Gaza: the importance of the Bob Gates straddle

22 thoughts on “Gaza: the importance of the Bob Gates straddle”

1. Gaza Expert Sara Roy on the current crisis:
   http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html

2. Once again Israel, backed by the US and a largely complicit Europe, are showing the futility of their power. They can kill, maim, and destroy, but they simply cannot effect constructive change.
   You would think that Washington and Tel Aviv would eventually be embarrassed by this constant exposition of themselves as nothing more than murderous lions, teeth intact, yet unable to master their domain. And so they persist in publicly humiliating themselves over and over again.
   Even more amazing is that no adult supervision seems ready to emerge from the devastation of Washington and Tel Aviv’s foreign policy adventures. It’s as if the entire foreign policy establishment likes being shown up as ineffective and incompetent.

3. But the difference with Lebanon in 2006 is that then US and Israelis needed several weeks to create enough facts on the ground to force Hezbullah to hand over the south to the Lebanese Security Forces and to the largely European beefed up UNIFIL – a situation that remains unchanged today. Is Hezbullah going to start a second front by attacking Israel from the north as it did in 2006? It doesn’t appear so.
   It’s worth remembering that in 2006 after the Hamas tunnel attack on Israel, that the Israelis first onslaught was against a Gaza power station. It then rounded up a significant % of the Hamas cabinet and imprisoned them, where they remain today. And nobody mentions them much any more?
   This time the Israelis have struck against Hamas’ law and order capability, doing so virtually at the instigation of the Hamas military wing itself. It is quite a bizarre situation that Hamas has created. But any ceasefire that has as its first component Hamas agreeing to stop rocket attacks forthwith, or agreeing to a verifiable demilitarisation of Gaza as Helena suggests, would be a major defeat for the Hamas military, just as the acceptance of the LSF and Unifil in soutern Lebanon was a severe setback for Hezbullah insofar as its ability to challenge Israel militarilly is concerned?
   In fact Hezbullah’s so far muted response seems to indicate that the prisoner-swap, the Dohar agreement, the Syrian diplomatic recognition of Lebanon and the Syrian/Israeli negotiations are all part of a move towards to the recognition of Israel as a jewish state? If so, the Hamas military must be finding itself in a squeeze.

4. Please allow me to launch a little literary criticism. What else do we have, after all? And if we ourselves are unable to withstand it, how then do we distinguish ourselves from the blood-mob, whom we oppose?
   In this post I find you saying that the USA’s hegemony is slipping away, and yet you make no attempt to construct its replacement. Instead, you work to restore the illusion of agency to the same former hegemons, Bush, Rice, Cheney, Gates and Jones and propose that these criminals should be the ones to “educate” Obama.
   Alas, the post reads like double-talk, to me.
   You might say to me: “It’s easy for you, a shameless communist, to make an unreserved denunciation, but it’s different for me.”
   Indeed it can be different for you, but only, I think, if you are more, and not less, revolutionary than a communist like me.
   The conceptual tools that we communists have are no different from the common currency of ideas as brought down by the academy over the centuries. We are of a piece with Hobbes, Swift, Fanon and Nkrumah and everything in between, because as you know, nothing is lost. We are not religious, we are secular, and as such our vocabulary is in common with your own. We are nothing extra.
   What you have extra, over us, is religion. Your religion, if good, I think, should take you beyond what the communists can do. But instead, you seem to fall short, falter and resile. You return back to the familiar place, dust off the ornaments, and restore the facade of respectability. Instead of being a prophet – a Jeremiah – you sooth, you gloss, and you hand the palm back to the hegemons. You reconstruct the image of their power, which is their power. You fail to be an iconoclast.
   I wish that you would rather begin to seek out the counter-hegemons, and that each one of them that you discover will be more heroic and uncompromising than the one before, until you have peopled an entire imaginable future, but with real names, of real heroes.
   I wish that you would agree with me that in the practical socialism which is called writing, there is no disinterested picture to be drawn. It is your choice which hegemony you portray, and the one you portray is the one you support. As Frantz Fanon wrote: There are no innocents, and there are no onlookers.
   Is this true, or not? Am I being unfair? If so, then how do we proceed? Where can we find sufficient power to do what has to be done?

