Just Another Day Under Israeli Rule

From Ynetnews
'Turning Bedouin village into Jewish settlement is racist'

Government's decision to convert Umm al-Hiran into Jewish settlement enrages Bedouin residents; 'You can’t just take an Arab and put a Jew in his place. This is Nakba of 2012,' they say

by Ilana Curiel

The continuous struggle of the Bedouin community in southern Israel has once caused a stir in a move Bedouins are calling "racist."

"We will continue fighting. We will not leave our land," residents of Umm al-Hiran, an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev slated for demolition, said. The government intends to build a new Jewish settlement called Hiran in place of the village.

"They say they want to evict us because of illegal construction," Salim Abu Al-Kian, 53, told Ynet. "We are ready to reach a settlement on the matter. We're willing to issue permits for homes that have yet to receive them. Unfortunately, the state does not want to help us. They want to expel us from our land. We have no value to them," he said.

After a stretched out legal battle, the National Council for Planning and Construction rejected the motion submitted by the Bimkom organization and Adala, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and approved the government's plans to establish a new Jewish village in northern Negev.


 

Umm al-Hiran village in the Negev (Photo: Hertzel Yosef)

The new village will be built in place of the Bedouin village which currently houses 500 people.

Amna Abu Al-Kian said that she would be willing to die before leaving her home. "I have six children and we have nowhere else to go to."

"Instead of the state helping us, we are thrown out to the street like animals," she exclaimed.

'We can live alongside Jews'

Other residents of the Bedouin village could not understand the council's decision and offered an alternative solution. "We wouldn't mind living alongside Jews. I wouldn't object to us being neighbors," said Salim Abu Al-Kian.

"You can’t just take an Arab and put a Jew in his place. This is racism. This is the Nakba of 2012," he added.

Another Bedouin resident said "we're citizens of the state of Israel. Israel claims to be a democratic country but it has neglected its citizens for decades. Why not recognize our rights? We have been the most loyal to Israel since its establishment. They can't keep pushing us into a corner."

Attorney Suhad Bshara from the Adala Center said that the "government's decision coincides with Israel's policy to expel the Bedouin residents from their lands and destroy their homes in order to clear the land for Jewish settlements."

The authority charged with regulating Bedouin towns in the Negev said that many of the residents have already found a solution – they are to move to the nearby newly-constructed Bedouin village of Horah.

Hassan Shaalan contributed to this report

Jon Stewart on the General Assembly Speeches

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Richman's Law

No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.

Looney Tunes Comes to the UN

Op-ed: The Hubris of Romney and Obama

Mitt Romney, whose bid to unseat Barack Obama looks more desperate every day, senses he’s found a weakness in his rival. In a foreign-policy speech the other day, he blasted Obama over the upheaval in the Arab world, saying, “This is a time for a president who will shape events in the Middle East.”

Romney is making two claims: that Obama has failed to shape events in the Middle East and that he, Romney, will succeed.

Could the hubris of a man seeking power be plainer? Does anyone with even a minimum ability to think clearly believe that Romney could “shape events” there?

Read "The Hubris of Romney and Obama."

Day of Atonement?

In Judaism, today is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Despite all that's happened over the decades, it's not too late for those responsible to atone for the continuing crimes committed against the Palestinians.

My Interview with Thomas Szasz

In the summer of 2005 I traveled to Thomas Szasz's home in Manlius, New York, and videoed an interview with the great critic of coercive psychiatry and the "therapeutic state."

Iraqi Jews Tell Israel to Stop "Tampering with Our History"

A group of Iraqi Jews living in Israel have demanded that the Israeli government stop "tampering with, exploiting, and deleting our history" as a way to negate the rights of Palestinians. "The way the Israeli establishment uses our history from the 1950s, is not in order to give us our rights back, but in order to get rid of the rights of the Palestinians, and avoiding a peace agreement with them,” Almog Behar, founder of Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat-Gan, wrote to the website The Electronic Intifada.

The Iraqi Jews are trying to recover the property they left behind in Iraq, but they object to the Israeli government's attempt to have that property cancel out Palestinian claims to the property they lost during the Nakba, or catastrophe associated with the founding of the state of Israel. The Committee states:

We are seeking to demand compensation for our lost property and assets from the Iraqi government--NOT from the Palestinian Authority--and we will not agree with the option that compensation for our property be offset by compensation for the lost property of others (meaning, Palestinian refugees) or that said compensation be transferred to bodies that do not represent us (meaning, the Israeli government).

