Friday 23 January 2009
"Exterminate All The Brutes"
Soldiers fighting in northern Gaza were afforded an "inspirational" visit from two leading rabbis, who explained to them that there are no "innocents" in Gaza, so everyone there is a legitimate target, quoting a famous passage from Psalms calling on the Lord to seize the infants of Israel's oppressors and dash them against the rocks.
NOAM CHOMSKY
On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel 's 2006 invasion of Lebanon , which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City . It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.
In his retrospective "Parsing Gains of Gaza War," New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner cited this achievement as one of the most significant of the gains. Israel calculated that it would be advantageous to appear to "go crazy," causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back to the 1950s. "The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day," Bronner wrote, "when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza ." The tactic of "going crazy" appears to have been successful, Bronner concluded: there are "limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war that they will seek to rein in Hamas," the elected government. That is another long-standing doctrine of state terror. I don't, incidentally, recall the Times retrospective "Parsing Gains of Chechnya War," though the gains were great.
The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes.
Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza , saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honor the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters.
The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar.To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defense" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut , proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists.
All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities." As Israel 's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labor government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name.
Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel 's tactics both in the current attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to `educate' Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon , where "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians -- the families and employers of the militants -- to restrain Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny , and other notable attempts at "education."
Israel has taken pains to make clear its dedication to these guiding principles. NYT correspondent Stephen Erlanger reports that Israeli human rights groups are "troubled by Israel's strikes on buildings they believe should be classified as civilian, like the parliament, police stations and the presidential palace" - and, we may add, villages, homes, densely populated refugee camps, water and sewage systems, hospitals, schools and universities, mosques, UN relief facilities, ambulances, and indeed anything that might relieve the pain of the unworthy victims. A senior Israeli intelligence officer explained that the IDF attacked "both aspects of Hamas -- its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing," the latter a euphemism for the civilian society. "He argued that Hamas was all of a piece," Erlanger continues, "and in a war, its instruments of political and social control were as legitimate a target as its rocket caches." Erlanger and his editors add no comment about the open advocacy, and practice, of massive terrorism targeting civilians, though correspondents and columnists signal their tolerance or even explicit advocacy of war crimes, as noted. But keeping to the norm, Erlanger does not fail to stress that Hamas rocketing is "an obvious violation of the principle of discrimination and fits the classic definition of terrorism."
More than 25,000 displaced Palestinians are currently taking shelter in U.N. facilities across the Gaza Strip
Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society. Gerges may be too kind. It is highly unlikely that Israeli and American officials - or the media and other commentators - do not appreciate these facts. Rather, they implicitly adopt the traditional perspective of those who monopolize means of violence: our mailed fist can crush any opposition, and if our furious assault has a heavy civilian toll, that's all to the good: perhaps the remnants will be properly educated.
IDF officers clearly understand that they are crushing the civilian society. Ethan Bronner quotes an Israeli Colonel who says that he and his men are not much "impressed with the Hamas fighters." "They are villagers with guns," said a gunner on an armored personnel carrier. They resemble the victims of the murderous IDF "iron fist" operations in occupied southern Lebanon in 1985, directed by Shimon Peres, one of the great terrorist commanders of the era of Reagan's "War on Terror." During these operations, Israeli commanders and strategic analysts explained that the victims were "terrorist villagers," difficult to eradicate because "these terrorists operate with the support of most of the local population." An Israeli commander complained that "the terrorist...has many eyes here, because he lives here," while the military correspondent of the Jerusalem Post described the problems Israeli forces faced in combating the "terrorist mercenary," "fanatics, all of whom are sufficiently dedicated to their causes to go on running the risk of being killed while operating against the IDF," which must "maintain order and security" in occupied southern Lebanon despite "the price the inhabitants will have to pay." The problem has been familiar to Americans in South Vietnam , Russians in Afghanistan , Germans in occupied Europe , and other aggressors that find themselves implementing the Gur-Eban-Friedman doctrine.
Gerges believes that US-Israeli state terror will fail: Hamas, he writes, "cannot be wiped out without massacring half a million Palestinians. If Israel succeeds in killing Hamas's senior leaders, a new generation, more radical than the present, will swiftly replace them. Hamas is a fact of life. It is not going away, and it will not raise the white flag regardless of how many casualties it suffers."
Perhaps, but there is often a tendency to underestimate the efficacy of violence. It is particularly odd that such a belief should be held in the United States . Why are we here?
Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel ." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel , which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.
Such details as those mentioned earlier, though minor, nevertheless teach us something about ourselves and our clients. So do others. To mention another one, as the latest US-Israeli assault on Gaza began, a small boat, the Dignity, was on its way from Cyprus to Gaza . The doctors and human rights activists aboard intended to violate Israel 's criminal blockade and to bring medical supplies to the trapped population. The ship was intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval vessels, which rammed it severely, almost sinking it, though it managed to limp to Lebanon . Israel issued the routine lies, refuted by the journalists and passengers aboard, including CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul and former US representative and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. That is a serious crime -- much worse, for example, than hijacking boats off the coast of Somalia . It passed with little notice. The tacit acceptance of such crimes reflects the understanding that Gaza is occupied territory, and that Israel is entitled to maintain its siege, even authorized by the guardians of international order to carry out crimes on the high seas to implement its programs of punishing the civilian population for disobedience to its commands - under pretexts to which we return, almost universally accepted but clearly untenable.
The lack of attention again makes sense. For decades, Israel had been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon , killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel , including secret prison/torture chambers, to hold as hostages for many years. Since the practices are routine, why treat the new crime with more than a yawn? Cyprus and Lebanon reacted quite differently, but who are they in the scheme of things?
Who cares, for example, if the editors of Lebanon 's Daily Star, generally pro-Western, write that "Some 1.5 million people in Gaza are being subjected to the murderous ministrations of one of the world's most technologically advanced but morally regressive military machines. It is often suggested that the Palestinians have become to the Arab world what the Jews were to pre-World War II Europe, and there is some truth to this interpretation. How sickeningly appropriate, then, that just as Europeans and North Americans looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the Arabs are finding a way to do nothing as the Israelis slaughter Palestinian children." Perhaps the most shameful of the Arab regimes is the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, the beneficiary of most US military aid, apart from Israel .
According to the Lebanese press, Israel still "routinely abducts Lebanese civilians from the Lebanese side of the Blue Line [the international border], most recently in December 2008." And of course "Israeli planes violate Lebanese airspace on a daily basis in violation of UN Resolution 1701" (Lebanese scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Daily Star, Jan. 13). That too has been happening for a long time. In condemning Israel 's invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the prominent Israeli strategic analyst Zeev Maoz wrote in the Israeli press that " Israel has violated Lebanese airspace by carrying out aerial reconnaissance missions virtually every day since its withdrawal from Southern Lebanon six years ago.True, these aerial overflights did not cause any Lebanese casualties, but a border violation is a border violation. Here too, Israel does not hold a higher moral ground." And in general, there is no basis for the "wall-to-wall consensus in Israel that the war against the Hezbollah in Lebanon is a just and moral war," a consensus "based on selective and short-term memory, on an introvert world view, and on double standards. This is not a just war, the use of force is excessive and indiscriminate, and its ultimate aim is extortion."
As Maoz also reminds his Israeli readers, overflights with sonic booms to terrorize Lebanese are the least of Israeli crimes in Lebanon, even apart from its five invasions since 1978: "On July 28, 1988 Israeli Special Forces abducted Sheikh Obeid, and on May 21, 1994 Israel abducted Mustafa Dirani, who was responsible for capturing the Israeli pilot Ron Arad [when he was bombing Lebanon in 1986]. Israel held these and other 20 Lebanese who were captured under undisclosed circumstances in prison for prolonged periods without trial. They were held as human `bargaining chips.' Apparently, abduction of Israelis for the purpose of prisoners' exchange is morally reprehensible, and militarily punishable when it is the Hezbollah who does the abducting, but not if Israel is doing the very same thing," and on a far grander scale and over many years.
Israel 's regular practices are significant even apart from what they reveal about Israeli criminality and Western support for it. As Maoz indicates, these practices underscore the utter hypocrisy of the standard claim that Israel had the right to invade Lebanon once again in 2006 when soldiers were captured at the border, the first cross-border action by Hezbollah in the six years since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, which it occupied in violation of Security Council orders going back 22 years, while during these six years Israel violated the border almost daily with impunity, and silence here.
The hypocrisy is, again, routine. Thus Thomas Friedman, while explaining how the lesser breeds are to be "educated" by terrorist violence, writes that Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006, once again destroying much of southern Lebanon and Beirut while killing another 1000 civilians, was a just act of self-defence, responding to Hezbollah's crime of "launching an unprovoked war across the U.N.-recognized Israel-Lebanon border, after Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Lebanon." Putting aside the deceit, by the same logic, terrorist attacks against Israelis that are far more destructive and murderous than any that have taken place would be fully justified in response to Israel 's criminal practices in Lebanon and on the high seas, which vastly exceed Hezbollah's crime of capturing two soldiers at the border. The veteran Middle East specialist of the New York Times surely knows about these crimes, at least if he reads his own newspaper: for example, the 18th paragraph of a story on prisoner exchange in November 1983 which observes, casually, that 37 of the Arab prisoners "had been seized recently by the Israeli Navy as they tried to make their way from Cyprus to Tripoli," north of Beirut.
