomb and as the only country with it, intended to use it, or threaten to use it, to have its way.
Truman even had his Secretary of State James Byrnes instruct Nationalist Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek to have his negotiator in Moscow, Soong Tse-wen, who was attempting to reach an agreement with Stalin for a Japanese peace deal, to slow the process down so that the two atomic bombs could be used before the war ended. As I note, thousands of American soldiers, marines, sailors and merchant seamen, not to mention tens of thousands of Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino and other military and civilian people died in that interval between the Trinity Test and the two atomic bombings (which alone killed a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians).
The decision to bomb two populated cities, and to do both by surprise in early morning when people were outside on the way to work, and when children on the way to school, was a deliberate effort to maximize both bombs’ death and destruction.
After Trinity, as it became clear around the “camp” at Los Alamos that the US was about to bomb a non-nuclear nation with its new weapons of mass destruction, Leo Szilard, a top physicist at Los Alamos typed a well reasoned letter to Truman, quickly signed by 70 fellow scientists on the project, pleading with him not to use the bomb on Japan. (Remember, It was a fear that Germany might build an atomic bomb that had led FDR to launch he Manhattan Project, and Hitler’s scientists never came close to building one before the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.)
Szilard’s petition was handed to Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, who promised to deliver to Truman. He apparently never did deliver it, though Truman was unlikely to have been swayed by it anyhow. (Even the opposition of 5-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII, to US use of an atomic bomb on Japan, which he expressed forcefully to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was ignored.)
Hall was horrified at the destructive power of the atomic bomb. He was also aware as an atomic scientist of the vastly more powerful fusion bombs that by war’s end were being looked into at Los Alamos, Hall had also heard word around Los Alamos that Gen. Gates at a dinner party in March 1944 for senior British physicists working at Los Alamos had told astonished guests that the real purpose of the bomb project was “to subdue the Russians.” This, shockingly, was said even as Russia’s Red Army, after staggering losses, was beating Germany’s crack troops and driving them back to Germany.
Hall, by the summer fall of 1944 had already become concerned that the US would emerge from WWII with a monopoly on the atomic bomb and an evident willingness to use its advantage to maximum effect. He rather presciently decided that the only way to prevent that situation would be to have another country with the bomb, one that would act to prevent that monopoly. He and his friend, Harvard roommate and later courier and co-conspirator Saville Sax, realized early that the only country capable of standing up to a nuclear US would be a nuclear USSR (which it must be noted was a key US ally against Germany and had done the main job of defeating Hitler’s Wehrmacht).
Hall passed his most significant information—many pages of carefully copied drawings and detailed descriptions of the construction of the plutonium bomb—to the American Soviet spy Lona Cohen, shortly after the Hiroshima bombing during a handoff in Albuquerque. She in turn delivered it to the NKVD in the Soviet Consulate in NY which sent it on to Moscow in the diplomatic pouch.
That information convinced both struggling Soviet nuclear scientists and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to put off efforts to develop a uranium bomb. Instead they decided to focus all available resources in the war-ravaged country on making a copy of the US plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki. They succeeded in testing that copy in the Semipalatinsk desert on Aug. 29, 1949, stunning US scientific and military experts who had predicted such a feat would take the USSR at least a decade.
It was a good thing for the Soviet people (and probably for humanity) that their country got its own atomic bomb when it did. Unknown to Americans, even today, the US, almost immediately after the war ended, had begun working on developing the hydrogen bomb, a nuclear fusion weapon of unlimited destructive power. Even more urgently important, work had begun on how to mass produce fission bombs of the size used on Japan, which at the time were being painstakingly and slowly assembled by hand.
The plan for these new mass-produced bombs, given various names like Broiler, Sizzle, and Shakedown as the number of bombs in the stockpile grew, but eventually called Operation Dropshot, was initially to use 400 of those Nagasaki-sized weapons to destroy 100 cities and other targets in the Soviet Union. Some bombs were also to target cities in the newly established Peoples Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of Vietnam and even major cities in the captive eastern European countries occupied by the USSR after the war and eventually known as the Warsaw Pact nations. During the late 1940s, the target date for this first-strike holocaust was 1954, the year (called A-Day by nuclear strategists in Washington), after which it was assumed that without a preemptive attack, the Soviets would have nuclear weapons with which to retaliate.
Once the Soviets had tested their first bomb in 1949, Washington’s mass murder scheme was thankfully put on indefinite hold, replaced by the Cold War arms race.
Critics will will no doubt say that the young physicist Hall and several other spies, notably the German/British physicist Klaus Fuchs, were traitors worse than America’s Benedict Arnold or Britain’s Mata Hari. But consider the millions of people, mostly civilians of third-world nations who have been killed as a result of US military actions since the end of World War II, and without any nuclear weapons being employed. If seems clear that had the Soviets not obtained their own bomb when they did, their country, and other less developed communist nations, would have likely been leveled to prevent their getting the bomb. Evidence for this view is how close the US came to using atom bombs in 1946 against Soviet troops preparing to move into Iran to claim rights to the oil field across the border from the USSR as promised at the Yalta conference, in 1948 during the Berlin Blockade and in 1954 to stave off capture of the French forces seeking to retake their Indochina colony from the Viet Minh independence forces. Threats to use the bomb against the USSR were made in each case but were not carried out for various different reasons.
Frightening as the Cold War era was (and I personally remember the anxiety back as far as 1955 when I was six!), and as scary as the current situation is with the Ukraine war and US-supplied weapons being used by the Ukrainian military deep inside Russian borders, there has been no use of a nuclear weapon in war since the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
That was the bomb Ted Hall helped design and that he helped the Soviets replicate.
Hall, who was never charged or prosecuted for his spying (long story there, all explained in my book), said he had hoped that if two nations had the bomb, neither would dare use it, fearing to do so would be a murder-suicide act, and that they as a result would ultimately ban it.
That hasn’t happened, although almost all nations of the world have voted to have nuclear weapons banned, and that ban is now part of the laws of war. The hitch is that all nine nuclear nations, including the US and USSR, have refused to sign on to the nuclear bomb ban and the international law has no enforcement mechanism.
Getting those nine nations to join the ban is the task ahead of humanity, and especially of the citizens of the recalcitrant nuclear nations.
At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington, the focus was on Ukraine. In the Washington Declaration, the NATO leaders wrote, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO.” Ukraine formally applied to join NATO in September 2022, but soon found that despite widespread NATO support, several member states (such as Hungary) were uneasy with escalating a conflict with Russia. As early as NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit, the members welcomed “Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” However, the NATO council hesitated because of the border dispute with Russia; if Ukraine had been hastily brought into NATO and if the border dispute escalated (as it did), then NATO would be dragged into a direct war against Russia.
Over the last decade, NATO has expanded its military presence along Russia’s borders. At the NATO summit in Wales (September 2014), NATO implemented its Readiness Action Plan (RAP). This RAP was designed to increase NATO’s military forces in Eastern Europe “from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.” Two years later, in Warsaw, NATO decided to develop an enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) in the Baltic Sea area with “battlegroups stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.” The distance between Moscow and the border regions of Estonia and Latvia is a mere 780 kilometers, which is well within the range of a short-range ballistic missile (1,000 kilometers). In response to the NATO build-up, Belarus and Russia conducted Zapad 2017, the largest military exercise by these countries since 1991. Reasonable people at that time would have thought that de-escalation should have become the priority on all sides. But it was not.
Provocations from the NATO member states continued. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the NATO countries settled on a course of fully backing Ukraine and preventing any negotiations toward a peaceful settlement of the dispute. The United States and its NATO allies sent arms and equipment to Ukraine, with U.S. high military officials making provocative statements about their war aims (to “weaken Russia,” for instance). Ukrainian discussions with Russian officials in Belarus and Turkey were set aside by NATO, and Ukraine’s own war aim (merely for Russian forces to withdraw) was ignored. Instead, NATO countries spent billions of dollars on weapons and watched on the sidelines as Ukrainian soldiers died in a futile war. On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, Royal Netherlands Navy Admiral Rob Bauer, who is the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, told Foreign Policy, “The Ukrainians need more to win than just what we have set up.” In other words, the NATO states provide Ukraine with just enough weapons to continue the conflict, but not to change the situation on the ground (either by a victory or a defeat). The NATO states, it seems, want to use Ukraine to bleed Russia.
Blame China
NATO’s Washington Declaration contains a section that is puzzling. It says that China “has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine.” The term “decisive enabler” has attracted significant attention within China, where the government immediately condemned NATO’s characterization of the war in Ukraine. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that NATO’s statement “is ill-motivated and makes no sense.” Shortly after Russian troops entered Ukraine, China’s Wang Wenbin of the Foreign Ministry said that “all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity should be respected and upheld.” This is precisely the opposite of cheerleading for the war, and since then China has put forward peace proposals to end the war. Accusations that China has supplied Russia with “lethal aid“ have not been substantiated by the NATO countries, and have been denied by China.
Lin Jian asked two key questions at the July 11, 2024, press conference in Beijing: “Who exactly is fueling the flames? Who exactly is ‘enabling’ the conflict?”. The answer is clear since it is NATO that rejects any peace negotiations, NATO countries that are arming Ukraine to prolong the war, and NATO leaders who want to expand NATO eastwards and deny Russia’s plea for a new security architecture (all of this is demonstrated by German parliamentarian Sevim Dağdelen in her new bookon NATO’s 75-year history). When Hungary’s Viktor Orban—whose country holds the six-month presidency of the European Union—went to both Russia and Ukraine to talk about a peace process, it was the European states that condemned this mission. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, responded with a harsh rebuke of Orban, writing that “Appeasement will not stop Putin.” Alongside such comments come further promises by the Europeans and the North Americans to provide Ukraine with funds and weapons for the war. Strikingly, the new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte even allowed Ukraine to use an F-16 jet from the Netherlands given to Ukraine when Rutte was the prime minister of that country to strike Russian soil. That would mean that weapons from a NATO country would be used directly to attack Russia, which would allow Russia to strike back at a NATO state.
NATO’s statement that characterizes China as a “decisive enabler” permitted the Atlantic alliance to defend its “out of area” operation in the South China Sea as part of its defense of its European partners. That is what permitted NATO to say, as outgoing Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a press conference, that NATO must “continue to strengthen our partnerships, especially in the Indo-Pacific.” These Indo-Pacific Partners are Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. Interestingly, the largest trading partner of three of these countries is not the United States, but China (Japan is the outlier). Even the analysts of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank have concluded that “a delinking of global production processes and consumption from China is not in sight.” Despite this, these countries have recklessly increased the pressure against China (including New Zealand, which is now eager to join Pillar II of the AUKUS Treaty among Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom). NATO has said that it remains open to “constructive engagement” with China, but there is no sign of such a development.
Photograph Source: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P098967 / Unknown author – CC BY-SA 3.0
Bring out the bon bons, the bubbles, and the praise-filled memoranda for that old alliance. At the three-quarter century mark of its existence, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is showing itself to be a greater nuisance than ever, gossiping, meddling, and dreaming of greater acts of mischief under the umbrella of manufactured insecurity. It is also being coquettish to certain countries (Ukraine, figures prominently in the wooing stakes) making promises it can never make good.
Its defenders, as is to be expected, see something very different before the mirror. They call the alliance a call for freedom, its enduring importance a reassuring presence. The more appropriate response would be convenience, the assurance of an alliance with collective obligations that would, given the circumstances, compel all parties to wage war against the aggressor. In terms of alliances, this is one programmed for conflict.
NATO is a crusted visage of a problem long dead. In the Cold War theatre, it featured in the third act of every play involving the United States and the USSR, a performance that always took place under the threat of a nuclear cloud. Any confrontation in Europe’s centre could have resulted in the pulverization of an entire continent. For its part, Moscow had the Warsaw Pact countries.
At the end of the Cold War, NATO had effectively ceased to be relevant as a deterrent force on the European continent. A new cut of clothing was sought for the members. Rather than passing into retirement, it became, in essence, a broader auxiliary force of US power. In the absence of a countering Soviet Union, the organisation adopted a gonzo approach to international security.
In 1999, the alliance became a killing machine for evangelical humanitarianism, ostensibly seeking to protect one ethnic group against the predations of another in Kosovo. In 2011, it involved itself in military operations against a country posing no threat to any members of the alliance. NATO, along with a steady air attacks and missile barrages, enforced the no-fly zone over Libya as the country was ushered to imminent, post-Qaddafi collapse. When the International Security Force (ISAF) completed its ill-fated mission in Afghanistan in 2015, NATO was again on the scene.
NATO’s Strategic Concept document released at the end of June 2022 took much sustenance from the Ukraine conflict while warning about China’s ambitions, a fairly crude admission that it wished to move beyond its territorial limits. “The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.” Why such an alliance should worry about such eastward ambitions illustrates the wayward dysfunction of the association.
On April 27, 2022 the then UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and ultimately doomed prime minister pushed the view that NATO needed to be globalised. Her Mansion House speech at the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet was one of those cat-out-of-the-bag disclosures that abandons pretence revealing, in its place, a disturbing reality.
After making it clear that NATO’s “open door policy” was “sacrosanct”, Truss also saw security in global terms, another way of promoting a broader commitment to international mischief. She rejected “the false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security. In the modern world we need both.” A “global NATO” was needed. “By that I don’t mean extending the membership to those from other regions. I mean that NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats.”
Praise for the alliance tends to resemble an actuarial assessment about risk and security. Consider this from former US ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute. NATO, in his mind, is “the single most important geostrategic advantage over any potential adversary or competitor”. With pride, he notes that “Russia and China have nothing comparable. The 32 allies in NATO train together, operate together, live together under a standing unified command structure, making them far more capable militarily than any ad-hoc arrangement.”
There is nothing to suggest in these remarks that NATO was one of the single most provocative security arrangements that helped precipitate a war that torments and convulses eastern Europe. Many a Washington mandarin has been of such a view: moving closer to Russia’s borders was not merely an act of diplomatic condescension but open military provocation.
One should, with tireless consistency, refer to the State Department’s doyen of Soviet studies, George F. Kennan, on this very point. In 1997, he issued the appropriate warning about the decision to expand NATO towards the Russian border: “Such a decision may be expected to inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
This speared provocation is repeated in the 2024 NATO Declaration made in Washington this month. It is effaced of history and context, Ukraine being a tabula rasa in the international system with no role other than that of glorified victimhood, a charity case abused in the international system. “We stand in unity and solidarity in the face of a brutal war of aggression on the European continent and a critical time for our security,” states the declaration.
Kyiv is promised aid under the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine program, though such provision is, in the manner of an all-promising eunuch, crowned by a caveat: “NSATU will not, under international law, make NATO a party to the conflict.” The prospects for future conflict are guaranteed by the promise, however empty, that, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO.”
The declaration goes on to speak on the “interoperable” and “integrated” nature of Kyiv’s operations with the alliance. “As Ukraine continues this vital work, we will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.”
NATO’s warring streak was further affirmed at the Washington summit by injudicious remarks about trying to make it “Trump proof” – a testament to the sleepless nights the strategists must be having at the prospect of a presidency that may change the order of things. He is bound to have gotten wind of that fact. Aggravated, the Republican contender may well withdraw the US imperium from the alliance’s clutches. In Washington’s absence, the NATO family might retreat into fractious insignificance. The ensuing anarchy, rather than stimulating war, may well do the opposite.
“There are days—this is one of them—when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. …I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they … have become in themselves moral monsters.”
– James Baldwin
The United States has slid into a form of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, evident in its cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies unleashed since the 1970s. At the heart of its authoritarian and rogue state practices is a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly defined by the rise of mass violence and a punishing state both at home and abroad. The U.S. has morphed into an empire run by a callous, greedy, billionaire class that has destroyed all remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now wraps itself not only in the flag but the sordid embrace of the Christian cross. America has transitioned from the old-style celebration of unchecked individualism depicted by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged to the glorified greed advocated by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, and the inhumane, psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman, dressed up in high fashion in American Psycho. This evolution of barbarity is further exemplified in the criminogenic images of right-wing Texas Christian preachers calling for gay people to “be shot in the back of the head.”[2] Welcome to Trump’s America.
With the death of the social contract emerged what Guy Debord called “a society of the spectacle,” characterized by death-dealing rituals, mass spectacles, and a psychotic infatuation with weapons of death. What is new here is a cultural sphere where irrationality functions as cultural glamour, and politics is dressed up in the ether of violence–a much-embraced ethical tranquilizer. The spectacle of the outrageous celebrates violence with a smirk. Remember those MAGA politicians wearing AR-15 pins after reports emerged of children’s bodies being blown apart in Uvalde, Texas. This spectacularizing of weapons of death adorned in family and distorted religious values was evident when right-wing politicians recently posed with AR-style rifles for Christmas card portraits, and churches in conservative states gave them away in raffles.
An ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action. Crimes against humanity now become fodder for video games and the Hollywood disimagination machine. All of which creates an ecology of cruelty and sadism that promotes a “symbiosis of suffering and spectacle.”[3]
Reuters reports that conservatives are pushing a bill in Congress to designate the AR-15 style rifle as “the National Gun of the United States.” Recently, an image surfaced of four elderly women in a church holding AR-15 rifles as part of a blessing ceremony. The staunch of death and moral vacuity oozes from these narratives. Some of the deadliest mass shootings in American history took place with these assault rifles. Against this mass psychology of fascism and ethicide is a history of children’s bodies blown apart by these weapons: 20 children killed in Newtown, Connecticut; 19 children killed in Uvalde, Texas; 17 students and educators killed in Parkland, Florida; 58 people killed and over 500 wounded in Las Vegas with assault weapons. Rather than mourn the deaths of children and others, the right-wing celebrates the weapons that killed them.
Even the widely condemned assassination attempt on former President Trump was turned into a promotional gimmick by the MAGA crowd, who sold sneakers featuring an image from the incident. Additionally, mindless conservative pundits and the MAGA propaganda machine leveraged the assassination attempt to portray Trump, once again, as a messianic figure, blending cultism, thoughtless loyalty and fanatical religious devotion into a toxic mix of fascist politics.
A culture that celebrates not just violence but the weapons that support it has lost its hold on humanity and celebrates itself through the rituals of barbarism. Violence is all that seems left for a large segment of society to feel anything, whether it be a sense of community or the weak pulse in the collective corpse-like body. In a society that turns AR-15 weapons into icons of violent masculinity and the adoration of death, all that is left are the screams of children and others who have symbols of the bloodlust of a dark fascist present and future.
Violence is once again in the news with the assassination attempt on Trump. But rather than provoke a national conversation about violence as the most important mode of communication, commodification, and national identity, it is removed from the pathology of state-sponsored violence, a cultural mode of entertainment, a valued commodity, and any sense of responsibility or social and ethical consequences.
In light of the assassination attempt on Trump, the term “assassination” blazes across the front pages of the mainstream press and social media, serving more as a political ad and tool of propaganda than as a warning about a society mired in violence. What seems to have gone unnoticed in the mainstream media is a certain irony surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life, given his repeated false claims that the Feds and Biden were trying to assassinate him. In this case, politically motivated, hollow talk about falsely alleged assassination attempts on Trump moved from the spectacularized realm of fear-mongering and fictional victimhood to a potentially deadly reality. Make no mistake the visceral and dangerous reality of such violence—unadorned by lies and political opportunism–has taught Trump nothing. Trump has a long history of mocking violence against others, such as the near-fatal attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a deranged right-winger. As a target of such violence, Trump reworks the language of violence into a narcissistic public performance” of victimhood and the enduring strongman.
The horror here is unbelievable, wrapped in an arrogant blend of economic, political, and religious fundamentalism that does not merely cover up violence but is complicit in it. Violence and the AR-15 assault rifle have become the new symbols of this true assassination, emblematic of a culture of predatory carnage and cruelty reminiscent of the horrors of a fascist past. This is a violence that has more cultural currency than justice, compassion, care, and the radical values of a true democracy. It is a violence wedded to the celebration of the death of historical consciousness, the assassination of truth, an indifference if not emotional investment in the suffering and death of millions of children from poverty, war, and disease.
