Thursday, June 27, 2024

UPDATED
You Saved Julian Assange

After 14 years of persecution, Julian Assange will go free. We must honor the hundreds of thousands of people across the globe who made this happen.



June 26, 2024
Source: Scheerpost





The dark machinery of empire, whose mendacity and savagery Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years trying to destroy him. They cut him off from his funding, canceling his bank accounts and credit cards. They invented bogus allegations of sexual assault to get him extradited to Sweden, where he would then be shipped to the U.S.

They trapped him in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for seven years after he was given political asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship by refusing him safe passage to Heathrow Airport. They orchestrated a change of government in Ecuador that saw him stripped of his asylum, harassed and humiliated by a pliant embassy staff. They contracted the Spanish security firm UC global in the embassy to record all his conversations, including those with his attorneys.

The CIA discussed kidnapping or assassinating him. They arranged for London’s Metropolitan Police to raid the embassy – sovereign territory of Ecuador – and seize him. They held him for five years in the high security HM Prison Belmarsh, often in solitary confinement.

And all the while they carried out a judicial farce in the British courts where due process was ignored so an Australian citizen, whose publication was not based in the U.S. and who, like all journalists, received documents from whistleblowers, could be charged under the Espionage Act.

They tried over and over and over to destroy him. They failed. But Julian was not released because the courts defended the rule of law and exonerated a man who had not committed a crime. He was not released because the Biden White House and the intelligence community have a conscience. He was not released because the news organizations that published his revelations and then threw him under the bus, carrying out a vicious smear campaign, pressured the U.S. government.

He was released — granted a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents — in spite of these institutions. He was released because day after day, week after week, year after year, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe mobilized to decry the imprisonment of the most important journalist of our generation. Without this mobilization, Julian would not be free.

Mass protests do not always work. The genocide in Gaza continues to exact its gruesome toll on Palestinians. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still locked up in a Pennsylvania prison. The fossil fuel industry ravages the planet. But it is the most potent weapon we have to defend ourselves from tyranny.

This sustained pressure — during a London hearing in 2020, to my delight, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Old Bailey court overseeing Julian’s case, complained about the noise protestors were making in the street outside — shines a continuous light on injustice and exposes the amorality of the ruling class. This is why spaces in the British courts were so limited and blurry eyed activists lined up outside as early as 4 a.m. to secure a seat for journalists they respected, my spot secured by Franco Manzi, a retired policeman.

These people are unsung and often unknown. But they are heroes. They move mountains. They surrounded parliament. They stood in the pouring rain outside the courts. They were dogged and steadfast. They made their collective voices heard. They saved Julian. And as this dreadful saga ends, and Julian and his family I hope, find peace and healing in Australia, we must honor them. They shamed the politicians in Australia to stand up for Julian, an Australian citizen, and finally Britain and the U.S. had to give up. I do not say to do the right thing. This was a surrender. We should be proud of it.

I met Julian when I accompanied his attorney, Michael Ratner, to meetings in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Michael, one of the great civil rights attorneys of our era, stressed that popular protest was a vital component in every case he brought against the state. Without it, the state could carry out its persecution of dissidents, disregard for the law and crimes in darkness.

People like Michael, along with Jennifer Robinson, Stella Assange, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, Nils Melzer, Craig Murray, Roger Waters, Ai WeiWei, John Pilger and Julian’s father John Shipton and brother Gabriel, were instrumental in the fight. But they could not have done it alone.

We desperately need mass movements. The climate crisis is accelerating. The world, with the exception of Yemen, stands passive watching a live streamed genocide. The senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion has turned everything from human beings to the natural world into commodities that are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. The decimation of civil liberties has shackled us, as Julian warned, to an interconnected security and surveillance apparatus that stretches across the globe.

The ruling global class has shown its hand. It intends, in the global north, to build climate fortresses and in the global south to use its industrial weapons to lock out and slaughter the desperate the way it is slaughtering the Palestinians.

State surveillance is far more intrusive than that employed by past totalitarian regimes. Critics and dissidents are easily marginalized or silenced on digital platforms. This totalitarian structure — the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it “inverted totalitarianism” — is being imposed by degrees. Julian warned us. As the power structure feels threatened by a restive population that repudiates its corruption, amassing of obscene levels of wealth, endless wars, ineptitude and mounting repression, the fangs it exposed to Julian will be exposed to us.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because our emails, phone conversations, web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, because we are the most photographed and followed population in human history, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This constant surveillance and personal data waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

The object of all totalitarian systems is to inculcate a climate of fear to paralyze a captive population. Citizens seek security in the structures that oppress them. Imprisonment, torture and murder are saved for unmanageable renegades such as Julian. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. The population is immobilized by trauma. The courts, along with legislative bodies, legalize state crimes. We saw all this in the persecution of Julian. It is an ominous harbinger of the future.

The corporate state must be destroyed if we are to restore our open society and save our planet. Its security apparatus must be dismantled. The mandarins who manage corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt media, must be driven from the temples of power.

Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up — which is what the corporate state is counting on — will see us enslaved and the earth’s ecosystem become inhospitable to human habitation. Let us take a lesson from the courageous men and women who took to the streets for 14 years to save Julian. They showed us how it is done.



Chris Hedges who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. He was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism. Hedges is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of numerous books, including War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.


Press Freedom Advocates Celebrate Julian Assange’s Release, But Warn of Impact of Plea Deal

June 26, 2024Z
Source: Democracy Now!



We discuss the plea deal and release of Julian Assange with press freedom advocate Trevor Timm. “Thankfully, Julian Assange is finally going free today, but the press freedom implications remain to be seen,” says Timm, who explains the U.S. espionage case against Assange, which was opened under the Trump administration and continued under Biden. Timm expresses disappointment that Biden chose to continue prosecuting Assange rather than demonstrating his stated support of press freedom. If convicted, Assange could have been sentenced to 175 years in U.S. prison, which Timm calls a “ticking time bomb for press freedom rights.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

“Julian Assange is free.” That’s what his wife tweeted after he left the Belmarsh Prison in London Monday, having reached a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors that will allow him to soon head home to Australia, ending a more than decadelong legal ordeal. Julian is now flying to the U.S. territory island of Saipan in the North Marianas, where he will appear before a U.S. district judge. He will plead guilty to one felony. He faced 175 years in a United States prison.

As we continue our coverage, we’re joined in Sydney, Australia, by Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist, longtime supporter of WikiLeaks. And we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a group that’s long advocated for Julian’s release.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! We have spoken to you both about the issue of Julian for many years. Trevor, if you can talk about the significance of this moment, the fact that, I mean, in the last week, it looks like, this deal was negotiated?

TREVOR TIMM: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Amy.

You know, I think the first word that comes to mind is “relief.” This case was a ticking time bomb for press freedom rights in the United States. You know, the case wasn’t getting a ton of coverage in the mainstream media, so I think there was a misconception that Julian Assange, because he was charged under the Espionage Act, was charged with spying. But what the Espionage Act essentially says is that you can’t receive and obtain and publish government secrets. And, of course, that’s what journalists do in this country all the time when they’re covering national security, whenever they’re covering policy. And so, thankfully, we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario, which would have been a court precedent, in a conviction in court, which then would have bound other judges potentially in future cases against other journalists.

But I am still worried about this guilty plea, because the one charge that Julian Assange was — is, essentially, pleading guilty to is a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act. And so, while there won’t be a legal precedent, there might be a practical precedent in the sense of future federal prosecutors might feel emboldened, now that they know that they’ve secured a guilty plea against a publisher, to go after others. You know, it’s possible, even though judges won’t to be able to cite this case or won’t be bound by this case, that they will know that it has occurred. And so, you know, I still think that the press freedom implications are potentially worrying and that we’re going to need to keep an eye on them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Trevor, why do you think the Biden administration didn’t just drop this case? Why did they continue to pursue it so persistently?

TREVOR TIMM: I mean, it’s really shameful that the Biden administration has kept up this case for so many years. You know, at Freedom of the Press Foundation, we organized a huge coalition of every major civil liberties organization, press freedom organization and human rights organization in the country. And, you know, in the first few weeks of the attorney general being in office, we denounced the case and implored them to drop it. And that coalition repeated its call pretty much every six months for the last three years.

You know, President Biden has gone out of his way to talk about how journalism is not a crime and that he respects press freedom, yet this case has essentially been hanging over journalists for the entire time they’ve been in office. They absolutely should have dropped it when they came into office. And you know what? They could have dropped it yesterday, and Julian Assange could have served the same amount of time in prison.

They seem to have wanted a symbolic victory, which, again, you know, could potentially hang over the heads of national security journalists for years. And, you know, don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame Julian Assange for taking this deal at all. He’s been through an incredibly harsh ordeal himself. But I do blame the Obama — or, sorry, the Biden administration. And, you know, I hope this doesn’t come back to haunt them and haunt us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk some also about the conditions of Julian’s confinement in Belmarsh?

TREVOR TIMM: You know, I think I just know from media reports that Julian has suffered from, you know, a series of serious medical conditions and has been isolated for long periods of time when he’s been there.

