It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
(RNS) — This final week is all about seizing control of the narrative about masculinity.
(Photo by Szilvia Basso/Unsplash/Creative Commons) Joshua Hammerman November 1, 2024
(RNS) — “The Cruelty Is the Point,” proclaimed Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay and subsequent book about the Trump era, and never has it been more apparent than during the waning days of the current campaign, and especially at Sunday’s rally in New York.
While Donald Trump himself often improvises as he spins his “weaves” of hate, the racist, vulgar diatribes spewed by his loyalists at Madison Square Garden were scripted, vetted and teleprompted. In other words: intentional. It added up to a symphony of scuzziness designed to intimidate, overwhelm and dominate, the verbal equivalent of Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt (or trying to).
On social media, some commented that MAGA’s opponents shouldn’t be baited by the rhetorical histrionics because this verbal garbage was a cleverly laid trap designed to capture the news cycle during this final week. But even if it was, this is a battle worth fighting. If the meanness is the message — and it is — naming that meanness should be the message of Trump’s opponents, because everything else flows from that. Trump’s entire agenda, from abortion to xenophobia, emanates from the lack of empathy at the core of his being. The cruelty isn’t just the point, it’s the veritable DNA of his movement.
If this harshness is a strategy aimed at attracting young men, the MAGA world has a distorted view of masculinity. True manhood is not about dominance, it’s about kindness and taking responsibility. I should know. I wrote the book about being a mensch (or at least one of the books). For Jews, the ideal model of a man is not a musclebound intimidator. Incidentally, although in German the term mensch clearly refers to males and connotes masculinity (or, in the case of Nietzsche, uber-masculinity), for Jews it is not gender-specific — a woman can be a mensch, too.
In the Talmud, Hillel the sage states, “In a world that lacks humanity, be human.” In a world as dehumanizing as ours has become, simply being a kind, honest and loving person, a man or woman of integrity, has become a measure of heroism – and at a time when norms of civility are being routinely quashed, it may be the only measure that matters.
Leo Rosten, who wrote “The Joy of Yiddish,” defines mensch as “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character.”
Saul Levine wrote in Psychology Today:
The admirable traits included under the rubric of mensch read like a compendium of what Saints or the Dalai Lama represent to many, or others whom you might think merit that kind of respect. These personality characteristics include decency, wisdom, kindness, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, benevolence, compassion, and altruism.
But one does not need to be a saint just to be a decent, thoughtful person. To be a morally evolved human being means in fact to be fallible and imperfect, but always striving to do better. It means to seek justice but never at the expense of compassion. It means to connect, to family, to one’s people and one’s home. It means to seek transcendence, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to love unconditionally, to serve a higher cause and live a life of dignity and integrity.
In other words, to be a man is to be the opposite of what the MSG-MAGA rally promoted. In truth, to be a real man is to be the opposite of Donald Trump.
And that needs to be the message, not only for the final week, but for all time. We can’t allow Americans of all genders to forget it. But especially men.
This election could be an inflection point, not only in the trajectory of U.S. politics, but also in how we perceive masculinity. The choice could not be starker: Hulk Hogan, the rip-off artist who failed to rip it off, or Doug Emhoff, the consummate gentleman, who’s already being called the “First Mensch.”
“I can’t wait to see him help her light the Shabbat candles,” said a DNC delegate from Long Island to The Forward.
Supporters of Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump enter a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
This may, at long last, be the moment when it becomes fashionable for real men to eat quiche. But even if it’s not, we can’t let the hypermasculine cruelty that we saw last Sunday stand.
It’s like the story of the man outside the gates of Sodom, warning the people to stop their sinning, a legend popularized by Elie Wiesel:
He went on preaching day after day, maybe even picketing. But no one listened. He was not discouraged. He went on preaching for years. Finally, someone asked him, “Rabbi, why do you do that? Don’t you see it is no use?” He said, “I know it is of no use, but I must. And I will tell you why: in the beginning I thought I had to protest and to shout in order to change them. I have given up this hope. Now I know I must picket and scream and shout so that they should not change me.”
And, I would add, if we cultivate civility and integrity with dogged persistence, we will eventually change them, too.
That’s our task now. Highlight the hate and present a new model of love. Masculine love. Years ago, when I circumcised my own son, the first time I had ever performed a bris, it helped me to understand an essential lesson about fatherhood, that the knife transforms the father not into a sculptor, but, paradoxically, into a shield. I wrote, “The breast provides, but the knife protects. It channels a father’s natural anger and jealousy into one controlled cut. He takes off one small part in order to preserve – and love – the whole.”
I appeal to men not to fall for this Übermensch nonsense. America is better than that.
Review of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They do with Their Money and Why You Should Hate Them Even More by Rob Larson (Haymarket, 2024).
In Rob Larson’s new book Mastering the Universe–an attack on wealth inequality in the US and globally–the author twice resorts to the phrase “ball fondling” to describe the sycophantic treatment billionaires typically receive in our society. While such profane vocabulary is relatively rare in his writings–although he does use “fucking” as an adjective or adverb several times in Mastering the Universe–it is also suggestive of a broader charm he brings to his intellectual output. In his career as a book author and writer for such publications as Dollars & Sense and Current Affairs, it is clear that he has endeavored to make himself relatable to ordinary people. His articulation of economic concepts and explanation of current events is made in a pleasingly simple, clear and frequently light hearted fashion. There is a beauty in his clear and unpretentious prose. His writing skill is all the more remarkable in light of him being an economics professor (at Tacoma Community College in Washington state). Not many professional economists are engaging writers.
Besides his writing gifts, Larson has another standout quality apparent in the book presently under review as well as in his other works. Like his mentor Noam Chomsky (to whom Mastering the Universe is dedicated), Larson is clearly an assiduous reader of mainstream news publications, particularly the business press. In Mastering the Universe, he weaves useful tidbits he picked up from the mainstream media with analysis from academic economists to produce a compelling narrative.
The basic argument of Mastering the Universe is one very familiar to left wing audiences: in recent decades, neoliberal government policies have led to a much greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. We live in a new Gilded Age: billionaire wealth has surged into the stratosphere while life for a significant majority of the American population is increasingly financially precarious. The dynamic was described in a leaked 2005 Citibank memo which Larson quotes at the outset of his book. The memo said that the United States was not merely a plutocracy but a ”plutonomy”: wealth is so concentrated in the top 1 percent of wealth earners that the latter are the primary drivers of economic growth. Much of the country’s spending power is hogged by the uber wealthy and so big business often places less priority on catering to the spending preferences of a large majority of the population.
Larson’s book adopts a particular angle in criticizing the concentration of wealth in the 1%. He argues that this wealth is spent wastefully, is not particularly “earned”–much of it is inherited–and that it is largely accumulated not in direct engagement with the productive economy but in passive income from assets (stock dividends, property rents, etc). Many pages of the book are spent cataloging how the rich spend their money on million dollar watches, superyachts, private jets and multiple condos that sit empty (while the homeless population surges on the streets outside). He lays particular emphasis on the environmentally destructive consumption of the 1%, for example their use of private jets.
