On June 6, 2021, Israeli occupation forces detained Palestinian activist and journalist Muna al-Kurd, the leader of the campaign against the ethnic cleansing of the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah. A day before, Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Givara Budeiri was arrested by Israeli police while covering a demonstration in the same area; she was later released from custody. What do these brutal practices of the Israeli state convey? They represent the innate violence of Zionist settler-colonialism. In the words of Mohammed El-Kurd (brother of Muna): “Living in Palestine is like having a policeman in your bed. Be it on the bus or in the supermarket, on the beach or in the courthouse, in a military uniform or in a Hawaiian shirt, settlers are everywhere. Colonial violence is a constant occurrence. Rifles aplenty.”
Foundational Violence
The settler state of Israel is built on foundational violence – a type of violence that creates sovereignty. Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe – is the word Palestinians use for Israel’s so-called war of independence. In November 1947, the UN partitioned British-controlled Palestine, granting the Zionists, who had been slowly colonizing the region, 55% of the land (the most fertile areas), though Jews were only a third of the population and controlled only 6% of the land at the time. Zionist forces used partition as a signal to move into action. In 1948, well-armed Zionist forces, numbering over 50,000, launched a war to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Arab population of Palestine.
Everything was organizationally orchestrated – well-calculated terror tactics were deployed to dispossess Palestinians of their land. Under Plan Dalet, spearheaded by David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister, Zionist forces were directed to carry out the “destruction of [Palestinian] villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those populations centers which are difficult to control continuously.” An official command to Zionist troops stated, “The principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages [and]…the eviction of the villagers.” More than 500 villages and localities were destroyed; more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland.
The Myth of Democracy
Israel is called the “only democracy in the Middle East”; this is patently wrong. It belies the fact that the foundational violence inherent in the colonial state manifests itself regularly and molecularly in everyday acts of dehumanization against Palestinians. Millions of Israel’s subjects have no real rights; they can’t even be called second-class citizens, because so many Palestinians living under Israeli military rule are denied citizenship. This is part of an entire legal framework that helps the Israeli state kill, imprison and torture Palestinians with impunity, stealing land and engaging in ethnic cleansing, while pretending to adhere to liberal and democratic political values.
Israel’s 2018 Basic Law – also known as the Nation-State Law – affirms Jewish supremacy. It states: “[Israel is] the nation state of the Jewish people…[the] exercise of the right to national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people [emphasis mine].” Thus, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are explicitly denied the right to reclaim their dignity.
According to Israeli law, any Jew in the world can become an Israeli citizen, whereas Palestinians are brazenly barred from returning to their home. Israel has had a longstanding policy of issuing, and revoking, IDs for Palestinians in order to deny their right to come back when they move or travel abroad. After its 2005 “withdrawal” from Gaza, for example, Israel began classifying Palestinians from Jerusalem and West Bankers who live in Gaza as residing “abroad,” revoking their IDs and barring their return to Jerusalem or the West Bank.
Israeli law also violates free speech rights; the Boycott Law disallows Israelis to “knowingly publish a public call for a boycott against the State of Israel.” The Nakba Law allows the Minister of Finance to fine any publicly-funded bodies that commemorate “[Israeli] Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning.” This is a blatantly discriminatory law against Palestinian citizens of Israel who wish to remember the forced dispossession and expulsion of their people. The law also prohibits events that criticize “the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” essentially repressing anti-Zionist activism.
The fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the current Israeli governing framework of settler-colonialism stresses the need for a strong struggle for decolonization. Zionism is a totally illegitimate ideology which – when put into practice – enacts the perpetual erasure of a group of people, transforming the lives of innumerable people into a continuum of pure violence. We need to collectively strive for an immediate end to this monstrosity.
Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com.
Why does the US advocate a free market while doing its utmost to stifle it? The current US-China economic war is a perfect example of this perplexing question.
The legacy of Milton Friedman, the founder of America’s modern political economy, was a representation of this very dichotomy: the use, misuse and manipulation of the concept of the free market.
Through the Chicago School of Economics, whose disciples have proved most consequential in the formation of the American approach to foreign policy, especially in South America, Milton constantly championed the virtues of the free market, emphasizing a supposed link between freedom and capitalism and insisting that governments should not micromanage markets.
But theory and practice are two different notions that hardly meet.
