Republicans Claim Harris Can’t Beat Trump — Don’t Believe Them

By Sasha Abramsky

July 23, 2024

Source: Truthout


Image by Lawrence Jackson, Public domain

Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection, Donald Trump declared that he believed Vice President Kamala Harris, the most likely Democratic nominee, would be easier to beat in November than Biden. The Republican Party immediately kicked into gear, denouncing Harris as “enabler-in-chief” to a floundering Biden and decrying her role in what the party continues to label an immigration “crisis.”

Don’t believe Trump’s bluster for a minute. Harris has the potential to be a far more formidable opponent than Biden.

First off, Trump’s supposed strength is more a product of Biden’s weakness than of a sudden lovefest a majority of Americans are having with the impeached, found-liable-for-sexual-assault MAGA leader. Put simply, there is no lovefest. This became even more evident after he was shot by a sniper in Pennsylvania — a situation which has, historically, seen the surviving political figure benefit from a surge of popular good will. Reagan’s approval ratings, after he was shot, climbed to nearly 70 percent. Meanwhile, polls after Trump’s shooting showed that he still only had a 40 percent approval rating, with a majority of Americans continuing to disapprove.

And those numbers are after a month in which Trump has had an extraordinary run of luck: from a would-be-assassin’s bullet whizzing past his ear, missing his head and recasting him as a victim rather than a promoter of political violence; to the malevolent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents immunity for anything deemed to be done in an official capacity; to a Florida judge throwing out the charges against him for illegally hoarding classified documents; back to Joe Biden’s beyond-decrepit debate performance on June 27.

Trump went through the entire GOP convention with the media spotlight firmly focused on the death-watch around Biden’s campaign. And yet throughout, his favorability rating has remained underwater, and in most polls his electoral support came in at less than 50 percent. Given the many leg-ups Trump has had since late June from the judicial system, from his opponent, and from the fates themselves, it’s remarkable that the Republican nominee remains as unpopular as he is — and it suggests that he has reached an apex of popularity beyond which he cannot rise.

In fact, I would argue, Trump’s run of luck ended on Sunday morning when Biden released a letter to the American people announcing that he would not seek reelection. And it further corroded when, a few minutes later, the president endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him. As potential challengers to Harris, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, instead began rallying around her candidacy it became clear that the Democrats were going to avoid a food fight for the nomination.

By day’s end, instead of forming a circular firing squad, Democrats had reaped more than $50 million in online donations — between five and 10 times the daily haul the party has seen since the June 27 debate. Given the sentiment of anyone-but-Biden among a wide swath of Democratic activists in recent weeks, and the relief at having a plausible candidate to support, this surge of incoming dollars could continue over the coming days and weeks, providing a huge war chest to take into the final post-convention sprint to the election.

Some pundits were quick to point out that there really wasn’t much of a difference in the polling between how Biden matched up against Trump and how Harris matches up against Trump — and to a degree that’s true. In an average of recent polls, Biden trailed Trump by about 2 percent, and Harris by about 1.5 percent.

These polls, however, obscure more than they illuminate. After the debate debacle, it was clear that Biden’s campaign was in a death spiral, one that he should have recognized weeks ago. Instead, he plowed ahead, taking a wrecking ball to his own prospects as he went. While the president touted supposed internal polls suggesting a rosier picture, in fact Biden’s numbers, especially in the swing states, were plummeting. States such as Michigan suddenly seemed entirely out of reach for the president, and a number of states that until recently were thought to be securely blue, such as New Hampshire and Minnesota, looked like potential Trump targets of opportunity.

By mid-July, it looked like the longer Biden remained the candidate, the more Democrats themselves would see it as a foregone conclusion that he would lose. As a result, donors began withholding funds and pollsters found that two-thirds of Democratic voters wanted a new horse to back in November’s election.

With a large share of Democrats sitting on their hands and refusing to actively campaign for Biden, and with the possibility that many more potential Democratic voters would simply not go to the polls come November, it seemed entirely possible the president’s campaign could be heading into wipe-out territory.

To reiterate, however, this was due to Biden’s weakness rather than to Trump’s innate strength.

Harris, by contrast, will enter the race with her campaign on an upward trajectory. If Biden trailing Trump by 2 percent seemed a pinnacle for the current president, from which he would only continue to tumble, Harris’s 1.5 percent deficit seems a baseline.

From now on, this will be her campaign. If she is strategic — which she is — she will bring the energy of relative youth to contrast with Trump’s 78-year-old persona. After all, Trump is prone to making the same kinds of gaffes that Biden did; instead of being the dynamic presence in the race, he will now become the more blundering candidate — and the public scrutiny that Biden underwent may now shift onto Trump.

Harris will, moreover, be able to step out of Biden’s shadow and craft her own political agenda. She can forcefully contrast the Democratic position on reproductive rights with Republican support for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade — a position that is deeply unpopular not just with Democrats but with independent voters.

Harris’s baseline poll numbers reflect views on a politician most Americans have seen only in a refracted light. They know her as Biden’s vice president, rather than as a political leader in her own right. Now, over the coming weeks, the country will see her shape her own political priorities, speak on the stump about her own values, debate — if Trump has the guts to share a stage with her — her corrupt opponent, and perhaps most importantly, choose her own vice-presidential nominee. If that nominee is a Rust Belt governor, or, say, Arizona’s astronaut-turned-senator Mark Kelly, the momentum from that choice alone ought to significantly recalibrate the race in several critical swing states.

In other words, take with a pinch of salt those Republicans who claim to be gleeful about the opportunity to take on Harris. The race for the White House is, today, dramatically different from what it was last week. In 2020, Biden was able to deprive Trump of a second term in office. In 2024, in stepping aside (albeit belatedly) and paving the way for a Harris candidacy and for the Democratic Party to rapidly coalesce around that candidacy, he may, once again, have found a way to trip Trump up and to block the MAGA leader’s authoritarian ambitions.

