Israel’s ivory towers of oppression

Mike Phipps reviews Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, by Maya Wind, published by Verso.

MARCH 19, 2024LABOUR HUB EDITORS

In January 2022 undercover Israeli soldiers entered the campus of Birzeit University on the occupied West Bank and opened fire. Ismail Barghouti was shot in the leg and subsequently detained for several weeks, one of dozens of Palestinian university students who are routinely abducted and held by the state every year for activity in, or membership of, one of over 400 student associations Israel deems “unlawful”. Peaceful protests against such practices have also led to beatings and arrests at the hands of Israeli state forces.

At Tel Aviv University, armed, uniformed Israeli soldiers study alongside civilian students. According to a 53-page list of conditions, the teaching faculty must operate in accordance with military restrictions. It’s in this context that the nature of Israeli universities is raised: are they liberal bastions of freedom and democracy or pillars of oppression of the Palestinian people?

The Israeli war machine is integrated into academia in other ways. In December 2008, an Israeli targeted airstrike killed 89 police cadets during their graduation ceremony in the Gaza Strip. The strike was approved by the Department of International Law under the leadership of Colonel Sharvit Baruch, which argued that such cadets could be considered combatants, so the strike was in accordance with international law.

A few weeks later, Tel Aviv University appointed the same colonel to teach a course on international law. In her new role, she applies the Israeli state’s central principle: “What we do becomes the law,” and helps construct “innovative legal interpretations to shield Israel from accountability, often indirect response to international condemnations.” Moreover, classified  data collected on Palestinians by the Israeli police and Shin Bet through illegal interrogation methods and torture are used in university-based research, a practice which would fall foul of an ethics review elsewhere.

Other faculties are similarly complicit. The discipline of archaeology constructs evidence in support of Israeli land claims through the erasure of Arab and Muslim history. This is often done quite crudely: “Israeli excavations in the occupied Ols City of Jerusalem quickly came under criticism by Palestinians and international scholars for their use of bulldozers to dig straight through strata from Arab-Islamic periods, removing findings from Islamic periods and levelling Islamic monuments.” Worse, archaeological research is frequently the pretext for expanding Israeli land settlements.

In the field of Middle East Studies, some scholars hold senior positions in elite military units and departments routinely offer training in regional expertise to the Israeli security state. Attempts to challenge such practices have been branded by university administrations as nothing less than an “internal terrorist attack.”

The author argues that, from its inception, Israel used the construction of universities to cement its territorial conquest of historic Palestine. Moreover, their research advances the work of the Israeli military, with companies like Elbit Systems, which makes warhead-carrying drones, having a very close relationship with the country’s universities. Some of these have developed programmes to enable students to become ‘unofficial ambassadors’ for the country abroad, to challenge the growing Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. Other universities train IDF soldiers directly.

Israeli universities also “systematically disallow critical academic research, teaching and discussion of Israeli settler colonialism.” When Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a respected Palestinian professor at Hebrew University, gave at talk at America’s Columbia University on how Israel uses occupied Palestinian neighbourhoods to test policing, surveillance technologies and weapons before marketing them abroad as combat-proven – a phenomenon Labour Hub explored last year –  her employer responded to the subsequent media uproar by dismissing her scholarly research as “personal opinions.”

In another, more famous case, a student wrote a highly marked master’s thesis on a 1948 massacre of Palestinians. When he was sued for libel by a veterans’ organisation, his university withdrew all legal support and responsibility, forcing him to assemble his own court defence. Since then, the Israeli state is busily reclassifying documents about the forcible expulsion and massacre of Palestinians which accompanied its foundation, precisely so they are not accessible to academic researchers.

But Israeli universities are party to far more physical repression. In 2022, two Palestinian students at Hebrew University, who were sitting on the campus lawn and singing in Arabic, were forcefully escorted off campus by a group of Israeli students, who were also off-duty police officers, handed over to the police for interrogation and subsequently banned from campus for six days.

Elsewhere, Palestinian students allege routine racial profiling and discriminatory practices by campus security guards. Evidence also abounds of unofficial caps on the numbers of Palestinian students admitted, notwithstanding their qualifications. When Palestinian students peacefully protest, universities regularly allow the police onto campus to arrest them and use their own internal disciplinary processes to suppress dissent.

On Palestinian campuses, Israeli military incursions, including the use of live ammunition, are routine. In Israel, peaceful protests by Palestinians are often met by violent counter-protests by Jewish-Israeli students, aided by the police. It’s against this backdrop that the call for an academic boycott is made – not as an abstraction – but as a basis for fundamental change in the way Israel’s universities work.

The repression identified against Palestinian students in this book has obviously intensified since October 2023. During the current onslaught, Israel bombed every single university in Gaza.

On the West Bank, hundreds of students and academics have been arrested for suspected political activities. A number of West Bank universities have announced the deaths of students and academics as a result of Israeli attacks. West Bank academic institutions have been stormed by the Israeli military, including Birzeit University which was vandalized. Restrictions on movement mean many students have lost the right to study on campus and Israel’s periodic shutting down of the internet limits their ability to study remotely.

Maya Wind has done an excellent job of assembling a range of material that should cut through the hogwash about Israel’s universities being somehow above and beyond the political fray. They are clearly vital to the Israeli war machine and ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Why we must speak up for the women of Palestine – Carole Regan

14th March 2024Leave a Commenton Why we must speak up for the women of Palestine – Carole Regan

“The casualties are horrendous and are still increasing. There are 30,800 people who have been killed and 72,298 who have been injured. It is women and children who form more than 70% of those numbers.”

Carole Regan addressed the ‘Rising Women in the Global South – Solidarity Rally #IWD2024’ on International Women’s Day (March 8th). You can read an edited version of her speech or watch the event in full below:

WATCH: ‘Rising Women in the Global South – Solidarity Rally on #IWD2024’ hosted by Arise Festival on March 8th.

I’ve been a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) since 1980s and Ive been to Palestine a number of times. The first time when I was President of the NUT in 1996 and my Union (now the NEU) has continued to support justice for the Palestinians 

I want to begin by reminding ourselves how The International Court of Justice defines the crime of Genocide:

“Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:

(a) Killing members of the group

(b) Causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group

(c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

(e) Forcible transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Republic of South Africa has accused Israel of being guilty of the act of genocide – Israel is undoubtedly guilty – not only in the court in The Hague but in the court of world opinion.

The overwhelming majority of the members of the United Nations and the overwhelming majority of people here in this country are calling for an immediate ceasefire.

The casualties are horrendous and are still increasing. According to figures released this morning (March 8th): There are 30,800 people who have been killed and 72,298 who have been injured. It is women and children who form more than 70% of those numbers.

On International Women’s Day it’s important to remember those thousands of women who have lost their lives under the Israeli brutal occupation. The current toll is two women dying each hour. These women are Workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, reporters, aunties, sisters, grandmothers, and mothers.

They are experiencing absolutely horrendous conditions with no sanitary products, nowhere to wash; and lack of dignity.

