Tariq Ali's Blog, page 7
October 16, 2014
Le Journal and Le Club
Walking from the Bastille to the rue Saint-Antoine in Paris a few weeks ago, I was thinking how swiftly the last few decades have taken their revenge on the past. The spectacle that overshadows all else in France today is the collapse of the political civilisation whose foundations were laid in 1789. Radical France – its intelligentsia, its political parties, its cinema and its press – has been neo-liberalised. Jean-Marie Colombani’s notorious post 9/11 editorial in Le Monde – ‘Nous sommes tous Américains’ – turned out to be a prophecy. Is it possible that the country’s historical memory will soon be erased and the events of the memorable years – 1789, 1793, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1936, 1968 – misrepresented or forgotten?
The new liberals, the historians François Furet and Pierre Nora, the politicians Jospin and Hollande, prepared the ground well for the French right. Manuel Valls, currently the Socialist prime minister, declares his admiration for Tony Blair while competing with the Front National’s Marine Le Pen to humiliate minorities. There is more than a whiff of Vichy in the air, with Muslims and Roma taking the place of Jews.
How many passers-by are aware that the monument in the centre of the place de la Bastille commemorates the martyrs of the July Revolution of 1830? The king had insisted on pushing through unpopular ordnances, dissolving the recently elected Chamber of Deputies, taking the vote away from the middle class and suspending press freedom. Up went the barricades. Charles X, like previous royal asylum seekers, fled to London, leaving behind the corpses of more than two hundred citizens, killed in the fight for press freedom.
Today the French press is in a bad way. Le Figaro is not as biased as the Telegraph, but it’s getting there. Le Monde and Libération are corporatised and in decline. It’s true that Le Monde diplomatique still appears every month, but though dependable on statistics and global politics, it’s too worthy and too dull to have any serious impact on national politics.
The challenge to the press has come from a website called Mediapart, launched in 2008 to expose the corruptions embedded in the Fifth Republic’s institutions and political parties. It was the idea of Edwy Plenel, a former editor of Le Monde, and three senior colleagues – François Bonnet (the editor), Gérard Desportes and Laurent Mauduit – who between them had vast experience and, more important, good contact lists. In Fabrice Arfy they have a meticulous and thorough investigator reminiscent of the young Paul Foot of the old Private Eye.
Mediapart is run on a subscription model: for your first euro you can have access to the site for 15 days; from there it costs nine euros a month. In 2011, the site made a €500,000 profit even though it doesn’t carry ads; 95 per cent of the website’s funds come from its subscribers. There are two front pages: Le Journal, for articles written by journalists, and Le Club, where the subscribers blog, comment and interact with the editors. Each day there are editions at 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 7 p.m., as well as English and Spanish versions; FrenchLeaks, an offshoot of Mediapart, is a domestic WikiLeaks.
Mediapart started with Sarkozy’s regime: the Bettencourt scandal; envelopes bulging with euros being handed directly to Sarkozy and Eric Woerth, a budget minister under Sarkozy. Then there were the funds Sarkozy received from Gaddafi (who wanted to help Sarkozy’s re-election), and the cover-up of the Karachi affair: 11 French engineers were killed (probably by the ISI) because the bribes linked to the sale of French submarines had not been paid in full to the great and the bad in Pakistan. Mediapart did not stop with Sarkozy. The Socialist government elected in 2012 was subjected to severe scrutiny, and the results were impressive. Jérôme Cahuzac, a cosmetic surgeon, hair-transplant king and junior economics minister, had been exhorting the nation to tighten its belt. Mediapart revealed that he had more than a million euros in secret Swiss bank accounts. Cahuzac lied about this to Hollande, to the French parliament and to the media. Mediapart persisted, now joined by the rest of the press. He was finally sacked.
The Mediapart offices, just off rue Saint-Antoine, house a team of 33 journalists. They operate as a daily newspaper sans papier. With 100,000 subscribers (and 2.5 million hits a month) Mediapart enjoy saying that they have half the combined circulation of Le Monde and Le Figaro. And the journalists are paid properly; the site doesn’t depend on free labour from interns. ‘We fight,’ Plenel told me. ‘Mediapart is the product of twin crises: an economic crisis of the old press and a democratic crisis of France especially, but also I think of the entire European continent.’