You know, we have to remember that this case started during the Trump administration, and the Obama administration actually refused to prosecute Julian Assange, for the exact reason that we’re talking about now. Eric Holder in the Attorney General’s Office during the Obama administration, you know, was reported to talk about the fact that there was this, quote-unquote, ”New York Times problem,” that it would be impossible to prosecute Julian Assange without then affecting newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post, who, of course, also have reporters who talk to sources within the government, who ask them for documents, who receive documents and then publish documents that the government considers classified. So the Obama administration actually rejected this case, despite not liking Julian Assange at all. The Trump administration revived it. And unfortunately, the Biden administration has continued it on for three years. And, you know, again, thankfully, Julian Assange is finally going free today. But the press freedom implications, I think, remain to be seen.

My Own Prison Ordeal Gave Me a Taste of What Assange May Be Feeling


une 25, 2024
Source: The Conversation


Image by Matt Hrkac, Creative Commons 2.0

Julian Assange is out of prison, after agreeing to plead guilty to violating the US Espionage Act. He is expected to be freed after appearing in a US courtroom on the Northern Mariana Islands this week.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all that Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release.

He spent 1,901 days in a small cell in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh Prison and, according to WikiLeaks, was “isolated 23 hours a day”.

I know – from first-hand experience – what imprisonment feels like. Make no mistake. Assange might not have been beaten up or had his fingernails ripped out, but extended confinement with an uncertain future is its own particular kind of excruciating torture.
The crushing burden of incarceration

Belmarsh came after Assange had already spent almost seven years seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

He went there to evade extradition to Sweden as part of a rape investigation he said was trumped up, and included the possibility of being sent on to the United States to face allegations of espionage.

When Ecuador eventually rescinded his asylum claim in 2019, he was dragged out of the embassy and arrested by UK police for absconding from bail.

The US wanted to extradite him for alleged conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and then 17 counts of espionage. Those charges, his supporters said, included the possibility of life behind bars.

My own ordeal in Egypt, where I was imprisoned on terrorism charges in 2014–15, was nothing compared to Assange’s, but it was more than enough to understand the crushing mental and physical burden that incarceration imposes on inmates.

And I also understand the weird blend of elation, confusion and disorientation that sudden release brings. Assange’s journey home will be much longer than his flight back to Australia.
A serious chilling effect on public-interest journalism

But Assange’s release does not end the questions this whole saga raised in the first place.

It began when his company, WikiLeaks, published a series of documents exposing evidence of war crimes and abuses by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks was doing what the First Amendment to the US Constitution was designed to achieve.

It guarantees freedom of speech and press freedom, and in the process it grants people the right to speak out against abuses of government authority.

That is a vitally important check on the awesome power that governments wield, and WikiLeaks should be celebrated for what it exposed.

Like many others, I believe Julian Assange should never have been charged with espionage.

The Obama administration was among the most aggressive in US history in going after journalists’ sources who leaked embarrassing government information.

Yet in 2013, Obama’s justice department decided against prosecuting Assange. Justice officials realised they couldn’t do it without setting a precedent that would force them to also go after established news organisations like the New York Times and Washington Post.

This case has undeniably had a serious chilling effect on public-interest journalism, and sends a terrifying message to any sources sitting on evidence of abuses by the government and its agencies.

While it is impossible to quantify the number of stories not told, it is hard to imagine it hasn’t frightened off potential whistleblowers and reporters.

It also leaves open the question of precedent. It is still not clear whether future governments might be able to use Assange’s guilty plea as a way of using the Espionage Act to go after uncomfortable journalism.

As we have seen in the past, leaders with an authoritarian streak tend to use every lever available to control the flow of information, and that must surely worry anyone who believes in the corrective power of a free press.
Questions about journalism

Assange has been hailed by his supporters as a “Walkley Award-winning journalist”. His gong is certainly prestigious and worth celebrating, but it is also important to recognise the award was for his “Outstanding Contribution to Journalism”.

I got the same award in 2014. I am very proud of that. I got it not for my journalism, but for my stand on press freedom while I was imprisoned. Assange rightly got his for the role WikiLeaks played in supplying journalists with a steady stream of incredibly valuable documents.

The distinction is important because of the particular role journalism plays in our democracy, elevating it beyond freedom of speech. Journalism comes with the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.

I don’t believe WikiLeaks met that standard; in releasing raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online, it posed enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.

This is not to diminish the importance or value of what WikiLeaks exposed. Australia’s union for journalists, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has rightly described this case as “one of the darkest periods in the history of media freedom”.

And it will undoubtedly cast a long shadow across public-interest journalism. But for now, we should all celebrate the release of a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power.

WikiLeaks and Assange

‘WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded and been found guilty in a US court to a single espionage charge. He is now free to return to his native Australia, having already served five years in a British prison.

Assange pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defence information at the United States District Court for The Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan on Wednesday morning. He was sentenced to the time he had already served in London’s Belmarsh Prison shortly afterwards, meaning he will not see the inside of a jail cell.’

The below is from the Socialist Standard January 2011

‘Once upon a time, if you wanted to keep a secret, you locked it in a drawer and held the only key. When states wanted to keep secrets, they used huge underground warehouses with security locks and armed guards to store the vast quantity of information compiled by their spies, spooks and secret police. Most of this information was useless, and most of it never saw the light of day. Then the information revolution happened.

A very large wired information network looks exactly like a sieve, and that's essentially what it is. Information leaks out of it in any number of ways, on purpose or by accident. When you can hold the personal details of 50,000 people on a pen-drive no larger than a cigarette lighter and when these can fall out of pockets on the tube train home, the potential for leakage is gigantic. Then there is email, which is not secure and which has become the preferred mode of communication for all businesses and public services. Just a few emails brought about 'Climategate' in 2009, in which a few careless phrases by researchers at the University of East Anglia fatally undermined the authority of the Independent Panel on Climate Change.

The recent WikiLeaks' exposure of the private lives and opinions of the world's movers and shakers has been so prodigiously covered in the press that the details are scarcely worth covering again, yet from a socialist standpoint the furore deserves to be set within a wider context than the conventional media never discusses. The capitalist class, as indeed all hitherto ruling classes, owes its power not only to its private ownership and control of wealth but also its private ownership and control of information, and inevitably socialists must ask themselves to what extent the overthrow of the latter is likely to lead to the overthrow of the former.

While controlled leaks have always been a tool of government, or internecine feuds within government, it was rare until recently for damaging information ever to escape and when it did, retribution was punitive. When in the 1970s Philip Agee, a CIA agent working in the UK, published an exposé of CIA operations including names of operatives, the US authorities reacted with fury, had him deported and mounted a smear campaign against him involving sex allegations and alcoholism that ran to 18,000 pages (Guardian, 19 December). In 1971 Richard Nixon was tape-recorded speaking thus of Daniel Ellsberg, another Pentagon mole gone public: "Let's get the son of a bitch into jail.... Don't worry about his trial. Try him in the press."

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has made no secret of his involvement in the leaks, so one would be astonished not to see governments trying to fling whatever mud they could at him. And sure enough, he is currently on bail in the UK and facing possible extradition to Sweden to answer sex crime allegations, followed by a possible further rendition to the US to face a lifetime wearing an orange jumpsuit in a certain Cuban seaside resort.

That these allegations are a frame-up is a conclusion that many people have leapt to with a conviction thus far unsupported by the known facts, however it is undeniable that the whole business looks damned fishy. If the UK or Swedish authorities go one step further and allow the Americans to get their hands on him, the affair may well blow up to become the Dreyfus case of the 21st century.

But how do you try a website? WikiLeaks is a game-changer for state security forces and radicals alike, challenging the whole notion of secrecy and calling into question what if anything can be kept secret. The universal state condemnation of WikiLeaks rings increasingly hollow and comical when one looks at the massive public support for it. The vast number of mirroring sites – sites that duplicate WikiLeaks – means that WikiLeaks could not realistically be shut down without shutting down the internet.

It isn't only source websites which pose a problem for state security, it's also destination sites. If you wanted to leak a confidential document in 1950, there would only be a few newspapers or small printing presses to leak it to, most of whom would not risk touching it. Conventional media tend to have a symbiotic, back-scratching relationship with government which ensures that newspapers are self-regulating so direct news bans – D notices – are rarely invoked. Media bosses are capitalists themselves and have no interest in rocking the boat. But the other side of the information equation is publication and distribution, and the internet has created unlimited scope for both.

Thus Wikileaks can sidestep conventional media and leak to anywhere, even to the Socialist Standard if it chose to, which means that the capitalist class has for all practical purposes lost control of the mass media. It cannot hope to strike mutually agreeable deals with every media outlet, especially not those avowedly hostile to it, and any attempt to coerce or threaten such outlets would be likely to blow up in its face and make matters worse.

Aside from the allegations against Julian Assange, Wikileaks itself is not however above criticism. Its foundation in 2006 is shrouded in some mystery. Founders allegedly include Chinese dissidents, mathematicians, technologists and journalists, yet none have been identified. There is supposedly an advisory board of 9 members, yet one 'board member' has said that his involvement is minimal and that the board is merely 'window dressing'. One volunteer told Wired Magazine that Assange considers himself "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". Indeed, WikiLeaks is not even a Wiki anymore because Assange has removed public editing access to it, and has moved away from being a mere whistleblowers' conduit to a full publisher in his own right. Whether or not he set out to do so, Assange does seem to be going for personal glory but in doing so is drawing down all the fire on himself. One-man-bands don't play well when they're playing against the state. One way or another, American and European state agencies are out to get WikiLeaks which is why the obvious move is to go for a decapitation strike against Assange himself.

