Jewbonics

Interview with Matan Kaminer on J14 and the Israeli left

Jewbonic — Fri, 04 May 2012 04:18:37 +0000

I met Matan Kaminer in Tel Aviv in January 2012, and we agreed to do an extended interview about the state of the left in Israeli society after the controversial J14 social justice protests.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background? How did you get involved in political activity?

I was born to an activist family. My grandparents were among the founders of the New Left in Israel in the seventies. After they left the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) they were among the founders of SIAH (New Israeli Left) and then of SHASI (Israeli Socialist Left), which, together with the CPI and the Black Panthers, founded the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality — as al-Jabha/Hadash. My parents also took the path from SIAH to SHASI, and my father was involved in Yesh Gvul, a movement of conscientious objectors to the occupation. He was imprisoned twice when he refused to fight in the First Lebanon War.

I became active in the Hadash youth group in Tel Aviv when I was fifteen. This was mostly a reading and discussion group — we didn’t actually do very much but it was formative for me intellectually and politically. Then I was involved in the “Shministim” movement of conscientious objectors and spent 21 months in prison for refusing to serve in the IDF. After that I travelled in South America and subsequently became active in solidarity work with migrants and refugees, particularly from Latin America but also in general. Last year I finished four years at Tel Aviv University, where I was also active in the Hadash branch, and I’m also a member of Ir LeKulanu, a municipal political front that also includes Hadash.

Talk a little bit about the origins of the current social inequality in Israel. Who put in place these programs? And how are they linked to the occupation?

These are difficult questions, and I’m not sure I know the answers to all of them. The regime in Israel-Palestine is capitalist and colonial. It is impossible to understand conditions in Israel proper — that is, territorially speaking, within the “Green Line,” or in terms of population categories, among citizens of Israel — without taking the Palestinians into account. Very broadly speaking, the past two or three decades have seen the regime move from a closed, protectionist and developmentalist model of growth to integration into global neo-liberal structures, relying more and more on the export of security and related technologies. To this you can add the financialization that we have seen in the rest of the world, making for a very prosperous financial-military-high-tech bloc and for well-paid workers in these industries.

On the other hand you have the rest of the population, including the “old” service elites, which have seen a decline in living standards and life chances over recent years. PM Netanyahu recently said that if you “deduct” the Arab and ultra-Orthodox citizens — the Palestinians in the territories were never part of this equation, of course — the economic situation in Israel is quite good. This is not true, but it’s telling, because I think the regime is worried about the impoverished middle classes making common cause with the “minority” poor.

Read the rest at MRZine

Technorati Tags: #J14, Israel, occupation, Palestine, political economy, Zionism

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2012 Symposium-Economics, Youth and Technology in the “Arab Spring”

Jewbonic — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:51:52 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Adel Iskandar, Arab Spring, Egypt, Joel Beinin, Labor, Twitter

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Vittorio Arrigoni, 4 February 1975 – 15 April 2011

Jewbonic — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:15:31 +0000

Shahd Abusalama

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Review of Shir Hever

Jewbonic — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 06:15:10 +0000

My review of Shir Hever’s The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation is up at the Middle East Report:

There is a latter-day tendency to see the 44-year Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as the organic outward growth of the Zionist idea — as though the aspiration to hold the entirety of the land, embedded in Labor Zionist doctrine, was in fact a certainty, simply waiting for time to catch up. With the occupation deepened since the 1993 Oslo accord, and the remainder of the Palestinian populace crowded into a scattering of bantustans in the West Bank and one big one in Gaza, one can understand the diffusion of this way of thinking. It appears that the Zionist drive to dominion has neared completion.

