- In Russia, gay rights activists are attacked by neo-Nazis, under the eyes of the police--and then the beaten activists are arrested.
- Israeli historian and No Empires hero Ilan Pappe's latest piece for Electronic Intifada, in parts one and two.
- Virginia Tilley on the academic boycott of Israel.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Well-Made World #9
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3 comments:
Doesn't the following claim --
"Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip is not a foreign policy gone wrong. The entire Israeli state system -- its laws, its policies, its ideology of Jewish statehood, the privileges that serve its Jewish-national society -- is implicated in a grand demographic strategy to exclude, imprison, and subjugate some 50 percent of the state's own territorial population solely on the basis of their ethnic identity. This distinguishes Israel from other states behaving badly by casting it into the particular moral abyss of an apartheid state."
-- get all those "other states" off the hook a bit too easily? What evidence is there suggesting the U.S.'s Iraq War is simply "foreign policy gone wrong"? I mean, I wish it were only that. But surely the scariest thing about the Iraq War is that, from the selfish perspective of its planners, it has gone completely right. Cheney's personal energy company is wealthier than ever. And, with that company's recent move to Dubai, it is well positioned to extend its power well into the future.
In Israel's case, one can at least make the argument that the state's right-wing hardliners are misguidedly working against their own interests. For that matter, one could make the same argument for Blair, and his involvement in the Iraq War. But can one say the same of the Bush regime?
In the passage you quote, Tilley is making the claim that Israel is unique in its being an "apartheid state"--a claim which No Empires feels, unequivocally, to be the truth.
It is not a question of other "states behaving badly" getting off
the hook; Tilley--an advocate/theorist of a one-state solution for Palestine/Israel--is drawing a distinction between Israel and other states (the US, UK, and Russia, for example) with whom, for all those states' hypocrisy and warmongering, Israel does not share this ugly characteristic.
It's certainly obvious that the ongoing Israeli project to Bantustanize any future "Palestinian state" is going swimmingly, if you're a Zionist. No Empires disagrees that Israel's "right-wing hardliners" are working against their own interests, as long as you're focusing on the Occupation, and not on last summer's foreign policy catastrophe in Lebanon.
Plus, the Bush regime appears to be losing the shit out of both of their wars.
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