We must also remember the 50,000 pregnant women who may have to give birth without medical help, with 5,500 expected to give birth in the next month without proper medical support and the almost 1m women who have been displaced.

Palestinian women have been, and continue to be, in the forefront of the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination and since 1948 resisting the illegal occupation.

Just to mention a few:

Tarab Abdul Hadi, a Palestinian woman born in Jenin in 1910 who founded the Palestinian Women’s Congress which resisted the British Mandate’s occupation of Palestine.

Fatima Bernawi who was amongst some of the first to mobilise against Israeli colonisation and was the first female Palestinian political prisoner serving 10 years in Israeli prisons

In 1936 Palestinian women from Baqa Al-Gharibiyeh stormed a British Mandate prison in response to the mass arrest of Palestinian men by British soldiers, then succeeded in freeing all the prisoners and ending the enforced curfew on the village.

Probably the most well known resistance fighter is Leila Khaled, who was involved in 1969 in the hijacking of TWA flight on its way from Rome to Tel Aviv. She was imprisoned and released later in a hostage deal.

And of course the courageous young Palestinian women at the forefront of the fight today, like Ahed Tamimi who defied Israel’s occupation with a slap that was heard around the world.

Muna El Kurd another brave Palestinian woman whose fearless journalism covering the continued Israeli colonisation and evictions in her neighbourhood, Sheikh Jarrah, led to the Palestinian struggle going viral in 2021. She was honoured as one of TIME Magazine’s most influential people.

Hanan Hroub is recognised as one of the world’s best teachers. Nujoud Merancy one of the leaders of NASAs Orion Spacecraft programme which is planning to send the first woman to the moon this year.

On 11 May 2022, the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead while she was covering a raid by the Israel Defense Forces at the Jenin refugee camp. Despite overwhelming evidence that she was killed by the IDF – no one has been brought to justice.

There are many other women who have been and continue to be part of the Palestinian resistance against occupation.

Most importantly is that without the end of the brutal occupation, girls, women, boys and men will never be able to fulfil their potential, their dreams, their aspirations – which is why we need to:

Continue to build solidarity with the Palestinian people;

Demand an immediate ceasefire;

Support the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

---

• This article is an edited version of the speech given by Carole Regan, speaking on behalf of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, to the ‘Rising Women in the Global South – Solidarity Rally #IWD2024’hosted by Arise Festival on International Women’s Day. You can watch the event in full here.
• You can follow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.

Was Jesus vegetarian? New ‘Christspiracy’ documentary says yes.

FISH ARE NOT VEGETARIAN, 

CHRIST'S FOLLOWERS WERE FISHERMEN

'He was one of the most hardcore animal activists,' one of the filmmakers told RNS.

Filmmakers Kip Andersen, left, and Kameron Waters, right, with a rescuer and a lamb in a scene from "Christspiracy." (Image courtesy Christspiracy)

March 18, 2024
By Kathryn Post


(RNS) — Is there an ethical or spiritual way to kill an animal?

That’s the question that animates “Christspiracy: The Spirituality Secret,” the forthcoming documentary that suggests Jesus and many of his early followers opposed the killing and eating of animals. This bombshell truth, the filmmakers argue, is part of “the biggest coverup in the last 2,000 years.”

The film’s premise may be controversial, but the minds behind it are no strangers to contention. Filmmaker Kip Andersen also co-created the hit documentaries “Seaspiracy,” “Cowspiracy” and “What the Health,” provocative exposés of the fishing, dairy and meat industries. These earlier films garnered countless views and plenty of backlash — but indisputably left an impression.

Still, by adding religion to the mix, Andersen expects to upset even more people. According to a Kickstarter campaign, which has raised a little over $433,000 of its $300,000 goal, the filmmakers claim they parted ways with Netflix after the platform asked for redactions from the film. Andersen said this led him and fellow filmmaker Kameron Waters to buy back the rights to their film.

Waters told RNS in an email that the pair “wanted to tell the story the way it was unfolding.” Netflix, he claimed, wanted to go a different direction, including “some particular parts they preferred cut that we didn’t agree with as we feel they are vital to the narrative, especially around Christ.”


Poster for “Christspiracy.” (Image courtesy Christspiracy)

On Wednesday (March 20), the film will show in a one-night-only event in over 650 theaters worldwide; in the U.S., the film will also show on March 24.

Seven years in the making, the fast-paced film tracks Andersen, a self-described “quasi-spiritual Buddhist yogi,” and Waters, a onetime Southern Baptist and gospel musician, as they seek new insights about the compatibility of religion and meat eating. The pair go from investigating a Kosher farm in Israel to tracking a cow-smuggling truck in New Delhi, examining the spiritual frameworks people employ while eating, farming, selling and slaughtering animals.

Amid the film’s many action shots, its through-line is the case for Christ’s opposition to eating and killing animals. The evidence includes an interpretation of Jesus’ well-documented cleansing of the temple. Animal theologian Andrew Linzey and James Tabor, a retired religious studies professor from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, suggest in the documentary that the temple was operating as a commercial slaughterhouse in Jesus’ time. When the gospels record Jesus calling the temple a den of thieves, he’s quoting Jeremiah 7, a passage that references idols and animal sacrifice. In the film, Oxford scholar Deborah Rooke translates the Hebrew word “parits,” often interpreted as “thieves,” as meaning “violent one.” This, the film claims, shows that Jesus was condemning animal sacrifice.

“The fact that four days before he was crucified, he goes in and shuts down the temple to basically stop animal sacrifice … he was one of the most hardcore animal activists, the ‘OG’ animal activist,” Andersen told RNS in a Zoom call.

In the documentary, the filmmakers say Jesus not only sacrificed his life for humans, “but to stop the killing of animals as well.”

In another part of the film, Keith Akers, an activist and author of “The Lost Religion of Jesus” (2000), refers to early sources that characterize Jesus’ brother James and cousin John the Baptist as vegetarian. “Jesus is simply carrying on the family tradition,” he says.

The film also cites early descriptions of the Ebionites, a sect that described Jesus as an opponent of animal sacrifice who refused to eat lamb during Passover. According to the 4th-century bishop Epiphanius, who condemned the Ebionites, the group also denied the divinity of Christ. Some scholars, including Robert Eisenman, also featured in the film, have characterized the Ebionites as followers of Jesus’ brother, James.

The documentary suggests that this vegetarian sect, along with two other 4th-century sects, the Nazoraeans and Nasaraeans, are all rooted in the original Jesus movement. And with added scriptural context, including apparent critiques of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, John the Baptist’s choice of baptism instead of animal sacrifice and Jesus’ quoting of the Hosea passage “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” in the Gospel of Matthew, the filmmakers conclude that the authentic Jesus movement opposed the killing and eating of animals.

“It’s so overwhelmingly obvious when you see this all put together that not only did he not eat animals, that this Nazarene movement he was part of were fiercely against killing animals,” Andersen told RNS.


