Crisis and Apartheid in Israel/Palestine

Israel's Struggle Within

— ATC interviews Uri Davis

This interview with Uri Davis, the author of Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (see the review following on p. 21 of this issue), was conducted for Against the Current by David Finkel in Detroit on September 16, 2004. Uri Davis spoke in Dearborn, Ann Arbor and suburban Detroit at the beginning of a speaking tour, mostly in Ontario, where he plans a legal challenge against the tax-exempt status of fundraising by the Jewish National Fund of Canada.

Against the Current: Since you live in Sakhnin (a mostly Arab municipality within Israel), I must ask you first about your town's soccer team—what you call football—which won the Israeli national championship. This qualified them to play in the European team tournament (UEFA), where they are playing today in Britain at Newcastle. I understand you're not a soccer fan, but can you tell us about the impact of this victory on your community, on the Arab sector within Israel and on Israeli society in general?

Uri Davis: When Sakhnin won the Israeli championship, the whole town was out celebrating the entire night. The victory was an occasion of great pride and satisfaction for everybody, including myself, because it was not regarded only in professional football terms but gave expression to broader sentiments.

First of these was the satisfaction of making it to the top despite many decades of being victimized by the calculated government policies of underdevelopment, imposed on the community by what is, in law and in practice, an apartheid state.

Apartheid is discrimination in law on a racialist basis. Racism and racial discrimination is defined in Article One of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in December 1965 and entered into force in January 1969, as follows:

In this Convention, the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

Like apartheid South Africa, discriminating in law on the racialist basis as defined above between "Whites" and "non-Whites," the state of Israel discriminates in law on a racialist basis as defined above between "Jews" and "non-Jews," and secures privileges to its Jewish citizens that are systematically denied to its Arab citizens. [For conditions of life in Sakhnin and the confiscation of the town's lands, see Apartheid Israel, 174-175.]

These barriers are also reflected in the poorly equipped football pitch, and in the team being consistently underfunded. To have achieved this victory under these conditions was a cause of great satisfaction and celebration—quite justly so.

Even so, as far as I'm concerned as a member of the community, I wasn't able to partake wholeheartedly in the celebration. For me there was an element of sadness, because Sakhnin won the national championship but this hardly compensated for the crippling losses inflicted on the community through land confiscation and "Judaization" policies [e.g. reserving around three acres per person in surrounding Jewish localities, with about one-eighth acre per person for Sakhnin]. These have resulted in Sakhnin becoming progressively more of a ghettoized slum rather than the thriving city it deserves to be.

ATC: Is the struggle for an independent Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories—the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem—compatible in principle with the struggle for a democratic, non-apartheid Israel?

U.D.: Yes, it is in principle compatible, if you underline two or three times "in principle." You must do this because the de facto formation of what is being labelled as the "two-state solution," such as is being outlined beginning with the Oslo "peace process," if it materializes at all will lead towards the consolidation of an apartheid State of Israel and a bantustan Palestine.

This would then be projected locally and internationally as the political expression of the right of the Palestinian Arab people to self-determination, and the bantustan state would be admitted as a member state of the United Nations. I also want to point out that the tendency I see in the international community to endorse this eventuality, and to endow it with UN legitimacy, stands in marked contrast to the world's consistent refusal to confer such legitimacy on the bantustans created by South Africa.

All attempts by the apartheid governments of South Africa to project the bantustans as political expressions of the right of the indigenous peoples of South Africa to "self-determination" were rejected emphatically by the international community.

That doesn't seem to be the case today with respect to the question of Palestine, unfortunately. I believe, however, that the emergence of a strong anti-apartheid movement worldwide in support of the rights of the Palestinian Arab people could alter this and move the international community to embrace, with reference to Palestine, positions closer to those it had embraced regarding apartheid South Africa.

ATC: How do you think it is possible to stimulate such a development?

U.D.: Elements of principled non-government organizations committed to anti-apartheid and democratic values have been present in Palestine, primarily in the Palestinian Arab constituency and secondarily among the Jewish constituency inside Israel since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. They are benefitting from the growing and developing network of international solidarity since the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964/65. My tour in North America is just one expression of this.

There is an obstacle which stands in the way of a breakthrough for Palestine solidarity, an obstacle the equivalent of which was not present to such a degree with respect to the anti-apartheid movement committed to supporting the democratic struggle in South Africa.

That difficulty is the success of the pro-Zionist lobby in dismissing legitimate and necessary critical exposure of Israeli war criminal practices as "anti-Jewish" or "anti-Semitic," and in this way to stifle critical discussion of Israel and Palestine in the West.

But the capacity of the Israeli Embassy to do this is progressively reduced over time, and I believe will be further weakened as the continuing criminal occupation policies of the governments of Israel unfold, and Palestine solidarity perseveres.

When, for instance, the Israeli occupation army recently dropped a bomb carrying a ton of explosives over a civilian area of Gaza, it isn't likely that the Israeli Embassy could suppress condemnation of this atrocity by claiming that people who condemn it are anti-Semitic.

Also, the political structures of the Israeli state, notably parliamentary party structures, are becoming progressively less stable. In the past ten years no Israeli government completed its term of office, and there have been new elections on average every two years. This situation is regarded as extremely damaging to the security and economic interests of the state as viewed by the ruling elites; for example, it makes any consistent or viable economic policy impossible.

