So many people in my area suffer from AFFLUENZIA

AFFLUENZIA:  A made up "mental illness" first described by the blogger, Mark Raymond Ganzer.  This illness occurs and  manifests itself in the upper-middle income class, the top 20% of money makers.  The illness is characterized by the holding as cherished and unshakeable beliefs the following:

That poverty is contagious

That homelessness is contagious

That mental illness is contagious

As a result of those beliefs, those people suffering from AFFLUENZIA spend much of their time in the role of "gate-keeper," and while they may generously support those who advocate and work for people living in poverty (and frequently do), and while they may generously support those who advocate for and work for homeless people (and frequently do), and while they may generously support those who advocate for and work for people who have been labeled "mentally ill" (and frequently do), under no circumstances whatsoever would they EVER consider

Feeding a person (or persons) living in poverty a meal, served in the home of the AFFLUENZIAC, or

Putting up for a night, or a week, or a month a homeless person (or persons) in the home of the AFFLUENZIAC, or

Visiting a dear friend or relative who has been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in the mental hospital.  The dear friend or relative, upon being released from the mental hospital is unlikely to ever receive an invitation to visit the AFFLUENZIAC's home.

In this manner, do the AFFLUENZIACS protect their home and family from the great trifecta of life's school of hard knocks:  poverty, homelessness, and mental illness.

AFFLUENZIACS also protect their established institutions (churches, schools, neighborhoods) from the presence of the impoverished (criminalizing those who have no money; labeling them vagrants; having the police tell the homeless to "hit the road") from the presence of the homeless (again, labeling them vagrants and leaving it to the police to pass along the message "hit the road, Jack, and don'tcha come back no mo, no mo, no mo, no mo), and to further protect these institutions from the presence of the mentally ill, again by calling the police, having an ambulance come to check out the vitals of the mentally ill one, shipping the mentally ill one to a medical hospital for evaluation, then involuntarily committing the mentally ill one to a mental hospital where, IF the mentally ill one is fortunate enough to also be impoverished and homeless, they are covered by the State of Illinois Medicaid plan, and thus the state can house and feed them for up to seven days (five "working days" plus a two-day weekend).

AFFLUENZIACS are so totally unprepared to deal with such life events as:

(a)  the loss of a job

(b)  the acquisition of a terminal disease

(c)  the loss of health insurance

(d)  the loss of their home

(e)  the emergence of a mentally ill family member

(f)  a marital infidelity

(g) the loss of accumulated savings which had been entrusted to "a guy" who for years

     had returned to them a very consistent 10% (during which time "the market" remained

     stagnant) because he had a secret formula!

That in the event of two or more such examples occurring shortly after one another, that they freak out, become clingy, whiny, titty babies, and frequently do themselves (and the rest of us) a favor by committing suicide.

Thanks, Lord, for small favors.

Normally, I would not post the following story (read it to discover why). In this instance, I publish it, weeping, at the awesome power of human love, respect, compassion, understanding, and honesty. Greater love than this, no one doth have.

Man Admitted to Hospital for Kidney Stone,

Discovers He's a Woman

By Ashley Jennings

A Colorado man who was admitted to the hospital for a kidney stone received surprising news when the nurse came back with test results revealing he was actually a woman.

Denver photographer Steve Crecelius said he's felt a little different all his life.

"When I was about 6 years old, I started having these feminine feelings, but that was in the '60s. Wearing my mom's makeup, I thought I looked pretty," Crecelius told ABC News.

So when he went to the emergency room five years ago, he wasn't too shocked when the nurse told him she found traits of both genders in his ultrasound results.

He was intersex, meaning he had both male genitalia and internal female sex organs.

"The nurse is reading the ultrasound and says, 'Huh, this says you're a female,' Crecelius said. "It was very liberating. I had spent so much energy after the age of 13 constantly evaluating how people looked at me and acted towards me."

Steve, who now goes by "Stevie," said his wife and their six children accepted his new identity right away.

