What You Need to Know About Trump’s Tariffs and the Rest of Trump’s Madness
The art of the deal, with him as dealer

By Robert Reich

February 3, 2025

Source: Substack


Image by Robert Reich



Understand this: The reason Trump has raised tariffs on Canada and Mexico is not to have more bargaining leverage to get better deals for the United States from Canada or from Mexico.

Hours before the Canadian tariffs went into effect, Trump was asked if there was anything Canada could do to stop them. “We’re not looking for a concession,” Trump said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon. “We’ll just see what happens, we’ll see what happens.”

The real reason Trump has raised tariffs on Canada and Mexico is to show the world that he’s willing to harm (smaller) economies even at the cost of harming America’s (very large) economy.

The point is the show — so the world knows it’s dealing with someone who’s willing to mete out big punishments. Trump increases his power by demonstrating he has the power and is willing to use it.

The same with deporting, say, Colombians or Brazilians in military planes, handcuffed and shackled. If, say, Colombia or Brazil complains about their treatment, so much the better. Trump says, without any basis in fact, that they’re criminals. Then he threaten tariffs. If Colombia backs down, Trump has once again demonstrated his power.

Why did Trump stop foreign aid? Not because it’s wasteful. In fact, it helps stabilize the world and reduces the spread of communicable diseases. The real reason Trump stopped foreign aid is he wants to show he can.

Why is he disregarding (or threatening to tear up) treaties and agreements (the Paris Agreement, NATO, whatever)? Not because such treaties and agreements are bad for America. To the contrary, they’re in America’s best interest.

The real reason Trump is tearing up treaties is they tie Trump’s hands and thereby limit his discretion to mete out punishments and rewards.

Don’t think of these as individual “policies.” Think of them together as shows of Trump’s strength.

If Canada or Mexico retaliates, he’ll retaliate against them with even bigger tariffs.

If some senior Republican members of Congress object that he’s stepping on congressional prerogatives, so what? It’s an opportunity to show them who’s boss.

If a federal court temporarily stops him, so what? He’ll go right on doing it and demonstrate that the courts are powerless to stop him.

Look behind what’s happening and you’ll see that Trump is employing two techniques to gain more power than any U.S. president has ever wielded.

The first is to demonstrate that he can mete out huge punishments and rewards.

It doesn’t matter if the punishment or reward is justified. A 25 percent tariff on Canada? Hello?

It’s a show of strength.

If prices skyrocket in America for oil and lumber from Canada or for fruits and vegetables from Mexico, no problem for Trump. Most Americans don’t understand how tariffs work, anyway. Trump will blame Canada and Mexico. And then threaten them with, say, 50 percent tariffs. Kabam!

Which brings us to the second technique Trump is using to expand his power: unpredictability.

What makes an abusive parent or spouse, or an abusive dictator, or Trump, especially terrifying? They’re unpredictable. They lash out in ways that are hard to anticipate.

So, anyone potentially affected by their actions gives them extra-wide berth — vast amounts of obedience in advance.

Trump keeps everyone guessing.

He demands that Denmark sell Greenland to the United States. He chews out the CEO of the Bank of America at Davos for allegedly discriminating against conservatives. He fires independent inspectors general. He purges the Department of Justice of career civil servants who prosecuted cases against him. He attacks birthright citizenship.

What’s next? Who knows? That’s the whole point.

How else to explain the bizarre deference — cowardice — we’re seeing among CEOs, the media, almost all Republican and even some Democratic lawmakers? Presumably, they’re all saying to themselves: “He could do anything, so let’s be especially careful.”

Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg kiss his derriere. Bill Gates is “frankly impressed” with him. Jamie Dimon, chief of JPMorganChase, decides he’s “not all wrong.”

Nearly 50 House Democrats support a bill targeting undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation. What?

In 1517, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that sometimes it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness” (Discourses on Livy, book 3, chapter 2). In his 1962 book, Thinking About the Unthinkable, futurist Herman Kahn argued that to “look a little crazy” might be an effective way to induce an adversary to stand down.

The “rule of law” is all about predictability. We need predictability to be free.

But much of what Trump is doing is either illegal yet will take months or years before the courts decide so, or is in the gray area of “probably illegal but untested by the courts.” Which suits his strategy just fine.

