New Vermont AFL-CIO President Is A Labor Reformer & DSA Member

BY STEVE EARLY

 JANUARY 4, 2024
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Editor’s Note: Unlike some local and national unions, AFL-CIO central labor bodies rarely have contested leadership elections, with opposing slates running on platforms offering alternative strategies for reviving the labor movement. In Vermont, there have been two such contests in the last four years, both resulting in a mandate for change.

In 2019, a group of local union officers and staff members created a reform slate called “Vermont AFL-CIO United!” Fourteen of its candidates got elected—taking all the top officer jobs and forming a majority on the state labor council executive board. Their goal was to revitalize a moribund organization through membership education, mobilization, and direct action, plus greater independence from the Democratic Party.

Rather than welcoming and applauding this leadership shift, the national AFL-CIO—then headed by the late Richard Trumka—threatened to put the Vermont Labor Council under trusteeship. As recounted by AFSCME activist David Van Deusen, in a forthcoming book from PM Press called Insurgent Labor, this headquarters take-over attempt was averted and reform efforts were able to continue.

A key organizer of the United slate four years ago, Van Deusen stepped down as Vermont AFL-CIO president after two terms in September. After another highly competitive election campaign, state labor council delegates chose Katie Maurice, a 31-year-old fellow member of AFSCME and DSA as his successor.

This time, the United slate again won a majority of the seats on the state fed executive board. Maurice’s running-mate, Ellen Kaye, from the American Federation of Teachers, became executive vice president. And the rest of their all-female leadership team includes Danielle Bombardier, a working member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who serves as Secretary-Treasurer.

At the convention, Vermont labor activists celebrated new organizing gains and an affiliation agreement with the long-independent State Employees Association, which have doubled the number of workers represented by the AFL-CIO in Vermont. In this interview, conducted by Steve Early, Maurice discusses her own path to joining a union, becoming a DSA member, and, now reportedly, the youngest state labor federation president in the country.

Steve Early: What led to your involvement in the labor movement?

Katie Maurice: After working on the administrative side of a private business for a few years, I was sick and tired of watching wages steadily rise for the men who were buddies with the boss while the women picked up all the slack for a fraction of their pay. I witnessed wage theft in the form of regular punch card adjustments by management and overt sexism and racism directed at the lowest paid workers, who had no real in-house recourse for these abuses.

I didn’t want my sense of dignity checked at the door when I entered my workplace. So, when given the chance, I jumped at the opportunity to get the hell out of there. I wanted a job where I had a voice and power over my own working life and labor– where democracy extended into the workplace and everyone was treated like the human beings we are.

Steve Early: What changed when you became an AFSCME member?

Katie Maurice: I joined AFSCME in early 2020, when I became a behavioral interventionist at the Howard Center, in Burlington, Vt., our state’s largest social service agency which has a staff of 1,600. After Covid-19 hit, my co-workers and I were briefly furloughed. We got help from our union filing for unemployment benefits. When we were recalled to our jobs, navigating life as an “essential worker” providing face-to-face mental health services during a pandemic posed all kinds of safety risks.

So that summer, I became a union steward and helped secure stricter safety measures to protect staff working at a summer camp. By the next winter, I was elected to serve as vice-president of our Local 1674 and the following year I became president. Currently, I serve as local secretary. Over the last three years, we have more than doubled our membership–largely through one-on-one conversations at work and home visits.

Steve Early:  What kind of social service work have you done at the Howard Center?

Katie Maurice: I’ve spent most of my time providing one-on-one behavioral support in public schools serving kids who have emotional, behavioral, developmental, and intellectual disabilities, from disproportionately poor and working-class families. Many of my fellow AFSCME members work directly with children and adults with a variety of disabilities in the community, in schools, residential facilities, and some workplaces. We also staff crisis programs, including those for substance use and recovery.

Every day, we are on the front-lines of disaster capitalism, a band-aid that is sorely needed but never enough. While very essential, our work doesn’t address any root problems—like criminalization of poverty and homelessness or diseases like addiction that are often rooted in socioeconomic stressors. The lower-income Vermonters we serve lack universal healthcare, affordable housing and public transportation, access to education and secure employment, lack of leisure time and recreational spaces, not to mention opportunities to enjoy art and culture.

