The lexicon, democracy, has an etymology, which can be traced back to the Ancient Greek word for the mob, which is translated into our own language with its Roman alphabet into the term, demos. The term, demos, with the suffix typically attached to it, forms the referring expression, democracy; which we assert to be the rule of the citizens. It is the position of the Midwest Alliance that democracy is realized when the will of the Demos becomes the policy of the state. The intermediary devices that we currently have installed in American Empire’s political system are a device to mitigate the power of the Demos; the will of the people.

Furthermore, the distillation of the people’s expression of opinions concerning matters of state, which constitutes a quasi-republic, not a democracy, have been corrupted by elitist cronyism and the influence of special interests, which invest money into the campaign coffers of career politicians. We suffer from the rule of the provincial, which imposes its selfish head at the expense of the cosmopolitan interests of the Demos, the populace.

The Demos is not represented through this system of polity. Rather, it is provided with the illusory impression that it somehow affects the posture of the state through ceremonial occasions where each member of the demos is provided the opportunity to express himself or herself through the casting of a single vote for an individual, who indirectly, in theory, represents the individual in the affairs of state.

Let us recognize this pathetic ritual, which reinforces the collective representation of a democratic nation, as a device to propagate a false ideology. We do not live in a democracy, we live in Empire, which is controlled by a plutocracy that carefully manages the representation, the veneer, of an electoral system, which provides the Demos with preselected choices, which are the products of a complex system consisting of networking and cronyist quid pro quo.

This process, conducted among the elites, preselects those who will be our choices for representation in polity. The individuals presented to us are typically those with the most elitist alliances, as well as, those with the access to the necessary capital required to enter into the ceremonial pageantries of primaries. Following the series of ritualistic dramatic performances, one of the members of the power elite eventually assumes the role of Emperor; more commonly designated as President.

Our choices are made in advance, prior to our even becoming cognizant of candidates presented as electoral options. We live under the rule of single political party, because the ideological divergences between and among the assortment of individuals belonging to the elitist class are blown into consequential oblivion by the intersection of interests among the plutocracy of Empire, which consist of preserving their elevated status.

Therefore, the Power Elite is interested and defined by the following teleology, which gives shape to their primary project: The maintenance of the status quo.

Tags: american empire, centralization, democracy, direct democracy, foreign policy, localism, midwest populist party, politics, populist movement, power
Categories: Commentary, Global, Populist Party, Democracy, liberty, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Power, Politics, Third Parties, Empire, Direct Democracy
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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 moving toward a unitary state, Michael Neumann has argued that “the one-state solution
absolutely requires a two-state solution. If ever there was a false dilemma, it is any claim that the two alternatives are mutually
exclusive.” See “One State or Two? A False Dilemma,” Counterpunch, Oct. 8, 2003,  http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann10082003.html2003 ).

[42]   Reflexive Modernization, p. 194.

[43]  Manifesto, AFADD, ibid.

[44]  See their website at http://www.onestruggle.org

[45]  Too much of our discourse is too erudite, academic. We need to learn how to reach ordinary people, most especially kids
and working youth in the Israeli and Palestinian street, finding fresh language and inventive modalities to capture their
imagination, a people’s rhetorics.

[46]  See  http://www.peoplesgeography.org

[47] See for example Joe Sacco,  Palestine, Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002 . A June 2003 interview with Sacco is at http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/jsacco.html  For excerpts from Sacco’s “The Underground War in Gaza” in New York Times
Magazine, July 3, 2003, see  http://www.csl.sri.com/users/mwfong/Commentary/Underground_War/

[48]    Manifesto, AFADD, ibid. An instructive website is http://www.dualpower.net  See also Brian Dominick, “An Introduction to
Dual Power Strategy,” http://www.anarchistcommunitarian.net/articles/theory/bdsdp.shtml

[49]  See Donato Romito,  “Anarchist Communists and the Italian ‘Base Union’ Movement,” The Northeastern Anarchist, No. 8,
Fall/Winter 2003,
http://www.ainfos.ca/03/oct/ainfos00539.html

[50] See Midnight Notes Collective, Auroras of the Zapatistas. Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War,  New York:
Autonomedia 2001; Gustavo Esteva & Madhu Suri Prakash,  Grassroots post-modernism. Remaking the soil of cultures.
London: ZED Books, 1998; idem, “Basta and Beyond – Linking and Learning with the Grassroots,” Forests, Trees and People
Newsletter, No. 38, March 1999, http://www-trees.slu.se/newsl/38/38esteva2.pdf

[51]  See http://www.assoc40.org

[52]  F. Schlomka, “Concept Paper for the Development of Mosaic Communities” (2003), http://www.cjme.org/MosaicConceptPaper.pdf  ; see also his “Mosaic Communities: Defying Institutionalized Racism,” Palestine Center, http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/pubs/20030718ftr.html

[53]  Hanegbi, H. and Benvenisti, M. “Cry, the beloved two-state solution,” Ha’aretz, Aug. 9, 2003, http://www.labournet.net/world/0308/ispa1.html. I have no doubt that at some very essential level, “mixed families” (for want of a better term) is what
it’s all about.

[54]   See Templer, “From Mutual Struggle to Mutual Aid,” ibid., 49-57.

[55]  See Peter Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 96-105.

[56]  Manifesto, AFADD, ibid.

[57]  See David D. Edwards, How to Be More Creative, San Jose/CA: Occasional Productions, “How to Create Ideas,” pp. 69-
96.

[58]    See http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/giudice.fr.html [no longer accessible online].

[59]   See his articles at the Alternative National Design Forum, http://www.hopeways.org  He remains a committed Zionist, an
ideology which many radical democrats in Israel would reject.

[60]  See http://www.nictt.org

[61]   See http://www.ncptsd.org/  The American fund of experience has been vastly ‘expanded’ in the wake of 9-11 and the
war in Iraq.

[62]  See http://www.nictt.org/transformation.html

[63]  And of course religious fundamentalisms and orthodoxies of various kinds and intensities in the Palestinian and Jewish
communities.

[64]  Adina Aviram, “Militarization of Knowledge” (New Profile 2003), http://www.newprofile.org/showdata.asp?pid=347

[65]  Ruth Hiller, “Chipping away at the core,” Peace News, June-August 2002, http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2447/index.
php

[66]  Rela Mazali, “’And What About the Girls?’: What a Culture of War Genders Out of View,”  New Profile, http://www.newprofile.org/showdata.asp?pid=254

[67]  J. Ghazi, “True Democracy: Palestinians Must Reject Separate State and Change Israel,” May 2002, via http://www.one-state.org

[68]   On the struggle in Zawiya, see http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/572.shtml 

[69]   See Gideon Levy, “’The peaceful way works best’ - the example of Budrus,” Ha’aretz,  Feb. 11, 2004,   http://taayush.tripod.com/new/20040612-haaretz-e.html

[70]  See http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/575.shtml

[71]   Jonathan Kuttab and Mubarak Awad, “Non-Violent Resistance in Palestine: Pursuing Alternative Strategies,” http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/pubs/20020329ib.html

[72]   “Non-Violence in the Middle East: a Talk with Mubarak Awad,” Peace Magazine, October 2000, Vol. 16, No. 4, http://www.peacemagazine.org

[73]  See http://www.psysr.org/NV/index.htm

[74] See Gene Sharp’s “198 methods of non-violent action” at http://www.peacemagazine.org ; useful is the peace and conflict
resolution links page at http://www.peacemagazine.org/pmlinks.htm

[75] Dugger, ibid. His anti-corporatist Alliance for Democracy, which is an NGO and not a political party, is accessible at http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/

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