Archive | April, 2023

Geopolitical Fault Lines in a World of Sovereign States and a Few Great Powers

29 Apr

[PREFATORY NOTE: A much modified earlier version of his post was published online by Transcend Medea Service (TMS) on April 17 2023; a longer post to address complexities of the Ukraine Crisis and Looming Tensions as to the future of Taiwan. ]

The Ukrainian Point of Departure: Mishandling the Aftermath of the Cold War

The Ukraine War is illustrative. There is no doubt that Russia violated the core prohibition of international law and the UN Charter prohibiting non-defensive recourse to international force when it launched its February 2022 attack on Ukraine. Also, the evidence is overwhelming that the United States irresponsibly and multiply provoked Russia by a series of interferences with the internal politics of Ukraine in the eight years preceding the invasion. Such provocations were expressive of Washington’s post-Cold War orientation of acting internationally as the one and only sovereign state with a geopolitical prerogative that permitted the pursuit of strategic interests without respect for geographical proximity and the restraints of international law, including the sanctity of the international boundaries of sovereign states. It is this post-Cold War circumstance that led the United States to become the first extra-territorial ‘global state,’ filling the temporary geopolitical vacuum of the 1990s with its delusion that such a condition could be permanently maintained. It is this factor that gave the Ukraine War such a high profile from its inception and prolonged its resolution. The made the direct challenge posed by Russia and the implicit one by relating to Taiwan so disquieting, given U.S. hegemonic worldview.

The launch of the Ukraine War became the occasion of a geopolitical war of position in which at stake were the relative alignments of the U.S., Russia, and China, and, contrary to public protestations in the West to contrary, second tier stakes involved effort to uphold the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. Expressed differently, the to be or not to be question is whether global security remains a traditional preoccupation of several governments managing a multipolar or bipolar world order. The alternative is to act as if this arrangement has been replaced by an existential shift to unipolarity in the aftermath of the 1991 Soviet implosion. In effect, the U.S sought to implement what amounted to a  ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for the world.

This geopolitical proxy war in Ukraine is about the aftermath of the Cold War configurations of authority with regard to global peace and security.  As such, it is about the alignment of the Great Powers in the world for which there are no established guidelines, accompanied by a refusal of political actors with a traditional geopolitical status, namely China and Russia, to leave the global management of power to the United States. As recently as early April 2023 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the UN Security Council articulated a Russian awareness of the strategic issues at stake when he rejected a ‘unipolar world order by one hegemon’ and proposed a ‘new world order’ along multipolar lines based on principles that needed to be established by agreements reached through the diplomatic efforts of China, U.S. and Russia.

After World War II

Despite the devastating world wars of the 20th century and the widespread fear in 1945 of a future war fought with weapons on mass destruction, the more internationalist approaches to global governance proved insufficient. The ambition of substituting international law as implemented by the UN for a continued reliance on the managerial skills and responsible self-restraint of dominant states turned out to be almost irrelevant to the overriding objective of avoiding World War III. The UN was established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical discretionary habits, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished, or at least, greatly limited hopes of transcending dangerous Great Power rivalries of the past. This failure of internationalism led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite close calls and good luck, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.

It is my contention that this fear of a resumption of major warfare never materialized because principal geopolitical fault lines had been established and respected between the West and the USSR by diplomatic agreements reached at Yalta, Moscow, and Potsdam in the last years of World War II producing a series of prudent political compromises resulting in dividing countries, and even cities and regions between East and West orientations. By far the most important arrangement of this character involved the agreed division of Europe, with special attention accorded Germany, and Berlin. These fault lines were also respected due to an understanding that breeching them could quickly escalate into a mutually disastrous war fought with nuclear weapons, and a reinforcing informal, yet robust, tabu about crossing the nuclear threshold by threatened or actual use of weaponry of mass destruction. To be sure, the credibility of the fault lines was backed up by opposed military capabilities that were at the ready in the event of any serious violation.

