Another post on Israel and Palestine

 As an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to self defense by projection of force, even against occupying civilians.  As an Occupying Power, Israel does not have the right to self defense by projection of force against the occupied people (such as the bombing of Gaza).  To legally bomb Gaza in the name of Self Defense, Israel would have to end the Occupation first.  I recently bought reference book on international law spelling this out.  I have an Israeli friend who brushes this away, saying "Israel is not an Occupying Power."  She sent video of Zionist professor arguing that Israel "conquered" Palestine just like other regimes in the world got started by conquering their territory.  In other words, theft, and we should all just get over it.  We might, if discrimination, apartheid, persecution of Palestinians, and blockade of Gaza were ended.  But discrimination and ethnic cleansing seems to be what the "Jewish State" is all about--it started in a burst of ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba in order to create a Jewish majority.  The very idea of a "Jewish State" is contrary to liberal principles in which all people are equal regardless of race or religion.  If a non-discriminatory state is ever constructed in the southern levant, perhaps it should called something different and non-sectarian.  Jews are not the only ones with ancestors from there.  2000 years later, something like 60 generations, we all have ancestors from the southern levant, including especially Palestinians, regardless of what culture or religion we follow now.  Zionist Jews only falsely claim to have been chosen for the southern levant by G-d.  Actually, G-d revoked that privilege twice and currently, according to Judaism itself--and this is still the belief of many followers of Judaism.  And holding on to one particular culture out of thousands that originated or disseminated there gives no special privileges, especially privileges which are themselves crimes against humanity, like Apartheid and Persecution.

Letter to Biden on Israel

We must condition military aid to Israel on better behavior.  It was outrageous for Israel to have provoked a conflict this year and begun the bombing of Gaza again with many violations of Palestinian civil rights in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.  Israel's horrifically disproportionate and criminal bombing of Gaza must not be normalized either.

We must push to end Israeli apartheid and persecution of Palestinians.  Since Israel has now made it impossible for there to be a sovereign Palestinian state, or one that would include East Jerusalem which is sacred to Palestinians, we must push for a single state for all Israelis and Palestinians without discrimination.  And the implementation of a Right to Return for Palestinian refugees.  These have been for too long promised but evaded.  Palestinians cannot be blamed for resisting endless occupation, apartheid, and persecution. 

Draft Uncropped Letter about Palestine

[I will have to cut this back for Biden, the newspaper, and other recipients.  But here is the full version.]

The present catastrophes in Israel and Palestine were provoked by deliberate terror from Israeli extremists performing extrajudicial (and probable delayed illegal "legal") evictions, extreme crackdowns on Palestinian movement and protest, and ultimately a police attack within the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest places in Islam and on one of the holiest days, with projectiles and tear gas.  Is it coincidental that Israel has been unable to form a new government after many elections, with Netanyahu looking like a loser on top of being criminal, that he might want to instigate another Palestinian crushing war to boost his image?  Such possibilities are the reason the US Founding Fathers required Congress to declare war.

The rocket response from Gaza was in fact legal under international law.  An occupied people, as Gazans still are because of the blockade and other Israeli controls, they have the right to self defense by any means available to them, including missiles that kill civilians of the Occupying Power.  And Gazans were also fighting in support of their fellow occupied non-Israeli-Citizen Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Israeli Palestinians who are "legally" discriminated against.

As an Occupying Power, Israelis do not have the Right of Self Defense.  They have the right to pack their backs and abandon their Occupation of another country.  Only after they are no longer occupying another country do they have the right of self defense.  I have heard this authoritatively many times, including in a recent video by one of the world's leading scholars on Israel, Norman Finkelstein.

Under international law, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza together form Palestine, and Israel would have to withdraw completely from all 3 areas, to then have the right of Self Defense from Palestinians.  This, and not blocking the Right of Return for Palestinian Refugees, would represent the real Two State Solution, as recognized in current international law.

Or, Israel could decide to abandon the Apartheid State nightmare, and become a legal state including all Palestinians including Refugees as full and equal citizens with no discrimination.  This is what most people today call the One State Solution.

It seems many if not most Palestinians and the global left has come together believing this One State Solution is the only possible and reasonable one anymore that would be consistent with international law and human rights.  For example, the BDS movement, which I support, has always promoted this.  A key promoter of BDS would have stood a chance of defeating the current Palestinian Authority president Abbas had the Palestinian Elections not been delayed.  Abbas was afraid of losing because of the issues of East Jerusalem coming to a head.  The "Two State solution" is visibly dead.  Unless East Jerusalem can be included in the Palestinian State, few Palestinians will accept it.

