Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1155
March 18, 2018
Ukraine: Women Organise In The War Zone
Gabriel Levy writes on women taking to the streets in Ukraine.
About 100 women took part in a “march for women’s rights” last week in Lisichansk, close to the front line between Ukraine and the Russian-supported separatist “republic” in Lugansk.
“We need to fight for our rights!” was the main slogan of the march, on Tuesday 6 March.
The women’s march in Lisichansk
Vladislava Nikolayevskaya, one of the organisers and a law student, wrote on her facebook page:
“Women in the war zone were not scared to go out on to the streets”, Pavel Lisyansky, a lawyer and human rights activist in the area, reported. “The organisers of the march were women human rights defenders, women activists and women residents of Lisichansk.”
On Friday 9 March Vera Yastrebova, one of the organisers, reported on the Lisichansk event at a meeting of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in London. Vera, a lawyer, was there with Lisyansky, who gave an account of human rights violations and attacks on labour rights – and on activists’ responses to them – on both sides of the front line.
Vera explained to the London meeting that the march for women’s rights in Lisichansk was the outcome of more than two years of campaigning work.
Asked what “attacks on womens’ rights” meant, she recounted that defining the concept of women’s rights had been at the centre of the campaigning work.
“We need to fight for our rights”
Sexual violence during military conflict; domestic violence; attacks on women workers’ labour rightsand conditions – women suffered these but did not always see them as attacks on their rights as women, as attacks on their human rights. But the campaign is aimed at changing perceptions.
Success has been mixed, Vera said: for older women, changing the ways of looking at these things is sometimes tougher.
The eruption of military conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the resulting impact on communities, has triggered the formation of numerous human rights defence groups. Pravozashchitnik [Human Rights Defender], a news sheet published by the Eastern Human Rights Group with support from the German consulate, reported that some of the most militant groups were formed by women activists, including:
■ The Womens’ Human Rights Group, formed in 2017 in Privol’e, Novodruzhevsk, Lisichansk and Gorskoe on the initiative of Irina Nikulnikova, a lawyer and mother of three children, who had worked for the coal company Lisichanskugol for ten years.
Pravozashchitnik reported:
■ The Lisichansk Human Rights Defence Group, formed in 2016 in Lisichansk, which focuses particularly on supporting students and young industrial workers. Pravozashchitnik reported that it is led by Vladislava Nikolayevskaya:
Vladislava said:
■ The Civil Inspection of Labour group, formed in 2014 in Debaltsevo to defend labour rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of women and students. The group was formed by Vera Yastrebova, who was forced to leave Debaltsevo during fierce fighting there in 2014 and who has fought more than 100 cases by refugees from the city.
Vera said in an interview:
This resurgence of activity in the front-line communities is inspiring and important. War is a means of social control, of demoralising and terrorising communities. It can leave them defenceless against elites. Since the Russian-supported military action in Ukraine started in 2014, in Russia itself state action against activists and oppositionists has been stepped up, accompanied by an intensification of crude nationalist propaganda. In Ukraine, an analogous upsurge of ultra-nationalism has led to a spate of physical attacks on trade union, anti-fascist, feminist and gay rights demonstrations.
But war can also provoke a fight back. That is the significance of the new forms of organisation taking shape in the front line communities. GL, 11 March 2018.
And another thing (13 March): feminists demonstrating on International Women’s Day in Kyiv were attacked by ultra-right-wing nationalists, while the police stood and watched, intervening only when the violence had already started. There’s a report on Vektor Media here.
Some other relevant stuff
■ Representatives of Labour Defence (Zakhist Pratsy), a Ukrainian independent union federation, last week participated in an international meeting of worker militants in Budapest. They rebuffed an attempt to get the meeting to adopt a pro-Russian, fake “anti-imperialist” stance. Read their report here.
■ In Syria, where Russian-backed violence is being used to crush families and communities on an even greater scale than in Ukraine, women continue to fight back – for example in Families for Freedom, which issued a statement on 8 March that began: “We are women behind the Families for Freedom, a movement to free our loved ones and thousands of others arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared in Syria. On this day dedicated to women, we mark and celebrate the resistance of Syrian women who have remained steadfast in the face of so many challenges: from the burdens of bombardment, forced displacement and the loss of our loved ones.” Read the rest on their facebook page here.
Earlier People & Nature articles on eastern Ukraine
■ “We need new ways of organising” (August 2017)
■ Trade unionists and communities oppose Donbass rail blockade (March 2017)
■ War as a means of social control” (October 2014)
■ For a full list, go to Site contents and scroll down to “Russia and Ukraine”
➽ Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature
About 100 women took part in a “march for women’s rights” last week in Lisichansk, close to the front line between Ukraine and the Russian-supported separatist “republic” in Lugansk.
“We need to fight for our rights!” was the main slogan of the march, on Tuesday 6 March.
The women’s march in Lisichansk Vladislava Nikolayevskaya, one of the organisers and a law student, wrote on her facebook page:
I think that there’s no need to prove to those active women of Lisichansk, who took part in our march, what rights exactly we are fighting for! ... I am very glad that, notwithstanding the sad situation and the negative comments, there are people who are not indifferent – who, on the contrary, are ready to defend their rights and to draw attention to what’s going on.
“Women in the war zone were not scared to go out on to the streets”, Pavel Lisyansky, a lawyer and human rights activist in the area, reported. “The organisers of the march were women human rights defenders, women activists and women residents of Lisichansk.”
On Friday 9 March Vera Yastrebova, one of the organisers, reported on the Lisichansk event at a meeting of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in London. Vera, a lawyer, was there with Lisyansky, who gave an account of human rights violations and attacks on labour rights – and on activists’ responses to them – on both sides of the front line.
Vera explained to the London meeting that the march for women’s rights in Lisichansk was the outcome of more than two years of campaigning work.
Asked what “attacks on womens’ rights” meant, she recounted that defining the concept of women’s rights had been at the centre of the campaigning work.
“We need to fight for our rights” Sexual violence during military conflict; domestic violence; attacks on women workers’ labour rightsand conditions – women suffered these but did not always see them as attacks on their rights as women, as attacks on their human rights. But the campaign is aimed at changing perceptions.
Success has been mixed, Vera said: for older women, changing the ways of looking at these things is sometimes tougher.
The eruption of military conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the resulting impact on communities, has triggered the formation of numerous human rights defence groups. Pravozashchitnik [Human Rights Defender], a news sheet published by the Eastern Human Rights Group with support from the German consulate, reported that some of the most militant groups were formed by women activists, including:
■ The Womens’ Human Rights Group, formed in 2017 in Privol’e, Novodruzhevsk, Lisichansk and Gorskoe on the initiative of Irina Nikulnikova, a lawyer and mother of three children, who had worked for the coal company Lisichanskugol for ten years.
Pravozashchitnik reported:
For the last two years [Irina] has not been paid her wages, despite having three young children. She left the [state-owned] company that was not paying her, and decided to find other work, but many of her colleagues remained there ... Irina got together a team made up of those women whose rights had been breached, and went, as it were, into battle. They organised protest meetings and pickets by individuals, and lodged complaints about the attacks on women's rights at enterprises in the region.
■ The Lisichansk Human Rights Defence Group, formed in 2016 in Lisichansk, which focuses particularly on supporting students and young industrial workers. Pravozashchitnik reported that it is led by Vladislava Nikolayevskaya:
who decided to take action after her father was unlawfully laid off from the D.F. Melnikov mine, owned by Lisichanskugol, and did not receive wage payments for almost a year ... Vladislava was strongly influenced by the breach of her father’s labour rights. She couldn’t understand how this could happen in a democratic and law-based state. She learned that many people were in the same situation, and couldn’t get legal help because such services were very expensive. And so Vladislava and her like-minded colleagues organised themselves in a human rights group.
Vladislava said:
My family have themselves felt what the breach of labour rights means, what it means to work without being paid, what it’s like to not know how to find the means to pay for municipal services and rent. Politicians only remember people just before elections, and then forget them – but someone has to defend people. Why not me?
■ The Civil Inspection of Labour group, formed in 2014 in Debaltsevo to defend labour rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of women and students. The group was formed by Vera Yastrebova, who was forced to leave Debaltsevo during fierce fighting there in 2014 and who has fought more than 100 cases by refugees from the city.
Vera said in an interview:
My home has been destroyed, so has my place of work. In a moment I lost everything. But instead of blaming everyone, I decided to defend people and compel the politicians to work for the good of those they represent.
This resurgence of activity in the front-line communities is inspiring and important. War is a means of social control, of demoralising and terrorising communities. It can leave them defenceless against elites. Since the Russian-supported military action in Ukraine started in 2014, in Russia itself state action against activists and oppositionists has been stepped up, accompanied by an intensification of crude nationalist propaganda. In Ukraine, an analogous upsurge of ultra-nationalism has led to a spate of physical attacks on trade union, anti-fascist, feminist and gay rights demonstrations.
But war can also provoke a fight back. That is the significance of the new forms of organisation taking shape in the front line communities. GL, 11 March 2018.
And another thing (13 March): feminists demonstrating on International Women’s Day in Kyiv were attacked by ultra-right-wing nationalists, while the police stood and watched, intervening only when the violence had already started. There’s a report on Vektor Media here.
Some other relevant stuff
■ Representatives of Labour Defence (Zakhist Pratsy), a Ukrainian independent union federation, last week participated in an international meeting of worker militants in Budapest. They rebuffed an attempt to get the meeting to adopt a pro-Russian, fake “anti-imperialist” stance. Read their report here.
■ In Syria, where Russian-backed violence is being used to crush families and communities on an even greater scale than in Ukraine, women continue to fight back – for example in Families for Freedom, which issued a statement on 8 March that began: “We are women behind the Families for Freedom, a movement to free our loved ones and thousands of others arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared in Syria. On this day dedicated to women, we mark and celebrate the resistance of Syrian women who have remained steadfast in the face of so many challenges: from the burdens of bombardment, forced displacement and the loss of our loved ones.” Read the rest on their facebook page here.
Earlier People & Nature articles on eastern Ukraine
■ “We need new ways of organising” (August 2017)
■ Trade unionists and communities oppose Donbass rail blockade (March 2017)
■ War as a means of social control” (October 2014)
■ For a full list, go to Site contents and scroll down to “Russia and Ukraine”
➽ Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature
The First Endowed Chair In Atheism, Humanism, And Secular Ethics
Scott Jacobsen from Atheist Republic reports on more progress being made in the world of academia against superstition.
Photo Credits: John J. Reilly Center and the University of Miami
The first Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics endowed chair is coming to the University of Miami according to internal sources. It will be the first in the United States and held by Professor Anjan Chakravartty.
According to University of Miami: News and Events, there has been the creation of an endowed chair for the study of “Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics,” which goes to show the advancement of the increase in diverse secular subject matter in the academic realm with even the controversial sentiments about secular, non-religious content in the public domain.
There have been recent studies, according to the report, that the number of the religious is in decline and the world appears to be in the midst of a global secularization. There will be implications for modern life.
The endowed chair was funded through a $2.2 million donation from the Louis J. Appignani Foundation. Bear in mind, though this is a good step, it is the first chair of its kind in the United States of America. The University of Miami Provost, Jeffrey Duerk, explained:
Anjan Chakravartty, will be the new chair and will join the University of Miami on July 1, 2018. Chakravartty is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Otavio Bueno, a philosophy professor, described the timing for the endowed chair a ripe time for the exploration of the complex academic topic of non-religiosity linked to morality. Bueno said:
Bueno continued to explain the position of Chakravartty as having an “impressive outreach ability” with the intention to and ability to take on discussions in an open manner in order for the comprehension of innately complicated issues to be readily available for anyone.
A professor of philosophy who was the chair of the department for 12 years, Harvey Siegel, noted on his first time of meeting the endowed chair donor, Louis Appignani, 15 years prior, where Appignani made it clear in a Miami Herald article that the primary purpose that drove the donor was to challenge “religion” and advocate for “atheism.”
Siegel said.
Appignani had explicit statements in support of some of the most influential people in the living atheist movement in the world today, including Dr. Richard Dawkins.
Appignani expounded:
Professor Chakravartty will be teaching on science and humanism in the Fall of 2018. He had his own statements to make to the public as well.
Chakravartty stated:
Photo Credits: John J. Reilly Center and the University of MiamiThe first Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics endowed chair is coming to the University of Miami according to internal sources. It will be the first in the United States and held by Professor Anjan Chakravartty.
According to University of Miami: News and Events, there has been the creation of an endowed chair for the study of “Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics,” which goes to show the advancement of the increase in diverse secular subject matter in the academic realm with even the controversial sentiments about secular, non-religious content in the public domain.
There have been recent studies, according to the report, that the number of the religious is in decline and the world appears to be in the midst of a global secularization. There will be implications for modern life.
The endowed chair was funded through a $2.2 million donation from the Louis J. Appignani Foundation. Bear in mind, though this is a good step, it is the first chair of its kind in the United States of America. The University of Miami Provost, Jeffrey Duerk, explained:
Atheism is a philosophical position to be explored and analyzed, and since we already address the topic in various departments — including our Religious Studies Department — this chair will add to an already established discourse.
Anjan Chakravartty, will be the new chair and will join the University of Miami on July 1, 2018. Chakravartty is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Otavio Bueno, a philosophy professor, described the timing for the endowed chair a ripe time for the exploration of the complex academic topic of non-religiosity linked to morality. Bueno said:
The U.S. is currently polarized in so many dimensions. Complex issues need to be addressed, and it’s important to talk about them and to have resources to analyze them carefully. … The university, as a research institution, should address these issues—seeking to understand their sources and why it’s so hard to settle them—in interesting, careful, rational and evidence-based ways.
Bueno continued to explain the position of Chakravartty as having an “impressive outreach ability” with the intention to and ability to take on discussions in an open manner in order for the comprehension of innately complicated issues to be readily available for anyone.
A professor of philosophy who was the chair of the department for 12 years, Harvey Siegel, noted on his first time of meeting the endowed chair donor, Louis Appignani, 15 years prior, where Appignani made it clear in a Miami Herald article that the primary purpose that drove the donor was to challenge “religion” and advocate for “atheism.”
Siegel said.
We tried to find some kind of way that our scholarly ambitions could meet his own ambitions — and after 15 years we found a way to do that — through the endowed chair ... He appreciates that the U cannot advocate for atheism, but he also appreciates that it’s of value to study the questions in their full historical and philosophical dimensions.
Appignani had explicit statements in support of some of the most influential people in the living atheist movement in the world today, including Dr. Richard Dawkins.
Appignani expounded:
Dawkins is probably the most influential educator-philosopher who has been expounding the cause of free thinking, questioning facts, and promoting critical thinking. … He met with students, went to classes, and gave a final lecture that filled up the stadium with over 4,000 — he really made a big impact.
