Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 155 (since 2009-08-01 18:59:36)

Max Ajl

Max is a writer and activist. Follow him on Twitter: @maxajl.

Website: http://jacobinmag.com/author/max-ajl/

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• Israeli 'retaliation'
  • Max Ajl August 22, 2011 at 6:53 pm

    No one is arguing that the car filled with civilians is a "legitimate military target." From the timeline posted, it appears that the attack on the car was nearly simultaneous with the arrival of a clearly marked military vehicle on the scene. You can imagine what was going through the heads of the assailants at that point, and the point is that these things happen during war and during military assaults, one reason among many I find the international law minutiae about whether X was a war crime or Y was a war crime so stupid. War is generally a crime. In this case, the occupation is war, Israel is willfully at war with its neighbors, and I think its responsibility englobes that of other actors, at least, within the immediate region. I don't necessarily dispute that the rocket attacks were, according to international law, war crimes. And I don't dispute that they should stop. But the terms of them stopping matter. They should stop as a result of the occupation ending. Anyone not serious about addressing the disease shouldn't be taken seriously when talking about symptoms. Furthermore I would consider wholly illegitimate any tribunal that attempted to try Palestinians for war crimes, because where is the court of the innocent who should blather about Palestinian guilt? The EU? America? Not a chance.

    And I don't read TovioS etc as "smiling" on Palestinian war crimes. I see them as not getting too exercised about them. Very different thing and totally understandable. If you're looking for someone morally depraved and totally hypocritical in the comment section here who can justify your denial of your complicity in Palestinian oppression, you'll find plenty of it wherever some sweet soul starts singing about the "corruption" of blood-soaked American politics by Israel. But I don't see much of that in the words of Chaos and the rest.

  • Max Ajl August 22, 2011 at 1:32 pm

    I in turn would appreciate if you acknowledge that when you ask, "Were they also a military target or victims of terror murdered by people who just wanted to kill as many Jewish Israelis as possible regardless of who they are?" you are proposing a self-serving binary, where reality is a spectrum.

    In non-genocidal politics, the aim is almost never to "kill as many of X socio-religious group as possible."

    The attacks started with an attack on a bus full of soldiers. As far as I can tell the injured were all soldiers. They escalated from there. As I wrote, what was planned and what was contingent is unclear. I don't think the aim was ever "to kill as many Jewish Israelis as possible." And you should think the same thing, especially because it's now being reported that they brought handcuffs.

  • Max Ajl August 22, 2011 at 12:49 pm with 7 replies

    I did not see the names of those killed in the car when I was researching the attacks yesterday. You are right to point that out, and I regret the error. The "possibly" should be erased. I think it is quite clear from the 3rd paragraph that I was distinguishing between killing civilians and killing soldiers.

• Savage murder of musician Ibrahim Qattush shows Syria's dictatorship is brutish, uncouth, macabre
  • Max Ajl August 11, 2011 at 9:56 pm

    Nitwit is a useful punching bag but he should be forced to write in the English language.

• Observing the discrimination against Palestinians gives me flashbacks to the 'Whites Only' signs in my youth in Mississippi
  • Max Ajl August 2, 2011 at 2:14 pm

    Actually, I've crossed through it six times in the past two years, and yes, everyone with their brain screwed on correctly knows that Egypt is under Israeli and American pressure to maintain the crossing in its current, pseudo-open-and-closed, state. Why is exactly how I explain the Egyptian humiliation and degradation of the Palestinians who have to cross through that border -- prison gate is more like it -- to see their families, go home, or get medical treatment.

  • Max Ajl August 2, 2011 at 12:34 pm with 19 replies

    You should read the news. Egypt under American and Israeli pressure only lets 450 people out per day. And frequently closes the border at a hint of "unrest" in Egypt, never mind that closure's effect on the Palestinians living in Gaza. As for Hamas, we hardly love the party, but the notion that they are doing something abhorrent by prioritizing sick people is only evidence of your own sick mind, which fixates on something that doesn't even qualify as propaganda against the Palestinians. Incidentally it takes about 5 hours on a good day to pass the 1km border between Rafah -- Egypt and Rafah -- Palestine, twice that on a bad day, if you're allowed through at all. If you aren't, you take a cab back home from Rafah to Gaza or further north, which runs 70 shekels. For the average Gazan male, that's an entire days wage. Perhaps it's a personality defect amongst Mondoweiss's suspect readership, thinking that Arabs are human beings, but those kinds of things tick us off for some reason.

• American Jews feel warmer about Netanyahu than Obama -- in switch from a year ago
  • Max Ajl August 1, 2011 at 5:15 pm

    1. Jeff, reading is not a process of mangling the words of others or mind-reading. It’s question of encountering the unknown, trying to understand it, and then fitting it into, or modifying, your world-view. You don’t seem to have figured that out yet, and the day is getting late. A man who is calling me “Ajls,” who writes, in response to the statement, “Since you attribute the Iraq War, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the US entry to WWI, and the international financial crisis as part of Israel’s mayhem, we clearly disagree on the scope of that mayhem,” that “I will debate you or anyone else at any time about who was responsible for the Iraq war but I do not attribute any blame for that to the Jewish community since, in fact, American Jews were” – not noticing that what I said was Israel and not American Jews, is a man who is simply not paying attention to either what he is reading or what he is writing.

    That’s too bad, but it may explain why you were marginalized and labeled a loose cannon in the 80s. Just a thought.

    2. The lobby is responsible for that which it is responsible, no more, no less. I have said repeatedly that it is (a) a sector of ruling-class power and (b) a propaganda service for elites and (c) agreed that it should be challenged directly. You may ignore those statements, but you may not pretend that they don’t exist.

    3. To that end, your psychobabble about my fear of antisemitism is cute but also deranged, and while it may help you stay in denial about what my argument actually is, what it will not be is correct.

    4. It is frankly bizarre that you would suggest I think anyone other than the Zionists has primary responsibility for the Nakba or the Naksa. You just write that to poison the well, which is contemptible.

    5. What troubles you is that I refer to the lobby as a sector of ruling-class power, which it is, because that troubles your whole analysis and numbskull strategy that somehow the people who run this country have been duped by the American Jewish Zionists such that both ordinary Americans and the remainder of the ruling class are both damaged by Zionist machinations. To put it politely, this is non-sense.

    6. Since it’s non-sense, you have to systematically warp evidence and ignore contrary evidence to confirm your warped world-view. See the conversations above.

    7. Since you think that the best way to get Americans to support the Palestinian cause is not to rouse them by linking their grievances against the empire and capitalism but rather by getting them pissed about what Zionism has done to them, your strategy makes sense in the sense that it is internally consistent. But I am curious if Phil and Annie think that we should build a right-wing populist movement to battle Zionism, or if we should use weaponize white racism in defense of Palestinian rights. I already know what you think, and I know what Palestinian and leftist organizers tell me about your idea: it’s insane, not because of the sensibilities on which it will grate, but because it will never work.

    8. That might be another reason you were labeled a “loose cannon.” But that is speculation.

    9. To that end, please don’t flatter yourself that I want you to stop writing on this blog. Your groupies seem to be flattering you adequately, so you can skip flattering yourself anyway. What I want is for you to start being helpful towards building a transformative political movement, work you abandoned decades ago. Anyway, every day is a day to choose, and my expectations are low. But surprise me, Jeff.

  • Max Ajl July 31, 2011 at 1:29 pm

    Jeff:

    I see no point in responding to this whole thing, because either you don’t know how to read or you think you can just say that people said things that they did not say. I wrote that “I just don’t consider it or Israel responsible or solely responsible for all the mayhem you attribute to it,” a line I stand by. Since you attribute the Iraq War, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the US entry to WWI, and the international financial crisis as part of Israel’s mayhem, we clearly disagree on the scope of that mayhem. Obviously the Nakba and the Naksa are overwhelmingly the responsibility of Israeli Jewry. You may indeed have posited my “unwillingness to accept as a fact that the primary, not sole, responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and their plight ever since can be laid at the feet of the Zionists and the world Jewish community,” but your postulation was non-sense, and one thing I will call you out on is simply making stuff up.

    I challenge you to produce one (in-context) quotation that I’ve written that even hints at the contrary. To say you put too much weight on American Jewry in the destruction of Iraq is not to say that you put too much weight on Israeli Jewry in the destruction of Palestine. They are different events, and I think your narrative about the lobby has been dealt with already. It's not unacceptable because it puts too much blame for murder of brown people on Jews. It's unacceptable because it's wrong.

    With the witch-hunt dismissed, let’s move on to something else. Here’re your ruminations about my mental state:

    There’s your tribalism showing again, Max, if you don’t mind me pointing out. Yeah, I know you really do mind because that seems to me and, I have a hunch to others, what lies at the root of what you are about…. his obsession with absolving Jews, collectively, from any blame for the Palestinian catastrophe, as revealed in virtually all his posts on MW, only reinforces my opinion. Hopefully, he’ll outgrow it… Max, in my opinion, has a problem dealing with his Jewish identity.

    You know not one thing about me, and the only response to your speculations is that you are demented, and have an unhealthy obsession with me and my religious background. You embarrass yourself and you embarrass the hosts of this blog. And you should stop, and if you don’t stop, they should stop you.

  • Max Ajl July 30, 2011 at 7:49 pm

    Jeffrey:
    We are getting somewhere. Kind of. Except you persist in putting words in my mouth. First, I did not say “the Israel Lobby wasn’t the problem.” I just don’t consider it or Israel responsible or solely responsible for all the mayhem you attribute to it. You from the very outset have insisted on turning differences of assessment into differences of principle. I did not say Hanieh agrees with me on the lobby (although I would bet he does, and he writes, “any talk of an 'Israel lobby' controlling U.S. foreign policy is nonsense.”)
    link to mrzine.monthlyreview.org

    You complain about insults. A grown man who opens up every diatribe by blathering about my “damage control” for Israel and my “tribalism” has no grounds for complaining about insults. Sorry Jeff.

    Your first 5 paragraphs are mostly irrelevant, although “MB” will call them a great rebuttal or something: they are an inventory of who-said-what, and frankly, I don’t care who said what or where the “reputable ‘scholars’ line up,” I don’t care what you think or what Chomsky thinks, what Zunes thinks or what Massad thinks. I care about what the truth of the matter is, and in that respect I find your arguments deficient, although obviously, there are clear problems with Chomsky and Zunes. Kanafani thought that Israel was a client state of imperialism. link to newjerseysolidarity.org

    But to clarify, the issue is not my “take” on the lobby. I don’t think you even know what my take on the lobby is. Certainly, you have never discussed it.

    As for JINSA, that Ford/Kissinger speech was meant to induce an Israel withdrawal from the Sinai. There was never pressure on Israel to end the occupation and there was never a serious threat of it. You can read the NYTimes coverage of that speech if you want. The withdrawal came, in the face of the lobby’s opposition, a clear test of the lobby’s strength, as the lack of war with Iran is another clear test.

    Furthermore, your history is wrong. The integration of the Israeli and American MICs began far earlier than you think it did, with Motorola, Tadiran, GTE, and others. As the NY Times put it in February 1972,
    

    To the extent that Israel could build tanks and planes and other advanced weapons, they point out that there would be less occasion for outcry in the Arab world over shipment of United States arms to Israel. And a more advanced arms industry would put Israel in a better position, through sales to other nations, to finance more of her own defence needs.

    Given the earlier penetration of American capital into Israel, this was quite a profitable line of business for American business. Some of that capital was Jewish. But some was not. You make too much of the MOUs, because you assume that nationalism explains something here that it does not. When people invest in a foreign country and make money, what the most important thing to highlight is that they made money. Not the nationalism they used to justify that investment or corral popular support for that investment, as American Jewish elites self-consciously did in the late 60s as they suffused American Jewry with Zionism, a considerable task. The Jewish aspect is clearly relevant. But it is only relevant when it is relevant, and exaggerating that aspect to rile up people with lies is a recipe for failure, because you can’t trick capitalism and you can’t weaponize racism in the service of justice. Sorry Jeff. And I am not “desperate.” Rather, you are. That is the tragic aspect of your political decay.

    Again, you make the weird point that “it will not be the US oil companies that stand to benefit from Iraq’s oil.” No: it was the US companies that benefited to the rune of a trillion dollars from Iraqi oil being kept in the ground and the Middle East being thrown into chaos. Stock market capitalization reflects investors’ predictions of future earnings, and somehow, investors think the oil majors will be doing fine. If they need to mount another war to abrogate the Russian and Chinese contracts, I have no doubt they’ll do so, and they’ll do it even if we burn alive every Jewish neo-con in Washington. Now you call that “stupid,” but what is stupid is your assumption that your crystal ball works. You make a similar error, writing that “if Washington and the major US oil company’s intent was to keep Iraq’s oil in the ground, than the war has been a major loss for both because, I assure you, that is not the plan of the Chinese, the Russians, or Malaysians,” ignoring the fact that the oil is still there and that their profits are through the roof. Again, the market seems to agree that the “intent” of the Chinese et al is not a threat to Exxon. Losses are measured in dollars, not tea leaf readings about what will or won’t happen in 20 years.

