Post 16. to the On the Ground Category, by Bill Templer

Here a brief but important statement on the current Israeli incursion in Gaza by the Fédération anarchiste francophone in France: http://international.federation-anarchiste.org/breve.php3?id_breve=9 It reminds us that politics in Palestine/Israel must project beyond the interminable clash of narrow nationalisms:
“It is once again the civilian population, directly affected, who is paying with its blood, living conditions, and freedom for the conflict between two nationalist, capitalist, military, and religious logics in the ongoing war between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. [….]

Israeli governments have always sought out this religious conflict and as such encouraged the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in order to legitimate their colonial policies of domination and ethnic apartheid to the West.

As anarchists we know that States separate peoples by erecting borders. Just as creating the State of Israel did not settle anything in this region or for the exiled Jewish peoples, themselves in a desperate situation in another era, the creation of a real Palestinian State cannot satisfy us. Indeed, how would a more formal State help Palestinians ? [….]

We propose anarchist federalism, fundamentally egalitarian and adapted to a Middle East composed of a mosaic of peoples, favouring the free association and federation on egalitarian bases of the individuals and groups of individuals making up this federalism. [….]

An alternative is possible in the Middle-East if both Israeli and Palestinian peoples reject the artificial barriers which separate and oppose them in order to unite against their common enemies, political, economic, religious, and military power to together build the bases of a society which guarantees peace and harmony.

The existence of collectives made up of Palestinian and Israeli individuals, for example struggling together against the Wall or supporting military deserters and opponents, proves once again that that which unites us, mutual aid and solidarity, is stronger than that which divides us.”

The FA is is the French affiliate of the International of Anarchist Federations: http://www.iaf-ifa.org/ , an international network of class struggle anarchist socialists. The only national affiliate of the IAF in an English-speaking country is the Anarchist Federation in UK: http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/

The future may see an akin organization emerge insh’allah in Palestine. ان شاء الله

Post No. 15 to On the Ground category, by Bill Templer

David (Ashan) of Anarchists Against the Wall has a posting June 21, summer solstice, about the CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) decision to call for a boycott against Israel. [tao.ca/~CUPE3903/web/?q=node/372 ] I think he says something that needs to be heard. About struggling against capitalism in the backyards closest to you.
************************************************

Ashan: It feels good to get support from an international organization for the cause with which we are involved, specifically, in this case, tear down the wall. However, as someone who has spent most of my life in occupied First Nations land (KKKanada), I can tell you that the Canadian genocide of the Aboriginal peoples of Turtle Island (North Amerikkka) is of Holocaust proportions. First Nations people are still fighting till this day to reclaim their land, their rights, and the dignity. Even right now, there is a standoff in Ontario between evil capitalist land developers (and their evil capitalist government allies) and the Mohawk peoples of Caledonia. You can read more about their on-going struggle at: http://sisis.nativeweb.org/

Today is Summer Solstice — the longest day of the year, a pagan holiday — and also National Aboriginal Day in KKKanada. On today of all days, I ask of you; before blindly supporting an organization that calls for a boycott of the Israhelli government, remember: the enemy of our enemy is not always our friend! It’s all very nice that CUPE is condemning the stealing of Palestinian land, suppression of Palestinian rights, and squashing of Palestinian dignity, but why are they not doing the same for Mohawk peoples right in their own backyard? Where is the anti-KKKanadian colonialism resolution on the CUPE website? Plainly, it does not exist; because as people of European origin, they *benefit* from it.

In summary, I would like to say something that may not be popular in Israeli (A)narchist circles, but I feel needs to be expressed nonetheless: In my mind, anti-Zionist activity by non-Middle Eastern peoples is legitimate if it is coupled with anti-colonial and anti-capitalist activity, as well. But anti-zionism without anti-capitalism IS antisemitism, plain and simple. Please do not allow these people to wash their hands clean and walk away feeling holier-than-thou because they’ve pointed out *our* problems. They cannot be allowed to have a clean conscience, while the First Nations peoples of Turtle Island continue to be genocided with the help of CUPE’s active participation of in the KKKanadian colonial capitalist economy.

In our rush to crush the wall, let us not abandon our First Nations Canadian cousins who are fighting for freedom, by supporting CUPE’s racist hypocritical stance. I say, boycott every capitalist country, starting with the one closest to you.

Your loving sibling in the struggle,
David
xoxo

from: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/againstwall

*****************

In the spirit of what Ashan reminds us, “anti-Zionist activity by non-Middle Eastern peoples is legitimate if it is coupled with anti-colonial and anti-capitalist activity” is a good watchword, maybe a yardstick. From a guy risking his body on a nearly daily basis in struggle on a dangerous front against the Israeli state. I don’t know if you can agree with xoxo’s “But anti-zionism without anti-capitalism IS antisemitism, plain and simple.” But keep in mind the principle behind it: “I say, boycott every capitalist country, starting with the one closest to you.” Maybe pass that on to the Presbyterian Church AmeriKKKa. Go into CUPE’s web site and you’ll learn that their Anti-Racism Working Group is “currently inactive” ….

Posting 21. The Jewish-Israel Lobby category, by Bill Templer, 15 May 2006
TILLEY AND FORWARD TO A ONE-STATE SOLUTION
 
Virginia Tilley’s article on Hamas and Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’ in Counterpunch is strong if perhaps a bit too ‘legalistic’ and complex in argument (http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley05112006.html ). I think the core of her own concern lies toward the end:
 
      “Carving the West Bank into cantons has eliminated any hope of a viable Palestinian state. The two-state solution is not working. In these conditions, should Hamas recognize Israel’s ‘right to exist’ if it is recognized to be eliminating Palestinian sovereignty altogether? […] The Road Map is based on the supposition that the only peaceful solution in Palestine is to establish one state for Jews and another for everyone else. If Israel’s ‘right to exist’ does not entail sustaining a Jewish majority (which necessitates discriminatory legislation, ethnic cleansing, land grabs, and social engineering), then the ethnic logic supporting two states disappears. Why agree to compose two secular-democratic states sitting next to each other in this small land? No one can articulate an answer, because ethnic demography is their only rationale. […] The entire Road Map logic has become nonsense, too.” 

      Virginia is the most cogent academic voice today projecting a one-state solution as the path forward, and I can recommend her The One-State Solution (Ann Arbor 2005). She tries in this Hamas article not to foreground that concern, but it is her central thrust on the Palestine/Israel question. Though she projects a democratic ‘secular’ state, I think some people inside Hamas could find her thinking quite compatible with the cultural and religious expression of Islam in a symbiotic egalitarian Arab-Jewish political frame.

      In her final chapter on concrete steps, Virginia addresses the question of “what qualities of ‘Jewishness’ would necessarily be lost if Israel ceased to have a Jewish majority?” (p.220). Though “the whole apparatus of Basic Law and public policy that now privileges Jewish nationality in Israel would have to be dismantled,” the urgent question is “how the core spirit and functions of the Jewish national home—sanctuary, national expression—can be preserved while providing Palestinians and all non-Jews with full political equality.”

      She goes on: “a completely ethnic-blind system would not suffice; mutual guarantees would have to ensure both Arab and Jewish collective interests, particularly in the transition. […] if Jewish life could sustain meaningful expression in a country so stabilized, the benefit to Zionism would actually be enormous, for it would defuse Israel’s daunting ‘demographic threat’ permanently, by making it meaningless. […] Debating the state’s exact design is, however, premature at this point. As in South Africa’s transition, the protagonists must sort out the new state’s design themselves through legitimate forums.” (p.221).

