Rape & Genocide: the Israeli War Machine We Support

by Eugene Doyle

 August 6, 2024

Email

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The headline above is outrageous and incendiary – it is also unquestionably true. We have a duty to bear witness to what the Palestinians must endure.

The great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote powerfully a couple of days ago about the rape culture that is part of the Israeli war machine.  Riots occurred at the Sde Teiman Israeli detention centre this week in support of soldiers arrested by the Israeli military police in connection with rape, torture and murder. Members of the Knesset, including cabinet ministers, participated in storming the prison, a living hell for hundreds of Palestinians. Schools are raising funds to support the soldiers charged, while senior military figures publicly howl at the arrests.  The assumption, based on decades of precedent, is that no one will face real consequences.

“Rapists as heroes,” Gideon Levy said in Haaretz newspaper last week. “Heroically sodomizing shackled and helpless men. How can we dare to complain about their Nukhba? [Hamas’s elite fighters, some of whom are accused of rape on October 7th].

“Even the shocking number of prisoners who have died in detention and the number of amputees do not tell the story of the evil and the sadism of Sde Teiman in full. The brutality, torture and inhumane conditions were, insofar as is known, accompanied by various kinds of sexual violence.

“Some day we will hear about this violence in detail. And then too, we won’t feel shame. And then, too, we will understand and forgive, and perhaps we will even take pride. After all, ultimately, the IDF is the most moral army in the world. Everyone knows that in Israel. Only in Israel,” Gideon Levy says.

This is an Abu Ghraib moment that is largely being ignored and that the US and Israel hope will quickly be forgotten. Abu Ghraib was an infamous US-run prison in Iraq where various depravities were perpetrated on Iraqi citizens. When “skite” photos emerged, it enraged the Arab world, shamed the Americans, and sharply brought into question the high-falutin’ pronouncements over why that poor country needed to be subjected to Pax Americana.

We shouldn’t be surprised at Sde Temein. The Chief Rabbi of the IDF Eyal Krim was appointed to his role as shepherd of the IDF despite being on record as saying rape of non-Jews, in certain circumstances, was ok:

“Although intercourse with a female gentile is very grave, it was permitted during wartime … out of consideration for the soldiers’ difficulties,” he wrote. “And since our concern is the success of the collective in the war, the Torah permitted [soldiers] to satisfy the evil urge under the conditions it stipulated for the sake of the collective’s success.” (The Times of Israel, 20.7.2016). With spiritual guidance like this, Sde Teiman becomes less surprising.

Only 4% of Israeli Jews feel that their army has gone too far in its war on Gaza, according to the latest research by Washington-based Pew Research Center.

The communications team at Pew responded to questions to drill down a bit – separating the views of Arab and Palestinian citizens of Israel (about 20%) from Jewish citizens. The numbers are depressing.

+Only 4% of Israeli Jews feel the IDF has “gone too far”.

+ 42% of Israeli Jews say the IDF “has not gone far enough”.

+The real number may be higher because 7% refused to answer these questions.

What is equally harrowing is that the governments of the West are turning their backs on Palestinian suffering.  It is something the governments of Australia, New Zealand and the West in general have done for generations prior to October 7. It demands an answer to two fundamental questions.

Who are you?  What do you stand for?  These are possibly the two most important questions any person or any society should ask themselves.  They generate insight into core values and identity.  Our leaders are telling us that we “share values” with the Israelis. That’s why we share intelligence with them, are helping by attacking the Houthis, welcome Israelis at the Olympics, trade with them, welcome their soldiers as tourists, and in so many ways participate in the commission of genocide.

The Knesset recently voted – with only the Arab parties opposing – for a resolution declaring the two state solution dead and buried.

The Israeli assassination in Tehran this week of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader on the Hamas side of the hostage negotiations, was designed to snuff out any chance of peace. Choosing to kill him in Iran on the very day of the inauguration of that country’s new President sent a clear signal. President Masoud Pezeshkian had stated that he wants to avoid war and try to settle the region down.  Iran will now feel compelled to respond.

Veteran Palestinian leaders like Dr Hanan Ashwari despair when they look at Western complicity in Israel and America’s crimes.  “Gangster style assassinations and extra-judicial executions are a matter of policy in Israel. The bombing of [Hezbollah military leader] Fuad Shukri in Beirut followed by the murder of Ismail Haniyyeh in Tehran are specifically designed to inflame the whole region and sabotage any chances of a deal or de-escalation. These are attacks not just on the capitals of sovereign states but also on significant leaders to ensure total provocation and destabilisation. Israel is a rogue state that represents a real & present danger globally,” she said this week.

The USA welcomed the Israeli leader last week to Congress.  Netanyahu loves America; it has the best democracy that Israel can buy.  He received over 50 standing ovations – nearly one a minute – from his vassals.

American economist and geopolitical commentator Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University told  Judge Napolitano this week:

“The position of the US in the world is in a kind of dramatic free-fall. Our foreign policy is bankrupt. There is fear [of the US], there is power, but there’s very little respect,” Sachs says.

