Archive | January, 2023

Antony Blinken Plays the ‘Two Sides Game’: Getting Israel Off the Hook

31 Jan

[Prefatory Note: The post below is based on my responses to an interview conducted by Rodrigo Craveiro, a Brazilian journalist who writes for Coorreio Brazilliense, the leading newspaper in the capital city of Brazillia.]

Antony Plays the Two Sides Game: Getting Netanyahu/Israel Off the Hook

Prelude: it is unclear to me whether Antony Blinken is acting other than as a loyal servant of President Joe Biden. But to make my point of departure as clear as possible, Blinken is the most lightweight Secretary of State a fitting complement to the overweight Mike Pompeo. Together they could do a late night TV comedy routine on the ‘arrogance of decline’ when it comes to America’s foreign policy in the Trump/Biden years. Their craven profile is most vividly expressed by their extreme subservience to extremist Israel, come what may, including its unlawful expansionism in occupied Palestine, and even the Golan Heights in Syria, which were Trump provocations endorsed by Biden. Given the outcome of the 2022 elections and the Netanyahu-led ‘extremist’ government, I would have thought Blinken/Biden could have been content to let this ugly culmination of Zionist ambitions pass in silence, rather than provide a public occasion for re-legitimating the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel as being as strong as ever, and unbreakable in the future no matter what. 

True, the Western labeling of this new leadership cabal in Israel as ‘extremist’ is itself polemical, implying that what preceded was moderate.. I am inclined to argue that virtually the entire elite spectrum of Israeli political parties is ‘extremist’ given their role in shaping an apartheid style of Jewish supremacy in Israel and Occupied Palestine many years before many were worried about the rise of the religious right as a political force in the form of Religious Zionism. My point being that the subjugation, dispossession, and exclusion of a people in relation to their national homeland has been the tragic destiny imposed on the Palestinian people since 1945, a resultt achieved with the active, continuing, and substantial U.S. complicity. The UK and UN are certainly also  partly to blame, having championed the partition of Palestine in 1947 without the consent of the resident population, which amounted to a denial of the most basic Palestinian rights, including the inalienable right of self-determination. Partition of a settler colonial state in an era of decolonization was also against the will of the peoples of the Middle East. As well, the UN and much of its membership then walked away after the 1948 War without condemning or reversing Israel’s territorial expansion by force, the forced mass exodus of Palestinians and the denial by Israel of their right of return to their homes and homeland, as also mandated by international law. If settler colonialism, de facto territorial annexations, and apartheid were not enough to fray the bonds between Washington and Tel Aviv, then it is hardly surprising that casting off the mantle of Israeli secular democracy would merit any rethinking of how the U.S. conceives of the ‘alliance of democracies’ that it purports to be leading in opposition to the Sino/Russian ‘alliance of autocracies.’

One last point, these displays of diplomatic steadfastness by the Biden/Lapid Declaration during a state visit to Israel a half year ago and now this post-election visit proved too much even for the corrupt and somewhat collaborationist Palestine Authority to swallow. President Mahmoud Abbas had the poise to dismiss Blinken’s ‘both sides’ approach to recent violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem with this rather mild rebuke: “We have found that the Israeli government is responsible for what’s happening these days,” that is, the upsurge of violence.“ Blinken did acknowledge, while in Ramallah for a few hours, that “what we’re seeing for Palestinians is a shrinkage of hope” that “needs to change.” This is double talk given Biden and Blinken’s much more weighty public display of solidarity with Israel, come what may. One is reminded of Hilary Clinton’s lame refrain after every Israel display of defiance with respect to international law, especially in the context of establishing additional Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, obviously a violation of Article 49(6) of the Geneva Conventions, as being ‘unhelpful.’

Without external pressure and internal resistance, South Africa would still be an apartheid state. The Palestinian horizon of hope will shrink until it disappears altogether with the continuation of resistance within and the spread of militant forms of global solidarity without. Without such pressure, and given such maintenance of geopolitical support, lament alone is not a liberation strategy for the Palestinian people. 

1– Today US Secretary of State Blinken called Israel and Palestinian for “urgent steps” to calm spiralling violence in the conflict. How do you see this request and what kind of measures do you believe are much more urgent and credible to reduce tensions?

It is not appropriate under the circumstances to treat Israelis and Palestinians as equally responsible for the recent upsurge in violence. Israel’s provocations are the principal cause of the current crisis that accompanied the formation of what has been widely viewed as the most extreme Israeli government since the country came into existence 75 years ago, with crucial internal cabinet position being given to outspoken anti-Paklestinian racists, most prominently Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich of Religious Zionism coalition group.

Of course, from the perspective of international law and morality, the Zionist Project was from day one ‘extremist,’ although it showed its hand only gradually over a span of almost a century. 

More appropriate measures responsive to the realities would be to suspend arms shipments to Isreal and to support UN censure of policies, practices, and Israeli leadership associated with racism, ethnic supremacy, and further dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland. 

2– Do you believe the US could have a decisive protagonism to push Israel and palestinian to negotiate a deal? Or do you believe a peace deal is out of question at this point?