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
As I write, another boat is on its way from Cyprus to Gaza , "carrying urgently needed medical supplies in sealed boxes, cleared by customs at the Larnaca International Airport and the Port of Larnaca ," the organizers report. Passengers include members of European Parliaments and physicians. Israel has been notified of their humanitarian intent. With sufficient popular pressure, they might achieve their mission in peace.
The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category - except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" - exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation.
The US-Israeli assault on Gaza escalated in January 2006, a few months after the formal withdrawal, when Palestinians committed a truly heinous crime: they voted "the wrong way" in a free election. Like others, Palestinians learned that one does not disobey with impunity the commands of the Master, who continues to prate of his "yearning for democracy," without eliciting ridicule from the educated classes, another impressive achievement.
Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of US military technology - used in violation of international and even US law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality. Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel , almost all grants." Israel 's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."
Greece 's response to US-backed Israeli crimes is rather different from the craven performance of the leaders of most of Europe . The distinction reveals that Washington may have been quite realistic in regarding Greece as part of the Near East, not Europe , until the overthrow of its US-backed fascist dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps Greece is just too civilized to be part of Europe .
Were anyone to find the timing of the arms deliveries to Israel curious, and inquire further, the Pentagon has an answer: the shipment would arrive too late to escalate the Gaza attack, and the military equipment, whatever it may be, is to be pre-positioned in Israel for eventual use by the US military. That may be accurate. One of the many services that Israel performs for its patron is to provide it with a valuable military base at the periphery of the world's major energy resources. It can therefore serve as a forward base for US aggression - or to use the technical terms, to "defend the Gulf" and "ensure stability."
The huge flow of arms to Israel serves many subsidiary purposes. Middle East policy analyst Mouin Rabbani observes that Israel can test newly developed weapons systems against defenseless targets. This is of value to Israel and the US "twice over, in fact, because less effective versions of these same weapons systems are subsequently sold at hugely inflated prices to Arab states, which effectively subsidizes the U.S. weapons industry and U.S. military grants to Israel." These are additional functions of Israel in the US-dominated Middle East system, and among the reasons why Israel is so favored by the state authorities, along with a wide range of US high-tech corporations, and of course military industry and intelligence.
Israel apart, the US is by far the world's major arms supplier. The recent New America Foundation report concludes that " U.S. arms and military training played a role in 20 of the world's 27 major wars in 2007," earning the US $23 billion in receipts, increasing to $32 billion in 2008. Small wonder that among the numerous UN resolutions that the US opposed in the December 2008 UN session was one calling for regulation of the arms trade. In 2006, the US was alone in voting against the treaty, but in November 2008 it was joined by a partner: Zimbabwe .
There were other notable votes at the December UN session. A resolution on "the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination" was adopted by 173 to 5 (US, Israel , Pacific island dependencies). The vote strongly reaffirms US-Israeli rejectionism, in international isolation. Similarly a resolution on "universal freedom of travel and the vital importance of family reunification" was adopted with US, Israel , and Pacific dependencies opposed, presumably with Palestinians in mind. In voting against the right to development the US lost Israel but gained Ukraine .
In voting against the "right to food," the US was alone, a particular striking fact in the face of the enormous global food crisis, dwarfing the financial crisis that threatens western economies.
There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination.
One of the heroic volunteers in Gaza , Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, described the scene of horror as an "All out war against the civilian population of Gaza ." He estimated that half the casualties are women and children. The men are almost all civilians as well, by civilized standards. Gilbert reports that he had scarcely seen a military casualty among the 100s of bodies. The IDF concurs. Hamas "made a point of fighting at a distance -- or not at all," Ethan Bronner reports while "parsing the gains" of the US-Israeli assault. So Hamas's manpower remains intact, and it was mostly civilians who suffered pain: a positive outcome, according to widely-held doctrine.
These estimates were confirmed by UN humanitarian chief John Holmes, who informed reporters that it is "a fair presumption" that most of the civilians killed were women and children in a humanitarian crisis that is "worsening day by day as the violence continues." But we could be comforted by the words of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the leading dove in the current electoral campaign, who assured the world that there is no "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza , thanks to Israeli benevolence.
Like others who care about human beings and their fate, Gilbert and Holmes pleaded for a ceasefire. But not yet. "At the United Nations, the United States prevented the Security Council from issuing a formal statement on Saturday night calling for an immediate ceasefire," the New York Times mentioned in passing. The official reason was that "there was no indication Hamas would abide by any agreement." In the annals of justifications for delighting in slaughter, this must rank among the most cynical. That of course was Bush and Rice, soon to be displaced by Obama who compassionately repeats that "if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that." He is referring to Israeli children, not the many hundreds being torn to shreds in Gaza by US arms. Beyond that Obama maintained his silence.
A few days later, under intense international pressure, the US backed a Security Council resolution calling for a "durable ceasefire." It passed 14-0, US abstaining. Israel and US hawks were angered that the US did not veto it, as usual. The abstention, however, sufficed to give Israel if not a green at least a yellow light to escalate the violence, as it did right up to virtually the moment of the inauguration, as had been predicted.
As the ceasefire (theoretically) went into effect on January18, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights released its figures for the final day of the assault: 54 Palestinians killed including 43 unarmed civilians, 17 of them children, while the IDF continued to bombard civilian homes and UN schools. The death toll, they estimated, mounted to 1,184, including 844 civilians, 281 of them children. The IDF continued to use incendiary bombs across the Gaza Strip, and to destroy houses and agricultural land, forcing civilians to flee their homes. A few hours later, Reuters reported more than 1,300 killed. The staff of the Al Mezan Center, which also carefully monitors casualties and destruction, visited areas that had previously been inaccessible because of incessant heavy bombardment. They discovered dozens of civilian corpses decomposing under the rubble of destroyed houses or removed by Israeli bulldozers. Entire urban blocks had disappeared.
The figures for killed and wounded are surely an underestimate. And it is unlikely that there will be any inquiry into these atrocities. Crimes of official enemies are subjected to rigorous investigation, but our own are systematically ignored. General practice, again, and understandable on the part of the masters.
The Security Council Resolution called for stopping the flow of arms into Gaza . The US and Israel (Rice-Livni) soon reached an agreement on measures to ensure this result, concentrating on Iranian arms. There is no need to stop smuggling of US arms into Israel , because there is no smuggling: the huge flow of arms is quite public, even when not reported, as in the case of the arms shipment announced as the slaughter in Gaza was proceeding.
The Resolution also called for "ensur[ing] the sustained re-opening of the crossing points on the basis of the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access between the Palestinian Authority and Israel"; that Agreement determined that crossings to Gaza would be operated on a continuous basis and that Israel would also allow the crossing of goods and people between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Rice-Livni agreement had nothing to say about this aspect of the Security Council Resolution. The US and Israel had in fact already abandoned the 2005 Agreement as part of their punishment of Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election in January 2006. Rice's press conference after the Rice-Livni agreement emphasized Washington's continuing efforts to undermine the results of the one free election in the Arab world: "There is much that can be done," she said, "to bring Gaza out of the dark of Hamas's reign and into the light of the very good governance the Palestinian Authority can bring" - at least, can bring as long as it remains a loyal client, rife with corruption and willing to carry out harsh repression, but obedient.
Returning from a visit to the Arab world, Fawwaz Gerges strongly affirmed what others on the scene have reported. The effect of the US-Israeli offensive in Gaza has been to infuriate the populations and to arouse bitter hatred of the aggressors and their collaborators."Suffice it to say that the so-called moderate Arab states [that is, those that take their orders from Washington ] are on the defensive, and that the resistance front led by Iran and Syria is the main beneficiary. Once again, Israel and the Bush administration have handed the Iranian leadership a sweet victory." Furthermore, "Hamas will likely emerge as a more powerful political force than before and will likely top Fatah, the ruling apparatus of President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority," Rice's favorites.
It is worth bearing in mind that the Arab world is not scrupulously protected from the only regular live TV coverage of what is happening in Gaza, namely the "calm and balanced analysis of the chaos and destruction" provided by the outstanding correspondents of al-Jazeera, offering "a stark alternative to terrestrial channels," as reported by the London Financial Times. In the 105 countries lacking our efficient modalities of self-censorship, people can see what is happening hourly, and the impact is said to be very great. In the US , the New York Times reports, "the near-total blackout...is no doubt related to the sharp criticism Al Jazeera received from the United States government during the initial stages of the war in Iraq for its coverage of the American invasion." Cheney and Rumsfeld objected, so, obviously, the independent media could only obey.
There is much sober debate about what the attackers hoped to achieve. Some of objectives are commonly discussed, among them, restoring what is called "the deterrent capacity" that Israel lost as a result of its failures in Lebanon in 2006 - that is, the capacity to terrorize any potential opponent into submission. There are, however, more fundamental objectives that tend be ignored, though they too seem fairly obvious when we take a look at recent history.
Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza , protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court . That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem , in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley , about one-third of the West Bank . What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints.
The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel , and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies.
The ravings of the political and military leaders are mild as compared to the preaching of rabbinical authorities. They are not marginal figures. On the contrary, they are highly influential in the army and in the settler movement, who Zertal and Eldar reveal to be "lords of the land," with enormous impact on policy. Soldiers fighting in northern Gaza were afforded an "inspirational" visit from two leading rabbis, who explained to them that there are no "innocents" in Gaza , so everyone there is a legitimate target, quoting a famous passage from Psalms calling on the Lord to seize the infants of Israel 's oppressors and dash them against the rocks. The rabbis were breaking no new ground. A year earlier, the former chief Sephardic rabbi wrote to Prime Minister Olmert, informing him that all civilians in Gaza are collectively guilty for rocket attacks, so that there is "absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings," as the Jerusalem Post reported his ruling. His son, chief rabbi of Safed, elaborated: "If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand, and if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."
