No Reproductive Justice Without Palestinian 

Liberation

by Mandy Medley

August 30, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Mandy Medley, photo by Steel Brooks.

The following speech was given at Union Park at the March on the DNC on Monday, August 19th.

Chicago for Abortion Rights is out here today because we REFUSE to allow the Democrats to use abortion rights and trans rights as a bargaining chip to force us to vote for their imperialist agenda. We refuse the liberal co-optation of the reproductive justice movement that tells us to “vote blue no matter who”. We reject Israel’s pinkwashing, and we do not stand with Zionist so-called feminists who celebrate their equal rights to blockade aid trucks and murder Palestinian families. We remember all the times Democrats promised to protect our right to bodily autonomy and utterly failed us. We know that there is no reproductive justice without Palestinian liberation, and we refuse to let the Democrats separate and divide our struggles. We refuse to vote for genocide.

We will not be distracted by the electoral circus of our two party system, which is funded by corporations and billionaires. Another casualty of this absurd election cycle is our abortion funds, many of whom are losing funding because the wealthy liberal institutions who pledged money after the Democrats allowed Roe to fall have now pulled that money to give to Kamala’s campaign, hindering thousands and thousands of Americans from getting the abortion care they need. We will continue to fund and support our abortion funds which have been doing all they can to keep abortion accessible after the Democrats abandoned abortion rights on a national stage.

And now, when it’s too late, Kamala Harris and many other Democrats are making reproductive justice one of the pillars of their campaigns. But empty campaign promises do not provide abortion care to people in states with restrictive abortion bans. Empty campaign promises do not keep clinic doors open. Empty campaign promises do not stop our tax dollars from going to Israel’s settler colonial project instead of materially supporting families here in the U.S. Empty campaign promises do not stop the bombs from falling on thousands of families in Gaza. We don’t want empty campaign promises. We want what the majority of Americans want— expanded access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care, support for families, and an end to U.S. arms exports to Israel.

And we know no matter who wins the election, we will show up in the streets day after day to make sure every person has the basic human right to reproductive and gender affirming healthcare, and we will mobilize and organize day after day until the U.S. stops sending money and weapons to Israel, and Palestine is free. We cannot rely on the Democrats to deliver us our liberation; we must seize it ourselves. Real feminists know that our liberation is bound up with the liberation of all working class people fighting for justice and freedom all around the world, including and especially in Palestine. No one is free until everyone is free.

And finally, we know that real power comes not from politicians, but from the people, and the people say:

Free, free Palestine!

Free Palestine, free abortion!

Please consider donating to the Chicago Abortion Fund.

This piece first appeared at Rampant.

Mandy Medley is a socialist feminist organizer and a worker-owner at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago.

Death Camp

by Gary Fields

 August 30, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Not the First Time: Family from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City in what remains of their house destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

Since 2007, when the State of Israel implemented its still-ongoing blockade of Gaza, several different monikers have emerged to describe the conditions for Palestinians living in the territory under the ongoing Israeli siege.  Now, after 11 months of the murderous Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, it is necessary once again to revise what the State of Israel has imposed on the territory.  What the state of Israel has created in the Gaza Strip is nothing less than a death camp akin to what the Nazis created for the massacre of Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich.

For many years, the descriptor of choice for Gaza emerged – surprisingly — from remarks in 2010 by the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron while on a trip to Ankara Turkey, who described the Gaza Strip as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”  Speaking alongside his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Cameron bluntly insisted that “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.”  This characterization of Gaza as a prison bore resemblance to the metaphor used by Michel Foucault to describe the stasis and immobility imposed by authorities on late medieval European towns afflicted by the Plague and became a standard representation of Gaza under the Israeli siege.

Man from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City grieving in the ruins of his house destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

After October 7, 2023, in the initial weeks of the brutal reprisal by the Israeli military against the civilians of Gaza, Masha Gessen in a highly provocative article for the New Yorker, wrote that the prison analogy was no longer applicable to describe what the Palestinians of Gaza were experiencing.  Gessen instead insisted on referring to Gaza as a “Ghetto,” and suggested that what Israel was undertaking in Gaza was precisely what the Nazis did in places such as the Ghetto of Warsaw.  In what was a courageous, as well insightful observation, Gessen wrote that the Israelis were “liquidating” the Ghetto of Gaza just as the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto.