October 15, 2014
Brazil
In today’s program, “Brazil: Two Women, One Country”, Ali discusses that country’s presidential elections and offers some points for an initial balance sheet of the Workers’ Party (PT) record in office
October 2, 2014
October 1, 2014
The Extreme Centre
Project Fear has had a temporary victory in Scotland but its legacy will not be a return to the status quo ante either in Scotland or elsewhere. The mind of the Scottish nation has stirred to new activity. Every single parliamentary constituency in Glasgow voted ‘Yes’. Henceforth the divide in Scotland will always be between the Unionists and those who want independence, and that will be the main issue in 2015: if Labour is dethroned by the SNP, say farewell to the UK state.
As for the rest of us, we live in a country without an opposition. Westminster is in the grip of an extreme centre that is the coalition plus Labour: yes to austerity, yes to imperial wars, yes to a failing EU, yes to increased security measures, and yes to the status quo. And its leaders: Miliband, a jittery and indecisive leader presiding over a parliamentary party (including his shadow chancellor) that remains solidly Thatcherite; Cameron, a PR confection, insolent to the bulk of his own people while repulsively servile to Washington and often to Beijing. Clegg barely needs a description. His party will suffer in the next election and we might soon be deprived of his presence. All are flanked on the right by Ukip, whose policies each tries to pander to in its own fashion. Euro-immigration is becoming an English obsession, even though it was this country that carried out Washington’s orders to expand the EU so that it lost any chance of social or political coherence.
What of our local institutions? The neutered BBC that during crises at home (Scotland) and wars abroad (Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) is little more than a propaganda outfit. The NHS? Crippled by Blair and Brown with their PFIs and privatisations and now well on its own way to privatisation thanks to the last Health Bill. The railway companies? Loathed by the bulk of their ‘customers’ they still receive state subsidies although the idea of renationalising them for the public good is rejected by the extreme centre.
Politically, we need a party to the left of this centre. The constitutional mess can only be sorted out by a constitutional convention that gives us a written constitution which sweeps away all the cobwebs (the antiquated and unrepresentative voting system, the unelected second chamber, the monarchy etc) and guarantees the right to self-determination of nations within the UK. This will not happen unless there is a grand remonstrance from below. Here the Scottish campaign for independence offers a good model.
September 29, 2014
The World Today – The Isis Factor
A weekly review of world politics by one of the world’s sharpest and most outspoken political analysts. Tariq Ali is the author of numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a filmmaker. In today’s program, The ISIS Factor, Ali interviews veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn, author of The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising”. The discussion between the two Middle East specialists centers on an analysis of the birth of the Islamic State forces, their links to the Sunni population in Iraq, and the consequences for region. teleSUR http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/web/t…
Watch of Tariq’s ‘The World Today’ program on the teleSUR English page
September 19, 2014
Blog
What will happen now? Cameron will use the victory to portray himself as the man who saved the union and with some justification. Project Fear was launched in Downing Street, after all with Nick Clegg and Ed Moribund pressed into service as page boys. Simultaneously Cameron will push through (with the devo max measures) a bill disallowing Scottish MPs from voting on English questions. This will keep the Tories united, UKIP happy and Labour shafted. No more Scottish cannon fodder for Westminster votes on the budget!
In Scotland itself there will be a lot of soul-searching within the SNP. How could they lose in some of their strongholds? Did they work hard enough? Should Salmon go and be replaced by Sturgeon? And who knows what else….On the left the spirited and non-sectarian Radical Independence Campaign fought well. It would be important to preserve and enhance this current in Scottish politics to argue the case for a very different Scotland and this means keeping the movement together. Radical Scotland will not disappear and the model here should not be any reversion to the tried and tested failures of the socialist left but something more like Podemos in Spain. There will be sadness and demoralisation and this is perfectly understandable, but it won’t last too long. British politics is getting worse not better.
Fear leads to passivity and even though in this case the Unionists managed to get the fearful out to vote they might never be able to do that again. Hope leads to activity and that is what the independence campaign represented. We will win the next time.
September 15, 2014
Interview: Tariq Ali on Gaza, BDS, ISIS and Iraq
Tariq Ali interviewed by Al McKay, an editor-at-large of E-International Relations.
August 18, 2014 — E-International Relations — Tariq Ali is a longstanding editor of the New Left Review. He has written seven novels and a number of screenplays, in addition to many works on history and world politics. His latest books are On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Coversation and The Obama Syndrome.