My working assumption is that in the next three to five years, such limited democratic procedures as have been in place since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948—limited in the sense that there are no guaranteed constitutional rights, since there is no constitution—will be suspended, and either an emergency government or military council will step in to govern the country.

If and when this happens, it will not be easy to project the State of Israel as "the only democracy in the Middle East."

ATC: In your book, where you discuss Jewish identity and Israel you use the term "Jewish tribes." Perhaps you could explain the meaning of this terminology, which I haven't seen used by any other writers. I understand it to mean something like "extended families" rather than a literal Biblical meaning...

U.D.: The term may sound esoteric to an English-speaking audience,but is less so in an Israeli Hebrew context. The political Zionist reference to the "ingathering of the Jewish diaspora in their ancestral homeland" includes references to the ingathering of the Jewish tribes. The country is officially divided into regional councils. All or most of these regional councils are named after the particular Jewish tribe which allegedly lived there in Biblical times.

So for example we have regional councils designated Zebulun, Asher, Mateh Benjamin, etc. The conceptualization of the Jewish society in Palestine in terms of Biblical tribes is not esoteric in the Hebrew Israeli and political Zionist context.

The other consideration is an attempt by myself to deal with the question of Jewish identity in politically acceptable terms, which for me means taking as the point of departure the separation of religion from the state. [See Apartheid Israel, 178 ff.]

I also am indebted to a colleague and teacher of mine, Akiva Orr, who extends this principle to include the separation of national identity from the state. [Editor's note: Akiva Orr is an Israeli mathematician, dissident and libertarian socialist. His collection of essays Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises (Pluto Press,1994) contains some of his work on problems of identity and nation.]

There is a large constituency of people who identify themselves as Jewish, but do not subscribe to the theology of Judaism, and would claim they partake in a community referred to as "the Jewish people."

The Zionist Federation, or political Zionism, claim to represent "the movement of national liberation" of a "Jewish people." In the name of this movement, they have committed massive war crimes and crimes against humanity, ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine, the Palestinian Arab people, razing their localities to the ground, some 400 rural as well as urban localities in the process.

But there is a constituency of people who identify themselves as Jews who do so in other than theological terms, and who are not happy with the political Zionist definition of "the Jewish people." As I am personally a member of that latter constituency, I asked myself, and discussed with friends, the question of in what sense I identify myself as Jewish.

I do not observe the codex of 613 Orthodox precepts, nor do I subscribe myself to the "Jewish people" in the political Zionist sense of that term. What then is my national identity and in what sense can I communicate my Jewish affiliation?

The solution I propose is to adopt the word "Hebrew" for the national identity of the people who have their origins in the Zionist colonial project in Palestine: the term Hebrew designating the national language of this people. This language, rather than anything else, sets this people as a distinctive national entity rather than other national entities.

The term "Jewish" then can be reserved for what I believe is the substance of my sentimental affiliation, i.e. to the Jewish tribal tradition, history and legacy. It is quite possible to be an atheist and yet a member of a tribe, not only a Jewish tribe but a Bantu tribe or any other.

There is a specific affiliation which can be recognized in the celebration of certain parts of the tribal tradition, which doesn't entail any theological commitments but reflects a bond which I feel is there.

Also, my professional intellectual discipline of anthropology affects my thinking. But I have no problem with my tribal affiliation, because I separate this affiliation entirely from my politics and from the state. I fully endorse the principle of separation of religion, national identity and tribal affiliation from the state, whether this be pagan, Jewish, Christian or Muslim or whatever other tribal affiliation.

The worst thing that can happen to a tribal affiliation, or to a democratic state, is to link these together. In just the same way, the linkage of church, synagogue or mosque religious institutions with the state results in the prostitution of the religious institutions as well as the state.

ATC 113, November-December 2004

( categories:

)

Review: A Final Warning?

— David Finkel

Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within. by Uri Davis. London and New York: Zed Press, 2003. 242 pp. $24.95 paperback.

"ISRAEL'S MAD COURSE towards its own destruction" (7) is the theme of Michel Warschawski's brief and terrifyingly direct essay. The thesis is simply stated: Israel's increasingly brutal occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza has fed straight back into Israeli Jewish society, leading to an accelerated process of ethical, social and political disintegration.

More than any other single book I've seen, this one should have the power to shake up pro-Zionist liberals, and I'm ordering several dozen copies to get into the hands of people who will read it more readily than a detailed historical treatise.

For this reviewer, what is new in Warschawski's message is the rapid collapse, during these past four years of the second Intifadah, of the independence of the Israeli press and other institutions generally grouped in the fashionable catch phrase "civil society" (a term Warschawski avoids). Here's his description:

Without critical media, without a High Court ensuring respect for basic individual rights and democratic norms, with an education system whose mission has become militarizing society and with omnipresent police surveillance, Israeli society no longer has the brakes to stop it from sliding down the slippery slope from the rule of law to a gang culture ruled arbitrarily by violence. The arbitrary rule of violence in the occupied territories is already spreading like gangrene through Israeli society. There is a grave danger that the process of degeneration will speed up in the next few years to a point of changing the state's structures to those of a fascist-type regime that will no longer need to bother about democratic pretensions or the principles of the rule of law. (64)

What I understand Warschawski to mean here is not fascism in the precise sense of a regime (as in Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain or Pinochet's Chile) where unions are systematically smashed, workers' organizations destroyed through state terror, and all political parties either banned or turned into direct state organs. I believe he means something more along the lines of military Bonapartism, where the armed forces take over when political parties and parliamentary institutions are unable to regulate conflicts arising from a massive crisis.

