Whose Side are You On? The People’s or the Polluters’?

BY GEORGE OCHENSKI

 APRIL 22, 2024
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Photograph Source: Darren Kirby – CC BY-SA 3.0

It’s well known that Republicans are “friendly” to corporations. But, as Montana’s top elected officials, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Attorney General Austin Knudsen, increasingly side with the polluters, Montana’s citizens are angered and more than justified to ask: Whose side are you on, the polluters or the people?

The latest example of our Republican officials siding with the polluters — and ignoring Montana’s Constitution — comes as the Montana Environmental Information Center sues Knudsen’s Department of Justice for communications it has had with Teck Coal, the Canadian company responsible for the selenium that is polluting Lake Kookanusa.

At first, Knudsen stonewalled the request – an ever more common tactic in the Republican “don’t ask, because we won’t tell” approach to governance. Then, the agency told the environmentalists they’d have to pay thousands of dollars to access the public records.

But the mandate of the Montana Constitution’s Right to Know provision couldn’t be more clear – and you don’t have to be an attorney to understand it.  “Right to know. No person shall be deprived of the right to examine documents or to observe the deliberations of all public bodies or agencies of state government and its subdivisions, except in cases in which the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure.”

There can be nothing in communications between Montana’s Attorney General and a foreign mining company that could possibly be considered “individual privacy.”  The “merits of public disclosure” however, are evident. With the very future of our public waters and fisheries at stake, you bet Montanans want know what our attorney general is discussing with a corporate polluter.

Instead of following the clear Constitutional mandate and honoring Montanans’ rights, Knudsen claims there is a “common interest privilege” between his office and the Canadian corporation and won’t release the documents. To put it bluntly, Knudsen has one “common interest” — and that’s to lawfully serve the people of Montana to protect our Constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.” Period.

Yet, as Knudsen stonewalls public disclosure, Gianforte’s administration goes even further by endorsing already failing “waste in place” remediation at Montana’s many toxic waste sites. And citizens are revolting.

The citizens of Columbia Falls are not willing to accept the Department of Environmental Quality signing off on leaving the toxic waste from the defunct aluminum smelter in their community.  As the Coalition for a Clean CFAC wrote: “Highly toxic waste buried at the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company (CFAC) Superfund site threatens our water, our health, our community, and our economy, if it is not removed. Yet the proposed ‘cleanup’ plan, written by the company’s consultants, would leave the toxic waste-in-place and restrict future economic redevelopment and human use. Forever. That’s not a plan that is good for anyone except CFAC.”

Likewise, the citizens of Deer Lodge want the toxic tailings gone from Arrow Stone, their city park on the banks of the Clark Fork River. The thin “waste in place” soil cover from 1999 has already deteriorated, once again exposing the community to the arsenic slickens now emerging.  As Powell County’s planning director said: “The community does not want a wastes-in-place remedy.  It’s not sufficient for the long-term.”

If you’re noticing a pattern here, that’s because the record is clear: Both Gianforte and Knudsen are increasingly siding with corporate polluters over the people of Montana, the very people they were elected to serve.  Which is why it’s no surprise that more and more Montanans aren’t willing to take fake cleanups and are asking: Whose side are you on – the polluters or the people?

George Ochenski is a columnist for the Daily Montanan, where this essay originally appeared.

Debt, Dictatorship and Haiti’s Crisis: It

 Has Not Always Been This Way 

BY JEFFREY SOMMERS – PATRICK BELLEGARDE-SMITH

 APRIL 22, 2024
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Photograph Source: Voice of America – Public Domain

Social disorder. Prisons emptied of violent criminals by gangs looking to rebuild their ranks. Schools, hospitals, and pharmacies targeted for looting and frequently burned. Corpses left rotting in the streets for fear of succumbing to the same fate by attempts to remove them. The capital’s port was captured and ransacked, with famine threatening. Meanwhile, on Haiti’s northern coast, cruise ships still disgorge foreign tourists to the protected (with no shortage of irony) “Columbus Cove Beach.”

There’s no sugarcoating it — the collapse of order in Haiti and the activities by gangs in recent months to capitalize on the situation is bad.

