Well-Made World 38

In another piece for the LRB, Henry Siegman sets things straight in terms of Israel/Palestine, discussing the truce (rather than ease restrictions in Gaza during the truce, he explains, Israel tightened its hold on the city, while Hamas was acknowledged to be quite effective in preventing rocketfire, including from groups like Islamic Jihad); Hamas on the terrorist list (Siegman reminds us that when it became a political party, Hamas publicly ended its suicide bombings and kassam fire, until the blockade); and the conception that Israel is acting as part of a widespread "war on terror" (as he writes, "It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions").

In other news, the NYT reports today that layoffs are expanding to sectors of the economy such as manufacturing, retailing and information technology. To this end, we have a piece from NE favorite Paul Craig Roberts on the next real estate crisis, which, he argues, will hit commercial real estate. His answer to the question of the hour--who will finance the next wave of debt in the US, once Obama brings the deficit to the $3 trillion mark?--is Americans, via inflation.

'Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.'**

Though we're currently down on Alexander Cockburn, his brother Andrew does not disappoint with his latest piece for Counterpunch, critique of the politics surrounding 'official' estimates/reporting on the downright horrifying number of Iraqi civilian casualties since the 2003 invasion. In contrast to the most recent Johns Hopkins findings, placing the number of Iraqi murders at 665,000, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) (which, we should point out, excludes many of the country's most dangerous destinations--Baghdad, Anbar province, and two other areas deemed too unsafe to visit) recently published a far lower number: 151,000. Despite the fact that the two estimates quantify totally different death tolls (the NEJM report is interesting strictly in civilian casualties, while the Hopkins report compares death rates since the invasion with years before), the NEJM estimate has been touted by everyone from George Bush to The New York Times as the more accurate of the two; however, Cockburn draws attention to sloppy reporting and misleading statistical rhetoric in NEJM report, rightly taking the journal to task for lending a hand in attempts to downplay the devastating effects of the American invasion.


In other news, Gabriel Piterberg has written a fascinating article for the New Left Review, in which he analyzes and, in a sense, unearths, Hannah Arendt's political opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine. Recognizing the real danger of anti-Semitism, Arendt rejects the notion of a racially-exclusive Jewish state and attempts to find other solutions to the infamous 'Jewish question'. And finally, if you can get past the awful new layout at one of our go-to websites, ZNet Communications, you'll find a recent interview, conducted by Stephen Shalom, with our friend Bashir Abu-Manneh, in which the latter touches on the significance of 2007 and 2008 being, respectively, the 40th and 60th anniversaries of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the establishment of the State of Israel. Bashir also speaks about congruity between present-day Hamas and pre-1982 Fatah, as well as the history and current state of the Left in Palestine.

**Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 1955