Countries like Turkey and Pakistan have experienced episodes of this type. In the Israeli case, the factors pointing toward a potential crisis uncontrollable by normal methods include the Palestinian revolt, growing anger among the Israeli poor, the power of the religious extreme right and the settlers, the influence of organized crime and the decay of established mainstream parties, accompanied by an increased direct political role of military elites. Declining social cohesion and the viciousness of social policy as well as personal behavior are among the symptoms.

Warschawski locates this process in a multiple context: the past four years of savage repression of Palestinian revolt; the failures of the "peace process," to which Israeli liberal intellectuals reacted as if Yasir Arafat had personally betrayed them; the consequences of the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, ending a period of "normalization" of Israeli society; and September 11, 2001, which inaugurated a U.S. policy where previous restraints on Israeli conduct were lifted.

Warschawski places great emphasis on the importance of Rabin's assassination. Despite his visceral dislike of Arafat and the PLO, Rabin had undertaken important steps toward reconciliation with Israel's Arab citizens. His murder, and the failure of the aging and decrepit secular Zionist elite to respond with an offensive against the violent religious right, set the table for an Israeli "counter-reformation" and the degenerative decade that has followed.

Another factor deserving closer attention is the role of the Jewish community leadership in the United States—"fascinated by force, by the image of a Jewish paratrooper who can be as brutal as a U.S. Marine" (102)—in mobilizing their constituency to celebrate Israeli might. This is a dimension of the tragedy that Warschawski mentions only briefly.

So far, the worst possible scenarios have not materialized—for example, the very real fear, reflected in one of Warschawski's chapters written shortly before the 2003 Iraq war, that the attack on Iraq might give Ariel Sharon's government cover for a massive physical expulsion of Palestinians.

This only means, however, that there remains an opportunity for the world to pay attention to the warning before time runs out. In any case (as other activists such as Jeff Halper point out) a massive expulsion isn't necessary; the destruction of Palestinian society can be accomplished through driving out, imprisoning or selectively killing its leadership and educated elites.

The End of Israeli Democracy? I have always been skeptical of claims that Israel's parliamentary institutions about to collapse, given their structural and ideological importance for "the only democracy in the Middle East" and the infinite combinations of party coalitions that have been improvised by Israel's political elites to meet any challenge to their entrenched power.

Yet Uri Davis in Apartheid Israel, writing from a somewhat different angle, offers a similar diagnosis:

Given what goes on in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, writing about political repression in Israel is like a guest taking residence in a Third World seaside resort hotel and complaining that his steak is not properly grilled, while the people in whose midst the hotel is located are starving...Yet it would be unwise to disregard the instruments of political repression inside Israel, if only because the political structures of the State of Israel are currently undergoing dangerous transformations. (125)

Like Warschawski, Davis outlines a process of growing direct intervention in politics by the military command. He also refers to the impact of Israel's deep economic crisis, and the spectacular wealth gap in which the top ten percent of households' gross income has reached twelve times that of the bottom ten percent.

The deterioration of the political structures of the State of Israel as reflected in the 2002 Knesset legislation [which sought to criminalize expressions of solidarity with Palestinian resistance, and led to attempts to bar leading Arab candidates from the 2003 elections] has been accompanied by manifestations of political corruption and economic deterioration of proportions hitherto unknown.

Over the past two decades, the discrepancies in access to income, property, capital, wage, education and consumption between the top 10 percent and the bottom ten percent have polarized to a degree that Israel is second only to the USA in this regard (Haaretz, 3 December 2002). Taken together, against the backdrop of a protracted economic recession and the costly war criminal policies of occupation, the chances are that the tanks of the Israeli army deployed to level down the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank will be directed to suppress food riots inside Israel, let alone the Supreme Court. (144)

Again, whether or not the extreme scenarios materialize, the tendencies pointing toward them are dangerous enough. Diagnosing the Crisis Michel Warschawski's book can be read in an evening, while the work of Uri Davis is a rather complex and exhaustively documented political treatise. They are complementary rather than contradictory, but come at the issues from somewhat differing directions.

Both are longtime activists dedicated to breaking the walls separating the peoples in the Palestine/Israel struggle. Strikingly, both are authors of similarly titled autobiographies, Crossing the Border (Davis, 1994) and Sur la Frontiere (Warschawski, 2002).

Warschawski's involvement in political and movement organizations extends from the post-1967 Matzpen ("Compass," the Israeli expression of the anti-Zionist new left) to most recently the Alternative Information Center. His column, regularly exploring the issues discussed in his book, appears in the AIC's magazine News from Within.

Uri Davis has not participated in the parties of the left—among other reasons, "I was never a Marxist" he told me in the course of the interview accompanying this review—but has played a role in founding such campaigns as the Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine (MAIAP, see 175-78). Davis also sharply differentiates himself not only from the official Zionist left but also dissident formations like Gush Shalom which in his view promote the vision of a reformed Jewish State.

Davis has written, edited or co-authored some fifteen books, including Israel: Utopia Incorporated (1977), a study of the Israeli trade union Histadrut's now long-vanished economic empire and its small Ashkenazi elite.[*] His other major contributions include a definitive history of the Jewish National Fund, co-authored with Walter Lehn.

