Editor’s Notes:

I was once under the impression that the Israeli State was a proxy for United States’ interests in the Middle East. However, it is becomming abundantly clear that the US might not be the senior partner in this nefarious relationship. After all, although we might supply the Israelis with cluster bombs, I doubt that it is an extension of our own policy to drop these insidious weapons on populated areas, such as South Lebanon. And to the Israeli apologists who will no doubt scream that there is no evidence that cluster bombs where ever used, I direct you to the independent journalist, Robert Fisk, who documented casaulties who carried the scares associated with the use of these weapons of terror, following the Israeli onslought on Lebanon after two Israeli POW’s were captured when positioned in the occupied territories stolen by the Israelis from the Lebonese. The following article was originally published on Counterpunch. I did not obtain permission to republish it here. However, from my own impressions, Counterpunch appears more interested in the dessimination of truth than with the protection of its intellectual properties.

R Cole

Did Monty Python Fan Dupe Laurie Mylroie?

By CounterPunch News Service

A bizarre “interview” with imprisoned former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was circulated yesterday by MEMRI TV, a non-profit in Washington DC that specializes in translating and circulating mainly Arab-language materials, selected to display the Arab world in a poor light, to the advantage of Israel.

Releasing its translation of the purported interview, supposedly conducted over the phone to the imprisoned former dictator by Al-Fayhaa TV on on March 28, 2006, MEMRI TV trumpeted the news to its customers that “Saddam Hussein issues a Calls to Cut Off Nose and Ears of Former Iraqi VP ‘Izzat Al-Duri and Declares: It Will Make Me Happy if Iraq Turns Into Ashes, Iraq is Not Worth Two Bits Without Saddam Hussein.”

Saddam is allegedly reacting to a taped message issued by his former vice president and loyalist ‘Izzat Al-Duri, who addressed the Arab League summit in Sudan.

Saddam Hussein: “All ‘Izzat Al-Duri ever wanted was to address the Iraqis as their leader, even if just for a few short minutes. Everybody remembers that he once addressed the Iraqi Women’s Union without my knowledge. Do you know what I did to him?”

Interviewer: “We don’t know. Tell us.”

[…]

Saddam Hussein: “The first thing I did when they brought him was to spit in his face.”

Interviewer: “Why?”

Saddam Hussein: “I said to him: ‘You despicable man, I spit on your owl’s face. How do you address these glorious women without me knowing about it?’”

[…]

“The only one who makes speeches in Iraq is the supreme leader - meaning me.

Interviewer: “You’re in prison. How can you give speeches?”

Saddam Hussein: “That’s a good question. You watch the court sessions. How many sessions have there been so far? Fifteen sessions?”

Interviewer: “Seventeen.”

Saddam Hussein: “I give a speech at every single session.”

[…]

“If I don’t give speeches, I get heartburn.

“I call to punish ‘Izzat Al-Duri, because he burned my heart.”

Interviewer: “Why, because he published a statement without your permission?”

Saddam Hussein: “He gave a speech without me knowing it. The punishment that I want for him is to cut off his tongue and ears.”

Interviewer: “Why cutting off his tongue and ears?”

Saddam Hussein: “To make him the same as all the renegades whose tongues and ears I cut off. And if ‘Izzat Al-Duri continues giving speeches in sign language, like the deaf do, I demand that his hands be cut off. And so on and so forth, until ‘Izzat Al-Duri is finished, and we get rid of this degenerate.”

MEMRI TV circulated this as “Special Dispatch No. 1127″ to its customers and it was instantly seized upon by Laurie Milroie, now somewhat fallen in status, but once riding high as an “Iraq expert” and a prominent propagandist for the US-led attack of 2003.

Milroie rushed out the “interview” at 12.57 EST, March 28,to her e-mailed Iraq News, under the breathless heading “Saddam Interview (Stunning), MEMRI TV”.

Then, just over 5 hours later came a second, crestfallen communiqué:

From: “Laurie Mylroie”
Date: March 28, 2006 6:05:06 PM PST
To: “Laurie Mylroie”
Subject: Saddam Interview was Hoax

A knowledgeable US government official has informed “Iraq News” that that remarkable interview with Saddam Hussein, published by MEMRI TV, is almost certainly a hoax.

Had the credulous Mylroie and editors at MEMRI TV been familiar with the 1975 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they might have wondered about such choice lines attributed to Saddam Hussein as “You despicable man, I spit on your owl’s face.”

ARTHUR: If you will not show us the Grail, we shall take your castle by force!

FRENCH GUARD:You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!

GALAHAD: What a strange person.

ARTHUR: Now look here, my good man–

FRENCH GUARD: I don’t wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!

GALAHAD: Is there someone else up there we could talk to?

FRENCH GUARD: No. Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
[sniff]

ARTHUR: Now, this is your last chance. I’ve been more than reasonable.

FRENCH GUARD: (Fetchez la vache.)

OTHER FRENCH GUARD: Quoi?

FRENCH GUARD: (Fetchez la vache!)
[mooo]

ARTHUR: If you do not agree to my commands, then I shall–
[twong]
[mooooooo]
Jesus Christ!

KNIGHTS: Christ!
[thud]
Ah! Ohh!…

ARTHUR: Right! Charge!

KNIGHTS: Charge!
[mayhem]

FRENCH GUARD: Hey, this one is for your mother! There you go.
[mayhem]

FRENCH GUARD: And this one’s for your dad!

ARTHUR: Run away!

KNIGHTS: Run away!

FRENCH GUARD: Thppppt!

FRENCH GUARDS: [taunting]

LAUNCELOT: Fiends! I’ll tear them apart!

The portion of the Saddam interview where the blustering ex-despot vows to chop off Mr al-Duri’s extremities is also strongly reminiscent of a scene in the Python classic where Arthur swipes off the arms and legs of the Black Knight.

BLACK KNIGHT: None shall pass.

ARTHUR: What?

BLACK KNIGHT: None shall pass.

ARTHUR: I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight, but I must cross this bridge.

BLACK KNIGHT: Then you shall die.

ARTHUR: I command you, as King of the Britons, to stand aside!

BLACK KNIGHT: I move for no man.

ARTHUR: So be it!

ARTHUR and BLACK KNIGHT: Aaah!, hiyaah!, etc.
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s left arm off]

ARTHUR: Now stand aside, worthy adversary.

BLACK KNIGHT: ‘Tis but a scratch.

ARTHUR: A scratch? Your arm’s off!

BLACK KNIGHT: No, it isn’t.

ARTHUR: Well, what’s that, then?

BLACK KNIGHT: I’ve had worse.

ARTHUR: You liar!

BLACK KNIGHT: Come on, you pansy!
[clang]
Huyah!
[clang]
Hiyaah!
[clang]
Aaaaaaaah!
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s right arm off]

ARTHUR: Victory is mine!
[kneeling]
We thank Thee Lord, that in Thy mer–

BLACK KNIGHT: Hah!
[kick]
Come on, then.

ARTHUR: What?

BLACK KNIGHT: Have at you!
[kick]

ARTHUR: Eh. You are indeed brave, Sir Knight, but the fight is mine.

BLACK KNIGHT: Oh, had enough, eh?

ARTHUR: Look, you stupid bastard. You’ve got no arms left.

BLACK KNIGHT: Yes, I have.

ARTHUR: Look!

BLACK KNIGHT: Just a flesh wound.
[kick]

ARTHUR: Look, stop that.

BLACK KNIGHT: Chicken!
[kick]
Chickennn!

ARTHUR: Look, I’ll have your leg.
[kick]
Right!
[whop]
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s right leg off]

BLACK KNIGHT: Right. I’ll do you for that!

ARTHUR: You’ll what?

BLACK KNIGHT: Come here!

ARTHUR: What are you going to do, bleed on me?

BLACK KNIGHT: I’m invincible!

