Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:
John Cassidy: Whither the GOP? A Republican Report Worth Reading: Well, not really. Focus groups show the Party to be "scary,""narrow-minded," and "out of touch," and some of the Party apparatchiki think they'd like to change it, but what they offer is cosmetic -- "we need a Party whose brand of conservatism invites and inspires new people to visit us." Problem is, the Republicans made most of their gains when people didn't realize where the party is going, and now that the party is, as even the report puts it, "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac," it's become all too clear what the Party stands for.
It remains to be seen how these strictures go down with the billionaires that increasingly fund the Republican Party. But in this report, there is a definite recognition that the party's image as a tool of the one per cent is doing it great damage. Interestingly, this skepticism towards being tied to the ultra-rich extends to the activities of the Super PACs, such as those controlled by Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, which last year spent about a billion dollars in advertising in swing states, and all to no avail. Unless the activities of "lone wolf groups" are coördinated with the activities of the party, the report warns, they are "more likely to waste their donors' money and act in a redundant, unhelpful manner."
Noura Erakat: Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations: Lots of things here, including some points on Israeli citizens who happen not to be Chosen People:
In 2011, Israel passed the State Budget Law Amendment. Popularly known as the Nakba Law, it penalizes, by revoking state funding, any institution that either challenges Israel's founding as a Jewish and democratic state or commemorates Israel's Independence Day as one of mourning or loss. The threat any such commemoration poses is a challenge to Israel's narrative of righteous conception.
The Prawer Plan, named after its author, former deputy chair of the National Security Council Ehud Prawer, seeks to forcibly displace up to 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their homes and communities in the Negev Desert to urban townships to make room for Jewish-only settlements and a forest. The plan, approved in September 2011, has no demographic impact, as these Palestinians are already Israeli citizens. It does, however, violently sever these Bedouin communities from their agricultural livelihoods and centuries-long association with that particular land.
Similarly, in 2001 the High Court of Justice rejected an appeal from internally displaced Palestinians to return to the villages of Ikrit and Kafr Bir'im, near the Lebanon border, from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948. Like the Negev-based Palestinians, these Palestinians are Israeli citizens and therefore pose no demographic threat. In fact, they currently live only miles away from their demolished villages. Their return to them only threatens a Zionist narrative that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. To further the erasure, Israel plans on building Jewish settlements where these communities once lived.
Israel's land and housing planning policies in the Galilee demonstrate that the threat is not just about demographics and memory but the cohesion of Palestinians within the state, and the potential for Palestinian nationalism. In Nazareth, home to 80,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel, bidding rights for public building opportunities are reserved for citizens who have completed military service. This excludes nearly all of Nazareth's Palestinian population, who do not serve in the Israeli military for historical and political reasons. In other Galilee cities, "Admissions Committees" can legally exclude Palestinians from their residential communities for being "socially unsuitable" based on their race or national origin alone. Together with its policy of Jewish settlement expansion within Israel as well as a matrix of similarly discriminatory urban planning laws, Israel forces its Palestinian citizens to live in noncontiguous ghettos throughout the state.
Until 1967, Palestinian "citizens of Israel" were second class, subject to military rule. Later in 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, seizing chunks of land and established military control over anyone who failed to flee, much like their earlier exercise but even more repressive. At the time, it was widely assumed that Israel would realize that the occupied territories didn't fit with the model of a democratic Jewish state, so would be swapped out for peace guarantees -- as happened with Egypt, although only after a further round of war. However, there were powerful groups within Israel who hated the idea of ever giving up land, and they worked hard to make "land-for-peace" and "two-state solution" impossible. Erakat explains that they succeeded:
Nevertheless, Israel has obliterated the two-state option since the signing of Oslo in 1993. It sanctioned, funded and encouraged, as a matter of national policy, the growth of the settler population in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, from 200,000 to nearly 600,000. It built 85 percent of the separation barrier on occupied West Bank land, circumscribing its largest settlement blocs and effectively confiscating 13 percent of the territory. Rather than prepare Area C (62 percent of the West Bank, now under interim Israeli civil and military jurisdiction) for Palestinian control, it has entrenched its settlement-colonial enterprise. Israel's siege has exacerbated the cultural, social and national distance between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And its intense Judaization campaign in East Jerusalem has accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians there, hardly preparing it to become the independent capital of the future Palestinian state.