The media calls it “chaos,” which is how various people and institutions experience it.

The practical consequence is that an increasing number of so-called “leaders” — in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, and around the world — are telling their boards, overseers, trustees, or legislatures: “We have to give Trump whatever he wants and even try to anticipate his wants, because who knows how he’ll react if we don’t?”

Together, these two techniques — big demonstrations of discretionary power to reward or punish, and wild uncertainty about when or how he’ll do so — expand Trump’s power beyond the point any president has ever pushed power.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Why is Trump so obsessed with enlarging his power?

Hint: It’s not about improving the well-being of average Americans and certainly not about making America great again (whatever that means).

Yes, he’s a malignant narcissist and sadist with an insatiable lust for power who gets pleasure out of making others squirm.

But there’s something else.

The bigger his demonstrable power and the more unpredictably he wields it, the greater his ability to trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, both in the United States and elsewhere.

I’m referring to America’s billionaires, such as Elon Musk and the 13 other billionaires Trump has installed in his regime, as well as the 744 other billionaires in America, and the 9,850 Americans with at least $100 million in net worth.

Together, these individuals have a huge storehouse of wealth. Many are willing to trade some of it to gain even more, and to tie down what they have more securely.

They give Trump (and his family) business deals, information, campaign money, and positive PR (propaganda). In return, he gives them tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and suspensions of antitrust.

I’m also referring to oligarchs in Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. He gives them special trade deals, energy deals, intelligence deals, access to global deposits of riches; or he threatens to hold them back. In return, they give him (and his family) business deals, information, support in political campaigns, and more covert propaganda.

This is Trump’s game: Huge demonstrations of power that’s wielded unpredictably. They’re eliciting extraordinary deals for Trump and his family, domestically and worldwide.

Trump says he’s doing this for American workers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He’s doing this for himself and for the world’s oligarchy, which, in turn, is busily siphoning off the wealth of the world.

How to stop this? The first step is to understand it.



Robert Reich  is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.

Canada and Mexico Under Attack: The China Solution

Dean Baker

 February 5, 2025
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For reasons that obviously have nothing to do with reality, Donald Trump has decided to renege on the trade deal he negotiated five years ago and start a trade war with Canada and Mexico. He wants to tax most of imports from these countries at a 25 percent rate, with the exception of Canadian oil, which will be taxed at a 10 percent rate.

This is a tax increase of roughly $200 billion a year ($1,600 per family) that will overwhelmingly be paid by moderate-income and middle-income families. It is the largest tax increase on them that has ever been imposed. And retaliation from both countries is likely to impose additional costs.

Meanwhile, both Canada and Mexico are struggling to deal with a situation where its neighbor and closest ally has turned into an erratic enemy. They can and should look to retaliate (I trust not honoring patent monopolies for items like prescription drugs and iPhones is on the list), but they should also look to longer term solutions. And there is one obvious answer here, China.

The logic is straightforward. China has an economy that is already almost one-third larger than the U.S. economy and growing far more rapidly. The growth gap should grow as Donald Trump’s erratic policies sap the dynamism of the U.S. economy.

But more important than its size, China produces just about anything these countries could want. It manufactures a wide range of items, many of high quality and available at far lower prices than U.S. products. It also is advancing rapidly in tech, where its AI is now at the cutting edge in terms of performance and massively cheaper and more energy efficient than the U.S. competition.

As both countries look to integrate with China’s economy, they could almost certainly count on considerable help from China in getting through the near-term disruptions created by Trump’s taxes. Imagine Canada took down its trade barriers and everyone in the country could now buy high quality electric cars for $13,000 a piece? There would be a similar story with solar panels, batteries, and many other items. Canada and Mexico could turn economic hardship into an economic bonanza.

It is understandable that these countries would be reluctant to tie their economies too closely to an autocratic regime like China’s, but with Trump and the Republican Party intent on abandoning democracy, their choice is which autocrat they want to line up with.

Xi offers two big plusses over Trump in this respect. Deals actually mean something to him. He doesn’t abandon the pacts he negotiated because of something he read on social media.

And Xi lives in reality. He recognizes that global warming is real and that you can’t prevent fires sparked by global warming through randomly opening dams.