Steve Early: Why did you join DSA?

Katie Maurice: I signed up in November of 2021 and remain a rank-and-file member of Champlain Valley DSA.  I joined DSA because the root cause of so many of our problems, as a working class, is capitalism itself, which robs working people of the resources needed to survive and live freely. I think we need to build a different economy, that puts people over profits. In the meantime, we need to create a broad-based anti-capitalist, anti-fascist labor movement in Vermont.

Steve Early: What made you decide to get involved in a state level affiliate of the national AFL-CIO, which is not the typical venue for labor activism by a young labor radical?

Katie Maurice: What motivated me was seeing the lack of essential resources provided to struggling unions in our rural and, thus, often ignored state. Anyone fortunate enough to be part of a progressive service sector local can’t confine themselves to that space alone. We need to engage with the wider labor movement, which is still at its lowest point in terms of union density and strike activity, despite resurgent younger worker interest in on-the-job organizing. If we fail to do so, members of too many unions will continue to be sold out and crushed and even the remaining left and progressive enclaves will collapse.

Steve Early: Could you tell us about the reform faction that has won two contested elections for the leadership of the Vermont labor council?

Katie Maurice: The reform slate called United! was formed in 2019 by progressive-minded rank-and-file union members who wanted to see a revitalized and fighting labor movement in our state. We articulated that vision in a 10- point platform later adopted as the official program of the state fed after we won.

Key elements of the AFL-CIO’s new agenda in Vermont include prioritizing organizing; not being afraid to exercise our power as workers, including by striking; speaking up on issues of social justice such as racism and gender oppression; achieving greater independence from the Democratic Party; and encouraging union democracy through wider participation of the rank-and-file.  United! is not just an individual or group of individuals seeking higher office in organized labor. We’re trying to reach and inspire every worker who wants a more thriving, fighting labor movement.

Steve Early: What were some of the key differences in the race—between your United slate and a more traditional building trades-led ticket?

Katie Maurice: Our fundamental disagreement was over organizational priorities—whether to focus on politicians or fellow working-class people? The more centrist candidates felt that the labor council should return to its old role as a State House lobbyist, which cultivated insider-relationships with legislators from both major parties.

The United! Slate, on the other hand, pledged to build rank-and-file power by redoubling our organizing efforts rather than redirect our resources back to lobbying for politicians who sell us out. It is our belief that when we build people power, it will be the politicians who ask for our endorsement, not the other way around. And that’s the direction we must take – one in which the politicians in the statehouse have to listen to us because WE have power.

Since 2019, we have strengthened our ties with the Vermont Progressive Party, a third party which has not only focused on workers’ rights but also championed broader social justice causes, in a political landscape often dominated by powerful corporate interests.  The VPP’s role as a party for the working class is not just about rhetoric; it’s about tangible actions. It’s about supporting legislation like the VT PRO Act that would protect the right to organize, about standing up against union-busting tactics, and ensuring that union members have a seat at the policy-making table.

Steve Early: By a narrow margin, you were elected the youngest state fed president in the country, as part of a very rare all female leadership team?

Katie Maurice: Yes, it’s a pretty important step we’ve taken and a first in our labor council’s history. Historically, it’s been difficult for women to participate in union activity, let alone hold positions of leadership. Lack of childcare at meetings is a huge barrier to participation. So United! hired unionized early childhood educators to provide child care at our conventions to make it easier for women and young families to participate.  It’s no secret that women are paid less, have fewer resources, are in less privileged positions of power, and have to work harder to get by. However, we’ve seen a recent resurgence in organizing led mostly by women in industries with a disproportionately female workforce such as food service, healthcare, and social services.

Steve Early: Democratic Left recently ran an account of how “Workers Circles”—small group discussions sponsored by DSA and the labor council—have become a vehicle for labor education and activism in Vermont? Where do you see this unusual program heading during your two-year term?

Katie Maurice: Workers Circles’ are a great place to start new organizing campaigns and build networks of support for them. Our goal is to rebuild the base of the labor movement by developing new rank-and-file leaders through peer collaboration. We have been training more facilitators and expanding the circles to other parts of the state. It’s a model that helps connect co-workers and comrades, so they can

support each other along the way.