In this interview, Tariq Ali discusses the recent Israel-Palestine conflict, the BDS movment, the rise of ISIS, and Obama’s commitment to long-term US involvement in Iraq.
* * *
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
I was born 26 years after the Russian Revolution and six years before the Chinese Revolution. I was 11 years old when the Vietnamese defeated France at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu. These events played a big part in my political biography.
One had to read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao. Initially uncritically, later with a more critical eye. This I did in Pakistan. The Cuban Revolution had very little impact on the left in Asia—except during the missile crisis—and so it was not until I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963 that I really understood what had happened in Cuba and read a great deal of Fidel and Che.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, one understood that it was the end of an epoch. One couldn’t just say, “Ah, the slate has been wiped clean and we can start afresh”. What happened marked the triumph of capitalism and the ideologies associated with it. Broadly speaking, a global counter-revolution. So what was to be done?
For some on the left, mainly uncritical admirers of the various Communist regimes, the choice was simple. Always worshippers of accomplished facts, they shifted their loyalties to the new order, becoming as dogmatic in its defence as they had once been in relation to Russia, China, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Albania, etc. For them, the new emancipatory project became “globalisation”, the United States and NATO or, in the case of some, Israel.
This process is not exactly novel. It happened after the Restoration in 17th century Britain. Christopher Hill has written an illuminating study on precisely this: “The Experience of Defeat.” The process was repeated again after the final defeat of the revolution in France. Stendhal wrote about this phenomenon very well. And so it goes. One must recognise the defeat, but one must not capitulate to “presentism”. Because what is now is not permanently static. Things change.
By the end of this century, the trajectory might be clearer. To give up, to say farewell to what was important about many of the ideas that motivated people in the last century, is foolish.
There has been much discussion in the media of the so-called moral high ground in the current crisis involving Israel-Palestine. Taking into consideration how events have played out, do you see either side having a serious claim to this?
“Moral high ground” is not a phrase I ever use. One person’s moral high ground can be another person’s dungeon. In the overall conflict the Palestinians are in the right. Much wrong has been done to them by Israel and its principal backer, the United States. The Israelis treat them as untermensch, have tried to destroy their past, their historical memory, and are now attempting to destroy them as a political entity.
What do you feel are the Israeli government’s current political aims in Gaza?
The destruction of Hamas, the intimidation of those who vote for it and the institution of a puppet regime that is a twin of the Palestinian equivalent of the Judenrat that exists on the West Bank. This aim is supported by Washington, Riyadh and Cairo, as well.
You’ve recently pointed out, in an interview with the BBC and in a talk for the Stop the War Coalition, that you feel there has been a change in the perception of the conflict, particularly the Israeli use of force, from those who were previously described as neutral and from those who were previously in the strongly pro-Israel camp. Do you feel that this shift in opinion offers hope to the Palestinians?
Opinion polls in Europe indicate that a vast majority of European citizens are opposed to Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, but this was also the case on Iraq. On its own, public opinion has no real force. So the shift will certainly give succour to the Palestinians, make them feel they’re not alone, but that is not sufficient to alter the overall situation.
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has been criticised recently by those who are also considered stern critics of the Israel government, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. Do you think the BDS movement is still an effective approach?
I don’t agree with the two Ns on this question. I think they’re wrong. What else can one do? It’s the only alternative to non-violence. Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative movement, has estimated that Israel has incurred losses of around 8 billion dollars due to the boycott campaign against illegal settlements, equivalent to 20 per cent of its GDP. If the figure is accurate, the movement has been a success.
What are your thoughts on US President Barack Obama’s commitment of the US to long-term involvement in Iraq, which he claims is a response to the rise of Islamic militants?
Nonsense. The real reason is to make sure that the US-Israeli protectorate [Kurdish region] remains safe. The aftermath of the occupation was designed to divide Iraq across religious lines. What we are witnessing (as I pointed out a decade ago) is the balkanisation of Iraq.
Do you agree with Hillary Clinton’s recent statement that the rise of ISIS can be attributed to the failure of the US to help rebels in Syria?
Another absurdity. The US did help and arm the Syrian rebels via Turkey. They did not bomb Assad out of existence, as they were unsure of the consequences. After all, Clinton, who supported the war on Iraq, should see what happens if you destroy a regime unilaterally. The rise of ISIS in Iraq is because they destroyed all the structures of the old regime. Had they done the same in Syria, we would have had an even worse situation than now, with at least three different wars taking place. Qatar/Turkey/US backing the so-called moderate Islamists, and the Saudis angry that the Muslim Brotherhood is being revived in Syria.
