Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1214

This Pound Shop Thatcher

Mick Hall @ Organized Rage writes that:

As the old song goes Theresa May is " just running scared" its why she will not take part in a leaders debate.
Mrs May prefers a cosy chat with Tories.
Here in Thurrock we have become used to Tory politicians lying to us. During the 2015 general election campaign our Tory MP Jackie Doyle Price promised to oppose any new Thames crossing within the borough. Shortly after she was reelected she went back on her word and supported a Thames crossing. Only she knows whether having her bottom on the soft leather seat of a government limousine made her forget Thurrock is one of the most polluted areas in England and Wales and the last thing it needs is yet another Thames crossing poisoning our youngsters and elderly.

Still, lies seem to drip from Tory lips and why wouldn't they when Theresa May is at the helm. She told us all there would be no snap election not once, not twice, but eleven times since she became PM. Yet this week she went back on her word and called a snap election on the 8th June. What has fundamentally changed since the 20 March when she last said there would be no snap election she refuses to say.

This woman has no shame. With a record like her's it's hard to know why any rational voter would believe a single word she says. It's not only on this matter which she has lied. When first in office this pound shop Thatcher claimed she was supporting ordinary working families, yet within months she introduced even more austerity measures which hit these families hardest, while giving yet more tax breaks to the most wealthy and multinational corporations.

Thankfully we have the choice of Mr Corbyn to vote for on 8th June. Ignore the pro-Tory media's claims about him not being leadership material. Since he became party leader he has been under a torrent of abuse and smears from his political opponents and the media, yet not once has he done anything but stand firm. He has shown in a life time of politics he is a man with strong core beliefs. Unlike Cameron, May, and the LibDem Nick Clegg, he does not flip flop all over the place and tac his sails to policies laid down by media barons like Murdoch, Rothermere, Dacre and the Russian oligarch Lebedev.

During Prime ministers questions he bettered the Tory leader week in and week out. Thus it's hardly surprising she is refusing to debate with him on live TV. Cameron acted in an equally cowardly manner in 2015 and the media acquiesced to Tory demands. This must not happen a second time. If Mrs May fails to fill her chair in the studio it should be left empty for viewers to see Theresa May refused to debate in a democratic forum the future of our nation. Even Donald Trump didn't shy away from a leaders' debate indeed he relished it and voters acted accordingly. (Please sign petition)

Corbyn has made it clear the result of June’s general election is not a foregone conclusion no matter what the media hype might claim. He opened Labour’s campaign by pledging to bust the “cosy cartel” of British politics. He added:

Much of the media and establishment are saying this election is a foregone conclusion. They think there are rules in politics, which if you don’t follow by doffing your cap to powerful people, accepting that things can’t really change, then you can’t win.

They say I don’t play by the rules – their rules. We can’t win, they say, because we don’t play their game. They’re quite right I don’t. And a Labour government elected on 8 June won’t play by their rules.

Corbyn then said it's time fat-cat bosses were reined in and started pay their full share of tax.

If I were Southern Rail or Philip Green [chairman of Arcadia Group], I’d be worried about a Labour government.
If I were Mike Ashley [chairman of Sports Direct] or the CEO of a tax-avoiding multinational corporation, I’d want to see a Tory victory. Labour is the party that will put the interests of the majority first.

He concluded:

When Labour win, it’s the people – not the powerful – who win. The nurse, the teacher, the small trader, the carer, the builder, the office worker win. We all win. In the coming weeks Labour will lay out our policies to unlock opportunities for every single person in this country. We will focus on giving people real control over their own lives and make sure that everybody reaps a just reward for the work that they do. We will no longer allow those at the top to leach off of those who bust their guts on zero hours contracts or those forced to make sacrifices to pay their mortgage or their rent. Instead of the country’s wealth being hidden in tax havens we will put it in the hands of the people of Britain as they are the ones who earned it. In this election Labour will lead the movement to make that change. We will build a new economy, worthy of the 21st century and we will build a country for the many not the few.

Not only is Jeremy Corbyn leadership material, he is just the man to put this nation on a new footing, a place where everyone gets their fare share and not as it is today just the wealthy and powerful.

Theresa May has presented the result of the election as a test of her leadership against Corbyn’s. Bring it on. Ted Heath did much the same in 1975 when he asked the electorate to decide "who governs Britain - the unions or the government" The British people rejected his clear attempt to divide the nation and returned Harold Wilson to office. Corbyn will do the same.

Vote Labour on June 8.

Remembering Our Patriots With Pride

Martin Galvin in a letter to the Irish News  challenges Trevor Ringland.


The view, voiced elsewhere by Nelson McCausland or Tom Elliot and here by Mr. Ringland, seems simple to understand. They feel political and emotional loyalty to British law and rule. They consider the British Army, Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defense Regiment their uniformed forces, which upheld British rule. Excesses, like Bloody Sunday, 'Hooded Men' torture, or murder by loyalist proxies were committed with good intentions in terrible times.

They judge anyone, like Jim Lynagh or Bobby Sands MP, who fought against British rule as criminals, to be remembered, if at all, with repentance rather than pride. Mr. Ringland says his perspective is "shared by many across our society". We can understand this view. Understand we make no apology for rejecting it.

Why do the feelings of those who attend Republican commemorations, seem incomprehensible to Unionists? Why do they seem as dismayed by Loughgall commemorations today, as they were that people dared elect Bobby Sands MP?

Mr. Ringland says of the 1968-98 Troubles "we had got into a mess that we should have avoided". This 'mess' began when Britain carved out as much of Ireland as they could keep, based on a sectarian headcount. For fifty years Westminster ruled behind an Orange State, giving Unionists carte blanche to impose a system of discrimination and second class citizenship in housing, jobs and voting rights.

Republicans commemorate men and women, who refused to submit to the sectarian clampdown on civil rights, Internment, Hooded Men torture, Ballymurphy Massacre, Bloody Sunday et.al. Despite risk of imprisonment or death, they fought to achieve Ireland’s right to freedom and remove British injustice . We read the 1916 Proclamation over those who died for its principles. We commemorate them as patriots and volunteers.

James Connolly, who signed the 1916 Proclamation said of British troopers about to shoot him, he would “pray for brave men who do their duty according to their own lights”.

No one expects Mr. Ringland to accept our view. Can he at least understand that there were honorable individuals from opposing backgrounds and allegiances, acting to maintain the right as they saw it, in the extraordinary times of 1969-98? Can he understand why we remember our patriots with pride?

                                          Slan,

                                        Martin Galvin

Clock Toward Brexit Ticks On

Dr John Coulter has been a political journalist, author and commentator on Irish affairs for 39 years. In Part One of this two-part series, he outlines his view of the only workable solutions for Unionism to the crisis which has hit the Irish peace process – compulsory voting and an all-island agenda involving the Commonwealth. In the second article, he will examine how Republicanism needs to develop to ensure the peace process is maintained.


In spite of a 10 per cent increase in voter turnout at the recent snap Stormont Assembly poll, just over 60 per cent of those entitled to vote turned up at the polling booths.

But what of the short-term in Northern Ireland? The parties have a matter of days to hammer out an agreement which could see devolved government restored, otherwise it is yet another Stormont election, or direct rule from Westminster.

The latter option – direct rule, which first hit Northern Ireland in the early 1970s in the aftermath of the fall of the original Stormont Parliament – will see mainly English-based Tory MPs impose hard-hitting austerity cuts to sort out the Province’s crumbling health and education sectors.

The essential problem of the current peace process is that the snap Assembly poll was a victory once again for tribal politics as voters kept up the Orange/Green polling patterns which have largely existed in Northern Ireland since the formation of the state in the 1920s.