The current work Apartheid Israel is a reworking of Davis' earlier Israel: An Apartheid State (2001). The changed framework in part reflects the author's profound disappointment with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he had championed as a national liberation movement. Indeed, Davis was forced to live in exile for ten years for associations with PLO leaders which prior to the Oslo accords were considered criminal in Israel.

In his view, however, the PLO tragically missed the historic opportunity to play the role assumed in South Africa by the African National Congress, which proclaimed itself to be the movement of both the exploited Black majority and of all progressive white South Africans who wished to create, in the words of the Freedom Charter, "one nation, which belongs to all who live in it."

Failing to adopt such a stance in Palestine/Israel led the PLO, Davis believes, to a disastrous policy in Oslo and afterward. The PLO's negotiating stance accepts what Davis argues can only become a truncated Palestinian bantustan, alongside an Israeli state with its structures of Jewish privilege and supremacy left intact. A corollary of this collapse has been that the United Nations General Assembly was successfully pressured to abandon its declaration that Zionism was a form of racism.

Today, Davis along with other supporters of what's called "the one- state solution" look to the democratic struggles of Arab citizens of the Israeli state—some 20% of Israel's population—along with a minority among Israeli Jews who are willing to support those struggles as well as the right of return of Palestinian refugees expelled in the ethnic cleansings of 1948 and 1967.

What defines "apartheid Israel," for Davis, is not the fact of racism, which sadly exists in many societies and often in forms as extreme or even more so than the Israeli case. Rather, Davis argues, after the democratic political revolution that ended South African apartheid, Israel is the only country where ethnic supremacy is officially enshrined through parliamentary legislation and the state's self-definition.

Davis devotes the book's central chapters to the details of this system, and sums it up thus:

(T)he official Israeli claim that the record of the State of Israel on the question of racism is not better, but also not much worse relative to many other members of the United Nations Organization is basically correct. But it also serves to veil the fact that Israel is probably the last remaining apartheid state member of the UN as well as the reality of Israeli apartheid, namely the regulation of racism in law through Acts of the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset), resulting in 93 per cent of all the territory of pre-1967 Israel being designated in law...for cultivation, development and settlement by, of and for Jews only. (39)

Apartheid Israel includes substantial additional material that can't be adequately covered here: documentary and eyewitness background on the destruction of hundreds of Arab villages by Israeli militias in 1948; the author's direct involvement in struggles against housing discrimination; and a reflection on the meaning of communal and linguistic "identity" and how it can be constructed in a secular and non-racist fashion. (178-187)

Davis has for many years identified himself as a Palestinian Jew (he was born in Jerusalem in 1943), even if this designation brought disapproval from both Jewish and Arab nationalist sectors. He expands it here to "Palestinian Hebrew anti-Zionist Jew of dual Israeli and British citizenship." (185)

Seeking Solutions Davis sees the potential solution to the Palestinian tragedy as an anti-apartheid movement, both internal and throughout the international community, following the South African example. Accordingly, he supports applying against Israel the kinds of international sanctions, boycotts and other measures that isolated the South African apartheid state.

Among the differences that Davis does not explore here is one that seems critical: South African apartheid arose not only as a systematic form of racism, but as a fiendish system of labor control to deny basic rights of citizenship to Black South Africans whose labor was the base of the country's capitalist economy. Despite its best efforts, however, South African capitalism brought into being a powerful Black labor movement that made the whole system unviable.

Political Zionism, in contrast, has sought to drive Arab labor as much as possible out of the economy. It cannot do so entirely, of course; but while working class Arab Israeli citizens have made substantial progress in integrating the Histadrut, many Palestinian laborers from the West Bank and Gaza been displaced from jobs in Israel by "guest workers" from Romania and Asia. The economy of the Occupied Territories has been shattered to the point where trade unionism is largely fictional.

The result is that the real working class in Israeli is substantially multinational, contrary to Zionist fantasy and mythology, with a majority of darker-skinned Jews alongside Arabs and assorted legal and illegal immigrant labor.

It may be added here that South African apartheid served also as a massive "affirmative action" program for the Afrikaner whites, eliminating white poverty in South Africa, while the neoliberal privatization mania in the Israeli state is creating deeper Jewish working class poverty. Despite the economic militancy of Israeli unions, however, it appears unlikely that a workers' movement of the South African type will spearhead the freedom struggle in Israel/Palestine.

Both Uri Davis and Michel Warschawski, if isolated in their own society, are prepared to carry on for the sake of a better future and the hope of international solidarity. Warschawski offers less programmatic prescription than a pledge of ongoing resistance:

Israeli dissidents, marginalized but more determined than ever, are gambling that (the catastrophe) can be averted. They know that by defending rights—the Palestinians' rights to begin with, but also rights in general as the foundation of the society they live in—they are fighting to save their own existence as citizens. (103)

The message is a warning not only to the American Jewish community, much of which is being mobilized around Israel's apartheid-colonial war—on the wrong side—but to the people of the United States and the globe.