Israel, the side in totally dominant control, shows no interest in a diplomatic approach to finding a solution for the conflict. With such an extremist government in control of Israeli foreign policy, the emphasis has shifted from those committed to ending the conflict through diplomatic negotiations to a unilateral approach imposed by Israeli force, essentially stabilizing and gaining international acceptance of an exclusivist Jewish State stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This outcome controlled Israeli thinking and the unfinished agenda of. the Zionist Political Project for more than the prior 20 years, although not so openly and aggressively proclaimed as recently..

Given this situation, it would cause serious US/Israeli tensions if Washington were to push hard for a revived diplomacy that was claimed to be ‘a peace process.’ There is no domestic pressure in the U.S. on Biden to move in such a direction, and Blinken’s legitimating visit and reaffirmation of U.S. unconditional support of Israeli security is a further indication that no such move will be forthcoming from Washington beyond the misleading and likely ineffective Blinken call for mutual de-escalation, which most objective observers regard as an evasive diplomacy based on false symmetry, or more bluntly put, as whitewashing intensification of prolonged Palestinian victimization..

3– What is the risk of an escalate of violence trigger a new intifada in your view? 

It is difficult to assess the thinking of the internationally recognized Palestinian leadership in Ramallah at this time, but the prospect of continuing Palestinian resistance to further Israeli violations of past understandings, such as formal Jewish visits to sacred Muslim sites will spontaneously spark escalated violence as does excessive use of force by Israeli security force and expansions of unlawful Israeli settlements. There would be widespread civil society support among Palestinians for a Third Intifada at this time, especially in the directly occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as well as among Palestinian support groups around the world.

Postlogue: It may be that Blinken’s real mission was to convey to Netanyahu in private the message that Israeli provocations are weakening public support for Israel in the United States, especially among younger generations of Jews. It is notable how the Western media has focused on the extent to which Israel’s turn to overt ‘extremism’ is of concern because. of its effect on Jewish support and how little attention is given to how this intensification of oppressive tactics magnifies Palestinian suffering.

Lifting the Curtain: Barbara Walters

21 Jan

[Prefatory Note: The post below is a departure from my usual focus on current political concerns. It attempts a mini-exploration of the public/private interface of a news and entertainment celebrity, especially known for her ability to go ‘persona,’ and even enter intimate terrain with some of the most famous political leaders of our time. Even with a revered TV personality, what we see when the curtain of privacy is lifted ever so slightly can be quite startling, as was my experience, ‘an encounter of the fourth kind.’ Is it okay to lift this curtain, even for an instant, for someone who has so recently died and has had a career that even critics find remarkable for its sustained achievements, and because a woman achieved this meteoric rise at a time when women were still expected to serve morning coffee to their male colleagues and be a quiet presence at meetings. Barbara Walters was a long-distance swimmer against the tide, and yet managed to dwelling for decades among the most luminous of TV stars. This post was published as an opinion piece by CounterPunch on Jan. 19, 2023 under the title Barbara Walters in Real Life: Icon and ‘Pushy Cookie.’ The present text varies insignificantly]

Lifting the Curtain: Barbara Walters 

Barbara Walters, who died on December 30, 2022, received many accolades during the days that followed. She was rightly hailed as a TV journalist who shattered many glass ceilings and fused hard news with gossip-style entertainment and an interview style that led even famous world leaders and others, accustomed to formality and social distancing, to drop their guard, seeming to relish the aura of intimacy she created. She was admired, particularly by her female colleagues, who extolled Barbara as ‘pioneer,’ ‘icon,’ and ‘legend.’ She was most frequently celebrated as an ‘iconic trailblazer’ who permanently elevated the role and impact of women in TV journalism. I share this assessment that only someone with her drive, professionalism, and specia style could achieve such an extraordinary career that makes it seem natural to eulogize her death with words of extreme praise, tempered in some assessments by her own self-deprecating image of herself as ‘a pushy cookie,’ and that she was, and probably needed to be, to climb to the heights of media stardom in the patriarchal TV kingdoms in which she engaged so creatively.

In the close aftermath of such a public death, I felt hesitant to share my own less flattering experience with Barbara. Yet as the days pass, I became convinced that this idealized portrayal of Walters needed to be balanced by off-camera encounters, even those such as mine that admittedly seem trivial if compared to the experience of countless others, but were important for me,  accompanied by intriguing asides, and I felt no bonds of loyalty.

My contact with Barbara Walters went back many years, reviving briefly three decades later. We were a year apart in age, she a year older, and both of us at the time attending Fieldston High School in Riverdale, NY, but living on the West Side of Manhattan, riding together in the school bus as we were considered by our parents too young to handle safely the long subway ride to 242nd street alone, and then walk for another fifteen minutes up a steep hill to reach the school grounds.  We quite often sat together and chattered about various adolescent concerns. My hazy recollection of those conversations of more than 75 years ago mostly remembers that I struggled to get a word in, Barbara talking incessantly in a glitzy superficial way. I was then (and now) too shy to hold my own. I do recall that we sometimes talked about our fathers who both had strong personal ties to entertainment celebrities.