The clickbait image of the day shouldn’t be Trump raising his hand defiantly after an assassination attempt. Instead, it should be a powerful visual of the American flag and the Constitution, both riddled with bullet holes.
Notes.
[1] The title highlights Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). The U.S. government prohibited their sale and the sale of all of Reich’s books including TheMass Psychology of Fascism. He was imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he died in 1957.
[3] Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, “Traffic in Pain,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 9.
Lyndon B. Johnson announcing a bombing halt in Vietnam and his decision not to run for re-election, March 31, 1968. (Wikipedia Commons)
Dinner fare
At 7 pm, GMT, I was tucking into my tabbouleh with pomegranate seeds at the Gem Restaurant in Norwich, when the news flashed on my phone. At first, it was confusing; The Times had posted an update to a story that hadn’t yet been published. It began in medea res: “Biden’s momentous decision to drop out of the race…” Then, a few minutes later, the headline appeared, all in caps (Trump-style): BIDEN DROPS OUT OF THE 2024 RACE followed by a feature, pre-written as if for an obituary. It covered the basics: calamitous debate performance, advanced age, nomination challenges ahead, and highlights of Biden’s later career. The U.S. paper of record mercifully omitted any account of his undistinguished 35-years in the U.S. Senate. While considering a promising plate of falafel and humus, I reviewed that career in my mind.
To say Biden’s pre-presidential career was undistinguished is generous. As a young U.S. Senator, he befriended, and sometimes voted with the notorious racists, senators Strom Thurmond, John Stennis and Jesse Helms, to oppose school integration. Later, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden’s failure to support Anita Hill in her testimony concerning sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, facilitated the appointment to the Supreme Court of arguably the worst justice in its history. His co-sponsorship of the 1994 crime bill sent tens of thousands of poor and mostly Black men to prison. Biden’s consistent support for the banking and credit card industries at the expense of consumers needlessly impoverished the very middle class families he claimed to champion. And his 2002 vote in favor of George Bush’s “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” resulted in decades of conflict and millions of deaths. It wasn’t just his vote that was egregious: As Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (he has been a promiscuous occupier of committee chairs), Biden rigged the hearing so that opposition voices were sidelined and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — the causus belli – were presented as fact instead of the fiction many of us knew them to be.
When in 2008, Barak Obama chose charismatically challenged Biden to be his veep, it seemed the fitting end to a tired pol’s career. The position, as Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice-President John Nance Garner told Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960, “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” True to the observation, Biden did little and said less in his eight years in office. In 2016, the 73-year-old meekly accepted being shunted aside in favor of Obama’s preferred presidential hopeful, former Secretary of State, former New York Senator, former First Lady, former Republican, always cold-warrior Hillary Clinton. (Thanks for that, Joe.) Four years later, just when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the nomination to run against President Trump – politically weakened by his disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic — Biden was thrust forward by the Democratic establishment in recognition of his decades of mediocrity, mendacity and obeisance:
“I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”
(Gilbert and Sullivan, “Sir Joseph Porter’s Song,” HMS Pinafore, 1878)
Biden as president
Until February 2022 Biden – to everyone’s surprise — was one of the better presidents in recent history. Though he wasted months negotiating with himself and a pair of weak U.S. senators (Mancin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona), he eventually got passed a nearly $2 trillion Covid relief bill, $1 trillion infrastructure package, and $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act that included significant investments to combat climate change, and support for low income, environmental justice communities. Suddenly, Biden was looking positively Rooseveltian! But just when a Green New Deal appeared to be the horizon, Biden went all Johnsonian instead. He went to war.
I won’t rehearse here the causes – long and short term – of the war in Ukraine. I have written about them here extensively, as have at least a dozen other Counterpunch writers with far more knowledge and experience than me. Suffice to say, the consensus is that this is a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia, with Ukraine paying the biggest price. The war will soon end on the same terms available before it started: Russia will keep possession of Crimea and gain some territory in the disputed Donbas region; Ukraine will gain membership in the E.U. and eventually in NATO; and a long-term peace treaty will be signed with Russia, possibly guaranteed by third parties. That the war still grinds on is a colossal waste unless you are a U.S. or European aerospace, munitions or fossil fuel corporation.
Biden’s second war, now in its second year, has cost the lives of more than 100,000 Palestinians and destroyed Gaza’s rudimentary infrastructure. He didn’t instigate it, but he acceded to Israeli polices that did. Prime Minister Netanyahu openly pursued a strategy of triangulation – supporting Hamas while weakening the Palestinian Authority — in order forestall the establishment of a Palestinian state, and enable Jewish Israeli settlers to claim more and more Arab land in the West Bank. That program blew up on Oct.7, 2023, at a cost of more than a thousand innocent Israeli lives.
Hamas is a vicious and unscrupulous military and religious cult, but they are the organic result of decades of oppression and international machination. The idea of erasing them, as the Israeli government claims to be doing, is ludicrous. Where there is oppression, there is resistance, and the more grotesque the former, the more perverse latter. Israel is not fighting Hamas, it is perpetrating a genocide, and Joe Biden has become its accomplice. Whatever else he has done, and whatever else he will ever do, his support for Netanyahu’s war of elimination will mark his name and tenure in office as surely as the war against Vietnam did Johnson’s. When the latter quit the race for re-election in March 1968, it wasn’t his electoral prospects that decided him, it was those damn kids chanting: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”
Biden speech next week
Alas, there is no evidence that Biden ended his run for re-election because of student protestors who have called him ‘Genocide Joe.” He quit reluctantly, without contrition or self-understanding. He sees himself as head of the “indispensable nation” and as acknowledged leader of the free world. He believes, sincerely it seems, that he’s the best candidate to defeat Trump and fend off the American bend toward fascism. In both respects he’s as delusional as Trump, if not as narcissistic. Now that he is out, there is at least a chance to beat Trump and if not end the slide toward autocracy, at least slow it enough that progressive forces might have a chance to regroup and resist in the future.
Biden still has an opportunity to accomplish a lot more. He can offer magnanimity and hope, like Johnson did in his speech from the Oval Office on March 31, 1968. (I remember it vividly, though I was just 12.) He began by announcing a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. “We ask that talks begin promptly, that they be serious talks on the substance of peace.” He continued:
Our purpose in this action is… to save the lives of brave men – and to save the lives of innocent women and children. It is to permit the contending forces to move closer to a political settlement. And tonight, I call upon the United Kingdom and I call upon the Soviet Union – as cochairmen of the Geneva Conferences, and as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – to do all they can to move from the unilateral act of de-escalation that I have just announced toward genuine peace in Southeast Asia.”
Only then did Johnson address the political crisis at home:
“There is division in the American house now. There is divisiveness among us all tonight. And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and the prospects of peace for all peoples…. And believing this as I do, I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year…. I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office–the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
History did not play out as Johnson hoped. His Democratic successors were successively marginalized (Eugene McCarthy), assassinated (Robert Kennedy) and defeated at the ballot box (Hubert Humphrey). Nixon prolonged the war for another five years at a tremendous cost in lives, resources and opportunities.
Biden’s should speak about more than just domestic politics in the next days and months. He should announce a peace initiative to end the Ukraine war, and an embargo on funding and weapons deliveries to Israel until it withdraws its forces, and forges a peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction agreement with the chosen representatives of the Palestinian people. Such initiatives would help bring peace to two areas of the world where it is desperately needed, as well as secure victory for Biden’s successor. It would also grant Biden himself a measure of historical redemption.
I try to avoid watching the Republican and Democratic conventions, not because I don’t care about US electoral politics but because the coverage tends to be worse than the spectacle itself. In the case of the Republican party and Donald Trump, the whole cursed thing is not only fiction, it’s cheesily produced fiction. Cheesy and treated as if it is anything more than bullshit sound and bullshit fury. Apparently, a fair number of US residents want nothing more (or less as the case may be). This truth is what made so many of us wonder whether or not Trump’s so-called brush with death the Saturday before the convention wasn’t also staged.
I’m not going to speculate on the shooting in Pennsylvania. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter what the alleged shooter’s motives were, nor does it matter whether or not Trump was seriously wounded. The Trumpists got what they wanted—another excuse to raise their con man hero on the pedestal they’ve erected for him. It’s a pedestal built from lies, millions and millions of ill-begotten dollars, right wing preachers and bishops calling themselves Christians and speaking in the tongues of Satan, and a fossil fuel industry intent on destroying the earth before their grandbabies are old enough to buy a legal drink. The only thing more grandiose than that pedestal is Donald Trump’s impression of himself. Like the worshippers of the golden calf erected under Aaron’s command in the Bible’s Book of Exodus, these Christians and their camp followers revel in their corruption. If you know the story, the Israelites’ god wanted to kill them all after the episode with the calf, but Moses talked god out of it. Then he brought the ten commandments to his people. If you believe in the story, you could argue it’s been downhill from there.
The upcoming Democratic shindig has the potential to be a bit more interesting, especially now that Biden stepped down. The already written script goes out the window. A new personality will be given the job of campaigning against Donald Trump who, despite his overblown confidence and the sycophantic hemming and hawing of most mainstream mediots in the US news business, does not have the White House wrapped up. The fascist tendencies put into play during his presidency and his two previous campaigns are now front and center. Indeed, they form the basis for his entire campaign. Given the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding presidential immunity—a decision which essentially gives the president immunity from prosecution for acts performed as president—a Trumpist future is a fascist future.
It’s not like the United States is the only nation in the global north where the rulers are having a difficult time with the idea of democracy. The French pretender Macron and his party came in third in the parliamentary elections there. The fascist/ultraright coalition came in second and the leftist coalition garnered the most votes. The reaction from Macron was swift. He refused to let them take power and quickly began cobbling together a coalition made up of his neoliberal party and non-fascist conservatives. The lesson to be drawn from this is easy. Liberals would rather align themselves with the right than allow the Left to take power. This is an old lesson that has proven true at least since Hindenberg made Hitler the Chancellor because both were afraid of the German Left.
There are those who continue to insist that Trump is a Russian asset. They point to his friendly overtures to Putin and his desire to end the war between Russia and Ukraine as proof of this. While it does seem that Trump prefers a good relationship with Russia more than the Democrats, the idea that he is somehow a tool of Moscow is impossible for me to accept. The United States has historically tried to play Beijing and Moscow against each other. The best example of this occurred while Nixon was president and he opened up relations with China, followed by a policy of detente with the USSR. Trump isn’t a Russian asset just because the policies he suggests occasionally align with those of Moscow. No. He’s just a product of the US in the last half of the twentieth century. Greed, triumphalism, racist and a worshiper of mammon; these are what defines Donald Trump and they are what defines the United States in 2024.
A quick summary, then. French ruler Macron rejects and attempts to subvert the results of the French election. Trump avoids prosecution in most of his trials after his court gives him immunity for his crimes. Then a wound smaller than one received when a kid falls off a bike appears on his head when another misled and misplaced young white male shooter fires a rifle at a rally and kills a Trump supporter. The Labour party wins elections in Britain, but the policies of that warfare state continue, doing its part in the genocide of Palestinians. The nuclear clock ticks closer to midnight because of Washington and Russia’s refusal to end the stalemated war in Ukraine. Moronic millenialists wearing bandages on their ears in support of their false prophet think turning back the hands of time to a fairy tale moment when rich white men did good things is somehow the way to deal with an uncertain future. The fraud J. D. Vance accepts his role as Horatio to Trump’s Hamlet. Or maybe Vance is Curly to Trump’s Moe (as in the Three Stooges, nyuk nyuk.) Meanwhile, the other guy isn’t the other guy anymore.
The sideshow is now definitely a shitshow. Hang in there.
“It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.”
— Henry Miller
+ Last Saturday a 20-year-old kitchen worker named Thomas Crooks, described as a loner nerd by friends, asked his father if he could borrow the family AR-15 semi-automatic rifle for some target practice at the local shooting range. Dad handed him the gun and sent young Tom on his way. But Tom bypassed the shooting range and drove 45 miles north from Bethel Park to Butler, Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was presiding over an outdoor rally. Along the way, Crooks stopped to load up with 50 rounds of ammo and buy a five-foot tall ladder.
Crooks arrived at the scene in Butler after the Secret Service and local cops had swept the area. He used his ladder to climb to the roof of a small warehouse about 450 feet from where Trump was speaking. The warehouse was outside of the primary security area under the supervision of the Secret Service and had been handed over to local police and sheriffs, those heroic figures so often valorized as the “sovereign leaders” of rural America by MAGA. Three police snipers were inside the building Crooks used as his shooting perch, but none of them were on the roof.
Several rally-goers told the local police they’d seen a man (or man-child) walking the perimeter of the site and then climbing onto the roof with a gun. Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said one of his deputies climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who saw the officer and turned toward him, pointing his AR-15. Rather than confront Crooks, the deputy dropped to safety. A few seconds later Crooks started firing. One of his eight shots nicked Trump’s ear and others hit three people at the rally, killing one and seriously wounding two. Crooks was then shot and killed by the Secret Service’s “counter-sniper team.” He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo from Demolition Ranch, a youtube channel featuring gun and demolition porn.
Trump, dribbles of blood streaked across his face, was marshaled off the stage by the Secret Service, while pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump was taken to a local hospital, where his ear was swabbed, and he was quickly sent on his way. Trump spent much of the next day playing golf.
As for Trump’s would-be assassin, Crooks didn’t seem overtly political. His politics were the politics of the gun. He searched online for the names of Biden and Trump, equally, it seemed and was likely to have pulled the trigger on the first one who entered the sights of his AR-15. There was just a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as he was concerned. Crooks is the next variation on Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucked up white kid, working a dead-end job in a shabbily run nursing home, who ventured forth bound for glory with a semi-automatic rifle in the Republic of the Shooter.
+++
+ Crooks fits the profile of every young, alienated white mass shooter since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into the lunchroom at Columbine looking to settle scores with anyone who’d bullied, laughed at or ignored them in gym class–only now the semi-automatic rifles can be bought more easily, openly carried nearly everywhere and amped up to full-auto with a bump stock.
+ Laura Bassett: “A white Republican man shot a white Republican man because of critical race theory?”
+ One of Crooks’ classmates at Bethel Park High School told the New York Times that as a freshman Crooks became a frequent object of ridicule by bullies at the school. “Those other kids would always say, ‘Hey, look, at the school shooter over there. They would tease him about his poor hygiene, body odor. He was an easy target.”
+ The family of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks is listed in a 2016 Trump campaign database as gun-owning Republicans who live a “gun-owning lifestyle.” The Trump campaign targeted them for pro-gun messaging. When the FBI searched the Crooks’s home, they found more than a dozen guns.
+ There’s no question that the Trump shooting will increase the power of the very same “Deep State” institutions so many MAGA people fear and believe were behind the plot to assassinate him.
+ FDR not only survived an attempted coup plotted by Wall Street tycoons in 1933 but he was also shot at while riding in an open car in Miami during that same year. One of the errant bullets killed the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak.
+ Nixon after George Wallace was shot in 1972 at the Laurel Shopping Center parking lot in suburban DC: “We must all stand together to eliminate this vicious threat to our public life. We must not permit the shadow of violence to fall over our country again.” There’s no originality to American politics anymore. The same trite banalities are recycled over and over.
+ Trump was shot with a 5.56×45mm bullet, commonly called a Five-Five-Six NATO round– the standard cartridge for NATO rifles. No way the US stays in NATO if he’s reelected.
Five-Five-Six NATO round.
+++
+ One of the principal victims of the Trump shooting appears to be the Biden campaign, which stood down in the aftermath of the shooting, as if they were conceding the election to Trump.
+ I’ve never seen a party go from 8 years of sustained hysteria over a coming political apocalypse into a state of near-catatonic passivity faster than the Biden Democrats…
+ Biden waited hours to make any kind of statement on the shooting. Then when he did, he botched it, saying “There’s no place for violence in American politics. In America, we resolve our differences at the battle [sic] box. You know, that’s how we do it, at the battle [sic] box, not with bullets.”
+ The official White House transcript of Biden’s Trump shooting press conference where he repeatedly referred to the Ballot Box as the “Battle” (respelled “Battol” by his nursemaid staff) Box…
+ A few hours after it was reported that Biden said he’d be willing to step down on the medical advice of his doctor, the White House announced that Biden had tested positive for COVID-19, the latest victim of the pandemic he said, “I, and I alone, ended.”
+ Biden’s doctor sent out the following note on the president’s condition…
+ A “non-productive cough with general malaise” sounds like not only a description of Biden’s health but his entire campaign.
+ Before the COVID diagnosis (or at least its public announcement), Biden had met with Hollywood mogul and Biden advisor Jeffrey Katzenberg in Las Vegas, who warned the president that the patience of big donors in the party “is wearing thin, and their cash soon will, too.”
+ Yes, you are. But this is not a recognized defense against complicity in genocide.
+ At a raucous meeting last weekend with House Democrats, Biden shouted down Rep. Jason Crow, the Colorado Democrat, who asked him about the importance of “national security” to Democratic middle-class voters. According to an account by Julia Ioffe in PuckNews, which was not disputed by the White House, Biden blustered: “First of all, I think you’re dead wrong about national security. You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who did the Pacific Basin! Tell me who did something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son!!…We’ve got Korea and Japan working together! I put AUKUS together! Anyway…Things are in chaos and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever…”
“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President to our voters,” Crow calmly insisted.
“You oughta talk about it!” Biden blurted. “On national security, nobody has been I better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me ONE! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”
+ As for the weird line about Biden doing “something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star, Crow, a Democrat from Colorado who sits on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, is a former Army Ranger, who served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions during the Battle of Samawah. Biden, like Trump, received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War.
+ There’s something psychologically twisted about Biden diminishing the meaning of his son’s bronze star to promote his own lofty achievements in foreign policy, which largely consist of a nuclear submarine deal with Australia, an internecine bloodbath in Ukraine and a genocide in Gaza.
+ Biden’s rant was downright Nixonian in his hubris and sense of self-importance, though in more garbled syntax than Tricky Dickie ever used, even after a few glasses of wine had twisted his tongue.
+ A note about Nixon’s drinking. Most people had him pegged for a whiskey guy. But Nixon favored fine wines, particularly Chateau Lafite Rothschild (at $650 a bottle), which he jealously reserved for his own consumption. Even at state dinners, Nixon ordered his staff to serve his guests vin ordinaire, with towels wrapped around the bottle’s labels to hide the origins of the cheap table wine they were being offered.
+ Later that day, Chuck Schumer had a one-on-one meeting with Biden in Rehoboth, where the Senate leader told Biden it would be in the “best interests of the country, the party and Biden” if he withdrew from the election. Schumer’s office didn’t deny the report and told ABCNew’s Jonathan Karl, the senator relayed “the views of his caucus.” ABC also reported that House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered the message, followed by Obama himself.
+ Was it Biden’s assertion earlier this week to the NAACP that “I know what a Blackjob is: it’s the VicePresident of the United States!” that was the final straw for Obama?
+ Ezra Klein: “It’s not just that Schumer told Biden he needed to step aside. It’s that Biden didn’t step aside, and so now the meeting is being leaked to build pressure and signal to others that they can act.”
+++
+ It’s gotten so bad that Biden now has trouble even reading off the Teleprompter. During his Vegas speech to the NAACP, he squinted at the screen and still misread text promising a 5 percent cap on rent increases for a cap on rent increases larger than $55.
+ This week a desperate Biden suddenly endorsed imposing term limits for Supreme Court justices, but not for himself, even though he’s 82, and has served 6 terms in the US Senate, two as vice president and one as president.
+ The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice was William O. Douglas who served for 36 years, 7 months. Biden served 36 years and 12 days in the Senate. Eight years in the White House as Veep and 3 years and 7 months (so far) in the White House as president. A total of 47 years and 7 months in federal office.