Just as with the Middle East, we hear the refrain that Haiti “has always been like this.” Except it hasn’t. Haiti’s history has been both storied and challenged. Reasonably educated persons often juxtapose Haiti to the comparatively thriving Dominican Republic (DR), the neighboring country with which Haiti shares an island. The comparison hints at a defect of the former relative to its better-off neighbor. (The subtext sometimes is that race explains their different fates.) Yet a long view of Haiti reveals its current poverty relative to the neighboring Dominican Republic has been anything but constant — it only emerged in the past four decades.

No doubt a wide gap has opened up between the economic performance of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The DR’s per-capita GDP last year was roughly 700 percent larger than Haiti’s. But going back to 1960, the year where quality data on GDP for the two countries became available, Haiti’s per-capita GDP was (inflation-adjusted) $1,716, 25 percent more than the DR’s, then at $1,374.

Indeed, Haiti’s per-capita GDP in 1960 was even a hefty 67 percent larger than today’s rich South Korea, and far from the poorest country in the Americas. This was no one-off performance. The trend, which predated 1960, differed little up to 1980; the DR was then posting per-capita numbers 29 percent greater than Haiti’s, which still placed them in the same ballpark.

Rather than Haiti “always” being this way, it was 1981 that marked the start of its rapid decline.  The Dominican Republic maintained and even slightly accelerated its steady economic growth that had until then been at rough parity with neighboring Haiti. By contrast, Haiti’s precipitously dropped.

Economic Disaster

Why? One reason was the 1970s oil shock, which increased the price of black gold by tenfold that decade. Needing to recycle cash from windfall sales of oil deposited with them, banks extended loans to all comers. Haiti’s dictator, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier, gorged himself on loans, while investing too little of this cash to develop Haiti’s economy.

Meanwhile, the United States ended its inflation in 1980 with Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s monetary shock. This cured America’s inflation problem, but massively drove up the repayment costs of those 1970s loans around the world that had to be paid back in the now-inflated dollar.

Duvalier then made a series of lazy and disastrous bets for Haiti’s economy. He went hat in hand collecting foreign aid as cheap foreign credit evaporated, but this tranche of cash did little for Haiti’s economy. Next, he slashed taxes on export earnings and invited foreign companies to employ Haiti’s cheap labor for assembly factories. The model earned plaudits from the United States — but it did not provide much benefit to Haiti, as nearly all inputs came from abroad, tax receipts from the foreign investment were negligible, and wages were kept at subsistence levels.

Then, fearing a new swine flu, in 1986 the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1986 instructed Duvalier to slaughter Haiti’s chief source of protein: pigs. A small, hearty variety, Haiti’s pigs were perfectly suited to low-input peasant production. USAID tried replacing them with a large US variety requiring housing conditions many peasants might envy; these new pigs died. Absent their traditional source of protein, desperate Haitian peasants turned to felling trees to sell for charcoal, thus producing the now tragically familiar images of Haiti’s deforestation.

Political Upheaval and US Meddling

Political upheaval followed as Haitians worked to end their twenty-eight-year-old dictatorship. The United States sought to guide this process, forcibly at points, demanding a veto power over policy in Haiti.

In 1995, US president Bill Clinton instructed Haiti to drop its tariff on US rice (subsidized and chiefly grown in Arkansas) from 50 percent to 3 percent. Haiti’s rice production subsequently collapsed. Two decades later, Clinton apologized to Haiti for advancing this disastrous policy.

This coup de grace to Haitian agriculture led peasants in the hundreds of thousands to decamp from the countryside to Port-au-Prince. Impoverished and desperate, peasants built housing from cinder blocks in the capital. When Haiti’s big 2010 earthquake hit, these cinder-block dwellings were destroyed. Official estimates put deaths at over 200,000 and injuries at 300,000, with another 1.3 million displaced and widespread disease following the collapse of infrastructure, from which Haiti has yet to recover.

