|
|
| You are not authorized to post a reply. |
|
| Author |
| |
Messages |
Sort: |
|
Nada
Posts:387
|
|
Posted:06/25/2007 6:38 PM |
|
Why Boycott Israel?
Because It’s Good for You
Gabriel Ash
Dissident Voice
June 23, 2007
Part I
The boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel’s
Apartheid scored an important victory recently when the British University
and College Union (UCU) decided to circulate “the full text of the
Palestinian boycott call to all branches for information and discussion” and
“encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and
proposed links with Israeli academic institutions.” The UCU resolution is in
fact quite moderate. Nevertheless, it raised the profile of the campaign
and elicited a round of shrill, wall-to-wall condemnations, from newspapers,
foundations, politicians and governments. Shockingly, not a single media
mogul (or any mogul, for that matter) is in favor of the boycott!
The major argument for boycotting Israel is that it is the right thing to
do. And it is. But for those of us who live off wages and depend on public
services, it is also the smart thing to do — especially in Europe, where
the BDS campaign is now facing a vocal onslaught. Support for Israel is an
important pillar of an islamophobic, anti-immigrant and pro-war front,
which includes many in the political leadership of Europe; their final prize is
finishing off the welfare state. In the second part, I will also show that it is
this front — not the UCU — that is heir to Europe’s historical anti-Semitism.
Europe’s political leadership is not merely opposed to boycotting Israel.
The European Union, supported by politicians in every European country,
has joined the US and Israel in a policy of siege, starving Palestinians of aid,
medical supplies and food. The policy punishes Palestinians for daring to
democratically replace a corrupt and ineffectual leadership. The EU supports
Israel’s demands for Palestinians to unconditionally surrender: one sided
“renouncement of violence,” and one-sided “recognition of Israel.” Israel,
of course, is free to continue assassinations and bombing and need not
recognize any Palestinian rights. Furthermore, European aid money, both
public and private, is deployed strategically to help entrench the occupation,
increase Palestinian dependency and discourage resistance. At the same
time, as Alexander Yakobson writes in Ha’aretz:
European countries recently gave their full support to Israel joining the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. European
funding for joint research and development projects with Israel - which
the UCU wants stopped - is more extensive than ever before, and
can only be expected to expand further. Economic ties between Israel
and the European Union have grown closer in recent years, in step with
the calls for boycotts. New agreements have upgraded Israel ’s
position and opened doors that had previously been closed.
Why all this love? It is no secret that most European bureaucrats, journalists,
observers and NGO workers, those who have had any real contact with
Israel, harbor few illusions about it. The feeling of the French Ambassador to
Britain, Daniel Bernard, who referred to Israel in private as “a shitty little
country,” is emblematic. European policy cannot be explained by the actual
beliefs of the professional class that implements it. Complicity is dictated
to them from above. Nor is this love for Israel the result of simple electoral
politics. Pro-Israeli lobbies in Europe don’t have as much clout yet as in the
US. And the European public generally sees Israel’s intransigence as a threat.
Israel, while not big, is a valuable commercial partner. Additionally, Israel’s
occupation creates needs, especially in military hardware and construction.
Many European companies directly benefit from contracts. French
Veolia, for example, is set to build a rail system for the settlements around
Jerusalem. Irish CRH holds a large cement monopoly in Israel. There is
also longstanding European support for maintaining the neo-colonial world
system. Europe’s businesses are profiting heavily from continued Southern
dependence and corruption. If we needed another reminder, the British BAE
Saudi bribes scandal came just in time. European capitals usually support
the US when a radical challenge to neo-colonial dependence emerges, as for
example in Haiti, Venezuela, and Lebanon.
But protecting profitable business falls short as an explanation. The strong
support for Israel by leaders such as Blair and Sarkozy threatens Europe’s
relations in the Middle East and perilously alienates its large immigrant
communities. It is not driven by business as usual. On the contrary, it is led
by an ideological kinship animated with revolutionary zeal and supported by
the needs of financial capital to liberate itself from the chains of the welfare
state. It is guided by a renewed desire to melt all that is solid into thin
air. Israel’s great friends in Europe — Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Nicolas
Sarkozy, Bernard Henri-Levy, Angela Merkel, Joschka Fisher, Lord Levy, and
many more — are the shock troops of the neoliberal assault on European
society, its workers and public services. What’s left of Palestinian land is on
the breakfast menu. But dinner’s piéce de resistance will be served from
the butchered European welfare state — education, high wages, job security,
followed by healthcare and retirement.
