The 1946 Oakland general strike began with a dispute at two downtown department stores, Hastings’ and Kahn’s, where 425 clerks (mostly women) were on strike for union recognition.
The strike, a landmark event in Northern California labor history, was also a significant, though misunderstood, episode in the strike wave of 1945-1946, the greatest strike wave in numbers in US history at the point.
The Oakland strike was very much in the spirit of the strike wave but it wasn’t a “called strike.” At the time Stan Weir was employed on the assembly line at Chevrolet’s East Oakland plant, a member of UAW local 76. He was riding a streetcar, on his way to work on Monday morning, December 3, the day Oakland was shut down.
“Shortly before 5 am, Monday, December 3, 1946, hundreds of workers passing through downtown Oakland… became witness to the police herding a fleet of scab trucks through the downtown area. The trucks contained commodities to fill the shelves of two major department stores whose clerks had long been on strike.
“The witnesses, that is, truck drivers, bus and streetcar operators and passengers, got off their vehicles and did not return. The city was filled with workers, they milled about the city’s core for several hours and then organized themselves.”
World War II ended in August, 14, 1945. V-J Day marked the end of war abroad and the beginning of rebellion at home. There had been strikes throughout the war years, often wildcat strikes in defiance of the no-strike pledge – policy demanded by the government from above, and supported by not only the unions but also radical organizations including the Communist Party.
So one result was pent-up demands. There were frustrated expectations – plus the widely held conviction that the time for sacrifice – both overseas and at home – was over. There was the belief that there had been sacrifice enough. By the end of September the number of days “lost” (won) to strikes had doubled, by the end of October it had doubled again. 200,000 coal miners struck in September; 44,000 Northwest lumber workers followed; as did 70,000 Midwest truck drivers, 40,000 machinists in San Francisco and Oakland, East Coast longshoremen, and many more – and this despite the statement from Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), that “no change will be made in the CIO’s no-strike policy…” and the similar pledge by American Federation of Labor (AFL) President William Green: “V-J Day will not mean an automatic ending of the restraint on strikes.”
1945 was just the prelude and US workers were not to be contained. There were more than 5000 major strikes in 1946, the largest and most sustained strike wave in US history, surpassing the strike years of 1919 and 1934. These strikes included the autoworkers who closed eighty General Motors plants in 50 cities. The steelworkers struck for 25 days, 750,000 strong, at that point the single largest strike in US history (to be surpassed by Latino May Day strikers in 2006). 400,000 coal miners struck. President Truman threatened to draft striking railroad workers.
At one point, there were 1,600,000 workers on strike. By the end of the year 4.6 million workers had been on strike. 28,500,000 work days had been lost to the employers. It was a magnificent display of working class power – it was “too big,” also too popular, to be defeated.
The trade union leadership was divided at the top – the AFL still competed with the CIO, though not for long, as they soon united to purge the left. Rank-and-file solidarity, however, was widespread. Just as in 1919 and 1934, the strike wave increased workers appetites; in 1919 there was the general strike in Seattle and in 1934 the general strike in Minneapolis.
In 1946 there were general strikes in Rochester, NY; Stamford, CT; Lancaster and Pittsburgh, PA and, of course, Oakland, CA.
“By nightfall /on the 3rd/ the strikers had instructed all stores except pharmacies and food markets to shut down, Bars were allowed to stay open, but they could serve only beer and had to put their juke boxes out on the sidewalk to play at full volume and no charge. ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama, Lay That Pistol Down’, the number one hit, echoed off all the buildings. That first 24-hour period of the 54-hour strike had a carnival spirit. A mass of couples danced in the streets. The participants were making history, knew it, and were having fun. By Tuesday morning they had cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but only those with passports (union cards) could get in.
“The comment made by a prominent national network newscaster, that ‘Oakland is a ghost town tonight,’ was a contribution to ignorance. Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population. It was a town of law and order. In that city of over a quarter million, strangers passed each other on the street and did not have fear, but the opposite.”
The Oakland Strike spread from the bottom up. There was never much evidence of official union leadership in the streets. But there were streetcar operators and bus drivers and truck drivers who refused to honor police cordons, demanded an end to “scab” labor and denounced the city administration and the police.
“Before the second day of the strike was half over a large group of war veterans among the strikers formed their own squads and went through close-order drills. They then marched on the Tribune Tower, offices of the anti-labor Oakland Tribune, and from there marched on City Hall demanding the resignation of the mayor and city council. Sailor’s Union of the Pacific (SUP) crews walked off the three ships at the Oakland Army base loaded with military supplies for troops in Japan. By that night the strikers closed some grocery stores in order to conserve dwindling food supplies.
“In all general strikes the participants are very soon forced by the very nature of events to themselves run the society they have just stopped. The process in the Oakland experiment was beginning to deepen…
“The top local Teamster officials, except one, were not to be found; the exception would be fired five months later for his strike activity. International Teamster President Dave Beck wired orders ‘to break the strike’ because it was a revolutionary attempt ‘to overthrow the government’. He ordered all Teamsters who had left their jobs to return to work.
At last, the unions acted. 142 unions affiliated with the Alameda County AFL declared a “work holiday” and 100,000 workers walked off their jobs. The business of Oakland effectively came to a halt.
“A number of the secondary Oakland and Alameda County union leaders did what they could to create a semblance of straight trade-union organization. The ranks, unused to leading themselves and having no precedent for this sort of strike in their own experience, wanted the well-known labor leaders in the Bay Area to step forward with expertise, aid, and public legitimization.
“The man who was always billed as leader of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, ILWU President Harry Bridges, who was then also State CIO President, refused to become involved, just as he did 18 years later during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement struggles. The rank-and-file longshoremen and warehouse- men who had been drawn to the street strike were out there on their own.