Similar views are expressed by prominent American secular figures. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz explained in the liberal online journal Huffington Post that all Lebanese are legitimate targets of Israeli violence. Lebanon 's citizens are "paying the price" for supporting "terrorism" - that is, for supporting resistance to Israel 's invasion. Accordingly, Lebanese civilians are no more immune to attack than Austrians who supported the Nazis. The fatwa of the Sephardic rabbi applies to them. In a video on the Jerusalem Post website, Dershowitz went on to ridicule talk of excessive kill ratios of Palestinians to Israelis: it should be increased to 1000-to-one, he said, or even 1000-to-zero, meaning the brutes should be completely exterminated. Of course, he is referring to "terrorists," a broad category that includes the victims of Israeli power, since " Israel never targets civilians," he emphatically declared. It follows that Palestinians, Lebanese, Tunisians, in fact anyone who gets in the way of the ruthless armies of the Holy State is a terrorist, or an accidental victim of their just crimes.
It is not easy to find historical counterparts to these performances. It is perhaps of some interest that they are considered entirely appropriate in the reigning intellectual and moral culture - when they are produced on "our side," that is; from the mouths of official enemies such words would elicit righteous outrage and calls for massive preemptive violence in revenge.
The claim that "our side" never targets civilians is familiar doctrine among those who monopolize the means of violence. And there is some truth to it. We do not generally try to kill particular civilians. Rather, we carry out murderous actions that we know will slaughter many civilians, but without specific intent to kill particular ones. In law, the routine practices might fall under the category of depraved indifference, but that is not an adequate designation for standard imperial practice and doctrine. It is more similar to walking down a street knowing that we might kill ants, but without intent to do so, because they rank so low that it just doesn't matter. The same is true when Israel carries out actions that it knows will kill the "grasshoppers" and "two-legged beasts" who happen to infest the lands it "liberates." There is no good term for this form of moral depravity, arguably worse than deliberate murder, and all too familiar.
In the former Palestine , the rightful owners (by divine decree, according to the "lords of the land") may decide to grant the drugged roaches a few scattered parcels. Not by right, however: "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land," Prime Minister Olmert informed a joint session of Congress in May 2006 to rousing applause. At the same time he announced his "convergence" program for taking over what is valuable in the West Bank , leaving the Palestinians to rot in isolated cantons. He was not specific about the borders of the "entire land," but then, the Zionist enterprise never has been, for good reasons: permanent expansion is a very important internal dynamic. If Olmert is still faithful to his origins in Likud, he may have meant both sides of the Jordan , including the current state of Jordan , at least valuable parts of it.
Our people's "eternal and historic right to this entire land" contrasts dramatically with the lack of any right of self-determination for the temporary inhabitants, the Palestinians. As noted earlier, the latter stand was reiterated by Israel and its patron in Washington in December 2008, in their usual isolation and accompanied by resounding silence.
The plans that Olmert sketched in 2006 have since been abandoned as not sufficiently extreme. But what replaces the convergence program, and the actions that proceed daily to implement it, are approximately the same in general conception. They trace back to the earliest days of the occupation, when Defense Minister Moshe Dayan explained poetically that "the situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against his will...You Palestinians, as a nation, don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you." You will "live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave," while we take what we want.
That these programs are criminal has never been in doubt. Immediately after the 1967 war, the Israeli government was informed by its highest legal authority, Teodor Meron, that "civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention," the foundation of international humanitarian law. Israel 's Justice Minister concurred. The World Court unanimously endorsed the essential conclusion in 2004, and the Israeli High Court technically agreed while disagreeing in practice, in its usual style.
In the West Bank, Israel can pursue its criminal programs with US support and no disturbance, thanks to its effective military control and by now the cooperation of the collaborationist Palestinian security forces armed and trained by the US and allied dictatorships. It can also carry out regular assassinations and other crimes, while settlers rampage under IDF protection. But while the West Bank has been effectively subdued by terror, there is still resistance in the other half of Palestine , the Gaza Strip. That too must be quelled for the US-Israeli programs of annexation and destruction of Palestine to proceed undisturbed.
Hence the invasion of Gaza .
The timing of the invasion was presumably influenced by the coming Israeli election. Ehud Barak, who was lagging badly in the polls, gained one parliamentary seat for every 40 Arabs killed in the early days of the slaughter, Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen calculated.
That may change, however. As the crimes passed beyond what the carefully honed Israeli propaganda campaign was able to suppress, even confirmed Israeli hawks became concerned that the carnage is "Destroying [ Israel 's] soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America " (Ari Shavit). Shavit was particularly concerned about Israel 's "shelling a United Nations facility...on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem ," an act that is "beyond lunacy," he felt.
Adding a few details, the "facility" was the UN compound in Gaza City , which contained the UNRWA warehouse. The shelling destroyed "hundreds of tons of emergency food and medicines set for distribution today to shelters, hospitals and feeding centres," according to UNRWA director John Ging. Military strikes at the same time destroyed two floors of the al-Quds hospital, setting it ablaze, and also a second warehouse run by the Palestinian Red Crescent society. The hospital in the densely-populated Tal-Hawa neighbourhood was destroyed by Israeli tanks "after hundreds of frightened Gazans had taken shelter inside as Israeli ground forces pushed into the neighbourhood," AP reported.
There was nothing left to salvage inside the smoldering ruins of the hospital. "They shelled the building, the hospital building. It caught fire. We tried to evacuate the sick people and the injured and the people who were there. Firefighters arrived and put out the fire, which burst into flames again and they put it out again and it came back for the third time," paramedic Ahmad Al-Haz told AP. It was suspected that the blaze might have been set by white phosphorous, also suspected in numerous other fires and serious burn injuries.
The suspicions were confirmed by Amnesty International after the cessation of the intense bombardment made inquiry possible. Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel 's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and undeniable," AI reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients... White phosphorus landing on skin can burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks on civilians.
It is, however, a mistake to concentrate too much on Israel 's gross violations of jus in bello , the laws designed to bar practices that are too savage. The invasion itself is a far more serious crime. And if Israel had inflicted the horrendous damage by bows and arrows, it would still be a criminal act of extreme depravity.
Aggression always has a pretext: in this case, that Israel 's patience had "run out" in the face of Hamas rocket attacks, as Barak put it. The mantra that is endlessly repeated is that Israel has the right to use force to defend itself. The thesis is partially defensible. The rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris . The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?
Any resort to force carries a heavy burden of proof, and we have to ask whether it can be met in the case of Israel 's effort to quell any resistance to its daily criminal actions in Gaza and in the West Bank , where they still continue relentlessly after more than 40 years. Perhaps I may quote myself in an interview in the Israeli press on Olmert's announced convergence plans for the West Bank: "The US and Israel do not tolerate any resistance to these plans, preferring to pretend - falsely of course - that `there is no partner,' as they proceed with programs that go back a long way. We may recall that Gaza and the West Bank are recognized to be a unit, so if resistance to the US-Israeli annexation-cantonization programs is legitimate in the West Bank, it is in Gaza too."
Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah observed that "There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel 's extrajudicial killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never stopped for a day during the truce. The western-backed Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has acceded to all Israel 's demands. Under the proud eye of United States military advisors, Abbas has assembled `security forces' to fight the resistance on Israel 's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian in the West Bank from Israel 's relentless colonization" - thanks to firm US backing. The respected Palestinian parliamentarian Dr. Mustapha Barghouti adds that after Bush's Annapolis extravaganza in November 2007, with much uplifting rhetoric about dedication to peace and justice, Israeli attacks on Palestinians escalated sharply, with an almost 50% increase in the West Bank, along with a sharp increase in settlements and Israeli check points. Obviously these criminal actions are not a response to rockets from Gaza , though the converse may well be the case, Barghouti plausibly suggests.
The reactions to crimes of an occupying power can be condemned as criminal and politically foolish, but those who offer no alternative have no moral grounds to issue such judgments. The conclusion holds with particular force for those in the US who choose to be directly implicated in Israel 's ongoing crimes -- by their words, their actions, or their silence. All the more so because there are very clear non-violent alternatives - which, however, have the disadvantage that they bar the programs of illegal expansion.
Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel . Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words.
The more detailed record is informative. The Palestinian National Council formally accepted the international consensus in 1988. The response of the Shamir-Peres coalition government, affirmed by James Baker's State Department, was that there cannot be an "additional Palestinian state" between Israel and Jordan - the latter already a Palestinian state by US-Israeli dictate. The Oslo accords that followed put to the side potential Palestinian national rights, and the threat that they might be realized in some meaningful form was systematically undermined through the Oslo years by Israel 's steady expansion of illegal settlements. Settlement accelerated in 2000, President Clinton's and Prime Minister Barak's last year, when negotiations took place at Camp David against that background.
After blaming Yassir Arafat for the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton backtracked, and recognized that the US-Israeli proposals were too extremist to be acceptable to any Palestinian. In December 2000, he presented his "parameters," vague but more forthcoming. He then announced that both sides had accepted the parameters, while both expressed reservations. The two sides met in Taba Egypt in January 2001 and came very close to an agreement, and would have been able to do so in a few more days, they said in their final press conference. But the negotiations were cancelled prematurely by Ehud Barak. That week in Taba is the one break in over 30 years of US-Israeli rejectionism. There is no reason why that one break in the record cannot be resumed.