Filmmakers Kip Andersen, left, and Kameron Waters. “Christspiracy.” (Photos courtesy Christspiracy)

Tabor told RNS that when Jesus was growing up, “the normal assumption” would be that, as a Jew, Jesus consumed lamb during Passover. “But once he starts preaching or teaching, it’s entirely possible … that he began to have a new covenant view of (eating animals),” he said.

Yii-Jan Lin, a New Testament professor at Yale Divinity School, said there were many Christian sects spawned from the Jesus movement, and we can’t say whether these, in particular, “represent Jesus correctly.”

She added that it seems strange that Jesus and his early followers would be against animal sacrifice, given the Gospels’ analogy of Jesus as the paschal lamb. “Jesus is upheld as the quintessential animal sacrifice. That becomes part of the entire early Christian allegory around his death,” she said.

RELATED: Vegetarian or vegan? What about lab-grown beef? Hindus follow scriptures for diet advice

The film goes on to discredit the many stories of Jesus eating or distributing fish, saying the fish references are later additions, mistranslations or metaphors. Finally, the film features scholars who suggest Jesus did not eat lamb for Passover at The Last Supper and who emphasize that God’s Genesis command for humans to have “dominion” over creation is a mistranslation that ought to be read as “stewardship.”

All of this leads the filmmakers to conclude that the true, vegetarian form of Christianity was overshadowed by the version promoted by Paul, who did eat meat.

“It becomes obvious that in full context, the story is that God’s creatures are to be protected and honored and that we have fallen away when we don’t do that,” Waters told RNS.

Aerial view of thousands of sacrificed animals during the Gadhimai festival in Nepal, documented in “Christspiracy.” (Image courtesy Christspiracy)

Though the claims about Christ are the focal point, the bulk of the film explores the spiritual methods and frameworks employed in the killing of animals today. For the filmmakers, witnessing the unnecessary deaths of countless animals was the most difficult part of the process.

In one scene, the team records the Gadhimai festival, a Hindu festival in Nepal where tens of thousands of animals are slaughtered. The event was disturbing both because of the sheer number of animals killed, according to Andersen, and because it shed light on how many more animals are killed behind closed doors in “the West.”

For Waters, the most challenging scene was at Polyface Farms in Virginia, where Waters filmed a rabbit being hung upside-down and killed, while a child looked on.

“I could have done something if I wasn’t filming, but I knew that I had to film it to be able to show what the reality is,” said Waters.

By the end, the filmmakers reason that all religions, at their root, value compassion for all beings. Religious systems that uphold eating animals aren’t representative of their own foundational Scriptures or leaders, and believers who kill and eat animals are, consciously or not, missing the point of their own religions.

For Lin, the documentary’s evidence about Christ’s opposition to killing animals, though interesting, doesn’t prove anything definitively. And drilling down to try to pinpoint the historical Jesus’ original beliefs regarding animals is a task that’s both elusive, she said, and unnecessary.

“I think we can make ethical arguments just fine from the 21st century against eating animals,” said Lin. “We don’t actually need the historical Jesus to be against eating animals.”

Tabor was more persuaded: “I also have come to a similar conclusion of the film, that there was a version of the Jesus movement that was definitely vegetarian, but probably vegan,” he told RNS.

For Waters, his many years researching and creating the film have strengthened his convictions that Jesus would have looked out for the last and the least, including animals.

“It’s only deepened my faith,” Waters said about the film. “My faith has always been to aim to be Christlike. I feel now I have a better picture … of what that looks like, now that I know what it means with our relationship and our connection to animals.”

Whitewashing Israel, Dehumanizing Palestinians: Past and Present

Over the decades there have been two main lines of argument in the western world in favor of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. One I shall call moderate and the other I will call hardline.

By Chris Green

March 17, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif, Creative Commons 4.0

The moderate line, coming from more progressive forces among ruling elites, has given unwavering support to Israel’s genocidal bombing and blockade of Gaza while adopting a measure of rhetorical recognition of Palestinian humanity. The prime example of this tendency recently has come from the Biden administration. The administration continues to sanction the massive, unhindered flow of weapons from the US facilitating Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza and has vetoed UN resolutions that might begin the process of stopping Israel’s massacres. They have also furthered the genocide by defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Gazan population’s last remaining resource for significant humanitarian aid, based on very thin Israeli accusations that a handful of UNRWA employees were involved with Hamas’s crimes on October 7th. At the same time Biden has decried Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza; Vice President Kamala Harris has made noises about the need for another temporary “humanitarian” pause to the bombing similar to the one last November; the administration has leaked numerous reports that Biden is very upset with Netanyahu’s savagery; and the administration, for public relations purposes, has facilitated aid drops in Gaza, which are totally meaningless and puny compared to the scale of the problem. The Biden team has also sometimes uttered fine words about achieving a two state solution for the realization of Palestinian rights. However the idea of a Palestinian state has long been a sick joke as Israel has continued to massively expand its settlement blocks in the occupied West Bank and integrate them within Israel proper.

The hardline argument, launched mostly by Republicans, is openly racist and leaves little room for accepting Palestinians as fully human. For example, Florida Republican congressman Brian Mast has insisted that there are no “innocent” Palestinian babies in Gaza. His colleague, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, said “kill em all”–Ogles’s spokesperson later claimed he was referring to Hamas, not Palestinian children, although he made his shocking statement as a direct response to a pro-Palestinian protestor who was belaboring him about the deaths of Palestinian babies caused by Israel.

Jason Rantz: A Hardline Zionist

Purveyors of the hardline argument dispense with the slightest nuance. Israel is completely good and the Palestinians are barbarians: many ordinary Palestinians are indistinguishable from Hamas rapists and baby killers. Last month, Seattle right wing talk radio demagogue (and Fox News contributor) Jason Rantz explained that “Palestinians are not synonymous with Hamas. But only a fool pretends there’s no overlap for a significant portion of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Rantz dismisses the idea that Palestinians are oppressed by Israel as a total fantasy, one constructed out of thin air by infantile twenty-something left wing activists looking to relieve boredom and make themselves appear important. Rantz says:

“Seattle activists…created marginalized Palestinian people suffering from Jewish oppression because they see Jews as white, thus easy to demonize. Their marches give them something to do on weekends when they’re otherwise alone…. waiting for the next Starbucks shift to start.”

Rantz implies that he believes that Palestinians have absolutely zero justice on their side. He asserts that the settlement of Palestine by Zionist settlers in the early 20th century was not a settler-colonial enterprise because:

“Jews have deeply rooted ties to Israel that date back over 3,000 years. Zionism was not about colonizing a foreign land but about the return to an ancestral homeland as recognized by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and later by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922.”

Furthermore, opines Rantz, it is false to say that, prior to October 7th, Israel was conducting a military occupation of Gaza. That ended in 2005.