The decline started around the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Sachs says. “I see the last five presidents, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden as continuing a path of decline of the United States in international respect, in international responsibility, in lawfulness, in making the world safer.

“Biden has been one of the worst presidents in modern American history. He just led us into more and more war and conflict.”

When I was a child, born in the 1950s, I wondered, like many people, how the Nazis could have done what they did; how did ordinary people in Germany put up with it?  I know the answer now because in all the countries of the West, our governments and many of our citizens have chosen silence, platitudes or complicity over solidarity and meaningful action. The Israelis are no worse than the Germans who committed genocide in Namibia in the early 20th Century, or the British who were running concentration camps in Kenya where various sado-sexual acts were performed on Mau-Mau activists (all while young Princess Elizabeth toured the country) or those who inflicted generations of atrocities on Aborigines, Maori, Kanaks and other victims of settler colonialism. Left unchecked (for example, by a responsible superpower) something happens in the human brain as entire societies slide into darkness. Stories of revival, or being the Chosen People or embodying Exceptionalism all have shadow sides and in those shadows terrible things happen to the victims of the strong.

I will give the last word to Martin Luther King.  His people suffered centuries at the hands of racists, rapists, supremacists, but the struggle continued to his death and to this very day.  I hope somewhere Palestinians read these words and find a glimmer of hope, an echo of solidarity in the dark night they are passing through:

“We shall overcome because Carlyle is right: No lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: Truth crushed to earth will rise again. We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right: Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.   Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right.  “You shall reap what you sow.” With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

Can the Left Support Resistance in

Venezuela Without Promoting US

 Hegemony?

by Daniel Falcone

August 6, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0

Recently, labor educator and economist Michael Yates of the Monthly Review stated, “Happy to see that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, won reelection, and by a healthy margin. The mainstream media always refer to Maduro as an authoritarian, a strongman, autocrat, etc. Yet, like Chavez before him, he keeps winning elections in what many outside observers say is one of the most transparent and fair voting systems in the world. The US, as usual, will do what it can to put the rightwing in power, just as it does everywhere in the world. But as Vijay Prashad has pointed out (see CounterPunch, 7/31/2024), the US has to find a way to get Venezuelan oil to Europe given the heavy sanctions placed on Russia. So, it will have to deal with the Maduro government. What an irony. In any case, let’s hope the communes in Venezuela continue to grow and develop cultures of solidarity.”

In this interview, exclusive for CounterPunch, David Smilde, the Charles A. and Leo M. Favrot Professor of Human Relations, and Senior Associate at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University, offers an additional take and discusses the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election that featured Nicolas Maduro (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and Edmundo Gonzales (Democratic Unitary Platform). Smilde, along with editor Daniel Hellinger, published Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chavez (Duke University Press), a widely read survey of the country’s political landscape.

Smilde addresses how his approach on the topic differs from others on the left regarding the election and he begins by outlining his Neo-Weberian framework and the different ways of looking at the concept of orientalism. Further, he summarizes the recent past of America’s foreign policy with Venezuela and provides a commentary on the media coverage of Venezuela. Smilde offers a better understanding of Venezuela and the left as he explains the critical case against Maduro and how it crosses a political divide.

Daniel Falcone: Can you talk a little bit about how your work helps address the moving parts of Venezuela’s electoral political framework especially in the current electoral moment?  

David Smilde: What is perhaps unique about my work is that I am a left progressive but do not rely on Marxian theory. I work with Michael Mann‘s Neo-Weberian framework that is different in two ways. First, it recognizes not only how the capitalist economy leads to a concentration of power, but how political actors, through states and parties, seek monopoly — and how culture in the form of media, religion and popular culture also can crystallize into ideology.

Of course, Gramscian theory deals with these elements too, but generally wants to see them as in sync through concepts such as “totality.” Neo-Weberian theory thinks they are often at odds and does not give priority to economic factors. A second important difference is that Neo-Weberian theory does not work with notions of teleology. There is no necessary direction of human society in the global long term or in any particular social context. This means that critical engagement in any context requires actual research and cannot depend on broad brushstroke treatments based on the supposed teleology of global geopolitics. It requires actual research to figure out who is trying to preserve their advantage, monopolize resources and disempower others.

Daniel Falcone: Can you provide some context on what you see to be the ideological points of division on the left regarding the US and the West’s reaction to Maduro’s dubious victory? The right wing is calling him a dictator and the progressive left is upholding Maduro as a revolutionary figure. What’s going on here?

David Smilde: Working on the Global South from the privileged position of the Global North entails responsibilities. In his seminal texts, Edward Said used the concept of “orientalism” to describe the tendency of journalists, scholars, and writers to portray people and leaders in the East as irrational, emotional and dangerous. We can absolutely see, from the beginning of the Chávez era this tendency towards what I think of as “right orientalism.” Chavez and Chavistas have been portrayed in the media precisely as childish, emotional, self-defeating, and dangerous to the rest of the world. But we can also see what I think of as “left orientalism.” This is the tendency of global progressives to portray any revolutionary leader who declares her or himself anti-imperialist, in uncritical, heroic terms and ignore their abuses of the basic rights of their people as well as their corruption. In both its left and right forms, orientalism is essentially the same. Distance and lack of information allows orientalists to misrepresent the people and contexts of the Global South. In doing so it denies their full humanity. Given that it is generally done as a way of engaging in the politics of the Global North — broadly understood to include the identity-work of individuals and groups as well — it is a form of imperialism. It essentially uses the Global South as a resource base for consumption in the Global North.