It is obviously not that Sharon is giving orders to George W. Bush as some Arab ideologists wrongly claim...The reason why Bush's total war is so much like that of Barak and Sharon is that both have been grown in neoconservative, racist and unilateralist think tanks (which have) been strategizing that New World Order, which is in reality the New World disorder of the new American empire...It is the Israelis who tested out the neoconservative strategy with its principles of elimination of international regulation, unilateralism, and permanent menace of preventive war...(And) with the current policies being carried on by the Bush dministration it is the whole planet that is driving at breakneck speed toward catastrophe. (106-107)

Endnotes

[*] In this work, Davis documented the surprisingly narrow base of the Histadrut's founding elite, who originated mostly in the Galicia region of southern Poland. Resentment of Ashkenazi (European Jewish) privilege among the growing non-European Jewish working class of Israel was the key to the toppling of the Labor Party by the right-wing coalition of Menahem Begin in the election of 1977—coincidentally, the same year Davis' study was published.

ATC 113, November-December 2004

( categories:

)

The Road to Civil War

— Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace campaigner and leader of Gush Shalom. Subscriptions to Gush Shalom's valuable newsletter The Other Israel are $30 per year (POB 2542, Holon 58125, Israel). This article is also available on the Gush Shalom site.

OCTOBER 23, 2004—Everybody in Israel is talking about the Next War. The most popular TV channel is running a whole series about it.

Not another war with the Arabs. Not the nuclear threat from Iran. Not the ongoing bloody confrontation with the Palestinians.

The talk is about the coming civil war. Only a few months ago, that would have sounded preposterous. Now, suddenly, it has become a possibility, and a very real one. Not another blown-up media sensation. Not yet another of Sharon's political manipulations. Not just a new blackmail attempt by the settlers. But the real thing on the ground.

They talk about it at cabinet meetings and in the Knesset, on TV talk-shows, in editorials and the news pages. The Chief of Staff has publicly warned that the army may fall apart. One of the ministers says that the very existence of the State of Israel is in danger. Another minister prophesies a bloodbath like the Spanish civil war.

Quietly and not so quietly, the Shin Bet [special branch security police—ed.] is taking precautions. The prison service has been ordered to prepare facilities for mass detentions. The army leadership is planning the callup of ten thousand reserve soldiers and starting to think about the steps they must take...

No, it's a very real threat.

On the face of it, it may seem to have appeared from nowhere. But whoever has eyes to see knew that it is going to happen, sooner or later. The seeds of the civil war were sown when the first settlement was put up in the occupied territories.

At the time, I told the Prime Minister in the Knesset: "You are laying a land mine. Some day you will have to dismantle it. As a former soldier, let me warn you that the dismantling of land mines is a very unpleasant job."

Since then, hundreds of mines have been laid. The minefields are being extended even now.

The process was led by religious cranks. Their declared aim, as they said then and never tire of repeating, is to drive all the Arabs out of the country that God promised us. And the land God promised us, as one of them reminded us on TV the other day, is not the "Palestine" of the British mandate, but the Promised Land—including Jordan, Lebanon and parts of Syria and Sinai.

Quoting the Bible, another one declared that we have come to this country not only to inherit, but also to disinherit the others, to drive them out and take their place.

Since the then Minister of Defence, Shimon Peres, implanted the first settlement, Kedumim, in the middle of the Palestinian population on the West Bank, the settlements have spread like locusts. Every settlement has gradually stolen the lands and water of the neighboring Palestinian villages, uprooted their trees, blocked their roads and built new roads, barred to Palestinians. Almost all the settlements have spawned satellite outposts on the nearby hills.

This is continuing at this very moment. After Sharon solemnly promised President Bush to dismantle some of the "outposts," dozens of new one have sprung up. All the ministries are actively helping the outposts that were officially defined as "illegal." Not only is the army defending them, thereby putting its soldiers in harm's way, but it is actually telling the "hill-boys" where to set up their outposts and secretly advising them how to go about it.

When we warned of the danger, we were told to relax. Only a small minority of the settlers, we were comforted, are fanatical freaks. These are indeed crazy and will forcibly resist any attempt to remove them. But that will not be a big problem, because the vast majority of Israeli citizens detest them and consider them a sect of crackpots.

Most of the settlers, we were told, are not fanatics. They went there because the government presented them with expensive villas, which they could not even dream about in Israel proper. They were looking for "quality of life." When the government tells them to move, they will take the compensation and move on.

That is, of course, a dangerous delusion. As Karl Marx observed, people's consciousness is determined by their situation. The good Laborites who were implanted by the Labor government on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip now talk and behave like the worst followers of the late fascist rabbi Meir Kahane.

Moreover, we were told, even the weirdos recognize Israeli democracy. Nobody will raise his hands against soldiers of the Israeli army. When the government and the Knesset decide to evacuate settlements, they will obey. They may raise a ruckus and put up a show of resistance, as they did during the evacuation of the North Sinai settlements in 1982, but at the end of the day they will give in. After all, even in North Sinai not one single settler refused, in the end, to accept their compensation.

But this disdain for the settlers is no less dangerous than the disdain for the Arabs. What had been hidden all the time is now becoming clear: the settlers don't give a damn for democracy and the institutions of the state. Their hard core spells it out: when the resolutions of the Knesset contradict the Halakha (Jewish religious law), the Halakha has priority.

After all, the Knesset is just a gang of corrupt politicians. And what value have the secular laws, copied from the Goyim (Gentiles), compared to the word of God, blessed be his name?

