Israel vs. the United Nations: The Nikki Haley Doctrine

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/22/israel-vs-the-united-nations-the-nikki-haley-doctrine/

June 22, 2017

by Ramzy Baroud

The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, seems to be championing a single cause: Israel.

When Haley speaks about Israel, her language is not merely emotive nor tailored to fit the need of a specific occasion.  Rather, her words are resolute, consistent and are matched by a clear plan of action.

Along with Haley, the rightwing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is moving fast to cultivate the unique opportunity of dismissing the United Nations, thus, any attempt at criticizing the Israeli Occupation.

Unlike previous UN ambassadors who strongly backed Israel, Haley refrains from any coded language or any attempt, however poor, to appear balanced. Last March, she told a crowd of 18,000 supporters at the Israel lobby, AIPAC’s annual policy conference, that this is a new era for US-Israel relations.

“I wear heels. It’s not for a fashion statement,” she told the crowd that was thrilled by her speech. “It’s because if I see something wrong, we’re going to kick ’em every single time.”

Trump’s new sheriff/ambassador, condemned, in retrospect, UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which strongly criticized Israel’s illegal settlements. While still in its final days in office, the Obama Administration did not vote for – but did not veto the Resolution, either – thus setting a precedent that has not been witnessed in many years.

The US abstention, according to Haley, was as if the “entire country felt a kick in the gut.”

What made Israel particularly angry over Obama’s last act at the UN was the fact that it violated a tradition that has extended for many years, most notably during the term of John Negroponte, US Ambassador to the UN, during the first W. Bush’s term in office.

What became known as the ‘Negroponte doctrine’ was a declared US policy – that Washington will oppose any resolution that criticizes Israel that does not also condemn Palestinians.

But Israel, not the Palestinians, is the occupying power which refuses to honor dozens of UN resolutions and various international treaties and laws. By making that decision, and, indeed, following through to ensure its implementation, the US managed to sideline the UN as an ‘irrelevant’ institution.

Sidelining the UN, then, also meant that the US would have complete control over managing the Middle East, but especially the situation in Palestine.

However, under Trump, even the US-led and self-tailored ‘peace process’ has become obsolete.

This is the real moral but, also political, crisis of the Haley doctrine, for it goes beyond Negroponte’s silencing any criticism of Israel at the UN, into removing the UN entirely – thus international law – from being a factor in resolving the conflict.

In a talk at the Geneva-based Human Rights Council – which is made up of 47 member countries – Haley declared that her country is ‘reviewing its participation’ in the Council altogether. She claimed that Israel is the “only country permanently on the body’s calendar,” an inaccurate statement that is often uttered by Israel with little basis in truth.

If Haley read the report on the 35th session of the Human Rights Council, she would have realized that the Rights body discussed many issues, pertaining to women rights and empowerment, forced marriages and human rights violations in many countries.

But considering that Israel has recently ‘celebrated’ 50 years of occupying Palestinians, Haley should not be surprised that Israel is also an item on the agenda. In fact, any country that has occupied and oppressed another for so long should also remain an item on international agenda.

Following her speech in which she derided and threatened UN member states in Geneva, she went to Israel to further emphasize her country’s insistence to challenge the international community on behalf of Israel.

Along with notorious hasbara expert, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, Haley toured the Israeli border with Gaza, showing sympathy with supposedly besieged Israeli communities – while on the other side, nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have been trapped for over a decade in a very small region, behind sealed shut borders.

Speaking in Jerusalem on June 7, Haley took on the UN ‘bullies’, who have ‘bullied’ Israel for too long.

She said, “I have never taken kindly to bullies and the UN has bullied Israel for a very long time and we are not going to let that happen anymore,” adding “it is a new day for Israel in the United Nations.”

By agreeing to live in Israel’s pseudo-reality, where bullies complain of being bullied, the US is moving further and further away from any international consensus on human rights and international law. This becomes more pronounced and dangerous when we consider the Donald Trump Administration’s decision to pull out from the Paris accords on global warming.

Trump argued that the decision was of benefit to American businesses. Even if one agrees with such an unsubstantiated assertion, Haley’s new doctrine on Israel and the UN, by contrast, can hardly be of any benefit to the United States in the short or long run. It simply degrades US standing, leadership and even goes below the lowest standards of credibility practiced under previous administrations.

Worse still, inspired and empowered by Haley’s blank check, Israeli leaders are now moving forward to physically remove the UN from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Two alarming developments have taken place on that front:

One took place early May when Culture and Sport Minister, Miri Regev, made a formal demand to the Israeli cabinet to shut down the UN headquarter in Jerusalem, to punish UNESCO for restating the international position on the status of Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem.

The second was earlier this month, when Prime Minister Netanyahu called on Haley to shut down UNRWA, the UN body responsible for the welfare of 5 million Palestinian refugees.