The close calls during the Cold War decades occurred when perceptions in Washington or Moscow put the relevant fault lines under challenge, by intention or misunderstanding, perhaps most notably in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. Although dumb luck played a role in avoiding the confrontation, as Martin Sherwin convincingly demonstrating in his masterful Gambling with Armageddon (2020) so did the realization of leaders in Moscow and Washington that there were dangerous ambiguities in the formulation of the fault lines. For the Soviet Union, U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in its Turkish neighbor was treated as equivalent its decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, especially given the real threat of a U.S. or U.S. backed intervention being directed at Castro’s Marxist government. For the United States this Soviet challenge was interpreted as an unacceptable encroachment on a vital Caribbean sphere of influence close to the U.S. homeland, purporting also to discourage any American future efforts to replace the Castro government by a regime-changing intervention. 

To avoid victory/defeat scenarios in this encounter led the Soviets to abandon the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. to remove discreetly nuclear weapons from Turkey rationalizing the initiative by arguing that they were headed for ‘retirement’ in any event. In other words, a more or less reciprocal backdown from postures of menacing confrontation was achieved largely resulting from the direct communications between the respective leaders in the midst of the crisis. Respecting spheres of influence, thanks to crucial agreements reached by the wartime diplomacy in 1944-45, the U.S. enjoyed a free hand in Western Europe and the Soviets in Eastern Europe, as well as the subdivision of Germany and the sub-sub division of Berlin. It was this recognition of and respect for such traditional spheres of influence that likely prevented World War III, especially in discouraging the kind of coercive responses by NATO countries to the crude and brutal Soviet interventions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) even in the face of conservative and militarist pressures to do so.

The two most prolonged wars during the Cold War were in Korea and Vietnam where neither side had major strategic interests, nuclear deployments, nor were geopolitical alignments significantly engaged. This runs contrary to Antony Blinken’s contention in the ‘rule-governed’ world that the U.S. respects, but its rivals supposedly do not. Blinken has publicly insisted that spheres of influence were thrown into the dustbin of history as of the end of World War II. The nature of what is Blinken’s source of rule governance, other than the foreign policy of the United States, has never been officially disclosed. What we know is that it is something currently presented by the highest U.S. foreign policy official as something radically different than either international law and the multipolar framing of world politics by Russia and China, countries which obviously give weight and legitimacy to their regional prerogatives and traditional spheres of influence. Perhaps, the spirit of the rule-governed world that Blinken believes has become the ‘new world order’ is best captured by the phrase ‘pax Americana.’  This label is more transparent of intent and effect than is the abstraction of ‘unipolarity.’

Past and Present Diplomatic Limits

Historians agree that World War I arose out of a series of interacting miscalculations by the Great Powers of Europe that resulted in a deadly war costing tens of millions of lives and great devastation, and changing nothing. This conflict exemplified the dangers of managing global power relations without geopolitical fault lines. However, the peace diplomacy at Versailles after combat ended in 1918 failed in its war prevention efforts centering on the establishment of the League of Nations, a punitive peace imposed on Germany, and an acceptance of unregulated international economic rivalry. Fascism and the Great Depression ensued, and new challenges were mounted against world order, abetted by Japan’s rise, which produced World War II. This destructive struggle led to a victory for the liberal democracies but also the onset of the Nuclear Age. A second effort at war prevention was undertaken, and although the UN was marginalized by the two ‘superpowers,’ and ‘world peace’ rested on a combination of prudent self-restraint, mutual deterrence, and the largely effective respect shown geopolitical fault lines established in Europe.

This combination of developments led to the long Cold War of arms races, interventions, and ideological antagonism yet succeeded in avoiding a third world war. Unfortunately, the Cold War ended in the early 1990s with available steps not taken to bolster war prevention capabilities, and the peoples of the world find themselves helpless at the edge of the cliff with the only hopeful sign a belated willingness of both sides to recognize that the Ukraine War would be most likely to end in a stalemate, leaving the post-Cold War geopolitical alignment unresolved. In conformity with my analysis, if this happens, the incentives to achieve a diplomatic recognition acknowledging the relevance of geopolitical fault lines for the 21st Century might occur but only if there is enough pressure by peace forces from below and rationality from above.

Not Forgetting Taiwan

Finally, a brief word on dangers of war in the Pacific arising out of the U.S./China relationship. It risks crossing the invisible line separating competition, which is consistent with peace and even cooperation motivated by mutual interests, from conflict, which teeters on the perilous edges of crisis, confrontation, and ‘warfare,’ hot or cold.