+ A Tale of Two Joe’s: Joe Stalin was elected to the Politburo in 1917 and held some kind of office in the USSR for the next 36 years, until his death by stroke in 1953. His long political tenure was 12 years shorter than Joe Biden’s. Over their decades in office, both Stalin and Biden oversaw genocides and developed personality cults, Stalin’s in the millions, Biden’s in dozens of paid staffers. There the parallels end, however. Stalin did defeat the Nazis; Biden seems determined to let their ideological grandchildren take over his own country.
+ Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 at the age of 75. He was replaced by 69-year-old Yuri Andropov, who died a year and a half later. Andropov was replaced by 73-year-old Konstantine Cherneko, who died a year later. Five years later the Soviet Union was in ruins. Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is probably the movie of our time, but it’s much too funny for our current predicament.
+++
+ In 1988, Biden suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms that he says “changed him into the man he wanted to be.” That “changed man” treated Anita Hill dismissively (1991), wrote the most racist and punitive crime law in US history (1994), wrote a counterterrorism bill that expanded the federal death penalty against people who hadn’t committed murder and became a model for the Patriot Act (1996), proposed cutting Social Security (1995), voted against gay marriage (1996), backed the gutting of welfare (1996), voted to repeal Glass-Steagel, setting the stage for the financial crisis (1999), voted for the Patriot Act (2001) and the Iraq War (2002/3), voted against bankruptcy protections for students (2005) and armed a genocide (2023/4).
+ You know your country is in a terminal tailspin when an overwhelming majority of its citizens want both candidates for president to withdraw.
+ According to a new AP poll: 70% of the country wants Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, including 65% of Democrats and 77% of independents. 57% of the country wants Donald Trump to withdraw.
+ This is the real Biden, equating the assassination attempt on Trump to college kids protesting genocide–not the guy in Detroit on Friday night reading the Sanders/AOC wish list like a political hostage on camera.
+ Dan Berger: “Is Trump the first US presidential candidate to run unopposed?”
+ Biden had a full-blown delusional episode this week during his kid-glove interview with Speedy Morman: “By the way, I’m the guy who did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure the Egyptians opened up the border to let goods through.” The interview aired shortly after Israel dropped 5 US-made 2000-pound bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp in a humanitarian safe zone that killed 100 people, half of them children, and wounded 300 others.
+ Around 4 in 10 voters (38%) say they are less likely to vote for Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza, according to a Century Foundation/Morning Consult poll taken in July.
+ Many progressives hope that Harris, if she becomes the candidate by fiat of Democratic party elites, will use polling like this to call for a dramatic shift of US policy on Israel. But even if she was inclined to make this rhetorical change, it’s complicated, as long as Harris remains Veep and Biden president.See the experience of the hapless HHH, who couldn’t unshackle himself from LBJ on Vietnam and recruit the alienated youth vote he needed to defeat Nixon. How can Harris openly revise or critique the policies of the very government she’s still second in command of? It’s why one of them needs to resign or her possible campaign is likely doomed before it even launches.
+ Sports journalist Bob Costas: “Biden had a chance to be seen by history as a statesman and a patriot. He spared the nation a second Trump term, he could have gone out in a gracious fashion. Now, we can no longer indulge his delusions.”
+ Much of the nostalgia for the good old Biden of yesteryear is political hokum. He’s always been a scheming politician with very conservative political instincts. Only months before the 1980 elections, Biden publicly attacked Jimmy Carter for being soft on crime. In his four years in office, Carter had managed to reduce the federal prison population by 25 percent. Biden, seeking to advance himself as a conservative Democrat, saw an opening and zeroed in on Carter’s lenient drug policies, saying, “I’m trying to alarm the policymakers. I’m saying that business as usual won’t work.”
+ Biden to Black Entertainment Television (BET): “When I originally ran…I said I was gonna be a transitional candidate, and I thought that I’d be able to move from this just pass it on to someone else. But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings a little bit of wisdom. And I think I’ve demonstrated that I know how to get things done for the country, in spite of the fact that we couldn’t get it done. But there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that.”…
+ “In spite of the fact that we couldn’t get it done.”
+ The enthusiasm gap (pre-shooting) is a canyon …
% satisfied with their Party’s presidential nominee:
+ The populist, anti-elite party is running a ticket of graduates from two Ivy League schools: Penn and Yale.
+ According to one of Vance’s friends from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the tipping point that flipped Vance from a relatively sedate Never Trumper into one of the most fanatical MAGA-trons on the Hill was the hostile reaction to Ron Howard’s treacly film of Vance’s book Hillbilliy Elegy. Jivani described the mocking reviews as “the last straw.” Blame it on Will Menaker: “Hillbilly Elegy: Mawmaw and Peepaw use hill people wisdom to help huge, fat pussy get an internship at The Heritage Foundation.”
+ Before JD Vance’s conversion to MAGA, this is what he had to say about Trump…
“Might be America’s Hitler”
“I’m a never Trump guy”
“Never liked him”
“Terrible candidate”
“Idiot if you voted for him”
“Might be a cynical asshole”
“Cultural heroin”
“Noxious and reprehensible”
+ Of course, none of these aspersions bother Trump. Vance has surrendered, bent the knee and kissed Trump’s feet. And Trump will parade him around like a captured warlord, until he tires of him and begins subjecting him to ridicule and humiliation.
+ Dime’s Worth of Difference, Update: Ron Klein, Biden’s former chief of staff, and JD Vance once worked at the same venture capital firm, the DC-based Revolution, which was started by Steve Case, the founder of AOL.
+ Trump, who hit the golf course the day after the assassination attempt, has yet to contact the wife of the man who was killed by a bullet meant for him at his Pennsylvania rally. Because Trump wouldn’t, would he? These aren’t people he really wants to talk to or has anything in common with, except their mutual love of Trump…
+ Vance’s wife, Usha Chilukuri, clerked for both Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts. Usha was born in San Diego to parents who’d recently moved to the states from the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, India. Usha is a practicing Hindu. Her interfaith marriage to JD was blessed by a Hindu priest. All this came as bracing news to many hardcore MAGA-trons, including the execrable Nick Fuentes who said on his white nationalist podcast: “Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
+ Here’s JD Vance (Yale Law grad) ranting about the corrupting influence of higher education: “When I think of this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is wisdom and there is a wisdom to what Richard Nixon said approximately 40 or 50 years ago, he said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.’” Professor diss aside, Nixon would be seen as both a cultural and economic Marxist by this group of fascist clowns.
+ Re: Vance’s assertion (quoting Nixon, approvingly) that “professors are the enemy.” Vance’s wife, Usha, has two degrees from Yale and one from Cambridge. Both of her parents are college professors. As a lawyer, she represented the Regents of the University of California and Usha herself taught American history at Sun Yat-Sen University in…wait for it…Guangzhou, China.
+ Vance on what he would’ve done on January 6: “If I had been VP, I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
+ Vance on retaliating against the Left (meaning anyone to the Left of Joe Manich, I presume): “We should seize the institutions of the Left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program … And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
+ Fox News’ Brit Hume on J.D. Vance: “Did [Vance] get it because he was really the best qualified to be president or did he get it because he sucked up effectively to the nominee?”
+ Here’s JD Vance’s text to a friend calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”
+++
+ A campaign whose most ardent supporters are divorced men features a twice-divorced man paired with a man who opposes divorce, even in cases of spousal violence.
+ Most divorced men plan to vote for Trump, while single women are the most likely to vote against him.
+ The ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter: “The divorced man is such a ripe target of reactionary grievance because he’s someone who once had patriarchal dominance and someone else’s freedom became a threat to it. We are a nation of ex-wives ruled by a confederacy of ex-husbands.”
+ Vance opposes divorce, even in cases of spousal violence: “This is one of the great tricks the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, the idea that well okay these marriages were fundamentally, uh, they were maybe even violent, certainly unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads though I’m skeptical but it really didn’t work out for the kids in those marriages.”
+ Does Vance’s opposition to divorce extend to gay marriages?
+ In 2022, Vance openly called for a national abortion ban, using overtly racist language: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally. Let’s say Reo v. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, you know let’s say 2024. And then, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to them to go have abortions in California. And, of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity. If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy? I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually. Hopefully, we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion and California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”
+ According to documents unearthed by The Lever, JD Vance recently tried to pressure regulators to allow police in anti-abortion states access to women’s private medical records in order to track down and prosecute women seeking legal abortions in other states.
+ JD Vance at the National Conservatism conference, “By the way, I have to beat up on the UK one last time. I was talking with a friend and were talking about, you know, one of the world’s big dangers is nuclear proliferation, though of course, the Biden administration doesn’t care about it. And I was talking about what is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon, maybe Pakistan kinda already counts, and then we finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labor just took over.” This is as stupid as it is bigoted.
+ Gabriel Winant on the Vance schtick: “J. D. Vance is the senator from the unconscious, a voice in Washington for unprocessed trauma, psychic repression, and the monstrous outlets such potent forces can find.”
+ Cleveland journalist Pete Kotz on Vance: “A man so willing to torch his self-respect should not be underestimated. The new J.D. is still under renovation. His acting will improve. And with no soul to weigh him down, his options are limitless.”
+ Mitt Romney on Vance, likely buttressing Vance’s appeal to the current GOP: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”
+++
+ Coast Guard gunboats are patrolling the canals of Milwaukee during the RNC Convention. This will probably soon become a permanent feature of all urban waterways in the US…
+ An executive of the gay dating app Grindr described the Republican National Convention as “basically Grindr’s Super Bowl.”
+ Tuesday was Back the Blue night at the GOP convention. It says something about the truly perverse psychological state of American politics that the RNC convention spent last night heaping praise on law enforcement days after local police retreated from confronting the Trump shooter, while in Milwaukee out-of-town cops providing “security” for the RNC gunned down an unarmed black homeless veteran as a threat more than a mile from the convention.
+ Samuel Sharpe, a homeless Black veteran who was a regular at an encampment in downtown Milwaukee, was shot and killed by police today. Not by Milwaukee Police, but by a Columbus, Ohio police officer, in town to help police the RNC Convention, who shot Sharpe a mile from the convention. “Why are cops from Ohio way out here?” asked David Porter, a friend of Sharpe’s. “Had that been Milwaukee PD that man would be alive right now. I know that because they know him.”
+ As if to emphasize their indifference to the victims of the shooting, they’re having an AR-15 giveaway at the GOP convention…
+ Days after a 20-year-old tried to nail Trump with an AR-15, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota’s law requiring people to be at least 21 to carry a handgun in public is unconstitutional.
+ While the Democrats–for some reason comprehensible only to Democrats–have “paused” fundraising after the failed assassination attempt, a Trump-owned company is selling sneakers for $299 a pair with an image of his bloodied face after the rally shooting…
+ Biden isn’t the only one who is “sick”…
+ Andrea Pitzer: “As an expert on concentration camps, I’ll chime in to say that yes, the Republican mass deportations will include concentration camps.”
+ In an extended post on Twitter, Mark Cuban argued that a lot of tech/crypto bros have thrown their support behind Trump as “a bitcoin play,” arguing that Trump’s inflationary policies and their destabilizing effect on the dollar’s status as a reserve currency will drive up the price of Bitcoin and make them even richer. “How high can the price go,” Cuban wrote. “Way higher than you think.Remember, the market for BTC is global.And the supply has a final limit of 21m BTC, with unlimited fractionalization.
“Keep that in mind as you consider what happens if because of geopolitical uncertainty and the decline of the dollar as the reserve currency, BTC becomes a “safe haven” globally.Which means that BTC could be what countries and all of us look to buy as a means to protect our savings.”
+ Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Marc Andresson and Ben Horowitz, announced they were going to begin sluicing millions into the Trump campaign. According to writer Rick Perlstein, Andresson once said of the rural working class Vance claims to valorize (but actually pathologizes): “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
+ On March 6th, Elon Musk wrote this: “Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.” This week he endorsed Trump and said he was going to donate $45 million a month to a pro-Trump PAC.
+ The center of what, Hell?
+ RFK Jr’s son apparently leaked a video of a phone call from Trump to RFK after the shooting where he promised him a job in his Administration if he would drop out and endorse him, disclosed what Biden told him when he called him, described the bullet that grazed him as like a giant mosquito bite, and ranted about child vaccines, about which Trump said: “When you feed a baby a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines and it looks like its meant for a horse, not a 10 pound or 20-pound baby … Then you see the baby starting to change radically, I’ve seen it too many times. Then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? You and I talked about that a long time ago.”
+ One campaign has a sense of humor even after an assassination attempt, while the other features an old fart taking potshots at his political grandchildren every day, as they try to take away the keys to his nuclear suitcase…Guess which one’s winning?
+ Trump, of course, is scarcely more cogent than Biden these days. Here’s the big news from Trump’s interview with Bloomberg this week: “I’m gonna get you guys a Coke. Would you please come in? Who wants something to drink? Anybody? A little Coke? Cokes and Diet Cokes. One thing I’ll say about Diet Coke, I have never seen anyone thin have a Diet Coke. No, it’s always Diet Coke. And I say it in sort of a friendly way. But people drink Diet Coke. I have never seen a thin person drink it. I’ve just never seen it. These guys come in and they order regular Cokes and they’re thin. So, I don’t know what’s going on with it? So go ahead.”
+ Reuters reported that Biden is “soul searching” about whether to drop out. If Biden’s “soul searching” that means his resignation speech will be written by Jon “Soul of America” Meacham, which will be almost too much to bear…
+ If Biden stands down, he can spend his remaining years–assuming he’s not put in the dock at The Hague or hauled before one of the military tribunals being planned by Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution”–fantasizing that he, and he alone, would have won and blaming the backstabbing Obama elites for a Democratic loss–a much more pleasant twilight of life scenario than the electoral fate that surely awaits him if he doesn’t…
In this essay, I will describe my activism on behalf of Palestinians’ human rights and their right to self-determination, from my graduate student days on a US campus, to the present in my position as a tenured full professor, and the ways in which I’ve experienced attempts at silencing and censorship. These attempts today are more blatant and worrisome than ever before on anyone speaking up for Palestine in the USA, in the wake of the deadly genocidal massacre and famine unleashed by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza after the Oct 7th 2023 attack by Hamas; an attack, which whilst condemnable for loss of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians, must be seen in light of the 75+years of ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people with far more dead, injured and imprisoned than Israelis to date.
When I arrived at Tufts from Pakistan at the end of the 1970s, as a graduate student in English, I was hardly aware of the outsize influence Israeli Zionist ideology exercised on college campuses, an extension of its hold on the halls of Congress and US politics in general. Like many who grew up in what was then called the Third World, especially a new country like Pakistan which for the decades I was growing up was very much in the US camp and through the influence of mass media (TV and cinema in those days)—my generation really bought into the vision the US presented of itself as the bastion of free speech, equality, and a haven for immigrants of all races, colors and creeds. The history of its genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African peoples to fuel its capitalist paradise for the few were of course, facts that were entirely obscured in the popular narrative of America as the Land of the Free and the Brave.
Very quickly after my immersion in my graduate studies in 1979, my political education began to be shaped by cataclysmic global events such as the Iranian Islamic revolution that succeeded in ousting the West’s puppet, Reza Shah Pehlavi, the Afghanistan debacle unfolding on the borders of my home country- yet another example of Big Power rivalry ruining the lives of millions of brown-skinned peoples- and the rejection, by the Arab Summit Conference’s General Assembly, of the Camp David Accords for failing to uphold the UN’s charter, that included the right of return, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine and participation of the PLO in all decisions pertaining to the future of Palestine.
Recognizing, with some of my other fellow international students from Lebanon and Iran, that most students were either quite ignorant of events and histories beyond the borders of the USA, or unaware of the biases of their news media toward the “third world”—we decided to focus on one particularly egregious example of this lack of information: the case of Palestine. Becoming a founding member of the first-ever Student-led Committee on Information about Palestine on my campus, I learnt first-hand how dangerous it was to speak out on behalf of Palestine and advocate for their rights when our event posters were torn down and threatening messages left on our answering machines (in the era before cellphones). Consequences we are seeing today for students and faculty protesting against Israeli genocide in Gaza are much worse, when people like myself and my comrades from Tufts would have been doxxed, our student group and its activities suspended or banned. Back then, the reactions to our efforts at presenting an alternative viewpoint on the question of Palestine were limited to messages meant to intimidate, but did not actually result in a loss of future employment as they have for many unfortunate student supporters of Palestine today.
My own professional trajectory proceeded fairly smoothly from finishing my graduate studies to landing a tenure-track position in the Department of English at Montclair State university a year after I graduated with my Phd. from Tufts. Aside from a few Visiting Professor gigs at places like Harvard, NYUAD and several higher ed institutions in my home country of Pakistan over the decades, my tenure home has remained Montclair State, which has gone from being designated as a College when I joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1987, to becoming a University. My 37-year career is, I contend, a study in surviving, at times even thriving in academia, despite the many obstacles small and large that are thrown into the paths of faculty like myself who dare to challenge the normative political narrative around Zionism, the singular issue that defies and denies all other progressive viewpoints.
First Rebellion
During my second year at MSU (then MSC)—I attended what was then an annual feature of our campus life: the annual Presidential Lecture. That year, our speaker was the famed New York intellectual, Susan Sontag, who was introduced a deferential group of administrators including the Acting President, and a leading member of our English Department faculty. The esteemed Ms Sontag spoke on the unit of the decade—what it is, what it signifies, how it came to be a temporal marker and so on—the usual arcane stuff intellectuals like to ponder. She honed in on a specific decade to provide some concrete examples to buttress her larger philosophical argument: the decade that the world witnessed the holocaust of the Jewish peoples in Nazi Germany, which was horrific in every sense. What got my goat, however, was the fact that this was the same decade—the 1940s—that also witnessed the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands and concomitant Nakba—catastrophe—visited on the Palestinian natives of those lands, thousands of them forced to flee the onslaught of Israeli forces, many who became victims of massacres and destruction of their homes, their olive and lemon groves, their villages, their past. When I raised this point as a question for Ms Sontag to comment on, as to why she had not alluded to this other group of people affected so badly during the decade under scrutiny—she started to tremble visibly on the stage, and ultimately responded with anger at the audacity of my question.
I remember how several junior faculty approached me as we streamed out of the auditorium asking what I was thinking, and wasn’t I afraid of jeopardizing my tenure and promotion at the institution? The following day I received a summons to the Chair’s office, who proceeded to school me in the true meaning of Jews being the Chosen People of God, and why I had in a way, disobeyed God’s laws by questioning his favorite humans! It was an extraordinary meeting, and I was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, except that I knew it was a serious matter, that I had to proceed with caution if I was going to get through the next few years and past the tenure decision with success. Luckily for me, I had a wonderful defender in the person of a senior member of the department, a very well-respected colleague who had brought some major grant monies into the department and college. She wrote a very strong op-ed for the campus student newspaper, The Montclarion, defending my right to free speech and expressing disdain for a globally renowned author who could not respond to a fair question except by berating me for simply asking the question. In the weeks that followed, I was amazed to discover daily messages left in my voicemail by colleagues—both staff and faculty—whom I did not know, acknowledging my courage in speaking out on a topic that most are trained to fear touching.
Since these were the days before social media, I was protected by the fact that such comments like mine could not go “viral” and hence avoid what today would surely be some sort of “cancellation.” Several years later I did get my tenure—but no promotion. For that, I had to fight hard, to the point of threatening a lawsuit, but again, luck prevailed and I got promoted to Associate Professor level the following year.
Post-tenure Obstacles and Resistances
The politics of fear that I observed amongst non-tenured faculty especially and also amongst those aspiring to leadership positions in the department and institution, operated on the unspoken assumption that criticism of Israel was unthinkable, a sure way to end a career, and hence resulted in a self-imposed censorship on the part of the majority of faculty at the university. Only one other senior tenured faculty member of my department and I, were vocal in our support for the right of Palestinians to self-determination and we were the only two who would speak out against the increasingly obvious Israeli apartheid state policies and its massive and brutal military response to stone-throwing Palestinian kids during the 1st and 2ndintifadas.