The two main Stormont power-sharing Executive parties – the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein – were again returned as the two largest parties in spite of the number of Assembly members overall being reduced from 108 to 90, with the DUP only one seat more than Sinn Fein.

However, the most important statistic to emerge from the March poll was that for the first time in Northern Ireland’s history, unionism has lost its overall majority in the state. The poll was also a significant victory for the centre ground parties, like Alliance and the Greens, who held all their seats.

The biggest electoral hits were suffered by the main so-called Stormont opposition parties. The moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, which although holding its 12 seats, failed to significantly eat into the Sinn Fein vote.

The DUP’s main unionist rival, the Ulster Unionist Party, which had dominated Stormont politics for at least 80 years, lost six of its 16 seats, forcing its leader Mike Nesbitt to quit. All eyes, however, will be on Sinn Fein to see how it moves in the coming days.

It is clear that the republican movement has long since concluded that the route to a united Ireland – namely the 32-county democratic socialist republic as desired by the rebels of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising – cannot be achieved through the front door of a direct terror campaign in Northern Ireland or in mainland Britain.

The aspiration of that socialist republic will only come about through the back door of Leinster House, seat of the Dublin Parliament. Since Sinn Fein president and former West Belfast MP was drafted in as a Louth TD, he has built the party’s representation in the Dail from fringe status to positioning Sinn Fein on a political springboard which could propel it into minority partner status in the next Dail expected after a Southern General Election later this year.

Sinn Fein’s republican strategy should be to ‘park’ its gains in Stormont for the meantime, and focus on increasing its TDs. It must create a scenario where either the two main parties in Leinster House – Fianna Fail or Fine Gael – have to rely on Sinn Fein to form the next coalition government.

Neither Fianna Fail nor Fine Gael can bank on the hope that enough Independent, Green or Labour TDs win seats to form a coalition government. Like it or not, both main Southern parties must swallow the bitter medicine which the late Ian Paisley senior had to take in 2006 when he signed up to the St Andrews Agreement – that he would have to climb into bed politically with Sinn Fein to form a stable devolved government.

Sinn Fein has an added rush to form a partnership in the Dail. Fianna Fail has already organised north of the Irish border and expects to be contesting Ulster elections by 2019. That could severely dent the Sinn Fein vote, keeping Sinn Fein in a position where it is constantly playing second fiddle politically to unionism.

As for Colum Eastwood’s SDLP, a formal merger with Fine Gael is the only option, otherwise Sinn Fein will eventually electorally inflict on the SDLP what the SDLP inflicted on the old Irish Nationalist Party at Stormont. That latter party is now confined to the dustbin of history.

A merger between Fine Gael and the SDLP would give both parties an ace card which they currently lack and which Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail both have – an all-island identity and organisational structure.

With Brexit looming, there is one more tactical shift which Sinn Fein must make – the historic leap of abandoning its traditional policy of abstentionism at Westminster and allowing its MPs to take their Commons seats, forming a voting alliance with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists along with anti-monarchists and republican sympathisers within the Labour Party.

It should not be forgotten that when Sinn Fein was formed in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, it was not a hardline republican party, but a movement which campaigned for dominion status. Rather than push for an all-Ireland solution, perhaps Sinn Fein would be better placed to settle for an all-island agenda – one which put the people of the island first and accommodated unionism.

There can be no doubting that Brexit will both geographically and economically place the Republic on the very edge of the European Union. This will have financially disastrous consequences for the once dominant Celtic Tiger economy.

The Republic must face the equally bitter reality that it will have to re-negotiate a closer relationship with the United Kingdom – whether that UK includes Scotland or not. Practically, the Republic will have to become a member of the globally powerful Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

The CPA currently represents some 50 plus regional and national parliaments throughout the world. While many of the nations represented in the CPA were former members of the British Empire, the CPA should not be misrepresented as that empire under a new title.

Ironically, Ireland was a founder member of the CPA in 1911 when the organisation was launched as the Empire Parliamentary Association when the island was entirely under British rule.

Political aspirations will have to take second stage to the needs of Irish citizens north and south of the border post Brexit. The peace process would be cemented if Brexit was followed by Irexit – namely, the Republic of Ireland following the UK out of the EU.

The South of Ireland would develop the all-island structure by formally joining the CPA and developing a closer relationship with Westminster. The compromise should placate both sides in the Irish debate; nationalists secure an all-island agenda; unionists have a pre-partition solution with the 26 southern Irish counties back in a formal partnership with London.

And this is where the original observation of compulsory voting kicks in – all voters will have a say. Ireland, north and south, does not want an English electoral nightmare where some MPs are being elected by less than 50 per cent of the electorate.

The key question as always – this is the workable all-island solution, but which of the two tribes has the political courage to take the first steps – nationalism or unionism? Meanwhile, the clock towards Brexit ticks on.



Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter

Buried In Cartloads

Chris Fogarty hits out at those he believes are concealing the truth about mass graves.


You might know that RTE Radio 1 Host Joe Duffy interviewed me on air; hostilely, on May 10th. Duffy obviously had an agenda other than honest. He had local "historians" on, claiming to not know that Smarmore was where the overflow from the Ardee workhouse grounds were buried in cartloads; and that it was all some kind of sinister mystery. Duffy phoned me thrice, and had set up the interview in advance, so he could have resolved the Smarmore monument "mystery" in advance by putting those local "historians" in touch with me.

Had he done so the "historians" would have learned that the people of Ardee have always known about the Ardee Union Board of Guardians' use of Smarmore cemetery during the Holocaust of 1845-1850. The Mooneys of Bridge Street, Ardee, were among those who would pay their respects by visiting Smarmore's "famine" grave. Raymond Mooney (1920-July 2, 2002) ex-Louth footballer, son of Ardee shop and and pub-owner Ian Mooney, used to take people to visit Smarmore. Raymond's sister Bridget married Malachy Towey. The Mooneys also brought Towey to pay his respects to Smarmore. Last night Towey assured me that he and his Ardee in-laws and everyone he knew in Ardee would appreciate that new monument. Even those who want to keep the Holocaust concealed had to admit the quality of the Smarmore monument. 

If those "historians" don't know of Lord Clarendon's infamous statement: "But for the onerous duty of escorting of provisions (foodstuff) the army in Ireland would have little to do", and don't know which British regiments were deployed to the Smarmore district, and aren't able to find out for themselves at Britain's National Archives in Kew, Surrey, I can send them photos of pages of my book; also of those pages' sources which are the original 1845-1850 Disposition of the Army records copies of which are in my possession. 

They cannot harm me; but I'm pretty sure that the motive of Duffy et al. was to intimidate monument makers from taking more such work. Their goal is to conceal that genocide and its mass graves. Very strange people. Why do they abet genocide? 

They have failed to intimidate me, and I hope that they failed against the monument makers.

A Curious National Home

The Uri Avnery Column regards the latest proposed bill before the Israeli parliament as outrageous.


Each member wants to be elected again (and again and again).

In order to be reelected, he or she must attract the attention of the public.

How? The simplest way is to propose a new law. A bill so outrageous, that the media cannot possible ignore it.

This sets up a natural competition. To draw attention, each new bill must be a bit more outrageous than the last. The sky is the limit. Perhaps.

The Last bill concocted by a Member who is an ex-secret service chief, is called "Israel – the National State of the Jewish People".

In general parlance, the Jewish People consists of all the Jews in the world, more than half of whom live outside Israel and are citizens of other states. They are not asked if they want the State of Israel to represent them. Goes without asking.

Indeed, Israeli ambassadors everywhere are considered by many a kind of unofficial overlord of the local Jewish community.

What about the Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute slightly more than 20%? Well, they remain citizens, but the state does not belong to them.

So What does the proposed bill say?