Is this a “conspiracy?” Not in the cinematic sense of a powerful cabal
meeting in secret and issuing marching orders. But there are plenty of secret
and public conversations taking place through which the different
elements of financial and political elites — the institutions, the corporations,
the media, the civil society pressure groups, etc. — hone their common
interests and learn to align and “conspire” — to speak in the same language
and rally around common causes and strategies. Describing exactly how
this alignment takes place is important and difficult. My purpose here
is limited to the easy part — to sketch this ideological front and to identify
its purpose by recognizing the historical patterns it repeats.
Support for Israel, Assault on Society
After WWII, the specter that used to haunt Europe was invited to sit at the
table and given a small plate in return for no longer moving furniture at night.
This arrangement, known as the welfare state, made possible the rebuilding
of a capitalist Europe. But it was expensive. With the Soviet Union no
longer, Europe’s capital is asking itself why it should continue paying. The
financial world has a clear agenda. It is not made in Brussels or in Whitehall.
If at all, it is made in the City of London. It is drummed up almost daily
in the pages of The Financial Times and weekly in The Economist. European
wages are too high. Social services are too lavish. Workers are living
too long, working too little, enjoying too much time on the French Riviera.
“ Europe” (namely the financial owners) cannot afford it. It makes European
labor “uncompetitive”. There is too much “rigidity” in labor markets
(i.e., too much stability in people’s lives). And taxes, needless to say, are far
too high. What really hurts is that financial profits are too low and stock
markets below the moon. The rich have been up in arms for decades now,
withholding their investment money or sending it overseas, where labor
is cheap and obedient. This has sent European unemployment figures into
the double digits. Governments, captured by a shallow competition between
so-called socialists and so-called Christians, are doing their part, whittling
down the welfare state on the one hand, and guaranteeing profits for the
needy wealthy on the other. Privatization is the preferred tool, and it works
wonders — for investors. British Rail, for example, has been a great success
story — for investors. In the UK — credit Margaret Thatcher — the work
is almost done, although Blair’s government is still struggling to euthanize
the National Health Service. Major privatization drives were also pushed
through in France and Germany. But the assault on public services ground to
a halt thanks to stiffer popular resistance, notably from trade unions.
France, with 2006 profits at only 5% of GDP, is where lines are now drawn
in the sand.
To do what elected governments cannot, the EU was transformed from an
idea to put an end to war to a strategy in the class war, its high offices
staffed with the faithful and entrusted with a mission to undermine labor’s
bargaining power. Monetary policy was transferred to the European Central
Bank, where Jean-Claude Trichet is now in charge of using interest rates to
help bosses stare down unions. But even this strategy took a beating when
the French public voted down the proposed neoliberal European constitution.
A ferocious ideological war for the neoliberal model (a.k.a. TINA –There Is
No Alternative) succeeded in eliminating heterodox thinking from the
mainstream. But the public refuses to buy the neoliberal prescriptions. It is a
law of European politics. Every government that pushes neoliberal
reforms gets clobbered in the polls. Yet thanks to the strength of TINA, no
government can follow any other course. The outcome is a tired and
demoralizing stalemate. A corrupt, off-putting political class rules with a
self-serving and anti-democratic credo, which Tony Blair exemplified: the
role of leadership is to shove unwanted policies down the throat of an
unwilling public, and suffer the resulting loss of public support with stoic
equanimity. But in the long run, you cannot run a parliamentary democracy
with 20% approval rates.
What can capital do in the face of this stubbornness? The answer, I think,
can be summed with a quote from Tom Friedman, one millionaire ideologue
(and firm supporter of Israel) who can spot an uppity French worker from
a mile, blindfolded: “give war a chance.” (Interestingly enough, Friedman’s
columns usually fall into one of three bins: Israel good; bombs good;
low wages good.) From theory to practice, Britain’s New Labor is the model
of linking warmongering abroad with the neoliberal assault on workers
at home: a foreign policy of joining forces with the US and Israel in
the Middle East and a domestic policy of destroying services and pandering
to the financial markets. Blair quite profitably destroyed the Labor party
as the party of labor. And do I need to mention Blair’s profound
disappointment with the boycott campaign?