Even if they succeed in bringing down Assange, there is no stopping what he started. This month a former Wikileaks advisor is set to found a new website called OpenLeaks, which aims to avoid the problems WikiLeaks has encountered, specifically by being governed democratically and by remaining as a conduit for anonymous information rather than empire-building into a publishing enterprise. At heart is the open source philosophy which holds that cooperative and transparent endeavour is more productive and progressive than the secretive and territorial ethos which underpins most capitalist activity: "Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers – both in terms of technology and politics – while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects" Wikipedia, OpenLeaks). There is a parallel here with file-sharing sites, which started as centrally controlled databases (Napster) that were easy to target and kill, before evolving into distributed peer-to-peer systems which had no centre and could never be nailed down and neutralised. There is a further parallel to be made here with democratic models in politics. Socialists oppose leaders and vanguardist leadership-based groups on the left, not only in fact but also in theory, because top-down hierarchy structures are too easy to neutralise. In fact, as a distributed, egalitarian and transparent organisation, we could lay claim to being the original political Open Source movement.


There is a momentum of workers' disgust at capitalism at the moment, at least in the western countries, starting with the sub-prime collapse which exposed nonsensical business logic, then massive bail-outs and bankers bonuses, together with squalid parliamentary expense fiddles, followed by the most savage cuts in living memory and attacks on the poor and those on benefits. Anyone who thought 'the yoof of today' could never be motivated by politics is having to eat their words as students pour onto the streets, camcorders in hand to record and upload police cavalry charges onto YouTube just as the police attempt to deny them. Meanwhile 'hacktivists' attack banks with massive Denial of Service offensives and the spontaneously organised UK-Uncut group occupy and picket the stores and offices of banks, mobile phone companies and high street stores accused of large scale tax avoidance. Though one could always quibble with these activists' grasp of the bigger picture over tax, or their tactics in singling out individual companies when, after all, they're all at it, you've got to admire how the digital native generation are mobilising their opposition in ways that the ruling class has not anticipated and is ill-prepared for.

The grubby game that is capitalism is being exposed as never before in its history, and more people are getting to know about it every day. The genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back in. These are interesting times for socialists.’

Paddy Shannon

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2011/01/wikid-games.html


UPDATED

Bowman Was Defeated by a Toxic Blend of Zionism and Militarism

THERE ARE 2 DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S
THE PROGRESSIVES 
AND WALL ST. (NO NEED FOR THE GOP)
June 26, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost a primary election Tuesday because of unprecedented spending against him by powerful forces that insist Israel does no wrong. By last week, AIPAC had already devoted more than $14 million to defeating Bowman, in retaliation for his outspoken support of human rights for all — including Palestinian — people.

Since last fall, most Democratic voters — especially young people — have recoiled at the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. But despite the magnitude of the horrors inflicted on civilians, the vast bulk of the U.S. media and political establishment has remained on automatic pro-Israel pilot, while often tarring strong opponents of the mass murder as antisemitic.

Although usually eager to defend Democratic incumbents facing strong primary challenges, this time the party’s leadership offered winks and nods to Bowman’s AIPAC-funded opponent, George Latimer. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went through only perfunctory motions of supporting Bowman. Another fellow Democrat, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, was in the groove when she declared on Sunday: “I am not weighing in on primaries intentionally. But what I’m very focused on is number one, I stand strongly with Israel.”

The meaning of such declarations is rote complicity with nonstop U.S. military aid to Israel as it maintains a siege of Gaza that has already lasted more than 260 days. During that time, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said last week, “more than 120,000 people in Gaza, overwhelmingly women and children, have been killed or injured” — “as a result of the intensive Israeli offensives.”

When this week began, Save the Children reported that “up to 21,000 children are estimated to be missing in the chaos of the war in Gaza, many trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” While voters were casting ballots on Tuesday, the Washington Post summarized a new assessment from experts reporting to the United Nations: “The threat of famine in the Gaza Strip has been revived after Israel’s military operation in the southern city of Rafah disrupted aid deliveries, leaving more than 500,000 Palestinians on the brink of starvation.”

Israel’s warfare — fully enabled by the U.S. government — is continuing to cause those systematic atrocities.

“All available evidence indicates that U.S. officials hold Israel to a lower standard than just about any other country,” Responsible Statecraft reporter Connor Echols pointed out last month. The evidence is ample.

The rock-bottom standards applied to the Israeli government are in sync with what the U.S. media and political establishment routinely apply to the United States government. The same basic mass-messaging patterns that confer absolution on whatever the U.S. military does (as described in my book War Made Invisible) are operative in making excuses for what the Israeli military does.

The militaries of the two nations are enmeshed. Not only does the U.S. send huge amounts of weapons and ammunition to Israel. The countries are also constantly exchanging intelligence as well as data on evaluating the efficacy of weaponry and warfare tactics. They share, and create, the same enemies in the Middle East. And the two nations execute highly deceptive maneuvers from the same propaganda playbooks.

In short, while their command structures are separate and they can sometimes be at odds over tactics and proprieties, the Israeli military largely operates as an extension of the U.S. armed forces.

Meanwhile, in the United States, dominant mentalities — constantly reinforced by mass media and mainstream politics — run along parallel ruts of Zionism and militarism that are mutually reinforcing and increasingly intersecting. Along the way, toxins draw strength from the poisons that Martin Luther King Jr. denounced as “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

All the denials notwithstanding, a bedrock of unwavering support for Israel as it continues the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is the base assumption — conscious or not — that Palestinian lives are far less valuable than Jewish Israeli lives. Or American lives.

The merger of American and Israeli militarism is now more comprehensive than ever. Both are driven by extreme nationalism, war profiteering, and ethnocentric bigotry. Nonviolent unyielding resistance is not futile. It is essential.




Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in 2023 by The New Press.


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Norman Solomon is an American journalist, author, media critic and activist. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director. Solomon's weekly column "Media Beat" was in national syndication from 1992 to 2009. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Since 2011, he has been the national director of RootsAction.org. He is the author of thirteen books including "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” (The New Press, 2023).

Scarsdale Is What We Thought It Was

BY MATT KARP
JACOBIN
06.26.2024

Jamaal Bowman’s defeat is another reminder that left-wing politics cannot live or die in the rich suburbs.



Westchester county executive George Latimer speaks to supporters after winning his race against Democratic incumbent representative Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th congressional district, June 25, 2024. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

The most expensive House primary in US history has ended in defeat for democratic socialist Jamaal Bowman, soundly beaten by Westchester county executive George Latimer.

According to the New York Times and much of the national media, the winners and losers here are fairly straightforward. Bowman’s defeat was a victory for the pro-Israel lobby, which spent $14 million to oust a major critic of the war in Gaza, and for leading centrist Democrats, from Hillary Clinton to Josh Gottheimer, who had endorsed Latimer. “The outcome in this race,” said an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spokesman quoted by the Times, “once again shows that the pro-Israel position is both good policy and good politics.”

Meanwhile, the paper called the election “an excruciating blow for the left,” including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and “the Squad” in Congress. They had rallied behind Bowman but could not save the gaffe-prone representative from his own voters, who ultimately rejected him as “too extreme to help solve the nation’s problems.”

Every single element of this fable is perfectly accurate — if only the entire district, the national Democratic coalition, and the whole of the American body politic resided in the village of Scarsdale, New York.

This elite Westchester suburb, with its manicured lawns, seven-figure mansions, and an average income of over $500,000 a year, had given Bowman nearly 40 percent of its vote in his upset victory four years ago. But this year Scarsdale decided it could not abide the congressman’s “far-left views,” on Israel or anything else: in the early vote there, Latimer led Bowman by the astonishing margin of 92 to 8 percent.

This was the pattern across wealthy Westchester suburbs, like Rye, Harrison, and Mamaroneck, where the early vote showed Latimer winning over 80 percent support. Residents there may have indeed rejected what the Times suggested were Bowman’s “extreme viewpoints,” including support for a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel’s war has killed nearly fifteen thousand children.

Yet in most working-class portions of the district, Bowman’s far-left views seem to have held up just fine. He took 84 percent of the vote in the Bronx. Analysts looking to find a popular repudiation of pro-Palestine politics will have to look somewhere beyond working-class Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where the congressman led the early vote by margins similar to his victory in 2020.

Unfortunately for Bowman, too much of his district did, in fact, reside in Scarsdale or somewhere similar. Though Times reporters did not see fit to mention it, last year NY-16 was redrawn so that the Westchester share of its primary vote jumped from about 60 percent to over 90 percent. This was of course the story of the entire election. The new and wealthy suburban areas in the district — including parts of Tarrytown and at least five additional country clubs north of Rye — all voted heavily against Bowman.

The good news for Bowman’s national supporters is that losing Westchester to an AIPAC-funded centrist is not a meaningful defeat for the American left. Any real challenge to corporate Democrats or the pro-Israel lobby will have to come from somewhere else. Scarsdale is what we thought it was — a tiny, eccentric sliver of an enormous, diverse, and largely working-class country.

The bad news is that the American left has not managed to make many inroads into that giant country, either. Perhaps the brand of politics that gave us the Squad in the first place — nine members in a Congress of four hundred and thirty-five — has run its course. If Bowman’s defeat is a wake-up call, it is not because he lost the neighborhoods around the Horseshoe Harbor Yacht Club and Blind Brook Country Club, but because the Left found itself fighting a battle there in the first place.