The reality is that there is no longer a superpower even ostensibly committed to democracy and the rule of law. At this point Canada and Mexico have to look at the one that can be a more stable partner for trade and investment relations. There can be little doubt at the moment this is China.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

A Choice: Submit to Trump’s Ridicule and

Tariffs or Seek Win-Win Trade Relations

by Kim Petersen / February 3rd, 2025

A widely known caution advises people not to put all their eggs in one basket.

An exemplar is Canada. Has Canada put too many of its eggs in its basket of trade with the United States?

Of course, Canada’s trade is not completely reliant on the United States, but it has cast its lot so much into the American camp that it has cut off or damaged opportunities to diversify its trade. As the junior partner, population-wise, in the trade partnership, Canada’s sovereignty and national dignity are being impugned in full view of Canadians and the rest of the world. US president Donald Trump, on the other hand comes off as a bully and a buffoon to the rest of the world, as well as critically thinking Americans.

Trump demeans Canada’s current prime minister (which isn’t hard to do), and by extension Canadians, by referring to Justin Trudeau as a governor of the 51st US state. He says he is going to impose a 25% tariff starting on 1 February because he claims that Canada is an unfair trader.

The accusation is absurd. Is the US forced to buy from Canada? Should Canada be required to buy items that it doesn’t need or want?

Trump says that the US doesn’t need Canada’s oil, lumber, etc. If so, then that is fine. Then just don’t buy. But by imposing tariffs, it comes across as an admission that US producers can’t compete on price and quality. Is America being made great again by not competing in an open market? If Canada is unfairly subsidizing or skirting the stipulations of the United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA, a “free” trade agreement proposed by Trump and reached during his first term as president that eliminated most tariffs) or the World Trade Organization (WTO) then grieve the purported unfair trade practices according to the agreed-to mechanism in the trade agreements.

Canadian Relations with China

Outside of trade disputes, just how sovereign is Canada. Justin’s father, former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, likened the Canada-America relationship as a mouse sleeping next to an elephant. Pierre, however, had an independent streak. He went to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1970 — before Richard Nixon in 1979.

Justin, though, has been reticent to stray from the American line.

·       Consequently, during the first Trump administration when Canada was asked/demanded to turn overMeng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei. Canada complied and held her under house arrest until the US agreed to drop the extradition request, with no charges forthcoming.

·       Canada even declined to engage with the world’s leading 5G provider Huawei, again at the behest of the US.

·       Even diplomatic niceties went by the wayside. Justin found himself confronted by People’s Republic of China chairman Xi Jinping about his divulging privileged discussion between the two of them. Trudeau didn’t have the decency at that time or afterwards to publicly apologize.

·       When the US pushed the narrative of a Chinese genocide being perpetrated by Han Chinese against Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, Canada joined in. The accusations were patently false and without evidence, rejected by the world’s Muslim-majority countries. Canada’s hypocrisy was revealed when Israel amplified its own genocide against Palestinians (as pointed to by the case brought to the World Court and the International Criminal Court). Canada continued to tout Israel’s right defend itself; i.e., in essence, supporting the right for an occupier to oppress and murderously deal with any resistance to occupation and oppression.

·       China is many thousands of kilometers across the Pacific Ocean from Canada. Yet, Canadian warships are engaged in provocative actions – what Canadian media calls “a high stakes global chess game” — in the Taiwan Strait.

·       After the US imposed 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, Canada followed suit with the same tariffs.

Trade Diversification

Fortunately, Chinese is not so pathetic as to hold a grudge. Besides, holding a grudge would be antithetical to developing good trading relations. Witness Argentina under Javier Milei leaving BRICS, and Milei’s undiplomatic remarks about communism. Nonetheless, China says it is ready to work with China despite Milei criticism such as likening China to an “assassin.” Eventually, Milei realized the economic necessity of deeper ties with China and Xi Jinpeng met with Milei. Milei’s about-face was described as “pragmatic collaboration.”

Will Canada realize the same need for pragmatic collaboration? The door is open as “China says it is ready to work with Canada despite Trudeau criticism.”

Although China is reducing its dependence on fossil fuels, China still desires energy, certain minerals, and other commodities that Canada can supply. Canada might best orient its economy to be accepting of opportunities that China (and other countries) might offer. It would be a seismic shift in orientation, but Canada might be best served by joining BRICS and considering what the Belt and Road Initiative has to offer.