    What’re even stupider are your assumptions about the contracts. For one thing, I repeat, if Washington wants to gut those contracts, it will, China is not about to threaten American power, you pal Mearsheimer’s prognostications to the contrary. Second, oil majors mostly profit at the pump, and they now know very well how to keep the price at the pump high: regional war. You may pretend that it’s just the lobby pushing for those policies. The rest of us will try to make analytical links between the funders of the politicians, the policies of the politicians, and the beneficiaries of the policies. It takes effort to not see the oil companies behind this, and that’s all the difference between the power to win an argument, as the lobby sometimes does, and the power to make your policy the baseline of thinking, which is what the oil and weapons companies do. Your crystal ball is out again when you write of the Iran war being a war for Israel. I hate to break it to you, but the Iran war has not happened, and it’s worthwhile to understand who the big boys are blocking it from occurring.

    Finally: you ask, “where would you have those in the US who support justice for Palestine focus their attention and activism? Telling them to take their protests to the gates of the major oil companies, or what? Do you really think BDS, alone, which has yet to make a major impact in this country, is sufficient?”

    No, I don’t. I agree that there should be a total and unlimited boycott of all interactions with Israel and all institutions that support the Israeli state. Congress people should have their offices occupied. And so on. The pressure should be real, there should be open social disruption and millions of people in the streets. The question is how to get them there and when they come, what to do then. The difference between us is that you want to lie to people and tell them that “Pelosi is a foreign agent,” and that the destruction of Iraq was just or even mainly a “war for Israel,” since there are people “ready to undertake anti-Israel actions.” This smacks of desperation and looks like insanity. Israel should be front and center of the anti-war movement, and the left needs to be re-built. In the surety that you will respond in total fury, exposing the lobby is part of that work. So is educating the public. At those tasks, you have a long record and I’m sure it’s a good one. The rabble-rousing, the lying, the mis-directed analysis, the Jew-baiting, the nationalism, the open embrace of right-wing populism, is not part of that work. It is murderous to it. And you should stop.

  • Max Ajl July 30, 2011 at 6:19 am

    I’d say you should apologize for lying. Why did you say no Arab intellectual agrees with me when clearly several do? Why won’t you retract your lie? Why should I respond to a pathological liar who is also a cheap racist, lies, and then changes the subject when confronted with the lie? Don’t worry about the apology. I still won’t take you seriously, because you have no understanding of what you are writing about and cannot account for the origins of either war against Iraq. Rather than respond to your pile of anecdotes and mis-understandings, because it would take 2000 words, let’s deal with 1 paragraph:

    Sure, Halliburton will get some millions out of doing a major part of the technical work but it can not be argued that this is in the same league as getting one’s hands on Iraq’s oil. One should consider whether the massive profits that the oil companies have made during the current wars will be greater than having a major stake in what is yet to be produced from Iraqi soil.

    You seem to be laboring under the sad misimpression, argued by no one here, that the point of policy is to get “hands on…oil.” Why? Oil is fungible, and US policy is oriented towards keeping Iraqi oil in the ground, not, for the most part, pumping it. Oil is a cheap commodity and the politics of it are keeping control of supply, price, and profits, facts you cannot disappear by waving a magic wand. The Clinton years were times of relative stability in the Middle East and the corporate profits of the oil majors were in the doldrums. They got smart and got a president, had him staff his cabinet with Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Halliburton and Bechtel work closely at the intersection of the oil and weapons industries, which is why Republican administrations, attuned to the interests of both, select them for cabinet posts. Thus they were well-represented in the Reagan years:

    As his initial Defense Secretary, Reagan chose Weinberger, a Bechtel vice-president; and in 1982, the president asked Shultz, Bechtel's president and formerly the Labor Secretary and Treasury Secretary of President Nixon, to become Secretary of State instead of Haig. Other Bechtel veterans with key positions were Casey (the CIA Director), Allen (National Security Advisor), Davis (Deputy Secretary of Energy) and Habib (Special Envoy to the Middle East).

    You claim that Baker et al opposed the war. They did. Guess what? Sometimes the corporate and political elite disagree over profit-maximizing strategies! And sometimes one strategy wins out over another, particularly when so many stand to gain so much. The difference between Scowcroft et al and little Bush is that it was the latter fighting for corporate campaign donations, so it seems enough of them liked the war-mongering that they were willing to fight to put him into office – especially after the lean years of the Clinton administration when the profits of the oil companies were at 30-year lows. But consider Scowcroft’s objections: that it would turn the Middle East into a “cauldron” and destabilize “moderate” regimes, meaning Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council. That is, the concern was that it would destabilize the countries that the US wants stable. In that sense, like many big wars, the US war on Iraq was a gamble. So? Capitalism is a gamble. A gamble that paid off.

    The Bush years and especially the Iraq war made a killing for weapons, oil, also Israel, behind it finance, and behind that the rest of the capitalist class fending off deflation. Then they popped Bush into office again in 2004. You make too much of some of the neo-conservatives being Jewish. Here’s Jason Vest, with the best investigative report on JINSA: which has “managed to weave a number of issues –support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general – into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core”, insisting that “the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity” for Israel and America “is through hegemony in the Middle East.” All those retired generals on JINSA’s board of advisors seem pretty bereft of Jewish names. Instead, they are part of the rotating door between defense think tanks, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex. Israel and its domestic allies play a role in that, using Jewish nationalism to legitimate policies that people wish to undertaken for other purposes, chiefly making money for both the Israel and American upper-classes, by now nearly seamlessly integrated, as you can see by tracking the parallel stock movements between the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. They nearly move in sync. Wonder why that is? Perhaps they’re owned by the same people, and all of them, know their interests better than you do.

    Now you can brandish a bunch of scholars at me to prove the claim about the “predominant influence of the American Jewish establishment in shaping US Middle East policy,” although Quandt writes that “"The interests of the conservative oil-rich Arab states…are well served by Israel's holding Egypt at bay." Here’s Quandt: “the influence of the so-called Zionist Lobby had been generally overestimated in the Arab World.” As for the rest of your scholars, I can thrust Ghassan Kanafani, Adam Hanieh, Bashir Abu-Manneh, Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler, and Stephen Zunes as you, and cap it off with a quotation from Gabriel Ash, but the argument isn’t settled by trading quotations or links but by trying to understand how policy is made and especially coming to terms with the fact that the people who run the empire know how to run it better than you do and know what their interests are, which does not occlude but rather incorporates the fact that the lobby is among those running the country and the lobby thus contributes to the “interests” possessed by the people who run the system.

    What say you Jeff?

    Easy: you say another logical train-wreck, making the statement about the profits that the oil companies “have made” and whether they will be greater than what is “yet to be produced.” I don’t know about you, but in my understanding oil companies first make profits now and then make them in the future. Now they make them from Saudi oil, and later they will make them from Iraqi oil. There is a lot of energy being expended to keep the Iraqi government under the American thumb so that in 25 years when it’s time to pump Iraqi oil they can abrogate the contracts of the Russian firms. Which incidentally did not win the bidding because “there is an understandable aversion by the people of Iraq to anything American,” but because Iraqi resistance prevented America’s preferred oil law from being passed.

    Meanwhile, of course, the oil majors seem less than concerned about the outcome of US foreign policy. Exxon has been smashing the NASDAQ over the past decade, so they seem OK with the “war for the Jew,” and they seem OK with Israeli policy. What say you? Do you have a different profit strategy for the oil majors? Send them a job application. Let me know how it goes. But I suspect no matter how many –bergs, -steins, and -itzes you creepily brandish at them, they’ll still measure their corporate performance in dollars and will hit the “delete” button on their inbox as soon as they see your name.

  • Max Ajl July 29, 2011 at 3:13 pm

    Look, that is Hanieh's argument. That's not my argument. I didn't cite it because I agree with it, although I agree with Hanieh on most things. I cited it because Blankfort wants to racialize the argument, and lied to do so, by saying that no Arab intellectuals agree with me. Clearly, at least in broad terms, some do. I never said the occupation is not related to the lobby. Although, speaking directly, it is not: it's related to Israeli internal social structure, which cannot stop building settlements. It's cheaper to steal Palestinian land then to risk the civil war that might ensue were the project to stop. Likewise, I never said the lobby doesn't matter. I responded specifically to Abunimah's comment that Israel makes US control of the Middle East less "smooth." Indeed, it does. That's part of the service Israel and the lobby provide to other sectors of domestic power: creating instability, because an unstable situation means war, and war means arms profits from arms sales and oil profits from increased prices. The arms sales seems pretty uncontroversial. You say that "business want open markets, friendly relationships and stability…US support for Israel for Israel makes none of that happen, yet it goes on. Why?" But different sectors of business want different things. Read this on oil: link to jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com

    I hope that will answer your questions. The amount of money made from petroleum is linked to control of the price, not control of the supply. Israel ensures that the price will remain high because it means that there will always be another war, and price spikes and profit spikes correlate with wars. The Israel lobby doesn't do this to make the oil and gas prices high -- although oil traders are some of Birthright's funders, like Mark Rich, and oil billionaire Lynn Schusterman.

    The oil companies propelled Bush into office. I am showing a link between the funders of the Bush campaign, actual policy, and actual profits. Then they put him there again in 2004 -- and this is the Republicans, less funded by Jewish cash. Doesn't it seem like they are doing fine with Israeli wars in the region? The lobby is a part of the same system as Israel, the same system as Saudi Arabia, and the same system as America, and the same system as Lockheed Martin. I don't understand why there is such reluctance to accept this claim. I mean, is there something prima facie unreasonable about it?

  • Max Ajl July 29, 2011 at 9:46 am

    [Cont]
    Bashir Abu-Manneh and Adam Hanieh clearly write that Israel is an asset/ally of the US, here and here: link to monthlyreview.org
    Hanieh writes here link to mrzine.monthlyreview.org

    In the late 1960s, with the definitive collapse of British and French colonialism in the Middle East, the US rose to become the dominant imperial power within the region. Because of the presence of oil, the Middle East became critically important to the overall construction of US hegemony in the global order. Control of the region's resources functioned simultaneously to secure a vital commodity, provide a source of profits, and as a cudgel with which to influence rival powers within the global marketplace. In the last 30 years, the region -- particularly the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) -- has taken on an increasingly important role as a source of flows of surplus capital -- and hence overall power -- within the global financial order.
    US policy towards the region is driven by these factors. Because the Middle East is a vital nexus of overall US power in the global economy, it needs to develop a political framework that will sustain and maintain its influence in the region.
    …

    Finally, and most importantly, the third key prop to US power in the region is the Israeli state. Since the 1967 war, Israel has played a key role in defending US interests in the region. It is the weapon that the US uses when it wants to crush popular movements but is unable to invade directly.

    So clearly Hanieh agrees with the general claim. So does Abu-Manneh. So why would you write the opposite? Either you cannot read the claims, or you don’t understand the arguments, or you are a liar. Assuming that the third is the case, you are also a bigot, since logically if Arab Adam and Jewish Max make similar claims, there’re no grounds for inferring that religious background has anything to do with them. Being either a bigoted liar or not capable of reading, is there anything you say that should be taken seriously on the question of American policy in the Middle East? Perhaps if people want their illusions about the world confirmed and want to evade responsibility for what has been done and continues to be done to the Middle East.

    Finally, a gift for you: Exxon’s Q2 profits were 10 billion dollars.
    link to theaustralian.com.au

    Clearly, Middle Eastern instability hurts Exxon’s profits. Walt and Mearsheimer said so, right?

  • Max Ajl July 29, 2011 at 9:31 am

    Jeffrey:

    I am not sure what to conclude about someone who (1) is incapable of quoting-in-full my position, rather than mendaciously paraphrasing; (2) lies when confronted with the vacuity of their position. “Pathological liar” seems fair, but since you were so befuddled by the Abu-Manneh article, maybe you just don’t know how to read, an explanation I think Mondoweissers should start considering seriously. Perhaps we can use it as evidence for the defense against the lunatics at Daily Kos. Over in reality, here is what I wrote:

    In an otherwise excellent interview with the Socialist Worker, Ali Abunimah says: “I don’t particularly buy the argument that Israel is an enormous asset to the United States. I think Israel is, in many respects, a burden and an obstacle to smooth U.S. control of the region.” The first claim is unfair. The capitalist imperialist yahood of Israel do more than their fair share of work confirming the antisemitic caricature of Jewish capitalists. They make plenty of money for them¬selves, plenty of money for the American upper class, and plenty of money for capitalist elites generally. The second claim is fair. Israel is a “burden” and “obstacle” to “smooth…control.” Without question, Israel’s presence makes US control of the region rough and uneven. And so?

    As I’ve told Ali repeatedly, the US doesn’t want “smooth…control” of the region. Why would the US want stability? Because that’s what US government declassified documents say, or because that’s what the snake-oil peddler Obama says? Obama also claims to want a two-state settlement, purportedly on or close to the ’67 lines, yet American administrations time-after-time have proven unable to deliver an institutionalized resolution. The conclusion drawn by a rational person is that the US government — for a medley of reasons — prefers process to peace, much like the Israeli government benefits more from a drawn-out peace process than an institutionalized final settlement. What should a rational person conclude about a US policy-making apparatus filled with bureaucrats and politicians muttering cant about stability while they OK billions of dollars of weapons shipments yearly to one of the more militarized regions on earth? One should conclude that stability is code. Code for what?
    Policy-making is very confusing when one tries to read the coffee grounds of policy-maker’s public utterances to try to divine their meaning. It’s less confusing when one starts from the fundamental interests of the primary entities that determine who will serve the four-year term as CEO of America Inc.: corporations and wealthy individuals. (Yes many of those individuals are Jewish but Jewish people just like other wealthy people under capitalism have one main interest: making money, and then making more)
    Is there a link between the lack of “smooth control” of the region and the profit-making strategies of American corporations? Could the arms and oil companies that compose the spine of American accumulation in the post-’67 era, the financial services firms that get fat on liquidity flowing through the system – do they make money off war in the Middle East?