The above is to say that it indeed has not “always been this way” in Haiti, which once economically rivaled the now-successful Dominican Republic. Yet it would be too easy to blame all Haiti’s misfortunes the past half century solely on the US — Haitian elites have made their share of errors. And Haiti views some of its neighboring states with distrust. Recently, a summit meeting of Caribbean leaders met in Jamaica; the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leadership representing fifteen Caribbean states is now seen by many Haitians as a tool of bigger powers.

It did not help that behind the convening host at the most recent CARICOM meeting, prime minister of Jamaica Andrew Holness, stood the Canadian, French, and Brazilian flags, an odd choice given the states CARICOM represents. Notwithstanding that CARICOM’s intentions might be “pure,” suspicions remain. Foreign interventions have always resulted in long-term disasters while at best providing short-term relief.

On March 25, James B. Foley, the US ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2007, published an op-ed in the Washington Post asserting “Haiti’s dysfunction is a permanent condition” and calling for yet another military intervention. If there has been any “permanent condition” in Haiti, it has been foreign interventions, and not the despair currently being experienced in the country.

Meanwhile, a presidential collegium was offered at the Jamaica CARICOM conclave, but with no Haitian representation at the meeting. In past decades in Haiti, the Cour de Cassation — Haiti’s supreme court — would have sent a provisional president. That option seemingly was overlooked and with it, the sense that decisions will be made by Haitians rather than for them.

The Caribbean nations, particularly those that are members of the Commonwealth, are fiercely independent in their foreign policies vis-a-vis the United States, as many of their politicians are major intellectual figures. Their stance on Haiti comes from a position of concern; they acknowledge a shared history of resistance to imperialism. Yet today, one still cannot discount the observation made in February 1907 by Dantès Bellegarde, arguably Haiti’s best-known diplomat and one of its most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century: “The US is too close and God is too far.”

A version of this article first appeared in Jacobin.

Jeffrey Sommers is a professor of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, along with Senior Fellow at their Institute of World Affairs. He is also Senior Fellow at the Center for Political Economy at Babeș-Bolyai University. His work on austerity has found print in dozens of academic publications, and his op-eds have appeared in CounterPunch, Financial Times, the New York Times, Project Syndicate, the Guardian, the Nation, Social Europe and others. He also is the author of the book Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.–Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation.

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He has authored and co-edited five books on Haiti, including The Breached Citadel, and served as president of the Haitian Studies Association. He has been featured in interviews by CNN International, NPR, and other major outlets.

 

The Immense Hunger

by Edward Curtin / April 18th, 2024

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live.  Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance.  All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world’s poor.  It is an old story, constantly updated.  It is one form of official terrorism.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today’s savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it “left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword.”  This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later.  Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of one’s ancestors’ perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today’s Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels?  Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price.  Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Frantz Fanon wrote accurately about the link between bread and land: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

Without bread to eat, as Marx and Victor Hugo told us in their different ways, the desperate become desperadoes.

The poet Patrick Kavanaugh, in his haunting long poem, “The Great Hunger,” concluded it thus: “The hungry fiend/Screams the apocalypse of clay/In every corner of this land.”  Lines that with a slight difference pertain to every land where famine is used as a weapon of war.

But why is this so?  What is this demonic force that drives some human animals to oppress others?

I think we can agree that humans have animal needs of hunger, thirst, sex, etc. that need to be satisfied, but that we also are symbolic creatures – angels with anuses as Ernest Becker has said so pungently in his classic book, The Denial of Death.  We live in a world of symbols, not merely matter.  Unlike other animal species, we have made death conscious and must deal with that consciousness one way or another.  We have beliefs, ideas, symbol systems and get our sense of self-worth symbolically.  Of course, the anuses are the problem because they remind us that despite all our highfalutin fantasies of omnipotence of the symbolic sort, what goes in one hole comes out the other and like those backdoor hole deposits we too are destined for underground holes in the earth.

But this is unacceptable.  The thought of it drives many savagely crazy – individuals, groups, and nations.  So, as Becker writes, “An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn’t come off second best.”  Herein lies the root of competition and the desire to be successful and hoist the symbolic trophies that declare us winners.  And if there are winners, there must be losers.  If I win and you lose, then I can feel superior to you and “good about myself,” at least in the realm where we compete.  Equality is a problem for humans, whom Nietzsche termed “the disease called man.”  This sense of competition can be relatively harmless or deadly.