5. Dominic:
   “The conceptual tools that we communists have are no different from the common currency of ideas as brought down by the academy over the centuries.”
   Interesting.
   How do you perceive the remnant Iraqi communist party supporting the US invasion to overthrow the Baath (on the grounds it was fascist)and then joining the government? Also the Kurdish parties long affiliation with the International communists?

6. bb, it’s o.k. that you are right “off-topic” and reeking with hostility, because this post of yours, like your previous one, gives us a good example of the kind of static that we have to wade through on the Internet, whenever we try building up any kind of head of revolutionary steam.
   Just like (if you’ll pardon the phrase) actually-existing-socialism, the socialism of the keyboard contends all the time with reaction.
   In the “Comment” format of the blogs, the growing dialogic consciousness is interspersed with great Calibanic blots and blobs, feeding off the revolutionary energy, and bulging up in proportion to its scope, striving to match it and smother it with dross.
   Long live the Cuban Revolution, 50 years old today!
   Long live the Cuban stalwarts!
   Viva, Fidel Castro, Viva!
   Now, companeros, can we not please return to the post of Helena Cobban and the meaning of it, which I say is contradictory? What do you say about that?

7. Dominic, my judgment is that US power in the world has eroded considerably but by no means completely. Ban and Lavrov may have taken noticeably more initiative this time round than Annan and Lavrov did in 2006– but it is still noticeably curtailed (or, self-curtailed) by the US insistence on continuing to shield Israel from the ceasefire request.
   So I agree with you it is important to identify the actual and potential counter-hegemons. But it is still also very important to understand the dynamics within Washington.
   I maintain, too, that we supporters of peace and human equality who are US citizens have special responsibilities to work within our own citizenry here to try to persuade our fellow-citizens and the elected officials of the anti-humane nature and downright folly (for our interests, as citizens) of the policy of supporting Israel’s vicious and arrogant attacks against so many of its neighbors, time after time after time.
   It seems clear to me now that Condi went seriously “off the Bushist reservation” when she gave some concurrence to Tuesday’s Quartet call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. But still, the fact she did is interesting and significant. I really do think the internal discussions among top Bush officials must be fascinating right now.
   God help Gaza. (And we should do what we can to help its people, too.)

8. Hi Helena, thanks for replying.
   All right, I do see that Condoleezza Rice may have publicly appeared to, as F W de Klerk might say, “distance herself” from the GW Bush line.
   But I don’t see why this is fascinating, as opposed to, say, squalid.
   This ambitious Ms Rice is somebody from Alabama, a contemporary of Angela Davis, who said that their city (Birmingham?) is called “The Johannesburg of the South”.
   I feel I know Condoleezza a bit because of this. Angela Davis came to Johannesburg and told us about these things.
   It is less than a month before Bush ceases to be President. For Rice, this distancing exercise is risk-free and a cheap investment in her future career, just a reminder before it is too late that this particular Birmigham girl is prepared to trim to the left if required, as easily as she trimmed to the right before.
   Perhaps it is advisable and a duty to mark these drab manoeuvres, but it is not fascinating, not in my book.
   It would be more fascinating to look forward to the people who are fashioning, and will continue to fashion, not a cowardly accommodation but a winning critique and an intellectual leadership, or even an emotional and poetic leadership, like Martin Luther King’s.

9. What’s at the back of my mind is this: That we are taking a beating with the tactics that we are using. It makes me to ask, is there not a better voice, and a better mode, and a better literary line of march?
   Not only that, but also, what about the way we work? Especially, how can we avoid people taking personal possession of campaigns? People doing gatekeeping and bottlenecking?
   These are related questions, in my opinion. the voice that speaks to all, so that all know “for whom the bell tolls”, is a voice that raises people up as free people, who will not be bottled up but will go to the work with a will, without further bidding.

10. Helena, You mention that compared to summer 2006
    “The “muscle” the US is able to wield in the international community is considerably scrawnier than it was back in ’06. Thus, this time, we saw Kouchner, Ban, and Lavrov taking initiatives on this matter that back in ’06 they would not have dared to take.”
    Just why would they not have dared defy the US in 2006? What would the US have done to them or their countries if they had acted then as they are now? Not much I would think.
    The one difference I do see now is that we had a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the Israeli military in ’06. Perhaps this is a factor making these various international actors less timid than before.