In France, the tougher battleground, newly elected Sarkozy is ready to double
down for the market. Here is how Armand Laferrere, Sarkozy’s former
adviser, explains the new President’s plans to out-Blair Blair. Domestically,
[T]he President campaigned as a radical reformer of the main
weaknesses in the French social compact. The French economy is
handicapped by insufficient productive activity and the high price of
labor. Therefore, he promised both to put people back to work…
[and replace] the jungle of French labor laws with a single kind of work
contract. Public-sector unions have blocked reforms before; therefore,
he promised to make it mandatory to keep a minimum level of
public services even in the case of a strike… the President promised
to finally give universities the power to run themselves and apply for
external funds on top of their taxpayer-funded base.
And as for the foreign counterpart of this domestic plan of lowering wages,
privatizing higher education and breaking labor unions:
[R]ecent election results allow me to say that my own cultural bias
in favor of America and Israel will be more reflected in French foreign
policy than it has been for half a century.
Laferrere made these comments in front of a crowd of neo-conservative
fanatics at JINSA (The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), one of
the many pivotal nodes in Washington that link between Zionism, the
armament industry and market fundamentalism. American neo-conservatism
is an inspiration to Europe’s stock market liberators. Unfortunately anti-war
commentary rarely stresses that the neo-conservative movement, in addition
to being fanatically pro-Israel, has always been fanatically anti-worker.
When the neo-cons took over the management of Baghdad, their plan for
what Naomi Klein called “a free market utopia” was a more uninhibited
version of what Sarkozy wants to do to France. One law from Saddam’s era
that the occupiers did not scrap was the restriction on trade unions.
The nexus between assault on labor and social services and vocal support for
Israel crawls up from under every stone one turns. I will turn just two
stones below. In condemning the UCU resolution, The Jerusalem Post gave the
full podium to the British Baroness Cox. Her Pomposity was quoted as
saying, “it is ironic and disturbing in the extreme that censorship is … being
promoted by some representatives of academic staff who should be the
guardians of academic freedom.” She also insinuated that the British police
should act against boycott supporters. You’d think that bringing police
squads to force academics to cooperate with Israel is not exactly a shining
example of how to protect academic freedom. But then the Baroness is
nothing if not consistent. For her, academic freedom means an academy free
from critical voices. She received her peerage from Margaret Thatcher
after the latter noted her McCarthyite book denouncing the prevalence of
Marxist professors in British education. She led the attack on teacher
education for being too leftist (i.e., too anti-sexism, anti-racism etc.) and
worked in and out of the House of Lords to privatize schools and de-skill
teachers. (See Dave Hill, "The Charge of the Right Brigade," and “The
Christian Schools Campaign: A Successful Educational Pressure Group?” by
Geoffrey Walford, British Educational Research Journal, September 1995,
pp. 451-464). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Cox’s bête noir is “radical
Islam,” which is “the greatest threat posed to the Western world.” She
is a pious Christian and known as a fighter for human rights, especially for
victims of Muslim governments. She is the co-founder of One Jerusalem,
an organization whose mission is “maintaining a united Jerusalem as
the undivided capital of Israel.” Perhaps following the moral example of the
crusaders, the baroness has no concern for the human rights of Jerusalem’s
Palestinian residents. Cox, to boot, has some issues with homosexuality,
which might explain the choice of words in her denunciation of the
“unnatural alliance” between “the Islamists and the left.” Noblesse oblige.
In France, media star and $200-million-worth Bernard Henri-Levi — a.k.a.
brand name BHL — is a major voice in opposition to the boycott. When
a boycott measure passed in Paris VI university in 2003, BHL was invited to
condemn it. He dutifully called it shameful, linked it immediately to Vichy
and called Israeli universities “the heart of peace.” BHL is France’s smoke
machine. Officially a socialist, he rose to the French firmament on a wave of
rightwing adulation for his role in defeating the French left in the ’70s.