This consensus for the One State Solution includes virtually all left Jews around the world.  There have been massive protests for Palestinian rights within this framework around the world, always including left Jews.  Openly anti-Zionist leftist Jewish groups include JVP and IfNotNow, and left Jews are also affiliated with many other anti-Zionist groups.  Many Orthodox Jewish groups around the world are also openly anti-Zionist, including Neturei Karta, who feel that the State of Israel is oppositional to fundamental principles of the Jewish religion.  I believe they are correct.

The old "liberal Zionist" tradition including a "2 state solution" has now virtually disappeared.  Nobody believes in it anymore, only establishment politicians use it as a cover for maintaining the status quo which is only getting worse for Palestinians, as the occupation takes more and more away from a possible future second state.  Meanwhile, many Zionist Jews in Israel and elsewhere openly dream of completing the Palestinian genocide, wiping them out of the area of greater Israel from the river to the sea, including masses of right wing Israelis chanting "May their names be erased" during a fire in the Al Aqsa compound.

By supporting Israel with $3.8 billion in arms every year, and diplomatically through the UN, Security Council, and other organizations. we in the United States have wrongly chosen to support a perpetrator of a 73 year ongoing war crime (not a "democracy") that started with the dispossession and displacement of 800,000 Palestinians, and has continued in that direction ever since.  We have supported the crushing of Palestinian lives and rights.  We have built a (crumbling) coalition supporting these heinous acts, and subverted principled opposition by other countries, like Iran and Syria, making them our "enemies" for no good reason.

We must bring all possible pressure to bear in bringing this situation to justice and peace.  Though given our proven role as a dishonest broker and champion of apartheid, it might be better if we simply pulled back all our support and did nothing more for Israel ever at all.

 

History of Canaan (aka Palestine)

This looks pretty good, despite not much questioning the Torah narrative of the First Temple period.

Note that Jews (or Israelites) were never completely expelled.  In the Babylonian Exile, it was only elites who were taken prisoner.  Some others fled, so the Jewish Diaspora actually begins then.

Likewise after the sacking of Jerusalem, Jews were only banned from the city and nearby areas.  Many remained in the surrounding area.  Many snuck back into Jerusalem anyway, and it was not long before Jewish access to Jerusalem was officially granted for special days.

Basically, not all Jews (or other groups within Canaan) ever left the region.  And there were many other groups who were not Jews.  Canaan has always been multicultural and multiethnic, perhaps the most multiethnic place on earth.

And this only covers a one millenium period.  Such cities as Jericho were settled many millenia  earlier (9th Century BCE...among the earliest human cities).   Ancestors of all the people who settled Europe must have at least passed through Canaan at one time or another because it's the land bridge between African and Europe and Asia.  Plus, even 2000 years is so many generations ago, nearly all of our ancestors are common, we only differ in our proportion of ancestries and the portion that stayed in our genes across generations.  And we differ from the cultures that we identify with, selected and re-selected over and over by friends and influencers.  No such identification provides the right to displace settled people from their lands and homes.  Even ancestry and ancient injustice do not do that.  Modern injustice should be settled with as much justice as possible and humanity.  The minimum standard of justice for Palestinians demands full Right of Return and social equality to Jews in the full territory they were displaced from.

No one group has a unique claim on Canaan as their homeland.  Many groups do, and because of it's central location, everyone alive today has ancestors who once lived there.  In particular, the Palestinian Muslims and Christians of 1900 had as much likely descent from ancient Canaanites as European Jews, if not far more.

The Philistines were originally colonizers.  They created the coastal cities, like Gaza, which most impressed the Romans.  So, according to this account, the Romans named the area Palestine after the Philistines in 500 BCE.  (Though they were colonizers, within only a few generations even the Philistines had substantial native Canaanite descent.)  Another account I am now reading suggests the name Palestine goes back further than this.

Imagine the Palestinian Right of Return

https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return/

Reading List

https://decolonizepalestine.com/reading-list/

Current situation

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2021/05/this-is-zionism-jewish-lynch-mobs-roam.html

JDA still not good enough

 The Jerusalem Definition of Antisemitism is a vast improvement over the IHRA definition with regards to separating discussion of Israel and Palestine from antisemitism.  But it doesn't go far enough.  It should completely separate the topics.