11. Dominic-
    After the Labor advocates of Mapam/Mapai in the mid-20th century gave way to the UN-violating settlement colonizers of the 1970s and 1980s who were no better than Jabotinsky’s neo-Revisionists of the same decades; and the supporters of Julius and Ethel in Manhattan gave way to Podhoretz’s Neocons; and the Neocons later planned with the neo-Revisionists a Jacobinist military revolution for the Arab world after the post-9/11 fall of Baghdad, while acting in coordination with the military industrial complex underlying George W. Bush’s Pentagon and White House; and in the meantime, the Arab leftist and communist movements gave way to reactionary anti-imperialist religious national Baathist and Qutbist movements which variously allied with and organized against the same Pentagon’s force of arms; and later more than one of the NSC-Pentagon’s planners restrained the guard dogs on 9/11 so the duplicitous attacks on NYC and DC could take place, in order for the fall of Baghdad and the new Jacobinist revolution to find their cause — do you really think there remains such purity in anti-imperial, anti-colonial Communist ideology that one or more from Hobbes, Swift, Fanon and Nkrumah and everything in between, could not find some interest in the ongoing political debates likely to influence the American President-in-waiting?
    This President-in-waiting is a man well-read in the ideas of Hobbes, Swift, Fanon and Nkrumah, and everything in between. Moreover, as he tries to determine how best to develop a US foreign policy response to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, you can bet that he is very much interested in the ongoing political debates among the current occupants of the White House/Pentagon. So soon after the most momentous election in American history, since perhaps the 19th century US civil war, if not before, does the requirement of ideological purity mean that we should already abandon this President-in-waiting, and the interests and concerns that he must have? Perhaps the sort of poetic, emotional and intellectual leadership which you seek is the sort this President-in-waiting seeks himself. Surely this leadership must come from being attentive to the squalid and drab, as well as the fascinating, not from devotion to ideological purity. The latter may be lost forever in the 20th century. The future is in the hands of a new generation still being forged, and we should hope they may draw inspiration from the life of the current US President-in waiting, not despair. If he is able to put the imperial beast of American foreign policy back into its cage, so the beast looks more like the relatively tame creature of the Carter era instead of the raging out-of-control monster of the Bush-Cheney years, then the world will be a far better place in the coming century.

12. Hello Seth,
    I’m glad that so many of my words were grist to your mill. I would like to record that the words “ideological purity” were not mine, but only yours.
    I was trying to say something quite different, and even that the religious, but more especially the literary, temperaments might more effectively be deployed in this case, as the scientific socialist one (mine). So, something like the opposite of what you have assumed. But no matter, because after all, I do remain who I am, and it can also be that only the communists will have the strength for the job of leadership, in this matter, in the end.
    But for the time being I am saying that I, as much as everyone else, have not been adequate to any part of this task that has stalked on a parralel path for nearly all of my life (I was born in 1945) and that we have all allowed a monster to grow, so that we now have ten times the task that we failed to achieve before, and could lose all of our other gains in this struggle.
    As for Mr Obama, who is in some sense a (Kenyan) countryman of mine, yes, I know he is likely to be better read than others who have occupied the office he waits for. I rejoiced at his election, but now I am nauseous about the appointment of Hilary Clinton, a warmonger, to replace Condoleezza Rice. This is an appointment of the most hellish, sulphurous kind.
    I am more than ever sure that you must build the (US) future outside of this decedant clique, of which Obama may turn out to be only the exception that proves the rule, or otherwise the new blood in a coven of vampires, bound to become a vampire himself, sooner than later.
    Or rather, you must build your future by filling the entire polity, of which that in-bred clique is only a tiny part.
    And so, also, must we in the world as a whole, sieze the whole polity with a new iconoclasm, so as to make another gain in the next half-century that is as large or larger than the great anti-colonial gains that we made in the last half-century.

13. It is necessary to review everything, and not stooge around in a small pond of prominenti.
    The religious are called and they have served before, with distinction. Take for example Oliver Tambo, Bishop Huddlestone, Canon Colins and many more including Muslim clerics who assisted in our anti-apartheid struggle.
    But now, look at silly old Bishop Tutu. He called on us to make war on Zimbabwe, only a couple of weeks ago. Now in Gaza, what can he say? He is caught with his clerical pants down.