"We told them individually. Some were in person and some weren't," Crecelius said. "Every one of them said, 'We don't care one way or the other. We love you for who you are and you're still my dad.'"

Crecelius and his wife, Debbie, have been together for 25 years and she's supported him every step of the way, including taking him to buy his first bra.

She told Crecelius, "You know, when I first saw you, I said to myself, 'He runs like a girl.'"

"I think we were pretty good when she began to mourn the loss of her husband," Crecelius said. "We worked through what we needed to. The concept of unconditional love is a larger story."

Intersex is a term used to describe people who bear both external genitals and internal organs, such as testes and ovaries.

A person with the condition may have male genitals along with fallopian tubes and ovaries.

"The condition used to be called hermaphroditism, meaning that person can't be identified as male or female," Crecelius said.

According to the Intersex Society of North America, more than 1,500 children a year are born intersex.

For Crecelius, he hopes he can be an advocate for those born intersex and same-sex couples.

"I think of bullying, because I haven't heard anyone talk about this. It's important to talk about," Crecelius said. "People need to be accepting and understand. I was born this way, and loving each other and supporting each other will always be the main factor in our household."

This is probably the most important health story going around. And the shrinks just LOVE to cook up new diseases (based on behaviors) so big pharma can cook up some drugs and everybody is happy as long as medicaid and medicare pay full amount for meds.

Psychiatrists Re-Affirm Fealty to Big Pharma

at Annual Meeting

The Mind Druggers - by MARTHA ROSENBERG

The first week in May brought a new leader in France and new prospects for same sex couples seeking marriage. But at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, attended by 11,000 psychiatrists, it was the same old same old. Instead of listening to the public outcry about overmedicated children, soldiers, elderly and everyday people watching too many drug ads, the psychiatry group re-affirmed its resolve to pathologize healthy people on behalf of its big brother, Big Pharma.

This is the year the APA puts the finishing touches on DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a compendium that determines what treatments insurers will cover, what disorders merit funding as “public health” threats and of course, Pharma marketing and profits. Some question the objectivity of a disorder manual written by those who stand to benefit from an enlarged patient pool and new diseases. Furthering the appearance of self-dealing is the revelation that 57 percent of the DSM-5′s authors have Pharma links.

No kidding. Scheduled presenters at this year’s meeting included former APA president Alan F. Schatzberg, MD and Charles Nemeroff, MD, both investigated by Congress for murky Pharma income. Nemeroff’s $9.3 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study depression was suspended, which happens rarely, when the government found out he had simultaneously taken $1.2 million from the antidepressant Paxil manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, Nemeroff. Oops. But now he is again basking in taxpayer money, recently awarded a $2 million five-year grant from the NIMH to study the “prospective determination of psychobiological risk factors of post-traumatic stress disorder.” Would should the government hold a grudge?

Schatzberg and Nemeroff are co-editors of the APA-published Textbook of Psychopharmacology whose 2009 edition cites the work of Richard Borison, MD former psychiatry chief at the Augusta Veterans Affairs medical center who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a $10 million clinical trial fraud.

Also scheduled at the meeting was S. Charles Schulz, MD, who was investigated for financial links to Seroquel maker AstraZeneca which were believed to alter his scientific conclusions.

And, speaking of Seroquel, despite Assistant Secretary of Defense Jonathan Woodson’s recent memo to all military branches about the overprescription of such antipsychotics (which include Risperdal) for PTSD, military figures linked to Seroquel were also scheduled presenters at the APA meeting.

Elspeth Ritchie, MD, who told the Denver Post that Seroquel was “very useful for the treatment of anxiety and combat-related nightmares,” though it was (and is) not approved for such treatment while she was medical director of the army’s Strategic Communications Office in 2008, was a scheduled presenter. Ritchie, who is now chief clinical officer for the District of Columbia’s department of mental health, appeared in an AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly funded webcast for the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy in 2008 in which she lauds the use of “sophisticated” psychiatric medicines “on the battlefield.”[i]

Seroquel, which carries heart warnings and is linked to sudden cardiac death, earned AstraZeneca nearly $6 billion in revenue last year, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. “IMS Health, a healthcare information and services company, said that in the 12 months ending in February of this year, 14.1 million Seroquel prescriptions were written, more than any other antipsychotic,” it reports.