First of all, it abolishes the status of Arabic as an "official language", a status it has enjoyed since Israel was founded. Hebrew will reign supreme - and alone.

Israel has no written constitution. The Supreme Court has created a kind of virtual constitution, resting on several "basic laws". A Knesset majority can overturn any of these at any time.

The basic legal assumption until now has been that Israel is a "Jewish and Democratic State", both attributes of equal status. The new law will change that. Both attributes will remain intact, but "Jewish" will become more important than "democratic" and trump it if there is a contradiction, as there frequently is.

This week Binyamin Netanyahu announced that he has adopted this bill and will push it through the Knesset in two months time. No problem.

Why Is there no problem?

Because, basically, there is no ideological opposition.

There is, of course, an Arab faction (split into three sub-factions: nationalist, religious and communist). But most Jewish opposition members would rather be seen in the Knesset cafeteria in the company of a rabid fascist Jewish member than an Arab one.

So if Netanyahu wants to ram the bill through, it will indeed become the law of the land.

What Does "Jewish" mean? Is it a national or a religious designation?

The average Israeli will answer: both, of course. It can be used in the one sense or the other, as expedience demands.

Zionism was basically a process of attempting to transform an ancient ethno-religious community into a modern nation. When the bill says that Israel is the "nation-state of the Jewish people" it means all the Jews around the world. "Nation" and "people" (and religion) are considered synonyms. We are all Jews, aren't we?

What about the US Jew who feels he belongs to the American nation? What about the Canadian Jew who is a complete atheist and treats his Jewishness as a quaint reminder of his grandparents? Or a hypothetical black South-African whose parents have been converted to Judaism by their white Jewish master? Or a Russian Jew, whose parents have adopted the Orthodox Christian faith?

They are Jews, all of them. Jewish religious law says that "a Jew, even if he commits a sin, is still a Jew." Adopting the Christian – or any other - faith is certainly a sin, but the convert still remains a Jew, whether he wants it or not.

The Nation-State of the Jewish People belongs to all of them. Or, rather, they all belong to the Nation State of the Jewish People.

All This has very little to do with the original Zionist ideology.

Theodor Herzl, a thoroughly naïve person, believed that all the Jews in the world would come to the Jewish State. Those who did not would cease to be Jews.

Even to David Ben-Gurion, an early Zionist, the idea that an American Zionist leader could continue to live in the USA was an abomination. His colleagues had a hard time convincing him that it was bad policy to tell that to the American Jews when you need their money.

Ben-Gurion would certainly not have agreed to a definition that would have turned Israel – his Israel! – into the state of these Jews, and turned them into quasi-citizens of the Jewish National State. God (in whom he did not believe) forbid.

What About secular Jews in Israel?

Well the first question is whether there really are "secular" Jews in Israel.

All the Jews who grew up in Israel are products of the Jewish educational system, based on the Bible. This produces in their mind a set of ideological certitudes that cannot be eradicated.

The People of Israel was born in a conversation between God and Abraham in a place located in today's Iraq. This is of course a legend, like a large part of the Hebrew Bible, including the forefathers, the exodus and the kingdoms of David and Solomon. (Their existence is disproved, inter alia, by their total absence from the voluminous correspondence of Egyptian rulers and spies in the Land of Canaan.)

But historical evidence is unimportant here. The fact is that every Jewish child in Israel carries the Bible deep in their consciousness. Meaning: Jews are special. Jews are unique. It's "them" and "us". The whole world against us.

My friend Reuven Wimmer has sent me a list of the basic beliefs of the average "secular" Israeli. It goes a follows:
He does not observe the Shabbat. He uses his car, buys, travels and goes to the seashore on the Holy Day.
But he believes in God.
He does not eat kosher, but prefers kosher restaurants.
He goes at least once a year– on Yom Kippur - to synagogue
He marries and divorces at the Rabbinate.
He does not like Arabs very much.
He does not want to be identified as a Leftist, but does not vote for the Right.
He is not in favor of separation between state and religion.
He has served in the army, loves the army and is proud of the state.
He is for Two States for Two Peoples, provided this does not harm the settlements.
He does not take part in demonstrations or any other political activities.

Since that is so, no real protests against the bill can be expected. We will call ourselves the Nation State of the Jewish People. Halleluyah. (For those who do not know: Halleluyah is Hebrew for "Praise God".)

What About the close to two million Arabs who are citizens of the National State of the Jewish People?

Up to now, no attention-hungry Member of the Knesset has yet concocted a bill to take away their citizenship.

So they will remain citizens of the state, which belongs to another people. For the time being.

We will have a National State for the Jewish people, in which the majority of the world’s Jews are not citizens, and in which two million non-Jewish Arabs will be citizens, in whose "eternal capital", Jerusalem, there live some hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants who are not citizens, which militarily occupies the West Bank with some 2.5 million Arabs, and which indirectly controls the lives of another two million Arabs in the Gaza Strip.

Altogether, there live now in historical Palestine some 7 million Jews and some 7 million Arabs.

A curious National Home.

Joining The British Labour Party

Mick Hall joined his local Labour Party branch in Thurrock He writes:
In 2015 for the first time in 50 years I joined a political party - how has it worked out?

For the first time in 50 years in 2015 I joined a political party. When I told my family and friends what I intended to do, they were astounded: "why would you want to do that when you know full well local politics in Thurrock is a cesspit of intrigue and smears." They had a point, as politics does seem to attract an abundance of people who are prepared to believe almost anything as long as it's whispered to them.

Whether we like it or not, Thurrock and its people have experienced massive changes over the last two decades. But one thing which doesn't seem to have changed one iota is how council business is conducted in the borough. For the last two decades 'the Suits' have appeared to be interchangeable. Mainly white, grey suited, middle aged men, they dress, act and talk alike. And as far as many of them are concerned they have the same managerial aims.

Central government cries austerity cuts, and they all to eagerly seem to reply as if helpless, where and what do we cut. It's hardly surprising the numbers who vote in local elections has fallen. Sadly many have concluded if they walk, talk, dress and quack like the Westminster political elites they want none of them.

Innovation and inclusiveness is not generally what these people do. This doesn't make them all duds. Some councillors, when they put their minds to it, can be first class and I don't just mean the best of the LP bunch. There is a Ukip councillor who would be an asset to any progressive party. That he chose Ukip and not the LP should have been a wake up call for Labour.

Times have changed yet many councillors seem to have failed to notice this. In the public eye they're regarded as indistinguishable from each other and senior council officials.

Why does this matter? Because unfairly these same senior officials are often wrongly blamed for the cuts and poor service residents receive from the council, when it's the Tory government which is mainly to blame.

Nevertheless inspired by Jeremy Corbyn's victory in the 2015 LP leadership contest I ignored all advice and signed on the bottom line and within a short space of time my membership card dropped through the door.

That I have chosen to post this piece on Organized Rage and not on the Thurrock Labour Forum Facebook page is itself an indictment of how the local party is run. If I were to post it there, past experience tells me it would be censored or taken down.

For example I posted a link to a LP local membership survey and it was removed. I replied to a comment by a moderator who wrongly, imo, claimed people in the UK are innocent until proven guilty. In the comment I wrote 'if you believe that you need to get out more.' Given this man had previously posted he only became aware Job Centre staff treated claimants appallingly after he saw Ken Loach's 'I Daniel Blake.' I thought telling him he needed to get out more was a reasonable piece of advice and still do.

The last straw for me was when the same moderator removed a comment in which I "thanked people for wishing me well after an operation and said I didn’t wish to comment on why a moderator had been removed as I had no wish to further inflame the situation."

