Friday, July 10, 2020
Socialist Strategy and the Biden Debate
Should anti-capitalists urge a vote for Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020 or not?
July 6, 2020 Max Elbaum ORGANIZING UPGRADE
https://portside.org/2020-07-06/socialist-strategy-and-biden-debate
The COVID-19 pandemic and the uprising to defend Black lives have cast a spotlight on a level of deep-rooted inequality, ruling class degeneration, and public-health-be-damned behavior that makes the U.S. unique even among capitalist countries. My next column will examine the sources of these pathologies in a nation founded on racial slavery and genocide that has now entered the stage of its imperial decline.
But first I want to join a debate that was riveting parts of the left before COVID-19 hit and George Floyd was murdered. Partly because important lessons from the early forms it took are in danger of being lost; and partly because the discussion is still raging, and the stakes are high:
Should anti-capitalists urge a vote for Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November 2020 or not?
CENTRAL POLARIZATON SHAPING THE MOMENT
Engaging this question head-on can do more than clarify the next five months’ action priorities, important as those are. It can illuminate issues of political strategy that go deeper than the tired “same debate every four years” ritual. And focusing on strategic questions is the best antidote to the tendencies toward call-out personal attacks, sectarian point-scoring, and general hectoring that sap morale and alienate potential allies.
Cutting to the strategic heart of the Biden debate means looking at these questions:
What does living in the era of neoliberal capitalism tell us – and not tell us – about the alignment of social forces in the U.S today? What is the central polarization – the main axis of struggle – around which the biggest current battles revolve?
How does white supremacy interweave with capitalist exploitation to shape that polarization?
What is the relationship of battles for democratic rights to the fight for working class power?
How does a left that is just beginning to climb out of the margins go from weak to strong, especially given the unique U.S. winner-take-all, two-party system?
In addressing these questions, this longer-than-usual column will present arguments for the following proposition:
The central polarization in the country today is between a Trumpist bloc driving toward authoritarian rule vs. a majority opposition that, for all the vacillations and differences within it, is defending the democratic space that movements for justice, peace and radical change require to advance. Race and racism lie at the heart of this polarization.
This has been the case ever since Trump was elected. But the administration’s response to the pandemic and the uprising has made it even clearer. The 2020 election will determine which force will hold governing power: a reactionary bloc anchored in white supremacy or an administration that can be influenced by a progressive current powered by the fight for racial justice.
A crucial way to maximize chances of the latter prevailing, as well as to build the strength and influence of the left itself, is for us to become an independent yet resolute force engaging this electoral battle. Our goal should be turning out the largest possible working class and people of color vote for Biden with the message that removing white nationalism from political power is an indispensable step in the long- term battle for transformative change.
DIFFERENCES OBSCURED DURING BERNIE’S CAMPAIGN
Differences over the strategic questions posed above are longstanding on the left. But they exploded with tremendous intensity immediately after Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign.
This was mainly because key strategic differences were obscured and largely unacknowledged while Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns were in full swing.
Bernie’s was the larger and more sustained effort. Most Bernie supporters backed his candidacy because they were enthusiastic about the programs he advocated and his “not me, us” approach.
But for socialists who backed Bernie, there was an additional factor. Bernie’s effort was seen as providing a vehicle for building a durable working-class movement against capitalism. What was not faced squarely was that on the level of socialist strategy, Bernie was sending two different – in fact, contradictory – signals.
One suggested his was a campaign against the billionaire class as a whole, and that the establishments of both parties were equally beholden to the 1%. While Bernie contended for the Democratic Party nomination, he was an “independent” and self-identified democratic socialist, so this could be interpreted as a strictly tactical and temporary choice. This signal implied that the main axis of U.S. struggle was workers vs. capital, and it led some to view Bernie’s campaign constituted a direct steppingstone to building a non-Democratic Party force that would unify workers and wage class struggle against the entire neoliberal ruling class.
But a different signal was sent by Bernie consistently calling Trump “the most dangerous President in modern American history” and stating from day one that he would support whomever won the Democratic nomination. Bernie and Bernie-connected groups like Our Revolution worked to build their independent clout, but also fought to maximize progressive strength within the structures of the Democratic Party. This approach signaled that the campaign regarded the main polarization in the country as the ultra-reactionary bloc behind Trump vs. a broad front in defense of democratic rights, within which the Bernie movement would set a working-class pole. The 2020 Democratic Party was the electoral vehicle for that anti-Trumpist front, and Bernie would maintain a unity-and-struggle relationship with all other political trends within it.
When Bernie’s campaign was growing, socialists largely ignored this important difference. Occasional conflicts did take place, for example the debate over how to relate to those radicals who believed Elizabeth Warren was more attuned to issues of racial and gender justice than Bernie, and/or that she had the best chance of uniting the anti-Trump front under a progressive banner. Bernie-backing socialists whose priority was defeating Trumpism advocated close cooperation with Warren supporters. But the other wing of socialist Bernie proponents were critical if not outright hostile. This produced a sharp debate that receded only because Warren’s campaign stalled and Bernie’s surged in February.
POST-BERNIE EXPLOSION
Then, right on the heels of Bernie’s Nevada-fueled surge, the South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and Michigan primary results knocked him out of the running. A few weeks later Bernie suspended his campaign, endorsed Biden, and announced he and the former Vice-President would set up a number of task forces to institutionalize a working relationship that would extend through the general election campaign into a Biden administration.
These steps – and then the task forces coming into being – were unmistakable signs that Bernie’s strategy was to fight for the influence of working-class-oriented programs within a cross-class anti-Trump front.
With the end of Bernie’s campaign and no more ambiguity about his stance, the suppressed strategic differences on the left rocketed to the fore.
While facing many challenges, radical supporters of Sanders, Warren or neither whose strategy was to fight for left influence within an anti-Trump front had a clear path forward. Engage urgent COVID-19 battles and start gearing up for the general. Craft the specifics of an anti-Trump message. Scale up infrastructure so that further efforts build independent organizational clout rather than getting subsumed in the official Biden campaign. Support progressive and socialist down-ballot candidates. Plunge into the host of grassroots labor, tenant, criminal justice, immigrant rights and voting rights battles that are key to expanding progressive influence inside and outside the Democratic Party. And after the uprising focused on anti-Black racism took off, go all-in behind it and the pivotal role being played by the Movement for Black Lives.
THE ‘NEVER BIDEN’ CAMP
For those who favor the Bernie movement transitioning into a purely working-class force fighting equally against both the GOP and Democratic Party establishments, the transition post-Bernie is tougher.
The course with the most logical and political consistency is to take immediate steps toward creation of a third party. But Bernie, most of the apparatus of his campaign, the Squad, and most Warren supporters – not to mention almost the entire labor movement and big majorities in communities of color – are signaling they will back Biden. It is hardly appealing to shift almost overnight from a surging movement of millions to a project weaker by several orders of magnitude.
Nevertheless, for most who believe that the central axis of struggle must remain worker-vs. capitalist and the left’s main task is to always promote a break with Democratic and Republican establishments, backing Biden, even with0ut a formal endorsement, is a bridge too far. So the dominant voices in this camp are left with a mainly what not to do approach to the 2020 presidential contest: socialist organizations should not get behind Biden or call for collective action to defeat Trump. Instead they recommend supporting socialist candidates in down ballot races and working in non-electoral struggles that build workers’ power.