ARTHUR: You’re a looney.

BLACK KNIGHT: The Black Knight always triumphs! Have at you! Come on, then.
[whop]
[ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s last leg off]

BLACK KNIGHT: Oh? All right, we’ll call it a draw.

ARTHUR: Come, Patsy.

BLACK KNIGHT: Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!

Lately Miyroie has been eagerly promoting the supposed disclosures in documents recently released by the US government of pre-2003 ties between Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda and Zarqawi. In flushes of battiness reminiscent of Clare Sterling (the Mylroie of the Rfeagan years) she has even accused the Bush administration of promoting a cover-up in this regard. The documents have been greeted ecstatically by the war lobby, even though there are documents which do not encourage the scenario they espouse, such as one in which Iraqi security, on hearing that Zarqawi is in Iraq, puts out an APB bulletin to establish his whereabouts.

MEMRI TV has been heavily touted by such promoters of the 2003 attack as former CIA chief R. James Wolsey who said in 2004 that “MEMRI is the single most important source for understanding what is happening in the Greater Middle East.” Another member of the War Party devouring MEMRI TV is Charles Krauthammer who has said “For anyone interested in what is really happening in the Middle East - what the Arab world is saying to itself - MEMRI is utterly indispensable.”

There are other intgriguing precursors in the Pythons’ movie, including one episode in Sir Galahad’s search for the Holy Grail:

GALAHAD: Open the door! Open the door!
[pound pound pound]
In the name of King Arthur, open the door!
[creak]
[thump]
[creak]
[boom]

GIRLS: Hello!

ZOOT: Welcome, gentle Sir Knight. Welcome to the Castle Anthrax.

Tags: american empire, israel, lebanon
Categories: Commentary
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An Article by
Ben Tanosborn

Heads or tails, go ahead, you call it! Heads you say? It looks like it came out heads, so we’d better make it two out of three. Damn, heads again! Let’s make it three out of five. Kids’ game, you say? Think again. That’s how grown-up bully nations play this thing we call “the democracy game.”

We are seeing it happen all over in Latin America, Venezuela being most news-worthy because of its colorful leader, Hugo Chávez, and his quips directed at George W. Bush or US’ historical mismanagement of relations with its southern neighbors. But we are also seeing it everywhere else, and with a recent sordid outcome in the Near East.

When Hamas won the Palestinian elections a year and a half ago, Israel and the US just didn’t accept the results. Not because there were irregularities in how the election was conducted, but because the majority of Palestinians didn’t vote “the right way.” And, as a measure of punishment for Palestinians’ lack of docility, both Israel and the United States put an economic chokehold on all Palestinians; also quickly twisting the EU’ arm to suspend aid, thus keeping the pressure on until those politically-illiterate ingrates were ready to capitulate to despair, and bring on a mini civil war - since one cannot conduct a coup on oneself, as the recent altercation has been misnamed.

Abbas’ reaction to Hamas’ takeover in Gaza went by the book (the PA Basic Law, or de facto constitution) when he dismissed PM Ismail Haniyeh, but he acted illegally on all other counts, such as the declaration of an “emergency government,” or the naming of a new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, since this gentleman is not a Hamas party member. And the president cannot rule by decree unless all the elements of such decree are approved by the Legislative Council during its first meeting under emergency conditions, as stipulated in Article 43 of the Basic Law.

Bottom line: the Palestinian Authority has in fact ceased to be courtesy of a fratricidal act of desperation. The Fayyad government cannot be truly recognized as a legitimate government, one representative of the Palestinian people now geographically, and for now politically, divided in two. Although these West Bank power-holders are likely to receive full support from Washington and Tel Aviv, and long withheld tax funds by Israel are starting to be released, negotiations that may originate between this illegitimate group and Israel will not hold water; and the US position will continue to be seen in the same light as that which has shone during the past 40 years.

In every respect the Palestinian Authority, the path to statehood, has been terminated, declared null and void. The introduction to the Basic Law referring to the Palestinian people as its ultimate political authority by being the source of power has extinguished its flame, becoming just poetic history. The reality now faced is that this is 2007, 1428 for most Palestinians, and the gravel path established by the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords was to be “asphalted” within a period of five years, something which has not come to past. Arguably, thanks for the most part to Bush’s inertia on this critical issue, prompted to be sure by the parasitic relations between the United States and Israel.

The two-state solution for Old Palestine (Israel and New Palestine) has now taken a new turn as a two-encampment solution to a people who have been suffering non-stop for almost six decades. Two-encampments: Gaza and the West Bank. back to square one and suffering re-dux.

Shame, shame on us! We have gone from “divide et impera” to “divide et humilito.” Our political effort in the Near East has taken a new approach, from divide and conquer (or divide and rule) to divide and humiliate. There just isn’t another honest way to view it.

When you are the ultimate holder of power, you make up the rules with the game still in progress or even right at the end. But, how long can the US keep flipping coins and declaring that it has won every game? That remains to be answered, but for now, Bush and the State Department have made it pretty clear: the US will not stop anyone from making a choice; they can either play America’s game or, simply, abstain.

Meanwhile let’s just give a decent burial to the Palestinian Authority and the hope it once gave not just Palestinians but peace-loving people throughout the world. Rest in peace, the peace you never had.

© 2007 Ben Tanosborn
http://www.tanosborn.com/

Tags: fatah, gaza, hamas, israel, middle east, palestine
Categories: Commentary
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The conclusions in this essay are allegations that I have derived from publicly available sources, which I provide a link to at the bottom of this essay.

Apparently, in the mind of Alan Dershowitz, there is a caveat to all instances of the applicability of International Law. It is the nation-state of Israel and its illegal and criminal acts against its Arab subjects. For decades Israel has persistently perpetrated abuse, mistreatment, and ethnic cleansing upon the indigenous Arab populations, who suffered the misfortune of falling under the control of the Israelis. All of the abuses experienced by the Palestinians and other Arab ethnic enclaves, subsumed under Israeli militarism - have been executed under the sanctums of Zionism.

Dershowitz is a Zionist ideologue and a serial apologist for the Israelis, who feels compelled to constantly contrive arguments in defense of Israeli crimes against humanity, whose only grammatical constraints consist of the uninhibited imagination with which Dershowitz is endowed; owing little or nothing to the principles of honesty and sound reasoning.

Dershowitz’s support of Israel - which is unqualified and guaranteed; whether Israel is right or wrong - would not be so deleterious if he had the self-discipline and integrity to make his arguments and then go on to support them through mechanisms sanguine in the context of academic practices. However, the Professor from Harvard lacks the compunction to comply with such precepts. He does not battle his adversaries over issues related to Israel through public dialogue; alternatively, Dershowitz prefers to execute his campaigns against those with whom he disagrees through subterranean quasi-political devices, which involve Dershowitz leveling his influence and stature via private communications intended to coerce the gatekeepers of the publishing industry not to permit their institutions to publicize works that are critical of Israel.

Many of us can remember the consequences of Dershowitz’s massive presence at Havard after two quite respectable scholars had an essay - addressing the impact upon American foreign policy formation that has been enjoyed by the pro-Israeli lobby in this country - censored. Dershowitz working both in front of as well as behind the scenes had the article pulled from Havard’s Website.

Furthermore, when Dershowitz cannot silence the opposition through backstage maneuvers designed to censor his opponents - which, in itself, is a peculiar strategy for a professed civil libertarian - he resorts to even more sinister methods that include the sabotage of the careers belonging to academics who were brave enough to publicly and openly - two attributes of character to which Dershowitz cannot credibly lay claim - take on the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States. Once again, Dershowitz - like any other coward - prefers to perform his political transactions in a modality clandestine to the purview of intellectual communities, who might object to Dershowitz’s attempts to silence opposition through professional sabotage.