Debate about the beginnings of the Israeli state is reasonably settled in historiography if not yet in the broader public realm. The general trajectory of Israeli history, its grounding in exclusionary settler-colonialism, quite unlike the inclusionary, plantation-style variety in South Africa, emerged from trends set in motion and likely crystallized by the early twentieth century. On the occupation, however, controversy still rages. Liberals and realists, glancing hopefully at a “peace process” that has been underway for one third of Israel’s existence, cast the post-1967 occupation as evanescent and extractable, rather than tightly woven into the warp and weft of Israeli political economy and culture. Radicals depict the occupation as emanating from long-standing tendencies among Jewish settlers, always eager to relax internal social tension by further theft from the indigenous population. Similarly, critics of Israeli settler-colonialism have long split along the historical fault line marked by the year 1967. For some, the founding of the state of Israel was bloody but legitimate, and the irredentism in the Occupied Territories is a horrible deviation from the Zionist project. For others, perhaps growing in number as the occupation persists, the process of Israeli state formation was, in its origins, sin.

Attitudes are well established. Yet actual explanations of the occupation’s endurance have been thin. Shir Hever’s The Political Economy of the Occupation is an effort to supply one that goes beyond partial or flawed theories and dominant obfuscations. Hever is first concerned to total the macro-economic costs and benefits of the occupation. He warns that aggregate numbers can conceal disparities of economic power and privilege in a blur of averages, but he uses them to paint a rough-and-ready picture of the relationship between the Palestinian and Israeli “sectors,” as well as the ways in which labor and capital, demand and tariffs, coil, braid and meld, making talk of Palestinian this or Jewish that not merely muddying but misleading. Many of the relevant statistics are buried or deliberately made inaccessible by the Israeli government. Nevertheless, Hever arrives at a cautious estimate of “income” drawn from the occupation: about 39 billion shekels during the period 1970–2008. He also calculates outflows of 104 billion shekels in the form of subsidies to the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, and 316 billion shekels in “security costs,” the currency expended to protect the settlers and subdue the restive Palestinians.

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Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution Episode2 | Sabah Ibrahim

Jewbonic — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:00:58 +0000

The participation of women in the Egyptian revolution didn't come as a surprise to us, nor do we view it as an extraordinary phenomenon.

Women are part of every society and form a part of the social, political and economical spectrum. It is history that tends in most cases to ostracize the participation of women and keep them in the shadow while highlighting the participation of men and attributing leading roles exclusively to them. This is why we want to document and share Her-story.

This project intends to shed the light on the participation of women and to document their experiences as part of the historical (herstorical) memory of the Egyptian revolution. We also view it as a tool for women empowerment everywhere and as a resource for researchers, students and everyone interested in the matter.

Team:
Art-Work Marta Paz
Sound Recorder Sandy Chamoun
Editor Ziyad Hawwas
D.O.P Laila Samy
Executive Producer Nazly Hussein
Director Leil-Zahra Mortada

Music by dAAX! ressonances under our keyboard from the album surfing on m03b10s / cc by sa
http://www.noconventions.mobi/daax

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Jan25, women

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Sign # 45623 that Israel will not Attack Iran

Jewbonic — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:35:08 +0000

Via Haaretz:

An Israeli strike against Iran would have "disastrous" consequences, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as saying on Saturday, adding the world remains silent on Israel's reported nuclear armament while threatening Iran over its peaceful program.

The comments, made to reporters while making the journey back from an official visit to Iran, came after on Wednesday the Turkish PM said that “no one has the right to impose anything on anyone with regards to nuclear energy, provided that it is for peaceful purposes."

The always-impending Israeli/American "attack" on Iran both isn't happening and is already happening, and that is its eternal utility.

Since it's not happening, statesmen like Erdogan can keep welding together their hegemony with nationalist anti-imperialist sentiment by appearing to defy imperial policy on Iran. In Iran proper, a country scared for its survival is one in which it citizens are less likely to engage in labor mobilization or agitate for more democracy. In America, Obama can appear to be fending off the Israel lobby even while putting in place sanctions intended to cut Iran off from the world. And in Europe, the leadership of the EU states, unwilling to provide anything for their citizenry economically, can put in place sanctions slowly while meanwhile placating their populations with the fact that there's no war yet.

