[Prefatory Note: This post is a slightly modified text of my responses to questions put to me by Daniel Falcone, published on Feb. 19, 2019 in Counterpunch with the title, “Troublesome Possibilities: The Left and Tulsi Gabbard.”
I use a more positive title here that better captures my sense of her candidacy. Since the interview Tulsi Gabbard made a strong and encouraging statement condemning Monsanto for trying to hide the evidence of the harmful impacts on human health arising from the continued merchandising and use of its highly profitable pesticide, Roundup. I think Gabbard has adopted an admirable stand. It is consistent with the willingness of Gabbard to give concrete meaning to her attacks on Wall Street and income/wealth inequalities. As my title suggests, I find Gabbard a promising candidate despite some false past steps, and believe she currently deserves the benefit of the doubt from all of us.]
The Promise of Tulsi Gabbard: A Partial Response to Skeptics
- The left seems to be divided on the candidacy of tulsi gabbard for president. What are your thoughts on this split?
I find it premature to pass judgment on Tulsi Gabbard either for her past socially conservative positions or her controversial political visits to autocratic foreign leaders. She twice went to Damascus to meet with Bashar al-Assad of Syria and to Delhi to meet with Narendra Modi. I find her explanation of these meetings, especially with Assad, acceptable, at least for now. She adopts a position, with which I agree, that meetings with foreign political leaders, including those that are viewed most negatively as essential initiatives for those who seek peace, and abhor war. She has compared her initiatives in this regard with her endorsement of Trump’s meetings with Kim Jung Un of North Korea to achieve a breakthrough on denuclearization and demilitarization of the Korean peninsula.
Her meeting with Modi did seem to involve an indirect endorsement of this political leader who has encroached upon the freedoms and democratic rights of the Indian people, especially the Muslim minority and progressive intellectuals. In her defense, she was brought up during childhood as a serious Hindu and remains observant, the first ever Hindu to be elected to the U.S. Congress, and it is humanly natural that she would welcome the opportunity to meet with the moat important Hindu leader in the world.
What I find attractive about her political profile is that she has evolved in progressive directions during her political career, and along the way has shown an unusual degree of political independence. Her resignation as Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) so as to support Bernie Sanders seems to me a strong and impressive signal as to where her heart and mind is situated. It was a bold principled act for a young and ambitious political figure. I also find her assertions that the war/peace agenda is the most important issue confronting the American people to be a further indication that she thinks and feels for herself, and is willing to ignore the taboos of mainstream American politics. I know from a common friend that she was deeply shaken personally by experiencing some months ago the supposed imminent nuclear attack that was aimed at Hawaii. Although, fortunately the attack turned out to be a false alarm yet not until after giving Hawaiians, including Gabbard, a horrifying existential appreciation of what is deeply wrong about basing national security on a nuclear capability. As a country, we desperately need candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination who are sufficiently aware of the menace of nuclear weaponry, and seem ready to do something about it, which means confronting the nuclear establishment that has killed every effort to get rid of nuclear weapons, most recently Obama’s 2009 Prague speech committing himself to working toward a world without nuclear weapons. None of the declared candidates seems to me nearly as motivated to do this as does Tulsi Gabbard. She can be viewed as a ‘Sanders Plus’ candidate, that is, Walll Street plus the Pentagon (a shorthand for global militarism).
Gabbard brings political skills, wide ranging experience, and a winning personality to her candidacy. She has engaged in electoral politics since the age of 21, is a genuine and attractive TV presence, and exhibits an engaging combination of composure, commitment, humility, and humor when explaining her worldview. The fact that she volunteered for combat duty in Iraq and yet emerged as critical of war making, and regime changing interventions and the coercive diplomacy that accompanies it, is a further encouraging feature of her political persona. It contributes credibility and depth to her anti-war stands on foreign policy. She connects her commitment to seeking peaceful ways of achieving foreign policy goals with the impact of her direct exposure to the ugly realities of war: “I have seen war first-hand is why I fight so hard for peace.” How many of the presidential candidates can match either half of this claim? Given the US role in the world, we cannot be content with presidential candidates that are progressive on domestic issues but evade or are mainstream on foreign policy litmus test issues.
