Month: April 2009

The End of Israel?

On April 2, 2009

I will confess that over the years I have moved from a strong support of the Israeli side to a disgust so deep that it is almost existential. I am not so self-righteous, so sure of my Gandhi-nature, to think that if I had been born in Palestine, as a Palestinian, that I would be committed to a non violent solution.

People don’t seem to get it. Most Palestinians have never known anything but occupation. They have never known anything but curfews, residences being bulldozed, travel passes and settlers moving in increasing numbers and taking the best land, along with access to water.

They have never known anything but a boot in the face. It’s that simple.

And the Israeli army, once the finest in the world, has been, as all armies are, coarsenened by the occupation. The Israeli state bemoans suicide bombers, then kills Palestinian opposition leaders with rockets – rockets they know will cause collateral damage (a phrase that means “will kill innocents”). They have complete access to the country and could easily assassinate people cleanly, without collateral casualties – they choose not to. They could arrest those same people, again easily. They chose not to. The blood is on their hands as much as those of the innocent Israeli citizens killed by Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets.

But there is much more blood on their hands. Much, much more. As with the narcissism that is America bewailing its losses (oh, you’ve lost 2,500, eh? How many have the Iraqis lost?) Palestinian losses are much higher than Israeli, and like Israeli they are predominantly innocent civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But I find it funny too, in a dark sort of way. My cold hard calculation is that the odds favouring Israel’s survival as a Jewish state have never been worse. Over time demographic realities will end the possibility of a two state solution. They will come to be an ethnic and religious minority ruling over bantustans full of Muslims who can’t vote, who are subject to attack, who are not allowed enough water for agriculture, who require passes to trvel from one part of Palestine to another – people who are clearly disenfranchised second class citizens.

Failure to make peace with Palestinians; greed for more and more of Palestine; the constant undermining of any faction capable of actually delivering a peace (ie. what is happening to Hamas right now); refusal to negotiate until the Palestinians have given up most of the items on the table prior to negotiation – all of these have doomed Israel to turn into South Africa.

Oh, none of this is to say that Palestinians bear no blame, let alone all the Muslim nations who have chosen to use the Palestinian situation as a political football. There have been despicable acts on both sides. But Israel chose to occupy Palestine – they chose to rule over non-citizens, and to keep them down with a military boot. They are the ones with the most power in the relationship – and in the end it is their dream of a safe Jewish state which is going to be destroyed by their own actions.

For the two-state dream is dying. Failure to achieve it leaves Palestinians clearly under Israeli rule. The majority of them have never known anything but Israeli rule.

What do you call a person who is subject to the authority of a country, who was born in land that country rules, who does not have a vote?

The failure of a two state solution, the insistence that Israel has the right to do anything it wants, including arresting cabinet ministers of a foreign government, in their own country, makes it clear that Palestine is not a separate country.

And if it is not a separate country, then it is part of Israel. And in the end it will be recognized as such.

Soon enough America is not going to be able to afford to continue massive subsidies of Israel. Soon enough protectionism and isolationism is going to be on the upswing. Soon enough other powers, like Europe and China, will find their relative power growing.

Soon enough, Uncle Sam isn’t going to be enough.

Soon enough, Israel is going to find itself all alone, locked in a country with a mjority of the population being Palestinian – Palestinians who have every reason to hate their occupiers.

And they will be faced with a series of horrible choices, choices that will either see the end of Israel as a Jewish state, will see them turn to ethnic cleansing, or will require them, at long last, to face what occupying another people’s country has done to their noble dream.

Originally Written June 29th, 2006 at the Agonist. More true now than it was then.

To Be or Not To Be A Sheep

By Ian Welsh

On April 2, 2009

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This picture of a huge crowd congregating on the Bank of England to protest the G20 meeting is worth looking at, but more interesting is this:

For a second straight day, French workers facing steep layoffs at a Caterpillar factory held four of their bosses at the U.S. manufacturer’s plant in the Alps, union officials said.

Short of the Soviet Union I wonder if there has ever been a population as saturated with propaganda and lies as the American one. Wonder how long it’ll be before such things happen in the US. Wonder if it does happen, if the SWAT teams will go in and start killing people.

Bankers lost trillions of dollars over the last 8 years due in large part to outright fraud, paying themselves billions in bonuses. Under both Bush and Obama, the response to their theft has been to give them trillions of dollars worth of money. Trillions have not been spent on helping people destroyed by the bankers greed, corruption, incompetence and theft.

If Americans continue to put up with this, they aren’t just sheep, they’re serfs.

The Personal Politics of Hopelessness

By Ian Welsh

On April 1, 2009

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great-depression-soup-kitchen As I write this I’m eating a sub I bought from across the street. While it was being prepared I chatted with the young woman making it, and she told me about moving from the Canadian Maritimes to Toronto, to, in essence, get a job that pays a little more than minimum wage. Because out in the Maritimes she had trouble getting even that.