According to Rantz, Seattle homosexual activists expressing solidarity with Palestinians are motivated by “blatant anti-semitism, historical ignorance or both.” They ignore Hamas’s homophobia, as well as deny or downplay the atrocities like the mass rapes it supposedly carried out on October 7th. Like fellow Seattle right wing talk radio host Ari Hoffman, Rantz has been busy using his radio show to doxx and incite harassment against pro-Palestinian Seattle area high school teachers, college students and professors, particularly those who question Israel’s mass rape narrative about October 7th. In typical Zionist fashion, he has been recklessly throwing around accusations of anti-semitism.

Meanwhile, according to Rantz (himself a gay man doing a bit of pinkwashing), while gay Seattle activists side with the Palestinians, “Israel is the only Middle East country with constitutional, employment and other codified LGBT rights.”

Some uncontroversial facts should be noted at this point in response to Rantz’s arguments. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine was nearly 90 percent Palestinian and most of the territory’s indigenous Jewish population was anti-Zionist. The latter were Haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews, who believed it was unscriptural to create a Jewish state before the coming of the messiah It is true that Israel evacuated its settlements from Gaza in 2005 but in 2007 also launched an air, sea and land military blockade of Gaza, tightly limiting the flow of goods and people in and out of the territory. Under such conditions, the Gazan economy was non-existent and the territory was completely dependent on outside aid, with its civilian infrastructure regularly destroyed every few years by Israeli bombardment. It is true that Israel has codified LGBT rights but it is also true that Palestinians have had no civil rights whatsoever under Israeli military rule since 1967, enduring constant extrajudicial killings, torture, detention without trial, mass destruction of housing and agricultural resources like olive trees, massive theft of land and KKK type pogroms from Jewish settlers. Even within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the country’s Palestinian citizens (nearly 20 percent of Israel’s total population) face substantial institutionalized discrimination.

With rare exceptions, both moderates and hardliners refrain from endorsing Israel’s massacre of civilians, with moderates expressing much more rhetorical concern about civilian deaths while the hardliners demonize Israel’s victims as terrorists. Both moderates and hardliners deny the obvious fact that Israel deliberately kills civilians and has done so on a massive scale long before October 7th. Both claim that Israel only kills civilians because Hamas hides its military command centers, weapons and other features of its sinister terror operations among civilians in hospitals, schools, refugee caravans and the like. Before October 7th, Israel could never provide substantial evidence that Hamas (or the PLO before it) was using “human shields” and the evidence it has presented since its latest attack on Gaza began has been shown to be very flimsy by the Washington Post, among others. Prominent Israel supporters have also floated pernicious and transparently false claims such as that there is currently no starvation in Gaza.

Whitewashing Israel:1930’s-40’s

Throughout the history of the Zionist presence in Palestine there have also been a hardline and moderate line of argument defending that presence. The hardline variant saw Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of western civilization amongst brown-skinned savages in the Middle East. Winston Churchill was an example of this tendency–he advocated for Zionism on the ground that it was an iteration of European settler colonialism. In 1937, he testified before Britain’s Peel Commission about his role as a cabinet minister two decades earlier in formally establishing Zionist colonization of Palestine under British oversight. When asked if Palestinains had a right to have a voice in the future of their land as the British facilitated the takeover of it by Jewish settlers, Churchill replied:

“I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Similar social darwinist thinking was evinced by the prominent American newspaper columnist and social critic H.L. Mencken in the 1942 publication of Heathen Days, the third volume of his autobiography. In the book Mencken recalled his 1934 journey to Palestine. He wrote that “the Arabs of the Holy Land, like those of the other Mediterranean countries, are probably the dirtiest, orneriest, and most shiftless people who regularly make the first pages of the world’s press.” Mencken contrasted Palestine’s modern, flourishing farms (“broad and smiling fields”) operated by Jewish settlers against the territory’s Palestinian farmers living in extreme poverty, residing in “squalid huts” and working their lands with stone age tools. Mencken noted that Zionist propaganda had portrayed Jewish settlement in Palestine as having a beneficial civilizational effect on the backward Arabs. Jewish settlement was supposed to help turn Palestine’s Arabs into “competent and successful farmers,” Mencken wrote. However this did not happen except in a handful of cases. Palestinians were stuck in “ancient shiftlessness and imbecility.” Their violent resistance to Jewish settlement was due to their “congenital unfitness” to compete with “their betters,” the Jewish settlers.

The racist brutality of the rhetoric of conservatives like Churchill and Mencken was in contrast to the progressive veneer of the rhetoric of most supporters of the Zionist project in the 1940’s. Those supporters were predominantly on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum, although the nature of their pro-Zionist rhetoric sometimes varied, incorporating both a hardline and moderate tone. Sarah Kaplan discusses the nature of this support in her 2018 book Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. She describes the composition of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry launched by the British and American governments in 1946 to study the problems of Palestine. One member of the Committee was Frank Buxton, editor of the Boston Herald, who described Jewish settlement of Palestine as similar to the European subjugation of the American Indian–a process of what he felt was a superior people displacing a more primitive one. Another member was Bartley Crum, civil rights activist, journalist and lawyer for the Hollywood Ten. Crum prattled about the great civilizational benefits Jewish settlement had brought Palestinians; the Zionists were guilty of no maltreatment of Palestinians. According to Crum, the only reason the latter opposed Jewish colonization of Palestine was that they were manipulated to do so by feudal Arab lords and the British government.

Other American progressives in the 1940’s were impressed by Israel’s partially socialist economic experiments such as the kibbutz collective farms and moshav cooperatives. Kaplan notes that one of these was I.F. Stone of The Nation magazine. Stone became a harsh critic of Israel after the 1967 war but in 1948 was a staunch Zionist. He was oblivious to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 persons that Israel carried out against Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Stone was somewhat vague in his thinking on Palestinian refugees but it appeared he accepted at face value Israel’s claim that Palestinians fled not because of ethnic cleansing but because the Arab armies attacking Israel had ordered them to do so. As Israel was getting on its feet as an independent nation, he lauded the Jewish state’s “mixed economy, voluntary farm collectives, {and] network of cooperatives.” Israel was a state where “socialist devices and democratic method could be combined, social justice achieved without sacrifice of individual freedom.”

Within Israel itself, the classic moderate Zionist was the country’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion, Tom Segev notes in his 2019 biography of the man, shared the belief present in the Zionist movement from the late 19th century onward that Palestine had to be emptied of as many Arabs as possible and Jews settled in their place. As secretary of the Histadrut, Palestine’s Jewish Agency’s labor union, in the 1920’s, Ben Gurion led in advocating the policy of Hebrew Labor, intimidating Palestine’s Jewish employers into hiring only Jewish workers and excluding Arabs.