Steve Early: Do you have any advice for other DSA members who are involved in new organizing campaigns or trying to improve union functioning through reform caucus activity?

Katie Maurice: Make time to have some fun together and experience the joy of community. Organizing is about breaking out of the isolation we experience at work and in our communities, which means building personal relationships, which can be deepened by the collective experience of class struggle.

We can learn a lot from the southern civil rights movement sixty years ago. Its local activists faced brutal white supremacist opposition. They knew what hardships lay ahead. But they were prepared because they had made an organizing plan. And, most importantly, they made a decision that living in a segregated society was intolerable and fighting back was worth the hardship and sacrifices necessary to change that situation.

When things get difficult, talk to your coworkers and ask them what is intolerable? Is it engaging in class struggle and organizing? Or is it the poverty wages? The degrading working conditions? The disrespect? In organizing lingo, we call this “framing the choice,” because to do nothing is also a choice to live with the conditions you have right now and to allow others to live that way, too.

Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was an organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com

Joel Roberts Poinsett: Namesake of the Poinsettia, Enslaver, Secret Agent and Perpetrator of the ‘Trail of Tears’

BY LINDSAY SCHAKENBACH REGELE

 JANUARY 4, 2024
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If people know the name Joel Roberts Poinsett today, it is likely because of the red and green poinsettia plant.

In the late 1820s, while serving as the first ambassador from the U.S. to Mexico, Poinsett clipped samples of the plant known in Spanish as the “flor de nochebuena,” or flower of Christmas Eve, from the Mexican state of Guerrero. He then introduced it to the U.S. on a trip home from Mexico.

The plant has been named poinsettia ever since.

But much like the history of the U.S., Poinsett had a complex and troubling past.

An ambitious politician, financial investor and enslaver, Poinsett was a secret agent for the U.S. government in South America who fought for the Chilean army against Spain during Chile’s War for Independence in the early 1800s.

A confidant of President Andrew Jackson, Poinsett also served as U.S. secretary of war under President Martin Van Buren and oversaw the ignominy of the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation and deadly march of Cherokee people from the South to reservations in the West during the 1830s.

And yet Poinsett, an avid botanist who brought scores of other plants to the U.S., also helped found an organization that led to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.

A privileged life

I came across his history almost by accident. I am a historian of capitalism in early America, and while I was on a research fellowship for my first book, “Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry,” another researcher suggested I go to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to check out the papers of a few War Department officials. Poinsett was one of those officials.

There, I found a large collection of his letters and other personal papers that spanned five decades of his life. I became so fascinated with his life that I decided to write a book about him. I detail his complicated life in another book, “Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism.”

Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 2, 1779, Poinsett was the son of a wealthy doctor and lived a life of privilege. He traveled throughout Europe and Russia in his early 20s before starting a military career.

In the 1810s, Poinsett traveled around South America as a secret agent of the U.S. State Department. His intelligence reports led in part to the drafting of the Monroe Doctrine.

That doctrine, written by Secretary of State John Adams and buried in President James Monroe’s address to Congress on Dec. 2, 1823, sought to prevent European colonization in South America and, in essence, claimed the entire Western Hemisphere for the U.S.

The doctrine also set the stage for two centuries of rocky relations between the U.S and Latin America.

In 1825, the Monroe administration appointed Poinsett as the nation’s first ambassador to Mexico. He arrived there in the spring of that year and almost immediately instigated a general distrust of American interference. He used his connections to secure favorable plots of land for himself and his friends and established a U.S.-based mining company to exploit Mexican resources for his own benefit.

It was on a trip to assess the profitability of some mines, in fact, that Poinsett admired the red and green plant and cut clippings to send to horticulturalists in the U.S. Exactly where and how these clippings were made and sent is not quite clear, but he remarked on the beauty of the plants he saw, which Franciscan friars in Mexico had been displaying at Christmas since the 1600s.

Several prominent horticulturalists in the United States later reported that Poinsett sent them plant samples. By the mid-1830s, agricultural reports described a plant with brilliant scarlet foliage, “lately referred to as the poinsettia,” as having been introduced by Poinsett in 1828.

Poinsett’s Latin America meddling

That same year, Poinsett also supported a coup in Mexico City.