According to Netanyahu, UNRWA ‘perpetuates’ refugee problems. However, the refugees’ problem is not UNRWA per se, but the fact that Israel refuses to honor UN resolution 194 pertaining to their return and compensation.

These developments, and more, are all outcomes of the Haley doctrine. Her arrival at the UN has ignited a US-Israeli hate fest, not only targeting UN member states, but international law and everything that the United Nations has stood for over the decades.

The US has supported Israel quite blindly at the UN throughout the years. Haley seems to adopt an entirely Israeli position with no regard whatsoever for her country’s allies, or the possible repercussions of dismissing the only international body that still serves as a platform for international engagement and conflict resolution.

Haley seems to truly think of herself as the new sheriff in town, who will “kick ’em every single time”, before riddling the bullies with bullets and riding into the sunset, along with Netanyahu. However, with a huge leadership vacuum and no law to guide the international community in resolving a 70-year-old conflict, Haley’s cowboy tactics are likely to do much harm to an already bleeding region.

Since the Negroponte doctrine of 2002, thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis were killed in an occupation that seems to know no ends. Further disengagement from international law will likely yield a greater toll and more suffering.

Trumpcare bill has been released, and it’s AWFUL

http://www.dsausa.org/

Breaking news, sisters and brothers: the full Trumpcare bill has been released and it’s just as awful as we feared.

Trump and the GOP are once again trying to sneak their destructive health care bill through Congress; a bill that will cost the lives of more than 30,000 people annually, if passed. That's why I'm asking you to donate $27 to DSA today. We need help mobilizing our members nationwide to oppose this awful bill.

As democratic socialists, we understand that health care — like education, food, and shelter — is a basic human right. Not only that, this country can afford to provide it if we just make the billionaire class pay their fair share of taxes.

A Medicare-for-All system is the best way forward. But while we keep fighting for universal healthcare, we need to protect what we’ve got, which for millions of people is the Affordable Care Act. That’s why we’re organizing all across the country to stop Trumpcare, from Kentucky to New Mexico. And we need your help.

Can you chip in $27 to help our national and local organizing efforts? We’re fighting back against Trumpcare and pressuring Congress to stop the bill. Your help can make all the difference.

This is one of the most important policy battles of our time. Our capitalist health care system has been an utter disaster for millions of people, and Trumpcare will make things even worse! It’s up to us to stop it.

In solidarity,

Maria Svart
National Director, DSA

Populist nationalism is the privileged domain of enjoyment in the social field

[...] the ideal levelling of all social differences, the production of the citizen, the subject of democracy, is possible only through an allegiance to some particular national Cause. If we apprehend this Cause as the Freudian Thing (das Ding), materialized enjoyment, it becomes clear why it is precisely “nationalism” that is the privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field: the national Cause is ultimately the way subjects of a given nation organize their collective enjoyment through national myths. What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing: the “other” wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our “way of life”) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.

(Looking Awry, p. 165)

Democracy’s Fascism Problem

FROM April 29, 2016, but worth reading again.

Europe has a ‘democracy deficit’ on both the Left and the Right

BY Slavoj Žižek

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19037/slavoj-zizek-democracys-fascism-problem

Sometimes faces become symbols of the anonymous forces behind them. Was not the stupidly smiling face of Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem the symbol of the European Union’s brutal pressure on Greece? Recently, the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP)—the European cousin of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—acquired a new symbol: the cold face of E.U. trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who responded to massive public opposition to TTIP this way: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

Now a third such symbol has emerged: Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission, who, on Dec. 23, 2015, scolded the Polish government for adopting a new law that subordinates Poland’s constitutional court to the authority of government. Timmermans also condemned the law that allows the Polish parliament to replace all executives at the country’s public television and radio companies. In an immediate rebuke, Polish nationalists warned Brussels “to exercise more restraint in instructing and cautioning the parliament and the government of a sovereign and democratic state.”

From the standard left-liberal view, it is inappropriate to put these three names into the same series: Dijsselbloem and Malmström personify the pressure of the Brussels bureaucrats (without democratic legitimization) on democratically elected governments, while Timmermans intervened to protect basic democratic institutions (judicial independence and a free press). It may appear obscene to compare the brutal neoliberal pressure on Greece with the justified criticism of Poland, but did the Polish government’s reaction not hit the mark? Timmermans did indeed pressure a democratically elected government of a sovereign state.

Recently, when I was answering questions from the readers of Süddeutsche Zeitung about the refugee crisis, the question that attracted the most attention concerned democracy—but with a right-wing populist twist. When Angela Merkel famously invited hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany, what gave her the right? My point here is not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to point out the limits of democratic legitimization. The same goes for those who advocate the radical opening of the borders: Are they aware that, since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demand equals a suspension of democracy—in other words, that a gigantic change should be allowed without democratic consultation?