The article at the site also discusses long-disclosed information that Jews left Iraq not because of pressure from the Iraqi government but because of false-flag operations by the Israeli Mossad. The Committee stated:

We demand the establishment of an investigative committee to examine:

1) If and by what means negotiations were carried out in 1950 between Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, and if Ben-Gurion informed as-Said that he is authorized to take possession of the property and assets of Iraqi Jewry if he agreed to send them to Israel;

2) who ordered the bombing of the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue in Baghdad, and if the Israeli Mossad and/or its operatives were involved. If it is determined that Ben-Gurion did, in fact, carry out negotiations over the fate of Iraqi Jewish property and assets in 1950, and directed the Mossad to bomb the community’s synagogue in order to hasten our flight from Iraq, we will file a suit in an international court demanding half of the sum total of compensation for our refugee status from the Iraqi government and half from the Israeli government.

The Electronic Intifada site features a video interview with the late Naeim Giladi, "an Iraqi Jew who joined the Zionist underground as a young man in Iraq and later came to regret his role in fostering the departure of some 125,000 Jews from Iraq."

Romney and the Palestinians

Mitt Romney couldn't have done a better job of showing his utter ignorance about the Palestinians if he had tried. On his recent visit to Israel he explained the economic disparity between Israel and the Palestinians territories by saying "culture makes all the difference." (Occupation? What occupation?) And in a follow-up, undoubtedly ghost-written article in National Review, "Culture Does Matter," he elaborated, "[W]hat exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture?"

 But then--incoherently--he added on Fox News, "I'm not speaking about, did not speak about, the Palestinian culture [!!!], or the decisions made in their economy. That's an interesting topic that deserves scholarly analysis, but I actually didn't address that [!!!]. I certainly don't plan to address that during my campaign. Instead, I will point out, the choices a society makes have a profound impact on the economy and the vitality of that society."

What about a society under occupation and oppression by a foreign power, where every aspect of life--including trade--is under the heel of the Israeli military? Where a fortified wall snakes through the victimized people's land, separating their homes from their farms and cutting their towns off from each other? As the Christian Science Monitor put it, "No mention from the would-be US president of the trade and mobility restrictions that Israel maintains over the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza–restrictions that both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have said for years are key factors in hampering Palestinian economic growth."

Never mind that when they have the chance, Palestinians engage in entrepreneurship and open universities. Can't mention that, though. It would destroy the narrative in which the Palestinians are The Other, alien creatures undeserving of rights and basic dignity--subhuman.

 As if that didn't show enough ignorance, the notorious clandestinely videoed May speech to donors surfaced, in which Romney said, "[T]he Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace."

How ignorant can one man be? Or maybe it isn't ignorance at all.

The Origins of Middle East Conflict

I highly recommend this video as an excellent introduction to the conflict in the Middle East. (For some reason, the embed code goes to the wrong video.)

Romney and the 47 Percent

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. . . . These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. . . . And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This quote is from the infamous surreptitious video made of Mitt Romney's speech at a fundraiser last spring. What are we to make of it?

The first thing to note is that Romney is typical of the right wing of the ruling elite, which often portrays lower income beneficiaries of the welfare state as a threat to the established order. In this view, they are dependent on government; they wish to remain that way; and they see themselves as victims.

Of course many people who qualify for welfare-state benefits take advantage of them, but it doesn't follow that they want to remain in that postion. Katherine S. Newman, author of Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market and No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, maintains that low-income people are far more industrious and ambitious, as well as determined to achieve independence, than the public generally believes. (Listen to her EconTalk conversation with Russ Roberts.)

Far less interested in independence from government are the large corporations, banks and otherwise, that exist by virtue of government contracts, guarantees, bailouts, and intellectual "property." The government's security establishment provides untold opportunities for companies to live off the taxpayers, which is much more secure than attempting to achieve market share among consenting consumers. (See Nick Turse's The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.)

Strangely, Romney's speech had nothing to say about that sort of corrupting dependence.

As for feeling like victims, the working poor didn't seem to display this attitude to Newman during her extensive field research. Yet why wouldn't they be justified in regarding themselves as such? The corporate state, with its myriad barriers to competitive economic activity, including self-employment, blocks many routes to prosperity.