    ...

    The US wants instability. Not in Saudi Arabia or the remainder of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Not in Israel proper. And not in Egypt. But elsewhere. Why? Simple. Instability slides inexorably to war. During wars, the price per/barrel of oil rises. The oil-producing states use that oil revenue to buy weapons and invest in US securities, whether treasury bonds that fund the debt that is the result of a trillion-dollar American military budget tied into the post-WWII system of military Keynesianism, or into stock purchasing to keep asset prices high. The gas price at the pump also rises. Since people of all incomes need gas for transportation, rising gas prices work as an indirect tax extracted from the Western working class, and with that cash the petro-carbon companies make the best possible investments: they buy presidents, who have a tendency to…make wars in the Middle East. Of course, wars need two sides, and with Israel in the mix, there will always be another war.
    The argument about Israel hindering American imperialism reduces, when shorn of the verbiage, to the notion that somehow the corporations that fund the presidents that are elected on war-mongering platforms don’t know what their interests are. Ali would rather just blame the Zionists, which in an odd methodological twist assumes that Jewish capitalists function in a fundamentally different way than non-Jewish capitalists. I am not sure what follows, and it seems like a long way around the bend to avoid coming to terms with the nature of the world in which we live, a world whose interpretive tumblers are keyed to the word class.

    Does Abunimah think that the American liberals and realists who might soak up the rhetoric about Israel no longer serving American accumulation will ever support a one-state settlement? And if not, why warp one’s entire cognitive apparatus to appeal to people who will never, ever, ever support your goals? The BDS movement calls for solidarity, not from governments, but from people. It assumes that Palestinian liberation will never go through Washington. It wants horizontal relations of support – most relevantly, from trade unions. The spirit is thoroughly anarchist, anti-systemic: an injury to one is an injury to all. The core message is one of responsibility. The people carrying out BDS in Europe and America are largely leftists. So what spirit of struggle, of shared responsibility, of a shared commitment to social change, to structural transformation, is inculcated by fobbing off responsibility for American intervention in the Middle East onto Israel and creating an analytical firewall between support for Israel and American imperialism?

    We know what the enemy thinks: he was in Oslo several days ago, blabbering about cultural Marxists and Muslims, killing children, and spouting pro-Zionist pro-Israel racist balderdash. He made the nature of the cleavages and rifts between us and them, and the alliances and partner-ships, ideological affinities and profit-making strategies, between Israeli, European, and American elites and their shock-troops amongst the right-populists and right-parties on the ground and amidst the AstroTurf, clear in the clearest possible way. He also exemplified the drift to racism and violent destruction within liberal capitalist societies. When our enemy is so clear about his tactics, his strategies, his vision, and the world he wishes to see, and is meticulous about aligning those things, we do ourselves no favors by muddling our own vision with muddied analysis.

    Your response to that – since you chose not to respond to the arguments – was
    

    At it again, I see, with your damage controI, Max. Tell me, why is it only certain "anti-zionist" Jews, who take the AIPAC position that Israel is an asset to the US and why not a single one of the reputable scholars who have been observing this conflict, some before you were born? And please, a straight answer, please, without insults.

    So first you insult then like a weasel demand no insults in response. Then you demand answers from me. Then you claim that “only certain ‘anti-zionist’ Jews” claim that Israel is an “asset” to the US. How to respond to such a claim? First, check if it’s true. Is it? Clearly not. Bashir Abu-Manneh and Adam Hanieh clearly write that Israel is an asset/ally of the US, here and here: link to monthlyreview.org
    Hanieh writes here [http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/hanieh190708b.html]

    US policy towards the region is driven by these factors. Because the Middle East is a vital nexus of overall US power in the global economy, it needs to develop a political framework that will sustain and maintain its influence in the region. This political framework (otherwise known as US "foreign policy") is worked out through the daily debates, struggles, and experiences of US capital and its representatives in governments, boardrooms, and think-tanks. Despite the real and important differences that continually arise, a broad consensus has emerged throughout the last four decades over how to exert and maintain influence in the region. This consensus rests upon three key pillars…. Finally, and most importantly, the third key prop to US power in the region is the Israeli state. Since the 1967 war, Israel has played a key role in defending US interests in the region…. For this reason, US military intervention in the region must be understood as a necessary complement to neoliberal "peace." With the American occupation in Iraq, and the threats and attempts to destabilize and attack Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the US supports and cultivates those social forces that it hopes will act as subserviently towards its interests in the region, and pursue normalization with Israel, as have the Jordanian and Egyptian governments.

    How did I characterize those arguments? As coming from “Palestinian intellectuals who share the general orientation if not the specific argument.”

    To which you respond, “Certainly, the argument of the author, Adam Hanieh, conflicts with that of Ajls who insists that what the US wants in the region is instability not stability. In other words, Ajl’s reply, coupled with his predictable insults, is a non-reply.”

    Two conclusions are possible. Either you don’t know how to read, or you are a liar. And that is why I banned you from commenting. A third conclusion follows if you are a liar: that you are racist, since you insist on racializing the argument. It also goes without saying that you are wrong: Exxon's profit this quarter were 10 billion dollars. link to theaustralian.com.au
    Clearly, Middle Eastern instability hurts Exxon's profits. Walt and Mearsheimer said so, right?

• Daily Kos, anti-semitism, & the zombie peace process
  • Max Ajl August 2, 2011 at 5:53 am

    Tree,

    Maybe I’m being unclear. I didn’t call jayn0t antisemitic. I think it has a childish analysis that’s meant to look antisemitic so that when someone is looking for some poison at this website to discredit it, they can find it. As for its motivations, I didn’t say they were racial. I said they were the motivations of a saboteur. The other issue is that how the issue is raised has no clear political conclusions, and being muddied, in the case of some arguments, people will draw the conclusions they’re meant to draw. Of course there is real antisemitism here. It’s usually in the mouths of the Israeli “anti-Zionists” so drenched in their racialized upbringing that they think that in fact all Jews are like Israelis. But such nuances will not enter the consciousness of the Cossacks.

    If you don’t think there is a strong element of thinking within the Palestine solidarity movement that we know how to run the country’s affairs better than its managers do, I don’t know what to say. That is the basic argument of the Walt and Mearsheimer book, which makes sense – that is exactly what they are arguing as defense intellectuals, that they have a superior plan for empire. The fact that those assumptions remain unarticulated does not mean they are not real or the bedrock of analysis.

    Your comments on OIL prices are not irrelevant, but not exactly the point either, and since yes, alternative sources of oil production come on line as prices rise, that hardly accounts for concomitant profit rises within the oil majors, which would be roughly linear, or at least a far less steep increase than that which is plainly visible if you plot profits of the oil majors. In the case of Iraq, the sanctions regime was deteriorating, and the point of American policy going back decades has been to keep Iraqi oil in the ground. Furthermore, you mischaracterize the graphs. Price went up between 1995 and 2000, and so did supply, and all at price points well below that required to make the deep-sea exploration or the bituminous extraction profitable. It is beyond me how you characterize the 2000 – 2005 period as one of stagnant or declining production. That’s not what your graphs say. It’s only partially a question of supply and demand anyway. Supply and demand in a cartelized market like the oil market is an effect of the distribution of power to begin with. link to cmes.hmdc.harvard.edu

    I don’t ignore that because it doesn’t fit my “pet theory.” All theories ignore a number of facts to begin to get to the core dynamics. But more relevantly, I wrote, “very little of that would be associated with profiteering at the pump, the main profit vector for oil companies, since much production has been nationalized, and that with over 40 years of correlations available we know that they take advantage of “perceived instability” to jack up prices at the pump, and it strains credulity to imagine that we see a correlation that those silly folk managing the empire do not.” What would you have us conclude from the fact that the downstream managers of the oil business jack up prices at the pump, not oil prices, every time there is regional instability? Do you think the 4.30 at the gallon reflects their supply-shock fears? Do you really think that? They don’t have to lobby for war. Others become the public face. The question that serious analysts will ask is why they don’t block these wars.

    Their unwillingness to block them seems sufficient to conclude that they want them, and why they enter electoral alliances with pro-Israel, pro-war parties, particularly in Republican administrations, and that this is simply a better explanation for American Middle East policy than that it’s all to protect Israel, and even more erroneously, that such support has hindered ruling class accumulation. What that argument reduces to is that they stabbed us in the back. All of this is part of a marginal but waxing political attempt to split Palestine solidarity from the left. That is a project Phil encourages. See the “very helpful” a couple screens up. That is messed up. And finally that is the ideological conceit of right-wing populism. If in the current European and American political atmosphere that doesn’t strike you as a threat, I don’t know what to tell you, except that above all things, I do not want to tell you “I told you so” over a pile of American children shot up at a left-wing summer camp.

  • Max Ajl August 1, 2011 at 4:03 pm

    Tree:

    1. You don’t seem to understand the issue. I didn’t call you, or jayn0t, or anyone an antisemite, a term by now cheapened of all meaning, and especially useless on this site as a descriptive analysis, despite the fact the the bigots at DailyKos just used the REAL antisemitism marinating here as an EXCUSE for them to remain in denial. That is, we are shooting ourselves in the foot, and for what? To have a certain "conversation"? Forfend we avoid indulging a certain conversation. This is not, after all, a liberation struggle.

    Having been insulting, as opposed to you, passive-aggressive, disingenuous, brimming with a will to power, calling that which you do not understand “simplistic,” I will again make something clear to you that you people seem to not wish to understand.

    The issue is not antisemitism – as though that is a concern for me. The issue is right-wing populism, and the issue is feeding it through this non-sensical liberal conspiracy theory that if only we booted out the neocons – the neocons that rose to power by fueling an arms race in the Middle East – all would be well in our Elysial democracy. What you either ignore or find it easy to not perceive is that there is an undercurrent of apologetics for imperialism running through some of the site, and that is not conducive to building a transformative movement, and is in fact, in the American context, one of the primary obstacles to building such a movement – the desperation of privileged articulate sectors to work within the system. A desperation that also characterizes sectors of our movement.

    2. To that end, I did not call jayn0t an antisemite. I called it an agent provocateur. Perhaps that was badly judged. What it is, is a saboteur. As well as a fool. See below.

    3. You either seem to not understand or to not want to understand that the lobby discourse – putting aside to the fact that it’s a sociologically empty concept as it’s used here on this site – is the basis for a chimerical alliance based on the notion that the yahood are screwing over this country’s elite and that you folks seem to think you know how to run the country’s capital accumulation better than the quotation-marked “imperial managers.” Of course, that’s just some jargon I imported from planet Jew-Marx. Thank you for alerting me to my error. I will submit to some of Jeffrey’s Blankfort’s illiterate web-stalking for remediation. Doubtless the moderators will approve some more ruminations on the psychology of Max Ajl. It is after all “part of the conversation.”

    4. More specifically on Iraq. You claim that the issue is that “people understand it fine, they are just disagreeing with it.” But you proceed to mis-characterize the argument. Which is annoying. Doubly annoying is that the argument was explained to you, but it is not the explanation that you mis-characterize, but the argument itself. See I wrote this: link to mondoweiss.net So what you refuse to see is the fact that not all power is visible. You want us to believe that the neo-cons got us in a war that the MIC and the oil industry didn’t want, yet somehow were blocked by the same oil industry from putting in place their plan for the privatization of Iraqi oil.

    5. On the question of “rising demand, falling production in Mexico and Venezuela, the switch over from MTBE to ethanol as a gas additive, oil refinery destruction associated with Hurricane Katrina, tax policies, or any other factor other than turmoil in Iraq for rising prices and profits,” that’s correct, I haven’t submerged my analysis in an econometric regression of the effects of those various things because most of them have to do with supply-demand dynamics when the simple fact is that the ratio of reserves to consumption has been increasing over the last 40 years, not decreasing, yet oil prices are at record highs, and in any event very little of that would be associated with profiteering at the pump, the main profit vector for oil companies, since much production has been nationalized, and that with over 40 years of correlations available we know that they take advantage of “perceived instability” to jack up prices at the pump, and it strains credulity to imagine that we see a correlation that those silly folk managing the empire do not. But someone who believes that the Palestine solidarity movement knows how to manage the empire better than the empire will believe anything.

    6. I write, “One option would be to look at corporate profits from 1991 to 2011, when the Jew state ran wild: just non-financial corporate profits went from 100 billion annually in 1991 to 800 billion in 2011.” And you respond, “is a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Are you really saying that US corporate profits have everything to do with Zionism?” No, I haven’t said any such thing. I have pointed out a basic flaw in the jayn0t-village idiot-saboteur analysis that posits that Zionism is injurious to the empire and capital accumulation –“capital accumulation.” One sees that basic error migrating to Abunimah’s analysis, and it’s silly.

