Anti-apartheid Solidarity in Canada

The Canadian journal Upping the Anti has a recent and excellent essay on their blog about efforts of Zionist groups working with the state to step up attacks on anti-apartheid solidarity. In 2004 there was a major push by Concordia university working with the state and Zionist groups to end anti-apartheid solidarity on the campus. When organizers attempted to block far right politician and occasional prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking, the university administration suspended several leading organizers and banned all anti-apartheid work on campus. These are the same liberal administrators who will be telling their grand kids 30 years from now how they were always against Israeli apartheid, just like they supposedly were with South African anti-Apartheid. Yeah right.

Like with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, there is a lot of revisionist history official society does to boost up their legitimacy. They don't tell you at the official NYU "celebrations" every year presided over by Sexton that Dr. King was hysterically denounced and threatened by these liberals when he came out and denounced the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. Today you have to laugh as they denounce Reverend Wright as a dangerous black man, and then try to turn Dr. King into a symbol in support of contemporary imperialism and white supremacy.

Anyway, this essay on more recent developments in Canadian anti-apartheid solidarity points out a few key issues that are critical for understanding what the struggle of a single campaign on a campus, community or union and the wider movement as a whole is. The Zionists and official society may have all the guns and money and coercive power of the state, which makes it difficult to organize at times (even as many make a lot of disingenuous excuses), but unfortunately for them, reality and history aren't on their side.

The solidarity movement in the U.S. is at a low point of activity at this time. By 2003-2004 things were slowing down. This was partially due to the fact that the second Intifada was devastated by Israeli state terror, but it was also largely due to the liberal political contradictions of many in the solidarity movement. As the U.S. and Israel attempted to resurrect the Oslo framework again and install the Palestinian elite in the West Bank firmly back in control with the Palestinian Authority apparatus at their disposal. Today, the same dynamics are playing out, only now is added the civil war strategy of the American and Israeli regimes, with the creation of death squad mercenary forces, first using this tactic in Iraq in 2004-2005 (learned from Central America in the 1980s and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam in the 1960s), and applied to Gaza as they carried out a coup against the elected Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority in 2007 and now being used in Lebanon as recently as this month.

In the last three years or so some of what was aimed for since 2000-2001 with the outbreak of the second Intifada and solidarity efforts has been achieved and begun to be implemented, but largely in Britain and Canada, not the U.S. The official announcement of the Campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was an important step that could not occur in 2000-2003, important years in U.S. anti-apartheid solidarity. The Zionist establishment and official society by 2003 had gotten back on their feet and organized a bit by the time the U.S. scene was fading some. They hit back in ways described in this essay, but much of the solidarity efforts were slowed down because of their own liberal political contradictions. Were the "negotiations" that the U.S. and Israel orchestrated with their Palestinian puppets legitimate or not? Was a "two-state solution" just a propaganda line or a viable reality that reflected the facts of the Israeli system? Were Zionist attempts in the U.S. to "dialogue" just a means to make relative apartheid or legitimate expressions of the political situation in Palestine-Israel? Were campus administrations and the state potential "neutral" arbitrators of this political struggle or part of the interests that support apartheid? We could go on.

What was at stake then for the Zionists, the state and university administrations was what this essay details well: the question of legitimacy. Just as U.S. imperialism must legitimize itself by saying it is all for "democracy", Israeli apartheid must attempt to maintain its "progressive" image. They benefit by the vast majority of people's lack of knowledge about the real situation and therefore they need to keep it that way. Because if most people really knew about these things they would obviously support the struggle for democracy and freedom that the U.S. and Israel must repress.

Every anti-apartheid campaign is about the struggle for legitimacy. When the British university teachers voted to boycott Israeli academics, the British and U.S. rulers, Zionist elites and university administrations went crazy with statements supporting apartheid, because they know that this is a serious blow against the legitimacy of apartheid. This is why in a campaign it is important to clearly struggle for the public space about how the situation is to be defined. It is important to make them defend apartheid and white supremacy by clearly and relentlessly showing that is what they are.

However, they must back up their always failing attempts at maintaining legitimacy with direct repression. Zionist forces working with the state and with support from the Israeli government have worked with McMaster and York Universities in Canada to expel students, ban events and tabling. In the U.S., Zionist groups and the Israeli government work closely with the FBI and local police to spy on and attack solidarity efforts and protests.

Today, anti-apartheid solidarity goes to the heart of exposing the anti-democratic and racist character of official society, because the legitimacy of the Israeli regime is tied directly to the legitimacy of their rule. It is the reason they do anything to attack free speech and association concerning solidarity work.

The efforts of Canadian anti-apartheid solidarity shows how far these efforts have come since 2000, where things are going, and what still needs to be done.

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Cowards and Pigs

Last week an Al-Nakba protest that moved from Nazareth to the destroyed Palestinian town of Saffuriya was attacked by paramilitary coward pig police while Bush and other Western rulers partied in Tel Aviv and Obama and the Democrats celebrated back home the 60 year anniversary of the founding of Israel. Jonathan Cook, who lives in Nazareth, has some details. Here's the video of the attack. If the protest was in the West Bank, at least Israeli soldiers would have had a chance to shoot up some Palestinian kids first. Tamer Nafar, of one of the better known Palestinian hip hop groups DAM, is interviewed for 60th year of the Nakba about what everyone's celebrating.