It was widely known after Barbara became famous that her father owned nightclubs, including the Latin Quarter in New York City. At school Barbara had a reputation of talking too much and teasing her student friends with the remote prospect of an invitation to accompany her to spend a weekend evening at her dad’s night club, tantalizing to the teenage imagination. Not surprisingly, no invitation came to me despite our friendly conversations that helped me at a rather early age to become a better listener than talker. Those older guys and her girlfriends who evidently received these much sought-after free passes to the Latin Quarter were apparently discreet or sworn to secrecy, and so I never heard accounts of whether the envisioned debauchery was more than an alluring myth. And I now think that maybe even the whole scenario was nothing more than a harmless phantasy adroitly manipulated by a teenage girl seeking romance.

At least 30 years later I ran into Barbara at a very different time in both our lives, a dinner meeting in the early 1970s of the Editorial Board of the recently established magazine, Foreign Policy. The event took place in the fancy East Side townhouse of Warren Manchel, a banker with international interests, the founding co-editor (with Sam Huntington) and publisher of the magazine, who had been Sam’s graduate school friend at Harvard, and possibly his roommate.  In the years before the magazine was sold to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and moved its offices, along with its editorial priorities to Washington, Warren’s home was the standard meeting place for periodic formal meetings of its Editorial Board, which for me at least were social gathering than serious meetings devoted to editorial policy. The attendees were too interested in each other and the world to have much time left over for the magazine.

As an aside, I do not think I ever before or since had the experience of sitting at a dinner table or living room with such a distinguished academic assemblage of overtly ambitious individuals. The group included such establishment stalwarts as Zbig Brzezinski, Joe Nye, Richard Holbrooke, and of course Sam Huntington. Sam had the most creative and interesting mind among us and also seemed the least ambitious (other than myself) when it came to reaching the top layers of influence within the U.S. Government. The others had their eyes fixed on plucking the biggest plums hanging from the upper branches of the power tree that had grown so tall in the climate of Washington careerist politics. Those with academic ties were waiting restlessly in their campus offices for that phone call offering them a big job in government, suffering from what some derisively called ‘Potamic Fever,’ a reference to the river that runs through Washington.   

Despite not running in that race, and seemingly out of place, I was there because Warren and Sam had recruited me to join the original FP Board at an expensive French NYC restaurant, not because I was on my way to the top in Washington but in response to my vocal anti-war stance during the Vietnam War. The foundational idea of FP was to create a magazine more alive and responsive to the diversities of ideological outlooks on global issues than Foreign Affairs, then and now the most prestigious and influential journal of Western establishment opinion bearing on foreign policy. As I recall, Sam had supported the Vietnam War, while Warren opposed it on realist grounds, making me am acceptable critical lone voice among the others, all reallists, persuaded to join for reasons of friendship or career. Because of my public opposition to the Vietnam War on the basis of international law rather than anti-imperialism, I suppose I seemed a safe enough bet to satisfy the new editors’ quest for a more diverse venue for foreign policy commentary that was reflective of some ideological differences in the country that often angrily rose to the surface during and after the Vietnam War, but still within limits. In retrospect, I imagine myself an acceptable dissenter as not tainted by Marxism. The Vietnam experience, however negative it turned out as a major failed U.S. undertaking, was not seen as a strong enough setback to splinter the establishment consensus that prevailed at the Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs. I never felt entirely comfortable in such company, but as Barbara taught me years before I joined the FP Board to believe I would learn more from listening to those with whom I disagreed than smoozing with likeminded comrades whose company I greatly preferred. I should further report that after the Carnegie Endowment took over FP in 1978, the Editorial Board was partially reconstituted, and I was not invited to remain a member, perhaps an early punitive pushback for criticizing Israel in public spaces after 1975. Perhaps more to the point, diversity was no longer considered a virtue among foreign policy influencers, and in fact was seen as a sign of ideological retreat and weakness in reviving the effort to restore confidence in the reliability of American global leadership beneath the storm clouds of the Cold War. Such a goal privileged unity of purpose and policy, and in this atmosphere I was again left out, which was not without its benefits.

As was the habit at these Editorial Board meetings, prominent personalities from various backgrounds bearing on leading global issue were invited guests, and Barbara definitely had earned such a status.  On that particular evening she was second to Shimon Peres, the liberal Israeli leader greatly admired in the West. In my view Peres was badly misunderstood by liberal Zionists who wrongly regarded him as a staunch advocate of a diplomatically negotiated fair peace with the Palestine. At dinner with such an influential group Peres had other priorities in mind than his usual concern with pleasing diaspora Jewish communities. As was the custom at these dinner meetings, Peres was given the opportunity to make a presentation, and spoke long before it became fashionable, of the natural convergence of strategic interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East despite their apparent confrontational relationship at that time. When it came time for questions, there were a series of approving remarks in the form of questions from several Board members seated around the dinner table. Put off by Peres’ forthrightly cynical proposal, I dared put forward a mild challenge by commenting upon the apparent tensions between Saudi governance and Israel’s embrace of democracy, and went on to call attention to an apparent lack of any concern about the prolonged suffering of the Palestinian people. 