As the saying goes:

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”

For the first few months after joining the LP I heard little from the local party. When I enquired my queries were either ignored or I was given what I regarded as the brush off. To say I found this dispiriting would be an understatement, although I didn't take it personally as I soon found out many new members had a similar experience and not only in Thurrock.
As one new member said to me:

It's as if some within the local leaderships decided new members should ride at the back of the bus.

If it were not for the regular updates, emails and messages I received from the Corbyn leadership team I would have long ago chucked my membership card into the Thames.

I have no wish to become a local politician nor hold senior positions within the local Party. As the old political adage goes every member can contribute no matter how big or small. I just wanted to be a foot soldier in the hope if we all pull together we might at least attempt to change the way politics is done in the UK.

That a change is desperately needed is perhaps best demonstrated by the putrid  legacy of the Iraq war, Brexit, and Mrs May's continuous austerity measures against those least able to shoulder the burden, while giving tax breaks to those who are well able to pay their full share.

At the first meeting I attended, a vote was taken on who the CLP would support in the second leadership contest in a year. To my surprise Jeremy Corbyn was nominated by an overwhelming majority. When the result was announced a cheer went up and this undoubtedly gave me heart and pleased me no end.

This high didn't last long because within a few weeks the local leadership stuck two fingers up at the new members and invited Dan Jarvis, the anti-Corbyn MP to Thurrock to talk to members at a special meeting for a non inclusive £20 entrance fee. It was pretty clear Jarvis was invited as a spoiler and was unlikely to appeal to new members.

And so it proved. As was expected the turnout at the Jarvis meeting wouldn't have filled the lower deck of a London double decker bus. Thurrock CLP has 300 new members and they were never going to attend a meeting to be lectured by a Blairite.

That this invitation was never put to a vote at a CLP meeting made me feel being a member of Thurrock LP is like rolling a large rock up hill, as not only are some members more equal than others, but sadly some regard the local party as their own personal fiefdom. If the party in Thurrock is to rebuild support amongst its traditional working class base this way of doing business is not the way to proceed.

If it's unwilling to tolerate a safe place where its members can post and debate party policy without fear of censorship and sanction, how on earth can it appeal to the wider electorate in the constituency?

Why would any member post to a Facebook page when their content may be removed for no better reason than a 'useful idiot' might disagree with it?

To sum up, what to make of it all 

Thurrock CLP undoubtedly has some able and committed people who wish to support the party leader and take the struggle forward. They come from all section of the party bar the Blairites, who act as mischief makers and in my view seem determined to follow their leader into the dustbin of history.

But the party is not in power in Thurrock and is losing ground across the borough and this has little to do with the party leader as the fall in support began long before Jeremy was elected.

To put it bluntly, Thurrock Labour Party has in the past made little secret of the fact it lost confidence in the working classes ability to be a force for progressive change. Thus it's hardly surprising a sizable section of the boroughs working classes have lost confidence in the LP bringing about societal change which will benefit their lives.

Carping, gossiping and whispering into ears is not the way. We need to be straight with each other, dare I say it treat each other in a comradely way. We all need to be on the same page as the national leadership.

The Corbyn leadership's policies set out below are becoming increasingly popular, but here in Thurrock we are not making any real attempt to get them across to the wider electorate. Indeed in the campaigns we have mounted around sure start centres, the NHS, and sheltered housing, Jeremy and his policies were not even mentioned in the leaflets.

In my view the old guard which still controls the Executive Committee is a law unto itself, it fears and censors the cut and thrust of democratic debate. It's made no real attempt to engage with new members. Nothing must be said or done which will upset the status quo. A status quo I might add which has seen Labour going from being the leading party in the borough to it's current position of being the also-rans to the Tories and Ukip.


Author Note: As I have already said I have reluctantly published this piece on my blog because I have no confidence it will not be censored and removed if I post it on the Thurrock Labour Forum Facebook group, which in itself sadly speaks volumes about the current state of the local party. 

The Settlement Legality Debate: FAQ

Writing in Tikkun Nathaniel Berman addresses the Settlement issue in Palestine.
  
I. Why Now?

The resurgence of debates about legality, particularly the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has become an unexpected feature of public discussion of Israel/Palestine over the past decade. This resurgence has been primarily the work of two kinds of forces. On the one hand, pro-settler advocates have been asserting that the pervasive international view of the illegality of the settlements is simply wrong. Such advocates range from a 2012 Israeli government “Report on the Status of Building in the Region of Judea and Samaria” (the “Levy Commission Report”), to articles published in the right-wing press, to activists relentlessly advancing such views in social media. On the other hand, the illegality of the settlements has been vigorously asserted by those active in international campaigns critical of Israel, especially the BDS movement. This article will primarily focus on the pro-settler use of the legality argument, evaluating its soundness and considering the contextual significance of its resurgence.

The revival of the legality debate is surprising because it seems, at first glance, at odds with current global developments. To be sure, there was a period, roughly between 1990 and 2003, when international debate about the use of force was pervaded with legal argumentation. In retrospect, it is astonishing how much of the debate about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990 and the US-led military response in January, 1991, was framed in terms of legal argument. The decade that ensued was something of a golden era for public international lawyers. The conviction that the end of the Cold War meant that the international law governing the use of force could “finally” be implemented, that the Security Council could “finally” play the role for which it was intended, became quite widespread. Even as such hopes became tarnished as the decade continued – most egregiously by the international failure to stop the 1993 Rwanda genocide – international legal discourse remained a key shaper of world opinion about the use of force. Every intervention – or lack thereof – was accompanied by fierce debate about its legality. The 1999 NATO invasion of Kosovo, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – its questionable legality, produced volumes of creative legal discussion.

That period now seems long past, though it may not be possible to identify the precise moment of its demise. Kosovo played a role, as did the decision of the US not to seek Security Council approval for the invasion of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, both of these actions could be plausibly (if not uncontroversially) justified under longstanding doctrines (humanitarian intervention in the former case, self-defense in the latter). But it was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent, if grudging, acquiescence to it by much of the world, that signaled that international norms about the use of force had lost their power to shape international policy. With the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, both of the erstwhile “superpowers” had firmly demonstrated their contempt for such international norms. To be sure, many condemned that invasion in terms of its blatant illegality, but such terms seemed out of touch with the new discursive character of international debate.

In the Israel/Palestine conflict, legal debate has long played a central, if intermittent, role. While I cannot rehearse the entire history here, suffice it to say that the conflict has been decisively shaped by the debate over, and adoption of, such international instruments as the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, the 1947 Partition Resolution, the 1967 Security Council Resolution 242, and so on. But there have been periods when questions of legality seemed more or less irrelevant to ongoing political developments.

In my view, it was the 1993 Oslo agreements and their aftermath that largely encouraged the most recent (if temporary) sidelining of the core legal issues of the conflict, such as the legitimacy of the State of Israel, the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, legality of the settlements, and so on. The twin recognitions of Israeli statehood and Palestinian peoplehood by Rabin and Arafat in 1993 promised to set aside zero-sum debates over rival, totalizing legal claims. In their stead, Oslo seemed (however briefly) to augur a focus on pragmatic adjustment of interests, the establishment of complementary Palestinian and Israeli societies, and the gradual oblivion of incommensurable claims over the land and its history.

The death of Oslo had both its sudden and gradual dimensions, with causes far too complex to discuss here. The second intifada sealed its demise – even though some of its formal structures persisted, and indeed continue to persist. Yet, this demise was not initially accompanied by a revival of the centrality of the legal debate. This was partly due to the accompanying violence: it seemed that neither legal principles nor pragmatic interests would henceforth be relevant, but only brute force.
However, as ever in this conflict, brute force has not decided matters, and zero-sum ideological battle has again become the order of the day: on one side, the de-legitimation of Israel as such; on the other side, the de-legitimation of any Palestinian claims to the land. Or, to use common shorthand: the advocates of a “one-state solution,” whether that state be Israel or Palestine, have seemed to be gaining the upper hand in shaping international debate, employing legal argumentation to advance irreconcilable claims.