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The Colonial Mind

Democracy Now recently had a debate between Benny Morris, Saree Makdisi and Norman Finkelstein on the 60 year mark of the Palestinian Nakba. Makdisi and Finkelstein provide standard fare. Finkelstein restates his commitment to the "two-state solution" despite all the evidence this is complete utopianism on his part, and Makdisi restates the impossibility of such a program. He could have added that the "two-state solution" is not simply contradicted by the facts of the Israeli system and its ideological committments.

The two state solution has moved from a revisionist two-stage theory of liberation adopted by the PLO in the 1970s and currently by Hamas, to a two-state theory. However, since the realities of Israeli rule exclude the possibility of any two-state solution, Fatah elites use it as a slogan to stay in the favor of the Western powers who set up the Palestinian Authority apparatus for them and recently restored them to power in the 2007 coup. But it is also a slogan of the U.S., Israeli and European governments to maintain their legitimacy to speak on the question at all. They can claim they have a program for Palestinian freedom, even though their actions say otherwise.

But getting to the point about why this debate is interesting: it is the perfect articulation of Left Zionist white nationalism by Benny Morris. Benny Morris is well-known as the pioneering "revisionist" historian, the first Jew who documented with Israeli government papers that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 was a purposeful plan and that hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were bulldozed. This undercut the main government propaganda that it was all just the fog of war.

But Morris is no repentant progressive in the normal sense. In an interview a few years ago he said that it was a shame the Zionist militias didn't finish the job. Now there's this big problem: the Jewish-only state governs 5 million Palestinians in historic Palestine and they've put this man in a moral quandry. They've made him feel bad about having to contemplate finishing the genocide. And it's so sad for Left Zionists like Morris because Palestinians by having any resistance to Israeli apartheid only bring state and fascist violence on themselves.

What's striking is the extent to which he states so clearly in this debate arguments that resonate with contemporary white racialism. He implies that the problems of the Jewish-only state arise because THEY--the Palestinians--are there in Palestine-Israel. The problem isn't him and Zionism. He (theoretically) has no problem with THEM being somewhere else, but not living next to him. Finally, in the end Morris says that white Jews could never live with Palestinians because they are different cultural species. Most white racialism today, even fascism, is not through race as a biological category, but a cultural one. Morris explains this as succinctly as possible. David Duke learned that sometime ago and the British National Party has been winning a lot of seats in state power learning this as well. They are simply for white rights and the protection of "their" culture.

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Egyptian Intifada

Hosni gets a face lift

The April 6th strike of the Ghazl el-Mahalla textile workers has erupted into nation-wide clashes with the state. The demands of the strike included the raising of the minimum wage for textile workers that hasn't been raised since 1984, that is leading to calls for the raising of the national minimum wage, payment of unpaid bonuses, and prosecution of corrupt management. Leaders of the Islamic Labor Party and Kefaya group, opportunistically and irresponsibly as Hossam el-Hamalawy argues, called for a general strike. On the morning of the strike, troops and police amassed near the factory, the largest of its kind in Egypt's textile industry. Police reportedly occupied the factory on Sunday, but by the afternoon clashes broke out, with live ammunition being fired on strikers and protesters. Strike leadership have been arrested and tortured in American-funded jails. For an indispensable source of information on the movement check 3arabawy frequently.

The Mubarak regime has been facing a rising strike movement in recent years. Similar developments have been happening in Iran. However, in Egypt, middle class grievances have been merging with the growing workers movement and combining with the protests against the regime in its alliance with US imperialism. Currently, the growing frustration with inflation, such as the rising cost of bread, as a result of world-wide rise in commodity prices, the mass arrest of hundreds of Muslim Brothers candidates and other opposition parties leading up to the recent elections, the deepening of neoliberal restructuring of the economy, the deepening of privatization of industries, casualization with the growth in temporary labor contracts, massive corruption and the strengthening of Israeli apartheid and the continuing occupation of Iraq is taking on the character of a wide-ranging political movement to bring down the Mubarak dictatorship. However, state terror has been effective before in preventing such democratic movements from cohering and Egyptian activists are routinely arrested and tortured.

And this is exactly what has been happening. Much of the leadership of the strike, along with a leader of Kefaya, and several well-known bloggers have been arrested and many of them have been tortured. The regime's attempt to occupy the factories and smash the student solidarity demonstrations in Cairo led to tens of thousands fighting back in the streets these last few days. Knowing that elections are a sham, and paralleling a call by the Muslim Brothers for a voter boycott, turnout for the most recent local elections has been estimated at 3%. While the U.S. and British rulers prop-up the dictatorship with billions of dollars in what they say is their fight for democracy, its legitimacy is near zero with its foundations being pulled at brick by brick with the hands of the working and middle classes alike.

To read the NYTimes or Washington Post you would think only when Egyptian bloggers "insult Islam" are they jailed by the regime.

Meanwhile, Egyptian state terror is completely censored from the pages of these papers, let alone such bastions of liberal opinion as openDemocracy, while endless articles stream forth on dictator Robert Mugabe's recent attempts to overturn election results and stay in power by smashing the MDC opposition and the Chinese state's attacks on the new spring for the Tibetan movement. It's important to understand what's going on in Egypt to see why its not on the front page of the rulers' press along with Zimbabwe and Tibet.

Since the early 1990s, the Egyptian government has embarked on a process of neoliberal restructuring involving the selling off of state-owned industries, the introduction of temporary labor contracts or casualization, reduction of subsidies for staples, and cut back on social services. It is a process familiar to the U.S. and around the world that has defined the political climate and social policy for the last 30 years. While street protest against the government, centered around student activity, has been developing since 2002 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, the center of strike activity began in the textile industry in earnest in 2006 and spread quickly from there.