I thought to myself that her experience is one that politicians need to have. Many politicians, of course, have never ever had a bad job. They went straight to a good university and from there to a good job or internship. They probably worked hard for it, and think they deserve what they have, never really seeing all the people whose feet were never on that road, who never had the same shot they did.

Then there are a fair number of pols, though less and less every year, who will tell you about the lousy jobs they had as teenagers, or maybe in their early twenties. But in most cases something is different between them and many working class and even middle class folks.

They knew they weren’t staying there.

When I was poor and working in lousy jobs I used to look in the mirror and see myself at 50, or 60. I expected to still be working at grindingly hard jobs, being treated badly by bosses (because there is no rule more iron than that the worse you are paid the worse your employer will treat you), and still being paid little more than minimum wage. That was the future I saw for myself.

And when I was on welfare, after having failed to find a job for 6 months, and even being turned down by McDonalds (in the middle of the early nineties recession) I wondered if I’d even ever have a shitty job again. I ate cheap starchy food, turned pasty and put on weight. My clothes ran down. When my glasses broke beyond the point where tape would keep them together I literally had to beg the optometrist to make me his cheapest pair and I’d pay him later. (I eventually did.) My life was a daily grind of humiliation.

And that’s what I expected my life to be.

When politicians participate in one of those “live on Welfare for a week/month” programs I’m happy, but I’m also dubious. The difference is that they know they’re getting out in a week or a month. They know it’s going to end. Much as I applaud someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, who lived for months working at lousy jobs, again, she knew it was going to end. She knew that, if push come to shove and she became seriously sick, she could opt out. She knew that if she really couldn’t eat for days, that was her choice.

Living without that safety net, knowing that if something goes wrong, that’s just too bad, changes you. Living without any real hope of the future, knowing that the shitty job you’ve got now is probably about as good a job you’re ever going to have, changes you.

And it changes your sense of what hard work is, of what it means to be deserving. I remember working on a downtown construction site as temp labor, and I’d watch all the soft office workers with their uncalloused hands come out for lunch, and I’d wonder why they got paid two or three times what I did for work that was so much easier (and which, of course, I could do, even if I didn’t have a BA.) At the end of the day they might be stressed, but I’d go home physically exhausted from hard labor and so would my co-workers.

Of course, I got out of that. I’d say “I went back to university”, but even though that’s true, it’s not what got me out, since I never finished my BA. Instead what got me out is that I finally got a couple chances to prove what I could do—I got a temp job in an office, and was one of their most productive workers (they measured it.) Later I got invited to blog, and hey, I can write, even if I don’t have a BA. I got lucky. Like most people who get lucky in work, that luck involved a lot of hard work, but it also involved luck.

But a lot of folks never get lucky despite the fact that they work hard. Perhaps they aren’t really all that bright (half the population, after all, is below average intelligence.) Perhaps they’ve got some personality issues or weak social skills. Perhaps there’s something not quite right in their brain chemisty. Or perhaps they just never catch a break because they aren’t lucky and their parents weren’t well enough positioned to help them get those breaks.

But still, most of them work hard and earn their money, whether it’s barely more than minimum wage or they did get a bit of luck and got one of the few remaining good blue collar jobs.

But when they look in the mirror, they know that the guy or gal looking in the mirror ten or twenty years from now is probably going to be doing the same thing. And they know that they’re one bad break away from losing even the little they have—one illness, one plant closure, one argument with their boss.

They don’t have a lot of hope for the future, except that it won’t get worse. The life they live now is the best it’s probably gonna get.

Living like that changes you. It makes you see people differently. You understand that there are a lot of bad jobs out there, and that someone’s going to be stuck with them. You know that most of those jobs are either hard or humiliating, and often both. You know that for too many people, a shitty job where they’re abused by their boss is as good as it gets.

This all comes to mind because of how Congress and other politicians have acted throughout the auto bridge loan debate. Folks who passed a bill giving their sort of people: wealthy people who went to good colleges, who work with their minds and not their hands in the financial industry, 700 billion dollars without any real oversight wanted to force a cram down of wages and benefits on auto workers. Journalists on TV who were sympathetic to the bailout, dripped with palpable contempt for the idea of “subsidizing unprofitable companies”, something that didn’t bother them when it was soft-handed professionals like themselves on the dole.

The narrative of the GI generation was “first person in my family to go to college”. They came up from poverty, they probably expected to live in poverty all their life, but when the world changed so changed their chances.

It was a generation of opportunity, but what has happened since them is the “closing of the American elite”. Every generation the odds of someone born poor making it into the elite decrease. At this point about 80% of the working class don’t get degrees. The US now has the least intergenerational social mobility in the Western world (it used to have the most). The elites have become self-perpetuating, and they never had to stare in a mirror and know that they may never have more than minimum wage job; that probably this is as good as it gets.