The preferred version, recently reiterated by Ethan Bronner, is that "Many abroad recall Mr. Barak as the prime minister who in 2000 went further than any Israeli leader in peace offers to the Palestinians, only to see the deal fail and explode in a violent Palestinian uprising that drove him from power." It's true that "many abroad" believe this deceitful fairy tale, thanks to what Bronner and too many of his colleagues call "journalism".
It is commonly claimed that a two-state solution is now unattainable because if the IDF tried to remove settlers, it would lead to a civil war. That may be true, but much more argument is needed. Without resorting to force to expel illegal settlers, the IDF could simply withdraw to whatever boundaries are established by negotiations. The settlers beyond those boundaries would have the choice of leaving their subsidized homes to return to Israel , or to remain under Palestinian authority. The same was true of the carefully staged "national trauma" in Gaza in 2005, so transparently fraudulent that it was ridiculed by Israeli commentators. It would have sufficed for Israel to announce that the IDF would withdraw, and the settlers who were subsidized to enjoy their life in Gaza would have quietly climbed into the lorries provided to them and travelled to their new subsidized residences in the West Bank . But that would not have produced tragic photos of agonized children and passionate calls of "never again."
To summarize, contrary to the claim that is constantly reiterated, Israel has no right to use force to defend itself against rockets from Gaza , even if they are regarded as terrorist crimes. Furthermore, the reasons are transparent. The pretext for launching the attack is without merit.
There is also a narrower question. Does Israel have peaceful short-term alternatives to the use of force in response to rockets from Gaza . One short-term alternative would be to accept a ceasefire. Sometimes Israel has done so, while instantly violating it. The most recent and currently relevant case is June 2008. The ceasefire called for opening the border crossings to "allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza ." Israel formally agreed, but immediately announced that it would not abide by the agreement and open the borders until Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in June 2006.
The steady drumbeat of accusations about the capture of Shalit is, again, blatant hypocrisy, even putting aside Israel 's long history of kidnapping. In this case, the hypocrisy could not be more glaring. One day before Hamas captured Shalit, Israeli soldiers entered Gaza City and kidnapped two civilians, the Muammar brothers, bringing them to Israel to join the thousands of other prisoners held there, almost 1000 reportedly without charge. Kidnapping civilians is a far more serious crime than capturing a soldier of an attacking army, but it was barely reported in contrast to the furor over Shalit. And all that remains in memory, blocking peace, is the capture of Shalit, another reflection of the difference between humans and two-legged beasts. Shalit should be returned - in a fair prisoner exchange.
It was after the capture of Shalit that Israel 's unrelenting military attack against Gaza passed from merely vicious to truly sadistic. But it is well to recall that even before his capture, Israel had fired more than 7,700 shells at northern Gaza after its September withdrawal, eliciting virtually no comment.
After rejecting the June 2008 ceasefire it had formally accepted, Israel maintained its siege. We may recall that a siege is an act of war. In fact, Israel has always insisted on an even stronger principle: hampering access to the outside world, even well short of a siege, is an act of war, justifying massive violence in response. Interference with Israel 's passage through the Straits of Tiran was part of the pretext for Israel 's invasion of Egypt (with France and England ) in 1956, and for its launching of the June 1967 war. The siege of Gaza is total, not partial, apart from occasional willingness of the occupiers to relax it slightly. And it is vastly more harmful to Gazans than closing the Straits of Tiran was to Israel . Supporters of Israeli doctrines and actions should therefore have no problem justifying rocket attacks on Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip.
Of course, again we run into the nullifying principle: This is us, that is them.
Israel not only maintained the siege after June 2008, but did so with extreme rigor. It even prevented UNRWA from replenishing its stores, "so when the ceasefire broke down, we ran out of food for the 750,000 who depend on us," UNRWA director John Ging informed the BBC.
Despite the Israeli siege, rocketing sharply reduced. The ceasefire broke down on November 4 with an Israeli raid into Gaza , leading to the death of 6 Palestinians, and a retaliatory barrage of rockets (with no injuries). The pretext for the raid was that Israel had detected a tunnel in Gaza that might have been intended for use to capture another Israeli soldier. The pretext is transparently absurd, as a number of commentators have noted. If such a tunnel existed, and reached the border, Israel could easily have barred it right there. But as usual, the ludicrous Israeli pretext was deemed credible.
What was the reason for the Israeli raid? We have no internal evidence about Israeli planning, but we do know that the raid came shortly before scheduled Hamas-Fatah talks in Cairo aimed at "reconciling their differences and creating a single, unified government," British correspondent Rory McCarthy reported. That was to be the first Fatah-Hamas meeting since the June 2007 civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza , and would have been a significant step towards advancing diplomatic efforts. There is a long history of Israel provocations to deter the threat of diplomacy, some already mentioned. This may have been another one.
The civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza is commonly described as a Hamas military coup, demonstrating again their evil nature. The real world is a little different. The civil war was incited by the US and Israel , in a crude attempt at a military coup to overturn the free elections that brought Hamas to power. That has been public knowledge at least since April 2008, when David Rose published in Vanity Fair a detailed and documented account of how Bush, Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams "backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever." The account was recently corroborated once again in the Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 12, 2009) by Norman Olsen, who served for 26 years in the Foreign Service, including four years working in the Gaza Strip and four years at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, and then moved on to become associate coordinator for counterterrorism at the Department of State. Olson and his son detail the State Department shenanigans intended to ensure that their candidate, Abbas, would win in the January 2006 elections - in which case it would have been hailed as a triumph of democracy. After the election-fixing failed, they turned to punishment of the Palestinians and arming of a militia run by Fatah strong-man Muhammad Dahlan, but "Dahlan's thugs moved too soon" and a Hamas pre-emptive strike undermined the coup attempt, leading to far harsher US-Israeli measures to punish the disobedient people of Gaza. The Party Line is more acceptable.
After Israel broke the June 2008 ceasefire (such as it was) in November, the siege was tightened further, with even more disastrous consequences for the population. According to Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, "On Nov. 5, Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza, vastly reducing and at times denying food supplies, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and parts for water and sanitation systems..." During November, an average of 4.6 trucks of food per day entered Gaza from Israel compared with an average of 123 trucks per day in October. Spare parts for the repair and maintenance of water-related equipment have been denied entry for over a year.The World Health Organization just reported that half of Gaza 's ambulances are now out of order" - and the rest soon became targets for Israeli attack. Gaza's only power station was forced to suspend operation for lack of fuel, and could not be started up again because they needed spare parts, which had been sitting in the Israeli port of Ashdod for 8 months. Shortage of electricity led to a 300% increase in burn cases at Shifaa' hospital in the Gaza Strip, resulting from efforts to light wood fires. Israel barred shipment of Chlorine, so that by mid-December in Gaza City and the north access to water was limited to six hours every three days. The human consequences are not counted among Palestinian victims of Israeli terror.
After the November 4 Israeli attack, both sides escalated violence (all deaths were Palestinian) until the ceasefire formally ended on Dec. 19, and Prime Minister Olmert authorized the full-scale invasion.
A few days earlier Hamas had proposed to return to the original July ceasefire agreement, which Israel had not observed. Historian and former Carter administration high official Robert Pastor passed the proposal to a "senior official" in the IDF, but Israel did not respond. The head of Shin Bet, Israel 's internal security agency, was quoted in Israeli sources on December 21 as saying that Hamas is interested in continuing the "calm" with Israel , while its military wing is continuing preparations for conflict.
"There clearly was an alternative to the military approach to stopping the rockets," Pastor said, keeping to the narrow issue of Gaza . There was also a more far-reaching alternative, which is rarely discussed: namely, accepting a political settlement including all of the occupied territories.
Israel's senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar reports that shortly before Israel launched its full-scale invasion on Saturday Dec. 27, "Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal announced on the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a `cessation of aggression' - he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crossing as of 2005, before Hamas won the elections and later took over the region. That arrangement was for the crossing to be managed jointly by Egypt , the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas," and as noted earlier, called for opening of the crossings to desperately needed supplies.
A standard claim of the more vulgar apologists for Israeli violence is that in the case of the current assault, "as in so many instances in the past half century - the Lebanon War of 1982, the `Iron Fist' response to the 1988 intifada, the Lebanon War of 2006 - the Israelis have reacted to intolerable acts of terror with a determination to inflict terrible pain, to teach the enemy a lesson" (New Yorker editor David Remnick). The 2006 invasion can be justified only on the grounds of appalling cynicism, as already discussed. The reference to the vicious response to the 1988 intifada is too depraved even to discuss; a sympathetic interpretation might be that it reflects astonishing ignorance. But Remnick's claim about the 1982 invasion is quite common, a remarkable feat of incessant propaganda, which merits a few reminders.
Uncontroversially, the Israel-Lebanon border was quiet for a year before the Israeli invasion, at least from Lebanon to Israel , north to south. Through the year, the PLO scrupulously observed a US-initiated ceasefire, despite constant Israeli provocations, including bombing with many civilian casualties, presumably intended to elicit some reaction that could be used to justify Israel 's carefully planned invasion. The best Israel could achieve was two light symbolic responses. It then invaded with a pretext too absurd to be taken seriously.
The invasion had precisely nothing to do with "intolerable acts of terror," though it did have to do with intolerable acts: of diplomacy. That has never been obscure. Shortly after the US-backed invasion began, Israel 's leading academic specialist on the Palestinians, Yehoshua Porath - no dove -- wrote that Arafat's success in maintaining the ceasefire constituted "a veritable catastrophe in the eyes of the Israeli government," since it opened the way to a political settlement. The government hoped that the PLO would resort to terrorism, undermining the threat that it would be "a legitimate negotiating partner for future political accommodations."
