Tag: Journal Articles

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There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the US military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan war can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground, and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.

In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world. “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.

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Just remember: In the grand bargain that is war, it’s their product and their profit. And that’s no bargain for America, or for that matter for the world.

Two days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Albert Camus wrote in his newspaper, Combat: “Our technological civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery.” A month later, in her September 1945 column in The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day condemned President Truman for having ordered the two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ten years later, on June 15, 1955, Day was still among the earliest protesters against nuclear weapons when, outside City Hall in Manhattan, she, A. J. Muste, Ammon Hennacy and 26 others refused to take shelter during compulsory air-raid Civil Defense drills which she considered psychological preparations for nuclear war. Day and the others were arrested, held in jail overnight, found guilty and given suspended sentences.

Fifty-five years later, reading about the Obama administration’s recently released strategy for a nuclear strike immediately brings to mind Dorothy Day’s protests against “rehearsals for death.” The rehearsals haven’t started yet, but officials say “they are moving aggressively to conduct drills, prepare communication guides and raise awareness among emergency planners.”

In 2007, Congress appropriated $5.5 million for studies on “atomic disaster planning” which have revealed that “a bomb’s flash would blind many drivers, causing accidents and complicate evacuation” and that “taking shelter can make a huge difference in survival rates.”

Whether we are being prepared psychologically to believe that we can win a nuclear exchange or simply being told what to do if we are the victims of a nuclear attack, the level of delusion here is striking. One cannot take cover from a nuclear weapon. Only by abolishing them can we make sure that we do not become their victims.

I am writing this while sitting in a small café in Rome’s old Jewish Ghetto. My wife Betty and I have been in Rome for a few days, staying in a small apartment a few blocks from the Campo di Fiori. It’s an excellent location for walking to many of the sites and sights we have on our “to see” list and a good place to catch a bus to almost anywhere else in the city.

Our first stop was the Grand Synagogue of Rome (Temple Maggiore) and the Jewish Museum. There are actually twelve synagogues in Rome, but there is only one in what is called “the Jewish Ghetto.” An interesting footnote about the Jewish community in Rome: You don’t join a particular synagogue; rather, all Jews in Rome donate money to a community fund that supports community institutions. This fund in turn contributes money to each synagogue.

Temple Maggiore’s basement houses The Jewish Museum of Rome, which holds a vast collection of extraordinary artifacts from the long rich tradition of Roman Jewish life. In the second century BCE, Jews came as traders from the Middle East. After the Roman Empire’s conquest of Jerusalem in 70 CE, they arrived as slaves. Post-1492, they fled Spain and Sicily to escape the Inquisition. This immigration was later augmented by Jews from central and eastern Europe, and even from north Africa.

They gathered in what is now called the Jewish Ghetto, a small four- or five-square-block area along the Tiber River. No buildings of the original ghetto survive, but the geographical boundary remains the same. As I glance out the café window, I can see a thriving community of restaurants, many serving Israeli dishes and traditional Roman Jewish food. My wife and I were anxious to taste the carciofi alla Romana, a small fried artichoke. (Delicious!)

Nearby are cafés and lots of shops that sell all types of Jewish memorabilia, and a busy Jewish day school. Walking back towards our apartment, we once again entered the Campo di Fiori and found a brass plaque in the middle of the piazza that commemorates the Inquisition’s confiscation of every copy of the Talmud in Italy. The search took about nine days. On Rosh Hashanah, in 1553, these and many other Jewish books were burned in the Campo di Fiori.

We will be in Rome for more than three weeks. We have a long list of places we’ve wanted to see for years and have never had the time to investigate. Our apartment has Wi-Fi, a roomy kitchen, and a small balcony. In September and October the weather is not as hot as in the summer months. This is a great way to spend a vacation if you are willing to walk a bit and perhaps get on the wrong bus from time to time. For us, spending time in the Jewish Ghetto, attending Friday and Saturday services in the Grand Synagogue of Rome, getting to experience some of the rich history of Jews of Rome, is only part of the joy.

Up until a few months ago, I lived in a Jaffan cubicle, for which I shelled out a large sum to a blackguard who shall remain unnamed. One day, I heard a ring at the door. I opened it with some trepidation, only to be informed by a municipal inspector that my neighbors next door were asking permission to do some remodeling. Wondering what this had to with me, as I was only a lowly renter, the inspector made it clear to me that I had the right to oppose the construction, and that it was his job to inform me of this right.

This is how things are carried out in a law-abiding region. The West Bank is famously not such a region. If any more proof is necessary, please look at the pictures on the next page. The first is a seizure order signed by Brigadier General Binyamin Eliezer, July 18, 1979; the second is a map of the seized land, taken from the lands of the village Dura Al Qara; the third is a document issued by Major Amnon Shasha a day later.

Paragraph 6a in Shasha’s document stipulates that the “seizure order is not to be published to the locals”; paragraph 8 stipulates that “no publicity is to be given to the order.” Why am I boring you with paperwork from 1979, a time so unenlightened that its favorite music was disco? Because it shows how the system of theft works in the West Bank.

Shasha was basically ordering confiscation of private, registered land, ostensibly for security reasons. In fact this land was confiscated for the purpose of building a settlement, and that fact was hidden from the village’s Palestinian residents. By doing so, Shasha deprived them of their right to protect themselves from the order by appealing to the High Court of Justice.

Such an act, the High Court ruled in 2005, is reserved for totalitarian states: “Secret legislation, kept in hidden archives, is one of the signs of a totalitarian regime and contradicts the rule of law.” Now we expect the court to follow its own ruling.

Attorneys Michael Sfard, Muhammad Shaqir, Shlomy Zachary and Anu Lusky recently petitioned the High Court on behalf of Yesh Din, in the name of Abd-Al-Rahman Ahmed Abd-Al-Rahman Qassem, a resident of Dura Al Qara whose land was confiscated under Shasha’s order.