      On p. 222 Virginia sets out some bulleted ‘provisions’ for the transition, well worth pondering. She even goes so far as to say: “sustain the Law of Return for Jews,” while heavily curtailing “the activities of the WZO and the Jewish Agency regarding the active promotion of Jewish aliyah” — and working out avenues for massive Palestinian return. The Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be absorbed into this unitary state, while eliminating “preferential access to land, water and transportation,” and any special incentives for these settlements, in a frame of working for the aim of “ethnic parity” in all spheres (p. 223).

      This is not just ‘dreaming.’ Virginia is associated with the group One Democratic State (www.one-democratic-state.org ) that I have mentioned before, where you are welcome to come on board. I find Virginia’s analysis and vision as laid out in the 2005 book non-socialist,and non-populist, too little concerned with a ‘bottom-up’ movement among Palestinians and Jews for a new kind of people’s commonwealth, but that is secondary within this broader frame. Ihud in 1942 called for a “Federative Union of Palestine and neighboring countries,” grounded on a “Union between the Jewish and Arab peoples, essential for “cooperation between the Jewish world and the Arab world in all branches of life—social, economic, cultural, political.” That was the vision of Buber, Akiba Ernst Simon, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold and others. Their party today would be banned in Israel under Art. 7(a) of the Basic Law.

      Importantly, Virginia is very careful not to demonize average Israelis, whatever their brainwashing by the powers that be. As far as I can see, she doesn’t have a class analysis of what is wrong with power and plutocracy inside Israel, but maybe that is an unfair judgment on my part.

      In mild critique, I think her Counterpunch piece on Hamas does not sufficiently foreground one major aspect of Israel’s distinctive political DNA: namely that it is the state of a movement, what some theorists in Germany in the 1930s called a Bewegungsstaat. That movement is committed to the pro-active “ingathering of the exiles,” and is thus by definition a never-bounded project, where a written Constitution is also exceedingly problematic. In talking about the Israeli ethnocracy, this core aspect is essential. The Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael) act in some ways as a state within a state inside the Israeli polity as the pincer arms of this movement of ingathering.

      This is a paramount reason why Palestinians cannot ‘recognize’ the essentially borderless state. Precisely because it is the ‘state of a global movement’ to in effect imbibe and vitiate (negate) the diaspora. No polity anywhere on the planet is constituted as an ethnocratic Bewegungsstaat to pro-actively gather in, ‘return’ and reunite millions of individuals quite literally from the ‘earth’s four corners.’ In her book, Virginia does deal with the unique role of the Jewish Agency and Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael.
REVISITING LAZARE

In the related discussion on the Lobby and its reality and implications, here a quote worth pondering:

“To those who denounce the Jewish peril before you, respond by attacking capital, whatever kind it might be, Jewish or Christian. Capital without any qualifier. To those who enlist you to cry ‘Down with Israel!’ answer ‘Down with Capital! Down with property!’ and don’t go any further than that; don’t allow yourself to be distracted from your route by those who want to guide you into an impasse which will lead you to nothing. Finance, speculation, capital, property, in one word, all your enemies are not Jews, they are universal: they are Christian, Muslims, Buddhists. Be careful not to help them and to compromise the cause by unconsciously supporting theirs. They will laugh at you after you will have foolishly served them as an auxiliary, and they will profit from their victory to better enslave you.”

It is from Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), a French social anarchist and writer active in the 1890s active on behalf of many causes and very centrally engaged in the struggle against anti-semitism in France. His classic study Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (1894) is well worth reading, today perhaps especially, in part as an anarchist antidote to Shahak. This book on anti-Judaism, its discourses and practices, is one of the few by a social anarchist historian, online in full: http://marxists.architexturez.net/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/1894/antisemitism/index.htm

Its first speculative chapter seems to resonate to frequencies in Shahak’s approach in Jewish History, Jewish Religion a century later (denouncing Jewish xenophobia and exclusivism), which is why Lazare paradoxically is sometimes quoted in openly anti-semitic diatribe. Yet Lazare’s anarchy shines through his analysis, even in chap. 1. And his concomitant struggle against French anti-semitism, such as Edouard Drumont’s La France juive, a classic vicious anti-semitic work on ‘Jewish supremacy’ in France that in part inspired Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Ford’s tirade was once an insidiously influential book worth (re)reading today in the polarized light of the current Lobby discussion.

As Ford says there in Chap. 13: “Anyone who essays to discuss the Jewish Question in the United States or anywhere else must be fully prepared to be regarded as ‘anti-Semite,’ a ‘Jew-baiter.’ Nor need encouragement be looked for from politicians, people or Press. […] There is a vague feeling that to use the word ‘Jew’ openly, or to expose it nakedly in print, is somehow improper. […]
The chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question is the super-sensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter. There is probably not a newspaper in America, and certainly none of the advertising mediums which are called magazines, which would have the temerity even to breathe seriously the fact that such a Question exists.”

1921. Sound familiar? The abridged edition of the book is available here, side by side on the cybershelf with Shahak: http://www.abbc2.com/historia/ford.htm

Lazare initiated journalistic discussion in France on the notorious Dreyfus Affair, among the very first dreyfusards. Lazare was in some ways a follower of Bakunin, who called for a “free federation of individuals, districts, provinces, and nations within humanity,” from the grassroots up. Lazare was the first in France to call for a social revolutionary anarchist Jewish path forward as part of the young Zionist movement there.

Eleven months ago, a square Place Bernard Lazare was dedicated in his name in the 3^rd arrondissement in Paris. There is an active Cercle Bernard Lazare in Grenoble, website online (www.cbl-grenoble.org ). It continues his concern for social revolution, struggle against racism, and justice in Palestine (which Lazare doubtless would have been in the forefront of today). The Cercle Bernard Lazare still looks to a two-state solution. I have little doubt Lazare would today be struggling for a path forward geared to a democratic antiauthoritarian anticapitalist unitary Arab-Jewish federative state, and beyond.

There is a Lazare Internet Archive: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lazare-bernard A French Wikipedia entry on him: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lazare and a short biography by Mitch Abidor: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/biography.htm Abidor states that he stuck to his class struggle beliefs, and “as a result he broke with the Zionists.” He died of cancer at the age of 38. Jean-Denis Bredin’s biographical study Bernard Lazare (1992) is available only in French, we need an English version. Jesse Cohn’s 2002 wide-ranging lecture “Anarchy in Yiddish” also looks at Lazare: http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article=488&var_recherche=%E2%8C%A9=en

I wanted to call attention to Lazare because I think he remains a paradigm in the joint struggle for revolutionary socialism and against anti-Judaism, and a masterful critic of the construction of ‘Jewish supremacism’ in the ferment of his day.

Posting 20. to The Jewish-Israel Lobby, by Bill Templer

Robert Fisk’s article in the Independent (April 27, 2006) “Breaking the Last Taboo: The United States of Israel?” perpetuates the false notion that critique of Lobbytalk comes almost only from the pro-Zionist Jewish right in the states, or in Australia, where Fisk has faced the ‘Jewish lobby’ in Oz. Why cannot those extremely critical of vicious Israeli voelkisch policy at the same time be concerned about potentially racist anti-Jewish discourse inside Lobby analysis and its web of rhetoric and implication?

London-based sociologist David Hirsh critiques Fisk in an article “Slipping Standards” that is worth reading: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_hirsh/2006/04/conspiracy_is_an_easy_way_out.htmlI I don’t agree with Hirsh on a number of points, but the initiative on the Left and website he has organized over the past year ENGAGE http://www.engageonline.org.uk brings together much thoughtful commentary about the dangers of this discourse. Hirsh like Avnery and Chomsky is highly critical of Israel, but Hirsh like Avnery thinks Israel should not be destroyed. And is a fierce enemy of what he perceives as anti-Jewish rhetoric disguised as ‘anti-Zionist’ in Britain and elsewhere, and now using the Lobbytalk as a ‘cocoon.’ I suggest you look at Engage: the journal, the articles. The arguments. Remember these are people on the Left, a whole spectrum. What Jeff Blankfort might inimically call the ‘Jewish Defense League within the Left.’