Many settlers do not yet say so openly and pretend to be insulted when such attitudes are attributed to them, but in fact they are dragged along by the hard core that has already thrown off all the masks. They challenge not only the policy of the government, but Israeli democracy as such. They declare openly that their aim is to overthrow the State of Law and put in its place the State of the Halakha.

A State of Law is subject to the will of the majority, which enacts the laws and amends them as necessary. The State of the Halakha is subject to the Torah, revealed once and for all on Mount Sinai and unchangeable. Only a very small number of eminent rabbis have the authority to interpret the Halakha. That is, of course, the opposite of democracy.

In any other country, these people would be called fascists. The religious coloration makes no difference.

The religious-rightist rebels are powerfully motivated. Many of them believe in the Kabbala—not Madonna's fashionable Kabbala, but the real one, which says that today's secular Jews are really Amalekites who succeeded in infiltrating the People of Israel at the time of the exodus from Egypt.

God Himself has commanded, as everyone knows, the eradication of Amalek from the face of the earth. Can there be a more perfect ideological basis for civil war?

Why has this become a threat at this point in time? It is not yet clear whether Sharon really intends to dismantle the few settlements in the Gaza Strip. But as the settlers see it, even the idea of removing one single settlement is a casus belli. It attacks everything that is holy to them. Sharon tried to convince them that it is only a ploy—to sacrifice a few small settlements in order to save all the others. In vain.

In preparation for the Great Rebellion, the settlers have unveiled their potential. The most eminent rabbis of the "Religious Zionist movement" have declared that the evacuation of a settlement is a sin against God and have called upon the soldiers to refuse orders. Hundreds of rabbis, including the rabbis of the settlements and of the religious units in the army, have joined the call.

The voice of the few opponents is being drowned out. They quote the Talmudic saying "the law of the kingdom is law," meaning that every government has to be obeyed, much as Christians are required to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, etc. But who listens to these "moderate rabbis" now?

The conquest of the army from the inside began long ago. The "arrangement" with the yeshivot (religious schools), that serve in the army as separate units, has allowed the entry of a huge Trojan horse. In any confrontation between their rabbis and their army commanders, the soldiers of the "arrangement yeshivot" will obey the rabbis.

Worse: for years now, the settlers have systematically penetrated the ranks of the officers' corps, where they now constitute an even more dangerous Trojan horse.

The right-wing refusal to obey orders is unlike the left-wing conscientious objection. The leftist refusal is a personal stand, the rightist refusal a collective mutiny. On the left, a few hundred refused to serve the occupation; on the right, many thousands, even tens of thousands, will obey their rabbis' orders to refuse military orders.

As the Chief of Staff has warned, the army may disintegrate.

Altogether, the settlers, together with their close allies in Israel including the yeshivot students, may amount to something like half a million people—a mighty phalanx for rebellion.

As of now, the settlers are only using this threat as an instrument for blackmail and deterrence, in order to choke off any thought of evacuating settlements and territories. But if the blackmail does not do the job, the Great Rebellion is just a matter of time.

ATC 113, November-December 2004

( categories:

)

AIPAC: Israel's U.S. Spy Den

— Allen Ruff

Keeping It Clear

THE SOCIALIST LEFT must remain clear in its avoidance of a conspiratorial view of history. The entire U.S. political spectrum in the aftermath of the 2000 election, and especially since 9/11, has been awash with conspiracy theories. With deep roots in our political culture, ahistorical conspiratorial views of the workings of the world, devoid of any class understanding or a structural and institutional analysis of what we live in, come bubbling to the surface, especially during times of "national crisis."

A recent example was contained in Michael Moore's highly popular documentary "Fahrenheit 911," from which one could come away believing that things in this country began to go awry following Bush's theft of the Presidency.

Even worse, the entire situation in the contemporary Middle East can be explained as the result of a conspiratorial alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Bush. Israel is ignored, as are the Neocon ideologues that steered the country toward a war in Iraq with trumped-up claims and false information.

Based more often than not on conjecture and coincidence, such conspiracy theories divert attention from the reality of what might actually be going on and serve to disempower and neutralize political action. Serving as a substitute for politics, such tales of behind the scenes manipulation have traditionally played into the hands of reactionary elements—the xenophobe and the chauvinist, the racist, anti-Semite and Arab hater—always eager to blame "the other" the "outsider," those with "dual loyalties."

Conspiracy is not the motor of history, as we understand it. That isn't to say that members of the ruling class occupying positions of power within the state do not plot and scheme on a regular basis. Of course they do, but never in situations solely of their own choosing.

If, at some level, capitalism is little more than organized crime, then members of the ruling class will always collude. If the imperialist order represents some "highest stage" of capitalism, then those occupying its "command centers" will display the highest order of venality and corruption.

Like contending mafia families ever eager to carve out a bigger share of "the take," various fractions of the ruling class and their servants occupying the state bureaucracies will cooperate as much as possible. But in a system based upon the competition of "all against all," conflicts must arise, leading on occasion to openly struggles for power, prestige and profit, the spoils. Our goal is not only to understand those moments, but to change the history that spawns them.—A.R.

EVERY NOW AND then some high level National Security "spy story" surfaces, one that allows us some glimpse into the inner workings of the imperial order. Often there for but a moment before the public relations "spin doctors" and subservient members of the press corps do their dirty work, such tales of true "intrigue" and "espionage" reveal important insights into the mechanisms of power.