“No organized contingents from the hundreds available in the warehouse and longshore hiring halls were sent to help, No CIO shops were given the nod to walk out or ‘sick-out’. Only through CIO participation could significant numbers of blacks have been drawn into this mainly white strike. The ILWU and other CIO unions would honor picket lines like those around the Tribune Tower or at the Oakland Army Base, but otherwise they minded their own business.
“Bridges had recently committed himself to a nine-year extension of the wartime no-strike pledge.”
The strike ended two days later. It was “… 54 hours old at 11 a.m. on December 5. The people on the street learned of the decision from a sound truck put on the Street by the AFL Central Labor Council. It was the officials’ first really decisive act of leadership. They had consulted among themselves and decided to end the strike on the basis of the Oakland City Manager’s promise that police would not again be used to bring in scabs.
“No concessions were gained for the women retail clerks at Kahn’s and Hastings Department Stores whose strikes had triggered the General Strike; they were left free to negotiate any settlement they could get on their own. Those women and many other strikers heard the sound truck’s message with the form of anger that was close to heartbreak.
“Numbers of truckers and other workers continued to picket with the women, yelling protests at the trucks and appealing to all who could hear that they should stay out. But all strikers other than the clerks had been ordered back to work and no longer had any protection against the disciplinary actions that might be brought against them for strike-caused absences. By noon only a few score of workers were left, wandering disconsolately around the now-barren city. The CIO mass meeting that had been called for that night to discuss strike ‘unity’ was never held.”
Historians tend to argue that 1946 strikes were mostly about wages, a “wage offensive” writes one. And this was true to a degree and in this the strikes were often successful, in the short term, in two ways; first in today’s terms, workers’ average gains were about $2 an hour and, because of the way demands were formulated, low wage workers benefited most – hence the idea at the time of a “solidarity wage.” But they were also about lives and beliefs, workers aspirations and they were a rebellion against control from above.
So the 1946 strikes also reflected the legacy of the 1930s, the inheritance of confidence US workers felt along with their capacity to organize and fight, but there would not be another such uprising until the strike wave of the 1970s (1967-1981).
In a sense the Oakland strike was both an end and a beginning. The victories of the 1930s were consolidated but from on high – by the “new men of power” (Mills). There were no women on labor’s first team. These men collaborated with management and government officials to institute a corporate compact, an unwritten agreement, the so-called “The New Deal Formula” of Industrial Relations.” The unions would “deliver the goods” but this and post-war prosperity compromised, and sometimes eliminated rank-and-file participation and undermined shop floor power – wages could be increased, benefits won (for union members) by making deals at the top. McCarthyism drove the rebels to the margins. In addition, wartime patriotism, both as the result of service, but also reflecting war-time no-strike pledges and war productivity drives dampened militancy and deradicalized American workers. At the same time, the Cold War had already begun on the shop floor.
“The Oakland General Strike was related to the 1946 Strike Wave in time and spirit, and revealed an aspect of the temper of the nation’s industrial-working-class mood at war’s end. Labor historians of the immediate post-war period have failed to examine the Oakland Strike, and thus have failed to consider a major event of the period and what it reveals about the mood of that time. In developing their analyses they have focused almost entirely on the economic demands made by the unions that participated in the Strike Wave. These demands were not unimportant. But economic oppression was not the primary wound that had been experienced daily during the war years.”
One last point: overwhelmingly, the strike wave was regional in character. It was a wave of strikes in the Northeast, the Great Lakes Region (including West Virginia) and to a lesser degree California. The rest, the South in particular, remained non-union. The demand that the CIO “organize the /segregated/ south” had been abandoned. These regions, not surprisingly, led the Republicans in recapturing Congress in 1946, in turn to the Taft-Hartley in 1947 — “the slave labor act” according to the AF of L).
Organizing the unorganized, black workers, women workers, farm workers, would have to wait.
See Stan Weir, Singlejack Solidarity, George Lipsitz, ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004)
And
Stan Weir, “The 1946 Oakland General Strike,” libcom library, Nov 22, 2005. Downloaded, October 21. 2011.
After UNESCO voted to give the Palestinians full membership, the words of State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland contained a hint that the Obama administration at the highest levels is quite seriously concerned about the possible consequences for America of cutting off funds to the UN agency as required by Zionist lobby driven law enacted by Congress. (The U.S. funds about 22 percent of UNESCO’s budget or roughly $80 million annually; and $60 million was scheduled to be sent this month).
Most of Nuland’s shortish statement would have been sweet music to the Zionist lobby’s ears.
“Today’s vote by the member states of UNESCO to admit Palestine as a member is regrettable, premature, and undermines our shared goal of a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in the Middle East. The United States remains steadfast in its support for the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state (what nonsense, I add), but such a state can only be realized through direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians (again what nonsense). The United States also remains strongly committed to robust multilateral engagement across the UN system. However, Palestinian membership as a state in UNESCO triggers longstanding legislative restrictions which will compel the United States to refrain from making contributions to UNESCO.”
But the end words of Nuland’s statement (presumably reflecting her mistress’s views) would not have been so comforting for the Zionist lobby. “U.S. engagement with UNESCO serves a wide range of our national interests on education, science, culture, and communications issues. The United States will maintain its membership in and commitment to UNESCO and we will consult with Congress to ensure that U.S. interests and influence are preserved.”
One possible implication of the words emphasized is that President Obama and perhaps even Secretary of State Clinton have looked into the future and realised that if America did default on its obligations to UNESCO, there could be moves to suspend or even expel it from the agency. Probably many misinformed Americans would welcome that happening, but it would be bad for America’s image in the world. The further implication is that President Obama is at least thinking about trying to persuade Congress to untie his hands on the matter of cutting off funds to UNESCO with the argument that it’s not actually in America’s own best interests to do so.