While Trump browbeats and disparages its trading partners to gain the US an upper hand in trade relations, China professes that it is about win-win relations. Such win-win relations are logical and conducive to continued business and greater profit to all sides. Win-win is more likely to preserve continued trade relations and build a good reputation for prospective trade relations elsewhere, whereas taking advantage of a trade partner might well endanger continued trade relations and not promote a positive image among other potential trade partners.

Moreover, Chairman Xi will not demean Trudeau, or his successor, as a governor of China’s 24th province (China has 23 provinces sheng — which includes, of course, the island province of Taiwan — and the governor is a shengzhang. There are also five autonomous regions, 4 municipalities, and two special administrative regions). Chinese are skilled diplomats.

China is assuredly interested in trade with Canada. China may well be a partner for Canadian commodities (which Trump ridicules): oil, gas, lumber, minerals, wheat, other agricultural products, Canadian technology, an end to Chinese tariffs on Canadian canola oil (enacted in response to Canadian tariffs on Chinese EVs), etc. China might even set up automobile plants to produce EVs for the Canadian market, preserving Canadian automobile jobs, and contributing to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The Chinese economy is ascendant while the US is getting bogged down by exploding debt. Much of the US economic fortunes are dependent on the dollar as a fiat currency. Yet, the pace of dedollarization is increasing. Many European economies are sputtering. Asia and the Global South are rising. Canada has a choice.

Tit-for-tat is a common response to the erection of tariffs, but it harms consumers in all countries. Trade diversification is a superior strategy, and it is something that Canada trumpets and needs to act on. Much of the rest of the world is poised to diversify its trade away from US tariffs against them.Facebook

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Read other articles by Kim.

 

Zionism is Far-Right Bigotry, Hate of “the Other,” and Supremacy

Eliding a far-right racist’s own religious heritage

by Paul Haeder / February 3rd, 2025

They are trying to elevate France recognizing Josephine Baker as a hero, yet, Amy Goodman has the ability — and whatever else is going on with the Black journalist she interviews, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo — to sidestep the tribal and religious and historical and intellectual identity of this French monster, Éric Zemmour (above image).

He’s Jewish and he openly uses his Jewishness as a cuddle to get where he is today — published writer and candidate for office? Where is the money trail, that is the question. I ask this as I did get a reader’s comments (from the Dissident Voice newsletter where I am published) who is from California but has lived in New Zealand for 25 years. He’s a businessman, in hospitality, and he writes me from time to time. He is concerned with employees from South America, in his New Zealand restaurant, still skeptical of the Pfizer and how the NZ government makes it illegal to work without a series of jabs — booster madness is what 2022 will be. Just a little research on NZ —

New Zealand Terrorist Attack: The Israel Connection

“The corporate press is correct that Tarrant and Breivik follow the practices of the anti-Islam xenophobic movement on the rise in Europe, North America and now Oceania, but the key element they deliberately avoid mentioning is their strong collective affinity for the state of Israel.”

You know, the Christian Identity politics in the world, well, of course they are tied to Identity, and that is Christianity. The Jewish Identity politics (an entire country, Israel, Jewish, and like In God We Trust USA Christian nation) tie into of course, Jewish-ness. Zionism Identity, well, of course, Zionism is the identifier. Why would Jewish Amy Goodman not mention this person’s — Zemmour’s — Jewish identity? He’s anti-Muslim, and he’s a proponent of murder and mayhem. He’s misogynistic as HELL.

Oh, Josephine Baker —

‘Baker wrote about the injustices she had witnessed for a French paper, France-Soir. From Montevideo to Copenhagen, she gave talks about the evils of US segregation, and on 28 August 1963, she was the only official female speaker to speak alongside Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. In her French military uniform, Baker spoke about her own struggle for justice to a quarter of a million people. Looking out at the mix of races in the crowd, she declared: “Salt and pepper — just what it should be.”

Yet these actions did not go down well with the FBI, who had a file open against her since 1951 because of her “anti-United States statements and her fight for racial equality”. For 15 years, until Baker’s 60th birthday, they recorded her actions and called her a Communist Party apologist, not least because she occasionally partied with the Castro brothers in Cuba.’