This “Never Biden” position (in the form of ‘Bernie or Bust’) was adopted by DSA at its 2019 Convention. As a result, the largest organization on the socialist left is without a positive national strategy for engaging in the 2020 contest. Rather than taking a course parallel to Bernie’s, as a national organization DSA has positioned itself on the margins of the central political fight of the year.
Given the big tent character of DSA and the wide range of views within it, what specific chapters and individual members will do varies widely. Those of us outside DSA need to respect the organization’s choice and recognize that most of what its members will do over the next five months will contribute positively to social change. But it is simply stating a fact that no revolutionary organization has ever grown into a powerful, much less dominant, force in any country without implementing a strategy that engages the main battle in nationwide politics, whether that fight is primarily electoral, mainly armed conflict, or anything in between.
WORKERS VS. NEO-LIBERAL CAPITALISTS
These differences within U.S. radicalism do not stem from any difference in the depth of anyone’s commitment to social transformation. Rather they reflect opposing assessments of what constitutes the central axis of political polarization in the U.S, today and therefore the most appropriate socialist strategy.
There is consensus on the left that we are currently living under capitalism in its neoliberal form. For the “Never Biden” tendency, that translates into seeing the workers vs. neoliberal capitalist conflict as the central axis around which socialists need to draw not just ideological but immediate electoral and non-electoral action lines. Any view other than this is seen as diluting socialist principle.
For decades, most who held this view argued that it mandated staying 100% out of the Democratic Party. In the wake of the 2016 Sanders campaign, and especially in 2019-2020, a large cohort abandoned this position (to cries of betrayal by their former co-thinkers}. Those who shifted decided that because of the constraints of the two-party system, it was acceptable to contend for a place on the Democratic ballot line, but only if insurgent candidates ran as socialists. Backing non-socialists in primaries or general elections, or engagement in any structure affiliated with the Democratic Party, was still forbidden.
There is a logic to this view. And it has particular appeal to people radicalized since the 2008 financial crisis. That event and the resulting economic downturn turned a large proportion of educated youth into a debt-ridden, downwardly mobile cohort.
WHITE SUPREMACY AT THE PIVOT
Appealing as it is, however, this perspective mis-assesses the lineup of forces in the country’s current polarization.
The left might wish for (and work toward making) the central dividing line in U.S. politics between a multi-racial, intergenerational and all-round inclusive working class vs. an alignment of big capital, chunks of the middle class and a small layer of ideologically corrupted or outright bought workers. But that is not the reality today and it very rarely has been in the past.
Today’s which-side-are-you-on dividing line is between a racist authoritarian bloc led by Donald Trump vs. a larger but much more heterogeneous array of forces that, from different angles, regard Trumpism as a dire threat to their rights and interests.
Both the Trump and anti-Trump camps are multi-class alliances. Both contain advocates of neoliberal economics. The conflict between them is nonetheless quite sharp. The dividing line is the system of white supremacy. This racist material relation is not an “add-on” that piles oppression on top of exploitation for certain groups of workers. Rather, it is integral to and interwoven with relations of exploitation in ways that have decisively shaped political conflict in the U.S. since its origins in 1619.
Trumpism rose to power in the wake of a 50-year backlash against the gains made by 1960s movements, the overthrow of legal Jim Crow and passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act most of all. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and then Reagan’s dog-whistle racism laid the groundwork for the openly racist “birther” campaign that transformed Trump from a reality-TV host into a formidable presidential candidate. Since 2016 Trump has gained complete control of the Republican Party. Former top GOP strategist Avik Roy put it concisely: the GOP is a party whose center of gravity is white nationalism. Anti-feminism and homophobia are incorporated into this toxic brew, and all who are not on board have been purged or cowed into acquiescence.
In a mirror image of the way the Black-led Civil Rights struggle expanded democratic rights and yielded economic gains for all workers and oppressed constituencies, racism lay at the cutting edge of the neoliberal era’s assault on the working class as a whole. It lies at Trumpism’s core, and has driven us to this moment when racial polarization, urban-rural polarization, partisan political and even basic information-source divisions now thoroughly overlap.
The differential impact of COVID-19 across the color line and the uprising to defend Black lives have both intensified this central polarization and underscored the way racism stands at its pivot. The country is now more sharply polarized than it has been since the Civil War.
This is the reason why Trumpism, which attacks the living standards and political strength of the U.S. working class, has been able to glue large numbers of white workers to its key social base in the capitalist class and middle strata. It is why the vast majority of people of color and other democratic minded people of all classes are arrayed against Trump. All workers have suffered intensified hardships since the 2008 financial crisis, but there is a deep racial chasm in the working class’ political response.
DRIVE TOWARD AUTHORITARIAN RULE
Going hand-in-hand with the Trumpism’s deployment of “strategic racism” is its drive toward authoritarian rule.
While Trump’s unhinged egomania contributes to this malady, authoritarianism’s main driver is the corporate core of Trumpism – the fossil fuel industry, military industrial complex, and a cohort of right-wing billionaires. These heavyweights calculate that they need to dispense with the previous norms of U.S. democracy to advance their agenda.
Their calculation is based mainly on two things:
The first is demographic change: the steadily rising proportion of people of color in the U.S. means expansion of the population that is most resistant to their increase-poverty-and-inequality program.
The second is the stagnation of the neoliberal model, which since 2008 has lost its capacity to even minimally share the fruits of economic growth and requires ever-harsher austerity for workers and the middle classes to keep going at all.
Faced with a rising proportion of people of color, a downwardly mobile young generation that is turning left, and increasing resistance to climate change denialism, top GOP leaders including Trump himself are on record stating they want to prevent a one person, one vote society.
The results include intensifying voter suppression, stacking the federal judiciary, purging all but Trump loyalists from all decision-making positions in the federal bureaucracy, and cultivating ties with openly fascist militias.
In response to COVID-19, heightened attacks on science and basic facts have been added to Trumpism’s racist (“China virus”) playbook. In response to the massive protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trumpists call for “dominating the battlespace” and the President tweets that Black Lives Matter is a “symbol of hate” and threatens mass murder (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts“).
These steps have gone past the rules-of-the-game that had been accepted by Republicans and Democrats since McCarthyism ended. Even the mild concessions to communities of color that the Democratic Party-wing of capital was willing to make are seen as a prelude “to pull down our whole culture: the American founding, western civilization and everything that sprang from it.” In the last few weeks Trump has gone all-in to defend-the-heritage-of-the-Confederacy mode, bringing to mind W.E.B. Du Bois’ observations about the parallels between the “white supremacism” of Jim Crow America and fascism.
INTRA-RULING CLASS CONFLICT
Trump’s escalations have produced a leap in intensity of intra-ruling class conflict. Previous “norms” served the U.S. ruling class well, especially facilitating their capacity to project “soft power” globally. No surprise that many in the elite see dispensing with them as a huge mistake. Similarly, important wings of capital think climate change and COVID-19 are real, science is important, and conspiracy theories are destabilizing and dangerous.
Plus being the target of “lock ’em up’ threats while Trump takes personal control of the Justice Department raises the stakes.
So, for a mix of reasons that include personal survival and partisan advantage as well as a certain conception of their class interest, a wing of the ruling class is opposed to Trump assuming “total authority.” They call for a return to a “reality based” politics where facts and science matter, and press for an end to gerrymandering and for voting rights protection.