That, it seems, is what Zionism’s First Lady in Congress fears. (We’ll get to who she is in a moment). Her response to Nuland’s words on behalf of the State Department was the following: “This is no time for the U.S. to back down… Congress must pass pending UN reform legislation to cut off funding to any UN entity that grants any upgraded status to ‘Palestine’. Such strong action is the only way to deter other UN bodies from following in UNESCO’s footsteps, and to prevent U.S. taxpayer dollars from paying for biased entities at the UN.”
In passing I have to say that I never cease to be amazed by the mind-blowing hypocrisy of almost all Americans in positions of political power. By far the most biased entity at the UN is the United States of America.
The Zionist lobby’s First Lady in Congress is the Cuban-American born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. (Her maternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews from Turkey who became active in Cuba’s Jewish community. Her mother converted to Catholicism). She was the first Republican to be elected to the House of Representatives from Florida and she is today the chairwoman of its Foreign Affairs Committee. In that capacity she introduced the bill to cut off US funding to any UN organization that recognises Palestinian statehood. She also advocates cutting funding to the Lebanese Armed Forces and the West Bank and Gaza.
That’s on the one hand. On the other is the fact that one of her major campaign funders was Irving Moskowitz, a Florida businessman who is a major funder of illegal Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem. Also a fact is that the J Street lobby group called on her to return campaign contributions from him because, it said, “he actively works to de-rail the chances for a two-state solution.”
Against that background it was entirely logical that she would take (as she did) the lead in demanding that the Obama administration “halt its condemnations of an indispensable ally and friend of the United States.”
Once upon a time it was only those seeking to be elected on the Democratic ticket who felt the need to kiss the Zionist lobby’s bottom. Now the Republicans are at it, too.
What chance does any American president have of confronting this lobby in order to be able to put American’s own real and best interests first? My answer (I never tire of giving it) is no chance unless and until enough American voters are informed enough to call and hold their Congressmen and women to account.
Footnote
Ros-Lehtinen’s history indicates that she is a fan of targeted assassinations, so presumably on this matter she thinks Obama is doing a better job than George “Dubya” Bush.
She appeared very briefly in 638 Ways to Kill Castro, a Channel 4 documentary film broadcast in the UK on 28 November 2006. It told the story of some of the many attempts by the CIA to kill the Cuban leader. Her contribution included this: “I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.”
When a 28-second clip of her saying that was circulated on the internet, she denied it by claiming that the production team had misrepresented her by splicing clips to make the sound bite. Director Dollan Cannell then released the unedited tapes of the interview with her, proving that she had twice welcomed an attempt on Castro’s life. It was the production team that had been misrepresented by her, not the other way round. Cannel asked for an apology but he didn’t receive one.
An inability to say sorry is, of course, one of the hallmarks of all who support Israel right or wrong.
President Obama’s descent to Israel-groveling was fast and furious, considering it’s been a short time from his June 2009 Cairo speech to his September 2011 UN speech. MJ Rosenberg dubbed Obama as the most Israel-subservient president ever: “Obama isn’t lying about his ‘pro-Israel’ record… This administration has been the most one-sided supporter of everything Israel asks for since 1948. There is no competition. Not even George W Bush comes close.” Maybe, but it’s clear this president, as every president before him, will do anything to get re-elected. What humiliation: the American president, elected by wide mandate, rendered supine by a pair of fanatics like Benjamin Netanyahu and his gloating neo-fascist cohort Avigdor Lieberman. The road to Washington runs through Tel Aviv.
There has never (yes, “never”) been, since at least the 1940s but unquestionably since 1967, “honest” brokerage from Washington or at least, if insistence on honesty is misinformed or naively misplaced, temporary impartiality for the sake of US interests. There is a yawning gap between the fiction of US pressure on Israel and the reality of capitulation to Israeli demands. American presidents have not had the political will to use their national representation to challenge Israel for the sake of US interests. The US has always presumed to be able to manage and quiet Palestinian and Arab interest or opposition, usually by initiating activity towards mediation and peace process, but without ever exerting the required pressure on its ally Israel. The notion of American “pressure” on Israel has always been a tactic to mollify Arab frustration, ever holding out the promise of just resolution of conflict.
There has never been a Zionism desiring peace, only the erasure of the Palestinian national presence from historic Palestine and resolve to realize the Holy Land’s unblemished “Judaization.” (The Israeli state or elite is not interested in genuine peace, and those, like MJ Rosenberg, who point out that the Israeli public supports a Palestinian state by a significant majority fail to mention that this in effect means a Bantustan state requiring little to no Israeli compromise. With the exception of a small Israeli minority, the majority just want the pesky Palestinians to disappear from their lives.)
There has never been “national unity” among perennially, hopelessly factionalized Palestinian elites and leaderships, resolved to monopolize Palestinian politics, and who’ve historically been as much of a detriment to their people as of help.
The only honest part of this dismal reality, for over a century, is the unbendable dignity and resistance of the Palestinian people and their current historical willingness to coexist in peace and mutual respect with those who displaced them and continue to dispossess and torment them.
Washington’s frantic, fulminating response to the Palestinians’ UN bid, its determination to preserve its monopoly and management of the “dispute,” is neither startling nor new. The American diplomatic, political, economic, and military machine is set on autopilot in behalf of Israel—the Palestinians, the distressed American people, the decline of US power, economic bankruptcy, genuine US interests, and the Middle East be damned. This of course won’t last much longer as the US strategic role, more accurately domination, in the Middle East is losing ground, its respect vanishing worldwide.
