Inauguration Day News

Watching TV in a hotel room in Chicago this weekend, No Empires learned from a scroll on CNN that "History Will Happen in 48 Hours." Ok. But now that it's happened (and yes, Michelle Obama donned a yellow Isabel Toledo number, while Aretha wore a sort of fantastic hat), we can point you to Kevin Alexander Gray's piece on Obama, black American national heros, and the US, the country that Martin Luther King Jr once called the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world." Reminding us of King's rising unpopularity towards the end of his life due in part to his outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam, Gray suggests that we remember King for something more than "I have a dream", particularly in light of the Gaza massacres. Certainly something to keep in mind while dancing to Beyonce and U2/reading Maureen Dowd.

And speaking of Gaza: Israel's High Court of Justice lifted the ban on Arab parties in the Knesset today; Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN, as well as about 300 other human rights groups, are claiming that Israel used white phosphorous in its attacks on Gaza and are calling for war crimes investigations.

Despite all of the "victory" talk by supporters of the Gaza massacres, Joseph Massad questions Israel's "right to defend itself", just as Khalid Mish'al and Bashir Abu-Manneh explain that the massacres will not weaken Hamas.

Gaza Massacres

As Western media outlets talk about hopes for a cease-fire in Gaza, we at No Empires thought we'd direct your attention to something that's been getting a bit less attention in Western media: Israel's surprising decision to bar Arab political parties from the Knesset this week, citing their support of a "terrorist organization" as well as violations of a 2002 law that would require them to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Here's Jonathan Cook on the issue for Electronic Intifada.

Well-made world 37

Thanks to our friend John and Jewish Peace News for another couple of links on Gaza:

First, Gush Shalom tells us about a 1000-person spontaneous demonstration outside of the defense ministry in Tel Aviv on Saturday. Next, The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) take the Israeli government at their word that the attack is an immediate response to Quassam attacks, but also discuss the ways in which Israel is unwilling to address the root of such problems--the fact that they are fight "a besieged and starving Gaza" after "41 years of increasingly oppressive Israeli Occupation without a hint that a sovereign and viable Palestinian state will ever emerge."

Next, Ravid Barak focuses on the planning of Operation "Cast Lead," a plan that dates back more than 6 months, but started coming to fruition over a month ago after dozens of Qassam rockets exploded in Israel.

Finally, we'll leave you with an excerpt from Zvi Barel's latest for Haaretz. Here, Barel delves a bit into the relationship between Israel's attack on a tunnel between Gaza and Egypt on November 6, killing at least six and violating the ceasefire. Increased rocket attacks after that date, Barel notes, were a result of this Israeli breach. According to Barel, Israel:

unilaterally violated [the cease-fire] when it blew up a tunnel, while still asking Egypt to get the Islamic group to hold its fire. Are conditions enabling the return of a ceasefire no longer available? Hamas has clear conditions for its extension: The opening of the border crossings for goods and cessation of IDF attacks in Gaza, as outlined in the original agreement. Later, Hamas wants the cease-fire to be extended to the West Bank. Israel, for its part, is justifiably demanding a real calm in Gaza; that no Qassam or mortar shell be fired by either Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other group.

Essentially, Israel is telling Hamas it is willing to recognize its control of Gaza on the condition that it assumes responsibility for the security of the territory, like Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon. It is likely that this will be the outcome of a wide-scale operation in the Gaza Strip if Israel decides it does not want to rule Gaza directly. Why, then, not forgo the war and agree to these conditions now?

On the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time

By now, we've all heard about the recent attacks on Gaza, but just to re-cap: on Saturday at about 11:20am (when children were at school, employees were in offices, and aspiring police officers were in the middle of training), 60 Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed 50 different sites in Gaza. This first bombardment took 3 minutes and 40 seconds, killed over 200 Palestinians, and injured nearly an additional 1,000. By Monday morning, several buildings at the Islamic University in Gaza had been leveled, tunnels between Gaza and Egypt were no longer functional, and more than 325 Palestinians were dead (as well as 2 Israelis since Saturday). At this point, as Gaza hospitals are running out of supplies and room for corpses (which they are forced to pile up on morgue floors right now), Israel is poised to embark on a ground invasion: tanks are lined up near the Gaza border and journalists have been forced to leave the area.

The US government has voiced near-unequivocal support of Israel's actions (actions which the UN called "disproportionate" in a frustratingly weak call for a cease-fire). In a statement on the situation in Gaza, Nancy Pelosi wrote: "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally." And on Meet the Press, Barack Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, avoided anything like condemnation of the Israeli attacks as well, telling viewers: “There’s only one president at a time...The president speaks for the United States of America. We will honor that.”

On December 27, Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories, issued a statement outlining Israel's war crimes in Gaza on Saturday, which include collective punshment, targeting civilians, and disproportionate military response.