Ben Gurion liked to juxtapose the civilized, mainstream Zionist movement he headed with the fascist, hardline revisionist Zionists. The latter included Irgun and the Stern Gang, two terrorist groups led, respectively, by future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. When Irgun and the Stern Gang massacred 250 Arab villagers at Deir Yassin in April 1948, Ben Gurion condemned the atrocity–but later refused his Justice Minister’s request that the perpetrators be prosecuted. In other cases, he was privately distressed by reports of Israeli forces carrying out murder, rape and looting against Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and ordered war crimes tribunals set up to try the perpetrators. Similarly Ben Gurion privately indicated to his cabinet his desire to see a proper criminal prosecution of those members of Israel’s Border Police who massacred 48 Palestinian citizens of Israel in the village Kafr Qasim in October 1956. A number of the perpetrators received prison sentences ranging from seven to seventeen years but all were out of prison by the end of the 1950’s, assisted by pardons from Israel’s President Yitzhak Ben Zvi.

By Segev’s description, Ben Gurion’s ideal ethnic cleansing operation was the removal of Palestinian inhabitants from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Ben Gurion personally ordered this operation and it was carried out in what he thought was a civilized manner. The inhabitants packed up their belongings, got on buses or were forced to walk toward the front lines of the Arab armies, being spirited away from their homes forever, with no physical violation of their persons by Israeli soldiers

Gaza vs. Dresden

Some–like former Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennett in his venomous, thuggish way–have sought to defend Israel’s slaughter in Gaza by comparing it to the Allied carpet bombing of German cities like Dresden during World War II which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The argument goes that the Allies killed civilians en masse in retaliating against Germany for starting a murderous war just as Israel is retaliating against Hamas for the atrocities of October 7th.

On January 11th, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s history and education departments, referenced the Gaza-Dresden connection in an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He gave his opinion as to whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza:

“No. A thousand times no. Saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is like saying the Allies committed it in Dresden. It confuses actions with motives. And it makes a mockery of the real genocide Jews and so many others — including Armenians and Cambodians — have suffered.”

In denying that Israel is committing genocide, Zimmerman shows he is blind to many things. But being a moderate as opposed to a hardline thinker, he allows that it is “entirely reasonable” to believe that the level of killing Israel has perpetrated is “disproportionate to its own suffering in the Oct. 7th attack by Hamas.” And he notes that although the Allied terror bombing of German cities during World War II was intended to undermine the support of ordinary Germans for Hitler, it actually increased that support. He fears something similar is happening in Gaza with support for Hamas and similar groups hardening under Israeli bombardment and blockade.

The Israeli military has a set of principles similar to the World War II policy of the Allies of deliberately bombing enemy civilians and civilian infrastructure on a massive scale. It is called the Dahiya doctrine, which describes how the Israeli military deliberately harms civilians so as to compel the latter to pressure their leaders to bow to Israel’s demands. In responding to the utilization of Allied World War II bombing of civilians as a defense for Israel’s crimes, it is important to point out a few things. As British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft points out in his 2021 book Churchill’s Shadow: The Lives and Afterlife of Winston Churchill, the Allied bombing of German civilians and civilian infrastructure had no effect on German warmaking prowess. German industrial output of weapons and munitions increased steadily until the end of 1944. Even after that point, German industrial plants still operated at 80 percent capacity. Also, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by military forces was codified as war crimes by the four Geneva Conventions signed by Western countries (and Israel) in 1949.

The apocalyptic war crimes Israel has visited upon Gaza have been thus far counterproductive to Israel’s stated goals of destroying Hamas and securing the release of the hostages Hamas took on October 7th. Hamas has suffered no visible dent in its operational capacity and a majority of the hostages are still captive.

Of course, Israel’s primary goal in making war upon Gaza’s people is not to protect its own civilians but to ensure Zionist supremacy over all of Palestine and to terrorize Palestinians into submission, forcing them to abandon their quest for dignity and nationhood.

STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE

A New Alliance Could Change Puerto Rican Politics

The Citizens’ Victory Movement and the Puerto Rican Independence Party are forming a coalition called La Alianza. Their goal: a radical shift in Puerto Rican politics.

By Rafael Bernabe, Ed Morales 

March 16, 2024

Source: Jacobin

Photo by José Fuentes



Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since the 1898 Spanish-American War. It had only US-appointed governors until 1948, and in 1952, Congress passed a joint resolution that approved its first constitution, which provided for limited autonomy. It would become a “Commonwealth,” but the island remained an unincorporated territory that lacked sovereignty and full rights afforded to US citizens, despite the fact that residents of Puerto Rico were granted citizenship in 1917.

Since then, the island’s politics have revolved around three political parties whose platforms are focused on its political status: the pro-Commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PDP), the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), and the pro-sovereign Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP). Beginning in the 1930s, a series of uprisings by nationalist forces have been met with repression by US agencies (notably the FBI, which maintained extensive files of suspected “subversives”), minimizing the voter base for the Independence Party and creating a two-party duopoly consisting of the PDP and PNP.
In the 2010s, the combination of Congress’s imposition of a Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) to restructure Puerto Rico’s $72 billion debt and the devastating natural disaster of Hurricane Maria had the effect of shaking the island’s residents’ faith in the two-party duopoly.

The FOMB made it clear that the local government was not in charge of the island’s finances, neutering the Commonwealth’s illusory autonomy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) poor response to Maria made Puerto Ricans doubt the pro-statehood party. As a result, a new, possibly game-changing element will be a feature of the elections in Puerto Rico this November. The newly created Citizens’ Victory Movement (MVC) and the PIP will form a coalition (called La Alianza) to pool their growing constituency in an attempt to further erode, if not destroy, the existing two-party system comprised of the PNP and PDP.

Earlier this year, I visited Puerto Rico and sat down with the MVC’s Rafael Bernabe, who was elected as senator at-large in 2020, engaging in a dialogue with him about the new alliance. The following is an edited version of our conversation.
Forming the Alliance

Ed Morales

The deterioration of Puerto Rico’s economy and the US Congress’s imposition of the FOMB to manage the $72 billion debt crisis has led to Puerto Rico’s people losing faith in its traditional electoral politics. What are the conditions that lead to the emergence of the alliance between the MVC and the PIP?

Rafael Bernabe

When you look at what has happened in the past fifteen years in Puerto Rico, it’s not too hard to see the reason La Alianza came about. The economy of Puerto Rico went into a very deep depression in 2005. If you look at the numbers, the economy of Puerto Rico has been in a depression. We have had fifteen years of economic stagnation, no growth whatsoever. About two hundred thousand jobs have vanished; thousands of people have had to leave the island because they can’t find them. They can’t live here. And at the same time, you have all of these terrible corruption cases in the government. The result of that crisis (which people feel very deeply), the fact that the two major parties have not been able to offer any alternative to that crisis, and that they are increasingly corrupt machines has meant that the support for these two political parties is decreasing sharply.