There you can also see the consciously offensive ‘stars and stripes’ cover of the Independent for April 27 that many Jews will find anti-Semitic in the classic sense. Of course there is more than one reading of the image:

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=391 What’s yours? I think some of you may be pretty unaware of anti-Semitic discourse and imagery over the decades. The new xenophobic far right anti-Roma / anti-Turk / anti-Jewish party ATAKA in Bulgaria uses imagery of a similar kind. Is this where the Anglo-American Left is wending?

Hirsh notes: “There is a real, current danger of the emergence of an anti-semitic movement in Europe and America - as well as elsewhere. This is not, at the moment, a battle on the streets. It is a battle on the level of discourse. And much of the careless discourse comes from the very anti-racists, liberals and socialists who ought to be the most sensitive to the danger of the emergence of this kind of racist movement. The left needs to get its act together on this. If the left can’t or won’t fight anti-semitism then we will all be in real trouble - because nobody else will.”

Sounds a bit similar to some of my own comments here a week ago. Hirsh and I differ regarding a ‘transformed’ Israel, because I’ve argued for a kind of radically de-Zionized version of Buber’s vision in the old Brit Shalom of a single unitary cooperative commonwealth, a ‘no-state’ solution. A Palestinian/Israeli zapatismo.

ITEM: Regarding blanket claims in Lobbytalk, take this one from Mearsheimer/Walt: “Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy … stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.”

COUNTER-FACT: One of the most outspoken critics of Israel and an eminent Palestinian social scientist has just been granted a full professorship at a major US university, and at no time was there any attempt to ’smear’ him. Nor had he ever experienced any such interference in his work. He is feared in academic circles in Israel for his astute scientific analysis of land policy, and the workings of the Israeli ethnocracy. How many other Palestinian social scientists are teaching in American academe and not being targeted by campus-watch.org and similar rightwing initiatives? Worth examining. Sure, Juan Cole is being targeted. But the above is a pretty broadside salvo. A scholar probably more radical than Cole, and a Palestinian left-nationalist in his analysis, is not. Why? The campus-watch.org website has only a small number of US campuses on its hit list. Take a look for yourselves.

Writing in the LRB, Robert Pfaltzgraff of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge/MA has some interesting comment: “The authors allege that ‘over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence’ at US think-tanks, and give a list that includes the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. The basis on which the authors make this assertion escapes me. We have undertaken studies of US policy towards the Gulf States as well as Israel and other countries in and around the Middle East. To the extent that such studies support Israel or any other states in the region, this is the result of an independent analysis of US needs and interests. If Mearsheimer and Walt had taken the time to interview me or any of my colleagues, they could easily have discovered this.”

In any event, I suggest you look at ENGAGE as a tonic against the excesses of your own conviction in this discussion. I agree with its major thrust, not its defense of left-liberal Zionism. And not with its principled opposition to the idea of academic boycott, where I am much closer to Ilan Pappe.

But the same rage for justice that can attack the Israeli plutocracy can also criticize racist suggestion and innuendo about Jews and ‘Jewish power’ in America and what some of us think is now emerging, a kind of ‘Sozialismus des dummen Kerls,’ as August Bebel characterized anti-Semitism on the left in Germany some 130 years ago. Hirsh is a comrade in the struggle against that. As is the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty socialist tendency in the UK that Hirsh and ENGAGE seem near to: http://www.workersliberty.org/ (’Jewish-dominated’?) , a grouping itself in solidarity with the Alliance for Green Socialism http://www.greensocialist.org.uk/ags/

As Liz Burbank recently wrote: “Making an israeli ‘lobby’ the issue and making the terms of the terms of this set-up debate ‘either-or’, ‘yes-no’ takes U.S. imperialism off the hot-seat. […] Meanwhile this vicious deception must be exposed and opposed because it aids our real enemies and because this strata’s role and influence is critical, beyond its own academic circles, in general media propaganda, and in broad mass movements as well as revolutionary working class and anti-imperialist movements. […] By design or default, this timely sneak attack has all the earmarks –and intended effects –of a psyops job–soon to be translated undoubtedly via the capitalist media for broader consumption.” (“Cui Bono & Some Thoughts on “The Ferment Over the ‘Israel Lobby,’” 29 April 2006).

Posting 19. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby category, Nadia Gould’s request for clarity

Oaxaca, Sunday, 23 April 2006

Dear Nadia,

      This is in answer to your e-mail, namely
————————-
Subject: Re: Jeffrey Blankfort’s article in Counterpunch
From: Nadia Gould <>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:27:24 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
To: George Salzman <>

Dear George,
Have you seen my book Hitler made me a Jew (Boson Book sold at Barnes and Noble or Amazon)? I started to read your enclosed email correspondance and I couldn’t continue — it scared me I am now 77 — if you read my small (84 pages) book you will understand all the emotions it brings back – 6 millions Jews were systematically killed when the world stood still doing NOTHING and let it happen and I was a lucky one to escape through Spain and Portugal – I know ANTISEMITISM I can smell like the gas from my stove – How many Jews are left in this world today? You (or the people with whom you discusss) are telling me that Israel is imperialist - racist - elitist … etc… Please write you or
whoever is writing you — write it all in CLEARER language EXPLAIN what you are really saying because if you say what I began to smell I feel sick —
Nadia

—–Original Message—–
From: George Salzman
Sent: Apr 21, 2006 12:53 AM
To: Jeffrey Blankfort
Subject: Re: Jeffrey Blankfort’s article in Counterpunch

Oaxaca, Thursday, 20 April 2006

Hi Jeff,
      Thanks for writing. Glad to hear from you, and that you can accept my appreciation of your work in spite of my previous criticism. The articles that Manuel Garcia referred to in his latest two notes, the ones by Gabriel Ash, are for me not such easy reading, but I think he’s doing something that completely escaped me, especially the second article, which ends with . . .
————————-
      Nadia, I’m sorry that the writing in the e-mail correspondence is not clearer and easier to understand. I urge people to use straightforward everyday language, but many academics seem reluctant to do that. Separately from the question of clear language, there is the problem that the issues are fairly complex. No one with even only the most basic acquaintance with the 20th century does not know of the horror of the Nazi slaughter of European Jews. It was a genocide against Jews by Christian nations, not by Islamic nations. The major powers decided to “provide a homeland” for Jews — in Palestine — which was inhabited by people who had lived there for ages. The founding Zionists were well aware they would have to push out the Palestinians.