The core present question is whether China intends to coerce Taiwan to achieve existential subordination to China or retains a position of what has been called ‘creative ambiguity’ by former U.S. diplomat, Chas Freeman. The essence of this deliberate ambiguity is to acknowledge simultaneously that Taiwan is part of China while allowing it to enjoy the full benefits of internal independence from China. This distinctive formula of diplomatic accommodation is embodied in the Shanghai Communique signed by the two countries in 1972 and respected for the last 50 years. The nature of the geopolitical fault line is a diplomatic compromise between the exercise of Chinese sovereign control over Taiwan and fulfilling Taiwan’s aspirations for independent statehood.

If either side acts to undermine the Shanghai arrangement it will invite a situation in some ways resembling the situation of provocative uncertainty leading to the Ukraine War. Mutual observance, in contrast, would help sustain an atmosphere of

Geopolitical Fault Lines in a World of Sovereign States and a Few Great Powers

[A much modified earlier version of his post was published in the online listserv Transcend Midea Service (TMS) on April 17 2023; a longer post to address complexities of the Ukraine Crisis and Looming Tensions as to the future of Tawan. ]

The Ukrainian Point of Departure: Mishandling the Aftermath of the Cold War

The Ukraine War is illustrative. There is no doubt that Russia violated the core prohibition of international law and the UN Charter prohibiting non-defensive recourse to international force when it launched its February 24, 2022 attack on Ukraine. Also, the evidence is overwhelming that the United States irresponsibly and multiply provoked Russia by a series of interferences with the internal politics of Ukraine in the eight years preceding the invasion. Such provocations were expressive of Washington’s post-Cold War orientation of acting internationally as the one and only sovereign state with a geopolitical prerogative that permitted the pursuit of strategic interests without respect for geographical proximity and the restraints of international law, including the sanctity of the international boundaries of sovereign states. It is this post-Cold War circumstance that led the United States to become the first extra-territorial ‘global state,’ filling the temporary geopolitical vacuum of the 1990s with its delusion that such a condition could be permanently maintained. It is this factor that gave the Ukraine War such a high profile from its inception and prolonged its resolution. The made the direct challenge posed by Russia and the implicit one by relating to Taiwan so disquieting, given U.S. hegemonic worldview.

The launch of the Ukraine War became the occasion of a geopolitical war of position in which at stake were the relative alignments of the U.S., Russia, and China, and, contrary to public protestations in the West to contrary, second tier stakes involved effort to uphold the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. Expressed differently, the to be or not to be question is whether global security remains a traditional preoccupation of several governments managing a multipolar or bipolar world order. The alternative is to act as if this arrangement has been replaced by an existential shift to unipolarity in the aftermath of the 1991 Soviet implosion. In effect, the U.S sought to implement what amounted to a  ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for the world.

This geopolitical proxy war in Ukraine is about the aftermath of the Cold War configurations of authority with regard to global peace and security.  As such, it is about the alignment of the Great Powers in the world for which there are no established guidelines, accompanied by a refusal of political actors with a traditional geopolitical status, namely China and Russia, to leave the global management of power to the United States. As recently as early April 2023 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the UN Security Council articulated a Russian awareness of the strategic issues at stake when he rejected a ‘unipolar world order by one hegemon’ and proposed a ‘new world order’ along multipolar lines based on principles that needed to be established by agreements reached through the diplomatic efforts of China, U.S. and Russia.

After World War II

Despite the devastating world wars of the 20th century and the widespread fear in 1945 of a future war fought with weapons on mass destruction, the more internationalist approaches to global governance proved insufficient. The ambition of substituting international law as implemented by the UN for a continued reliance on the managerial skills and responsible self-restraint of dominant states turned out to be almost irrelevant to the overriding objective of avoiding World War III. The UN was established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical discretionary habits, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished, or at least, greatly limited hopes of transcending dangerous Great Power rivalries of the past. This failure of internationalism led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite close calls and good luck, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.

