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."

Blockchain, Art, and Value

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.