As the settlements chopped up the West Bank, some people on both sides started advocating a "one-state solution" whereby Israel would keep its settlements but grant citizenship to the remaining people living in the seized territories. Many Zionists treat this proposal as such a non-starter that even mention of it gets you tossed from the room. In a two-state scenario based on 1967 borders with return of the 1947-49 refugees barred, Jews would enjoy a large majority, but adding in the occupied territories changes the balance to 5.9 million Jews vs. 6.1 million non-Jews, threatening the Jewish State's democratic trappings. Netanyahu and his cohort are unwilling either to part with land or to unify its people, so they pretend they can keep their current two-caste system working indefinitely. And the more Jews appear as overlords in the occupied territories, the more they target Israel's "Palestinian citizens" -- it's hard to check the racism, the brutality, the paranoia at the Green Line, so it's no surprise that Israel's occupation mentality corrupts the whole country.
Paul Krugman: Marches of Folly: Noting the tenth anniversary of Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq:
There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war -- having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war's boosters predicted -- left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.
So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn't look like it.
The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that "everyone" thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents -- but they were out of the mainstream.
The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration. This was true in political circles; it was equally true of much of the press, which effectively took sides and joined the war party.
CNN's Howard Kurtz, who was at The Washington Post at the time, recently wrote about how this process worked, how skeptical reporting, no matter how solid, was discouraged and rejected. "Pieces questioning the evidence or rationale for war," he wrote, "were frequently buried, minimized or spiked."
Closely associated with this taking of sides was an exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority. Only people in positions of power were considered worthy of respect. Mr. Kurtz tells us, for example, that The Post killed a piece on war doubts by its own senior defense reporter on the grounds that it relied on retired military officials and outside experts -- "in other words, those with sufficient independence to question the rationale for war."
As I recall, at the time it was not difficult to find dissenting views, but they were always hard pressed to keep up with the avalanche of pro-war propaganda, disadvantaged by lack of access to sources, and by being shut out of the limited media sources that seem to sway Washington, as opposed to public, opinion. But more than media complicity, the one thing that stands out in my mind as allowing Bush to get away with all the lies and nonsense was the administration's ability to steer the entire cast of Democratic Part 2004 presidential aspirants to vote for the war: Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, Daschle, Clinton, Schumer, Biden, Dodd, Lieberman. None wanted to be caught up opposing a successful war -- as had happened to some Democrats opposed to the first Iraq war in 1990, the definition of success being rather murky there -- and none had the foresight to see how this war would turn out differently.
Krugman likens this group-think to the current nonsense he struggles with daily on the mass misunderstanding of Very Serious Persons of basic macroeconomics. Valid complaint, perhaps even clearer here how moneyed interests have corrupted even basic science for their own purposes, and how successfully the elite media has wrapped itself around Washington's fickle brains.
MJ Rosenberg: The Times Eviscerates the Occupation: Use this link as an introduction to the long New York Times piece by Ben Ehrenreich: Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?:
The best news about the Ehrenreich piece is that he simply describes the occupation in all its ugliness, forcing the reader to forget for a time all the propaganda about Palestinians and instead focus on the conditions Palestinians are subjected to simply because the settlers (and the Israeli government that supports them) wants their land. And, beyond that, he defends non-violent resistance to the occupation as the one means that can end it. (He quotes one Israeli army official saying that he prefers dealing with resisters who shoot, "you have the enemy, he shoots at you, you have to kill him." But he is confounded by non-violent resistance. Another is quoted as saying, "We don't do Gandhi very well." In short, Ehrenreich eviscerates the occupation and describes how it can be ended.
Also see Rosenberg for his review of Obama's Israel-Palestine trip, No Big Surprises but He Accomplished His Goal. The key point here was when Obama "compared the Palestinian struggle to the civil rights movement in America, invoking his own daughters as beneficiaries of that struggle." This doesn't inspire me with much confidence, but it does clearly focus on equal rights, as opposed to the caste regime that Israel has constructed.