      If you have not read the research paper by Mearsheim and Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, you can glance at their clear discussion (on pp. 9-10 of the full version at papers.ssrn.com/abstract=891198) of the Zionists’ awareness that their project would entail much suffering by Arabs.
For example, they write,

      The mainstream Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi-national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine. The Zionist leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but this was a tactical maneuver and not their real objective. As David Ben-Gurion put it in the late 1930s, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” ³²

      To achieve this goal, the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. Ben-Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.” ³³ Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it, “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.” ³⁴

. . .
      . . . Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?” ³⁷

 
      I think that’s about as clear writing as you’ll find anywhere, and it’s all carefully referenced. When I got your note I went to look at our earlier correspondence. The first note, about 2 and 1/2 years ago, was
———————
Subject: regarding your last message
Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2003 10:03:05 -0500
From: Nadia Gould <>
To: George Salzman <>

Dear George ,
      I thank you for sending me your last message even though I had asked you to stop sending me your newsletter - this last one was very interesting and I appreciated getting the website address of the Shalom people - it is a funny coincidence that I had received a day earlier the address of website of Hamas (located in Holland) - I have traveled in Muslim countries for many years and I have lived in the homes of great wonderful warm people - the best - I love many things about the culture believe me- I personally, am not religious but I, barely, escaped the Holocaust at the very end of 1942 read my book!!!

      my dear George, PLEASE show me websites from the Muslim world that could be compared to the Shalom in Muslim countries – if you can — I will maybe change my mind for the moment I am not convinced that the Palestinians are not the pawns of the extremists Muslims who hold the Moderates everywhere in the Muslim world hostages-

sincerely ,
Nadia

NADIA GOULD
212 666 7553
LOOK FOR MY BOOK
IN BOSON BOOKS
NON-FICTION
———————
      I have not seen your book, which you promised to mail me but apparently forgot to do. There are two excellent groups in Palestine I happen to know of offhand, The Palestine National Initiative (Al Mubadara) which has a website at http://www.almubadara.org/en/ (somewhat out of date), and The Gaza Community Mental Health Center. In a recent paper, at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-02-18.htm, I wrote,

      Among the many responses to Hamas’s sweeping electoral victory is the relatively brief assessment of Dr. Eyad El Sarraj, psychiatrist and founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Center (GCMHC). It is not among those many articles cited by Bill Templer, possibly because it was published after Templer completed his article. I got it by e-mail from the GCMHC on February 12. It is available at http://www.gcmhp.net/File_files/onvictorhamas.html.

      The Gaza Community Mental Health Center is first rate. You might also contact a friend, Laurie White <>, a Jewish woman from Ann Arbor who is part of an organization, Zeitouna <, of Arab and Jewish women who are soon going to Israel-Palestine and who are devoted to achieving real peace, peace with justice and dignity for all people. The main point is to recognize our common humanity. The horrors of the past cannot be undone, but we can try to use our intelligence and compassion to change the course of history to bring an end to such horrors.

Sincerely, and with best wishes,
George

Posting 18. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby, an essay by Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, 22 April 2006

Who’s the dog? Who’s the tail?
 

      I don’t usually tell these stories, because they might give rise to the suspicion that I am paranoid.

      For example: 27 years ago, I was invited to give a lecture-tour in 30 American universities, including all the most prestigious ones - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Berkeley and so on. My host was the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a respected non-Jewish organization, but the lectures themselves were to be held under the auspices of the Jewish Bet-Hillel chaplains.

      On arrival at the airport in New York I was met by one of the organizers. “There is a slight hitch,” he told me, “29 of the Rabbis have cancelled your lecture.”

      In the end, all the lectures did take place, under the auspices of Christian chaplains. When we came to the lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me the secret: the lectures had been forbidden in a confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League, the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The salient phrase has stuck to my memory: “While it cannot be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor, yet…”

---

      And another story from real life: a year later I went to Washington DC in order to “sell” the Two-State solution, which at the time was considered an outlandish, not to say crazy, idea. In the course of the visit, the Quakers were so kind as to arrange a press conference for me.

      When I arrived, I was amazed. The hall was crammed full, practically all the important American media were represented. Many had come straight from a press conference held by Golda Meir, who was also in town. The event was to last an hour, as is usual, but the journalists did not let go. They bombarded me with questions for another two hours. Clearly, what I had to say was quite new to them and they were interested.

      I was curious how this would be reported in the media. And indeed, the reaction was stunning: not a word appeared in any of the newspapers, on radio or TV. Not one single word.

      By the way, three years ago I again held a press conference, this time on Capitol Hill in Washington. It was an exact replica of the last time: the crowd of reporters, their obvious interest, the continuation of the conference well beyond the appointed time - and not a single word in the media.

      I could tell some more stories like these, but the point is made. I recount them only in connection with the scandal recently caused by two American professors, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They published a research paper on the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States.

      In 80 pages, 40 of them footnotes and sources, the two show how the pro-Israel lobby exercises unbridled power in the US capital, how it terrorizes the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, how the White House dances to its tune (if indeed a house can dance), how the important media obey its orders and how the universities, too, live in fear of it.

      The paper caused a storm. And I don’t mean the predictable wild attacks by the “friends of Israel” - which means almost all politicians, journalists and professors. These pelted the authors with all the usual accusations: that they were anti-Semites, that they were resurrecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so forth. There was something paradoxical in these attacks, since they only illustrated the authors’ case.

      But the debate that fascinates me is of a different nature. It broke out between senior intellectuals, from the legendary Noam Chomsky, the guru of the Left throughout the world (including Israel), to progressive websites everywhere. The bone of contention: the conclusion of the paper that the Jewish-Israeli lobby dominates US foreign policy and subjugates it to Israeli interests - in glaring contradiction to the national interest of the US itself. A case in point: the American assault on Iraq.

      Chomsky and others rose up against this assertion. They do not deny the factual findings of the two professors, but object to their conclusions. In their view, it is not the Israel lobby that directs American policy, but the interests of the big corporations that dominate the American empire and exploit Israel for their own selfish aims.

      Simply put: does the dog wag its tail, or does the tail wag its dog?

      I am nervous about sticking my head into a debate between such illustrious intellectuals, but I feel obliged to express my view nevertheless.

      I’ll start with the Jew, who went to the Rabbi and complained about his neighbor. “You are right’” the Rabbi declared. Then came the neighbor and denounced the complainant. “You are right’” the Rabbi announced. “But how can that be,” exclaimed the Rabbi’s wife, “Only one of the two can be right!” “You are right, too,” the Rabbi said.

      I find myself in a similar situation. I think that both sides are right (and hope to be right, myself, too).

      The findings of the two professors are right to the last detail. Every Senator and Congressman knows that criticizing the Israeli government is political suicide. Two of them, a Senator and a Congressman, tried - and were politically executed. The Jewish lobby was fully mobilized against them and hounded them out of office. This was done openly, to set a public example. If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 Senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith.

      President Bush, for example, has withdrawn from all the established American positions regarding our conflict. He accepts automatically the positions of our government, be they as they may. Almost all the American media are closed to Palestinians and Israeli peace activists. As to professors - almost all of them know which side of their bread is peanut-buttered. If, in spite of that, somebody dares to open their mouth against the Israeli policy - as happens once every few years - they are smothered under a volley of denunciations: anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi.

      By the way, American guests in Israel, who know that at home it is forbidden to mention the influence of the Jewish-Israeli lobby, are dumbfounded to see that here the lobby does not hide its power in Washington but openly boasts of it.

      The question, therefore, is not whether the two professors are right in their findings. The question is what conclusions can be drawn from them.

      Let’s take the Iraq affair. Who is the dog? Who the tail?

      The Israeli government prayed for this attack, which has eliminated the strategic threat posed by Iraq. America was pushed into the war by a group of Neo-Conservatives, almost all of them Jews, who had a huge influence on the White House. In the past, some of them had acted as advisers to Binyamin Netanyahu.

      On the face of it, a clear case. The pro-Israeli lobby pushed for the war, Israel is its main beneficiary. If the war ends in a disaster for America, Israel will undoubtedly be blamed.

      Really? What about the American aim of getting their hands on the main oil reserves of the world, in order to dominate the world economy? What about the aim of placing an American garrison in the center of the main oil-producing area, on top of the Iraqi oil, between the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Caspian Sea? What about the immense influence of the big oil companies on the Bush family? What about the big multinational corporations, whose outstanding representative is Dick Cheney, that hoped to make hundreds of billions from the “reconstruction of Iraq”?

      The lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-Israeli connection is strongest when it seems that American interests and Israeli Interests are one (irrespective of whether that is really the case in the long run). The US uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel uses the US to dominate Palestine.