Also participating in the military and PTSD content at the APA meeting was Matthew Friedman, MD, Executive Director of the VA’s National Center for PTSD who reported, “I received an honorarium from AstraZeneca in the past year,” in a 2009 government slide show called “Pharmacological Treatments of PTSD and Comorbid Disorder.” Friedman also served as a Pfizer Visiting Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine last year yet is listed in the APA meeting guide as having no “significant relationships to disclose.” APA officials have not responded to several requests for comment.

The elaborate multi drug “cocktails” prescribed to troops suffering with PTSD are not just dangerous (having never been tested as combinations) they are capable of making troops with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), signature Iraq/Afghanistan injuries, worse through alterations in brain chemistry and the blood brain barrier.

And APA presenters had another recommendation for quetiapine (Seroquel): a treatment for the nation’s millions of alcoholic and drug addicts, who are next on Pharma’s radar.

Martha Rosenberg’s is an investigative health reporter. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, has just been released by Prometheus books.

Notes.

[i] “The Returning Veteran: PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury,” Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy, May 28, 2008



As far as in the U.S., Saul Landau's question (Do Reporters Read) is moot. In the first place, our best reporter is masquerading as a twice-weekly opinion piece writer, not wishing to taint herself with the appellation "reporter" which, again, in the U.S. at least in the major media markets is a euphimism for 'STENOGRAPHER.'

Alan Gross and the Free Press

Do Reporters Read?

by SAUL LANDAU

Less than 3 years ago, Cuban authorities arrested Alan Gross, who had an almost $600,000 contract with DIA.Inc., to carry out a USAID program in Cuba.

At his Havana trial, Gross heard Cuban authorities present his trip reports in which he revealed how he supplied a pre-selected group of mostly Jewish Cubans with sophisticated and illegal technology.

Gross smuggled the parts into Cuba “piece by piece, in backpacks and carry-on bags.” These included “laptops, smartphones, hard drives and networking equipment,” wrote Desmond Butler. “The most sensitive item, according to official trip reports, was… a specialized mobile phone chip that experts say is often used by the Pentagon and the CIA to make satellite signals virtually impossible to track.”

With Gross’ sophisticated SIM card the group could also defuse signal tracking. His secrecy was not intended to keep Cuban officials from learning Jewish matzo ball recipes.

The U.S. Agency for International Development funded the operation as part of its “democracy promotion” plan “to provide economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of U.S. foreign policy goals. Gross, however, identified himself as a member of a Jewish humanitarian group, not a representative of the U.S. government.”

On May 11, 2012, some three months after Butler’s article appeared, State Department Press Briefing officer Victoria Nuland fielded a question.

“Yesterday, Josefina Vidal, a Cuban official …said [on CNN] that they’ve conveyed some kind of offer to the U.S. Government on the release of Alan Gross. Is there any possibility at all of negotiation on that front?

NULAND: “Go back to an interview Secretary Clinton gave to CNN…. There is no equivalence between …convicted spies — [in the 1990s, Cuban agents infiltrated exile terrorist groups in Miami to stop their terrorism in Cuba. The agents fed their information via Havana to the FBI who after years of using their data arrested them. In 2001, a jury convicted and a judge sentenced them to draconian terms] — in the United States, and… an assistance worker who should never have been locked up in the first place.”

Did she not read Butler’s piece?

“So we are not contemplating any release of the Cuban Five, and we are not contemplating any trade. The continuing imprisonment of Alan Gross is deplorable, it is wrong, and it’s an affront to human decency. And the Cuban Government needs to do the right thing.”

QUESTION: “Why is it okay to talk about trading with the Taliban but not with the Cubans for a U.S. person that’s been in jail and is in poor health?”