II. What is the Law?

I turn to an overview of the legal issues relevant to the settlements, beginning with the basics. A full legal discussion would take an entire volume (or more); I have striven here to deal with the most central questions.

Israel is a State (in the international law, not the American, sense – i.e., an independent country). Its statehood has been recognized by most other States, and, most importantly, by its status as a Member State of the U.N. If any other State were to use force against its “territorial integrity or political independence …, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations,” it would be violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, one of the most sacred norms of post-World War II international law. At a formal legal level, such issues as the “legitimacy” of Zionism, Jewish historical claims to the land, and so on, are simply irrelevant to the legal status of the State of Israel.
The Palestinians, for their part, have been recognized as a “people” with the right to “self-determination” by the U.N., most States, and the International Court of Justice [the "ICJ", a.k.a, the "World Court"]. Under General Assembly Resolution 2625 (1970), most of whose norms are considered by international legal authority as binding, the right to self-determination can be implemented in one of three ways: “the establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State, or the emergence into any other political status determined by a people.” As a “people,” the Palestinians thus possess the right, as yet unimplemented, to choose one of these three options. There is a strong international preference that the right to self-determination be implemented through independent statehood, as expressed in state practice during decolonization and in General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), the predecessor to 2625 and the seminal document in the ripening of self-determination into a general international legal right.

The territorial dimension of Israeli statehood and Palestinian self-determination requires discussion of at least two additional legal issues. The first concerns the status of the “Green Line,” the border defining Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbors, particularly Egypt and Jordan. The Agreements explicitly declared that they were not decisive as to the parties’ legal claims, including territorial claims. Nonetheless, the years after 1949 saw a growing international recognition, at least de facto, of the Green Line as the border of the State of Israel. The precise moment when this de facto recognition acquired legal stature may be hard to pinpoint, though it seems to have largely occurred. Thus, in its 2004 decision on the Israeli security wall, the ICJ implicitly assumed the de jure status of the Green Line – particularly in its proclamation that the Geneva Conventions’ provisions for occupied territories apply to “Palestinian territories … east of the Green Line,” implicitly declaring them inapplicable to territories west of the Green Line because they lay within the sovereign territory of Israel.

This statement by the ICJ brings us to the legal term, “occupation.” Recent pro-settler advocates insistently deny that this term can be applied to the West Bank. They contend that “occupation” only applies when territory is wrested by one sovereign State from another sovereign State. The West Bank has not had an internationally recognized sovereign since the long defunct Ottoman Empire. The British, who succeeded the Ottomans in ruling Palestine, were merely a “Mandatory Power,” a kind of trustee, administering the territory on behalf of the League of Nations. Jordan, which conquered the West Bank in the 1948 war, was widely condemned for its subsequent annexation – an annexation recognized formally only by Britain and perhaps, at an informal or de facto level, by the U.S. The annexation was initially condemned as illegal by the Arab League, which nearly expelled Jordan over the issue.

In 1968, Yehuda Blum, an Israeli international legal scholar and diplomat, offered what was perhaps the first, and most influential, legal argument for an Israeli claim to the West Bank: the theory of the “missing reversioner.” Under this theory, the full set of international rules governing “belligerent occupation” did not apply due to the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign to which the territory could “revert.” Blum, however, did not go so far as to deny that the term “belligerent occupation” applied. Rather, the “missing reversioner” meant that only those rules “intended to safeguard the humanitarian rights of the population” applied, and not those “protecting the reversionary rights of the legitimate sovereign.” Current proponents of the Israeli claim, however, have assertively taken the step from which Blum refrained: the denial of the very existence of an “occupation.”[1]

In any case, the relevance of the “missing reversioner” to the international law of occupation has been soundly rejected by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 decision (as well as by almost all other authorities), as I have noted above. The ICJ based its rejection on the purpose of the relevant provisions of the Geneva Conventions, the travaux preparatoires (records of discussions among the parties to the Conventions), subsequent confirmation by the views of the parties to the Conventions, and many Security Council resolutions – the standard methods used to determine the meaning of a treaty’s provisions. Moreover, as I show below, the Court’s declaration that all the Geneva Conventions provisions governing belligerent occupation apply to the West Bank is amply supported by the overall policies underlying those provisions, as well as other legal developments, above all the right of self-determination.

(I note that I do not have the space here to discuss the legality of the occupation as such, but only that of the legality of settlements in any occupied territory. A plausible argument could be made that the inception of the occupation was legal in 1967 as an exercise of the right of self-defense, but that, as Aeyal Gross has recently shown, the question remains as to whether it has become illegal due to the manner in which it has been conducted.[2])

The core argument for the illegality of the settlements is based on one of the primary goals of the rules governing belligerent occupation: the obligation of the occupier not to change the character of the occupied territory beyond that which is required by strict military necessity. This goal underlies the basic rule about occupation codified in Article 43 of the Hague Regulations of 1907: the requirement that the occupying State “take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” This policy also informs the prohibitions on forcing the inhabitants to swear allegiance to the occupying State (art. 45) and on the confiscation of private property (art. 46), as well as the rules about public property: “The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct” (art. 55). Articles 46 and 55 leave no land upon which an occupier could build any civilian settlement, let alone one of a permanent character.

To be sure, the 1907 Hague Regulations seem to assume the existence of a sovereign “reversioner” and to see the role of the occupying State as a kind of trustee for that sovereign until the negotiation of a peace treaty. The “missing reversioner” theory would declare all provisions informed by this assumption to be inapplicable to the West Bank. And, indeed, one might very well ask: for whom is the occupying State a trustee in the absence of a legitimate sovereign, for whom is it obligated to observe the rules of usufruct in relation to public property, on behalf of whom is it forbidden to impose its own legal framework – and, in general, whose rights is it supposed to safeguard?

The answer under current international law is clear: the beneficiary of all these rules is the population, or rather, “the people” of the occupied territory. Recall that even Blum affirmed that, in the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign, those rules designed to safeguard the “humanitarian rights of the population” are applicable to the West Bank, thus acknowledging that the absence of a “reversioner” did not entail the absence of a beneficiary of at least some of the rights granted by the law of occupation. To be sure, Blum distinguished between such “humanitarian rights” and political claims – the latter, under his theory, inapplicable by virtue of the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign. And Blum’s position would have been plausible in 1907.

But Blum’s distinction is no longer valid under current international law, due to the right of self-determination, recognizing the political rights of “peoples” not yet organized into a sovereign State, and the infusion of international law generally with the values it embodies. Under this recognition of the political rights of non-state peoples, the beneficiary of the trust-like status of occupied territory, in the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign, must be “the people” of the territory. It is on its behalf that the occupying State must govern the territory, refrain from unnecessary legal changes, safeguard public property, and so on.

The pro-settler (and indeed pro-annexation) argument – that the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign makes the territory available for appropriation by the occupier – thus completely ignores the gradual emergence into international law of the right of political self-determination. While the self-determination of peoples may have only fully ripened into a general international legal right after 1960, the principle informed much of the post-World War I redrawing of the boundaries of Europe. Woodrow Wilson gave it one of its earliest and most eloquent formulations in his 1918 “Four Principles” speech, when he declared that “peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game” – a principle which runs directly counter to the “missing reversioner” theory.