The ‘Chicago Boys’ – South American economists who were mostly educated under Friedman himself – were dispatched in the 1970s and 80s to advise some of the continent’s most notorious dictatorships on how to manage their economies. They selectively advocated free-market economics that seemed to only serve the interests of the US and, to a lesser degree, the ruling classes of various South American nations. The bloodbath that ensued in much of the continent during those years can still be felt to this day, from Chile to Argentina and elsewhere.
Friedman died in 2006, after receiving accolades from his own government, in addition to the British government during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. However, his supposed wisdom continues to shape the mindset of mainstream US economists to this day, thus allowing for the unresolved dichotomy to persist: how can the US government ‘stay out’ of the free market while, simultaneously, intervening to control this very free market whenever the outcomes do not suit its interests? A perfect case in point is the ongoing US economic war on China.
Contrary to the common perception, this war was not initiated by the Trump Administration when the US President slapped a series of tariffs on Chinese exports to the US, starting in June 2018. Indeed, it has existed for much longer. Even the supposedly more amiable Barack Obama Administration was engaged in this war. We could argue that Obama’s Pivot to Asia in 2012 was a renewed war declaration.
When the new Joe Biden Administration declared a major ‘reset’ in its foreign policy, Biden did not see the need to engage with China through friendly diplomatic channels. The hostilities continued between both countries simply because this ‘conflict’ has been the status quo ante for decades.
Last April, a bipartisan push at the US Congress raised the heat on Beijing by linking the latter’s human rights record with its economic practices, proposing to funnel billions of dollars into the US economy to, essentially, micromanage the ‘free market’ in favor of the US and to challenge China’s ascendancy.
On May 25, the Chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Gregory Meeks, introduced the 470-page Bill, entitled, “Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act.” This EAGLE Act “addresses a range of issues, including increased investment to promote U.S. manufacturing, trade, work with allies and partners, re-engagement in international organizations and recognition of the treatment of China’s Uyghur Muslim minority as genocide,” Reuters reported.
The Bill advanced after a Senate vote two days later, and is expected, once finalized and signed into law, to serve as the legal and political foundation of Biden’s economic war on China. Like previous administrations, Biden’s is motivated by the Chicago Boys’ mentality, i.e. free market that suits the interests of the US and economic war when this ‘free market’ deviates from its ultimate goal.
One of the most baffling aspects of the US-Chinese economic war is that both countries are similar in terms of economic ambitions. In some ways, the Chinese copied various aspects of the American economic model of yesteryears. China is a capitalist country though it is managed by a ‘Communist Party’. The Party’s intervention in the economy, though it uses unique ideological justification and political discourse, is similar to the US government’s management of the US economy, especially during times of crisis, for example, the 2008 recession.
This ‘conflict’ is hardly motivated by an ideology or human rights violations, but by the fact that China’s economy continues to soar, thus increasing its share of the global economic largesse. With an 18.3% growth in the first quarter of 2021 – the biggest jump in GDP since 1992 – the Chinese momentum is eclipsing the performance of the US economy and its European allies. With economic power, political influence follows, with China now hoping to rearrange global alliances, not just in Asia, Africa and South America, but also in Europe.
According to many mainstream analysts, such as Stuart Anderson, writing in Forbes in June 2020, Trump’s economic war on China has failed. That failure is the direct result of, as Panos Mourdoukoutas concludes, also in Forbes, “the lack of clear direction of what the American side wants from China.” This lack of clarity continues to “give Beijing an upper hand.”
The ill-defined US objectives in China continue to also characterize the new Administration. Even the massively expensive Congressional Bill, once it becomes law, will not be able to answer the simple question: what is the US endgame in China?
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Not a day goes by these days without a casual remark about animal extermination in Australia. Mice have moved to the front of the queue in terms of animal species Australians would most like to liquidate. The language used has various registers: sombre and regretful; grave and scientific; panicked and bloody.
This is all ordinary fare and is characterised by ignoring the anthropogenic nature of the problems. Behind every pest outbreak on the Australian continent is a human hand operated by a muddled mind. In Australia, that hand has been particularly busy in negligence. Since the eighteenth century, animal species have been introduced inadvertently or through design affecting and in many instances devastating the continent’s ecosystem.
Some have been introduced with the purpose of neutralising other designated pest species, the most calamitous example being that of the cane toad. Introduced by agricultural scientists of the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations in 1935, the toad’s intended target were scarab beetles whose root-feeding larvae delighted in commercial agriculture, notably sugarcane crops. Famously, the toad preferred different sources of food and proceeded to prey on other species with gusto, including native predators. The species flourished.