CONTRIBUTOR
Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a Jacobin contributing editor.

Jamaal Bowman’s Courage

June 26, 2024
Source: The Beinart Notebook



Watch video here: https://open.substack.com/pub/peterbeinart/p/jamaal-bowmans-courage?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web


I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage.

Sources Cited in This Video:

Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank.

Jewish Currents article I wrote about how Pro-Israel groups keep US foreign policy white.

Our guests this Friday at 11 AM will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

See you on Friday,

Peter


VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his race for re-election to Congress. And I wanted to say something about him and that race. Now, it’s important not to be willing to overlook the flaws of people just because you profoundly agree with them on really important policy issues. So, I don’t want to suggest that Jamaal Bowman didn’t make any mistakes in this race. I think it was unfortunate when he said that Jews in Westchester segregate themselves. If you look at the context, I think you can understand what he was trying to say, which was essentially that people would understand him better if people live together more, and that would actually break down antisemitism. But still, I think it was probably a territory that he shouldn’t have ventured into. But that said, again, even though we need to be willing to be critical of people we disagree with, it’s also important that we not be naive.

And that comment had nothing to do with the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. That onslaught was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom. When members of Congress are staunch supporters of Israel, they can say things that are far, far more problematic vis-à-vis Jews than anything that Jamaal Bowman ever said, and get a complete pass. The reason that Jamaal Bowman had a target on his back was really simple. It’s because he went to see what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the vast majority of members of Congress avert their eyes. They make a conscious choice to go to Israel on AIPAC junkets that don’t show them the reality of what it’s like for Palestinians to live their entire lives without the most basic of human rights. I suspect perhaps they just don’t want to know because they know that if they did see, it would only cause problems for them. But Jamaal Bowman went to see. He even went to Hebron, which is perhaps the most brutal of all the places in the West Bank, a place where Palestinians can’t even walk on certain streets in their own city. And he had the courage to see. And he had the courage to talk about it. And that’s unusual for a member of Congress.

And the thing you always need to remember about these people, you know, who spent untold amounts of money, unprecedented amounts of money, on trying to defeat him—the people who gave all this money to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to defeat him—is that, overwhelmingly, they have not seen the things that Jamaal Bowman has seen. I have lived in proximity to those people my entire life. I’m telling you they may have been to Israel 40 times. But those kind of AIPAC donors, they don’t go to see what life is like for Palestinians who have lived their entire lives in the West Bank without the right to vote for the government that has life and death power over their lives under a different legal system, a military legal system, while they’re Jewish neighbors enjoy free movement, and due process, and the right to vote, and citizenship. If they had gone to see those things, I think many of them would not be AIPAC donors because it would shake them to their core. But one of the reasons I think they find the kind of things that Jamaal Bowman says so frightening is because they haven’t had the courage to go and actually face these realities for themselves. But Jamaal Bowman did go to face these realities and then he took it upon himself to talk about what he had seen. And he paid a political price.

The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and this race is that you can’t disentangle the attack that he came under because of his views about Israel from the opposition to him simply because he was a courageous and passionate progressive on a whole range of issues. The thing that’s important to remember about people who give a lot of money to AIPAC is it’s not just that they’re pro-Israel, or that they’re generally Jewish. They’re also extremely wealthy. And it’s often difficult to disentangle their pro-Israel politics from their class perspectives. But things fuse together, right? They don’t want supporters of Palestinian rights in Congress. But they also don’t want people who are going to raise their taxes or try to fundamentally change the American economic system.

And so, when you defeat Jamaal Bowman, it’s kind of a twofer because you get rid of a critic of Israel, but you also get rid of someone who potentially could threaten your own bottom line. And one of the dirty little secrets, I think, about kind of American Jewish organizational life is that people find it often easier to say that they oppose progressives because those progressives are anti-Israel or supposedly ‘antisemitic’ than to admit that partly they’re doing it for economic self-interest because they’re just really rich people who don’t want progressives like Jamaal Bowman because those people might threaten their bottom line. So, that’s another reason I think that progressives like Jamaal Bowman come under such fierce assault. It’s much nicer if you’re one of the very, very wealthy people who gave all this money to AIPAC to have a kind of milquetoast moderate like George Latimer who won’t rock the boat on Israel. And he won’t really rock the boat by challenging corporate interests on anything.

The third point I want to make about Jamaal Bowman has to do with race. Now, it’s not true that AIPAC opposes Black members of Congress simply because they’re Black. Which is to say if there’s a really, really pro-Israel Black member of congress, like Ritchie Torres, they’re thrilled about that, right. But it’s also not coincidental that so many of the people that AIPAC tries to destroy politically are Black or other people of color. And that’s because people who have a family history of oppression in the United States are more likely—not always, by any means—but, on average, are more likely to identify with the Palestinians because of their own experience. They’re more likely to feel, as Jamaal Bowman did, a kind of moral obligation to themselves and their own ancestors to go and see what’s actually going on to Palestinians who lack basic rights in the West Bank.

And so, when you go to politically destroy people who care about Palestinians, you’re going to end up destroying a disproportionate number of those people who will be Black or other people of color. And there’s a whole history to this. It didn’t start with Jamaal Bowman. You can think about Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who, coming out of the Civil Rights movement, felt he had an obligation to have a concern for Palestinians, and met a PLO representative in the late 1970s, and there was a big pro-Israel outcry, and he was forced out of his job. Or Jesse Jackson, who came under assault in the 1980s when he ran for president, or a congressman like Walter Fauntroy or Barack Obama or Raphael Warnock. You may remember that Raphael Warnock went on a trip of Black pastors to see Palestinian life for himself, wrote a very passionate, eloquent letter talking about the parallels between the oppression of Palestinians and the oppression of Black Americans. And Raphael Warnock came under fierce assault and had to walk that back. And if he hadn’t walked that back, he probably wouldn’t be a senator right now.

Jamaal Bowman is a different kind of person. He’s a very unusual politician in that he is a man of genuine moral conviction, of genuine moral courage, and he was willing to put his political life at risk. And he did so perhaps partly because we are in this extraordinarily horrifying moment—a moment when people are being tested, when people are doing things that I think we will remember for a very long time. I saw yesterday that Save the Children was reporting that, by their estimates, as many as 20,000 children in Gaza are either detained, missing, lying in mass graves, or dead under the rubble. Twenty thousand. I think perhaps Jamaal Bowman knew that this was a moment on which he was willing to be judged and he was willing to risk his political career for that. And I really, really hope that I live long enough to live in an America in which Palestinian lives are considered equal to Jewish lives. And in that America, I believe, that people will look back with shame at what was done to Jamaal Bowman, and maybe even some of those AIPAC donors or their children or grandchildren will feel shame, and we will look back at Jamaal Bowman in this race as a hero.

It says in Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah—and forgive the gendered language, it was written a long time ago—it says, ‘in the place where there is no man, be a man.’ Or we might retranslate it as, ‘in the place where there is no humanity, bring humanity.’ Jamaal Bowman was in a place in Congress in Washington where there are very, very few people who are willing to risk anything politically for the cause of Palestinian lives, for the cause of Palestinian freedom. And he did. In a place where there was no man, he was a man. And for that reason, I believe we will one day look back on him as a hero.


AIPAC’s Defeat of Jamaal Bowman Disguises Its Weakness
06.26.2024

Lost in the triumphalism over Jamaal Bowman’s loss is that AIPAC has had to drastically narrow its ambitions, targeting the most already vulnerable of Israel critics in order to inflate its strength.


Jamaal Bowman watches during a campaign event at Hartley Park on June 24, 2024 in Mount Vernon, New York. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Left-wing insurgent campaigns have hoped that while getting into Congress might be extraordinarily hard, once in, they could rely on the benefit of being incumbents to hang onto their seats and stay in Congress. Last night’s Democratic primary race for New York’s 16th congressional district, which saw Squad member and two-term representative Jamaal Bowman fall to Westchester county executive George Latimer by nearly twenty points, shows this is no longer a safe bet.

Last night’s result will be a boon for the Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which, through its super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP), poured nearly $15 million into the race to unseat Bowman. It is arguably the crowning achievement of a strategy that pro-Israel groups first pioneered three years ago to deny Bernie Sanders’s campaign surrogate Nina Turner a safe congressional seat in Ohio she was set to easily win.

Bowman’s loss will soon be used — in fact, already is and was before the polls even closed — by AIPAC and other pro-war forces to scare less courageous candidates and members of Congress into line. Pro-Israel groups have framed the race as a referendum on Bowman’s and the rest of the Squad’s stance on the Gaza war US-Israel policy and argued that these positions are out of step with a more centrist Democratic electorate. They have been assisted by much of the press, which you will soon see helpfully spreading AIPAC’s preferred narrative in coverage of Latimer’s victory.

US politicians were already terrified of AIPAC when it ramped up the scale of its political interference in 2022 by entering Democratic primaries directly and funneling massive amounts of cash against progressive candidates critical of Israel, however mild or tangential to their candidacy those criticisms were. As several people involved in progressive campaigns told me earlier this year, candidates and politicians often privately say they have to hide or walk back their disgust toward Israel’s actions in case they get primaried over it. The goal with the Bowman result is to wield it as a cautionary tale of what can happen to your political career if you defy the pro-Israel lobby, whether by voting against US military aid to Israel or even simply backing a cease-fire, both of which Bowman did.