    7. You say,
    

    In Israel, the problem is not primarily one of white versus brown, although there is some structural privilege left towards Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi. The problem is Jewish bigotry towards non-Jews in general and most specifically against Palestinians and other Arabs (and this accounts for some of the anti-Mizrahi attitudes as they are seen as Arabs as well on some level in Israel.). And, unfortunately, among American Jews this same attitude, that approves of oppression against non-Jews in Israel, an oppression they would condemn mightily(and rightly) if the tables were reversed,

    Where to start? Marriage within the ethnic group is at over 90 percent, Mizrahi staff the lower ranks of the army, the settlers are primarily Mizrahi, and the Israeli upper class has used intra-Jewish divisions to maintain its privilege for decades. The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi split is just what’s “left”? Incidentally you are pretty sanguine about American Jews. Actually American Jews seem pretty happy with a “post-apartheid” South Africa now that there are some black rich people to assuage a view of the world that insists that it is race and not structure that is the problem. In fact it is both, combined, interweaving, but I don't mean to disrupt your caricature of my "simplistic" analysis, in which corporations are not legally bound to maximize profits according to their charters and their weight in the economy and the electoral process doesn't have the preponderant effect on policy formation. Kolko was also called a strident determinist, so perhaps this is a compliment.

    8. I write from Cairo. I just spent 12 hours traveling from Gaza. Perhaps I should do better self-promotion, but I am too busy sitting on my ass in Beit Hanoun and kvetching on the internet.

    9. If my “insults” are what keeps you from joining a movement to shake up our society, there is nothing to say.

  • Max Ajl July 31, 2011 at 12:36 pm

    MRW:
    I appreciate the précis of an economic history of America, but have to say that someone who writes glowingly of “American pre-eminence [which] had to do with its economic policies from 1791 until we adopted Milton Friedman’s ideas in 1980, and started down the road with free trade agreements in 1985, the first of which was with Israel. (Israel benefited from this exponentially, not the US)” a version of American economic history without the genocide of the American Indians, without the slave trade and the destruction of African societies, without the brutal colonization of the Philippines, without the destruction of Vietnam, is a person with whom I disagree too much on too fundamental assumptions about the world and American history for discussion to have much value. You want to return to some Elysian Fordian capitalism, scoured of coups and massacres in Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. I don’t. That’s fine, people with all visions of the world can oppose the Special Relationship, the occupation, and Zionism. However, as I’ve explained to you, your understanding of the US-Israel FTA is flawed.

    Here: link to electronicintifada.net

    At this point, a few issues arise. First, Smith seems surprised that a free trade agreement would wound US “worker income.” Odd, because free trade agreements are built to benefit capital at the expense of workers. Second, readers should ask why he’s so swift to accept units like the “Israeli economy” and the “American economy” alongside their companion, the “American national interest.” (Anyone who wants to defend something like a coherent “national interest” can explain the common apprehensions of the Palestinian national interest shared by collaborators in Ramallah and peasants in Gaza’s borderlands.) Furthermore, interests can cross national lines. We need to look at who owns what, and national borders give us very little information about that.
    Smith is not unaware of the transnational nature of the ownership structures of nominally Israeli corporations — he provides some evidence of the beginnings of the acquisition of the Israeli high-technology sector by capital from the American high-technology sector. But he should have kept digging. We also know other things: that the bulk of growth in Israeli-American “trade” since 1996 has been in the high-technology sector, and that American capital is aggressively invested in “Israeli” high-technology firms. Academics Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler calculate that the correlation coefficient between the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and the NASDAQ was .7 in the five-year span from 1996 to 2001 — meaning 70 percent of variations in the TASE are “explained” by variations in the NASDAQ — as “trade” deficits begin to mount. From 2002 to 2007, a nearly synchronous 92 percent of variations in the TASE were explained by movements in the NASDAQ, as amidst a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, “Israeli” firms became decreasingly Israeli except by physical place of production. Furthermore, Israeli state subsidies to high-technology firms, as well as state-sponsored investments in human capital and infrastructure, are astronomically high. Israel is a very nice place for many American companies to invest. Smith misses an opportunity to discuss and explain the implications of this tightly-wrought economic relationship, not least of which is that the trade deficit is mostly a statistical artifact.

    Subsequent free trade agreements would have happened with or without the Israeli FTA, and to argue otherwise is just an unserious stochastic view of history. To call it a “statistical artifact” is to note that only place of location is being transferred. The off-shoring of the American economy is a real problem, but it’s also a symptom: capitalism proceeds according to the logic of increasing its value, not according to the values of nationalism. In an age of porous borders, FTAs, and trans-national capital flows, the question of addressing off-shoring is complex, and for anyone seriously concerned about these issues, it should start with re-localizing agricultural production, not industrial production, which is too frequently about producing stuff that no one needs in the first place. You write that “It’s the other way around. The jobs, tax, and capital go to Israel,” not understanding that the Israeli industrial plant which is sending goods to America is owned by American-based investors in the first place. That is not to dismiss the issue. But it is to re-orient it from what you think it is to what it actually is. And it’s not getting taxed much, although it is making jobs. That it is not getting taxed much is part of why it got sent there in the first place.

  • Max Ajl July 30, 2011 at 7:00 pm

    Annie:
    It’s a lot of questions, so I’ll be selective. You ask, “would you contend if there was no zionism or israel those same capitalist would be doing more business with other (non jewish) actors in the ME and it could be equally lucrative,” and the answer is, of course. Without Zionism and Israel the world would have been a better place, I think. Herzl had a shitty idea, Rothschild and American Zionists supported it for shitty reasons, the Nazis supported it for shitty reasons, the Brits supported it for shitty reasons, America has supported it for shitty reasons, and we are still counting the bodies from that support. Those shitty reasons mostly had to do with power and class – maintain their own class privilege, maintaining American capital’s pre-eminence, and so on. Some say Zionism had more to do with it than capitalist interests in terms of upper-class Diaspora Jewish support. I don’t find that argument particularly convincing. If there were no Israel, American capitalists would have made different choices, for sure, and it could have been equally lucrative – who knows. But there is an Israel, and investing in it, and reaping the profits from its main export – regional instability – has been a tremendous gift to American capital. The other question is the most important one: you write, “if (big if) the teachers association here in california checked into it and found investing their pension funds in iranian companies was a lucrative option are you positing the people who invest those funds for the calif teachers assoc would be just as likely to invest in iran as they would to investing in israel? you think all those pension funds invested in israel is strictly a matter of good (the best choice) business?”

    In one sense, yes. In another sense, no. Pension funds don’t invest in Iran because Iran is a center of power that is hostile to the United States. It’s also a special case, and very high on the enemy list – much higher than China, which is integrated into global investment and commodity circuits. So when you write, “i’m just wondering why it is you think we choose sanctions for one country and another involved in gross human rights violations we avert our eyes and keep on investing” – it’s because we don’t care at all about human rights violations and never have. We care about power. But there is also no “we,” either on our end or on the end of the capitalists. There are just lots of capitalists, jockeying with one another, making alliances, fighting, and so on, to become richer. The classic Edward Herman study found a correlation between US investments and human rights abuses, because when states kill people – even when Israel kills people – it isn’t (generally) doing it to be malicious, although malice will be a factor in individual incidents and individual psychological pathologies. It’s doing it because it’s state policy, and it’s state policy because someone with a lot of money decided that it should be state policy. In general such decisions are made because they end up making a rich person richer.

    Most importantly, union investment in Israel bonds can’t be reductively explained by the “best choice.” Starting at least in 1967, perhaps earlier, wealthy Jews started making a concerted effort to spread Zionist ideology within the Jewish community more broadly. It worked – it worked amongst liberals, it worked amongst socialist radicals, and it worked amongst trade unions, whose owners invested in Israel bonds out of “solidarity” with the Israeli “socialist” project (it never was, and never could be, socialist; capitalist through-and-through). I think elliptically part of your question is if simple profit maximization explains everything, and no, it doesn’t, especially because most of us don’t live our lives that way, and the mission of capital is to make us live our lives according to its dictates. Part of that is interfacing with the culture, through representations and propaganda – a lot of the lobby’s work. So when you ask, “if it is primarily a matter of what’s the best choice for the capitalist system then why do we even have or need an israel lobby,” I don’t think it’s a matter of the “best choice for the capitalist system,” because the system doesn’t make choices. Capitalists within it make choices. My reckoning is that what we call “the lobby” is shorthand for mostly Jewish investors with major investments in Israel, a trans-national segment of the ruling class, with its own interests, and so it pushes for a specific set of policies, and has a lot of money to throw around to do so. And you ask, “aren’t lobbies about pressuring people to go with their side when they have options?” Of course, which is why it is so weird to deny the lobby. If the lobby didn’t do anything, why would it need to exist? And why would leftist be averse to the notion that money buys access and power? What would be weird is if it didn’t.

    I actually think there’s far more to it: the lobby has become the spokesperson for ruling-class militarism, and if anyone dissents, you can tar them as antisemitic for opposing a war to keep the Jew state safe. That’s a useful service. There’s no question the lobby should be taken down, let there be no mistake about it, but we do ourselves no favors by pretending that it is responsible – or 100 percent responsible – for things for which it is either not responsible or only somewhat responsible, and which would probably have occurred in its absence. One of those things was destroying Iraqi society.

    Finally you ask, “are you saying our investments in israel are because it’s simply the best financial choice?” I think American Jewish capitalists started investing in Israel in the 1920s, perhaps earlier. Whether they did so out of their capitalist interest or out of nationalism seems like a chicken-and-egg question. What seems clear is that they made a lot of money out of it – Israel had amazing growth rates until the early 1970s. Of course, those investments coursed along patronage networks that had to do with Jewish communal affiliation. There’s nothing wrong with pointing that out. And that end result of that has been more death and suffering than there would have been otherwise. The upshot of that is that by blaming the lobby for what it has not done as well as for what it has, we orient ourselves to building a movement that will only take down the lobby and nothing else. And then when the next Middle Eastern country burns and Palestinians are locked in a two-state prison, what next? We should get the analysis straight so we don’t have to say “oops” when our victory turns to ash in our mouths.

  • Max Ajl July 30, 2011 at 6:17 am

    Tree,
    This is not about my theory and I am not upset. It's about the odd assumption peddled here that the Palestine solidarity movement knows the interests of the empire better than imperial managers and that we should thus negotiate for Palestinian freedom in Washington. Since you don't seem to want to understand either the argument or the political conclusions it entails, and would rather carp about "Jewish identity" (wherever and whatever that is). This is an understanding of the conflict that is very agreeable for privileged people, because it prevents them from getting off their asses and doing something to change the structure within which we are enmeshed, a structure we are very much a part of. We can try to understand that structure with an eye to changing it, or do nothing. Or a third option: kvetch on the internet and whimper that someone accused you of antisemitism. Don't worry. No one did. You may go to bed now. Your soul is secure.

  • Max Ajl July 30, 2011 at 2:51 am

    Annie:

    He isn't saying anything. He's making an untestable theory resting on the notion that the elites who run this country don't know what they are doing, and that the bloody American capitalist empire is being betrayed by Jewish capitalists. It's a silly attempt at internet rabble-rousing, it's politically feeble, and it doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong. It mis-understands American empire and is the delusional basis for an alliance between the American working class and non-Jewish elites, all betrayed by American support for Israel. I am waiting for someone to start muttering about "gatekeepers." 1, 2, 3...

  • Max Ajl July 29, 2011 at 12:21 pm with 16 replies

    Where does one locate the "interests of capitalism as a whole"? Alan Greenspan is a kike, so we can't take his comments seriously. Where shall we turn? To "jayn0t"? To the oil companies? Since 2001 the majors have netted over a trillion dollars, they seem pretty happy with Zionism. Financial firms probably far more. But then, the finance firms especially are riddled with yarmulkes, preventing the good old ruling class from understanding its interests. This seems to post serious methodological issues. One option would be to look at corporate profits from 1991 to 2011, when the Jew state ran wild: just non-financial corporate profits went from 100 billion annually in 1991 to 800 billion in 2011. here, see for yourself: link to maxajl.com

    but then my information might be tainted. it's also on a Jew site. I'm not sure how to solve this problem. one solution would be pogroms. another would be to just call you out as an agent provocateur, ignore you, and then work on movement building. I'll let the movement itself decide. I am not too worried.

• My response to 'DailyKos' smear
  • Max Ajl July 29, 2011 at 11:16 am

    Fredblogs writes "I think that given the ratio of Israel-bashers and outright anti-Semites (some of you know who you are, others are in denial) on this site to Israel-supporters...blablabla."

    This confused me. Israel-supporters weaponize Jewish suffering and Jewish identity in defense of murder. They plaster Jewish religious symbols on military planes, claim that there is something intrinsic to Jews such that they produce antisemitism, and then (incorrectly) defend Israel's major service to empire, regional destabilization, mass mayhem and murder, as in defense of the Jewish state. So who again are the antisemites? Ratios tend to be between two non-overlapping groups. In this case there seems to be a little too much overlap for your comment to be coherent.

    However, Cliff, just because he's a Zionist doesn't mean he's wrong. Like stopped clocks even Zionists are capable of being right for about 2 seconds of the day. There are of course antisemites both reading and commenting here. They are in fact the larger problem than the Zionists in a sense, because the Zionists are identifiable as the enemy, but there is a weird embrace here occasionally of both agent provocateurs as well as people a little too eager to place the blame for general imperial mayhem on the yahood. The danger of that approach is not to Jews, but that it enables the Israel-defenders to stay in denial mode, and gives them an excuse. Part of our work should be not giving them that excuse.