Larson also makes the crucial point that the most dynamic sectors of the economy today–and the foundation of the astronomical fortunes of the uber wealthy which control them–were created through public funding. For example, the internet was developed in significant part through investments by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency. He points to this dynamic as underlying one of the latest wasteful spending fads of oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos: space tourism. Decades of NASA’s taxpayer funded R&D in outer space travel laid the foundation for Bezos’s space tourism company Blue Origin. Revolutionary Socialism: The Cure for Wealth Stratification
Larson argues that progressive social movements that successfully brought pressure on governments in the United States and Europe in the mid-20th century to engage in wealth redistribution and protection of labor unions made a crucial mistake. While such movements were able to visibly reduce economic inequality in their respective societies–and increase taxes and regulations on corporations–the productive forces of the economy remained controlled by private capitalists. Beginning in the 1970’s, those capitalists in the United States and Europe utilized their wealth to launch a counterattack against the welfare state and the power of labor unions. Larson believes that progressive movements must make central to their agenda a demand to completely expropriate the means of production from private ownership. Businesses should be taken out of the hands of owners and managers and placed under the democratic control of the group that actually produces society’s wealth: the workers. This is the true meaning of socialism.
As to how society might secure the complete expropriation of the means of production, radical left readers will be well familiar with Larson’s exhortations for ordinary people to form mass movements. It is understandable that Larson offers cliches on this point; there is no magic formula for securing radical economic and social change; by far the most realistic method to do so is patient organization of social movements and mass struggle over a long course of time. Regarding current mass movements, Larson offers a useful summary of recent worker organizing efforts at Amazon and Starbucks.
Larson offers no description of the nuts and bolts of the operations of a potential post-capitalist society where workplaces are democratically controlled. It is likely that he believes that such structures would have to be worked out through trial and error according to the specific circumstances and needs of particular regions and locales. In any case, Larson’s book makes an effective case that economic exploitation under capitalism has derailed the achievement of full human freedom for far too long.
Trade union organiser and activist Jurgis Valiukevičius talks to Simon Pirani about the new workers’ movements in Lithuania, emigration and immigration, and about how sympathy for Ukrainian resistance has opened up space for discussions about the meanings of nationalism and anti-imperialism. A Labour Hub long read.
Simon: Please tell us about the labour movement in Lithuania. What are its strengths and weaknesses? What form does it take (trade unions? workplace organisations? and so on). Are there links between the labour movement and other social movements?
Jurgis: The labour movement in Lithuania has been weak, but we have seen some positive tendencies during the last ten years: there have been more strikes and a bit more militancy.
Union membership has been low: around 8-10 % of the workforce are union members. Since the economic transformations that were implemented after Lithuania assumed independence from Soviet Union in 1990, union membership steadily decreased. Most of the factories closed down, and there were no more large industrial sites where traditional union activity could take place.
In the Soviet Union, unions tended to function as welfare providers, distributing social welfare such as housing and vacations. When there were problems with the workers’ rights, they were used to writing complaints to the Communist Party branch in their workplace, or solving matters directly with the factory directors through paperwork and official negotiations.
Once the state control of the production process disappeared, there was no official that the union reps could complain to, which left the unions defenceless. At the same time, most of the union leaders were not equipped with organising skills. And the new business class that was emerging at that time, came out of shady mafia-style groups with connections to the central government.
I have previously published (in English) stories of worker resistance that took place around these times. Workers would guard their factories from being dismantled by the new owners until they received compensation for unpaid wages. In the most radical cases, people would do hunger strikes.
Stopping production does not make much sense if your factory is going bankrupt. So the only way to force some kind of reconcialition was through using your own life as a defence of last resort of valuable property.
You could say that the workers managed to put some political pressure on the government officials to intervene. Around 2001, the government created a bankruptcy fund, out of which workers could expect to get back some of their salaries if their company became financially insolvent. However, most of these struggles were rather reactions to the privatisation process and did not produce positive experiences of collective power. Most of the people who took part in these struggles felt disillusionment with political and social activity. The effect on people was further disengagement from mass organisation such as unions or political parties.
And what about more recent times?
During the last decade, union membership stabilised, and new union iniatives were started, that are trying to organise precarious workers, as well as look for connections with the broader left movement and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The most militant are the teachers. They have been on strike once every four years. Also they organise more publicly oriented protest actions that stimulate public discourse and popularise ideas about striking. In 2019 they occupied the education ministry for a month. Teachers slept in the ministry while waiting for collective negotiations.
In 2023 they organised a strike march: teachers made a “pilgrimage” from all corners of Lithuania, walking on foot and visiting every little town’s school. All these actions helped this particular union of teachers, the Lithuanian Education Employees Trade Union, to grow. Many of its strongholds are in rural areas.
In 2019 a new union, G1PS or First of May Labour Union, was established. This is the union I represent and work for. The organisation was established after successful protests against liberalisation of the labor code in 2018. This union organised in the service, cultural and IT sectors as well as some workers for sales platforms (for example, Uber or Bolt).
While this union is fairly young and small in numbers, it has a different model: every worker can become a member despite of their profession. It provides free consultation on labour issues. In five years, it has set up six branches – some are based in single workplaces and some are oriented towards sectors, such as the platform couriers.
In general, the main obstacles to building a more militant and active labour movement are not only economic and ideological, but also legal. The Lithuanian strike law is one of the most restrictive in Europe. It forces workers to go into negotiations before legally acquiring a right to strike. It can take up to two years to pass through the negotiations, and the union cannot change its demands in that time. As a result, most negotiations end without much results, and strikes are rare.
Currently, the unions have been calling for the strike law to be liberalised, and there are expectations that the next government will put this question on the agenda.
What about the Lithuanian economy? As far as I understand, in recent years it has largely been integrated into the EU, and trade with Russia has been reduced. How have these changes affected working class people?
The Lithuanian economy has been completely transformed over the last 30 years. From being dominated by light industry in Soviet times, now it mostly consists of small and middle sized companies in the services sector, IT, logistic and financial markets.
The two richest men in Lithuania are the owner of the Maxima shopping chain, and the owner of Girteka, a logistics company. Both economic sectors profit from precarious work conditions – in the shops women comprise most of the workers, and in logistics, migrants dominate the workforce of drivers.
Apart from that, Lithuania has a large agricultural sector: the main export is grain. While there are some industrial sites, these are mostly post-soviet relics that survived the transition of the 1990s. Every major city has its own “free economic zone”, which is typical for an eastern European country trying to attract foreign capital.
Our financial market is fully dominated by Scandinavian banks. We don’t have a national bank. There is an institution named like this, but it only provides analysis and some policy proposals for the government.
The economy’s trajectory has been towards integration into EU markets. The war in Ukraine and economic sanctions that followed after the Russian attack shifted business even more towards EU markets. The geopolitical situation on one hand slowed down foreign direct investment. On the other hand, the government is trying to attract military industry – there are deals made with German and Ukrainian industrial companies to open new factories in Lithuania.
With deindustrialisation, the working class has been feminised and deskilled. If you asked today’s supermarket workers about their personal history, many of these women had previously worked in a factory with some higher qualification. They lost their jobs in 1990s and could not find anything that would fit their education. Then they found work in the shops and supermarkets that sprung up during the early 2000s.
Furthermore, there has been a large-scale emigration, to Ireland, the UK, Germany and the US. In the last three years, the level of migration has stabilised, and there are more people coming to Lithunia than leaving. However, most of the immigrants are not local people returning, but Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians arriving for the first time.
The working class become more mixed, and stratified by nationalities and by legal status. The workforces of the construction and logistics sectors, and the sales platforms, are dominated by migrants at the moment, which creates tensions and stimulates nationalist political tendencies.
I have several questions about the war in Ukraine, and Lithuanian people’s attitude to it. First, may I ask you about refugees. I believe that now there are a substantial number of refugees from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus in Lithuania. How are they treated by the government? How is their life in Lithuania? How have Lithuanians reacted to their arrival?