This gambit of using Bowman’s loss to convince others that criticizing Israel will end their careers may well work. But it really shouldn’t. In reality, AIPAC’s threat is more of a bluff than it seems.
Hidden Weakness

AIPAC’s high-profile involvement in Bowman’s primary (and its plan to do the same to fellow Squad member Representative Cori Bush this August) was, in reality, a carefully calibrated public relations move meant to inflate its own fearsome reputation on Capitol Hill while disguising a less-than-stellar track record this year. It’s easy to forget, but the media narrative for much of the past eight months was that the Squad was facing an extinction-level event: an “electoral bloodbath,” with at least four members (Bowman, Bush, and representatives Summer Lee and Ilhan Omar) facing “brutal” and “competitive primaries,” not to mention the entire bloc “grappling with one career-threatening problem or another,” such as Representative Rashida Tlaib’s November censure by the House.AIPAC’s high-profile involvement in Bowman’s primary was, in reality, a carefully calibrated public relations move meant to inflate its own fearsome reputation on Capitol Hill while disguising a less-than-stellar track record this year.

“There is a 100% chance that members of the Squad are going to be tagged with these far-left positions that are out of sync with the mainstream of the party and the general public,” one Democratic strategist said in October.

That hasn’t really worked out. Despite her censure and generally becoming a lightning rod for pro-Israel attacks, Tlaib is safe in her seat, with no serious challenger and out-fundraising everyone in Michigan, with AIPAC having failed to recruit a challenger to run against her despite dangling $20 million in front of them. Omar has won the state Democratic Party endorsement — and has a fundraising advantage — over her primary challenger in a race the pro-Israel lobby has been pointedly absent from so far.

The lobby has also fallen flat on its face in non-Squad-involved races, blowing $4.6 million on beating centrist representative Dave Min in March over his mild criticisms of Israeli policy; the $400,000 it set on fire running ads against Representative Thomas Massie, a prominent GOP critic of Israel, didn’t move the needle an inch in that race, which Massie won with nearly 76 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, much of the public, particularly Democratic voters, has shifted closer to the Squad’s positions on the Gaza war and US-Israel policy since October, contrary to what AIPAC and its allies were rubbing their hands imagining eight months ago — and contrary to neoliberal Democratic representative Josh Gottheimer’s hopeful claim this morning that “the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in.”

But AIPAC’s biggest failure this cycle was in fellow Squad member Summer Lee’s reelection for the 12th District in Pennsylvania just two months ago. Lee’s race, which she won by more than twenty points, had many of the same factors that AIPAC and its boosters are arguing doomed Bowman: her district had a significant Jewish population; she didn’t mince words when it came to Israel and its war; she was criticized by some local Jewish leaders who even accused her of being an antisemite; she voted against military aid to Israel; and, in theory, she had a precarious grip on her seat, having only served one term after just barely scraping through to win the Democratic primary two years earlier, when a tidal wave of AIPAC spending obliterated her early lead.

And yet, this year, AIPAC preemptively bowed out of Lee’s race despite big plans to spend $10 to 20 million to beat her, because at least four people the lobby feverishly tried to recruit in Pittsburgh said no, deciding she wasn’t beatable. As Lee told me, “AIPAC lost because they couldn’t win.”

This is part of a pattern: in both Pennsylvania and across the country, AIPAC endorsed candidates who tended to be in noncompetitive districts or even running unopposed. That way, when its endorsees won, regardless of whether or not their AIPAC endorsement actually figured in the race, the lobby could then swoop in and loudly take credit, publicize its reverse-engineered 100 percent (or close to it) success rate in a cycle, and proclaim that “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.”Across the country, AIPAC endorsed candidates who tended to be in noncompetitive districts or even running unopposed.

That’s exactly why UDP scrambled to publicize the defeat of Kina Collins this past March in Illinois’ 7th District at the hands of a fourteen-term incumbent, calling her a “Justice Democrats candidate” whose loss “was a significant defeat for the Squad and the anti-Israel fringe.” In reality, Collins was neither a Justice Democrats endorsee this year nor received a cent of outside spending backing her campaign, unlike two years ago. But UDP spent nearly half a million dollars on a race in which Collins came a distant third anyway, so it could claim victory over pro-Palestinian activists.

None of this paints an image of an indomitable force assured of its own power or the popularity of its ideas. And AIPAC’s involvement in Bowman’s race fit squarely in this public relations–minded strategy. The two-term congressman became such a major target of AIPAC’s spending barrage not because he was a critic of Israel, but because he was one of the few critics of Israel the organization could actually beat.
Bowman’s Vulnerabilities

What made Bowman such a vulnerable candidate?

It’s hard to argue it was because his challenger’s position on the Gaza war — which Latimer made a habit of not giving a straight answer on — was more popular than Bowman’s support for a cease-fire and cutting off US military aid. An Emerson College poll of voters in the district from early this month found that more voters favored a candidate who backed a Gaza cease-fire than vice versa, and that far more (50 percent) believed the United States was spending too much on aid to Israel in its war than too little (17 percent) or the right amount (33 percent). Yet despite this, voters also said they were more aligned with Latimer on the war by a nearly sixteen-point margin.

In fact, Bowman wasn’t even disliked in the district, with voters holding a favorable opinion of him by a fifty-three to forty-one margin. It’s just that Latimer was better liked: 65 percent viewed him favorably, compared to 23 percent who gave an unfavorable view.

Bowman’s disadvantage went well beyond the issue of Israel. Having come out of nowhere to win the seat in 2020, he was never secure in the district. As the Huffington Post’s Daniel Marans reported, Bowman won reelection handily in 2022 largely because the establishment vote was split between two candidates.

Latimer, meanwhile, was a local boy who had spent decades in Westchester and New York politics serving in various political posts: Rye city councilman, Westchester county legislator and board chairman, county Democratic Party chair, New York state assemblyman and senator, and Westchester county executive. This helps explain Latimer’s advantage in name recognition and favorability in the district, as well as the unusual amount of local official and party endorsements he drew against an incumbent.Latimer was a local boy who had spent decades in Westchester and New York politics serving in various political posts, explaining his advantage in name recognition and favorability in the district.

It’s not a coincidence that Squad members like Tlaib and Lee — who came to their seats by first rising through state politics and, in Lee’s case, riding a progressive wave that put several progressive allies in key posts — managed to ward off similar local challengers. The victorious Lee was even endorsed by her two AIPAC-backed senators, Bob Casey and John Fetterman, both of whom oppose a cease-fire. A former Bowman advisor told the Atlantic that “he did not make the kind of connections and build out the coalition like he needed to in the district” — a district that had been redrawn since his 2020 win to include wealthier, whiter parts of the county.

Bowman was also hamstrung by a preexisting, widely covered, and non-Israel-related scandal: pulling a fire alarm in the middle of a House session, for which he earned a censure from the Republican-led lower chamber and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. The embarrassing incident made national and local headlines for many months.

AIPAC’s spending onslaught may have taken advantage of these vulnerabilities, but it also had an impact in itself. The sheer scale of anti-Bowman money poured into the race — a total of $18 million from anti-Bowman outside groups, which made it the most expensive House primary in history, and, as one observer pointed out, amounted to more than three times the total amount raised in the entire British election taking place right now — funded a relentless stream of negative ads that played on this scandal and highlighted Bowman’s other missteps. Those included opposition research that had him espousing fringe views before he was an elected official and, most prominently, his vote against the president’s infrastructure bill.

That vote, in reality, stayed true to the legislative strategy Democratic leadership had themselves devised to get the president’s ambitious agenda across the finish line. But shorn of context, the attacks sent a message that AIPAC had first devised way back in 2021 against Turner, and which pointedly never actually mentioned Israel: progressives and the Squad were incompetent, fringe extremists disloyal to the party and not serious about legislating. It was an effective message in a solidly blue district where 87 percent voted for Biden in 2020. The pro-Bowman side simply could not match that firepower to counteract this wall-to-wall narrative and redefine him in the voters’ eyes, having been outspent by a massive more than seven-to-one ratio.

It’s also impossible to deny that, in a heavily Jewish district, the outcome was affected by Bowman’s positions on Israel. More specifically, as Marans pointed out, the Congressman made several unforced errors, including failing to turn up to post-October 7 vigils and arrange meetings with local Jewish leaders and constituents, and using rhetoric of questionable political wisdom to criticize Israel’s war that made it easier for opponents to smear him as a fringe extremist. These errors alienated persuadable middle-of-the-road pro-Israel voters, including the liberal Zionist group J Street, which had worked with Bowman in previous elections. Some of it came as a last-minute attempt to shore up his left flank and drive up turnout. But some of it predated the election, seemingly in response to pressure to move left on the issue.Bowman ended the race as a candidate whose rhetoric and positions more closely matched those of activists, while campaigning in a district that had become more conservative than the one he had first won with more moderate posturing.

The result was a double-edged sword. Bowman ended the race as a candidate whose rhetoric and positions more closely matched those of activists, while campaigning in a district that had become more conservative than the one he had first won with more moderate posturing. Whether forcing Bowman to shift constitutes a bigger win than keeping in Congress one of the few members willing to vote against military aid to Israel and one of its most prominent pro-cease-fire advocates will be up for internal left-wing debate.
Make Them Realize

No one, not even the staunchest liberal supporters of Israel or its current war, should come away feeling good about the Bowman race. As many have correctly pointed out, much of the unprecedented sum of money UDP blasted into the district to defeat him came from pro-Trump Republican megadonors who hold repugnant views at odds with most of those who voted against Bowman, whether on labor rights and taxing the rich or abortion rights and the legitimacy of the 2020 election result. Through AIPAC, these donors have jerry-rigged a way to interfere in and shape the Democratic Party.