During the 1919 revolution in Egypt the liberal elite Wafd Party rode the rebellion of working people to power, negotiating a deal with British colonial occupation and smashing the early democratic organizations of the workers that were decisive in winning the qualified independence of 1923. The anti-democratic Wafd was politically dependent on British imperialism, the importation of British capital, and the British-installed monarchist stooge. The situation is no different from the liberal elites promoted by today's "progressive" imperialists. Textiles have been a major industry in Egypt going back to the 1930s and 1940s and it was textile workers who played a major role in finally running the Wafd elites out of power.

The rise to power of the radical nationalist Nasser saw the break with British and American imperialism. Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council, or Free Officers, consolidated their power not by smashing the Egyptian working classes' organizations, but by incorporating them into intense state-capitalist development and support from Soviet capital. Like the New Deal in the U.S. or the British Labor Party in Britain, this resulted in the creation of new "progressive" labor law, subsidies and other benifits and compensation. These state-capitalist concessions were made possible through the destruction of any independent political power of Egyptian workers and the incorporation of a union bureaucracy that would help guarantee labor quiet. Once again, working people found a new regime of exploitation.

By the late 1970s the Nasserist state was seeing the first signs of being dismantled. By the 1990s neoliberal political and economic policies had taken fully hold in Egypt, a world-wide phenomenon. The union bureaucracies of the old Nasserist state have helped this neoliberal bonanza for the rich by ensuring that the roots of the Mubarak regime continue to wrap around and strangle any independent democratic movement in Egyptian industry. Egypt is just one more example of how the only relation in today's ruling class ideology to "democracy" (pimped in the NYtimes and flying on the wings of imperialism and "economic reforms") is making sure it doesn't exist.

The strikes of the last two years have been the center of gravity of the movement that has spread out across other industries, including the growing privatized industries, combining with the student movement, and embracing the middle class professional associations, with college professors and doctors going out on strike, and much of the civil service, whose salaries are not keeping up with inflation.

As Mustafa Bassiouny and Omar Said show, a key development has been a return to the central conflict of working people's movements in the effort to build independent national unions rooted in strong workplace democratic committees and to oust the General Federation of Trade Unions attached to the Mubarak regime. The attack on the April 6th strike spilled over into the streets in a direct confrontation. This is an important time in Egypt and the Middle East in general, where democratic struggles are challenging the barbarism of U.S. imperialism, Israeli apartheid and the legacy of "revolutionary" state-capitalism alike.

For more check out this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and Rabab el-Mahdi.

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Liberalism and the New White Man's Burden

Paul Berman has become better known in recent years for writing a number of books since 9-11, reconstructing the ideological defense of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and support for Israeli apartheid. He is a favorite intellectual of the liberal elites in his attempts to give imperialism "democratic" justifications.

For his efforts, they have rewarded him well, reserving spots in the NYTimes and a chance to cash in with a post at NYU. However, Berman first proved his bona fides in writing the usual "leftist"-turned-sober story in his 1990s A Tale of Two Utopias. Like his fellow sadists Todd Gitlin and Christopher Hitchens, he dons the mantle of authenticity by impersonating a former New Leftist himself, and making his "critique" more marketable. In distinguishing between the legacy of "bad" New Leftist, say the old anti-imperialist militant--perhaps a Black Panther still scaring the kids--and the "good" New Leftist, like someone who went on to sober up and realize that providing charity to the poor and the oppressed is more respectable, the dollars start rolling in.

Today he's manning up as editor of the progressive imperialist journal Dissent, founded by Irving Howe, a cousin of what came to be known as neoconservatism, and playing ideological general in search of an army of young idealist imperial social workers. Writing in the New York Times this past week, he's laid out some of his ideas about the need for solidarity with Arab and Muslim "liberals". So for those who are not familiar, what does he have to say and why is it important?

In his 2004 book, Terror and Liberalism, Berman essentially argues for a new Popular Front. This term refers to the policy of the Soviet Union in the 1930s calling on the Communist Parties to subordinate themselves to liberal leadership in the name of defeating fascism. Today, Berman has been one of the more visible elite intellectuals attempting to develop the ideological basis for such a policy for today's Western Left. Only this time the Berman is not alone, of course. In the U.S. and Europe such arguments have been piled up through a proliferation of books and journals big enough to fill a garbage dump off the New Jersey Turnpike.

Here are a few paragraphs from Berman:

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

"Dismaying" and "surprising": words that are the consequence of shibboleths playing like thought.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Kanan Makiya, Irshad Manji, Fouad Ajami, among others: these types that Berman speaks for here have solidarity enough. The government, university and corporate cash lining the pockets of these people is proof enough of that. Berman tells us that these people represent "human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society" and shouldn't the Left support them? But Berman shouldn't worry too much. The deafening silence of the liberal left on the sheer scale of mass imperial terror being carried out on Iraq, Palestinians, Lebanon, with its civil war strategies and revving up the death squads, should comfort him.

And that's the problem with Berman's bad faith posturing. The real Arab and Muslim liberals are locked up in Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and Gulf State jails. They are under attack, some being purged, from American and European universities. Berman himself wrote a long essay in The New Republic against a major Muslim liberal in Europe, Tariq Ramadan. He has expanded it into a book that is coming out shortly. And he hasn't been working alone. The U.S. government denied Ramadan a visa to enter the country as a visiting professor at Notre Dame.