Israel has called this an all-out war against Hamas because of quassam attacks that have killed about 18 people in 8 years, but as Neve Gordon writes in the Guardian, this attack has nothing to do with rocket attacks, which Israel could have prevented long ago. Instead, it has to do with a) the destruction of Hamas as a political entity (which, Gordon notes, is not going to happen, at least not through military means); b) to help Kadima and Labour defeat Likud and the abominable Netanyahu; c) to re-establish the Israeli military in the eyes of the world after its performance two summers ago; and d) to keep Abbas in power for a bit longer after his term ends on January 9. In Syria, the exiled political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, is calling for a 3rd intifada, a call which the Fatah leader clearly has no mind to heed. Meshaal said on Al Jazeera that Hamas had tried "all the peaceful options, but without results;" he is now pushing for more rocket attacks and considering the reinstitution of suicide bombings in Israel (which would be the first since 2005).

For more information on whats going on in Gaza, please see this article by Jennifer Loewenstein in Counterpunch, Hassan Haidar's piece for Dar Al Hayat on the timing and pre-meditation of the attacks, this first person account of the bombing on Saturday by Dr Eyad Al Serraj, a psychologist in Gaza City, this episode of Democracy Now, which features NE favorite Gideon Levy as well as an phenomenal discussion with one-state solution advocate Ali Abunimah. We'll leave you with an excerpt:

We have to go back to the Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States, not just the Bush administration, but apparently as well the incoming Obama administration. We have to recognize the complicity not just of the so-called international community, but also of the Arab regimes, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, the Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt. Tzipi Livni, when she issued her threats against Gaza, was in Cairo in the biggest Arab capital, and Aboul Gheit stood next to her silently.

Mahmoud Abbas is not a bystander, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority. For two years since the elections, which Hamas won, he and his coterie have been collaborating with Israel and the United States, first to overthrow the election result and then to besiege Gaza. We have talked before of the Palestinian Contras, funded and armed by the United States, which sought to overthrow Hamas in June 2007 and had the tables turned on them. And now this. The complicity of Mahmoud Abbas is very clear and must be clearly stated. He does not have the authority, moral or otherwise, to call together the Palestinian people for anything. He has gone over to the other side. He has joined the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, and I choose my words very carefully.

And let me say this, as well, Amy, that Israel is trying to produce and promote the fiction that it is engaged in a war with a so-called enemy entity. What Israel is doing is massacring a captive population. You heard—you said in the headlines how Nancy Pelosi, our so-called progressive, liberal, antiwar Speaker of the House, gave her full support to these crimes. Obama has done the same through a spokesman. And that will not change. The United Nations issued a weak statement aimed at covering the backsides, let me say, of those who issued it, not aimed at changing the situation.

What are Palestinians calling for today? Yesterday, the Palestinian National Committee for the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions reissued and reaffirmed its call on all international civil society in the United States, in North America, in Europe, everywhere, to redouble the efforts for boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the anti-apartheid movement. This is necessary. This is moral. This is the nonviolent resistance we can all participate in. And it is more urgent than ever. Let’s not look back at these crimes like we look at the Warsaw Ghetto and like we look at Guernica and we look at the other atrocities of the twentieth century and say, “We had the chance to act, but we chose silence and complicity.” The time to stop this is now.

And we also have to be clear that those who are accountable—Ehud Barak, his orders over the past few months to withhold insulin, chemotherapy drugs, dialysis supplies, all forms of medicine from the people of Gaza, were just as lethal and just as murderous as the orders to send in the bombers and warplanes to attack mosques, to attack universities. The Islamic University in Gaza is not a military site. It is a university with 18,000 students, 60 percent of them women. Last night, Israeli warplanes attacked a female dormitory in the Islamic University. This is what Israel is attacking. They attacked the fishing port. No food gets into Gaza. People can barely fish enough to sustain them, and Israel has attacked the fishing boats that sustains them. These are historic crimes, and we cannot be silent about them.

Gone so long

As you may have noticed, early this fall No Empires went into retirement. But now, faced with the devastation of Gaza, we've decided to decided to start writing again. So stay tuned for a long piece on the Gaza massacre as well as a round-up of some of the best news and opinion pieces on the subject.

But for now--for all New Yorkers, please head out to Herald Square this evening to protest Israel's actions in Gaza.

PAKISTAN

Today, as the American campaign in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province continues despite continued protests in Pakistan (protests which started after last Wednesday’s first publicly-acknowledged ground raid by American forces on Pakistani soil), a few notes on the current political situation in that country:

After some under-the-table dealings with the always-intrigue-inclined US ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has been sworn in as president of Pakistan. As Tariq Ali noted recently in an article for Comment is free, Zardari is poised to be a particularly pliant leader, the Pakistani equivalent of neocon favorite Hamid Karzai. Zardari is indebted, after all, to American neoconservatives (most notably, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad) not just for his new position as president but also for reversing the freeze on his Swiss bank accounts (the second richest person in Pakistan, Zardari’s accounts had been frozen due to pending corruption charges).