Intellectually and morally, he is a fraud. Here is just one example from Doug
Ireland’s highly recommended account of this incarnation of Baudrillard’s
simulacrum: the great humanitarian moralist “ … BHL inherited the
family’s huge lumber business, Becob … while BHL was running the
company, numerous international bodies and a report from the Canadian
government denounced it for keeping its African workers in penurious
semi-slavery.” Hypocrisy might be easier to forgive if BHL’s public
“positions” were not themselves smokescreens. BHL’s performance is built on
a simple technique that allows him to speak “truth to power” from the
dead center of French power: he endorses leftist positions in vague emotive
terms in order to better undermine them. Examples: he disagrees with
neo-conservatives, but thinks Charles Krauthammer and Christopher
Hitchens are the contemporary equivalent of Sartre. He opposed the war on
Iraq, but chides us in the global anti-war movement for believing that
“it is better to live as a serf under Saddam than to be free thanks to Bush.”
Free, one presumes, from the constraints of bodily existence. BHL is against
“the Clash of Civilizations,” but works to exacerbate it. Like practically
all vocal defenders of Israel, BHL — who claims to have introduced the term
“islamofascism” — is a leading purveyor of Islamophobia and racist drivel,
although perfumed with highfalutin rhetorical flourish. Here’s a sample:
“The Taliban weren’t just defeated, they were defeated without a fight. …
the image of these defeated fighters, lionized by the Arab street from
Baghdad to Damascus, the image of these salahudins who were supposed to
bring America to its knees, and who, at the first shot, fled like chickens,
could only astound those who identified with them.” On neoliberalism, BHL
is an impressive Weapon of Mass Distraction. Consider that when he finally
announces his hyper-hyped electoral endorsement for 2007, he breaks
with the knight of neoliberalism Sarkozy over … the medical explanation for
pedophilia.
Next: anti-Semitism and the inner logic of this double assault.
Part II: The Enemy
What then lies at the root of this quite natural alliance between Christian
fundamentalists, market fundamentalists, billionaires, Zionists, islamophobes,
and garden variety warmongers? Karl Schmitt, the Nazi philosopher
of law who theorized the way to defend the Christian state from the twin evil
of communism and liberalism, identified the essential basis of political
authority in the power to name the enemy. For Schmitt, while leftists see the
enemy across town, in the ruling class and the state, the problem with
liberals is that they see no enemies. Communism must be opposed; but the
liberal alternative is not up to the task, since, without enemies, politics
degenerate. To defeat the liberal atrophy of politics as well as labor’s militant
tendencies, Schmitt saw the necessity of having an existential enemy, one
that the whole state can be fully mobilized against. The enemy creates
the conditions for the exercise of decisive state power, free from the restraints
imposed by law and the deadlocks of parliamentary politics. Although
the debt is rarely acknowledged, that has been the guiding principle
of right-wing reaction. One could read Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization”
thesis as the globalization of Schmitt’s insight. While originally presented as
descriptive, the “Clash of Civilization” has been so influential because
it is in practice a political program, one tailored to combat what Huntington
himself called elsewhere “an excess of democracy.” Does one needs to
mention that Huntington also looks askance at unions? The raw Schmitt,
however, is too clearly reactionary. The new Schmittianism of the
Islamophobic front is a rightwing reaction veiled in the trappings of the
traditional left.
Having an enemy across the border — alien, total, menacing — helps the
right assert political power domestically, the power it now needs to liberate
stock markets from the fetters of the welfare state. This is the revolution’s
goal, and support for Israel is right at the center of it. Huntington’s
“Clash of Civilizations” thesis is manna from heaven for Israel because it
places its fight against the Palestinians in a larger struggle that includes the
whole West. This was always a conscious and important Zionist goal.
Two examples of many: Max Nordau addressing the crème of British
Imperialism at Albert Hall in 1920. “We know perfectly well what you require
of us. We are to keep guard over the Suez Canal for you. We are to act as
sentinel over your route to India and Asia …” And a short century later here
is former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu capitalizing on 9/11: “What is
at stake today is nothing less than the survival of our civilization.” And “The
international terrorist network is thus based on regimes Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Taliban Afghanistan, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and several other
Arab regimes such as the Sudan … the Palestinian groups cooperate closely
with Hezbollah, which in turn links them to Syria, Iran and Bin Laden.”
Of course, Hezbollah and Bin Laden’s affiliates are sworn enemies,
and Arafat was connected to neither. The other thing worth noting about
Netanyahu is his neoliberal zeal in cutting welfare, and the fact that during
his tenure as Finance Minister the poverty rate in Israel rose 15%.