In any case, it may be that the Palestinian leadership’s full UN membership bid far from represents a clean break from bilateral negotiations whose central function is enabling Israel to proceed with its colonization and annexations unabated. The Palestinians accepted, however reluctantly, a deferment on a Security Council vote, allowing the “Quartet” time to convince both sides to restart “peace talks” by devising a framework for renewed negotiations toward a deal at the end of 2012 (in time for US presidential elections). The Israelis of course will not accept “preconditions” while the Palestinians insist on a halt to colonial settlement construction and 1967 lines as the basis of negotiations.
The Palestinian calculation, in addition to fears of US retribution in the form of vital aid cut-off (which can be catastrophic for Palestinian livelihood), is that this will break the deadlock, perhaps lead to an exertion of pressure on Israel. But this, a way out for them via meaningful negotiations, is a forlorn hope from a leadership whose only self-justification for existence is the two-state, peace process industry. That twenty-year industry’s brief is interminable engagement with frameworks and mechanisms rather than the substance of peace.
All this craziness in the service of not cornering Washington into exercising its veto, which it realizes will weaken and isolate it, along with its reckless, destabilizing partner Israel, further.
Being open to negotiations is smart if, indeed, the Palestinians adhere to a synergistic strategy, based on an uncompromising set of principles, willing to eject without hesitation that component which does not work (bilateralism) and forge ahead with that which does, or has a better chance of modest success (multilateralism).
But vital components of this strategy are missing, including political and national unity and democratic inclusion of civil society. The decades-long resistance of the PLO/PA to embracing grassroots democracy is a predictable outcome of believing the US can deliver. The leadership, concerned with its privileges and power and its prerogative to undertake and dabble in any political or diplomatic initiative it deems justified, cannot easily extricate itself from its Washington dependency and grip, accept that the Palestinian strategy has been a monumental failure and resort to the undiluted democratic will of its people.
The options of going to the General Assembly for collective recognition of a Palestinian state to add to the current 114 or to “upgrade” Palestinian observer status will have to wait, except that the Palestinian strategy includes piecemeal upgrade, as the recently successful application for full membership in UNESCO (and presumably other UN agencies), which has Washington going ballistic, attests. The Palestinians are apparently not about to let multilateralism based on international law and UN resolutions quietly die to accommodate American-Israeli designs whose implicit or unspoken assumption is that the Palestinians do not and should not enjoy the right to legally and diplomatically advance their cause or defend themselves against military occupation.
The argument that a hopelessly Israel Lobby-captive US will move aside for others to make Palestine-Israel peace is not very realistic, at least at this period; emerging nations, unless sporting a unified, coordinated position and overcoming divergent interests, do not have the power and influence to implement a UN based peace settlement. Nor is the EU, a key, though not very unified player, willing to subordinate or imperil its inter-Atlantic strategic partnership with the US, the EU’s conundrum a barometer of how strongly and to what lengths the US will defend and shield Israel. The obstacle to advancing a fair settlement requiring Israeli adherence to international law by emerging nations and the EU—i.e., influential states in the international community—is and has always been this: the awesome asymmetry of military power between Israel and the Palestinians, and less so between it and its neighbors, underwritten by the open-ended guarantee of US military power.
What explains this Israel right or wrong lunacy, this congenitally dysfunctional advocacy in behalf of a foreign state? To make the rationally contingent argument that the US would not continue along this path if it did not think that its decades-long Israel-first policy is a success for itself and its partner, is a partial explanation that neglects a larger, more complex context. That context is not only the presumed alignment of US and Israeli hegemonic goals, but also lies in the domestic front.
US behavior flows from American historical, ideological, cultural, and economic foundations. However, this is confused by the fact that the US and Israel have become politically and strategically indistinguishable. American support for Israel is multi-causal including imperial folly and great power hubris, but unconditional support is a product of domestic influences. It’s clear that the “special relationship”—the depth, effectiveness, and pervasiveness of Israel’s influence in American politics, the reflexivity of US support from president to Congress, governor to state legislature—is obvious and puzzling, even bizarre.
This reality is due not only to the vaunted Israel Lobby, but also to the American media that serves as Israel’s uninhibited supporter and promoter. There is no deviation of opinion, across the entire spectrum of American media, local to national, including films and television, from the sustain-Israel-first-at-all-costs consensus.
If the American elite and policymaking establishment indeed “thinks” or presumes that its policies have been a success, it is certainly not because of objective reality. In addition to the imperial thrust, it is because of an enormously dominant pro-Israel ideology and narrative, and a false perception perpetuated by a powerful, organized Lobby and its pervasive support by the mass media and cultural image-makers. Israel’s influential intellectual supporters, conservative and liberal, developed the ideological rationales for the “special relationship” propagated through their dominance of research institutes, think tanks and in the media, and through their common presence as officeholders, appointees, and advisers. Most of the American intellectual class has been intimidated into blather on the topic of Israel and Zionism.
Israel and its interests became effectively institutionalized in the American socio-political system after decades of this Israel-influence build up in American politics, society, media, and culture.
In a rational world, US interests require, as they did since 1967, a viable, not a sham, Palestinian state that satisfies the Palestinians, dramatically reduces tensions through the normalization of Arab-Israeli relations, rolls back religious-political extremism, and generally works as a stabilizing factor in the Middle East. To settle Palestine-Israel justly and fairly is absolutely vital to maintaining any semblance of US influence in the Middle East. In a rational world, the Palestinians’ eminently reasonable UN bid is the best that could happen to and for the US.
Such a balanced approach is something the American people, despite the mighty efforts to control the official discourse, intrinsically understand. Support for Israel is neither a fixed determinism nor a deep cultural phenomenon regardless of evangelical and neo-conservative fervor, or the support of mainly white Republicans who internalize Israel’s mythos as their own. Support for Israel is the fruit of unrelenting organization and pressure. Majorities of Americans, in poll after poll, reject taking sides in the Palestine-Israel conflict, oppose Israel’s settlement building, and support the idea of fairly resolving the conflict. A majority even rejects going to war for Israel’s sake should it and Iran engage in open conflict, while half would not use US troops to help Israel even if attacked by a neighbor.