The facts were well-understood in Israel , and not concealed. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir stated that Israel went to war because there was "a terrible danger... Not so much a military one as a political one," prompting the fine Israeli satirist B. Michael to write that "the lame excuse of a military danger or a danger to the Galilee is dead." We "have removed the political danger" by striking first, in time; now, "Thank God, there is no one to talk to." Historian Benny Morris recognized that the PLO had observed the ceasefire, and explained that "the war's inevitability rested on the PLO as a political threat to Israel and to Israel 's hold on the occupied territories." Others have frankly acknowledged the unchallenged facts.
In a front-page think-piece on the latest Gaza invasion, NYT correspondent Steven Lee Meyers writes that "In some ways, the Gaza attacks were reminiscent of the gamble Israel took, and largely lost, in Lebanon in 1982 [when] it invaded to eliminate the threat of Yasir Arafat's forces." Correct, but not in the sense he has in mind. In 1982, as in 2008, it was necessary to eliminate the threat of political settlement.
The hope of Israeli propagandists has been that Western intellectuals and media would buy the tale that Israel reacted to rockets raining on the Galilee , "intolerable acts of terror." And they have not been disappointed.
It is not that Israel does not want peace: everyone wants peace, even Hitler. The question is: on what terms? From its origins, the Zionist movement has understood that to achieve its goals, the best strategy would be to delay political settlement, meanwhile slowly building facts on the ground. Even the occasional agreements, as in 1947, were recognized by the leadership to be temporary steps towards further expansion. The 1982 Lebanon war was a dramatic example of the desperate fear of diplomacy. It was followed by Israeli support for Hamas so as to undermine the secular PLO and its irritating peace initiatives. Another case that should be familiar is Israeli provocations before the 1967 war designed to elicit a Syrian response that could be used as a pretext for violence and takeover of more land - at least 80% of the incidents, according to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.
The story goes far back. The official history of the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish military force, describes the assassination of the religious Jewish poet Jacob de Haan in 1924, accused of conspiring with the traditional Jewish community (the Old Yishuv) and the Arab Higher Committee against the new immigrants and their settlement enterprise. And there have been numerous examples since.
The effort to delay political accommodation has always made perfect sense, as do the accompanying lies about how "there is no partner for peace." It is hard to think of another way to take over land where you are not wanted.
Similar reasons underlie Israel 's preference for expansion over security. Its violation of the ceasefire on November 4 2009 is one of many recent examples.
An Amnesty International chronology reports that the June 2008 ceasefire had "brought enormous improvements in the quality of life in Sderot and other Israeli villages near Gaza, where before the ceasefire residents lived in fear of the next Palestinian rocket strike. However, nearby in the Gaza Strip the Israeli blockade remains in place and the population has so far seen few dividends from the ceasefire." But the gains in security for Israel towns near Gaza were evidently outweighed by the felt need to deter diplomatic moves that might impede West Bank expansion, and to crush any remaining resistance within Palestine .
The preference for expansion over security has been particularly evident since Israel's fateful decision in 1971, backed by Henry Kissinger, to reject the offer of a full peace treaty by President Sadat of Egypt, offering nothing to the Palestinians - an agreement that the US and Israel were compelled to accept at Camp David eight years later, after a major war that was a near disaster for Israel. A peace treaty with Egypt would have ended any significant security threat, but there was an unacceptable quid pro quo: Israel would have had to abandon its extensive settlement programs in the northeastern Sinai. Security was a lower priority than expansion, as it still is. Substantial evidence for this basic conclusion is provided in a magisterial study of Israel 's security and foreign policy by Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land .
Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'."
One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel." There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel " are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible. Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands.
Isn't It Time For A War Crimes Tribunal
By Robert Fisk
21 January, 2009
The Independent
It's a wrap, a doddle, an Israeli ceasefire just in time for Barack Obama to have a squeaky-clean inauguration with all the world looking at the streets of Washington rather than the rubble of Gaza. Condi and Ms Livni thought their new arms-monitoring agreement – reached without a single Arab being involved – would work. Ban Ki-moon welcomed the unilateral truce. The great and the good gathered for a Sharm el-Sheikh summit. Only Hamas itself was not consulted. Which led, of course, to a few wrinkles in the plan. First, before declaring its own ceasefire, Hamas fired off more rockets at Israel, proving that Israel's primary war aim – to stop the missiles – had failed. Then Cairo shrugged off the deal because no one was going to set up electronic surveillance equipment on Egyptian soil. And not one European leader travelling to the region suggested the survivors might be helped if Israel, the EU and the US ended the food and fuel siege of Gaza.
After killing hundreds of women and children, Israel was the good guy again, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire that Hamas was certain to break. But Obama will be smiling on Tuesday. Was not this the reason, after all, why Israel suddenly wanted a truce?
Egypt's objections may be theatre – the US spent £18m last year training Egyptian security men to stop arms smuggling into Gaza and since the US bails out Egypt's economy, ignores the corruption of its regime and goes on backing Hosni Mubarak, there's sure to be a "compromise" very soon.
And Hamas has had its claws cut. Israel's informers in Gaza handed over the locations of its homes and hideouts and the government of Gaza must be wondering if they can ever close down the spy rings. Hamas thought its militia was the Hizbollah – a serious error – and that the world would eventually come to its aid. The world (although not its pompous leaders) felt enormous pity for the Palestinians, but not for the cynical men of Hamas who staged a coup in Gaza in 2007 which killed 151 Palestinians. As usual, the European statesmen appeared hopelessly out of touch with what their own electorates thought.
And history was quite forgotten. The Hamas rockets were the result of the food and fuel siege; Israel broke Hamas's own truce on 4 and 17 November. Forgotten is the fact Hamas won the 2006 elections, although Israel has killed a clutch of the victors.
And there'll be little time for the peacemakers of Sharm el-Sheikh to reflect on the three UN schools targeted by the Israelis and the slaughter of the civilians inside. Poor old Ban Ki-moon. He tried to make his voice heard just before the ceasefire, saying Israel's troops had acted "outrageously" and should be "punished" for the third school killing. Some hope. At a Beirut press conference, he admitted he had failed to get a call through to Israel's Foreign Minister to complain.
It was pathetic. When I asked Mr Ban if he would consider a UN war crimes tribunal in Gaza, he said this would not be for him to "determine". But only a few journalists bothered to listen to him and his officials were quickly folding up the UN flag on the table. About time too. Bring back the League of Nations. All is forgiven.
What no one noticed yesterday – not the Arabs nor the Israelis nor the portentous men from Europe – was that the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting last night was opening on the 90th anniversary – to the day – of the opening of the 1919 Paris peace conference which created the modern Middle East. One of its main topics was "the borders of Palestine". There followed the Versailles Treaty. And we know what happened then. The rest really is history. Bring on the ghosts.