Now, after 11 months of incessant daily bombing and killing of a largely defenseless population with no end in sight; with an entire population, including women and children, made to suffer from no food, no clean water, diseases with no medicines and with the hospitals largely destroyed; and with the civilians of Gaza locked inside the space of the territory with nowhere to flee; the Israeli military is re-creating a project akin to the camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Oswiecim but on a larger spatial scale.  What else but a death camp corresponds to the organized daily slaughter of Palestinians within a confined space carried out by the State of Israel?

An area of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

In such circumstances, the question that beckons for answers is:  how could a nation that claims its heritage from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps — and prides itself on upholding the slogan “never again” — turn around and inflict virtually the same kind of suffering on another group of civilians, and do it seemingly without remorse?  While there are no easy answers to this vexing puzzle, surprisingly one place to begin comes from the insights of two contemporaries from the 19^th century with vastly different political persuasions.

In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.*  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about revolutionaries such as Robespierre and St. Just who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.”

The main mosque in the town of Kuza’a (Khan Yunis District) destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please.  They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  He used this insight to show not how history repeats, but instead how history “rhymes” as human actors in the present recreate in the present what they have encountered from past experience.  Marx famously described the reprise of the past as both tragedy and farce.

In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them and in an uncanny way re-enact what they themselves know and have already experienced.  What these two towering figures reveal is that history weighs upon the living as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Holocaust and the experience of the Nazi death camps cast upon Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?

In response to this question, the logical but ultimately naïve impulse is to imagine the victims of the Holocaust filled with compassion for those who have experienced similar fates.  Supposedly, those who endured the ravages of the death camps would emerge from their tragedy replete with empathy for the suffering of others.  In some cases, this is undoubtedly true.

Far more credible is the disturbing likelihood that the Holocaust produced heirs thoroughly replete with rancor and bitterness toward humanity, with little compassion for other victims of brutality and injustice, and a deeply resentful if not unique sense of victimhood.  Indeed, these were hapless victims of an unspeakable state sponsored crime who passed such sentiments of bitterness and resentment to subsequent generations, including the current generation of Israelis who by all accounts of public opinion are fully supportive of the fratricidal activities of their government and seem oblivious to the suffering of their Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.  How else is it possible to explain the coarsened cruelty of those Israeli civilians vandalizing aid supplies intended for the starving and suffering people of Gaza, a truly depraved spectacle that conjures up images of the suffering, starving, skeleton-like Jewish captives in the death camps of the Nazis.

Apartment Buildings in Beit Hanoun destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

+++

There is a scene toward the end of the recent award-winning film, The Zone of Interest in which Nazi death camp commanders and various civilian experts are in a meeting, seated around a large table discussing how they will implement the logistics of liquidating a contingent of 700,000 Hungarian Jews who are being transported to the various camp locations.  The coldly blunt, even banal dialogue in this scene on the logistical challenges of processing so many bodies for death is obviously an echo of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil.  At the same time, the visual imagery in this cinematic re-creation of the meeting is eerily similar to the fleeting images presented on newscasts of the so-called, Israeli “War Cabinet” that usually features the stoic faces of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant.  While we don’t know the exact words exchanged among these Israeli Generals and civilian leaders, the handiwork of this group has been on full display for the world to see for the past 11 months.

In a riveting press briefing of August 26^th, two veteran UNRWA officials directly involved in on-the-ground distribution of medical and food aid to the people of Gaza, Louise Wateridge and Sam Rose described a humanitarian catastrophe that they characterized as unprecedented, something they had never seen in decades of UN work.  People in places such as Al-Mawasi and Deir al Balah, without food, water, medicines or medical care, are living amid lakes of raw sewage in an apocalyptic landscape of carnage in conditions utterly unfit for human habitation.  The situation is worsening by the hour as Israel commands one million starving and sick people to remove themselves again and again — already 16 evacuations in August — and find shelter in a confined space comprising 11% of Gaza that the Israeli military is incessantly bombarding.

Ultimately, the way to comprehend how such a situation described by the two UNRWA officials comes about is to juxtapose the scene from The Zone of Interest on the liquidation of the 700,000 Hungarian Jews, and compare it to the visuals of the Israeli War Cabinet.  There is an unsettling symmetry in this comparison that asks us to ponder how the State of Israel has come to this moment in massacring so many thousands of innocents, while keeping those still alive penned in place, readying them for death by preventing them any route of escape.

* For the rest of this paragraph and the next see Gary Fields, “Nazis:  The Fraught Politics of a word and a People Besieged.”  Jadaliyya.

Gary Fields is a Professor in the Department of Communication at UCSD and the author of Enclosure:  Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror.  He lives in San Diego.