• 'Tears of Gaza' – lest our tears dry up
  • Max Ajl July 24, 2011 at 4:47 pm

    Please spare us your sympathy for Sderot. The Israeli upper-class settled the n.... Arab Jews in development towns on the frontiers where it knew they would be subject to fedayeen raid-reprisals from the Palestinian population that had just been ethnically cleansed. As indeed they were. The Israeli upper-class could care less about the people on the firing lines in southern and northern Israel. If it wanted to secure their safety, it would end the occupation. The terror of the children in Sderot is real. Human beings shouldn't have to live beneath rocket fire. Those of us interested in ending it, as opposed to those interested in perpetuating the situation that makes Hamas rocketry inevitable, will try to end the conflict in whatever way we can. And some of us, like you, will cry crocodile tears on the internet.

• Thinktank that promoted war w/ Iraq (& now Iran) was funded by Steinhardt, Saban, Bronfman, Feith and Marcus (of Home Depot)
  • Max Ajl July 23, 2011 at 9:33 am

    The reason for the hostile and willful illiteracy is beyond me, and I use those words because you are clearly more-than-capable of understanding what is being said to you. The authors put the PHRASE “interest of the capitalist system” in quotation marks, because the system is an abstraction for understanding the systematic logic of how particular interests are expressed. The quotation marks are not there to suggest that there is no system.

    The authors are concerned also with far more than “trying to debunk the notion of Israeli ‘Statism.’” They are trying to understand how Israeli policies carried out both within Israeli territorial borders and outside of them augment the power, measured in capital, of diverse interests, with the common denominator being that they are capitalist interests. With that said, it is stunning that you think I rebuked “Sin Nombre” for mentioning a “sort of political patronage.” I rebuked him for the specific direction of conspiratorial non-sense at the religious background of the Russian oligarchs in the absence of either concern over what is important, namely what has happened to Russia, or with direct analysis of the relevance of their background, which in the context of their proximity to the to-be-privatized corporations I doubt had much to do with Israel. If there is evidence to the contrary, bring it.

    I wish there were far more discussion of the transnational groupings that benefit from investments in Israel. I think it is very relevant that many of them are Jewish and have said so repeatedly, here and elsewhere; I am about 95 percent sure that they are largely the ones who fund or compose the Jewish lobby, if it was seriously conceptualized, and which makes clear that the nature of the lobby is business-as-usual in the system, although yes, there is obviously direct complicity within that system for specific crimes that people within it carry out – American elite Zionists for Palestinian statelessness, in this case.

    What I added is that in terms of both direct and indirect benefits, there are many that are not Jewish. It’s beyond me why you think Goldman Sachs or Lazard Freres are “Jewish,” other than their names. Their management is disproportionately Jewish, no doubt, in line with a disproportionate number of Jews in the upper reaches of finance in New York as well as in the American upper-class. But an objective sociology has to establish how that matters beyond speculative gestures. There’s a difference between Jewish nationalism as a legitimating force in American imperialism and Jewish nationalism as a drive element in American nationalism, and that’s all the difference between knowing the difference between the “system” and its cheerleaders.

    Now if that’s your methodology for establishing “Jewishness” I guess it follows that “The majority of the global information technology and communications companies were eventually purchased by these same Jewish transnational groups”; personally tracking down the precise ownership of capital flows into Israel over the last 20 years does not seem to me the easiest thing to do. It’s certainly not in the Sassoon report, and it’s not in the book I suggested.

    What is in the book I suggested is that GTE, United Technology, and Siemens, Itek, Motorola, and so on were major investors in the 1970s and 1980s, mediated, as I wrote above, by Israeli Jews: “During the mid-1980s, Israeli ‘policy makers’ increasingly found themselves as ‘go betweens’, flying back and forth across the Atlantic to mediate the various interests of American and Israel contractors.” In the 90s they included the GE pension fund and Disney. Jews again? Or Duetsche Telecom, France Telecom, Bellsouth, Motorola (again)? The issue is systemic, which explains the hesitance to push for full-scale end of the occupation: the structure will have to be re-structured. Hence why the ICC’s rulings have no force and why the US Supreme Court will never enforce a civil judgment against Israel, unless there is a social revolt that will suddenly make it “interpret” the law differently. Hence why it is bought and paid for. And finally the suggestion that we can buy it back, just with different currency.

    Finally, you say that the “authors don’t, or can’t, explain the rapid capital growth…” etc. What they say is that “What exactly happened during these two and half years to ‘release’ this sixfold increase in value was unclear. Arison himself knew nothing about construction. He did understand politics, though. And indeed, after the sale there were calls for independent inquiry into why the Histadrut was so eager to get rid of its prized assets, and for so little” – in other words, the economic base built up by settler-colonialism and a war-economy with little labor unrest was stolen by politically connected capitalists. No wonder American Jews love their Israel so much. For the rich among them, it really does a hell of a job of making them richer. A more complete explanation of Zionist hegemony amongst American Jewry than the partial one we tend to rely on, I think.

  • Max Ajl July 22, 2011 at 10:55 am

    Keith:

    Most of what you say isn't worth replying to. If you don't want to be considered a bigot, don't bring up people's backgrounds unwarrantably, and do your research. Having not done so, you may "speculate" all you wish, but don't be shocked when those speculations elicit judgments. One point however is worth replying to, even if it responds to another one of these "interpretations" you seem to prefer to deal with, rather than simply reading the words on the page. I did not call Phil a crypto-fascist. Nor did I call Phil a right-wing populist. I said that there are flirtations with that kind of thinking. I don't think they are helpful. I think they're damaging, not least because they open the movement up to the accusation of bigotry and ease the way for the wavering middle to remain in denial.

    Hostage: there isn't much to dispute about what you said, except for the fact that yes, the military aid is indeed the most commonly alluded to and most commonly mis-understood facet of the "aid" and the Special Relationship. Beyond that most of you say repeats what I said, except for your placing in quotation marks the word "system," which was obnoxious but to be expected. One area I differ is that while I agree that "members of the Jewish community often brag about Jewish “control” of media, finance, & etc," you should try to think about what marks that control as characteristically Jewish. I'll answer: it's the way lower- and middle-class Jewish identity was mobilized behind policies that lined the pockets of the Jewish upper-class, for the most part.

    Finally you discuss the occupation. I am aware of it. What do you propose to do about it, go to the bought-and-paid-for ICC? The occupation and apartheid will end when it's cheaper for Israeli and global elites to end them than to continue them. Same with the Special Relationship which, pace a lot of writing here, is a core policy of the American elite. It's part of that quotation-marked chimera, "the system." How to change that system is an open question. But one way not to change it, one way to be absolutely sure that it will remain rock-solid, is to deny that it exists.

  • Max Ajl July 21, 2011 at 9:34 am

    Look. Capitalism and imperialism always work through an intermediary layer of culture and ethnicity. The history of race, culture, and class are deeply intermixed, but different in every case. There is nothing wrong with spelling out that history, so long as one is careful about it. Palestinian oppression mostly occurs along national lines. Those carrying it out – in Israel – are Jewish. The ones in positions of power in Israeli society are also European white. The former fact gets far more attention here than the latter fact. Both are relevant. As we get further from the local oppression of the Palestinians, the respective relevance of whiteness vs. Jewish whiteness changes. And whiteness is only short-hand for the real issue, which is control over capital. The Saudis are plenty complicit, against what Chomsky might suggest.

    Yes, it was Jewish capitalists who invested in Israel starting in the late 1800s such that today it is a powerful state with a per-person GDP half that of the US. But contrary to the snake oil peddled here, since 1967 the role of Israel in the political economy of accumulation has been to make rich people richer. Those rich people are more often non-Jewish than Jewish, although Jewish people have been disproportionately the ones making money off direct investments in Israel, and Jewish nationalism in America has played an important legitimating role in American support for Zionism. That much is clear. How Zionism became such a powerful ideology amongst organized American Jewry is a worthwhile subject of investigation. I agree that excising Zionism from American Jewry and ending American support for Israel are important goals. I agree that the Israel lobby is a powerful fragment of the ruling class. It should be challenged directly, not least because so much of its power resides in its ability to operate in the shadows.

    I don’t engage in the practice of “counting Jewish heads,” although if someone wants to write an objective sociology of how exactly American Jews have entered and commingled with the American elite over the last 50 years, I would be interested in reading it. I don’t engage in that practice not because it is irrelevant, but because most often, especially on this site, it is a right-wing populist diversion from anti-systemic struggle. It is not white power that is the issue, but Jewish power; not American imperialism, but Zionism. It’s a rotten analysis, not because it is necessarily antisemitic, but because it is wrong, it leads to wrong-headed political conclusions, it hefts off responsibility for empire and capitalism onto the Jews, it makes creating radical social change harder, and it rests on the idiotic notion that the internet-chattering brigades of the Palestine solidarity movement understand the interests of the powerful better than the powerful do.

    If someone is really thick-skulled enough to think that we can understand American power by thinking that “It definitely is about Wall Street and the IMF, and perhaps the effect of Jewish influence in these two areas,” a cowardly weaselly “perhaps,” and Keith’s, not mine, I can help them out with that line of thought by bringing them a copy of Mein Kampf from the bookstore on the corner. It is worthwhile being honest about what we are talking about. Not because there will be another Holocaust. And not because the pogrom will return to my part of America. But because if the commenters here – and Phil – want their flirtation with right-wing populism, here moving towards it, here backing away, but not articulated, they want to toy with the idea, pretend not to be toying with it, and so on, they should have it openly, with no bones about it. If the agenda is to make the Palestine solidarity movement an ally of white right-wing racism, please be clear about it, and I have no question that on the topic most Palestinian and Arab activists will shoot that idea out of the sky. See, the pogrom starts with those it can identify easiest. And they are the ones identifiable by the color of their skin.

  • Max Ajl July 21, 2011 at 4:43 am

    Keith:
    I don't know if you don't know how to read or you simply read into what other people write whatever you wish they said, as opposed to what they actually said. The discussion started from a comment expressing dismay that in the face of the destruction of Russian society, "Sin Nombre"'s moral energy was not devoted to that destruction and its effects on real human beings, the question of privatization of public assets, the Sachs-shock reforms on the Russian economy, and so on, but to the question of Jewish power, a common occurrence here, where moral outrage is basically hollow, and more importantly mis-understands the nature of the system in which we live. It is insistently myopic and unprincipled, and that is the issue, and I am not sure how to make that clearer.

    Now this is a neat trick to discuss what I "suggest" or "imply" rather than the words I write on the page, which were that he "almost got it," but that the "myopic" focus is not helpful because it ignores that big bugaboo, "the system." Now in case you wish to mis-understand that as well, here is what he wrote: “Esp. the delicious aspect of Israel essentially funneling our *own* money back into these kinds of things given the monstrous amount of dough we ship to Tel Aviv every year,” which since I assume is a reference to the military aid is making so many fundamental errors of mis-interpretation of the basic political economy that I responded, not with an accusation of bigotry, but with an accusation of myopia. They are not the same thing. You are a prime example of that, bigoted but not myopic.

    Here are the words I wrote, which you find impossible to quote: "Israel has helped a hell of a lot of “smart guys” become richer. Most of them have not been Jewish, although the role of Jewish “smart guys” and also Jewish rich guys in cementing the links between other smart guys and Israel has been real." That is the blend of nationalism and capitalism has yielded very big fruits, but that the most important role here has been Israeli politics as an intermediary, an intermediate link in the chain of other profit-making endeavors. My concern is to get people to think systemically, which is not a question of diverting blame but of understanding the system, because you cannot understand the system’s constituent parts without a holistic understanding of what you are looking at more broadly.

    Now, if you want to actually discuss the political economy of Jewish money in an intelligent way, why don't you write something up and submit it to a left-wing website, or Dissident Voice, or a scholarly journal. (good luck dealing with the methodological issues). I would recommend against the inquiry into yahood finance, or your proclamations that “It definitely is about Wall Street and the IMF, and perhaps the effect of Jewish influence in these two areas.” That seems more like a subject for Stormfront.

    Now, I don't know how to write in such a way that you cannot mis-interpret my words, but the issue is not antisemitism, which is a demeaning and bigoted racialization of my motives. The issue is mis-apprehending the nature of power in this country and mis-conceiving what must be done to change the distribution of that power. You don't seem interested in that project. Fine. If it helps in avoiding the recognition of your own issues to call me an "anti-Gentile chauvinist," fine: be a lunatic. You're in good company. Now, you are an illiterate bigot, but that only concerns me insofar as you insist on mis-interpreting my words. Stick to what I write and you’ll be ok.

    NB: The Elders of Zion at Cornell have given their full imprimatur to the words above, I sent it to the majlis for pre-publication approval.

  • Max Ajl July 20, 2011 at 7:36 pm

    MRW:

    Apparently, you were not paying attention when tens of billions of American and Russian dollars started flooding into Israel to snap up Israeli assets in the 1990s, nor when the Israeli government offered Intel effective guaranteed profits of 33 annually percent on its investment there, nor when Israeli belligerence served as an excuse for oil majors to opportunistically raise prices at the pump having nothing to do with supply/demand factors, or when the Israeli-catalyzed Middle Eastern arms race secured profits for Boeing and Lockheed Martin from 1970 onwards, nor when US taxpayers circuitously routed 2.25 billion dollars yearly to the US MIC through "military aid" to Israel.