During the Mexican presidential campaign in 1829, Poinsett supported Vicente Guerrero, whom he saw as more amenable to his and U.S. financial interests. When Guerrero lost to moderate Manuel Gómez Pedraza, Guerrero staged a coup with Poinsett’s approval that forced Gómez Pedraza to flee Mexico.

Because of Poinsett’s poor conduct during the election, the Mexican government requested Poinsett’s removal from his post. President Andrew Jackson instead allowed Poinsett to resign.

Poinsett left Mexico and went back home to South Carolina.

On Oct. 24, 1833, at 54 years old, Poinsett married a 52-year-old, wealthy widow from South Carolina who owned a rice plantation and almost 100 enslaved people.

Though he wrote that he enjoyed married plantation life, he was not done with politics or the military.

In 1837, Poinsett was named U.S. secretary of war and oversaw the execution of Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act that the Cherokee people referred to as the Trail of Tears. That act saw the violent displacement of members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations from their homelands in the South to reservations in the West.

The creation of the Smithsonian

Based on his travels and experiences around the world, Poinsett believed that the U.S. should have a national museum to conduct scientific research and display the expanding government collections, including plant specimens.

In his retirement, Poinsett helped found in 1840 and became president of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts.

That organization later became part of the Smithsonian Institution, whose gardens now showcase thousands of poinsettias during the Christmas season.

Poinsett died on Dec. 12, 1851.

It remains unclear how long the plant that bears his name will remain known as the poinsettia. After years of controversy, the American Ornithological Society announced that it was going to remove all human names from as many as 152 bird species, including those linked to people with racist histories or people who have done violence to Indigenous communities.

Though no attempts as yet have emerged to rename plants, it’s my belief that Poinsett’s poinsettia may be the first.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Saving Israel by Ending Its War in Gaza

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false.

by Jeffrey D. Sachs Posted onJanuary 04, 2024

Reprinted from CommonDreams with permission of the author.

When Congress returns in January, President Joe Biden will push the case to deepen American complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza through another US armaments package for Israel. Americans should raise their voice in a resounding no.

An arms package for Israel is not only against America’s interests but also against Israel’s interests. The only path to real security for Israel is peace with Palestine. The US can help bring this about by ending the supply of munitions for Israel’s brutal war and by promoting the two-state solution as called for by international law.

I spelled out the diplomatic path to the two-state solution in a previous column for Common Dreams. That path remains open. It is actively promoted by the Arab and Islamic countries and supported by nearly the entire world.

Israel’s brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat to Israel’s survival. Because of Israel’s extraordinary violence, the world is uniting against Israel, while Israel is suffering massive military losses. Incredibly, some Israeli leaders are now openly advocating an even wider war in the Middle East, one that could well spell utter disaster for Israel.

The surging global opposition to Israel’s policies is not antisemitic. It is anti-genocide. It is also pro-peace, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine. If Israel ends the genocide, it will end the global opposition it now faces.

Defeating Hamas is not Israel’s real aim in Gaza

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false. There is no ethical, practical, legal or geopolitical case for destroying Gaza – killing tens of thousands of civilians, and uprooting 2 million people – to protect Israel against the kinds of preventable and controllable threats that Hamas actually poses.

During the years 2008-2022, Hamas and other militants killed around a dozen Israeli civilians per year, while Israel usually killed at least ten times more civilian Palestinians. There was a spike in 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza, with 19 Israeli civilians killed versus 1,760 Palestinian civilians. Hamas launches many rockets, but almost all are intercepted or cause little damage. Israel responds with periodic massacres (as in 2014) and with more regular airstrikes. The Israelis even have a cynical name for their periodic killing, called “mowing the grass.” It is common knowledge inside Israel that Hamas long served as a “low-cost” political prop used by Netanyahu to “prove” to Israelis that a two-state solution is impossible.

In all the years of Hamas rule in Gaza after 2007, Hamas has never captured Israeli territory, much less remotely threatened Israel’s existence or survival. Simply, it couldn’t do so even if it wanted. Hamas has around 30,000 fighters, compared with more than 600,000 active and reserve personnel in the IDF. Hamas lacks an air force, armored units, a military-industrial base, and any geographic maneuverability outside of Gaza.