These are not “bourgeois” issues irrelevant to socialists. Preservation and expansion of democratic space is crucial if the working class and all those damaged by capitalism are to have the most favorable conditions to organize for power.
This crucial point is obscured, and the danger of Trumpism is badly under-estimated, by a framework that minimizes the differences between the Trump and corporate Democrat camps because both can be said to espouse versions of neoliberalism.
PULLED INTO THE VORTEX
The intensity of the Trump/GOP vs. anti-Trump polarization pulls everything into its vortex. Issues from climate change to public health, where opinion once was spread across party lines, have become thoroughly partisan. Even amid a pandemic that thrusts the need for science-based government action center-stage, the GOP base is sticking with an administration that is spreading conspiracy theories, doubling down on privatization, repealing environmental regulations, and giving employers immunity to jeopardize the health of their employees,
Democratic opinion has shifted in the other direction. Polling shows a markedly leftward shift among Democratic voters on issues related to anti-Blackness and immigration, especially since the Black Lives Matter uprising. Support for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal has skyrocketed.
Even on issues where resistance to change is strongest, a shift is underway. On foreign policy (long the holy of holies for bipartisan cooperation) there is now a body of stalwart antiwar congresspeople with stable popular support. On perhaps the toughest issue of all – the Party’s lockstep support for Israel – there is progress, with Israel’s apologists expressing horror that the issue is “becoming politicized” as backing for Palestinian rights grows steadily in the Democratic base.
Responses to the pandemic have likewise bent to the gravitational force of the Trump-anti-Trump dynamic. Stances toward “reopening”; toward who is responsible for the staggering health and economic toll; toward mask-wearing or even whether the pandemic is a serious problem at all, fall along partisan lines.
The immense force of the country’s central polarization also explains why
Biden beat Bernie and Warren so decisively in the primaries. The left was outgunned in this fight. We did not yet have the base or infrastructure to prevail. But it was the “electability” factor that accounts for the scale of Biden’s win. Many on the left regarded “electability” as a red herring deployed by the corporate media to block the left. The anti-left “commentariat” did play it up, but it resonated deeply with many voters, including in constituencies that would benefit far more from Bernie’s program than Biden’s.
Why? Because these voters saw the central task in 2020 as getting Trump out of power. They wanted to see the broadest possible front arrayed against him in November. We may not agree that Biden, rather than Bernie or Warren, is the best candidate around which to build such a front. But voters’ who saw Biden as most likely to succeed cannot simply be dismissed by a left that aims for majority support.
IMPLICATIONS FOR LEFT STRATEGY
Grasping the centrality of the Trump anti-Trump polarization, and the fact that white supremacy is at its pivot, is the key to accurately assessing the moment and the left’s key tasks:
We are in a “democratic moment” that can open the door to deep-going change. In immediate practical terms, the issue facing the U.S. in this election and all the battles swirling around it is how much democratic space we will have in 2021 and after. Preserving maximum democratic space is important in itself. In addition, the pandemic and uprising have all but closed off the possibility of returning to the “old normal” and there is a new level of mass support for far-reaching change which includes a surge of support for socialism. This combination has already forced Biden to shift his mantra from “return to normalcy” to promising “sweeping economic change” and means there is a huge opportunity for social movements to take advantage of wider democratic space to press for structural change and win important victories.
Throwing ourselves into the anti-Trump coalition is the best route for both ousting Trump and building the strength of progressive movements and the socialist left. This course propels us to broad interaction with working class and people of color constituencies, enabling us to learn more about their thinking and to expand our ranks. It is a path to building closer alliances with the range of labor, racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ, tenant rights, public health and other organizations that will be going all out to beat Trump in November. And it gives us a chance to significantly reduce the number of Bernie supporters who do not vote for Biden (an alarming 25% in 2016).
(There are leftists who acknowledge that the central axis of battle in the country is Trump-anti-Trump, or at least that everyone would be far better off if Trump is defeated, but argue that socialists should still abstain from the electoral battle against Trump. Rather, we should focus on other battles to build up left power. That kind of orientation might be practical in the short term for a small organization. But on the level of strategy it substitutes the voluntarist notion that the left can set the agenda and timetable for mass struggle for a materialist perspective that recognizes that underlying trends and political forces far more powerful than ourselves set the conditions that we must deal with. In doing so it fosters a stronghold, “if you build it, they will come” approach to politics that would consign the left to the margins as the struggles of millions pass us by.)
Build the independent strength of left and socialist organizations in the course of the election campaign – Our Revolution, Working Families Party, state-based power-building organizations, organizations in the Left Inside-Outside project, sections of DSA that participate in the anti-Trump front. This task means more than persuading and turning out voters. It means being part of campaigns against voter suppression between now and the election, taking part in voter protection efforts on election day, and making specific preparations for mass action to defend the election results in case Trump loses but refuses to accept the result. It also means participating in a mix of down-ballot races and non-electoral actions essential to defending the health, rights and economic interests of workers and all who are vulnerable – an especially urgent task right now with infections soaring and the benefits that have been keeping millions afloat about to run out.
Each specific organization has limited resources and is positioned in different locations and sectors. Choices must be made about specific action priorities. Within a common strategy there will be different tactical approaches.
“BEAT TRUMP” OR “NEVER BIDEN”
I will close with a contrast between the messages the “Beat Trump” and “Never Biden” strategies each send to one of the constituencies most important for the left to be rooted in if we are to become a powerful driver of transformative change.
The majority of African Americans in the U.S. live in the South (the 11 states of the former Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia, and Delaware.) This is the sector of the U.S. population that has the strongest collective memory of both Jim Crow and the bitter and bloody struggle of the Civil Rights Movement to overthrow it. The shadow of that history, of lynching and racist violence by state authorities and non-state actors, hangs heavy over the region as a seemingly constant stream of murders from Trayvon Martin to Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor keeps reminding us. State governments in the South are among the most pro-military, anti-union, and anti-reproductive rights in the country.
There are notable differences in political outlook along generational and other lines in this sector: like other communities African Americans in the South are far from monolithic. But unity in defense of the gains made in the 1960s remains a powerful factor. Further, state-level campaigns like Stacy Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida in 2018, Charles Booker in Kentucky in 2020, as well as numerous local contests, have not only energized almost all sectors of the community, but positioned it as the anchor of a growing multi-racial alignment.
In the wake of Trump’s criminal and racist response to both the pandemic and uprising, it is possible that Georgia and Texas may become battleground states; prospects to beat Trump in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida have improved; and new possibilities for gains in down-ballot races have opened up in in every southern state. Southern activists, especially southern Black activists, have increased the volume on the longstanding call for both the Democratic Party and the progressive eco-system to wake up to the importance of the South and devote real resources to bolstering organizations rooted there. There is every indication that African Americans in the South will be in the forefront of the efforts to build a multi-racial electoral coalition to beat Trump in November and make sure that every vote is protected and counted.
Leaving aside for a moment how it will affect vote tallies on November 3, which of the following messages is likely to build the strength of the socialist movement in this crucial constituency?
*”We will throw our organization strength into the electoral battle to defeat Trump and prevent a return to Jim Crow, and push from there for this country to become a genuine multi-racial democracy under the leadership of the working class.”
or
*There is not enough difference between the contenders for the presidency to make it worth our while to take part in electoral fight to beat Trump. Instead, we will focus on building our own strength on our own timetable and engage in presidential politics when we decide there is a socialist candidate more deserving of our time and energy.”