After Hamas’ electoral win in Gaza in 2005—and it bears noting that Israel helped create it as an alternative to the secular PLO in 1987 after the First Intifada—Israel, despite agreeing to a truce that held for a number of years, staged a raid by the IDF on members of Hamas, killing six of them on Nov 4th, 2008. This led to retaliatory firing of rockets by Hamas, and on Dec 27, 2008, Israel attacked the Gaza strip by land and air in what it dubbed Operation Cast Lead, killing, over a 3 week period, a total of 1419 Palestinians of whom 1167 were civilians, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whilst Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem reported 1385 Palestinians killed. The use of white phosphorus bombs on civilian targets including two hospitals (Al Quds and Al Wafa), as well as on the UN compound in Gaza City, was declared a war crime by several human rights organizations such as Amnesty International as well as the Goldstone Report, as were family massacres conducted by IDF forces, and killing of Palestinian civilians fleeing homes holding aloft white flags. During Operation Cast Lead, total number of Israelis killed was 4: 3 civilians and 1 soldier, and 518 wounded.
When I tried to organize a day long teach-in with scholars and artists at my university to educate our student body as well as the larger community on the scale of atrocities being committed by Israel during Operation Cast Lead, allowing for debate and discussion on Zionism as a political ideology, the creation and role of Hamas in Palestinian resistance struggles as part of a rise in Islamist or political Islam which many countries in the grip of US imperialist policies, rightly or wrongly saw as a strategy of resistance–I was taken aside by certain department members who later held leadership roles, in an attempt to discourage me from inviting some of the speakers I had lined up—specifically, the anti-Zionist academic activist, Norman Finkelstein. When I asked why, I was told that “he is not a scholar.” This, despite the fact that even before being declined tenure at DePaul university, Prof Finkelstein had already published 3 books with major academic presses which most “scholars” would be honored to have their books published by: University of California Press, University of Minnesota Press, and Verso, plus a fourth book by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan Books—also very prestigious, being one of the oldest publishing companies in the US.
Obviously, the issue had little to do with whether he was or wasn’t a scholar; rather, as a son of holocaust survivors, the fact that he was writing exposes of Israel as a fascist, apartheid state, with a book entitled the Holocaust Industrystriking a blow to the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust as sui generic and untouchable by any sort of critique, followed by another on the “mis-use of antisemitism and abuse of history”—well, the Zionist industry had to silence him and unfortunately that was the effect my colleagues’ persuasive tactics resulted in; in the end, I invited Joseph Massad, a scholar of Palestinian history at Columbia, who at that point in time, hadn’t yet become the target of Zionist student attacks demanding his ouster for teaching, in their opinion a “one-sided” perspective on Israel-Palestine, effectively smearing him as an anti-semite in the process.
I want to be clear here that the colleagues in question are themselves respectable scholars in their respective fields, and have been kind and gracious in their dealings with me through the decades. I’m sure they wouldn’t recognize or even agree that what they were doing was a form of censorship by invoking the dreaded spectre of antisemitism. Their approach to censoring opinions like mine are far more sophisticated than the more outrightly course and obvious intimidation of some other colleagues, like, for instance, a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist who was Chairperson of our College’s department of Religion and Philosophy for many years, and had affixed to his office wall, a large Confederate flag. For displaying an obviously racist emblem extolling the virtues of a slaveholding past in the South, this colleague was never sanctioned or told he couldn’t fly the flag in full view of students (and faculty) walking past his office, many of whom were surely intimidated or felt harassed or unsafe by in the presence of such a symbol. Yet in recent days after the Oct 7th 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel that immediately resulted in Israel’s massive deadly assault on Gazan civilians and which was clearly genocidal in intent—the little Palestinian flag I affixed to my office door (courtesy the Students for Justice in Palestine on our campus)—drew notice and condemnation from several faculty members, including my current dept chair(one of the two colleagues who in 2008 had argued against issuing an invitation to Norman Finkelstein) who told me during a private exchange that he was hurt to see this display of support for Palestinians so soon after Hamas attacked Israel; never mind that as I pointed out in our friendly exchange of views, and without endorsing Hamas actions, that there really was no comparison in terms of number of lives lost—27,000 vs 1200 to date—nor had the attack resulted in damage to civilian infrastructure on the Israeli side anywhere close to what Israeli counterattacks on Gaza’s schools, hospitals, homes delivered in retaliation. The sign on his door, announcing his office as a safe space for all students experiencing “anti semitism, anti Zionism, Islamophobia,” has, by equating anti-semitism with anti-zionism, opened up a dangerous space that encourages attacks from students on those of us who proffer critiques of Zionism as a racist nationalist ideology that is unacceptable to many people of the Jewish faith too. Sure enough, a student in one of my classes this past semester brought a charge of anti-Semitism against me, which I managed to effectively debunk because of meticulous record-keeping I have learnt to do precisely to ward off such attacks. Whilst within a week of my putting up the little Palestinian flag in a display of solidarity, it was gone, vandalized, my Chair’s sign remains on his door. Despite our cordial relationship, I cannot get him to see how the fallacious conflation it endorses, poses a grave threat to freedom of speech in our classes. The passage of HR 3016 into law recently will have a similar chilling effect.
To return to my Christian Zionist colleague, who is now long-since retired—back then he was a very powerful faculty member, who headed up for over a decade, our college’s committee that decided annually who would be awarded the prestigious University Distinguished Scholar award. It would be an important recognition legitimizing the kind of schol-activist work I had been doing, combining literary with cultural critique to avowedly advance a social justice agenda. And I believe that was precisely why it was important for the neoconservative cohort to deny me such recognition, which could open the door to many other scholars (and students)—to follow this path.
I had to apply 10 years in a row before I got it—and that was only once I brought a complaint against my self-proclaimed Christian Zionist colleague, insisting he be relieved of his chair’s position on this committee as no one is supposed to serve continuously for that length of time. To demonstrate how egregiously biased this individual was and yet managed to control the actions of a diverse body of faculty in his attempts to prevent an award/recognition I had clearly earned through my numerous publications when I started applying for this award, I will share the following point of information. One year, the committee under his leadership, decided to vote for another faculty member who had applied for this award so as to prevent me from being in the running, which proved to be such a ridiculously partisan decision that even the university President (no supporter of mine)—that year was forced to deny their decision, with the humiliating result that NO ONE was awarded this honor that year. How do you vote for someone to be given a Distinguished Scholar recognition when they haven’t published anything of note—except a few newsletter entries and an article in a non-peer-reviewed journal? Thanks to someone with a sense of justice on that committee, I managed to have a look at this other faculty’s application dossier (all of 2 pages long!)—and used the information I gleaned to later write to the President as well as the Dean of my College to let them know I wasn’t going to abide the current Chair of the Award Committee being allowed to serve another term. In that letter, I detailed the decisions taken over the past 10 years which according to what I knew about research and publication records of applicants including myself, had wronged me by refusing to acknowledge both the breadth and depth of my scholarship.
The next year, sure enough, with the threat of legal action by me as well as perhaps, a few awakened consciences—I got what by rights I should have received a decade earlier. Perhaps because my scholarly publications have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine issue, I was helped with a strong case made on my behalf by my department representative to the Awards committee, the same colleague who is in disagreement with my anti-Zionist views.
This is where things get trickier and murkier.
People obviously have/should have, a right to their views, but when holding a particular set of views puts someone’s career in danger, and brings them into the line of censure and censorship, then dangerous precedents curbing free speech are being set.
In the cases I experienced involving the two colleagues described above, one has been very subtle in this area of curbing my right to free expression through a soft “guidance”, at times even by helping me advance certain career goals, whereas the other made blatant attempts to deny me a platform of visibility and scholarly prominence due to my views on a particular issue with which he was in disagreement. The real problem is that these two very different types of censoring actions, one within the bounds of friendly collegiality the other not—are united under the banner of a shared Zionist ideology that has huge clout in academia and politics and works to isolate people like me in an effort to curb our ability to grow in numbers and strength. As an illustration of the latter claim I’m making, despite pleading for the past two decades to my department colleagues to back a request to the upper administration for a tenure-track line in Arab and Arab American literature and culture, or hire even another postcolonialist like myself who could teach within my areas of interest such as the course I created called Images of Muslim Women and which currently gets offered only when I am available to teach it—my requests have been effectively sidelined. Hiring another brown South Asianist like me or an Arabist has proved impossible over the past 37 years, and we remain a white-dominated dept.
In the case of the more blatant approach, it led my Christian Zionist colleague in the aftermath of 9/11, to posting outrageously racist and xenophobic comments about me on a 3-4,ooo strong faculty and staff listserv, such as “Go back to the caves you crawled out from”—when I insisted on historicizing the 9/11 tragedy, bringing to the fore arguments being made by activist writers like Arundhati Roy about the many 9/11s that preceded what happened on US soil, in so many countries of the global south thanks to unrelenting military and economic interference by the US’s military-industrial imperialist complex. Part of my own historicizing argument was to link unqualified US backing of the Zionist colonial-settler Israeli apartheid nation to the state of general distrust and dislike of the US by the majority of the world’s brown and black peoples. I also published an anthology of writings by Muslim women called Shattering the Stereotypes in which I made these links between US’s destructive imperialist policies around the globe, including its egregious support for land theft and killing of native Palestinians by Israel, to the rise of Islamist extremism as a form of opposition to what its sympathizers and followers perceive as the unchecked hegemony of the western bloc of nations led by the US of A.
Making such links obviously did not go down well with people like the former Chair of Religion and Philosophy at Montclair. Accordingly, he made vocal and visible attempts to silence me, but in effect, this just exposed his bias ever so clearly, to the chagrin of more sophisticated minds, some of whom may have shared similar reservations about my politics and point of view.
Without going down the path of assuming I know what lay in the hearts and minds of colleagues as well as administrative leaders, I can attest to the fact that a strange confluence of pressure built up around me in the decades after 9/11, wherein I became the “Muslim Woman” made to emblematize both the exception to the rule of Muslim fundamentalism in western academic locations, as well as to be looked at with suspicion for harboring sentiments which, because they were at odds with the US-Zionist machine of Empire, rendered me unpatriotic (hence a traitor) in the eyes of many. Several students especially in classes where I taught Palestinian writers like Ghassan Kanafani or Arab feminists like Nawal el Saadawi who also exposed the links between Zionism, US imperialism, patriarchy and racial capitalism, as well as so-called Islamic fundamentalism —called me anti-USA, complaining about me in student evaluations. At times some Jewish students expressed anger at my views, although in more recent years, the number of Jewish anti-Zionist students has grown exponentially on campus, as a result, perhaps, of exposure to oppositional views of Zionist discourse taught by people like me. In any case, the net result of the confluence of both admiration as well as distrust for what I stood for, for the views I espoused unambiguously in my teaching and my writings, exposing the links between all manner of pieties, combined to result in a number of eventualities.
The first of these was the discovery that my name was on the AMCHA list of professors “inimical to Israel” and hence to be avoided and denounced. Here is what the Amcha Initiative’s website announcement of their stated objectives:
IMPORTANT:Share this list with your family, friends, and associates via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or word-of-mouth.
As the fall semester begins, many students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict. AMCHA Initiative has posted a list of 218 professors identifying themselves as Middle East scholars, who recently called for the academic boycott of Israel in a petition signed. Students who wish to become better educated on the Middle East without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering. (my emphasis)
From MSU, apparently, I’m the only such signatory listed:
Montclair State University
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Professor and Director, Women and Gender Studies
During the 2016-2017 academic year, after a semester teaching abroad at NYU in Abu Dhabi, I returned to MSU and because of a sudden departure of the woman who had succeeded me as Director of Women and Gender Studies after I’d completed two terms in the position, I was requested by colleagues teaching in the program, and at the behest of the then Provost, to take up the post once more so as to keep the program running smoothly. I agreed to do so for one year, stating that we needed to find someone else to take on these leadership responsibilities as I had done my duty and had agreed to resume my position only for a year to ensure that a program I had built up over the past 6 years and in whose success I was invested, would not fall apart. Over the summer months preceding the Fall term, I then worked pro-bono to restore some order in the program prior to moving into the AY, which included finalizing the hiring of 2 new adjunct instructors to teach several of our required courses which were already at capacity with registered students. One of these new instructors, who had already met with, and whose credentials had been vetted by, the outgoing Director, who had offered both him and the other instructor jobs for the coming year, apparently had tweeted a comment sometime over the past year, expressing his disgust at President Trump and stating, “Trump is a f—ing joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright.” I did not know of these political opinions of said instructor or about this social media posting expressing a strong wish to see the current President of the US dead, but even if I had, I would have treated it as his right to free speech particularly in off-campus fora. A few weeks prior to the start of the Fall term, I was asked to meet with the Dean of my college, who informed me that I had been relieved of my position as Director of the program.
The reason I was given for this ignominious “firing” from a leadership position that I had been invited to—nay begged—to fill, was that a letter had been sent to the President of the University, from an outside source asking how someone calling for the assassination of our country’s President, had “slipped through the cracks” in the hiring process without being properly vetted. Since I was the Director in charge, the barb was clearly pointed at me, and as such, had its desired effect: not only the instructor in question, but I too was relieved of our positions. Here is how I saw what happened, as I outlined in an article published soon thereafter in CounterPunch.
I believe strongly that my “firing” was in response to the Islamophobic rant sent to the President, Provost and Dean of my university by right wing columnist James Merse (who writes for a rag called the Daily Caller in NJ)—and on which he also copied me. In this email he threatened the university, claiming he and his “cohort” of right-wing supporters would have marched in protest onto the campus had the admin not fired Allred! He kept asking in that email “how did Allred’s hire slip through the cracks” (he had previously stated such things publicly)-and since I was the new Director in charge of the Program at this time, the question was obviously pointed at me. Now all the administrators knew I had had nothing to do with hiring this Allred guy—so why remove me then? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these right-wing nuts like Merse knew of my public writings exposing their outfits and the individuals that head them and that right now in the US, these scary folks are exercising their financial and political clout to pressurize university administrators to fire or otherwise silence voices like mine who are anathema to them.
A particular article I had published a few years prior, also in Counterpunch, traces precisely this money-trail of funders of Islamophobia which I argued in the article, is quite clearly linked to Zionist and pro-Israeli sources and conservative think-tanks. My research into these links was prompted in the fall of 2012, by seeing huge billboards appear at my Hudson Valley town’s train station, touting nakedly Islamophobic ads. I wrote:
I was stunned to see an ad on a billboard staring me in the face from across the train tracks stating the following:
19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism.
The ad was paid for by two organizations called “Jihad watch.org” and “Atlasshrugged”. Jihad Watch is a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and its Director is a man named Robert Spencer who is the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). According to the Jihadwatch website:
Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community. Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Regnery), is a supposed “expose” of how jihadist groups are advancing their agenda in the U.S.
Spencer was joined in weaving his web of anti-Muslim (and more specifically, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian) conspiracy theories—which are still being taught to and ingested by the US military forces—by his colleague Pamela Geller, an acolyte of the early 20th c. writer Ayn Rand, a libertarian conservative and uber-capitalist—hence the name of the blogsite she sponsors, Atlasshrugs.com. which today has become https://gellerreport.com/ and is spewing forth venomous stories repeating unsubstantiated Israeli hasbara claims about Hamas ‘ rapes of Israeli women (which have been proved to be utterly factitious, relying on uncorroborated accounts of two unreliable witnesses belonging to a very suspect and morally compromised militia group called ZAKA, which in Israel itself prior to Oct 7th, had been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it).[1]
As I was researching the links between Islamophobic content of Spencer and Geller’s work and their support for Israel, it became clear that theirs was a racist agenda that also appealed to neoconservative white supremacists in Europe. So I pointed out how
The attacks on Muslims and those thought to be Muslim which … are linked to racism in general, are hardly confined to the US. The terrible massacre of innocent children at summer camp in Norway by Anders Brevik a few years ago can be linked to the hate-speech of bloggers Geller and Spencer who are cited as important influences by Breivik in his Manifesto.
As I argued in the conclusion of that essay, there was (still is!)–a confluence of several dangerous discourses that coalesced in August 2012 in the anti-Muslim ads such as those posted on MTA train stations in NY. Jihadwatch and AtlasShrugged were also behind another series of ads posted on municipal buses in San Francisco and on municipal buses, and here is what these proclaimed:
In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.
Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.
The equation of “civilized man” with the State of Israel, the “savage” with that of the absent Arab, is lifted verbatim from a 1974 lecture by American author Ayn Rand, which have been echoed by Golda Meir and other past and present leaders of Israel:
The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.
(lecture delivered in 1974)
Connecting the Dots
What I’ve tried to do throughout my academic career, is to connect the dots between phenomena the academy wishes to keep separate and de-linked via its erection of disciplinary walls, zealously guarded, even when lipservice is given to the virtues of interdisciplinarity. Most of all, drawing connections between Zionism, US militarism, racialized capitalism and exposing, as I have, how these disparate formations are threaded together in ways that permeate and inform the hallowed halls of academia, is clearly the kind of display of disobedience to the norms of our profession that must needs be punished.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the University President took the occasion of a threat toward the campus made by the reporter for the Daily Caller (a Fox News affiliate, founded by Tucker Carslon and Neil Patel), who stated in an email to the top brass that he had been prepared to “organize and lead significant peaceful-but loud—protests and campaigns” to hold the university accountable had it not terminated the adjunct instructor’s position– to not just fire that adjunct, but also “punish” me by publicly dismissing me from my position as Director of WGS. Doing so can be read as a decision made possible by a serendipitous confluence of factors, to appease a university President wary of someone espousing my politics “leading” and setting policy and curricula goals for a small but thriving program with a reputation for disobedience, as well as to do the kind of damage control needed to prevent conservative donors allied to the individuals, media outlets and think-tanks the Daily Caller reporter had links with, to withdraw their financial support.
What I had argued several years prior to my wrongful dismissal–that a confluence of interests in the US political and cultural sphere threatened to overcome the polity with hatred, zenophobia, Islamophobia, racism—these same factors came together a few years later to ensure the following outcome in my professional life: as a brown Muslim woman who had painstakingly exposed links between Zionism and these other ills, I would not be given a public-facing position that might result in persuading others to what is clearly anathema in US discourse. Here is what I had written in 2012, following the Islamophobic and anti-Palestine poster campaign orchestrated by Geller and Spence:
What this uncritical support and valorization of the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens leads to, as the world has seen in the past 60 years or so since Israel was founded and Palestine reduced to a series of occupied settlements, is ongoing war between unequal opponents in Israel/Palestine. Such a state of affairs based on injustice toward the Palestinians who have been refugees in their own lands since 1947, with more than 4 million of them displaced in the Palestinian diaspora, has contributed to many of the troubles we face today as the world becomes a full-scale conflict zone from East to West, North to South. The mentality of the Gellers and Spencers of this world has infected the good sense of people on all sides of this and other related debates on human rights worldwide, and exerted undue influence on the foreign policy of the USA; it has shaped presidencies and policies, and now, if unchecked, such a mentality could bring together discourses of racism, zenophobia, class and gender politics together with Islamophobia, that may push the electorate into voting for people who would lead the country back into the Dark Ages of a second McCarthy era.
Well, as it has turned out, whether you are Trump or Biden—the Palestinians remain as fodder to be served up to the Israel lobby.
Where I Am/ We Are Today
We are obviously all under surveillance and today we are seeing the terrible consequences of speaking truth to power affecting students and faculty across our campuses who dare to condemn Israeli genocide and show empathy with Palestinian civilians being butchered in the thousands.
Once again, with a handful of other faculty on my campus, I am active on our campus discussion list in posting analysis and information beyond state-sponsored media narratives. Once again, we are the victims of name-calling and one of us on my campus has been publicly silenced due to complaints against him of “creating a hostile work environment.” I have in recent months, published an essay outlining this outrageous turn of events.