This is encouraging. Even while confounded by the Israel narrative beaming through their radios and television screens and printed in their newspapers, Americans simply desire neutrality. Even in the context of a pro-Israel media and politicians, these typical survey results belie the claim of monolithic cultural or religious foundations in support of Israel, or of an exceptional or special relationship or great public commitment, love, or bond. This suggests that, were an American president to “draw a line in the sand” in dealing with Israel, the American public would back him or her by a solid majority, albeit opposition hypocrisy and pandering to the Lobby remains a problem for any fair-minded government or politician.
The false fusion and institutionalization of American and Israeli interests may well lead to a disaster for the Israelis and Palestinians as well as the region. At the same time, the assumed categorical permanency of support for Israel may erode faster than anyone believes as the US inevitably confronts its own great crises in the cause of American, not foreign, interests.
– Issa Khalaf has a Ph.D. in political science and Middle East Studies from Oxford University.
In his testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence and Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Management hearing on “Iranian Terror Operations on American Soil,” Lawrence J. Korb counselled against military action, recommending instead that
The Obama administration should use the Iranian plot to convince our allies to recommit themselves to enforcing the current sanctions on Iran. This plot provides evidence of continued hostile Iranian behavior, evidence that should be used to bolster the international coalition against Iran.
Moreover, the United States should strengthen its own sanctions regime and press for stronger international sanctions that can garner the support of our allies in this coalition. The sanctions on Iran draw legitimacy from the fact that they have been approved by the United Nations and even involve some of Iran’s former allies, such as Russia and China. Maintaining the support of this robust coalition should be one of the primary goals of the U.S. response.
Simultaneously, the United States should continue its efforts to engage with the Iranian government. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted last month, “even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we had links to the Soviet Union. We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other.” Talking to Iran promotes stability in the U.S.-Iranian relationship and, to the greatest extent possible, denies the Iranian government the ability to use the specter of “evil America” as a means of unifying the Iranian people.
Concluding by saying that “Iranian aggression toward the United States cannot be tolerated,” the Center for American Progress senior fellow advised the Congressional hearing that “it is important that the U.S. response to the Iranian plot furthers our long-term goals: deterring Iranian aggression and protecting U.S. national security.”
Korb’s stated concerns for American national security, however, have to be weighed against the two decades the former assistant secretary of defense in Ronald Reagan’s administration has devoted to working for the release of Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy who “did more damage to the United States than any spy in history.” In a January 12 Foreign Policy op-ed, Korb revealed his role in Israel’s latest attempt to free Pollard:
On Jan. 4, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of the Knesset to read a letter that he had sent to the president of the United States, calling for the release of Jonathan Pollard. The Israeli leader admitted that Pollard, a former U.S. naval intelligence analyst serving a life sentence for espionage, “was acting as an agent of the Israeli government.” He nevertheless contended that Pollard’s 25 years in prison represented a sufficient punishment for his crimes and pointed to the support of a number of former U.S. officials and congressmen for clemency.
Netanyahu’s request did not come as a surprise to me. On Dec. 20, 2010, after speaking to the Knesset, I met with the prime minister and urged him to go public with his request. Unless he did so, I argued, the issue would not gain the traction it needed. I also pointed out to him that he needed to publicly apologize and pledge to never again recruit Americans to spy against their country, which would allow supporters of Pollard’s release to respond effectively to the argument that the Pollard case was business as usual for Israel.
Dismissing the concerns of U.S intelligence professionals and prosecutors, Korb cited Netanyahu’s letter, which noted that the United States is “based on fairness, justice, and mercy,” and urged Obama to commute Pollard’s sentence. “It is the right thing to do,” he said.
The Center for American Progress, where Korb is a senior fellow, is funded by major individual donors such as George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing, and Herb and Marion Sandler. In a February 18 interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Soros confidently asserted, “I would like to bet that the Iranian regime will not be there in a year’s time.”
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“We certainly see ourselves as ambassadors of Israel in the world, cultural ambassadors, hasbara ambassadors, also in regards to the political conflict.” – Idan Raichel, 2008 (“An interview with Idan Raichel,” translated from Hebrew in online magazine To Australia).
On Tuesday, 18 October, I and eight other Adalah-NY members stood in front of the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan, holding signs, singing songs, and handing flyers to passersby and concert-goers. The concert: Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter India.Arie, and “Israel’s most popular dread-locked musician” (according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Idan Raichel.
Despite one India.Arie fan’s claim that “I’m sure she doesn’t even know who the other performer is tonight; that’s how concerts get planned,” the show was actually part of a larger tour the two musicians have planned together to promote their joint album “Open Door.”
“Does ‘Open Door’ include Palestinians?” asked one of our signs, while another demanded, “Don’t entertain apartheid.”
“Idan Raichel can’t support apartheid,” countered one concert-goer. “He sleeps with a black woman!”
While this claim is as laughable as it is offensive, the more prevalent objection to cultural boycott actions is the idea that culture and politics are somehow separate. But as long as the Israeli government uses art and culture to cover up Israeli war crimes, culture and politics are clearly intertwined.
As is evident in Idan Raichel’s quotation above, the musician is willingly part of the Brand Israel campaign, which aims to bring arts to the world in order to, in the words of an Israeli foreign ministry official, “show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war” (“After Gaza, Israel grapples with crisis of isolation,” The New York Times, 18 March 2009).