An Open Letter to Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party

BY RICHARD FALK

 JULY 23, 2024
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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

There is every reason to be glad that Joe Biden finally acted responsibly by withdrawing his candidacy for a second term. But to call this overdue act ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’ is to rob those precious words of their proper meaning. It is certainly true that Trump repeatedly lies about his achievements and the failings of his opponents but the exaggerations and selective self-congratulations of the Democratic Party are only a degree less deceptive from the perspective of political communication. Biden, and now Kamala Harris, neither defend nor apologize for a foreign policy that has repudiated diplomacy in the Ukraine context and made no secret of their complicity in supporting Israel’s violent assault on the entire civilian population of Gaza that much of the rest of the world views as a transparent and severe instance of the crime of crimes, genocide.

Against this background, should not Democrats, and Americans generally are entitled to expect more before heeding unity pleas tied to urgent calls for yet more campaign donations? What Biden and Harris said in officially announcing the decision to withdraw and the endorsement of VP is worth reflecting upon.

Biden’s words:

“My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

This statement is pretty much boiler plate for such occasions, although it might have included some affirmation of Kamala Harris as having a bold independent, intelligent, compassionate voice that made her counsel to me so valuable during these past four years. Instead, Biden leaves the impression that Harris performed admirably in implementing his policy agenda. Now all Americans will have an opportunity to listen to what this unquestionably outstanding public servant has to say on her own behalf in seeking broad support in what is shaping up as one of the most vitally important presidential elections in the nations 248 years of existence.

In accepting Biden’s endorsement and committing herself to seeking the presidency.

Kamala Harris’s words are for my taste too much in the spirit of presenting herself to the voting public as Biden 2.0:

I am running to be President of the United States.

It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve alongside our Commander-in-Chief, my friend, President Joe Biden – one of the finest public servants we will ever know. And I am honored to have his support and endorsement.

And I am eager to run on the record of what Joe and I have accomplished together. We built our country back after our predecessor left it in shambles – making historic progress in upgrading our nation’s infrastructure, fighting climate change, and more. We are stronger today because we took action – together – to invest in America’s future.

The language is a gracious expression of her period serving as VP, but also again a presentation of the Biden presidency as compiling a record to be judged by its positive impacts on the lives of Americans, conveying an image of US foreign policy being so bipartisan that is not worth talking about, or more truthfully, that either its defense or critique would be divisive because the citizenry is split with regard to the Ukraine War and toward complicity with the Israeli perpetrators of criminal policies and practices in Gaza, positions pronounced unlawful a few days ago by a near-unanimous majority of the 15 judges who issued their decision on Israel’s occupation of Gaza.

It is possible that Kamala Harris, who admirably has acknowledged that she must earn the nomination not merely inherit it as a Biden final bequest, will give a forthright speech to the American people that exhibits a measure of independence, and abandons the incredible stance of Democratic Party nominees to be silent this year about the world out there beyond American borders. Surely, Biden’s frequent claims that America is in the best position of any country to provide global leadership, a view widely contested outside the West, deserve either reasoned affirmation or, more appropriately, prudent modification. Harris has a great opportunity to speak in her own voice, and not just channel the Biden record, but will she seize it? Looking back at her autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, I was encouraged by the pride she took in being part of an activist family of color dedicated to progressive causes while growing into adulthood, including opposition to the Vietnam War.

In closing, I should acknowledge that I had substantive reservations about supporting Biden/Harris, despite appreciating much of their domestic record, because of their foreign policy. It posed for me, to put it bluntly, a choice between a warmonger and a mentally unstable incipient fascist. I am wondering whether that is still my choice, or whether Harris or some other Democrat seeking to earn the nomination will soften my anxieties about the Democratic Party approach to the 2024 elections. I should also add that I was disappointed by the domestic failure of the Biden presidency to do more to protect the academic freedom of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and elsewhere. and by the related refusal to take responsibility for protecting all its students, and not just Jewish students as beneficiaries of donor interferences with the integrity of America’s once proud centers of higher education. One result has been to lead such institutions to take punitive action against foreign, especially Muslim, students to dare express their pro-Palestinian sentiments.

As Americans are readying for a highly objectionable Netanyahu visit to Washington this week, it is a time to elevate the electoral dialogue not only at the presidential level but also in relation to the many important Congressional contests. This unfortunate display of perverse diplomacy will also test Harris’ composure in her role as Vice President, whether to exhibit politeness but refrain from an ideological embrace of a foreign leader with a scandalous record.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.

Who Are The Olympics For?

By Maher Mezahi

July 24, 2024

Source: Africa is a Country

Image public domain via stockvault

On Friday evening, the world’s attention will lock in on the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games as they return to Paris, the birthplace of Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Games. Over its 128-year history, de Coubertin’s Olympiad has experienced some quite radical changes. His inaugural 1896 Games in Athens saw participation from just a dozen nations, while 206 are expected to take part this summer in Paris. Only nine sports were featured in Greece, while 32 will be on display in France. Perhaps most crucially, today’s Olympics both incur billions of dollars in debt and generate billions in revenue, a stark contrast to the much more austere inaugural edition.

Yet, while it is true that the Olympic Games have evolved and expanded over time, the multi-sport mega event has never fully espoused the principles of Olympism and proffered African athletes the same respect as others. Indeed, the first African athletes to compete in the modern Olympics were a pair of South African marathon runners who competed in the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri: Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani. However, the two were brought to the US not as professional athletes but as actors to reenact battles of the Anglo-Boer War for the 1904 World’s Fair, which was held in St. Louis in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. At the fair, Taunyane and Mashiani participated in an event titled “Athletic Events for Savages” held on August 11–12. It is not clear how they were later registered in the Summer Olympics marathon on August 30, but what is known is that they finished ninth and 12th, respectively.