History is replete with the latter type, where the fear of not being immortal leads to the extermination of others, as if to say: “See, we are number one.”  You die but we live.  This is the case with the present Israeli policy of genocide of the Palestinians through famine, bombs, and guns.  The chosen enemy is always considered dirt, pigs, reduced to animal status not worthy to exist, and in a transference of existential trepidation emanating from a deep sense of insecurity masked as triumphalism, must be eliminated because their very existence threatens the oppressors God-like sense of themselves.

There is physical hunger and there is symbolic hunger.  Each needs satisfaction.  In a just and equitable world, the hunger for bread would be easy to satisfy.  It is the symbolic hunger for an answer to death that poses the deeper problem and causes the former.  For in a world where people could recognize their fears and deep-seated anxieties and stop transferring them to others, the bread of truth might reign.  We might stop slaughtering and starving others to purge ourselves of the self-hate and insecurity that drives us to feel the love of our fellow victimizers but the hate of our victims.  No one would be Number One.  All would be chosen and feast as equals at the table of the bread of life.

If only the Israeli and U.S. government leaders were wise enough to read, they might read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and turn from the path of their joint obsession to obliterate the world for a trophy that they will never hoist.  Ishmael might reach them with his words: “For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”  And they might seek peace, not an expansion of war.

If only. . . . but I dream, for they have chosen war, and the dark furies lay in wait.

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

 

Israel Faces Its Detractors

The Jewish Caliphate

by Dan Lieberman / April 22nd, 2024

The Israel that many admired through a myopic lens has been brought into improved focus, a ruthless state that has similar characteristics to the Nazi state — virulent nationalist, irredentist, militarist, racist, repressive in occupied territories, ethnic superiority, thought control, and genocidal. One major difference between the Nazi Germany and apartheid Israel is that Nazi Germany had no religious attachment; Israel is emerging as a theocracy. This difference solicits a comparison between Israel as a Jewish theocratic state and the now defunct Islamic Caliphate, known as Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL).

The need to compare Israel with ISIS comes from Israel’s attempt to associate Hamas with ISIS. Israel’s worldwide propaganda machine (Hasbara) previously ordered that references to Hamas be preceded by the word terrorist, as if the two words were one word. After decades, the Pavlovian response to the characterization assured that when hearing the word Hamas the adjective terrorist naturally flows to the brain. The terrorism that Israel and its Mossad have inflicted on the Palestinian Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian people, as well as hundreds of innocents from several nations throughout the world, are never discussed. After the October 6 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which incorporated unnecessary excesses, Hasbara issued a new link for attachment to Hamas, “Hamas is ISIS,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When uttering those words, Netanyahu should have looked in the mirror. A comparison determines that the founding of the Israeli and short-lived ISIS state and securing themselves as unique and dominant authorities have similarities.

Foreigners created the lands

Foreign fighters entered Syria and Iraq and allied with domestic populations to gain territory and incorporate the territory into the Islamic State (IS). Many of the fighters were from the Caucasus and Europe, were not Arab nationals, and sympathized with the ISIL cause.

In 1948, the Israeli forces contained few fighters who were born in the British Mandate; most were immigrants from previous decades and volunteers from Western nations. Foreigners to Palestine engaged in the capture of Palestinian land that enabled the creation of the enlarged Israel and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians.

Uniting the people

The Islamists spoke of uniting the Arab Muslim people and inaugurating another Golden Age of Arab civilization in the Levant. Out of what? Just as the elements that produced the great Hellenist civilizations no longer exist for the Greek people, the elements for reviving an Arab civilization no longer exist for the Arab people. The Mongol onslaught broke the ties that bound the Arab peoples — devotion to the same religion, a House of Wisdom that contained the first university, which translated Greek and Indian texts and became a center for advancements in humanities, sciences, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and governance of Muslim Arabs for Muslim Arabs. The modern Muslim Arabs have more in conflict than in solidarity and no longer pursue the uniquely creative efforts of their ancestors. Go through the numbers and we find that ISIL appeals to a small disaffected group who define for others what is Muslim and who is Arab.