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Thursday 22 January 2009
The Collapse of Capitalism and the Safety Net of Gold
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For Ponzi schemes to succeed, they must expand faster than the request for redemptions. If they do not, they will collapse. This is what happened to Bernard L Madoff Investment Services, the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The same is about to happen to capitalism. Although capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme, credit-based economies, sic capitalism, and Ponzi schemes share the same fatal flaw. Both must constantly expand or they are in danger of collapse. Today, because capitalist economies are no longer expanding, but contracting, their continued contraction will lead to collapse. PUNDITS PUNDIDIOTS & PREDICTIONS Dr. Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment (Princeton University Press, 2005), has done remarkable work regarding the ability to accurately predict future events. In a highly disciplined scientific study, Dr. Tetlock had asked experts to predict future events and over 20 years analyzed their predictive accuracy and methodology of thinking. Tetlock's study concluded that experts are no better in predicting the future than anyone else; in fact, the better known the expert, often the lower the ability to accurately predict. Louis Menand's review of Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment in The New Yorker perhaps says it best: ..Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they [experts] are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. On March 2, 2007, Dr. Tetlock spoke to the Positive Deviant Network by speaker phone as he was unable to attend in person. Martha and I were in the audience along with other members of the PDN. The previous day we had distributed my 148 page analysis of the US and global economy to the PDN. In How To Survive The Crisis And Prosper In The Process, The Time of the Vulture, I had predicted prices of US and global real estate would fall 40 to 70 % and the stock market 70 to 90 %, plunging the US and perhaps the world into another Great Depression. At the time in the early spring of 2007, there was no evidence of an impending economic disaster. The next day when the feedback came back from the PDN, it was neither pleasant nor positive. Perhaps it was a variant of the "shoot the messenger" syndrome, but there was loud and vocal opposition to the dire economic predictions I had made. Later that day, again by speaker phone, when PDN members were given the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with Dr. Tetlock, PDN member Dr. James Hardt, a neuroscientist and researcher on the effect of brain waves on human consciousness took the opportunity to say that he had read my economic analysis and found it remarkable. The comment by Dr. Hardt was especially meaningful as Dr. Hardt had scored far higher than all other PDN members in both knowledge-based and predictive tests. The PDN experience underscored the fact that the truth—when unpleasant and predicted—is rarely welcome in any venue. The reason why pundits are popular is not because they tell the truth. Pundits are popular because they tell people what they want to hear, the truth not withstanding. The unpleasant truth is that the truth when unpleasant has never been popular. In the past, I would have laid the cause of America's ignorance of economic issues at the foot of corporate and government interests who gain the most in today's corrupt environment. But the truth is the present state of ignorance and corruption could not have occurred without the abiding and willing denial of the America people. Americans themselves have chosen denial, sound bites and slogans over substantive discourse and understanding. While in the short term it has been easier to do than the alternative, i.e. to think, in the long term it will prove fatal. The bill for collective denial and ignorance is coming due in America; and, when it is paid—as it will be—America will never be the same. Nor, will the world THE LAST STAGE OF CAPITALISM AND PONZI FINANCE Like Ponzi schemes, capitalist economies must constantly expand or they will collapse. This is because capitalism is a system wherein credit-based money has been substituted for real money, i.e. savings-based money such as gold and silver; and credit-based money soon turns into compounding debt. The end of such systems has always been bankruptcy. When credit-based economies contract, governments, businesses and families are no longer able to pay the principal and compounding interest on their debt and economic collapse results. The current system began when the Bank of England, England's central bank, started issuing credit-based paper banknotes in place of gold and silver in 1694. This system was transferred by private bankers to America in 1913 in the form of the Federal Reserve Bank, the US central bank equivalent of the Bank of England. The credit-based central bank system then spread after WWII to the rest of the world. As the credit-based system spread, so too did the resultant compounding debt and now, the day of reckoning for everyone has arrived. WHY IS EVERYONE SURPRISED? When credit-based capitalist economies contract, they are unable to pay and service previously incurred debt. This is now happening in the US, the UK, the EU and Japan. After economic contraction, corporate, individual and government bankruptcy comes next. After sustained economic contraction, systemic collapse occurs. Alan Greenspan, the pundit's pundit for much of the last three decades, presided over much of the expansion of global credit during and after the 1980s, an expansion that led to extraordinary and unsustainable levels of global debt. The truth is levels of US debt have been untenable for much longer than we believe. Buckminster Fuller stated that the US was actually bankrupt in the 1930s, and that we have only postponed the realization of such and the inevitable day of reckoning by various forms of ledger sheet cheating. While Alan Greenspan reigned as chief pundit for those who believed his economic prognostications to be true, the man who really understood our credit-based economy was Hyman Minsky, a little-known economist who, unlike Greenspan, happened to be right. Hyman Minsky's perhaps greatest contribution to the current economic dialogue is his "financial instability hypothesis", which postulates that when capitalist systems mature, they became increasingly unstable. Minsky's theory did not sit well with those in government and Wall Street who presided over increasingly mature capitalist markets. They instead much preferred the more positive outlook of Alan Greenspan, "the thinking man's Abby Joseph Cohen", who publicly saw only a "bit of froth" as the greatest financial storm of the century, the next Great Depression, was brewing. IF ALAN GREENSPAN WAS A CARDIOLOGIST ALL HIS PATIENTS WOULD BE DEAD In Minsky's "financial instability hypothesis", the ability to pay the principal and interest on debt is the critical marker. There are three types of "units" in Minksy's financial instability model, each type/unit more unstable than the previous. The first type, hedge financing units, possess the ability to pay both principal and interest payments from existing cash flow. This is the optimal mode. The second type, speculative finance units, cannot repay principal payments but can meet their existing obligations by" rolling over" their debt. The third type in Minsky's model are Ponzi units which can only pay down debt by selling assets or by borrowing. This is the most common form of debt repayment today. This is because as per Minsky's model, capitalist markets are now mature—perhaps overly mature and somewhat incontinent and beginning to smell—and have thus made the progression from hedge to speculative to Ponzi finance. BERNARD MADOFF'S BROTHER SAM In 1960, from the very beginning when Bernard Madoff first began soliciting money, the end of his scheme was destined. But because Bernard Madoff was unusually bright and capable, his Ponzi scheme lasted far longer and was far more successful than any such previous scam. The same can be also said for the Ponzi scheme of Bernie's brother, Sam, aka "Uncle Sam". But unlike Bernie, Uncle Sam did not think up his scheme on his own. He was acting as the agent of the original schemers in England who realized that England's economy was no longer expanding as it had previously in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, in the early 20th century, in 1913, the original schemers convinced Uncle Sam to run the same scheme in America that had been so profitable to them in England. The scheme was capitalism, def. commerce in combination with capital markets founded on credit-based paper money issued from a central bank. The scheme was to profit by indebting businesses, entrepreneurs, workers and savers and government and, as bankers, the schemers would get rich off the hard work, savings and productivity of others; and, in the US, their scheme worked as well as it had in England. As the economy expanded and the nation became increasingly indebted, bankers became increasingly wealthy. It is no coincidence that the "financial services sector, sic the paradigm of parasites" recently comprised the largest share of both the UK and US economies, economies which correspondingly had the lowest rate of savings in the world. It is also no coincidence that as the indebtedness of each nation grew the share of economic activity and the exorbitant salaries and bonuses of bankers grew as well. Unfortunately for the host and parasite in capitalist economies, there is a limit to how much a parasite can safely take from the host before the host dies, a limit only discovered after the process has gone too far. In December 2008, the end came for Bernie's Bernard L Madoff Investment Services. In 2009, the same will happen to his brother, Sam who is now using Ponzi finance to pay for US borrowing. In 2009 or some time shortly thereafter, the credit-based paper money scheme of bankers, sic capitalism, will bring down what but a few decades ago was the most powerful economy in the world, the United States of America. Uncle Sam, just like his brother Bernie, is toast. "Look, they're circling the wagons." "But we're not in the circle." "Thought you would be?" When wagon trains would come under attack, the wagon masters would "circle the wagons" for protection. Such is happening today as capitalism itself is now under attack. What Americans are finding out, however, is that only the bankers are currently inside the circle—bankers are now the only ones being protected, the very ones responsible for the crisis in the first place. Observers and especially Americans might believe that something is wrong with this picture. What they do not understand is that the picture is a perfect reflection of the power dynamic underlying capitalism. Bankers could not have accomplished their nefarious ends had they not first secured the full cooperation and protection of government. This they did in England when they promised King William they would extend all the credit he wanted to wage his wars. This was replicated in the US when private bankers staged a midnight coup by passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 which illegally transferred the right to issue money from government into the hands of private bankers. This is the reason the US government has first protected the bankers, not the public, in this crisis. Bankers give government the unlimited credit that governments overspend, thereby indebting the nation and future generations into perpetuity. The US government bailout of bankers, TARP, is "owe-back" time. The rest is history, or is about to become so. When people have their eyes shut and their minds closed, they will not see nor understand what is happening to them. Trust me on this, although many will not understand what is about to happen, it will not prevent it from happening. What we are about to experience is an economic tragedy in personal terms that will exceed anything in recent memory. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s will not equal what is now about to be; and those who thought their adherence to a belief system about God was faith are now about to find out the difference. IGNORANCE DENIAL CONSEQUENCES Uncle Sam is now engaged in the same activity that caused Bernie's investors so much trouble, the use of Ponzi finance to pay bills. It is estimated that the US deficit may increase this year by two trillion dollars. As recently as 1980, the total US debt after 200 years was only $980 billion dollars. Now, 28 years later, US indebtedness will probably exceed $12 trillion, a very, very large sum—unless of course it is not going to be paid back. The truth is all countries are now running deficits and all major economies have determined that extraordinary levels of fiscal stimulus are needed to avert a global deflationary collapse. Where is all the money going to come from? While some economic answers are difficult to come by, the answer to that question is very simple. The currencies of all countries are now fiat, meaning they are but paper coupons printed at will by their governments. The answer is: Governments will print the money they need. It is said that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke studied the Great Depression and concluded the road not taken was the correct answer to what would have prevented the Great Depression, that infinite liquidity could have prevented the deflationary collapse if made available in time. Ben Bernanke's answer closely resembles that which would be given by a focus group of New York heroin addicts, that only an unlimited and immediate supply of heroin would offset the irreparable pain and harm that would otherwise result if nothing is done.
HELICOPTER BEN IS AFFECTIONATELY KNOWN AS NEEDLE BEN TO THE CREDIT JUNKIES ON WALL STREET THE EXPIRATION DATE WRITTEN IN INVISIBLE INK ON PAPER MONEY WILL BE DETERMINED BY THE SPEED OF THE PRINTING PRESSES When will the yen go to zero? When will the dollar disintegrate? When will the pound become worthless? When will the time be too late? Listen to the speed of the presses As money is made overnight The faster the presses are running The closer the time will be for flight But no one can tell the hour When money will lose its worth For the future is still too cloudy And tomorrow's yet to be birthed. But the day is coming so trust me Don't trust the money they print Whether a dollar a euro or peso It ain't comin' out of a mint It's printed with ink on some paper But it used to be silver or gold When money was more than a promise Not a fraud that we've been sold THE PRINTING PRESSES ARE RUNNING This process has already begun. M1, the measure of "narrow money aggregates", the amount of cash and coins in circulation and in overnight deposits has been rising in the past six months. M-3, the broadest measure of monetary aggregates is no longer made public by the US government. But M-3 will explode upwards as governments seek to provide even more credit to deflating markets, a fact the US government does not want known. M-1, NARROW MONEY AGGREGATES 13 WEEK RATE-OF-CHANGE. US FEDERAL RESERVE Week ending June 9, 2008 - 0.1 % Week ending July 28, 2008 + 2.9 % Week ending Aug 25, 2008 + 6.2 % Week ending Sept 29, 2008 + 8.8 % Week ending Oct 27, 2008 +14.8 % Week ending Nov 24, 2008 +22.6 % Week ending Dec 29, 2008 +32.2 % Ben Bernanke's antidote to a US deflationary depression may well result in hyperinflation. Hyperinflation will spell the end of the US currency because hyperinflation removes all remaining vestiges of confidence in paper money.