Obviously, the most blatant exemplar of the pattern of conduct to which I have referenced on the part of Dershowitz happens to be the case with Finkelstein, who has endured a protracted and often publicly opaque war upon his career. Due to Finkelstein’s scholarly work, which - by and large - refuted many of the writings that Dershowitz has published upon the subject of Israel and its geopolitical posture toward its regional neighbors - Dershowitz has attempted to curtail Finkelstein’s procurement of tenure from academic institutions.

The secret battle waged by Dershowitz upon Finkelstein’s career and livelihood assumes the form of private correspondences with the members of departments where Finkelstein has been awarded tenure track positions. As it turns out - following revelations that Dershowitz had been engaged in these backstage political operations - it has become publicly confirmed that the Professor from Harvard had distributed to Finkelstein’s colleagues a 60 page character assassination in an effort to curtail Finkelstein’s overly deserved obtainment of tenure. Reportedly, this document that Dershowitzed had quietly disseminated was inflated with contents that have been, by and large, contested and refuted by Finkelstein; a brilliant and widely acclaimed scholar who is now in his early fifties; considered one of the leading intellectuals on Israeli geopolitical affairs - and currently coming up for tenure at De Paul University; only to have his well-earned - and late coming - reward for his scholarly work in precarious straights, due to a secret campaign conducted by Dershowitz, which, as it turns out, has been going on for years.

It should be mentioned that this essay is not making allegations regarding any possible transgressions of ethics on the part of Dershowitz. Rather, I am interested in assessing the extent to which Dershowitz possesses honor. Subterranean political tactics might not be unethical in a strict sense of the word and the significance it assumes in this context; although, to prefer the backstage dealings of a politician to the openly and sincerely waged battles that would be executed by someone, who is just as concerned with being right as he is about obtaining his political objectives, is certainly dishonorable.

We all know the rhetoric that is used to criticize the actions of terrorists who, apparently, conduct their battles through cowardice and without honor by reverting to tactics that evade military attire and the battlefield in favor of violent acts qualifying as terror. I strongly believe there is a comparison to draw between the methods of terrorists and the subterranean political tactics of Professor Dershowitz. Therefore, in order to fully assess the extent to which Dershowitz has gone in his acts of intellectual terrorism, we should follow the policy recommendations made by no other than Dershowitz and impose a special warrant permitting the use of torture in order to coerce Dershowitz to disclose the full extent of his dishonorable engagements; and, certainly, there would be no more apropos of a location to conduct this enhanced form of interrogation than Guantánamo Bay.

Due to restrictions in time, I am pressed into providing bibliographical references to the allegations made in this essay. I apologize for not better documenting the sources that have led to the conclusions presented in this brief essay, which encapsulates a great deal, but only takes the time to treat it in generalities.

Notes:

The remarks made concerning Dershowitz and his use of libel to silence opposition is supported by the following essay by Dr. Frank Menetrez

http://counterpunch.org/menetrez04302007.html

I have additionally made conclusions from the letters posted by supporters of Finkelstein’s at the following:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=665

Most importantly, I implore the reader to investigate the activities to which I referenced on the part of Dershowitz him or her self. There is an abundance of literature freely available over the Web. An excellent place to start - a source from which you can spiral from various links which will lead the reader, I am certain, to the same conclusions I have reached:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com

Russell Cole

Tags: Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein, imperialism, israel, pro Israeli lobby
Categories: Commentary
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I agree that the hyperbole and rhetoric is deployed by all sides of this issue. However, there is a more fundamental dynamic that seems to be organizing this problem in a manner that prevents the relevant parties from coming under the direction of any form of multilateral internationalism. This condition results from the failure of Israel - similarly to the United States - to recognize international provisions for adjudicating these types of matters; implementations of international law that are nearly universally accepted. The United States, of course, fails to submit itself to very basic standards of international law because officials would be vulnerable to prosecutions for war crimes and other related crimes against humanity. Obviously, Israel is motivated by the same considerations as the United States.

Neo-conservatism is not an ideology that is limited in its scope to the politics of the United States. Neo-conservatism is simply the form that a more general ideology presents itself in the context of United States politics. I would describe this larger ideological phenomenon as the metropolitan discourse of Anglo Empire; an entity with which Israel is in collusion, and, in fact, an extension - a conclusion supported by reference to the Oslo Accords.

Remember, the Middle East assumed its current sociopolitical configuration from a source stemming from the vestiges of a colonialism that was organized and orchestrated not only by the British but by America as well. An example would be the protection of business interests that resulted in the British convincing Eisenhower to cause a regime change in Iran in order to thwart the nationalization of oil resources in that country that were intended to usurped control of the resources from British corporate interests. By helping the Americans procured for themselves a share of the exploits.

To put it in a nutshell, there are larger forces at work - which I am doing a poor job in identifying - that actively seek to prevent any resolution to this conflict, because if the Middle East was to resolve this issue it would effectively create a condition where Anglo interests could no longer impose themselves via a mechanisms, which it currently possesses, functions through its role as a broker of power; a capacity currently assumed through an extension of Anglo Empire that is essentially the Israeli regime.

Russ Cole

Tags: colonialism, foreign policy, hezbollah, israel, lebanon, middle east, neo conservatism, palestine
Categories: Commentary, Global, Russell Cole's Blog, Power, Empire
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American politicians - with the exception of the atypically principled Chuck Hegel - refuse to even consider the possibility that Israel is anything less than fully justified in its ferocious attack upon the country and inhabitants of Lebanon. Apparently, the dehumanizing expression, collateral damage, is a sufficient rhetorical device to effectively obfuscate the destruction of non-combatant human life during military operations that are planned under the auspices of the foresight that such atrocities can likely occur and are in fact probable.

Israeli soldiers, who retain their humanity during the strategic considerations of the Israeli war technicians are not to be endangered through their deployment on the ground until the area has been thoroughly bombarded with artillery and bombs from the air. As it has been announced, Israel will take its time and choose when to actually attempt to occupy the Southern portions of Lebanon. Transparently, an Israeli life is far more esteemed than a Lebanese noncombatant civilian. Of course, Israel in a great gesture of consideration for the Lebanese inhabitants has dropped leaflets warning the indigenous population to leave their homes in order the avoid an impending assault from the American supplied planes dropping ‘high-precision’ American bombs upon the Lebanese that apparently are not precise enough to compensate for the imprecise intelligence of the Israeli war technicians as they coordinate their targets.

I, personally, am too the point of exasperation over the inability of this country, America, to even raise objection to this onslaught. In order for me to express the reasons for my dismay, let us go over the events that precipitated this slaughter. Israel currently detains, against international law, approximately 9000 Lebanese and Arabs in its prisons. In order to barter for the release of these prisoners, held in extrajudicial limbo, the militant group in Southern Lebanon, which formed in response to Israel’s earlier invasion and occupancy of Lebanon, captured 2 Israeli soldiers. Well, I suppose the value of a Muslim life has increased in its evaluation by two fold because it is now worth, approximately, 1/4500th, of an Israeli’s life, because this is what has ‘justified’ Israel’s unrelenting incursions with accumulating ’collateral damage’ into Lebanon.

I have some basic proposals for the general conditions that might eventually lead to an end of this ongoing conflict between Israel and virtually all of its geopolitical neighbors. First, and I borrow this recommendation from Chomsky, Israel can begin by following the Geneva Convention. Second, Israel can unconditionally withdrawal from the West Bank. Third, Israel will end what amounts to the guidoization of the Gaza Strip, as it continues to isolate to the most densely populated area in the World - I wonder why? - from all transactions it might conduct with its neighbors and fellow nationals.

Enough is enough, and I personally am not going to be inhibited from speaking out against this outrage due to it making me vulnerable to these ridiculous accusations of anti-Semanticist. The ”Little Warrior Nation,” Israel, must end this mistreatment of the indigenous inhabitants whom Israel has already displaced from much of their traditional homeland.