There’s no reason to believe this playbook is going to stay limited to the pro-Israel lobby. As former representative Andy Levin told me, “This may have been pioneered by AIPAC, but Big Pharma isn’t stupid, the tobacco industry isn’t stupid, the fossil fuel industry isn’t stupid. Why won’t they just say: ‘Great idea, AIPAC. Thank you very much. We will pick the nominee of both parties and that’ll be great for us to advance our interests.’”

Meanwhile, to the extent that anyone believed it in the first place, no one should take seriously anymore the Democratic establishment’s claims that it believes in diversity, protecting incumbents, and passing the torch to a new generation. Party bigwigs enabled, and in some cases actively assisted, the replacement of an exciting, young, black educator with a seventy-year-old, white career politician who had a history of obstructing federal desegregation efforts.

Bowman’s challenger’s campaign also happened to be one of the more shockingly racist ones in recent history, with Latimer accusing Bowman of having an “ethnic benefit,” of having the heavily Arab American town of Dearborn, Michigan, as his “constituency,” and of “taking money from Hamas,” to name just a few potshots. Press coverage fixated on Bowman’s scandals while largely sidelining Latimer’s numerous missteps, including missing a budget vote because he was on a trip with a woman who wasn’t his wife, whom he also set up with a six-figure government job — a black mark on the supposed objectivity of the mainstream media.

Bowman was defiant and morally clear-eyed in conceding defeat, as he has been throughout the past eight months. “We will never stand for the bombing and killing of babies in Gaza,” he told supporters. “Our opponents . . . may have won this round at this time in this race. But this will be a battle for our humanity and justice for the rest of our lives.” We will never know if he might have overcome his disadvantages had events gone a little differently here and there, or if he had made a handful of different choices. But overcoming is also a lot harder with the weight of nearly $20 million on your neck.

Bowman’s loss is a projection of AIPAC’s financial strength, but also, paradoxically, a sign of the limits of its ability to defeat Israel critics despite the ungodly sums of money at its disposal. After giddily anticipating the Squad’s obliteration last October and a firm swing in public opinion toward its positions, the lobby has serially failed to defeat its targets and had to drastically narrow its electoral ambitions in the face of its left-wing opponents’ strength, all while watching the US public turn against Israel’s ghastly war and US support for it in ever larger numbers.

The Left’s first job is to recognize this. Its next job, whether through Representative Bush’s upcoming primary election or future contests, is to make the rest of the political establishment realize it too.

CONTRIBUTOR
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

Meet Your New Robot Boss

AN INTERVIEW WITH CRAIG GENT

Many have long worried that AI and robots will replace workers. But less attention has been paid to the increasing use of algorithmic systems to manage workers — creating ever more authoritarian and exploitative workplaces.


Workers fulfill orders at an Amazon fulfillment center on Prime Day in Melville, New York, on July 11, 2023. (Johnny Milano / Bloomberg via Getty Images)


INTERVIEW BY CAL TURNERSARA VAN HORN
JACOBIN
06.24.2024

From cab drivers and baristas to Amazon workers and McDonald’s cashiers, many workers are concerned about how new technologies are degrading labor conditions. Across the spectrum of politics and perspectives, many see automation and computerized decision-making as threats to the quality or existence of workers’ jobs.

But in his forthcoming book Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work, out from Verso in August, scholar Craig Gent argues that people often fail to understand the most harmful aspects of new technology in the workplace. He demonstrates that the overriding concern for most workers should not be replacement by robots but management by them.

Gent argues that “algorithmic management” — the use of computers to supervise worker productivity and make workplace decisions — worsens managerial structures that already rob workers of their agency and dignity. Resisting this heightened domination requires recognizing how algorithmic management undermines workplace organizing, and campaigning for its suppression.

Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn spoke with Gent for Jacobin about how algorithms are reshaping the workplace, the shortcomings of some union responses to AI so far, and the creative ways that workers are fighting back.
SARA VAN HORN

Algorithmic management and algorithmic power are key concepts in Cyberboss. Could you define these terms?

CRAIG GENT

Algorithmic management essentially means that workers’ frontline experience of management is actually a computer, an algorithm — or, in more nebulous terms, a “system” — rather than a human manager.

Algorithmic power is a third plank of power within the workplace. In addition to managers and their power and workers and their power, the computer system itself has its own authority within the workplace.
CAL TURNER

Could you give some examples of workplaces where technology is playing an increasingly managerial role?
CRAIG GENT

You see it everywhere, from fast food and cafés to taxi firms, newsrooms, and the justice system. But at the apex are logistical workplaces, where in addition to organizing physical processes of moving goods around, algorithms are managing the workers who work there. That can take the form of managing their movements, managing their tasks, or managing the allocation of labor itself.

Typically, it will look like workers are engaging with “the system” through a screen-based interface. For example, nowadays McDonald’s workers are interfacing with a screen that is organizing the orders in front of them. In logistics workplaces, it’s often a handheld scanner. Within the gig economy, it’s usually an app.
SARA VAN HORN

Could you talk a little bit about the fallacies of the “robots are coming for my job” argument against automation? What does it misunderstand?
CRAIG GENT

People have been talking about workless factories — so-called “lights-out” factories, where you don’t even need to turn on the light because robots don’t need light to work — since at least the 1970s. Obviously we have seen well-publicized prototypes of robots running around workless factory floors. But robots are very expensive to maintain, fix, and procure, and they run into problems that humans don’t.It’s much more likely that we’ll see workers managed by computers than replaced by them.

For example, the mundane problem of dust is a problem for robots that are spending hours a day roving around a warehouse floor. So I wager that we’ll see a truly workless warehouse around the same time that we master the dustless warehouse — which is not to say that it will never happen, but it’s improbable. It’s much more likely that we’ll see workers managed by computers than replaced by them.
CAL TURNER

You write that there is more at stake in the future of work than remuneration and certainty, meaning that labor unrest often strains against not just low wages, but also managerial control. What does this mean for the future of work?
CRAIG GENT

It means that we will see a further assault on dignity at work and what it means to be respected as a worker. Few people really enjoy the fact that they have to go to work, but absolutely no one wants to be actively squeezed for their labor and treated in inhuman ways while they’re working. I think we’ll see a degradation of how we can expect to be treated at work, which has political implications beyond the workplace for class politics more broadly.

It also means that we have to think about labor organizing in broader ways than we’ve become used to. Many labor organizations like trade unions have over time shrunk what they’re about: they are about pay, pensions, terms and conditions, health, and safety. But in many cases, those concerns don’t really touch the essence of where and how algorithmic management enacts power.
SARA VAN HORN

Could you talk more about that tension and how you have seen it playing out? How have unions responded to algorithmic management — or not responded?
CRAIG GENT

Speaking from a British perspective, unions are obviously aware that technologies are reshaping work, and they have suspicions that these technologies are being used to treat workers badly and to degrade the work itself. However, when it comes to the actual substance of their demands, they haven’t had much to say about the technology itself.

The reason for that is that trade unions over the last hundred years have gotten out of practice with laying any claim to the organization of work itself, and many don’t even see it as their role. The idea of the manager’s right to manage is strong even within trade unionism. Unions are happy to stake a claim on job losses or pay, but they see the actual organization of work as the business of managers. Landmark assurances of labor rights were gained on terms and conditions, but the explicit trade-off was jettisoning any claim over new technologies or reorganizing the work process.

The way that plays out is often that trade unions are forced to stand by and watch it happen, playing a buffer role and trying to improve the rate of exploitation. I remember speaking to one trade union official who was quite proud of the fact that their union had, along with the employer within a logistics center, ushered in independent time-and-motion studies to be carried out on the work. They saw it as an exercise in benchmarking: if time-and-motion studies could be done, then they would have a shared objective sense of what was possible within a given time.

That is completely buying into management logic, but they saw it as the union’s drawing a line in the sand around which they could negotiate. When I spoke to workers who had experienced such processes, it simply led to them having to work harder. Trade union officials understood time-and-motion studies in the workplace in a way that was completely antithetical to the benefit of workers on the shop floor.

The labor movement is also often uncomfortable with intervening because of the mediating role that they often adopt, with the workers on one side and the employers on the other and the union in the middle. Unions often want to temper forms of resistance and organization that aren’t the sanctioned ones. One thing that was really striking when I was speaking to workers was that they nearly all had an ambivalent relationship to trade unions — and they were doing the resistance anyway. If anything, they were resisting despite the trade unions that were recognized in their workplaces.

If we want to win on the terrain of algorithmically managed companies, if we want to find where the leverage is, then we’re not going to find it in the old ways of doing things. That is not to say that traditional forms of industrial action are pointless. But there’s this idea within a lot of unions that you must first organize and get recognition to negotiate, and if negotiation doesn’t work, then you have action short of a strike, and then you have a strike action, and then you get what you want. But that pipeline begins to break down in such a way that, if we’re really serious about getting ahead of this technology, we have to be far more creative in our approach.Within very regimented ways of working, having a more tacit understanding of the ways that you can get around the system becomes crucial.