Those who send the second message may build a force which defends radical ideas and contributes to important fights.
But the left forces whose strategy translates into sending the first message have much better prospects to grow their ranks and expand their influence, power and coalition relationships.
Beyond that, they will be dealing a blow to the ‘permanent opposition’ mentality that has so often stunted the vision of U.S. radicals – embracing instead the revolutionary idea that our goal is to be part of, and then ultimately lead, a coalition that governs and transforms the whole country.
Housing Activists Unite to Fight Mass Evictions and Defund Police
“I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to ‘protect and serve.’”
July 6, 2020 Candice Bernd TRUTHOUT
https://portside.org/2020-07-06/housing-activists-unite-fight-mass-evictions-and-defund-police
As COVID-19’s second wave bears down, nearly half of all states’ eviction moratoria have already expired or are set to expire in the next two months. A federal moratorium that bans evictions of people in rentals backed by the government expires July 25. To make matters worse, the CARES Act’s supplemental boost to unemployment insurance ends July 31.
The country is already in the beginning stages of a massive eviction crisis as housing courts nationwide reopen. As many as 28 million renters could lose their homes in the coming eviction wave, boosting the national homeless rate by as much as 40 to 45 percent by the end of the year.
The wave will hit low-income Black and Brown people, who are twice as likely to rent as white people, the hardest. According to an Urban Institute survey in which half of adult renters reported having trouble paying rent or bills from late March to mid-April, Black and Brown renters were most likely to report reduced spending on food, depleted savings or increased credit card debt. According to the latest census data, 44 percent of Black tenants reported having little or no confidence they could make their next rent payment.
Last week, the U.S. Labor Department reported more than 1.5 million Americans filed new state unemployment claims, bringing the national total of claims to more than 44 million since mid-March. Rising Black and Brown unemployment coupled with mass evictions could spark renewed uprisings in the streets amid a national reckoning over racial justice following the police-perpetrated killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Even before the pandemic, the U.S. was facing affordable housing, eviction and homelessness crises disproportionately impacting Black and Brown people. In 2019, about 568,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night, with Black people making up 40 percent of those experiencing homelessness despite being 13 percent of the U.S. population.
While Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently introduced legislation that would extend and expand federal eviction protections for nonpayment of rent for one year, Congress is not expected to begin negotiating a new economic relief package until after July 4. Meanwhile, the $3 trillion HEROES Act stimulus package, which also includes a nationwide eviction moratorium, continues to languish in the Senate.
Without federal rental assistance and an extension of renter protections, the coming eviction wave could send the nation’s already dire homelessness numbers skyrocketing, overwhelming already overburdened shelters and emergency rooms.
This is the reality that housing rights activists across the nation are bracing for, and they say they won’t let it unfold without a fight. While calling for rent and debt cancellation for millions of tenants impacted by the pandemic, many activists are also tying their housing demands to the national movement to defund police as some prepare to face off with city marshals, constables and cops forcibly evicting renters.
Militarized Evictions in Oakland
Dominique Walker, an activist with Moms 4 Housing, a collective of unhoused and housing insecure mothers in Oakland, California, told Truthout that the collective’s organizing pressure has been key in city leaders’ decision to extend Oakland’s eviction moratorium to August 31. Nonetheless, several of the mothers say their housing is still in danger: They won’t be able to pay their owed rent when the city’s moratorium expires.“This is the police state that we live in, where they will spend tens of thousands just to make you get out of a speculative-owned property rather than help you get permanently housed.”
The end of the city’s moratorium, she says, will have severe, disproportionate impacts on Black and Brown renters, as gentrification and tech wealth has accelerated a housing affordability crisis that was already among the nation’s most dire before the COVID-19 crisis: The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland is $2,300.
When the moratorium lifts, many tenants could owe $10,000 or more in back rent. Many simply won’t be able to pay, and could wind up on Oakland’s streets, where they join an unhoused population that has already jumped by 47 percent in the past two years.
After struggling to keep her family housed while working two jobs, Walker and three other working mothers reclaimed a vacant, investor-owned house on the 2900 block of Magnolia Street last November to call attention to the city’s “displacement machine.”
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office evicted the moms and their children in a high-profile, militarized raid in early January. Sherriff’s deputies decked in riot gear and armed with AR-15s showed up with an armored tank and a specialized robot. The eviction ultimately cost the county $40,000 — well beyond the cost of simply housing the families — a point the moms are now zeroing in on ahead of a looming eviction wave.
Walker tells Truthout that in addition to calling for full rent relief, the moms are targeting the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office for funding cuts. They want that money reinvested in organizations that provide housing and a jobs training program focused on providing mothers with the necessary skills to land jobs that make at least $40.88 an hour — the minimum wage required to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland.“There still hasn’t been an explanation of why they came with that much force for mothers and babies.”
The January eviction “was a very violent display and was meant to cause terror in folks who are standing up for their human rights,” Walker says. “This is the police state that we live in, where they will spend tens of thousands just to make you get out of a speculative-owned property rather than help you get permanently housed and fix the issue. It was unreal.”
Walker says the group is still working to plan actions this week targeting the Alameda County Board of Supervisors budget.
The January eviction “looked like a war scene out of a movie,” she says. “There still hasn’t been an explanation of why they came with that much force for mothers and babies, so we still want to hold them accountable for that while redirecting some of those funds to get mothers and babies off of the streets.”
Targeting Cops and Marshals in NYC
On the East Coast, New York’s City Council voted this week to cut $457 million from city’s housing agency while also allocating an additional $8.6 million to city housing programs. The council also cut $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) budget, canceling the planned hiring of about 1,160 officers.
Both housing and police accountability activists, many of whom have protested at City Hall since last Tuesday, argue the budget doesn’t go far enough to address the twin crises of police violence and mass evictions, and say the council used accounting tricks to move money around, such as shifting funding of school policing over to the Department of Education.
Hundreds of renters also rallied last week outside newly opened housing courts in at least five city boroughs and in upstate New York to call for debt and rent cancellation and to protest the end of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s eviction moratorium, which expired June 20.
So far Governor Cuomo has resisted extending the moratorium, siding with landlords he says must continue to pay property taxes, utility bills and mortgages. Housing advocates fear up to 50,000 new eviction cases could be filed in the coming days, and that thousands of cases that were already in progress but were paused in March will resume.
A separate state order shielding tenants directly affected by the pandemic is set to expire in late August and could result in an explosion in the number of eviction cases, transforming the coming wave into a tsunami.“Police violence is an extension, the most brutal expression, of the ways police exist to protect private property interests and not people.”
At least 19 legal services organizations, including The Legal Aid Society and The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, oppose the state’s reopening of housing courts, arguing that continuing eviction proceedings not only spells disaster for renters but could also expose legal aid workers to COVID-19. Sixty-nine housing advocacy organizations recently penned an open letter to Governor Cuomo demanding a universal eviction moratorium for all renters in New York State for the duration of the pandemic.
The New York-based coalition of tenants and housing activists, Housing Justice For All, is calling for the extension of the New York moratorium for the remainder of the year as well as rent, mortgage and utility payment cancellation. The group has helped coordinate the city’s largest rent strike in nearly a century, with at least 400 families in buildings each containing over 1,500 rental units withholding rent in May.