The official position of the government has been that migrants from these countries are not the same and we cannot apply the same rules to everyone. You could say that Ukrainians have the easiest access so far. Yet, as the Ukrainian government is trying to get back their men to serve in the army, the positions of Lithuanian government has been somewhat changing – there is more talk about the need to bring the Ukrainians back to defend the country. Yet, this would create a big problem for the business, as Ukrainian comprise an important segment in the workforce by now.
The Belarusian diaspora is very big, but less outspoken. There is a long common history between Belarusians and Lithuanians. We have a Belarussian university in Vilnius that moved here after [Belarusian president Alyaksandr] Lukashenka banned it in Minsk. And the main Belarusian opposition organisation led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has its office in Vilnius. But Belarusians are treated in ambivalent manner – because of the 2020 protests, they were at first supported and loved, but once the war started in Ukraine, they have been looked at with more suspicion.
It is true that in Lithuania there are many secret agents of the Kremlin and of Lukashenka. And yet for ordinary people, the suspicion mostly translates into problems of getting asylum or documents. There are horrific cases of politically active Belarussians being sent back to Belarus, straight into the hands of the KGB [security police], just because they worked in some state company years ago.
You commented in your article for Posle.Media on the way that establishment and liberal forces in Lithuania often find it convenient to use ordinary Russians as a target for prejudice, and/or claimed that ordinary Russians are responsible for the brutality of the Russian government. You also said that, since the all-out invasion of Ukraine by Russia, this has changed. Can you give us an update?
I think that, in terms of ideologies, divisions are made by our political elites between “civilisation vs brutality”. As we align ourselves with the “civilised” part of the world – in the broadest sense the “west” – we tend to draw the other side as hopelessly bestial and undemocratic. There is constant eagerness to paint the Russian society as brutal and bestial – it makes us feel more European and democratic.
Additionally, I believe that a large part of the support of our political elite for Ukraine comes not out of anti-imperialist positions, but is rather manifested as implicit hatred towards Russia as a country. There is a repetitive message in media that Ukrainians are fighting our war against Russia.
This is basically the dominant discourse in all of the media and political life. But opinions in the population are rather more mixed.
We just had parliamentary elections on Sunday (27th October). The unofficial winners of these elections is a party that came in third place – a fringe right-wing party which is led by a long-time parliamentarian [Remigijus Žemaitaitis], who got to be famous because he was accused of anti-semitism. He certainly made anti-semitic statements in parliament, before the 7th October [2023 attack on Israel by Hamas], that’s true. But later, the accusations of anti-semitism and an impeachment process against him made him into an “anti-establishment” figure. He perfectly exploited this sentiment, mobilising “protest” votes – a sort of Trump-style Lithuanian edition.
You can also hear more scepticism towards Ukrainians and support for Ukraine. However, the parties that tried to exploit this sentiment did not win any major vote in the Parliament election. Actually, the main politician who advocated pro-Kremlin positions just announced that he is ending his political career: he did not manage to get a parliament seat.
Earlier on, in the spring of this year, we had a presidential election in which one candidate, who expressed somewhat nostalgia for Soviet Union, got around 50,000 votes in all Lithuania. He won the largest percentage in the regions where Russian and Polish minorities are predominant. The media took this as a proof that we have “a Russian threat” in our own country – although this candidate was, I think, the only one that managed to translate his leaflets and visit these regions during his campaign.
What about the agreement recently made between Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, that Ukrainian men eligible for conscription should be returned to Ukraine? The background to this, as you know, is the difficulties that Ukraine is having in fighting the war with Russia, without conscripting more people to the army. Has there been a reaction to this in Lithuania?
This agreement has not been forced into law – I think that economic interests have halted the implementation of this policy. As I mentioned before, the Ukrainian working class is well integrated into workforce and whole sectors would stop functioning if one day all the men would be sent back to Ukraine.
However, some of the political parties aim to deliver such policies. It takes shape in “unofficial” steps. For example, there are many Ukrainians whose passports expire – and once your passport expires, your visa is also no longer valid. And if you go to the Lithuanian migration department, they will tell you that you have to go to Ukraine to get your passport. What it means is that you will never come back from Ukraine: if you are fit for the army, you will be conscripted.
I know more and more people who are asking themselves what to do. A large number of migrants might fall into this grey zone, and live without documents or decide to join the army.
To help people in western Europe understand, could you say something more generally about the attitude of Lithuanians to Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, and to the political evolution of the Putin regime towards dictatorship in recent years? I will explain my question in this way. A few months ago I met up with an old comrade and friend of mine, a lifelong socialist activist. He criticised me for writing articles, in which I said that Ukrainians had a right to defend themselves, arms in hand, against Russian aggression. He said, “you are in danger of supporting NATO”. I said that I believed that Russian imperialism, and not NATO, was the primary cause of the war in Ukraine.
And I added (roughly): “People in the Baltic states, and elsewhere in eastern Europe, see the world very differently from people who live in Mexico, and elsewhere in central America. The imperialist power they are worried about is not the same one. I bet you that, after Russia invaded Ukraine, workers in the Baltic states breathed a sigh of relief, that their governments had joined NATO.”
After that, I read in your article in Posle that NATO membership indeed has a very high approval rating among Lithuanians. Please comment.
Yes, your comment is quite right. For us, anti-imperialist critique means that not only the US or “the west”, but also others, can be imperial powers. This simple idea seems to be very hard to understand for some of the left in western countries. And I get it – for many people in Lithuania it is quite hard to grasp the idea that not only Russia has imperial interests.
Yet, in a strange way, the western left maintains the same western-centric view, even when it comes to critique colonialism and imperialism. I think this should not be the way: we should learn to listen and respect each others’ histories and positions, even if it contradicts our theories. It is one of the sad illnesses of dogmatism on the left – trying to fit the world into theory. I think it should be the other way around, or that there should be some kind of interaction between the two.
Our countries’ histories have been shaped by the Russian empire more than by the western countries. It is only 30 years since we began to function as independent states. I have read a lot of critique of nation-states and nationalism, and I see many problems in our countries with nationalistic ideas. However, in my view, the difference between most of the western countries and the eastern European countries is that the west has never been occupied by other countries in modern times.
You had fascism, revolutions, and some dictatorships – but it always was your own history. For our societies, the fear of being occupied by some other country is more real. So when Putin claims that the current borders in eastern Europe are not rightful and they should be changed – this is a clear sign of danger for us.
I think that nationalism should also be criticised by putting it into this historical and geographic context. There is this idea that eastern European societies are more nationalist. In Italy I even heard negative opinions about Ukrainians that they are too nationalistic, because they bring their country’s flags to protests. It seems that those who express such opinions cannot understand different contexts and histories: there might be a big difference between a person bringing an Italian flag to a protest in Italy, and a person bringing a Ukrainian flag.
Eastern European societies have lived under occupations for most of the time, and, sadly, but nationalism is one of the easiest tools of mobilising against such powers. I am saying this not to propose that we should all embrace nationalism, but only to understand that you cannot measure everything according to one history. This just destroys any kind of possibility for dialogue and solidarity.
I would also like you to share, for readers in western Europe, your thoughts about Lithuanian history. Many people here forget that Lithuania spent the whole 19th century as a Russian colony, just as many countries spent long periods as British colonies. How do people in Lithuania see that now?