In the decades that followed, African athletes could compete only under the flags of their colonizers, whose repressive regimes controlled the frequency and manner in which indigenous athletes practiced sport. As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…”—the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing—and this year’s Olympics continue the tradition of discrimination.

Seven years ago, when France was awarded the rights to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, a fresh-faced Emmanuel Macron celebrated by stating, “The Games are the Games for all, all territories, all sectors.” Just a few days before the Games kick off, it’s become abundantly clear to many Africans living in France and to French citizens of African descent that Paris 2024 will not be “the Games for all.”

When it comes to freedom of expression, for instance, Muslim female athletes in France have been prohibited from wearing the hijab at the highest levels of sport for decades. Amnesty International’s July 16 report, titled “Hijab Bans in French Sport Expose Discriminatory Double Standards ahead of Olympic and Paralympic Games,” notes that French authorities have weaponized concepts like state neutrality to justify laws and policies disproportionately impacting Muslim women and girls. Amnesty also noted that France is the only European country enforcing bans on religious headwear through national laws or individual sports regulations. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued a weak response to the rights organization, stating, “Freedom of religion is interpreted in many different ways by sovereign states.”

African athletes also feel that historically their political concerns are often ignored by Olympic officials. Egypt boycotted the 1956 Melbourne Games when the IOC did not exclude Great Britain, France, and Israel, the countries responsible for the tripartite aggression during the Suez Crisis. In 1976, a near continent-wide boycott of the Montreal Games occurred due to the IOC’s refusal to ban New Zealand, whose national rugby team had toured apartheid South Africa earlier that year.

Today, many Africans see a double standard in excluding Russia from the Olympic Games while maintaining Israel’s participation. The IOC’s explanation hinges on Russia’s violation of the Olympic Charter as it absorbed regional sports organizations in occupied Ukrainian territory (Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia). However, there have been no ramifications for the Israeli Olympic Committee, despite continued sporting activity in Palestinian-occupied territories, the complete destruction of sporting infrastructure in Gaza, and the massacre of no less than 300 sportspeople and officials since October 7, 2023.

When Algerian Judoka Fethi Nourine forfeited his match at the 2020 Tokyo Games to avoid facing an Israeli opponent, he and his coach were subsequently banned for 10 years. It would not be a surprise to see other African athletes withdrawing from competing against Israeli athletes should they be drawn against one another in this year’s Games.

On the ground in Paris, Macron’s government has been working hard to present a polished Parisian image to the world at the expense of marginalized groups. Over the past year, police and courts have evicted around 5,000 people from the capital, mostly single men from war-torn countries like Sudan. According to reports from DW News and the New York Times, vulnerable migrants are often offered social housing outside of the capital, but they soon realize that they are being tricked into deportation or housing that does not meet the most basic standards.

Unfortunately, none of these strategies are novel when it comes to hosting the Olympic Games. But as we consume several weeks’ worth of peak athletic performance, we should keep in mind that the organizers of Paris 2024 utterly failed to resolve underlying issues of inclusivity, fairness, and human dignity this summer.

Maher Mezahi is a football journalist and host of the Africa Five-a-side podcast. Based in Algiers, he is a contributing editor for Africa Is a Country.

Inside the Struggle to Stop the ‘Social Cleansing’ of Paris for the Olympics

Aid groups and migrants are mobilizing to provide social services and block the eviction of the most vulnerable people in Paris ahead of the Olympics.

By Daniel McArdle

July 24, 2024

Source: Waging Nonviolence


Olympic rings in Paris, 23 September 2017. More: View public domain image source here



With the approach of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, organizers and aid groups are working to ensure the continuation of social services in the city. They are also trying to stop the evictions of over 12,500 of the city’s most vulnerable people, who often face the destruction of their dwellings, belongings and documents.

“Those are their homes, no matter how rough,” emphasized Antoine De Clerck, coordinator of La Reverse de la Médaille, or RDLM, a collective of over 80 different aid organizations formed in response to the “social cleansing” operation underway in the city.

More than a million people filed requests for asylum in the European Union in 2023, the highest level in seven years, according to E.U. statistics, and France received the second-highest number of requests at 167,000.

“We have a welcome policy in France,” De Clerck said. “You are welcome on the streets.”

Paul Alauzy, the migration mission manager with Medecins du Monde in Paris and a founder of Collective Access to Rights, which is part of RDLM, said the group took the early decision not to oppose the games outright.

“We share common values with them. But they promised the most inclusive games ever, so we want them held to the promises,” Alauzy said. “You have a big state machine crushing the lives of the most unwanted people, and the Olympics is like oil, making the machine stronger.”

RDLM launched in October with a protest by activists and aid workers outside the Olympic Committee Paris headquarters and a simultaneous letter to the committee and the government.

Knowing that the government normally funds social services but gives the work to NGOs, they began by offering detailed proposals to handle the entire project of continuing to care for the homeless during the games.

“We worked really hard [to develop responses to the] problems that we identified — food and water access, emergency sheltering, public spaces,” De Clerck said, but the budgets were never approved. “We’re going to work with police to make sure that where there’s food distribution and some queuing we don’t have police doing controls for undocumented people, so at least people get food.”
No support

To find the funds to ensure the continuation of care, RDLM went first to the Olympic Committee itself, which said it could not support their efforts with its $12 billion budget. The group then appealed instead to the games’ corporate sponsors. De Clerck wrote over 60 letters to sponsors of the Olympics, and the group received only a handful of responses, all of which said they did not have the budget.

Alauzy pointed out that there were funds for a “propaganda” campaign that gave pamphlets on Olympics history to schoolchildren along with a two-euro coin, which cost $16 million. To save the lives of people dying in the streets, RDLM was only asking for $10 million, “a drop in the bucket” that could have been used to provide food and stockpile tents and blankets.