Being the first black woman to become a global celebrity and to star in a major feature film – 1934’s Zouzou  undoubtedly made Josephine Baker an influential cabaret siren and fashion icon. Yet she was also so much more. A Second World War spy for the French Resistance, a civil rights activist, a suspected communist sympathiser, and a single mother to twelve adopted children from all over the globe, Baker refused to dance to anyone’s drum but her own.

Her words still resonate today: “Surely the day will come when colour means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul, when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free.”

(Ailsa Ross is a journalist living in the Canadian Rockies. She’s the author of The Woman Who Rode a Shark: And 50 More Wild Female Adventurers [AA Publishing, 2019])

So, how do we frame all of this through the lens and looking glass of racism and bigotry, a real foundation of Zionism, which is the founding force of the state of Israel? This by, Yoav Litvin, an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer. His work can be found at yoavlitvin.com.

Early Zionists syncretised many aspects of European fascism, white supremacy, colonialism and messianic Evangelism and had a long and sordid history of cooperating with anti-Semites, imperialists and fascists in order to promote exclusivist and expansionist agendas.

In fact, throughout the past century, anti-Semites and Zionists have worked towards the mutual interest of concentrating Jews in Israel; the former as a means of scapegoating and expelling an unwanted population, and the latter to combat the “demographic threat” posed by native Palestinians. Further, both anti-Semites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopia of global apartheid.

Zionism is a racist and settler colonialist movement, which opportunistically coopts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide of indigenous Palestinians. White supremacy is dominant within Israeli society, which privileges white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of dark-skinned African Jews, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews as well as African refugees. African/black Jewish communities are often denied recognition by Israeli authorities with some members even deported.

Zionism is based on a distinctly secular outlook, which embraces aggression and expansion as an acceptable response to trauma and denounces the traditional Jewish pacifist approach of viewing hardship as divine punishment for sins. The Israeli regime capitalises on a dynamic of violence and inequality reinforced by fear-mongering and the rewards of resource acquisition to promote a privileged ruling class at the expense of colonised Palestinian people. Zionist strategists manipulate the past traumas Jews have endured to galvanise support for aggressive policies that disenfranchise Palestinians.

They call it double punishment, or at least that’s what Yonathan Arfi, vice president of the Representative Council of French Jews, describes it. False narratives from Jews, and then coming from people who are Jewish. Stephen Miller, anyone? Remember his prominence in Trump-Alt-Hatred politics? So, Zemmour is Jewish, espouses supremacist views of whites (Jews over Goyim, but he doesn’t yammer too much on that), and he thinks all women are baby breeders and do not have the capacity for politics and can’t be geniuses. So, the legitimacy he claims as a Jew with his Nazi patina, well, that is the double take, double tap, double punishment.

So many will question how much Zemmour truly engages with his Jewish identity – but, as philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argues, that has become irrelevant. Despite rigorous criticism from the Jewish community, “what Mr. Zemmour does, whether he likes it or not, [is] in the Jewish name”. (source)

They all do land with parachutes, pariahs and war criminals, one and all.

Israeli military hegemony is indeed no long-term guarantee of US interests in the region, but the scale of the US-Israel military relationship and the close synchronization of US and Israeli strategy down to the present are determined by a strategic calculus, not by sentiment. Kissinger’s comments do reflect an important shift in US policy at this time, towards greater reliance on compliant Arab regimes to preserve the status quo. But Israel’s function as a “strategic asset” is no mere rhetorical flourish of Ronald Reagan’s campaign. US policy, in 1975 as now, aimed to enhance Israel’s strategic capacity in the region, consolidate friendly Arab regimes, and to isolate and debilitate the Palestinian movement.
— “Kissinger Memorandum: ‘To Isolate the Palestinians,’” Middle East Report, 96 (May/June 1981).

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pulitzer-prize winner Alice Walker caused much controversy by recommending David Icke’s book And the Truth Shall Set You Free, claiming it was “a curious person’s dream come true”.

Many reacted sharply to Walker’s endorsement of what is widely considered to be an anti-Semitic book, accusing her of embracing Icke’s racist conspiracy theories; others, like Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, defended Walker, claiming her ideas are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. In her article, In defence of Alice Walker, Abulhawa claimed Palestinians are “killed, humiliated and destroyed in visible and invisible ways by Israel’s notions of Jewish supremacy”.
— Yoav Litvin, “The Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy,’” Al Jazeera

This, Alice Walker, or …

Kissinger and the Tribe . . .