In studying how people are already resisting, I saw things like know-how and knack become really important. Within very regimented ways of working, having a more tacit understanding of the ways that you can get around the system becomes crucial. Despite the initial appearance that these are individualized forms of activity by disgruntled workers, there were forms of collectivity that sprang up around them, like workers sharing special codes to hack their wearable scanners.

We have to remember that managers are not at the top of the hierarchy. Usually, managers themselves don’t have great insight into the system. So if workers were able to exploit that fact — if tacit understanding and tactical know-how were combined with the institutional weight of a trade union movement that really wanted to shake things up — that would be genuinely impressive.




CAL TURNER

Could you talk about AI specifically?

CRAIG GENT

AI means a lot of things in a lot of different contexts, but it basically means just very fast computers. Obviously, the AI that people became most familiar with over the last year is large language models, which in some instances — like we saw with the Hollywood writers’ strike — threatens to take away jobs. But it’s not really about management by computers. We could also call the systems that are used in Amazon fulfillment centers AI in the sense that they work cybernetically with a degree of autonomy.

AI has become relevant in conversations around algorithmic management because it’s something that trade unions are latching onto. In Britain, trade union efforts around AI are being led by the Trades Union Congress, which is the overarching body for most of the unions. They have a manifesto called “Work and the AI Revolution,” which is guiding a lot of the efforts of member unions around AI. But the manifesto really hinges on a thin ledge of health and safety and whether AI is going to — by virtue of its inhumanity — put workers’ health and safety at risk. It is also overly concerned with transparency in a way that misunderstands how algorithmic management becomes powerful in the first place.

The transparency argument comes from this idea that what’s problematic about algorithmic management is that it’s a black box: we can’t see how it’s making decisions, and therefore you can’t reason with it or make counterproposals. But if you open up algorithmic management, it’s just lines and lines and lines of code. There’s no portion of code you could hope to isolate that would account for the power relations in an algorithmically managed workplace.

Put another way: if you think the problem is a particular algorithm, and you’re not finding the social decisions that have gone into it, then you need to widen the picture. As the cultural anthropologist Nick Seaver writes, “Press on any algorithmic decision and you will find many human ones.” So the focus is essentially in the wrong place. The lines of code of an algorithm are not going to tell you what you want to know, which is really about the organization of work and power within the workplace.
SARA VAN HORN

What would be the most strategic way for trade unions to engage with algorithmic management? What is the most powerful demand they could make?
CRAIG GENT

The most powerful demand would be suppression. I was given a lot of hope by the demands that the Writers Guild of America made around AI in its strike last year. They recognized that they couldn’t say AI was a health and safety issue, and instead argued that nothing good could come of AI within that particular sector.

I don’t think it’s possible to have ethical algorithmic management. Algorithmic management just intensifies labor — that is what it’s for. So suppression would be the demand that would make me really excited.

Short of that, however, I think serious attempts to undermine the power of companies that use algorithmic management would be useful, particularly because of the way that algorithmic management undermines things like strikes. I make an argument for broadening the historical organizing repertoire of trade unions, which is still based on a very twentieth-century version of the workplace. Instead, unions need to get more comfortable with tactics that aren’t new but that were used a lot more going further back in history, like subversion at work or sabotage.The lines of code of an algorithm are not going to tell you what you think you want to know, which is really about the organization of work and power within the workplace.

One of the problems that unions have to overcome is the complete fragmentation of the workforce — not just in terms of precariousness, but within the workplace itself. Algorithmic management organizes workers within space such that they might not come into contact with each other, where work is a lonely and antisocial experience where you’re too strapped for time to get to know anyone. Algorithmic management robs us of the preconditions for organizing at work.

In terms of how algorithmic management undermines the strike itself, it’s as simple as companies being able to reroute around strikes. In Germany, during the first-ever strikes against Amazon, there were days and days lost to strike action. But the effect on Amazon was negligible, because it could simply reroute orders to other warehouses so fast that there was minimal service disruption.
CAL TURNER

Could you talk about how people have resisted algorithmic management, both as individuals and collectively?
CRAIG GENT

There was a case of a slowdown at a warehouse near Heathrow Airport where workers were being tightly monitored for their productivity. Their shift allocation every day was based on whether they had achieved a certain productivity score the day before, so their day would start with a text message telling them whether their shift was confirmed or whether it was canceled.

These agency workers were paid 70 percent of what in-house workers were paid. A few of the agency workers got together and organized a slowdown where they decided they were going to work at 70 percent of the productivity target for the obvious symbolic reason. Because the workers were so used to having to work to a certain productivity metric that would be quantified and presented to them, they were actually able to gauge what 70 percent of productivity felt like. And this — their embodied relation to the productivity metric — was confirmed to them in the next day’s text messages.

Unfortunately, that action didn’t work, because the organizers got ratted out to management. But it was a really interesting moment in which people’s experience of working to the algorithm enabled them to resist it.

In other cases, resistance has taken the form of subterfuge, where people realize they can use the devices that they interact with day in and day out in unintended ways to get around the algorithm. They can take themselves out of productivity calculations, for example, or award themselves unsanctioned breaks, and then workers share this knowledge around on the down-low. In other places, resistance has taken the form of using computers and learned passwords to overcome the informational asymmetry that defines algorithmic management.




CONTRIBUTORS

Craig Gent is a writer, editor, and researcher. He is a director at Novara Media, where he has worked for over ten years.

Cal Turner is a writer based in Philadelphia.

Sara Van Horn is a writer living in Serra Grande, Brazil.
The Samson Option: Israel’s Plan to Nuke Its Opponents

What’s ambiguous about Israel’s nuclear policy is not whether the country has these weapons, but how it plans to use them.

ISRAEL IS REPORTED TO HAVE 300 NUKES

June 26, 2024
Source: The Progressive





On September 22, 1979, U.S. surveillance satellite “Vela 6911” detected a double flash of light in the Indian Ocean midway between Africa and Antarctica that appeared to be consistent with the detonation of a nuclear weapon. As researchers with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) note in their paper, “Israeli Nuclear Weapons, 2021,” U.S. intelligence at the time of “the Vela incident” believed the double flash to be an Israeli nuclear test, conducted with logistical support from the Apartheid-era South African government. A panel assembled by President Jimmy Carter, however, rejected this conclusion based on a premise that the Administration knew to be false, but did not want to challenge politically—that Israel did not possess nuclear weapons.

Israeli “nuclear ambiguity,” its lack of official confirmation or denial that it possesses nuclear weapons, persists to this day. Nevertheless, as of 2021, researchers estimate that the country possesses ninety nuclear warheads, capable of being delivered by aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles, and sea-based cruise missiles. Israel is reserving these weapons for “the Samson Option”: an all-out assault on the civilian population centers of its opponents.

Researchers have been able to reconstruct the history and current status of Israel’s nuclear program through declassified materials, as well as statements by Israeli politicians and officers themselves.

“Israeli officials do not explicitly discuss the country’s nuclear doctrine, but the country still needs to implicitly signal the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes,” says Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, which advocates for nuclear disarmament. “Reading between the lines of statements from former and current officials and military planners provides insights into how the country may use its nuclear weapons, such as the Samson Option.”

In 1999, Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen published Israel and the Bomb, which relied on recently declassified documents from archives in Israel and the United States to piece together the process by which the government of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion colluded with or deceived U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, and Norwegian Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen to begin construction of a nuclear reactor in the late 1950s. Ben-Gurion’s government first denied the reactor’s existence, then insisted on its peaceful purposes in scientific research and energy production—all while intending to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Israel may have assembled its first nuclear weapon as early as 1967. It remains the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons.

The ambiguity around Israel’s nuclear arsenal also extends to its nuclear doctrine, or the circumstances under which it would choose to deploy nuclear weapons. A previous report from the FAS describes a key component of Israel’s nuclear doctrine as “the Samson Option,” a reference to the biblical figure Samson, who killed himself and his enemies by collapsing the pillars of the temple in which they all stood. The Samson Option similarly invokes murder-suicide, threatening any force that successfully defeats Israel’s conventional military with nuclear retaliation.

“Israel’s policy of never formally acknowledging its nuclear arsenal makes its doctrine ambiguous, but the Samson Option is believed to refer to Israel’s plans for overwhelming nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear adversaries if the country faces an imminent, existential threat,” says Davenport. “It would likely include deliberate, disproportionate nuclear strikes against non-military targets, such as cities, despite the clear violation of international humanitarian law.”

The Samson Option stands in contrast to doctrines embraced by other nuclear powers, such as “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). Developed during the Cold War, MAD posits that nuclear powers like the United States and the Soviet Union could deter each other from ever using nuclear weapons through the threat of retaliatory strikes—that is, if one nuked the other, the other would nuke back, meaning neither would survive. Unlike MAD, Israel’s Samson Option specifically threatens its non-nuclear opponents.

“MAD is designed to deter war or prevent war from escalating to nuclear use,” explains Davenport. “The Samson Option is not designed to deter a nuclear adversary from a first strike or counter strike—Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. Rather, its purported purpose is to ensure Israel’s survival. Under the Samson Option, nuclear weapons would be deliberately used against a non-nuclear adversary as a last resort to prevent an Israeli defeat.”