I agree that we do need to look at the dark sides of aspiring politicians, but we should do so in a discerning and empathetic manner. There are no absolutes when it comes to evaluating political profiles. I believe we should generally be more attentive to the trajectory of political and personal behavior, and not hold to account a person’s coming of age beliefs, indiscretions, including long ago misguided views of acceptable partying behavior. In other words, it is not only what they did or are accused of doing back then, but far more significantly, what they have done since then. Have they convincingly changed course, and taken with conviction enlightened and progressive policies on race, sexual harassment, and sensitivity to those who are marginalized and vulnerable minorities.
We should also give political figures the benefit of the doubt when they exercise the freedom to depart from conventional orthodoxies. In this regard, no matter how much we might abhor many aspects of the Trump presidency, the fact that Gabbard withheld judgment on his foreign policy in the Middle East or Korea, and in relation to global militarism is understandable, even commendable. To be confident about such a positive assessment, we have to await further clarification of her positions on these and other issues before reaching a judgment. The question we should ask ourselves in whether on balance Gabbard deserves to wave a banner
before the American people proclaiming her commitment to a progressive political future.
- How closely does gabbard criticism and support correlate to criticism and support for Assad?
I regard it as a mistake to merge criticism of Gabbard from the left with attitudes toward the situation In Syria, including the Assad leadership. Gabbard was seemingly naïve when she spoke after her meeting favorably of Assad’s apparent willingness to give assurances of his democratic intentions for the country. Yet at the same time no one has spoken with any moral and political authority about how to respond constructively to the Syrian disaster since its inception in 2011, including the wizards of the Belt Way, the voices of the national security establishment, as well as the most strident civil society activists pro and con military intervention by the US.
As I understand Gabbard’s mission, it was to work toward the end of violence in Syria and the restoration of political normalcy, enabling the withdrawal of American troops. She was reported as concerned about the perverse peculiarity of the US Government teaming with al-Nusra and even ISIS so as to promote the insurgency against the legitimate government, however tarnished, of Syria. Supposedly, the first priority of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since 9/11 is counterterrorism, so it is only Pentagon ideologues who overlook the contradictions between what American leaders want us to believce and what we do when it comes to Syria, and elsewhere. We may criticize Gabbard for seeming to take Assad’s words at face value, but we should note the context in which all approaches by Washington to Syria have failed. The old Nightingale dictum fits: “first, do no harm.” I think that Gabbard passes this test better than most, including those that mount criticism of her Syrian initiatives.
3. Is gabbard a “progressive” in your view both domestically and foreign policy wise?
I believe that Gabbard has exhibited many strong progressive tendencies, but the whole picture of her outlook, especially on foreign policy remains cloudy. Her strong backing of Sanders in 2016 is weighty evidence of a progressive approach, but we need more specifics with respect to health, education, taxation, immigration before feeling confident about supporting her ideas on domestic policy. With respect to foreign policy, there are now more blanks to fill in than clear indications of where she stands on critical issues and her broader worldview relating especially to such global challenges as climate change and global migration. It would be helpful, and revealing, if Gabbard can free herself from the AIPAC core of the Israeli lobby and its powerful donor community. She would win many adherents, and lose some, if she adopted a position if she crafted a more balance US approach to relations with Israel and with regard to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights. It would also be reassuring if Gabbard were to demonstrate support for the UN, international cooperation on issues of global scope, issue a call for nuclear disarmament negotiations, and express some understanding of why it has become so critical to anchor American foreign policy on the basis of respect for international law.
4. The hard left is taking gabbard criticism very hard and accusing social democrats and marxists of engaging in “identity politics” and support for “neoliberalism.” How did these terms (important in accurate application) become so vague on the left?