It is arguable that some of the loudest voices currently calling for military intervention in Iraq, who were previously calling for military intervention in Syria, are coming from what could be described as the Euston Manifesto left. What effect do you feel the Euston Manifesto has had on the political left since it was created, and do you think it actually represents what it claims to represent, i.e. modern leftist internationalism?
Are these people on the left? I think I described them in my response to your first question. They’re liberal imperialists, a position that has a long pedigree in Britain. The Fabians and mainstream Labour upheld the British Empire and defended its values long after the independence of India in 1947. Labour governments played an appalling role in Malaya and Aden in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. They had no need of a “humanitarian” ideology, since they were still infected by civilisational zeal.
Many E-International Relations readers are students. What key advice would you give those wanting to start a career in political activism?
Read, read and read again while becoming active. In Britain and North America, I couldn’t advise them to join a political party of the left because none exist. In Greece, I do recommend that working within Syriza is the best opposition, Podemos in Spain and the Left Party [Die Linke] in Germany, and that’s about it… otherwise, the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland, Stop the War in Britain and other similar organisations elsewhere are the best transition to radical politics.
September 7, 2014
Scots, undo this union of rogues. Independence is the only way to fulfil your potential
Glaswegians mark Margaret Thatcher’s death. ‘The bulk of Scotland voted against Thatcher, and her brutal dismantling of the 1945 compact shook the union’s foundations,’ Photograph: David Moir/Reuters
For the first time since 1707, Scotland has its sovereignty, honour and dignity within its grasp
Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century. This is not always the case when new states are born – the break-up of Yugoslavia is sometimes cited, and with good reason, to demonstrate the opposite. But Yugoslavia was wrecked by the IMF with disastrous consequences: ultra-nationalism, civil war and ethnic cleansings at home exacerbated by a German intervention to divide the country, followed by the Nato bombing. A better analogy for Scotland is Norway’s peaceful and collaborative secession from Sweden in 1905.
Scotland was tricked into the 1707 union with England, sold down the river by what Robert Burns called its “Parcel o’ Rogues”: What force or guile could not subdue, through many warlike ages / Is wrought now by a coward few / for hireling traitor’s wages / The English steel we could disdain / secure in valour’s station / But English gold has been our bane / Such a parcel o’ rogues in a nation.
Later Walter Scott enlarged on this theme: “It may be doubted whether the descendants of the noble lords … who accepted this gratification would be more shocked at the general fact of their ancestors being corrupted or scandalised at the paltry amount of the bribe.”
The weakness in traditional Scottish nationalism lay in its own inability to grasp that identity could not be the only factor in the march to independence. As the late Stephen Maxwell, Tom Nairn and other Scottish intellectuals have pointed out, the union was a compact between the English bourgeoisie and a weak and desperate Scottish elite. The latter obtained entry into English markets and, later, to its colonies in North America and Asia. Five of the British viceroys who ruled India were members of the Scottish gentry. Scottish administrators were a cornerstone of the imperial bureaucracies in Asia and Africa.
For the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Scottish elites benefited greatly, the subaltern layers less so. (As a proportion of population, Scottish deaths exceeded English ones in the inter-imperialist war of 1914-18.) There were other downsides as well. Scotland’s political identity was destroyed, and a huge Scottish emigration to North America followed the brutal Highland clearances. These included every layer of Scottish society, not just the remnants of the defeated clans. The reasons were not only economic. Many Scots left a country occupied by redcoats.
Two processes combined to reawaken Scotland. The depression of the 30s left a deep mark on the country, and the end of empire that followed a decade later after another war created the basis for new thinking. Until 1945 the Labour party, born in Scotland, had been pledged to Scottish home rule. Clement Attlee’s reforms, it was thought, made the idea redundant, and certainly few in Scotland thought otherwise. But the emergence of a new nationalism was the result of a democratic deficit.
The bulk of Scotland voted against Margaret Thatcher, and her brutal dismantling of the 1945 compact shook the union’s foundations. When Tony Blair followed suit, belittling the Scottish parliament as little more than a local council, the haemorrhaging of Labour votes began. The real tartan Tories in the Scottish parliament today are the visionless careerists of New Labour, incapable of producing a leader with even one-fifth of the qualities that distinguished the late Donald Dewar. Small wonder that support for independence is strongest among working people.