On December 2, Democracy Now— Read the transcript and see more of Diallo’s words.

We go now to France where we are joined by French journalist and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo. Her latest op-ed for the Washington Post is headlined Josephine Baker enters the Panthéon. Don’t let it distract from this larger story. Thank you so much for joining us, Rokhaya. Why don’t you start off by telling us that larger story and then go into the significance of Josephine Baker being recognized?

Rokhaya Diallo: Thank you so much for inviting me. I am very happy—to me, it’s very good news to finally have a woman of color in the Panthéon, which is, as you said, one of the most prestigious places to welcome the most revered French figures. It is something that is very meaningful, because as well as being an entertainer, she was also a hero of resisting during the Second World War but also took part to the March on Washington. As you said, she was the only woman.

But there are two things that left me with mixed feelings. First, the fact that France tends to use the fact that it has been very welcoming to African Americans throughout the 20th century to picture itself as a very open and welcoming country. But the thing that we tend to forget is that while Josephine Baker was celebrated and dancing on Parisian stages, France was a very violent colonial power, so it was also colonizing Africa and Asia and also the Caribbean, and perpetrating very much violence to people who were colonized and also displaying them in what was called at that time the Colonial Exhibitions, which were basically human zoos where you could see people coming from the colony to be seen by visitors from Paris and from other regions of France.

So there was a double standard with African Americans being welcomed because they were American and didn’t have any historical agreement to settle with France. At the same time, other people of color were actually submitted to the French state.

I go back to New Zealand, because it is very easy to believe New Zealand is this great, well-run, law abiding, great place!

Sources:

1. “New Zealand’s Hidden Role at the Biggest US Bombing Base in the Middle East”
   A recent issue of Air Force News revealed that a senior NZDF officer served a six-month posting at the Qatar base, placing New Zealanders at the heart of the main targeting and bombing center in that region

2. “World’s Super Rich Buying Pandemic Escape Mansions in New Zealand”
   A number of the planet’s richest people, including billionaire co-founder of Paypal Peter Thiel, are escaping to New Zealand to shelter in luxury bunkers amid the COVID-19 pandemic.FacebookTwitter

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Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

 

Zionism: Jews and Penguins




by M. Shahid Alam / January 27th, 2025

Zionists have sought to delegitimize Palestinian opposition to Zionism or Jewish settler-colonialization of their lands, by accusing them of antisemitism, that is, of harboring hatred for Jews as such, not because of what they had/have been doing to Palestinians.

Yahweh gave Palestine to the Jews in perpetuity: thus the story goes in the ancient literature of the Hebrews as recorded some 2,500 years ago in Genesis. Why would the Palestinians refuse to handover their country to the ‘original’ Ashkenazi title-holders to Palestine: if not for their hatred of Jews – if not for their inveterate hatred of Jews? Is there be any merit to this accusation? Could it be that in fact, this accusation is a smear – one instance of the weaponization of antisemitism – employed by Zionist Jews to malign their Palestinian victims? Indeed, this smear is hurled at anyone with the temerity to disagree with the narrative that Zionist Jews have constructed to justify their European exclusionary settler-colonialism in Palestine, now ongoing for more than a century.

It is as if the Whites in the United States were to accuse the Blacks of anti-white racism whenever they demanded their human rights. It appears that the Whites in the USA have not thought to be this creative when defending their apartheid, their exclusion of Blacks from the rights of citizenship. That is not to say that they have not been nearly as creative in other ways.

Consider a simple test to discover where the truth might lie in this matter, with the Jewish accusers or the Palestinians accused? Imagine a replay of the history of Palestine starting with the announcement of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917.

In this infamous Declaration – actually a letter written by one British Lord, Sir Arthur Balfour, to another British Lord, Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent member of the Rothschild banking family in Britain. In this letter, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary – tersely and artfully – conveyed the British government’s commitment to create a “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In other words, the British Empire would use all the authority at its disposal to enable European Jewish Zionists to create a Jewish colonial-settler state in Palestine.