While dangerous moves to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are afoot as witnessed in a US Congressional Resolution passed last December, the temper of the masses has changed. This has been unambiguously on view as millions of people many of them of the Jewish faith, across the world continue to take to the streets in protest of the Israeli genocide–a word that following the ICJ’s ruling, will now forever be attached to the Israeli state.
On US campuses, as well, while firings and suspensions of untenured faculty who are vocal in their support of Palestine are on the rise, as is the doxxing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students from many of whom job offers have been rescinded, this is all being countered by many more of us than ever before, refusing to be silenced or intimidated. Helped by several colleagues, I am proud to announce that we have joined FJP National with the creation of our university’s chapter of the same, and are slowly seeing numbers of members rise, though many have requested anonymity.
While I have at times elected to, and at others been deliberately sidelined in the decision-making apparatus of university life, I believe that justice will always prevail in the end. I am proud of having remained a disobedient voice, of questioning the norms that compel us to be compliant to the norms of authority in, or outside of, academe. Indeed, I am currently the plaintiff in a case to investigate and discipline my Dean who at a public event in February of this year, refused to greet me or my husband civilly when I walked up to him to say hello, and instead launched into a hostile diatribe against what he claimed were antisemitic remarks I had made on the campus listserv.
I’d like to end by citing a passage from Steven Salaita’s latest essay, in which he pulls no punches regarding the compromises we as scholars working for remuneration and rewards make; at the same time, he exhorts us to do the right thing, to embrace disobedience and class disloyalty, in order to refuse compliance to a genocidal world order:
Maybe it’s time for scholars to disobey our own compunctions—that we’re important or even indispensable, that our education gives us special insight, that innovation would die if we suddenly went away. Our main compunction, as with all the professions, is to obey class loyalties. Disobedience should be introspective, then. We have to disrupt the norms and procedures that advantage the compliant. How can this be done? It’s hard to say. But that it needs doing is by now beyond doubt.
Steven paid the ultimate price for disobedience—he was fired from his faculty position even before setting foot on the campus that had hired him, for a series of tweets condemning Israeli slaughter in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. I am lucky I managed to get tenure, and within the constraints and privileges afforded by it, have tried and will continue to try to speak truth to power—including going after those, like my Dean, who think they can get away with abuse of power in their attempts to silence us.
When I hear (as per President Biden’s comments on the Butler shooting) “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence – it’s sick. It’s sick,” I am reminded that the narrative of American history is actually one long paean to political violence—from Bunker Hill to all those weapons being sent off to kill Gazans.
Now about half of the Republican party is strutting around with an AR-15 lapel pin, which suggests that rooftop gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks might well (at least for the Grand New MAGA Party) have been part of the solution, not part of the problem.
After Abraham Lincoln was shot, not many of his Republican supporters walked around with buttons that read “Sic semper tyrannis” (“thus always to tyrants”)—which is what assassin John Wilkes Booth shouted as he leaped onto the stage at Ford’s Theatre.
On the other hand, Trump might well owe his next presidency to his would-be assassin, so perhaps, as it becomes clear that Crooks was in lockstep with Trumpism, a revived Warren Commission might be pressed into service to explain how the gunman himself was a victim of Deep State transgenderism and to attribute his rooftop violence to hormone blockers that robbed him of him of his manhood.
* * *
My doubt about the official narrative of the Butler shooting is this: I am not entirely persuaded that Crooks mounted his step ladder to heaven only with the goal of dispatching Donald Trump to eternity.
Yes, in all likelihood he fired the shot that either winged the former president or blooded him with a ricochet, but did Crooks really intend to kill Trump?
From what I read and hear on newscasts, Crooks was a rank-and-file MAGA, J.D. Vance circle jerk Republican, sheep dipped in Trump ideology and someone who probably recited the Second Amendment when saying grace at Thanksgiving.
Crooks died wearing his Demolition Ranch t-shirt (it’s a GunTuber video website that closes the circle between porn, cartoons, and assault weapons as a cure for societal ED, if not Bidenism), and not long after the Crooks’ front yard was awash in Trump signs (“God, Guns & Country: Trump 2024…”).
Before that, the American sniper was singing Trump’s praises in his conversations with friends. So why, now, did he want to bring down his idol?
* * *
My sense is that Crooks needs to be defined as a post-modern assassin, the spiritual heir of AR-15 school shooters, different from such historical presidential assassins as Charles Guiteau (who in 1881 shot President James Garfield and shouted the words, “I am Stalwart. Arthur shall be president”) or John Hinckley, who shot at Ronald Reagan in 1981 “to impress” Jodie Foster.
For all I know, Crooks might well not even have been aiming at Trump, but instead imagined himself on his rooftop laying down covering fire to Make America Great Again.
Maybe he thought his shots would take out some members of the seditious press? Maybe he believed that his gun burst would be construed as the first shots of the next American Revolution, that which convict Steve Bannon preaches on his podcasts?
Maybe by some twisted logic Thomas Matthew Crooks believed that in his efforts as an onward Christian nationalist soldier, Trump would invite him to the White House, much the way the president rewarded triggerman Kyle Rittenhouse with a presidential audience for taking out some Black Lives in Kenosha?
* * *
In case Rittenhouse is lost in your jumbled memories of the bump stock nation, Kyle was the Illinois teenager sent off to Wisconsin with a lunch box from his mother and an AR-15 (the semi-automatic military-grade weapon, not the lapel pin) to do battle with Kenosha protesters (many of whom were unhappy that the police had shot Jacob Blake during an arrest).
Vigilante Rittenhouse initially self-deployed in a car lot in downtown Kenosha, then under threat from BLM rioters.
During the confrontations of that summer night, Rittenhouse shot and killed two men, and seriously wounded a third.
One of the men Rittenhouse killed was chasing him, suspecting that the Illinois teenager armed with an AR-15 was an active shooter and not some minuteman drafted by the Kenosha police to ensure domestic tranquility.
* * *
Rittenhouse was tried, according to press reports, for “first-degree intentional homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.” A jury exonerated him.
Following the not-guilty verdict, former president Trump issued a statement: “Congratulations to Kyle Rittenhouse for being found INNOCENT of all charges.”
Trump said: “If that’s not self-defense, nothing is,” and he added: “He should never have been put through that. That was prosecutorial misconduct.”
Later the former president welcomed Rittenhouse to Mar-a-Lago, where Trump called the gunslinger a “really a nice young man”. Trump told broadcaster Sean Hannity that Rittenhouse “wanted to know if he could come over and say hello because he was a fan.”
Then, as if a presidential audience at Mar-a-Lago wasn’t enough for Kyle Rittenhouse, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Pluto) issued a statement that read:
Kyle Rittenhouse deserves to be remembered as a hero who defended his community, protected businesses, and acted lawfully in the face of lawlessness. I’m proud to file this legislation to award Kyle Rittenhouse a Congressional Gold Medal.
Was it lost on AR-15 owner Thomas Matthew Crooks that the Trump circle beatified another AR-15 active shooter?
Was the Demolition Ranch, MAGA-loving gunman fantasizing that when it was all over in Butler the former president and Republican candidate would invite him to dinner? Maybe together they could watch The Day of the Jackal?
Guns twist mens’ minds, and to many in American politics (but probably not those who had to collect the dead in Uvalde), AR-15s now speak an auto-erotic language of love and attraction, at least to the likes of Thomas Crooks and Donald Trump.
* * *
The attempted assassination (or whatever metaphor the shooting was) has allowed Trump to ascend into political heaven where his rape judgments, civil fraud penalties, and felony charges for espionage, sedition, and electoral racketeering are seen as little more than “trespasses” that the electorate is happy to forgive (provided it doesn’t have to vote for the demented Biden).
If assassination deification wasn’t enough for one month, around the same time the Supreme Court decided to sell the former president various indulgences for his repeated sins.
First, the flag-waving Roberts Court overturned the original intent of the U.S. Constitution that no man or woman, even a president, is above the law—by listing all those presumptive instances (including the official act of paying off a porn star while seated at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office) when a president (the judges mostly had Trump in mind) can beat any and all raps.
When those dispensations seemed insufficient to curry favor with his candidate mob boss Trump, Justice Clarence Thomas (apropos of nothing in the case being heard) added an addendum that was little more than a mash note to Florida Judge Aileen Cannon to embolden her to dismiss the Florida documents case against Trump.
The Thomas addendum was written in such a way (legally misleading and false, but that hardly matters if it’s on Supreme Court letterhead) that it can be used to challenge many of the other cases pending against the criminally charged Trump.
In less than two weeks, the Supreme Court ruling and the assassination attempt have transmogrified Trump from a psychotic (who sounded like Travis Bickle talking about how “the late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man…”) to a statesman and the Great White Hope of those who dream of the United States of Apartheid.
At this week’s Republican National Convention (and what felt like an endless rerun loop of Dynasty) Trump basked in the near-endless hallelujahs that “God protected him” in Butler for a higher purpose. That was the message spread from every speaker from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem (I had hoped we might be done with this cast of B actors).
After a while, the Almighty began to sound like yet another political action committee eager to buy Trump air time or launder money for his attorneys.
* * *
I am not surprised that Donald Trump would find common cause with the school shooter industrial complex—the NRA, gun fetishizers like Don Jr., the U.S. Concealed Carry Association and the Second Amendment crowd, not to mention all those clicking on Crooks’ own Demolition Ranch snuff films.
Here’s the advertisement copy for a Demolition Ranch pimped-out edition of the AR-15:
Team EMG is proud to announce this special collaboration with F1 Firearms and Demolition Ranch to bring you the Demolition Ranch AR-15! The Demolition Ranch AR-15 is a special edition rifle in the real shooting world engineered and spec’d out to perfection by the elite engineers at F-1 Firearms and Matt himself. Fully licensed featuring authentic F1 and Demolition Ranch engravings, this EMG airsoft parallel training rifle is a stunning recreation of the real firearm this was based on.
Does it sell at a discount to any Republican member of Congress now wearing an AR-15 lapel pin?
* * *
Even before the AR-15 had its own congressional fan club, Trump was refusing to consider any legislation that might make it harder to spray an assault weapon around a grammar school or shopping mall.
For example, after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa in January 2024 that killed one child and wounded six others, it took Trump 36 hours to say anything (even though he was then campaigning in Iowa), and when he did say something, it was to tell Iowans: “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
And here, according to U.S. News and World Report in 2024, is how Trump summed up his gun policies while president. He told the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:
During my four years nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield… [I am the] best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House….Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day.
These words would have been music in the ears of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who must have thought he would be dying to absolve Trump of any sins.
One of the oddest arguments made by self-declared friends of Israel is that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. That assertion is comprehensible if the person making it believes that God Himself gave the Jews property rights from the river to the sea – but Theodore Herzl and the founders of modern Zionism embraced no such belief. On the contrary, that movement’s largely secularized leadership defined Zionism from the outset as a form of ethnic nationalism – a claim to the same “right of self-determination” as that asserted, say, by the Irish or the Serbs. The argument, therefore, is that it is antisemitic to deny the Jews (considered as an ethnic community, not a confessional group) the same alleged right enjoyed by the Irish and the Serbs. Forgetting for the moment that only a handful of world’s 3,000 or so ethnic peoples enjoy the right to control a nation-state, the question remains: what does Zionism have to do with Judaism?
The answer is to be found in history rather than in sacred texts. The rise of mass-based antisemitism in Europe culminating in the unimaginable catastrophe of the Holocaust convinced many Jews that the alternative to yielding to genocidaires was to fight them, and the best way to fight them was to command the resources of their own nation-state. Israel was conceived of not only as a means of deterring or escaping would-be Hitlers, but also of ensuring that Jews would “never again” go helplessly to their deaths or be forced to beg more secure nations to admit them. If the United States and other wealthy nations had welcomed Jewish refugees and survivors in the 1940s instead of slamming shut their doors, a good deal of the pressure to create a Jewish state might have been dissipated. The fact that they did not – not even in the shadow of the gas chambers – convinced many that they needed to play the nationalist game if they wished to ensure their survival.
This reasoning, however, generated another question . . . and created a dilemma. In the dog-eat-dog world of competing nation-states, nations do not survive and thrive unless they are either isolated and unthreatening or warlike and strong. Given the geopolitical importance of the oil-rich Middle East, the rapid growth of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, and America’s imperial ambitions, it was clear even before 1948 that Israel would neither be isolated nor considered harmless. Violent conflicts between Jewish settlers and Palestinians had been endemic since the late 1920s, and not one Arab state accepted the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan. Given the intensity of this opposition, how could a state offering Jewish residents and would-be immigrants preferential treatment become sufficiently warlike and strong to survive?
The answer was suggested by the formation of a Jewish Legion in World War I and a Jewish Brigade in World War II that fought in Palestine and Syria as units of the British army. When the U.S. replaced Britain as the region’s dominant power, Israel became an American ally and its armed forces de facto extensions of U.S. military power. From 1948 onward no other client state received anything close to the military and civil aid donated by the leader of the “Free World” to Israel. Ironically – and tragically – the state created to establish Jewish independence and security was thus from the outset a neocolonial dependency and imperial outpost of the United States.
This was not a recipe either for internal peace or international security. Since 1945, targeted by rebellious subject peoples and competing great powers, the U.S. has fought five major wars and participated in scores of bloody proxy struggles. According to the Brown University Cost of War project, American wars since the al Qaeda attacks of 2001 have killed 4.5 million people, most of them civilians. In the same period, the State of Israel has fought six interstate wars and three wars in Gaza. It is customary in the West to attribute this persistent insecurity and violence to the malice and fanaticism of Israel’s Palestinian subjects and Muslim neighbors – a partisan “explanation” that ignores the Jewish state’s neocolonial origins, its expulsion and oppression of Palestinians, and its faithful service to American and European patrons. Whatever the sources of Israeli insecurity, however, the result over time has been to strengthen the position of “hard” vis a vis “soft” Zionists.
Zionism: “Hard” and “Soft”
Since the late nineteenth century, when modern Zionism took form, the attempts to combine Judaism with ethnic nationalism have tended to generate three schools of thought. We can call these Hard Zionism, Soft Zionism, and anti-Zionism.
The Hard Zionist school is currently represented by the Netanyahu regime in Israel – a right-wing ruling coalition that includes the leading Jewish religious parties, parties representing Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and advocates of annexation of all the Occupied Territories. The perspective that shapes their political views assumes the existence of serious, long-term, irreconcilable conflicts of interests and values between Jews and non-Jews. It also accepts the ineluctable persistence of a neo-Darwinian global environment in which only the most violent groups and nations survive. Since the time of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, founder of this school, the implication has been that Jewish survival requires the existence of a state controlled by Jews and capable of dominating both internal and external enemies militarily.
A radical sense of collective insecurity has always been the driving force of Hard Zionism. Jabotinsky considered the Jews a “race” threatened demographically by intermarriage and social assimilation as well as endangered physically by antisemites. The Odessan leader admired Mussolini’s fascistic militancy, dressed his own militia in brown shirts, and called for creation of an “Iron Wall” of armed force that would protect Israel from inevitable attacks by hostile Arab nationalists. He approved of terrorist violence against the British and the Palestinians, rejected the UN’s partition of Palestine into two states, and scoffed at the idea that Jews and Palestinians could coexist peacefully, unless the latter accepted Jewish supremacy in a single Jewish state. Netanyahu’s father was Jabotinsky’s secretary, and his coalition still follows his ethnic supremacist line.
“Soft” Zionism, on the other hand, reflecting its left-liberal origins, began by expressing a somewhat less intense sense of Jewish vulnerability and a somewhat more sanguine view of the possibility of peaceful coexistence with non-Jews. My own family history reflects this perspective. From their home in a New York suburb, my parents learned about the Holocaust from reliable witnesses, tried vainly to convince other Americans that the slaughter was occurring, then worked passionately to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel. Working with Israeli agents like Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem, my father helped to refit an old freighter renamed the Exodus to transport European survivors to Palestine. In 1948 he ran guns to the Jewish army, the Haganah. He and his comrades insisted that Israel’s real enemy was not the Palestinians or other Arabs, who had been misled by their leaders, but uncaring British colonialists and wealthy, power-hungry sheikhs.
Soft Zionists like my father welcomed the UN Partition Plan and believed that Jewish and Arab workers could live peacefully together under the auspices of a social-democratic regime. Their faith was that Israel could be both a Jewish state and a pluralist democracy and that the need for military dominance would prove temporary. When Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations made war against Israel in 1948, this faith was shaken, but not shattered. During that war, Israeli troops and militias displaced some 750,000 Palestinians and destroyed more than 500 villages. Arguing (contrary to plentiful contrary evidence) that the refugees had left their lands voluntarily, the new state refused either to readmit them or to compensate them for their losses. Israel’s Jewish majority was bolstered over the next two decades by substantial immigration from the Arab world and from Russia – an application of the “right of return” accorded exclusively to Jews. But after the “Six Day War” of 1967, the Israelis again found themselves in control of more than a million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The question of how Israel could be both a Jewish state and a democracy was again thrown into question, along with the related question of the deep contradiction between militaristic nationalism and Jewish ethics.
The Soft Zionist answer that emerged over the next generation was to advocate a Palestinian state, one that would not threaten Jewish control of Israel either demographically or militarily. A state occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and perhaps East Jerusalem) was always conceived of as a disarmed entity with limited powers that would be compelled as a condition of its existence to accept Israeli military and economic superiority. Not surprisingly, this idea was not popular in the Palestinian “street” or among groups seeking either to gain equality with Israeli Jews or to expel them from the region. Over the next three decades, a substantial majority of Soft Zionists such as Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres therefore alternated between the carrot of peace negotiations (the “two state solution”) and the stick of IDF-led warfare against resisters. Over time, the stick became far more prevalent than the carrot.
The high point of Soft Zionist achievement was the 1993 Oslo Accords in which the Palestinians led by Yasir Arafat and his Fatah organization agreed to recognize Israel and live in peace with its citizens, while the Israelis, led by Labor Zionists Rabin and Peres, agreed to recognize the Palestine National Authority and to permit it to rule the West Bank and Gaza by the year 2000. The Accords raised high hopes but failed to deal with a series of crucial issues, including continued Israeli settlement of the Occupied Territories, an asserted right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the status of East Jerusalem.
Furthermore, substantial sectors of both communities, increasingly influenced by politicized religious organizations and leaders, opposed the agreement and rejected further efforts to compromise. Between September 2000 and February 2005 some 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis died in an uprising that Palestinians called the Al-Aksah Intifadah. While organizations like Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Martyrs Brigade organized suicide bombings in Israel, militant Zionists multiplied settlements on the West Bank and vowed never to leave “Judea and Samaria.” One such ultranationalist, Baruch Goldstein, assassinated 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, and another, Yigal Amir, assassinated Prime Minister Rabin a year later.
One year after that, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, marking the beginning of the end of Soft Zionist hegemony in Israel. He would rule again from 2009-2021 while the movement of settlers into the West Bank became a flood, and would end by forming the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history. In practice, Zionists of both schools accepted Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” principle, which seemed to them the only way to secure the existence of a secure Israel with a permanent Jewish majority. Simultaneously, Palestinian groups were learning not to trust liberal Zionist professions of belief in a two-state solution or the bona fides of the Palestine Authority (PA), whose governance activities on the West Bank seemed little more than a fig leaf for expanded Israeli settlement and harsh security measures. Each side blamed the other for the failure of previous negotiations, and the trust that had once persuaded some members of elite groups to deal with each other nonviolently was dissipated.
Netanyahu’s attempt to keep the Palestinian movement divided by supporting the PA’s authority on the West Bank directly and Hamas’ rule in Gaza indirectly backfired spectacularly on October 7, 2023. Even so, Israelis traumatized by Hamas’ violence, including almost all the Soft Zionists, united behind his regime’s determination to uproot and destroy that organization completely, even if this meant massive destruction of the civilian population. A wave of revulsion against Israel’s indiscriminate violence in the U.S. and other nations endangered President Joe Biden’s chances to be re-elected in November 2024 and led him to blame the Netanyahu regime for using “disproportionate” force and failing to recognize the need for some sort of postwar Palestinian state.