The notion that an independent Scotland will be parochial is risible. The “internationalism” of New Labour and its coalition lookalikes essentially means subordinating the entire British state to the interests of the US. They have made Britain a vassal state: on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on the gathering of intelligence. An independent Scotland could be far more internationalist and would benefit a great deal from links to both Scandinavia and states in other continents.
A campaign of fear, based on dodgy statistics, is under way, with the failed model of anglo-globalisation presented as the only model. Scotland’s sovereignty, honour and dignity are within its grasp for the first time since 1707. It would be a dark day indeed if the parcel o’ rogues triumphed again.
This article originally appeared in the Guardian on Thursday 13 March 2014
September 4, 2014
Reflections on the Independence Referendum
As I debate what to write on my ballot paper, I am becoming increasingly irritated by the Electoral Commission’s decision to amend the original wording, ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ to ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ My problem is that I don’t really have a simple answer to the latter question, while I have a clear response to the former, which is: ‘Agree with whom?’ Nobody on either side of the argument has painted a picture of a truly independent Scotland for me to agree with. On the one hand, the Happy Together Party assumes that anyone who doesn’t want to be ruled from Holyrood wants to be ruled from Westminster. Trouble is, I don’t want to be ruled at all. On the other hand, it is clear that a vote for independence would inevitably be seen as an endorsement of the SNP’s appalling record on the environment and local democracy. Either way, the answer is clear: there is nobody to agree with, so my only possible response is ‘No’.
The question I am actually invited to consider is ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ Well, yes, but we’ll have to talk further. I can’t just tick a box. This isn’t one of those George Bush he-who-is-not-with-me-is-a-terrorist situations, is it? Or is it? Ever since I voiced a couple of reservations about the SNP’s fitness to ‘lead’ Scotland, I’ve been called a Stilton-eating, Cameron-loving surrender-monkey often enough to wonder if this is the reasoned debate I’d hoped for. I do believe that Scotland (like any supposed democracy) should be independent of the following: a) the whims of American billionaires with grandiose plans for golf courses; b) the magisterial nixing of local planning decisions by central government; c) the flouting of EU law in pursuit of a simple-minded and wholly unviable energy strategy; d) the abuse of parliamentary committees to circumvent checks and balances on the governing party; and e) a feudal, environmentally damaging system of land ownership, buttressed by extravagant subsidy systems – all of which we have suffered under the SNP.
Who will win? I couldn’t say and, anyway, I am waiting for real change, not a gloss on business as usual. If I had to make a prediction, however, I would say that the SNP will do what it has always done when it comes to democracy, which is to let the people decide – and then, if it doesn’t get the result it wants, overrule us from Holyrood.
Blinded by Israel, Visionless in Gaza
The US Senate votes unanimously to defend Israel including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. I don’t think he did it for the money. He is a paid-up member of POEEI (‘Progressive on Everything Except Israel’ and pronounced pooee) the liberal segment of US society, which is not progressive on many things, including Israel.
Take, as one example, the case of ‘Colonel’ Sanders. I thought my late friend Alexander Cockburn was sometimes too harsh on Sanders, but I was wrong. Sanders has been arselickin bad for a long time now as Thomas Naylor informed us while exploding the myths surrounding the Senator in a CounterPunch piece in September 2011:
“Although Sanders may have once been a socialist back in the 80s when he was Mayor of Burlington, today, a socialist he is not. Rather he behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.. Since he always “supports the troops,” Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.
Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return. If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.”
A unanimous Senate vote is rare, so what explains being more loyal to Israel than quite a few critical Jewish Israelis in that country itself? An important factor is undoubtedly money. In 2006 when the London Review of Books published an article (commissioned and rejected by the Atlantic Monthly) by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer on the Israel Lobby, there was the usual brouhaha from the usual suspects. Not the late Tony Judt, who publicly defended publication of the text and was himself subjected to violent threats and hate mail by we know who.