Professor Chakravartty will be teaching on science and humanism in the Fall of 2018. He had his own statements to make to the public as well.
Chakravartty stated:
First and foremost, we’ll be looking at an important area of philosophy which concerns values—a number of issues exploring how the sciences and values intersect with and impact society ... It’s in the context of this relationship between science and society that I would like to engage the idea of humanism.
March 17, 2018
Irish Abortion Referendum 2018 – Irish Feminism's Final Frontier
Barry Gilheany with the first in a series of articles on the campaign for the Repeal of the 8th Amendment.
Recent articles in TPQ on the proposal to remove the Eighth Amendment or Article 40.3.3 designed to, in perpetuity, to forestall any attempt to introduce liberalising abortion legislation in the Republic of Ireland, from the Irish Constitution have condemned it as an attack on “national self-determination” and defends the anti-abortion firewall of Article 40.3.3 as “based on a particular vision of the common good, which places a high value on personal freedom, while limiting the deliberate ending of innocent human life” [1]
I aim in this piece to show that the Eighth Amendment does anything but protect national self-determination, the dignity of women or even unborn life. That in reality the removal of the Amendment and the promised accompanying legislation permitting elective abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy represents probably the final stage in the maturation of the Republic of Ireland as a sovereign and liberal democracy. Irony of ironies, the Republic could well end up with an abortion law aligned to the norm in Western Europe and one that is more liberal that that of the British Abortion Act of 1967 with its two doctor stipulation and where abortion is still criminalised under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (and certainly more liberal than that in Northern Ireland to where the 1967 Act was never extended and where abortion is a devolved matter for the moral majorities of the two tribes there. Truly Home Rule is no “longer Rome Rule!)
The proposed referendum this year (most likely at the end of May) to remove from Constitution of the Republic of Ireland the Eighth Amendment or Article 40.3.3 which bans abortion in the Republic and to replace it with a promise to introduce to introduce effective abortion-by-request in the first trimester (three month period) legislation may well represent the final denouement in the Republic's generation long political, legal and cultural conflict over abortion.
The draft heads of a Referendum Bill were passed at the weekly cabinet meeting on 20th February 2018 and a draft bill will decided at last week's Cabinet meeting where Minister of Health, Simon Harris, is presented a policy paper which will seek to repeal the second Irish statute (the first is the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861) dealing with abortion – the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, 2013 and replace it with new legislation.
The legislation will provide for terminations “without specific indications” (effectively abortion on demand) for up to 12 weeks or the first trimester of pregnancy. The legislation will also enable the provision of abortion pills in the first trimester in all medical settings, although it will be a GP-led service. In addition it is proposed that terminations will only be provided after 12 weeks where there is a “serious threat” to the life, physical health and mental health of the mother. In the case of the latter, the opinions of three medical professionals must be sought; where both health and life are at risk two must be consulted No gestational limits will be applied in these cases of in that of fatal foetal abnormality[2].
The proposed new law will decriminalise women who procure abortions but will impose criminal sanctions on medical professionals who carry out abortions outside this legislative framework.[3]
Thus Article 40.3.3 or the Eighth Amendment is to be entirely removed and replaced by a clause, the 36th Amendment, which stipulates that the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament) may legislate to regulate termination of pregnancy.
To counter the spectres of the abortion “industry” looking for prospective “customers” in the manner of Big Tobacco seeking out new markets for its toxic products amongst children in the developing world which the pro-life/anti-choice conjures up as being behind the “pro-abortion” lobby, I aim to show that the removal of the Eighth Amendment from Bunreacht na hEireann and the proposed legislation to replace it can represent a genuine Irish solution to a sui generis Irish problem. I draw upon the works of the Irish feminist legal scholars Mairead Enwright, Fiona de Londras from Birmingham Law School and Ruth Fletcher from Keele University Centre for Law, Ethics and Society to show how a model of abortion law change in the Republic of Ireland can properly enshrine women's bodily integrity, agency and autonomy while also accommodating societal interest in the value of unborn life.
The model for future abortion law in Ireland developed by Enwright et al from Birmingham Law School came out of their work as the group of legal experts for the Commission for Repeal of the Eighth Amendment established by Labour Women in late 2014 has been proposed by Labour Women. In addition to this group of legal experts, this Commission also comprised a political group, a medical group Its stated aim was to … examine the best legal and political strategies to accomplish:
(1) Repeal of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution in its entirety
(2) The introduction of detailed legislation providing for the circumstances in which abortion may legally take place; the Access to Abortion Bill, 2015
It should be noted that the following draft does not represent Labour Party policy whose Conference in February 2015 passed a motion proposing more limited changes. This model is designed with “women's lived experiences in mind”.[4]
The proposed model is guided by four principles:
First, that such a law would regulate abortion in Ireland by primary reference to the bodily integrity, welfare, agency, autonomy and self-determination of the pregnant woman while still recognising a public interest in preserving foetal life where possible and with the consent of the pregnant woman. Such legislation would differentiate in terms of time limit, for example, between abortions in differing circumstances in which abortion is permissible. Five are proposed: where there is a risk to health up to the end of the 12th week of pregnancy; where there is a risk of severe or disabling damage to health up to the end of the 24th week of pregnancy; where there is a risk to life, including suicide, no term limit. No term limits likewise in the cases of fatal foetal abnormality and emergency. In addition key Guiding Principles are inserted into the proposed law which would apply in the interpretation and application of the law which would reframe approach to abortion law[5]
These Guiding Principles would:
(1) Guarantee access to abortion services in accordance with the provisions of the Act
(2) Protect the rights of the pregnant woman to;
a. life;
b. freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment;
c. bodily integrity and autonomy;
d. self-determination, including the right to informed decision-making in relation to medical treatment;
e. private and family life, including the right to privacy
f. health, including the right of access to appropriate health-care in a safe and prompt fashion, and the right of access to healthcare information.
(3) Access to abortion services will not be hindered due to race, sex, religion, national or social origin, disability, HIV status, marital or family status, immigration status, sexual orientation, age or other social status.
(4) The maintenance of embryonic and foetal life is an important social function, which should be voluntary and consensual.
In addition, the Bill would reinforce the importance of consent to all medical treatment and decriminalise abortion.[6]
Second, in challenging the mainstream consensus, this new Irish abortion law would not (I) provide for a separate rape ground in order to obviate the requirement of any woman to prove rape or to participate in any criminal law process; (ii) would provide for a simple health ground applicable in early pregnancy removing any requirement to prove severe or disabling threat to health . It would also remove the “fatal foetal anomaly” in current legislation. In simplifying health indications thus, the group feel that they are reflecting current European and national human rights law.[7]
Third, the proposed law seeks to replace “pronatalist paternalism” in Irish medical practice with a “welfare orientation” by which the pregnant woman is seen as the patient and abortion as a medical practice and which would enable medics to pursue the course of treatment they believe is suitable for their primary patient (i.e. the pregnant woman) and facilitate a genuinely equal doctor-patient relationship.[8]
Fourth, the proposed law while ensuring that abortion is actually as widely available as possible, respects the 'deeply held convictions of members of the medical profession and of the general public' regarding the status of the unborn. Medics refusing to participate in abortion on the basis of a “good faith” objection would be allowed to exercise such conscientious objection ( except when there is an immediate risk to the life or severe and disabling damage to the health to the woman) providing they inform and maker alternative arrangements for the patient. However health-care institutions may not invoke such objections and a duty would be placed on the Minister of Health to ensure that maintenance of a “safe and timely” service while accommodating conscientious objectors. The proposed law would establish a Review Tribunal of mixed representation of medics, practising lawyers and “other people” which would hear objections to adverse decisions “within strict deadlines” so that the pregnant woman can make representations. Finally to ensure access to abortion services for women, the law would prohibit harassing or intimidating behaviour” outside premises where abortion services are provided and provide an obligation to provide full information to women on their entitlements under the Act.[9]
A possible model for reconciling the women's right to bodily integrity is given by Ruth Fletcher in evidence to the Oireachtas on the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill, 2013. She argues that the “best ethical argument for legal recognition of the 'unborn' from its earliest stages is that it will, subject to assistance from the pregnant woman, become a person in the future. Since the future personhood argument does not apply to foetuses with lethal abnormalities, they should be excluded from legal definitions of the 'unborn'.[10]
A second pillar of a compelling state or societal interest in the protection of unborn life which does not negate women's bodily integrity lies on the potential of the embryo/foetus to become a person, not on actual personhood. The moral status that derives from this potentiality cannot be superior to the moral status that derives from sentience; i.e. the actual capacity to feel pain or pleasure nor can it equivocate to the higher moral status which accompanies personhood and the capacities for reason, will and communication. Based on this balancing of the values that accrue from potential person and actual personhood, Fletcher makes the following recommendations: that the unborn should be defined so as to exclude those foetuses which have lethal abnormalities and will not have a future independent life and that the unborn should be defined to mean “the foetus following the earliest moment at which sentience is possible.[11]
Critiquing the narrow margins of the 'risk to life' ground for abortion in the 2013 legislation because of the supposed requirement under Article 40.3.3 to treat the life of the pregnant woman as the same as the life of the embryo ; Fletcher argues for a full evaluation of the pregnant woman's interests as well as those of the unborn. Foetuses are the bearers of biological life and future persons, but this kind of lifer cannot be equated with that of breathing, feeling and comprehending women. Thus a legal test should be: “It is an offence to carry out a medical procedure, in the course of which or as a result of which unborn human life is ended, where there is a real and substantial threat to the life of the woman, including to her life interests in mental and bodily integrity” (Fletcher, 2013).
Fletcher defends conscientious objection provisions subject to the conditions that they must apply to individuals rather than organisations and only in circumstances where alternative provision is readily available. Conscientious objection is not an absolute interest as it is constrained by the need to prevent harm to others, pregnant women in this scenario, Finally, if conscientious objection to the provision of abortion is legally acceptable then so is a 'conscientious objection' to the sustenance of an embryo/foetus within one's body. Where an informed conscience tells a woman that termination of her pregnancy is the best moral resolution to dilemmas that have arisen in the course of this pregnancy, then that conscience is entitled to respect, recognition and legal accommodation.[12]
Finally, criminalisation of women who seek abortions does not achieve the constitutional aim of protecting foetal life. It has failed to prevent the hundreds of thousands of abortions that Irish women have sought outside Irish jurisdiction since the insertion of Article 40.3.3 into the Irish Constitution will not prevent any more. Criminalisation in stigmatising those with unwanted pregnancies and disabling their healthcare providers has worsened immeasurably the physical and psychological experience of unwanted pregnancy. Rather than criminalising women who seek abortion, Irish legislation could vindicate unborn life by investing in pregnancy-related care and research into miscarriage. Thus the legislature should either repeal Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (what better assertion of Irish independence and sovereignty from Victorian British rule!), without replacing it with a new offence. Or if it is not willing to follow the path of decriminalisation, it should at minimum define the offence to exclude attempts to cease a pregnancy and reduce significantly the maximum 14 years incarceration penalty as it punishes a decision which gives effect to the legitimate moral choices of women and their healthcare providers.[13]
Abortion law, as it stands in the Irish Republic is, from the point of view of women, is is very formulaic, totally medicalised and almost completely negates women's health needs, decision-making capacities and lived experiences. I have outlined the elements of a progressive abortion law in Ireland (and indeed elsewhere) One that makes the woman, as a rights bearer with agency, autonomy and bodily integrity, at the centre of decision-making but also one that, while refuting personhood arguments for foetal rights, also engages with the case for a compelling societal interest in the value of foetal life based on its potentiality.
To those that believe that unborn law is sacrosanct from the moment of conception, I say that no one on the pro-choice side of abortion divides seeks (or should seek) to criminalise the holding of such a viewpoint in the manner that those of use who do not believe, based on similarly sincerely held ethical convictions, that absolute personhood begins at the moment of conceptions and that no one on the pro-choice seeks to negate the personal autonomy of those with pro-life convictions either in body or mind in the way that generations of Irish women, North and South, and those who have dissented from dominant anti-choice cultures North and South. Feminists and humanists are not deaf to arguments about the value of unborn life.
The question I would put to those who wish to retain the Eighth Amendment is : how would the privileging of unborn life in its purely biological sense have prevented the endangerment of unborn life from a thalidomide scandal or the effects of a Bhopal or Agent Orange? How does it prevent the foetus from exposure to noxious substances like alcohol, tobacco, hard drugs and workplace or other environmental poisons that its mother may be ingesting.
These questions are particularly compelling now that the Supreme Court has found that Article 40.3.3 has ruled that the only right that the right has is to be born; it appears to have no rights to protection from the sorts of harm listed above.
Repeal The Eighth Amendment! Up The Republic!
References
[1] Dr Anne McCloskey “Republicanism, Sovereignty and The Right to Life" The Pensive Quill 13th February 2018.
[2] Irish Times, 21st February 2018.
[3] '' ''
[4] Mairead Enright, Vicky Conway, Fiona de Londras, Mary Donnelly, Ruth Fletcher, Natalie McDonnell, Sheelagh McGuinness, Claire Murray, Sinead Ring & Sorcha ui Chonnachtaigh Abortion Law Reform in Ireland: A Model for Change Feminists@law Vol 5, No 1 pp.1-8 (2015)
[5] Enright et al: p.5
[6] '' '' p.4
[7] '' '' p.4
[8] '' '' p.4
[9] '' '' p.5
[10] Dr Ruth Fletcher Opening Statement to the Health Committee on the General Scheme of the Protection of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, 2013 pp.1-5 http://oirechtas.ie/parliament/media/committees/healthandchildren/Dr-Ruth Fletcher, - Keele University.pdf
[11] Fletcher: p.2
[12] Fletcher: p.4
[13] Fletcher: p.5
➽ Barry Gilheany is the author of a PhD thesis Post-Eighth Abortion Politics in the Republic of Ireland from Essex University, Department of Government. He is also the author of The Discursive Construction of Abortion in Georgina Waylen & Vicky Randall (Eds) Gender, The State and Politics Routledge, 1998. This is the first in a series of articles that he will be writing for TPQ in the course of the abortion referendum campaign in the Republic of Ireland. He is currently resident in Colchester, Essex.
Recent articles in TPQ on the proposal to remove the Eighth Amendment or Article 40.3.3 designed to, in perpetuity, to forestall any attempt to introduce liberalising abortion legislation in the Republic of Ireland, from the Irish Constitution have condemned it as an attack on “national self-determination” and defends the anti-abortion firewall of Article 40.3.3 as “based on a particular vision of the common good, which places a high value on personal freedom, while limiting the deliberate ending of innocent human life” [1]
I aim in this piece to show that the Eighth Amendment does anything but protect national self-determination, the dignity of women or even unborn life. That in reality the removal of the Amendment and the promised accompanying legislation permitting elective abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy represents probably the final stage in the maturation of the Republic of Ireland as a sovereign and liberal democracy. Irony of ironies, the Republic could well end up with an abortion law aligned to the norm in Western Europe and one that is more liberal that that of the British Abortion Act of 1967 with its two doctor stipulation and where abortion is still criminalised under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (and certainly more liberal than that in Northern Ireland to where the 1967 Act was never extended and where abortion is a devolved matter for the moral majorities of the two tribes there. Truly Home Rule is no “longer Rome Rule!)