The Zionists spoke of uniting world Jewry and recreating a homeland for all Jews in a land they claim was once a home and empire for Jews. Because Judaism is not a religion that governs or attracts those who need strong devotion, religion originally did not play a role in their mission. Nor were the Zionists uniting a people — Jews around the globe did not share a common language, history, or culture and could not be classified as a nation any more than the Mennonites and Jehovah Witnesses can be considered peoples. The Zionists’ thrust was one of narrow disaffection, of belief that Jews would never be accepted in any nation. Its appeal, minuscule to Jews at the time of its beginnings, tended to unify Jews by sharing woe, harm, and victimization, a process of uniting psyches by trauma. Present-day Israel still clings to the traumas and uses the Old Testament to give it legitimacy and a focus for all Jews.

Recreating the ancient empire

The previous Golden Age of the Arab world lasted for 600 from 622 AD to 1258 AD, and, as happened to other civilizations, capitulated to superior military forces. The use of the term Caliphate and its designation as an incorporation of the Arab people into a unified body is an exaggeration. Competing dynasties — Umayyad in Damascus and later Iberia, Abbasid in Baghdad, Fatamid in Egypt, and the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Muslim but not Arab — can claim the term Caliphate, but all have disappeared from history and so has the Caliphate. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Mongols, and a host of other civilizations had several dynasties, but neither the Italians, Greeks, Egyptians, nor other communities of today are considered heirs or recreations of these previous civilizations. The Golden Age of Arab domination of the Levant is not myth; the modern Caliphate is myth, has no definition in the present, and no return to the past.

History, archaeology, and anthropology dispute the assertion that the Jews of today have a unique relation to the wandering Hebrew tribes and that these tribes secured a foundation as a civilization or an empire. There might be some slight genetic connection but the dispersal of the original tribes and Jews throughout the world, together with conversions, have modified the DNA and a new genetic pool has arisen. There are no significant traces — administration, monuments, buildings, weapons, accepted history, independent writings, tools, implements, or structures — to substantiate that the ancient Hebrews were other than wandering and hilltop tribes, with some communities having periods of urban concentration. No history or records by other civilizations during the time of the Israelites mention the supposed accomplishments of David and Solomon.

History of the ancient Hebrew people rests on the acceptance of the Old Testament as a historical narrative. The Bible resembles literature by a people and not an authentic history of a people — a saga with historical occurrences. Its tone, language and stories are mainly derived from Ugaritic literature of the 12th century B.C. Canaanite city-state of Ugarit and from previous Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, and other ancient texts, stories, and legends. Listen to these other voices and we find echoes of the Old Testament. Several of the Psalms were adapted from Ugaritic sources; the story of the flood has a near mirror image in Ugaritic literature.

Recognized archaeologists (Israel Finkelstein, the director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, William Dever, professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, and Margreet Steiner, University of Leiden) have shown that the biblical history of an ancient Israel is mostly myth until the era of Omri in the 9th century B.C., and any attempt to refer to the myth has no definition in the present and no relation to the past.

Descendants of those who owned the land

ISIL claimed they were descendants of those who had close attachment to the lands and cultivated and possessed the soil. For centuries, mainly Arabs occupied the Levant, including historical Palestine, and, except for Israel, they now firmly control all of the Middle East and North Africa. The problem in the Arab nations is that the land and resources are controlled by few and are not properly distributed. Resolving that situation did not need an Islamic state; it needs more democratic states.

Can Jews correctly claim they are descendants of those who had close attachment to the lands, cultivated the soils, and owned them? The biblical twelve tribes of Israel retreat from history is presented as a mystery; described as the “Lost tribes of Israel.” Did they fall into a crack? How does this ridiculous description survive normal thought?