Radicalizing Europe’s Muslims therefore serves Israel’s purpose. But it is
also, in line with Schmitt’s and Huntington’s ideas, a blessing for the
neoliberal assault. Western support for Israel inflames Muslim public opinion
and produces instances of fanaticism that in turn help inflame popular
animus against Muslim immigrants. Practically all organized support for
Israel is involved in demonizing Islam. The demonization of Islam
strengthens the appeal of the most radical Islamists and increases the
likelihood of terrorist attacks. Terrorism breeds fear and fear breeds obedience
to authority and conformism. Divide and conquer. (Take, for example,
Margaret Hodges recent foray into anti-immigrant xenophobia to cover up
for New Labor’s policy of shafting its constituents) It works in the US.
It works in Israel. Why shouldn’t it work in Europe? Needless to say, a state
about to go smash labor and destroy public services needs all the obedience it
can generate. It also needs vast police powers, and what better way to
justify curtailing civil rights than a frenzy surrounding terrorism?
Furthermore, war and fear of terrorism require the transfer of funds from
social services to defense and security. This is a bonanza for Israel since Israel
specializes in selling security and defense wares. But spending on defense
and security is also much better than spending on welfare from a neoliberal
perspective. First, it is a way for the state to fund corporate profits
directly, and therefore dear to the heart of financial capital. Second, the shift
in priorities leads to dislocations that are in themselves useful for
precipitating changes in the rules of work in favor of higher profits and lower
wages. Third, social spending increases labor’s bargaining power. Defense
spending doesn’t. It is pure waste, which is an advantage from the point
of view of profits under current conditions. War, fear of terrorism, and
immigrant bashing also bolster the legitimacy of the EU. Cross-border arrest
warrants, mobile joint border policing, anti-terrorist task forces, are easier
to justify than higher prices and lower wages.
Finally, in terms of talking left and walking right, Israel is indeed a “light
onto the nations,” and a successful controlled Schmittian experiment
ensconced within a formal parliamentary democracy. Today, Israel is the
second most unequal society in the developed world. The silver medal status,
however, depends crucially on not counting Palestinians under occupation.
Taken as a whole, Israel is in fact the industrial world’s indisputable leader in
inequality. But even that doesn’t quite capture its unique achievement.
Consider that this inequality is the result of a century of economic
development during which, most of the time, Israel was under “socialistic”
leadership! Europe had to wait for the ’80s and ’90s to find socialist leaders
whose real motto is “investors of the world unite!” Israel already had
such leaders in the ’20s. (See Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel)
This “socialist” and “democratic” legacy of Zionism must offer an appealing
roadmap for the Tony Blair left. Unlike most European countries, Israel
developed as a capitalist country without going through the menace of
a radical-left alternative. The nationalism of the historic labor party (Mapai)
precluded it. The existential enemy authorized a secure zone for the
unhindered development of capital. Consider this revealing nugget from
Mapai leader David Hacohen:
I remember being one of the first of our comrades to go to London
after the first World War. … There I became a socialist… I had to fight
my [student] friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend
the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut;
to defend preaching to the housewives that they not buy at [Palestinian]
Arab stores, to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. …
To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the
markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the
skies the Keren Kayemet [Jewish National Fund] that sent Hankin to
Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the
fellahin [peasants] off the land … to take Rothschild, the incarnation
of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him the “benefactor” — to do all that
was not easy. (my emphasis. Haaretz, Nov 15, 1969, quoted in Arie
Bober, ed., The Other Israel)
The Israeli Labor Party has the distinct achievement of firmly associating
the term “left” with racism and class privilege, against both Palestinians and
Jews. Today, it is the party of generals, the security services and neoliberals.
Compared to Europe, the complete dismantling of the Israeli welfare state
sailed through with ease. The long-term strategy that netted these results was
the Schmittian strategy of a state fully mobilized against the Enemy, the
Arab, both internally and externally. Here is Mizrahi writer and activist Sami
Shalom Chetrit describing how it works, how war is used to entrench class,
race and power:
You look at the Arab and actually you’re looking the mirror, and you’ve
been taught that the reflection in the mirror is actually bad, negative,
low, enemy, so you start spitting in the mirror. It’s hard to spit in the
mirror everyday, because you go crazy. It’s hard to live with self-hatred,
you get sick, so what do you do? You channel everything to the Arab.