But then there is the fact that the war has already started: the US has set up a system of sanctions against countries which buy Iranian oil, and has used this system to get 10 European Union countries, as well as Japan, to cut their oil purchases from Iran. For that reason, they will not be sanctioned. Other countries have 3 months before sanctions set in. China, India, Turkey, South Africa, and South Korea are among the major purchasers of Iranian oil. Erdogan's posturing may be an attempt to secure the domestic political space to reduce Turkish oil imports from Iran, while South African oil imports from Iran shot up in February while China categorically rejects US pressure or influence on its oil sourcing.

When someone discusses whether or not Obama or Netanyahu will attack Iran, two things always should be kept in mind: there is next to no chance that an Israeli leader will do anything without an implied American green light, and America is already attacking Iran, and the currently unmeetable challenge is to get it to stop doing so.

[h/t Yoshie for sources]

Technorati Tags: AIPAC, Erdogan, Iran, Obama, Turkey

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Raja Khalidi on Palestinian Liberation and Neoliberalism

Jewbonic — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:40:45 +0000

At Jadaliyya:

Over the past year, as Arab peoples in surrounding countries erupted in protest against dictators, security regimes, and failed social and economic policies, the Palestinian people living in their occupied homeland have remained quiescent. Neither have mass protests targeted the Palestinian “regime’s” policies or negotiating performance, nor has resistance to Israeli occupation escalated or taken more effective forms.

In contrast to the turbulence and revolutionary potential of the Arab Spring, has neoliberal ideology, through its economic policy content, created a Palestinian constituency for normalcy and risk aversion that could hold back progress in the struggle for national liberation? In exploring the impact of recent neoliberal economic policies of the Palestinian Authority (PA) on living conditions and popular political consciousness, the burning question is whether these have succeeded in creating a people willing to resist encroachments upon their material gains and the liberal way of life.

Intuitively at least, the eventuality of a neoliberal complacency seems unlikely, if not absurd, for a people struggling for liberation from a regime of prolonged Israeli settler colonialism. Any informed observer cannot but be cognizant of the ravages on social fabric wrought by neoliberal policies in many countries, including within the neo/post-colonial range of experiences. To the extent that a the fallout from the world economic crisis may evolve into a backlash that targets neoliberal policies and their impact globally and in the region, even if not necessarily their legitimacy, the need to elaborate a relevant critique in the Palestinian context becomes compelling.

[Read the rest there]

[Also note this Haaretz interview in which Khalidi -- in contrast to many others -- does not take issue with the PA's aid dependency but rather to the uses to which it puts that aid. He also comments that the bloated PA payroll is a consciously Keynesian choice by the PA, the only counter-cyclical tool in its economic policy toolkit. The idea is to exploit preexisting patterns and flows of capital by using state power to build up Palestine's resistance capacities. Along similar lines, Samer Abdelnour argues that international NGOs and aid organizations "must seriously rethink the claim that their work is 'apolitical,' should immediately publicize the extent of potential harm caused throughout their chain of operations, and outline a transparent action plan for eliminating potential harm in their work." Elsewhere, he, Sam Bahour, and Alaa Tartir offer pragmatic proposals for creating a resistance economy, by creating economic facts on the ground from which Palestinians can project strength. Part of the proposal is using the economic leverage of the Diaspora to re-develop a thoroughly dedeveloped Palestinian economy, trapped in the cage of a political economy defined by growth in the absence of human development. Also see Linah Alsaafin's reflections on what has happened to the March 15 Movement in Palestine.]

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, liberation struggle, Palestine, political economy, West Bank

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Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon

Jewbonic — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 02:19:45 +0000

This open letter was posted at the website of the US Palestine Community Network. Please forward to any and all activist circles concerned with Palestinian liberation and freedom and justice in the Middle East.

For many years now, Gilad Atzmon, a musician born in Israel and currently living in the United Kingdom, has taken on the self-appointed task of defining for the Palestinian movement the nature of our struggle, and the philosophy underpinning it. He has done so through his various blogs and Internet outlets, in speeches, and in articles. He is currently on tour in the United States promoting his most recent book, entitled, ‘The Wandering Who.’

With this letter, we call for the disavowal of Atzmon by fellow Palestinian organizers, as well as Palestine solidarity activists, and allies of the Palestinian people, and note the dangers of supporting Atzmon’s political work and writings and providing any platforms for their dissemination. We do so as Palestinian organizers and activists, working across continents, campaigns, and ideological positions.

Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with “Jewishness”. He claims that all Jewish politics is “tribal,” and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical “Jewish” one, part and parcel of defining one’s self as a Jew. Therefore, he claims, one cannot self-describe as a Jew and also do work in solidarity with Palestine, because to identify as a Jew is to be a Zionist. We could not disagree more. Indeed, we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist.

Palestinians have faced two centuries of orientalist, colonialist and imperialist domination of our native lands. And so as Palestinians, we see such language as immoral and completely outside the core foundations of humanism, equality and justice, on which the struggle for Palestine and its national movement rests. As countless Palestinian activists and organizers, their parties, associations and campaigns, have attested throughout the last century, our struggle was never, and will never be, with Jews, or Judaism, no matter how much Zionism insists that our enemies are the Jews. Rather, our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.

We reaffirm that there is no room in this historic and foundational analysis of our struggle for any attacks on our Jewish allies, Jews, or Judaism; nor denying the Holocaust; nor allying in any way shape or form with any conspiracy theories, far-right, orientalist, and racist arguments, associations and entities. Challenging Zionism, including the illegitimate power of institutions that support the oppression of Palestinians, and the illegitimate use of Jewish identities to protect and legitimize oppression, must never become an attack on Jewish identities, nor the demeaning and denial of Jewish histories in all their diversity.

Indeed, we regard any attempt to link and adopt antisemitic or racist language, even if it is within a self-described anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist politics, as reaffirming and legitimizing Zionism. In addition to its immorality, this language obscures the fundamental role of imperialism and colonialism in destroying our homeland, expelling its people, and sustaining the systems and ideologies of oppression, apartheid and occupation. It leaves one squarely outside true solidarity with Palestine and its people.

The goal of the Palestinian people has always been clear: self determination. And we can only exercise that inalienable right through liberation, the return of our refugees (the absolute majority of our people) and achieving equal rights to all through decolonization. As such, we stand with all and any movements that call for justice, human dignity, equality, and social, economic, cultural and political rights. We will never compromise the principles and spirit of our liberation struggle. We will not allow a false sense of expediency to drive us into alliance with those who attack, malign, or otherwise attempt to target our political fraternity with all liberation struggles and movements for justice.

As Palestinians, it is our collective responsibility, whether we are in Palestine or in exile, to assert our guidance of our grassroots liberation struggle. We must protect the integrity of our movement, and to do so we must continue to remain vigilant that those for whom we provide platforms actually speak to its principles.

When the Palestinian people call for self-determination and decolonization of our homeland, we do so in the promise and hope of a community founded on justice, where all are free, all are equal and all are welcome.

Until liberation and return.

Signed:

Ali Abunimah

Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Omar Barghouti, human rights activist

Hatem Bazian, Chair, American Muslims for Palestine

Andrew Dalack, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network

Haidar Eid, Gaza

Nada Elia, US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Toufic Haddad

Kathryn Hamoudah

Adam Hanieh, Lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London

Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon! Canada

Monadel Herzallah, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network

Nadia Hijab, author and human rights advocate

Andrew Kadi

Hanna Kawas, Chair person, Canada Palestine Association and Co-Host Voice of Palestine

Abir Kobty, Palestinian blogger and activist

Joseph Massad, Professor, Columbia University, NY

Danya Mustafa, Israeli Apartheid Week US National Co-Coordinator & Students for Justice in Palestine- University of New Mexico

Dina Omar, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine

Haitham Salawdeh, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network

Sobhi Samour, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London

Khaled Ziada, SOAS Palestine Society, London

Rafeef Ziadah, poet and human rights advocate

Technorati Tags: Gilad Atzmon, Palestine, white supremacism, Zionism

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Israel Doing What it Does Best

Jewbonic — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:30:50 +0000

Yesterday, Mona El Farra wrote from Gaza:

Gaza 11-3-2012 4pm

The Israeli army continues its military attacks against the Gaza Strip. The attacks started Friday, March 10 at 5:30pm. I heard the first terrible explosion as I drove back to Gaza City from Khan Younis. There was a lot of smoke, shattered windows, and a fire in this blue car that was targeted by a missile from an Israeli drone. These offensive acts, though supposedly targeting Palestinian armed resistance men, are illegal according to international law. Every human is entitled a trial.