Viewed as a reflection of differing tactical and strategic interests within and among the various bureaucracies that formulate and implement "foreign policy," such short-lived "scandals" expose very real conflicts between various competing factions.

As interesting, if not more so, is the disappearance from public view, the "cover-up" of such intrigues—a reflection of not only Executive power over the Justice Department, but of the correlation of forces within a never monolithic or homogeneous ruling class. The August-September exposure and rapid disappearance of what some immediately began to call "AIPACgate" provides a case in point.

In late August, Larry Franklin, a well-placed Iran specialist working in the Pentagon, was accused of passing sensitive documents to Israeli intelligence through operatives of the influential pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The New York Times soon did its duty as "the paper of record" and described Franklin as a "low level" DOD civilian employee.

The case rapidly took on a new dimension, however, when the Washington Post reported that "an ongoing investigation" of AIPAC as a possible conduit for information to Israel went well beyond Franklin and had been proceeding for over two years. According to the Post, the FBI was also examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic intercepts of communications, was also forwarded to Israel.

The "leak" of that two-year FBI probe led to further press examination of the key players, all "higher ups" at the DoD. Stories began to raise questions regarding the connections between Donald Rumsfeld's Neocon crew, their connections with AIPAC, Israeli intelligence and ultimately, their affinity for Ariel Sharon's rightist Likud Party.

The initial disclosures, coming on the eve of the Republican Convention, suggested a "big story" as the fall election season was just about to heat up. Quickly submerged until "after the elections," the story as it unfolded also came to suggest a power struggle between Bush administration's Neocon appointees at the Pentagon and National Security Council, and the National Security State bureaucracies at the CIA and the State Department.

Regime Within the Regime

So what was the Franklin case? The "leaked" FBI investigation focused on the Pentagon's policy department, a "mini state department" within Donald Rumsfeld's DOD that has played a major role in shaping current U.S. Mideast policy. It is headed by the Neocon activist with long-time Likud links, Defence Undersecretary Douglas Feith.

Not some low level nobody, but the Pentagon's chief Iran analyst, Franklin was the "go to" man when Feith and his boss, Paul Wolfowitz had questions on Iran. Franklin worked directly under Feith's deputy, William Luti, also well-known for his pro-Likud sentiments.

Franklin had come to FBI attention over a year and a half ago when he unexpectedly walked into a Washington lunch hour meeting with AIPAC operatives and an Israeli embassy official already under surveillance as espionage suspects.

An Army reserve colonel and former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who had previously served at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, Franklin had been in the news before. It already had come to light in early August, 2003, that he and Douglas Feith's top Middle East specialist, Harold Rhode, had been meeting with Manuchar Ghorbanifar, the international weapons merchant and notoriously unreliable Middle East "intelligence asset" connected to Iran.

Rhode was a protege of Michael Ledeen, who as a National Security Council consultant in the mid-1980s introduced Ghorbanifar to NSC aide Col. Oliver North and others in the opening stages of what became the Iran-Contra affair (the secret sale of U.S. weapons to the Islamic Republic, with the proceeds going to fund murderous counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua). Ledeen, an influential Neocon war hawk and pro-Likud zealot, reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Feith's staff.

According to the Washington Monthly, Franklin was part of an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and Feith's office. Franklin and Feith deputy Harold Rhode were involved in ongoing meetings with Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles. Ledeen acted as intermediary. The first meeting, in Rome in December, 2001 included Franklin, Rhode and Ledeen, who organized the meeting. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.)

Present with Ghorbanifar were number of dissident Iranians. Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, a well-known Neoconservative ally.

These intelligence sharing meetings on Iran and Iraq reflected a bitter administration power struggle, pitting officials at Rumsfeld's DoD pushing for a hard-line policy of "regime change" in Iran, against others, bypassed career officers at the State Department and the CIA, who have been disturbed by the course and direction taken by the Neocon hawks surrounding Bush. The DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal U.S. foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the foreign policy establishment.

What's the Goal?

The big picture here is that, as in the Iran-Contra scandal of the '80s, key members of the administration have been engaging in illegal actions to secretly influence U.S. foreign policy. But in what direction?

Clearly the pro-Likud Neocons, from Wolfowitz on down, have had their sights fixed on Iran. Long-time advocates of "regime change" in Teheran, they've sought to steer the United States in a more aggressive confrontational direction toward Israel's remaining major foe and "Axis of Evil" state.

What else was going on? Apparently, there was a brief period of warming relations between Washington and Teheran in late 2003. Negotiations regarding the swap of al Quaeda higher-ups, were under way. The Jerusalem Post, viewing the developments in a positive light, revealed that at least one of the meetings with Rhode, Ledeen, Franklin and Ghorbanifar was quite specific in its attempt to torpedo better U.S./Iran relations:

The purpose of that meeting was to undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government. At the time, Iran had considered turning over five high level al-Quaeda operatives, among them Osama bin Laden's son and Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, the new "bogey man" currently being blamed for much of the anti-occupation violence in Iraq, in exchange for Washington dropping its support for Mujahadeen Khalq (MEK), the Iraq-based rebel Iranian group long sheltered by Saddam Hussein. Iran was reported to have Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in custody in summer of 2003, and to be entirely willing to hand him over to the United States in return for some high-ranking MEK members. But the neocon network, including Franklin, Rhode and Ledeen, intervened to stop the trade. It would have led to better U.S.-Iran relations, which they wanted to forestall.

