By Bob Kosuth
The public is justifiably angry about the hundreds and hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars that have gone to bail out the big bankers. Compared to them, honest working people got very little in the way of stimulus dollars to create jobs. Few Americans, however, pay attention to the $700 billion that was recently passed by President Obama and the Congress for current wars and other military spending. More important, this kind of money is being spent every year. That's nearly $2 billion per day and that's a lot of money. Do the math. If your full-time job was to spend $10,000 per day, it would take you 274 years to spend a billion dollars. The military machine does it in a single day, every day.
We often hear that no price is too high to pay for "national defense" but if the US spent this kind of cash to create jobs and improve the livelihood of people at home and abroad, we'd be better off here and we'd have far fewer enemies and lots more friends. Someone might say that a military career is a great opportunity, especially for minorities. Well, I remember when my plane full of draftees took off from Chicago to Fort Polk LA in 1971. It was largely full of inner city Blacks and they were on that plane not because they were particularly patriotic but because like me they had no other options.
Unfortunately, elections don't change much when it comes to military spending and war making. That's something we've learned in the past year. Bush is gone but we still have Bush's wars. The Northland Anti-War Coalition is still around too. Check us out at northlandantiwar.blogspot.com and look at our ad in this issue. Please join us to stop these wars and build a better democracy.
This article above was submitted to the Hillsider newspaper. Be sure to pick up the March issue of the Hillsider to see the NAWC ad inside!
Showing posts with label analysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label analysis. Show all posts
February 16, 2010
July 2, 2009
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: Social and Ethnic Divisions Among Israeli Jews and the Politics of Palestine
by Bob Kosuth
On June 13th about 35 folks gathered at the Friends Meeting Hall in Duluth to hear a presentation by anthropologist and feminist Dr. Smadar Lavie, Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Islamic World and the Middle East at Macalester College. To do complete justice to all she covered would be impossible, so let me focus on just two major aspects that are likely to be new to many readers--the nature of the Mizrahim population and why it has pushed Israeli politics to the right.
The Mizrahim are Jews whose origins are North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire margins of Europe. They make up 63% of the Jewish population of Israel and 50% of the total population of the state of Israel when one includes the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Though the majority, they are generally socially and economically at the bottom of Israeli society. On the other hand, the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, though numerically a minority, form the economic and cultural elite of Israeli society and represent the familiar European face of Israel typically seen by the rest of the world.
From 1948 till the present, the Mizrahim have been settled in the border zones of Israel by the politically powerful Ashkenazim. The Ashkenazi right wing's policy of settlements has been a boon to the economically disadvantaged Mizrahim, who have received good affordable housing and other benefits in return for their political allegiance to the right. Thus, they have been the major contributing factor to the rightward drift of electoral politics. According to Lavie, the Mizrahim are considered "true Israelis" only when they become cannon fodder on border zones or pawns to replace expelled Palestinians in order to make impossible their legitimate right of return. The ultimate irony is that, being of Middle Eastern origin and economically disadvantaged, the Mizrahim have the greatest potential for dialogue--if not coalition--with the Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians at large. It's their manipulation by the elite Ashkenazi minority that prevents this. Netanyahu's current government is only the latest manifestation. In Lavie's view, putting the Mizrahim in settlements is not unlike the movement of poor landless Scots to Northern Ireland by the British.
Much more could be said and sadly I have not at all covered the complexity of how feminism within the various groups figures in the equation. Mizrahi feminism is inspired by US feminists of color while Ashkenazi establishment feminism reflects the limitations of their class status.
Given the circumstances, Professor Lavie's conclusion is that the clock is ticking on a just solution to the problem of Palestine. For her, a just and lasting peace would only be accomplished through a secular one-state solution because only such a state could encompass all the social class, religious and cultural variation within Palestinian, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi cultures.
In any case, no solution is possible without an understanding of the social class, economic and power disparities between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. Potential US or European intermediaries have to speak directly to the concerns of the Mizrahim and not just talk to their Ashkenazi manipulators.
To say the least, the challenges are daunting.
-Bob Kosuth , Duluth MN BBC (rkosuth(at)hotmail(dot)com)
For a fuller treatment by Ms. Lavie, see: http://electronicin tifada.net/v2/article10208. shtml or Left Curve no. 33, 2009 (www.leftcurve. org) "A Year into the Lebanon2 War"
On June 13th about 35 folks gathered at the Friends Meeting Hall in Duluth to hear a presentation by anthropologist and feminist Dr. Smadar Lavie, Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Islamic World and the Middle East at Macalester College. To do complete justice to all she covered would be impossible, so let me focus on just two major aspects that are likely to be new to many readers--the nature of the Mizrahim population and why it has pushed Israeli politics to the right.
The Mizrahim are Jews whose origins are North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire margins of Europe. They make up 63% of the Jewish population of Israel and 50% of the total population of the state of Israel when one includes the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Though the majority, they are generally socially and economically at the bottom of Israeli society. On the other hand, the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, though numerically a minority, form the economic and cultural elite of Israeli society and represent the familiar European face of Israel typically seen by the rest of the world.
From 1948 till the present, the Mizrahim have been settled in the border zones of Israel by the politically powerful Ashkenazim. The Ashkenazi right wing's policy of settlements has been a boon to the economically disadvantaged Mizrahim, who have received good affordable housing and other benefits in return for their political allegiance to the right. Thus, they have been the major contributing factor to the rightward drift of electoral politics. According to Lavie, the Mizrahim are considered "true Israelis" only when they become cannon fodder on border zones or pawns to replace expelled Palestinians in order to make impossible their legitimate right of return. The ultimate irony is that, being of Middle Eastern origin and economically disadvantaged, the Mizrahim have the greatest potential for dialogue--if not coalition--with the Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians at large. It's their manipulation by the elite Ashkenazi minority that prevents this. Netanyahu's current government is only the latest manifestation. In Lavie's view, putting the Mizrahim in settlements is not unlike the movement of poor landless Scots to Northern Ireland by the British.