The proposed referendum this year (most likely at the end of May) to remove from Constitution of the Republic of Ireland the Eighth Amendment or Article 40.3.3 which bans abortion in the Republic and to replace it with a promise to introduce to introduce effective abortion-by-request in the first trimester (three month period) legislation may well represent the final denouement in the Republic's generation long political, legal and cultural conflict over abortion.
The draft heads of a Referendum Bill were passed at the weekly cabinet meeting on 20th February 2018 and a draft bill will decided at last week's Cabinet meeting where Minister of Health, Simon Harris, is presented a policy paper which will seek to repeal the second Irish statute (the first is the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861) dealing with abortion – the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, 2013 and replace it with new legislation.
The legislation will provide for terminations “without specific indications” (effectively abortion on demand) for up to 12 weeks or the first trimester of pregnancy. The legislation will also enable the provision of abortion pills in the first trimester in all medical settings, although it will be a GP-led service. In addition it is proposed that terminations will only be provided after 12 weeks where there is a “serious threat” to the life, physical health and mental health of the mother. In the case of the latter, the opinions of three medical professionals must be sought; where both health and life are at risk two must be consulted No gestational limits will be applied in these cases of in that of fatal foetal abnormality[2].
The proposed new law will decriminalise women who procure abortions but will impose criminal sanctions on medical professionals who carry out abortions outside this legislative framework.[3]
Thus Article 40.3.3 or the Eighth Amendment is to be entirely removed and replaced by a clause, the 36th Amendment, which stipulates that the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament) may legislate to regulate termination of pregnancy.
To counter the spectres of the abortion “industry” looking for prospective “customers” in the manner of Big Tobacco seeking out new markets for its toxic products amongst children in the developing world which the pro-life/anti-choice conjures up as being behind the “pro-abortion” lobby, I aim to show that the removal of the Eighth Amendment from Bunreacht na hEireann and the proposed legislation to replace it can represent a genuine Irish solution to a sui generis Irish problem. I draw upon the works of the Irish feminist legal scholars Mairead Enwright, Fiona de Londras from Birmingham Law School and Ruth Fletcher from Keele University Centre for Law, Ethics and Society to show how a model of abortion law change in the Republic of Ireland can properly enshrine women's bodily integrity, agency and autonomy while also accommodating societal interest in the value of unborn life.
The model for future abortion law in Ireland developed by Enwright et al from Birmingham Law School came out of their work as the group of legal experts for the Commission for Repeal of the Eighth Amendment established by Labour Women in late 2014 has been proposed by Labour Women. In addition to this group of legal experts, this Commission also comprised a political group, a medical group Its stated aim was to … examine the best legal and political strategies to accomplish:
(1) Repeal of Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution in its entirety
(2) The introduction of detailed legislation providing for the circumstances in which abortion may legally take place; the Access to Abortion Bill, 2015
It should be noted that the following draft does not represent Labour Party policy whose Conference in February 2015 passed a motion proposing more limited changes. This model is designed with “women's lived experiences in mind”.[4]
The proposed model is guided by four principles:
First, that such a law would regulate abortion in Ireland by primary reference to the bodily integrity, welfare, agency, autonomy and self-determination of the pregnant woman while still recognising a public interest in preserving foetal life where possible and with the consent of the pregnant woman. Such legislation would differentiate in terms of time limit, for example, between abortions in differing circumstances in which abortion is permissible. Five are proposed: where there is a risk to health up to the end of the 12th week of pregnancy; where there is a risk of severe or disabling damage to health up to the end of the 24th week of pregnancy; where there is a risk to life, including suicide, no term limit. No term limits likewise in the cases of fatal foetal abnormality and emergency. In addition key Guiding Principles are inserted into the proposed law which would apply in the interpretation and application of the law which would reframe approach to abortion law[5]
These Guiding Principles would:
(1) Guarantee access to abortion services in accordance with the provisions of the Act
(2) Protect the rights of the pregnant woman to;
a. life;
b. freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment;
c. bodily integrity and autonomy;
d. self-determination, including the right to informed decision-making in relation to medical treatment;
e. private and family life, including the right to privacy
f. health, including the right of access to appropriate health-care in a safe and prompt fashion, and the right of access to healthcare information.
(3) Access to abortion services will not be hindered due to race, sex, religion, national or social origin, disability, HIV status, marital or family status, immigration status, sexual orientation, age or other social status.
(4) The maintenance of embryonic and foetal life is an important social function, which should be voluntary and consensual.
In addition, the Bill would reinforce the importance of consent to all medical treatment and decriminalise abortion.[6]
Second, in challenging the mainstream consensus, this new Irish abortion law would not (I) provide for a separate rape ground in order to obviate the requirement of any woman to prove rape or to participate in any criminal law process; (ii) would provide for a simple health ground applicable in early pregnancy removing any requirement to prove severe or disabling threat to health . It would also remove the “fatal foetal anomaly” in current legislation. In simplifying health indications thus, the group feel that they are reflecting current European and national human rights law.[7]
Third, the proposed law seeks to replace “pronatalist paternalism” in Irish medical practice with a “welfare orientation” by which the pregnant woman is seen as the patient and abortion as a medical practice and which would enable medics to pursue the course of treatment they believe is suitable for their primary patient (i.e. the pregnant woman) and facilitate a genuinely equal doctor-patient relationship.[8]
Fourth, the proposed law while ensuring that abortion is actually as widely available as possible, respects the 'deeply held convictions of members of the medical profession and of the general public' regarding the status of the unborn. Medics refusing to participate in abortion on the basis of a “good faith” objection would be allowed to exercise such conscientious objection ( except when there is an immediate risk to the life or severe and disabling damage to the health to the woman) providing they inform and maker alternative arrangements for the patient. However health-care institutions may not invoke such objections and a duty would be placed on the Minister of Health to ensure that maintenance of a “safe and timely” service while accommodating conscientious objectors. The proposed law would establish a Review Tribunal of mixed representation of medics, practising lawyers and “other people” which would hear objections to adverse decisions “within strict deadlines” so that the pregnant woman can make representations. Finally to ensure access to abortion services for women, the law would prohibit harassing or intimidating behaviour” outside premises where abortion services are provided and provide an obligation to provide full information to women on their entitlements under the Act.[9]
A possible model for reconciling the women's right to bodily integrity is given by Ruth Fletcher in evidence to the Oireachtas on the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill, 2013. She argues that the “best ethical argument for legal recognition of the 'unborn' from its earliest stages is that it will, subject to assistance from the pregnant woman, become a person in the future. Since the future personhood argument does not apply to foetuses with lethal abnormalities, they should be excluded from legal definitions of the 'unborn'.[10]
A second pillar of a compelling state or societal interest in the protection of unborn life which does not negate women's bodily integrity lies on the potential of the embryo/foetus to become a person, not on actual personhood. The moral status that derives from this potentiality cannot be superior to the moral status that derives from sentience; i.e. the actual capacity to feel pain or pleasure nor can it equivocate to the higher moral status which accompanies personhood and the capacities for reason, will and communication. Based on this balancing of the values that accrue from potential person and actual personhood, Fletcher makes the following recommendations: that the unborn should be defined so as to exclude those foetuses which have lethal abnormalities and will not have a future independent life and that the unborn should be defined to mean “the foetus following the earliest moment at which sentience is possible.[11]
Critiquing the narrow margins of the 'risk to life' ground for abortion in the 2013 legislation because of the supposed requirement under Article 40.3.3 to treat the life of the pregnant woman as the same as the life of the embryo ; Fletcher argues for a full evaluation of the pregnant woman's interests as well as those of the unborn. Foetuses are the bearers of biological life and future persons, but this kind of lifer cannot be equated with that of breathing, feeling and comprehending women. Thus a legal test should be: “It is an offence to carry out a medical procedure, in the course of which or as a result of which unborn human life is ended, where there is a real and substantial threat to the life of the woman, including to her life interests in mental and bodily integrity” (Fletcher, 2013).
Fletcher defends conscientious objection provisions subject to the conditions that they must apply to individuals rather than organisations and only in circumstances where alternative provision is readily available. Conscientious objection is not an absolute interest as it is constrained by the need to prevent harm to others, pregnant women in this scenario, Finally, if conscientious objection to the provision of abortion is legally acceptable then so is a 'conscientious objection' to the sustenance of an embryo/foetus within one's body. Where an informed conscience tells a woman that termination of her pregnancy is the best moral resolution to dilemmas that have arisen in the course of this pregnancy, then that conscience is entitled to respect, recognition and legal accommodation.[12]
Finally, criminalisation of women who seek abortions does not achieve the constitutional aim of protecting foetal life. It has failed to prevent the hundreds of thousands of abortions that Irish women have sought outside Irish jurisdiction since the insertion of Article 40.3.3 into the Irish Constitution will not prevent any more. Criminalisation in stigmatising those with unwanted pregnancies and disabling their healthcare providers has worsened immeasurably the physical and psychological experience of unwanted pregnancy. Rather than criminalising women who seek abortion, Irish legislation could vindicate unborn life by investing in pregnancy-related care and research into miscarriage. Thus the legislature should either repeal Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (what better assertion of Irish independence and sovereignty from Victorian British rule!), without replacing it with a new offence. Or if it is not willing to follow the path of decriminalisation, it should at minimum define the offence to exclude attempts to cease a pregnancy and reduce significantly the maximum 14 years incarceration penalty as it punishes a decision which gives effect to the legitimate moral choices of women and their healthcare providers.[13]
Abortion law, as it stands in the Irish Republic is, from the point of view of women, is is very formulaic, totally medicalised and almost completely negates women's health needs, decision-making capacities and lived experiences. I have outlined the elements of a progressive abortion law in Ireland (and indeed elsewhere) One that makes the woman, as a rights bearer with agency, autonomy and bodily integrity, at the centre of decision-making but also one that, while refuting personhood arguments for foetal rights, also engages with the case for a compelling societal interest in the value of foetal life based on its potentiality.
To those that believe that unborn law is sacrosanct from the moment of conception, I say that no one on the pro-choice side of abortion divides seeks (or should seek) to criminalise the holding of such a viewpoint in the manner that those of use who do not believe, based on similarly sincerely held ethical convictions, that absolute personhood begins at the moment of conceptions and that no one on the pro-choice seeks to negate the personal autonomy of those with pro-life convictions either in body or mind in the way that generations of Irish women, North and South, and those who have dissented from dominant anti-choice cultures North and South. Feminists and humanists are not deaf to arguments about the value of unborn life.
The question I would put to those who wish to retain the Eighth Amendment is : how would the privileging of unborn life in its purely biological sense have prevented the endangerment of unborn life from a thalidomide scandal or the effects of a Bhopal or Agent Orange? How does it prevent the foetus from exposure to noxious substances like alcohol, tobacco, hard drugs and workplace or other environmental poisons that its mother may be ingesting.
These questions are particularly compelling now that the Supreme Court has found that Article 40.3.3 has ruled that the only right that the right has is to be born; it appears to have no rights to protection from the sorts of harm listed above.
Repeal The Eighth Amendment! Up The Republic!
References
[1] Dr Anne McCloskey “Republicanism, Sovereignty and The Right to Life" The Pensive Quill 13th February 2018.
[2] Irish Times, 21st February 2018.
[3] '' ''
[4] Mairead Enright, Vicky Conway, Fiona de Londras, Mary Donnelly, Ruth Fletcher, Natalie McDonnell, Sheelagh McGuinness, Claire Murray, Sinead Ring & Sorcha ui Chonnachtaigh Abortion Law Reform in Ireland: A Model for Change Feminists@law Vol 5, No 1 pp.1-8 (2015)
[5] Enright et al: p.5
[6] '' '' p.4
[7] '' '' p.4
[8] '' '' p.4
[9] '' '' p.5
[10] Dr Ruth Fletcher Opening Statement to the Health Committee on the General Scheme of the Protection of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, 2013 pp.1-5 http://oirechtas.ie/parliament/media/committees/healthandchildren/Dr-Ruth Fletcher, - Keele University.pdf
[11] Fletcher: p.2
[12] Fletcher: p.4
[13] Fletcher: p.5
➽ Barry Gilheany is the author of a PhD thesis Post-Eighth Abortion Politics in the Republic of Ireland from Essex University, Department of Government. He is also the author of The Discursive Construction of Abortion in Georgina Waylen & Vicky Randall (Eds) Gender, The State and Politics Routledge, 1998. This is the first in a series of articles that he will be writing for TPQ in the course of the abortion referendum campaign in the Republic of Ireland. He is currently resident in Colchester, Essex.
Radio Free Eireann Broadcasting 17 March 2018
Martin Galvin
with details of this weekend's broadcast from
Radio Free Eireann.
Radio Free Eireann will broadcast today March 17.
Irish History Roundtable and New York St. Patrick's Day Parade historian John Ridge will discuss the evolution of the New York parade from a small religious procession to a world renowned display of Irish pride, achievement, culture and support for Irish freedom.
While Irish flags and "England Out of Ireland" banners are a feature of St. Patrick's Day Parades in New York, the Irish flag is banned from the parade in the overwhelmingly nationalist town of Newry.
Stephen Murney of Saoradh will give a live report on groups intending to carry the Irish flag.
Author,journalist and political commentator Anthony McIntyre will cover the latest political developments including the political fallout from the break-up of the Stormont talks and and meaning of the unionist retreat from an apparent agreement.
Happy St Patrick's Day!!!
John McDonagh and Martin Galvin co- host.
Radio Free Eireann is heard Saturdays at 12 Noon New York time on wbai 99.5 FM and wbai.org.
It can be heard at wbai.org in Ireland from 5pm to 6pm or anytime after the program concludes on wbai.org/archives.
Irish History Roundtable and New York St. Patrick's Day Parade historian John Ridge will discuss the evolution of the New York parade from a small religious procession to a world renowned display of Irish pride, achievement, culture and support for Irish freedom.
While Irish flags and "England Out of Ireland" banners are a feature of St. Patrick's Day Parades in New York, the Irish flag is banned from the parade in the overwhelmingly nationalist town of Newry.
Stephen Murney of Saoradh will give a live report on groups intending to carry the Irish flag.
Author,journalist and political commentator Anthony McIntyre will cover the latest political developments including the political fallout from the break-up of the Stormont talks and and meaning of the unionist retreat from an apparent agreement.
Happy St Patrick's Day!!!
John McDonagh and Martin Galvin co- host.
Radio Free Eireann is heard Saturdays at 12 Noon New York time on wbai 99.5 FM and wbai.org.