It is my contention that this fear of a resumption of major warfare never materialized because principal geopolitical fault lines had been established and respected between the West and the USSR by diplomatic agreements reached at Yalta, Moscow, and Potsdam in the last years of World War II producing a series of prudent political compromises resulting in dividing countries, and even cities and regions between East and West orientations. By far the most important arrangement of this character involved the agreed division of Europe, with special attention accorded Germany, and Berlin. These fault lines were also respected due to an understanding that breeching them could quickly escalate into a mutually disastrous war fought with nuclear weapons, and a reinforcing informal, yet robust, tabu about crossing the nuclear threshold by threatened or actual use of weaponry of mass destruction. To be sure, the credibility of the fault lines was backed up by opposed military capabilities that were at the ready in the event of any serious violation.

The close calls during the Cold War decades occurred when perceptions in Washington or Moscow put the relevant fault lines under challenge, by intention or misunderstanding, perhaps most notably in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. Although dumb luck played a role in avoiding the confrontation, as Martin Sherwin convincingly demonstrating in his masterful Gambling with Armageddon (2020) so did the realization of leaders in Moscow and Washington that there were dangerous ambiguities in the formulation of the fault lines. For the Soviet Union, U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in its Turkish neighbor was treated as equivalent its decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, especially given the real threat of a U.S. or U.S. backed intervention being directed at Castro’s Marxist government. For the United States this Soviet challenge was interpreted as an unacceptable encroachment on a vital Caribbean sphere of influence close to the U.S. homeland, purporting also to discourage any American future efforts to replace the Castro government by a regime-changing intervention. 

To avoid victory/defeat scenarios in this encounter led the Soviets to abandon the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. to remove discreetly nuclear weapons from Turkey rationalizing the initiative by arguing that they were headed for ‘retirement’ in any event. In other words, a more or less reciprocal backdown from postures of menacing confrontation was achieved largely resulting from the direct communications between the respective leaders in the midst of the crisis. Respecting spheres of influence, thanks to crucial agreements reached by the wartime diplomacy in 1944-45, the U.S. enjoyed a free hand in Western Europe and the Soviets in Eastern Europe, as well as the subdivision of Germany and the sub-sub division of Berlin. It was this recognition of and respect for such traditional spheres of influence that likely prevented World War III, especially in discouraging the kind of coercive responses by NATO countries to the crude and brutal Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956), East Germany (1958), and Czechoslovakia (1968) even in the face of conservative and militarist pressures to do so.

The two most prolonged wars during the Cold War were in Korea and Vietnam where neither side had major strategic interests, nuclear deployments, nor were geopolitical alignments significantly engaged. This runs contrary to Antony Blinken’s contention in the ‘rule-governed’ world that the U.S. respects, but its rivals supposedly do not. Blinken has publicly insisted that spheres of influence were thrown into the dustbin of history as of the end of World War II. The nature of what is Blinken’s source of rule governance, other than the foreign policy of the United States, has never been officially disclosed. What we know is that it is something currently presented by the highest U.S. foreign policy official as something radically different than either international law and the multipolar framing of world politics by Russia and China, countries which obviously give weight and legitimacy to their regional prerogatives and traditional spheres of influence. Perhaps, the spirit of the rule-governed world that Blinken believes has become the ‘new world order’ is best captured by the phrase ‘pax Americana.’  This label is more transparent of intent and effect than is the abstraction of ‘unipolarity.’

Past and Present Diplomatic Limits

Historians agree that World War I arose out of a series of interacting miscalculations by the Great Powers of Europe that resulted in a deadly war costing tens of millions of lives and great devastation, and changing nothing. This conflict exemplified the dangers of managing global power relations without geopolitical fault lines. However, the peace diplomacy at Versailles after combat ended in 1918 failed in its war prevention efforts centering on the establishment of the League of Nations, a punitive peace imposed on Germany, and an acceptance of unregulated international economic rivalry. Fascism and the Great Depression ensued, and new challenges were mounted against world order, abetted by Japan’s rise, which produced World War II. This destructive struggle led to a victory for the liberal democracies but also the onset of the Nuclear Age. A second effort at war prevention was undertaken, and although the UN was marginalized by the two ‘superpowers,’ and ‘world peace’ rested on a combination of prudent self-restraint, mutual deterrence, and the largely effective respect shown geopolitical fault lines established in Europe.