By 500 BC, the agrarian and pastoral Hebrew tribes had been absorbed into other empires — Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and later Greek and Roman. They formed a new group of Jews, who pursued urban trades throughout Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire. In the Persian Parthian and Sasanian Empires (248 B.C. to 641 A.D.), which housed the three great Jewish academies of Surah, Pumbadita, and Nehardea, the legacy and heritage of modern Jews and Judaism are best expressed. These academies codified the oral and written laws and produced the Babylonian Talmud, which became the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the basis for all Jewish law.

Although Jews lived in the Levant and controlled a small portion of the area during the short reigns of the Hasmonean kings, Jewish prominence and physical attachments to the ancient land of Israel and Jerusalem were not great and were mostly spiritual. Some remains of Jewish dwellings, burial grounds, and ritual baths can be found, but few, if any, major Jewish monuments, buildings, or institutions from the Biblical era exist within the “Old City” of today’s Jerusalem. The oft-cited Western Wall is the supporting wall for Herod’s platform and is not directly related to the Second Temple. No remains of that Temple have been located. This portion of the Western Wall lacks absolute proof of its being close to the “holiest of the holies,” and therefore has religious significance by default ─ there is no other apparent religious construction from ancient Hebrew’s Jerusalem.

In an attempt to connect ancient Israel to present-day Jerusalem, Israeli authorities apply spurious labels to Holy Basin landmarks.

Neither King David’s Tower nor King David’s Citadel relate to the time of King David.

Neither the Pools of Solomon nor the Stables of Solomon relate to the time or life of King Solomon.

Absalom’s Tomb is an obvious Greek sculptured edifice and therefore cannot be the tomb of David’s son.

Securing themselves as the unique and dominant authority

Troubling reports had the Islamic State destroying Christian churches and relics, most prominently those of the Assyrian Church of the East. Other destruction included the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the best-preserved ruins at the Syrian site of Palmyra, Mar Elian Christian Monastery, and The Imam Dur Mausoleum, an example of medieval Islamic architecture and decoration, and ancient sites, museums and libraries in Nineveh, Mosul, Hatra, Mari, and Nimrud.

Israel also consolidated its ethnic appearance.

Meron Rapaport, History Erased, Haaretz, July 5, 2007 reports that “during the 1950s, the nascent state and IDF set about destroying historical sites left behind by other cultures, particularly Muslims. This policy was so indiscriminate that even synagogues were destroyed.” Rappaport continues with information from Dr. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, The Buried History of the Holy Land. since 1948 that said, “of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 remained standing. New Hebrew nomenclature replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages, and ruins.”

Conclusion

Equating Hamas, an organization that together with Iran has fought ISIS in its territory, has not been well received and is deliberately false. The Financial Times, John Reed in Gaza City JUNE 1 2015, “Hamas seeks to stamp out Isis in Gaza,” reports,

Night-time security checkpoints have gone up around Gaza City over the past month — the most visible sign of a crackdown by the ruling Islamist movement Hamas on local followers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or ISIS). In recent weeks, supporters of Isis have claimed credit for several bombings and Hamas has rounded up and imprisoned dozens of people, officials and analysts in Gaza say.

The Associated Press, as well as other news sources and institutions, explain why Hamas is not ISIS.

In contrast, Hamas is an exclusively Palestinian movement. Its members are Palestinian and its ideology, albeit violent, is focused on liberating what it says is occupied land through the destruction of Israel. While branded a terrorist group by Israel and its Western allies, its deadly attacks have been focused on Israeli targets.

During its 16 years of rule, Hamas built up a system of government that includes not only its military wing, but also tens of thousands of teachers, civil servants and police. The group also has significant support inside the West Bank and an exiled leadership spread out across the Arab world.

The Islamic State is no longer a caliphate and has little possibility of ever becoming a big “C again!” Examine carefully and focus intensely and soon the apparition becomes clear — if Israel is known as the Jewish state, then ISIL was unknowingly patterning its development (not its behavior) with similar principles to those of the Zionists. The rise of the nation-state under monarchs, which began in the 1500s and developed into nations guided by native people, has entered a new phase ─ get a group together, invade a weak foreign land, provide a false history to authenticate claims, and establish a new nation. The crushing similarity that seals the issue ─ ISIL had no defined borders and neither does Israel.Facebook

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Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.