Although this prescription has a “Soft Zionist” ring, the new state Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have in mind seems virtually identical to that earlier proposed by the Trump administration and its chief Middle East spokesperson, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. This would be an entity backed and financed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, ruled by the PA or some equally conservative elite, disarmed, pacified, and committed to helping advance U.S. regional interests against the “Resistance Front” led by Iran and Hezbollah. The “two-state” solution thus becomes part of a “two-bloc” solution for the Middle East, with the Americans controlling the wealthier, more powerful bloc. What sort of state or regional arrangement the Palestinians of Gaza or the West Bank might themselves want was not – and is not – considered a relevant matter.
The repetitive pattern here seems unmistakable. United States rulers maintain their hegemony in the region by all means necessary, handsomely rewarding states and groups that cooperate and conducting covert or overt warfare against those that resist. When Hard Zionist policies do not provoke serious internal rebellions or interstate wars, the Americans are happy to support leaders like Netanyahu, who treat the Palestinians as “unpeople.” But when Hard policies produce uprisings or wars that destabilize the region, U.S. leaders, whether Republicans or Democrats, make a Soft Zionist U-turn.
This is exactly what the Clinton Administration did in 2000, when Bill Clinton attempted to hammer out a two-state agreement between Israel’s Ehud Barak and Palestine’s Arafat. Those who blame the Palestinians for the failure of this effort do not understand (or don’t want to) that what such deals actually offer is what Rashid Khalidi calls a “one state, multiple Bantustan” solution. The Jewish state defined and defended by Zionists of either school always retains absolute military, technological, and economic superiority over any projected Palestinian entity. The Palestinian statelet is therefore designed to function, in effect, as an administrative subdivision of Israel and an imperial outpost (allied with other satellites) of the United States. Little wonder that so many Palestinians opt instead for a “single state” solution that would compel the Israelis either to treat them as equals or publicly abandon their democratic pretenses.
The situation recalls a vastly more ancient conflict that I wrote about in a book called Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah (Harcourt, 2006). There I described the “soft” imperialism of Cyrus the Great, who liberated the nations made captive by Babylon, allowed Jewish exiles to return to Israel, and promised the world a new era of peace and justice under Persian rule. What a guy! The prophet Isaiah of Babylon was so impressed by Cyrus that he declared him to be God’s Messenger. Even before the Persian leader died, however, it was clear that his empire would have to be maintained by massive force. Cyrus’s successors were Darius and Xerxes, “’hard” imperialists who “pushed the boundaries of the empire deeper into Asia and Europe but found themselves trapped in an increasingly brutal struggle to maintain control over their restive, far-flung subjects” (p. 160). As the Prophets recognized, the dream of a just and stable world at peace could never be realized by power-hungry empire-builders.
So it goes to this day. Hard and soft varieties of ethnonationalism are opposite sides of the same coin – or, if you like, different gears of the same engine. Their common purpose, like that of a “hard cop” and “soft cop” working over a suspect to obtain a confession, is to maintain a dominant elite’s supremacy and control. When one approach doesn’t produce the desired result, the other is called into play; in either case, the unruly suspect is condemned for refusing to accept the inexorable demands of superior power.
Zionism as currently defined connotes Jewish supremacy in Israel, Israeli supremacy in Palestine, and American supremacy in the region. This compels those who advocate the equal dignity of nations and the global solidarity of peoples to move beyond both “hard” and “soft” Zionism in order to embrace a more humane – and more Prophetic – perspective. Call this viewpoint anti-Zionist, post-Zionist, or better yet, radical humanist; whatever the label, it calls us to move beyond the current system of endemic violence to create a world in which the massacre of ethnic enemies and oppression of subject peoples is never permitted – not even to save one’s own group from an alleged threat of extinction.
The day after the Gaza War – and beyond the Jewish State
Left-liberal “labor Zionists” were still ruling Israel in 1958, when I made my first visit to that country with a group of fellow college students. Liberal or not, most Israelis talked proudly about the Sinai War, a military adventure in which the Israeli Defense Forces, abetted by British and French troops, invaded Egypt and seized the Suez Canal to prevent Egypt’s President Nasser from nationalizing that valuable piece of European-owned property. Meanwhile, the Labor Party leaders whom we met informed us that Israel’s great challenge was to remain culturally European and to avoid becoming a “Levantine state.” After a week of listening to this sort of propaganda, we went to Hebrew University to hear the philosopher Martin Buber denounce the Sinai War, criticize Israeli racism, and call for establishment of a “binational” state in which Jews and Palestinians would share power with each other and make peace with their neighbors.
The audience for this talk was very small – ten American students, their two supervisors, and a smattering of people from Hebrew University. Even so, the author of I and Thou told us he was glad to speak to any audience, since most Israelis considered his views utopian and disloyal. I vividly remember his aura of wise compassion (which I felt much later in the presence of the Buddhist sage, Thich Nhat Hanh), his impassioned defense of the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homeland, and his sadness at being ignored or disrespected by his fellow Jews. I had no clue then but discovered fifteen years later, in Congressional hearings on U.S. intelligence activities chaired by Senator Frank Church, that our leaders on this tour had been dispatched by the C.I.A. to report on the activities of “oppositionists” like Martin Buber.
Was Buber a Zionist? Certainly, when that term did not imply the existence of a state owned and operated by Jews in their own interests, but embraced the idea later summarized by Edward Said as “one state for two peoples.” Buber’s inspiration was neither the hard nationalism of right-wing nationalists like Jabotinsky nor David Ben-Gurion’s slightly softer version, but the ideas of the “spiritual Zionist” known as Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg), who insisted that Palestine was never an “empty land” and declared that it must be shared with existing Arab residents. Buber insisted that Palestine should become a state in which a Jewish community (NOT a “Jewish state”) could live in peace and security with its Palestinian neighbors under a constitution designed to recognize the integrity and equal rights of each community. Like Ahad Ha-Am, he believed that a nation-state devoted to defending Jewish supremacy against all competitors would inevitably deform Judaism and generate violent resistance.
Others both in Palestine and North America had reached similar conclusions, although for different reasons. Reform Jews organized by Rabbi Elmer Berger and his American Council for Judaism argued that Judaism was a religion, not a political or cultural community, and that Zionism obstructed Jewish assimilation into their own (true) national cultures. At the same time, Jews belonging to certain devoutly orthodox sects asserted that a Jewish state was a contradiction in terms, since a political body ruled by God’s law and pursuing justice and peace could not exist until the start of the Messianic age.
Martin Buber, on the other hand, was neither an assimilationist, a Messianist, nor a nationalist. In his view and that of a group of intellectuals including Hebrew University president Judah L. Magnes and Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, what was needed was a democratic state whose constitution would recognize the communal interests of Jews and Palestinians and their common interests as workers. By the time I met Buber, his organization, “Unity” (Ichud), had already been bypassed by the Zionist party and rejected by an increasingly nationalist Israeli public. Later, the binational idea was embraced by thinkers and activists ranging from Hannah Arendt and Edward Said to Tony Judt but was opposed both by Zionists and by Palestinian nationalists aiming to construct a single state in which their constituents would constitute a majority.
Even so, the conflicts of the past two decades, culminating in Israel’s catastrophic war on Gaza, have breathed new life into the idea. That war has delegitimized the Jewish state by revealing the genocidal implications of Zionism. But it also reminds us that militant ethno-nationalism on the part of any group determined to dominate all others leads in the direction of ethnic cleansing and genocide. For further discussions of issues relating to bi-nationalism, see the work of Georgetown University law professor Lama Abu-Odeh and that of Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh of the Open University of Israel (The Arab and Jewish Questions, Legend Press, 2020).
Whether the future of Palestine involves the creation of two states or a single state, and whether the constitution of that state is binational or unitary, it seems clear that Israel as currently structured must be radically transformed. But the fate of this land, and, indeed, that of the entire region, has never been a matter to be decided by its inhabitants, either Jewish or Muslim. The imperial powers’ control of the region, originally challenged by Arab revolts against the British and French, has been maintained and even strengthened by American/European wars and machinations. From the 1958 U.S. invasion of Lebanon to two wars against Iraq, intervention in the Syrian civil war, overthrow of the Libyan state, covert warfare against Iran, and all-out support for Israel in a dozen regional conflicts, the United States has not ceased to wield its military power to decide who rules and who serves in the Middle East. Equally influential are the bribes in the form of civil and military aid packages that keep obedient leaders in power and marginalize their opponents, and the diplomatic maneuvers that provide temporary settlements favorable to U.S. interests, such as the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel.
As a result, to define the current struggle in the Holy Land as an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and to speculate about possible forms of settlement on “the day after Hamas” grossly misconceives the real situation, which is that of imperial proxy warfare. The much-publicized differences of opinion between Israel’s Netanyahu regime and America’s Biden administration are purely tactical (and have not prevented Democratic as well as Republican leaders from inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress.) These leaders’ strategic goals – the maintenance of U.S. hegemony and Israeli military superiority in the region – remain unchanged. But if the imperial system in the Middle East is a source of violent conflict, which seems undeniable, how can one talk seriously of a peaceful “day after” that leaves this system in place?
Understanding the connection between imperialism and war in the Middle East, the late Johan Galtung, one of the founders of peace studies, argued that peace in the region did not depend on a “two-state solution” but on a “six-state solution” — the establishment of an autonomous regional organization able to stand up to the U.S. and to make collective decisions in its members’ interests. The guiding principle, in his view, was to connect any possible peace plan for Palestine and Israel to an effective diminution of American power to enable local parties to decide their own fates. A similar argument has been made more recently by Kaye and Vakil in “Only the Middle East Can Fix the Middle East: The Path to a Post-American Order.”
If the American role in creating, exacerbating, and perpetuating the Israel/Palestine conflict is not recognized – that is, if we buy into the fantasy of noble imperialism and the pax americana – the “day after” solutions now being retailed by will prove equally illusory. Each day that the slaughter in Gaza continues makes it clearer that Zionism can never again command the loyalty of Jews dedicated to peace and justice or anyone else committed to the development of a human community. It is long past time for American Jews to get rid of the Israeli flags that so often stand on the bimas of their synagogues and temples. But the American flags standing there should also be eliminated. Realizing the vision of a human community – the vision of prophets from Isaiah to Marx – means transcending all forms of ethno-nationalism that stand in the way of human development. The point is not to deny one’s ethnic and cultural heritage but to overcome the fixation on national (and in America’s case, imperial) identities and to move ahead, out of the flames of the present holocaust, toward species-consciousness.
First, it was a breaking-news headline. Loud bangs heard at Trump rally in Pennsylvania. Then, an explanatory update. Shots fired. Then, it was named. Assassination attempt. Sounds became actions, actions became intentions. Then, finally—but thanks to the internet, so quickly—the image: Trump being ushered off-stage by his security detail, a grimace across his face, a smack of red blood above his right ear, his fist raised in defiance.
And I know I cannot be the only one who, the second I saw that already-iconic image, the instant that pop of red hooked my gaze, thought: Oh, no. He’s definitely going to win now.
At times like these, some things bear remembering that are easily forgotten. It is not a self-evident state of affairs that a bullet grazing the side of Trump’s face—and photographic evidence of the event circulating around the globe—should necessarily deliver him an election. There is nothing intrinsic about the contrast between a ribbon of blood curling down the side of one’s cheek and their clenched, shaking fist hovering in the air that says: president. Yet, does it not feel so entirely commonsensical that Trump will be politically buoyed by this could-have-been assassination that it barely warrants explaining?
How did we get here? When were spectacles of public injury—of which the image of the Bleeding Trump will now become an historical example par excellence—instated as our primary political currency? How were questions of vulnerability—of who is most vulnerable, to whom, and why—placed at the core of public life? Why does the status of “victim” carry such undeniable political cachet?
In her recent book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, scholar Lilie Chouliaraki explains how the strategic cultural collapse of what she calls “tactical” and “systemic” forms of suffering have emerged as the dominant cultural strategy of the Right in the 21st Century. Her analysis shows how regressive political actors like Trump have seized upon public performances of victimhood in order to position certain publics (overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, cisgender) as unacceptably vulnerable to a variety of malevolent forces (immigration, crime, gender, feminism… the list is long). Calling these public performances of suffering “tactical” does not suggest that they are contrived or exaggerated or staged. Rather, they are tactical insomuch as they seize upon the affective force of public pain in order to hamstring any critical interrogation of what (if indeed, anything) pain may have to tell us about power. Tactical suffering maintains it as “common sense” that injury is a trace of vulnerability, and vulnerability a trace of oppression.
This, we must understand, is how a photograph of a bleeding Trump becomes an evidentiary symbol for a beleaguered, systemically oppressed MAGA base. The sight of blood carries an implicit claim to the universal (and universalizing) vulnerability of the human body: Trump, we now know, bleeds red like the rest of us. But vulnerability has a politics that extends beyond the definitional vulnerability of the body to injury and death—and Trump is not vulnerable as the rest of us are. We are not, contrary to this recent, absurd headline from The Spectator, “all MAGA.”
Trump is not vulnerable in the way that migrants are vulnerable to militarized borders. He is not vulnerable in the way that a pregnant person seeking an abortion is now vulnerable in certain states following the Dobbs decision. He is not vulnerable in the way that a transgender woman is now (even more) vulnerable to being harassed, attacked, or simply legislated out of existence. He is not even particularly vulnerable to gun violence, in a country where the gun lobby has been emboldened by Trump’s endorsements and where the majority of politically motivated shootings are perpetrated by the same white nationalists to whom he preens and dogwhistles.
He may bleed red, but in the version of America he and his movement seek to create, he will almost certainly bleed least.
Today, Trump is alive and well. What that pop of red circulating on our social media feeds and lingering on our screens signals to us on a primal level, however, is that he could be killed. It is the subjunctivity of his injury—its could be-ness and could-have-been-ness—that allows his persistent narratives of self-victimization (the blood) and his “strong man” image (the fist) to sit side-by-side in public mind, undisturbed by their apparent contradiction. This effect—by which the hypothetical comes to dominate over the actual in our public imaginations of who is most vulnerable to injury in our society—is what I have, through my own work as theorist of the relationship between violence and culture, come to describe as victimcould.
Trump is a master of victimcould. He has built a political career out of strategically weaponizing the merely possible to distract from the far more important question of what is probable, and of positioning himself and his followers as “victims” of injuries that are always, conveniently, just around the corner of history. As many have remarked, his most baffling power has always been to find ways to establish himself—a spray-tanned millionaire and television personality—as some kind of proxy for the “left behind” white, working American man. His insistence on his own vulnerability has always been in the service of cultivating and appealing to the self-perceived vulnerability of the version of the American people he purports to represent. This America, Trump insist, is vulnerable not to the present political order (capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal), but to an emerging one (progressive, redistributive, egalitarian) that he promises to kill in its cradle.
What we’re left with is a “funhouse mirror” version of political reality (to borrow a phrase from Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Empowered) in which we are to believe that it is Trump specifically (and powerful, white men in general) who are most vulnerable to what history has in store. Most striking, however, is that we are seeing this distorted “mirror world” (to borrow another phrasing from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger) rendered into being using the visual building blocks of the very same emerging, alternative world that Trump and his followers insist is so very dangerous.
Last year, prior to Trump’s arrest, AI-generated image-inings of his “could be” arrest went viral online. They depicted a suited Trump being swarmed and toppled by a gaggle of uniformed police officers in the middle of the street. These images called to mind the already-iconic images of vulnerable protesters being wrestled to the ground by uniformed police during the Black Lives Matter protests—a likeness that is probably far more than just aesthetic, given what we know about how AI uses existing “real” photographs to produce new “unreal” ones. In the latest “real” image of Trump sauntering offstage in Pennsylvania on Saturday, his raised fist becomes a warped spectre of a defiant Colin Kaepernick, a just-freed Nelson Mandela, a not-yet-silenced Angela Y. Davis. The whole world feels turned upside down—and Trump and his ilk are somehow to be found both at the bottom and the top.
Predictably, there has already been much chatter online about whether or not Saturday’s attempt on Trump’s life was “real” or whether it was some kind of false flag designed to augment the already-strong mythologies that frame his presidential campaign. This, too, is an example of Klein’s “doppelganger effect,” in which a climate of profound epistemic uncertainty gives those on the Left and Right alike passes to believe only that which conforms with their own worldviews and political metanarratives.
But the question of whether the this was a “real” assassination attempt—whether Trump really could have been killed on that Pennsylvania stage—is entirely the wrong question. Trump is a candidate for president, and a highly controversial one at that. He could be killed any day of the week—as could Biden. The right question is what that irreducible possibility actually means. What, if anything, does the Bleeding Trump have to tell us about the relationship between vulnerability and power—especially, when contemplated against the backdrop the real and actual and present deaths and injuries that make up the landscape of contemporary American politics?
Trump is not invulnerable, because none of us are. But the actual politics of vulnerability in America today has disturbingly well-defined contours: it routinely favors wealthy white men like Trump, and routinely victimizes people of colour, people living in poverty, women, queer and transgender communities, migrants, and many other groups that the MAGA movement has sought to vilify. Resisting the movement’s logic of victimcould means insisting upon the political primacy of the actual over the hypothetical at every turn. It demands tending to the reality of the world still with us.
Most people probably don’t know this but Wikipedia has a page called “List of Israeli assassinations”. It begins in July 1956 and stretches over 68 years until today. The majority on the list are Palestinians; among them are famous Palestinian leaders PFLP’s Ghassan Kanafani, Fatah’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir – also known as Abu Jihad, Hamas’s Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and Islamic Jihad’s Fathi Shaqaqi.
When looking at the long list, it is impossible not to notice that the number of assassinations and assassination attempts Israel has carried out over the years has increased exponentially: from 14 in the 1970s to well over 150 in the first decade of the new millennium and 24 since January 2020.
I was reminded of this list when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a news conference on July 13 to celebrate Israel’s attempt to kill Hamas’s military commander Muhammad Deif in Gaza. Israeli fighter jets and drones had just hammered al-Mawasi camp, which now houses an estimated 80,000 displaced Palestinians living in densely populated tents.
Within just a few minutes of the fusillade, the pilots had massacred at least 90 Palestinians, including scores of women and children, while injuring an additional 300 people. All of this occurred in an area Israel had previously designated a “safe zone”. As gruesome images of dead bodies charred and shred to pieces filled social media, reports surfaced that Israel had used several US-made guided half-tonne bombs.
In his news conference at the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Tel Aviv just a few hours after this bloodbath, Netanyahu admitted that he was “not absolutely certain” that Deif had been killed but maintained that “just the attempt to assassinate Hamas commanders delivers a message to the world, a message that Hamas’s days are numbered.”
Yet even a quick perusal of the “List of Israeli assassinations” makes clear that Netanyahu was speaking with a forked tongue. He knows all too well that Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi or military leaders Yahya Ayyash and Salah Shehade have done very little to weaken the movement and may well have increased its following.
If anything, years and years of Israeli assassinations demonstrate that they are primarily used by Israeli leaders to pander to and rally their constituencies. Netanyahu’s recent news conference is no exception.
But as macabre as the Wikipedia List is, the names on it only tell a partial story. That is because it fails to include the number of civilians killed during each and every successful and failed assassination attempt.
For example, the July 13 strike was the eighth known attempt on Deif’s life, and it is difficult to calculate the total number of civilians Israel has killed in its scramble to assassinate him. The Wikipedia List fails to capture how the increase in assassinations has led to an exponential increase in civilian deaths.
This becomes clear when we compare Israel’s current assassination policy with its policy during the second Palestinian Intifada. When Israel assassinated the head of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, Salah Shehade, in 2002, 15 people were killed, including Shehade, his wife, 15-year-old daughter, and eight other children.