To be fair, as Graham Usher points out in this week’s Al-Ahram, none of the charges leveled against Zardari by Pakistani intelligence agencies (for which the new president spent eleven years in jail) have managed to stick in court, and moreover, following Benazir’s death last winter, Zardari did managed to form the largest coalition in the history of Pakistan, unseating a military ruler in the process. But Zardari’s shady financial dealings, not to mention his disdain for Pakistani lawyers and his reluctance to restore the country’s judiciary—his fear of the rule of law, as Usher calls it—still leave him one of the most loathed figures in Pakistan, particularly among intellectuals and the urban middle class.

***

At a talk given on 11 September at the London Review Bookshop--coinciding with the release of his latest book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Simon & Schuster, 2008), Tariq Ali offered a brief political history of Pakistan, as well as an analysis of the most recent developments--some, according to Ali, quite unprecedented--in Pakistani politics: last year's "forced arranged marriage" between Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf; Bhutto's assassination; the election of her widower (and current head of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party), Asif Ali Zardari, as Pakistan's president; and the raids carried out in recent weeks by US Special Ops in the border regions of Pakistan, unsanctioned by the Pakistani government. Pakistan's dependence on the United States (coming mostly in the form of military aid) and the US's "partial dependence" on Pakistan as a regional ally dates back, Ali says, to the early 1950s, when the US was appealed to by Pakistani political elites to fill the vacuum left by the British on the eve of the creation of the Pakistani state. The US's interest in the region lay primarily in India, according to Ali, until India become a major player in the non-Aligned movement and the US, fearing a Vietnam-style "domino effect" in the region, began assembling a network of security pacts, including the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Central Asian Trade Organization, and the Baghdad pact, all of which were buttressed by the United States and Great Britain. The years 1958-1969 saw a military dictatorship (that of Ayub), backed by Washington, until mass mobilizations in October 1968--calling for Pakistan's withdrawal from all security pacts with the West--toppled the regime, and eventually led to the secessionist movement in East Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Ali was quick to point out that the 1968 insurrection in Pakistan was the only one of the fabled mass movements of '68 that actually succeeded. The dictatorship of Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, from 1977-1988 was, according to Ali, the darkest period of Pakistan's history to date; it "brutalized" the political culture of Pakistan, and brought religion to the forefront of Pakistani politics in a way that was unprecedented in the history of the state. During the Zia dictatorship, the state poured money into Islamic organizations, giving them control of education and communication ministries, which facilitated the spread of their anti-secularist and anti-radical messages. Mass purges of these elements in the country's political establishments ensued. As in Afghanistan, the money Washington gave to Pakistan's leadership during this time went toward funding those who are now denounced as terrorists, and Pakistan during this period (particuarly during the Afghan-Soviet war) was conceived of in Washington as a frontline in the war not on terror, but on communism.

As far as recent developments go, Ali finds that the mobilizations in favor of the embattled judiciary that consumed Pakistan during the last 18 or so months of Musharraf's rule as the most pivotal, and heartening, events in recent memory in Pakistan--though notes that these were so little reported on in the Western press because of Pakistan (and Musharraf's) perceived status as allies of Washington and Britain. He laments the ease with which the PPP accepted that Benazir's son should inherit leadership of the party, with her widower at the helm until her son comes of age. Calling Asif Ali Zardari "the most corrupt politician even in Pakistan's chequered history", he notes that if it comes out that Zardari had prior knowledge of Bush's secret order authorizing raids into Pakistan, his time as President will surely be cut short. Ali also remarked on the unpredecented warning the head of Pakistan's military gave to Washington, saying that if American forces do mount an invasion into the sovereign territory of Pakistan, they will be resisted. And though he is loath of conspiracy theorizing, Ali did wonder whether or not the recent raids, aimed at creating a "mini-war" situation in Pakistan, were designed to bolster the campaign of John McCain. Ali ultimately finds an "incredibly grim situation" in Pakistan at the current moment, with little to no alternative for a population caught between the military and political corruption that have been part and parcel of Pakistan virtually from its founding. With the war in Afghanistan going horribly (and with the vast majority of the Pakistani population being fundamentally opposed to NATO actions in the region), Ali says that the next weeks and months in Pakistan are critical; yet he admits that more innocent people can be expected to die as Washington toys with the idea of opening a new front in its sorrowful "war on terror". The solutions for Pakistan are land reforms, to modernize the countryside and bring the poor peasantry of Pakistan into a national political dialogue, as well as a regional solution involving India, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia (because NATO and the West are so completely mistrusted), aimed at bringing about at least twenty years of peace so that the Pakistani population might have time to psychologically recover, and so that social reconstruction might be given a chance.

Works Consulted #12

• Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (University of California Press, 1989)

• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Penguin, 1985)

• Michael Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave, 2008)

• Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996)

Check back soon for a long overdue follow-up post on PAKISTAN.