Housing Justice For All Campaign Coordinator Cea Weaver tells Truthout that the group is supporting efforts to confront police violence in the city and is calling for the firing of all city marshals, responsible for serving eviction papers. The coalition’s actions outside housing courts and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office have heavily emphasized the role of police in evictions.
The coalition has also organized several teach-ins on the intersection between housing and racial justice. This week, coalition organizers are training tenants and activists in both direct action and legal tactics for eviction defense in anticipation of hundreds of renters being forced out of their homes.
“Police violence is an extension, the most brutal expression, of the ways police exist to protect private property interests and not people, and that’s very much a part of what we are pushing and framing in this moment,” Weaver told Truthout. The coalition is not trying to replicate the work already being done by its affiliated groups, but instead, center anti-police brutality messaging in its housing work because the issues are interconnected.
Housing rights activists in New York highlight the NYPD’s 1984 murder of Eleanor Bumpurs, a 67-year-old Black woman, in her Bronx public housing apartment during her scheduled eviction. Advocates also point to more recent cases of Black people killed in their own homes, such as Botham Jean in Dallas, Texas, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
“We need to prevent people from being evicted when the marshals come, but in reality, we want a much earlier intervention,” Weaver says. Ultimately though, she says, direct action and legal tactics aren’t a transformative solution. “We need to be able to use principles of eviction defense to heighten the political urgency to pass a real ‘cancel rent’ program. We can’t permanently block marshals from coming to get people through direct action alone.”“We need to be able to use principles of eviction defense to heighten the political urgency to pass a real ‘cancel rent’ program.”
A “real cancel rent” program means a policy that would automatically forgive all rent, mortgage and utility payments accrued during the COVID-19 pandemic that would apply universally to all homeowners and renters. Beyond pandemic-related protections and rent cancellation, Weaver says there must be a broader expansion of tenants’ rights in the private housing market, an end to homelessness, and investments in public and decommodified housing.
She is heartened by recent primary victories of progressive Democratic challengers Jamaal Bowman, Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, who ran strongly on affordable housing platforms. Bowman, who ran on a national homes guarantee, joined housing justice organizations and tenant leaders this week in supporting a national eviction blockade as part the rent cancellation movement and “We Strike Together” campaign.
New Data in Boston
Housing advocates with City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston have organized eviction blockades in defense of renters since the 1970s, according to the organization’s executive director, Lisa Owens. Now, she says, the group is working to bring renters into a series of online trainings that encourage tenants to form associations while guiding them through a series of escalating direct-action tactics. The group is also pushing two state bills that would provide a year of housing stability for renters and lift a ban on rent control.
“We believe in escalating direct action tactics based on the level of consciousness that gets developed when you’re beginning to figure out how to fight your case,” Owens says.
At least one of the group’s staffers have been directly involved in organizing efforts to redirect 10 percent of the Boston Police Department budget to community needs and services, including affordable housing. Last week Boston’s city council passed a city budget that only contained small cuts to the police department’s overtime pay, but Owens says police accountability and housing activists have since worked together more closely as a result of efforts to defund the department.“I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to ‘protect and serve.’”
A report released Sunday based on three years of housing court data collected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers and City Life/Vida Urbana found that 70 percent of market-rate eviction filings in Boston occur in neighborhoods of color — and most starkly in Black neighborhoods — even though only about half of rental housing is in these neighborhoods. The pandemic produced a spike in eviction filings in Boston before the state issued an eviction moratorium in April; 78 percent of the suspended cases were in communities of color.
Annie Gordon is one Black tenant at risk of eviction once the state’s moratorium lifts. She is the tenant association leader at the “SoMa Apartments at the T,” a Boston apartment complex she’s lived in for 44 years. The complex had already priced her out when it raised rents in 2018. Then the pandemic struck, laying off a family member Gordon relied on for financial help.“We didn’t even realize we had rights or that we could speak up when it comes to our housing.”
Gordon told Truthout tenants in her building are committed to defending one another from city marshals attempting evictions, if it comes to that, by using nonviolent, physical blockade tactics. She supports the city’s cuts to the police department’s overtime pay, saying that funding affordable housing is “much more important” than paying cops overtime.
The association is working to negotiate with the building’s management company to work out “a little more reasonable” rent increase than what was initially asked. They haven’t received a response from the company as of yet, Gordon says.
“Myself, as well as other tenants here, we didn’t even realize we had rights or that we could speak up when it comes to our housing. We didn’t know that. We just automatically assumed landlords have all the rights,” Gordon says.
City marshals and constables forcibly evicting renters in Black communities only adds to the stress and anxiety these communities face while struggling to survive the nation’s multiple crises, she says. “I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to ‘protect and serve.’”
The Police and the Pentagon Are Bringing Our Wars Home
Thanks to years of hyper militarization, American police departments are recreating our global war zones here at home. With these weapons on our streets, our history of structural racism becomes that much deadlier.
July 6, 2020 William J. Barber, Phyllis Bennis FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS
https://portside.org/2020-07-06/police-and-pentagon-are-bringing-our-wars-home
Uniformed U.S. soldiers occupied the center of the city, where an armored personnel carrier was stationed at a major intersection. Was it Kabul or Atlanta?
A U.S. military helicopter hovered over crowds of unarmed civilians, its down-drafts whipping debris and broken glass into their faces. Was it Mogadishu or Washington, D.C.?
Armed, uniformed men surrounded unarmed civilians. One of them shouted “light ’em up” and began firing projectiles. Was it Baghdad or Minneapolis?
Armor-clad, armed U.S. officers targeted and fired on journalists. Was it Iraq or Louisville?
In every case, it was both. Thanks to years of hyper militarization, American police departments are recreating our global war zones here at home. With these weapons on our streets, our history of structural racism becomes that much deadlier.
In recent weeks, overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators protesting police killings and racism have been met by riot police, National Guard troops, and armed federal officers wielding tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber-coated metal bullets. Armored personnel carriers prowl the streets, turning U.S. cities and towns into war zones.
It’s shocking, but it’s not the first time. When a police officer killed 17-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, an armored personnel carrier stalked the agonized protesters who filled the streets.
Throughout U.S. history, policing has always been bound up with racism — and the military.
Organized police forces in the United States trace their roots to the slave patrols organized to capture and return enslaved people who managed to escape bondage.
After reconstruction, when a pandemic of lynching spread across the country, police stood by and in many cases initiated or assisted the kidnapping, torture and murder of people in their custody.
In the 1950s and ’60s, brutal police attacks against civil rights activists and African Americans trying to register to vote continued the pattern. So did police and National Guard violence against antiwar protesters at Kent State, Jackson State, and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
This militarism at home is linked inextricably to U.S. militarism abroad. The troops that Trump called in to deploy against protesters in Washington, for example, had just returned from duty in Iraq.
Today’s “global war on terror” is less visible than in earlier years. But those wars continue — and it’s mostly black, brown and Muslim people who die. Civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing in Afghanistan, for instance, were higher last year than at any time in the 20-year-long war.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. linked systemic racism and militarism as two of the three evil “triplets” he was committed to end. Yet that linkage remains a hallmark of U.S. policy in general — and of the militarization of police in particular.
Just in 2014, as Black Lives Matter demonstrations spread across the country, more than 500 law enforcement agencies received MRAP armored personnel carriers, designed to withstand bomb blasts in war theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. Police in North Little Rock, Arkansas (population: 62,000) got two MARCbots, armed robots designed for war in Afghanistan.