Daniel Falcone: If we can go back to the Chavez years up until now, how would you evaluate and compare Bush’s or Obama’s foreign policy regarding Venezuela as well as how respective Trump and Biden doctrines might materialize in the region?

David Smilde: This is a big question because not only do you have different administrations, but quite different approaches at different moments within these administrations. We can basically think of different moments in which the policy has been to 1) ignore, 2) to engage diplomatically, 3) to pressure, and 4) regime change. I think the most damaging moment was the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign in 2019 and 2020 during which sectoral sanctions and secondary sanctions were levied and even military action was threatened. This, on the one hand, helped consolidate and unify the Maduro coalition, reducing internal discussion and criticism as everyone prioritized survival. On the other hand, it undermined opposition to the government as the sanctions contributed further to the economic collapse that was begun by Maduro’s economic mismanagement. It generated a wave of migration and led the people who stayed to concentrate on daily survival. In such a context, the Maduro government’s power over the population increased.

The Trump policy largely continued during the first year of the Biden administration as key personnel such Ambassador Jimmy Story continued in their positions and continued to support the interim government of Juan Guaidó. This changed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. At that point the geopolitics and political economy of US relations with Venezuela changed and the Biden Administration had much more motivation to change course and engage in diplomacy with the Maduro government. Since then, it has continued to engage and use sanctions relief as a way to try to promote democratic elections. To my eye, this has been the most successful period of US policy towards Venezuela. While the elections did not lead to an immediate democratization, they have put Maduro in a place in which his authoritarian regime has been exposed to the domestic and international audiences that before were dubious. There are no guarantees to where this will lead. But it is always better to force an authoritarian government to play the political game than to just sit back and consolidate its power.

Daniel Falcone: How is the agenda-setting and mainstream corporate media covering the election in your view in general? 

David Smilde: There was a time when I thought the corporate media was part of a big conspiracy to defend the interests of capital, and that it therefore systematically misrepresented the interests of underprivileged people seeking liberation. There is something to that view, of course. But over the past fifteen years, I have been working closely with journalists from major corporate media and have found them to be quite open-minded — often more oriented to facts and with less of an axe to grind than my academic colleagues. Most journalists are quite progressive and have a significant sense of vocation. They generally want to do good reporting and are quite happy to complicate power. If they do not have good information, are on tight deadlines, and must cover contexts they do not fully understand, they will often use the narrative hooks typical of right orientalism. But if they have good sources that give them quality information and explain the history, context, and probable evolution of events on the ground, they generally relish writing stories that complicate power and humanize average people.

Daniel Falcone: I read that even in Petare, the barrio, once a Chavista stronghold, was resisting and revolting against Maduro’s “win.” Obviously, this differs from Republican, Democrat, and elite institutional criticism of the election results. But can you discuss the need, or difficulty in pushing back against US hegemony while making critical cases against Maduro?  

David Smilde: We are indeed seeing a new demography of protest in Venezuela in this round. On July 29, the day of Maduro’s proclamation it was the popular sectors who went to the streets to protest, despite María Corina Machado‘s calls on the population *not* to take to the streets. This should not surprise. They are the sectors that have most suffered in recent years with the economic collapse and were most hoping for change. And it is precisely because they are not the traditional opposition base — that they did not pay attention to the call not to protest — and went to the streets. The optics of this protest are quite difficult for Maduro as it is not easy to portray them as the same middle class, violent protests of 2014 and 2017.

The critical case against Maduro really crosses the left/right divide. Apart from Marxist hardliners, who think democracy and human rights are bourgeois tools and think a dictatorship is necessary to reach socialism, those of us who are left, because we reject the structural inequality created by people in positions of privilege and power, should be squarely against Maduro. He has used his control over the state, the military, and the oil industry to give himself and his officials a life of luxury while average Venezuelans struggle day-by-day to put food on the table and a roof over their heads and educate their children. There is nothing progressive about Maduro and his government. Criticizing and working against Maduro’s authoritarian government does not require support for U.S. hegemony, just the opposite. It will only be through a multilateral, regional diplomatic effort that any solution will be forged. The US can facilitate but should allow the governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to lead advocacy for a solution.

In the long term, the best way the left can push back against US hegemony would be to advocate for and support movements and governments that work against structural inequality in all its forms, through democratic means. Concentrating power does not lead to more democracy, it just remains concentrated. And as suggested above, this advocacy should be based on actual knowledge and concrete portraits of people and contexts in their full humanity. There are no angels in Venezuela or elsewhere, just people with the usual set of vices and virtues with a constant tendency to create structural inequalities and monopolies. This must be combatted and is a struggle that will never end.

Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City.