As a result they have no real empathy or understanding of the vast majority of the middle and working class. The elites know they worked hard to be where they are, what they don’t see is that their feet were put on the path from birth, and that every opportunity was given to them. Opportunities that were not so open to those below them, who have to virtually bankrupt themselves to go to university and whose schools were completely broken, even as the value of BA declines to multi-generational lows. Put yourself in debt for 20 years, and it may still not buy you the good life.

That existence, hand to mouth, with no hope, is something America’s elites have never experienced and don’t understand. For them there’s always another opportunity, always another chance: always hope. And what matters to them is when the “deserving”, which is to say, their own class, is in trouble. So they’ll bail out the financial sector, even though it hasn’t made any more profit than the Big 3 in the past 8 years, and unlike the financial sector, didn’t bring down the world economy, but they won’t help out the undeserving whom they don’t understand.

America has become the most class ridden society in the Western world, far worse than Britian. Congressional seats are passed on to family members and friends like corrupt boroughs in 18th century England. The rich are bailed out and ordinary people left to sink. Responsibility is enforced on the least in society while the privileged are allowed to skate. Sell a gram of pot, go to jail; but kill hundreds of thousands in an illegal war and it’s no big deal.

The elites don’t live in the same world as ordinary people. They have become completely disconnected from that world. This is entirely logical on their part, because for 30 years they’ve gotten rich, rich, rich at the same time as ordinary people haven’t had a single raise. When you’re sitting on the top it’s very clear that all boats don’t need to be lifted and that Americans aren’t all in it together. The elites have done just fine, for over 30 years, while the rest of society went to hell.

So there’s no empathy born of shared experience, of the knowledge that sometimes life sucks and no matter what you do, it’s going to suck, and that that’s the way many people live. And there’s no acknowledgment of a need to make America work for everyone, because for the elites, that’s simply not true: America doesn’t need to work for everyone for things to be good for them.

This then, is how they’ve acted. Plenty of help for themselves, for the people they see as part of their group. And very little help for everyone else. Because the elites aren’t like ordinary people, they don’t believe they have many shared interests with you, and they no longer have any real shared experience.

Expect to eat a lot of cake over the next few years if this attitude doesn’t change. The elites, of course, are wrong. At the end of the day a nation without a solid working and middle class always falls into steep decline.

But, as Adam Smith once said, “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.”

Nonetheless, as many nations have discovered, that amount isn’t infinite.

Originally published December 21st at FDL.

Netanyahu’s Delusional Desire to Attack Iran

By Ian Welsh

On April 1, 2009

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Netanyahu states that if the US doesn’t deal with Iran’s “nuclear program”, Israel will.

Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.

This is like saying “if Russia doesn’t stop its program to create apocalyptic fairies, we will attack them”. That is to say, while Iran certainly has a nuclear program, there is no credible evidence that it is trying to get nuclear weapons, only civilian nuclear technology.

And while Iranian defenses may be “permeable”, who, exactly, is going to give Israel overflight rights to get its planes to Iran? Add to that the fact that Israel will need multiple sorties, unless it wants to use nuclear weapons itself (which would be somewhat ironic) and there’s a fair chunk of bluster going on here.

And then there is Netanyahu’s apocalyptic hysteria:

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

This is just propaganda, or if not that, self-delusion. There is no credible evidence that Iran is willing to accept certain nuclear annihilation in order to use nuclear weapons on Israel. Nukes come with return addresses, even nukes given to terrorists. Iran having nukes just means it can’t itself be nuked without retaliation, what Israel is concerned about is not the possibility of pre-emptive nuclear war started by Iran, but the fact that if Iran was to get nukes (again, there is no evidence they are trying, but Israeli decision makers don’t appear to care about evidence) then Israel would loose its Middle Eastern nuclear monopoly.

If the US greenlights an Israeli attack on Iran it risks having both Iraq and Afghanistan go up in flames, and having Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which would send the price of oil through the roof and put intolerable pressure on the world economy.

In no way is an Israeli attack on Iran in America’s interests. In no way is it in Israel’s interests. However, like the Israeli attack on Gaza, it may serve domestic Israeli political needs, by making Israelis feel tough and as if they are doing something for their security. Like the attack on Gaza, however, all it will accomplish is to make the rest of the world trust and like Israel even less. And it may make Iran decide that it does actually need nuclear weapons.

Israeli decision makers are abominably bad. After failing to achieve their goals in Lebanon (destroy Hezbollah) or Gaza (end smuggling and missile attacks) they now claim they want to attack another country for doing something there is no evidence it is doing.

George Bush would approve, I suppose.