Peres, visibly annoyed, brushed off my remarks as naïve and ‘leftist’ in relation to real world geopolitics. Barbara interpreted my remarks as unacceptably hostile and took offense. She delivered a rather lengthy rant attacking me for an impolitic questioning of Israel’s pursuit of peace, as well as its own interests as explained by its most beloved leader. I felt that Barbara had no memory of our earlier high school encounters, which had the curious effect of amusing me. This impression was confirmed after the dinner was adjourned, and she came to me to apologize for the attack, saying that she had a tiring and frustrating day, and lost control of her feelings (something, incidentally, she was famous for not doing when performing her professional magic). Her high-pitched shrill attack at the time had struck me as an unexpectedly ultra-Zionist outburst, although I had no knowledge of her views on Israel beyond this incident, and I was sufficiently annoyed by her over-reaction to my civilly phrased comments to Peres, whom I had met on other occasions, that I didn’t feel like reminding her that we were once, sort of friends. Reflecting on my own behavior, I confess that I was too intimidated by the surroundings dominated by men of power than to be other than polite in addressing Peres. In retrospect, Barbara the only woman present other than Manchel’s wife, was self-confident enough to let her raw feelings to hang out without any sign of the intimidation that treated what I said according to socially appropriate constraints.

As a further coincidence, Barbara and I were both invited to a small lunch in the Delegate’s Dining Room at the UN two weeks later hosted by Clovis Maksoud, a prominent Lebanese diplomat, to honor the Palestinian intellectual diplomat, Shafik al-Hout. Shafik was a friend, who I shortly thereafter invited to speak to my seminar on international relations at Princeton. As visas only allowed Palestinian diplomats to travel within a 25-mille radius from the UN, I actually needed to obtain permission from the Secretary of State before Shafik could visit. Surprisingly, permission was granted, but only for the seminar, with a clearly stated prohibition disallowing any wider presentation of his views in the form of a university lecture. Such a constraint made the grant of permission less a victory for academic freedom than a personal accommodation probably thought to be without political resonance. Decades later I can report with pride that it was the best attended seminar during my 40 years at Princeton. Shafik carried off the occasion with great charm, wit, and knowledgeable views sensibly presented. The feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive, some saying that they had never before had an opportunity to hear a Palestinian official speak, and were impressed. Overall, the experience reinforced my convictions that grew stronger over the years that when academic freedom is given a freer rein at universities, we all benefit. 

Back to Barbara, after seeming so alarmed by any show of sympathy for the Palestinian plight, seated next to Shafik, she let go of her politics, and behaved as someone seeming to flirt with an attractive partner at this lunch that she must have attended reluctantly, understandably fearing boredom in the milieu of UN bureaucrats. The lunch ended with Barbara giving her private phone number to Shafik. I never had the temerity to ask him whether he made use of it. Now I wish I had.

As in life, the asides may be more significant than the story line, and for this I apologize to readers who felt misled by the title and early paragraphs. From the vantage-point of the present, I feel grateful for Barbara Walters’ explorations of the links between private and public in the lives of some of the greatest figures of our time, at her best creating intimacy with historical figures who were not used to such exposure but in the moment enjoyed it. I suppose it says a lot that her most watched interview was with Monica Lewinsky and the U.S. president who most helped gain access to obtain interviews was none other than Richard Nixon.    

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Is Israeli Settler Colonialism and Apartheid Poised for Victory or Defeat?

13 Jan

“These are the basic lines of the national

government headed by me:

The Jewish people have an exclusive

and unquestionable right to all areas of

the Land of Israel. The government will

promote and develop settlement in all

parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee,

the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

         Benjamin Netanyahu, December 30, 2022

Anyone with but half eye open during the last several decades should by now be aware that of the existence of an undisclosed Zionist Long Game that preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948,  and remains currently very much alive. It aims at extending Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Occupied Palestine, with the probable exception of Gaza, excluded for demographic and biblical reasons. The significance of Netanyahu’s publicaffirmation of this previously secretive long game is that it may be reaching its final phase, with him presiding over the far right governing coalition that is poised to pursue closure. 

Should it matter that Netanyahu’s claim of exclusive Israel’s supremacy on behalf of the Jewish people over the whole of the promised land is in direct defiance of international law? Additionally, Netanyahu’s statement is also perversely at odds with Biden’s stubborn insistence, however farfetched, on reaffirming U.S. Government support for a two-state solution. This zombie approach to resolving the Israel/Palestine struggle has dominated international diplomacy for years, usefully allowing the UN and its Western members to maintain their embrace of Israel without seeming to throw the Palestinian people under the bus while doing just that. Netanyahu’s brazen avowal of Israeli unilateral expansionism foregoes these earlier diplomatic charades to placate world public opinion to put Israel’s intentions of unilaterally finishing the Zionist Project. Such a forthright approach challenges the UN, the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian people, governments around the world, and transnational civil society to open both eyes and finally acknowledge that the two-state solution is dead. This does not mean giving up on a peaceful solution based on political compromise, but it does suggest shifting such hopes from two-state proposals to a single unified confederal, secular state with coexisting dual homelands for the two peoples based on equality of ethnic entitlements to Palestine as often conceived from ‘the river to the sea.’ Such a state would have a single governance structure upholding the fused sovereign rights of a post-Zionist, presumably renamed, state premised upon equal citizenship and human rights for Jews and Palestinians.   