It is important to note that since the land was confiscated —thirty-four years ago— no military use has been made of Qassem’s land. Seizure orders, according to international law and the judgments of the High Court, allow the seizure of lands only for pressing military needs.

How did a major allow himself to openly, in writing, defy an order signed by a general, and a prominent one, at that? Perhaps because, even then, IDF officers knew which way “the Commander’s Spirit” points: actions promoting effective annexation. And they knew that even if Ben Eliezer himself wouldn’t like what was done to his order, his seniors in the army or government would. And that’s another way the occupation corrupts the army.

Events in Egypt have reinforced my sense of living in a universe different than the one inhabited by Israel’s most vicious critics (let’s call them IMVCs) in the blogosphere. Oh, we have a few things in common. Like them, I am inspired by the Egyptian crowds demanding the overthrow of a tyrant. Like them, I am appalled by the continuing Israeli occupation and settlement expansion and the sufferings of the Palestinian people.

But they still appear to reside in a kind of alternate reality, harboring assumptions that do not apply to the universe I know. Here are two of those assumptions:

1. The Israel lobby in the U.S. is the only reason America propped up Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his corrupt regime for so long.

2. There was and is something inherently wrong with the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

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America’s latest populist movement, which reaches back to revolutionary history by calling itself the ‘Tea Party,’ helped shape the remarkable results of last November’s midterm election. Some dare to hope that candidates elected in that political uprising might help arrest America’s alarming decline. Others see the uprising as no more than a cover for the corporate power that lay behind many so-called insurgent campaigns of that extraordinary political season.

One thing about Tea Party ideology is clear: it is almost entirely a reaction to the Obama administration’s domestic policies. The decline of American greatness, however, is due at least as much to profoundly misguided foreign policies. Unless those policies are reevaluated and changed in some fundamental way, there will be little chance of reclaiming America’s immense promise.

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The United States is a warlike nation and is likely to remain so even as its insistence on global hegemony weakens it economically and politically. This is the looming danger that threatens America’s future. If any of the Tea Party insurgents who won election last year turns into a true insurgent on those issues, many will cheer. America is waiting for brave voices to challenge the militarist consensus.

Virtually overnight, the Arab Middle East has been irrevocably transformed. The implications for America’s vital interests in the region and for Israel-Palestine peacemaking will be far-reaching.

Most observers seem to agree that Israeli fears of the growing political influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and of a resurgence of Hamas in the West Bank end what little prospect for an Israeli-Palestinian accord might have survived the latest deadlock in the U.S.-brokered peace talks.

But in reality there was never the slightest possibility of the parties reaching agreement. Binyamin Netanyahu and his government were convinced they had bested Obama in their confrontation over continued settlement construction, and could now continue gobbling up the West Bank with impunity, disregarding not only American interests but international law and all previous agreements committing Israel to halting the construction of settlements and dismantling all its illegal outposts.

Despite repeated promises, not only were the illegal outposts not removed, many were converted into full-blown settlements. The long-planned goal of Israel’s colonial enterprise — establishing irreversible control over Palestine through its settlements — was clearly in sight, if not already an accomplished fact.

The recent upheavals have dramatically increased the cost to American interests of the country’s current policies in the Middle East. No one has suggested the U.S. punish Israel in order to get its way. It need only cease to reward it — with unprecedented military, diplomatic and economic gifts — for its indifference to the damage its sabotaging of a two-state solution has done not just to the Palestinians but to America’s national interests and its own.

At this historic turning point, a president who honestly and fully informs the American people of the likely consequences of U.S. leadership being abandoned in a part of the world so critical to America’s national security will have their support — even if he goes so far as to put forward a framework for a two-state accord that ends the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

For those of us who have labored in the vineyard of Middle East peace for decades, this is the best of times and the worst of times. Around the world, the cause of a just peace between Israel and Palestine has enlisted many millions of followers. Here in the U.S. our movement, so marginalized for so long, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, among Jews and gentiles alike.

Yet actual progress toward peace seems stalled at best. The shift to the right in Israeli politics makes the task more daunting than ever. The Obama administration’s veto of a UN resolution that declared Israeli settlements illegal — simply stating the administration’s own position — reminds us how hard it still is to pry U.S. policy away from right-wing Israeli positions.

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The news from the Middle East for the past few weeks has been riveting to watch and live through. Young and old protesters taking to the streets and relying on nonviolent tactics in Tunisia, and then a few days later seeing the faces of at least a million Egyptians march in Cairo and Alexandria and calling for the end of a dictatorship, and all the while stressing nonviolence.

A population so set on achieving nonviolent solutions to unseat a dictator has given me a feeling that something was working there about which one could only dare dream. As we all know, President Obama was in Egypt in June 2009 and gave a dynamic speech about democracy. I read the speech and was quite surprised that no one balked at his subject, knowing that Egypt was not a democracy.

How did this nonviolent revolution come about? How did so many understand the basic rules of nonviolent tactics? Gene Sharp, who has been a giant among those of us in the peace movement but barely known outside these circles, has worked tirelessly for years in defining what and how nonviolent strategies succeed. His book ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’ — a 93-page guide to bringing down autocrats — is available in 24 languages and has been an inspiration to many.

The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict had quietly led workshops in Cairo several years ago, training Egyptian democracy activists. Sharp’s booklet, ‘198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,’ was translated into Arabic and made available to many protesters in Tunisia and Egypt. FOR literature used in the civil rights movement had also been translated into Arabic and widely distributed.

There are times when working in the peace movement that one loses sight of the prize. But seeing the results in Egypt has made it clear that persistent peace education and nonviolent resistance training can create meaningful change.