On October 7, Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion into Israel that lasted that horrific day. This did not reflect a new super-ability of Hamas to invade Israel but rather a shocking failure of Israeli security. Israeli leaders had ignored extensive warnings of an upcoming Hamas attack and had inexplicably left the Gaza-Israel border severely under-manned. Even more astoundingly, they did so just days after Israeli extremists had stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, one of the Islam’s holiest sites. Hamas exploited Israel’s astounding security lapse by breaching the border in an attack that led to around 1,100 Israeli civilian deaths, and Hamas’ taking of 240 hostages, with an unknown number of the Israeli civilian deaths that day caused by Israeli aerial bombing and crossfire in the IDF’s counterattack.

By re-fortifying the border with Gaza, Israel has stopped further ground incursions by Hamas. Netanyahu has ordered the destruction of Gaza not to protect Israel from Hamas, but to make Gaza uninhabitable and thereby to fulfill his longstanding intention to impose permanent Israeli rule over the territory. Netanyahu gets the added bonus of clinging to power despite his grievous other failures.

The Israeli government’s more basic objective is to solidify its total control over “Greater Israel,” meaning all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its objective with the incursion in Gaza is to push the population out of the territory. On October 10, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” More recently, Netanyahu spoke of “voluntary emigration” of the Gazan population – voluntary, that is, after Gaza has been laid to waste and Gazans told to evacuate. Metula Mayor David Azoulai declared that “the whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.” He later clarified that he would like to see the Gaza population “relocated,” not murdered. Most recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared fascist, called for Gaza’s population to be cut to 100,000-200,000 from the current population of more than 2 million. Israel aimed from the start of its invasion of Gaza to push the Gazans into Egypt, but Egypt adamantly refused to be a party to ethnic cleansing.

In the 1970s, the aim of dominating Palestine to create Greater Israel as a Jewish state was a fringe belief. Now it rules Israeli policy, in part reflecting the enormous political weight of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“Greater Israel,” defined as Israel of pre-1967-War borders, plus Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, is home to roughly seven million Jews and seven million Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians. Israel can rule Greater Israel only by dominating seven million Palestinians, or by driving them out of their homes by war, violence, and extreme discrimination. The quest for Greater Israel in practice leads Israel to commit grave crimes against the people of Palestine. The ongoing crime is Apartheid rule, with its severe injustices and indignities. The graver crime is ethnic cleaning as Israel is attempting in Gaza. The gravest of all is genocide, witnessed in the thousands of deaths of innocent civilians occurring each week now in Gaza.

Israel’s turn towards extremism

The American people need to understand that Israeli politics has become dominated by extremists who mix religious fervor with murderous violence against the Palestinians. This ultra-violent side of Israel is readily apparent in Israel but is still largely unknown to the American public. Israeli brutality in Gaza comes as a surprise to many Americans, yet it has become par for the course in Israel itself, although some Israelis are no doubt in denial of the facts on the ground in the Occupied Territories. The Grayzone has put together a shocking compilation of Israeli soldiers and leading personalities celebrating Palestinian deaths.

Israel’s genocidal violence towards the Palestinian people appeals to much of the Israeli public for several reasons. First, always lurking in the shadows in Israel is the memory of the Holocaust. Politicians like Netanyahu have long stoked the terror of the Holocaust to argue crudely and falsely that all Palestinians want to kill all the Jews, so that the violent suppression of the Palestinians is a matter of life and death for Israel. Of course, as in any spiral of hatred, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy to Netanyahu’s rhetoric and actions, leading to counter-actions and hatreds from the other side. Yet rather than trying to solve those through dialogue, interaction, diplomacy, and peacemaking, the cycle of hatred is stoked.

Second, orthodox rabbis have expanded upon the security narrative by insisting that Israel has a sacred right to Palestine because God gave all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean to the Israelites.

Third, with 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian lands conquered in 1967, Greater Israel has become a fait accompli for a large part of the Israeli people, with a large voice in Israeli politics. These settlers moved into conquered territory and now fervently insist on defending their settlements. The UN Security Council (UNSC Resolution 2334) has unequivocally declared Israel’s settlements in occupied Palestine to be in flagrant violation of international law, yet Smotrich himself, in the inner cabinet, is a leader of the settler movement.