The moral case for cultural boycotts
Adalah-NY stated in a recent press release that beyond Raichel’s collusion with the Israeli government’s cynical use of art, he has served in and performed for the Israeli army and actively expressed support for the Israel military during its brutal attacks on Gaza in the winter of 2008-09 and criticized Israelis who refused to serve in the army.
Raichel’s performance in 2007 in the Israeli settlement Nokdim led to a call for boycott by the Israeli organization Gush Shalom for collaborating with settlements that prevent any possibility of peace (“New Yorkers protest India.Arie concert with Israeli superstar Idan Raichel,” 18 October 2011).
In 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) called on global civil society to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, products, and events that normalize Israel’s multi-layered system of oppression against Palestinian people. Many international artists have heeded the call and have refused to perform in Israel, including Elvis Costello, Gil Scott-Heron, Devendra Banhart and The Pixies.
Cultural boycott actions can be fairly simple, and provide an opportunity for people to work together nationally. Our friends in Seattle alerted us and their friends in Olympia to Raichel’s tour and sent us the flyer they would be using on the tour’s opening night. We revised the flyer for a New York audience and sent it to our friends in Burlington and Boston. With minimal effort, we had coordinated a five-city protest action.
The moral case for cultural boycott should be clear, yet there are still some who question it on tactical grounds. Why focus on cultural boycott, they ask, when it is arguably the hardest case to make to a non-politically minded public? Over and over again, I have found cultural boycott actions to yield some of the richest dialogue I have seen about Palestine.
Holding peace-loving, liberal-seeming artists and audiences accountable
People who attend cultural events, particularly peace-loving liberal-seeming concerts such as India.Arie and Idan Raichel, are often quite receptive to arguments about social justice. They do not want to be accused of supporting racism, and they do not want to cross a picket line.
On 18 October, some people merely read our signs and moved on. Some questioned the connection between Raichel and the government. Some thanked us for being there. Some sneered and tore our flyers in half. One person took extra flyers to pass out inside. One debated whether to give up her $200 ticket, and then decided instead to yell “Free Palestine” during the show.
People engage in different ways, but they engage. They are pushed beyond their comfort zones. They begin to question, or, in the case of committed Zionists, they are at least reminded that they cannot get away with using culture to whitewash apartheid.
Shifting the discourse
Perhaps the most important gain of the cultural boycott in the United States so far has been the way in which it has shifted the discourse about Palestine. One of our first cultural boycott actions in New York was a small protest of the Batsheva Dance Company, who we discovered with very little notice was to perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March 2009.
The show happened to coincide with Israeli Apartheid Week, the annual week of actions around the world to bring attention to Israeli apartheid policy and to support the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, so we brought people together to sing, chant and distribute flyers.
Our press release garnered media attention, and a number of articles were written which questioned the tactic of cultural boycott. In so doing, however, these articles took for granted the idea that Israel can be called an apartheid state that should be protested against, and even at times boycotted. It was simply the cultural boycott that was being questioned. We had successfully shifted the discourse and opened an important conversation within the mainstream media.
Israel is desperate to salvage its global image and promote itself as a liberal democracy, but it is not working. As Idan Raichel and India.Arie continue their “Open Door” tour, people with conscience the world over are heeding the Palestinian civil society call for BDS. Cultural boycott actions highlight cultural workers’ complicity in Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, thereby opening the door to justice a little wider each day.
Hannah Mermelstein is a Palestine solidarity activist working with Adalah-NY and a school librarian based in Brooklyn, NY.
The extraordinary power of the U.S. government to assassinate people has, once again, been manifested in the assassination of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. No, that’s not Anwar al-Awlaki, the American Muslim cleric whom U.S. officials recently assassinated in Yemen. That’s Abdulrahm al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki.
There are several things that are especially fascinating about the U.S. government’s assassination of this American teenager, who apparently traveled to Yemen looking for his father before his father was assassinated:
First, the U.S. government has assassinated a minor.
Second, no one except the assassins knows why they assassinated the boy.
Third, the people who planned and carried out the assassination — from President Obama, to the Pentagon, to the CIA — aren’t talking.
Fourth, nobody can force them to explain why they killed the boy.
The assassination of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki reveals in stark clarity where the U.S. government’s imperialist foreign policy and resulting war on terrorism have brought us as nation and as a people. We now live in a country in which the president and his military and paramilitary forces now wield the omnipotent authority to assassinate anyone they want, anywhere in the world, with impunity and without having to provide an explanation to anyone.
In a news story on the assassination of the boy, Time magazine cites a young friend of Abdulrahman asking, “Who can’t America kill?”
Indeed! The fact, as discomforting as it might be, is that the president, the military, and the CIA can now kill anyone they want for whatever reason they want, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The assassination of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki confirms the extent of this extraordinary post-9/11 power now wielded by the U.S. national-security state.
It’s never been made clear the precise reasons for the assassination of the boy’s father, Anwar al-Awlaki. Some people speculate that it’s because he was exhorting Muslims to resist U.S. imperialist policies with violence. Others speculate that it was because he was actually conspiring to commit terrorist attacks against the United States. Others suggest that it was because he was purportedly a member of al-Qaeda. Others say it was because he was committing treason.
Neither President Obama, nor the Pentagon, nor the CIA have ever provided an explanation for the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, confirming, once again, that we now live in a country where government officials can assassinate anyone they want, foreigners and Americans alike, with impunity.
Why assassinate the 16-year old boy?
Was he supposedly doing what his father was doing? Was he allegedly exhorting Muslims to resist U.S. imperialism with force? Was he allegedly conspiring to commit terrorist attacks himself? Was he supposed to be a member of al-Qaeda?
We don’t know. The only people who know are President Obama, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA and, again, they’re not talking and, under the war on terrorism, are apparently not required to talk.