This is either incomprehension or propaganda. Which ever it is, it's rooted deeply in the history of colonialism and white supremacy--the stink of bad faith is all over Berman's arguments-- and an ideological crisis of the American and European middle classes.

Rudyard Kipling Returns

People forget that the White Man's Burden, famously coined by British poet Rudyard Kipling to honor the U.S. attempts to subjugate the Philippines, was in fact conceived of as a progressive project. This ideology has become self-consciously renewed and embraced in recent years for reasons that need to be discussed.

This movement of intellectuals has a long history in the U.S. and a somewhat more recent legacy in Europe, such as the so-called "New Philosophers" in France. In the 1990s, these establishment intellectuals began to argue for a "humanitarian imperialism". During the Cold War, these things were justified by referring to the "threat" of Communism in all things. All political movements that jeopardized the interests of the dictatorships and the ruling elites supported by these "democrats" could be smashed by U.S. imperialism through either indirect support or direct military intervention. This policy was important to shore up the political and economic order at home. Dictatorships and ruling oligarchs may depend on U.S. imperialism because they have no social support, but U.S. rulers depend on them to ensure cheap consumer goods by keeping any democratic movements disabled and therefore keeping cheap super-exploited labor available. Further, the raising of "national security", the slogan of the imperial presidency, ensures that domestic racist forces can be mobilized around an "external enemy." It used to be "Communism". Today its "terrorism".

"Humanitarian imperialism" had tried to provide a new set of explanations for the persistence of U.S. imperialism after the Soviet Union collapsed. Since the occupation of Iraq, progressive racists have attempted to graft the Humanitarian program of the 1990s onto the full neo-conservative program of "pre-emptive war". These two strains are functionally indistinguishable from each other and it is one of the reasons a Paul Berman type is usually thrown in with the neo-conservatives. However, there are important differences to consider.

We have to briefly take a step back in time to uncover the deeper intellectual roots of the relationship and differences of this ideology in American history. In the late 1940s, as the Second World War ended, the Trotskyist parties who were the most coherent forces on the anti-Stalinist left at the time, debated the nature of the Soviet Union. There were three positions. One said that the ruling class of the Soviet Union must be overthrown, but it is worth critically defending against Western imperialism because it is more progressive. Another said that both the Soviet Union and the Western states represented together two forms of state-capitalism and the path forward was not to allign with either, but support the democratic movements in all these countries that are both struggling against this new stage of capitalism. A third position was that there was no possibility of these movements against state-capitalism, but it was more possible in the West than in the Soviet bloc countries. Therefore, it was important to critically support Western imperialism abroad and subordinate to the "progressive" sections of the ruling classes and official society.

In the 1960s, this third position split into a left-wing and right-wing social democratic position in relation to the rebirth of the black movement, rank-and-file workers movements and the occupation of Vietnam. Later, with the growth of the PLO and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the politics of Israeli apartheid would enter into this dynamic. The left-wing social democrats, around Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, and the right-wing social democrats around Max Shachtman, had different ideas about how they would essentially extend the New Deal and create a more benevolent U.S. imperialism. While the right-wing social democrats cozied up around the AFL-CIO labor bosses and fully supported the continued attack on Vietnam, the left-wing social democrats came to believe that the Vietnam occupation was doing more harm than good in protecting anti-Communist forces that were also opposed to the dictatorship in South Vietnam supported by the U.S. Further, these left-wing social democrats tended to be more critical of the big labor bosses, like Meaney and Kirkland, and supported more forcefully the Civil Rights leadership in its attempt to extend the New Deal to African-Americans. Both wings were for a Popular Front-type politics in which working peoples' organizations subordinated themselves to the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party elites.

However, both strains were deeply hostile to Black Power, the rank-and-file workplace movements, and full opposition to U.S. imperialism. The rejection of white liberal patronage and the critique of their racism, in their attempt to justify the failures of the Civil Rights movement to end white supremacy, drove them crazy. Right-wing social democrats tended to view the inability of the Cold War liberal coalitions of Civil Rights, Labor Bureaucracy, and Keynesian Capitalists as unable to control the growing black movement, rank-and-file movement, the campus situation, and the economic crisis emerging in the later 1960s. This is the origins then of neo-conservativism, and neo-liberal thought more generally. It emerged as a call for the reestablishment of the racial and class order. It was perfectly attuned to the middle and ruling classes that needed to feel good again about saying they were going to be in charge, that became a signature of the rise of the New Right.

It is for this reason that the right-wing social democrats would go on to become the neo-conservatives and the heirs of the left-wing social democrats would increasingly grow quiet or even critically supportive of the Reagan Revolution as the 1980s progressed. The left-wing social democrats never programmatically broke with their belief in this old elite coalition to keep people in their place. By the 1990s, they could not muster any independent or coherent opposition to the dominance of the new neo-liberal social and economic policies, the dismantling of the New Deal, critical support for the reconstructed triumph of U.S. imperialism after its defeat in Vietnam, and dabbling in the new orientalist racialist quackery.