It’s very simple social psychology. That is how we all became Arab
haters, because if we don’t hate them, we’re going to hate ourselves. …
[That’s] why they keep the Occupation going… They won’t back down
because if they do, they will lose their Ashkenazi, Zionist hegemony…
Right now, in my view, everything is collapsing but no one complains
because “we are at war …”
The way Israel deliberately confounds the left-right distinction is also
reflected in the internal politics of the West. While it is not difficult to discover
the hands of wealth and reaction behind pro-Israel bodies, much of the
Western left is congenitally paralyzed on the subject of Israel. The common
attitude is silence or mealy mouthed half-criticism. The most significant agent
of this debility is the cult of the Holocaust. Pre-war communists correctly
saw Zionism as a colonial and racist enterprise. In the struggle against
fascism, however, the left won the war but lost the peace. The apotheosis of
the Holocaust and the enshrining of an idealistic, nostalgic anti-fascism
was their sop. Israel sought and was accorded the guardianship of European
guilt. Holocaust kitsch and the attendant sanctification of Israel is now
the West’s alibi against all charges of continuing racism. In addition, Jewish
community organs, captured by wealth, built their power on the cult
of the Holocaust and now use it to de-legitimize criticism of Israel and drum
up Islamophobia. Support for Israel is therefore a crucial element in
preventing the articulation of a coherent social-democratic opposition to
racism.
The Repetitions of Anti-Semitism
A word on anti-Semitism is a must, given the incredible cheek of those
describing the UCU decision as anti-Semitic. A century ago, the radical threat
that was threatening Europe’s elites was communism. At the same time,
the immigrant masses that sought refuge from misery in the West were the
Ostjuden — Jews from Eastern Europe. Stereotyped and ridiculed as
backward, dirty and subversive, and a fertile social ground for socialist and
communist agitation, the Ostjuden also transformed anti-Semitism. Before
they arrived, Western anti-Semitism was the work of anti-liberal agitators
fanning the resentment of the downwardly-mobile lower middle-classes
by pinnng the blame to wealthy, integrated Jews. Respectable modern gents
would not be seen near it and socialists fought against it. The Ostjuden
provided anti-Semitism with a concrete class of poor, Jewish immigrants who
actually looked different and who competed with native labor for the
lowliest jobs during the severe economic crises that followed the First World
War. After the 1917 revolution in Russia, the propaganda campaign against
communism almost merged with anti-Semitism. Russian anti-communist
expatriates brought with them The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Bolshevism
was described as a Jewish plot and Jewish immigrants a subversive danger.
This new anti-Semitism was directly useful as a tool for undermining worker
militancy. Hence, unlike the old anti-Semitism, it gained ground with the
political and business elites, even in liberal England. Churchill described
Bolshevism as the work of “international Jews.” The conservative Tories used
a mixture of anti-Bolshevism, anti-immigration and veiled anti-Semitism to
respond to the first Labor Party national election victory in 1924. The
Zinoviev letter, a forgery that implied that Labor was taking orders from
the (Jewish) Bolsheviks put the Conservatives back in government. A
clampdown on Jewish immigrants ensued under the Home Office of Sir
William Joynson-Hicks. In the US, the industrialist Henry Ford was a leading
impresario of this anti-communist anti-Semitism and the publisher of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion’s first U.S. edition. Does one need to mention
that he was also anti-union and anti-immigration? The Nazis carried
this identification between Jews and Bolshevism to the extreme; it was the
platform that brought them to power and the political basis for the
concentration camps. But it is necessary to remember that their
fear-mongering about Jewish subversion was all too respectable and a staple
of the conservative defense against workers’ militancy all across Europe.
A new round of anti-immigrant xenophobia washed over Europe in the 1980s.
It was fanned by party politics and the end of the post-war boom. Margaret
Thatcher infamously described Britain as “swamped by alien culture.”