A large part of the resistance effort has been the compilation and dissemination of information. On June 6, RDLM released a 78-page report called “One Year of Social Cleansing” that detailed evictions case by case along with legal assessments of their proposed justifications. The document also contains several examples of government memos that explicitly link the expulsions to the Olympics as a matter of policy.

“The Olympics have definitely accelerated the social cleansing,” said Amaia, a professor of colonial history of America at Sorbonne University and a member of the Solidarity Collective with All the Immigrants and Sud Educational Syndicate.

To collect data, volunteers participated in a “night of solidarity,” where they surveyed the city to count those sleeping outside. Researchers then extrapolated the population of homeless in the city from those counted during the annual event. By combining these numbers with data about police raids, they were able to determine that at least 12,000 people had been displaced, even accounting for those who faced repeated removals.

Aid workers are clear that the expulsions have made their work more difficult, if not impossible at times. Alauzy and de Clerck both said that their organizations generally lose contact with those who are expelled, and both described the loss of hard-earned trust in the aid groups’ work.

Alauzy said that when 450 migrants were expelled from a warehouse in Virty-Sur-Seine, the largest squat in France, Medecins du Monde received steadily fewer responses from phone calls to the population every week. Many of them had jobs but faced discrimination in rentals on top of pressure on the housing market in France generally.

Beyond providing partial solutions to basic needs like shelter and water, the squats serve as centers of community, group solidarity and community organization.

Alauzy gave the example of a particular homeless immigrant from Sudan who has struggled with alcoholism since coming to Europe, but had found improved stability thanks to his squat and the networks it provided.

The community in the squat would encourage him to sleep and drink water, but now he can be found living alone on a mattress outside a metro station.

“Since the end of the squat his health is going down, down, down, because he’s alone, he’s isolated; he cannot shower like he used to, so he’s drinking more,” Alauzy said. “So when we say there are 12,500 expulsions, it’s real individual lives … being crushed.”

Beyond the Olympics, the RDLM believe that the government has systematically targeted those encampments and squats which have been centers of resistance and organization.
Speaking out

One way that affected populations are resisting has been by speaking to major news organizations.

With the government repeatedly rejecting requests for funding and denying that expulsions were linked to the Olympics, the aid groups have escalated their threats to speak to the media, particularly during the games.

“So we told them, yes you’re gonna have cameras from the whole world for the athletes, but they’re gonna want to tell what’s happening in the city, and we started getting attention,” De Clerck said.

The government initially denied the link between expulsions and the Olympics but now no longer denies it, instead disagreeing about numbers.

Alauzy wanted to launch the collective “with a bang, something new and memorable,” so the group took an idea from French environmental groups and used lasers to project “Games of Expulsion” on the Olympic Committee building.
Refusing to cooperate

The main option offered to evicted persons during the last six months was being bused to centers located in rural, isolated locations with few resources and little opportunity to connect with the community.

Others are offered emergency sheltering, but it can be as little as one night, and when they call again after being forced back to the streets, they are told there are no spaces. So De Clerck describes it as a way for the government to pretend that they’re fixing the problem without really offering any permanent solutions.

“Some people have been in the streets for 10, 15 years,” he said. “You can’t move those people,” who may have residence permits, habits, jobs, places to shower and social connections.

In January, after three months of weekly buses leaving Paris, many began to refuse the option, having heard by word of mouth that the proposed solution wouldn’t serve them.

“This is an example of resistance as well,” Alauzy said, like when “a regular mom in the streets says ‘no, I’m not getting on the bus,’ because this is not good for us.”
Youth stand up

Around a quarter of those affected by expulsions are minors, many of whom are alone in France, unaccompanied by adults.

After being evicted from their tent encampment in Belleville Park in April, around 200 of the youths formed a collective and occupied a theater and cultural center. They routinely stage demonstrations at various strategic points across the city, like the health and education administration buildings.

Access to healthcare is among their chief demands, along with education and housing. “Most of the time they ask for school, and that’s very touching,” De Clerck said. “It’s beautiful the way they are demonstrating every day.”

The Belleville youths can be seen passing out pamphlets to pedestrians at rallies held by migrant solidarity groups like Coordination Sans-Papiers and Marche du Solidarite, whose stickers advocating rights for undocumented migrants are plastered on lamp posts and street signs across the city.

The pamphlet also points out that the youths are in a real way a major subject of French politics and the recent election, where the primary fault line was disagreement about immigration. “We are not a danger,” a recent pamphlet read. “We are asking for, in short, the same rights as anyone in France.”

In the building, the youths have essentially established a welcome center of their own and can be found engaged in art projects, making group journals, cheering their friends as they return for the day, and welcoming contributing aid workers. There are security guards, and the city has banned journalists with cameras from entering.

“They’ve been demonstrating outside the education administration buildings and they’ve earned small victories by gaining an audience with administrators,” said Jeanne, a founder of a social services group called Center Tara. But they still face technical issues like a dysfunctional website that requests their proof of address, “which, by definition, they don’t have.”
Logistics of resistance during the games

The RDLM is now engaged in a massive mapping project intended to provide food and other basic services, comparing the security zones with the locations of social facilities. During the games themselves, some aid centers will face mandatory closures while others will need to be moved for practical reasons of protection. Centers that normally serve a thousand meals a night to people who often queue an hour and a half will have to serve two thousand meals, as other surrounding centers are closed.

One of the largest medical centers of Medecins du Monde will have to be dispersed to other locations because it falls within the triangle of the Olympic village, the stadiums and the Olympic Committee offices.

“It’s not because it’s not accessible, but they’ve got a lot of undocumented people, and the police presence will be insane,” De Clerck said. “So they’re very careful about the undocumented people being able to go for their health checks without risking being deported.”