      But if something exceptional happens, such as the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair or the sale of an Israeli spy plane to China, and a gap opens between the interests of the two sides, America is quite capable of slapping Israel in the face.

      American-Israeli relations are indeed unique. It seems that they have no precedent in history. It is as if King Herod had given orders to Augustus Caesar and appointed the members of the Roman senate.

      I don’t think that this phenomenon can be wholly explained by economic interests. Even the most orthodox Marxist must recognize that it also has a spiritual dimension. It is no accident that American (as well as British) fundamentalist Christians invented the Zionist idea well before Theodor Herzl hit upon it. The evangelical lobby is no less important in today’s Washington than the Zionist one. According to its ideology, the Jews must take possession of all the Holy Land in order to make the Second Coming of Christ possible (and then - the part they don’t shout about - some Jews will become Christians and the rest will be annihilated at Armaggedon, today’s Meggido in Northern Israel).

      At the basis of the phenomenon lies the uncanny similarity between the two national-religious stories, the American myth and the Israeli. In both, pioneers persecuted for their religion reached the shores of the Promised Land. They were forced to defend themselves against the “savage” natives, who were out to destroy them. They redeemed the land, made the desert bloom, created, with God’s help, a flourishing, democratic and moral society.

      Both societies live in a state of denial and unconscious guilt feelings - over there because of the genocide committed against the Native Americans and the horrifying slavery of the blacks, here because of the uprooting of half the Palestinian people and the oppression of the other half. Both here and there, people believe in an eternal war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.

      Anyhow, the American-Israeli symbiosis is unique and far too complex a phenomenon to be described as a simple conspiracy. I am sure that the two professors did not mean to do so.

      The dog wags the tail and the tail wags the dog. They wag each other.

Posting 17. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby category, by George Salzman

Bill Templer wrote on 21 April 2006:

VIDEO Cindy Sheehan: Hold Bush Accountable
www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm

      Listen and watch this video by Cindy against Bush and the war — and then imagine it filtered through the anti-Lobby discourse. Is that the kind of antiwar movement you want to build? Imagine the adjective ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ even one time in her discourse. Bill

Dear Bill,

      You’re a tough, determined, valuable ally. But so is Jeffrey Blankfort, and Noam Chomsky, and many others. I can barely stay in the swim. Obviously, with your latest post to the blog you’re attempting to raise the discussion to a higher level, tackling the “body language” of writing. I’m reminded of an earlier piece titled, “To the shoemaker, there’s nothing like leather”, just as To the plumber, there’s nothing like copper tubing, and now, To the linguist, there’s nothing like critical discourse analysis (CDA). Oi! Oi! Oi! There’s no end to how much I still have to learn. I’ve had for many years an allergic reaction to the word “semiotics”, ever since my daughter Erica first brought it home from Brookline High School, and when I came upon “sociosemiotics” in your essay, I felt an involuntary constriction in my throat, but that didn’t stop me. It’s a good essay, and you end it with your feet solidly on the ground: “Meanwhile, the real struggle is against Israeli fascist policy and U.S. geopolitics. Our comrades are in Budrus and Bil’in every week fighting that. Direct action. Palestinians and Jews shoulder to shoulder, facing the Israeli army.” But I’m by no means persuaded that your position on the matter of labelling is correct.

      Like you, I think Gabriel Ash’s two articles are excellent, though I’ve read them only once. It seems to me that he constructs a better frame of reference from which to think about what’s going on than the one we were using earlier. I’ll close this note with a few other facets of this multi-address correspondence.

1. I think we are building real trust among ourselves in this effort. An example is in the changing position of Karen Spence, who wrote me on 13 Apr 2006, “Are you trying to get me killed, or have my life ruined? What the hell is your strategy here?” Karen has moved, I think comfortably, back into participation in the discussion.

Subject: Re: The flood seems to be subsiding
From: George Salzman
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 11:08:53 -0500
To: Karen Spence
CC: Jeffrey Blankfort , Adam D. Sacks

Karen, this is just to acknowledge your note that begins,
———————-
Subject: RE: The flood seems to be subsiding
From: Karen Spence <>
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 10:56:18 -0400
To: George Salzman <>, Adam D. Sacks <>
CC: Jeffrey Blankfort <>

This is one issue, in particular, that I would welcome wholeheartedly to be wrong all of the time, especially when it comes to not giving someone the benefit of the doubt. …
———————-
Building trust in the movement for human liberation is a major problem. I’ve tried to explore it in an earlier writing, which starts:

Mutual Aid and Mutual Trust
essay 5 of the series
Building the Global Grassroots Infrastructure
December 29, 2001

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grass/Infra/Infra-5.htm
it is also available (without graphics) on the Boston Indymedia Center Website at http://boston.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=4544

Summary: In the context of ongoing terror promoted by the U.S. government, building mutual aid and mutual trust within the growing global grassroots infrastructure is considered.

THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT
Instead of Mutual Aid, Mutual Horror

      Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the U.S. regime — George W. Bush and the rest of his Cabal — fully supported by mainstream U.S. corporate mass media, launched its War FOR Terrorism, a global attack on all fronts to further promote and assure U.S.-directed terrorism. It began in the U.S. with adoption of police-state control measures and military mobilization, and a sustained propaganda campaign by the Bush Cabal and its mainstream corporate media allies, looking towards broad government violations of traditional rights to privacy and many of the supposedly inviolable constitutional guarantees of Americans. Less than one month later, on October 7th, the U.S. regime began its massive bombing strikes against Afghanistan. …

and somewhat indirectly more recently in an essay that begins:

Out of the box!
Towards humane survival
G. S. <>
February 18, 2006

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-02-18.htm

      Once upon a time there lived a very smart Jew. At age 70 he received a letter from a rabbi, who explained that he had sought in vain to comfort his 19-year-old daughter over the death of her sister, “a sinless, beautiful, 16-year-old child.”

      In reply the elderly Jew wrote, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” [1]

The Hamas electoral victory: a chance to break out of the box?
Or are we prisoners still?

NOTES:
[1] The exchange between the rabbi and Albert Einstein was in the New York Times obituary published one or a few days after Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955 at age 76.

      These efforts of mine reveal much of what I believe we need to do. Certainly trust among ourselves is a rock-bottom requirement. But it takes effort, and total honesty with each other.
Sincerely, and with best wishes,
George

2. One of the shortcomings of this entire discussion is, as it were, its stress on objective un-emotional analysis, as though only a commitment to purely logical discourse can serve us. Of course (excuse me, Bill) I know we need to be rational but we ought, I think, to let our passion for decency and love not be hidden by dedication to unemotional exchanges. There’s no sense of moral outrage — and I mean real, fierce rage — in, for example, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper. At least with Chomsky’s writing, his outrage usually ripples beneath the skin of his sarcastic prose, though I’m not sure his ZNet piece shows it. And Gabriel Ash’s fine work reads as though it were the product of a logic machine, at least that’s how it struck me. It’s like a straightjacket of academic discipline that we’re confined to. That’s no good for getting to the folks we really need to get to listen and learn. Here’s what Joe Bageant has to say about this in one of the numerous notes that already came in today:

Subject: from joe bageant
From: Bageant, Joseph <>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:30:59 -0500
To:

Greetings my fellow grizzled old coot!

      And thank you George for the reasonable voice of your reply in the face of my desperation. Times are hard and it “gets pretty drunk out” some nights. Working inside small town red state America has taken its toll on my nerves for sure. You’re right. The struggle is global and needs to be fought that way. It’s hard to remember from this vantage point. About the only way in which I would differ with your insightful reply is that … well, come to think of it, I would not disagree with a word of it.