By the way, while many lower income people pay no income tax, they do get hit with the regressive payroll (FICA) tax, which until recently helped fund the government's general operations. While formally, employers pay one half of that tax, in fact most or all of the employer's share comes out of workers' pay.

Romney is trying to distract attention with a 14-year-old audio of then-State Senator Barack Obama endorsing a mild form of income "redistribution." Government distribution of wealth, of course, is objectionable, just as government itself is. But Romney to date has had nothing to say about the systematic upward transfer of wealth that the corporate state effects in a variety of way. To offer just two examples: Intellectual "property" law prohibits free competition, creates artificial scarcities and thus extra-market profits, and privatizes value that would have naturally been "socialized" in a freed market. Second, barriers to competition (again, including self-employment) reduce the bidding for labor and hence workers' bargaining power, resulting in lower wages than would otherwise be seen in a freed market. (See these articles by Charles W. Johnson and Gary Chartier.)

It is certainly true that no one is entitled to other people's stuff. That is just as true of the powerful and well-connected business interests that through government intervention amass great wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

When Romney begins talking about that sort of "redistribution of wealth" I will start to take him seriously.

Alex Cockburn: The Anti-Statist

This is my contribution to the CounterPunch memorial issue for Alexander Cockburn, the left iconoclast who died recently.

A libertarian--a radical, decentralist, pro-market, but anti-capitalist left-libertarian, at any rate--could tell that Alex Cockburn was exceptional when even his eulogy for a departed Marxist compelled interest.

After the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy died, Alex wrote that Sweezy "trenchantly detected and explained: the reasons for the New Deal's failure, until World War II bailed out the system; military Keynesianism and the Korean war as the factors in US recovery after that war; underdevelopment in the Third World, consequence of dependency that was created by imperialism . . . ; the increasing role of finance in the operations of capitalism. . . ."

The implied debunking of the standard left-right fairy tale that constitutes most people's notion of American history, is--or should be--of great interest to libertarians, who ought to understand that capitalism equals, not radically decentralized freed markets, but exploitative corporatism.That insight and attitude are what drew me and my left-libertarian comrades to Alex. My last contact with him was to ask that he blurb a book to which I contributed, Markets Not Capitalism, edited by Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson. He delivered the blurb: "We on the left need a good shake to get us thinking, and these arguments for market anarchism do the job in lively and thoughtful fashion."

Unfortunately, I only met Alex once, in 2008. We both spoke at an extraordinary conference put on by the Future of Freedom Foundation in Reston, Virginia titled "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties." What was extraordinary was that this well-attended anti-empire, pro-Bill of Rights gathering featured the most prominent conservatives, progressives, leftists, and libertarians who were alarmed about imperial war and domestic tyranny. They included: Glenn Greenwald, Bruce Fein, Stephen Kinzer, Robert Higgs, Justin Raimondo, and Ron Paul.

I knew of Alex's work long before that, and followed his writings in The Village Voice, The Nation, even The War Street Journal. Now, finally, I would have my chance to talk to him. (He had already published me at CounterPunch.) He did not disappoint; he was funny and charming, and interested in what subversion I was up to. I'd like to think we hit it off.

In his wonderfully wide-ranging talk, he discussed the prospect of an alliance between the libertarians and his kind of left. "There has to be more utopianism, and there has to be more straightforward spirit of mutiny, which I think you libertarians are good at offering. If the left would offer a little bit of utopia-some of the utopia may differ-then I think we can continue to have an enjoyable and hopefully a creative association."

When I asked him to elaborate in the Q&A, he referred to an earlier attempted alliance, namely, the old Inquiry magazine (which I helped edit, 1982-1984), which assembled the best anti-statists no matter where they placed themselves on the political spectrum. Acknowledging that there are "some big issues [between libertarians and him] that . . . have to be sorted through," he continued, "I think a battle of the ideas, maybe one a year, would be a lot of fun. We should talk about it. I hope we do." Alas, we never got to do it.

Israel's Crimes Against Humanity

Israel's drive to rid the West Bank of as many Palestinians as possible while cowing the rest into submission has been especially hard on the children. Between 500 and 700 children are arrested every year and many suffer lasting psychological damage as a result. Children are also traumatized when their home is raided by the army. In a typical raid, masked Israeli soldiers in full combat gear break into a home after midnight with their guns pointed, often accompanied by dogs. As the terrified children look on, they ransack the house and, if they are bored, vandalize it. The army carried out 63 raids in the West Bank during the first 10 days of July alone.