The groups have had to continually fight for access to information about the government’s plans. For example, government documents suggest that any location near train stations might need to be cleared due to overcrowding and security concerns.

“Fundamental rights, just being here and breathing, will be threatened,” De Clerck said.

“It’s a big moment for militarization of the police. They’re policing the streets and kicking out the unwanted, but they’re also going to police the social movements,” Alauzy said. “If we organize an action during the games, will we be like social terrorists? We don’t know what they will do to us, so it’s one of the really scary parts of the Olympics.”

But Amaia said that, “it can play in favor of the activists to the extent that it is the moment to put pressure [on the government]” because there will be so many journalists there to cover the Olympics.
Minor successes and ongoing struggle

When the authorities tried to ban food distribution in two areas of Paris with high numbers of migrants and drug users in October, the RDLM quickly filed an appeal. Within two weeks they won the case, since the government’s justification for denying such a basic service was weak.

“We’re really fearing that it’s happening again just before the Olympics, so that we don’t have enough time to go to court,” De Clerck said. “We have a bunch of lawyers scrolling all the decrees every day — they can just put a little sentence in a decree somewhere.”

They also won a small victory when the Olympics gave half a million dollars to a social center for children as part of the new Olympic village. 

To stop the city from removing mothers from a squat on July 3, people blocked vans for hours until the city offered them other housing. (WNV/Daniel McArdle)

Despite successfully blocking repeated unsuitable solutions suggested by the government, the Belleville youths were eventually evicted from the squat on July 3. The youths were bused to be housed by the city in gymnasiums for the summer. Since it’s only a temporary solution and they don’t have 24-hour access or showers in the gyms, they are continuing their organizing efforts.

After buses removed 230 minors to be relocated to gymnasiums, mothers with infants who were also staying in the building refused for over four hours to enter the vans as supporters protested alongside them.

“The city is prepared to throw these women with children in the street,” Amaia said. “It’s a disgrace. We are asking what world, in what life, what society is it where women with infants who are one-month, two-month, or three-months old have to sleep in the streets? And how is it possible that there isn’t a place in a city of more than a million, and so rich?”

Thanks to the demonstrations blocking their removal, the mothers finally received an accommodation offer at the end of the day from the city government, who will be taking charge of them. But the groups continue to protest to make clear their demands for their living conditions and access to care.

“Just because you have a high security [situation] doesn’t mean you need to push the homeless away,” De Clerck said. “If you don’t want to have them in the streets, then just shelter them.”

Zionism: the End of an Illusion

By Richard E Rubenstein

July 21, 2024

Source: CounterPunch





One of the oddest arguments made by self-declared friends of Israel is that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. That assertion is comprehensible if the person making it believes that God Himself gave the Jews property rights from the river to the sea – but Theodore Herzl and the founders of modern Zionism embraced no such belief. On the contrary, that movement’s largely secularized leadership defined Zionism from the outset as a form of ethnic nationalism – a claim to the same “right of self-determination” as that asserted, say, by the Irish or the Serbs. The argument, therefore, is that it is antisemitic to deny the Jews (considered as an ethnic community, not a confessional group) the same alleged right enjoyed by the Irish and the Serbs. Forgetting for the moment that only a handful of world’s 3,000 or so ethnic peoples enjoy the right to control a nation-state, the question remains: what does Zionism have to do with Judaism?

The answer is to be found in history rather than in sacred texts. The rise of mass-based antisemitism in Europe culminating in the unimaginable catastrophe of the Holocaust convinced many Jews that the alternative to yielding to genocidaires was to fight them, and the best way to fight them was to command the resources of their own nation-state. Israel was conceived of not only as a means of deterring or escaping would-be Hitlers, but also of ensuring that Jews would “never again” go helplessly to their deaths or be forced to beg more secure nations to admit them. If the United States and other wealthy nations had welcomed Jewish refugees and survivors in the 1940s instead of slamming shut their doors, a good deal of the pressure to create a Jewish state might have been dissipated. The fact that they did not – not even in the shadow of the gas chambers – convinced many that they needed to play the nationalist game if they wished to ensure their survival.

This reasoning, however, generated another question . . . and created a dilemma. In the dog-eat-dog world of competing nation-states, nations do not survive and thrive unless they are either isolated and unthreatening or warlike and strong. Given the geopolitical importance of the oil-rich Middle East, the rapid growth of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, and America’s imperial ambitions, it was clear even before 1948 that Israel would neither be isolated nor considered harmless. Violent conflicts between Jewish settlers and Palestinians had been endemic since the late 1920s, and not one Arab state accepted the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan. Given the intensity of this opposition, how could a state offering Jewish residents and would-be immigrants preferential treatment become sufficiently warlike and strong to survive?

The answer was suggested by the formation of a Jewish Legion in World War I and a Jewish Brigade in World War II that fought in Palestine and Syria as units of the British army. When the U.S. replaced Britain as the region’s dominant power, Israel became an American ally and its armed forces de facto extensions of U.S. military power. From 1948 onward no other client state received anything close to the military and civil aid donated by the leader of the “Free World” to Israel. Ironically – and tragically – the state created to establish Jewish independence and security was thus from the outset a neocolonial dependency and imperial outpost of the United States.

This was not a recipe either for internal peace or international security. Since 1945, targeted by rebellious subject peoples and competing great powers, the U.S. has fought five major wars and participated in scores of bloody proxy struggles. According to the Brown University Cost of War project, American wars since the al Qaeda attacks of 2001 have killed 4.5 million people, most of them civilians. In the same period, the State of Israel has fought six interstate wars and three wars in Gaza. It is customary in the West to attribute this persistent insecurity and violence to the malice and fanaticism of Israel’s Palestinian subjects and Muslim neighbors – a partisan “explanation” that ignores the Jewish state’s neocolonial origins, its expulsion and oppression of Palestinians, and its faithful service to American and European patrons. Whatever the sources of Israeli insecurity, however, the result over time has been to strengthen the position of “hard” vis a vis “soft” Zionists.