Soon after the Balfour Declaration, European Jews began arriving in Palestine, under the military protection of the British colonial government in Palestine. Over the next thirty-one years, these Jewish colonial-settlers – drawn almost entirely from Europe – built the political, social, administrative and military infrastructure of an exclusionary Jewish state in Palestine – one that rigorously excluded Palestinians – with the fullest support and cooperation of its British colonial government.

When the Palestinians organized to resist the settler-colonization of their lands, the British colonialists were ready to use brutal force against them. Starting in 1936, as the resistance gained momentum, the British responded with blunt and brutal force. They made mass arrests of Palestinians, incarcerating them in concentration camps without trial; they demolished homes and villages suspected of supporting the resistance; and clamped curfews on villages and cities to disrupt the movement of Palestinian fighters. By the time the Palestinians resistance was crushed in 1939, nearly all the leaders of the resistance had been executed – often staged as public spectacles – sentenced to long prison terms or exiled. In other words, the British had created the conditions for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Jewish colons.

In 1947, the Ashkenazi Jewish colons began to employ their superior societal, state and military power to initiate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. By the end of 1948, they had captured 78 percent of mandatory Palestine; simultaneously, the Jewish military and militia perpetrated dozens. of massacres to expel 80 percent of the Palestinians from the lands conquered for the Jewish state. Israel banned the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes inside Israel, and those attempting to return were repulsed with deadly force.

Of the Palestinians who remained inside Israel, many lost their homes, agricultural lands and businesses. In addition, all were placed under military rule that would not be lifted until December 1966. After military rule ended, these Palestinians have lived under a variety of restrictions that remain in force to this day. Israel has been an apartheid society since its inception, with two sets of laws, one for Jewish colons and another for Palestinians.

In a mere thirty-one years, then, the European Jewish colons had created a Jewish state in Palestine after ethnically cleansing more than half its population, a unique achievement in the history of settler colonialism. In June 1967, Israel conquered the rest of Palestine – East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and the West Bank – while also expelling another 200,000 Palestinians from these areas.[1]

All the other European colonial-settlers in the Americas, Oceania and Southern Africa had taken centuries to create their own state, something the Jewish colons in Palestine achieved in a mere thirty-one years. In addition, the Jewish colons achieved this without a natural ‘mother country.’ How did a tiny, hated, weak and persecuted minority manage to achieve this miracle?

In our replay of this history, we will not change any of the events of this history of the settler-colonization of Palestine. We will only change the identity of the colons; we will replace the European Jewish settler-colonists with Penguin settler-colonists from Antarctica. These Penguins too will enter Palestine to establish an exclusionary Penguin settler-colonial state after expelling 80 percent of the Palestinians from 78 percent of Palestine. In other words, the Jews and Penguins do not differ in their aims, methods or achievements as
colonial-settlers in Palestine. They differ only in their identity: one group consists of Jews – at first overwhelmingly from Europe – another consists of Penguins from Antarctica.

If Palestinian opposition to the Zionist project was motivated by their antisemitism or prior hatred of Jews – then we should expect them to react differently to an identical settler-colonial project, now undertaken by Penguins from Antarctica. The Palestinian reaction has to be different because the Penguins are not Jews, and no one could accuse the Palestinians of antipenguinism, or an ancient hatred of Penguins because of their Penguin identity.

No Orientalists – Jewish, Christian, or secular: English, French or German – have accused Islam, the Qur’an, Prophet Muhammad, Muslim rulers, Muslim theologians, Muslim poets – Hafiz, Rumi, Omar Khayyam – Muslim philosophers – Al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes – of teaching the Muslims to hate the Penguins.

Simply stated, the Palestinians could not have brought a prior anti-Penguinism to their encounter with the Penguin settlers-colonists in Palestine. Without prior hatred of Penguins, therefore – using the logic of the Zionists – we can expect the Palestinians to welcome the Penguin settlers who begin arriving after November 1917. Since the Palestinians not infected with anti-Penguinism, they would not object to their dispossession by the Penguins.