    Here, read this book and catch up: link to bnarchives.yorku.ca

    Keith: thank you for confirming. Just functionally illiterate. I wrote, "Israel has helped a hell of a lot of “smart guys” become richer. Most of them have not been Jewish, although the role of Jewish “smart guys” and also Jewish rich guys in cementing the links between other smart guys and Israel has been real. Their role in investing in Israel such that it could help make other rich people richer is also real. But it will not help to myopically focus on the Jewish angle."

    In other words, the political economy of Jewish investments in Israel is a research topic worth looking at, but not the way it was presented above. You responded, "Max Ajl’s contention that the main beneficiaries of the Jewish state are Goyim seems a stretch, to put it charitably. Conventional business deals with Gentiles, sure, but special consideration? Unless he has mounds of data to demonstrate that the Jewish state is in the Gentile promotion business, I’m going to assume that his comment is a Jewish knee-jerk response to perceived anti-Semitism."

    Except first you invented a straw-man -- the distinction between "special consideration" and "conventional business deals," which was not my distinction, since all I talked about were most of the beneficiaries. A point which you don't dispute. Then you said I had a "Jewish knee-jerk response," which comes covered in chicken soup or what? Plz explain.

    Now, things aren't verboten, and I don't come from an academic background. The thing is, where I was brought up, reading the Talmud with David Mamet -- wait, it was actually just kindergarten --we learned to read the words in front of us before responding to them. You might try that at some point, or you could stick to degenerating into an Israel Shamir doppelganger. Either way.

  • Max Ajl July 20, 2011 at 3:48 am with 15 replies

    And I'm going to assume you're either a bigot or functionally illiterate, but since mis-reading my comments and then going for my background is apparently cool with the coward moderators, by all means, bring it up. Whatever makes you feel good!

    On the other hand, here's what I actually wrote: "Israel has helped a hell of a lot of “smart guys” become richer." Are most of the investors who snapped up tens of billions of dollars of Israeli assets in the 90s Jewish? Are the stock-owners of Intel Jewish? Are the stock-owners of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Exxon Jewish? That's who Israel has helped become richer. It's true that I haven't checked their last names to see if they end in -stein or -berg, but something makes me think they are just regular members of the aristocracy of wealth that runs this country.

  • Max Ajl July 19, 2011 at 6:16 pm with 1 replies

    So huge sectors of the Russian economy were basically stolen out from under the Russian people. The life expectancy for Russian men is 63 years, which is a lot higher than it used to be, while the Gorbachev-era economic reforms caused immense human suffering, unemployment, and early deaths, including from a tuberculosis outbreak. Yet you want to focus on the fact that "7 or 8" (was someone's brit milah subject to dispute or something?) were Jewish. Or that Haim Saban, a scoundrel no doubt, "somehow" got a gambling monopoly on Macao, and that "somehow" is linked to his being Jewish, as opposed to his being a well-connected billionaire.

    What is tragic here is that you are almost on to something:

    But then you think … hey, if *I* were Israel you damned right I’d be on the lookout for smart guys abroad absolutely devoted to me, and help them *become* powerful as hell in all different ways I could. Underwrite their ventures, help ‘em defeat their competitors, help ‘em get whatever special considerations I could, and etc., etc., ad infinitum. (Plus, once you’ve helped ‘em, you got ‘em by the balls too in any number of big ways.)

    This is the point. Israel has helped a hell of a lot of "smart guys" become richer. Most of them have not been Jewish, although the role of Jewish "smart guys" and also Jewish rich guys in cementing the links between other smart guys and Israel has been real. Their role in investing in Israel such that it could help make other rich people richer is also real. But it will not help to myopically focus on the Jewish angle. Not because many Jews haven't covered their hands with blood in this business over the last 80 years. They certainly have. But it is far from the whole story.

• Open letter to the German left on BDS, from Palestinian and Israeli Activists
  • Max Ajl July 19, 2011 at 5:52 pm

    The struggle to build a real left is ongoing, in Germany and elsewhere. Part of that struggle is integrating Palestine solidarity fully into the left. In Germany, that aspect of the struggle clearly has a ways to go. There are a number of ways to react to that difficulty: criticism, support, and so on; open letters, media exposure, etcetera. But the question of how to react to that difficulty is a question within the Palestine solidarity movement and a question within the left. It is not a question for right-wing agent provocateurs who want to weaponize white racism in a chimerical effort to cleave Palestine solidarity from the left in the service of an equally chimerical analysis that suggests that the left and Palestinians have different enemies. there are plenty of places, both on the internet and in real life, where you can cavort with people who pretend to care about Palestinians but really could care less about them, and where people gather and covertly or overtly express their racism, at Jews in one sense, but really more fundamentally in their disregard for the effectiveness of the struggle, at those who will suffer most if that struggle fails. in that sense their thoughtless racism finds its victims amongst the people at the bottom of the pile. one of the wonders of white privilege!

    but i'm wandering. i meant to tell you: don't get confused. despite a few lapses, this is not one of those places.

• Steve Walt edges ever closer to... One democratic state
  • Max Ajl July 8, 2011 at 10:33 am

    Kathleen, at some point you might choose to try to understand the distinction between cheer-leaders and players. They play different roles. The cheerleaders are important. But the game needs the players. No one has denied the role of the lobby and the neo-cons in pushing for the war. But if you want to understand policy, you look at its beneficiaries and funders. That would be the weapons and oil industries. You can also choose not to understand that link, nor the fact that Rice, Cheney, and Bush are not Jewish and they were in the upper echelons of decision-making. You don't have access to the archives. What you have access to are data on campaign funding and the profits from the corporate sectors whose candidate got into office. Read this:

    A growing body of evidence, and even greater body of speculation built on that evidence, has been compiled over the last three years. Based on it, here is the short answer to the first question: In connection to the war in Iraq, there are two main groupings of interests in the current White House. The upper echelon, Bush, Cheney, and Rice, is closely connected to Big Oil, and so are dozens of administration officials. On the level directly below the top, the launching of the war was handled by neo-conservatives such as Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Bolton, and Cambone; the neocons were mostly brought to the White House by Cheney. The neo-conservative team in government was supported by a strong cast of characters on the outskirts of government, including Perle, Wurmser, Ledeen, Gaffney, and many others. The so-called neocons drew their power from two constituencies, the defense industry and the Israel Lobby.

    Three observations are needed to finish the picture. First, the defense industry is the dominant economic force in Washington, a position that is inherently tied to the size of the defense budget. Cheney, Bush and many other top officials have deep ties in the defense industry. Second, it is a mistake to view the connection to Israel as a purely ideological affair. In so far as it is a factor in American politics, Israel stands for the small elite of military, business and political figures with close ties within the U.S. Third, there is a silent element in this picture: the larger part of the U.S. ruling class outside the directly involved industries. While there is no evidence I am aware of there has been a push for war outside the oil and defense industries and the Israel Lobby, it is quite improbable that the war could have be launched without at least the tacit acceptance of the broad corporate/capitalist class.

    link to dissidentvoice.org

  • Max Ajl July 7, 2011 at 3:50 pm

    Oil and weapons firms did incredibly well off the Iraq War. Stocks in general headed off deflation -- which Greenspan and others were warning about. Finance did great until 2008. Who "lost" the war?

  • Max Ajl July 7, 2011 at 1:59 pm

    Simple. We will put enough pressure on Israel through BDS that the Israeli upper-class has to let the refugees back. And then we will put even more pressure such that there will be massive redistribution of resources. And if you think America will come to your aid, we’ll carry out enough social disruption here that the American government will break the Special Relationship in the process of trying to let off enough steam to prevent a social revolution. And if you don’t like those strategies, cool. Don’t help. We will do it without you. You’ll be in good company with the populist chatterboxes.

  • Max Ajl July 7, 2011 at 1:23 pm with 5 replies

    Well, Leigh, you are partially correct. But I'd add a few points. The "US" has no interests." Different people within the US have interests, and some of them include the people in the lobby, who have lots of investments in Israel. They may have chosen to put them into Israel because they were Zionists, or because they saw the opportunity for a buck, whatever the case may be, those interests are there, the investments are real, and so people defend them. Ending the occupation will require a great deal of change in Israeli society, there will have to be a lot of distribution, maybe from the top to the bottom, and the Israeli ruling class will do whatever it can to postpone that change, whatever form it takes.

    A lady from Ramallah told me she doesn't think Israel will survive ending the occupation. Maybe she's right. Provided that it doesn't go up in a radiation plume, I won't exactly be heartbroken over that, but the Israeli elite will, and so will the American elite, which, whatever some sectors of it may think of the occupation, do want Israel to continue to exist in the Middle East. Walt and Mearsheimer say as much in their book.

    So what do they do? They stall a lot, and Obama can't even impose the apartheid solution that he'd probably prefer, given who funded his election. (Bush's "peace process" was just window-dressing in my opinion.) If enough pressure mounts, and we are far from that point, a Democratic president may be able, or be forced to, ram through a nicer version of the apartheid solution, better than what Walt envisions perhaps but hardly justice. The quality of that version will depend on the amount of pressure mounting. At the moment, a veneer of concessions will do the job. Later as pressure mounts, perhaps real concessions will be in order.

    The lobby does represent a political blockage to getting those concessions. It does not represent even close to the sole political blockage to ending the Special Relationship, which is about arms sales, high-tech, and constricting oil supplies through a destabilized Middle East, in the process keeping oil prices and in turn gas prices high, and keeping the profits from those oil and gas prices cycling into Western hands.

    So finally the idea that Western pro-Pal activists should be lining up behind the agenda that the status quo is bad for the empire is self-defeating -- or defeating for those who will have to live in the aftermath of a resolution imposed on imperial terms. Which won't be the people commenting on this blog, for the most part.

  • Max Ajl July 7, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    Pamela, eee is a right-wing Zionist troll, but through the filter of his/her racism it does occasionally perceive some truth. There are other options than the ones Walt outlines. They'll be ugly as hell, for sure, and we should do everything we can to oppose them. But insofar as we simply say that a "one-state settlement is inevitable" after a civil rights struggle, don't you think that faith in the future to provide justice provides a certain balm for people to avoid action, or avoid more urgent or radical or transformative action? I think it does, unfortunately, for some people.

• A despairing conversation with an Arab friend at the Four Seasons
  • Max Ajl July 3, 2011 at 3:45 pm

    eee,
    I agree with you. The Palestinians should accept a compromise, and "The compromise will reflect of course the relative power of both sides." Personally I think the compromise should be to accept that their liberation struggle won't rehearse the Algerian independence struggle. I think they should let the people stay but expropriate them. But my say in the matter is minimal, although yours is still less, and in any case they'll figure that on on their own. As everyone knows,the question is not one of "compromise." There will be a compromise between perfect justice and history. The question is one of the timing of that compromise. And time is working against you. You've chosen to make the suffering on the road to that compromise greater than it would otherwise be, and that's one of the sadder things any human being could possibly elect to do.

• Haaretz: Greek move against boats was born of Netanyahu campaign for Greek financial rescue
  • Max Ajl July 2, 2011 at 9:51 am with 1 replies

    Perhaps Alec it is instructive to see where the racism goes. When we make racism the cause of any social action without looking at the social conditions within which the racism occurs and also without checking to see if racism is indeed the reason something happens, the result will be blaming Jews as Jews for anything Jews do whether or not they do it as Jews or for "Jewish" reasons. I don't see his comment as any less bigoted or demeaning than things that you let through constantly. I just see it as more blatant about its bigotry.

• Flotilla activists undergo nonviolence training (Israel fears mass nonviolent protest above all)
  • Max Ajl June 30, 2011 at 4:57 pm

    Where do you get the "intermarriage...is very high"? There's class and geographical separation so the null hypothesis is low intermarriage, Israel apparently falsifies or makes confidential demographic statistics on origins, ecological analysis by Michael Shalev and others on voting patterns and party affiliation finds that Mizrahi/Ashkenazi still matters. If you're uncharacteristically not fabricating this stuff, link to some social science on it.

• Libidinous pro-choice aide who toiled for rightwing Republicans admits her motivation came down to one issue
  • Max Ajl July 2, 2011 at 9:33 am

    I could sarcastically respond, "We'll have to do it without you," but I can't really type those words at the moment without feeling empty. Right now the Greek government, which is tightly linked through economic links to the American government and is under the thumb of trans-national finance capital, all of it linked to this crappy capitalist system, is screwing the flotilla and giving Israel a substantial victory -- or at least salvaging something from the defeat. That capitalist system is relentlessly implicated in Israeli oppression. That system works through the intermediary of territorial units we call states. The biggest one is America, which can bully a lot of the smaller ones. If there are not liberated places for resistance, it becomes very hard to resist.

    None of this sidelines the specific responsibility of Haim Saban or whoever. But you glibly mis-understand social reality and economic history and red-bait me on my "different agenda," while your agenda and the agenda of millions of privileged people just like you will make freeing Palestine that much harder, because you are in denial about what has happened and what has to be done to prevent it from continuing. So can I glibly say, "you are welcome to your denial," or "we'll have to do it without you?" Not at all. What you should think through is who exactly you're helping with your denial. It's the people whose flag is blue and white.

  • Max Ajl June 30, 2011 at 6:59 pm

    Tree, although your comment is superficially polite, communicative, genial, and understanding, underneath it is profound intellectual, political, and (ethnic?) hostility.