The emergence of this violent strand of Judaism dates to the early 1970s, just after the 1967 Six-Day War. The policy question in Israel after 1967 was what to do with the newly occupied Palestinian land. Drawing on the proposals of Yigal Allon, a leading Israeli politician, Israeli leaders decided to keep East Jerusalem and to establish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to put “facts on the ground” to protect Israel’s security. From the start, Israeli governments defied UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), which rejected Israel’s acquisition of territory by war.

What happened next was momentous. Ultra-religious Jews took up the cause of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as part of a messianic calling to make Israel the “Earthly support of the Lord’s throne,”(here p. 69). In 1974, Gush Emunim was launched as an ultra-nationalist religious settler movement by followers of the father-son rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose teachings combined the land claims of the Book of Joshua, Talmudic law, Chassidic mysticism, nationalism, and political activism.

The religious motivation of Greater Israel is that God gave the Jews all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In the Book of Joshua, probably completed in the 6th century BC, God instructs the Israelites arriving from Egypt after 40 years in the desert to annihilate the nations of Canaan in order to take the land for themselves. God promises the land extending “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites. (Joshua 1:4, New Living Translation). With God’s backing, Joshua’s armies commit a series of genocides to capture the land.

This extraordinarily violent text and related parts of the Bible (such as the annihilation of the Amalekites in the Book of Samuel), have become crucial points of reference for right-wing Israelis, both religious and secular. As a result, today’s Israel pursues a 6th century BC messianic vision of securing all of Palestine for the Jews. Supporters of Greater Israel often label the opponents of this ideology as anti-Semites, but this is wildly off the mark, as the former Executive Director of the Harvard Hillel has eloquently argued. The opponents of Greater Israel are against extremism and injustice, not against Judaism.

The Jewish settler movement led to a murderous disdain of the Palestinian. In his book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Prof. Israel Shahak draws attention to the religious zealotry of Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, a leader of the West Bank settlers:

“Let us say clearly and strongly: we are not occupying foreign territories in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. This is our ancient home. And thank G-d that we have brought it back to life … Our responsibility to Jewish faith and redemption commands us to speak up in a strong and clear voice. The Divine Process of uniting our people and our Land must not be clouded and weakened by seeming logical concepts of “security” and “diplomacy.” They only distort the truth and weaken the justice of our cause, which is engraved in our exclusive national rights to our land. We are a people of faith. This is the essence of our eternal identity and the secret of our continued existence under all conditions.” [2002]

In Jewish History – Jewish Religion (2nd edition, 2008), Shahak quotes the Chief Chaplain of the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army in 1973: “In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah (Jewish law) to kill even good [Palestinian] civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good” (p. 76).

The tactic of using violence to provoke mass Palestinian flight has been part of Israel’s playbook from its inception. On the eve of Israel’s independence, during 1947-8, Jewish militant groups used terror to provoke the mass departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a sordid process called nakba by the Palestinians (“catastrophe” in Arabic).

Netanyahu’s government aims to repeat the nakba in the Gaza war by forcing Gazans to flee to neighboring Egypt or other parts of the Arab Middle East. However, unlike in 1947-8, the world is watching in real-time, and is expressing outrage at Israel’s blatant attempt at ethnic cleansing. Egypt told Israel and the US in no uncertain terms that it would not be a party to Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and would not accept a flood of Gazan refugees.

The quest for Greater Israel is doomed to fail

Israel’s attempt to violently create a “Greater Israel” will fail. The Israeli Defense Forces are suffering massive losses in the brutal urban warfare in Gaza. While Israel has killed more than 20,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, it has not destroyed Hamas’s capacity to resist Israel’s invasion. IDF leaders say that the battle against Hamas will require many more months, but well before then, global opposition will likely become insurmountable.

In desperation, Israeli leaders such as Defense Minister Benny Gantz want to expand the war to Lebanon and probably to Iran. US hardliners such as Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have dutifully and predictably chimed in, urging a US war with Iran. This Israeli gambit too will likely fail. The US is in no position to fight a wider Middle East war, after having drawn down its stockpile of munitions in Ukraine and Gaza. The American people too strongly oppose another US war, and their opposition will be heard in an election year, even by a Congress in the pocket of the military-industrial complex.