MS. NULAND: “There’s no equivalency in these situations, and the Cuban Government knows that. This is a matter of a sitting government [the Taliban governed Afghanistan before US troops invaded in 2001] having locked up an assistance worker on no basis whatsoever. …I mean, our view is he did nothing wrong.”

Ignoring facts in Butler’s AP story. the State Department insists Gross “was distributing laptops and standard computer equipment to help the Jewish community access the Internet.”

In fact, however, as La Alborada reported, Gross was establishing an infrastructure for an encrypted satellite-communications system to spread unrest in Cuba and permit US supervisors to build democracy. “Gross as its expert operator, was only a cover-up based on Gross’ being Jewish and an active supporter, in the US, of B’nai B’rith, presentable as a kind of Jewish Santa Claus for Internet-deprived Cubans of his religion.”

Cuba did not arrest Gross for “trying to help fellow Jews share religious and cultural information; he is in jail for being an agent of a foreign country in a program intended to destabilize …the government of Cuba.”

Why do we have a press if government officials don’t read or refer to it? Even reporters ignore it. Wolf Blitzer either faked ignorance or was uninformed when he interviewed Hilary Clinton and Alan Gross.

But Desmond Butler read Gross’ trip reports as did “USAID officials [who] received regular briefings on his progress, according to DAI spokesman Steven O’Connor.”

Butler shows how, in order “to avoid airport scrutiny, Gross enlisted the help of other American Jews to bring in electronic equipment a piece at a time. He instructed his helpers [Jews on religious trips to Cuba] to pack items, some of them banned in Cuba, in carry-on luggage, not checked bags.”

In her May 11 press briefing Nuland “categorically reject[ed] the charges against him, and the fact that he’s been locked up …with no cause” She also forgot to read, Judy Gross’ — his wife — statement to a TV reporter. “We know now that he [Alan] did break Cuban law. He did not know that until he got to Cuba and was arrested.

Dear Judy,

Please send a copy of your interview to Secretary of State Clinton, President Obama and their press officers. Then, in front of the White House and State Department, hold up the key “Alan-did-break-Cuban-law” sentence on the off chance someone might notice.

Lots of luck. Saul.

Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP screens at NCORE in NYC June 1 at the Marquis Marriott, 1535 Broadway. Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow.

There is plenty of wealth to go around in the world, but it’s tied up in too few hands for democratic capitalism to operate efficiently for society at large. Thus, in order to maintain civil order, totalitarianism increasingly becomes a byproduct of this conundrum.

Capitalism at War

The Poverty of Nations

by ROBERT HUNZIKER

There is plenty of wealth to go around in the world, but it’s tied up in too few hands for democratic capitalism to operate efficiently for society at large. Thus, in order to maintain civil order, totalitarianism increasingly becomes a byproduct of this conundrum.

According to Forbes 2011 survey of billionaires, they hit all-time new records for total wealth and numbers (the total count of billionaires is 1,210), thanks to reverse Robin Hood taxation policies that impoverish government coffers, i.e., Federal Tax Receipts, whilst transferring those dollars, via a doctored tax code, into the pockets of tens of thousands of millionaires and billionaires. The total count of what Forbes refers to as High Net Worth Individuals is 871,000 people worldwide worth over $30 million each, implying total wealth of $26-to>$50 trillion; $26 trillion is nearly twice the size of the U.S. economy.

Wealth creation has increasingly become the key measurement of capitalism’s efficacy ever since Adam Smith’s magnum opus An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) aka: The Wealth of Nations, wherein he expounds upon how rational self-interest and competition lead to economic prosperity for society at large, American industry and government have been guided by these free-market principles. For over 200 years, with bumps & lumps along the way, prosperity reigned, and Adam Smith would be smiling. But, for reasons he describes within his own treatise, Adam Smith would be frowning today because of the sorry state of capitalistic nation-states.

Again and again, Smith warned the general public that a true laissez-faire economy could become a conspiracy of business and industry scheming to influence politics and legislation against the best interests of the consuming public.