I am publicly, at this point, not an anti-Semite, but most certainly, and unapologetically, an anti-Zionist. There is nothing I can really affect with respect to this, but I have seen enough this dehumanization of Muslim life, and I refuse to politely swallow my own vomit any longer as these crimes against humanity continue, and members of my very own country refuse to consider that this should end, right now!

R Cole

Tags: anti war, collateral damage, foreign policy, Global, israel, lebanon, middle east, politics, Russell Coles Blog, war
Categories: Commentary, Global, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, War
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I find it ironic that an ethnicity that has been so toiled by a history of oppression, persecution, and bigotry has so little sympathy for those who suffer under conditions that approximate some of the frightful circumstances that the Jewish ethnicity has found itself, in many varying forms, with respect to its history.

Indeed, many Jews, who espouse a camouflaged guise of the Zionist discourse, possess a metropolitan world-view with respect to the Palestinians and their history in this and the previous century, which amounts to nothing less than victimization as the subjects of the ethnic cleansing practices of an imperial culture, the Israelis.

I would like to perform some historical revision 101 for those who seem to lack the ability to adequately conceptualize the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Palestinians did not voluntarily hand over their homeland to the influx of Jewish colonialist immigrants, occurring under the auspices of Zionism. The Palestinians were systematically routed by the Zionists.

Furthermore, the Palestinians, who were under the rule of the Egyptians and the Jordanians in Gaza and the West Bank, did not launch the second conflict against the Israelis in the last century; rather, it was the Israelites, who struck first upon the Egyptians, whom, according to the Israelis, where about to strike the state of Israel in order to initiated an anti-colonialist struggle; thus constituting what Israel refers to under the rhetorical ploy of an, ‘existential threat.’ Therefore, the Palestinians living in these two occupied territories did not concede their autonomy through some process of military defeat. Instead, similarly to the Checks in the Sudetenland, they came to be occupied by the Israelis due to the foreign-policy decisions of other nations.

Therefore, there is no justification for the state sponsored terrorism enacted by the Israelis against the Palestinians in the occupied territories; (notice the lexiconic relationship between territory and terrorism: they both possess the same stem, TERROR). So, perhaps, now, all those who scream, “Anti-Semite!” when anyone accumulates the necessary courage to speak out against the insidious assassinations conducted by the Israelis, always with a manifold of ‘collateral damage,’ can realize who the real terrorists are with respect to this ghastly situation in the Middle-east.

Perhaps, even, these profoundly insincere people - mostly Zionists and Evangelicals - will begin to realize the symbolic isomorphism, with regards to the significance these two concepts assume within their respective mythologies, between “Reich” and “Zion.”

Russell Cole

Tags: empire, ethniciy, foreign policy, Global, imperialism, israel, middle east, oppression, palestine, Russell Coles Blog, society, Terrorism, war, zionism, zionist
Categories: Commentary, Global, Society, Russell Cole's Blog, War, Empire, Terrorism, Foreign Policy, Imperialism
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by Bill Templer 

Abstract

The paper develops 13 theses on libertarian perspectives for building a new grassroots anti-authoritarian, Populist movement in Israel/Palestine to press forward from the bottom up through people’s politics, neighborhood autonomy and radical direct democracy to a solution to the impasse in politics and economy there — ‘regaining the commons’ on both sides of the divide. American activists can tap some of the ideas in forging a popular movement of anti-Power, dual power and revitalized inclusive democracy stateside. It is one struggle.

The Inversion of the Dynamics of Socio-economic Power

1. Networks not Pyramids. Nothing viable can come from structures imposed from the top down by political and economic elites.  Politics must be returned to the people, the grassroots, inside the Israeli state and throughout Arab space everywhere in Palestine. Creativity in building practical vision must be at the heart of a new thinking inside initiatives to move toward a unitary radically democratic and Populist polity, a Cooperative Commonwealth of Canaan.[2]  A powerful chemistry for changing hearts and minds must be catalyzed, in the best sense of what Wallerstein has called “utopistics” in charting new decentralized institutions.[3]  Such bottom-up decentralized autonomous structures are one answer to fears about demographic numbers, majority and minority, in a unitary state, and also can provide an authentically rooted framework for networks of cultural autonomy.

These emergent networks, already existent in part in the work of groups such as the Arab-Jewish solidarity group Ta’ayush (Together!) and Anarchists Against the Wall in Israel, can look to the example of horizontalidad and neighborhood autonomy and solidarity now multiplying, for example, as a complex of movements and grassroots initiatives across Argentina. Marina Sitrin notes: “Autonomy is a bubble that exists within the system. With autonomy what we are able to do is to construct spaces where the logic of the system does not reign. […] What we can do is continue constructing, without falling into the logic of the system.”[4]

After Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, workers took control over their factories, seized the machines and started once again to produce — but without the bosses. The unemployed movements continued to provide for the unmet needs of their various communities, creating bakeries, small cooperatives, and community gardens to provide food and jobs. Populist movements in the United States and among Israelis and Palestinians can draw inspiration and learn from that ongoing concrete experience in social transformation.

2. Regaining the Commons. This will require a massive popular movement to “regain the commons” among ordinary Jews and Arabs,[5] energizing a new ensemble of struggles for direct & inclusive democracy and participatory economy from the desert to the sea.[6] It means bringing ordinary people into a new kind of political and economic decision-making in their own streets and neighborhoods and communities, a pro-active role in the management of their own affairs and those of the new commonwealth at all levels. A simple motto for such a transformation: “there can be no justice without freedom, and no freedom without the power to participate directly and democratically in the decisions that affect our lives.”[7]  This is radical Populist vision extrapolated to the deadlock that politics in traditional modes and modalities has reached in Israel and Occupied Palestine.

George Salzman has noted: the belief that ”nation-states constitute the only rationally conceivable form of political organization … is a key part of the ‘mental cage’ in which most of us live,” stressing the urgency of breaking free from that prison.[8]  Building a new Canaan will require shedding a whole shelf of mental cages. Gustavo Esteva stresses that many indigenous movements across the planet have “alternative cultural understandings of power that do not fit easily into the nation-state structures.” They are interested in “not just taking over existing power structures, but transforming existing notions of how power itself should be wielded. Their view of power is built from the grassroots upwards – that is, it is embedded in the community.”[9] This rethinking of the very geometry of Power should be the model for a new politics in Canaan.

Shared desire for a transformed political imaginary can begin to alter the rules of the political game itself, a “sub-politics … shaping society from below.”[10] What is needed is an anti-authoritarian sub-politics on both sides of the divide, anchored in networking, mobilizing from the bottom up. To counter the “manufacturing of consent” from above. Such a “rule-altering politics” seeks to overcome “statecraft,” the classical top-down game of political spectacle in all its duplicity, which most citizens in all existing polities – including Israel and the PA – are wise to and weary of.[11] Aware in their guts of the old saw: “Whoever you vote for, the government gets in.”

In Ron Dugger’s  August 1995 call to rebuild a Populist movement in the U.S., he stressed:

We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular government in the United States. The big corporations and the centimillionaires and billionaires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government. It’s as if American democracy has been bombed.[12]

He called then for a “new national force to end corporate rule.” The picture a decade later is far bleaker and more critical.