The New York Review of Books, perhaps shamed by its own gutlessness on this issue among others, commissioned a text by Michael Massing which pointed out some mistakes in the Mearsheimer/Walt essay but went on to provide some interesting figures himself. His article deserves to be read on its own but the following extract helps to explain the unanimous votes for Israeli actions:
“AIPAC’s defenders like to argue that its success is explained by its ability to exploit the organizing opportunities available in democratic America. To some extent, this is true. AIPAC has a formidable network of supporters throughout the US. Its 100,000 members—up 60 percent from five years ago—are guided by AIPAC’s nine regional offices, its ten satellite offices, and its one-hundred-person-plus Washington staff, a highly professional group that includes lobbyists, researchers, analysts, organizers, and publicists, backed by an enormous $47 million annual budget…. Such an account, however, overlooks a key element in AIPAC’s success: money. AIPAC itself is not a political action committee. Rather, by assessing voting records and public statements, it provides information to such committees, which donate money to candidates; AIPAC helps them to decide who Israel’s friends are according to AIPAC’s criteria. The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that analyzes political contributions, lists a total of thirty-six pro-Israel PACs, which together contributed $3.14 million to candidates in the 2004 election cycle. Pro-Israel donors give many millions more. Over the last five years, for instance, Robert Asher, together with his various relatives (a common device used to maximize contributions), has donated $148,000, mostly in sums of $1,000 or $2,000 to individual candidates.
A former AIPAC staff member described for me how the system works. A candidate will contact AIPAC and express strong sympathies with Israel. AIPAC will point out that it doesn’t endorse candidates but will offer to introduce him to people who do. Someone affiliated with AIPAC will be assigned to the candidate to act as a contact person. Checks for $500 or $1,000 from pro-Israel donors will be bundled together and provided to the candidate with a clear indication of the donors’ political views. (All of this is perfectly legal.) In addition, meetings to raise funds will be organized in various cities. Often, the candidates are from states with negligible Jewish populations.
One congressional staff member told me of the case of a Democratic candidate from a mountain state who, eager to tap into pro-Israel money, got in touch with AIPAC, which assigned him to a Manhattan software executive eager to move up in AIPAC’s organization. The executive held a fund-raising reception in his apartment on the Upper West Side, and the candidate left with $15,000. In his state’s small market for press and televised ads, that sum proved an important factor in a race he narrowly won. The congressman thus became one of hundreds of members who could be relied upon to vote AIPAC’s way. (The staffer told me the name of the congressman but asked that I withhold it in order to spare him embarrassment.)”
All this is made possible by official US policies since 1967. Were the US ever to shift on this issue unanimous votes would become impossible. But not even the United States has so far banned public demonstrations opposing Israeli brutality and its consistent deployment of state terror.
On a weekend (18-19 July 2014) where demonstrations took place in many different parts of the world, the French government banned a march in Paris organised by many groups including France’s non-Zionist Jewish organisations and individuals. The ban was defied. Several thousand people were drenched in tear gas by the hated CRS. The French Prime Minister Manual Valls, a desperate opportunist and neo-con, the scourge of the Roma in France, competing with Le Pen for the right wing vote and unsurprisingly an adornment of the French Socialist Party who models himself on a shameless war-criminal and shyster (Tony Blair) explained the ban in terms of ‘not encouraging anti-semitism’, etc. The grip of the Israel Lobby in France is complete. It dominates French culture and the media and critical voices on Israel (Jewish and non-Jewish) are effectively banned.
The Israeli poet and critic, Yitzhak Laor (whose work depicting the colonial brutality of Israeli soldiers has sometimes been banned in his own country) describes the new rise of Euro-Zionism in sharp terms. The ‘philosemitic offensive’ is ahistorical:
It would be facile to see this memorializing culture as a belated crisis of international conscience, or a sense of historical justice that took time to materialize . . . The majority of United Nations General Assembly members have emerged from a colonial past: they are the descendants of those who suffered genocides in Africa, Asia or Latin America. There should be no reason for the commemoration of the genocide of the Jews to block out the memory of these millions of Africans or Native Americans killed by the civilized Western invaders of their continents.
Laor’s explanation is that with the old Cold War friend-enemy dichotomy swept aside a new global enemy had to be cultivated in Europe:
In the new moral universe of the ‘end of history’, there was one abomination—the Jewish genocide—that all could unite to condemn; equally important, it was now firmly in the past. Its commemoration would serve both to sacralize the new Europe’s liberal-humanist tolerance of ‘the other (who is like us)’ and to redefine ‘the other (who is different from us)’ in terms of Muslim fundamentalism.