In fairness, it is true that this Zionist Long Game has only recently become fully apparent to all but the closest observers of the struggle. Throughout the 20th century this design of progressive expansionism was hidden from public view by a combination of Israeli control over the public narrative and U.S. complicity, which deceived especially diaspora Zionists by assuming that Israel was open to a political and territorial compromises and that it was the Palestinians who were mainly responsible for the failures to accept reasonable diplomatic proposals prefiguring Palestinian statehood. Such an interpretation of the stalemate was always deeply mistaken becuase it underestimated Israel underlying ambitions. 

The Zionist Project from its very beginnings, more than a century ago, proceeded by stages to accept as final whatever was politically attainable at any given time, before moving quietly and quickly on to the next stage in fulfillment of its long-range colonization plans. Zionism never convincingly gave up its guiding commitment to establish a Jewish state that exercised sovereign control over the whole of ‘the whole of the promised land,’ itself a misleadingly precise reading of Judaic biblical tradition that could be concretized in any way that the Israeli leadership preferred.

This pattern of expansionist priorities should have become evident in the periods following the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and after World War II. The infamous colonial Declaration had pledged British support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. This pledge was made credible during the British mandatory period by accommodating ballooning Jewish immigration, which coincided with the rise of antisemitic fascism, most visibly in Nazi Germany, but extending to much of the rest of Europe. 

After World War II came the UN partition resolution (UNGA Res. 181, 1947), which not only ignored Palestinian rights of self-determination by partitioning the country without a prior referendum, changing the status of the Jewish presence from ‘national home’ within the state of Palestine to a sovereign Jewish state on fully half of Palestinian territory, and then failing to take effective responsibility for implementing the portions of the UN proposals more favorable to Palestinians. This internationally devised ‘solution’ was greeted positively at each stage by the Zionist formal leadership, but rejected by representatives of the Palestinian people and by neighboring Arab governments. This regional rejectionism led directly to the 1948 War, which resulted in the catastrophic dispossession of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, known to its victims as the nakba, ending with a ceasefire that increased Israel’s share of Palestine from 55% to 78%. The dispossession of such a large number of Palestinians was integral to the Zionist commitment to make Israel not only Jewish but democratic.  It was understandably thought insecure to suppose that Israel could remain an ethnic democracy without a substantial Jewish demographic margin, and this could not be obtained except by dispossession, by coercive means to the extent necessary. From early on, Zionist zealots believed it desirable for security and nation-building to work toward a Jewish Only state, and that goal may resurface in the months ahead, not only to achieve ethnic purity, but to quell worries about Palestinian ‘demographic bomb.’

The next step in carrying forward the Zionist Project resulted from Israell’s victory in the 1967 War, which drove Jordan out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and Egypt from Gaza). II also dispossessed another large number of indigenous Palestinians, a course of events known among Palestinian as the naksa. The 1967 War also resulted in Israel’s prolonged occupation of the territories occupied during the short war, and it was the beginning of an Israeli version of ‘triumphalism,’ which also made converts among foreign political elites in Washington previously worried that full support for Israel would alienate the Gulf oil producers. 

The occupation by law and political consensus at the time was expected to be temporary (a matter of a few years at most) but the establishment of many unlawful Jewish settlements encroaching on what had been projected as a coexisting Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem strongly suggested that all along Israel’s leadership envisioned permanent arrangements with an end game in mind that did not include viable Palestinian statehood encompassing the West Bank heartland. Israel stalled over the years by complicated demands for border adjustments being agreed upon prior to any withdrawal. And somewhat later on, with a show of temerity, Israel contended that the West Bank was ‘disputed territory’ rather than ‘occupied territory.’

Another strong straw in the wind back in 1967 was Israel immediate declaration and enactment of a sovereign claim over the whole of an enlarged Jerusalem as the ‘eternal capital’ of the Jewish state, signaling its unwillingness to trust an outcome of post-1948 diplomatic negotiations (or to uphold the Jerusalem portion of the UN Partition Plan), which had originally envisioned East Jerusalem as the capital of the co-equal Palestinian state, before backpedaling and accepting the idea of the holy city being divided between the two peoples. This incorporation of Jerusalem into Israel proper was repeatedly rejected by overwhelming votes in the General Assembly, duly ignored by the Israeli government, but again Israel found that it would suffer no adverse consequences by defying international law and General Assembly majorities.

There were many lesser displays of virtuoso salami slicing by Israel of Palestinian rights and expectations in the subsequent 55 years. The Oslo diplomatic process lingered and languished for more than 20 years after the 1993 hyped handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn, which was the most notable stunt by Israel along these lines designed to show the world that Israel remained open to achieving a negotiated sustainable peace. 