Communists and Israel

A great background on how the Soviet Union gave critical support for the creation of Israel, ignoring fundamental principles and turning course on a dime.  (It later reversed itself.)  Amazingly, the US voted for the rights of Palestinian Refugees to return, and the Soviet Union voted against the right of return.

This has to be seen as how a failure to stick to principles can lead to very bad things.

Here are Right Wing Zionists celebrating "Jerusalem Day" (the day Zionists stole Jerusalem--which was intended to be an international city not controlled by any one state) while watching trees around Al Aqsa Compound burn.  They are singing about revenge.  Some have claimed that Palestinians set the fire and the Jews are merely celebrating an annual holiday.  I don't find that believable, but actually it wouldn't change my assessment of how ugly this scene is, and it has been re-tweeted by many anti-Zionist Jews in horror, including Joshua Leifer (of Jewish Currents) who responded to such defenses by tweeting:

"You think it's a defense to say that this happens every year. 

But it's just as damning. The people in the video are clearly reacting to the fire. They're shouting ימח שמם at the Palestinians.

You can't lie that ugliness away."

I liked this pessimistic view of blockchain, art, and value.

I hate and distrust blockchain.  It's an anarchist solution, and I believe anarchism cannot be achieved before communism.  The worker's party must take over the bourgeois state, not destroy it, was the winning position at the First International.  The anarchists, being in the minority, refused to accept and established their own "libertarian socialist" tradition ever since, based on the dictatorship of the crankiest.

 Brad DeLong had linked this different view.

Endless US Babbling about "Human Rights" elsewhere

When you count all US operations outside the US as well as within, the US is the world's worst human rights abuser.  For example, US foreign actions have caused the displacement of 37 million people since 2001, according to the Guardian.  Caitlyn Johnstone spells it out in one of her best threads ever I think.  Sometimes I don't agree with her but here I do.

Somehow, this doesn't get counted when US complains of other human rights abuses by other countries and sanctions them.  War crimes by the US are hardly mentioned by the media if at all, going back forever.

Inevitably, these sanctions end up punishing ordinary people rather than regime leaders they are supposedly targeted to.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1388827828745949185?s=20

Human Rights Watch

In the past few years, after following Grayzone and similar websites, I've begun to question Human Rights Watch (HRW) a group I supported several times in the last 20 years.  I'd begun to wonder if they weren't part of the general Western Imperial Disinformation Program that is incessantly critical primarily of "enemies" of the USA, while ignoring abuses by USA and allies.  (After reading this Grayzone article, there is no doubt in my mind.  HRW pushes sanctions and applauds coups in leftist South American governments including Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ecuador while ignoring right wing death squads.)

In the past month, HRW has released two landmark reports.  The first, which nobody I know well except me is moved to question, concerns the Uighurs in China.  The second concerns Palestinians in territories controlled by Israel.  I think everyone I know except for a handful of Zionist friends would find the report on Israel very believable if not incredibly obvious.

A Zionist friend of mine is now railing against HRW as another brick in the endless worldwide wall of antisemitism.  I'm more suspicious of the fact that HRW retained an official presence in Israel until recently, and it seems to me they could have released their report on Israel 10 or 20 years ago, if not 30.  Given my feelings and actions (such as support for BDS) towards Israel, I doubt Israeli authorities would ever let me in to the country.  So how was HRW there until recently?  HRW presence in Israel always looked like a whitewash to me--one more reason to doubt that the organization was impartial.  I had similar feelings when Greta Thunberg visited Israel.

So, from my perspective, the HRW report on Israel and the Palestinians looks more like a credibility generating measure than anything else.  No reasonable or impartial person could doubt it.  To "show" they are impartial, HRW finally (after decades) releases a report on Palestinians in Israel, only a week or two after releasing a harsh report about Uighurs in China.  In the spy novels of John LeCarre, the report on Israel would be called Chickenfeed bundled in with the current operational disinformation on China.

I'd like to see Grayzone or Dr Asatar Bair demolish the HRW report on China.  Such people have primarily been focused on one non-impartial China researcher, Adam Zenz.  Leaving me somewhat unsatisfied because there seem to be others reporting on the Uighur situation, possibly with more credibility.

Keynes and Proudhon

 A long discussion at CrookedTimber led me to this comparison of Keynes and Proudhon by Dudley Dillard in 1942.  Keynes and Proudhon have ideas that are remarkably similar in many ways.  They are both anti-Marxist reformers who believe that Interest (and the power of banks to make capital scarce) is the key thing which must be reformed by society.  Keynes admitted following the ideas of Gesell, a student of Proudhon.