According to that Time magazine article, some unidentified U.S. official is quoted as saying that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” — collateral damage in the assassination of an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist who was killed as part of the same strike.
One problem, of course, is that that information might well be false, especially since it’s not under oath and comes from an unidentified official. Thus, the information is worthless insofar as understanding why the assassins ended the child’s life. Another problem is that even if the claim is true, an obvious question arises: Did the assassins know that 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was present and, therefore, would likely be killed in the attack?
Perhaps I should mention that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn’t the only teenager assassinated in the attack. Also assassinated were his teenage cousin and six other people with whom he was having dinner. Were they also alleged to have been terrorists? Again, we just don’t know. The president, the Pentagon, and the CIA just aren’t talking and apparently don’t have to.
Did the U.S government assassinate Abdulrahman al-Awlaki because he was the son of an alleged terrorist? Did they assassinate him to send a message to other would-be terrorists — that this is what will happen to your children (or other relatives) if you oppose the U.S. Empire? Did they assassinate him to preclude the possibility of his growing up with a thirst for vengeance and retaliation arising out of the assassination of his father?
We just don’t know. I think the idea is that while the government is disappearing people from life through assassination, we, the citizenry, are expected to not dwell on such things and instead to simply continue going about our daily lives with the understanding that the government is doing what is necessary to keep us safe.
But one thing is for sure: The assassination of 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki confirms that we now live in a country whose government has the unfettered authority to assassinate anyone it wants, adult or minor, foreigner or American, and remain mute about it.
This Halloween the neo-Malthusians, many dressed up as environmentalists, will have a big scare for us – the birth of the 7 billionth person on “space ship” earth. We will hear again of the demographic disaster sure to befall us with yet another mouth to feed. But a wondrous antidote to such fear mongering is one of the best books of the last year, The Coming Population Crash, by Fred Pearce. The book begins with a sound thrashing of Malthus and satisfyingly exposes the historical and conceptual links between his failed ideas and some unsavory strains of the current environmental movement such as the Carrying Capacity Network and Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, an anti-immigrant group.
At its heart the book conveys a simple fact. The rate of population growth has been decelerating for decades – well before the publication in the 1970s of Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist, implicitly racist, and dead wrong neo-Malthusian tract, The Population Bomb. It is amazing that many environmentalists are unaware of the crucial fact of slowing population growth, and that some react with hostility to it. Further, somewhere between 2050 and 2100, growth will stop and then come crashing down. It is not the sky that will be falling but the population. From Eastern Europe to Southern Italy to Singapore, that day has already arrived and sooner or later it will come to all parts of the planet. In fact, it may well be that in the next century the problem will be a population that is not large enough to be optimal; but that will be for the 22nd century humans to decide and act on.
And why has this happened? The key is the successful assault on patriarchy by women determined to control their fertility and their lives. Yes, prosperity helps; and population control programs, most notably in China, have had some effect, but they are not the essential factors. In rich countries and poor, religious and secular, Islamic and Christian, the trend is under way and irreversible. Of that there can be no doubt.
The reason is simple. In the latter half of the 20th Century the survival rate of infants increased dramatically so that women did not have to continue to have children for a reproductive lifetime to replenish the population. At the same time, the sexual revolution and easy contraception came along. Now bearing children takes only 10-15 percent of the adult lifetime of a woman.
As Pearce puts it, “Women have grabbed the chance created by that change. While having children remains important to most women’s lives, it is no longer the only thing or even the main thing they do. They cease to wield power only within the home. Now they are out of the front door. Across the rich world and in much of the poorer world too, women outnumber men on university campuses and dominate entry to professions like medicine, media and the law. They run the farms and even the governments, sometimes. The reproductive revolution has created a feminist revolution that has a long way to go. But it has already changed the world. For thousands of years men ruled the world. Patriarchy was regarded as necessary to produce the next generation. It was deeply engrained and tenaciously defended by men,” their social institutions, both church and state, and mores that condemned lesbianism and homosexuality.
The reproductive revolution kicked away this system of patriarchy, because it was no longer necessary to sustain populations. Women have always wanted equal rights. Feminism is not a new idea And some women have always broken free. But for most women the reproductive revolution has taken feminism from the ‘realm of utopia to practical possibility’.
So while we hear a great deal of alarmist talk about “peak oil” from certain quarters we scarcely ever hear of “peak population.” Fertility in the world peaked at between five and six children per woman in the 1950s. It is now down to 2.6 and still dropping. Replacement is about 2.1, and we are almost there.
What about the aging of this population? The other side of contemporary Malthusianism is the claim that an older population means more mouths to feed and fewer younger working hands to feed them. But that is also false. We have gone from a revolution in agriculture, where it takes an ever smaller fraction of the population, and an ever smaller amount of land per capita, to feed us, to an advanced technological revolution where, for example, productivity in manufacturing in the U.S. is growing exponentially with a rate constant of .035 per year and in all areas at an exponential rate of 0.02 per year. (Productivity here is output per person hour.) So when you hear a voice telling you that we cannot afford Social Security or Medicare benefits for all that is the voice of Malthus, always wrong, calling from his grave.
In fact, Pearce sees a great benefit in an older population. Not only will it be healthier than in the past and capable of making contributions well into the eighth decade of life, but it will be less testosterone driven, with more historical sense and more wisdom and less given to the calls of demagogues. Let us hope so.
In the end the greatest philosophical debate of the modern era may be the one between Marx (and Godwin) versus Malthus. Marx famously labeled Malthus’s views as a “slander on humanity” and its capabilities. Malthus’s views have been used, explicitly or implicitly, to justify some of the worst atrocities in human history, way beyond that of the great Irish famine. But in addition to being cruel, Malthus has always been wrong. He remains so to this day. If we ignore his false prophecies and those of his heirs, we have a very bright future indeed.