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that in the Israeli strategic imaginary ‘peace’ was never what Oslo was about. The real basis of Israeli support for Oslo, besides satisfying international pressure to manifest a willingness to engage in some semblance of negotiations, was to gain the needed time to make the Jewish settlement movement large and territorially diffuse enough to become irreversible. Such an obvious assault on the two-state mantra should then have sounded the death knell of two-state duplicity, although it was overdue by 40-50 years. Yet the curtain was not lifted then or since.  The continuing international avowal of adherence to a two-state solution, until the present, was mutually convenient for both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership and for friendly foreign governments, and even for the UN that was far too weak to insist on Israeli compliance with international law in the face of Euro-American unwavering refusal to authorize any pushback in the UN Security Council.  

Israel’s 2018 Basic Law proclaiming the supremacy of Jews in ‘the promised land of Israel,’ including the whole of the West Bank, moved a giant step closer to revealing the integral goals of the Zionist Project as openly endorsed by Netanyahu to coincide with the swearing in of his fourth go at being the Prime Minister. As argued here, the essential elements of such a project had preceded its public endorsement by more than a century, but for an Israeli head of state to dramatize the commitment as openly was new, and politically of great significance.

Yet, despite this series of monumental successes of this Zionist Long Game is from some perspectives more problematic of completion than it has ever been, strange as such assertions might be regarded from a purely materialist view of politics. The Palestinian people have held firm in their commitment to self-determination throughout, while enduring a century of being tested by large-scalle Israeli settler encroachments, as aggravated by Palestinian disunity and inadequate representation at the international level by the quasi-collaborative leadership provided by the Palestinian Authority. The spirit of resistance and struggle has been sustained by a Palestinian deep culture of steadfastness of sumud as reinforced by global solidarity initiatives and a generally supportive global public opinion, as well as by Palestinian resistance and gllobal solidarity, which although sporadic never disappeared.

Additionally, the weight of evolving historical circumstances has enabled the Palestinians to achieve important victories in The Legitimacy War being waged by the two peoples for the control of symbolic and normative spaces in the wider struggle, against all odds, is being won by the Palestinians. Over the course of the last decade the international political discourse has increasingly accepted the Palestinian narrative of Israel as ‘a settler colonial state,’ a damaging assessment in an era where colonialism elsewhere was being dismantled by the weaker side militarily, suggesting the unrecognized leverage of law, morality, global solidarity, and nationalist mobilization in out maneuvering a militarily superior adversary.

My previous comments on this latest, possibly terminal phase, of the Zionist Project, is further illuminated if interpreted through the lens of settler colonialism. As Patrick Wolfe, the leading academic expositor of the concept, and others point out, a settler colonialist undertaking eventually falters and collapses unless it manages to eliminate or at least permanently and radically marginalize and pacify the native population. Settler colonial successes in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand confirm this hypothesis as do the most prominent instances of failure, South Africa, and less clearly, Algeria. Given this historical record, I anticipate feverish Israeli attempts in the near future to achieve a further massive dispossession of the Palestinian people. In an important sense, the nakba should be understood as a process rather than an event back in 1948, to be culminated during the 2020s by a new surge of dispossession tactical moves.

Beyond allegations of settler colonialism, and more carefully documented, the accusation of apartheid directed at the Israeli state, which had long dismissed as the irresponsible screams of those that wanted to destroy the Israeli state, became validated by an emergent civil society consensus. Over the course of the last six years exhaustive reports prepared under the auspices the UN (ESCWA), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the fiercely independent Israeli NGO, B’Tselem issued reports documenting with care and professional skill the apartheid allegations. As memories of the Holocaust faded and wrongdoing toward Palestinian rights became harder to shove under the rug, world public opinion especially in the West, became somewhat more sympathetic to and convinced by the Palestinian narrative, and as significantly, by the relevance of the South African precedent that became harder to ignore. 

Further symbolic Palestinian victories included widespread diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood by many governments in the Global South, admission of Palestine to non-voting membership in the UN, access as a state party to the International Criminal Court and its 2021 judgment authorizing the investigation of Palestinian allegations of international crimes in Occupied Palestine after 2014, and at the end of 2022, approval by a wide margin of a General Assembly Resolution requesting an Advisory Opinion from the World Court in The Hague on the prolonged unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories amounting to a deprivation of the Palestinian right of self-determination. The 2022 HRC appointment of a high-level Commission of Inquiry with a broad mandate to investigate Israel wrongdoing was also a revealing UN turn in favor of the Palestinians. Such challenges to Israeli administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories only occurred after decades of UN frustrations arising from Israeli non-compliance with international humanitarian law in the OPT as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention devoted to belligerent and refusal to cooperate with UNHRC Special Rapporteurs.