These parties combined used to get around 97 percent of the votes between them. The PIP got 3 percent, and they got the rest. And now that’s down to like 64 percent: the PNP gets 33 percent; the PPD got 31 percent. These political parties have basically collapsed over the past ten years. In 2016, [ousted former governor] Ricky Rosselló won the governorship with 42 percent of the vote, which was already low enough, and then he was not even able to complete his term because the people got so fed up with his government that they mobilized and they overthrew him. It’s the closest thing we’ve had to a revolution in Puerto Rico. People were in the street mobilizing for twenty days nonstop and forced the governor to resign. In the election in 2017, the PIP jumped from 3 percent to 14 percent. And the MVC, which was participating for the first time, gets 14 percent, which is an indication that people are very much open to new alternatives. So the rise of the vote for the MVC and for the people is very much part of the same process, because many of the people who were on the streets trying to get rid of him were seeking new alternatives. Now that we are in an alliance, we have come together in one single force.

Ed Morales

Has there been any inspiration from these types of alliances that have happened in multiparty democracies in Europe and Latin America?

Rafael Bernabe

In Uruguay, there’s the Frente Amplio, which includes many parties of the Left that governed Uruguay for a long time. Some of us may not necessarily agree with exactly the policies or the lines adopted by the Frente Amplio, but the notion of an alliance of the Left parties, yeah, that’s an inspiration. And we know that alliances of parties of the Left are rather common, have been experienced and tried out in many places around the world.

Ed Morales

The last time we talked, about a year ago, you talked about legal strategies to formalize an official alliance. Have you exhausted those legal strategies?

Rafael Bernabe

Well, the situation is as follows: up until 2011, this type of political alliance in general elections in Puerto Rico was legal. It was not uncommon in the past for that to happen in New York, for example, where you could have the same candidate in the column of different political parties. Going back to the 1930s, there was an alliance between the Socialist Party and the Republican Party, and it was called a coalition. Alliances or coalitions like these were eliminated in 2011 when they rewrote the electoral law in Puerto Rico. Back then, they prohibited having the same candidate in several columns. After the 2020 elections, the PIP and the MVC became interested in forming a coalition or an alliance. So we knew we had to deal with that prohibition.

The first angle of attack was to enact legislation to reform the law so that it would go back to the way it was before this prohibition. But the PNP and PDP majority are not interested in facilitating us having an alliance, so they blocked that, and there was no chance that they would approve the legal reestablishment of the possibility of having an alliance.

The second angle of attack was to challenge this prohibition in the courts. We argued that this prohibition is a violation of the right of association and the right of free expression, and that there’s no reason why the state should prohibit two parties from forming an alliance in the electoral process. And the courts ruled against us. It’s really an absurd ruling, holding that even though we do have a right to associate, the state has the right to limit such rights if there’s enough reason for doing so. And they decided that there was enough reason because allowing for a candidate to appear in the column of more than one party would generate confusion in the electorate and would lend itself to some sort of manipulation of the voter. So they’re basically saying that people are too dumb in Puerto Rico to understand something that is done everywhere else. We appealed to the appellate court, which ruled similarly. So we were left with the other option, which is to work around the law.

Ed Morales

In [MVC leader and former Puerto Rico representative] Manuel Natal Albelo’s explanatory address at the MVC Assembly in December he referred to a “no competition” arrangement, and a fraternal competition. Could you describe those?

Rafael Bernabe

We cannot establish officially an alliance between the two parties, but we can come to an agreement, which would make it a de facto alliance. A very clear example is in the race for the mayor of San Juan. In cases such as this, we run a candidate, in this case Manuel Natal, and the PIP doesn’t run a candidate. We call on our people and the PIP people and everybody else to vote for the candidate of the MVC. The same thing happens, for example, in Caguas, the other way around — we don’t have a candidate for mayor of Caguas. The PIP has one, and then over there we vote for the candidate of the PIP.

It’s a little bit more problematic regarding the national posts, the governor and the resident commissioner, because in the case of the governor, the electoral law forces all parties to have a candidate in order to participate in the elections. So in that case, the MVC agreed that the gubernatorial candidate of the alliance is going to be Juan Dalmau, who is the candidate for the PIP. We are calling on everybody to vote for Juan Dalmau, but the law forces us to have a candidate of the MVC. We have a candidate for governor, Javier Cordova, and he’s officially the candidate for governor of the MVC. But he’s telling people, don’t vote for me, vote for Dalmau, who is the candidate of the alliance.

There are other cases in which, for whatever reason, we were not able to come to an agreement. There are towns in which the people are going to have a candidate for mayor and we are going to have a candidate for mayor; they’re going to compete. And the idea is that we are not going to compete in a negative way. It’s a fraternal competition. We basically allow people to vote for whoever they want to vote for.

Ed Morales

I see in the local press there is this derogatory term, “candidatos de agua” (“water candidates”), that refer to candidates who are not asking for votes. What does that mean?

Rafael Bernabe

That’s a term that you use traditionally for candidates who are placed on the ballot because they want a placeholder. But in this case, it’s not really a candidato de agua, because Cordova is fulfilling a role. We prefer to call it a spokesperson candidate or canidato portavoz, a candidate who is carrying the message of La Alianza. We have several people who are aspiring to the post of resident commissioner, but it’s almost sure it’s going to be Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, my fellow senator. The PIP has somebody who is their candidate for resident commissioner, but that candidate is supporting the vote for Ana.

The other element of the alliance is that Puerto Rico has eight senatorial districts. Each one of them elects two senators. So you have sixteen senators elected from all over the island and in each senatorial district, and a voter can vote for two candidates. If you live in Arecibo, you can vote for two candidates to the Senate and so on. In each one of those eight districts, the PIP and the MVC are each presenting one candidate, so it’s split halfway. If you live in San Juan, you can vote for the candidate of the PIP and the candidate of the MVC. Instead of having two candidates for the PIP and two candidates for the MVC, we have one and one. So the people vote for one of the MVC and one of the PIP. And that’s basically how it’s organized.

Ed Morales

But it’s still a victory for you if one of the two candidates wins.

Rafael Bernabe

Yeah, absolutely. We think we have a good chance of winning in some municipalities. And there are other municipalities in which both parties are relatively weak. So we both have candidates and most probably neither of them is going to win. The fact that we have two candidates is not really preventing us from winning in a municipality that we would otherwise win. And in the most significant contests, we have agreed to support either candidate, one candidate of the PIP or the MVC.
Possible Victory

Ed Morales

So the goal is to continue to raise awareness that the prevailing two-party duopoly is not working, and more and more people are feeling dissatisfied with it.

Rafael Bernabe

You could clearly see that with Natal — if you go by the official results, he lost the election for mayor of San Juan by around two thousand votes. He almost won. And many of us think that he won. It was just stolen.

Ed Morales

What is the basis for saying that it was stolen?

Rafael Bernabe

Because there were a lot of irregularities, particularly regarding the absentee ballots and mail-in ballots There were a lot of problems with that, and we denounced it at the time, and it was a matter of much discussion afterward. But regardless, let’s assume that he lost by three thousand votes. If he had gotten the votes that the PIP candidate got, he would’ve won. So he stands a very good chance of winning the majority of San Juan in the capital city, and that would be a major thing.