This is why Berman's "progressive" support for comprador Muslim and Arab intellectuals can only find him (and them) in the camp of rising white populism, fascism, apartheid and imperialism. Since Berman cannot develop his ideas in relation to any real movement of Arabs and Muslims, whether in the Middle East, Europe or the U.S., he can only justify those things he is supposedly against as the lesser of evils. His hilarious and grossly misinformed attack (or smart propaganda) on the Muslim liberal Tarik Ramadan shows the pattern. Berman is developing the racialist discourses of pathology and social deviancy that is at the center of the White Man's Burden and has been applied by "liberal-minded" whites to all democratic people of color movements and aspirations to negate white supremacy. Berman cannot abide letting people of color liberals into official institutions until they swear allegiance to the status quo. This same exact thing happened during the 1960s with Civil Rights and Black Power in the U.S. When Martin Luther King denounced the Vietnam War, called for a poor people's movement in the U.S., and called for recognition of black culture as foundational to America, he was hysterically denounced by the liberal establishment. A figure like Ramadan does no different today, yet Berman, and his friends like Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, stand with the rising tide of white populism and fascism in Europe against the democratic movement of people of color in Europe.

Berman isn't alone. There is an intellectual industry out there, with journals such as openDemocracy, Democratiya and Engage, based in the university and corporate money reconstructing an ideology of progressive imperialism and racism. Unfortunately, democratic forces from below are deeply unprepared for such an assault and the result is a profound passivity among the Left in regards to what could possibly be a new stage of U.S. imperialism. U.S. elites work undisturbed at home in literally destroying whole nations in the Middle East and shoring up their allied dictatorships. Such work to create a progressive imperialism may reflect an ideological crisis of the Western middle classes, but without counter-work that exposes these forces and engages with the real democratic tradition at home, it isn't necessary that they will fail at their task.

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Free Political Prisoner Sami Al-Arian

There is a new documentary out on the arrest and show trial of Palestinian professor Sami Al-Arian that you can watch online. He was arrested in 2003 after being the subject of a sustained attack by Israeli propagandists and agents, the Federal government and Fox News. He spent most of his two years in prison in solitary confinement and was acquited of almost all charges thrown at him by the Feds. They accused him of being an organizer for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and planning terrorist attacks in the U.S. At one point, the Federal prosecutors took the jury on a field trip to watch a car bomb.

In turns out that the Feds had nothing accept his speeches, phone calls, writings, conferences and rallies he attended, and what books he owned. Many prosecution witnesses came from Israel to testify about Palestinian terrorism. Al-Arian's defense attorneys were prevented by the racist judge from mentioning the history of Israeli apartheid at all.

The jury, recognizing the government was putting him on trial for free speech and association, acquitted him in 2005, after the Feds spent tens of millions of tax dollars putting on a show trial.

Such show trials have been part of the government's propaganda efforts to expand secret police powers since 9-11. Most of these have been entrapment cases in which Federal informants have schemed-up crimes to dupe less than capable people into terrorism charges as in cases in Chicago, Albany, Miami, Detroit, and New York City. Other attempts have been to go after Islamic centers and charities. The most famous case was the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which featured central testimony from Israeli agents, that collapsed in a mistrial.

These cases are meant to normalize political repression, either in the form of creating a specter of "al Qaeda" where none exists, and attack solidarity efforts with Middle East struggles, in particular Palestinian and Lebanese movements. And to think of all the tax dollars spent on supporting Israeli apartheid, all those private funds raised, think tanks created, all those Zionist fascists sitting in city councils and state legislatures.

Since the Feds had lost, they had Al-Arian sentenced to another year in prison for 1 count of conspiracy. Breaking the plea agreement, in which it was stated he would not have to testify in any other cases, he was then forced to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a fishing expedition against Islamic charities, which he has refused to do. He was then held in contempt of court. He is currently on hunger strike.

The documentary is on the road currently. Check the free Al-Arian website for more details.

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Apartheid in Hebron

An in-depth report on the advance of the segregation policies of the Israeli state in Hebron was compiled by B'Tselem last year. There is a summary essay of its findings in Counterpunch by Stephen Lendman. As the map above graphically illustrates, this report tells us a lot about what the term "Peace Process" means.

The essay is important because it provides a window into the microcosm of how the entrenchment of Israeli segregation works. By focusing on one particular Palestinian city, the report is able to explain the general features of Israeli apartheid through their specific application in the details of the social fabric of Palestinian life.

Nearly 40 years ago, a small group of fascists set up in a hotel in Hebron and would not leave. After the Israeli army armed them and the government supplied them with subsidies, the privilege of their white skin, and 40 years later, the center of the city of Hebron is cleansed of its inhabitants and several hundred white supremacists, along with the Israeli army, control the whole city of 150,000 Palestianians. Zionist fascist gangs periodically go on progroms to kick out more Palestinians from their homes while the IDF guards the whole enterprise.

Several features of the Israeli policy of separation and displacement stand out in Hebron and are typical of how this system is entrenched:

-the explicit or tacit support of armed gangs to create the outposts of Jewish-only neighborhoods which, once established, must be protected for "security reasons"

-the establishment of a legal regime that rezones urban space and geographical areas to create the pretext for the creation of Palestinian-only ghettos

-the confiscation and/or destruction of Palestinian homes

-the disruption Palestinian economic life by restricting movement through checkpoints, the implementation of pass laws, and the establishment of curfews

-the denial of building permits to Palestinians; and the expansion of building permits for Jews

After almost 30 years of this strategy, Israeli apartheid was to be famously given formal legal recognition during the "Peace Process" of the 1990s, and specifically the Hebron Agreement in 1994. Hebron was meant to be a test case for this, to see if the newly Israeli and American created Palestinian Authority, stuffed with Palestinian elites who benefited from the Oslo years, would go along with this "legal" solution to the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, just as it has reached its normative status of Palestinians living inside the Green Line as Israeli "citizens". Every time you read "Peace Process" in the papers or hear it on the news, this is what they are talking about.