Zionism: “Hard” and “Soft”

Since the late nineteenth century, when modern Zionism took form, the attempts to combine Judaism with ethnic nationalism have tended to generate three schools of thought. We can call these Hard Zionism, Soft Zionism, and anti-Zionism.

The Hard Zionist school is currently represented by the Netanyahu regime in Israel – a right-wing ruling coalition that includes the leading Jewish religious parties, parties representing Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and advocates of annexation of all the Occupied Territories. The perspective that shapes their political views assumes the existence of serious, long-term, irreconcilable conflicts of interests and values between Jews and non-Jews. It also accepts the ineluctable persistence of a neo-Darwinian global environment in which only the most violent groups and nations survive. Since the time of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, founder of this school, the implication has been that Jewish survival requires the existence of a state controlled by Jews and capable of dominating both internal and external enemies militarily.

A radical sense of collective insecurity has always been the driving force of Hard Zionism. Jabotinsky considered the Jews a “race” threatened demographically by intermarriage and social assimilation as well as endangered physically by antisemites. The Odessan leader admired Mussolini’s fascistic militancy, dressed his own militia in brown shirts, and called for creation of an “Iron Wall” of armed force that would protect Israel from inevitable attacks by hostile Arab nationalists. He approved of terrorist violence against the British and the Palestinians, rejected the UN’s partition of Palestine into two states, and scoffed at the idea that Jews and Palestinians could coexist peacefully, unless the latter accepted Jewish supremacy in a single Jewish state. Netanyahu’s father was Jabotinsky’s secretary, and his coalition still follows his ethnic supremacist line.

“Soft” Zionism, on the other hand, reflecting its left-liberal origins, began by expressing a somewhat less intense sense of Jewish vulnerability and a somewhat more sanguine view of the possibility of peaceful coexistence with non-Jews. My own family history reflects this perspective. From their home in a New York suburb, my parents learned about the Holocaust from reliable witnesses, tried vainly to convince other Americans that the slaughter was occurring, then worked passionately to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel. Working with Israeli agents like Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem, my father helped to refit an old freighter renamed the Exodus to transport European survivors to Palestine. In 1948 he ran guns to the Jewish army, the Haganah. He and his comrades insisted that Israel’s real enemy was not the Palestinians or other Arabs, who had been misled by their leaders, but uncaring British colonialists and wealthy, power-hungry sheikhs.

Soft Zionists like my father welcomed the UN Partition Plan and believed that Jewish and Arab workers could live peacefully together under the auspices of a social-democratic regime. Their faith was that Israel could be both a Jewish state and a pluralist democracy and that the need for military dominance would prove temporary. When Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations made war against Israel in 1948, this faith was shaken, but not shattered. During that war, Israeli troops and militias displaced some 750,000 Palestinians and destroyed more than 500 villages. Arguing (contrary to plentiful contrary evidence) that the refugees had left their lands voluntarily, the new state refused either to readmit them or to compensate them for their losses. Israel’s Jewish majority was bolstered over the next two decades by substantial immigration from the Arab world and from Russia – an application of the “right of return” accorded exclusively to Jews. But after the “Six Day War” of 1967, the Israelis again found themselves in control of more than a million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The question of how Israel could be both a Jewish state and a democracy was again thrown into question, along with the related question of the deep contradiction between militaristic nationalism and Jewish ethics.

The Soft Zionist answer that emerged over the next generation was to advocate a Palestinian state, one that would not threaten Jewish control of Israel either demographically or militarily. A state occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and perhaps East Jerusalem) was always conceived of as a disarmed entity with limited powers that would be compelled as a condition of its existence to accept Israeli military and economic superiority. Not surprisingly, this idea was not popular in the Palestinian “street” or among groups seeking either to gain equality with Israeli Jews or to expel them from the region. Over the next three decades, a substantial majority of Soft Zionists such as Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres therefore alternated between the carrot of peace negotiations (the “two state solution”) and the stick of IDF-led warfare against resisters. Over time, the stick became far more prevalent than the carrot.

The high point of Soft Zionist achievement was the 1993 Oslo Accords in which the Palestinians led by Yasir Arafat and his Fatah organization agreed to recognize Israel and live in peace with its citizens, while the Israelis, led by Labor Zionists Rabin and Peres, agreed to recognize the Palestine National Authority and to permit it to rule the West Bank and Gaza by the year 2000. The Accords raised high hopes but failed to deal with a series of crucial issues, including continued Israeli settlement of the Occupied Territories, an asserted right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the status of East Jerusalem.

Furthermore, substantial sectors of both communities, increasingly influenced by politicized religious organizations and leaders, opposed the agreement and rejected further efforts to compromise. Between September 2000 and February 2005 some 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis died in an uprising that Palestinians called the Al-Aksah Intifadah. While organizations like Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Martyrs Brigade organized suicide bombings in Israel, militant Zionists multiplied settlements on the West Bank and vowed never to leave “Judea and Samaria.” One such ultranationalist, Baruch Goldstein, assassinated 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, and another, Yigal Amir, assassinated Prime Minister Rabin a year later.

One year after that, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, marking the beginning of the end of Soft Zionist hegemony in Israel. He would rule again from 2009-2021 while the movement of settlers into the West Bank became a flood, and would end by forming the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history. In practice, Zionists of both schools accepted Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” principle, which seemed to them the only way to secure the existence of a secure Israel with a permanent Jewish majority. Simultaneously, Palestinian groups were learning not to trust liberal Zionist professions of belief in a two-state solution or the bona fides of the Palestine Authority (PA), whose governance activities on the West Bank seemed little more than a fig leaf for expanded Israeli settlement and harsh security measures. Each side blamed the other for the failure of previous negotiations, and the trust that had once persuaded some members of elite groups to deal with each other nonviolently was dissipated.