Indeed, the concept of pre-20th century international law that the right of self-determination directly rejects is the close ancestor of the “missing reversioner” theory: that of “terra nullius,” land that belongs to no one and therefore available for appropriation. This notion had a long and ignoble career in the history of imperialism, whose phases were sketched by ICJ Judge Ammoun in the 1975Western Sahara Case:

(1) Roman antiquity, when any territory which was not Roman was nullius.
(2) The epoch of the great discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which any territory not belonging to a Christian sovereign was nullius.
(3) The nineteenth century, during which any territory which did not belong to a so-called civilized State was nullius.

The ICJ thoroughly rejected the notion of terra nullius in the Western Sahara Case, declaring that “territories inhabited by tribes or peoples having a social and political organization” cannot be regarded legally as terrae nullius. Since all “tribes” and “peoples” have “social and political organization,” the Court effectively declared that only uninhabited territory could possibly be nullius.

The “acquisition of sovereignty” over any inhabited territory, therefore, cannot be “effected unilaterally through ‘occupation’” but, rather only through “agreements concluded with local rulers,” whether or not such local rulers were the representatives of States.

I now turn to the key legal rule specifically governing settlements, Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The meaning of this provision has been fiercely contested in the West Bank context. Pro-settler advocates argue that it refers only to forcible transfers of population, and relate it to the mass Nazi deportations to concentration camps. This interpretation treats the two terms, “deport” and “transfer” as synonymous. The authoritative 1958 commentary on the Geneva Conventions by the International Committee of the Red Cross ["ICRC"], however, gives a very different reading:

It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race.

In the words of the ICJ in 2004, the provision prohibits “not only deportations or forced transfers of population such as those carried out during the Second World War, but also any measures taken by an occupying Power in order to organize or encourage transfers of parts of its own population into the occupied territory.” This interpretation, endorsed by the ICRC, the ICJ, and most international lawyers, is consistent with the overall policy framework of the law of occupation, which is that the occupying State must refrain from taking steps to change the character of the occupied territory – and attempts to alter its demographic character through settlements, and a fortiori any unilateral steps toward annexation, run directly counter to that policy.

III. What about San Remo?

One of the most surprising features of recent pro-settler legal argumentation is its preoccupation with three, nearly century-old, texts culminating in the establishment of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine: the Balfour Declaration (1917), the San Remo Resolution (1920), and the Mandate for Palestine (1922). These documents are of variable legal significance. The British Balfour Declaration, which “view[ed] with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” was a unilateral declaration of policy by a State engaged at that time in a military struggle for the control of Palestine. Standing alone, it had no international legal significance. The San Remo Resolution was an agreement between four States (Britain, France, Italy, and Japan), declaring their intention to accept certain terms to be incorporated in the Mandates for Palestine, Syria (apparently including Lebanon), and Mesopotamia (soon to be called Iraq). The four States agreed that the Mandate for Palestine would be granted to Britain which would be “responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] Declaration.” Again, the Resolution was a statement of policy by four States, but had no independent legal significance. Finally, the Mandate for Palestine, a binding international treaty between Britain and the League of Nations, adopted the Balfour Declaration in its preamble and provided for a number of detailed provisions for its implementation. Of these texts, only the Mandate, an international treaty, was legally binding – making the current emphasis by pro-settler advocates on the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Resolution rather inexplicable from a legal point of view.

In any case, even the Mandate has lost all current legal relevance. The Mandate and its precursor texts were written in a radically different time, before a vast array of radical factual and legal changes in the international and regional situation. Above all, these texts were adopted before the establishment of the internationally recognized State of Israel. The establishment of the State did more than fulfill the goal of the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”: it over-fulfilled it - since the vague term “national home,” a term with no precise legal meaning in 1917 or any prior or subsequent time, was chosen precisely to avoid promising Jewish statehood. A comparison of the Palestine Mandate with all other post-World War I treaties make this clear: when the intention was to guarantee independent statehood to peoples, the texts said so explicitly.

One could quibble further about the language of the Balfour Declaration (for example, it seems to promise only that the “national home for the Jewish people” will be somewhere “in Palestine,” rather than providing for the constitution of Palestine as a whole as a Jewish national home). However, the establishment of the State of Israel, with its over-fulfillment of the “national home” policy, suffices to render the related provisions of the Mandate obsolete. Under a long-established rule governing international treaties, “rebus sic stantibus,” a “fundamental change of circumstances” that alters the basic conditions under which treaty provisions were adopted nullifies their binding character.
Two other provisions are often mentioned by pro-settler advocates. The first is the provision in the Mandate calling for Britain to “encourage … close settlement by Jews on the land.” Again, with the lapse of all the “national home” provisions by operation of rebus sic stantibus, this provision, too, is obsolete. Indeed, the establishment of an internationally recognized State of Israel renders the obligation of a foreign Mandatory Power to “encourage … close settlement” a bit absurd.

The second provision is Article 80 of the U.N. Charter. Article 80 is part of Chapter XII of the Charter, providing for the establishment of an International Trusteeship System to replace the League of Nations Mandates. Article 80 provides that “nothing in” Chapter XII “shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments.” Pro-settler advocates, drawing on an article written by Eugene Rostow in 1978, view this provision as maintaining all the provisions of the Palestine Mandate in relation to any part of the territory that has not been “allocated” – a term they use to mean territory not yet granted to an internationally recognized sovereign.

This argument fails on at least two grounds. First, the operation of rebus sic stantibus, rendering obsolete the Mandate’s Jewish national home provisions, is not a result of Chapter XII, and thus the restrictions of Article 80 are simply not pertinent. Second, the ripening of self-determination into an international legal right has not only changed the legal situation (reinforcing the rebus sic stantibus argument) but also signifies that the territory cannot be considered “unallocated” simply because there is no recognized sovereignty over it. In any case, all such arguments have been implicitly rejected by the ICJ, almost all international lawyers, and the international community of States.

IV. What about Resolution 242?

Another old debate which pro-settler advocates have resurrected concerns the meaning of Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in November, 1967. Among other things, the resolution calls for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied” during the Six Day War. Pro-settler advocates argue that the absence of a definite article before the word “territories” signifies that the resolution did not require Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied during the war and that this provision could be fulfilled by withdrawal from any of the occupied territories – for example, by the withdrawal from Sinai under the 1979 Camp David Accords. Such arguments often involve comparison of the French and English texts, fine points of English and French grammar, and statements by various people involved in drafting the resolution. The pro-settler advocates also argue that the resolution thus legitimates Israeli settlements.

These arguments are rather baffling. Even if the grammatical point is correct (which is by no means certain), the resolution must be interpreted in light of general international legal rules about occupied territory. Under these rules, territory occupied during war cannot be unilaterally annexed. This prohibition is, indeed, stated in Resolution 242 itself, whose second preambular paragraph “Emphasiz[es]the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war…”. Even if the pro-settler interpretation of “territories” is correct, the resolution would simply be stating that in a negotiated resolution of the conflict, the parties would be free to consent to changes to the pre-war boundaries. This reading renders compatible the second preambular paragraph and the (controversial) interpretation of the word “territories.” I also note that the resolution makes no mention of settlements at all.
In any case, the resolution must be interpreted in light of later legal developments, above all, by the near-universal recognition of the Palestinians as a “people” with a right to self-determination. The resolution makes no mention of Palestinians, who appear only as anonymous “refugees.”

IV. What about Howard Grief?

One of the frustrating features of the pro-settler legality arguments is their seeming indifference to the basic rules governing the determination of the state of international law. They repeatedly point to the existence of a small number of legal writers who have argued for the legality of the settlements, ignoring the thousands who have held the contrary view, as well as the authoritative decision-makers who have also so held (almost all States, the U.N., the ICJ, the ICRC, etc.). They argue for the superiority of the arguments of their chosen writers and contend that, at the very least, the issue is “disputed” and that illegality cannot be viewed as conclusively established.