Local and state police departments across the country do not ordinarily include budget lines to buy armored personnel carriers. But under a once-invisible program known as 1033, the Pentagon offers “surplus military equipment” free to any police agency requesting it.
And if the good people of North Little Rock don’t really need armed robots, well, they’ve got them anyway.
Does all that military gear make police officers more likely to act like occupying armies? We can’t say for sure, but we do know the relatively small town had two officer-involved shooting cases during one two-week period this spring.
“When the government equips police departments like they’re equipping the military, we undermine healthy relationships between the police and the community,” explains Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson. “We have created a culture where police officers think of themselves as warriors, not guardians.”
From the beginning, the Poor People’s Campaign — a national mobilization of poor and working-class Americans — has made ending the 1033 program a centerpiece of its demands.
Rather than tinkering around the margins, we need to end systemic racism and the militarism that makes it even deadlier — from Kabul to Atlanta and Baghdad to Minneapolis.
India, China pull back from brink of conflict
The feuding neighbors agree to respect the Line of Actual Control separating their respective territories
By SUMIT SHARMA
JULY 6, 2020
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/india-china-pull-back-from-brink-of-conflict/
India and China have pulled back from the brink of conflict by agreeing to respect the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and work to avoid clashes.
Both had agreed not to allow differences to become disputes, India said after the talks on Sunday between Ajit Doval, the country’s national security adviser, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
“They re-affirmed that both sides should strictly respect and observe the [LAC] and should not take any unilateral action to alter the status quo and work together to avoid any incident in the future that could disturb peace and tranquility in border areas,” India said in a statement.
India has been engaged in skirmishes with China over the past two months along India’s northernmost tip at Ladakh. India accuses China of encroaching several kilometres into Indian territory.
“The two sides should also ensure a phased and stepwise de-escalation in the India-China border areas,” India said. “In this regard they further agreed that both sides should complete the ongoing disengagement process along the LAC expeditiously.”
Doval and Wang Yi’s virtual interaction on Sunday was preceded by a surprise visit to Ladakh by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 3.
Modi met top army generals to take stock of the situation first-hand and accused China of expansionism, a charge Beijing denied.
On June 15, a skirmish between troops of the two countries turned ugly and 20 Indian soldiers were killed. The killings enraged India, prompting it to move troops and weapons nearer the border.
The Chinese embassy in New Delhi said after the Doval/Wang Yi talks,”The right and wrong of what recently happened at the Galwan Valley in the western sector of the China-India boundary is very clear. China will continue firmly safeguarding our territorial sovereignty as well as peace and tranquility in the border areas.”
China said Doval and Wang Yi agreed to keep communicating to ensure full and enduring restoration of peace and tranquility in the India-China border areas. Diplomatic and military officials of the two countries would continue the talks.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/india-china-pull-back-from-brink-of-conflict/
India and China have pulled back from the brink of conflict by agreeing to respect the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and work to avoid clashes.
Both had agreed not to allow differences to become disputes, India said after the talks on Sunday between Ajit Doval, the country’s national security adviser, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
“They re-affirmed that both sides should strictly respect and observe the [LAC] and should not take any unilateral action to alter the status quo and work together to avoid any incident in the future that could disturb peace and tranquility in border areas,” India said in a statement.
India has been engaged in skirmishes with China over the past two months along India’s northernmost tip at Ladakh. India accuses China of encroaching several kilometres into Indian territory.
“The two sides should also ensure a phased and stepwise de-escalation in the India-China border areas,” India said. “In this regard they further agreed that both sides should complete the ongoing disengagement process along the LAC expeditiously.”
Doval and Wang Yi’s virtual interaction on Sunday was preceded by a surprise visit to Ladakh by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 3.
Modi met top army generals to take stock of the situation first-hand and accused China of expansionism, a charge Beijing denied.
On June 15, a skirmish between troops of the two countries turned ugly and 20 Indian soldiers were killed. The killings enraged India, prompting it to move troops and weapons nearer the border.
The Chinese embassy in New Delhi said after the Doval/Wang Yi talks,”The right and wrong of what recently happened at the Galwan Valley in the western sector of the China-India boundary is very clear. China will continue firmly safeguarding our territorial sovereignty as well as peace and tranquility in the border areas.”
China said Doval and Wang Yi agreed to keep communicating to ensure full and enduring restoration of peace and tranquility in the India-China border areas. Diplomatic and military officials of the two countries would continue the talks.
Embracing the Equality of Nations
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/07/06/patrick-lawrence-embracing-the-equality-of-nations/
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
The signs of America’s decline are ubiquitous now such that the phenomenon is no longer worthy of debate.
China, Japan, South Korea; Italy, Spain, Germany, the Danes and Norwegians — Asia and Europe all gain control of the Covid–19 pandemic even as the U.S., by the newest numbers, is back where it was during the worst of it last spring.
This is systemic failure next to systemic success, plain and simple.
We face a leadership failure, too — again, as others do not. President Donald Trump was not wrong, during his Mount Rushmore speech last Friday, to note the frightening illiberality of American liberals. But there was something disturbingly Mussolini-esque in his language, his gestures, his defiance of reality — altogether the portentous dynamic one saw between an ignorant figurehead and a crowd embracing his ignorance as its own.
“The worst are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming,” and the worst are either running our republic or propose to run it. Things fall apart: We are collectively responsible for this.
Bitter as our national circumstances are at this moment, let us not miss the larger reality of which they are expressions. Read properly, America’s decline is a subset of the decline of the West. The phrase is Oswald Spengler’s, of course — the title of a two-volume work he published a century ago. If the German historian got as much wrong as right, he was spot on in identifying our Western-centric understanding of history as a Faustian fallacy that would eventually bite us on the backside.
We are now living through the epochal turn Spengler’s thesis implied. All that befalls us and all our leaders do — our failed response to the Covid–19 crisis, the collapse of our political institutions, the exposure of our papered-over past, our ever-more-aggressive conduct abroad — is best understood as a function of this historic moment.
The West’s superiority over the non–West has been a given in the Atlantic world for half a millennium. I take my date from Vasco da Gama’s landing at Calicut, on India’s Malabar Coast, in 1498. From the Portuguese explorer’s first steps in the East and ever since, this presumption has rested primarily on the West’s material preeminence.
Systems of governance, social norms, individual liberties — the East was considered inferior in all such matters. But it was science, technology and industry that mattered most: From these the West derived its power and claimed its right to imperial dominion. Dieu et mon droit, remember?
This claim to historically ordained superiority evaporates as we speak. So is this, our Spenglerian moment. It has been a long moment, let’s say, unfolding for some time. But the Covid–19 crisis hastens it and brings it into painfully sharp relief.
21st Century Imperative
Parity between West and non–West is a 21st century imperative, a human destiny no nation can hope to prevent.
Your columnist has argued this (and applauded it) since the Cold War’s end. A wise and imaginative world power would not merely accept this turn of history’s wheel: It would embrace it, recognizing the immense advantage in having more voices from more perspectives address themselves to humanity’s common problems and tasks.
No such good fortune comes to us. The Europeans appear to be at least minimally open to the thought that the era of the West’s “global leadership” — skipping the euphemism, its colonial and postcolonial domination — draws to a close.
This may be an overly optimistic reading, I confess. But it is inarguably the case that the U.S. stands alone in waging so ferocious a fight against the prospect of equality among nations.