While he held the job of President Barack Obama’s peace process envoy, former US Senator George Mitchell generally maintained a good reputation. He came into the job with high regard because of his role in Northern Ireland.
During his Middle East tenure, Mitchell was notoriously tight-lipped, allowing people to believe that behind the stony face was a tough and fair “honest broker” who would privately take Israel to task in ways that the US could not do publicly.
But this was always an illusion. As detailed minutes of previously secret meetings, revealed in the Palestine Papers showed, Mitchell was very much ‘Israel’s lawyer’ – to use Aaron Miller’s famous term – just like all previous US envoys and officials. Mark Perry and I analyzed some of these documents revealing Mitchell’s role as Israel’s enabler.
Now, Mitchell has spoken out at London’s Chatham House on 17 October, and in his own words – as reported by Israel’s Haaretz. His comments largely confirm that in his general approach and in very specific ways, Mitchell was actively working to [further] Israel’s agenda and was never remotely an “honest broker.” Here are some highlights from the Haaretz article with my analysis.
Endorsing collaboration with occupation despite disastrous effects on Palestinians
From Haaretz:
“Order and personal security [in the West Bank] have been established in a way that never was previously,” stated Mitchell. “The problem is that that effort cannot be sustained in the absence of progress, or at least the hope of progress on the political front. It will break down internally on the Palestinian side, and it will break down in relations with the Israelis. And it is to President Abbas’ credit that, notwithstanding the fact that we haven’t been able to get into meaningful negotiations, he has maintained co-ordination and co-operation on the security front and it continues.
In other words, Mitchell sees it as positive and praiseworthy that Mahmoud Abbas is unconditionally collaborating with Israeli occupation forces without any benefit for Palestinians. When Mitchell talks about “order and personal security” he means order and personal security for Israeli occupiers and settlers and perhaps at certain periods for Palestinians restricted to the showcase Area A ghetto-cities of Ramallah and Nablus. But for Palestinians living all over the occupied West Bank and eastern occupied Jerusalem there is neither order nor personal security.
In the eastern occupied Jerusalem neighbhorhoods of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, hundreds of families live with the insecurity of knowing their houses are targeted for destruction for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
This is the “order and security” that Mitchell is praising.
Interfering in Palestinian politics, opposing reconciliation
From Haaretz:
Speaking on Gilad Shalit’s release, Mitchell said that the subject is extremely sensitive for Israelis, and that the deal has positive aspects. Yet he insisted that the prisoner exchange had yielded negative results, such as strengthening Hamas vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority.
Mitchell’s logic can be inferred: his priority was to keep the Palestinian leadership weak and divided so that the most subservient element, the Abbas-led PA, would be more vulnerable to a US-brokered deal on Israel’s terms. This contrasts markedly with his approach in Ireland, where the US supported a broad Irish nationalist common front encompassing the Republic of Ireland government, and the “moderate” and “extremist” nationalist parties in Northern Ireland to strengthen their negotiating positions vis a vis the British-backed unionists.
Shock, horror, Israel might have to “choose” democracy
Haaretz:
Changing demographic realities will compel Israel to make fateful choices, Mitchell suggested.
“Israel, if the two state solution is lost, will have to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic state,” he said. “And that’s a choice they should not have to make.”
Mitchell makes clear with these words that he shares Israel’s racist perception of Palestinians not as rights-bearing human beings but as a ‘demographic threat’ to Jewish supremacy.
His priority – like that of the rest of the US Zionist foreign policy establishment, and like President Obama – is not justice, or even “peace” but first and foremost maintaining racial and colonial privileges for Israeli Jews. What alarms Mitchell most of all is that Israelis should ever have to abide by democratic principles in which all people have equal political rights, regardless of their membership in one or another ethnoreligious group.
Israel, Mitchell tells us, should never be forced to choose democracy. Instead it was his job to try to goad Palestinians into accepting a bantustan on Israel’s terms that would spare Israel that terrible “choice.”
Palestinian Authority not subservient enough for Mitchell’s liking
If we take the Haaretz report as a complete and accurate report of Mitchell’s comments (admittedly something that can’t be taken for granted), what’s notable is that he attacks the PA for not seizing the opportunity of Israel’s so-called 10-month “settlement freeze” but he was silent about the fact that the freeze was fake all along:
Haaretz says:
Mitchell also criticized the Palestinian Authority’s responses to American efforts to renew negotiations with Israel. He claimed that the Palestinians were unwilling to accept the 10-month settlement construction freeze declared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2009; the Palestinians contended that this freeze was “useless,” and refused to engage in negotiations.
“They refused to enter into the negotiations until nine months of the 10 had elapsed,” Mitchell said. “Once they entered, they then said [the freeze] was indispensable. What had been worse than useless a few months before then became indispensable and they said they would not remain in the talks unless that indispensable element were extended.”
A few crucial facts: First, the “settlement freeze” never even nominally included eastern occupied Jerusalem, where Israel has been most aggressive in demolishing Palestinian homes and expanding its racist colonies. Second, in the rest of the West Bank the “freeze” was never a freeze since it only included “new” construction and excluded the thousands of colony homes at various stages of completion.
Finally, once the formal 10-month “freeze” ended, Israel immediately embarked on a building boom which Israel’s Peace Now termed “the most active period in many years.”
So Mitchell doesn’t appear to have been concerned about the reality, but only about the PA’s willingness to go along with a fiction that there was a “freeze” when there never was.
No matter which personalities are appointed to “peace process” roles in a US administration, a commitment first and foremost to Israel’s racist and colonial agenda and to the safety and “security” of its occupation are always the highest priorities, with Palestinian rights nowhere on the horizon.
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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