      Another thing: It has occurred to me that Joe Sixpack may be irrelevant in the 2008 elections, if the battle is truly that of information, media, manufactured consent and all that stuff so discussed by internet intelligencia on the left. I just don’t know anymore who among us are pawns and who are not, such is the level of illusion and disinformation. (I can tell you for sure that Jeff Saint Clair is a Bildergerger-launched disinformation robot shape shifting as an internet leftist!) Seriously though, I know only one thing at this point: the battle for the consciousness and dignity of man is certainly benefiting from the Internet, but it will ultimately be fought right here in good old “meatspace.” Face to face, door to door and person to person. Sort of a Fallujah of the heart. But as long as we are all in different cultural silos of class and talking only to each other, the only result will be that we will coalesce as “the opposition,” for sure. But so what? So we get a little air time on NPR like we did this morning about the Israeli Lobby. So what? Again it is just one more group of elites arguing with another. Academics. Politicians. Media. Leftist Internet pundits…

      Meanwhile, there are tens of millions of Americans who have been blinded, then raised and fattened for profit like cattle by the capitalist state and its economic, cultural, military and political elite. And when the money elites set fire to the barn as they exit with all the dough for their offshore villas, the cattle will stampede in their rage most likely toward scapegoating some darker skinned mook, or war, or some other atrocity as they have been trained. And there will be no one to lead them.

      When that happens, it would be damned nice if the comfortable progressive liberal and leftist folks with the IRAs and the masters degrees and the aesthetics and insight that only education can bring knew just one poor working mook at the chicken plant well enough to call them on the phone. And I mean really know them. Have been to their cheap weddings and helped with their troubled kids. Really know them as human beings as friends, and god forbid! Maybe even loaned them a few bucks when they were behind on the heating bill. (LOL! Never happen! Leftists believe the government should do it.) Because then when the stampede starts the left could influence the direction in which it runs, the road that will be taken in the face of fear and insecurity and rage at having been betrayed. The culturally inflicted blindness of the working class voter in America is misused by both parties, we know that. But even a blind man can HEAR the truth when it is spoken. The trick for us is to deliver it to someone other than the choir in which we sing. Face to face. Hell we don’t even do that with each other for the most part. We do it on then net. However, I must say I was deeply humbled when you went to such great discomfort and expense to visit me in Winchester. I was moved to near tears, but never showed it, did I? The pride of old men…Southern men are the worst.)

      On the other hand, being raised in such meanness and poverty, maybe I just have too much residual class hate for everyone born even one more rung up the ladder than I was. I dunno. You are the only Jewish intellectual I seem to like personally. And if you find the sudden discovery of the Jewish Lobby by Jews themselves interesting, well hell ole buddy, so do I. It’s kinda like a dog finding its own ass, but what the hell? You’ve tolerated a lot of my blindnesses and even hand carried the books to me that would cure them. (I am still working on Peter Kropotkin.)

      Whatever the case, I have experienced hundreds of times what Jeff St. Clair quoted in his post: “One of the successes of the lobby’s merchandising of the Holocaust has been that people are fearful of saying or writing the word “Jew” in a negative manner whereas it is open season on every other group on the planet.”

      And even that doesn’t convince me that, fucked as the Jewish Lobby is, it is in no particular way near the heart of America’s problem. It is simply another one being acknowledged. The problem seems to be the heart itself.

Joe Bageant

Kiss Nancy for me, and when I get to Oaxaca some day, I will kiss her myself when you aren’t looking.
——————————————————–
Subject: PS: from joe bageant
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:43:05 -0500

RE: I’m sending this out to a very limited list, still, if you want me to take your name off this list (it’s not my so-called e-mail distribution list of about 1400), please let me know.

Nah. Send it to all 1400 if you want I don’t care. I have no secrets. And besides, we all need to be more open, be more trusting, throw all our secrets out onto the porch for our neighbors to see.

Your brother,
joe

3. And here’s the start of “There’s nothing like sociosemiotics” — to the linguist:

To the shoemaker, there’s nothing like leather
November 11, 2003

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/Salz/2003-11-11.htm

Subject: What about voting? Should we, and if so for whom?
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 08:40:53 -0600
From: George Salzman <>
BCC: (entire general list)

Oaxaca, Thursday, November 11, 2003

Friends:
      When I first went to live in Boston in 1964 I got a pair of Madre boots, made by Fabbiano in Italy. Although I already had heavy duty mountain boots, good for rough rocky terrain and ice fields in the Colorado Rockies; the lighter …

How do we get to the good people who, for example, are ordinary, everyday right-wing religious fanatics? Not with our intellectualizing — that’s for sure.

All the best,
George

Posting 16. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby category, by Bill Templer

To answer George: yes, it IS about language. My own recent critique is precisely about discourse and language. Rhetorical analysis. That is what I’m trying to address a bit in the constructions of a masterful journalist like Blankfort. One dimension is FACTS ABOUT SOCIAL PRACTICE, the societal networks of Capital and its geopolitics, which Ash looks at pretty convincingly — what at a LEVEL OF POLITICAL ANALYSIS the discussion is about.

SOCIOSEMIOTICS AND THE POLITICS OF DISCOURSE: But another level in any text or their ensemble is the texturing of the discourse itself, the representations and imaginaries it creates, its discoursal world. It seems elementary to have to say this here. How racism functions at various key levels is through LANGUAGE and imaging, its architecture and innuendo and inculcation. How gendered talk is reproduced and constructs a universe is something any feminist knows. How anti-Zigan talk works is bitter knowledge to East European Roma. How anti-Palestinian racism works as a ‘discourse’ in Israel is likewise clear to any Palestinian, in the Negev or elsewhere. That discourse underpins and reproduces social practice. How anti-Semitism circulates at the level of verbal construction of attitudes and images in Europe, North America and elsewhere remains an analogous set.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: CDA sets out to look precisely at that, like the key work of linguist Norman Fairclough (U Lancaster) and many others. Teo talks about the need to “unpack the ideological underpinnings of discourse that have become so naturalized over time that we begin to treat them as common, acceptable and natural features of discourse.” You can find some papers of Fairclough at http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/norman.htm A recent book of his on CDA is Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (Routledge 2003).Here a brief paper for starters: http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/paper4.doc

I’ve worked with Palestinian social scientists on how reporting about Palestinians is slanted in the North American press. We’ve used some techniques of CDA.

I’m pretty sure that what Eliot Cohen and others on the Jewish right are responding to in part is this DISCOURSAL WEB OF INNUENDO AND UNDERTONE that shapes and reproduces attitude in analysis on ‘Jewish power and its organizations.’ The politics of rhetoric. Ash in his analysis does not address that. Neither does Chomsky or John Spritzler. Neither do Mearsheimer and Walt. Nor in fact does Eliot Cohen in an explicit way.

They look at the elephant and what it could be — not its discoursal construction and texturing and ‘framing as a narrative.’ I suggest that part of what is seriously needed is CDA analysis of this Lobbytalk.

Any 9^th-grade high school kid can be taught to do this in critical media analysis. In CDA, Fairclough also examines “the ‘resonance’ of discourses, their capacity to mobilize people, not only in the institutions but also in the lifeworld.”

In any event, I would agree with Juan Cole that Likud and its stateside mafia are what need concentrating on. As he says: “David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes are encouraging a new kind of antisemitism, which sees it as unacceptable that Jews should be liberals or should crticize Likud Party policies.”