Yes, since 1795, the territories that we now call Lithuania was under Russian empire up until 1918. Also, the serfdom was formaly stopped only in 1861, however, the peasants were not given the land (which caused several uprisings). And then again from 1945 to 1990 we were part of Soviet Union.
While speaking about this history, I neeed to say that sadly, this historical experience of occupations does not easily translate into a broader understanding of different colonisations. Our school curriculum and general ideas about history still see “our experience” as somewhat exceptional. Maybe this is unavoidable for such a small country – to always fixate on ones country’s history. However, in terms of finding solidarity, there is some potential to look for connections with other experiences of colonisation.
There is of course a big difference among Lithuanians around racism. And probably racist beliefs are the ones that blocks any kind of more global understanding of colonisations and imperialism.
What about the Soviet Union? In our discussions in the labour movement in western countries, it seems to me that the “campist” position of those who oppose Ukraine’s right to resist Russian aggression is basically a continuation of those who saw the Soviet Union as the epitome of anti-imperialism. The roots of this are political ideas that back in the 1970s and 80s we called Stalinist. I remember having arguments with members of the Communist Party in the UK, back then, who defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as having been necessary, for the defence of the Soviet Union. How is all that viewed in Lithuania, by your generation?
My generation is the one that has been born after the end of the Soviet Union, and our opinion about this system has been shaped more by state propaganda than by any kind of real experience. In the most general terms, the Soviet Union is kept alive as a “horror story”, which should push you to believe that today you live in a truly equal and free society – which is some propagandistic bullshit.
I would say that, according to age, you could divide the Lithuanian population roughly into three groups. I already mentioned my group: people for whom the Soviet experience is less important in their political backgrounds. These are people that tend to align themselves with “European values” – human rights, the LGBTQ movement, and so on.
Then there are people who grew up in the Soviet Union, but took part in the protests and experienced the independence movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Most of these people tend to be very sceptical of any kind of left politics, and are supporters of the conservative side. And while it is not a monolithic strata, I think this group is often mobilised mainly by stories about “if you elect such-and-such a person, the Soviet times might come back”. This rhetoric is used by the conservative parties and usually it also has some class-ist overtones – the idea that democracy is threatened by the poor, the so-called homo sovieticus (those, that were left behind).
And lastly, there is a generation that lived most of their lives in the Soviet Union. This generation is fading away. While they survived very horrific times of war and deportations under Stalin, they also saw the growth of cities, the industrialisation of agriculture, and also some kind of liberalisation of life under Khrushchev and Gorbachev. They experienced all the modernisation of the state that was done in Soviet times.
This is also the generation that has been most disillusioned by the reforms and the changes that took place after independence. Maybe their pensions got cut, maybe they lost their jobs and could not change their profession because they were already in their late 50s. Also, for most of them, the factories, companies and cultural centres that surrounded them, or were even built by their own hands, have been destroyed by the privatisation.
They are full of anger and disbelief in the current system, which easily translates into nostalgia for Soviet times. However, I believe that such nostalgia should be read not as direct support for the Soviet system, but as disillusion with the current system.
To what extent is there active support, and solidarity with, Ukraine’s fight against Russia in Lithuania? How is it expressed (for example, volunteers going to fight, aid to civil society organisations, other actions)?
There are a couple of strong volunteer organisation that were started after war began in 2014, and grew with the current escalation. At the moment, the support is at a lower level. And there is a process of disagreement about, how much support can we give? And yet, Lithuanian society is still very positive about supporting Ukraine, as this is seen a crucial element for our own national security.
There is an idea, that if Ukraine falls, we would be next. I am not sure whether there are real grounds for that fear, and I also believe that the right wing uses it to mobilise support for their political programme. However, I cannot say that such a threat is impossible. Specifically, if the US government changes its policy on Ukraine, than our situation might become serious quite soon.
The Israeli assault on Gaza over the last year has galvanised millions of people, including socialists, in western Europe. There have been big demonstrations against the supply of weapons to Israel by the western powers. In London, a group of us have gone on some of these demonstrations with banners and posters saying, “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime”, and trying to underline the fact that Ukrainians, like Palestinians, have the right to resist aggression. We have met with a great deal of sympathy from other marchers. How do these issues look, from your point of view?
As I mentioned before, the support towards Palestine has been very limited, but with some positive changes recently.
The main obstacle to support is not that the population does not understand the situation in Palestine, or in Lebanon. The problem is that Israel has very strong ties with Lithuanian institutions, and that can affect the position of the political elite. And so Lithuania has voted against any kind of support for Palestine in the UN. Also, the media portrays the genocide as a conflict between the “civilised” Israel and “terrorist” Hamas. In this way they are trying to align Israel genocide with Ukrainian resistance against Russia: this is a very wrong and stupid alignment.
After all, so much depends on the US. Among the political elite, the main fear about expressing support for Palestine is that it might trigger the US to weaken its support for Lithuania. You can see that the same logic works with Ukraine, which also votes against Palestine at the UN.
Despite all this, there have been protests against Israeli aggression, organised by local activists together with migrant communities. They have been far smaller than the ones that were organised to support Ukraine. However, I see that there is a bit more space to discuss the Palestinian question and there are more people who are willing to listen.
I hope that in the future there will be more politicians who will be brave enough to denounce the genocide that has been carried out by the Israel government and the right wing movements in Israel.
Thank you for taking time to answer my questions in such detail.
Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham, and writes a blog at peoplenature.org, where this post first appeared.
American Healthcare Workers Plead for End to Gaza Bombing
On October 3, 2024, 99 American healthcare workers in Gaza released an open letter to the White House pleading for an end to Israel’s bombing of little children.
The letter was sent by American physicians, surgeons, nurse practitioners, and nurses who had volunteered a combined five years to treat the besieged people of Palestine.
The letter said: “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: End this madness now!”
The letter writers also said that “every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest… It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilians and military authorities.”
Dr. Mark Perlmutter said, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand, the first of many.”
A U.S. Veterans Affairs trauma and critical care surgeon said: “I’ve never seen such horrific injuries, on such a massive scale, with so few resources. Our bombs are cutting down women and children by the thousands. Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty.”
The American healthcare workers also wrote: “We quickly learned that our Palestinian healthcare colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world… they had lost family members and their homes. Most lived in and around their hospitals with their surviving family, in unimaginable conditions.”
Because Israel claimed hospitals were sometimes used by Hamas, the letter signatories said: “We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.”
The authors also estimate that more have now died from starvation and disease and untold thousands buried under the rubble than by military deaths. They estimate what they described as a very conservative total of over 118,000 who have died in the past year in Gaza. In July, the well-respected British medical journal, The Lancet, had estimated 186,00 deaths there.
Professor Sachs is a Jew who has been a very outspoken critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sachs said, “Israel is less safe today, by far, than a year ago despite 40,000, 100,000, 200,000 deaths.”
He deplored what he called the “cruel bombing of apartment buildings, hospitals, clinics, schools – it’s been horrendous.”
Sachs said, “Netanyahu is leading Israel into the greatest insecurity of its modern history – complete diplomatic isolation.” He added that “Israel can never be safe with Netanyahu’s delusional plan.”
The professor said Netanyahu has been “selling” a regional war in the Middle East for over 20 years in his speeches, writings, and congressional testimony, and that he is “counting on the U.S. military and the U.S. taxpayer” to make Israel the dominant power so it can “rule in an apartheid manner over millions of people.”
Sachs also said “the war in Iraq in 2003 was strongly promoted by Netanyahu. He wanted a war against Saddam Hussein by the United States for Israel’s sake.”