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Wake Up!

Last year was tough, but lots of courageous things happening in Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, France, England and right here in NYC, so it's time to get some perspective and stay uplifted thanks to Outlandish:

let's not cry tonight, I promise you one day it's through
my brothers, my sisters,
shine a light for every soul that ain't with us no more
my brothers, my sisters

As the great African liberation leader Amilcar Cabral, murdered by colonialism, said, "tell no lies; claim no easy victories". God bless all the freedom strugglers in the Middle East, Europe, America, Canada, and beyond, surviving and fighting white supremacy worldwide inshallah.

Check out Outlandish, O-Marz, Salah Edin, DAM, Arab Summit and others on the new Middle East download from Egypt and Lebanon over at African Hip Hop Radio.

Speaking of super group Arab Summit: here's Part 1 and Part 2 of a recent interview with Davey D talking about their album, Fear of an Arab Planet. Claiming a lineage with Public Enemy, and through that the history of Black Power, should tell us a lot about where the struggle should be going. Here's another interview over at Electronic Intifada.

One more hip hop note. Long time coming documentary, Slingshot Hip Hop, on Palestinian originators DAM, Arapeyat and others, directed by NYU's own Jackie Reem Salloum, is finally coming out. Although parts of it were presented at the Other Israel film festival this last Fall, it will hit theaters after its run at Sundance last week.

There's a release party on February 8th for Slingshot Hip Hop at the Knitting Factory with DJ Kayper, GC and The Soul Mafia, and Erika Rose as part of Israeli Apartheid Week here in NYC. Check it out.

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The Other Wall: Darkness in Gaza

The other wall

In Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love, which chronicles his stay with the Palestinian fedayeen in the early 1970s, there is a story about a highly symbolic incident in Beirut. One day, an apparently homeless Palestinian man suddenly showed up in the neighborhood. He smelled bad and seemed to have mental problems. People felt sorry for him and gave him food and money when they could. Shortly after, when the Israeli army invaded Beirut, this same man was standing in the turret of a tank rolling down the street where he played the role of harmless madmen, returned as another kind of madmen, a colonel in a uniform with a grim look on his face. The so-called Palestinian homeless man turned out to be an Israeli intelligence officer, returning during the subsequent invasion with his mask off to wreak mass terror on the civilian population.

In retelling this story, Genet gets at one of the mythic and psychological aspects of settler colonialism: that it is "identical with Power" itself. The power to manipulate the natives in this story is the other side of the colonel's return as a sadistic tormentor. This is possible, according to Genet, because colonialism equates its order with the "beginning" of history itself. The madmen is needed to constantly demonstrate the indestructability of the colonial regime, to continuously reimpose the racial order, and to revitalize the myth that history is either himself or nothing.

This same idea appears in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; a book in which the living body of Palestine-Israel emerges from its pages today. The settler "is the absolute beginning," says Fanon, who must live by the idea that "This land was created by us" and that "If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages." Therefore, "the settler asks each member of the oppressing minority to shoot down 30 or 100 or 200 natives, he sees that nobody shows any indignation and that the whole problem is to decide whether it can be done all at once or by stages." This madman, lost in a delirium of racial phantasms, looms over Gaza today.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded over the border between Gaza and Egypt last week, temporarily breaking the blockade imposed by the U.S., Israeli, European, and Arab regimes. Palestinians fought Egyptian police and later blew up and toppled the border wall. It wasn't only that Palestinians overwhelmed the small police forces, but Egyptian authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak had to claim that he allowed a temporary halt to the siege because, once again, the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and the movement for democracy throughout the Middle East converged.

Once again, the Palestinian struggle strikes a blow against imperialism and white supremacy.

Anti-apartheid protests in Lebanon

The current crisis in Gaza has had the potential to spark off the kind of large demonstrations against Israeli apartheid and the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime that were seen in the spring of 2002. That spring saw the glimpses of a mass movement against the U.S.-supported dictatorship throughout the Middle East. This last week threatened to repeat 2002, with demonstrations in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and elsewhere. In Cairo, several hundred people were arrested, many of whom were hauled-off to Mubarak's torture chambers with U.S. applause. Meanwhile, a general strike in Lebanon has converged with its own demands, while U.S.-backed right wing gangs have been attacking strikers. The convergence of Egyptian anti-apartheid solidarity and anti-imperialist solidarity with Iraq and Lebanon and the Egyptian labor strike movement has continued to show the possibilities of struggle against the Mubarak regime.

At the same time, the temporary break of the siege in Gaza has been an equally powerful, though uncertain, victory over the depravity of Western imperialism, the apartheid regime, and its Arab vassal states. The U.S. and Israeli strategy of combining what the Washington architects of Central American policy in the 1980s called going "primitive", that is mass killings of the civilian population, with building up the military power of the elites, has failed. Imperialism's public relations advertisements for "democracy" in the Middle East are only more exposed in Palestine-Israel and Lebanon by the popular movements for democracy, where imperialism has not yet been successful in inducing aspects of civil war as it has in Iraq.

The Israeli effort to strengthen the embargo against food, fuel and money into Gaza, has been shown for what it is by the Palestinians. The Israeli government has always used blockades against Palestinian bantustans since it controls them, but since 2006 such embargoes increased in scale. Last week, the government imposed a complete blockade and all power was cut, and darkness overtook Gaza.