ANTI-ZIGANISM: I worked for many years with Roma in southeastern Europe, who are the pariah minority par excellence. Their discrimination in social practice is huge, insidious. And it is interwoven with a whole web of anti-Gypsy DISCOURSE in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia, and most especially ‘Albanian’ Kosovo. –Is discourse everything? Of course not. Especially for the Roma. –Is it central? You bet. Bulgarian discourse is saturated with anti-Roma talk and attitude, a whole anti-Zigan imaginary that kids are inculcated with from an early age. And their parents take for granted, naturalized discourse. Ask any African-American, including Cynthia McKinney: what African-Americans are highly sensitive to in the media is a whole webbing of allusion and innuendo.

MAIN THESIS: The same techniques in CDA we have used to analyze ‘rhetoric’ in slanting reporting on Palestine or in anti-Roma discourse have to be applied to Lobby talk to unpack the discoursal features. That is part of the problem of how Lobbytalk is perceived and interpreted. That is not being done.

Of course: anti-Jewish attitude is far more than language as it is translated into a world of actions. But it is ALSO a tissue of word and subtext and allusion. That is one level. In a mediatized world, a primary level many Jews may be responding to in their unease about Lobbyspeak. And the level mobilized when conservative Jews point to anti-Semitic aspects of anti-Israel analysis, and attacks on AIPAC and ADL.

HYPHENATED AMERICAN: Let me comment a bit (more) on Jeff’s construction linking Lantos, McKinney and “out of town wealthy Jews.” In anti-Jewish discourse, that latter phrasing is incidentally absolutely loaded. What I didn’t mention in the brief bit I posted on George’s blog is Jeff’s ‘implicit labeling’ of Lantos as a ‘hyphenated American.’ Whose real loyalties are to another country.

This is an old part of the nativist representation and imaginary in the states. As Theodore Roosevelt said in 1915: “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” Jeff does not use the term specifically (how could he?) but suggests this quite clearly at a couple of points, letting the reader ‘extrapolate.’ This is typical rhetoric on the right. It is old stock in anti-Semitism stateside. A whole sub-universe is brewed beneath the textual surface where these things reverberate.

Jeff is a masterful journalist who knows how to ‘texture’ his narrative. Which is why he foregrounds Lantos and then does not mention him again in the last 40 percent (!) of his Counterpunch article on McKinney. Is this good writing? Yes, when slanted texturing is part of the journalistic game. Something we look at a lot in CDA analysis of newspaper articles.

Jeff writes: “Far too many Palestinians have been killed, tortured and imprisoned on the altar of Jewish sensibilities for Bill or anyone to have legitimate objections to anyone else calling people and things for what they are.” ‘Legitimate objections’?

Fabricating implicitly racist discourse is illegitimate. The media are full of such fabrication. Is some specific discourse subtextually or overtly racist? Sometimes a hard question. But discussing and analyzing whether discourse is racist (or chauvinist or ableist) is a central part of what the left in the states remains about. Where’s the line between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’? Sometimes hard to determine.

So I’ve tried to begin (really just begin) to unpack some of the DISCOURSAL underpinnings of what may be going on in critique of the Lobby. Others should do this more systematically. It’s needed. Beyond the kind of debate by Ash, Chomsky, Spritzler and others. I know that Rob Jensen, a critical journalism prof at U Texas very sensitive to how journalists manipulate discourse — and just gratuitously attacked by Jeff in his last posting — also agrees about this.

‘Gratuitous’ is an accurate term to designate some of what is going on here. For example, Jeff’s remark that someone named ‘Mordechai’ objected pretty strongly to his slash-and-burn bit on Lantos in Counterpunch. He could have said: ‘one angry respondent’. But Jeff didn’t. This is how ‘representation’ works, CDA Lesson 1.

Jeff is very aware of this: “I have not read Bill’s critique and if all he found to object to was my reference to Jews (and no doubt mentioning Mordechai by name stirs the same reaction) then … I am not inclined to read it.” Jeff knows the levers he pulls. ‘Stirs the same reaction’ is part of what CDA foregrounds in its prisms. It also looks carefully at the tightrope between labeling with or without the article ‘the’.

Jeff: “Saying Jews’ is very different from saying ‘The Jews,’ but that applies to every ethnic, national, or religious group.” Sure, but depending on context, that specific semiotic difference can be minimal, even if the ‘semantic’ difference is specifiable. EXAMPLE: ‘Mormons are there behind the scenes trying to gain control ….’ vs. ‘The Mormons are there behind the scenes ….’ Mormons would probably object to both. In Bulgaria, we have struggled to have the print media stop labeling people arrested as ‘Roma.’ Does Jeff want California papers to give the race or ethnicity of anyone arrested? I’m sure not. In Germany in 1935, it used to be: ‘Der Jude xxxx …’ To echo Jeff: “Calling people for what they are”?!

As Fairclough notes: “language connects with the social through being the primary domain of ideology, and through being both a site of, and a stake in, struggles for power.”

Meanwhile, the real struggle is against Israeli fascist policy and U.S. geopolitics. Our comrades are in Budrus and Bil’in every week fighting that. Direct action. Palestinians and Jews shoulder to shoulder, facing the Israeli army.

Bill (Zeev bin Natan)

Posting 15. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby category, by George Salzman

Subject: Jeffrey Blankfort’s article in Counterpunch
From: George Salzman <>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:35:08 -0500
To: Jeffrey Blankfort <>, Bill Templer <>
CC: Adam D. Sacks <>, Alan M. Dershowitz, …

Oaxaca, Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Dear Jeff and Bill,

      Manuel Garcia called our attention to your article, Jeff, in Counterpunch, at www.counterpunch.org/blankfort04172006.html, in a note on Monday. Several hours later I sent you a congratulatory note (which just now I fished out of my Trash mail folder) that read:

Subject: [Fwd: Re: A belated answer]
From: George Salzman <>
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 20:28:47 -0500
To: Jeffrey Blankfort <>

Oaxaca, Monday, April 17, 2006

Hi Jeff,
      This article is incredibly well done, more evidence of your value in uncovering The Jewish-Israeli Lobby.
Sincerely,
George

      It was intended to be only a personal note, because of course (I too, like Jeff and many others, use “of course” to stress the obvious) I did not anticipate your adverse criticism of Jeff’s paper, Bill, which you later posted to the weblog. I think your criticism is totally wrong, and I have printed out your posting, “15. Untouchables?” in order to go through it carefully before writing a rejoinder. I’m very glad you are using the blog as it is intended, for direct posting, and I wish other folks would use it also. It’s set up so that anyone who registers, which is not complicated and at no cost, receives a default “author” status, enabling the author to post both articles and comments on other posts. Comments can be put up without even registering.

      I know, Bill, that you don’t like having individuals being labelled as Jews, and I think I understand why, but I believe you are in error. This in spite of the fact that of all the people I correspond with, it is you and James Herod with whom I am in the closest ideological agreement. Each of us is firmly convinced that all the statist “solutions” proposed are dead ends and that only a truly global anarchist society with no hierarchical power structures whatsoever is capable of ending the human carnage and environmental destruction now going full throttle. So at a deep level we agree, while knowing our shared dreams are not yet even on the horizon.

      Your writing as a visionary is inspirational, which is why I’ve put some of it on my website. But as a critic I find your arguments quite uncompelling. I’ve only read your criticism of Jeffrey’s latest article once, but was struck immediately by your failure to cite a single factual error in what he said. Instead, you concentrated on the connections he tried to draw between different events, on the “undertones”, as you termed them, of his article, which to you suggested anti-Semitism. I think that’s nonsense, as I intend to try to argue persuasively as soon as I get out of the hole I’ve dug myself into with those multiply-addressed e-mails. There’s still a great deal that has only been going back and forth among the relatively small group of addressees, and which needs to be posted on the blog to be available to the remainder of the folks on my e-mail distribution list, and to other people who might access the blog.