It can be heard at wbai.org in Ireland from 5pm to 6pm or anytime after the program concludes on wbai.org/archives.
March 16, 2018
Because There Is Nothing
More From the Uri Avnery Column on the controversy that has engulfed the Israeli criminal, Binyamin Netanyahu. The Flood of corruption affairs that is now engulfing the Netanyahu family and its assistants and servitors does not seem to diminish his popularity among those who call themselves "the People".
On the contrary, according to the opinion polls, the voters of the other nationalist parties are rushing to the rescue of "Bibi".
They believe that he is a great statesman, the savior of Israel, and are therefore ready to forgive and forget everything else. Huge bribes, generous gifts, everything.
Strange. Because my attitude is exactly the opposite. I am not ready to forgive "Bibi" anything for being a great statesman, because I think that he is a very minor statesman. Indeed, no statesman at all.
The Final judgment about Bibi's capabilities was passed by his father early in his career.
Benzion Netayahu, a history professor who was an expert on the Spanish inquisition, did not have a very high opinion of his second son. He much preferred the oldest son, Jonathan, who was killed in the Entebbe operation. This, by the way, may be the source of Bibi's deep complexes.
Politically, Benzion was the most extreme rightist there ever was. He despised Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the right-wing Zionists, as well as his pupil, Menachem Begin. For him, both were liberal weaklings.
Benzion, who felt that his talents were not appreciated in Israel and went to teach in the United States, where he brought up his sons, said about Binyamin: "He could make a good foreign secretary, but not a prime minister." Never was a more precise judgment made about Bibi.
Binyamin Netanyahu is indeed excellent foreign minister material. He speaks perfect (American) English, though without the literary depth of his predecessor, Abba Eban. About Eban, David Ben-Gurion famously remarked: "He can make beautiful speeches, but you must tell him what to say."
Bibi is a perfect representative. He knows how to behave with the great of this earth. He cuts a good figure at international conferences. He makes well-crafted speeches on important occasions, though he tends to use primitive gimmicks a Churchill would not touch.
A foreign minister functions, nowadays, as the traveling salesman of his country. Indeed. Bibi was once a traveling salesman for a furniture company. Since traveling has become so easy, foreign ministers fulfill most of the functions that in past centuries were reserved for ambassadors.
As his father so shrewdly observed, there is a huge difference between the duties of a foreign minister and those of a prime minister. The foreign minister implements policy. The prime minister determines policy.
The ideal prime minister is a man (or a woman) of vision. He knows what his country needs – not only today, but for generations to come. His vision embraces the entire needs of his country, of which foreign relations is only one aspect, and not necessarily the most important one. He sees the social, economic, cultural and military aspects of his vision.
Benzion Netanyahu knew that his son did not posses these capabilities. A good appearance is just not enough, especially for a leader of a country with such complicated problems, interior and exterior, as Israel.
When One thinks about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one remembers his saying "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Thinking of Winston Churchill, one remembers: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few."
Thinking about Bibi, what profound saying does one remember? Nothing but his comment about the many corruption cases in which he is involved: "There will be nothing because there is nothing."
Binyamin Netanyahu's main occupation, between criminal interrogations, is traveling abroad and meeting with the world's leaders. One week in Paris meeting President Macron, the next in Moscow meeting President Putin. In between, an African country or two.
What is achieved in these multiple meetings? Well, nothing to speak of.
That is very shrewd. It touches a deep nerve in Jewish consciousness.
For many generations, Jews were a helpless minority in many countries, West and East. They were entirely dependent on the graces of the local lord, count, Sultan. To remain in his good graces, a member of the Jewish community, generally the richest, took it upon himself to gratify the ruler, flatter him and bribe him. Such a person became the king of the ghetto, admired by his community.
As a phenomenon, Bibi is a successor of this tradition.
Nobody Loved Abba Eban. Even those who admired his extraordinary talents did not admire the man. He was considered un-Israeli, not a he-man as a typical Israeli man should be.
Bibi's public standing is quite different. As a former commando fighter he is as he-mannish as Israelis desire. He looks as an Israeli should look. No problem there.
But ask one of his admirers what Bibi has actually achieved in his 12 years as prime minister, and he will be at a loss to answer. David Ben-Gurion founded the state, Menachem Begin made peace with Egypt, Yitzhak Rabin made the Oslo agreement. But Bibi?
Yet at least half of Israel admires Bibi without bounds. They are ready to forgive him countless affairs of corruption – from receiving the most expensive Cuban cigars as gifts from multi-billionaires to outright bribes which may amount to many million dollars. So what?
The social composition of his camp is even odder. They are the masses of Oriental Jews, who feel despised, downtrodden and discriminated against in every respect. By whom? By the Ashkenazi upper classes, the "whites", the Left. Yet nobody could be more Ashkenazi upper-class than Bibi.
Nobody has yet found the key to this mystery.
So What is Netanyahu's "vision" for the future? How is Israel to survive in the next decades as a colonial power, surrounded by Arab and Muslim states which may one day unite against it? How is Israel to remain master of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, populated by the Palestinian people, not to mention East Jerusalem and the shrines holy to a billion and a half Muslims throughout the world?
It seems that Bibi's answer is "Don't look, just go on!" In his way of thinking, his solution is: no solution. Just continue what Israel is doing anyway: deny the Palestinians any national and even human rights, implant Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a steady but cautious pace, and otherwise maintain the status quo.
He is a cautions person, far from being an adventurer. Most of his admirers would like him to annex the West Bank outright, or at least large chunks of it. Bibi restrains them. What's the hurry?
But doing nothing is no real answer. In the end, Israel will have to decide: make peace with the Palestinian people (and the entire Arab and Muslim world), or annex all the occupied territories without conferring citizenship on the Arab population. Ergo: an official apartheid state, which may turn in the course of generations into an Arab-majority bi-national state, the nightmare of almost all Jewish Israelis.
There is, of course, another vision, which nobody mentions: waiting for an opportunity to implement another Naqba, expel the entire Palestinian people from Palestine. However, such an opportunity seems unlikely to present itself a second time.
Bibi seems unconcerned. He is a man of the status quo. But having no vision of his own means that consciously or unconsciously he holds in his heart the vision of his father: get the Arabs out. Take possession of the whole land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan (at least), as the Biblical Israelites once did.
What Will Bibi do in face of the corruption indictments closing in on him?
Hang on. Whatever happens. Indictment, trial, conviction, just hang on. If everything falls to pieces, democracy, the courts, law enforcement agencies – just hang on.
Not the course one would expect from a great statesman. But then, he is no statesman at all, great or small.
I repeat the suggestion I made last week: in due time have him confess, grant him an immediate pardon. Let him keep the loot, and – bye bye, Bibi.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
On the contrary, according to the opinion polls, the voters of the other nationalist parties are rushing to the rescue of "Bibi".
They believe that he is a great statesman, the savior of Israel, and are therefore ready to forgive and forget everything else. Huge bribes, generous gifts, everything.
Strange. Because my attitude is exactly the opposite. I am not ready to forgive "Bibi" anything for being a great statesman, because I think that he is a very minor statesman. Indeed, no statesman at all.
The Final judgment about Bibi's capabilities was passed by his father early in his career.
Benzion Netayahu, a history professor who was an expert on the Spanish inquisition, did not have a very high opinion of his second son. He much preferred the oldest son, Jonathan, who was killed in the Entebbe operation. This, by the way, may be the source of Bibi's deep complexes.
Politically, Benzion was the most extreme rightist there ever was. He despised Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the right-wing Zionists, as well as his pupil, Menachem Begin. For him, both were liberal weaklings.
Benzion, who felt that his talents were not appreciated in Israel and went to teach in the United States, where he brought up his sons, said about Binyamin: "He could make a good foreign secretary, but not a prime minister." Never was a more precise judgment made about Bibi.
Binyamin Netanyahu is indeed excellent foreign minister material. He speaks perfect (American) English, though without the literary depth of his predecessor, Abba Eban. About Eban, David Ben-Gurion famously remarked: "He can make beautiful speeches, but you must tell him what to say."
Bibi is a perfect representative. He knows how to behave with the great of this earth. He cuts a good figure at international conferences. He makes well-crafted speeches on important occasions, though he tends to use primitive gimmicks a Churchill would not touch.
A foreign minister functions, nowadays, as the traveling salesman of his country. Indeed. Bibi was once a traveling salesman for a furniture company. Since traveling has become so easy, foreign ministers fulfill most of the functions that in past centuries were reserved for ambassadors.
As his father so shrewdly observed, there is a huge difference between the duties of a foreign minister and those of a prime minister. The foreign minister implements policy. The prime minister determines policy.
The ideal prime minister is a man (or a woman) of vision. He knows what his country needs – not only today, but for generations to come. His vision embraces the entire needs of his country, of which foreign relations is only one aspect, and not necessarily the most important one. He sees the social, economic, cultural and military aspects of his vision.
Benzion Netanyahu knew that his son did not posses these capabilities. A good appearance is just not enough, especially for a leader of a country with such complicated problems, interior and exterior, as Israel.
When One thinks about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one remembers his saying "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Thinking of Winston Churchill, one remembers: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few."
Thinking about Bibi, what profound saying does one remember? Nothing but his comment about the many corruption cases in which he is involved: "There will be nothing because there is nothing."
Binyamin Netanyahu's main occupation, between criminal interrogations, is traveling abroad and meeting with the world's leaders. One week in Paris meeting President Macron, the next in Moscow meeting President Putin. In between, an African country or two.
What is achieved in these multiple meetings? Well, nothing to speak of.
That is very shrewd. It touches a deep nerve in Jewish consciousness.
For many generations, Jews were a helpless minority in many countries, West and East. They were entirely dependent on the graces of the local lord, count, Sultan. To remain in his good graces, a member of the Jewish community, generally the richest, took it upon himself to gratify the ruler, flatter him and bribe him. Such a person became the king of the ghetto, admired by his community.
As a phenomenon, Bibi is a successor of this tradition.
Nobody Loved Abba Eban. Even those who admired his extraordinary talents did not admire the man. He was considered un-Israeli, not a he-man as a typical Israeli man should be.
Bibi's public standing is quite different. As a former commando fighter he is as he-mannish as Israelis desire. He looks as an Israeli should look. No problem there.
But ask one of his admirers what Bibi has actually achieved in his 12 years as prime minister, and he will be at a loss to answer. David Ben-Gurion founded the state, Menachem Begin made peace with Egypt, Yitzhak Rabin made the Oslo agreement. But Bibi?
Yet at least half of Israel admires Bibi without bounds. They are ready to forgive him countless affairs of corruption – from receiving the most expensive Cuban cigars as gifts from multi-billionaires to outright bribes which may amount to many million dollars. So what?
The social composition of his camp is even odder. They are the masses of Oriental Jews, who feel despised, downtrodden and discriminated against in every respect. By whom? By the Ashkenazi upper classes, the "whites", the Left. Yet nobody could be more Ashkenazi upper-class than Bibi.
Nobody has yet found the key to this mystery.
So What is Netanyahu's "vision" for the future? How is Israel to survive in the next decades as a colonial power, surrounded by Arab and Muslim states which may one day unite against it? How is Israel to remain master of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, populated by the Palestinian people, not to mention East Jerusalem and the shrines holy to a billion and a half Muslims throughout the world?
It seems that Bibi's answer is "Don't look, just go on!" In his way of thinking, his solution is: no solution. Just continue what Israel is doing anyway: deny the Palestinians any national and even human rights, implant Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a steady but cautious pace, and otherwise maintain the status quo.
He is a cautions person, far from being an adventurer. Most of his admirers would like him to annex the West Bank outright, or at least large chunks of it. Bibi restrains them. What's the hurry?
But doing nothing is no real answer. In the end, Israel will have to decide: make peace with the Palestinian people (and the entire Arab and Muslim world), or annex all the occupied territories without conferring citizenship on the Arab population. Ergo: an official apartheid state, which may turn in the course of generations into an Arab-majority bi-national state, the nightmare of almost all Jewish Israelis.
There is, of course, another vision, which nobody mentions: waiting for an opportunity to implement another Naqba, expel the entire Palestinian people from Palestine. However, such an opportunity seems unlikely to present itself a second time.
Bibi seems unconcerned. He is a man of the status quo. But having no vision of his own means that consciously or unconsciously he holds in his heart the vision of his father: get the Arabs out. Take possession of the whole land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan (at least), as the Biblical Israelites once did.
What Will Bibi do in face of the corruption indictments closing in on him?
Hang on. Whatever happens. Indictment, trial, conviction, just hang on. If everything falls to pieces, democracy, the courts, law enforcement agencies – just hang on.
Not the course one would expect from a great statesman. But then, he is no statesman at all, great or small.
I repeat the suggestion I made last week: in due time have him confess, grant him an immediate pardon. Let him keep the loot, and – bye bye, Bibi.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
Retromania
Christopher Owens once again takes readers into the world of music with his latest book review.
Ever listen to the charts and think "I've heard this sound before?"
Ever look at the high street fashion and think "that was worn by kids 20 years ago?"
Ever watch a remake of a well remembered film from 30 years ago and think "what was the point in that?"
It's been a recurring theme in conversations over the years, and the conversations only seem to get louder as time goes on. So it's a perfect time to revisit this tome, first published in 2011.
Writing for Melody Maker from 1985 to 1996, Reynolds had a seat at a fascinating moment in music history: the various divisions in the underground were fading away and hybrids were being created (A.R Kane mixing free jazz and shoegaze, Public Enemy assimilating radical politics and cut up montages for music, The Young Gods integrating Kurt Weil and classic rock into their industrial sound) before the rave revolution took prominence.
Although I wouldn't agree with quite a few of his think pieces (he has a massive blind spot when it comes to metal, and he gets Killing Joke completely wrong in his landmark 2005 book Rip it Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 ), I can't deny his influence in music journalism and I tend to find his tastes coincide with mine. So it's no surprise he took on the job of deconstructing this somewhat pernicious period in pop culture.
In the introduction, he writes that:
And by the end, he's included movies, theatre, television, pornography, toys, interior design and fashion.
As a result, it's not a big surprise that the biggest focus for the book is music. While this is unsurprising (given Reynolds' background as a music journalist), there is another reason for this:
Tellingly, Reynolds reveals he's just as engulfed in this as much as the average person. While part of this is down to his job, he concedes that the allure of the past is just too much at times. This battle of dynamics becomes a prevalent theme throughout, but it also shows that the issues we're discussing haven't just appeared in the last ten years, they've been there since the mid 1960's.
Beginning by discussing the concept of nostalgia (coined in the 17th century by Johannes Hofer to describe homesickness that Swiss mercenaries would find themselves having on long tours of military duty) and its use by both conservatives and radicals to appeal to people sympathetic to their sentiments (the idea of a lost paradise for republicans, while unionists pine for the days where 'everyone knew their place').