Smith, the father of economics and the prophet of capitalism is idolized by capitalists the world over; however, he would not recognize today’s democratic capitalism because his greatest concerns about conspiracies scheming to influence politics, undermining his theory, have come to fruition. As a result, capitalism is a failed institution for society at large. Rather, it has morphed into a quasi-totalitarian plutocratic nation-state that resides within a hollow shell of democracy.

Smith’s economic principles depend upon freedom of markets translating into prosperity for “society at large”. His is a broad view of economic consequences. However, economic results, especially over the past three decades, have increasingly narrowed, funneling riches into fewer hands and penalizing society at large, i.e., the broad middle/working classes, accomplished by the political Right’s adoption of neoliberal principles, and these principles have largely been adopted by both political parties. Therefore, both Democrats and Republicans are at fault for the disastrous state of capitalistic democracy and the subsequent evolution into a quasi-totalitarian state ruled by an elite plutocracy.

How did this happen?

Ever since President Reagan and PM Thatcher, in the 1980s, blessed the policies of: (1) deregulation, particularly financial deregulation, (2) privatization, (3) minimalist government, and (4) diminishment of unions, the world of capitalism has spun out of control and into the hands of neoliberal theory & practice, embracing, and enlarging upon Reagan’s and Thatcher’s policies to the point of “sky-is-the-limit” engineering of legislation and policy in favor of only the rich, protected by an increasingly authoritarian state.

Coincidentally, in the mid 1980s, America’s finance, insurance, real estate (FIRE) sector of the economy overtook manufacturing as the major contributing sector to U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Today, FIRE is twice as large as manufacturing. The upshot is financial interests, as the predominate sector of the economy and working hand-in-glove with neoliberal themes, mold U.S. legislation in their favor.

Additionally, in the eighties, the most significant tax legislation in generations occurred with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, removing numerous tax loopholes and lowering taxes across the board, a reform that was broadly embraced by America. Since then, over 15,000 changes have legislated a Reverse Robin Hood tax code crowned by George W’s tax cuts, designed like a subprime mortgage, i.e., designed to make people see certain good things and not recognize the fine print where the devil is in the details, worth vast amounts to the wealthy but worth very little to everybody else… these changes in estate taxes, top tax rates, capital gains, and dividends, further enrich the wealthy beyond imagination!

As explained by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson in Winner-Take-All-Politics, Simon & Schuster, 2010, “Step by step and debate by debate, our public officials have rewritten the rules of the economy in ways that favor the few at the expense of the many.” By gradually making changes over the past 30 years, and supercharged by ‘W’, the rich have been put on wealth-creation testosterones like never before, laying the groundwork for just six members of the Walton family, whose patriarch founded Wal-Mart, to have as much wealth as the bottom 30 percent of the entire U.S. population.

Today, the United States is controlled by a small cadre of super wealthy families, spearheaded by innocuous-sounding tax-free organizations like Americans for Tax Reform, founded in 1985, headed by America’s most powerful conservative voice, Grover Norquist. The entire Republican Party pays homage to Norquist, and he, in turn, takes his marching orders from the wealthy families who operate behind the curtain, the Wizards of Oz of America’s quasi-totalitarian state.

According to Chris Hedges, Truthdig, March 26, 2012, “Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law… The defense of freedom and truth becomes a crime… Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of national security.”

Last year President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which act negates the writ of habeas corpus, the most powerful cornerstone of civil rights since the Magna Carta. Every English-speaking jurist since the 12th century must have turned over in the grave. Subsequently, May 2012, U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest overruled the domestic military detention provisions of the act, an act that was roundly supported by Democrats and Republicans. This is a clear, and extremely troubling, clarion call for how far off course democracy has strayed.

Praise the likes of Chris Hedges as an offset to our spineless press corps and weak-kneed politicians, who, on a daily basis, supplicate for morsels of Newspeak at the White House Briefing Room. Unfortunately, America’s only defense against a surge towards complete totalitarian control by the plutocrats, the Democratic Party, has proven helplessly weak, and seemingly, frightened by its own shadow, e.g., the democrats completely blew it even when they had control of the presidency and the Congress.