This combination of developments led to the long Cold War of arms races, interventions, and ideological antagonism yet succeeded in avoiding a third world war. Unfortunately, the Cold War ended in the early 1990s with available steps not taken to bolster war prevention capabilities, and the peoples of the world find themselves helpless at the edge of the cliff with the only hopeful sign a belated willingness of both sides to recognize that the Ukraine War would be most likely to end in a stalemate, leaving the post-Cold War geopolitical alignment unresolved. In conformity with my analysis, if this happens, the incentives to achieve a diplomatic recognition acknowledging the relevance of geopolitical fault lines for the 21st Century might occur but only if there is enough pressure by peace forces from below and rationality from above.

Not Forgetting Taiwan

Finally, a brief word on dangers of war in the Pacific arising out of the U.S./China relationship. It risks crossing the invisible line separating competition, which is consistent with peace and even cooperation motivated by mutual interests, from conflict, which teeters on the perilous edges of crisis, confrontation, and ‘warfare,’ hot or cold.

The core present question is whether China intends to coerce Taiwan to achieve existential subordination to China or retains a position of what has been called ‘creative ambiguity’ by former U.S. diplomat, Chas Freeman. The essence of this deliberate ambiguity is to acknowledge simultaneously that Taiwan is part of China while allowing it to enjoy the full benefits of internal independence from China. This distinctive formula of diplomatic accommodation is embodied in the Shanghai Communique signed by the two countries in 1972 and respected for the last 50 years. The nature of the geopolitical fault line is a diplomatic compromise between the exercise of Chinese sovereign control over Taiwan and fulfilling Taiwan’s aspirations for independent statehood.

If either side acts to undermine the Shanghai arrangement it will invite a situation in some ways resembling the situation of provocative uncertainty leading to the Ukraine War. Mutual observance, in contrast, would help sustain an atmosphere of peaceful competition between the two countries and demonstrate that geopolitical fault lines can do what neither international law nor the UN are capable of presently doing, setting mutually respected limits in situations of strategic disagreement and tensions between Great Powers. 

competition between the two countries and demonstrate that geopolitical fault lines can do what neither international law nor the UN are capable of presently doing, setting mutually respected limits in situations of strategic disagreement and tensions between Great Powers. 

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A Special SHAPE Webinar Featuring Daniel Ellsberg’s Keynote

19 Apr

On behalf of SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth), we co-convenors extend a warm invitation to your members, affiliates and others in your network to a webinar (flyer attached) on The Rising Danger of Nuclear War with Daniel Ellsberg. Responding to his keynote address will be Richard Falk and Zia Mian – this Friday 21 April. It is a notable occasion to have this opportunity to listen to this live statement by Daniel Ellsberg on these themes as his own extraordinary life of dedication and witnessing approaches its end.

LA 2.00 pm   Mexico City 3.00 pm   New York 5.00 pm   Buenos Aires 6.00 pm    London 10.00 pm

REGISTER HERE


SHAPE was initiated some months ago with a CALL to individuals and groups around the world. It seeks to build a community of individuals and groups sharing this sense of urgency about the present historical situation, dramatized by the dual challenges of the prolonged Ukraine War, generating dangerously escalating tensions between Russia and the United States and the worsening prospects of responding adequately to climate change. SHAPE has previously arranged two prior successful webinars. We regard this event as our most ambitious and significant event and hope you will be with us.

In this spirit, we urge you to join with over 4,000 other to read and ENDORSE our Call, which is attached together with a link for its endorsement. The poster for the webinar is also attached.

Joe Camilleri, Professor of International Relations Emeritus, LaTrobe University, Melbourne

Chandra Muzaffar, Director of JUST, Malaysia

Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton Univeristy

Co-Convenors of SHAPE

DEMOCRACY AT RISK FOR JEWS IN ISRAEL, BARE SURVIVAL FOR PALESTINIANS 

7 Apr

[Prefatory Note: A modified version of this post was published in CounterPunch on April 5, 2023, and written prior to the shocking attacks by Israeli armed police on worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque; further escalation may result during the days ahead if ultra-religious Jews go ahead with plans for incursions at Al-Aqsa in the course of the Passover holidays. As usual, governments in the West and the main media platforms insufficiently depict and condemn Israeli violence or the rockets fired from neighboring Lebanon as well as Gaza in response to the violation of Palestinian rights of worship producing disproportionate Israeli artillery and air strikes.]