Laor skillfully deconstructs the Glucksmanns, Henri-Levys and Finkelkrauts who dominate the print media and the videosphere in France today. Having abandoned their youthful Marxist beliefs in the late Seventies, they made their peace with the system. The emergence of an ultra-Zionist current in France, however , predates the ‘New (sic) Philosophers’. As Professor Gaby Piterburg, reviewing Laor’s essays in the New Left Review, explained:
As in the US, the 1967 war was a turning point in French Jewish consciousness. A young Communist, Pierre Goldman, described the ‘joyous fury’ of a pro-Israel demonstration on the boulevard Saint-Michel, where he encountered other comrades, ‘Marxist-Leninists and supposed anti-Zionists, rejoicing in the warrior skills of Dayan’s troops’. But the political reaction of the Elysée to the 1967 war was the opposite to that of the White House. Alarmed that Israel was upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East, de Gaulle condemned the aggression, describing the Jews as ‘an elite people, sure of itself and domineering’. French Jewish organizations that had taken a pro-Israel foreign policy for granted began to organize on a political basis for the first time, as Pompidou and Giscard continued de Gaulle’s arms embargo into the 70s. In 1976 the Jewish Action Committee (CJA) organized a ‘day for Israel’ which mobilized 100,000 people. In 1977 the formerly quietist CRIF, representative council of some sixty Jewish bodies, produced a new charter denouncing France’s ‘abandonment of Israel’, published by Le Monde as a document of record. In the 1981 presidential election the CJA founder, Henri Hajdenberg, led a high-profile campaign for a Jewish vote against Giscard; Mitterrand won by a margin of 3 per cent. The boycott was lifted, and Mitterrand became the first French president to visit Israel. Warm relations were sealed between the CRIF and the Socialist Party elite, and a tactful veil of silence drawn over Mitterrand’s war-time role as a Vichy official.
[A small footnote: Whenever Professor Piterburg (a former officer in the IDF) is attacked by Zionists at public lectures for being a ‘self-hating Jew’, he responds thus: “I don’t hate myself, but I hate you.” ]
So much for official France. The country itself is different. Opinion polls reveal that at least 60 percent of French people are opposed to what Israel is doing to Gaza. Are they all anti-semites? They couldn’t be influenced by the media, could they? Because it’s totally pro-Israel. Could it be the case that the French population is ignoring Hollande, Valls and the mercenary ideologues who support them?
What about Britain? Here the Extreme Centre that rules the country as well as the official ‘Opposition’ dutifully supported their masters in Washington. The coverage of the recent events in Gaza on state television (BBC) was so appallingly one-sided that there were demonstrations outside the BBC’s offices in London and Salford. My own tiny experience with the BBC reveals the fear and timidity at work inside. As I blogged on the London Review of Books, this is what happened:
On Wednesday 16 July I received four calls from the BBC’s Good Morning Wales.
First morning call: was I available to be interviewed about Gaza tomorrow morning? I said yes.
First afternoon call: could I tell them what I would say? I said (a) Israel was a rogue state, pampered and cosseted by the US and its vassals. (b) Targeting and killing Palestinian children (especially boys) and blaming the victims was an old Israeli custom. (c) The BBC coverage of Palestine was appalling and if they didn’t cut me off I would explain how and why.
Second afternoon call: was I prepared to debate a pro-Israeli? I said yes.
Afternoon message left on my phone: terribly sorry. There’s been a motorway crash in Wales, so we’ve decided to drop your item.
Few British citizens are aware of the role their own country played in creating this mess. It was a long time ago when Britain was an Empire and not a vassal, but the echoes of history never fade away. It was not by accident, but by design that the British decided to create a new state and it wasn’t Balfour alone. The Alternate Information Center in Beit Sahour, a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization promoting justice, equality and peace for Palestinians and Israelis recently put up a post. It was a quote from The Bannerman Report written in 1907 by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and, as it was strategically important it was suppressed and was never released to the public until many years later:
“There are people (the Arabs, Editor’s Note) who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions. These people have one faith, one language, one history and the same aspirations. No natural barriers can isolate these people from one another … if, per chance, this nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and would separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars. It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain its coveted objects.”
[Dan Bar-On & Sami Adwan, THE PRIME SHARED HISTORY PROJECT, in Educating Toward a Culture of Peace, pages 309–323, Information Age Publishing, 2006]
Tariq Ali is the author of The Obama Syndrome (Verso).
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