However, by the 1970's, nostalgia had become intertwined with both pop culture and the consumer entertainment complex, so the programmes and toys we grew up with tap more into the collective psyche than memories of war or socio political events. In 1972, people asked "where were you when Kennedy was shot?" In 2018, people ask "did you have Adidas track bottoms with the buttons down the side?"
Remember, rock n roll is (give or take a year) sixty years old. So it's not a surprise that we now have museums, halls of fame, restraints and exhibitions dedicated to the genre. But since when did a genre that caused so much moral panic and commotion belong in a museum to be studied and dissected? Reynolds brings up a phrase conjured up by the much derided Jacques Derrida, 'archive fever', to categorise this. Nothing is insignificant and everything has to be documented and noted. And American network PBS are quoted in the book in such a way that chimes nicely with the above line:
Naturally, there had to be a fair bit of myth making and truth twisting in order for rock n roll to reach this "plateau."
In many ways, the ultimate (and perhaps extreme) example of this is Sha Na Na. Mastermind George Leonard was in despair at how the Vietnam War had divided students and wanted to remind them of something that united them: rock n roll. His mix of the anachronistic (the word 'greaser' was not in use in the 50's) and myth making (the students on campus would have looked upon 'greasers' as hoodlums and wouldn't have come from the same social background as them), combined with the music, struck a nerve with the Woodstock crowd.
As you can probably guess by what I've discussed so far, the book goes off in various tangents (such as discussing the similarities between Northern Soul dancers and Grateful Dead fans) but always manages to tie them back to the overall theme, and demonstrate that nostalgia and looking to the past for inspiration have always been a thing throughout the history of rock n roll.
What's also noticeable, but not surprising, is that the sounds and visions coming from the underground (where the innovation and forward thinking traditionally take place) are the ones who are openly borrowing/retooling the past for their own end:
This sense of deflation is furthered when Reynolds brings up the case of noted sci-fi author William Gibson. Noting that all of his books since 2000 have been set in the present, Gibson feels that:
The end result of the book is to realise that, yes there is a rich lineage of history that we can endlessly gorge on, but at some point we need to create a new future for ourselves. Pop may well eat itself, but what do you do when the whole thing is consumed? While Reynolds tries to end on an optimistic note by saying that he believes the future is still out there, the reader can be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
It's a book that will cause arguments, one that will make you delve into those particular period described and make you reappraise them, and it's a book you can dip in and out of. In that sense, it's an enthralling read. But it still leaves you questioning.
With the recent demise of the NME, and the curation of grime (a twenty year old genre), it seems we're still haven't settled the argument: are we stuck in the past, or (to paraphrase William Burroughs) are we cutting up the past to find the future?
Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past Faber & Faber ISBN-13: 978-0571232093
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
Ever listen to the charts and think "I've heard this sound before?"
Ever look at the high street fashion and think "that was worn by kids 20 years ago?"
Ever watch a remake of a well remembered film from 30 years ago and think "what was the point in that?"
It's been a recurring theme in conversations over the years, and the conversations only seem to get louder as time goes on. So it's a perfect time to revisit this tome, first published in 2011.
Writing for Melody Maker from 1985 to 1996, Reynolds had a seat at a fascinating moment in music history: the various divisions in the underground were fading away and hybrids were being created (A.R Kane mixing free jazz and shoegaze, Public Enemy assimilating radical politics and cut up montages for music, The Young Gods integrating Kurt Weil and classic rock into their industrial sound) before the rave revolution took prominence.
Although I wouldn't agree with quite a few of his think pieces (he has a massive blind spot when it comes to metal, and he gets Killing Joke completely wrong in his landmark 2005 book Rip it Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 ), I can't deny his influence in music journalism and I tend to find his tastes coincide with mine. So it's no surprise he took on the job of deconstructing this somewhat pernicious period in pop culture.
In the introduction, he writes that:
Once upon a time, pop's metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging-into-the-future feel of periods like the psychedelic sixties, the post-punk seventies, the hip-hop eighties and the rave nineties. The 2000s felt different... Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the 'Re' Decade. The 2000s were dominated by the 're-' prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments. Endless retrospection: every year brought a fresh spate of anniversaries, with their attendant glut of biographies, memoirs, rockumentaries, biopics and commemorative issues of magazines. Then there were the band reformations...
And by the end, he's included movies, theatre, television, pornography, toys, interior design and fashion.
As a result, it's not a big surprise that the biggest focus for the book is music. While this is unsurprising (given Reynolds' background as a music journalist), there is another reason for this:
... retro-consciousness nonetheless seems most chronically prevalent in music. That may well be because it somehow feels especially wrong there. Pop ought to be all about the present tense, surely? It is still considered the domain of the young, and young people aren't supposed to be nostalgic...
Tellingly, Reynolds reveals he's just as engulfed in this as much as the average person. While part of this is down to his job, he concedes that the allure of the past is just too much at times. This battle of dynamics becomes a prevalent theme throughout, but it also shows that the issues we're discussing haven't just appeared in the last ten years, they've been there since the mid 1960's.
Beginning by discussing the concept of nostalgia (coined in the 17th century by Johannes Hofer to describe homesickness that Swiss mercenaries would find themselves having on long tours of military duty) and its use by both conservatives and radicals to appeal to people sympathetic to their sentiments (the idea of a lost paradise for republicans, while unionists pine for the days where 'everyone knew their place').
However, by the 1970's, nostalgia had become intertwined with both pop culture and the consumer entertainment complex, so the programmes and toys we grew up with tap more into the collective psyche than memories of war or socio political events. In 1972, people asked "where were you when Kennedy was shot?" In 2018, people ask "did you have Adidas track bottoms with the buttons down the side?"
Remember, rock n roll is (give or take a year) sixty years old. So it's not a surprise that we now have museums, halls of fame, restraints and exhibitions dedicated to the genre. But since when did a genre that caused so much moral panic and commotion belong in a museum to be studied and dissected? Reynolds brings up a phrase conjured up by the much derided Jacques Derrida, 'archive fever', to categorise this. Nothing is insignificant and everything has to be documented and noted. And American network PBS are quoted in the book in such a way that chimes nicely with the above line:
we want to make sure we're able to continue being an archive of American culture ... This is the new classical music ... for our generation. It's rock'n'roll, and we want to make sure on public television it's preserved.
Naturally, there had to be a fair bit of myth making and truth twisting in order for rock n roll to reach this "plateau."
In many ways, the ultimate (and perhaps extreme) example of this is Sha Na Na. Mastermind George Leonard was in despair at how the Vietnam War had divided students and wanted to remind them of something that united them: rock n roll. His mix of the anachronistic (the word 'greaser' was not in use in the 50's) and myth making (the students on campus would have looked upon 'greasers' as hoodlums and wouldn't have come from the same social background as them), combined with the music, struck a nerve with the Woodstock crowd.
As you can probably guess by what I've discussed so far, the book goes off in various tangents (such as discussing the similarities between Northern Soul dancers and Grateful Dead fans) but always manages to tie them back to the overall theme, and demonstrate that nostalgia and looking to the past for inspiration have always been a thing throughout the history of rock n roll.
What's also noticeable, but not surprising, is that the sounds and visions coming from the underground (where the innovation and forward thinking traditionally take place) are the ones who are openly borrowing/retooling the past for their own end:
most left-field genres - drone/noise, underground hip hop, extreme metal, improv, etc. - seem to have settled into a steady-state condition, evolving at an incremental rate that is unspectacular at best and often barely perceptible.
This sense of deflation is furthered when Reynolds brings up the case of noted sci-fi author William Gibson. Noting that all of his books since 2000 have been set in the present, Gibson feels that:
...where his generation had made a cult of 'the capital-F Future', the youth of today 'inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory'.
The end result of the book is to realise that, yes there is a rich lineage of history that we can endlessly gorge on, but at some point we need to create a new future for ourselves. Pop may well eat itself, but what do you do when the whole thing is consumed? While Reynolds tries to end on an optimistic note by saying that he believes the future is still out there, the reader can be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
It's a book that will cause arguments, one that will make you delve into those particular period described and make you reappraise them, and it's a book you can dip in and out of. In that sense, it's an enthralling read. But it still leaves you questioning.
With the recent demise of the NME, and the curation of grime (a twenty year old genre), it seems we're still haven't settled the argument: are we stuck in the past, or (to paraphrase William Burroughs) are we cutting up the past to find the future?
Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past Faber & Faber ISBN-13: 978-0571232093
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
March 15, 2018
Floundering When Lying
Mick Hall insists that:
it never ceases to amaze me why Gerry Adams claims he was never a member of the IRA
Nor do I buy Gerry was never Green Booked. Why? because for most volunteers this is a big deal, as the now dead republican Martin Meehan once said to a US audience "it's like you graduating from your WestPoint." Why would Gerry Adams have thought any differently when from a very young age he was steeped in the history of the Irish Republican Movement.
In a recent interview on the Andrew Marr show Adams makes some worthwhile and interesting points about Brexit, a Corbyn led British government, and why Sinn Féin would not be taking their seats in the Westminster parliament even if the votes of SF MP's could help unseat the Tory government.
He comes across fine, fine that is until Marr asked him what has become the inevitable question about his membership of the IRA. Then being the man he is Gerry flounders, as he above all others knows to deny his IRA membership is untrue.
When he is uncomfortable or dare I say being uneconomical with the truth he screws up his eyes, and the important stuff he wishes to get across falls by the wayside, which negates the very reason why he is giving the interview.
Gerry retires as president of the Sinn Féin next week, he deserves his place in the sun having recognised before most the Provos' war with the British state to complete the Irish national revolution had run into the ground. Besides how many coffins of his friends and comrades can one man shoulder?
It's worth repeating Kieran Conway's words, a former head of the IRA's intelligence department and no friend of Adams, when he wrote in his book Southside Provisional:
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk, says Hegel. Only when a shape of life has grown old can it be understood. Perhaps Adams genius was to see it had grown old before the rest of us and to then to have taken things in the sole direction left.
Once he steps down I hope the next time Gerry is asked whether he was a member of the IRA by a journalist doing the British security services bidding, he tells the chump who is asking:
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
it never ceases to amaze me why Gerry Adams claims he was never a member of the IRA
Nor do I buy Gerry was never Green Booked. Why? because for most volunteers this is a big deal, as the now dead republican Martin Meehan once said to a US audience "it's like you graduating from your WestPoint." Why would Gerry Adams have thought any differently when from a very young age he was steeped in the history of the Irish Republican Movement.
In a recent interview on the Andrew Marr show Adams makes some worthwhile and interesting points about Brexit, a Corbyn led British government, and why Sinn Féin would not be taking their seats in the Westminster parliament even if the votes of SF MP's could help unseat the Tory government.
He comes across fine, fine that is until Marr asked him what has become the inevitable question about his membership of the IRA. Then being the man he is Gerry flounders, as he above all others knows to deny his IRA membership is untrue.
When he is uncomfortable or dare I say being uneconomical with the truth he screws up his eyes, and the important stuff he wishes to get across falls by the wayside, which negates the very reason why he is giving the interview.
Gerry retires as president of the Sinn Féin next week, he deserves his place in the sun having recognised before most the Provos' war with the British state to complete the Irish national revolution had run into the ground. Besides how many coffins of his friends and comrades can one man shoulder?
It's worth repeating Kieran Conway's words, a former head of the IRA's intelligence department and no friend of Adams, when he wrote in his book Southside Provisional:
In the end the IRA was unable to deliver the reunification of Ireland and it wasn't for the want of trying, yes Adams is a mendacious lying bastard. but what else could he be? For the movement could never have been taken in the direction he took without a bit of dissembling.
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk, says Hegel. Only when a shape of life has grown old can it be understood. Perhaps Adams genius was to see it had grown old before the rest of us and to then to have taken things in the sole direction left.
Once he steps down I hope the next time Gerry is asked whether he was a member of the IRA by a journalist doing the British security services bidding, he tells the chump who is asking:
No, I'm no longer going there, the question reeks of groundhog day and unless you have something sensible to ask me, I'm off to put on my slippers and smoke my pipe.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
Still Bigger Mountains Of Plastic On The Way
Gabriel Levy examines the plastic world we live in.
Thanks to their efforts, global output of ethylene and propylene, the two main raw materials for plastics production, is expected to rise by one-third in the next seven years.
Plastic waste in Mumbai, India. From the India Water Portal web site
I am all in favour of campaigns to cut down the insanely wasteful use of plastic bottles, bags and packaging. But let’s also make sure we understand the root of the problem: systems of production and consumption that aim only to raise output, and the mighty corporate interests that control them.
The trail from gas, oil and coal production, through petrochemicals plants, to manufacturing and trading companies thatgorge on needless mountains of plastic, has been well researched by campaigning NGOs, lawyers and journalists. Here is People & Nature’s handy guide:
Production: the US shale gas boom
Nearly all plastics are made from coal, oil or gas (see “Quick chemistry catch-up”, below). The recent boom in shale gas production has caused US gas supply to outstrip demand. That in turn has triggered a wave of investment in petrochemicals plants that make ethylene, the key raw material for several types of plastic.
In other words, it is the availability of cheap raw material – not any obvious human need – that is driving plastics production growth.
The US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report last month that three new ethylene plants (called “cracking” plants) had started up in 2017, and another six are due to come on line this year and next. The EIA forecasts that US consumption of ethane, the intermediate product from which ethylene is made, will in 2019 be one-third higher than in 2017 (1.6 million barrels per day (bpd), up from 1.2 million bpd), and that exports of ethane to be processed elsewhere will rise by 70%, to 310,000 bpd, by 2019.
The EIA sees extra ethane consumption as the most significant result of rising US shale gas production. More extra ethane will be consumed in the US than all other hydrocarbons put together, its analysts think.
On top of those ethylene crackers already being built, a huge queue of 264 new petrochemicals investments – about $164 billion worth – are underway or planned, according to the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group. That announcement was made the year before last, and more than half of those (55%) were only at the planning stage – and, thank goodness, facing strong public opposition in many cases. Nevertheless, 40% were completed or underway.
There’s a survey of fracking’s role in driving plastics production by Food and Water Watch here. And a report on the petrochemicals projects by the Centre for International Environment Law (CIEL) highlighted:
■ An agreement between ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, to build 11 processing plants – including a $10 billion ethane cracker, which will be the biggest in the world – in Portland, Texas. The plan is meeting community resistance.
■ A plan by Total to build a new ethane cracker and a new polyethylene plant in Texas, in partnership with Borealis and Nova.
■ Six new cracking facilities proposed in North Dakota, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
From the US Energy Information Administration web site
European petrochemicals companies are at a disadvantage against their American competitors, who have cheap gas, and their Chinese competitors, who have cheap coal. But INEOS is planning to
expand its production of ethylene and propylene anyway. The new ethylene output will be added to its plants at Grangemouth, Scotland, and Rafnes, Norway, and a new plant at Antwerp, Belgium will produce propylene.
