Free Association

This Says It All

2012-05-27T10:37:00.001-05:00

Peace, Not War

2012-05-27T10:11:00.000-05:00

"We perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices." --Paddy Chayefsky, The Americanization of Emily

On Religion

2012-05-27T08:14:00.000-05:00

All elements of religion but the love of universal justice and compassion--as found in the Prophets--constitute idolatry, including worship of “God.”

The Easy Way

2012-05-27T07:52:00.001-05:00

No wonder allegiance to a state has replaced love of justice as the core value of Judaism. It's easier.

Latest Scribblings

2012-05-26T08:39:00.001-05:00

“Romney and Bain Capital”

“TGIF: Government Beneficence and Other Fairy Tales”

Excellent Documentary on the Nakba

2012-05-22T07:08:00.002-05:00

Penn on Obama's Monstrous Position on Drugs

2012-05-21T08:27:00.002-05:00

Obama to the American people: I got away with using drugs. Fuck the rest of you!

PLEASE SHARE THIS!

The General's Son

2012-05-20T17:20:00.001-05:00

Miko Peled, author of The General's Son, is the son of Matti Peled, the IDF general-turned-peace and justice activist.

On Israel’s “Right to Exist”

2012-05-20T08:40:00.001-05:00

When I posted Sharmine Narwani’s provocative article “Excuse Me, But Israel Has No Right to Exist” on Facebook, I got an inappropriate reaction from libertarians. It was summed up by one comment this way:

No territorial State has the right to exist. They are all organisations against individual rights and liberties.

This answer is true but inappropriate. Why?

Narwani was not tendering a general proposition in political philosophy. She had no intention of operating in the realm of abstraction on this occasion. Rather, she was making a point that seems to elude people, including many (most?) libertarians. Narwani was drawing attention to the fact that invocation of the Jewish State of Israel’s “right to exist” is intended to derail any effort to focus on the right of Palestinian individuals to live on and work the land they and their families have inhabited for more than a thousand years (and perhaps much further back.) Changing the subject to the State of Israel’s alleged right to exist—and that’s what this move is, a change of subject—is designed to make sure that the rights of Palestinians are never discussed.

Imagine you caught a burglar in your home pilfering your silverware. Now imagine that when you demanded he put your property down, he responded, “Wait. Before we talk about that, I demand that you first acknowledge my right to exist in this spot with these things in my hands.” You would not regard that demand as legitimate.

To proclaim Israel’s right exist is to proclaim that a political entity founded by a group of individuals on an ideology of ethno-racial chauvinism has a moral right to land it obtained through brutal ethnical cleansing. The Zionist movement had (and has) as its premise that Palestine is “Jewish land” and that the non-Jews are unfit for it. Thus it had (has) to be “redeemed.” The outcome was what the Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe. The political entity known as Israel thus occupies land stolen from the Palestinian people.

That is the context from which to judge all that goes on in Palestine/Israel today. This is no “dispute” or “conflict” in the sense that two sides have roughly equal claims to the same land and resources. The claims are no more equal than those of my hypothetical homeowner and burglar. Contrition therefore belongs on the Jewish, not the Palestinian, side. (I hope no one will say that a UN General Assembly vote made this all morally acceptable.)

(For details see Jeremy Hammond’s excellent brief introduction, The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination. For a close examination of the Zionists' alleged purchases of land see Stephen P. Halbrook’s “The Alienation of a Homeland.” On the systematic efforts to cleanse the nakba from history see Neve Gordon's "Erasing the Nakba." For the Jewish case against Zionism, rooted in the Prophetic tradition, see Jack Ross’s biography, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism. But you need not take their word for it. Consult an Israeli historian, Benny Morris, who thinks ethnic cleansing was a good thing but did not go far enough.)

We may put it another way: Israel is the only country I can think of that, de jure, does not belong to all its citizens. (I am not saying that other countries actually operate as though they belonged to their citizens.) As the self-proclaimed “Jewish State,” Israel is said to belong not to its citizens but to the Jewish People worldwide. Under the “Law of Return,” anyone who qualifies as a Jew (that is, has a Jewish mother and hasn't converted to another religion or was converted to Judaism by an approved rabbi) may become a full citizen merely by moving to Israel. Note the word “return.” A Jewish person who “makes aliyah” need not have ever lived in Israel, so she would not literally be returning. (It’s merely assumed, despite reasons for assuming otherwise, that her ancient ancestors might have once lived in Palestine.)