In the 2020 elections, the MVC candidate for governor got 14 percent of the vote. Dalmau, the PIP candidate, got 14 percent of the vote. Those two added to 28 percent of the vote. [Current governor] Pedro Pierluisi won the governor’s race with 33 percent of the vote. So again, it’s within reach. If Dalmau were to get an increase in votes greater than these two parties combined receiving the last elections, which he could very well do, he could become the next governor.

It’s not easy. I cannot say it’s even probable, but it’s quite possible. There are also district candidates for the legislature that have a very good chance of getting elected. Eva Prados was a candidate of ours in the last elections, and she lost by a very slim margin and is now running as a candidate of the alliance. She has a very good chance of getting elected. Rosa Segui, who worked with me here, was a candidate for the Senate. She did very well, and now she’s running as part of the alliance and also has a very good chance of getting elected. So it’s going to be a very close, interesting race. It’s not like in the past, when the Left and the progressive forces just ran to bring a message and educate people on certain ideas and raise awareness. There’s a real chance that we are going to win many important races this time.

Ed Morales

And so how would it work in the legislature? The last time we talked, you described some elements of La Alianza were already working in the legislature, right?

Rafael Bernabe

Through the last three years of legislative work here in the capital, we have been collaborating: the PIP, us, and an independent senator, Vargas Vidot. So the PIP, Vargas Vidot, and us most of the time agree on just about everything, all the issues, and we work together. We vote in the same way and so on. So we are practicing the alliance already in terms of what we do here in the capital. Now we’re trying to do it more widely.

Ed Morales

What is your take on the PIP? It’s not just focusing on the status issue; it has been focused on a left progressive position, and I guess the idea that independence would bring an opportunity for more leftism and progressivism.

Rafael Bernabe

The independence movement for the longest time is not a movement that’s limited to the goal of making Puerto Rico independent. It’s very much involved in all sorts of social struggles: the labor movement, the environmental movement, the student movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement, and so on. So most of the independence movement is very much active in all of these struggles. The MVC has the particularity that there are many independentistas in it, but not everybody is an independentista. We include people who are not independentista, but most of the people who are in the MVC are also active in all sorts of other social struggles. The agenda of both movements includes the colonial question and the status question, and the need to determine how we are going to define or redefine the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, but includes all sorts of issues as well, like the fight against privatization and the defense of the environment.

One indication of how significant this possibility of the alliance is, is the fact that you have this very strong effort organized by the business class. Last March, many important members of the Puerto Rican business sector organized a super PAC called Democracia es Prosperidad (Democracy Is Prosperity) to gather funds and intervene in the elections. The official reason for this super PAC is to combat what they think is the threat of forces that want to limit free enterprise in Puerto Rico. They’re very afraid of La Alianza because they know that we have presented legislation to increase the minimum wage, eliminate the subminimum wage of the people who receive tips in Puerto Rico, and reestablish many labor rights that were eliminated back in 2017 when they approved this labor reform law.

If La Alianza wins or gets a lot of votes, important social and labor legislation is going to be approved, and they want to avoid that. Until recently, these business sectors were happy to rely on the PDP and the PNP to defend their interests. They have this whole campaign against La Alianza, saying that this is a socialist alliance. There has been a Left in Puerto Rico for the longest time, and they didn’t feel that threatened, but now they do.
Building a Platform

Ed Morales

In terms the messaging, this idea of attacking corruption seems to be the main messaging I hear in the media. But are you using that a lot to just get people’s attention so you can also talk about things like decolonization?

Rafael Bernabe

The alliance as a whole and the MVC in particular have varied interests. Depending who you talk to, you will see a different emphasis. You need to fight corruption, and you need to have people who are honest occupying government posts. But if you talk with Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, that’s not her main issue. She talks a lot about women’s rights, about reproductive rights, about the fight against racism, the fight against transphobia and homophobia and so on and so forth. I tend to emphasize more labor issues, labor rights and trade-union rights and so on and so forth. And Mariana Nogales, who’s a representative in the House, emphasizes environmental questions. The MVC and PIP have supported measures protecting the University of Puerto Rico and defending public education from the projects of privatization. I would say that corruption is an issue, but by no means is our campaign reduced to the question of corruption.

Ed Morales

Sometimes much of the anti-corruption narrative comes from the Feds and the FBI, who carry out these investigations.

Rafael Bernabe

I guess there is an element that they don’t want their money stolen. The United States sends millions of dollars to Puerto Rico. So there’s a problem there. I understand that if they are going to send some money, it’s supposed to be used for certain things. There’s a problem if you tolerate violation of the law, and it’s also true that a lot of people see them in a positive light, given the fact that the Puerto Rico government agencies have not been up to what they should be doing regarding these things. Many of the investigations carried out by federal agencies could have been carried out by Puerto Rican agencies, but they weren’t.

Ed Morales

You’ve said that the degree of leftism and progressivism between the two parties is very similar. That is to say one party is not necessarily more about socialism or workers’ rights than the other?

Rafael Bernabe

I would say neither party is a socialist party. They are both prolabor, pro–women’s rights, and pro–LGBTQ rights. They both defend that public services should be essential, that services should be publicly owned, and the guarantee that includes electricity, water, education, and health. Both parties support the creation of public health system. These are by any account left-wing parties, progressive parties, whichever term you want to use.

In the MVC, there are people who are socialists, myself included, and everybody knows that we are socialists and it’s no secret, but there are many people who are not socialists. And we agree to struggle for certain immediate reforms and things that working people need to defend the environment, that we need to defend women’s rights and so on and so forth. As a socialist, when I have the opportunity and the occasion, I explain why I am against capitalism. I think in the end we have to abolish capitalism in order to solve our fundamental problems. But I always make it clear that I’m speaking for myself. The MVC as such is not a socialist movement. It includes people who are and people who aren’t socialists. If you look at the program of these two parties, they’re very similar.

Ed Morales

So are you going to have two different party platforms, or are you going to put out one platform?

Rafael Bernabe

The idea is that both parties will retain their individual programs. That’s fine. And then we are going to have sort of a basic program of La Alianza, and the way it’s envisioned right now is a relatively short document that has ten, fifteen basic points. I’m sure it is going to include the creation of a single-payer type health insurance system and eliminate this system that we have now. I’m sure it will include some sort of mechanism to try and solve the status question. It’s going to include the defense of the autonomy and the finances of the University of Puerto Rico, the defense of labor rights and restoration of labor rights as well. The PIP program is two hundred pages long, and the MVC’s is like 150 pages long. We’re going to have a much shorter document that consolidates, underlines, or emphasizes those issues that we think should be in the center of the campaign of the alliance.

Ed Morales

There’s a theoretical question that I wonder if you could talk about that is in the US right now. There’s a lot of discussion about this conflict between people who favor class politics and people who are involved in identity politics. There’s an idea that supporting class struggle is somehow mutually exclusive from identity politics, which many believe has been co-opted by neoliberalism. Does this sort of conflict exist in Puerto Rico?