A Looming Nuclear Catastrophe

by Melvin Goodman

 August 30, 2024

Facebook

TwitterReddit

Image Source: Alex Shuper

“Escalation dominance defines a situation in which a nation has the military capabilities that can contain or defeat an adversary at all levels of violence with the possible exception of the highest.”

– Reagan Administration’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, “Discriminate Deterrence,” 1988.

There is no greater strategic madness than the belief that nuclear superiority must be maintained at each rung of the nuclear ladder in order to maintain deterrence.  U.S. weapons technology was a major driver of escalation dominance throughout the 1950s and 1960s along with the belief that the Soviet Union would move to a level of nuclear conflict that the United States could not counter.  “Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” parodied these fears, and the arms control and disarmament developments of the 1970s and 1980s helped to defuse them.  Sadly, the Biden administration has taken a step that suggests a return to escalation dominance, which will spiral a Pentagon budget that will soon reach $1 trillion per year.

“Dr. Strangelove” remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of two saber-rattling superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation.  Now we have a third superpower—China—that is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and the Biden administration has approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan—the Nuclear Employment Guidance—that seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from Russia, China, and North Korea.  According to David Sanger in the New York Times, the document is so highly classified that “there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.

The importance of escalation dominance in the Cold War was driven by such Cold Warriors as Paul Nitze, who argued that a Soviet nuclear attack would enable the Kremlin to hold the American population hostage and to dictate the terms of peace.  Nitze added that the Soviet Union’s “effective civil defense program” would keep Soviet casualties to two to four percent of their population, a cost that Moscow would be willing to pay to achieve “dominance.”  These absurd notions encouraged the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s to advise U.S. families to build bomb shelters as protection from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.  President John F. Kennedy said the government would provide such protection for every American; in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan guaranteed protection in the form of his Star Wars missile defense.

Only the United States has spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of a missile defense shield over the entire country.  I wrote about this 25 years ago in a book titled “The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion.”  Now, European leaders are talking about a “European Air Shield,” and the Heritage Foundation—Donald Trump’s think tank—favors a missile defense system that would destroy over 100 incoming missiles.  Trump’s flawed reference to the success of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system is also illusory because it intercepts small short-range rockets fired by militants in the region and not ballistic missiles.

The next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the dangers of the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  China is expanding its nuclear arsenal; Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and warning about World War III; Iran’s nuclear program is expanding rapidly in size and sophistication; and North Korea reportedly has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear states that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Israel, India, and Pakistan.

The close ties between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are feeding Washington’s nuclear paranoia.  Washington’s failure to hold substantive discussions with these four countries makes the potential for conflict more real.  Our obsession with terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons adds to the exaggeration of the threat and our distorted strategic spending. The fact that Donald Trump may return to the White House, where he once boasted about the size of his nuclear button and promised to return America’s nuclear arsenal to the “top of the pack,” adds to nuclear uncertainty.

Russia and China are willing to enter discussions on nuclear matters with the United States, but only as part of a larger strategic discussion on the tensions and challenges that confront Washington’s bilateral policies with both Moscow and Beijing.  President Biden’s administration has refused to enter such an expanded dialogue, which is a major failure in its national security strategy.  It is essential for the three major nuclear powers to discuss arms control, risk reduction, and the importance of nonproliferation; the United States is primarily responsible for the failure to begin a dialogue.  Instead, Biden and his national security team have been preoccupied with ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia relationship, which has never been stronger.  In fact, it has been Washington’s opposition to Sino-Russian relations that has led Moscow and Beijing to bolster their ties.

The United States has been lacking serious disarmament specialists at the highest levels of the government since the Obama administration when John Kerry was secretary of state and Rose Gottemoeller was undersecretary for arms control and international security and assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation.  Kerry and Gottemoeller were fighting an uphill battle because of President Bill Clinton’s decision in 1997 to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seriously weakened the entire arms control community in the United States.  ACDA’s demise as an independent voice for arms control weakened national security by narrowing arms control options for presidential decision making.

Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending,  The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament.  The United States is already responsible for half of the global spending on the military, and is the world’s only country that has power projection capabilities that involve every corner of the globe.  Our nuclear inventory contains more warheads than there are strategic targets, and this is certainly true for the other nuclear powers around the world.  There is no greater shared irresponsibility in the international community than the secret decisions that led to the overkill capabilities in the nuclear inventories of the nine nuclear powers.  It will take a serious act of statesmanship to stop the fear-mongering delusions that could once again shape our nuclear weapons policy.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.