More than ‘Democracy’ is at Stake in Israeli Protests

Israeli police violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque directed at Palestinian worshippers in the midst of Ramadan on the nights of April 5 and 6 is a serious violation of international arrangements in Jerusalem to protect Muslim holy sites, none more sacred than Al-Aqsa. It interfered with prayer rituals important to hundreds of worshippers allowed entry, producing mass arrests, denials of entry to the mosque, and beatings of unarmed Palestinians. These incidents are of the same criminal quality as the settler destruction of the village of Huwara (near Nablus), and a reminder that Netanyahu is unwilling or unable to control these violent excesses of Israeli extremists acting in this manner with encouragement from leading members of his cabinet.  

There are two interwoven conflicts currently playing out in Israel, but neither,

despite the Western liberal spin, relates to a supposedly threatened demise of Israeli democracy.  Such a concern presupposes that Israel had been a democracy until this recent wave of extremism arising from the new Netanyahu-led Israeli government’s commitment to ‘judicial reform.’ A euphemism hiding the purpose of such an undertaking, which was to limit judicial independence by endowing the Knesset with the powers to impose the will of a parliamentary majority, if needed, to override Israeli court decisions by a simple majority and, in addition, exercise greater control over the appointment of judges. Certainly, these were moves toward institutionalizing a tighter autocracy in Israel as it would modify some semblance of separation of powers, but it was in no way a nullification of democracy as best expressed by legal guarantees of equal rights enjoyed by all citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religious persuasion.

Israel, as a Jewish State that confers by its own Basic Law of 2018 the inalienaable right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people and asserts ethnic supremacy at the expense of the Palestinian minority within its own borders of more than 1.7 million persons undermines Israel’s claim to be a democracy, at least with reference to the citizenry as a whole. As well, Palestinians have long endured discriminatory laws and practices on fundamental issues that over time have led the governance policies of the country to be widely and convincingly identified as an apartheid regime. Israeli apartheid is operative in both the Occupied Palestine Territories and Israel itself. If the idea of democracy is stretched beyond reasonable limits, it is possible to regard Israel as an ethno-democracy or theocratic democracy, yet these terms are vivid reminders that to view Israel as a ‘democracy’ is itself a political oxymoron.

Since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has denied equal rights to its Palestinian minority. It has even disallowed any right of return to the 750,000 Palestinians who were coerced to leave during the 1947 War, and are entitled by international law to return home, at least after combat has ceased. The current bitter fight between religious and secular Jews centering on the independence of Israel’s judiciary is rather remote from most Palestinian concerns and is regarded as an intramural Jewish squabble. Such a view reflects the Palestinian disillusionment with Israel’s justice system. Since 1948, Israel’s highest courts  have consistently supported Israel’s most internationally controversial moves, including ‘unlawfully’ restricting Palestinians, establishing Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, denying the right of return, upholding the separation wall of occupied territory, collective punishment, annexation of East Jerusalem, house demolitions, and prisoner abuse.

On a few occasions, most notably with respect to reliance on some torture techniques used against Palestinian prisoners the judiciary has shown slight glimmers of hope that it might address Palestinian grievance in a balanced manner, but after more than 75 years of Israel’s existence and 56 years of its occupation of Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 this hope has effectively vanished.

Nevertheless, Israel’s control of the political narrative that shaped public opinion allowed the country be to be legitimized, even celebrated by hyperbolic rhetoric as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ and as such, the one country in the Middle East with whom North America and Europe shared values alongside interests. In essence, Biden reaffirmed this canard in the text of the Jerusalem Declaration jointly signed with Yair Lapid, the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, during the American president’s state visit last August. In its opening paragraph these sentiments are expressed: “The United States and Israel share an unwavering commitment to democracy…”