I am not sufficiently conversant with this line of debate to have strong opinions, yet I share the sense that criticisms of Gabbard from several ideological perspectives has been exaggerated, dogmatic, and unbalanced. She deserves the chance to present herself as a presidential candidate without political smears. There are enough positive features of her candidacy and background to make me conditionally favorable, but this could change if she takes a hard line on ‘Islamic radicalism’ or Iran that some of her critics condemn her for. At this point only a wait and see attitude is constructive. In a search for much needed unity, looking back to the failures of 2016, the Democratic Party would do well not to adopt hostile attitudes towards any candidate who seriously challenges Trump’s hateful national chauvinism and the Cold War hangover that I label ‘the bipartisan consensus’ (that is, neoliberalism plus global militarism plus special relationships with Middle Eastern autocrats). Gabbard mounts such a challenge to a degree that compares favorably to her Democratic rivals for the nominations
5. Which group of politicians and sets of voters identify more with Gabbard in your view, sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party or Rand Paul and advocates of libertarianism. I fear the latter.
It is too soon to tell, although you raise a troublesome possibility. In my view, at this stage, I regard Gabbard as similar in appeal to that of Sanders with a more troubling mixture of positions offset or balanced by her war/peace emphasis, and her readiness to learn from experience and to give voice to independent views. These positions may collide with both the current liberal outlook and with the national security consensus, which although anti-Trump, has kept the Cold War mentality alive and well as the operative worldview of both of the two established political parties as well as of the deep bureaucratic state. In this latter sense, there is some resemblance to the positions taken by Rand Paul, his willingness to stand alone and his ad hoc anti-militarism, but her attitude toward social issues seems distinctly anti-libertarian to me, making such comparisons misleading and unfair.
In general, I remain sympathetic with the Gabbard candidacy. I find it refreshing that a young and energetic woman from Hawaii who is a practicing Hindu is running for the presidency at this time. To be sure she has baggage, not least of which is her apparent uncritical reaction to Modi, the autocratic leader of India. Before judging Gabbard we should keep in mind that the other more promising candidates each have serious blemishes with respect to their past or their current policy posture. I think at this early stage of the political campaign it is well to let many flowers bloom, and observe closely which wilt. My guess is that Tulsi Gabbard will fare well as the candidates come before the public to state their arguments for gaining support of the American voting public, but less well with the monied special interests. If this is so, it exposes the plutocratic character of American national politics more than it does the strength or weakness of a given political figure.
Some say Gabbard is too young, too far from the American mainstream, and too exotic in background to become a credible candidate, that she has faded from view even before ever being fully seen. Let’s hope this sort of judgment is overridden by a surge of appreciation for Tulsi Gabbard’s promise and potential.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Can We Imagine a Just Peace for Palestine?
28 FebCan We Imagine a Just Peace for Palestine?
While waiting without even a glimmer of hope for the Trump ‘deal of the century’ the Palestinian ordeal unfolds day by day. Many Israelis would like us to believe that the Palestinian struggle to achieve self-determination has been defeated, and that it is time to admit that Israel is the victor and Palestine the loser. All that needs to be done is to force feed a bitter pill of defeat to the Palestinians, and all talk from Trump or otherwise about a deal will become irrelevant.
Recent events paint a different picture than this premature Israel triumphalism. Every Friday since the end of March 2018 the Great March of Return has confronted Israel at the Gaza fence. Israel has responded with lethal force killing more than 250 Palestinians and injuring over 18,000, repeatedly using grossly excessive force to deal with almost completely nonviolent demonstrations protesting the denial by Israel of fundamental human rights belonging to the Palestinian people.
The political organs of the UN have remained awkwardly silent for a year. Yet finally on February 28, 2019 the report of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Gaza Protests was released. The Commission established by the Human Rights Council in Geneva to examine allegations of excessive force used by Israel in response to the Gaza weekly demonstrations of the Great March initiative during 2018. The Report based on extensive factual documentation reached the principal conclusion that Israel had “no justification to shoot protesters with live ammunition.” The implication of such a finding is that criminal violations of international humanitarian law, as set forth in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, had been massively, flagrantly, and repeatedly violated by Israel’s response to the Gaza protests.