In Israel, a workers’ movement struggling to expose the veiled dictatorship of a handful of  families over the Israeli economy, media and politics has stated that the established political parties are the:

servants of the 12 billionaire families that control this country, and do their bidding, at our expense. They only pretend to address our problems, in order to win our votes. We have been suckers for too long. It is time we stopped supporting the parties of the bosses. It is time we, the workers, organize ourselves to utilize our enormous power in order to defend our rights, and secure decent living conditions for all.  …  Once in power, we would take control of the economy away from the 12 families who own the major banks and concerns, and place them under public ownership, run under workers control. This vast wealth could then be used to secure decent lives for all. [13]

It is often forgotten that the blind national-chauvinistic politics of successive Israeli governments have been dictated by very small and powerful corporate and political elite. An Israeli and Palestinian Populist movement would seek to break the stranglehold of this capitalist plutocracy on the masses of the population and the economy, truly ‘regaining the commons’ for both peoples moving forward toward the dream of a ‘cooperative commonwealth’ beyond the dark legacies of interethnic strife and Israeli settler colonialism and its ideology. As Dugger stresses: “We, 21st century Populists, are committed to the equal importance of every person, no matter the person’s race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, politics, or nation of origin.”

3. Communalist Alternatives. What is to be undone? Chaia Heller stresses the need for us to free ourselves of “internalized capitalism,” the belief that this system is inevitable and can only be reformed or complemented.[14] Experiments around the world to create autonomous spaces are spreading. Their experiences – part of “grassroots activism – a world on fire”[15] – can be tapped, creativity shared, learning from the ferment in the World Social Forum[16] and People’s Global Action.[17]  That too can serve for as a taporoot for Populist vision both in the U.S. and in Palestine.

The impasse in Israel/Palestine is, in its distinctive form, a microcosm of the pervasive vacuity of our received political imaginaries. And the ruling elites that administer them. The very “insolubility” of the conflict in Palestine in terms of the conventional “State” invites a unique historical laboratory for alternative pathways leading from mutual struggle to mutual aid and trust.[18] In that crucible for change, Arabs and Jews can test structures and chemistries for constructing a radically inclusive social and economic order based on communalist principles – or something akin. Not just the “emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class,” as Tony Judt projects,[19] but a new democratic consciousness, a groundswell of Jewish-Arab ta’ayush, pulling and living together, a kind of ‘harambee!’ in the classic East African sense.

The appeal of Zapatismo’s answers in Chiapas for addressing problems in the El Sereno community in northeastern Los Angeles can also be applied in moving forward toward a people’s Canaan: “Finally there are no more illusions. Civil society is quickly becoming aware that it must do what governments have no will to do and no longer can. Out of the global political- economic ruins are being born several phoenix movements that offer liberating solutions of democratic autonomy, participatory democracy. These are proactive self-sustenance; movements aiming to rebuild society from the bottom up.”[20]

In this spirit, nodes of action can be created both on the Israeli and Palestinian left to popularize a call for “non-hierarchy, confederated direct democracies, communal economics, social freedom, and an ecological sensibility.”[21]  Beyond the clash of antipodal national narratives, we need to move toward redefining the possible architecture of a non-nationalist pluralistic polity in Palestine.  In the spirit of what Heller has called “a new understanding of citizenship defined not in relation to a state or nation but in opposition to nations and states.”[22] Rifat Odeh Kassis echoes a similar key in closing his August 2003 paper with the text of John Lennon’s classic lyric “Imagine.”[23]

4.  New Modes and Topographies of  Pluralist Polity Have To Be Drafted – beyond existing models such as that of Switzerland, Belgium, the “concordance democracy” of  the Lebanese polity or other multicultural pluralistic states. In projecting an end to Israeli ethnocratic structures and mentalities of apartheid,[24] our imagination should not be limited by comparisons to the South African model and its lessons. Federalism has to be reinvented, multiculturalism reconfigured in Canaan if it is to succeed. We should not be afraid to envision what direct democracy might galvanize in a populist Israel/Palestine. Militarism pervades Israeli society, decades of oppression, occupation and lack of self-determination have generated a complex geometry mass disempowerment and pyramided power within Palestinian society.  It is that culture of hierarchy which a radical rethink must address.

One relevant body of theory for imagining a Canaan commonwealth underpins the vision of  “libertarian municipalism”  (aka communalism) developed by Murray Bookchin and associates at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont.[25] Its ultimate goal is a Commune of communes that can replace the conventional State and all its hierarchies, with “land and enterprises … placed increasingly in the custody of the community – more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils.”[26] “Each confederal council in turn would send a delegate to a confederation of a still wider region. […] all regional interrelationships would be structured around local assemblies, confederated or unified through city and confederal councils, in a Confederation of Confederations. […] This system of self-managed political life would be more like a network than a statelike pyramid.”[27] This is directly reminiscent of Martin Buber’s  vision of  “an organic commonwealth . . . that is a community of communities.”[28] Buber’s communalism sought to address “the greatest crisis humanity has ever known”[29] and is not welded to Zionism.[30]

5. Breaking Free: Hands-On Grassroots Restructuring. James Herod’s strategies for “getting free” foresee an array of people’s initiatives: neighborhood associations,  employees’ associations, coop housing associations, meeting halls, as in Chiapas, for people’s assemblies, peer circles, more worker-owned enterprises, locally controlled radio and TV stations, alternative schools, new forms of home schooling.  He goes into detail exploring the structure and physiology of such neighborhood and employees’ associations. And asks: 

what if we changed direction entirely, and stopped spending all our time trying to stop the crimes of capitalists, and started fighting instead for what we really want? What if the 15,000 towns in the United States with 2,500 inhabitants or less started switching to direct democracy, through neighborhood assemblies, scuttling their hierarchical mayoral governments, something they could easily do if they wanted to? What if peasant villages started converting to cooperative labor? What if workers in stores, offices, and factories forgot about unions and started setting up workplace assemblies to get control over their lives there? What if neighbors on a block started combining resources to create households of 100 to 200 persons?[31]

Herod’s ideas need to be looked at in depth in projecting modes of anti-Power and politics at radically local scales as a tool in building a Canaan Commonwealth. 

Central is the view that social transformation in Canaan must build bottom-up from the scale of the household and neighborhood.[32] That if “place” is “humanised space,” Israelis and Palestinians must learn to forge their own identities and futures through the construction of “progressive places,” the matrix for a “new politics of ethnicity, race, gender and class.”[33]  In the fight to transform capitalism, we are really struggling against our own dehumanization, at the molecular level of everyday life and the household as consumption unit on up the pyramid of hegemony to neoliberal globalization and its “Disequilibrium Machine.”[34]  Anti-authoritarian transformative politics is distinctively sensitive to this geometry of what geographers call “scale.”

As stressed, this is one answer to fears in a unitary Canaan about the “numbers game” of majority and minority typical of conventional elite-dominated pyramided democracies. An armature of genuine autonomy with real power at lower scales is likewise an effective framework for ensuring secularism in the new Canaan and the total “separation of church and state.”[35]

A kindred compelling vision for change is participatory economics.  Parecon is a wide-ranging blueprint of revitalized community that withers received conceptions of social life and the conventional neoliberal nation-state in moving toward ParPolity. Parecon’s concrete aims of a communal being-in-the world center on five principles: equity / diversity / solidarity / self-management / ecological balance,[36] and envision feasible trajectories for getting from here to there.[37] Its topography of authentic community based on change from below and by your own bootstraps can be transposed in part to the work of imagining what a unitary polity in Palestine might become. Parecon elaborates the contours of a more humane economy, exploring new conceptions of just wages, transformed consumption, balanced job complexes, self-management, even speculating on alternative institutions to the WTO and World Bank. It too can feed into Populist economy theory for the 21st century.