After the strike, there was a public uproar in Israel at the loss of civilian lives, with 27 Israeli pilots signing a letter refusing to fly assassination sorties over Gaza. Almost a decade later, an Israeli commission of inquiry found that due to an “intelligence gathering failure” commanders had not known that there were civilians present in the adjacent buildings at the time, and had they known they would have called off the attack.
The commission’s findings are in line with the laws of armed conflict, which allow, or at least tolerate, the killing of civilians not directly participating in hostilities so long as these killings are not “excessive” in relation to the “concrete and direct” military advantage that the belligerent expects to gain from the attack.
This rule, known as the principle of proportionality, is designed to ensure that the ends of a military operation justify the means by weighing the anticipated military advantage against the expected civilian harm.
Today, however, we are light years away from the commission’s conclusions both with respect to the repertoires of violence Israel has adopted and the legal justifications it now provides.
First, Israel’s forms of warmaking have changed dramatically since 2002. According to the Israeli organisation Breaking the Silence, which is made up of military veterans, two doctrines have guided the Israeli assaults on Gaza since 2008. The first is the “no casualties doctrine”, which stipulates that, for the sake of protecting Israeli soldiers, Palestinian civilians can be killed with impunity; the second doctrine recommends intentionally attacking civilian sites in order to deter Hamas.
These doctrines have unsurprisingly led to mass-casualty attacks, which, according to the laws of armed conflict, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a consequence, Israel’s military lawyers have had to modify the way they interpret the laws of armed conflict so that they align with the new warfare strategies.
If two decades ago killing 14 civilians when assassinating a Hamas leader was considered disproportionate and thus a war crime by the Israeli commission of inquiry, in the first weeks after October 7, the military decided that for every junior Hamas operative it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians. If the target was a senior Hamas official, the military “authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
This might seem egregious, but an officer at the International Law Department in the Israeli was very candid about such changes in a 2009 interview for Haaretz: “Our goal of military is not to fetter the army, but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner.”
The former head of the department, Colonel Daniel Reisner, also publicly stated this strategy was pursued through “a revision of international law. If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.”
In other words, the way we calculate proportionality is not determined by some a priori moral edict but rather the norms and customs created by militaries as they adopt new and most often more lethal forms of warmaking.
Again, Netanyahu knows this all too well. He has stated that he personally approved the al-Mawasi strike after receiving satisfactory information on the potential “collateral damage” and the type of ammunition to be used.
What is clear is that as Israel decimates Gaza and kills tens of thousands of people, it is also attempting to recreate the norms of warmaking and significantly transform interpretations of the laws of armed conflict.
If Netanyahu and his government succeed in rendering Israel’s version of proportionality acceptable among other state actors, then the laws of armed conflict will end up justifying rather than preventing genocidal violence. Indeed, the very architecture of the entire international legal order is now in the balance.
Whether we call it “polycrisis,” like Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze, or “the age of catastrophe,” like the distinguished Marxist Alex Callinicos, there is no doubt that we are living in a period where the very foundations of the contemporary world order are cracking. There is that enigmatic line Gramsci used to describe his era that is also appropriate for ours: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
This short essay will focus on a key dimension of the polycrisis: the unravelling of the global hegemony of the United States.
The downspin of the U.S. empire has had a number of causes, but key among them are military overextension, neoliberal globalization, and the crisis of the liberal political and ideological order. Let us discuss each in turn.
Overextension and Osama
Overextension refers to the gap between the ambitions of a hegemon and its capacity to achieve those ambitions. It is almost synonymous with the concept of overreach as used by the historian Paul Kennedy, the slight difference being that overextension as I use it is principally a military phenomenon. The struggling empire the United States is today is a far cry from the unipolar power it was a quarter of a century ago, in 2000. If we ask ourselves what led to this situation, it inevitably comes down to one individual: Osama bin Laden.
The aim of bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 was precisely to provoke the overextension of the empire by forcing it to fight on several fronts in the Muslim world that would be inspired to revolt by his dramatic action. But instead of igniting revolt, Osama’s act ignited revulsion and disapproval among most Muslims. September 11 would have been a big failure had not George W. Bush seen it as an opportunity to use American power to reshape the world to reflect the Washington’s unipolar status. He took Osama’s bait and launched the United States into two unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The results have been devastating for America’s power and prestige.
During the June 7, 2024, debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Trump referred to the defeat in Afghanistan as the worst humiliation ever inflicted on the United States. Now Trump, as we all know, is prone to exaggeration, but there was strong element of truth in his statement.
According to CIA analyst Nelly Lahoud, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for a-Qaeda, bin Laden still changed the world and continued to influence global politics of nearly a decade after.” If the United States is the confused and groping global power it is today—one that has been, moreover, reduced to a dog being wagged by the Zionist tail—that is to a not-insignificant degree due to bin Laden.
To acknowledge the significance of 9/11 is not, of course, to endorse it. Indeed, for most of us, the attack on civilians was morally repelling. But one must give the devil his due, as they say, that is, point out the objective, world-historic impact of the deed of an individual, be this person a saint or a villain.
Trading Places
Let us turn to the second major cause of the unravelling of the hegemonic U.S. status: neoliberal globalization. Thirty years ago, U.S. corporate capital, along with the Clinton administration, envisioned globalization, achieved through trade, investment, and financial liberalization, as the spearhead of its greater domination of the global economy. Wall Street and Washington were wrong. It was China that was the biggest beneficiary of globalization and the United States one of its main victims.
Investment liberalization meant billions of dollars worth of U.S. corporate capital flowed to China to take advantage of labor that could be paid at fraction of the wages paid labor in the United States in exchange for technology transfer, voluntary or forced, that helped China comprehensively develop its economy. Trade liberalization made China the manufacturer of the world supplying mainly the U.S. market with cheap products. Both investment and trade liberalization contributed to the deindustrialization of the US and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, which declined from 17.3 million jobs in 2000 to around 13 million today. Compounding the deleterious effects of deindustrialization have been the financialization of the U.S. economy, that is, making the super-profitable financial sector the leading edge of the economy, and regressive taxation, which led to an extremely inequitable distribution of income and wealth.
China has traded places with the United States in the global economy. China is now the center of global capital accumulation or, in the popular image, the “locomotive of the world economy.” According to IMF calculations, China accounted for 28 percent of all growth worldwide from 2013 to 2018, which is more than twice the share of the United States. What must be underlined is that while the United States followed neoliberal policies of giving full play to market forces, China selectively liberalized, with the powerful Chinese state guiding the process, protecting strategic sectors from foreign control, and aggressively demanding advanced technology from Western corporations in exchange for cheap labor.
Although in dollar terms, the United States is still the biggest economy, by some other measures, like the World Bank’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China is now the world’s largest. In the United States, 11.5 percent of people now live in poverty, whereas, according to the World Bank, only 2 percent of China’s population is poor.
Of course, China has faced challenges in its rise to the world’s economic summit, but development, as the economist Albert Hirschman point out, is a necessarily unbalanced process. China’s crises are crises of growth, compared to the U.S. crises, which are crises of decline.
From De Facto to Armed Civil War?
Military overextension and the effects of neoliberal economics have contributed not simply to political disaffection but to political turmoil in the United States, with one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, becoming the spearhead of far-right or fascist politics fueled by racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, fear, and decline in economic status among white people. Politics has become severely polarized, and some warn that there is now a state of de facto civil war. In short, the political and ideological regime of liberal democracy is now in grave danger, with many liberals and progressives warning that Trump’s Plan 2025 will amount to the establishment of a fascist dictatorship. They are not wrong.
Here is what Steve Bannon, the ideological chief of the U.S. far right, says,
The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump… We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
A second Trump presidency is now a certainty, with the strong possibility that the de facto civil war could turn into an armed civil war. Indeed, the assassination attempt on Trump on July 13, whoever carried it out, may well be a major step towards the unrestrained violence depicted in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.”
Crisis of the Liberal International Order
Washington has been the guardian of the international order, and with the economic and political crisis of the United States, that order has also entered into a deep crisis. What are the key aspects of what has been characterized as the liberal international order? First, of all, global leadership of the United States and the West underpinned by U.S. military power. Second, a multilateral order that serves as a political canopy for Western capital, whose mainstays are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Third, an ideology that promotes Western-style democracy as the only legitimate political regime.
This liberal order is now in trouble on two fronts: on the international front, it has lost legitimacy among the global South, which sees the multilateral system as designed mainly to keep it down; internally, the liberal democracy that is its guiding ideology is under assault from the far right. If the far right comes to power in the United States and in key states in Europe—and it may come to power soon in France and soon after that, in Germany—the international order they would favor would probably continue to assert Western economic supremacy but adopt a much more unilateralist approach, more protectionist approach of securing it instead of using the IMF-World Bank-WTO complex. Certainly, the far right will abandon the hypocritical appeal to liberal democracy as a model for the rest of the world.
Headed for War?
China says it is not out to displace the United States as global hegemon. To the U.S. elite, however, China is a revisionist power determined to dislodge it as the global hegemon. Especially in the Biden years, the United States has become more and more determined to use that dimension of hegemony where it enjoys absolute superiority over China, military power, to protect its status as number one.
This is why the danger of war between the United States and China is not to be underestimated, and this is the reason the Western Pacific is such a powder keg, far more than Ukraine. In Ukraine, the United States and China confront each other through proxies, Russia and NATO, while in the Pacific they confront each other directly.
The United States has scores of bases surrounding China from Japan to the Philippines, including the massive floating base that is the Seventh Fleet. The South China Sea is now filled with rival warships performing naval “exercises.” Among the latest visitors are vessels from France and Germany, U.S. allies that have been dragooned far from NATO’s traditional area of coverage to contain China. U.S. and Chinese warships have been known to play games of chicken—heading at each other and then swerving at the last minute. A miscalculation of a few feet could result in a collision, with unpredictable consequences. Fears that the South China Sea will be the next site of armed conflict are not alarmist.
In the absence of any rules of conflict resolution, the only thing preventing conflict is the balance of power. But balance-of-power regimes are prone to breakdown, often with catastrophic results—as was the case in 1914, when the collapse of the European balance of power led to World War I. With Washington aggressively marshaling Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, five carrier task forces of the U.S. Navy, NATO, and the newly created AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance into a confrontational stance against China, the chances of a rupture in the East Asian balance of power are becoming more and more likely—perhaps just a collision or away.
Hegemonic Transition or Hegemonic Stalemate?
So what does the future hold? Some say a hegemonic transition, whether peaceful or not is inevitable.
But let us pose another possibility. Perhaps, we should be looking not so much at a hegemonic transition but at the emergence of a hegemonic vacuum akin to but not exactly the same as that which followed the First World War, when the weakened Western European states had ceased to have the capacity of restore their pre-war global hegemony while the United States did not follow through on Woodrow Wilson’s push for Washington to assert hegemonic political and ideological leadership.
Within such a vacuum or stalemate, the U.S.-China relationship would continue to be critical, but with neither actor able to decisively manage trends, such as extreme weather events, growing protectionism, the decay of the multilateral system that the United States put in place during its apogee, the resurgence of progressive movements in Latin America, the rise of authoritarian states, the likely emergence of an alliance among them to displace a faltering liberal international order, and increasingly uncontrolled tensions between radical Islamist regimes in the Middle East and Israel.
Both conservative and liberal policymakers paint this scenario to underline why the world needs a hegemon, with the former advocating a unilateral Goliath who does not hesitate to use threat and force to enforce order and the latter preferring a liberal Goliath who, to slightly revise Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying, speaks sweetly but carries a big stick.
There are, however, those, and I am one of them, who view the current crisis of U.S. hegemony as offering not so much anarchy but opportunity. Although there are risks and great dangers involved, a hegemonic stalemate or a hegemonic vacuum, opens up the path to a world where power could more decentralized, where there could be greater freedom of political and economic maneuver for smaller, traditionally less privileged actors from the global South playing off the two superpowers against one another, where a truly multilateral order could be constructed through cooperation rather than be imposed through either unilateral or liberal hegemony.
Yes, the crisis of U.S. hegemony may lead to an even deeper crisis, but it may also lead to opportunity for us. To use Gramsci’s image that I began this essay with, we may be entering an age of monsters, but like Ulysses, we cannot avoid going through the dangerous passage between Scylla and Charybdis if we are to get to the promised safe harbor.
Israel’s genocidal war is both massacring Palestinians and destroying their physical and social infrastructure. In particular, Israel has targeted Palestinian educational institutions. In late April, UN experts concluded, “with more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.”1 The aim of this settler-colonial project is to eradicate the physical, intellectual, and political reproduction of the Palestinian people. As Maya Wind documents in her new book Towers of Ivory and Steel, the Israeli higher education system plays a key role in this agenda. Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews Wind about the current war, the nature of Zionist higher educational institutions, and the case for a boycott of Israeli universities.
Maya Wind is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship broadly investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. Towers of Ivory and Steel(Verso, 2024) is her first book.
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Your book is a brilliant account of the role Israeli higher education plays in enforcing apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. The flip side of that for the Israeli state is the destruction of Palestinian higher education, best exemplified by what activists have called “scholasticide,” that is, the complete demolition of Palestinian educational institutions. Why is Israel so intent on destroying Palestinian schools and universities?
Palestinian and Indigenous scholars of education across the world have long analyzed settler colonialism through the prism of the university. Informed by this work, I investigated the institution of the university in order to study the Israeli settler colonial project. The Zionist project has always sought to eliminate and replace indigenous Palestinians with Jews as the basis for the Jewish state. Because Israel has always regarded Palestinian education as a force behind the Palestinian liberation movement (and therefore a threat to its rule), the erasure of Palestinian knowledge production and the destruction of Palestinian centers of education—what Karma Nabulsi has called “scholasticide”— is central to this project of Palestinian elimination and dispossession.
Israel has continuously obstructed, raided, and bombarded Palestinian universities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) since their founding, and it has escalated its repression of Palestinian universities in tandem with Palestinian popular uprisings. When the First Intifada erupted in 1987, Israel immediately targeted and labeled universities as sites of rebellion. Between 1988 and 1992, the Israeli military ordered the closure of Birzeit University, along with all Palestinian institutions of higher education. Palestinian faculty and students were forced to continue their collective study underground, which Israel then designated “cells of illegal education” and continually raided, arresting faculty and student participants.
Israel has criminalized campus mobilization and has targeted student organizers in particular, declaring 411 Palestinian student groups and associations unlawful since 1967. Every year, the Israeli military abducts dozens of organizers of student associations, either from their campuses during the day or from their homes in the middle of the night. These students are often held in administrative detention, which allows Israel to indefinitely incarcerate Palestinians in military prisons without either charge or trial based on undisclosed evidence. Israel subjects these students to ill treatment and torture, including beatings, prolonged shackling in stress positions, and threats of extended detention that would derail their academic studies.
Even before the current war on Gaza, Israel’s illegal siege targeted Palestinian universities with debilitating economic and structural isolation and periodic aerial bombardments that damaged their already dilapidated infrastructure. In the course of this genocide, Israel has destroyed every single Palestinian university in the Gaza Strip, reducing them all to rubble. Over ninety thousand university students now have no university to attend.
Israel’s continuous war on Palestinian education extends from the detention and killing of Palestinian organizers in universities across the OPT to Shin Bet interrogations, arrests, and disciplinary hearings for Palestinian citizens at Israeli universities. Across all the territories under Israeli governance, the university campus is not a safe space for Palestinian students. Israeli universities are the state’s partners in their oppressive campaign to deny the Palestinians’ right to education. This denial is central to subduing the Palestinian movement for liberation.
So, the entanglement of the university with settler colonialism has two facets: first, because the universities of the colonized harbor tremendous liberatory potential, the colonial administration targets them with brutal repression; second, the colonizers establish their own universities as pillars of settler rule. My book focuses on this second facet through a comprehensive study of the Israeli university system. I wrote it in response to the call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
For two decades now, PACBI has illuminated the imbrication of both the Israeli university and the Western university with colonial violence. In answering the Palestinian call and demanding divestment and an academic boycott, the student encampments in the US and Europe have come to face this violence in the brutal repression enacted through the universities’ collaboration with the state. But this confrontation has emboldened and multiplied an emerging movement to decolonize higher education in Palestine and across the world.
In your book you illustrate how, much like kibbutzim, the construction of Israeli universities as physical outposts was part of the conquest, colonization, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They were, as you argue, “land-grab institutions.” How were they set up? What role did they play in colonization? And how do they continue to fulfill that function today?
The parallels between kibbutzim and Israeli universities are important. Both have long been celebrated as Israel’s foremost liberal—if not progressive, or even “Left” –—institutions. In fact, not only do they serve as critical infrastructure of Palestinian dispossession, but it is precisely their liberal identity that has been so instrumental in justifying and sustaining the Zionist colonization of Palestine for decades.
Kibbutzim were established on Palestinian lands and designed as frontier communities to anchor campaigns for Palestinian expulsion and Jewish settlement expansion across historic Palestine. Universities too, were founded as land-grab institutions to anchor demographic and territorial engineering in regions of particular strategic concern for the Israeli state. The broad international celebration of both Israeli kibbutzim and universities as progressive has enabled them to obscure the colonial nature of the Zionist project and enact violence against Palestinians.
In the case of Israeli universities, this begins with the physical infrastructure of their campuses. They were built to anchor the official state program of “Judaization”: the state’s theft of Palestinian lands and interruption of Palestinian territorial contiguity, coupled with the expansion of Jewish settlement and Jewish land ownership.
Hebrew University, the first university of the Zionist movement, was established in 1918 as a state-building institution. It was built at the strategically chosen apex of Mt. Scopus to stake a symbolic and material claim to the entire city of Jerusalem. In the wake of Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the Mt. Scopus campus played an important role in the state’s project to “unify” the city through the illegal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem. After nineteen years spent at a campus in West Jerusalem, the university’s return to the Mt. Scopus campus was made possible by Israel’s 1967 occupation. Its return fueled the expropriation of property from neighboring Palestinian communities and the continuous building of new settlements on Palestinian lands in occupied East Jerusalem.
In the Galilee, the most populous Palestinian region within Israel’s borders, the University of Haifa plays a key role in interrupting Palestinian territorial contiguity and facilitating Palestinian land theft. It anchored research and planning for mitspim (lookouts), nuclei of Jewish settlement built on strategically selected hilltops throughout the Galilee. They were conceived of as a “deterritorializing device” by the Israeli state in the wake of the Palestinian “Land Day” in 1976 and growing concern over Palestinian citizen mobilization. Designed to create “facts on the ground” and solidify control over Palestinian lands, mitspim also serve as sites of surveillance for Jewish residents to monitor Palestinian land use and potential expansion. University of Haifa experts have helped plan, develop, research, assess, and improve mitspim and other Israeli programs of demographic engineering in the Galilee.
In the Naqab (which Israel calls the Negev), the region most sparsely populated by Jewish Israelis, Ben-Gurion University anchors the Zionist project of displacing and replacing Palestinian Bedouins. The university was established to “make the desert bloom,” as the Zionist adage puts it, and “develop the Negev” by growing its Jewish population. The university facilitates regional “Judaization” by aiding the state in transferring military bases from Israel’s center to the Naqab and supports its Jewish-Israeli students to participate in this land-grab project. Ben-Gurion students continually establish “student villages,” exclusively Jewish settlements across the Naqab, which provide student housing with the explicit goal of facilitating permanent residence on state lands previously inhabited by Palestinian Bedouins.
In the occupied West Bank, Ariel University was developed to normalize and grow Jewish settlements and expand Israeli sovereignty in the OPT. The university was conceived of by the settlements’ founders as a means to bring more Jewish Israelis into the occupied West Bank and to transform the illegal settlement of Ariel into a legitimate suburb of the Tel Aviv metropolis. As the institution developed from a college into a fully accredited university, it has expanded Israeli legal jurisdiction in the OPT and fueled a construction and population boom in the settlement to create “facts on the ground.” The normalization and development of Ariel University and the Israeli settlement and planned annexation of the occupied West Bank are thus intertwined.