Rafael Bernabe

No, not really. No, no. I mean not at all.

Ed Morales

You said that you were interested in class issues and are anti-capitalist: Do you think you are among the furthest to the left in the MVC?

Rafael Bernabe

I’m the most leftist, okay? There’s nobody to the left of me. [Laughs] There’s a big abyss. There’s nothing. If you go to the left of me, you’re dead. But I cannot think of anybody that sees these different topics as contradictory or antagonistic. You could find people who would say, “I’m interested in the LGBTQ struggle,” but it’s not like LGBTQ activists are against labor struggles. I would say most people on the Puerto Rican left see these struggles as complimentary. And most of the people I know on the Left would go to a march defending the environment and another day will go to a gay pride parade, and the next day they will go to some labor mobilization. I would say there are people who emphasize one thing more than another. That’s inevitable, I guess. But no, I would say there’s not such a sharp debate between the different approaches. Most people mix these things.

Ed Morales

In the United States, discourse on “decolonization” can get trapped in a theoretical framework, but here you’re literally living in a colony, and decolonization is an immediate, tangible issue. How does that affect the political dynamic on the Left?

Rafael Bernabe

Here, the Left is made up mostly of people who are active in different struggles. There’s an element of that, but it’s not an academic left, let’s say. And I don’t say academic in a bad way. I’m an academic, I work at the university, but the people who are active in the Left are active in movements. There are people in the university theorizing things, but they’re really not part of the Left. Not long ago, there was a march here in support of Palestine and denouncing the genocide. There must have been like a thousand people or something. But most of the people who were there in that march were basically the same people from the labor mobilizations or the environmental mobilizations or the women’s rights mobilizations.

Ed Morales

I covered a little bit about the University of Puerto Rico protests in 2010, and saw that they had assemblies and this notion of horizontalism. The assemblies that the MVC functions through seem to echo this kind of organizing and party process.

Rafael Bernabe

The MVC has a very strong element of promoting participation and promoting debate and discussion and openness. If you look at our assemblies, not only are they open to everybody — anybody can speak, everything is put to a vote. All of it is transmitted over social media, so there’s no secret decision-making and so on. We decided in an open assembly where we discussed the two candidates for Puerto Rican senators at-large, and we just finished the process of people registering who want to aspire to be a candidate. I am one of the candidates. So whoever’s going to be the candidate is not decided by the leadership of the movement. It is going to be decided by many people. There’s very much that culture of participation and debate and discussion.

Rafael Bernabe

Yeah, yeah, from below, absolutely.

Ed Morales

I saw that in Claridad that the Hostosian National Independence Movement (MINH), which has roots in the old Puerto Rican Socialist Party, had expressed a desire to cooperate with La Alianza. Are there more parties like that?

Rafael Bernabe

Yeah, the MINH officially approved supporting the alliance. And there are some members of the MINH who are running as candidates for the MVC within the list of the MVC. They are running as candidates. And there are other left-wing groups that are also either already supporting or will probably endorse voting for the alliance; I wouldn’t be surprised.

Ed Morales

How about the unions?

Rafael Bernabe

In the case of the MVC, we’ve had a lot of support. One of the founding organizations of the MVC is the Sindicato Puertorriqueño de Trabajadores (SPT), which is the Puerto Rico local of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). And the SPT had a long process of internal discussion and debate in which it officially, through several assemblies, determined that it didn’t want to support candidates in the old traditional parties anymore, and that it wants to engage in the construction of a new political party that would be capable of defending the interests of the labor movement. But we’ve also had established links with labor leaders and labor activists in many other unions, and many of them are very sympathetic to La Alianza.

Ed Morales

One more question. You’re going to have the constitutional convention as part of your platform. I think I saw somewhere a quote of you saying, “We can’t keep waiting for Washington to push that through.” How much of a priority is the constitutional convention?

Rafael Bernabe

Normally, in Puerto Rican politics, people are taught and people are told that we have to wait for the United States and for Congress to take action to solve this status question. As I argued, many times, they want us to be spectators to the process of determining what it’s going to be our future. We just watch to see what Congress is doing, what it’s not doing, whether such certain congressperson is willing to support something or not support something, whether a committee acts or doesn’t act.

But the process of self-determination is not going to come that way; it should start with us. We should take action so that we begin the process of self-determination, and we sort of serve notice to the US Congress that we, the Puerto Rican people, have organized ourselves to solve this problem as urgently as possible. The way to do that is to call an Asamblea Constitucional de Estatus, which means that people vote, they elect delegates to this assembly. These delegates will be elected on the basis of what status they represent. There will be some who support statehood. There will be some who support independence. There will be some who support free association. People will vote for whoever they want; if people choose a statehood majority, that’s it. Independence majority, whatever. And that assembly then, as a representative of the will of the Puerto Rican people, will have the task of reaching out to the US Congress and telling them, well here we are.

We have to figure out how we are going to decolonize Puerto Rico. The bill that was presented by Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez several years ago was probably the best, because that bill said that the US Congress recognized that Puerto Rico is in a colonial status. The bill was good, but it died. So our position is that we have to take action as soon as possible in the direction of solving this issue. And the first action we could take is electing this assembly as a representative of the Puerto Rican people in order to start the ball rolling.

The Far Right in Portugal: The Impossible is About to Happen

By Roger Hallam

March 17, 2024

Source: Rogel Hallam




This week in the Portuguese elections, the far right surged to 18% of the vote while the two main parties collapsed to around 25% each. This is now a pattern across western democracies. The collapse in support of the centre left and centre right and the rise of the populist left and right forces. At the moment, the momentum is with the radical right.

The conventional wisdom of the liberal political class, as shown in endless opinion articles, is that the centre right and left have to, in various unspecified ways, get their act together and stop the rise of the extremes. “Will Europe ever learn?”, one Guardian article writes. What does that actually mean apart from a vague appeal for people to be nice?

It is vague because there is, in fact, no effective structural response to the rise of the political outsiders. Both the centre right and centre left are ideologically committed to an international neo-liberal regime that systematically undermines the incomes and the identities of the majority. This international regime has also shown itself incapable of fulfilling its first political duty: to protect the lives and livelihoods of the people. The elites pouring more carbon in the air will now take us over 2C.

In other words, it is impossible for these political forces, both ideologically and structurally, to respond to what is objectively the most extreme political project in human history – the destruction of the biosphere for private commercial gain.

The reason people are turning to the “extreme” left and right is because the centre – the existing political system – is beyond “extreme” itself. It is literally taking us to hell whilst lying and insulting our intelligence along the way – “1.5C is still possible” they claim. Not a good strategy to make friends and influence people!

The question now is which impossible options remain – the take over of western democracies by demagogic right or left wing forces – or a renewal of democracy by a new revolutionary movement which forces changes in constitutions to give legislative power to citizens assemblies based upon sortition and informed deliberation.

I’m opting for the latter impossibility.