In Scotland, INEOS has started a legal challenge against the government’s ban on fracking – and is being staunchly opposed, e.g. by local groups affiliated to Frack Off. For convincing arguments against INEOS’s plans, see the Food and Water Europe blog.
Production: plastic from Chinese coal and Middle East oil
East Asia overtook Europe as the largest plastics producing region in the mid 2000s – and China accounts for most of that production. China expects to increase its propylene output by 6.9% each year up to 2025.
China, which has plenty of cheap coal, is developing processes to get the raw material for plastics production out of it (see “Quick chemistry catch-up” below). CIEL’s excellent report explains that China’s coal-to-olefins (i.e. plastics feedstocks) capacity grew more than seven times over, to 7.92 million tonnes per year, between 2011 and 2015.
These investments “clash with China’s expressed environmental goals and its shared planetary interest in a safe climate, as coal-to-olefins production is massively carbon intensive”, CIEL points out.
China is also investing in more traditional processes for producing ethylene and propylene from crude oil, with output expected to be 90% higher in 2030 than it was in 2015.
The growth of US and Chinese petrochemicals capacity follows on the heels of a period of rapid expansion of the industry in the Middle East, between about 2008 and 2016. One mammoth project – Sadara Chemical Company, a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Saudi Aramco – is still under construction in Saudi Arabia. It will produce 3 million tonnes per year of ethylene when it’s built. Many other plants that have gone up in the last decade are already in operation across the region.
Consumption: it’s all about the supply chains
Public anger about the wasteful use of plastic tends to focus on the stuff we can see: bottles, carrier bags and seemingly endless quantities of wrapping. In reality, that’s a significant but still minor part of the whole picture. Much bigger quantities of plastic are used for wrapping and transporting goods before they even get to the shops. About twice as much plastic is used in these pre-shop supply chains than by people who buy stuff, according to the best estimates, i.e.:
■ A report commisioned in 2014 by the United Nations Environment Programme, Valuing Plastic, said that, in the consumer goods industry, the amount of plastic by weight used in packaging was about the same as the amount actually contained in the products consumer goods, and about half of what was used in the supply chain.
(To quote the report exactly: “Overall, the global weighted average of plastic-in-packaging used in the consumer goods industry is 2 tonnes per $1m revenue; of plastic-in-product 2 tonnes per $1m revenue; and of plastic-in-supply-chain 4 tonnes per $1m revenue” (page 27). There is plenty wrong with the report, which is based on the idea of assigning a monetary value (“natural capital”) to the ecological impact of economic activity. I think that’s a really bad approach. But this particular comparison holds good.)
■ An exhaustive research project by a team at the University of Cambridge estimated that, in the UK, 10-20 kg of plastic packaging per head comes into the home, but that 30 kg of plastic packaging per person is used to get goods from one factory to another, or from factories to shops. Twice as much, on average. In Sustainable Materials With Eyes Wide Open, a publication aimed at explaining the research to the public, the team wrote: “This industrial packaging is hidden from our consumer eyes.” Unlike consumer packaging, it exists solely to protect good in transit, and is an excellent target for “life extension for re-use” (pages 310-311).
The people who control the plastics industry respond to such points by funding reports that stress how useful plastics can be. One such report, published in 2016 by the American Chemistry Council, argued that replacing plastics in all applications with other materials would produce even more negative environmental impact. The logic is obviously twisted.
Humanity is collectively clever enough to find ways to do things that do not ruin the world we live in. The starting point has to be to find those ways, not to compare bad with worse. In the case of plastics, a complete re-working of supply-chain packaging might be one place to start. Simply using less stuff, rather than replacing one type of stuff with another, is worth looking at too.
Waste, waste, waste: the failure of recycling
Only 9% of all the plastic ever produced was recycled, an international team of university-based researchers recently concluded from a massive research project. Another 12% was incinerated, and 79% “accumulated in land-fills or the natural environment”. (Their article, unlike so many these days, is free to download here. Good for them!)
Cows grazing in (mostly plastic) rubbish, Delhi, India. Photo by Monika
The disastrous failure of recycling is also a central theme of a well-researched report by the Ellen Macarthur foundation, The New Plastics Economy.
The excess of plastic waste in the oceans, highlighted by David Attenborough and his team in the Blue Planet II series, has been quantified by scientific research. About 70% of all waste dumped in the oceans is plastic. Marcus Eriksen and a team at the Five Gyres Institute in California, USA, estimated that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing more than 260,000 tonnes, are floating at sea. Another team, headed by Jenna Jambeck at the University of Georgia, USA, reckoned that the quantity of plastic that has sunk into the oceans is 10-30 times as heavy as that floating pile of garbage. More recently, researchers have studied the effects of plastic microparticles, invisible to the naked eye, that are embedded in sea plants and animals and, increasingly, in food chains.
Aaaaargh!! What can we do?
I don’t believe in putting simple “answers” to difficult problems in my blog posts. The conclusion from the above is that the surge of plastics production in recent decades is a striking example of capitalism doing what it does: expanding production and creating markets, oblivious both to the human suffering and the damage to our natural surroundings it causes. The upturn in plastics production expected in the next few years has not been caused by any change in consumers’ behaviour, but in the sudden availability of cheap gas (in the USA) and coal (in China). Capitalism doing what it does.
As for resisting this insanity, I suppose that, for one thing, we (by which I mean, social and labour movements who oppose capitalism and the havoc it causes between humanity and nature) should find ways of putting our ideas across to people all around us who can see what’s going on, but don’t know what to do about it.
For example, here in the UK, it has been encouraging to see the public outrage about plastic waste in the oceans, triggered by the frightful scenes broadcast in the Blue Planet II series. Yes, people are human: when we are reminded e.g. that albatrosses, our fellow creatures, are unwittingly feeding plastic to their young, or that other sea creatures are being dragged to a painful death by webs of plastic garbage, it makes us angry.
In the labour movement, we need to combat simplistic productivist dogma (the assumption that increased production of everything, rising economic output, etc, is necessarily good for us) and refuse the false choice of jobs-vs-a-livable-planet. Socialism is surely a view of the future that envisages us all living productively and creatively, and without trashing the world around us. It’s doable.
Everywhere, we need to combat the cynical protection of corporate interests inherent in consumer campaigns. Sure, restaurants could stop using plastic straws. But that is no substitute for questioning the logic of the logistics industry, where much greater quantities of plastic is used and wasted.
Quick chemistry catch-up
There are five “standard plastics” that make up about 85% of the total consumed: polyethylene (32%), polypropylene (23%), polyvinyl chloride or PVC (16%), polystyrene (7%) and polyethylene terephthalate or PET (7%).
Polypropylene is made from propylene, and the other four are made from ethylene. Both ethylene and propylene are hydrocarbons, produced by “cracking” (a conversion process) either from natural gas liquids (i.e. condensate and other liquid hydrocarbons that come out of the ground together with natural gas), or from naphtha (an oil-based liquid produced in crude oil refining).
It is also possible to make plastics from coal derivatives, and China – which has plenty of coal but less oil and gas – is investing heavily in technology that makes propylene from methanol (a hydrocarbon that can be produced from coal) or gas oil (a product of oil refining). Technologies such as methanol-to-propylene are collectively called coal-to-olefins (olefins is the chemical term for a group of hydrocarbons including ethylene, propylene and butadiene).
Sources: a CIEL report, the American Chemistry Council, and the EIA.
Alisher Usmanov. Photo from kremlin.ru
And the last word on this goes to …
… Alisher Usmanov, the billionaire part-owner of Arsenal Football Club. Usmanov, who now controls some of Russia’s largest steel-making, media and internet companies, claimed in an interview that he made his initial fortune by manufacturing plastic bags. The Soviet Union, until its collapse in 1991, had been largely free of western-style consumerism. People carried textile or string bags in their pockets in case they passed a shop or kiosk selling stuff they needed. But in the late 1980s, as manifestations of consumer capitalism began to appear on the streets of Soviet cities, former convict Usmanov – according to his own account – was “holed up with a broken leg in a hotel […], and had as a room-mate an engineer for a petrochemicals company. Usmanov read a book the man left behind, and discovered that with one tonne of polymer he could make 30,000 to 36,000 plastic bags. That tonne cost 437 rubles; a bag typically retailed for a ruble. The economics were irresistible. Usmanov borrowed an unspecified amount of money to make use of a factory (still ‘Soviet property’, he says) at night. Soon he was undercutting rivals by selling bags for 60 kopecks.” The point of the story is that cheap raw materials, and the profit motive, produced huge quantities of plastic where there had been none before. The same thing is happening now, on a much bigger scale.
■ Gabriel Levy blogs @ People and Nature.
Thanks to their efforts, global output of ethylene and propylene, the two main raw materials for plastics production, is expected to rise by one-third in the next seven years.
Plastic waste in Mumbai, India. From the India Water Portal web site I am all in favour of campaigns to cut down the insanely wasteful use of plastic bottles, bags and packaging. But let’s also make sure we understand the root of the problem: systems of production and consumption that aim only to raise output, and the mighty corporate interests that control them.
The trail from gas, oil and coal production, through petrochemicals plants, to manufacturing and trading companies thatgorge on needless mountains of plastic, has been well researched by campaigning NGOs, lawyers and journalists. Here is People & Nature’s handy guide:
Production: the US shale gas boom
Nearly all plastics are made from coal, oil or gas (see “Quick chemistry catch-up”, below). The recent boom in shale gas production has caused US gas supply to outstrip demand. That in turn has triggered a wave of investment in petrochemicals plants that make ethylene, the key raw material for several types of plastic.
In other words, it is the availability of cheap raw material – not any obvious human need – that is driving plastics production growth.
The US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report last month that three new ethylene plants (called “cracking” plants) had started up in 2017, and another six are due to come on line this year and next. The EIA forecasts that US consumption of ethane, the intermediate product from which ethylene is made, will in 2019 be one-third higher than in 2017 (1.6 million barrels per day (bpd), up from 1.2 million bpd), and that exports of ethane to be processed elsewhere will rise by 70%, to 310,000 bpd, by 2019.
The EIA sees extra ethane consumption as the most significant result of rising US shale gas production. More extra ethane will be consumed in the US than all other hydrocarbons put together, its analysts think.
On top of those ethylene crackers already being built, a huge queue of 264 new petrochemicals investments – about $164 billion worth – are underway or planned, according to the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group. That announcement was made the year before last, and more than half of those (55%) were only at the planning stage – and, thank goodness, facing strong public opposition in many cases. Nevertheless, 40% were completed or underway.
There’s a survey of fracking’s role in driving plastics production by Food and Water Watch here. And a report on the petrochemicals projects by the Centre for International Environment Law (CIEL) highlighted:
■ An agreement between ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, to build 11 processing plants – including a $10 billion ethane cracker, which will be the biggest in the world – in Portland, Texas. The plan is meeting community resistance.
■ A plan by Total to build a new ethane cracker and a new polyethylene plant in Texas, in partnership with Borealis and Nova.
■ Six new cracking facilities proposed in North Dakota, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
From the US Energy Information Administration web site European petrochemicals companies are at a disadvantage against their American competitors, who have cheap gas, and their Chinese competitors, who have cheap coal. But INEOS is planning to
expand its production of ethylene and propylene anyway. The new ethylene output will be added to its plants at Grangemouth, Scotland, and Rafnes, Norway, and a new plant at Antwerp, Belgium will produce propylene.
In Scotland, INEOS has started a legal challenge against the government’s ban on fracking – and is being staunchly opposed, e.g. by local groups affiliated to Frack Off. For convincing arguments against INEOS’s plans, see the Food and Water Europe blog.
Production: plastic from Chinese coal and Middle East oil
East Asia overtook Europe as the largest plastics producing region in the mid 2000s – and China accounts for most of that production. China expects to increase its propylene output by 6.9% each year up to 2025.
China, which has plenty of cheap coal, is developing processes to get the raw material for plastics production out of it (see “Quick chemistry catch-up” below). CIEL’s excellent report explains that China’s coal-to-olefins (i.e. plastics feedstocks) capacity grew more than seven times over, to 7.92 million tonnes per year, between 2011 and 2015.
These investments “clash with China’s expressed environmental goals and its shared planetary interest in a safe climate, as coal-to-olefins production is massively carbon intensive”, CIEL points out.
China is also investing in more traditional processes for producing ethylene and propylene from crude oil, with output expected to be 90% higher in 2030 than it was in 2015.
The growth of US and Chinese petrochemicals capacity follows on the heels of a period of rapid expansion of the industry in the Middle East, between about 2008 and 2016. One mammoth project – Sadara Chemical Company, a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Saudi Aramco – is still under construction in Saudi Arabia. It will produce 3 million tonnes per year of ethylene when it’s built. Many other plants that have gone up in the last decade are already in operation across the region.
Consumption: it’s all about the supply chains
Public anger about the wasteful use of plastic tends to focus on the stuff we can see: bottles, carrier bags and seemingly endless quantities of wrapping. In reality, that’s a significant but still minor part of the whole picture. Much bigger quantities of plastic are used for wrapping and transporting goods before they even get to the shops. About twice as much plastic is used in these pre-shop supply chains than by people who buy stuff, according to the best estimates, i.e.:
■ A report commisioned in 2014 by the United Nations Environment Programme, Valuing Plastic, said that, in the consumer goods industry, the amount of plastic by weight used in packaging was about the same as the amount actually contained in the products consumer goods, and about half of what was used in the supply chain.
(To quote the report exactly: “Overall, the global weighted average of plastic-in-packaging used in the consumer goods industry is 2 tonnes per $1m revenue; of plastic-in-product 2 tonnes per $1m revenue; and of plastic-in-supply-chain 4 tonnes per $1m revenue” (page 27). There is plenty wrong with the report, which is based on the idea of assigning a monetary value (“natural capital”) to the ecological impact of economic activity. I think that’s a really bad approach. But this particular comparison holds good.)
■ An exhaustive research project by a team at the University of Cambridge estimated that, in the UK, 10-20 kg of plastic packaging per head comes into the home, but that 30 kg of plastic packaging per person is used to get goods from one factory to another, or from factories to shops. Twice as much, on average. In Sustainable Materials With Eyes Wide Open, a publication aimed at explaining the research to the public, the team wrote: “This industrial packaging is hidden from our consumer eyes.” Unlike consumer packaging, it exists solely to protect good in transit, and is an excellent target for “life extension for re-use” (pages 310-311).
The people who control the plastics industry respond to such points by funding reports that stress how useful plastics can be. One such report, published in 2016 by the American Chemistry Council, argued that replacing plastics in all applications with other materials would produce even more negative environmental impact. The logic is obviously twisted.
Humanity is collectively clever enough to find ways to do things that do not ruin the world we live in. The starting point has to be to find those ways, not to compare bad with worse. In the case of plastics, a complete re-working of supply-chain packaging might be one place to start. Simply using less stuff, rather than replacing one type of stuff with another, is worth looking at too.