The events of October 7, as well as the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, reveal the dangers of Israel’s nuclear doctrine. On October 7, conventionally armed Palestinian militants were able to successfully overwhelm defenses at multiple points of the militarized border wall constructed by Israel around Gaza. The Palestinian militants advanced under a barrage of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel—one of which struck an Israeli military base housing nuclear-capable missiles, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Even after the Israeli military managed to repel the Palestinian militants, at least one Israeli politician called for the use of nuclear weapons against Gaza, as reported by the Associated Press and others. Therefore, the true ambiguity that now remains is not whether Israel possesses nuclear weapons, but how those weapons might be used.

“Israel’s nuclear arsenal does not protect the state against conventional strikes, particularly from non-state actors,” says Davenport. “Furthermore, the irresponsible rhetoric of Israeli politicians threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza erodes the taboo against nuclear use and underscores the critical importance of redoubling efforts to reduce nuclear risk and work toward disarmament.”

How Israel Became a Nuclear Power
JACOBIN
06.23.2024

Israel’s nuclear program is its worst-kept secret. It was made possible through the support of Western nations like France and has thrived due to a cynical attitude toward nonproliferation that has made the world more dangerous.


An Israeli soldier rides in a tank near the border with Gaza on October 14, 2023, near Sderot, Israel. (Amir Levy / Getty Images)


Israel’s nuclear weapons program has been an open secret for over fifty years. Declassified documents and the wider availability of satellite imagery has largely been responsible for revealing the extent of the nation’s nuclear program. So too has the courage of whistleblowers such as Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician who exposed his country’s covert program and was subsequently drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents in Italy before being secretly tried and sentenced to eighteen years in prison in 1986.

Yet the United States and other nuclear-armed states, as well as a broad range of bodies responsible for monitoring arms proliferation, continue to maintain a policy of not publicly acknowledging the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons.

These norms of institutional secrecy are surprisingly powerful and far-reaching. US government employees have been fired for referring to Israeli nuclear weapons. Even Wikipedia’s page on the subject uses circuitous language to refer to their existence. (The page is locked to edits from almost all contributors.) This approach is effective: a 2021 poll suggested that more Americans believed that Iran has nuclear weapons than that Israel does, when the reality is the opposite.

This wall of silence has proven remarkably porous. During the early days of Israel’s war on Gaza, government officials openly entertained the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the battlefield, and figures within the US military think tank circuit have wondered whether Israel’s secrecy is doing it more harm than good.

Conventional wisdom about the strategic importance of possessing nuclear weapons is that there’s no reason to have one if you don’t tell anyone. Intimidation is as much a part of deterrence as use. If no one suspects you can respond to an attack with the overwhelming force of a nuclear counterattack, what’s to make them think twice?

But Hezbollah’s continued assault on northern Israel, which has thus far led to the evacuation of over ninety thousand people, gives lie to the notion that possession of nuclear weapons offers complete protection. In a recent speech, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, made it clear that if Israel were to cross what it considers to be red lines, there would be no target within the country safe from a retaliatory response. It is therefore not clear that Israel’s nuclear weapons are on their own preventing it from being attacked in a way that threatens its existence. Israel’s relationship with the United States has, however, afforded it a range of impressive offensive and defensive nonnuclear capabilities, backed up by the even larger looming threat of US military involvement, which it is actively using.

Were the US to enforce its own policies consistently, Israel’s status as a state in possession of nuclear weapons would directly threaten its access to aid. The Glenn Amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act explicitly prohibits arms assistance to and mandates sanctions on countries that have, as Israel did in 1979, tested a nuclear weapon after 1977. But the fact that its nuclear weapons program continues to command this kind of bizarre deference illuminates the forces driving nuclear proliferation around the world.
The Forces Behind Proliferation

Scrupulous nonacknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons in the present day is part of the United States’ general position of aiding Israeli military endeavors, regardless of the financial or strategic cost. But the reason Israel has nuclear weapons in the first place has less to do with its relationship with the United States and more to do with the geopolitical forces that have driven proliferation since America first dropped the bomb on Japan.


The program that produced Israel’s nuclear weapons is as old as the state itself. As Avner Cohen details in Israel and the Bomb, a nuclear program was discussed by Israel’s leaders practically from the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, took an intense personal interest in nuclear technologies in particular and science and technology as foundations of modern state power in general.Hezbollah’s continued assault on northern Israel gives lie to the notion that possession of nuclear weapons offers complete protection.

Already in 1949, Israel was conducting exploratory research for potential uranium deposits in the Negev, a desert region in the country’s south. When these proved inadequate, it developed techniques for producing usable nuclear material from the relatively poor resources at its disposal, before turning to the United States as the potential source of the raw materials necessary to jump-start a nuclear program.

But in the immediate postwar years, the United States was unwilling to provide the necessary material without guarantees from Israel that the country’s leaders saw as undesirably inhibiting. Israel instead turned to other small countries with nuclear programs at different stages of development: France and Norway, two of only three European countries in the early 1950s operating nuclear reactors.

Israel and France shared a set of geopolitical interests. Both opposed the government of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The French, motivated by neocolonial idealism, took issue with Nasser for nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Israel of course felt threatened by Nasser’s Arab nationalism.

Skepticism about the possibility that the US nuclear umbrella could actually offer security guarantees also motivated nations like France to advance a Gaullist policy of strategic autonomy. This meant encouraging nuclear proliferation where doing so would secure the broader geopolitical interests of declining powers.
Nonproliferation Amid Great-Power Rivalry

In the present, the United States actively works to shield the Israeli nuclear weapons program from criticism as well as public knowledge. As with France’s hostility to a Nasser-led anti-Western order, the Israeli-US alliance is strongly motivated by fear of Iran, or any other anti-American state, developing its own nuclear program. Yet Israel’s nuclear weapons, along with the substantial, long-term support among a certain segment of the US political class for war with Iran, are two very powerful factors driving Iran to develop its own nuclear weapon.

At present, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, though experts believe that it currently maintains the capability to quickly develop them. President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal limited Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon and imposed a regime of inspections and oversight which provided assurance to other countries that it was not developing nuclear weapons. But Israel opposed the deal on the grounds that it did not go far enough to preclude the possibility that Iran might one day develop a nuclear weapon — a similar kind of all-or-nothing approach to the one that informed the Donald Trump administration’s decision to exit the agreement in 2018.

As Israel’s war on Gaza continues and expands outward into the broader region, it seems it may only be a matter of time before Iran finally does develop a nuclear weapon. After its recent large-scale rocket attacks against Israel, Iran announced that it might reverse its current voluntary commitment to not developing nuclear weapons should Israel retaliate by hitting its nuclear facilities. It goes without saying that this would make the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran much more dangerous, giving even low-level incidents the potential to escalate to dramatic and destructive new heights.The United States actively works to shield the Israeli nuclear weapons program from criticism as well as public knowledge.

In effect, unwillingness to commit to nuclear nonproliferation has led to nuclear proliferation. This explains why Saudi Arabia has in recent years betrayed nuclear ambitions. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has stated in US press outlets that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran did so. Yet rather than treating this open disregard for stated US policy as a serious limit on US-Saudi relations, the United States has been pushing for a so-called “normalization” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel — including a stipulation of a “credible path to a Palestinian state.” Saudi Arabia, in turn, wants the United States to provide it with nuclear technology — ostensibly, of course, for a power program.

The dilemma for America is that whatever interest it does have in nuclear nonproliferation must be balanced against its broader commitment to global hegemony. The latter would be undermined if China, which it now sees as its key competitor, stepped in to provide technical support to fledgling nuclear programs, as it has done with Saudi Arabia. Last year, China sent one of its engineering companies to conduct surveys of the Gulf monarchy’s uranium deposits, although it seems unlikely that these deposits could support a nuclear program of any size.

Nuclear weapons experts have called for safeguards that could prevent the development of a Saudi nuclear weapons program. Yet unlike in the case of Israel’s search for nuclear material, the threat of safeguards doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to the kingdom’s openly stated nuclear ambitions. It sometimes seems that U.S. nuclear weapons policy in 2024 is based on a tacit acceptance of its powerlessness over global nuclear weapons politics. Rather than trying to prevent proliferation, America has been forced to settle for the role of being the primary nuclear patron where it can.
Existential Threats

Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons has been largely irrelevant to the ongoing war in Gaza. The country’s overwhelming conventional capabilities have granted it superiority on the battlefield, at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. But possession of nuclear weapons reinforces the worldview that underlies Israel’s political calculations (and to some extent, those of every nuclear-armed country): that its existence is constantly threatened, and it is only rational for it to possess the means of responding to such threats with unlimited force.

It is the states with the most nuclear weapons, Russia and the United States, that most assiduously cling to the logic that weapons of mass destruction are the only safeguard against existential threats. Both have consistently bypassed opportunities to deescalate the very real, immediate risks to human safety and civilization that the continued existence of nuclear weapons poses. In doing so, they’ve set a powerful precedent for every other country in the world to uphold nuclear weapons as the only real guarantor of security.

Without a real commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in global politics by the states that can certainly afford it, this de facto policy encourages nuclear proliferation. Israel’s well-defended status as a nuclear power that need not even announce itself is not an exception, but an example to other states thinking of going nuclear.


CONTRIBUTOR
Emma Claire Foley is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. Her writing and commentary has appeared in Newsweek, NBC, the Guardian, and elsewhere.