In the near future, paper money will become increasingly worthless as all governments increase the printing of their respective currencies hoping to prevent deflationary forces from progressing. Governments will be helpless to do so but this will only cause more money to be printed in the futile hope of containing that which cannot be contained. No experiment with paper money has every worked. The primary intent has always been to spend what does not exist. This underlying intent will in the end destroy whatever paper money has built in the interim. Were it not for the safety concerns about the ink used in the printing of paper money, in the future the best use for paper money would be as toilet paper—of course, the quality of the paper would have to be much improved in order to gain wider acceptance.
FREEDOM VERSUS FRAUD A CRASH COURSE IN THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS Bernard Madoff's fraud lasted 48 years and took in $50 billion. However, the monetary fraud perpetrated by bankers in collusion with government has lasted far longer and has taken in far more than Bernie's home grown Ponzi scheme—and the pain and losses will be commensurately greater as well. Ludwig von Misis, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich Hayek are the best known proponents of the Austrian School of Economics. Like Hyman Minsky, they are not as well known as John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. The reason being is that they served the truth whereas Keynes, Friedman and Greenspan served power. From Wikipedia: Austrian School economists advocate the strict enforcement of voluntary contractual agreements between economic agents, the smallest possible imposition of coercive (especially government-imposed) commercial transactions and the maximum openness to individual choice (including free choice as to the voluntary means of exchange). What most do not understand is that today's markets are not free. Believing they are free and being told it is so is not the same as being so. Government intervention occurs no less in today's capitalist markets than it did in yesterday's communist markets. The only difference being method and subtlety. The manipulation of the gold price, intervention in foreign exchange markets, the raising and lowering of interest rates, the use of tax incentives to promote/distort economic activity are all signs of government intervention. Compared to communism, capitalist markets indeed appear free. Compared to free markets, capitalism is a rigged game. GOLD MODERN ECONOMICS AND THE TRUTH We are now approaching the end-game, the resolution of past economic sins that cannot be banished by government intervention. Indeed, it is government intervention at the direction of bankers that caused today's problems. More of the same will only result in more of the same. The bankers' scam could not have happened had not King William allowed England's bankers to replace England's gold and silver coins with paper bank notes in 1694. Capitalism's resultant empire known first as imperialism and later as globalization lasted 315 years. It is now about to end. As paper currencies increasingly lose value, the price of gold and silver will rise. As those in government know all too well, gold and silver move inversely to the value of paper assets in fiat systems. Economics is not rocket science and neither is fraud. But "modern economics" is a misnomer, modern economics is a monetary fraud clothed in the guise of free markets. If you truly want to be free, this is something you might want to think about—that is, if you want to think. PROFESSOR FEKETE AND THE AUSTRIANS Professor Fekete was responsible for bringing the major figures of the Austrian School of Economics to my attention. When this era is over, when the excessive debt created by excessive credit has swept away the hubris of Keynes and Friedman, the Austrians will have been vindicated by history. The theories of the Austrian School were dismissed in the universities that taught that gold and the gold standard were relics of a bygone era, relics which had no relevance to the financially sophisticated markets of today. Recent events have proved the universities wrong and the Austrian School of Economics right. I am forever indebted to Professor Fekete for his introduction to these theories, theories which clearly explain the events of today. I still remember the article in which Professor Antal Fekete pointed that that bank access to cheap credit would not prevent systemic deflationary collapse in these times. That such a policy would result in bankers borrowing freely at the trough of government credit but the credit would not be passed on. Instead, it would be used by banks to invest in bonds and other "safer" financial assets. This is exactly what is happening today and I can do no more than to suggest that those seriously interested in this crisis to further acquaint themselves with Professor Fekete's writings, and if possible, to attend his upcoming lectures March 27-29 in Szombathely, Hungary. I will also be giving a talk. For information, contact GSUL@t-online.hu. Lies will seek you out, but the truth must be sought. Faith, gold and silver will be priceless in the days ahead. Darryl Robert Schoon Blog www.posdev.net/pdn/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogger=drs&Itemid=81 |
Confidence is the essential ingredient in the global con game called capitalism now being run by bankers and their unwitting co-conspirators in government, a game that is now about to end.
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Tuesday 20 January 2009
If the state can't save us, we need a licence to print our own money
It bypasses greedy banks. It recharges local economies. It's time to think seriously about an alternative currency
- The Guardian, Tuesday 20 January 2009
In Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, the descendants of nuclear holocaust survivors seek amid the rubble the key to recovering their lost civilisation. They end up believing that the answer is to re-invent the atom bomb. I was reminded of this when I read the government's new plans to save us from the credit crunch. It intends - at gobsmacking public expense - to persuade the banks to start lending again, at levels similar to those of 2007. Isn't this what caused the problem in the first place? Are insane levels of lending really the solution to a crisis caused by insane levels of lending?
Yes, I know that without money there's no business, and without business there are no jobs. I also know that most of the money in circulation is issued, through fractional reserve banking, in the form of debt. This means that you can't solve one problem (a lack of money) without causing another (a mountain of debt). There must be a better way than this.
This isn't my subject and I am venturing way beyond my pay grade. But I want to introduce you to another way of negotiating a credit crunch, which requires no moral hazard, no hair of the dog and no public spending. I'm relying, in explaining it, on the former currency trader and central banker Bernard Lietaer.
In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange". The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.
But the projects that have proved most effective were those inspired by the German economist Silvio Gessell, who became finance minister in Gustav Landauer's doomed Bavarian republic. He proposed that communities seeking to rescue themselves from economic collapse should issue their own currency. To discourage people from hoarding it, they should impose a fee (called demurrage), which has the same effect as negative interest. The back of each banknote would contain 12 boxes. For the note to remain valid, the owner had to buy a stamp every month and stick it in one of the boxes. It would be withdrawn from circulation after a year. Money of this kind is called stamp scrip: a privately issued currency that becomes less valuable the longer you hold on to it.
One of the first places to experiment with this scheme was the small German town of Schwanenkirchen. In 1923, hyperinflation had caused a credit crunch of a different kind. A Dr Hebecker, owner of a coalmine in Schwanenkirchen, told his workers that if they wouldn't accept the coal-backed stamp scrip he had invented - the Wara - he would have to close the mine. He promised to exchange it, in the first instance, for food. The scheme immediately took off. It saved both the mine and the town. It was soon adopted by 2,000 corporations across Germany. But in 1931, under pressure from the central bank, the ministry of finance closed the project down, with catastrophic consequences for the communities that had come to depend on it. Lietaer points out that the only remaining option for the German economy was ruthless centralised economic planning. Would Hitler have come to power if the Wara and similar schemes had been allowed to survive?
The Austrian town of Wörgl also tried out Gessell's idea, in 1932. Like most communities in Europe at the time, it suffered from mass unemployment and a shortage of money for public works. Instead of spending the town's meagre funds on new works, the mayor put them on deposit as a guarantee for the stamp scrip he issued. By paying workers in the new currency, he paved the streets, restored the water system and built a bridge, new houses and a ski jump. Because they would soon lose their value, Wörgl's own schillings circulated much faster than the official money, with the result that each unit of currency generated 12 to 14 times more employment. Scores of other towns sought to copy the scheme, at which point - in 1933 - the central bank stamped it out. Wörgl's workers were thrown out of work again.
Similar projects took off at the same time in dozens of countries. Almost all of them were closed down (just one, Switzerland's WIR system, still exists) as the central banks panicked about losing their monopoly over the control of money. Roosevelt prohibited complementary currencies by executive decree, though they might have offered a faster, cheaper and more effective means of pulling the US out of the Depression than his New Deal.
No one is suggesting that we replace official currencies with local scrip: this is a complementary system, not an alternative. Nor does Lietaer propose this as a solution to all economic ills. But even before you consider how it could be improved through modern information technology, several features of Gessell's system grab your attention. We need not wait for the government or the central bank to save us: we can set this system up ourselves. It costs taxpayers nothing. It bypasses the greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals. It can be tailored to the needs of the community. It does not require - as Eddie George, the former governor of the Bank of England, insisted - that one part of the country be squeezed so that another can prosper.
Perhaps most importantly, a demurrage system reverses the ecological problem of discount rates. If you have to pay to keep your money, the later you receive your income, the more valuable it will be. So it makes economic sense, under this system, to invest long term. As resources in the ground are a better store of value than money in the bank, the system encourages their conservation.
I make no claim to expertise. I'm not qualified to identify the flaws in this scheme, nor am I confident that I have made the best case for it. All I ask is that, if you haven't come across it before, you don't dismiss it before learning more. As we confront the failure of the government's first bailout and the astonishing costs of the second, isn't it time we considered the alternatives?
Yes, I know that without money there's no business, and without business there are no jobs. I also know that most of the money in circulation is issued, through fractional reserve banking, in the form of debt. This means that you can't solve one problem (a lack of money) without causing another (a mountain of debt). There must be a better way than this.
This isn't my subject and I am venturing way beyond my pay grade. But I want to introduce you to another way of negotiating a credit crunch, which requires no moral hazard, no hair of the dog and no public spending. I'm relying, in explaining it, on the former currency trader and central banker Bernard Lietaer.
In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange". The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.