The Israeli government says that since homemade rockets continue to be launched from Gaza, it will impose a complete blockade until they stop. 2 people in Sderot were killed recently from these rockets. The NYTimes reports, "Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said he won't allow Gazans to live ordinary lives while Israelis next to Gaza are suffering from daily rocket attacks". So how have Palestinians been doing these last two years living "ordinary lives"?

The blockade has been in place to varying degrees since Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in the beginning of 2006. But that's only part of the story. The Israeli army has coupled this blockade with continued murders and arrests of Palestinian activists and civilians. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, in the last two years the Israeli regime has killed 1030 Palestinians, 193 of which were children. During these two years, 44% of these 1030 dead were civilians. Almost half of all Palestinians killed didn't even have a gun in their hands. In this same time, only 24 Israelis were killed. This doesn't even include the over 1000 civilian dead in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 2006, or the number of brave Lebanese who took up arms to defend their homes and not let the apartheid regime carry out another 20 year occupation.

How to make sense of these sick numbers? Since the second intifada began in 2000, it has challenged the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. This regime has responded by practicing mass terror and the destruction of the Palestinian social fabric itself, while further entrenching its segregationist and displacement policies. While American supplied F-16s, Apache helicopters, and tanks strafe the Palestinian bantustans, soldiers shoot up demonstrations, murdering hundreds of people. Meanwhile, Zionist fascist militias rampage through Palestinian ghettos, destroying shops, cars and crops in the field. It was a policy announced in the very beginning of the second intifada when more than a dozen Palestinians living inside the Green line, so-called Palestinian-Israelis, were shot down for organizing demonstrations in solidarity, while Zionist mobs prowled the streets looking for Palestinians to lynch.

A couple days relief

In the Gaza bantustan in recent years, these practices can only be characterized differently in that they're of a much greater scale. Water, medicines and food have been low and malnutrition and preventable diseases are growing. Since there are no supplies, Gaza's meager textile factories have come to a close and the entrances out of the bantustan are blocked by Israeli soldiers, preventing any further work inside the Green Line. Unemployment is at 75%.

Meanwhile, Israeli Jews live their ordinary lives undisturbed by any of this. Olmert's Orwellian flip is exactly the kind of psychological displacement by the colonial racist mind that Fanon notes in Wretched of the Earth: it is the whites that are under attack, and as for the condition of the native he has only brought upon himself. The scales of violence, therefore, are appropriate in the moral economy of white supremacy. We see this in American newspapers where, if a an Israeli Jew is occasionally killed, there is front page coverage, while every week Palestinians are killed in demonstrations and arrests and they remain unmentioned and faceless. Olmert's comment reveals exactly the calculus of white life as more valuable than non-white life.

This gets at Genet's Israeli madman as colonial sadist. In the social ideology of Zionism, colonial sadism is based on the racial ideas of Arab inferiority and barbarism. The Zionist madman must commit mass state terror because the native not only deserves it, but this is the only way to maintain the racial order in the logic of colonialism and apartheid. Gaza today is only the most extreme example of this dynamic in Palestine-Israel.

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New Flyer: Gaza and Ongoing Apartheid

The entrenchment of apartheid as one set of laws and practices for the indigenous population and another for Jews is ongoing and getting worse. As one well-known leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, the situation facing Palestinians is even worse than in South Africa. U.S. government and institutional support—like right on this campus—is integral to apartheid’s existence. In the United States, Britain, South Africa and Egypt, there is a growing campaign of boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from companies doing business inIsrael-Palestine. It is modeled on the successful solidarity efforts in support of the democratic movement to end South Africa apartheid. Similarly, the Palestinian movement to end apartheid cannot succeed if we here do not hold our own university accountable.

NYU students are building an anti-apartheid campaign here. Get involved!

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What Is The “Peace Process?”: The Annapolis Talks and the Future of the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Olmert, Bush, Abbas: trying to save apartheid

“If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” - Ehud Olmert, Annapolis talks, 11/07

Last November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas met with US President George Bush in Annapolis, Maryland for the first stage of a new round of “peace talks” – an official society song and dance that the world has not seen in almost six years since the "Road Map to Peace" talks in Taba. Most people outside of the United States (including most Israelis), understand that the so-called “peace process” is a public relations scam, that contrary to the supposed purpose of these talks – the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state and the negotiation of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace – the peace talks are actually designed to give international legitimacy to Israeli apartheid regime, and to prolong the day of reckoning when a Palestinian civil rights movement finally dismantles this structure from below.

But why are these new talks just happening now? Why, after six years of dormancy, has the Colonial Fascism Cabaret just come back to town? Is it because of the Hollywood writer’s strike, and there was just no one to write the lines? While this would be a solid guess for those not in the know, the six years of public silence are certainly not for lack of words. Rather, this recent round of peace talks is occurring because of a profound crisis in Israeli apartheid policies and thought, triggered by the very recent and very powerful popular struggles of the Palestinian people. To understand the current phase of official society “dialogue” in Israel/Palestine, we need to look at the recent history of democratic movements among the Palestinians themselves.