Franklin answered directly to Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, a former Newt Gingrich staffer and early advocate of military action against Iraq. Luti came to light in early 2003 after The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote about his intelligence work in the Office of Special Plans (OSP). According to Hersh, Luti and his OSP cohorts were charged with digging up intelligence on Iraq that would support the administration's arguments for going to war. Conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the OSP began work soon after 9/11 and produced the intelligence reviews that shaped U.S. policy toward Iraq and helped move public opinion toward war.

Hersh tells us that the OSP "...brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community;" that by late 2002, the OSP had overshadowed the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to become Bush's main intelligence source on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and on Hussein's alleged Al Quaeda connections.

The OSP, Hersh told us, relied in part on information provided by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, now fallen from favor. (At some point, Chalabi became a liability for his former Neocon patrons, but exactly why is part of the story that hasn't come out yet.) Franklin's colleague Rhode had previously acted as a liaison between Feith's office and Chalabi.

Far from some low level bureaucrat, Franklin was the Pentagon's top Iran analyst, specifically brought into the Office of the Secretary of Defense because he shared the pro-Likud neocon worldview of Feith, Luti and Wolfowitz. He was very much part of their inner circle.

What It All Means

So how do we decipher all these apparent machinations without lapsing into conspiracy fantasies of the kind which fascinate the anti-Semites of the paranoid right? Congressional Democrats and curious journalists have long asked questions about the central role Feith's office may have played in a range of dubious intelligence enterprises. It pushed claims about a supposed Saddam-al Qaeda partnership and overblown estimates foisted on them by Chalabi of alleged Iraqi stocks of WMDs.

In 1996, Feith and his long-time Neocon crony Richard Perle helped prepare a policy plan, "A Clean Break," prepared for Israel's then Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Calling for a "Greater Israel," it called for a much more aggressive policy toward Iraq and Syria and for ending peace talks with the Palestinians, an end to the "Peace Process."

The Franklin "scandal," immediately referred to by some as "AIPACgate," suggests that bypassed elements of the national security state bureaucracies at the CIA, which some Neocons blame for the disaster in Iraq, and the FBI, frustrated by three decades of spying investigations squelch for political reasons, may have decided to go after what some clearly view as a "Washington's fifth column."

The "leak" of Franklin's meetings with Israel's AIPAC go-betweens, seemingly coming from John Ashcroft's Justice Department, may have served to kill an ongoing investigation, one that might have implicated Bush administration higher-ups in this election year. The press, with few exceptions, let the matter slide as a minor, short lived footnote to "business as usual" in Washington.

What remains clear is that the DoD Neocons, desiring a broader confrontation with Iran, have taken it upon themselves to circumvent normal foreign policy channels. In the process, they and their media allies and apologists have succeeded to inflame anti-Semitism, encourage probable future terrorist attacks in the United States, and further destabilize the entire Middle East.

Selected Sources

"Spy suspect was involved in Iran policy debate," The New York Times, Friday, September 3, 2004.
"Wider FBI Probe Of Pentagon Leaks Includes Chalabi," Washington Post, Friday, September 3, 2004.
"Leak Inquiry Includes Iran Experts in Administration," Washington Post, September 4, 2004.
Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris, "Iran-Contra II? —Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation," Washington Monthly, September, 2004.
For additional pieces by Rozen and Marshall on their respective blog sites: www.warandpiece.com and www.talkingpointsmemo.com Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," The New Yorker, May 12, 2003.
Jim Lobe, "How neo-cons influence the Pentagon..." Asia Times, August 8, 2003.
Curt Anderson, "White House said to have learned of Israel spy investigation in 2001" Associated Press, September 4, 2004.
Juan Cole, "Spy Scandal's Roots are Deep," progressivetrail.org/articles/040902Cole.shtml, and various articles on Informed Comment (web log site for Juan Cole, www.juancole.com)
"Spy probe tests U.S.-Israeli ties," by Faye Bowers, Christian Science Monitor 08/30/04.
"2d probe at the Pentagon examines actions on Iraq, The Boston Globe 08/31/04
Mark Mazzetti and Richard B. Schmitt, "Report on Iran Key to Spying Inquiry," Mark Mazzetti and Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times 08/29/04; "FBI Questions Israeli Lobbyists in Spying Probe," Los Angeles Times 08/31/04.
"Israel's Albatross: U.S. Neocons," by Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times 08/31/04. (Also at www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17574)
Ha'aretz (Israel): Articles by Aluf Benn and Nathan Guttman, August 29-31, 2004 (www.haaretzdaily.com)
Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com): "Shalom: Franklin affair is 'media nonsense,'" by Janine Zacharia and Herb Keinon, 08/28/04. "Who is Larry Franklin?" 08/28/04. Editorial, "The AIPAC kerfluffle," 08/29/04.
Stephen Green, "Serving Two Flags—The Bush Neo-Cons and Israel" www.counterpunch.org, September 3, 2004.

ATC 113, November-December 2004

( categories:

)

Against the Current

Put a Socialist in the Senate!

Donate

User login

Barbara Zeluck Presente!

One Year of Obama and the Democrats’ Debacle

Regroupment & Refoundation of a U.S. Left

New Pamphlet: Hell on Wheels

From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Justice