Prior to Israel’s election last November that resulted in a coalition government regarded as the most right-wing in the country’s history, the U.S. government and diaspora Jewry seemed intent on ignoring the deepening civil society consensus that Israel was guilty of inflicting an apartheid regime to maintain its ethnic dominance that was subjugating and exploiting Palestinians living in Occupied Palestine and Israel. Apartheid is outlawed by international human rights law, and treated in international law as a severe crime, widely viewed as second only to genocide. Notable opponents of the extreme racism of South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and John Dugard have each commented that Israeli apartheid treats Palestinians worse than the cruelties that South Africa inflicted on their black African majority population. South African apartheid was condemned at the UN and throughout the world as internationally intolerable racism. Allegations of Israeli apartheid have been abundantly documented in a series of authoritative reports: UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (2017), Human Rights Watch (2021), B’Tselem (2021), Amnesty International (2022). Despite these condemnations, the U.S. Government and liberal pro-Israel NGOs have avoided even the mention of the apartheid dimension of the Israeli state, not daring to open the issue for debate by attempting to refute the allegations. As Dugard pointed out when asked what was the greatest difference between fighting apartheid in South Africa and Israel, he recently responded: “..the weaponization of antisemitism.” This has been borne out in my own experience. There was considerable conservative opposition to anti-apartheid solidarity initiatives with respect to South Africa but never the attempt to brand activists as themselves wrongdoers, even ‘criminals.’ The IHRA definition of antisemitism that conflates harsh criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews has given Zionists a powerful punitive tool by which to deflect pro-Palestinian activism by branding adherents as antisemites.

From these perspectives, what is at stake in the protests, is whether Israel is to be treated as an illiberal democracy of the sort fashioned in Hungary by Viktor Orban, diluting the quality of the procedural democracy that had been operative for Israeli Jews since 1948. The new turn in Israel gestures toward the kind of majoritarian rule that has prevailed for the last decade in Turkey, involves a headlong slide toward outright an intra-Jewish autocracy in Israel. Yet we should note that in neither Hungary nor Turkey have governance structures of an apartheid character emerged, although both countries have been serious issues involving discrimination against minorities. Turkey has for decades has rejected demands from its Kurdish minority for equal rights and separate statehood, or at least a strong version of autonomy as well as upholding human rights. These instances of encroachment on basic human rights in Turkey and Hungary have at least not occurred within a framework of settler colonialism that in Israel has made Palestinians strangers, virtual aliens, in their own homeland where they have resided for centuries.

Racism is not the only reason to dissent from the democracy-in-jeopardy discourse, dispossession may be the even more consequential one. If native people were to be asked whether they worried about the erosion or even the abandonment of democracy in such settler colonial ‘success stories’ as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. the question itself would have no current existential relevance to their lives. Native peoples were never meant to be included in the democratic mandate that these encroaching settler communities adopted so proudly, while being contemptuously indifferent to the exclusion of native peoples. Their tragic fate was sealed as soon as the colonial settlers arrived. It was in each instance one of marginalization, dispossession, and suppression. This indigenous struggle for ‘bare survival’ as distinct peoples with a viable culture and ways of life of their own making is one of several scandals of modernity. The destruction that was so produced amounts to what Lawrence Davidson has called ‘cultural genocide” in his pathbreaking book of 2012, which even then included a chapter condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian society.

Underneath the encounter among Israeli Jews, which allegedly discloses a chasm so deep as to threaten civil war in Israel lies the future of the settler colonial project in Israel. As those who have studied ethnic dispossession in other settler colonial contexts have concluded, unless the settlers manage to stabilize their own supremacy and limit international solidarity initiatives, they will eventually lose political control as happened in South Africa and Algeria under very different schemes of settler domination. It is this sense that the Israel protests going on need to be interpreted as a double confrontation. What is explicitly at stake is a bitter encounter between secular and ultra-religious Jews the outcome of which is relevant to what the Palestinians can expect to be their short-run fate going forward. There is also the implicit stake between those who favor maintaining the existing apartheid arrangements resting on discriminatory hegemony but without necessarily insisting on territorial and demographic adjustments and those who are intent on using violent means to extinguish the Palestinian ‘presence’ as any sort of impediment to the further purification of the Jewish state as incorporating the West Bank, and finally fulfilling the vision of Israel as coterminous with the whole of the ‘the promised land’ asserted as a biblical entitlement of Jews as proclaimed by the mainstream Zionist optic.