It is unlikely that prosecutions will follow either in Israel or internationally, but it is at the very least a major victory for the Palestinians in the ongoing Legitimacy War to gain the high moral and legal ground with respect to world public opinion. Whether the Report causes enough of a public stir to prompt the UN to take some further action in the General Assembly or the Security Council remains to be seen. As the Great March protests have continued on Fridays so far in 2019, increasing the casualty levels, there are already calls for an extension of the Commission’s mandate so at least a complete documentary record of the continuing Israeli abuses will be available.
It would seem that there is a feeling in international circles that nothing much can be done to bring about a peaceful and just solution at this stage. Such a conclusion might explain the various recent moves in the Arab world toward an acceptance of Israel as a legitimate state, which has included steps toward diplomatic normalization. Beyond these developments, Israel has joined with Saudi Arabia and the United States in a war mongering dangerous escalation of an already unwarranted and provocative confrontation with Iran. In addition, Israel and Egypt are collaborating on security issues at the border and in the Sinai, as well as in the joint development of off shore oil and gas projects. It should be noted that this warming of the Arab world to Israel has been occurring at the very time during which abuses of the Palestinian people has achieved their highest level of harshness ever.
This puzzling recent background make this an opportune moment for stocktaking with respect to this conflict that has gone on for more than a century, and assessing what would be the best way forward. The assumption here is that the only acceptable objective remains what it has long been—namely, a sustainable and just peaceful coexistence between the two peoples.
The most daunting challenge given present realities, is how peace might be made in a manner that realizes the fundamental right of the Palestinian people to achieve self-determination in a territorial space that was for centuries their place of residence, their own homeland. The prevailing international consensus had been that a solution would be achieved by geopolitically framed negotiations between Israel and accepted governmental representatives of the Palestinian people. The authoritative framing of such an approach was entrusted to the United States, which itself unavoidably insinuated a fatal flaw into the diplomatic process if the goal was to achieve a peaceful compromise that was fair to both sides and juridically sensitive to Palestinian claims of right under international law. It is reasonable to ask, ‘How possibly could such a compromise emerge if the stronger party had the unconditional backing of the geopolitical intermediary and the weaker party was not even clearly the legitimate representative of large sectors of the Palestinian people?’ Another unacknowledged obstacles to this Oslo approach was the degree to which its presuppositions collided with the true agenda of the Zionist Project, which was to gain sovereign control of all of the biblically promised land, a goal that was glaringly inconsistent with maintaining political space for some reasonable expression of the Palestinian right of self-determination.
Additionally, this already flawed framework was further abused by subordinating the so-called peace process to Zionist expansionist goals, expressed by annexing Jerusalem, denying refugee rights of return, and expanding unlawful settlements in occupied Palestine. These anomalies were accentuated by the American insistence that Palestinian objections to such unlawful Israeli moves be deferred until the last stage of negotiations on the supposed grounds that such objections would disrupt the peace process. In retrospect, it is clear that these patterns of violation by Israel were, on the contrary, themselves intended to prevent the peace process from ever reaching ‘final status negotiations,’ much less actually achieving a negotiated peace. This disrupted diplomacy is exactly what transpired, perhaps disappointed some naïve Palestinians, but not at all surprising the Likud leadership, which always expected, and worked to achieve, such an outcome.
This geopolitical framework, as resulted from the faulty implementation of the Oslo Framework of Principles, as adopted in 1993, has by now been widely discredited by most objective observers as well as by the participating governments. This abandonment of Oslo did not occur, however, before Israel had used the past 25 years to pursue unimpeded their expansionist goals. In this process, Israel succeeded in making the establishment of an independent Palestinian state a political impossibility, with the secondary desired effect of putting the Palestinians in a far weaker position than before the Oslo approach was adopted.
The perverse failure of the top down approach to reach a sustainable outcome has led to a public attitude of defeatism when it comes to achieving a peaceful compromise. The residual post-Oslo top down option is the coercive imposition of ‘peace’ by declaring an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat. In other words, if diplomacy fails, the winner/loser calculus of war is all that is left over other than an indefinite continuation of a simmering status quo.
