The Israeli military has installed robotic weapons that can fire tear-gas, stun-grenades and "non-lethal" bullets in two volatile locations on the West Bank. One is atop a turret at al-Aroub refugee camp; the other in the nearby city of Hebron, where soldiers often clash with Palestinian residents. When young protesters pour into the streets hurling rocks and improvised firebombs at Israeli soldiers, the robotic weapons unleash gas and projectiles on them, according to witness accounts. The robo-weapons, produced by Israeli firm Smart Shooter, use artificial intelligence to track targets. Israel says the technology saves lives—both Israeli and Palestinian. But, as YNet states in its report on the installation, "critics see another step toward a dystopian reality in which Israel fine-tunes its open-ended occupation of the Palestinians while keeping its soldiers out of harm’s way."
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, released its second report, stating there are "reasonable grounds to conclude that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence and the Israeli Government's de-facto annexation policies." The commission called for the UN Security Council to bring to an end the "illegal situation resulting from the permanent occupation imposed by Israel" and require Israel to bring "its permanent occupation to an end immediately."
In Episode 131 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls out the ironically named Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) for openly defending Russian disinformation. FAIR serially portrays the 2014 Maidan Revolution as a US-instrumented, Nazi-tainted, unconstitutional "coup." FAIR commentators Luca Goldmansour, Gregory Shupak and Bryce Greene are all guilty of this. They do not bother to consult voices of Ukrainian civil society—academics, media watchdogs and human rights groups—that refute this notion. Glomming onto the notorious Nuland phone call to dismiss a grassroots pro-democracy uprising as a Washington "regime change" intrigue reveals chauvinistic contempt for the Ukrainians. And hyping the supposed "Nazi" threat in Ukraine (while ignoring the Nazi-nostalgist and neo-fascist elements on the Russian side) abets Putin's ultra-cynical propaganda stratagem of fascist pseudo-anti-fascism. Rather than calling out Fox News for its propaganda service to Putin, FAIR instead joins them. How did a supposed progressive media watchdog become a de facto arm of Kremlin war propaganda?
The Parliament of Catalonia passed a resolution recognizing Israel's actions in the Palestinian Occupied Territory as "against international law and...equivalent to apartheid as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court." The resolution was approved with support from all the left parties in the regional body. En Comú Podem (Together We Can) stated that the regional parliament is "the first European institution to recognize that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people, as noted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch."
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government's planned cable car over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The ruling was met with approval by proponents such as Jerusalem's mayor, Moshe Lion, who claimedthe project will reduce air pollution and "allow comfortable and efficient access to the Western Wall and the Old City." However, the decision has been met with condemnation by many, including city planners and architects,environmental groups, and Karaite Jews, a minority sect with a cemetery located along the proposed cable car's path. Palestinian groups have especially criticized the proposed path through East Jerusalem, an area ceded to Arab control in the 1949 armistice but occupied by Israel in 1967. Advocacy group Ir-Amimtweeted: "Folks will hop in in [West Jerusalem] and have no idea they're cabling over the heads of occupied Palestinians."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, just days after issuing blatant nuclear threats, engages in the classic anti-Semitic trope of blaming Nazism on the Jews. Speaking to Italian TV, Lavrov responded to a reminder that Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish thusly: "When they say 'What sort of nazification is this if we are Jews,' well I think that Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it means nothing. For a long time now we've been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest anti-Semites are the Jews themselves." This as Russian state media voices openly call for "total annihilation" of Ukraine, and more mass graves are being discovered daily. Russia will be glorifying this campaign of extermination in massive military parades next week, commemorating the Soviet Union's 1945 victory over Nazi Germany.
British socialist Daniel Randall’s important 2021 book Confronting Antisemitism on the Left offers an important critique of the phenomenon—but is limited by stopping short of a forthright anti-Zionism that can incorporate Jewish liberation into an anti-oppressive praxis. Drawing on my experiences in the US and Randall’s in the UK, I argue that Left anti-Semitism has some of its strongest roots in a Stalinist approach that instrumentalizes Jews and other oppressed groups as political chess pieces. This can be repudiated in a Jewish cultural resurgence that calls for “smashing Zionism not Israel.”
For weeks, East Jerusalem has seen nightly protests over the impending eviction of hundreds of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah district—culminating in violent clashes with riot police at al-Aqsa Mosque. Compounding the anger is another grievance—Israel's denial of East Jerusalem Palestinians' right to participate in elections for the Palestinian Authority's Legislative Council. With the overwhelming majority of East Jerusalem Palestinians denied Israeli citizenship by an array of bureaucratic artifices, this means they are effectively disenfranchised of the vote in either sovereignty.
President Joe Biden's pledge to rebuild the Iran nuclear deal is already deteriorating into a deadlock—a testament to the effectiveness of the Trump-era intrigues that sabotaged the agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Biden and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei have each traded "You Go First" statements—the White House demanding Tehran return to compliance with the JCPOA and Khamenei insisting the US lift the sanctions that were re-imposed by Trump. There is indeed a case that the US, having abrogated the pact first, should now be the party to "blink" in the stand-off, and lift the sanctions as a good-faith measure.
The world is breathing a collective sigh of relief after General Services Administration chief Emily Murphy officially contacted the team of president-elect Joe Biden, marking the Trump administration's belated initiation the transition process. But along with the news of Murphy's capitulation come reports that the US has deployed heavy bombers to the Middle East, and that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a secret meeting in Saudi Arabia with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Simultaneously, Yemen's Houthi rebels have conveniently claimed responsibility for a missile attack on a Saudi oil facility in the port of Jeddah. And this all comes just days after the disconcerting news that Trump had gathered his cabinet and advisors for a White House conclave weighing the options for military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. With his attempted judicial coup failing, Trump's Plan B could be postponement (read: cancellation) of the presidential transition under pretext of a world crisis of his own making.
A long time ago, not long after the end of the end of World War II and still in the shadow of the shoah, a nice (half-)Jewish girl in New York's Long Island suburbs decided to wear a Star of David to make sure people would know at a glance that she was a Jew. This, ironically, proved to be the first step on her path to anti-Zionism—a life journey that led from Berlin to the refugee camps of the West Bank.
President Trump's executive order, ostensibly extending civil rights protections to Jewish students on college campuses, is a masterpiece of propaganda and disguised motives, actually criminalizing opposition to the expropriation of the Palestinians, making a consistent anti-racist position legally impossible—and thereby, paradoxically, abetting anti-Semitism.
Two Israeli ex-prime ministers are now involved in the cannabis industry, and legalization became a key issue in this month's elections. But in a case of strange bedfellows, legalization was aggressively taken up as a campaign plank by the far right.
Bill Weinberg speaks at the NYC Anarchist Forum on "Neither NATO Nor Qaddafi, Thank You: Anarchist Perspectives on Libya and the Arab Spring," April 27, 2011
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