As usual, the entire civilian population including women and children, pays the highest price and bears the brunt of this terrible situation. Already several children have been killed, one was on his way to school when he was hit by shrapnel.

Our concern is not just the attacks but also the lack of medications and supplies. If Israel continues this operation, the number of causalities will increase. The toll is 16 dead and 30 injured until this minute.

Gaza's population already lives in a dire humanitarian situation. We are still under Israel's military occupation and the internal conflict between Palestinian political groups is not solved. But worst of all, the governments of the world are silent and indifferent.

We at the Red Crescent Society of the Gaza Strip and the Middle East Children's Alliance appeal to the international community, and to our friends and supporters to spread the word about what is happening now in Gaza and pressure your governments to stop these attacks soon.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is on the verge of collapse, the military attacks continue while we lack electricity and our medical facilities and hospitals have little amounts of fuel to operate their backup generators. We have insufficient medications. 186 basic medications are lacking in our pharmacies. Besides the insufficient medical supplies, children in the special neonatal intensive care units as well as renal dialysis patients are in great danger due to the power outage. Our cancer patients are dying unnecessarily, unable to have their treatments. Our diabetic and asthmatic patients, as well as many others with chronic illnesses who need their medications regularly cannot get it. The list of the victims is too long to mention.

Please act immediately to stop this attack against Gaza population. You have been always great supporters and showed your solidarity, at the most difficult times.

Yours sincerely

Dr. Mona ElFarra

Vice President, Red Crescent Society for the Gaza Strip

As usual, Israel started the assault by assassinating Palestinian militants. I will use the Israeli terminology, as there is nothing wrong with it. The men Israel assassinated in the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign that is euphemistically called the Israel-Palestine conflict were people who, when they are not living with their families, are militantly defending their homeland. There is nothing wrong with that.

The usual rogue's gallery, ever-eager to aggravate the race war, has weighed in to condemn the retaliatory rocket fire out of Gaza. Their words are worthless when their deeds make that rocket fire almost inevitable. One result of the Egyptian insurrection is that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces now has to make an occasional gesture to popular sentiment to take the boil off the social pressure that is slowly building against its collaborationist policies. Thus Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr said that "Egypt is highly distraught by the Israeli attacks...Egypt is currently exerting efforts and making crucial calls for an immediate end to this Israeli escalation to end bloodshed of our brothers." Translated into English that means, Israel, when you bomb a territory full of Arabs right next to our own our people notice. The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi-dominated parliament passed a motion calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Egypt and the halting of gas exports to Israel.

Neither will happen, as the parliament is powerless. But the pressure is not just building in Cairo but elsewhere: in El Arish solidarity marches took place today and more are planned for later this week. El Arish is a medium sized city an hour from the Egyptian border with Gaza. There, Muslim Brotherhood cadres are also more sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle than they are in places further afield where the impacts of Egyptian policies lack such clear immediacy. The Egyptian leadership, trying to calm the situation, offered Palestinians in Gaza fuel if a "ceasefire" takes hold. The Popular Resistance Committees are rejecting a "ceasefire" until they can extract a promise that Israel will refrain from targeting their militants and leadership. They will never get that promise merely from negotiations. Indeed, Israel insists that it will not stop "preventive targeting" operations: "The Israeli army will continue to attack the terrorists in Gaza with strength and determination," said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In other words, Israel will attack at will and reject on principle any ceasefire with the Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile the death toll inches upwards: 25 since Friday, with over thrice that injured.

Technorati Tags: ceasefire, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine, SCAF

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The Arab Revolts

Jewbonic — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 06:21:13 +0000

Please enjoy this great panel on the Arab insurrections

Technorati Tags: Arab Spring, As'ad abuKhalil, Deepa Kumar, Israel, Joel Beinin, Palestine, Tunisia, Zionism

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