Turkish labor was the issue in Germany. In France, Jacque Chirac became
mayor of Paris with the promise of clamping down on North-African
immigrants. A campaign of police harassment dutifully followed. But the
new xenophobia had its limits. Like pre WW-I anti-Semitism, it was too
transparently racist and mean-spirited. It gave the political right a divisive
issue and significant electoral gains, but it did not create a unified discourse
that could take the center and marginalize the left. A major weakness was the
lack of an international component. There was no connection between
the terrorism of the IRA and the immigrants from Bangladesh. There was no
link between cold-war anti-communism and the Algerian communities in
Paris. There were many enemies, but there was no one big existential enemy.
But now there is. The Clash of Civilizations, the Israeli outpost fighting
to avoid being “swamped” by Palestinians, 9/11, the war on terror, Muslim
difference, immigration and the veil, all come together in one discourse
that links an external ideological and physical threat to the “foreign”
presence in Europe. This is no longer a discourse that divides between the
center-left and center-right. It is a radical right-wing discourse that
thoroughly takes over the center. The power to name the enemy proves itself
again. Today’s apologists of Israel’s Apartheid, be they Jewish or not, seek
to exploit fears and spread hatred against Muslim immigrants, even accusing
them of plotting world domination, all in the service of lower wages and
higher stock markets. They are the true heirs of The Protocols’ Western
admirers. “Islamism” is the boogeyman that replaces “Bolshevism”. Muslim
immigrants take the place of the Ostjuden. Green replaces Red. And Israel
is where Germany was in the ’30s, the frontal outpost where the fight against
the enemies of capital rages fiercest.
Of course, there is the inevitable farcical aspect to this rhyming of history.
Many things are different, not in the least the historical memory of Nazism
which weighs heavily on the political theater. For this reason, Israel
cannot (I hope) match the Nazi horror. A more important difference is that
radical Islam is hardly as real a danger to property relations as the
communist revolution in Russia was. Western workers, who are anyway
unlikely to convert to Islam, are not in a revolutionary mood. And the area of
the globe that can be described as Muslim is far from being a significant
military force that balances Western powers as the Soviet Union did. It
includes a chain of barely functioning states on which the US and NATO can
stage their telephoto wars-for-profits with abandon. The repetition of the
triangular structure of xenophobia (Anti-Semitism/Islamophobia,)
radical threats (Bolsheviks/Islamists,) and immigrants (Jewish/Muslim,) is
not a defense against workers’ militancy. It reflects a triumphal neoliberal
juggernaut on the march, unable to satiate itself before it devours every
last vestige of human welfare.
As the French and German reaction to the Iraq war made evident, there
is significant elite opposition in Europe to the use of Islamophobia and to the
neo-conservative war drive. But the resilience of this liberal opposition
is questionable. It is disturbing how quickly the animus of the French and
German governments against the Iraq war floundered. Islamophobia is
ultimately fueled by the limits Western democracy places on profits. Fighting
Islamophobia while resisting neoliberalism requires therefore a campaign
that goes beyond moralizing. An understanding of the role that Islamophobia
and support for Israel ’s Apartheid play in the neoliberal assault is a must.
Conversely, given the kind of state Israel is, support for Israel is the most
egregious internal contradiction of liberal imperialism. A wide and sustained
conversation about the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) campaign —
why it is needed, what conditions it is trying to change, why it is legitimate,
and who its opponents are — is a very important educational tool in this
struggle.
Sally Hunt, UCU general secretary and a committed Labourite, is against
the boycott because she doesn’t believe the majority of members support it.
She told the Guardian, “When I speak to members, they tell me they want
their union to focus on pay and conditions.” The separation between
the struggle over pay and conditions of teachers and other workers and the
larger questions about the character of the state is artificial. As we’ve seen,
there is no such separation in the tactics of power. The financial and political
elites always manage their foreign wars and their domestic concerns
in tandem, with a keen eye to how each campaign can profit from the other.
What schools and universities teach, who pays teachers and how much,
who could fire them and for what, who has access to education and
with what quality — all these inherently political questions are at stake in
the fight over Islamophobia and Israeli Apartheid. It is the duty of the BDS
campaign supporters to make the case that restraining Israel’s brutality
is not only the right and ethical thing to do, but also essential to successfully
defending “pay and conditions.”
Gabriel Ash is an activist and writer who writes because the pen is
sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not. He welcomes
comments at:
g.a.evildoer@gmail.com.
|
|
|
| You are not authorized to post a reply. |
|
ActiveForums 3.0
|
 |
|
|
|