We encounter here the old dilemma: What happens to democracy if the majority is inclined to vote for racist and sexist laws? It’s easy to imagine a democratized Europe with a much more engaged citizenry in which the majority of governments are formed by anti-immigrant populist parties. I am not afraid to conclude that emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of legitimization.

Of course, no privileged political agent knows inherently what is best for the people and has the right to impose its decisions on the people against their will (as the Stalinist Communist Party did). However, when the will of the majoity clearly violates basic emancipatory freedoms, one has not only the right but also the duty to oppose that majority. This is not reason to despise democratic elections—only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth. As a rule, elections reflect the conventional wisdom determined by the hegemonic ideology.

Left critics of the European Union thus find themselves in a predicament: They deplore the “democracy deficit” of the European Union and propose plans to make the decision making in Brussels more transparent, but they support the “non-democratic” Brussels administrators when they exert pressure on democratically legitimized “fascist” tendencies. What lies behind this contradiction is the Big Bad Wolf of the European liberal Left: the threat of a new Fascism embodied in anti-immigrant right-wing populism. This strawman is perceived as the principal enemy against which we should all unite, from (whatever remains of) the radical Left to mainstream liberal democrats (including E.U. administrators like Timmermans). Europe is portrayed as a continent regressing toward a new Fascism that feeds on the paranoiac hatred and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy (mostly Muslims). While this new fascism is dominant in some post-Communist East European countries (Hungary, Poland, etc.), it is getting stronger in many other E.U. countries where the view is that the Muslim refugee invasion poses a threat to European civilization.

But is this really fascism? The term is all too often used to avoid detailed analysis. The Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, killed in early May 2002, two weeks before he was expected to gain one-fifth of the vote, was a paradoxical figure: a right-wing populist whose personal attributes and opinions (for the most part) were almost perfectly “politically correct”: He was gay, had good personal relations with many immigrants and possessed an innate sense of irony, etc.—in short, he was a good, tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic political stance. He opposed fundamentalist immigrants because of their lack of tolerance toward homosexuality, women’s rights, religious differences, etc. What he embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness. Perhaps he had to die because he was living proof that the dichotomy between right-wing populism and liberal tolerance is a false one—that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin.

Many leftist liberals, like Jürgen Habermas, idealize a “democratic” European Union that never existed. Recent E.U. policy is nothing more than a desperate attempt to make Europe fit for global capitalism. The usual Left-liberal critique of the European Union—it’s basically okay, just with a “democracy deficit”—betrays the same naïveté as those critics of former-Communist countries who supported the Communists but bemoaned the lack of democracy. In both cases, the democracy deficit is a necessary part of the structure.

In a reference to the likely election of Syriza in Greece, in December 2014, the Financial Times published a column headlined: “Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters.” In the Pink Lady’s ideal world, Europe gets rid of this “weakest link” and experts gain the power to directly impose economic measures. If elections take place, their function is to confirm the consensus of experts.

As Eurocrat and former prime minister of Italy Mario Monti put it: “Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians.”

The only way to counteract the “democratic deficit” of global capitalism would be through some transnational entity. But the nation-state cannot serve as a democratic bulwark against global capitalism for two reasons: First, it is a priori in a weak position at a time when the economy functions as a global force; second, to do so, a sovereign nation-state is obliged to mobilize nationalist ideology and thus opens itself up to rightist populism. Poland and Hungary are today two such nationstates opposing globalization.

This brings us to what is the principal contradiction of global capitalism: Imposing a global political order that would correspond to a global capitalist economy is structurally impossible, and not because it is empirically difficult to organize global elections or to establish global institutions. The reason is that the global market is not a neutral, universal machine with the same rules for everybody. It requires a vast network of exceptions, violations of its own rules, extra-economic (military) interventions and so forth. So while our economy is more and more global, what is “repressed” from the anonymous global economy returns in politics: archaic fixations and particular (ethnic, religious, cultural) identities. This tension defines our predicament today: The global, free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing social divisions. Commodities circulate more and more freely, but people are kept apart by new walls, from physical walls (such as in the West Bank and between the United States and Mexico) to reasserted ethnic and religious identities.

Does this mean that we should bypass the topic of democratizing Europe as a blind alley? On the contrary, it means that, precisely because of its central significance, we should approach it in a more radical way.

The problem is more substantial: How do we transform the basic coordinates of our social life, from our economy to our culture, so that democracy as free, collective decision-making becomes actual—not just a ritual of legitimizing decisions made elsewhere?

DEMOCRACY'S RIGHT-WING DEFAULT SETTING

When voters are given a choice between a Republican and a republican, they will choose the Republican.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--hoskx8tC8

Good Riddance to Corporate Democrats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUkA-5Vd3E0

Corporate Democrats Continue Losing

"Centrist" Pro-Israel Corporate Democrats would rather LOSE than run a Progressive who could win


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxeAWyYiPHM






I'm laughing my ass off at Ossoff