6. One No, Many Yeses. Of course, such libertarian socialist blueprinting is not everyone’s political meat. It will not seem a feasible or plausible path forward to some. In dialogue on the unitary state in a variety of fora, a pluriverse of views can be accommodated, with multiple input from many quarters, streets, groups and individuals. The crux here is to begin concrete discussion oriented to vision, generating practicable scenarios of change.  As Harry Cleaver notes: “This does not mean unity for socialism or any other singular post-capitalist ‘economic’ order, but rather the building of […] a new mosaic of interconnected alternative approaches to meeting our needs and elaborating our desires.”[38]

My thesis is that at the present juncture, probing exploratory dialogue is imperative: in the spirit of One “No” (to a neoliberal capitalist two-state pseudo-democratic solution) but many “Yeses” (to exploring a variety of views and options in political economy, a mix of alternative socialities and political structures, an inventive Populism for two people on a path to creating a radical democracy that is the only pathway forward for Palestinians and Israelis).[39] 

7. Utopian Realism: A Staged Path Forward? I have argued elsewhere that even within a two-state pseudo-solution imposed by circumstances and elites, it will be possible to build a movement of anti-Power that seeks to create the unitary state from below. [40] Many who support a one-state solution will disagree with such a “staged” or “phased” strategy, rejecting it as a doomed compromise. But given the constraints of realpolitik, a game plan is needed.[41]

Consider this alternative: the truncated Palestinian state to be born – and a still Zionist-nationalist Israel dominating it – would be the initial arenas for nurturing the embryo of the new in the shell of the old, a turf (however fractured in a Palestinian Bantustan) for creating “dual power” over the middle term. The emergent counter-institutions on the ground would seek to “hollow out” or “gut” capitalist structures and top-down bureaucracies, and, inside Israel, confront all forms of discrimination rooted in Zionist ideology. Moving forward toward fusion, building a dialectic for the sublation of the two-state monstrosity. Perhaps a phased view is akin to what Anthony Giddens in a related context has called  “utopian realism.”[42]

8. Khalas (Enough is Enough. Ya basta!)! Organize, Organize, Organize. In any event: start to build infrastructure now. A hundred flowers can blossom, a hundred schools of thought contend in this pluralistic political vision – its very eclecticism a necessary component at this juncture. Establish ateneos (self-managed social, cultural and educational centers) to defend, promote and foment demands. Create an organization in Israel and Palestine akin to the new Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy, whose manifesto can serve as a guideline for praxis.[43] Collectives crystallizing around opposition to the Apartheid Wall can evolve in the Zapatista spirit of the Ya basta! movements in Italy and New York. Remembering that organization grows out of struggle, not vice versa. 

Beginnings can be small, generating nodes for a new mode of sub-politics that does not exhaust itself in protest and defense but goes beyond. One such grouping exists: the progressive space now opened on the Israeli left by the collective One Struggle (Ma’avak Ehad) needs to be widened, and extended into Palestinian society. The focus on animal rights inside One Struggle (human & animal liberation) is a singular component some activists would not espouse so centrally. But the group’s overall analysis is congruent with core libertarian socialist positions, and they are in daily direct action against militarism, Zionism, the IDF, the Occupation and the Separation Wall, and some of its members linked to Anarchists Against the Wall.[44] 

Create new media: imperative is a periodical in Hebrew and Arabic, online and in print, popularizing the idea of the unitary state. More study groups for alternative and autonomist politics need to be established now, and an array of literature translated into Arabic and Hebrew, in part in easy-to-grasp language and visuals that kids and working folk can understand. [45] One prototype for a popular grassroots medium is the “comic book” on people’s geography nearing completion with the People’s Geography Project stateside.[46] It could be translated and adapted for praxis in Israel/Palestine, where geopolitics at multiple scales is at the very core of the struggle. The PGP is indeed a model for a Populist geography.

More broadly, activists for a new Canaan can learn to use comic journalism techniques modeled on those of Joe Sacco and others to reach broader segments of the population.[47] “Street theater” geared to a unitary state is also needed, a great tool for touching minds and hearts, set in an imagined Arab-Jewish Commonwealth of the future. Dynamic togetherness at micro- scales must be translated not only into simple concepts ordinary people can understand but enacted in authentic structures. Inside Israel, it is crucial to multiply initiatives to bring together Jewish and Arab kids and youth, neighbors, younger and older married couples –  creating programs pro-actively oriented to the vision of a unitary state.

9. Labor Autonomism and Dual Power.  Central to an engine for change under the authoritarian PA and the iron grip of the Histadrut labor bureaucracy in Israel are autonomous labor movements of Palestinian and Israeli workers. Dual power in a class society means building a class force to oppose its ruling elites. And the creation of counter-institutions: “Dual power seeks to erode the legitimacy of the state and other systems of centralized power […] while working to meet people’s material needs and satisfy their desires for freedom, these counter-institutions consistently create dissonance with the top-down institutions they seek to dismantle.”[48]

How structures of democratic dual power could be crafted in a Palestinian society now facing the deeply anchored dual power of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other movements of defensive counter-violence is a separate complex question only Palestinian activists can begin to address.

Hamas is poised in January 2006 to enter the electoral arena in Palestine  in earnest and perhaps become a major political force. In its own gut way, Hamas is a people’s insurgency movement,  with a solid anchoring in the neighborhoods and hearts of the people. And its popularity among the working and oppressed Palestinian masses reflects this role, despite the idiom of violence for which it is known to the broader non-Palestinian media and publics.

Massive non-violent resistance (see below) and militant autonomous unions are two alternatives. It is imperative to generate agenda and praxis oriented to transforming the economic and class structures of Israeli and Arab society in a broad program for greater solidarity, equity, joint working-class action, across “national” lines. Over the longer term, self-management is direct democracy’s best school – in work places, especially inside new forms of libertarian syndicalist praxis, modeled in part on the Italian cobas “base union” experience.[49] 

10.  Prefiguring the New in the Shell of the Old. Integral to new movements for social transformation that look to Zapatismo and the non-violence of the EZLN is a “prefigurative” politics: building the future in the present. James Herod sees this strategy applied to creating free associations  centered on democratic, autonomous neighborhoods, governed by direct-democracy Household and Home Assemblies, the incubators of the new society. That is also reflected in some of the structures Zapatismo has been forging in Chiapas state in southern Mexico[50] – now some 1,200 “autonomous” communities, organized into 50 autonomous municipalities and six autonomous regions.  And, on a micro scale, is present in the experimental village councils the Association of Forty has helped to craft in “unrecognized” Bedou villages inside the Israeli state.[51]

A major bridging goal should be the proliferation of “rainbow” communities. Indeed, social-geographical  work on the “five mixed Jewish-Arab cities” in Israel by Ghazi-Walid Falah and others could provide part of the researched foundation for rethinking multiethnic communities, a hundred new towns and co-operative settlements, with mixed multicultural neighborhoods and schools. This is in effect the idea behind a recent initiative “Mosaic Communities” launched by Fred Schlomka: “By building an alternative institution on a firm democratic foundation, MOSAIC COMMUNITIES may eventually motivate a change in the exclusive Jewish nature of the national institutions in Israel. Since civic institutions form the backbone of any vibrant democracy, we envisage that our success will spawn additional alternative institutions in other areas of the economic and social matrix.”[52] In the evolving metabolism of such an interactive system for decision-making and allocation, extending across the “mixed cities and mixed neighborhoods and mixed families” that Haim Hanegbi dreams,[53] the salience of “ethnic- national” identities could begin to atrophy fade as organic solidarity builds.  Organic solidarity is the foundation for a Populist Cooperative Commonwealth throughout all of historical Palestine.

The massive return of refugees to the spaces of Canaan’s Negev/al-Naqab and elsewhere could be directed in part to such new mosaic towns.[54] The returnees, long oppressed, will be open to the experimental praxis of a new economy and society. The epitome of gross disempowerment  at every scale, including the household, over several generations, they are a natural constituency for fresh departures.  The dialectic of such reconfiguration of power and its scalar spaces would have to operate through a ”rainbow space” that must be created, with the two national communities in ever more integrative synergy. It entails transforming neighborhoods, generating hybrid places out of now still segregated spaces.[55]

These ”spectrum” communities, more radicalized than in Schlomka’s conception, would also be platforms for evolving flexible, decentralized systems of autonomy, non-hierarchical critical thinking and self-reflexivity. The “nested federation” of workers’ and consumers’ councils from micro-levels on up to the “national” plane and beyond affords an alternative political architecture: “we envision such decentralized confederations on the regional, continental, and even global levels.”[56]  How this might function in a co-operative Canaan commonwealth is part of the uncharted wilderness of direct democracy there, and perhaps within a broader regional Near Eastern communalist transformation yet to come. 

