Rabbi Michael Lerner’s speech brought down the house at Mohammad Ali’s funeral & is making an international splash, even among progressives. That’s swell. So can he explain to us his comment that liberal & progressive Jews “have called upon the United States to stand up to the part of the Israeli government that is oppressing Palestinians”?
Which “part” of the Israeli government is oppressing Palestinians, as he sees it? The military which occupies the West Bank, has East Jerusalem under martial law, & bombs Gaza so badly it’s becoming uninhabitable? The judiciary that creates draconian laws governing Palestinians under occupation but refuses to prosecute Israeli settlers for violence against Palestinians? The Knesset filled to capacity with rightwing parties & politicians calling for even more unspeakable violence & repression of Palestinians?
So the question really is, which part of the Israeli government isn’t oppressing Palestinians?
In response to the good rabbi’s speech, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
In 2010, Santana pulled out of a scheduled performance in Israel citing scheduling difficulties. Palestinians & BDS activists–giving him a respect we have learned he didn’t deserve–assumed it was because of our appeals that he honor the cultural boycott of Israel.
In a press statement earlier this year his manager denied the 2010 cancellation was due to BDS. He said, “Carlos Santana is a citizen of the World & he plays his music & spreads his message of Love, Light & Peacewherever he goes. Carlos believes the World should have no borders so he is not detoured or discouraged to play anywhere on this planet. We look forward to performing in Israel this summer.” (Those silly caps are all Santana’s.)
Love, Light & Peace, my ass! Despite months of appeals by BDS activists he will perform in Tel Aviv on July 30th as part of his Luminosity Tour. Luminosity means the brightness of a celestial object or the rate of emission of radiation but the only luminosity coming out of his performance will be the toxic emissions bouncing off the apartheid wall.
Our man is a weasel who spouts sentimental gibberish, like so many other weasels before him, to make big bucks by supporting apartheid. But we need to make sure that if we can’t stop him from disgracing himself, the whole world knows just what kind of weasel he is.
(Photo from Facebook wall of BDS appeal to Santana is of Mustafa Ismail, a Palestinian living in Gaza whose family was ethnically cleansed in 1948 from Jaffa. Jaffa, the cultural centre of Palestinians, was occupied in 1948 & has since been for the most part destroyed & annexed to Tel Aviv. The few remaining Palestinians face apartheid & ethnic cleansing.)
Proof that Drumpf is too stupid to be president: he pledged to bring back waterboarding & even worse forms of torture. Hard to believe he took Obama & CIA director John Brennan at their words when they claimed it ended in 2009. Denying it isn’t the same as ending it. That’s the same stunt Obama played with the war in Iraq: declaring it ended while continuing to deploy troops, mercenaries, & the CIA there.
(Please understand my criticisms of Drumpf are never an underhanded endorsement of Clinton. Neither is suitable for any official capacity; they are both murderous thugs.)
Recognizing the humanity of the Palestinians is not the new standard for solidarity–though Bernie Sanders & Rabbi Michael Lerner both got away with it. What does it even mean to recognize their humanity? Does it mean as distinct from dogs? Or as the same as Israelis & the rest of us?
Such a formulation has a meaning in politics only in the barbaric phase of capitalism when racism dominates world politics. But it is not sufficient to allow people a pass on Palestinian justice. Once you recognize that they are indeed human beings (they’ll be so glad to hear that) you have to choose where you stand on the colonial occupation of their lands, on Israeli apartheid & that great big apartheid wall, on ethnic cleansing, & on their claims to self-determination.
If you think, after all of Israel’s aggressions & barbarisms, that their very own little bantustate addresses Palestinian demands for justice, then maybe your understanding of what a human being is isn’t the problem. Maybe the real problem is your understanding of justice.
A word of solace to those panicking at the prospect of a Drumpf presidency: he is not going to march into the White House & start building a wall on the southern border. US agribusiness is absolutely dependent on the labor of undocumented immigrants–as are construction, meat packing, & several other industries. His braggadocio is not going to preempt the imperative needs of several multi-billion dollar industries.
He is not going to lay down a ban on Muslims entering the US. The US Immigration Service carefully monitors who does & does not enter this country. Modifications are & can be made in their practices without a single word from Drumpf. More importantly, the presidency is not yet a dictatorship & will not become one unless oligarchic rule is challenged & sees no other way to defend its system. There is a history & a method to fascism that is not going to be altered by his bombast.
As for those wars he promises? Clinton has promised even more. But neither of them will go to war against any country unless the generals in the Pentagon, the CIA, all those government think tanks & high-level consultants, & the oligarchy agree to it.
If we do our political work & build the social movements for change & justice, we have less to fear & more cause for hope.
The postmortems on the Sanders revolution are as tiresome as they are exhaustive when the death of an illusion is something to be lauded, not grieved.
The parsing of differences between Clinton & Drumpf have just begun & promise to make the next five months a hell on earth. It’s the price the rest of us pay for lesser evil politics.
Palestinian solidarity activists are called upon to tell the truth, the whole truth, about their struggle against Israeli colonialism. We are not authorized to accept discounts on their behalf on their right to self-determination.
It is not sectarian idealism to stand by principles & reject the compromises, betrayals, & political idiocies of a bantustate solution or to criticize liberal Zionists (like Rabbi Michael Lerner) who try to make that a realistic possibility for Palestinians.
Call me a nitpicker, but that speech by Rabbi Michael Lerner at Mohammad Ali’s memorial service got a whole lot less impressive when he called for a Palestinian bantustate rather than a democratic secular state for Palestinians & Jews.
The good rabbi is my political generation & well-versed in the gestalt of 1960s & 1970s activism: antiwar, pro-civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights. He may be progressive on many questions but he remains–despite the violence of Israeli colonialism, apartheid, & ethnic cleansing–a liberal Zionist supporter of Israel. Like Chomsky & Finkelstein, he opposes the violent character of Israel but refuses to acknowledge the inextricable relationship of apartheid to the ideology of Zionism & Jewish supremacism. He supports Israeli colonialism.
Also like Chomsky & Finkelstein, he is an opponent of BDS. He often tries to appear impartial, equivocal even, but he opposes it. You can’t play both sides of the street in politics & the good rabbi is long enough in politics to know that. He’s written a book titled “The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left” where he attributes criticism of Israel to “internalized anti-Semitism” & tries to distinguish “legitimate criticism of Israel from Israel-bashing.” So he sure as hell doesn’t support BDS which he considers a threat to a Jewish-only state.
Lerner has the politics of J Street, the liberal alternative to AIPAC & the organizational attempt to give a more humane face to Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing.
Swell that he talks tough to power but not if its to be in a better position to shill for Israeli colonialism & stick Palestinian justice in a bantustate.
It’s just so wrong, so sickening that Bill Clinton eulogized Mohammad Ali.They report Ali planned his own memorial service. His doctor reports he suffered no brain impediments from Parkinson’s Disease. But he must have been out of touch with political realities from the Clinton era: the war on Black youth that incarcerated thousands of Black kids for drug use (many for life without parole) & minor infractions; the evisceration of welfare that forces poor women, children, disabled, elderly to scrounge for food from food banks & dumpsters.
We honor Ali as the people of Louisville did today–as one of ours. Whether he knew it or not, he had nothing in common with Clinton.
“Ruins of an Utopia” by Rollie Mukherjee, depicting the Indian occupation of Kashmir. No one understands the barbed wire realities better than Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
Long live Kashmiri Intifada! Long live Palestinian Intifada!