Waste, waste, waste: the failure of recycling
Only 9% of all the plastic ever produced was recycled, an international team of university-based researchers recently concluded from a massive research project. Another 12% was incinerated, and 79% “accumulated in land-fills or the natural environment”. (Their article, unlike so many these days, is free to download here. Good for them!)
Cows grazing in (mostly plastic) rubbish, Delhi, India. Photo by Monika The disastrous failure of recycling is also a central theme of a well-researched report by the Ellen Macarthur foundation, The New Plastics Economy.
More than 40 years after the launch of the first universal recycling symbol, only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling. When additionalvalue losses in sorting and reprocessing are factored in, only 5% of material value is retained for a subsequent use. […] The recycling rate for plastics in general is even lower than for plastic packaging, and both are far below the global recycling rates for paper (58%) and iron and steel (70-90%). In addition, plastic packaging is almost exclusively single-use, especially in business-to-consumer applications (page 17).
The excess of plastic waste in the oceans, highlighted by David Attenborough and his team in the Blue Planet II series, has been quantified by scientific research. About 70% of all waste dumped in the oceans is plastic. Marcus Eriksen and a team at the Five Gyres Institute in California, USA, estimated that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing more than 260,000 tonnes, are floating at sea. Another team, headed by Jenna Jambeck at the University of Georgia, USA, reckoned that the quantity of plastic that has sunk into the oceans is 10-30 times as heavy as that floating pile of garbage. More recently, researchers have studied the effects of plastic microparticles, invisible to the naked eye, that are embedded in sea plants and animals and, increasingly, in food chains.
Aaaaargh!! What can we do?
I don’t believe in putting simple “answers” to difficult problems in my blog posts. The conclusion from the above is that the surge of plastics production in recent decades is a striking example of capitalism doing what it does: expanding production and creating markets, oblivious both to the human suffering and the damage to our natural surroundings it causes. The upturn in plastics production expected in the next few years has not been caused by any change in consumers’ behaviour, but in the sudden availability of cheap gas (in the USA) and coal (in China). Capitalism doing what it does.
As for resisting this insanity, I suppose that, for one thing, we (by which I mean, social and labour movements who oppose capitalism and the havoc it causes between humanity and nature) should find ways of putting our ideas across to people all around us who can see what’s going on, but don’t know what to do about it.
For example, here in the UK, it has been encouraging to see the public outrage about plastic waste in the oceans, triggered by the frightful scenes broadcast in the Blue Planet II series. Yes, people are human: when we are reminded e.g. that albatrosses, our fellow creatures, are unwittingly feeding plastic to their young, or that other sea creatures are being dragged to a painful death by webs of plastic garbage, it makes us angry.
In the labour movement, we need to combat simplistic productivist dogma (the assumption that increased production of everything, rising economic output, etc, is necessarily good for us) and refuse the false choice of jobs-vs-a-livable-planet. Socialism is surely a view of the future that envisages us all living productively and creatively, and without trashing the world around us. It’s doable.
Everywhere, we need to combat the cynical protection of corporate interests inherent in consumer campaigns. Sure, restaurants could stop using plastic straws. But that is no substitute for questioning the logic of the logistics industry, where much greater quantities of plastic is used and wasted.
Quick chemistry catch-up
There are five “standard plastics” that make up about 85% of the total consumed: polyethylene (32%), polypropylene (23%), polyvinyl chloride or PVC (16%), polystyrene (7%) and polyethylene terephthalate or PET (7%).
Polypropylene is made from propylene, and the other four are made from ethylene. Both ethylene and propylene are hydrocarbons, produced by “cracking” (a conversion process) either from natural gas liquids (i.e. condensate and other liquid hydrocarbons that come out of the ground together with natural gas), or from naphtha (an oil-based liquid produced in crude oil refining).
It is also possible to make plastics from coal derivatives, and China – which has plenty of coal but less oil and gas – is investing heavily in technology that makes propylene from methanol (a hydrocarbon that can be produced from coal) or gas oil (a product of oil refining). Technologies such as methanol-to-propylene are collectively called coal-to-olefins (olefins is the chemical term for a group of hydrocarbons including ethylene, propylene and butadiene).
Sources: a CIEL report, the American Chemistry Council, and the EIA.
Alisher Usmanov. Photo from kremlin.ru And the last word on this goes to …
… Alisher Usmanov, the billionaire part-owner of Arsenal Football Club. Usmanov, who now controls some of Russia’s largest steel-making, media and internet companies, claimed in an interview that he made his initial fortune by manufacturing plastic bags. The Soviet Union, until its collapse in 1991, had been largely free of western-style consumerism. People carried textile or string bags in their pockets in case they passed a shop or kiosk selling stuff they needed. But in the late 1980s, as manifestations of consumer capitalism began to appear on the streets of Soviet cities, former convict Usmanov – according to his own account – was “holed up with a broken leg in a hotel […], and had as a room-mate an engineer for a petrochemicals company. Usmanov read a book the man left behind, and discovered that with one tonne of polymer he could make 30,000 to 36,000 plastic bags. That tonne cost 437 rubles; a bag typically retailed for a ruble. The economics were irresistible. Usmanov borrowed an unspecified amount of money to make use of a factory (still ‘Soviet property’, he says) at night. Soon he was undercutting rivals by selling bags for 60 kopecks.” The point of the story is that cheap raw materials, and the profit motive, produced huge quantities of plastic where there had been none before. The same thing is happening now, on a much bigger scale.
■ Gabriel Levy blogs @ People and Nature.
March 14, 2018
Go in Peace!
The Uri Avnery Column discusses the scandal ridden Binyamin Netanyahu.I Have a confession to make: I don't hate Binyamin Netanyahu. I don't hate Sara'le either.
I generally don't hate people. With the sole exception of people who have betrayed the trust I put in them and tried to stick a knife in my back. Not more than three or four in all my life. I am not going to name them.
I have not met Netanyahu on a private basis more than two or three times.
Once, he introduced me to his second wife in the Knesset corridor. She seemed to me a nice young woman.
The second time we met at a photographic exhibition, in which there was a photo of me wearing a pilot's helmet. (Don't know how and why).
"You look like Errol Flynn," he told me. I had never seen an Errol Flynn movie, but took it as a compliment.
We had, of course, many arguments in the Knesset, but that doesn't count.
Therefore, if I want to remove Netanyahu from the government, and as soon as possible, it is not because of any personal feelings. I just believe that he is a disaster for Israel.
The endless cases of bribery that have surfaced – and continue to surface, like submarines – necessitate his removal at once. And we have not yet even reached the affair of the German-built submarines, which promises many new revelations. As a former editor of a news-magazine that specialized in investigations of corruption affairs, I can smell it.
A lot of people would enjoy seeing "Bibi" in prison. I would not. If it were up to me, the President of State and the Attorney General would offer him a Nixon-style deal: resign immediately and be pardoned five minutes later. You and your wife. No case, no trials. Go home and enjoy life.
There is no financial problem. Netanyahu is a rich man, with a generous pension as a former Prime Minister, with several luxury apartments, quite apart from the huge bribes he seems to have pocketed along the way.
Also, every publisher in the world would gladly pay a big advance for his memoirs.
So there is no reason to pity him.
Trouble Is, who will take his place?
The empty Knesset seat will be occupied by an anonymous female lawyer, who was put on the party's candidate list on the spot reserved for "new female candidate". But that is not really important.
The important question is: who will become Prime Minister?
Netanyahu's resignation would not automatically mean the dissolution of the present Knesset. If another Knesset member can put together a majority in the present Knesset, he (or she) will be the next Prime Minister. Only a Likud member stands a chance.
But is there any likely candidate? I doubt it. Like many strong but insecure leaders, Netanyahu has not groomed a successor. On the contrary, he has driven away all possible candidates.
The present Likud leadership and the entire gallery of the present government ministers of the Likud and its allies consist of nonentities. Not one of them I could really imagine as the man(or woman) responsible for the future of Israel. God forbid (whether He exists or not).
If No One succeeds in setting up a new government in the present Knesset, a new Knesset must be elected.
Can new elections produce a different majority? Possible, but not likely.
In a normal country, after the almost incredible series of corruption affairs, the opposition would assume power, and one of its leaders would become Prime Minister. Simple.
But Israel is not a normal country. There is a profound split between left and Right, with nothing in the middle. For large blocks of voters to move from Right to Left is almost impossible. Neither is there agreement on the question of what is the proper behavior for a Prime Minister.
A professor once told me: "A British Prime Minister who fills all senior government positions with relatives would be considered corrupt. An Egyptian leader who does not do so would be considered egoistic. What, he has so much luck and does not share it with his family?"
It seems that the more evidence about Netanyahu's corruption turns up, the more fiercely his party members support him. It's all a smear campaign of the evil Left! It's all fake news! The police is in cahoots with the treasonous Ashkenazi Labor party (in spite of the fact that the police chief, who was personally picked by Netanyahu, is a Yemenite kippah-wearing former secret service officer).
So The next Knesset will probably look more or less like the present one. If so, what will happen?
Of the 120 members of the present Knesset, 30 belong to the Likud, 10 to Kulanu ("All of Us"), a splinter party formed by a former Likud member, 8 to the religious Jewish Home party, 7 to the Oriental religious party, 6 to Avigdor Lieberman's extreme rightist "Israel our Home" party, 6 to the Orthodox party. This is the present government coalition, 67 altogether.
The opposition consists of 24 Labor members (called "Zionist Camp"), 11 in Ya'ir Lapid's "There is a Future" party, 5 Meretz members and the 13 United Arab List members, whom almost nobody counts. Altogether 53.
Assuming that the results of the next elections will be more or less the same, as polls predict, these numbers draw the eye almost automatically to the 10 members of Kulanu. Their unquestioned leader is Moshe Kahlon, at present the always-smiling Minister of Finance, who is considered liberal and moderate. Can he switch camps?
Actually, everybody assumes that in the next elections the Labor party will go down. After changing leaders like socks, it chose an Oriental boss, Avi Gabbay, in order to shake off the curse of being an "Ashkenazi" party. It did not work. Under Gabbay, the party continues to lose in the polls. (The Likud , with its overwhelming Oriental membership, always chose Ashkenazi leaders like Netanyahu.)
If Labor goes down, Lapid's party goes up. It may well become the largest party. This would turn Lapid into the likely candidate for Prime Minister, provided he succeeds in drawing Kahlon to his side.
But who is Lapid? He is the perfect politician. He looks good on TV. He speaks well and says nothing. This ideological void is a great advantage: he is everything to everybody.
His father, whom I knew well, was a Holocaust survivor, who vividly remembered his childhood in the Budapest ghetto.He was a liberal politician, but with an extreme nationalist outlook. The son may turn out the same.
So what would Prime Minister Lapid do about peace? Nobody knows for sure. He would find it mentally difficult to include the Arabs in his coalition – which would deprive him of a majority. However, the Arabs may support him "from the outside", as happened to Yitzhak Rabin and made the Oslo agreement possible. But some warn that under Lapid "we would pine for Netanyahu”.
Many dream of a completely new party, a union of all liberal, progressive, peace-loving elements, with a new, young leadership, which would completely change the landscape. But there is no sign of it yet.
On the contrary, many young people turn away from politics in disgust and engage in direct action, fighting the settlers and trying to protect the Arab population. Wonderful people, important actions – but completely without influence on politics. And alas politics decides our future.
I Love Israel. My comrades and I created it and paid for it with our blood (literally). My heart aches when I see what is happening.
But I remain an optimist. I continue to believe that somehow, somewhere, salvation will come. New political forces will emerge and come to the fore.
As our Muslim friends would say: inshallah (God willing).
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
I generally don't hate people. With the sole exception of people who have betrayed the trust I put in them and tried to stick a knife in my back. Not more than three or four in all my life. I am not going to name them.
I have not met Netanyahu on a private basis more than two or three times.
Once, he introduced me to his second wife in the Knesset corridor. She seemed to me a nice young woman.
The second time we met at a photographic exhibition, in which there was a photo of me wearing a pilot's helmet. (Don't know how and why).
"You look like Errol Flynn," he told me. I had never seen an Errol Flynn movie, but took it as a compliment.
We had, of course, many arguments in the Knesset, but that doesn't count.
Therefore, if I want to remove Netanyahu from the government, and as soon as possible, it is not because of any personal feelings. I just believe that he is a disaster for Israel.
The endless cases of bribery that have surfaced – and continue to surface, like submarines – necessitate his removal at once. And we have not yet even reached the affair of the German-built submarines, which promises many new revelations. As a former editor of a news-magazine that specialized in investigations of corruption affairs, I can smell it.
A lot of people would enjoy seeing "Bibi" in prison. I would not. If it were up to me, the President of State and the Attorney General would offer him a Nixon-style deal: resign immediately and be pardoned five minutes later. You and your wife. No case, no trials. Go home and enjoy life.
There is no financial problem. Netanyahu is a rich man, with a generous pension as a former Prime Minister, with several luxury apartments, quite apart from the huge bribes he seems to have pocketed along the way.
Also, every publisher in the world would gladly pay a big advance for his memoirs.
So there is no reason to pity him.
Trouble Is, who will take his place?
The empty Knesset seat will be occupied by an anonymous female lawyer, who was put on the party's candidate list on the spot reserved for "new female candidate". But that is not really important.
The important question is: who will become Prime Minister?
Netanyahu's resignation would not automatically mean the dissolution of the present Knesset. If another Knesset member can put together a majority in the present Knesset, he (or she) will be the next Prime Minister. Only a Likud member stands a chance.
But is there any likely candidate? I doubt it. Like many strong but insecure leaders, Netanyahu has not groomed a successor. On the contrary, he has driven away all possible candidates.
The present Likud leadership and the entire gallery of the present government ministers of the Likud and its allies consist of nonentities. Not one of them I could really imagine as the man(or woman) responsible for the future of Israel. God forbid (whether He exists or not).
If No One succeeds in setting up a new government in the present Knesset, a new Knesset must be elected.
Can new elections produce a different majority? Possible, but not likely.
In a normal country, after the almost incredible series of corruption affairs, the opposition would assume power, and one of its leaders would become Prime Minister. Simple.
But Israel is not a normal country. There is a profound split between left and Right, with nothing in the middle. For large blocks of voters to move from Right to Left is almost impossible. Neither is there agreement on the question of what is the proper behavior for a Prime Minister.
A professor once told me: "A British Prime Minister who fills all senior government positions with relatives would be considered corrupt. An Egyptian leader who does not do so would be considered egoistic. What, he has so much luck and does not share it with his family?"
It seems that the more evidence about Netanyahu's corruption turns up, the more fiercely his party members support him. It's all a smear campaign of the evil Left! It's all fake news! The police is in cahoots with the treasonous Ashkenazi Labor party (in spite of the fact that the police chief, who was personally picked by Netanyahu, is a Yemenite kippah-wearing former secret service officer).
