Israel Is an Extremist Enterprise

Jacobin

In preparation for April elections, Israeli prime minister and right-wing icon Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to increase his chances of forming a majority government by finagling a merger of extremist party Otzma Yehudit — Jewish Power — with Jewish Home, another far-right party whose ideology is more palatable to mainstream opinion.

Otzma Yehudit subscribes to the worldview of Meir Kahane, the New York-born rabbi — assassinated in 1990 — whose movement was banned from Israeli politics in the 1980s and classified as a terrorist group in the United States. Among the many charming ideas inherited from Kahane are that the occupied Palestinian territories should be annexed to Israel and Palestinians should be expelled.

The New York Times notes that Netanyahu has “enraged Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States by striking a bargain with a racist anti-Arab party whose ideology was likened by one influential rabbi to Nazism.” And it’s not just the usual liberal Zionists wringing their hands at the perceived sullying of Israel’s image.

AIPAC — pillar of the Israel lobby in the United States — retweeted a condemnation of Otzma Yehudit by the American Jewish Committee, seconding the conviction that the party is “racist and reprehensible.” (This didn’t stop AIPAC from tweeting the very next day that it was “honored to announce” Netanyahu’s impending attendance as a speaker at its 2019 policy conference.) Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL), also took to Twitter to lament that the Otzma Yehudit leaders and their “hate-filled rhetoric” were “being legitimized” by the Jewish Home-Jewish Power union: “There should be no room for racism & no accommodation for intolerance in Israel or any democracy.”

But while the ostensibly antiracist uproar no doubt comes off as noble, the fact is that Israel is fundamentally a racist and anti-Arab state that has carried out an uninterrupted flow of reprehensible behavior.

Where, pray tell, are all of the concerned curators of Brand Israel when the country opts to undertake one of its regular bouts of slaughter in the Gaza Strip? Where are the paeans to tolerance and democracy when Israeli Arabs are deemed second-class citizens and non-Israeli ones are treated as either terrorists or collateral damage? READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Venezuela, Hezbollah and Iran: The latest hysteria from the US ‘backyard’

Middle East Eye

Speaking on 6 February to Fox Business about the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a grave warning about outside interference in the South American nation: “People don’t recognise that Hezbollah has active cells. The Iranians are impacting the people of Venezuela and throughout South America."

The next day, the US Southern Command’s Admiral Craig S Faller informed the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iran “has deepened its anti-US influence campaign in Spanish-language media, and its proxy Lebanese Hezbollah maintains facilitation networks throughout the region that cache weapons and raise funds, often via drug trafficking and money laundering”.

As usual, concerned media took the ball and ran with it.

In one exemplary piece of sensationalist drivel for Radio Farda - the Persian-language component of the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty network (with a website also in English) - Penny L Watson babbled about the threat posed to the US on account of Hezbollah and Iran’s alleged conversion of Venezuela into a base of operations.

As of 2010, she asserted, there were “as many as six terrorist training camps” scattered around the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and Margarita Island off the country’s coast, regularly hyped as a terror hotbed. (I myself incidentally visited the island around that time and didn’t manage to track down a single “terrorist”, despite being in the company of a Lebanese-Palestinian friend who had fought alongside Hezbollah against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon.)

A New York Post article by Benny Avni, who surmises that “Iran’s clerics” must be “trembl[ing] as they watch their old Caracas allies teeter”, brings up another pet factoid regularly regurgitated by right-wing fearmongers: the possibility of air travel between Venezuela and Iran. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

EXILE: REJECTING AMERICA AND FINDING THE WORLD

EXILE: REJECTING AMERICA AND FINDING THE WORLD 
ships in April from OR Books.
Pre-order now and get 15% off.
More information plus excerpt here.

Che Guevara left Argentina at 22. At 21, Belén Fernández left the U.S. and didn’t look back. Alone, far off the beaten path in places like Syria and Tajikstan, she reflects on what it means to be an American in a largely American-made mess of a world. 

After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Belén Fernández ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekking—through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin America—to packing avocados in southern Spain, to close encounters with a variety of unpredictable men, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernández survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling—as of the present moment—continued survival.

In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Belén Fernández has established herself as a one of the most trenchant observers of America’s interventions around the world, following in the footsteps of great foreign correspondents such as Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag. READ MORE AT OR BOOKS.

Cold Warrior Elliott Abrams returns to battle in Venezuela

Al Jazeera English

Shortly after right-wing figure Juan Guaido auto-proclaimed himself interim president of Venezuela in January - to the immediate applause of US President Donald Trump - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the appointment of a special envoy to "help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy and prosperity to their country", that is to get rid of legitimate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro once and for all.

The envoy is neo-con extraordinaire Elliott Abrams, praised by Pompeo as a "seasoned, principled, and tough-minded foreign policy veteran", whose "passion for the rights and liberties of all peoples makes him a perfect fit and a valuable and timely addition" to the State Department team.

"Veteran", at least, is an accurate description. Abrams indeed boasts a long career of shady political exploits in Latin America undertaken on behalf of the American government.

While serving in the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Abrams was a star of that Cold War period known as the Iran-Contra affair, during which the US illegally sold weapons to Iran and funnelled the proceeds to right-wing Contra forces busily terrorising Nicaragua.

Abrams was even convicted for his role in the affair, but was later pardoned by George HW Bush.

In her war memoir Blood on the Border, US scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz recalls Abrams's lofty prediction that "when history is written the Contras will be folk heroes".

But the Contras were responsible for setting off a decade-long war that killed an estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans, and thus understandably aren't recalled as "folk heroes" by anyone but a hardcore group of delusional neocons. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Review: Syria war: Rebuilding in the middle of a cyclone

Middle East Eye

Once upon a time in Syria, there was an evil dictator against whom the people rose up. They were brutally repressed, and war ensued.

This, at least, is one of the versions of the Syrian conflict (2011-present) that is mass-marketed on the international scene, in all of its oversimplified, decontextualised, and politically expedient glory. It's fortunate, then, that antidotes to such deceptive reductionism exist - among them the newly edited collection Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War.

The editors are Linda Matar of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Ali Kadri of NUS and the London School of Economics, who explain in their introduction - titled "Syria in the Imperialist Cyclone" - that the objective of the compilation is to provide a "broad-scope analysis of what went wrong in Syria" and perspectives from "different angles of the political spectrum".

Obviously, this is not a book that will go down well with Western cheerleaders for the opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who delight in smearing as "Assad apologists" anyone who dares to deflect a bit of blame for the conflict onto any other party.

And while the various contributors to Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War do deliver significant criticism of Assad and his policies, the overarching role of the aforementioned cyclone is made painfully clear. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.