He added that America is “not served by a blind obedience to the Israel Lobby” and that Americans “do not want another disastrous Middle East War.”
Now Netanyahu has expanded his war into Lebanon, and he will go further – into Syria, Jordan, Iran and perhaps other places – if the U.S. does not stop him.
Sachs said the “American people do not want a nuclear war over Israel’s claim over Gaza or the occupied territories.”
I wish every member of Congress would read the letter from the American healthcare workers in Gaza and listen to the Judging Freedom podcast of Oct. 8. Sadly, I don’t believe any of them will read or listen to either one. Hopefully, you will.
Reprinted with author’s permission from the Knoxville Focus.
John James Duncan Jr. is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Tennessee’s 2nd congressional district from 1988 to 2019. A lawyer, former judge, and former long serving member of the Army National Guard, he is a member of the Republican Party.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are widely considered one of the most powerful armies in the world. And, according to Israeli leaders, they are “the most moral army in the world.” How, then, to reconcile these statements with what is happening now in Gaza and Lebanon, where tens of thousands of women and children have been slaughtered or injured in the conflict with the Palestinians?
On October 13 and 14, dozens of Palestinians civilians were killed and many more wounded by the IDF’s attacks on a Gaza hospital and several refugee camps. The dead included women waiting for food to be delivered and children at play. The IDF claims that they only operate against terrorists and are investigating the incident, a lame excuse when practically never these investigations by the Israeli military result in punishment for those guilty of serious crimes.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) states that the IDF shelled dozens of hungry people waiting for food at a distribution center in the Jabalia refugee camp. Dozens of homes were destroyed in these incidents. The humanitarian organization Save the Children estimated last June that around 21,000 kids are missing in the Gaza Strip, and that roughly 4,000 children are buried under debris. “No parent should have to dig through rubble or mass graves to try to find their child’s body,” said Jeremy Stoner, Save the Children’s regional director for the Middle East.
UNICEF reports that in Gaza cases of diarrhea among children under five have soared, while cases of scabies, lice, chicken pox, skin rashes and respiratory and gastrointestinal infections have also climbed. Hundreds of thousands of children have been killed or injured, and more than half a million children are in need of psychological support due to sustained trauma. Malnutrition is rampant; when left untreated malnutrition and disease are a deadly combination.
Last August, a 10-month-old baby became partially paralyzed after contracting polio in Gaza. According to the World Health Organization, Gaza has not registered a polio case for 25 years. Because of the dismal sanitary conditions, type 2 poliovirus had been detected in samples collected from the territory’s wastewater last June. Poliovirus, most frequently spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious.
Humanitarian organizations blame the re-emergence of polio in Gaza on the disruption of vaccination programs and the massive damage to water and sanitation systems. “Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are at risk,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russel said that the re-emergence of the virus in the strip after 25 years is “another sobering reminder of how chaotic, desperate and dangerous the situation has become.” The Gaza Ministry of Health accused the IDF of intensifying “its targeting of the health system” in north Gaza as more hospitals came under siege or fire.
The IDF’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon, which have resulted in the deaths of thousands of women and children, have been widely condemned. According to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, at least 2,412 people have been killed during the IDF attacks. The Gaza Health Ministry reports that 42,519 people have been killed in Gaza. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, dozens of people were killed or injured after an IDF attack in the town of Beit Lahia.
During a recent trip to Belgium, Pope Francis suggested that the IDF’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon have been “immoral” and disproportionate, saying that they go beyond the rules of war. According to International Humanitarian Law, “The harm caused to protected civilians or civilian property must be proportional and ‘not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’ by an attack on a military objective.”
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court investigated allegations of war crimes during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In an open letter containing his findings, he elucidates the use of proportionality. In the letter he states, “A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) (Article 8(2)(b)(i)) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality) (Article 8(2)(b)(iv)).”
The IDF consistently violates elemental rules of war. As Omer Bartov, a Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University wrote, “If we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need –or really, the duty—to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss.”
As 2,000 pound-bombs continue falling on women and children, Prime Minister Netanyahu struts among his troops. He is totally unconcerned to the evil he is causing, as Gaza and Lebanon become not only a cemetery for people, but a cemetery for hope and peace in the region.
Dr. Cesar Chelala is a co-winner of the 1979 Overseas Press Club of America award for the article “Missing or Disappeared in Argentina: The Desperate Search for Thousands of Abducted Victims.”
Western Support for Israel: A Colonial Legacy
by Alain Marshal / October 28th, 2024
Western support for Israel’s high-tech genocide, justified in the name of the Holocaust, exposes the blatant hypocrisy of so-called ‘liberal values.’ The stakes of the current conflict extend beyond Palestinian liberation, challenging the deeply ingrained colonial mindset of the West at the heart of both global and domestic systems of oppression.
For over a year now, Israel’s relentless bombardment and military operations in Gaza have been supported not only by diplomatic backing but also by military assistance and distorted media narratives all over the “collective West.” Often, this unconditional support is explained through two conventional arguments: a historical guilt tied to the Holocaust, depicting Israel as a perpetual victim of “Islamic terrorism” and/or antisemitism, and shared values between the West and Israel. However, these explanations fall short of explaining the depth and persistence of Western complicity. A third and more convincing hypothesis suggests that Israel is fulfilling the same colonial and racist impulses that Western powers were forced to restrain after decolonization.
The Holocaust Guilt Argument: A Flawed Explanation
The idea that the West supports Israel because of guilt from the Holocaust is often cited as a driving factor. While it is true that Western nations, particularly the United States, were initially sympathetic to the establishment of a Jewish state in the wake of World War II, this narrative of guilt does not explain the breadth of support Israel continues to receive today.
Before 1967, U.S. support for Israel was more restrained and pragmatic, reflecting broader Cold War interests in the Middle East. While the U.S. recognized Israel immediately in 1948, its aid and support remained relatively limited, balancing its ties with Arab nations. The U.S. did not view Israel as a strategic ally before the Six-Day War. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. was cautious about deep involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict and sought to maintain relationships with oil-rich Arab nations that were key in its geopolitical strategy against the Soviet Union.
During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the U.S. reined in Israel and its British and French allies, forcing them to retreat disgracefully after their invasion of Egypt, which had been prompted by Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. This incident underscores how, prior to 1967, the U.S. was not yet committed to unconditional support for Israel and even aligned itself with international condemnation of its actions. However, after the Six-Day War, this dynamic shifted, as Israel’s military prowess made it an invaluable Cold War asset, leading to a much deeper alliance between the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. began providing significant military and economic aid to Israel, transforming the relationship into the close strategic partnership it is today.
The Holocaust narrative also gained renewed prominence post-1967, shaping U.S. and Western perceptions of Israel. Before this period, the memory of the Holocaust, while acknowledged, was not as central in American public discourse or foreign policy. The Eichmann trial in the early 1960s played a role in bringing Holocaust memory to the forefront, but it was after 1967 that the Holocaust narrative became deeply intertwined with Israel’s legitimacy in Western discourse. The Holocaust was increasingly invoked to justify the need for a strong, secure Jewish state, whitewashing or deflecting criticism of its policies toward Palestinians and other Arab nations.