Sincerely, and with best wishes,
George

Posting 14. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby, by Bill Templer

      Blankfort’s latest article, on racism in DC in Counterpunch, “The Touchable and the Untouchable. A Tale of Two Members of Congress and the Capitol Hill Police,” deserves reading: http://www.counterpunch.org/blankfort04172006.html But its subtexts boggle the mind and point up the discursive and analytical dilemma we face. The article focuses on the rotten racist treatment accorded Cynthia McKinney by the DC police, and the total disregard of terrible behavior by Tom Lantos in a traffic accident six years ago — and builds a PURELY FICTIVE BOND between these two ‘cases.’ Loaded with undertones that I hear as anti-Semitic.

      UNTOUCHABLE TOM?: Blankfort alleges that Tom Lantos is ‘untouchable’ by the DC police. Why? Because he is [quote]: “white, Jewish, Hungarian born and portrays himself as ‘the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress.’ He is an unabashed supporter of Israel. That makes him, of course, an ‘untouchable.’”

      Notice the expression ‘of course,’ common in Blankfort’s syllogisms. Is this an argument? Blankfort also suggests, almost in an ‘aside,’ that Lantos and his tale about the behavior of the Iraqi army in Kuwait was significantly responsible for the decision in Congress to back the 1991 Gulf War. Again, a Jewish Holocaust survivor helps ‘engineer’ the Gulf War?

      And Lantos, of course “is also the ranking Democrat on the powerful House International Relations Committee, which provides him with unusual opportunities to help Israel. He sponsors repressive legislation targeting the Palestinians and Israel’s Middle East adversaries […] Lantos made his first trip to the Jewish state in 1956 and has been there nearly 60 times since. And all along you thought his first concern was the voters in his district.”

      On and on, a portrait of Mr. Untouchable in an article mainly on McKinney and her current plight. The pith of the article is about DC racism and the failure of the Congressional Black Caucus to properly back McKinney. This is important, relevant to the racist society America remains. Yet the article foregrounds Lantos in that its whole first section is about him, not McKinney and the racism she is suffering. Why is an old traffic incident connected with Lantos dragged into this? To build a connection with the ‘Jewish Lobby’ where none exists? To construct such a nexus in readers’ minds? To ‘upfront’ this baggage in a piece of serious journalism, as a false ‘portal’ to the article’s kernel?

      As Blankfort states early on: “McKinney, of course, is African-American, and one of the few members of the Congressional Black Caucus who has not been cowed into submission by the Democratic Party and the only one who has refused to genuflect to the Israel lobby. But, again, this story isn’t about Israel, although its specter and that of its lobby seem ever present.”

      Note the last sentence here! “Seem ever present” — in the writer’s mind, or down at Counterpunch might be more accurate.

      Discussing McKinney, Blankfort says: “The Democrat Party leadership was overjoyed when McKinney was defeated for re-election in 2002. After she had served five terms, AIPAC decided to make an example of her for having criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. That led to a stream of money flowing to her opponent, Denise Majette, from wealthy out of town Jewish donors.”

      So the McKinney-Lantos (read: ‘African-American’ vs. ‘Jewish-Zionist’) contrast is reinforced. “Out of town Jewish donors” were Cynthia’s real nemesis. Perhaps the same “donors” who support Lantos in California? Is that the insinuation?

      The last 40% of the article and its conclusion do not contain a single further reference to Lantos (!), and build toward a strong critique of the CBC and racist attitudes pervasive in DC. But I guess the editors at Counterpunch liked the extraneous and insidious bridge to the ‘Jew’ Lantos as resonant innuendo. It is much harder to construct that span to the two more dovish ‘Jewish Zionist’ senators from California, Feinstein and Boxer, but that too is ‘of course’ possible.

      THE ‘JEW’ FEINSTEIN: Here is something pretty gross from discussion on Feinstein from elsewhere on the Internet: “Diane Feinstein was on the Intelligence Committee and she stated, along with Bob Graham and Nancy Pelosi, that there was no sign of an imminent threat from Hussein. Unlike Pelosi and Graham, however, Senator Feinstein voted to approve the attack. Why? Because Iraq was seen as a threat to Israel if not to the US, Because wealthy San Francisco millionaire and Democratic fund raiser Walter Shorenstein has always been a strong supporter of Israel, and because when Shorenstein says ‘Shit!’, Diane Feinstein squats and starts making grunting noises.” The same writer goes on: “It is not anti-Semitism to point this out. My quarrel is not with Jews — it is with wealthy men and their whores in Congress who have brought disaster upon my country for no good reason. It is with people who manipulate and deceive the American voters.” And, he might add: who ‘happen to be Jewish.’

      Sound disturbingly familiar? Their ‘whores’ in Congress? The ‘conspiracy’ in which Shorenstein is a major player.

      Among Dianne Feinstein’s most vociferous enemies, attacking her inter alia as a ‘Jew,’ are the gun lobby (look at http://www.freerepublic.com ). Here’s another, an acme of vituperation against both Feinstein and Boxer, “the Lady MacBeth and Baby Jane of the Upper Chamber”: http://www.etherzone.com/1999/lieb111799.html As Norman Liebmann states there: “It should not be necessary to remind us all, guns have a long and honorable history of keeping thieves, despots and officious yentas like Boxer and Feinstein from sending jack-booted people to break down doors in the dead of night and cart away other folk’s property. Guns can prevent that. An AK-47 is not only a means of defense, but also an effective confiscation deterrent.”

      ELIOT COHEN’S TAKE: Cohen is a prof. of polisci at Johns Hopkins (School for Advanced International Studies). I don’t agree with his positions on most issues, and most esp. Israel, but Cohen’s article in a San Diego paper on Mearsheimer/Walt is worth brief reading: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060407/news_lz1e07cohen.html

      He says something about anti-Semitism I can second: “If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information – why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.”

      ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been a pretty outspoken critic of Israeli ideology and policy most of my life. I put forward positions of Matzpen in the 1960s that were considered truly anathema. I have many articles around on Israeli fascist voelkisch policy, including two recently on the Hamas breakthrough.

      I was blacklisted as a teacher in Israel for my politics and work with the Bedouin and with Palestinian social scientists. I’m opposed to Lantos’ politics on virtually all issues, and to the ADL positions on Israel and West Asia. Yet the ADL is in the forefront of open struggle against attempts to ‘Christianize’ America. I think they are right on about that. The ADL was a leader in the struggle against the KKK over generations and on the front lines of fighting racism in American life since 1913. Are they part of a ‘world Zionist conspiracy’ and reducible to that figment? More nuance is badly needed.

      I can’t accept anti-Jewish innuendo on the American left wrapped in neo-con and ‘Lobby’ critique. It really disgusts me. I have no doubt it is there. Qui bono?

      I thought our struggle is against Capital and how it controls society and politics, not ‘Jewish Capital.’ Struggle against a ruling class in Israel, whose core is some 15 interknit families, that wants violence to continue. The spiral of that bloodshed is being tightened even as I write. This struggle should have no truck with demonizing working masses in Palestine or Israel. Or Jewries anywhere in the world.

      V FOR VENDETTA What we need in Israel and Palestine and California is clear:
“Anarchists envision a society without government, nations, law or capital, and where hierarchy, coercion, and competition have been replaced with voluntary cooperation and sharing of resources. Organized into ‘collectives’—non-hierarchal volunteer groups—anarchists oppose war, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and fascism, and defend animals
and the environment against corporate exploitation.

      Instead of petitioning governments for reform, anarchist create concrete alternatives — grassroots media as an alternative to corporate media, building industrial unions where workers agitate for their rights directly rather than ceding power to union bureaucrats.”

[ www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos17952.html ]

      Work for that and ‘lobbies’ will be in the dustbin of Capital’s history.