Netanyahu’s attempt to keep the Palestinian movement divided by supporting the PA’s authority on the West Bank directly and Hamas’ rule in Gaza indirectly backfired spectacularly on October 7, 2023. Even so, Israelis traumatized by Hamas’ violence, including almost all the Soft Zionists, united behind his regime’s determination to uproot and destroy that organization completely, even if this meant massive destruction of the civilian population. A wave of revulsion against Israel’s indiscriminate violence in the U.S. and other nations endangered President Joe Biden’s chances to be re-elected in November 2024 and led him to blame the Netanyahu regime for using “disproportionate” force and failing to recognize the need for some sort of postwar Palestinian state.

Although this prescription has a “Soft Zionist” ring, the new state Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have in mind seems virtually identical to that earlier proposed by the Trump administration and its chief Middle East spokesperson, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. This would be an entity backed and financed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, ruled by the PA or some equally conservative elite, disarmed, pacified, and committed to helping advance U.S. regional interests against the “Resistance Front” led by Iran and Hezbollah. The “two-state” solution thus becomes part of a “two-bloc” solution for the Middle East, with the Americans controlling the wealthier, more powerful bloc. What sort of state or regional arrangement the Palestinians of Gaza or the West Bank might themselves want was not – and is not – considered a relevant matter.

The repetitive pattern here seems unmistakable. United States rulers maintain their hegemony in the region by all means necessary, handsomely rewarding states and groups that cooperate and conducting covert or overt warfare against those that resist. When Hard Zionist policies do not provoke serious internal rebellions or interstate wars, the Americans are happy to support leaders like Netanyahu, who treat the Palestinians as “unpeople.” But when Hard policies produce uprisings or wars that destabilize the region, U.S. leaders, whether Republicans or Democrats, make a Soft Zionist U-turn.

This is exactly what the Clinton Administration did in 2000, when Bill Clinton attempted to hammer out a two-state agreement between Israel’s Ehud Barak and Palestine’s Arafat. Those who blame the Palestinians for the failure of this effort do not understand (or don’t want to) that what such deals actually offer is what Rashid Khalidi calls a “one state, multiple Bantustan” solution. The Jewish state defined and defended by Zionists of either school always retains absolute military, technological, and economic superiority over any projected Palestinian entity. The Palestinian statelet is therefore designed to function, in effect, as an administrative subdivision of Israel and an imperial outpost (allied with other satellites) of the United States. Little wonder that so many Palestinians opt instead for a “single state” solution that would compel the Israelis either to treat them as equals or publicly abandon their democratic pretenses.

The situation recalls a vastly more ancient conflict that I wrote about in a book called Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah (Harcourt, 2006). There I described the “soft” imperialism of Cyrus the Great, who liberated the nations made captive by Babylon, allowed Jewish exiles to return to Israel, and promised the world a new era of peace and justice under Persian rule. What a guy! The prophet Isaiah of Babylon was so impressed by Cyrus that he declared him to be God’s Messenger. Even before the Persian leader died, however, it was clear that his empire would have to be maintained by massive force. Cyrus’s successors were Darius and Xerxes, “’hard” imperialists who “pushed the boundaries of the empire deeper into Asia and Europe but found themselves trapped in an increasingly brutal struggle to maintain control over their restive, far-flung subjects” (p. 160). As the Prophets recognized, the dream of a just and stable world at peace could never be realized by power-hungry empire-builders.

So it goes to this day. Hard and soft varieties of ethnonationalism are opposite sides of the same coin – or, if you like, different gears of the same engine. Their common purpose, like that of a “hard cop” and “soft cop” working over a suspect to obtain a confession, is to maintain a dominant elite’s supremacy and control. When one approach doesn’t produce the desired result, the other is called into play; in either case, the unruly suspect is condemned for refusing to accept the inexorable demands of superior power.

Zionism as currently defined connotes Jewish supremacy in Israel, Israeli supremacy in Palestine, and American supremacy in the region. This compels those who advocate the equal dignity of nations and the global solidarity of peoples to move beyond both “hard” and “soft” Zionism in order to embrace a more humane – and more Prophetic – perspective. Call this viewpoint anti-Zionist, post-Zionist, or better yet, radical humanist; whatever the label, it calls us to move beyond the current system of endemic violence to create a world in which the massacre of ethnic enemies and oppression of subject peoples is never permitted – not even to save one’s own group from an alleged threat of extinction.

The day after the Gaza War – and beyond the Jewish State

Left-liberal “labor Zionists” were still ruling Israel in 1958, when I made my first visit to that country with a group of fellow college students. Liberal or not, most Israelis talked proudly about the Sinai War, a military adventure in which the Israeli Defense Forces, abetted by British and French troops, invaded Egypt and seized the Suez Canal to prevent Egypt’s President Nasser from nationalizing that valuable piece of European-owned property. Meanwhile, the Labor Party leaders whom we met informed us that Israel’s great challenge was to remain culturally European and to avoid becoming a “Levantine state.” After a week of listening to this sort of propaganda, we went to Hebrew University to hear the philosopher Martin Buber denounce the Sinai War, criticize Israeli racism, and call for establishment of a “binational” state in which Jews and Palestinians would share power with each other and make peace with their neighbors.