On the other hand, a Palestinian who was one of the million-plus Arabs driven from their villages in 1948 (or even earlier) or 1967 and who could therefore actually return to her home is prohibited from doing so. Her home has long been confiscated, perhaps demolished. In fact her entire village may have been leveled to make way for an exclusively Jewish town. (Over 500 such villages were destroyed during the period of Israeli independence.)

Yes, the Muslim, Christian, and secular Arabs who were not among the 750,000 who fled what became Israel in 1948 were allowed to become citizens of the Jewish State, with the vote and representation in the Knesset. But there’s less here than meets the eye. Non-Jews are second (third?)-class citizens who get inferior government services and who have no power to change Israel’s official designation as the state of the Jewish People. Indeed, any political party that aspires to change that designation is outlawed. A recent law requires new non-Jewish citizens to pledge allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish, democratic [sic] state.” In 2010 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed, as a condition for progress in negotiations, that Palestinian leaders acknowledge Israel as “the national state of the Jewish People.” It is worth noting that until a 2005 legal challenge, the Israeli identity card identified citizens not as Israeli but as Jewish, Arab, Druze and Circassian, and so on. Citizens are still so designated in government records.

Thus, in this context, when libertarians say "all states are illegitimate," they blur a critical distinction and give those who occupy Palestinian property and otherwise oppress Palestinian individuals an undeserved pass. I imagine that an ardent Zionist would much rather hear that response than one that perceives and exposes the real intent behind the proclamation of Israel’s right to exist: the negation of the rights of Palestinians.

I shouldn’t have to mention this but I will: To say that the state of Israel has no right to exist is not to say that the individuals living in Israel have no right to exist—quite the contrary--and the Palestinians would agree. That raises the question of how best to proceed in achieving justice for the long-suffering Palestinians. This is a complicated question to which there is no easy answer. But here’s one thing advocates of universal freedom and justice can say: The rights of the Palestinians must not be plastered over by irrelevant claims about the Jewish State’s right to exist.

The Israeli "Peace Process" on the Ground

2012-05-19T14:16:00.001-05:00

From Rachelle Marshall’s “Israel's Current Demand: Most of the West Bank,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March-April 2012

On Jan. 23, 100 Bedouins in Anata, northeast of Jerusalem, were forced into the cold outdoors just before midnight, when army bulldozers arrived without warning and demolished their entire community, including all their personal belongings. Many of the displaced were children and babies. On Jan. 25 near Hebron, Mohammed Abu Qbeita was building a house on his own land when soldiers came and ordered him to stop. When he refused to move, an army officer truck knocked him to the ground and drove a trailers attached to a tractor over his legs, crushing one of them.

No one is safe from the random cruelty.

TGIF: Individualism, Trade-Unions, and “Self-Governing Combinations”

2012-05-18T08:18:00.001-05:00

[I]ndividualists more than anyone will see the merit in any arrangement which minimizes the chance that one will be subjected to the arbitrary will of another—even in consensual relationships.

Read TGIF here.

Never, Ever

2012-05-17T18:31:00.001-05:00

I am not now , nor have I even been, a member of any diaspora.

Op-Ed: JPMorgan Lesson: End Government Bank Guarantees

2012-05-17T09:48:00.001-05:00

It’s widely believed that JPMorgan Chase’s recent $2 billion–plus loss proves we need the comprehensive banking regulation called for by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.

That belief is wrong.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Op-ed: When Will Obama Evolve on the Drug War?

2012-05-16T10:03:00.001-05:00

Much is made of how President Obama’s position on same-sex marriage has “evolved” to an endorsement of legalization. One hopes his position on the atrocity called the “war on drugs” is evolving.

Read the rest here.