In The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein explains how the memory of the Holocaust has been instrumentalized to shield Israel from criticism. He argues that before 1967, American Jewish elites used the Holocaust primarily to denounce anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, drawing parallels with Nazism. Skeptical of the Jewish state, they feared that its creation would reinforce accusations of dual loyalty, especially in the context of the Cold War. However, the 1967 war changed all that: Israel’s military display impressed the United States, which made it a strategic pillar in the Middle East. For American Jewish elites, this alignment enabled a smoother assimilation into the United States: Israel was now perceived as a defender of American interests. The Holocaust took on a central place in American Jewish memory, serving to reinforce Israel’s legitimacy as an outpost against common enemies. American Jewish intellectuals, hitherto largely indifferent to Israel’s fate, increasingly rallied behind the Hebrew state, which they presented as a bastion of Western civilization. After 1973, this memory was consolidated as a tool of mobilization and influence, aimed at justifying support for Israel, whatever the circumstances. This allowed Israel to present itself as a permanent victim, despite its growing military and geopolitical dominance, thereby deflecting scrutiny of its actions, especially concerning the occupation of Palestinian territories.
Western intervention in the Middle East has historically been driven by control, exploitation, and domination, not altruistic motives. As Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth,
The colonizer, who is himself the product of a history of violence, has, in the final analysis, only one way of dealing with the violence that is directed against him: he must point out that the violence comes from the victim. He must show that he is the one who is oppressed.
Colonizers often invoke past suffering to justify current oppression, manipulating historical victimhood to evade responsibility for their own violence. In this case, Israel has weaponized its historical trauma to deflect criticism of its actions, transforming the Holocaust into a shield to justify its violence against Palestinians. This perverse exploitation is bolstered by Western nations, who eagerly participate in the narrative, masking their own complicity in the ongoing colonial project. The irony and outrage of this defense of current agressions, massacres and ethnic cleasing in the name of a past genocide become clear when we reflect on the words of Aimé Césaire, who saw in Europe’s colonial crimes the roots of modern barbarism.
Césaire famously argued in his Discourse on Colonialism that Europe’s greatest crime was not the rise of fascism per se, but the fact that “what [Hitler] inflicted on Europe, Europe had previously inflicted on the colonies.” He highlights the deep hypocrisy of the West, which only recoiled in horror at Nazism when it became a victim of its own tools of oppression, which had long been honed through colonization in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As Césaire states,
What the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.
By participating in Israel’s genocidal project, the West is not atoning for the Holocaust; rather, it is perpetuating the same logic of exclusion and dehumanization that enabled colonialism and Nazism. This is why Israel’s invocation of the Jewish people’s tragedy rings hollow in the context of its ongoing violence — because what was once condemned when perpetrated in Europe is now justified in Palestine. This selective application of moral outrage underscores the reality that the West’s real concern is not with human rights or justice, but with protecting colonial interests and racial hierarchies.
Ultimately, the West’s relationship to Israel is less about historical guilt than about using Israel as an instrument to perpetuate a colonial and imperialistic project in the Middle East. The same crimes the West claims to condemn in its past are the ones it now supports in the present, showing that its commitment to “never again” has never truly extended beyond Europe’s borders — that paradoxically include the Jewish population of Israel, a pure product of “Western civilization”.
The Myth of “Shared Values”
Another common justification for the West’s support of Israel is the claim that it upholds Western humanist and democratic values, making it a natural ally in a region often depicted as autocratic and hostile to Western ideals of progress. This argument is frequently strengthened by referencing the so-called “Judeo-Christian roots” of Western identity, which frame Israel as part of a shared cultural heritage. These supposed roots are presented as the moral foundation of the West, positioning Israel as a guardian of civilization against a perceived Middle Eastern “otherness” — particularly Islam, seen as irreconcilable with these values.
As Edward Said famously observed, “Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” Israel, with steadfast Western support, replicates this narrative. But the true aim is not liberation — it’s about maintaining power through violence and subjugation. The West has long framed the Arab world as the civilizational “other” to justify intervention and alliances that are first and foremost about domination. The West’s support for Israel is less about common democratic principles and more about maintaining colonial power structures through an “us versus them” dynamic.
Israel is often hailed as the only democracy in the Middle East, a civilizational outpost in a supposedly barbaric and chaotic region, yet its treatment of Palestinians — both within its borders and in the occupied territories — completely contradicts the democratic values it claims to uphold, exposing it as a full-fledged apartheid regime. Said’s critique of Orientalism shows how such perceptions have historically allowed Western powers to rationalize their support for oppressive regimes under the guise of protecting civilization.
In practice, Western nations turn a blind eye to Israel’s violations of principles and norms when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians. Discriminatory policies, ethnic cleansing, and gross abuses of human rights are overlooked by Western governments that would vehemently condemn such actions elsewhere. After October 7, the hypocrisy of “Western values” has been unmasked and discredited for ever by the torrents of crocodile tears shed for 40 Israeli babies decapitated only in the putrid imagination of propagandists, while indifference prevails towards the thousands of Palestinian babies and children torn apart, with images and videos circulated daily on social media. Human rights have been exposed as nothing but a rhetorical tool used to justify political agendas rather than a genuine commitment to humanist ideals. The West prides itself on defending even animal rights, yet it seems that “human animals” — Palestinians and all so-called “inferior races” — are, in its eyes, granted only the right to die in silence, the sole “blessing” of Western civilization.
A Colonial, Racist, and Islamophobic Project Fulfilled
The most compelling explanation for Western support lies in the fact that Israel’s actions resonate with colonial, racist, and Islamophobic ideologies that Western powers still harbor, despite the postcolonial era. Israel’s ongoing expansion of settlements, displacement of Palestinians, brutal military occupation and regular massacres reflect the same colonial practices that enabled Western powers to conquer America between the 16th and 19th centuries, but were forcibly abandoned in Africa and Asia due to the decolonization movements of the mid-20th century.
As Fanon highlighted in Black Skin, White Masks, colonialism inherently dehumanizes, dividing the world into compartments “inhabited by different species.” This process is central to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, who are reduced to a status below that of full human beings. Palestinians are portrayed as terrorists or existential threats, a narrative used to justify Israel’s ongoing occupation, military assaults, and outright extermination. The West’s complicity in this dehumanization is rooted in its own colonial legacy, where indigenous peoples were displaced, exploited, and erased from existence in the name of progress and civilization.
Furthermore, Islamophobia plays a crucial role in maintaining this alliance. The demonization of Muslims and Arabs as inherently backward, violent and irrational has become a central tenet of Western foreign policy, particularly after the events of 9/11. Israel capitalizes on this Islamophobic discourse, portraying itself as a bulwark against “Islamic extremism” in the region. Western nations, particularly the U.S., use this narrative to justify their support for Israel, despite its blatant disregard for international law and human rights. The Netanyahu government exemplifies the very fanaticism and bloodlust attributed to Arabs and Muslims, as seen in its leaders’ messianic rhetoric, violent calls for the annihilation of Palestinians and genocidal actions.
In this sense, Israel is not simply a rogue state acting independently; it is fulfilling the very impulses that Western powers were forced to moderate after the end of formal colonialism. The support for Israel’s policies towards Gaza, the broader Palestinian question and neighbouring Arab countries is not an aberration but rather a continuation of colonial violence by other means. As Fanon argued, colonialism is not just a physical occupation but a psychological and ideological project that persists long after the formal end of empire.
Israel as a Proxy for Western Oppression
The West’s unwavering support for Israel, despite its clear violations of fundamental universal norms, cannot be fully attributed to Holocaust guilt or a purported alignment of values. Instead, Israel serves as an outlet for Western powers to express their suppressed colonial instincts, racism, and Islamophobia. The settler-colonial project in Palestine mirrors the violence that Western powers once inflicted upon colonized peoples across the globe. Just as European empires sought to “civilize” non-Western populations through domination, Israel perpetuates this colonial legacy by asserting control over Palestinians. Having been forced to abandon their formal colonial empires, Western nations now view Israel as a proxy to continue their project of domination by alternative methods.