Peace from Above versus Peace from Below
Such thinking, although prevalent in elite circles, overlooks the historical agency of people, both those resisting injustice and those mobilized throughout the world in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. It is these bottom up kinds of political dynamics that were responsible for the most momentous changes in the history of the last century. It was national mass movements that challenged successfully, although at heavy human costs, the unjust structures of colonialism and South African apartheid, and eventually prevailed despite their military inferiority and the fierce geopolitical resistance they encountered. In other words, people manifested and exercised superior historical agency despite inferior capabilities on the battlefield and diplomatically. This potency of popular movements is a reality with a potential to subvert the established order and for this very reason is treated as irrelevant by mainstream thinking and policy planners.
It is precisely on the basis of this deconstruction of power and change that hope for a brighter Palestinian future lies. The strength of the Palestinian national movement is, and always has been, on the level of people as fortified by the growing international moral consensus that Israeli apartheid colonialism is wrong, indeed a crime against humanity according to international criminal law [see Article 7 of the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court and the International Apartheid Convention of 1973 on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid] It is this bottom up process of struggle, spearheaded by Palestinian resistance and given leverage by global solidarity initiatives such as the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] Campaign as it gains momentum and heightens pressure. Historical outcomes are never certain, but the flow of history has been against this Israeli/Zionist combination of colonial appropriation of Palestine and the apartheid structures relied upon to ensure the subjugation of the Palestinian people.
On this basis, some general observations follow.
The Two State Solution should be pronounced ‘Dead.’ For several years, at least since the de facto abandonment of the Oslo diplomacy in 2014, the two-state solution cannot reasonably be continued to be put forward internationally and in liberal Zionist circles as a viable political option. Yet it continues to be affirmed by many governments and at the UN. This is not because there is any informed belief that it might finally happen, but rather because every other outcome seemed impossible, too horrible to contemplate, or calls upon Israel to give up its claim to be an exclusivist Jewish state. In other words, many leading political figures and opinion leaders hold onto the two-state approach as an alternative to what they viewed to be zero. This reflects an impoverishment of the political and moral imagination, only capable of conceiving a solution to prolonged struggle of this type as deriving from top down approaches; bottom up approaches are not even considered, and if mentioned, are derided as irrelevant.
It seems far more realistic, and hence honest, to admit the defeat of two-state diplomacy and take account of the existing situation confronting Palestinians and Israelis so as to consider alternatives. To come to this point, it might be helpful to explain why the two-state solution has become so irrelevant. Above all, it seems evident that the Likud, which has been long in political control of Israeli never wanted an independent Palestinian state to be established, yet recognized the public relations advantages of not acknowledging this in public or even in private diplomatic communication. Netanyahu let the cat out of the bag when he pledged during his 2015 electoral campaign in Israel that a Palestinian state would never come into existence as long as he was Israel’s leader. This pledge ratified for those Israelis in doubt what was in any event Israeli policy, hoping that making if official only in Hebrew internal discourse would minimize any international backlash. This enabled Netanyahu after the 2015 election to reiterate cynically his receptivity to negotiations within the two-state mantra while continuing to engage in behavior that confirmed for Israelis that such an outcome would never occur.
Perhaps, more fundamental, the settler movement has long passed a point of no return. There are currently in excess of 600,000 Israeli settlers living in more than 130 settlements spread all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settler leaders believe that the settlements have so changed the map of Israel to exclude any possibility of an independent Palestine. Their leaders are now so confident that they openly envisage the settler population becoming 2,000,000. This should finally drive the point home to Palestinian two-staters as well as to world that Israel no longer pretends to be willing to allow a Palestinian state to be established.