    For one thing, you don't quote from anything written and just wave your hand generally at a "foolish" claim that no one has made and that no one trying to understand Israel, the Middle East, or the Special Relationship has made in decades. certainly nothing in the 100s of thousands of words I've spilled rehearses that "foolish" claim. Phil wants to understand the occupation and so do you and the occupation is an internal Israeli matter. was there economic crisis in Israel in 65-66 alongside rising pressure from the N. Africans for redistribution that was beginning to crystallize politically? yes. did the racist Israeli elite choose to go to war to resolve those problems? very likely. did they have a racist ideology? of course, but ideologies have to fight for survival, and they work best when covering for something others wish to do anyway and use it as a fig-leaf. since racist expansionary territorial nationalism was the ideology, and since it was cheaper to go to war then engage in internal social distribution, the Israeli elite went to war. Palestinian labor went into Israel, setting off an economic boom. it wasn't until the late 70s that the settlement movement took off. if culture "explains" the settlement project, why did it only take off in the late 70s? something to do with the Gush Eminum, mostly Mizrahi, emerging and being more racist than the racists? then in the early 80s and 90s, land being far cheaper in the West Bank than in Israel proper? I'm not writing an essay (or I am, but I am not pasting it all in here) but these issues are complex, and so yes, at every step in the game, the Israeli elite acceded to the settlement project because that was the easiest way to deal with internal social issues.

    over on our shores: from 67 - 70, the US elite wavered. from 70 to 75, there is very little evidence that they cared at all about ending the occupation, and I see little role for the lobby there. they blocked Carter's attempt to impose a solution, but that solution would not have been justice, it would have been a crappy bantustan solution with continued Special Relationship and so continued arms sales. in each administration the dynamics were different, and yes, a simple assertion of Zionism does not explain much because full-bore Zionists fiercely oppose the settlement project and do so in Haaretz every week. there's a good political economy explanation for why they can't craft a political program to end the occupation, too, and at least part of it is that they say "fund the hoods, not the settlements," forgetting that the settlements are populated by Mizrahi, as is the army disproportionately. that is, the liberal Zionist class position precludes them from pushing the sort of redistributive program that could perhaps end the occupation -- not remotely my only concern, frankly.

    now. two other points. the first is that this thing about "against economic interest" and "wield economic interest" is baffling. the Special Relationship sucks. it sucks for most Americans, it sucks especially for the people in the Middle East, and it even sucks for most Jews, who get very little out of it. the Jewish elite, well-invested in Israel, does get a lot out of it. necessarily elites and common people have opposed interests. one of those opposed interests is that the elite wants common people to think that the elite is somehow representing the common peoples interest when it is not. capitalism is the story of their success in both representing that story and using violence to ensure that their system continues. racism is part of how they set us at each others' throats; hence the comment about the inability to weaponize racism in the form of white populism to defend Palestine, because the "common interest" between elites and common people is precisely illusory. the Special Relationship continues because it is profitable, and even Walt/Mearsheimer basically concede that would be the case if the occupation ended. now it's true we have very little shot of selling Palestinian liberation as in the interests of poor communities elsewhere. their own poverty comes first. but what we can do is offer a quid pro quo, which is our solidarity for theirs, which is what solidarity means: linking the struggles of those dispossessed or oppressed in various ways by a unified system, not merely linking the struggles but linking the demands, and carrying out social disruption to the point where those demands are met.

    finally.you write that "...is liable to raise the same anti-semitic feelings he fears are raised by cultural or religious analysis..." when quite explicitly I wrote the opposite: "Jews are a priv­i­leged and powerful minority, and we won’t be the victims of renewed right-wing populism..." which should be amended: I sure as hell won't. far more likely the brown people will. now what does piss me off is that not only is this explicit in what i wrote, you know very well that I spent 6 months in Gaza, you know very well I did not hide my background there. that does not strike me as the actions of a person worried about antisemitism. what do you think? so i will ask you for the last time to take me off your therapists' couch, and do not ever put me there again or misleadingly refer to my background as a way to avoid dealing with my words. it is frankly unacceptable. i am not here for your amusement.

  • Max Ajl June 30, 2011 at 6:24 pm with 2 replies

    It's called revolutionary socialism.
    Try these:
    link to en.wikipedia.org
    link to en.wikipedia.org

    however, the comment you just made exemplifies why I don't and won't ever respond to your other comments. it's literally useless. and Moscow has nothing to do with it.

• Atzmon and Jewish identity
  • Max Ajl July 1, 2011 at 2:24 pm

    Tree:
    Here is what Avi wrote, after "mis-remembering" the lie that occasioned Gabriel to call him contemptible: "his rhetoric on the Israel Lobby are there for anyone who cares to read them, which supports my assertion regarding his and your tribal loyalties. The point stands." To which I responded, "The stuff about the lobby is just childish Jew-baiting non-sense." Meaning, the "tribal loyalty" bit. It is, although I have little doubt I'll be mis-quoted on that in the future.

    Finally. I disagree with plenty of people on the lobby and probably a few people on Atzmon who I will happily and unreservedly work with to liberate Palestine, because actions are more important than theory. But insofar as people are trapped in either idealist voluntarist politics, culturalist essentialism, interest-group liberalism, think they can weaponize white racism to break the Special Relationship, or think that putting American yahood on a black couch is what will get their Israeli yahood out of Khalil, they are in denial, and it will be their denial and not mine that will strengthen the chains shackling Palestinian freedom. With that I am done.

  • Max Ajl July 1, 2011 at 12:08 pm

    Avi:

    Your fantasies about my "tribal loyalties" are interesting, but also irrelevant and weird, and, since like Atzmon you can't seem to shrug off your Zionism, also revealing. I am happy for people to judge me for what I have written and more importantly for what I have done. I make no claims to objectivity nor impartiality. I am trying to end Zionist domination of cis-Jordan and orient my writing to ending that domination. I am open to constructive input in my errors, but beyond that I'm not particularly interested in your input here, even remotely. The stuff about the lobby is just childish Jew-baiting non-sense. If anyone wants to make a persuasive case against what I have written I'd be open to it. But I have not seen it, nor have I seen anything other than general myopia with respect to the US empire and a general lack of knowledge about the history of our country. This is unfortunate, but a predictable part of any social movement. It's called liberalism. A rot very difficult to treat.

    What you seem unable to transcend is the notion that ideas move the world. As you know, that's a perspective straight from Zionist historiography, and it is part of Zionist propaganda. To me the lobby thesis as you wish to defend it, and not as a serious conceptualization would deal with it, accepts those claims, but with values reversed. If you have seen deconstructions of Shafir, Peled, Machover, Lockman, Bichler, Nitzan, Orr, and so on that should cause me to change my perspective, please direct me to them. In their absence, the argument is just boring, if I want to read racist non-sense I can go read the Jerusalem Post. No doubt your "comment stands," and the rest of the maggots, with the imprimatur of the native informant, will eat it up. I have other things to do.

    Annie: I just saw your comment above. As I told you, I specifically responded to you because you jumped on Tom. I did not call you "morally vacuous," and use firm language because I think it clarifies differences rather than submersing them in talk about dialogue. I see no value in dialogue with people actively trying to sabotage our movement and in fact consider it of negative value. I responded to you as opposed to others because I know exactly who you are and thus you are accountable, perhaps more importantly you are involved politically beyond being an internet clatterer like some of the folks here, and for those reasons, worth responding to. I have to confess that I find it increasingly worthless to engage with anonymous people that I disagree with.

    So I repeat, I consider Atzmon as engaged in sabotage, and am happy to share that perspective, and will continue to judge those who want to dialogue with him, as do most people I work with in actual political organizing. That is just my nature. If saying so is "gatekeeping," make the most of it. Every movement and every discussion "gatekeeps." That is how one judges a movement. If the pseudonymous "Thomson Rutherfords," "Avis," and "MBs" of the world judge me for it, so be it. I can live with their disdain.

  • Max Ajl July 1, 2011 at 11:00 am

    I was not planning on returning to this thread. I think plenty of people have shown their true colors, which is helpful. it's good to know who has identified themselves as obstacles on the route to a movement that can make social change, and who can or cannot identify saboteurs. also sad.

    But two points. One, Avi: here is your exchange with evildoer where he used the word "contemptible": link to mondoweiss.net

    not quite what you say he said, by a long shot.

    two, I have not responded to Gilad, and I did not call him a Holocaust denier. so again you put words in other people's mouths. this is not cool. what I said was that his defenders here revealed themselves as having no moral and intellectual standards, a claim I put my name next to and stand by, and claim once again that it is their problem. however, i screwed up in saying that it's not my problem. it is my problem, because the lack of serious moral and intellectual standards in a serious political movement is all of our problem. you are correct that there's a double standard for Atzmon and Zionist Nakba deniers. some of the groupies here seem to think Atzmon is our ally, while it is clear that Zionist Nakba deniers are our enemy. as are saboteurs. of which Gilad is one, whether in effect or in intent. take from that what you wish.

  • Max Ajl June 25, 2011 at 9:38 am

    I don't know "MB" my anonymous amigo if reading is a skill they teach where you are from. I said I don't care about Atzmon and I do not, which is why I reacted to Annie and not him. so you are wrong about that, and can practice reading the words that appear on the page in front of you, and in the process might dislodge some of the petty prejudices that you mistake for thought.

    When you have figured out how to do that that, step two. Read the next couple sentences.

    What you are ever wronger about is your statement that "he doesn’t deserve the attention he gets." I think he deserves exactly the attention he gets, as well as who he gets it from. like attracts like, in this case internet chatterboxes who mistake clattering away on a keyboard for contributing to social change. That you lap it up is not my issue. It's yours. Finally, because I should give you something to be right about, you are correct that he is not waiting for or seeking my stamp of approval. What you seem to think is that I care.

  • Max Ajl June 25, 2011 at 5:52 am with 20 replies

    Annie, the fact that the bigotry is not glaring to you -- and others -- is an indication of the fact that you have no intellectual or moral standards. Not a personal attack, just an observation. I don't care too much about the Atzmon village-idiot performance, frankly. Some people need their petty prejudices confirmed by a native informant. So be it. But others will care, and you are out of line making an attack on Tom, who writes under his actual name, while you glide around under a veil of anonymity saying gosh-golly-gee don't know so much about the holocaust while you blithely defend the bigotry of a right-wing armchair clown who, I should add to Tom, doesn't merit one-hundredth of the attention he has been given on this thread. That bigotry will have no effect on its targets, so it does not concern me. Racism is not separable from the power relations within which it occurs. Nevertheless there is no warrant for criticizing someone for reacting to that bigotry.

    What should concern you is that not everyone will see things as I see them, and this is not philosphe amateur hour or the Giladi power-of-hour to worry about Mohammed-from-Gaza, who trust me, does not give a crap about "native oriented cells" in the movement. Generally Mohammed is more concerned about stopping the munitions from landing on his doorstep and is not impressed with cant about a false, non-existent universalism. He wants effective political action. Please think hard this morning about whether this discourse contributes to that, and whether it's Tom, who has a proven record as an on-the-ground getting-hands-dirty political organizer on this, who is the problem today. He is not.

• 'House divided cannot stand' (Netroots tried to embrace Zionists and non-Zionists in vague, squishy hug)
  • Max Ajl June 21, 2011 at 1:24 pm with 1 replies

    You seem to be confused. There is no American left. There are tons of American leftists, and they are not "PEP" anymore, although there is a residue of that but not much. But we are unorganized and uncoordinated. When you say "leftist" what you mean is liberal. And their positions on most things are either milquetoast, incoherent, or non-sense, their position on Palestine being a particularly abhorrent example of that.

• Britain’s denial of democracy and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
  • Max Ajl June 24, 2011 at 8:07 am

    Andrew, Jeff is right. You are missing the point. This debate is a footnote in an ongoing and marginal political attempt to deploy white racism to liberate Palestine. It finds pleasant breeding grounds amongst crotchety oppressed white dudes on the internet who don't do a whit of the organizing around BDS or anything else. Furthermore, it will never work, because activists on the ground, most of whom are Arab or Muslim, will never accept it, and insofar as the discourse gains a constituency, which is undeniable, it certainly has, it will never become operational in practice, as I can promise you from the traffic on the national SJP list-serv -- anyone with a brain is aware that if that white racist populist movement came into existence, its first targets would be the ones identifiable by their skin color. Of course it is also manifestly idiotic. The deployment of racism means challenging our enemy where it is strong -- channeling racism into defense of empire, colony, and capitalism. Which is also why the notion of a Palestine lobby is mis-guided in my opinion -- it means challenging our enemy where it's strong, in terms of monetary capital.

    So people will be schizophrenic and will accept that their on-the-ground organizing and their discourse don't match up, but what's more important is not the discourse, but the organizing. So the BDS movement aims to form horizontal links amongst oppressed people in solidarity with one another along standard progressive principles: an injury to one is an injury to all. It might not work, that's true, but it is the only thing that can work. It's true that discourse matters, and so the exchange you're having above is important. It's good to combat the misinformation and the lies, because all they do is muddy the moral case for Palestinian liberation. They will continue to do so until someone says bkafee, you are hurting our struggle. I suspect it won't be long now.