This support for Israel isn’t only about geopolitics or strategic alliances and interests. It’s about preserving the colonial order in a world increasingly calling for justice and liberation. Former colonial powers in the West are not just contending with this externally, in global power struggles between unipolar and multipolar systems, but also internally from marginalized groups, often coming from their former colonies. These groups challenge the legacies of racism, oppression, and inequality that were established during the colonial era. In this context, support for Israel helps suppress these growing movements by reinforcing the belief that colonial power structures — whether global or domestic — must remain intact.
If Israel were to be defeated, it would pave the way for a second wave of decolonization — this time, a decolonization of minds. Just as the early victories of Hitler during World War II demonstrated that European colonial powers could fall, emboldening indigenous populations to rise against their masters, Israel’s defeat would similarly expose the fragility of the global neocolonial order. This would inspire more developing countries to break free from US hegemony and oppressed groups within Western nations to push harder against segregation in their societies, exposing the hypocrisy and injustices of policies rooted in oppression. This notably explains why Western media, acting as guardians of the social order, eagerly parrots Israeli military rhetoric, praising its supposed successes, even when they amount to mass terrorism, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Israel must remain “invincible,” not just for geostrategic reasons but as a psychological fortress. Its dominance reassures Western powers that the colonial mindset endures, allowing them to justify oppression at home and abroad, paying tribute to “worthy” victims and preserving “the lives that count,” all under the guise of hollow “values.” The struggle in Gaza is not solely for Palestinian freedom — it’s a stand for the freedom and dignity of all humankind. TwitteRedditEmail
Alain Marshal is a plebeian by nature and nurture. Contact: alainmarshal2 [at] gmail [dot] com. Read other articles by Alain.
The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.
Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.
These mercenaries will be hired by the CIA. “The plan, approved by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, calls for the Israeli military to clear out pockets of Palestinian resistance. … 48 hours after stamping out resistance, they plan to erect separation walls around the neighborhood, forcing its residents, and no one else, to enter and exit using biometric identification under the CIA contractors’ control. Those who do not accept the biometric regime would be refused humanitarian aid.” In other words: they will starve to death. The Gazans who do accept “the biometric regime” won’t be starved to death. Biometrics includes fingerprinting but also other physical — and also behavioral — measurements of an individual who is being kept under surveillance.
The company at the forefront of this plan is called Global Development Company, described in its promotional materials as an “Uber for war zones.” Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana owns it and employs several top Israeli and American military intelligence officials, including retired U.S. Navy Captain Michael Durnan, retired U.S. Special Forces captain Justin Sapp, former Israeli military intelligence division head Yossi Kuperwasser, and former Israeli military chief intelligence officer David Tzur.
Kahana has played a key role in the dirty war against Syria in the 2010s and worked with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army [the “FSA,” which the U.S. Government under Obama hired to help overthrow and replace the Russia-and-Iran-supported President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad; and Dan Cohen’s FSA link is to an article in Britain’s Independent heroizing Kahana, headlining him as “Israeli man starts ‘Good Samaritan’ charity to get injured Syrian women and children to Israel for medical help.” That article opens with a video in which he speaks as a “philanthropist.”]
… GDC has also been involved in Ukraine, where it collaborated with the Zionist organization, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to operate a refugee camp in Romania near its border with Ukraine. …
Kahana’s Gaza plan has been in the works since at least February 2024. He presented the plan to establish these electronic cantons – what Jewish News referred to as “gated communities” – to the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, as well as Netanyahu. U.S. officials did not respond. While the Israeli military had agreed, the Israeli prime minister shot it down. “What’s the rush?” he quipped. …
However, as Hamas has maintained its civil control throughout Gaza and Israel has failed to defeat armed resistance groups, the Netanyahu government is relying on the U.S. to do its bidding. …
While the [original version of the] proposal called for the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia to assume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that has failed to materialize, prompting the United States to approve deployment of CIA contractors.
In other words: finally, Netanyahu, too, approved the plan.
The meticulous plan, seen by Jewish News, envisages the creation of “gated communities” in a safe space in the Strip and biometric recognition put in place for civilian recipients of aid. Those who did not pass the biometric tests would not have received aid. The gated communities are described as a Secure Humanitarian Logistics Corridor which, the plan states, “once established, can process and securely deliver humanitarian assistance from other sources across Gaza”.
In other words: the plan is as Cohen describes it, but employs euphemistic phrasings to deceive fools into believing that Kahana, his GDC, and his concentration camps for cooperative Gazan survivors, are “humanitarian,” and “gated communities,” such as that phrase is used in America to refer to protected oases of peace amidst a surrounding environment of war — like saying, “We’ll protect you Gazans.”
Cohen’s article didn’t mention the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department’s Defense Forensics & Biometrics Agency (DFBA), but this federal Agency (which he does link to without mentioning it) was, in fact, established by President Obama in 2012, and is crucially involved in what Kahana’s GDC is doing in Gaza. In 2016, DFBA’s “Overview” stated: “Biometrics and forensics are critical to identifying known and unknown individuals by matching them with automated records (such as for access control) or with anonymous samples (such as crime scene investigations).” In other words: the surviving Gazans will be tracked not by a number that is tattoed onto their arms like was done at Auschwitz to prisoners who weren’t immediately sent to their deaths, but instead tracked by the person’s “biometrics.” So: Israel’s Jews use Hitler’s — the original form of — nazism, but against different people, and with modern technology.
Furthermore: their propaganda is far more sophisticated than Joseph Goebbels’s was.
The link that Cohen provides to DFBA is to its current promotional video, their latest “Overview.”
It makes clear that DFBA is being used by the federal Government not ONLY in order to control the surviving Gazans, but ALSO in order to control the American people, as well as to extend the American empire throughout the world.
In other words: Yesterday it was the Jews who were the target; today it is the surviving Gazans who are, and also an increasing percentage of Americans are (targeted by our own Government); and, in the future, this system is to become expanded to everyone.
Cohen’s article also (at the word “worked”) linked to (but unfortunately out of context) a self-promotional youtube by and for Kahana himself, that appears to have been intended by him to promote himself to both Russians and Syrians, as being a magnanimous israeli philanthropist who rescues victims of his hated Assad, because he cares so much about the Syrian people.
We are already well beyond George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984. This is the reality of today’s U.S. empire.
On October 24 was posted to X an exposé by James Li, of the top people at the U.S. magazine the Atlantic, which opens, “Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic‘s Editor-in-Chief who compared Trump to Hitler, was an IDF prison guard at a facility known for torture and sex abuse. He also pushed the false Saddam-Al-Qaeda link that led to the Iraq War and keeps pushing for war in the Middle East.” And the magazine’s owner is Steve Jobs’s deeply neoconservative widow, and she pitches her propaganda to Democratic Party voters, to keep them backing her candidates.