Israel’s diplomatic setbacks, unless reversed, will prove devastating. Israel has hemorrhaged political support worldwide. In a recent UN General Assembly vote, 174 countries, with 94% of the world population, voted in favor of Palestinian political self-determination, while just 4 countries with 4% of the world population – Israel, the United States, Micronesia and Nauru – voted against (another 15 countries abstained or did not vote). Israel’s hardline militarism has united the world against it.

Israel counts entirely now on its one remaining supporter, the United States, but US support is also waning. By a huge margin, 59% for and 19% opposed, Americans support a cease fire. Americans support Israel’s security but not its extremism. Of course, America has its own Christian and Jewish zealots who base their politics on biblical literalism/orthodoxy, but they are a minority of public opinion. American support for Israel depends on the two-state solution. Biden knows it and has reiterated US support for the two-state solution, even as the US supplies munitions for Israel’s war on Gaza.

While American Jews generally support Israel, they do not support Israel’s religious messianism. In a 2020 Pew Survey only 30% of American Jews believed that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” 63% believed in the feasibility of peace between Israel and Palestine through the two-state solution. Only 33% believed as of 2020 that the Israeli government was making sincere efforts towards peace with the Palestinians.

Even Orthodox US Jews are divided on the question of Greater Israel. Some orthodox Jewish communities such as the Chabad are believers in the biblically motivated Greater Israel, while others such as the Satmar community (also known as Naturei Karta) are anti-Zionists and outspoken critics of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people stating that Judaism is a religion not a nation concept. The Satmar community believes that the revival of the Jewish homeland must follow God’s timeline, and not a Zionist timeline.

Supporting Israel’s extremism is not in America’s interest

The US has been providing the munitions for Israel’s brutal war. This complicity has led to a lawsuit by Palestinian plaintiffs charging the US Government with violations of the Genocide Convention. As part of this legal effort, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has methodically documented the genocidal statements by Israeli leaders here and here.

The US is also facing severe and costly diplomatic isolation as it defends Israel’s indefensible actions. In recent votes of the US Security Council and the UN General Assembly, the US has stood almost alone in backing Israel’s hyper-violent and unjust actions. This is hurting the US in countless other areas of foreign policy and global economics.

The US federal budget is also under tremendous stress from military-related spending, which will reach around $1.5 trillion in total in 2024. The American people have had enough of the bulging military spending, which has been a central factor in raising the public debt from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to around 100% of GDP today. With soaring debts and the rise in interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans, the public is resisting Biden’s calls for more deficit spending to fund the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and will vociferously oppose a wider war in the Middle East, especially one that would draw the US into direct combat.

Of course, US open-ended support for Israel has seemed to be unstoppable in American politics. The Israel lobby – a powerful constellation of Israel politicians and wealthy Americans – has played a huge role in building this strong support. The Israel lobby gave $30 million in campaign contributions in the 2022 Congressional election cycle, and will give vastly more in 2024. Yet the lobby is up against the public’s growing opposition to Israel’s brutality in Gaza.

The two-state solution remains Israel’s true chance for peace and it’s security

Israeli leaders and diplomats have to stop shouting that critics are all anti-Semites and listen to what the world is actually saying: Israel and Palestine need to live side by side based on international law and mutual security. The support for a two-state solution is support for the peace and security of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, just as it is support for the peace and security of the Palestinian people in their own state. To the contrary, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and inflaming anti-Israel (and anti-US) sentiment around the world, is antithetical to Israel’s long-term security and perhaps even its survival. The Arab and Islamic states have repeatedly declared their readiness to normalize relations with Israel within the context of the two-state solution. This goes back to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and includes the important Final statement of the extraordinary joint Arab Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, 2023. The US and Arab countries should quickly agree on establishing a joint peacekeeping force to keep both sides safe in the context of implementing the two-state solution.

Many zealous religious settlers will strongly resist a Palestinian state, asserting their right to do so based on ancient biblical texts. Yet the point of Judaism is not to rule over millions of Palestinians or to ethnically cleanse them. The real point is not to provoke global opprobrium but to use reason and goodwill to find peace. As Hillel the Elder declared, “Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.” The real point is to fulfill the ethical vision of the Prophet Isaiah (2:4), who prophesied that “nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So may it be.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.