Israeli and its puppet NGOs, UN Watch and NGO Monitor, recognized the gravity of these largely symbolic delegitimizing developments, as did the Israeli government. Israel was intelligently responsive to the risks to its own viability as a Jewish Supremacy state by the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa due to pressures brought about by a blend of resistance, symbolic delegitimation, and global solidarity initiatives. Accordingly, Israel and its militants fought back, with total support of the U.S. Government, but not substantively, recognizing the costs of bringing about further scrutiny of the substance of Israel’s policies, practices, and racist ideology. Instead, the Israeli pushback focused on attacking the critics and their institutional venues, including even the UN, as antisemitic, and in the process smearing conscientious legal experts and even international civil servants and the institutions themselves. This has created a sufficient diversionary smokescreen to enable Biden and top EU bureaucrats to keep faith with both sides by championing the hollow prospect of ‘two states for two peoples’ when even they must know by this time that such a policy is moribund, and no longer is of much use as a public relations tactic. This assessment is truer than ever now that an apparently cocky Netanyahu has publicly told foreign political leaders to their faces that Israel no longer is interested enough in the two-state ploy to underpin its credibility. This leaves Israel’s most ardent supporters out in the cold with no place to hide their formerly respectable pro-Israel one-sidedness.

Given this line of interpretation, contrary to media commentary, Netanyahu, rather than being burdened, is likely pleased that his governing coalition is heavily dependent upon the rightest extremism of the Religious Zionism (RZ) and Jewish Power bloc. In the present context RZ, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvar seems useful, if not natural allies of Likud in launching this culminating phase of the Zionist Project. This last phase involves territorial consolidation over the whole of the promised land and likely moves to inflict further dispossession of Palestinians—on the scale of a second (or intensified) Nakba—from their native lands. Seen in this way, the Netanyahu declaration above amounts to a virtual road map, hopefully from his point of view with RZ taking most of the heat for its inflammatory, openly racist, and likely violent implementation.

Given this background, the present context should be understood differently than the prevailing mode of reporting that stresses the difficulties for Netanyahu of heading the most right-wing and extremist government in the history of Israel. Mainstream journalism remains sympathetic with Netanyahu’s situation of supposedly being forced to rely on a coalition that gives dangerous influence to RZ. In opposition to such thinking, I believe having RZ entrenched in his governing structure actually strengthens the hand Netanyahu wants to play. 

It is instructive to notice that most of the regrets up to now expressed in the U.S. about the extremist successes  in the 2022 Israeli elections are devoted to their possibly negative impact on support for Israel in the liberal democracies, especially, among the predominantly secular dominant communities that largely shape  attitudes toward Israel in the European and U.S. Jewish diaspora. The probability of intensifying suffering inflicted on the Palestinians hardly ever is mentioned, and almost never evokes Western empathy. Such slanted presemtations has always slighted the successive stages of the Palestinian collective trauma that has obscured their Orientalist erasures throughout the struggle.     

Biden’s undoubtedly unconscious embrace of such Orientalist insensitivity to Palestinian rights, much less acknowledging Palestinian legitimate aspirations should have been expected. The evasive wording of Biden’s statement congratulating Netanyahu, warrants scrutiny: “I look forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region, including threats from Iran.” In the same text, the American president asserts that “the United States will continue to support the two-state solution and to oppose policies that endanger its viability or contradict our mutual interests and values.” What struck me most, although by now I should have known better, was the absence of even a small gesture of recognition that these developments might have a negative relevance to Palestinian wellbeing. Often silences convey meanings better than do words of explanation with the hope of winning approval.

Despite all, most pro-Israeli commentary analyzing the shift to the right on the part of the Israeli voting public attributes the extremist outcome in the November elections to some combination of the perceived absence of ‘a partner’ in the search for peace, the Israeli security-first response to Palestinian ‘terrorism,’ the rising influence of the religious right within Israel, the emboldening effects on Israel of the normalization agreements (so-call Abraham Accords) reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency, and even Iran’s threat to Israel. Undoubtedly, these contextual factors were influential in persuading a larger segment of Israeli voters to swallow their dislike of a governing coalition that gave strong influence to RZ, interpreted in some circles as the foretaste of a now plausible Jewish theocratically-tinged fascism. Overall, it seems enough Israelis gave priority to their hopes for a unilaterally imposed Israeli ‘victory’ scenario to the hypocritical uncertainties of the diplomatic status quo that is disinterested in negotiating a political compromise with its Palestinian counterpart. My main point here is that the shift to the right was opportunistic and pragmatic rather than reactive, resulting in most media accounts missing the relevance of the commitment of the Israeli religious right to the completion of the Zionist Project in the near future. 

My own encounters with liberal Zionist opinions in America emphasized a belief that Israeli good will with respect to a political deal with the Palestinian had run into a brick wall of Palestinian hard line opposition, an indirect validation of the ‘no partner’ excuse, or at best, blaming both sides for diplomatic failure in an asymmetric situation where one side was the oppressor and the other the oppressed. This view was accentuated by the entirely unreasonable, accompanying insistence that Israeli’s closest ally and geopolitical source of security serve as intermediary in all ‘peace’ negotiations. Nothing exhibited Palestinian weakness or lack of strategic judgment more dramatically than this willingness to rely on such a flawed diplomatic process for their prospects of realizing such basic national rights as self-determination.