True, the Palestinian Authority has long seemed ready to accept even a territorially abridged state, ceding sovereignty over the settlement blocs near the border, although continuing to insist that a the capital of a Palestinian state must be located within Jerusalem. A broad spectrum of Israeli political leaders agree that the future of Jerusalem is non-negotiable, and that the city will remain forever unified under sole Israeli sovereignty and administration. Under these conditions it can be safely concluded that it is no longer plausible for even the PA to continue to support the position that the two-state path to peace between the two peoples can somehow still be revived as the basis of a negotiated resolution of the conflict.
The Arab Accommodation is Tenuous. Israel feels little pressure to seek a political compromise given present conditions. With Trump in the White House and Arab governments scrambling toward normalization and accommodation, Israeli leaders and public opinion seem ill-disposed to make concessions for the sake of peace. As such keeping the two-state non-solution alive as a Zombie scenario is a way to proceed with Israel’s continuing efforts to expand further the settlements while in actuality implementing its coercive version of a one-state solution.
There are strong reasons to feel that this Israeli confidence that the Palestinian demand for rights can be indefinitely ignored is premature and likely to be undermined by events in the near future. For one thing, the Arab moves toward normalization are unstable as is the entire region. If there is a renewal of Arab uprisings, in the spirit of 2011, it is quite possible that support for Palestinian self-determination would abruptly surge to the top of the regional political agenda, likely in a more militant form than ever before. The Arab people, as distinct from the governments, continue to feel deep bonds of solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters, and at some point are almost certain to make their weight felt. As argued earlier, it is people and soft power, not governments, elites, and hard power, that have eventually prevailed since 1945, especially in struggles against colonialism. The Palestinian struggle is the one remaining unfinished colonial war, and there is no reason to believe that it will contradict the pattern of victory for the anti-colonial movement of national empowerment.
Beyond this, should the Trump presidency be defeated in 2020, there is likely to be an Israeli reevaluation of their interests. Such a prospect is heightened by signs that Jewish unconditional support for Israel is dramatically weakening, including in the United States. Furthermore, the global solidarity movement supportive of the Palestinian national movement is spreading, deepening, and growing. It is becoming more militant, engaging moderate global public opinion, and has the symbolic benefit of strong backing in South Africa, which sees the fight for Palestinian rights as analogous to, and even in some ways a continuation of their own anti-apartheid campaign.
What Next?. Two conclusions emerge from this analysis: first, a continued reliance on the two-state diplomacy within a framework that relies on the United States as an intermediary or peace broker is long overdue to being regarded as irrelevant and discredited. Its continued endorsement serves only as a distraction from what might be both possible and desirable. Secondly, despite Israel’s recent gains in acceptance within the Middle East and its absurdly one-sided support in Trump’s Washington, the Palestinian national movement persists, and under certain conditions, could mount a serious challenge to Israel’s colonialism and apartheid structures of governance.
In light of these conclusions, what Is the best course of action? It would seem that only a democratic and secular single state could uphold self-determination for both peoples, holding out a promise of sustainable peace. It would need to be carefully envisioned and promoted with international safeguards along the path toward realization. It does not seem a practical possibility at present, but putting it forward as a reasonable and responsible outcome that can be regarded as just avoids despair and holds out hopes for a humane peace when the time is right. It is helpful to recall that opinion was united in South Africa that the governing elites would never voluntarily abandon their reliance on apartheid, until they did. For such an outcome to happen presupposes a major modification of Israeli identity, above all the acceptance of a secular state implying the abandonment of the statist dimension of the Zionist project.
In such a binational (one state, two nations) situation, the newly created single state could offer national homelands to Jews and Palestinians, while finding a name for the new state that is congenial to both peoples. Maybe this will never happen, but it is the most just and sustainable vision of a peaceful future that responds to decades of diplomatic failure, massive Palestinian suffering and abuse. Above all, such a solution recognizes that is people that possess the moral authority and fulfill political promise of national resistance and global solidarity. Such an understanding would be tantamount to a legislative victory by that still unacknowledged, yet powerful, Parliament of Humanity.
Tags: A New Peace Process, Deal of the Century. Apartheid & Colonialism, Israeli Triumpjhalism, Peace by People