Indeed, if the Penguin settlers could cite ancient Penguin could cite chapter and verse from their ancient scriptures to prove that a feathered Yahweh, some 5000 years ago, had awarded Palestine in perpetuity to the progeny of a Penguin Abraham and Jacob, we might expect the Palestinians to honor the feathered Yahweh’s pledge, since there is only one God, whether he reveals himself to Penguins, Jews, Arabs, Ostriches or Kangaroos. We might even expect the most devout Muslims among the Palestinians to insist on serving the divinely chosen Penguins as their slaves in perpetuity.

However, we would be sorely disappointed in these expectations. Once we grant the Palestinians their humanity – and we have to, willingly or not – surely they will oppose the Penguin settler-colonists – as they had resisted the Jewish settlers-colonists – but not because of any prior hatred of their Penguin identity. The Palestinians would oppose the Penguin settlers because of what they must do to them as exclusionary settler-colonists. Like their Jewish counterparts, they too will use terror to ethnically cleanse them, and establish an exclusionary Penguin settler-colonial state in Palestine.

In other words, the Palestinians will oppose the Penguins because they have arrived in their land with the same intentions as the Zionist Jews. Notwithstanding their disparate identities, both are exclusionary settler-colonists entering Palestine under the military protection of a British colonial government. Regardless of why the Jews or Penguins may have launched their exclusionary settler-colonial project, regardless of who they are, both will use terror to expel the Palestinians from their lands. Since the Palestinians are humans, as human as the Jews, no more and no less, their human instincts of self-preservation, their human pride in their history and culture, their human love for their homes and their children will persuade them to oppose both the Jewish and Penguin colonial project. Indeed, they have the right and moral obligation to resist settler-colonialism, no matter who the colons are, no matter the promises the deities may have made to the colons, no matter the national mythologies they believe or pretend to believe in.

We may now summarize the argument of this essay. Since an exclusionary settler-colonialism seeks the total or near total erasure of another people, the natural instinct for self-preservation (common to all forms of life) will propel its victims to resist and repel the settlers. The victims’ instinct for self-preservation is not predicated on any prior hatred towards the settler-colonists; their present revulsion over the past and ongoing actions of the colons will suffice to activate their instinct of self-preservation. In other words, the Palestinians resisted Zionism because it sought their erasure as a people, not because the people who sought their erasure were Jews, real or fictive descendants of the Hebrews.

One has to conclude that Zionist accusation of antisemitism against Palestinians is based on the premise that the latter do not possess the instinct for self-preservation. In the Zionist narrative, the Palestinians opposed Zionists not because they were opposed to their own erasure, but because this erasure would be effected by the hated Jews. They would have welcomed their own erasure if only this were to be effected by any other people – Yemenis, Vietnamese, Nepalese or Australian Aboriginals – or any other species – Penguins, Kangaroos, Koala Bears or Dolphins.

Notwithstanding the pretext of Zionism – claiming that the European Jews were reclaiming their divine patrimony – the mostly secular Zionist leaders must have understood that this was a cover for their exclusionary settler-colonial project. The white settlers who effected the erasure of native Americans also sought cover for their slaughter in divine sources. Many of them thought of themselves as the new chosen race, and of America as their promised land. Other white settlers in North America spoke of their manifest destiny: this was part of God’s plan to create a new freer, Christian society in a new land.

The Jewish Zionists owe their success to brute force, not originally their own, but the brute force of antisemitic Western imperialist powers. This is not to suggest that the results of brute force cannot endure. I will claim exemption from such naïvet&eacute. No doubt, the Jewish Zionists were inspired by the many successful European colonial-settler states in the Americas and Oceania. There were many failures too. I am thinking of the many European settler-colonies in North Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa that were dismantled in the second half of the twentieth century. There were also two settler-colonial states that belong in this category: South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

Certainly, history will decide whether Zionism belongs in the first or second category of settler-colonialisms, not time that is measured in years or decades, but historical time that is witness to the birth and death of hundreds of states.

Unfortunately, it may be the case – and I may be wrong about this – that the pioneers of Zionism were not thinking of historical time. Smart as they were, they may have been misled by their own recent successes and by their envy of European nation states.

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Notes

1. Israel also captured the Golan Heights and the Sinai, territories belonging respectively to Syria and Egypt.

M. Shahid Alam is professor emeritus of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of two books of poetry: Intimations of Ghalib (Orison Books, 2018) and Yardstick of Life (KDP, 2024). He may be reached at moc.oohay@06720malaqla.