14. It is necessary to review everything, and not stooge around in a small pond of prominenti.
    The religious are called and they have served before, with distinction. Take for example Oliver Tambo, Bishop Huddlestone, Canon Colins and many more including Muslim clerics who assisted in our anti-apartheid struggle.
    But now, look at silly old Bishop Tutu. He called on us to make war on Zimbabwe, only a couple of weeks ago. Now in Gaza, what can he say? He is caught with his clerical pants down.

15. Dominc-
    I am sorry if I mistook your point of view. I also did not know that you and Obama are African kin, you from the south and he from the equatorial. I find interesting your statement about Tutu and Mugabe.
    A few questions, though:
    If your temperament is the scientific socialist a la Marx-Engels of more than 150 years ago, is that not an ideological pure temperament? Surely over the last 80 years we see clearly that a socialist disposition based on “science” is one that pretends to a non-existent purity.
    During the last 40 years, have we not as thinking persons learned that there is not, and can not be, a “scientific” view when it comes to human beings in society? The thinker who relates to society under the pretension of “science” corrupts the very process of relating. Today’s poets and philosophers, literary or otherwise, know this to be true.
    On Tutu and Mugabe, I wonder what Obama would think of the comparison between the South African case under Mandela and Mbeki on the one hand, and Mugabe’s recent policies on the other. What if the incoming Obama/Hillary administration accepts Tutu’s advice, and sees cause to overthrow the regime in Hrare?
    A student of mine once asked, if Hitler’s regime was a racist fascist regime for blaming the social and economic troubles of Germany on a comparatively wealthy ethnic-racial minority that became subject to dispossession of property, assault and killing, then what stops Mugabe’s regime from being classified in the same way, although in a milder form than Hitler’s, for the way that it is treating the white property-owning class of Zimbabwe.
    Could Tutu’s political views derive from some awareness on his part that Mugabe and Mugabe’s regime can not be given a “pass” on the crimes that are being carried out in Zimbabwe, just because he is a black leader who once led a just national liberation movement against White colonial rule? What might Mandela think of my student’s question? What might Obama think? What might you think?

16. You still want to have an argument with me about communism. Why don’t you see that a movement cannot be built this way? We are not going to agree about this kind of thing, but we have to work together, anyway. What we must discuss is tactics. This is what I am trying to say here.
    In the South African struggle, it’s what we call unity in action. It means that you bring what you can bring to the task, and I bring what I can bring.
    We must look outward, so as to grow. This means that more and more people of more and more divers persuasions must be drawn into the ranks.
    So get with it, Seth. Nobody is looking for wall-to-wall ideological purity here, unless it is yourself. What we all must want is that the Gaza killings be stopped immediately, and that Palestinians everywhere, but particularly those in Gaza, must have their freedom.
    Of course there is an exact equivalence between the white settlers of the former Rhodesia (and those of Kenya where I grew up, as a child of settlers), and the white settlers of Israel.
    A significant portion of the Israeli settlers of today are individuals who have lived the settler life in several of these settler colonies, and in South Africa.
    There are certainly South Africans who will have spent their Christams holiday break killing people in Gaza, and who will be back at work on Monday in Johannesburg and other such places, like everybody else here, as if it was as normal as can be to spend Christmas killing. Please point all this out to your student. As for the rest of it, that must be for another time and place, not here.
    Here, now, we should be discussing the topic of what can be done for peace in Israel/Palestine.