Much more could be said and sadly I have not at all covered the complexity of how feminism within the various groups figures in the equation. Mizrahi feminism is inspired by US feminists of color while Ashkenazi establishment feminism reflects the limitations of their class status.
Given the circumstances, Professor Lavie's conclusion is that the clock is ticking on a just solution to the problem of Palestine. For her, a just and lasting peace would only be accomplished through a secular one-state solution because only such a state could encompass all the social class, religious and cultural variation within Palestinian, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi cultures.
In any case, no solution is possible without an understanding of the social class, economic and power disparities between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. Potential US or European intermediaries have to speak directly to the concerns of the Mizrahim and not just talk to their Ashkenazi manipulators.
To say the least, the challenges are daunting.
-Bob Kosuth , Duluth MN BBC (rkosuth(at)hotmail(dot)com)
For a fuller treatment by Ms. Lavie, see: http://electronicin tifada.net/v2/article10208. shtml or Left Curve no. 33, 2009 (www.leftcurve. org) "A Year into the Lebanon2 War"
June 21, 2009
The Real Nuclear Bullies
by Bob Kosuth
Published in the Reader Weekly 6/18/09
The Reader's May 28 article on North Korea's nuclear ambitions immediately reminded me of a 1981 collection of essays entitled Protest and Survive (Monthly Review Press), in which Daniel Ellsberg makes the point that the US has in fact used nuclear weapons repeatedly since 1945 just as one uses a gun pointed at someone's head regardless of whether the trigger is pulled or not. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the utility of nuclear weapons is not in the application but the threat.
Obviously, this is what the North Koreans are trying to accomplish as well. What has made it so sensitive and unacceptable is that the nuclear prerogative is one that the US wants to preserve only for itself and its intimate friends.
One of the best buddies of the US in the nuclear club is the state of Israel, which is in possession of a sizeable number of nuclear weapons. Unlike North Korea, Israel has never opened itself up to international inspections or signed any non-proliferation agreements.
The North Koreans have stated publicly that their intention in developing nuclear weapons is to call attention to US/Western/Israeli hypocrisy on nuclear weapons issues and demand direct state to state talks and full diplomatic relations with the US.
The situation with Iran is similar. It's ok for the US and Israel to be able to threaten Iran with nuclear weapons but the reverse is not acceptable. It's encouraging that many young Iranians have rejected the idea of being pawns in this game as evidenced in the recent election even though their voices are now being stifled. Similarly, both in Israel and around the world many Jews have begun to separate their Jewish identities from Zionist colonialism in Palestine. Unfortunately, in both places there still exist powerful elites who manipulate fear and nationalism to stay in power.
The North Korean situation brings all of this to the fore. The media pundits and academics are having a field day debating who's on first in Pyongyang and why, calibrating whether North Korean missiles can reach Sara Palin in Alaska (Can US missiles reach North Korea? Can Israel bomb Iran? Duh!), and whether or not North Korea can eventually become another China, quietly buying US debt and supplying cheap goods to Walmart.
All of this frenetic media and State Department bluster is, of course, intended to drown out any honest examination of who wrote and continues to enforce the nuclear weapons game rules in the first place. Any re-evaluation of these issues will have to start on Main Street because it will surely not be forthcoming from any addresses on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Published in the Reader Weekly 6/18/09
The Reader's May 28 article on North Korea's nuclear ambitions immediately reminded me of a 1981 collection of essays entitled Protest and Survive (Monthly Review Press), in which Daniel Ellsberg makes the point that the US has in fact used nuclear weapons repeatedly since 1945 just as one uses a gun pointed at someone's head regardless of whether the trigger is pulled or not. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the utility of nuclear weapons is not in the application but the threat.
Obviously, this is what the North Koreans are trying to accomplish as well. What has made it so sensitive and unacceptable is that the nuclear prerogative is one that the US wants to preserve only for itself and its intimate friends.
One of the best buddies of the US in the nuclear club is the state of Israel, which is in possession of a sizeable number of nuclear weapons. Unlike North Korea, Israel has never opened itself up to international inspections or signed any non-proliferation agreements.
The North Koreans have stated publicly that their intention in developing nuclear weapons is to call attention to US/Western/Israeli hypocrisy on nuclear weapons issues and demand direct state to state talks and full diplomatic relations with the US.
The situation with Iran is similar. It's ok for the US and Israel to be able to threaten Iran with nuclear weapons but the reverse is not acceptable. It's encouraging that many young Iranians have rejected the idea of being pawns in this game as evidenced in the recent election even though their voices are now being stifled. Similarly, both in Israel and around the world many Jews have begun to separate their Jewish identities from Zionist colonialism in Palestine. Unfortunately, in both places there still exist powerful elites who manipulate fear and nationalism to stay in power.
The North Korean situation brings all of this to the fore. The media pundits and academics are having a field day debating who's on first in Pyongyang and why, calibrating whether North Korean missiles can reach Sara Palin in Alaska (Can US missiles reach North Korea? Can Israel bomb Iran? Duh!), and whether or not North Korea can eventually become another China, quietly buying US debt and supplying cheap goods to Walmart.
All of this frenetic media and State Department bluster is, of course, intended to drown out any honest examination of who wrote and continues to enforce the nuclear weapons game rules in the first place. Any re-evaluation of these issues will have to start on Main Street because it will surely not be forthcoming from any addresses on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)