The very fact that Hitlerian enactments like the National Defense Authorization Act are legislated absent out-and-out sweeping objections by the national news, and pass with strong bipartisan support, is clear evidence the country is numb to the threat of totalitarian impulses. A couple hundred years ago, this inane act would have been cause célèbre for revolution.

Throughout history, access to a proper understanding of the state of affaires, when tainted, has always worked in favor of mass revolutions against the prevailing order. The French Revolution, for example, is indebted to Claude Fauchet’s weekly addresses to crowds of 5,000-8,000 people at the Palais Royal, lecturing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 work, The Social Contract with follow up discussions about a more equitable distribution of wealth. The American Revolution is likewise indebted to pamphleteers like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry, today’s heroes but yesteryears’ street activists.

However, it is improbable that Adams, Henry, and Paine could operate in the same fashion today as they did 200 years ago. The USA Patriot Act would likely stop them dead in their tracks. This Act is riddled with nebulous provisions that leave the doors wide open for the government to take whatever action it deems necessary, depending upon the subjectivity of the enforcer(s).

More than likely, the three Founding Fathers would be classified as terrorists and thrown in jail. Adams’ “Committees of Correspondence,” which served as a shadow government opposed to the British, disseminated seditious information. Henry was one of the most outspoken exponents of revolution in defense of historic rights. Paine’s Common Sense pamphlets preached revolution and independence. These men, revered as America’s Founding Fathers, prove the adage: “timing is everything.”

Those Founding Fathers, without a doubt, today would register as rapidly blinking lights within the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Utah Data Center, scheduled to open in 2013, which is a heavily fortified $2 billion project of immense secrecy. Its purpose will be to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications. This is finally the completion of the infamous “total information awareness” program created by George W’s henchmen but blocked by Congress in 2003.

The NSA data center will store and analyze private emails, phone calls, Google searches, parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, etc. Plus, it’s The Big Enchilada of spying; the NSA data center is a code-breaker, able to de-encrypt financial information, stock transactions, business deals, diplomatic secrets, legal documents, and any transmission that is encrypted. This is Big Brother come to life. The old insider NSA saying, “Never Say Anything,” is now more apropos than ever before. Most likely, this will put many of world’s terrorists in unemployment lines, but what about average citizens? How do they protect themselves in a hollowed democracy?

Christopher Hedges (Democracy Now interview May 17, 2012 by Amy Goodman) believes taking to the streets and revolutions are inevitable, but as he says, the Stamp Act took place in 1765, ten years before the American Revolutionary War (1775-83.) In other words, revolutions take a long time to develop; however, that was then. Today, revolutions can happen overnight, witness the Arab Spring… spontaneous combustion is in vogue!

Revolution, or not, there is good news as a result of the 2008-09 worldwide financial meltdown. This scrape with Armageddon has focused the attention of the world on the cozy relationship of Wealth, Wall Street, the Fed, Congress, and the Presidency. Collaterally, it has focused attention on inequities and the rise of plutocracy, including neoliberal policies, e.g. austerity, as practiced by the EU and IMF and World Bank, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people in capitals around the world openly demonstrating and sloganeering against Austerity, Big Banks, Wall Street, and the Wealthy.

Capitalism is at war, being fought in the streets. The massive demonstrations around the world the past couple of years are not for naught. When tens/hundreds of thousands of citizens take to the streets, as in Madrid, Paris, Athens, Manhattan, Hadramout, Moscow, Montreal, Santiago, and London… over time, things happen! People do not stand in the cold, in the rain, in the harsh elements for the fun of it… out of the blue, untoward things happen very unexpectedly!

Thus, capitalism’s bankrupt failure to provide for its citizens at large is on display for the world to see, and this failure is, in large measure, caused by the misallocation of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, leaving ‘The Poverty of Nations’ in its wake.

Whether the nuts and bolts of effective totalitarian control by plutocrats can effectively deal with a degenerating world that is increasingly split into two distinct camps, the rich and the working poor, remains to be seen. Capitalism is not functioning as an institution of socio-economic order for society at large. No, it is failing on all fronts other than with the highest order, the First Estate.