The humble house mouse is said to have arrived with the British First Fleet in 1788 but some speculation abounds that the introduction might have come via Dutch ships charting the coast of “New Holland” in the 1600s. A 2011 study on that question found that “a British Isles origin of Australian mice is the most reasonable interpretation of our results.”
Mice populations have recently soared, notably in New South Wales and southern Queensland, given drought breaking rains. Crops have been attacked and animal food reserves contaminated. There have been instances of infection, notably leptospirosis. As Danica Leys of the Association of Rural Women sees it, “It is an economic and health crisis. From the contamination of food and water by mice, to the diseases they spread, this pest is affecting more than crops, not to mention the stress it causes”.
The rise in numbers has made an impression on foreign press outlets. The London-based Express wrote of an infestation of tens of millions of mice. Australians had “reported the mice terrorising their lives, creeping over their faces as they sleep, biting them, invading classrooms and even nibbling at patients in their hospital beds.” It did not take long for these militant rodents to be seen as a threat to Australia’s most populous city. Channel 10 News Sydney had warned about a potential mice “march”.
The hearty solution, as always with the next pest, is mass extermination. Australia’s deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack expressed the widely held view that, “The only good mouse is a dead mouse.” To that end there is seemingly no end to the devilish applications of human ingenuity in destroying or regulating a species. Modern mice killers try to sound like educated middle managers, flirting with scientific rationalist inquiry. Can we be more modern in the ways we massacre them? Take, for instance, the next generation of “gene driven” technology, with the New South Wales government promising AU$1.8 million for the venture. (The total mouse control package comes to AU$50 million.)
The most important feature of this technology is inducing infertility, a soft, tender gloved version of dispatch. This form of extermination is clean, avoids killing other species on route, and sits well with the bio-controllers. “We have modelled it already,” Paul Thomas of the University of Adelaide states, “and it should cause the population to crash over time.” Thomas is also delighted by the “X-shredder” approach, which involves targeting the X chromosome carrier, namely, the sperm of the mice.
You might be forgiven for thinking that a daring experiment for the betterment of humanity was in the offing. “Mice arrived in Australia with the first fleet,” trumpeted the NSW Minister for Agriculture Adam Marshall, “and from then until now the best control methods we have been able to come up with have been baiting and trapping.”
The less modern aspect of this inspired strategy is the use of a particular poison, bromadiolone, which has been likened by Marshall to the use of “napalm”. (Should we be worried?) The factsheet of the National Pesticide Pest Centre is cheery about its effects. “Unlike some other rat poisons, which require multiple days of feeding by an animal, bromadiolone can be lethal from one day’s feeding.”
With such sinister war metaphors involved, even the bio-control boffins are concerned that this was going too far. Species murder is acceptable, but, as with some genocidaire types, it comes with ceremonial restraint. Killing mice with such poison would insert the substance into the food chain, endangering predators.
Peter Brown, who heads the rodent management research team at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), notes that “anti-coagulants can accumulate up through the food chain, and so birds of prey or other animals can be feeding on dead mice and they could potentially get a lethal dose themselves through secondary poisoning.”
Evidence of bird deaths arising from the ingestion of poisoned bait has already been found in the central west of NSW. And that’s in connection with the less toxic and commonly used zinc phosphide. Kelly Lacey, a volunteer for the NSW Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Services (WIRES), found 100 dead galahs in a cemetery in Parkes at the end of last month. It was particularly galling for her, seeing as she had been involved in rehabilitating and releasing a good number of the birds around the area.
Bait poisonings of household pets and working animals have also been recorded. Peter Best, a veterinarian based in South Tamworth, estimated that one in 15 admissions to his practice had involved poisoned animals.
Such facts could only make another researcher at the CSIRO sigh. “If it’s used properly,” observed Steve Henry, “it should be a very, very low risk that a bird should find one of those grains of zinc phosphide and eat it.” The bait was sound. The same could not be said for those using it. “Why birds start falling out of the sky is [that] people do inappropriate things.” Such people used the bait in ways “not described on the label, or people make up their own baits.”
When asked about her attitude to the problem, Healthy Rivers Dubbo convenor Melissa Gray suggested, with no detectable irony, that everybody wanted “the mouse plague gone, but there’s no silver bullet.” No silver bullets, maybe, but virtually everything else in the armoury of extermination. For the president of the NSW Farmers Association, the mayhem caused by such a poison as bromadiolone was worth the effort. Showing the somewhat patchy wisdom of his forebears, he accepted the lethal calculus. “It will cause poisoning in animals that eat the dead mice”. That, however, “was the lesser of two evils”.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
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