But the projects that have proved most effective were those inspired by the German economist Silvio Gessell, who became finance minister in Gustav Landauer's doomed Bavarian republic. He proposed that communities seeking to rescue themselves from economic collapse should issue their own currency. To discourage people from hoarding it, they should impose a fee (called demurrage), which has the same effect as negative interest. The back of each banknote would contain 12 boxes. For the note to remain valid, the owner had to buy a stamp every month and stick it in one of the boxes. It would be withdrawn from circulation after a year. Money of this kind is called stamp scrip: a privately issued currency that becomes less valuable the longer you hold on to it.
One of the first places to experiment with this scheme was the small German town of Schwanenkirchen. In 1923, hyperinflation had caused a credit crunch of a different kind. A Dr Hebecker, owner of a coalmine in Schwanenkirchen, told his workers that if they wouldn't accept the coal-backed stamp scrip he had invented - the Wara - he would have to close the mine. He promised to exchange it, in the first instance, for food. The scheme immediately took off. It saved both the mine and the town. It was soon adopted by 2,000 corporations across Germany. But in 1931, under pressure from the central bank, the ministry of finance closed the project down, with catastrophic consequences for the communities that had come to depend on it. Lietaer points out that the only remaining option for the German economy was ruthless centralised economic planning. Would Hitler have come to power if the Wara and similar schemes had been allowed to survive?
The Austrian town of Wörgl also tried out Gessell's idea, in 1932. Like most communities in Europe at the time, it suffered from mass unemployment and a shortage of money for public works. Instead of spending the town's meagre funds on new works, the mayor put them on deposit as a guarantee for the stamp scrip he issued. By paying workers in the new currency, he paved the streets, restored the water system and built a bridge, new houses and a ski jump. Because they would soon lose their value, Wörgl's own schillings circulated much faster than the official money, with the result that each unit of currency generated 12 to 14 times more employment. Scores of other towns sought to copy the scheme, at which point - in 1933 - the central bank stamped it out. Wörgl's workers were thrown out of work again.
Similar projects took off at the same time in dozens of countries. Almost all of them were closed down (just one, Switzerland's WIR system, still exists) as the central banks panicked about losing their monopoly over the control of money. Roosevelt prohibited complementary currencies by executive decree, though they might have offered a faster, cheaper and more effective means of pulling the US out of the Depression than his New Deal.
No one is suggesting that we replace official currencies with local scrip: this is a complementary system, not an alternative. Nor does Lietaer propose this as a solution to all economic ills. But even before you consider how it could be improved through modern information technology, several features of Gessell's system grab your attention. We need not wait for the government or the central bank to save us: we can set this system up ourselves. It costs taxpayers nothing. It bypasses the greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals. It can be tailored to the needs of the community. It does not require - as Eddie George, the former governor of the Bank of England, insisted - that one part of the country be squeezed so that another can prosper.
Perhaps most importantly, a demurrage system reverses the ecological problem of discount rates. If you have to pay to keep your money, the later you receive your income, the more valuable it will be. So it makes economic sense, under this system, to invest long term. As resources in the ground are a better store of value than money in the bank, the system encourages their conservation.
I make no claim to expertise. I'm not qualified to identify the flaws in this scheme, nor am I confident that I have made the best case for it. All I ask is that, if you haven't come across it before, you don't dismiss it before learning more. As we confront the failure of the government's first bailout and the astonishing costs of the second, isn't it time we considered the alternatives?
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Sunday 18 January 2009
The Credit Card Dragnet
Problems with this universal piece of plastic
January 17, 2009 By Girish Mishra
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In Economics, by 'money', we mean anything that is accepted for clearing a debt. To illustrate, if we go to a bookshop and buy a book, priced at $15, the moment the deal is struck and the shopkeeper hands over the book to us, we become indebted to him and this debt can be cleared by handing him anything, ranging from grains, secondhand books, etc. to currency notes. We can also discharge this debt by transferring $15 from our bank deposit through cheque. Please note that cheque is not money but only an instrument to transfer a particular sum from our bank deposit, which is money. In case our bank deposit is nil or insufficient, the cheque becomes meaningless and is dishonoured.
Traditionally, a person's capacity to spend has been circumscribed by the cash with him, his total deposits in banks and his movable and immovable property. He can borrow against his term deposits in banks and his property. Normally, he cannot borrow against his property more than its market value. Obviously, his ability to buy goods and services is limited. Moreover, a sane person always tries to save money for future exigencies and other needs like old age, ceremonies, education of children and so on. Thus his capacity to spend has been generally restricted. No creditor has normally dared to lend him more than his present worth and against his future earnings.
This limit to his capacity to borrow and spend has disappeared once the credit card, popularly known as plastic money, has come into existence. He can now go on shopping till he becomes tired and falls to the ground. To translate a Sanskrit saying, "one can now borrow and drink refined butter!" This has given a great boost to the phenomenon of consumerism when, with the beginning of the ongoing globalization, credit cards has become internationally acceptable.
Even though the credit card came into existence in the 1950s, its concept was visualized by Edward Bellamy, a leading American novelist of the second half of the 19th century. Bellamy was a Marxian socialist. As early as 1887, he published his novel Looking Backward. Its hero, Julian West, goes into a deep slumber in Boston towards the end of the 19th century and gets up in the year 2000. He finds that he is still in Boston but everything else has changed beyond recognition. The world has changed and become completely stranger to him. He is naturally bewildered. Fortunately, he gets a guide in Doctor Leete who explains that socialism of Marxian conception has come to prevail. One of its facets is that people do not have to carry cash for making purchases. Instead, they carry a card which is widely accepted. Thus Bellamy visualizes the advent of credit (more appropriately, modern day debit) card in chapters 9-11, 13 and 25-26.
During the 1930s and 1940s, a rectangular metal plate (2½×1¼), bearing holder's name and his place of residence, was generally issued by merchants with a large number of branches to their regular customers whose credit worthiness was beyond doubt. They were billed at regular intervals.
The credit card in the present form was introduced in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank X McNamara, the founders of Diners Club. This was followed by the Bank of America's card in 1958, which, in the course of time, came to be known as Visa card. This became acceptable in America and a number of countries abroad. In 1966, Master Card came into existence when a host of banks joined hands and established MasterCharge. It received a big boost when the Citibank merged its own Everything Card with it. Later on, other banks came with their own cards.
Every credit card holder has his PIN or Personal Identification Number whose genuineness is verified by the shopkeeper and the cardholder is then allowed to shop with no cash in his wallet, and on the basis of income likely to accrue to him in future. The shopkeeper, too, gains by increasing his sale. The company that has issued the card guarantees the payment to the shopkeeper and recovers it from the cardholder after a fixed period of time. In case the cardholder is unable to repay the debt, the company charges interest usually at very high rates. In some countries, coercion including muscle power is also used by the company to recover its dues.
Since a cardholder is allowed teleshopping, there are instances of his PIN being stolen and misused. There are organized criminal gangs, specializing in this business. Three years ago, The Guardian (November 8, 2005) wrote: 'Credit-card fraudsters are increasingly turning to the internet now that the "chip and pin" system has closed other money-making avenues, new figures show.
'"card-not-present" fraud—in which criminals get hold of people's credit and debit card details and use them to buy goods online, over the phone or by mail order—has grown by 29% in a year... Online banking fraud has also risen sharply.'
The 2006 documentary film, "Mixed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and The Era of Predatory Lenders" vividly depicts the various unsavoury aspects of credit cards. A credit card is used as an ATM card too and this has induced criminals to steal it along with the pass word and withdraw money from holder's account. Moreover, the credit card companies fleece holders by way of hidden costs and terms and conditions not being made explicit at the time of issuing cards.
With the onset of the worldwide recession, both the cardholders and credit-card companies are in trouble. With growing incidence of unemployment, the demand for cards has slumped and the arrears of bills of credit-card companies have been accumulating. In India, as a result, a prominent bank like the ICICI is in great trouble. Now credit- card companies are realizing their folly of issuing cards without properly evaluating the creditworthiness of the clients. In fact, till 2007, companies used to lure prospective clients by hook or by crook and give them cards. A large number of cardholders have simply disappeared without clearing their dues. Since they have lost jobs and vacated their rented apartments with no permanent address. It is extremely difficult to trace them out.
The situation in America is extremely bad. Out of the total population of 300 million, the number of cardholders is 70 million, i.e., roughly one-fourth. It is reported that, initially, card-issuing companies indulged in extortion by charging high rates and resorting to complex terms and conditions, which very few customers could comprehend. As The Christian Science Monitor (December 18, 2008) has reported, more than fifty per cent of the college-going students in the USA has four or more credit cards per head. In the present era of recession, they find it extremely difficult to clear off their dues to card-companies.
The Americans owe more than $1 trillion by way of arrears to card- companies. The growing pressure from the Federal Reserve has forced them to apply tough measures to recover the arrears and they have adopted strict norms for the issuance of cards. To quote a report by Bloomberg.com (Dec. 18), "Credit-card companies, facing an increase in defaults and a decline in consumer spending, and raising some rates, adding fees and cutting credit lines as the Federal Reserve makes the most sweeping changes to the industry in 30 years." On the other hand, existing cardholders have begun reducing their purchases. Consequently, there is a continuous decline in the volume of effective demand, adding fuel to the fire of recession. It is feared that during next one and a half years, there may be a decline to the tune of $2 trillion only due to strictness as regards credit cards.
It is needless to add that consumerism, banking, credit proliferation, etc. will be adversely affected.
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