17. Dominic,
    We are in complete agreement about attracting more people into the social justice movement. I am not trying to have an argument with you. I am simply raising critical points which I hear the youth of today making about earlier generations. One being the earlier generations’ false devotion to “science.” Two being the reverse privilege extended by earlier generations to individuals in social justice movements based on that earlier generation’s victimization along the lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
    I find merit in these points of critique as a way to broaden the social justice movement because it heralds a time when, in the first instance, the human species may advance beyond its own arrogance of external knowledge to find supreme contentment in knowledge of the self, and in the second instance, the human species may finally reach the point where the self is evaluated by “the content of its internal character” and not any of the labels one may attach to its external characteristics. This would represent a true breakthrough in the global movement for social justice.
    I ask you this question about Mugabe’s Zimbabwe because I am not a professor of African affairs, and I presume you are. Once I was posed the same question by a student in class asking about the social justice of Mugabe’s rule. I frankly did not know how to answer because I could see the puzzle which my student was dealing with. This puzzle is partly formulated around the two points above since my student was evaluating Mugabe based on 1) the merit of Mugabe’s land confiscation policies and his crude “science” approach to reconfigure Zimbabwean society at a time when the economy of Zimbabwe was collapsing; and 2) the merit of Mugabe as a leader based solely on the content of his character as a just or unjust ruler, not based on any privilege one might grant to Mugabe as an elderly black leader of an old national liberation movement.
    I have asked this question to a number of well-informed people about Zimbabwean, Kenyan, and South African affairs, and they all respond as you do: silence, as if it is a topic one dare not address. One colleague visiting my university four years ago as a guest lecturer from Nairobi responded with complete silence, and I learned through other colleagues that he presumed I was racist for even raising the subject of my student’s question with him. I had merely sought the opinion of this visiting Kenyan scholar since I honestly did not know how to respond to my student. Moreover I was prepared to accept the views of this Kenyan scholar as a legitimate basis of answering my student’s question, regardless of whether the Kenyan had a favorable or unfavorable view of Mugabe. In other words, I had no position on the matter, but I learned from the experience that the matter is so sensitive among Africans that one risks being accused of racism for even asking the question.
    All I am aksing, Dominic, is for your view of Mugabe as a leader, and of his policies as a basis of social justice. Is Mugabe truly serving the interests of social justice in Zimbabwe through his policies of violent gang-enforced land redistribution? Is it possible these policies parallel to a degree the policies of a racial fascist? Are these questions so sensitive that one dare not even pose them? In my view, as I shared with my student four years ago after my own experience in raising the student’s question about Zimbabwean affairs with my colleague, is that we should never reach the point in the struggle for social justice where one dare not “raise the question” or enter into an open exchange of ideas.
    I think even Marx 140 years ago would have agreed with this viewpoint. I apologize that I am diverging from the topic of this post, but I see this as a good opportunity to learn more about social justice issues of Zimbabwe and I truly hope that you will respond. Please understand again that I am not seeking an argument. I simply do not know enough about Zimbabwe to understand why this question is always met with silence. Is it true that there is some good coming from Mugabe’s policies? Are Zimbabweans benefiting in any way? The western media on this issue is entirely against Mugabe, and Zimbabwe is portrayed as an economic, social, cultural, and political disaster under Mugabe’s rule.

18. O.k., lets try to put something together out of this that is a little bit “on topic”.
    You, professor, are trying to say that science is anti-human, whereas it is science that distinguishes human beings from other animals. We humans have the capacity of progressively growing the social knowledge that we share. We increase this social knowledge from generation to generation. That is human. That is the essence, and being conscious of this essence takes you to the pint of being humanist. Humanists are rational, unlike the fascists that you want to talk about, and unlike the Israelis of today.
    I don’t like clever people sailing over what I have already written. You’ll do it again, no doubt, professor, because at your age it is a habit you can’t break. But for the others, let me remind them of the point I made at the beginning about the continuity of secular thought. Humanism goes back to the beginning of historical time, and it has always been contested. Nothing is lost: We are the living product of history.
    The struggle of the humanists against the irrational “will-to-power” crowd, as well as their counterparts the fatalists, still continues. At this time we have both irrational “post-modernism”, and Israeli bestiality, to contend with. At other times there have been the likes of Caligula, Attila, the Rape of Nanking, slavery, and colonialism in countless incidents and long years of systemic mass-scale brutality. In our time we have this to deal with: Palestine. This is our portion.
    Always we fight for humanism, a.k.a. ubuntu. The people, as humans, are bound together by a common secular consciousness, and not by constructs of race and blood, or by mummeries or superstitions. This common consciousness includes what we call science. Science is humanity. It is the sphere of our knowing, and in our knowing resides our morality. I’m sure you know that, prof. Or do you think that a person can sin unconsciously?
    This is the basis upon which the struggle of the Palestinians is seen as the world’s struggle. Helena was right to post the picture of the children’s choir. It is the oppressed who must fight for reason and to preserve culture, while the oppressor must fear reason and culture. One of the first things the Israeli bombers destroyed this week was a university. Where is your protest about that, prof?
    You insist on Zimbabwe, but you are far behind. There was an election at the end of March 2008 that the MDC won, but Zanu-PF will not vacate. That is what we are dealing with now. Once again the incumbents are the irrational ones and the excluded ones are demanding a rational process and opposing an arbitrary process.
    When the MDC does finally come in, and removes Robert Gabriel Mugabe from the Presidency of Zimbabwe, it will not reverse the Zanu-PF land reforms. It will not. You are flogging a dead horse, my friend.
    I repeat what I wrote above about the Rhodies: you must know that these are settlers who have been occupying land that was stolen by force, much of it in living memory, and the rest in the recent past.
    You are surprised that African people’s jaws drop in speechless amazement when you compare the Rhodesian settlers to the Jews who were slaughtered by Hitler under the Third Reich. Nobody owes you a leg-up from that sort of depth of ignorance. For God’s sake, man, go and do some reading.