What a strange paradox: Billionaires/millionaires set new all-time records while their capitalist nation-states suffer record debts amidst austerity measures for the middle and working classes.

Is this the Wealth of Nations?

Robert Hunziker earned an MA in economic history at DePaul University. He lives in Los Angeles.

The Negation of the Palestinian State

A Bird's-Eye View

The Negation of the Palestinian State

by URI AVNERY

 

On May 15, the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, its Arab citizens observed a day of mourning for the victims of the Naqba (“catastrophe”) – the mass exodus of half the Palestinian people from the territory which became Israel.

Like every year, this aroused much fury. Tel Aviv University allowed Arab students to hold a meeting, which was attacked by ultra-right Jewish students. Haifa University forbade the meeting altogether. Some years ago the Knesset debated a “Naqba Law” that would have sent commemorators to prison for three years. This was later moderated to the withdrawal of government funds from institutions that mention the Naqba.

The Only Democracy in the Middle East may well be the only democracy in the world that forbids its citizens to remember a historical event. Forgetting is a national duty.

Trouble is, it’s hard to forget the history of the “Palestinian issue”, because it dominates our life. 65 years after the foundation of Israel, half the news in our media concern this one issue, directly or indirectly.

Just now, the South African government has decreed that all products of the West Bank settlements sold there must be clearly marked. This measure, already in force in Europe, was roundly condemned by our Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as “racist” (looks who’s talking!). However, it joins a boycott initiated 15 years ago by my Israeli friends and me.

The new government coalition has declared that it will renew negotiations with the Palestinians (everybody knows that this is a hollow promise). A wave of murders and rapes is being attributed to Arabs (and African asylum seekers). All presidential candidates in Egypt promise to take up the fight for the Palestinians. Senior Israeli army officers have disclosed that 3500 Syrian and Iranian missiles, as well as tens of thousands in Hizbollah’s South Lebanon, are ready to be launched against us because of Palestine. And so on, a daily list.

115 years after the foundation of the Zionist movement, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates our news.

THE FOUNDING FATHERS of Zionism adopted the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” (coined much earlier by a British Christian Zionist). They believed the Promised Land to be empty. They knew, of course, that there were some people in the country, but the Zionists were Europeans, and for Europeans at the end of the 19th century, the heyday of imperialism and colonialism, colored people – brown, black, yellow, red or whatever – did not count as people.

When Theodor Herzl put forward the idea of a Jewish State, he was not thinking about Palestine but about an area in Argentina. He intended to empty this area of all its native population – but only after they had killed all the snakes and dangerous beasts.

In his book “Der Judenstaat” there is no mention of Arabs – and not by accident. When Herzl wrote it, he was not yet thinking about this country. The country appears in the book only in a tiny chapter added at the last moment, titled “Palestine or Argentina?”

Therefore Herzl did not speak about evicting the Palestinian population. This would have been impossible anyway, since Herzl was asking the Ottoman sultan for a charter for Palestine. The Sultan was a Caliph, the spiritual head of all the world’s Muslims. Herzl was too cautious to bring this subject up.

This explains the otherwise curious fact: the Zionist movement has never given a clear answer to its most basic question: how to create a Jewish state in a country inhabited by another people. This question has remained unresolved to this very day.

But only seemingly. Hidden somewhere underneath it all, on the fringes of the collective consciousness, Zionism always had an answer. It is so self-evident, that there was no need to think about it. Only few had the courage to express it openly. It is imprinted on the “genetic code” of the Zionist movement, so to speak, and its daughter, the State of Israel.

This code says: a Jewish State in all the Land of Israel. And therefore: total opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state – at any time, anywhere in the country, at all costs.

WHEN A strategist plans a war, he first of all defines its aim. That is the Main Effort. Every other effort must be considered accordingly. If it supports the main effort, it is acceptable. If it hurts the main effort, it must be rejected.