11.  Energizing a Heuristics for Change.  Unblock creativity. We need to flush the mind in everyday thinking about alternative structures and processes. That means foregrounding political brainstorming as a central mode of idea multiplication. It means ideating a kaleidoscope of solutions, learning to defer “closure,” suspending judgment, leaving criticism to a later stage. Learning to incubate new angles.[57] People can workshop on guided fantasy, projecting what creative ta’ayush, mosaic communities, new forms of Arab-Jewish synergy and symbiosis could become.  We need to dust off classic manuals like R. H. McKim’s Experiences in Visual Thinking, Alex Osborn’s Applied Imagination or James Adams’ Conceptual Blockbusting, applying them to “idea generation sessions” on the elaborated architectonics of the République de Canaan. 

Take Fausto Guidice’s recent Canaan reverie “Faisons un rêve,” for example. It is just such an experiment in political imagining. As he notes: “Il faut rêver. Alors, pour vous encourager à rêver, je vous propose cette petite fiction […] À chacune et à chacun de développer selon son imagination cette fiction somme toute réaliste.”[58] So is Ursula LeGuin’s now classic utopian novel The Dispossessed and her vision of a libertarian socialist society on distant Anarres.

One of the forgotten American futuristic novels by the key Populist writer and  politician Ignatius Donnelly (author of the 1892 Populist Platform Preamble) is The Golden Bottle (1892). It is a narrative in which a poor farmer named Ephraim Benezet from Kansas becomes Populist president of the United States, reforms the American society and economy and even establishes a world government. Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office (1892) is also an imaginative Populist classic novel, with its heroine Ida Wilbur, perhaps modeled on Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease, who says at one point: “The heart and center of this movement is a demand for justice, not for ourselves alone, but for the toiling poor wherever found. . . . It is no longer a question of legislating for the farmer; it is a question of the abolition of industrial slavery.”

Inside Israel, Ehud Tokatly, a maverick populist decentralist, has fleshed out a vision for Israel/Palestine set in the 21st century: a federation of autonomous communities in a porous structure beyond the modern state. Tokatly has fictionalized a form of Jewish-Arab “community democracy” in his recent Hebrew utopian novel Neualtneuland, playing on Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland (Old-New Land). Neualtneuland is a kind of Looking Backward à la Edward Bellamy set in a 21st-century neo- communitarian Israeli future based on “non-territorial autonomy and federalism.” Tokatly is (still) a Zionist but his Israeli- Populist ideas, couched in a fictive mold, may be worth tapping and debating.[59]

12. A Therapeutics for Synergy. Learn from therapeutic initiatives: like the Centre for Trauma and Transformation in Omagh, Northern Ireland.[60] Set up in 2002 for inventive applied communal “political psychotherapy,” it seeks to assist  individuals and communities suffering from the shock and bloodshed of ethnic communal violence in Ireland’s north. Research indicates that those who go through the trauma of violence can emerge with great creative resilience. The hands-on practice of NICTT in dealing with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be tapped in moving forward to a Canaan commonwealth, as can the somewhat analogous fund of experience of the National Center for PTSD in the U.S.[61]

PTSD therapies can provide fresh angles for generating modalities for reconciliation, healing the wounds on both sides of a century of struggle between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. A therapy for freeing the resilience in our peoples that is there. A network of such centers will be needed in laying the psychological groundwork to undergird a unitary polity: “Through transformation, the grip of the past is loosened and the future is discovered. For both people and communities, transformation holds the hope of incorporating the past, along with its pain, losses and injustices, into a future of rediscovered and perhaps even enriched experiences of community and of life itself.”[62] 

Crucial in this psychological healing process for a shared Canaan are practices in the self-management of identity, which means confronting the structures and entrenched beliefs that oppress the Other, especially militarism and patriarchy.[63] Particularly in the Israeli “warrior state,” with its highly intricate and interlinked bureaucracies of Control and hierarchies of power, it is urgent to carve out counter-spaces to challenge the militarized social order, its “militarization of knowledge”[64] and dignity-denying norms and values – in the words of a New Profile activist: “the major mechanism to keep all Arabs, the disabled, homosexuals and particularly women in their ‘place.’”[65]

As New Profile co-founder Rela Mazali has noted: “living within a war culture, the consciousness of each and every member of society is militarized to some degree. The presuppositions, what gets left out, what goes without saying, what remains unseen, are prescribed, circumscribed, by a deeply militarized socialization. The process of identifying and peeling off the militarized filters through which I have learned to see reality is possibly unending.”[66] Overcoming these multiple filters and blinders will be central to self-therapy and self-discovery in the Jewish communities across Canaan.

13.  The Ultimate Power Tool. In advancing a mass movement for fundamental grassroots change in Israel and Palestine, non- violence should gravitate to the heart of its practice. The work of the ISM and initiatives around www.stopthewall.org are models in our time and place. Jalal Ghazi has counseled: “using civil disobedience and not suicide bombs, a non-violent Palestinian struggle for freedom might reinvigorate the Israeli peace movement.”[67] Traditions of resistance and defiant defense as exemplified in the non-violent, locally organized civil struggle against the Separation Wall in Zawiya[68] village, Budrus,[69]  Biddu and Ar Ram[70] need to become more central. They signal a nascent qualitative change in popular organizing for anti-Power in Palestine. In future, large-scale scenarios are conceivable: “Massive marches toward the borders in support of the Right of Return must be planned. While the governments in neighboring Arab states can easily prohibit armed incursions across their borders, they would be hard pressed to stop Palestinians from attempting to peacefully return to their homeland.”[71] 

Mubarak Awad has suggested that the refugees could even burn their camps in rage, challenging the conscience of the international community and the Israeli masses[72]  – creating their own “facts on the ground,” long the strategy of the Israeli state. Inside the Israeli ethnocracy, new forms of non-violent resistance can be applied by Israel’s Arab citizens here and now to press for full equality

The necessary venues are legion. One at a more “symbolic” cultural scale is a non-violent confrontational movement to have the mosque in Beersheva/Bi’r As-Sab’, the largest in Israel south of Tel Aviv and soon a century old, restored to the al-Naqab Bedouin. Arguably Beersheva’s most elegant structure, the grand mosque is presently standing derelict, long desecrated as a museum for the Jewish-Zionist history of Negev settlement and Negev archeology. And presently defaced by a huge metal sculpture of a rooster at its very portals, a quasi-emblem of an apartheid state. There is no active mosque anywhere in Beersheva, the center of a region with tens of thousands of Muslims.  

Activists for Canaan can learn from sites on non-violent social change like that maintained by Psychologists for Social Responsibility.[73] The journal Peace Magazine is packed with practical ideas for massive civil disobedience as a people’s tool for sub-politics, localized transformation and the building of a non-violent, self-reliant inclusive social order, from the bottom up. [74] It is relevant for Palestine/Isrel, and relevant for the struggle stateside to revitalize the American Populist Movement and forge “for the first time, a democracy that is actually governed by the people who live in it, in our own interests and those of posterity.”[75]

Khalas!/ Basta ya! All this requires grassroots experimental praxis. The mindsets on both sides of the divide have been frozen by fire. Be realistic and begin to think the impossible. A mass Populist movement is central to that realism.