The audience for this talk was very small – ten American students, their two supervisors, and a smattering of people from Hebrew University. Even so, the author of I and Thou told us he was glad to speak to any audience, since most Israelis considered his views utopian and disloyal. I vividly remember his aura of wise compassion (which I felt much later in the presence of the Buddhist sage, Thich Nhat Hanh), his impassioned defense of the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homeland, and his sadness at being ignored or disrespected by his fellow Jews. I had no clue then but discovered fifteen years later, in Congressional hearings on U.S. intelligence activities chaired by Senator Frank Church, that our leaders on this tour had been dispatched by the C.I.A. to report on the activities of “oppositionists” like Martin Buber.

Was Buber a Zionist? Certainly, when that term did not imply the existence of a state owned and operated by Jews in their own interests, but embraced the idea later summarized by Edward Said as “one state for two peoples.” Buber’s inspiration was neither the hard nationalism of right-wing nationalists like Jabotinsky nor David Ben-Gurion’s slightly softer version, but the ideas of the “spiritual Zionist” known as Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg), who insisted that Palestine was never an “empty land” and declared that it must be shared with existing Arab residents. Buber insisted that Palestine should become a state in which a Jewish community (NOT a “Jewish state”) could live in peace and security with its Palestinian neighbors under a constitution designed to recognize the integrity and equal rights of each community. Like Ahad Ha-Am, he believed that a nation-state devoted to defending Jewish supremacy against all competitors would inevitably deform Judaism and generate violent resistance.

Others both in Palestine and North America had reached similar conclusions, although for different reasons. Reform Jews organized by Rabbi Elmer Berger and his American Council for Judaism argued that Judaism was a religion, not a political or cultural community, and that Zionism obstructed Jewish assimilation into their own (true) national cultures. At the same time, Jews belonging to certain devoutly orthodox sects asserted that a Jewish state was a contradiction in terms, since a political body ruled by God’s law and pursuing justice and peace could not exist until the start of the Messianic age.

Martin Buber, on the other hand, was neither an assimilationist, a Messianist, nor a nationalist. In his view and that of a group of intellectuals including Hebrew University president Judah L. Magnes and Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, what was needed was a democratic state whose constitution would recognize the communal interests of Jews and Palestinians and their common interests as workers. By the time I met Buber, his organization, “Unity” (Ichud), had already been bypassed by the Zionist party and rejected by an increasingly nationalist Israeli public. Later, the binational idea was embraced by thinkers and activists ranging from Hannah Arendt and Edward Said to Tony Judt but was opposed both by Zionists and by Palestinian nationalists aiming to construct a single state in which their constituents would constitute a majority.

Even so, the conflicts of the past two decades, culminating in Israel’s catastrophic war on Gaza, have breathed new life into the idea. That war has delegitimized the Jewish state by revealing the genocidal implications of Zionism. But it also reminds us that militant ethno-nationalism on the part of any group determined to dominate all others leads in the direction of ethnic cleansing and genocide. For further discussions of issues relating to bi-nationalism, see the work of Georgetown University law professor Lama Abu-Odeh and that of Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh of the Open University of Israel (The Arab and Jewish Questions, Legend Press, 2020).

Whether the future of Palestine involves the creation of two states or a single state, and whether the constitution of that state is binational or unitary, it seems clear that Israel as currently structured must be radically transformed. But the fate of this land, and, indeed, that of the entire region, has never been a matter to be decided by its inhabitants, either Jewish or Muslim. The imperial powers’ control of the region, originally challenged by Arab revolts against the British and French, has been maintained and even strengthened by American/European wars and machinations. From the 1958 U.S. invasion of Lebanon to two wars against Iraq, intervention in the Syrian civil war, overthrow of the Libyan state, covert warfare against Iran, and all-out support for Israel in a dozen regional conflicts, the United States has not ceased to wield its military power to decide who rules and who serves in the Middle East. Equally influential are the bribes in the form of civil and military aid packages that keep obedient leaders in power and marginalize their opponents, and the diplomatic maneuvers that provide temporary settlements favorable to U.S. interests, such as the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel.

As a result, to define the current struggle in the Holy Land as an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and to speculate about possible forms of settlement on “the day after Hamas” grossly misconceives the real situation, which is that of imperial proxy warfare. The much-publicized differences of opinion between Israel’s Netanyahu regime and America’s Biden administration are purely tactical (and have not prevented Democratic as well as Republican leaders from inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress.) These leaders’ strategic goals – the maintenance of U.S. hegemony and Israeli military superiority in the region – remain unchanged. But if the imperial system in the Middle East is a source of violent conflict, which seems undeniable, how can one talk seriously of a peaceful “day after” that leaves this system in place?

Understanding the connection between imperialism and war in the Middle East, the late Johan Galtung, one of the founders of peace studies, argued that peace in the region did not depend on a “two-state solution” but on a “six-state solution” — the establishment of an autonomous regional organization able to stand up to the U.S. and to make collective decisions in its members’ interests. The guiding principle, in his view, was to connect any possible peace plan for Palestine and Israel to an effective diminution of American power to enable local parties to decide their own fates. A similar argument has been made more recently by Kaye and Vakil in “Only the Middle East Can Fix the Middle East: The Path to a Post-American Order.”

If the American role in creating, exacerbating, and perpetuating the Israel/Palestine conflict is not recognized – that is, if we buy into the fantasy of noble imperialism and the pax americana – the “day after” solutions now being retailed by will prove equally illusory. Each day that the slaughter in Gaza continues makes it clearer that Zionism can never again command the loyalty of Jews dedicated to peace and justice or anyone else committed to the development of a human community. It is long past time for American Jews to get rid of the Israeli flags that so often stand on the bimas of their synagogues and temples. But the American flags standing there should also be eliminated. Realizing the vision of a human community – the vision of prophets from Isaiah to Marx – means transcending all forms of ethno-nationalism that stand in the way of human development. The point is not to deny one’s ethnic and cultural heritage but to overcome the fixation on national (and in America’s case, imperial) identities and to move ahead, out of the flames of the present holocaust, toward species-consciousness.