In the last two decades, there have been two major anti-colonial uprisings in historic Palestine: the First Intifada, from 1987-1993, and the Second Intifada, from 2000-2004. These movements created an immense political crisis for the Israeli state and official society (not to mention the Palestinian establishment), precisely because they challenged the very foundations of unequal social relations institutionalized in the laws and de facto practices of Israel - relations characterized by ethnic separation and subjugation in a hierarchy of citizenship.
Because as in apartheid South Africa, access to citizenship and civil rights in Israel is defined by race and ethnicity through religion, Jew versus Arab, a system in which Jews have full political rights and Palestinians have modified ones or none at all, depending on where they live.

The two-state solution is no longer a possibility for Palestinians because there cannot be an acceptance of living in bantustans which the Israeli government has created. The paradigmatic shift to an anti-apartheid analysis, signals a possible return to the original program in the PLO charter for a democratic Israel-Palestine for equal rights, for the national Palestinian movement. This is what the Zionist regime fears. The demand for equal rights and citizenship as a goal for the national movement would end, once and for all, the public relations stunts of the "peace process".

Every Israeli and American state official knows this, hence the tirelessly revisited “peace process” and its crucial “two-state solution.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it best himself during the recent Annapolis talks: ““If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” The Orwellian mirage of a two-state promise is the only way to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, to maintain the rigid ethnic segregation and separate but unequal practices that define the entire social fabric of Israeli society as a whole.

In the Israeli political establishment, there have been two approaches to dealing with these Palestinian democratic challenges to the current state of affairs. One promotes continual military subjugation and even genocide against the Palestinian population – the civilian shoot-to-kill policy during the two Intifadas, or the recent total-war military blockade and economic strangulation of the entire Gazan population, being just two examples of this. The other position advocates the “the two state solution:” a political arrangement where Palestinians are placed on a handful of disconnected and Israeli military regulated ethnic reservations and these reservations are collectively referred to as a “state” against all rational instinct.

Handala's message to apartheid

This second vision is specifically modeled after the South African apartheid regime’s “peace offerings” constructed through the 1960s and 1970s – a series of limited autonomy Bantustans, militarily surrounded and bisected by the apartheid state forces, having no political autonomy and subject to new invasion and occupation at any time. These were the terms of both the Oslo and Camp David Accords. But what unites the first and second vision is that they both share a philosophy of racial manifest destiny and separation, falsely equating the history and identity of Jewish people with the existence of an apartheid state. This philosophy is called Zionism. Zionist justification for Israeli apartheid is intimately tied to notions of superior and inferior races and cultures, often associated with the idea and practice of white supremacy.

Therefore, the context of the Annapolis has to be seen through this goal of empowering Palestinian representatives, whose base of support is the U.S. and Israeli governments, to affirm an international recognition of de facto apartheid. But this cannot be done effectively if grass roots popular democratic resistance is not crushed and at the same time the leading resistance organization, Hamas, is not destroyed. Bush promoted the idea of elections through Abbas, but Abbas lost badly to Hamas. Since the election of Hamas to the bantustan government in 2006, the Israeli government, and the U.S. and European regimes have been working to remove it.

Through their proxies in the Fatah party elite, led by Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad and Mohammed Dahlan, they were able to carry out a coup. The bantustan government was restored in the West Bank ghettoes to the Fatah elite--who got rich off of the Oslo years in the 1990s, while apartheid was further entrenched-- however they were run out of Gaza, where Hamas has historically deeper roots.

Mohammed Dahlan, close to the Israeli government and the U.S., was directed by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and flushed with more American and Israeli weapons, to attack and destroy Hamas and any resistance in Gaza and in the West Bank. Although this plan failed in Gaza, it is being carried out in the West Bank bantustans. Now the Palestinian Authority police forces are being overseen by US general Keith Dayton. The goal is to ensure that the work of apartheid goes on undisturbed while Palestinian faces imprison and murder any resistance to it.

If the original goal of the "peace process" in the 1990s was to reestablish the political legitimacy of Israeli apartheid that was quickly fading with the democratic challenges of the first intifada, this time it is more difficult to restore that legitimacy. In the 1990s, the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was allowed to enter the West Bank and be the Palestinian face of this process. It worked for awhile because despite great disillusionment, Yasser Arafat still had a lot of symbolic legitimacy as the most recognized leader of the historic national movement and leader of Fatah. There is no such illusory legitimacy today. The Palestinian Authority, and the hand-picked people like Fayyad, Abbas and Dahlan, depend completely on American and Israeli government interests.

While Abbas and the PA leadership smile during photo-ops like Annapolis, saying nothing about the structures of apartheid, Israel continues its collective punishment of the Gazan population and is quietly consolidating its apartheid structure in the West Bank as well, strengthening and expanding its infrastructure of Jewish-only towns, Jewish-only roads, IDF checkpoints and the latest "security" wall.

The democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people to be free from apartheid have sent a wave of fear through Israeli (and not to mention American) official society. The election of Hamas to municipal power in Gaza (and the subsequent total war response of the Israeli Defense Forces against the Gazan civilian population) is only one manifestation of this. The recent Annapolis peace talks come on the heels of a growing awareness amongst Israeli rulers that apartheid is losing its legitimacy, and that something must be done on the international scene to preserve the racial character and hierarchy of Israeli society as a whole.

It is important for democratic minded people in the US, and all people of good faith, to support the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and exert real pressure on the Israeli government through divestment and economic boycott here. The American student divestment movement played a critical role in the 1980s in bringing the South African apartheid regime to its knees. It is up to this generation to see that the same solidarity is offered to the Palestinian people as they continue the struggle against colonialism and apartheid in their homeland.

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