• What do you do when Netroots is just not that into you?
  • Max Ajl June 17, 2011 at 3:31 pm

    That's interesting. With some exceptions, I'd say the Palestine solidarity movement, insofar as it's a movement, has general contempt for the Democratic Party, and it's one of the few movements that has actually stayed alive during a time of massive left reversal and quiescence, not merely since 2008 but since 1968. Compare to the anti-war movement, which mostly de-mobilized amidst the Obama presidency. There are now academic studies about this. See link to www-personal.umich.edu

    You say "most major social movements and groupings" disagree with me, and as a result, "Whenever an individual, organization or movement walks away from all that, they become instantly marginalized an ineffective." Perhaps they become marginalized because the major social movements and groupings are making a bad choice: choosing quixotically to try, and fail, to reform a core institution of capitalist power from within rather than recognizing it for what it is and choosing to organize independently from it and pressure it from without. Lenin called this "false consciousness"; he thought it inhabited the working-class. Actually I'd say it's more of a middle-class phenomenon, because comfortable people feel inclined to work within the system rather than to try to rock it or break it. Working-class people know that the system doesn't do anything for it. Thus they don't bother to vote -- it's not worth it when the issue is choosing what color and brand the knife that's going to cut your neck is when either way at the end of the day you're dead.

    Whether anyone thinks it's the lobby corrupting the Democrats or whether the Democrats were already corrupted by capital (the lobby is capital, anyway), you can't cleanse the corrupted, and making the political choice to do so is tragic, whether the majority of these "movements" choose to do so or not.

  • Max Ajl June 17, 2011 at 2:09 pm with 11 replies

    Clencher, although there are issues of big-tent vs. small-tent to be raised in the real world, there's a prior issue. You seem to think the Democratic Party has a progressive agenda, and that it could potentially be part of "a broad social movement that wants to build power at home." The job of the Democratic Party is to prevent the coalescing of a social movement, and to prevent a progressive agenda from being implemented. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party. Its job is to blunt and if possible disperse and destroy bottom-up social change and anger at the system. Obama did that perfectly. The question of fitting Palestine solidarity work into a broader social movement is a real one. There are many who comment on this blog whose agenda seems quite contrary to grassroots movement building. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party is bought and paid for, and any movement oriented towards the Democratic Party as an electoral vehicle has already made itself impotent.

• What about American sectarianism? (and Jewish fears that it will bust loose)
  • Max Ajl June 18, 2011 at 6:28 am with 1 replies

    Keith, given the way American political culture deals with all issues -- generally, the most ugly way imaginable -- there is a likelihood that the widespread organized Jewish support for Zionism will lead to an uptick of antisemitism. Why don't you take that seriously? You claim that would be against the Jewish elite's interests, but by the same token the predicted upticks of terrorism were a predicted consequence of the American invasion of Iraq, yet the American elite merrily carried out the invasion and has been bathing in war-loot ever since. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. There are neither "Jewish" interests nor "American" interests, the concepts are chimeras.

    However, there is a grain of truth in your comment. Much of the discourse on the lobby describes it as an expression of tribal interests, whatever those are. It refuses to see the lobby for what it is -- a lobby that uses the rhetoric of tribe and ethnicity to mobilize Jews behind support for policies that generally benefit only a small portion of Jews, and that also service other sectors of American capital (see: Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and XOM, stock prices since 2001). Just because it's ethnically identifiable does not mean it's not akin to other segments of ruling class power. Those arguing otherwise are basically saying that "Jewish" history, whatever that is, is idealist, while the rest of history is materialist. They should go read Rodinson's Cult, Ghetto, State to disabuse themselves of that notion. The idea that a non-existent Jewish people alone in the world should be analyzed in ethnic and idealist terms, across centuries and continents, doesn't make any sense.

    Nonetheless, the personalization of the lobby is a good move in American political culture. Americans are notoriously averse to talk of structures but hate individualized domination. There is a lesson for leftists to be learned from the right-wing lobby talk, and we should learn it quick.

• Even Sandra Day O'Connor (in NY Review of Books) sees damage to US interests in 'vast disparity' of Israel's power
  • Max Ajl June 5, 2011 at 2:18 pm

    Jim, I agree with your criticism. But you don't take it far enough. The "lobby" debate -- as it is conducted on the right and not as it should be understood on the left, where it shouldn’t be a debate -- the concerns of "realists" that Phil likes to allude to, and Petraeus's false grandstanding about the "safety of our troops" (why doesn't he lobby for decent armor or just ending the wars?), is a question about how to secure, or re-secure, American power. The lobby must be confronted. Whether confronting it would end the Special Relationship is open to debate. Revealingly, Mearsheimer, Walt, and Anthony Cordesman don't seem to think so. I don't think so either.

    That should make it clear that the debate about securing American power is not about the Palestinians, and it's not about ending dictatorships, and it's not about Arab liberation, it simply is not about freedom in any meaningful way. It's about an attempt by a segment of the ruling class to bring the current boil of the Israel-Palestine conflict down to a more manageable simmer so that they can re-entrench American hegemony in the region and more broadly. Other significant fractions of the ruling class have absolutely no problem whatsoever with continued occupation, so long as there's the appearance of a peace process to try to quiet down Arab peoples who hear peace and see war and tend not to buy what imperialist apologists sell.

    With that goal in mind, the "realists" propose a "demilitarized state" which Palestinians when polled overwhelmingly reject, in the context of a two-state "solution" that will probably leave key water resources in Jewish Israeli hands. That's better than the current alternative, which is continuing settlement, with genocide flitting in and out of view over the horizon, but the idea that it's a social vision behind which the Palestine solidarity movement should be mobilizing is not only horrifying but also tragic.

    There's also the not-so-minor issue that organizing for Palestinian freedom under the umbrella of securing American imperialism in the region and in the long-run is not only nauseating but also pathetic and represents a basic violation of any kind of progressive principles, all sacrificed so that we can attempt this fated-to-fail strategy of appealing to white racism to liberate Palestine. Of course, no one, except right-wing activists, takes this strategy seriously, so at the discursive level all that it does is contaminate the purity of the case for Palestinian liberation. I do not understand why people would wish to take that route, especially people like Phil who, whatever my criticisms of his politics, is genuinely committed to Palestinian liberation. Unfortunately, the road to freedom does not go through Washington.

• New White House page on Israel's security says nothing about settlements or occupation, but tons about Iran, Goldstone, slaughter of innocent Israelis, delegitimization
  • Max Ajl June 6, 2011 at 7:14 am

    Jeffrey, you have blown a great deal of smoke to avoid the points. The point is that the people you are appealing to as “critics” of the Special Relationship are in fact critics of the occupation, which is very clear when the full extracts are posted. They criticize the “strategic asset” theory but who here makes those claims with those words? You assault the life out of a straw man.

    What they are suggesting, and what you are suggesting, is that changing the Israel-American Special Relationship should only be carried out within the confines of making it workable for American power, or you know, our splendid democracy, which the lobby is about to carry into its final hour (do you believe this or does it just sound good when you clatter it out?). The lobby is a component of the system. So is big oil. Different components have different interests. Only the lobby cares about maintaining the occupation. Obama might prefer an apartheid solution under Fayyad along with token Israeli withdrawals and a land-swap in the Galilee.

    So I repeat, the lobby must be confronted, but an analysis of American policy in the Middle East that departs from the lobby and arrives at recommending profit strategies for American corporations is not only impotent but idiotic. You have to start from oil, weapons, and war, and you have to drop this axial delusion that the powers-that-be want stability. They do not. Israel contributes to that instability. You will have noticed that the Republican Party, less reliant on Jewish donors, wants more instability. Please try to “explain” that.

    But we are debating degrees of domination and degrees of instability. What is clear is that those in power care nothing about ending the occupation, let alone fulfilling the three demands of the BDS platform. This does not mean Walt et al are doing a disservice to Palestinians by challenging the lobby. Obviously not. But the logic of a movement is different from the logic of defense intellectuals. Why you want to hitch your horse to those calling for a demilitarized Palestinian state is beyond me, unless, of course, you fancy yourself in their position.

    However, this creates certain problems of interpretation and mis-understanding. So “Danaa” emits an off-kilter rant about “big pharma” not being as powerful as the lobby when it has blocked the universal health program that every other Western industrial country has, and then caterwauls about how Israel is “trying very hard to subvert the entire American system,” and you seem to think that you have a plan for managing empire but those Zionists keep screwing it up, and you falsify evidence, ignore facts, close your eyes to contrary evidence, all in the service of catapulting American power into a new American century, same as your brothers over at the PNAC.

    Then you spew “tribalist” but don’t seem to understand that there is no tribe, the “tribe” and the “people” are Zionist inventions. What you mean, and what would clarify things, is to call me a kike, so I recommend that to clarify things to the readers here.

    You ask what the instability was from 1973 to 1987. The occupation? A belligerent Israeli presence in the Middle East, keeping it in a state of constant tension? Recurrent Israeli invasions of Lebanon? I read the NY Times coverage of that Ford speech. There was no threat for a return to 1967 borders, and there was no reason to believe it would have been carried out. What Ford wanted was a peace treaty with Egypt. He didn’t care about the occupation. As I recall, the peace treaty eventually came, while Carter poured weapons into the Middle East. Those Zionists are clever! Somehow they convince the US president to babble about stability while exporting billions of weapons into an already-unstable region. Israel pursues its role, the lobby pursues its role, but what you refuse to understand, or pretend not to understand, is that not everyone loses. Just the powerless.

    What you refuse to understand is that it is a system. Different pieces play different roles in the system. Until you understand the system as a system, you will understand nothing, which is where you stand right now, and where will you remain, a ranting demagogue, enjoying his brief moment. Enjoy Jeff. You have no hidden agenda. They’re all out in the open. Your role in the system is to apologize for it. At that, if at nothing else, you do a decent job. Since it seems unlikely that you’ll get more than this end-of-days little podium, and the movement seems to be ignoring your strategy of liberating Palestine by allying with white racists, and almost no one will publish you, it seems that you must have something, so please take the last word. It’s about the only thing you’ll ever get.

  • Max Ajl June 5, 2011 at 4:44 pm

    Zionist ideology posits that Jews are outside of history and have an essence which inevitably produces antisemitism. Zionist ideology also posits that Jewish settler-colonialism was purely idealist, or not motivated by "material" interests. Jeff's analysis does the same thing, just with values inverted. Now, this essay is not total non-sense -- it's much too long to respond to in detail -- but these are better:
    link to 16beavergroup.org
    link to books.google.com

    the worst mistake is assuming that MAINTAINING supply is the point. rather, it's controlling and thus constricting supply. Israel, acting out of its own interests, has helped this process. so has the lobby, acting out of their interest in bettering the growth of their investments in Israel. the job of the US government has been to mediate and manage varied interests. Israel, oil, finance, and weapons have generally lined up from 1973 to 1991, and 2001 - 2011. there have been squabbles over specific policies, capitalism is antagonistic, and different fragments have different interests and occasionally clash. a good theory of the lobby will analyze its intersection with those interests and how it has guided and constrained the debate. but we have no good theory. i am not chomsky nor ANSWER. the lobby is real, but the point that the lobby has steered American policies in the Middle East again US capitalist interests is simply absurd.

    finally, you ask about "US best interests." this is a chimera. there are no "US" interests. different sectors of power have their interests, and the rest of us -- say 85 percent of us -- have an interest in a good life untrammeled by power. and those in power agree on very little but agree on the utility of our chains and the need to keep them strong and unbroken. so we have an issue. but they have an issue too: we all have an interest in breaking those chains. but perhaps we can stop begging elites to give us and Palestinians some sad scrap of freedom, and we should organize to take what was ours to begin with and is ours by right.

  • Max Ajl June 5, 2011 at 4:08 pm

    Danaa, you miss the point. If American elites saw Israel as a real threat to their real interests -- making money -- they would act against it. They do not because they don’t. Most simply don’t care, and many make money off Israel in “peace” and war: weapons, high tech, oil, finance. Frankly, that is the American economy. The remainder of American capital is mostly trans-national, and so they simply don’t care. If they don’t care, what is the point of building a movement meant to appeal to people in power to save us from the big bad yahood capitalists who are screwing both ordinary people, non-yahood capitalists, and Palestinians? You can’t build a social movement on a lie.

    Now, of course there is a Washington political culture where you don’t step on other elites’ toes unless they are really trodding on yours. That, too, is part of why the lobby remains un-confronted. You say money is “conservative,” but that’s just an odd euphemism, as is the bit about perceived “market winners.”

    Money wants to grow. When it encounters obstacles to its growth, it attacks them. When it sees paths to continued growth, it uses them. Israeli policies have been a useful vehicle for making the American rich richer, and trying to deny that is not only hallucinogenic but politically impotent.

    Obviously, a debate is now taking place on the future of American power. The lobby constricts that debate. But it wouldn’t be very big anyhow, I am sorry to say. Blankfort’s anatomies of the lobby are useful. But when he tries to understand the lobby, he is like a doctor trying to understand the role of the lungs without reference to the heart and the circulatory system. The arguments are worse-than-useless. If we want to end Israeli power, we have to understand it, and in understanding it, we have to look at how it has served other sectors of the American elite. You can’t lie to capitalists, because they know what’s in their bottom line and we don’t.

    Having understood the system we are confronting, the next step is to make alliances with others not necessarily damaged by Israeli power but by other segments of ruling class power, interlock our movements and our demands, and carry out social disruption to the point where the ruling class can either listen to us or cease to have power. If that is the social program pushed by the likes of Blankfort, please let me know. I have seen no evidence of it.

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