On October 15, ZeroHedge headlined “US Threatens Israel With Arms Embargo As Evidence Of War Crimes Becomes Impossible to Deny.” This is how successful U.S. politicians win votes from their suckers. Biden publicly threatens Israel at the same time as he privately authorizes — and arms to the teeth — what it is doing that he publicly condemns. Both of America’s political Parties are fully complicit in this deceit — this genocide.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Crippling UNRWA: The Knesset’s Collective Punishment of Palestinians
by Binoy Kampmark / October 27th, 2024
The man has a cheek. Having lectured Iranians and Lebanese about what (and who) is good for them in terms of rulers and rule (we already know what he thinks of the Palestinians), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been keeping busy on further depriving access and assistance to those in Gaza and the West Bank. This comes in draft legislation that would prevent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from pursuing its valuable functions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli state has been relentless and pathological. Even before last year’s October 7 attacks by Hamas, much was made of the fact that the body seemed intent on keeping the horrors of the 1948 displacements current. Victimhood, complained the amnesiac enforcers of the Israeli state, was being encouraged by treating the descendants of displaced Palestinians as refugees. Nasty memories were being kept alive.
Since then, Israel has been further libelling and blackening the organisation as a terrorist front best abolished. (Labels are effortlessly swapped – “Hamas supporter”; “activist”; “terrorist”.) Initially came that infamous dossier pointing the finger at 12 individuals said to be Hamas participants in the October 7 attacks. With swiftness, the UN commenced internal investigations. Some individuals were sacked on suspicion of being linked to the attacks. Unfortunately, some US$450 million worth of donor funding from sixteen countries was suspended.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini was always at pains to explain that he had “never been informed” nor received evidence substantiating Israel’s accusations. It was also all the more curious given that staff lists for the agency were provided to both Israeli and Palestinian authorities in advance. At no point had he ever “received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”
In April, Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace and security”. Repeatedly, requests by the agency to deliver aid to northern Gaza had been refused, staff barred from coordinating meetings between humanitarian actors and Israel, and UNRWA premises and staff targeted.
Israel’s campaign to dissuade donor states from restoring funding proved a mixed one. Even the United Kingdom, long sympathetic to Israel’s accusations, announced in July that funding would be restored. In the view of UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, UNRWA had taken steps to ensure that it was meeting “the highest standards of neutrality.”
In August, the findings of a review of the allegations by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, instigated at the request of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, were released. It confirmed UNRWA’s role as “irreplaceable and indispensable” in the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, a “pivotal” body that provided “life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”
In identifying eight areas for immediate improvement on the subject of neutrality (for instance, engaging donors, neutrality of staff, installations, education and staff unions), it was noted that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” that the agency’s employees had been “members of terrorist organizations.”
On October 24, UNRWA confirmed that one of its staffers killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza, Muhammad Abu Attawi, had been in the agency’s employ since July 2022 while serving as a Nukhba commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion. Attawi is alleged to have participated in the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im in October last year. His name had featured in a July letter from Israel to the agency listing 100 names allegedly connected with terrorist groups. But no action was taken against Attawi as the Israelis failed to supply UNRWA with evidence. Lazzarini’s letter urging, in the words of Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications, “to cooperate … by providing more information so he could take action” did not receive “any response”.
Having been foiled on various fronts in its quest to terminate UNRWA’s viable existence, Israeli lawmakers are now taking the legislative route to entrench the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Two bills are in train in the Knesset. The first, sponsored by such figures as Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky and Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, would bar state authorities from having contact with UNRWA. The second, sponsored by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, would critically prevent the agency from operating in Israeli territory through revoking a 1967 exchange of notes justifying such activities.
Even proclaimed moderates – the term is relative – such as former defence minister Benny Gantz support the measures, accusing the UN body of making “itself an inseparable component of Hamas’s mechanism – and now is the time to detach ourselves entirely from it”. It did not improve the lot of refugees, but merely perpetuated “their victimisation.” Evidently for Gantz, Israel had no central role in creating Palestinian victims in the first place.
By barring cooperation between any Israeli authorities and UNRWA, work in Gaza and the West Bank would become effectively impossible, largely because Jerusalem would no longer issue entrance permits to the territories or permit any coordination with the Israeli Defense Forces.
UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills. “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.” Ambassadors from 123 UN member states have echoed the same views, while the Biden administration has, impotently, warned that the proposed “restrictions would devastate the humanitarian response in Gaza at this critical moment” while also denying educational and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
In their October 23 statement, the Nordic countries also expressed concern that UNRWA’s mandate “to carry out […] direct relief and works programmes” for millions of Palestinian refugees as determined by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) would be jettisoned. “In the midst of an ongoing catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, a halt to any of the organisation’s activities would have devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of civilians served by UNRWA.”
The statement goes on to make a warning. To impair the refugee agency would create a vacuum that “may well destabilise the situation in [Gaza, and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem], in Israel and in the region as a whole, and may fundamentally jeopardize the prospects of a two-state solution.”
These are concerns that hardly matter before the rationale of murderous collective punishment, one used against a people seen more as mute serfs and submissive animals than sovereign beings entitled to rights and protections. Israel’s efforts to malign and cripple UNRWA remains a vital part of that agenda. In that organisation exists a repository of deep and troubling memories the forces of oppression long to erase.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
It is apparently not much of an exaggeration to say that Israel’s attack on Iran fizzled. Some targets were hit and at least two Iranian soldiers were killed, but the ineffectiveness of the operation was probably due to several factors:
Israel just doesn’t have the weaponry. Most of its missiles don’t have the distance, and those that do, just barely so. That’s true for a lot of its drones, too, and they are too easily detected and don’t have the carrying power.
The US didn’t aid, in particular with refueling manned aircraft. It’s just as well. It would have been a good way to lose both pilots and aircraft.
Most of the nations geographically in between Israel and Iran would not permit overflights from either Israel or the US. Iran told these nations that they prefer to remain on good terms with them, and that they would consider it an act of war to lend their airspace to Israeli operations.
Iranian antiaircraft systems were apparently quite effective.
Other factors may have been involved. It is possible that cooler heads prevailed in the Israeli and US militaries, for example, but we may never know, or at least not soon. Nevertheless, the main reason that Israel did not cause more damage appears not to be a question of intention, but of capability. There’s no question that Israel was hoping for an escalation that would widen the war and force the US to enter on Israel’s side. That appears to have been avoided. Iran will have to respond, but unlike Israel, neither Iran nor the US wants escalation. Iran’s response will therefore be measured, and they will declare the matter settled.
The Netanyahu government now finds itself squarely in check, though not yet checkmated. Nevertheless, the best it can do now is probably a stalemate. This is not good in the short run for Gaza and the Palestinians, nor for Lebanon, but it’s also not good for Israel, whose population is emigrating, whose economy is tanking, and which is generally a pariah throughout the world. Its decades of building its image as glamorous, progressive and a technological powerhouse is gone. It is now the redoubt of religious fanatics and criminals that even much of the international Jewish community is loathe to support. Its current mainstay is the international network of influence peddlers such as AIPAC, whose power has not dwindled in the US and other western governments, due to its ability to enrich the military industrial complex and to control the elective processes in these governments. With the loss of a wider base in the Jewish community, however, that power is likely to decline.FacebookTwitteRedditEmail
Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. Read other articles by Paul.
Almog Cohen, member of the Israeli Knesset, Using Lies about the 10/07 Attack to Justify Targeting and Killing of Palestinian Children
by Dissident Voice Communications / October 26th, 2024
X/Twitter screen cap from Almog Cohen. He is perpetuating lies about the 10/07 attack to justify targeting and killing of Palestinian children.
Dissident Voice Communications (DVC) is a non-profit meta-company in the public interest (well, depends on which public), we aim to challenge the hegemony of Big Media by communicating... all sorts of stuff. Read other articles by Dissident Voice Communications.