It is a mystery where Netanyahu, the pragmatic extremist, stands, and perhaps he has yet to make up his mind. Thomas Friedman, the most reliable weathervane of liberal Zionism weighs in with the claim that Netanyahu for the first time in his long political career has become an ‘irrational’ leader that is no longer trustworthy from the perspective of Washington because his tolerance of Jewish extremism is putting at risk the vital strategic relationship with the U.S. while discrediting what has long been an illusion of reaching a peaceful resolution of the conflict by diplomacy and the implementation of a two-state compromise. Such tenets of a liberal approach were deliberately rendered obsolete by the scale of Israeli settlements and land-grabs beyond the 1948 green line, which itself confined Palestinian hopes to only 22% of Palestine as it was under the British mandate and UN Partition Plan.

Politically, Netanyahu needed the support of Religious Zionism to regain power and obtain support for judicial reform to evade being potentially held personally accountable for fraud, corruption, and the betrayal of the public trust. Yet ideologically, I suspect Netanyahu is not as uncomfortable with the scenario favored by the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benezel Smotrich as he sometimes pretends. It allows him to shift blame for dirty deeds in dealing with the Palestinians. To avoid the dreaded South African outcome, Netanyahu seems unlikely to oppose another final round of dispossession and marginalization of the Palestinians while Israel embarks on the completion of a maximal version of the Zionist Project. For now Netanyahu seems to be riding both horses, playing a moderating role with respect to the Jewish fight about judicial reform, while winking slyly at those who make no secret of their resolve to induce a second nakba (in Arabic, ‘catastrophe’), a term applied specifically to the 1948 expulsion. For many Palestinians the nakba is experienced as an ongoing process rather than an event limited by time and place with highs and lows.

My guess is that Netanyahu, himself an extremist when addressing Israelis in Hebrew, has still not decided whether he can continue to rise both horses or must soon choose which to ride. Having appointed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to the key positions vesting control over Palestinians and as the chief regulators of settler violence it is pure mystification to consider that Netanyahu as going through a political midlife crisis or finding himself a captive of uncongenial coalition partners. What he is doing is letting it happen, blaming the religious right for excesses, but not unhappy with their tactics of seeking a victorious end of the Zionist Project.

Liberal Zionists should be deeply concerned about the degree to which these developments in Israel give rise to a new wave of real antisemitism, which is the opposite of the weaponized IHRA kind that Israel and its supporters around the world have been using as state propaganda against critics of state policies and practices. These targeted critics of Israel have no hostility whatsoever to Jews as a people and feel respectful toward Judaism as a great world religion. Rather than respond substantively to criticisms of its behavior, Israel has for more than a decade deflected discussion of its wrongdoing by pointing a finger at its critics and some institutions, especially the UN, International Criminal Court, and the Human Rights Council where allegations of Israeli racism and criminality have been made based on evidence and scrupulous adherence to existing standards of the rule of law. Such an approach, emphasizing the implementation of international law, contrasts with the irresponsible Israeli evasions of substantive allegations by leveling attacks on critics rather than either comply with the applicable norms or engage substantively by insisting that their practices toward the Palestinian people are reasonable in light of legitimate security concerns, which was the principal tactic during their first decades of their existence.

In this sense, the recent events in Israel are dangerously portraying Jews as racist criminals in their behavior toward subjugated Palestinians, done with the blessings of the government.  The unpunished settler violence toward Palestinian communities has even been affirmed by relevant government officials as in the deliberate destruction of the small village of Huwara.  photo-recorded aftermath of settlers dancing in celebration amid the village ruins, is surely a kind of Kristallnacht, which of course is not meant to minimize the horrors of Nazi genocide, but unfortunately invites comparisons and disturbing questions. Such impressions are rendered even more plausible by harrowing photos of Israeli police beating Al_Aqsa worshippers. How can Jews act so violently against a vulnerable native people living amongst them, yet denied basic rights? And will not this kind of grotesque spectacle perversely motivate neo-Nazi groups and rightists throughout the world to castigate all Jews? In effect, Israel by both cheapening the real menace of antisemitism in this IHRA process of attaching the label where it doesn’t belong and at the same time arousing hatred of Jews by documented renditions of their inhuman behavior toward a people forcibly estranged from their native land. By so acting, Israel is making itself vulnerable in a manner potentially damaging to Jews everywhere, which is an inevitable global spillover from this inflammatory campaign of the Netanyahu government to victimize even more acutely the Palestinian people, aiming at their total submission, or better their substantial departure from their own homeland.