While these factors have been endlessly analyzed in piecing together a coherent, exoteric or public narrative, the real story—the deep roots of these developments—is in my view yet to be told. This is because the true account of the evolution of the Zionist Project before and since the establishment of Israel is bound up with an esoteric or secret Zionist narrative that links the successive stages of Israeli expansionism to an overarching vision. This esoteric narrative centered on a strategic plan for the ideologically coherent and steady unfolding story of Israeli expansionism, which involved a pragmatic suppression of disclosing the utopian character of Zionist Project of recovering all of Palestine during a period when such ultimate goals seemed hopelessly out of reach due to the prevalence of rampant nationalism and the widespread decline in the geopolitical leverage and political acceptance of colonialism.

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Harvard University Succumbs

7 Jan

Harvard University Withdraws a Fellowship from Kenneth Roth & HRW

I admit to feeling an ironic mean-spirited satisfaction that Ken Roth had his appointment as Senior Fellow at the Carr Center of Human Rights of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government cancelled. After serving for 29 years as Director of Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading organization addressing human rights violations, Roth was superbly qualified for and entitled to this appointment. And would have had it but for the exertion of effective Zionist donor influence at Harvard. Without such a backroom factor this most revered academic institution would have undoubtedly been proud of Roth’s presence. [Chris McGreal, “Harvard Blocks Role for Former Human Rights Watch Head Over Israel Criticism,” The Guardian, Jan. 6, 2023] After his long and distinguished tenure at HRW Roth had become a civil society celebrity. This incident is another demonstration that even the most respected and wealthy institutions of higher learning are not fully insulated from nasty ideological and mercenary pressures that go against their proclaimed missions.

The irony of Roth’s mistreatment recalls a somewhat illuminating anecdote that seems so relevant that I cannot resist its disclosure. Over a decade ago I was a member of a local HRW advisory committee in Santa Barbara where I live. One day I got a phone call from a friend who chaired the committee. She informed me of my removal from this body because of a conflict of interest arising from my then holding the position of UN Special Rapporteur for Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. I thought it strange that this technical rule, given its dubious application here, should have been suddenly invoked some years after I had taken up the UN position, which led me to iuire further as to the real motive for my abrupt removal..

And I suppose unsurprisingly, it didn’t take me long to find out the true explanation for my ouster. UN Watch, Israel’s puppet NGO in Geneva had complained to HRW that it was unseemly to retain on their organizational chart a person with such notorious antisemitic views as myself. It was Ken Roth, I was told who had made the move to dismiss me. in. response, What followed could have been anticipated, UN Watch seized upon the incident to boast about their influence, announcing this blacklisting ‘victory’ on their website and through media releases. HRW was silent in response, allowing the impression to stand that I had been removed from their committee because of my antisemitism. I asked that HRW issue a statement clarifying my removal from committee on their stated grounds, which I thought of as a routine request, and learned that it was supported by several senior HRW staff, but rejected by Roth. The incident had some harmful effects on my academic life: lecture invitations were withdrawn or cancelled, and I experienced a variety of other unpleasant effects of becoming ‘unacceptably controversial.’ 

By coincidence, a few weeks later Roth and I appeared on the same panel at the University of Denver, and I told him that I was harmed by the way my removal from the SB Committee was handled, giving UN Watch grounds to show that I was too extreme in my criticisms of Israel for even HRW. Roth brushed me off with these unforgettably derisive words—“no one pays any attention to what UN Watch says.” In fairness, I acknowledge the subsequent reckless bravery of HRW years later in joining Amnesty International and B’Tselem in finding that Israel had established an apartheid regime of governance when it comes to the Palestinian people. [See “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,’ Human Rights Watch, April 27, 2021; see also earlier report by Richard Falk & Virginia Tilley, “Israeli Pactices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” UN ESCWA, MRCH 15, 2017.] It was this single report among hundreds issued during Roth’s long tenure that caused enough of a backlash as to make Harvard succumb. 

I wish that it was true that smears by UN Watch and likeminded individuals and organizations lacked the leverage they possess to produce such totally unjustified results as inflicted on Roth. I suspect that what motivated Roth in my case was the influential Zionist membership on the HRW Board. As a child, I had known Bob Bernstein, the founder of HRW, as a family friend in NYC, and had a rather unpleasant dinner with him here in Santa Barbara a few years before incident while he was the leading Israeli advocate on the HRW Board. I learned that he and other board members were unconditional Israeli supporters who would have shed no tears about my treatment a few years hence.

Roth’s experience recalls the famous 1946 poem of the German theologian and pastor, Martin Niemöller, which vividly depicted the problems arising from the tendency of liberals under pressure to sacrifice principles for financial gain or woke morality. The poem was undoubtedly inspired by Pastor Niemöller’s own life, especially the shift from being an outspoken pro-Nazi in his early years to becoming an imprisoned anti-Nazi dissident later in life:  

First They Came 

“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Pastor Martin Niemöller

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