Rachelle Marshall, "Romney Goes All Out for the Israel Lobby"

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2012 

The Constitution or Liberty

Someone excerpted the last four minutes of a lecture I gave at a FEE seminar a few summers ago. Enjoy!

About that Video

Perhaps if the West, and especially the United States since World War II, hadn't subjected the Arab and Muslim world to nonstop brutality -- if the US hadn't sponsored repressive dictators and monarchs -- if it hadn't enabled Israel's savage treatment of the Palestinians, the occupation of their land, and the invasion of its neighbors -- if US troops hadn't peed on Afghan corpses -- and then if Americans hadn't burned Qurans in Afghanistan -- maybe, just maybe that ridiculous anti-Muslim video would not have been noticed.

Obama and the Iraqi Withdrawal: Credit Where Credit's Not Due

I'm tired of Obama's supporters boasting--falsely--that he kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. First, the war isn't over. Sectarian violence is still commonplace. The millions of refugees created by the U.S invasion in 2003 still have not returned home.

Second, Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops only because George W. Bush was forced by the Iraqi government, which is allied with Iran, to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) dictating a full withdrawal at the end of 2011. Bush wanted dozens of permanent bases but Prime Minister Maliki said no.

As 2011 wore on, Obama sent War Secretary Panetta to beg Maliki to "ask" that U.S. troops remain in Iraq. Maliki refused, especially after Muqtada al Sadr, the influential Shi'ite leader, threatened to resume his Mahdi Army's resistance to U.S. occupation. Maliki also told Panetta there would be no U.S. bases.

Obama withdrew the troops because--despite his best efforts--he was ordered to do so under terms reluctantly agreed to by his predecessor.

Obama's supporters should stop lying about how the U.S. occupation in Iraq ended.

Roy Childs's Anarchism and Justice Released

Exciting news from the Cato Institute: It has just issued its first ebook: Anarchism and Justice by Roy A. Childs Jr., a collection of writings by the great libertarian author and editor. Childs (1949-1992) was the long-time editor of Libertarian Review and the Lassez Faire Books catalog. He persuaded many young libertarians of market anarchism in the 1970s (me included) with his open letter to Ayn Rand, included in the volume. Also included is Roy’s refutation of Robert Nozick’s “invisible hand” theory of the emergence of the minimal state. George H. Smith contributed an introduction.

“We must start out as anarchists,” Roy writes, “and have the advocates of the state make out their case.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Anarchism and Justice 
• Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand 
• The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism: An Open Letter to Objectivists and Libertarians 
• The Invisible Hand Strikes Back 
• Anarchist Illusions

Take Me to Your Leader

Meet the Press host David Gregory probably raised a few eyebrows when he told Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, "You are the leader of the Jewish People."

I have searched my memory and cannot remember ever hearing the PM of Israel called the leader of the Jewish people. I realize that Israel holds itself out--controversially--as the state of the Jewish People (not merely of its citizens), but does it follow that the PM is therefore the leader of the Jewish People? How many Jews outside Israel consider Netanyahu their leader in a religious or any other sense? How many inside Israel?

And what exactly is the Jewish People? Is it a race, an ethnic group, a religious community that comprises people of all races and ethnicities? I think the answer is to be found in Shlomo Sand's book.

What's with David Gregory? All he wanted to talk about with Netanyahu was Iran. As Philip Weiss reminds me, Gregory never mentioned the continued oppression of the Palestinians and the occupation of their land.

Some investigative reporter.

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Bibi's Contradiction

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu told Meet the Press host David Gregory today that Iran's leadership is so fanatical that once it acquired a nuclear weapon, it could not be contained the way the Soviet Union and China were. But he contradicted himself by also saying that drawing bright red lines for Iran would avert a military conflict.

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Why would the regime be rational before it acquired a nuclear weapon but irrational afterward? Iran's leaders are surely aware that attacking Israel with a nuke would be regime suicide, something they have shown no inclination toward to date.

Of course, US and Israeli intelligence say Iran has not decided to build a weapon, and the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran is converting its enriched uranium into plates that are unsuitable for weaponization but suitable for the production of medical isotopes.

Blowback in Libya

Reporter Pepe Escobar provides good perspective on the violence in Libya: "Mr Blowback rising in Benghazi."