Roger Waters Sings a Song for Palestine

2012-05-15T06:10:00.001-05:00

Nakba Day

2012-05-15T05:51:00.001-05:00

Today is Nakba Day, the day set aside to remember the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 in connection with the creation of the “Jewish State” of Israel. Over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and villages, and many massacred, in an ethnic-cleansing operation that should shock the conscience. The Arabs who remained in the Israeli state that was imposed on them by the UN and Zionist military forces have been second-class citizens from that time.

Since 1967 the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many of whom were refugees from the 1948 catastrophe, have lived under the boot of the Israeli government. Their day-to-day lives are under the arbitrary control of the Israeli government. Gaza is an open-air blockaded prison camp subject to periodic military onslaughts, while the West Bank is relentlessly gobbled up by Jewish-only settlements and violated by a wall that surrounds Palestinian towns and cuts people’s homes off from their farms.

Again, I note that the best short introduction to the catastrophe is Jeremy Hammond’s The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict.

Additional reading: "Why the Inconvenient Truths of the Nakba Must Be Recognized," by Tom Pessah

TGIF: For Equality; Against Privilege

2012-05-12T11:02:00.001-05:00

This week's TGIF is an encore from 2006: "For Equality; Against Privilege." Enjoy!

Come and See the Danger Inherent in the System

2012-05-12T10:59:00.001-05:00

I remain puzzled at the refusal of civil libertarians to see the dangers inherent in government control of medical care.

Screw the Vote

2012-05-09T07:11:00.001-05:00

So the people get to vote on who may marry? And this pleases conservatives? I thought they disliked mobocracy.

Scott Horton and Me

2012-05-08T10:24:00.001-05:00

Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio interviewed me on May Day about the relationship between libertarianism and workers.

Op-ed: Obama, bin Laden, and Mitt

2012-05-08T06:25:00.001-05:00

The partisan squabbling over the killing of Osama bin Laden is a typical election-year distraction, effectively squelching discussion of more important matters one year after the execution of the al-Qaeda chief executive.

Aided by cable-TV talking heads, Americans are spending too much time speculating over whether presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would have given the order to get bin Laden, and also issuing paeans to President Obama’s “courage.” (We have a strange notion of courage. Did Obama risk his own life? Of course not. He was safe in the White House Situation Room. Perhaps he “risked” his political career, but even that isn’t certain. A failed operation might have won him sympathy for a good try. On the other hand, the men under his command were ordered to risk their lives and the lives of others.)

While the commentators are engaged in trivialities, big foreign-policy questions are ignored.

Read “Obama, bin Laden, and Mitt.”

“Nice Shirt”

2012-05-06T17:12:00.001-05:00

That’s the one and only comment I got today when I wore my “Free Palestine” shirt to Barnes & Noble in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Not at All

2012-05-05T08:48:00.001-05:00

I don't like the vestige of tribalism I find in myself.

TGIF: Forgotten Critic of Corporatism

2012-05-05T08:16:00.001-05:00

Frank acknowledgments about the Gilded Age from an unexpected source. Read it here.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Blasts Sabre-Rattling American Israel-Firsters

2012-05-05T08:07:00.001-05:00

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was booed and taunted with cries of “Neville Chamberlain” when he told an American audience that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “messianic feelings” regarding Iran and that unilateral military action against the Islamic republic would be a mistake.

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Post, Olmert sarcastically told the hostile crowd:

As a concerned Israeli citizen who lives in the state of Israel with his family and all of his children and grandchildren, I love very much the courage of those who live 10,000 miles away from the state of Israel and are ready that we will make every possible mistake that will cost lives of Israelis.

The New York Times also reported:

But Mr. Olmert went much further. Drawing boos from a largely American audience in New York, he fired off a wide-ranging broadside against Mr. Netanyahu’s foreign policy, saying that the prime minister was unprepared to offer meaningful compromise to Palestinians….

Olmert is just the latest prominent Israeli to express opposition to Netanyahu’s belligerent stand against Iran. “Gabi Ashkenazi, the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, and Eliezer Shkedy, the former air force commander, told the conference on Sunday that an international approach to Iran was preferable,” the Times reported.

Several former Israeli intelligence chiefs have stated that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon, echoing the judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies. Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz has described the Iranian regime as “composed of very rational people,” adding that it will not acquire a bomb. “I don't think [Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] will want to go the extra mile,” Gantz said.