Bill Templer, a Chicago-born Israeli, worked many years with the Association for the Support and Defence of Bedouin Rights in al-Naqab/Negev Desert, the Galilee Research Center in Nazareth, and in the Roma civil rights movement in eastern Bulgaria. A widely published translator from German and Hebrew, he is on the staff of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig, and is currently teaching at a technological university in Thailand’s far south.

*This is a revised version of a paper originally included in the papers of the Conference on One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel, Lausanne/Switzerland, June 23-25, 2004. On the conference, organized by the Association for One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel (http://one-democratic-state.org), see http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/8516

Notes

[1]  Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left, San Francisco: AK Press, 1999, p. 347.

[2]  See Sami Aldeeb: “A State that we can call Canaan […] unless the population choose another name,” in idem, “The
Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: One or Two States?,” http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/aldeeb002.html ;
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle, New York: Pluto Press,
2004. For similar vision, though devoid of any program for direct democracy,  see also the 2001 essay by Edward Said, “The
Only Alternative,” http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/said.html and the book-length study by Virginia Tilley, The One-
State Solution, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2005. Tilley’s weakness is in part her inability to imagine and project a people’
s movement among Israelis and Palestinians for radical democratic and economic transformation; her scenarios remain within
the frame of capitalist relations as usual.

[3]  Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century, New York: New Press, 1998.
Wallerstein terms “utopistics”: “not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better,
and historically possible (but far from certain) future” (p. 2). My primary thesis is that a utopistic heuristic is in order in the
disorder of Israel/Palestine. To generate another kind of political and economic imaginary.

[4] On new directions in autonomy and neighborhood solidarity, see Marina Sitrin, “Horizontalidad in Argentina,” http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/07/26/1417232 . The actions of Anarchists Against the Wall are regularly reported on in http:
//www.ainfos.ca .

[5]  See Naomi Klein, “Reclaiming the Commons,” New Left Review 9, May-June 2001, http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24305.shtml

[6]  See Takis Fotopoulus, Towards an Inclusive Democracy, The Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need for a New
Liberatory Project, London: Continuum International, 1997; see also his journal The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy (formerly Democracy & Nature), http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal .

[7] Manifesto, Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy, http://www.afadd.org

[8] He questions the whole idea of the nation-state as a basis for any solution in the Israel/Palestine conflict, see his “Out of
the Prison!”  (March 2003), http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grass/Infra/Infra-9.htm ;  see also Chaia Heller,
“Revving It Up! The Revolutionary Potential of the New Anti-Globalization Movement,” http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028150435799

[9]  Gutavo Esteva, G. “A flower in the hands of the people,” The New Internationalist, #360, 2003 http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JQP/360/108648118/p1/article.jhtml

[10]   See “The Reinvention of Politics,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lash, Reflexive Modernization,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 40; Ulrich Beck, Die Erfindung des Politischen, Frankfurt am Main: suhrkamp, 1993.

[11]  Bookchin defines statecraft as “a state with its top-down system of rule, bureaucracy, and force, that all but excludes the
people from the management of public affairs” (op cit., p. 312).

[12] Ronnie Dugger, “A Call to Hope and Action. Let Us Rebuild a True Populist Movement,”   http://www.geocities.com/progpop/popcall.html ; originally published as “A Call to Citizens: Real Populists Please Stand Up!,” The Nation, 14 August
1995.

[13]  Socialist Struggle (Ma’avak Sotsialisti), articles 28 January and 3 February 1999, http://www.maavak.org.il/maavak/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=67  and http://www.maavak.org.il/maavak/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=66 . There is no need to agree with all political positions of the Socialist Struggle (a CWI affiliate)
group to profit from their analysis of the contradictions of Israeli capitalism.

[14] Heller, ibid.

[15]   See George Salzman, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grassroots/

[16]  See the report at http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/235.shtml ; on the WSF, see http://www.wsfindia.org/

[17]  See http://www.agp.org . Among its hallmarks: “We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination
including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all
human beings.”

[18]  See George Salzman, “Mutual Aid and Mutual Trust,”
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grass/Infra/Infra-5.htm ; Harry Cleaver, “Kropotkin, Self-valorization and the Crisis
of Marxism,” Anarchist Studies, February 1993, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/kropotkin.html

[19] See Tony Judt, “Israel: the Alternative,” New York Review of Books  50, No. 16,  October 23, 2003, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671

[20]  Roberto Flores,  “Community Autonomy: the El Sereno Community in Northeast Los Angeles,” In Motion Magazine, 1999,
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/chprop.html

[21] Manifesto, Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy, ibid.

[22]   Heller, ibid.

[23]  Kassis, “A One Democratic State might be THE Solution,” http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/kassis.html

[24] See Oren Yivtachel, “Ethnocracy: the Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” Constellations 6 (3), 1999, pp. 364-390. Some
of the “key regime characteristics” of ethnocratic polity: “Despite several democratic features, mainly ethnicity (and not
territorial citizenship) determines the allocation of rights and privileges; a constant democratic-ethnocratic tension
characterizes politics. … A dominant ‘charter’ ethnic group appropriates the state apparatus, determines most public policies,
and segregates itself from other groups” (p. 368).

[25]  See http://www.social-ecology.org

[26]  Bookchin, “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,” Green Perspectives, October 1991,  http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol1/bookchin_libertarian.htm

[27]  Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left, p.  313.

[28]  Martin Buber,  Paths in Utopia,  Boston: Beacon Hill 1958 [1949], p. 136.

[29]  Ibid., p. 129.

[30]   Buber’s communalist political thought was significantly shaped by his mentor Gustav Landauer, the social-anarchist
thinker who led  the abortive Munich Council Republic in 1919, murdered in its quelling. In his eulogy, Buber called Landauer
the “secret spiritus rector” and “designated leader of the new Judaism” (see Yaacov Oved, “Anarchism in the Kibbutz
Movement,” 2000,
http://www.anarchistcommunitarian.net/articles/kibbutz/kibbtrend.html ; Buber, ibid., 46-57). Y. Goren and Haim Seeligman
have edited An Anthology of Jewish Anarchists (Bernard Lazarre, Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam), Tel Aviv, 1997 (Hebr.)
where they stress Landauer as a potential source for renewal of utopian thought within Israeli society. Buber’s communalism
has best to be retrofitted to the present and stripped of any Zionist dross.

[31]  J. James, “The Weakness of a Politics of Protest,” http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/16.htm

[32] Bill Templer, “From Mutual Struggle to Mutual Aid: Moving Beyond the Statist Impasse in Israel/Palestine,” borderlands
ejournal, 2(3), 2003, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no3_2003/templer_impasse.htm ; idem, “The
Impasse in Israel/Palestine: Moving Forward Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth,” Social Anarchism, in press.

[33]  Peter Taylor and Colin Flint, Political Geography. World Economy, Nation-State and Locality, Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2000,
pp. 326-27.

[34] R. Hodge, “Monstrous Knowledge in a World Without Borders,” borderlands ejournal 1 (1), 14, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/hodge_monstrous.html

[35]  Individual religious freedom and other lifestyle preferences can of course flourish in this ambient of personal and
community liberation.

[36] Michael Albert, Parecon. Life after Capitalism, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 4 ff. See their website http://www.parecon.org 
For a draft of what a pareconic polity might look like, see Stephen R. Shalom, “ParPolity: Political Vision for a Good Society,”
http://www.zmag.org/shalompol.htm

[37]  See Michael Albert, Moving Forward. Program for a Participatory Economy, San Francisco: AK Press, 2001; idem,
Trajectory of Change , Boston: South End Press, 2002.

[38] Harry Cleaver, “Nature, Neoliberalism and Sustainable Development: Between Charybdis & Scylla?” (1997), http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/port.html

[39]  See “One No, Many Yeses,” Midnight Notes 12, http://www.midnightnotes.org/12intro.html

[40]  See Templer, “From Mutual Struggle to Mutual Aid,” ibid., 27 ff.

[41] Though he presents no plan for movi