Do you think it is coincidence that Washington’s aggressions toward its declared enemies has intensified as America’s failed response to the Covid–19 pandemic becomes too evident to deny? I don’t. Our neoliberal political economy has failed.
Our elevation of individuality into an “ism,” a creed, has failed. Counting from the Reagan presidency, our savaging of our public sector over four decades leaves us looking like a nation of deluded nitwits. The military hardware we worship like cargo cultists proves of no use.
Consider these declared enemies, our latest axis of evil. China, Russia, and Iran are all non–Western nations in unmistakably emergent phases of development. In the advance toward parity with the West, these three are among the leaders.
They all have sturdy state sectors, centralized governments to one or another degree, and extensive social welfare systems. None is immune from domestic turmoil, but none is beset with institutional collapse. And not to be missed: As of Monday, China has 405 active Covid–19 cases on its books; Russia and Iran while their numbers are not nearly as good, appear to be in recovery mode, bringing their crises under control.
When the U.S. aggresses toward these nations by way of sanctions, threats of military attack, or a trade war, never mind how it explains itself. In the final analysis it acts in defense of the pretense of Western superiority. It is essential to the preservation of America’s understanding of the world that these nations fail.
Mike Pompeo, our thickheaded secretary of state, hoes this envy-of-the-world row more or less daily. At issue here is what I call the tyranny of American happiness: The worse we have done, the happier we must declare ourselves. This is our last line of defense against all admissions of failure. How forlorn a nation are we.
Pompeo takes his place in a centuries-long line of thinkers, commentators, travelers, and who have you — some a lot more elevated — who insist on the incontrovertible superiority of the West. It is to those in this tradition our virus-beset moment is bitterest.
When India and China Were Richer
Some years ago Angus Maddison, the late and noted British economist, published a study showing that until the brink of the 20th century the Chinese and Indian economies were the world’s largest by considerable margins. The U.S. overtook China in gross domestic product little more than a century ago. To speak of parity, then, is to speak of a return to it. What we witness now would be of little surprise were we not so conditioned to our habit of Orientalism.
Maybe Western Europeans are more cognizant of history’s waves. I read their far superior responses to the Covid–19 crisis as an indication they can still think for themselves after decades of marching to Washington’s orders.
They are emphatically not behind the U.S. in its efforts to cultivate a new Cold War with China, in its determination to apply its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran ever more stringently, in its efforts to isolate the Russian Federation. We will have to see where this emergent drift in European thinking leads. As things stand, it looks as if the U.S. is effectively pulling the West apart from within. No bad thing.
Spengler considered civilizational decline inevitable, a fate imposed by history’s laws—a very Germanic notion. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12–volume “A Study of History” came some years later, thought otherwise. Decline is the consequence of a failure of imagination and creativity among leaders. They can no longer respond anew to new circumstances. Decline comes to a choice, then, not a fate.
Your columnist stands with Toynbee on this point. The West’s decline, now so evident, arises from the choices its leaders make daily, Europe’s ambivalences notwithstanding. But we must not miss the optimism buried beneath the apparent pessimism. What is in decline should decline. Then there is at least the prospect of beginning again, and differently.
Annexation of West Bank Will Only Deepen Israel’s Apartheid Policies
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/07/07/annexation-of-west-bank-will-only-deepen-israels-apartheid-policies/
It is time for the world to deny Israel its impunity, writes Vijay Prashad.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
It is impossible to be calm about the fate of the Palestinian people. Since 1948, they have been denied their country and denied their right to exist. One United Nations resolution upon another has said that their exile must end, that they must be allowed to build lives of dignity. Between UN Resolution 194 (1948) and 242 (1967) are a string of resolutions calling for the right of Palestinians to have a homeland and for the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland.
During the 1967 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan told Lieutenant General Yitzhak Rabin that the aim of the war was to remove all Palestinians out of the entire territory to the west of the Jordan River. When Israel seized that land from Jordanian control, Israel’s Prime Minister Levy Eshkol said that the new territory was a “dowry,” but that this “dowry” came with a “bride” – namely, the Palestinian people. “The trouble is that the dowry is followed by a bride,” he said, “whom we don’t want.” The Israeli plan has always been to annex all of Jerusalem and the West Bank, either killing the Palestinians who live there or pushing them out to Jordan and Syria.
This is precisely what the Israeli government is threatening to do: the annexation of the West Bank. The Oslo Accords of 1994 provided the basis for a “two-state solution” in which the Palestinian people would control the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in a future Palestinian state. But Israel was never going to permit such a reality. The imposition of prison-like conditions on Gaza and the punctual bombardment of that congested and impoverished area has left its people bereft.
The open annexation of East Jerusalem through land grabs has changed the status quo of that city. The Israeli state-backed policy that sent close to half a million Israeli settlers to occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank – often with the best water sources – has erased the possibility of any sovereign Palestinian state.
For years, Israeli settlers have encroached upon Palestinian land with the full backing of the Israeli state. Now, Israel has threatened (and postponed on July 1) to incorporate these settlements – which the United Nations has called illegal – into Israeli territory.
Since UN Resolution 237 (1967), the United Nations has cautioned Israel not to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), which sought to ensure civilian protections in war zones, in the areas that Israel seized from the Palestinian people in the 1967 war. UN Resolution 2334 in 2016 said that the Israeli settlements were a “flagrant violation” of international law and had “no legal validity.”
The current annexation plan of Israel shows disregard for international law and for the democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people.
What would annexation of the West Bank mean? It would mean that Israel has grabbed the land that it had formally ceded to a future Palestinian state and that Israel is willing to incorporate the Palestinian natives of this land as non-citizen residents of Israel.
The land grab would violate international law; the second-class status of Palestinians affirms Israel’s status as an apartheid state. In 2017, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission of West Asia published a report called “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid.” The report showed that all Palestinians – regardless of where they live – are impacted by the apartheid policies of the Israeli state.
Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship (ezrahut) do not have the right to nationality (le’um), which means that they can only access inferior social services, and that they face restrictive zoning laws and find themselves unable freely to buy land.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem are reduced to the status of permanent residents who must constantly prove that they live in the city. Palestinians in the West Bank live “in ways consistent with apartheid,” write the authors of the UN report. And those who are exiled to refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have been permanently denied their rights to their homeland.
All Palestinians – whether those who live in Haifa (Israel) or in Ain al-Hilweh (Lebanon) – suffer the consequences of Israeli apartheid. This indignity is punctuated with laws that humiliate Palestinians, each one meant to make life so miserable that they are forced to emigrate.
The annexation of the West Bank will only deepen Israel’s apartheid policies. The Zionist state will not permit Palestinians full citizenship rights. There is no intention to incorporate the Palestinian people into Israel with full citizenship nor to cede even a threadbare Palestine. This is barefaced colonialism of the old type.
Inside this kind of colonial aggression comes the demolition of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem (such as Wadi Yasul) and the destruction of olive groves (such as in Burin Village). In the few months of 2020, the Israeli state has arrested 210 Palestinian children and 250 students, as well as 13 Palestinian journalists. These moves are reported by human rights groups and condemned by Palestinian civil society organizations but are otherwise ignored. This is the attrition of dignity.
All of this is illegal: the demolitions, the settlements, the apartheid wall that encircles the West Bank. UN resolutions, International Court of Justice rulings, civil society condemnations: none of it seems to make an impact.