For over a century, Israeli universities have been expanding national borders and advancing “Jewish sovereignty” across historic Palestine. They have been planned, designed, and built to serve as settlement outposts on confiscated Palestinian lands and militarized bases for the Israeli state to further Palestinian dispossession. Their international reputation as liberal, if not progressive, institutions provide them cover to serve Israeli settler colonialism with impunity.
The Israeli higher educational system is deeply integrated with the apartheid state and the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in particular. What are the key features of this integration? What role do they play for the IOF?
Israeli universities run programs that conceptualize academic and military training as one and the same. All public universities offer their facilities, faculty, and expertise to the Israeli military for training and advancing the career development of soldiers and security state personnel through specialized degree-granting programs. For soldiers, this is run through a specialized academic program administered through the university system called Atuda (academic reserve). Atuda was developed to provide the Israeli military a cadre of highly educated and specialized soldiers.
The Israeli military runs fifty degree programs across all public Israeli universities, covering soldiers’ tuition and granting needs-based stipends in exchange for extended military service as commanders and officers after they graduate. The wide-ranging disciplines these programs offer include courses in languages, humanities, law, life sciences, data sciences, and engineering. Through Atuda, soldiers are drafted and then sent to complete academic degrees and basic training, followed by a minimum six years of military service. This elite academic-military track has long operated as a pipeline to military leadership, academic posts, and executive positions in Israel’s military and tech industries.
Senior military personnel and academics attest to the importance of the program. They claim that Atuda is both crucial for its military and central to providing Israeli companies with technological capabilities and a competitive edge in the global market. Knowledge and ideas developed through Atuda are not patented by the military, allowing for a “knowledge spillover” into the Israeli private sector. Graduates of Atuda degree programs in physics, math, and computer science have frequently assumed key positions in Israeli military research and development, with some later establishing their own security sector companies.
Crucially, Atuda hones the capacity of Israeli soldiers to carry out their work in maintaining Israel’s illegal military occupation and system of apartheid. Israeli universities prepare Israeli soldiers for their daily labor of violating Palestinian rights. They train engineers for the research and development of weaponry used against occupied Palestinians, as well as officers for combat units and the Intelligence Corps.Many of the soldiers graduating from Hebrew University’s prestigious “Havatzalot” Atuda program serve in Unit 8200 of the Intelligence Corps, which is responsible for amassing Palestinian phone calls, text messages, and emails. As Palestinians have long reported—and as Israeli whistleblowers have corroborated—soldiers from Unit 8200 use their routine surveillance of Palestinians in the OPT to collect information and try them in military courts. The unit also uses information about peoples’ financial difficulties, sexual orientation, serious illnesses, or their loved ones’ needed medical treatments to extort them into collaborating with the Shin Bet.
Palestinian journalists, researchers and human rights organizations have been reporting these forms of Israeli coercion across the OPT for years. Al Mezan Center for Human Rights has extensively documented Israeli extortion and arrests of Palestinian cancer patients as they travel to and from the Gaza Strip. Unit 8200, which now includes soldiers trained at Hebrew University, is responsible for these violations of Palestinian rights. Unit 8200 soldiers have also created mass “target banks” in Gaza to guide the IOF in killing Palestinians over the last nine months.
In tailoring courses and degrees to soldiers and offering soldiers exclusive training under their auspices, Israeli universities have become integral to honing Israel’s military capabilities and reproducing its labor power. So, not only are Israeli universities central to the infrastructure of apartheid, but they are also now training soldiers carrying out a genocide.
In your book you expose the function of Israeli universities as knowledge factories for apartheid and occupation. How do they generate founding myths about the past and provide ideological justifications for the Zionist project in the present?
Knowledge production within universities must be taken seriously because it has been central to shoring up the legitimacy of the Zionist project. Over the decades, Israeli universities have helped the Israeli state create legal frameworks that have paved the way for the impunity of the current genocide.
In the field of legal studies, the Israeli state has collaborated with its universities to legitimate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Israel has been an innovator in interpreting international humanitarian law, with the OPT as its laboratory. To sanction its permanent military regime, Israel has created the legal infrastructure to justify extrajudicial assassinations, torture, and the deployment of (what would otherwise be considered) disproportionate use of force against civilian populations.
As legal scholars Noura Erakat and Lisa Hajjar show, these theorizations and legal interpretations sanction practices that have been traditionally defined as extralegal in international humanitarian law. Yet Israeli scholars, who collaborate with the Israeli military leadership, have conceptualized and provided the philosophical and legal foundations for Israeli military doctrines, strategies, and tactics that have been deemed war crimes by international human rights organizations.
Tel Aviv University is a key site for such legal innovation. At its Institute of National Security Studies (INSS), academic experts and senior security state personnel join forces to develop and publish legal guidance for the Israeli government and military. In INSS journals, Israeli scholars and military personnel have articulated justifications for the exclusion of Israeli military doctrines, strategies, and tactics from the usual terms of international law. For instance, they proposed a new category to contravene the legal distinction between combatants and civilians when they coined the term “third population”—persons who appear to be noncombatants but may potentially interfere with Israeli military operations. Referring to Palestinian civilians in this way enables the Israeli military to target them with impunity.
Right now, Israeli legal scholars are providing theoretical justifications for the genocide for its defense against international legal charges. Israeli scholars mobilized in the wake of the South African petition accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people. At the INSS, they joined panels with senior personnel from the Israeli Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs to craft arguments and narratives to influence international lawyers and public opinion, and to convince the judges at the International Court of Justice to side with Israel against South Africa’s case. Israeli academic knowledge production is thus being used to cultivate Israeli impunity and justify genocide.
Israel likes to claim that it respects the rights of its Palestinian population, pointing to their inclusion in all institutions of its society from the Knesset to the higher education. Your book exposes such proclamations to be lies that cover up apartheid. What is the experience of Palestinian scholars and students in Israeli universities? How do the state and universities restrict and repress Palestinians’ right to research, study, advocate, and organize?
Israeli universities continually manipulate the facts when manufacturing propaganda about their ostensible inclusion of Palestinians. Government data actually shows that Palestinian students have always been underrepresented in Israeli universities. In 2022, Palestinians made up just over 16 percent of bachelor’s degree students (when they make up 30 percent of university-aged citizens in Israel), and their numbers shrink in the higher echelons of the university hierarchy. They make up just over 11 percent of master’s students, 8 percent of PhD students, and only 3.5 percent of university faculty.
Even research from the Israeli Ministry of Finance concluded that the integration of Palestinians in Israeli universities is currently declining and that the gaps in access between Palestinian and Jewish students are, in fact, widening. Thus, while Israeli universities may tout their integration of Palestinian students and programs to counter the campaign for an academic boycott’s cascade of victories, their claims are contradicted by actual facts and data.
But a debate about the numbers obscures the foundational problem of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. There is a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, enrolling Palestinian students and the facilitating the mere presence of individual Palestinians in Israeli universities and, and on the other, permitting the Palestinian identity and Palestinian politics on campus.
Like their inclusion in the Israeli state as citizens, Palestinian enrollment in Israeli universities has always been considered an “undesirable inevitability” by the Israeli state. Their presence was fiercely debated, resisted, and, ultimately, only reluctantly tolerated. From their entry into the Israeli university system Palestinians citizens have been closely surveilled and monitored by university administrations and the Israeli security state. The Israeli educational system seeks to create what anthropologist Khaled Furani describes as “‘Israeli Arabs,’ closed in a box and reconciled with Zionism and with its state.” Palestinian students graduating from this system arrive at the university in hopes of finding a more liberatory space. Yet upon their arrival at Israeli universities, Palestinian students find that these institutions too are embedded in an Israeli society whose existence is, as Furani puts it, “based on the negation of the Palestinian existence.”
Soon after they enter the Israeli university, Palestinian students and scholars quickly come to understand the structural barriers to their exploration of Palestinian history and identity. They are policed in classroom discussions and in their own thinking and writing. This of course extended to any sort of political mobilizing on campus. Universities closely monitor and violently repress Palestinian activism. Administrations summon Palestinian students to disciplinary committees, refuse to authorize their events, suspend their student groups, and permit the Israeli police and Shin Bet to arrest them on their own campus.
This longstanding repression has escalated since October. According to leading Palestinian civil rights organization Adalah, over 160 Palestinian students have already faced disciplinary action—34 of them suspended or expelled—often just for posts on social media.2 For their online expression and campus activism, Palestinian students have been accused (and sometimes indicted) for “incitement,” arrested, and subjected to abuse in Israeli detention facilities. Not only have universities failed to protect Palestinian students on campus or publicly defend their rights to oppose the genocide in Gaza, but the administrations themselves have often referred complaints against their students to the Israeli police that led to their arrest.3
Finally, the encampments that have swept campuses in the US and throughout the world have raised the demand for the divestment of university endowments from firms invested in Israel and for an academic boycott of Israeli universities. How does your book substantiate the case for an academic boycott? What does that boycott entail? Why is the call for an academic boycott a crucial part of the movement against Israeli apartheid?
The call for the academic boycott is in fact the foundational call of the BDS movement. The Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC) issued its call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions in 2005. A full year before that, in 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) called to boycott the Israeli academy as a pillar of Israel’s “regime of oppression” against Palestinians. As scholars, staff, and students in the international academic community, we need to take the Palestinian analysis that the Israeli academy was the primary institution to be boycotted seriously.
There has been a build up towards this moment for two decades now, with academic associations, faculty and graduate student unions, and undergraduate student councils passing resolutions to endorse the academic boycott. But this student uprising and its rapid cascade of wins is remarkable. We are witnessing a total paradigm shift exactly twenty years since PACBI first issued its call.
My book offers further data and evidence to substantiate what PACBI and Palestinian scholars have long argued—that the Israeli universities are pillars of Israeli racial rule. They have called for an institutional boycott until Israeli universities sever their ties to the apartheid regime. PACBI has articulated deeply principled and clear guidelines for the academic boycott. Read correctly, these offer Israeli universities a road map forward and extend an invitation to Israeli academics to address their institutions’ complicity in Israeli apartheid. In South Africa, some white faculty and students heeded the call from the African National Congress—echoed by the international community—and demanded that their universities sever their ties to the apartheid regime and take meaningful steps toward decolonization. Palestinians are calling on scholars across the world to guide Israeli academics to demand the same.
PACBI’s guidelines also call upon those of us in the Western academic community to address our own complicity in Israeli apartheid. Western universities have conferred an exceptional status to Israeli institutions, offering a broad range of funding opportunities, joint research ventures, and study-abroad programs. No such parallel collaborations exist with Palestinian universities or any other university system in the Middle East. For funding, publications, and legitimacy, Israeli universities are deeply dependent upon the Western system of higher education. This gives those of us in Western universities—students, staff, and faculty—both a critical opening and a responsibility to intervene and, at the very least, to end our own complicity in Palestinian unfreedom.
The courageous student uprising is leading all of us in fundamentally reimagining higher education and transforming it into the infrastructure of liberation in Palestine and throughout the world.
In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment, I spent several days and nights with them.
Gush Emunim: The Origin of the Settlement Movement
Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate article about the murder of those two teens.
My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of shabat.
The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. “Do you light?” she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother’s apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an assimilated Jew — an atheist, no less — standing in Kiryat Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped was a decent interval.
Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On the top, of course, were the Jews. “This may shock you,” she said, “but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,” she faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate, “in theocracy. Right, Zvi?” “Not exactly,” said Zvi. “Not a theocracy. The government of God.”
Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, “the Faithful” claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War, the 1967 conflict Israel fought against a coalition of Arab states, during which it took the West Bank, which its leaders called “Judea and Samaria.”
“Here began our first place,” one movement leader told me, “in Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true world of Judaism.”
“Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace,” another Gush activist explained. “That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to construct a people on its land.” But, he continued, “there were moral problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw them out? And we did throw them out… All the stuff about socialism, about national redemption, may be true, but that’s only one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong.”
And so began the settler movement, which, to this day, has never ended or stopped taking land from the Palestinians.
The Alon Plan
Even before that Jewish supremacist incursion, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin’s deputy prime minister, drafted a plan calling for settlements that would extend Israel’s political boundaries to the Jordan River. Such new Jewish settlements would ring Palestinian villages and towns and separate them from one another. In 1979, when I interviewed the mayor of Halhoul, where those two teens had been murdered, he took me to a hilltop, pointed to Kiryat Arba, and said all too prophetically: “The settlements are a cancer in our midst. A cancer can kill one man. But this cancer can kill a whole people.”
Following the Six-Day War, leaders of the Faithful supplied the shock troops for those growing settlements. It was common wisdom then that the situation “on the ground” was changing from month to month in favor of the Israelis. When I first started reporting there, a trip between East Jerusalem and Ramallah took about 20 minutes. However, once settler-only highways had been built and checkpoints put in place for Palestinians, the trip became at least twice as long. Initially, just soldiers posted on the roads, such checkpoints would later be industrialized with footpaths, tunnels, and turnstiles that looked like the ones in the subway system of New York where I later lived. Palestinians were then often forced to wait, sometimes for hours, before being allowed — or not — to proceed to their destinations.
The Israel-U.S. Peace Process
In 1993, a “peace process” was launched in — yes, you could hardly get farther away — Oslo, Norway. It “changed the modalities of the occupation,” as Noam Chomsky put it, “but not the basic concept… [H]istorian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that ‘the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.’” The U.S.-Israeli proposals at Camp David in 2000 only strengthened that colonialist urge. Palestinians were to be confined to 200 scattered areas. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed the consolidation of the Palestinian population into three cantons under Israeli control, separated from one another and from East Jerusalem.
From then on, Israel only continued its relentless occupation of Palestinian land. In 2002, it started erecting an enormous barrier wall along the Green Line and parts of the West Bank. At its most dramatic, that wall is a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.
After 1979, every time I traveled to the West Bank I saw new Jewish settlements in formation, with their characteristic red-tiled roofs and white walls. Meanwhile, the Israelis restricted Palestinians from building new homes or even additions to current ones. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, that prohibitive situation has resulted in an uglified city center with ever taller buildings. Today, in photos of Ramallah’s contemporary downtown I can’t even recognize the place I last visited in 2009.
Violence
From the very start, Jewish violence has accompanied the proliferation of settlements. In 1979, settlers and soldiers were already terrorizing residents of the Palestinian village of Halhoul and committing violence elsewhere. “A rash of civilian acts of vandalism occurred last spring,” I wrote that year. “Settlers… uprooted several acres of grapevines belonging to farmers from Hebron… Kiryat Arba residents also broke into several Arab houses in Hebron and wrecked them.” A four-year-old boy slipped out of his house during one of the curfews (levied by the Israelis on Halhoul, but not, of course, on Kiryat Arba). That child was then stoned by Israeli soldiers. Five months later, I reported speaking with his mother. She “thrust the child toward me and pointed at a scar that still showed on his forehead. ‘What can we do?’ she implored me. ‘We have no weapons. We are helpless. We can’t defend ourselves.’”
In 1994, an American extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and wounded another 125 of them. He was a supporter of the extremist Kach (Thus) movement founded by American rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1988, that movement and a split-off from it called Kahane Chai (Long Live Kahane) were declared to be “terrorist” in character by the Israeli government. It mattered little, however, since terrorism against Palestinians continued to flourish.
Too Little, Too Late
Forty-five years after my first report on the settlements, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that a farmer in his seventies living in the West Bank village of Qusra, Abdel-Majeed Hassan, had shown him “the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said [Israeli] settlers had destroyed.” Six residents of Qusra had been killed in such attacks, Kristof reported, between October 2023 and late June 2024. Israel’s government responded to the October 7th Hamas assault in Gaza by endorsing “more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements.” Almost duplicating the agonized statement of that Palestinian interviewee of mine in 1979, another Palestinian, an American engineer who had returned to the West Bank, told Kristof, “I’m an American citizen, but if they attack me here, what can I do? They can break my gate; they can kill me.”
His article was entitled “We Are Coming to Horrible Days.” Coming? The horror began over half a century ago. Had the New York Times run similar articles, starting in the late 1970s; had successive American governments not turned a blind eye to what was happening; had Washington not continued funding Israel’s crimes with some $3 billion a year in aid, that country’s land thefts and other crimes on the West Bank could never have continued. In 1979, Israel was already confiscating water from Halhoul and other Palestinian villages, while in the ensuing years you could see swimming pools and lush lawns in the Jewish settlements there, even as Palestinian villages and towns were left to collect rainwater in barrels on housetops.
Twenty-three years after I made my first trip, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem reported that, in “the first decade following the occupation, the left-leaning ‘Alignment’ governments followed the Alon Plan.” It advocated settling areas “perceived as having security importance” and sparse in Palestinian populations. Later, governments under the far more conservative Likud Party began establishing settlements across the West Bank, not just based on security considerations but ideological ones.
Jewish Supremacy
A word about the attitudes of Israeli Jews. In 1982, I interviewed a group of Israeli teenagers, one of whom, the daughter of Israeli leftist acquaintances of mine, told me that each new generation in her country was more right-wing than that of its parents. On one of several trips to Hebron in those years, I read this graffiti on a wall: “ARABS TO GAS CHAMBERS.” It certainly caught the mood of both that moment and those that followed to this day. For decades, in fact, the cry “Death to Arabs!” could be heard at some Israeli demonstrations. By the time Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza in 2023, you could watch videos of Israeli soldiers dancing and chanting “Death to Amalek! (The name Amalek refers to ancient biblical enemies of the Jews.)
Kristof writes that “Israel’s ‘state-backed settler violence,’ as Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorize Palestinians and force them off their land — as has happened to 18 communities since October [2023] — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops…The United States is already in the thick of the West Bank conflict… Many settlers have American accents and draw financial support from donors in the United States.”
But keep in mind that this is nothing new. Baruch Goldstein, that infamous mass murderer of 1994, was an American and it was very clear even then that American Jews were among the most rabid of the settlers.
In 2021, fulfilling the prophecy of the very first Israeli settler I ever visited, Zvi Eidels, the Israeli regime established what the human rights organization B’tselem called “a recognition of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
It feels bitter indeed to me to be able to say, “I told you so.” My accounts were largely ignored in those decades when I periodically reported from the West Bank. After all, I wrote for The Village Voice and other non-mainstream publications. The New York Times was largely silent on the subject then and Kristof’s recent telling observations sadly come decades too late. Even as I was finishing this article, Israeli forces were bombing densely populated neighborhoods in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps in the northern West Bank. (The Nur Shams brigade, which was an Israeli target, is an armed resistance group affiliated, according to Mondoweiss, with the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.)
Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s greatest writers, recently let me know that even he – whom Israeli forces once recognized as an illustrious person and allowed to travel in relative freedom — fears venturing outside since the settlers are “all over” the West Bank. In a recent Guardian article he wrote: “I spent the last 50 years of my life getting used to the loss of the Palestine of my parents; and… I might spend the remaining years of my life trying to get used to the loss of Palestine in its entirety.”
I’ve known Shehadeh since 1982 and never in all those years had I seen him despair. It’s unbelievably depressing to find him writing this now. All I could write back was: “I’m afraid you may be right.” Sometimes evil does triumph. Israel has now become a largely fascist country with a deeply fascist government and it has been transformed into that, at least in significant part, because my country has profusely underwritten the most malignant developments there, which are still ongoing.
Just as I was finishing this article, in fact, the Associated Press reported that “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades.” That land grab, its account added, “reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history.” Thus have the prophecies of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim been fulfilled.
[Author’s Note: I am forever indebted to Noam Chomsky, with whom I first became friends in 1964, and whose 1974 book, Peace in the Middle East?, taught me about the realities of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians. For my first trip, he provided me with the name of a person of great influence, the incomparable Dr. Israel Shahak, as well as of other holocaust survivors opposing Israel’s occupation. Noam Chomsky launched me on the long trajectory of my writing about Palestine from 1979 to this very moment. He is now 95 years old and in Brazil with his wife Valeria, recovering from a stroke. May he be blessed through the ages.]