19. Dominic-
    I am not arguing with you. I am in 100% agreement with most of what you wrote. I also have read generally about issues in Africa, and I know that there are Africans and Zimbabweans who disagree strongly with Robert Mugabe.
    I did not compare “the Rhodesian settlers to the Jews who were slaughtered by Hitler under the Third Reich.” As I told you this was a question asked by my student, not me. His question drew a parallel between Hitler’s social attitudes and Mugabe’s social attitudes. Both the student and myself are well aware of the difference between white Rhodesian settlers and Jewish citizens of Germany in the 1930s, and that difference is obviously the one which makes the parallel falter. Nonetheless the parallel exists between the actions of two heads of state.
    I understand that the MDC was elected and Mugabe refused to step aside. I understand that supporters of the MDC and many Zimbabweans have sought land redistribution for many decades. But I doubt that good leaders of the MDC would pursue this land redistribution by the crude means Mugabe uses with his crony thugs who go about beating up and killing people. Again the parallel is between Mugabe and Hitler.
    I am glad to have your views stated on the matter. I am glad that we return to the topic of Gaza and Palestine. We may still differ slightly about the significance which “science” has in human consciousness. I am a secular humanist in the same tradition which you speak. I am proud of the historic traditions of humanity. But “science” as it came to be understood in the post-Renaissance can be abused in horrific ways. This is what the younger generation is rebelling against. We must embrace the progressive in human consciousness, not the abusive element of western “science.”

20. Seth,
    Thank you for your reply.
    You still insist that a “parallel exists between the actions of two heads of state”, by which you mean “the crude means Mugabe uses”. This is a variant of the “it’s not what he did but the way that he did it” argument, with which we are familiar. This argument is prevalant in SADC, the Southern African Development Community, whose appointed mediator in Zimbabwe is the ex-President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. In spite of this argument, or because of it, or under cover of it, the SADC has in practice supported Zanu-PF and failed to support the MDC’s victory at the polls.
    You may be able to get from this that for us in Southern Africa the argument that “it’s not what he did but the way that he did it” is not a lot of use. Or rather, it seems to serve as a veil, for anyone who cares to pick it up and use it to obscure other, different, machinations.
    There are real parallels in this situation. The main one, I repeat, is the parallel between the settlers of Rhodesia, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa and other such places, and the settler state of Israel. I do mean to say Israel. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” settlers is not the point here. The primary settler entity is Israel, not “the settlements”.
    The parallel of the settlers is not merely a comparison of abstractions. I repeat, there are many individuals who have proceeded from African settler colonies, as these achieved their freedom, to Israel, and others who keep one foot in Africa and another foot in Israel. These settlers are still an active, leading component of the Israeli settlerist project.
    Israel is the redoubt of settlerdom. Israel’s actions are the revanchism of settlerdom. This is the main reason why Israel is supported in “The West”, including, but not limited to, the USA. Israel is part of the general metropolitan reaction to the huge world-historical shift that materialised as colonial freedom in the latter part of the 20th century. Everything of colonialism is there, in Israel, in concentrated and florid form, including the racism, the brutality, the complacency, the decedance and the fatal corruption of individual and social morality among the settlers themselves.
    The remedy for Israel is transformation. There is no shortage of experiance in this regard. There are fifty-three independent countries in Africa alone, each of which could usefully show its experience and give its advice.
    There has to be independence, and sovereignty of nations. We have struggled for that. But a state sovereignty that is based on a racial or religious criterion is not acceptable. It undermines all the others and as we are seeing, it is logically compelled to attack them with military force, time and again, only pausing to reload, as it were.
    So the other way to put the parallel is this: That the recognition of sovereignty and independence is finally conditional on real internal democracy. Independence is all of a piece with the morality of humanism about which we agree, you and I. Presently, neither Zimbabwe, nor Swaziland, nor Israel pass this test. As soon as possible, all of them must be prevailed upon to transform themselves; but the most urgent, critical case for transformation is the nest of settlerdom: Israel.