Since 1948, Israel has acted with impunity as it has sought to annihilate Palestine and Palestinians, to steal the “dowry” and dispose of the “‘bride.” Not far from the wall that Israel built surrounding the West Bank to humiliate the Palestinians are the traces of walls that Israel has knocked down to turn homes into dust.
Those walls, which once held up roofs, were shelters for a people who have been thrown off their axis, made to walk at a tilt, always afraid of the settler’s bullet or the soldier’s handcuffs.
Prison walls are made of stone. Settlement walls are made of stone. But the walls of the homes of a Palestinian are made of that odd combination of fear and resistance.
There is fear that the cannons of the colonizer will blast through them, but there is resistance that acknowledges that the walls of the home are not the real walls. The real walls are the walls of fortitude and perseverance.
Wretched states are hollowed out by their insensitivity and by their injustice. In the absence of moral conviction, it is impossible for the Israeli state to make its case except by the arrogance of guns. When a bulldozer comes before a home, it is the bulldozer that will prevail, but it is the home that remains alive in the hearts and dreams of the people. Bulldozers produce fear, but not humanity.
A humane society cannot be built by fear. It must be built by the enthusiasm of love. Wretched states – such as Israel – cannot build a utopia of love on land that has been scarred by brutal theft. Even after olive trees have been uprooted, their groves still smell of olives.
Yalalan Band (Palestine), “Dingi Dingi,” 2016
After the 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza, the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon wrote “Afterwords.” The poem imagines a child walking with a grandfather (sidu).
Are we going back to Jaffa, sidu?
We can’t
Why?
We are dead
So are we in heaven, sidu?
We are in Palestine, habibi
and Palestine is heaven
and hell.
What will we do now?
We will wait
Wait for what?
For the others
….
to return
There is no time to wait. It is time for the world to deny Israel its impunity, which is provided by the full-throated backing by the United States of America.
During the 1967 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan told Lieutenant General Yitzhak Rabin that the aim of the war was to remove all Palestinians out of the entire territory to the west of the Jordan River. When Israel seized that land from Jordanian control, Israel’s Prime Minister Levy Eshkol said that the new territory was a “dowry,” but that this “dowry” came with a “bride” – namely, the Palestinian people. “The trouble is that the dowry is followed by a bride,” he said, “whom we don’t want.” The Israeli plan has always been to annex all of Jerusalem and the West Bank, either killing the Palestinians who live there or pushing them out to Jordan and Syria.
This is precisely what the Israeli government is threatening to do: the annexation of the West Bank. The Oslo Accords of 1994 provided the basis for a “two-state solution” in which the Palestinian people would control the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in a future Palestinian state. But Israel was never going to permit such a reality. The imposition of prison-like conditions on Gaza and the punctual bombardment of that congested and impoverished area has left its people bereft.
The open annexation of East Jerusalem through land grabs has changed the status quo of that city. The Israeli state-backed policy that sent close to half a million Israeli settlers to occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank – often with the best water sources – has erased the possibility of any sovereign Palestinian state.
For years, Israeli settlers have encroached upon Palestinian land with the full backing of the Israeli state. Now, Israel has threatened (and postponed on July 1) to incorporate these settlements – which the United Nations has called illegal – into Israeli territory.
Since UN Resolution 237 (1967), the United Nations has cautioned Israel not to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), which sought to ensure civilian protections in war zones, in the areas that Israel seized from the Palestinian people in the 1967 war. UN Resolution 2334 in 2016 said that the Israeli settlements were a “flagrant violation” of international law and had “no legal validity.”
The current annexation plan of Israel shows disregard for international law and for the democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people.
What would annexation of the West Bank mean? It would mean that Israel has grabbed the land that it had formally ceded to a future Palestinian state and that Israel is willing to incorporate the Palestinian natives of this land as non-citizen residents of Israel.
The land grab would violate international law; the second-class status of Palestinians affirms Israel’s status as an apartheid state. In 2017, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission of West Asia published a report called “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid.” The report showed that all Palestinians – regardless of where they live – are impacted by the apartheid policies of the Israeli state.
Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship (ezrahut) do not have the right to nationality (le’um), which means that they can only access inferior social services, and that they face restrictive zoning laws and find themselves unable freely to buy land.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem are reduced to the status of permanent residents who must constantly prove that they live in the city. Palestinians in the West Bank live “in ways consistent with apartheid,” write the authors of the UN report. And those who are exiled to refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have been permanently denied their rights to their homeland.
All Palestinians – whether those who live in Haifa (Israel) or in Ain al-Hilweh (Lebanon) – suffer the consequences of Israeli apartheid. This indignity is punctuated with laws that humiliate Palestinians, each one meant to make life so miserable that they are forced to emigrate.
The annexation of the West Bank will only deepen Israel’s apartheid policies. The Zionist state will not permit Palestinians full citizenship rights. There is no intention to incorporate the Palestinian people into Israel with full citizenship nor to cede even a threadbare Palestine. This is barefaced colonialism of the old type.
Inside this kind of colonial aggression comes the demolition of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem (such as Wadi Yasul) and the destruction of olive groves (such as in Burin Village). In the few months of 2020, the Israeli state has arrested 210 Palestinian children and 250 students, as well as 13 Palestinian journalists. These moves are reported by human rights groups and condemned by Palestinian civil society organizations but are otherwise ignored. This is the attrition of dignity.
All of this is illegal: the demolitions, the settlements, the apartheid wall that encircles the West Bank. UN resolutions, International Court of Justice rulings, civil society condemnations: none of it seems to make an impact.
Since 1948, Israel has acted with impunity as it has sought to annihilate Palestine and Palestinians, to steal the “dowry” and dispose of the “‘bride.” Not far from the wall that Israel built surrounding the West Bank to humiliate the Palestinians are the traces of walls that Israel has knocked down to turn homes into dust.
Those walls, which once held up roofs, were shelters for a people who have been thrown off their axis, made to walk at a tilt, always afraid of the settler’s bullet or the soldier’s handcuffs.
Prison walls are made of stone. Settlement walls are made of stone. But the walls of the homes of a Palestinian are made of that odd combination of fear and resistance.
There is fear that the cannons of the colonizer will blast through them, but there is resistance that acknowledges that the walls of the home are not the real walls. The real walls are the walls of fortitude and perseverance.
Wretched states are hollowed out by their insensitivity and by their injustice. In the absence of moral conviction, it is impossible for the Israeli state to make its case except by the arrogance of guns. When a bulldozer comes before a home, it is the bulldozer that will prevail, but it is the home that remains alive in the hearts and dreams of the people. Bulldozers produce fear, but not humanity.
A humane society cannot be built by fear. It must be built by the enthusiasm of love. Wretched states – such as Israel – cannot build a utopia of love on land that has been scarred by brutal theft. Even after olive trees have been uprooted, their groves still smell of olives.
Yalalan Band (Palestine), “Dingi Dingi,” 2016
After the 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza, the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon wrote “Afterwords.” The poem imagines a child walking with a grandfather (sidu).
Are we going back to Jaffa, sidu?
We can’t
Why?
We are dead
So are we in heaven, sidu?
We are in Palestine, habibi
and Palestine is heaven
and hell.
What will we do now?
We will wait
Wait for what?
For the others
….
to return
There is no time to wait. It is time for the world to deny Israel its impunity, which is provided by the full-throated backing by the United States of America.
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