The pro-settlement legal writers cited are a heterogeneous group – they include some recognized international lawyers, as well as legal scholars in other fields who dabbled to some extent in international law; the careers of some included official Israeli government positions. One of the latter prominently mentioned by pro-settler advocates is Howard Grief, an otherwise obscure Canadian-born lawyer who advised a cabinet minister during the Shamir government, who seems to be responsible for their obsession with the San Remo Resolution. Almost all are individuals clearly identified with the right-wing or even far-right of the political spectrum – including Howard Grief, whose petition to the Israeli Supreme Court to declare the illegality of the Oslo Accords was summarily dismissed as “a political position.”

Whatever the variable credentials of this group, ad hominem arguments are beside the point. International law is not a natural science in which something may be objectively true even if the vast majority of authorities fail to recognize it as such. Nor is it a moral inquiry in which (at least according to some moral theories) a value may be superior to others despite majority thinking. Nor is it concerned with a religious inquiry into the divine intent of a holy scripture. On the contrary, international law defines itself as concerned with consent of States, consensus or near-consensus of scholars, and authoritative institutional interpretations of texts. According to the widely accepted categorization (codified, among other places, in the Statute of the International Court of Justice), the sources of international law are: 1) treaties ratified by states; 2) “customary international law” – widespread State practices that “ripen” into legal rules by virtue of their acceptance as such by most States (the latter known by the Latin phrase, “opinio juris“); and 3) “general principles of law” – principles of the domestic law of States that are so widespread they become transformed into international legal rules.

Moreover, since many of the disagreements here concern the interpretation of treaties, we should note that the principle governing the formation of customary international law – which may be summarized in the formula, “practice + opinio juris” – reappears in only slightly different form in relation to the interpretation of potentially ambiguous legal texts. As stated in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties:

There shall be taken into account, together with the context:

(a) any subsequent agreement between the parties regarding the interpretation of the treaty or the application of its provisions;
(b) any subsequent practice in the application of the treaty which establishes the agreement of the parties regarding its interpretation;
(c) any relevant rules of international law applicable in the relations between the parties.
The contention of the wrongness of the overwhelming consensus about the illegality of settlements – shared by States, Courts, and the vast majority of international lawyers – thus misunderstands the nature of international law. One may, of course, oppose international law in whole or in part. But to treat it as though it had a timeless truth, which a lone observer or small group of observers could discover independently of such a consensus is simply a misunderstanding.

V. The Debate as a Tragic Symptom … and One Last Canard

As I noted at the outset, my general view is that this strange resurgence of the legal debate is a symptom of a growing loss of faith in a possible resolution of the conflict within a framework that would give at least partial expression to each of the competing nationalist aspirations. But it also reflects an even more disturbing phenomenon. As many observers have pointed out for years, the two-state solution – which still seems to many, including me, to provide the only framework that could plausibly bring about a peaceful and just resolution of the conflict – is belied by a “one-state reality” for which it serves as an alibi. Moreover, as the occupation looks ever-increasingly permanent, the legal category begins to look increasingly detached from reality, because permanence is the very condition the legal rules intend to obviate. And, yet, for all the reasons pointed out above, once “occupation” becomes obsolete, the alternative is not legitimate Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, as the pro-settler advocates claim. Rather, it can only be replaced by terms like “colonialism” and “apartheid,” historical categories that describe systems of governance in which settlers and the majority population are governed by two legal systems, and in which only the former have citizenship and civil and political rights. In the context of a “one-state reality,” the campaign against the applicability of the legal descriptor “occupation” is thus chilling indeed.

One last, unpleasant canard must be mentioned here. Pro-settler advocates contend that those who think all settlements must be evacuated are calling for the West Bank to be “judenrein,” thus associating opponents of settlements with Nazis. This is wrong, indeed obscene, on so many grounds, and in so many ways, that another essay would be required to express them all. Since my focus here is on international law, I limit myself to one point only. The settlement project may not be honestly described as the effort by individual Jews to rent or purchase homes and whose rights to do so should be protected by something like anti-discrimination law. The settlement project involves the collective movement of portions of the civilian population of a State into territory under military occupation by that State. The project was initiated and remains directed by governmental and non-governmental leaders whose declared intention was, and is, to facilitate the eventual imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the territory in whole or in part. The project was largely (though not exclusively) initiated, and remains largely led, by those guided by a nationalist-messianist ideology, which views the retention of the land by the State of Israel and/or the Jewish people to be mandated by divine will.

The project is maintained with the backing of the full might of the Israeli military and by massive governmental expenditure on housing and infrastructure. In short: the core legal issues do not concern housing discrimination or private property – and even less the moral evaluation of individual settlers. If some settlers are violent and racist extremists, and many simply indifferent to the human reality of Palestinians as individuals and as a people, others are ordinary families drawn to the West Bank by governmental economic incentives, some are apolitical spiritual exemplars, and there are even a few, like the late Rabbi Menachem Froman, who are genuine peace-seekers. The legal issues concern the actions of a State bound by international rules governing territory occupied during armed conflict, rules that prohibit moves toward the unilateral imposition of sovereignty on such territory and subordination of its population, of which the settlement project is the most flagrant form.

[1] One should also note that subsequent writings by Blum, published after Oslo, suggest that he no longer maintains the relevance of the theory he advanced in 1968.[2] Aeyal Gross, The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (Cambridge, 2017).
Nathaniel Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture at Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities, and codirects the Religion and Internationalism Project. He recently published Passion and Ambivalence: Colonialism, Nationalism, and International Law (Brill 2012).

There Is A Border .... And There Will Continue To Be A Border

From The Transcripts John McDonagh speaks to Mary Ward of Republican Sinn Féin in studio about her memories of Martin McGuinness and Republican Sinn Féin’s stance on issues facing Ireland.
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John: And with us in the studio is Mary Ward or, as she’s known in Donegal as ‘Corcaigh Mary’, because no matter how long she lives in Donegal she’s from County Corcaigh and she’ll be ever known as that. You were talking about Martin McGuinness – when you reported to him did you report to him as a member of Sinn Féin or as an IRA man?

Mary: Well I was reporting to him as an IRA person because I was reporting on behalf of Cumann na mBan.

John: And what years are you talking about now?

Mary: I’m talking right up until 1978.

John: Hmmm…that’s strange. He said he left in 1974.

Mary: Well I met with Martin McGuinness and other people that I assumed to be members of the IRA.
Mary Ward
They approached myself and Geraldine Taylor, as president and adjutant of Cumann na mBan, when they wanted to dismiss Cumann na mBan. They wanted Cumann na mBan to stand down which we refused to do - as did the women of 1916 - refused to stand down. And at every split throughout the history of Irish Republicanism in the twentieth century Cumann na mBan were always to the fore and always went their own way when it came to the Irish Republic. But that night I can still remember and hear Martin McGuinness to this day. He wanted to take of all them – they had a new structure within the IRA where they were setting up cells and he wanted to take the Cumann na mBan volunteers - the active Cumann na mBan volunteers - into their cells and for the Executive of Cumann na mBan to stand down. And when I refused this he turned around and he said to myself and Geraldine Taylor: What are you afraid of? Losing your stripes? So that was in I would say the Winter, the early Spring of 1978.

John: And Mary, you’re talking about 1916 – Republican Sinn Féin was very active in the commemorations and we covered it here on Radio Free Éireann but one of the biggest disgrace that the Free State government did – they put up a wall of all the people that were killed in 1916 – I was surprised they didn’t put up on the wall people that were killed jaywalking at that time on O’Connell Street. But anybody that was involved, they said it could be the IRA, it could be the British. How did you feel about it? And what is it called, this wall?