21. Dominic-
    Yes, we need to keep the focus on Israel as the Imperial capital of Settlerdom. You and I are in agreement. In no way am I trying to distract attention from the pressing issue of Gaza and Palestine.
    On this difference of view between us concerning “science,” I am perhaps more knowledgeable of Eastern or Asian views on human consciousness, and this is why I look at the question of “science” in a different way. For instance, the Arab and Muslim view of “‘ilm” is different from the traditional Western understanding of “science.”
    Western consciousness created a separate category for “science” which it placed in isolation from wisdom and compassion. Eastern consciousness, which significantly need not be separate from secular humanism, tends to translate “science” as simply cwisdom or knowledge. Thus Eastern consciousness better avoids the monstrous abuses of “science,” when Western culture placed it in a dominant position over and above the humanitarian sensibilities.
    For example, the monstrous crimes of the Nazis in the name of “science,” or the crimes of Truman when he dropped the Atom bombs on Japan. This is what I referred to when I spoke about the younger generation critiquing the false views of earlier generations on cold, hard “science,” including the kind of false views of a cold, hard “social science” that led to Stalin’s crimes. In no way did I mean this critique to concern secular humanism. The Eastern consciousness of wisdom/knowledge as a more humane science is perfectly compatible with secular humanism.
    In my view it is a peculiarity of Western consciousness that creates a cold, hard “science” as a subset of Knowledge/Wisdom — and in the West, this often becomes a detached and superior subset which leads to criminal abuses. This has relevant and important implications for the issue of Palestine, and the origins of the Zionist movement which started as a secular nationalist drive to colonize land albeit with quasi-religious characteristics and certain economic motivations.
    At the beginning of the Zionist Settler movement in Palestine, its European leadership carried a Western consciousness of “science” knowledge as something superior to the Eastern culture in which it sought to implant Zionist settlements. Settlers like Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky, Meir, behaved as though they and their knowledge were superior to the surrounding Palestinian Muslim/Christian majority. This was even derived partly from the Marxist construct of “oriental despotism,” which it considered to be an inferior level of development to industrial capitalism. Peter Gran and many other scholars have debunked this idea that western industrial capitalism was superior to business and trade institutions in the East.
    In any case, the Zionists imagined they carried an enlightened Western science into Palestine which would create social and economic “development” for the betterment of Palestinians. This false consciousness of “science” or “scientific” knowledge was put to use from the beginning of the entire colonial settler project, and of course not just by the Zionists. It is significant that Zionism remains in the 21st century, and that it lingers as the Capital of Settlerdom as you put it. I wonder about your reference to South African Christmas vacationers in Israel, participating in the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. I know that South African mercenaries operated for hire by Americans in Iraq from 2003 on, but is this the same to which you refer?
    I am curious are these South Africans you refer to dual citizens in Israel? Are they mainly South African Christian Zionists? Or are these primarily Jewish citizens of South Africa? There needs to be established international watchdog organizations which can track these mercenary activities, and hopefully one day prosecute those who organize the mercenaries? In the US, I know the leadership of organizations like Blackwater should be prosecuted for the war crimes they committed in Iraq. The whole lot should be put out of operation, and I agree with you it must start with the mercenaries headquartered in Israel.

22. Hi Seth,
    Enough is as good as a feast. Let’s leave it there and move on.

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