So The next Knesset will probably look more or less like the present one. If so, what will happen?
Of the 120 members of the present Knesset, 30 belong to the Likud, 10 to Kulanu ("All of Us"), a splinter party formed by a former Likud member, 8 to the religious Jewish Home party, 7 to the Oriental religious party, 6 to Avigdor Lieberman's extreme rightist "Israel our Home" party, 6 to the Orthodox party. This is the present government coalition, 67 altogether.
The opposition consists of 24 Labor members (called "Zionist Camp"), 11 in Ya'ir Lapid's "There is a Future" party, 5 Meretz members and the 13 United Arab List members, whom almost nobody counts. Altogether 53.
Assuming that the results of the next elections will be more or less the same, as polls predict, these numbers draw the eye almost automatically to the 10 members of Kulanu. Their unquestioned leader is Moshe Kahlon, at present the always-smiling Minister of Finance, who is considered liberal and moderate. Can he switch camps?
Actually, everybody assumes that in the next elections the Labor party will go down. After changing leaders like socks, it chose an Oriental boss, Avi Gabbay, in order to shake off the curse of being an "Ashkenazi" party. It did not work. Under Gabbay, the party continues to lose in the polls. (The Likud , with its overwhelming Oriental membership, always chose Ashkenazi leaders like Netanyahu.)
If Labor goes down, Lapid's party goes up. It may well become the largest party. This would turn Lapid into the likely candidate for Prime Minister, provided he succeeds in drawing Kahlon to his side.
But who is Lapid? He is the perfect politician. He looks good on TV. He speaks well and says nothing. This ideological void is a great advantage: he is everything to everybody.
His father, whom I knew well, was a Holocaust survivor, who vividly remembered his childhood in the Budapest ghetto.He was a liberal politician, but with an extreme nationalist outlook. The son may turn out the same.
So what would Prime Minister Lapid do about peace? Nobody knows for sure. He would find it mentally difficult to include the Arabs in his coalition – which would deprive him of a majority. However, the Arabs may support him "from the outside", as happened to Yitzhak Rabin and made the Oslo agreement possible. But some warn that under Lapid "we would pine for Netanyahu”.
Many dream of a completely new party, a union of all liberal, progressive, peace-loving elements, with a new, young leadership, which would completely change the landscape. But there is no sign of it yet.
On the contrary, many young people turn away from politics in disgust and engage in direct action, fighting the settlers and trying to protect the Arab population. Wonderful people, important actions – but completely without influence on politics. And alas politics decides our future.
I Love Israel. My comrades and I created it and paid for it with our blood (literally). My heart aches when I see what is happening.
But I remain an optimist. I continue to believe that somehow, somewhere, salvation will come. New political forces will emerge and come to the fore.
As our Muslim friends would say: inshallah (God willing).
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
Would The Real Paul Merton Please Stand Up
In usual form Sean Mallory is not impressed by Arleen Foster nor Theresa May.
A British Prime Minster whose recent humiliation by the DUP, on at least two occasions, seems to cause her no concern. May along with the DUP, a party steeped in traditional moral and ethical values except when it comes to money, has been rewarded with a tranche of their one billion bung to be allocated as they choose.
And an amendment to restrict the time frame of a new Parliamentary Act that now requires political parties in Norn Iron to declare their funding.
The Act is not to be back dated so as the DUP can avoid having to fully explain where the £400,000+ for their wrap around London anti-Brexit campaign advert came from ... more of their moral and ethical behaviour on full display.
Speaking of Parliament, traditional parliamentary protocol follows the age old accepted practice of having parliament vote and pass government spending in order to illustrate to the commoners that there is accountability in government spending.
To overcome this traditional practice May in conjunction with the DUP have unethically decided to waiver this traditional practice and issue the tranche without parliamentary approval but give the commons a vote after such. Something about a horse and a stable door comes to mind!
Which brings to the fore why demands by the DUP to be re-empowered at Stormont falls on the deaf ears of Nationalists. Malfeasance and the DUP is much like the leopard and its spots.
Sinn Féin, after stating that a deal had been done on an Irish language Act, announced that the deal was reneged on by the DUP due to the anti-Irish position of the DUP grass roots. The DUP responded with a denial and continues to respond that there was no agreement but an un-agreed draft in spite of insurmountable evidence to the contrary.
They also, Sinn Féin that is, failed to explain why they had failed to secure any of their other red lines such as Foster standing aside while the RHI investigation continues, no agreement on legacy issues and marriage equality or bill of rights .... all quietly forgotten about within the draft agreement and why they allegedly agreed to some Military Covenant Act being pushed by Jeffrey Donaldson!
The SDLP reeling from the failure of the talks and Foster's denial of responsibility vented their anger through tweets and with a particular plug on the recent Siberian snow fall on Ireland.
“Never mind the beast from the east what about the cunt from the North” – a tweet in reference to Arlene Foster.
SDLP Councillor Denise Mullen reported that her son had retweeted a tweet on her phone while she was in the shower and fell over backwards to apologise to the DUP and Foster. Why the tweet was on her phone or who sent it to her has like the Talks draft agreement remained a mystery.
The tweet already well circulated on the internet information highway was doing the rounds and ‘unexpectedly’ ended up on her phone.
Dup colleagues of Foster fell over themselves to condemn Mullen and reported her to the PSNI for breaching some crime against culture or some similar censorship act thingy. Angrily, they demanded she apologise and explain which ran contrary to their support for Fosters flawed denials of the draft agreement.
Anyway, Mullen obeyed as demanded and profusely apologised and bent the knee which is something all Nationalist public representatives seem to avail of at every opportunity when demanded to do so by Unionism.
Other tweets unrelated to Nationalist political parties simply tweeted how Foster bore an uncanny resemblance to comedian Paul Merton, in a wig, Merton in the wig that is. Well, at least he's British!
May, having spent time away from Westminster at an EU war cabinet meeting in Chequers, emerged to announce a ‘3 basket’ approach to future EU negotiations. And in doing so resurrected the idyllic postcard image of an English village grocery store ... in Finchley no doubt. A description once shared by another EU citizen when he described England as a ‘nation of shop keepers’ ... Enough said about the baskets the better!
Meanwhile Barnier and his crew, having decided long ago that the sooner they get rid of the Brits the better, launched into legalising the December agreement and presented it to May irrespective of her 3 baskets approach.
May and with Foster's approval, denounced it as interfering in the sovereignty of the UK and declared that ‘no British Prime Minister could agree to it’ and instead of being face-slapped found herself unnervingly back-slapped by the DUP. Thus reneging on the December deal and proving claims in December by external observers to the deal that given the first opportunity, the ugly head of ‘Perfidious Albion’ would arise.
To drive the momentum on and following on from her repudiated landmark speeches at Lancaster House and Florence, at Mansion House, Theresa announced in her speech that Britain’s position post Brexit, economically, would not be very favourable indeed and in usual Brexit style further clarified that this unfavourable position would be met by the EU fulfilling of five tests set by her and her war cabinet: “What I set out in the five tests are the five tests I will be setting,” ... totally clear!
Continuing in true Brexit style, she then hastily retracted and declared that the five tests may not indeed be five tests but could increase or decrease in number, not substance, but all that was dependent on what is finally agreed. She finished off with a, look, never mind, let's just get on with it....hurrah!
Nevertheless, a speech most welcomed by the DUP and a few Tory Remainers who, even though she should have said that 18 months ago now felt that she should be given a chance!
The speech, politely and diplomatically acknowledged by Barnier, was dismissed by Verhofstadt as more waffle and also welcomed and simultaneously dismissed by Varadkar and Coveney.
Armed with Arlene's, sorry, Theresa's speech, The DUP on the heels of Sinn Féin departed for Europe to meet Barnier and under no uncertain terms let him know full well what they thought of his legalising the December deal.
Sinn Féin on the other hand, armed, sorry, unarmed with their new leader, Mary Lou, headed off to the EU and met with Barnier for an auld banter which by all accounts went rather spiffingly.
On the other hand, the DUP, not realising that they were no longer in a Unionist dominated environment lost their ability to intimidate and slunk away after meekly delivering their ‘No Surrender’ to Barnier who politely listened and then told them to bugger off.
And so, as Carlos ‘the heckle’ Puigdemont joins Alexis Tsipras on the spineless leaders bench of Europe, by declining the offer of leader of the Catalan assembly while in exile, as Kim Jung offers the USA a radioactive olive branch, as Vladimir Putin announces to the world an unstoppable long range nuclear missile, as Syria descends in to an even deeper cesspit of death and destruction and all at the hands of a Western crusade, and as Theresa prepares the British public for a no deal Brexit solution we can rest easy in our beds knowing that Deputy Dodds and the gang at Westminster are at some point in the Brexit negotiations about to be pissed on from a very great height by Theresa and her war cabinet!
Sean Mallory is a Tyrone republican and TPQ columnist
A British Prime Minster whose recent humiliation by the DUP, on at least two occasions, seems to cause her no concern. May along with the DUP, a party steeped in traditional moral and ethical values except when it comes to money, has been rewarded with a tranche of their one billion bung to be allocated as they choose.
And an amendment to restrict the time frame of a new Parliamentary Act that now requires political parties in Norn Iron to declare their funding.
The Act is not to be back dated so as the DUP can avoid having to fully explain where the £400,000+ for their wrap around London anti-Brexit campaign advert came from ... more of their moral and ethical behaviour on full display.
Speaking of Parliament, traditional parliamentary protocol follows the age old accepted practice of having parliament vote and pass government spending in order to illustrate to the commoners that there is accountability in government spending.
To overcome this traditional practice May in conjunction with the DUP have unethically decided to waiver this traditional practice and issue the tranche without parliamentary approval but give the commons a vote after such. Something about a horse and a stable door comes to mind!
Which brings to the fore why demands by the DUP to be re-empowered at Stormont falls on the deaf ears of Nationalists. Malfeasance and the DUP is much like the leopard and its spots.
Sinn Féin, after stating that a deal had been done on an Irish language Act, announced that the deal was reneged on by the DUP due to the anti-Irish position of the DUP grass roots. The DUP responded with a denial and continues to respond that there was no agreement but an un-agreed draft in spite of insurmountable evidence to the contrary.
They also, Sinn Féin that is, failed to explain why they had failed to secure any of their other red lines such as Foster standing aside while the RHI investigation continues, no agreement on legacy issues and marriage equality or bill of rights .... all quietly forgotten about within the draft agreement and why they allegedly agreed to some Military Covenant Act being pushed by Jeffrey Donaldson!
The SDLP reeling from the failure of the talks and Foster's denial of responsibility vented their anger through tweets and with a particular plug on the recent Siberian snow fall on Ireland.
“Never mind the beast from the east what about the cunt from the North” – a tweet in reference to Arlene Foster.
SDLP Councillor Denise Mullen reported that her son had retweeted a tweet on her phone while she was in the shower and fell over backwards to apologise to the DUP and Foster. Why the tweet was on her phone or who sent it to her has like the Talks draft agreement remained a mystery.
The tweet already well circulated on the internet information highway was doing the rounds and ‘unexpectedly’ ended up on her phone.
Dup colleagues of Foster fell over themselves to condemn Mullen and reported her to the PSNI for breaching some crime against culture or some similar censorship act thingy. Angrily, they demanded she apologise and explain which ran contrary to their support for Fosters flawed denials of the draft agreement.
Anyway, Mullen obeyed as demanded and profusely apologised and bent the knee which is something all Nationalist public representatives seem to avail of at every opportunity when demanded to do so by Unionism.
Other tweets unrelated to Nationalist political parties simply tweeted how Foster bore an uncanny resemblance to comedian Paul Merton, in a wig, Merton in the wig that is. Well, at least he's British!
May, having spent time away from Westminster at an EU war cabinet meeting in Chequers, emerged to announce a ‘3 basket’ approach to future EU negotiations. And in doing so resurrected the idyllic postcard image of an English village grocery store ... in Finchley no doubt. A description once shared by another EU citizen when he described England as a ‘nation of shop keepers’ ... Enough said about the baskets the better!
Meanwhile Barnier and his crew, having decided long ago that the sooner they get rid of the Brits the better, launched into legalising the December agreement and presented it to May irrespective of her 3 baskets approach.
May and with Foster's approval, denounced it as interfering in the sovereignty of the UK and declared that ‘no British Prime Minister could agree to it’ and instead of being face-slapped found herself unnervingly back-slapped by the DUP. Thus reneging on the December deal and proving claims in December by external observers to the deal that given the first opportunity, the ugly head of ‘Perfidious Albion’ would arise.
To drive the momentum on and following on from her repudiated landmark speeches at Lancaster House and Florence, at Mansion House, Theresa announced in her speech that Britain’s position post Brexit, economically, would not be very favourable indeed and in usual Brexit style further clarified that this unfavourable position would be met by the EU fulfilling of five tests set by her and her war cabinet: “What I set out in the five tests are the five tests I will be setting,” ... totally clear!
Continuing in true Brexit style, she then hastily retracted and declared that the five tests may not indeed be five tests but could increase or decrease in number, not substance, but all that was dependent on what is finally agreed. She finished off with a, look, never mind, let's just get on with it....hurrah!
Nevertheless, a speech most welcomed by the DUP and a few Tory Remainers who, even though she should have said that 18 months ago now felt that she should be given a chance!
The speech, politely and diplomatically acknowledged by Barnier, was dismissed by Verhofstadt as more waffle and also welcomed and simultaneously dismissed by Varadkar and Coveney.
Armed with Arlene's, sorry, Theresa's speech, The DUP on the heels of Sinn Féin departed for Europe to meet Barnier and under no uncertain terms let him know full well what they thought of his legalising the December deal.
Sinn Féin on the other hand, armed, sorry, unarmed with their new leader, Mary Lou, headed off to the EU and met with Barnier for an auld banter which by all accounts went rather spiffingly.
On the other hand, the DUP, not realising that they were no longer in a Unionist dominated environment lost their ability to intimidate and slunk away after meekly delivering their ‘No Surrender’ to Barnier who politely listened and then told them to bugger off.
And so, as Carlos ‘the heckle’ Puigdemont joins Alexis Tsipras on the spineless leaders bench of Europe, by declining the offer of leader of the Catalan assembly while in exile, as Kim Jung offers the USA a radioactive olive branch, as Vladimir Putin announces to the world an unstoppable long range nuclear missile, as Syria descends in to an even deeper cesspit of death and destruction and all at the hands of a Western crusade, and as Theresa prepares the British public for a no deal Brexit solution we can rest easy in our beds knowing that Deputy Dodds and the gang at Westminster are at some point in the Brexit negotiations about to be pissed on from a very great height by Theresa and her war cabinet!
Sean Mallory is a Tyrone republican and TPQ columnist
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