Mary: Well speaking on the day that it happened at the protest, our president, Des Dalton, described it as a ‘wall of shame’. And on that day Des Dalton asked the question: Could anybody possibly see the Algerians honouring the French who tried to quash their revolution? Or indeed could anybody see the French honouring the German forces that killed Germans, you know? So why should Irish people be ashamed of honouring their dead? Why had The Rising to be linked into the Second World War and why should we, as a proud nation of long-standing, a thirty-two county ancient nation, honour those who we oppose to their occupation of our country?

John: Mary, one of the other topics that was brought up by Anthony about this vote that’s coming on now in June, is Brexit. Brexit affects particularly the border counties and being my mother’s from Donegal and I’m up there all the time (I’ll be going over now in May again) the effect that this border has and the Free State government will have no say on what type of border – hard border – soft border. Brussels will be directing the Dublin government – this is how you’re going to patrol that border and then the British government is going to dictate to everyone in The Six Counties – this is how you’re going to patrol it. So the Free State government’s going to have no say in this border that’s coming up. And maybe talk about some of the hardships of living on the border and Donegal being so isolated.

Mary: Well first of all I would say from a Republican Sinn Féin point of view: We welcomed the Brexit result in Britain because firstly – we welcomed it on two levels: Firstly, it exposed the inherent fissures within the so-called ‘united kingdom’ and from our point of view it will, hopefully, hasten its demise. Secondly, we welcomed the likelihood of a referendum on Scottish independence and secondly it strikes a blow against the EU project and gives encouragement to other progressive forces throughout Europe. Unfortunately, we regretted, that the whole debate was taken over by the alt-right and the right in Britain because their bluster, jockeying for positions within the British Conservative Party, blurred what was the thing.
But where I live in Donegal we never benefited, we never benefited from EU membership, you know? So Brexit isn’t going to really – in some ways it will affect us. But we live in an area that was designated by the EU – the BMW Area, that was the border, Midlands and western area and we were disadvantaged – we were classed as a disadvantaged area in the area that I, myself, come from it has been decimated by Ireland’s EU membership. Because I live within a fishing community and the fishing industry in Ireland has been completely decimated. And like from the very beginning the successive Irish Free State governments, Twenty-Six County governments, were prepared to let the fishing go in favour of agriculture – that was from the beginning. It was one of the things I remember on the pier in Killybegs with the late Joe O’Neill back in 1972 telling the fishermen in Donegal this like, you know?
Now another thing is: In Monaghan area, border area, over the last number of years would have had a thriving mushroom industry where they exported their mushrooms to Britain predominantly and it was a huge trade. Unfortunately now, with the fluctuations in the sterling – and this is probably the only way that it will be affected, with the fluctuations in sterling – that industry has gone to the wall. Now the Free State Twenty-Six County government, they have spent billions upon billions attracting foreign inward investment into Ireland and it’s estimated that for every job created by an American or a Dutch or Chinese company in Ireland that it will cost the Irish taxpayer something like a hundred thousand euros and yet they will not invest in indigenous industries. They will not save the mushroom industries. But they will come running out here to Boston Scientific offering them all kinds of inducements, all kinds of – you know all about their problem with the previous American government in collecting tax on multinationals who use Ireland as a kind of a tax haven for laundering their money.
Now having said that, the ordinary people will rise to the occasion and they’ve already started to do so in places like Dundalk where they have started local coupons they call them, like you know, to attract business to stay local and that people will earn dividends – instead of running off to Newry if they work in Dundalk. But like most of the people along the border – will say they’ll survive. Now the big question, and the big question for the Irish government and for the Provos and everybody else is: they don’t want to see a return to custom posts on the border because that will give lie to the united Ireland in everything but name. It will show up that there actually is a border, there is a border there since 1922 and there will continue to be a border whether Britain is in or out of the EU – there is a border because you do not have a thirty-two county united Ireland.

John: And that’s Mary Ward from Republican Sinn Féin.
(ends time stamp ~ 50:04)

Post Political Conference Success

Via the website of Gilad Atzmon, the Post Political Conference discussion.


I would like to use this opportunity to thank theatre owner Lorcan Otway for taking a firm position on freedom of speech and elementary rights.

I would also want to express my gratitude to Joe Friendly who has been documenting NYC dissent for many years.

Last but not least, my admiration to the supporters of freedom who joined us last Sunday.



Lorcan Otway & Tom Kiely – Opening Words

Stanley Cohen: The Insular View of the American Left (starts here)

Gilad Atzmon: The Tyranny of Correctness – deconstructing identity politics and understanding its origin (starts here )

Michael Lesher – Jewish Identity vs. Jewish Religion (starts here)

Professor Norton Mezvinsky: The Quagmire of Current Political Terminology in U.S. Society (starts here)

1916 Societies Loughgall Martyrs 30th Anniversary Commemoration In Cappagh

The 1916 Societies commemorated the IRA volunteers and one non-combatant killed at Loughgall in 1987.
The Loughgall Martyrs Commemoration was held on Sunday 7th May at 3pm in Galbally/Cappagh. The 2000 strong procession started from Galbally community centre and made its way to Cappagh, where upon arrival was met by a rapturous reception. ‘Only Our Rivers Run Free’ was then sung by Paul Cassidy. Noel McKeown from the P.H. Pearse Society, Galbally-Cappagh made a speech:


On the 8th of May 1987, 9 Irish men were murdered by British crown forces at Loughgall, Armagh. Eight of these men were IRA Volunteers of the East Tyrone Brigade, Vol. Pádraig McKearney, Vol. Seamus Donnelly, Vol. Paddy Kelly, Vol. Tony Gormley, Vol. Eugene Kelly, Vol. Jim Lynagh, Vol. Gerard O’Callaghgan, Vol. Declan Arthurs. Civilian Anthony Hughes was also murdered that evening and his brother Oliver was badly wounded. So on behalf of the 1916 Societies, I would like to welcome the families of these brave men here today. During the tour of the graves yesterday, your pain and heartache is still clear to be seen, but your sense of pride is overwhelming. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome here the many friends and comrades of these brave men.

Seán Ó Loingsigh, nephew of Vol. Pádraig McKearney read the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Vol. Paddy Kelly’s daughter Siobhan then read the Tyrone Roll of Honour accompanied by a lament played by Rhiannon Quinn. Followed by Niamh Donnelly niece of Vol. Seamus Donnelly who recited a poem, which was written by local man Peter McCaughey.

A member of each of the 9 families laid a lily at the monument in memory of their love one. Wreaths were laid on behalf of Friends and comrades, the 1916 Societies, the Tyrone National Graves and the Thomas Clarke band Dungannon.

The Lowering of our National flag was carried out by Brian Arthurs brother of Vol. Declan Arthurs accompanied by lament by Rhiannon Quinn. Then the crowd stood for a minute silence in memory of the men murdered at Loughgall and all others who lost their lives as result of British occupation in Ireland. Brian Cauley, Chairman of Tyrone National Graves led the crowd in a decade of the rosary. Noel then proceeded to pay homage to the Palestinian Prisoner, Mazen al- Maghrebi from the West Bank who died on hunger strike in an Israeli jail on Friday by asking the crowd to remember him and past on condolence to his family.


The Loughgall song was the song by Paul Cassidy. Noel then took proceedings to a close by saying;

Just before we finish off with our national anthem, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for attending this fitting Commemoration for these 9 men, especially the families, your dignity and courage is an inspiration to us all. The 1916 societies are grateful for your help and support here today and we endeavour to fulfil the ultimate tribute of a 32 county democratic socialist republic to these brave IRA Volunteers. I would also like to thank everyone who took part in the proceedings here today, the bands, the flag bearers and everyone else who took part. I would like to invite you all to the community centre for refreshments. Now we will have Caron Brannigan to sing our National Anthem.