The Main Effort of the Zionist/Israeli movement is to achieve a Jewish State in all of Eretz Israel – the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. In other words: the prevention of an Arab Palestinian state.

When one grasps this, all the events of the last 115 years make sense. All the twists and turns, all the seeming contradictions and deviations, all the curious-looking decisions make perfect sense.

In a bird’s eye view, the Zionist-Israeli policy looks like a river striving towards the sea. When it meets an obstacle, it goes around it. The path deviates to the right and to the left, sometimes even going backwards. But it perseveres with a wondrous determination towards its goal.

The guiding principle was to accept every compromise that gives us what we can get at any stage, but never let the final aim out of our sight.

This policy allows us to compromise about everything, except one: an Arab Palestinian state that would confirm the existence of an Arab Palestinian people.

All Israeli governments have fought this idea with all available means. In this respect there was no difference between David Ben-Gurion, who had a secret agreement with King Abdullah of Jordan to obstruct the setting up of the Palestinian state decreed by the UN General Assembly’s 1947 resolution, and Menachem Begin, who made a separate peace with Anwar Sadat in order to get Egypt out of the Israeli-Palestinian war. Not to mention Golda Meir’s famous dictum: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. Thousands of other decisions by successive Israeli governments have followed the same logic.

The only exception may be the Oslo agreement – which also did not mention a Palestinian state. After signing it, Yitzhak Rabin did not rush forwards to create such a state. Instead, he stopped in his tracks as if stunned by his own audacity. He hesitated, dithered, until the inevitable Zionist counter-attack gathered momentum and put an end to his effort – and his life.

THE PRESENT struggle over the settlements is an integral part of this process. The main aim of the settlers is to make a Palestinian state impossible. All Israeli governments have supported them, openly or covertly. They are, of course, illegal under international law, but many of them are also illegal under Israeli law. These are variously called “illegal”, “unlawful”, “unpermitted” and so forth. Israel’s august Supreme Court has ordered the removal of several of them and seen its rulings ignored by the government.

The settlers assert that not a single settlement has been set up without secret government consent. And indeed, all the “unlawful” settlements have been connected at once to the water and electricity grids, special new roads have been built for them and the army has rushed to defend them – indeed the Israel Defense Forces have long ago become the Settlements Defense Forces. Lawyers and shysters galore have been employed to expropriate huge tracts of Palestinian land. One famous woman lawyer discovered a forgotten Ottoman law which says that if you shout from the edge of a village, all the land where the shout cannot be heard belongs to the Sultan. Since the Israeli government is the heir of the Jordanian government, which was the heir of the Sultan, this land belongs to the Israeli government, which turns it over to the settlers. (This is not a joke!)

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems in abeyance and “nothing happens”, it is really going on with full force in the only battlefield that matters: the settlement enterprise. Everything else is marginal, like the awesome prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran. As I have been saying all along: that will never happen. It is a part of the effort to divert attention from the Two-State Solution, the only peaceful solution there is.

WHERE IS the negation of the Palestinian state leading to?

Logically, it can only lead to an apartheid state in the entire country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. In the long run, that would be untenable, leading to an Arab-majority “bi-national” state, which would be totally unacceptable to almost all Israeli Jews. So what is left?

The only conceivable solution would be transfer of all the Arabs to the other side of the Jordan. In some ultra-right circles, this is openly talked about. The Jordanian monarch is deadly afraid of it.

Population transfer already happened in 1948. It is still a point of debate whether this was done deliberately. In the first part of the war, it was clearly a military necessity (and practiced by both sides). Later on, it became more deliberate. But the main point is that the refugees were not allowed back when the hostilities were over. On the contrary, some villages were emptied and destroyed even later. Everybody acted under the invisible directive of the Main Effort, a direction so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness, that it did not need any specific order.

But 1948 is long gone. The world has changed. What was tolerated from post-Holocaust brave little Israel would not be tolerated tomorrow from mighty, arrogant Israel. Today It is a pipe-dream – like similar dreams on the other side that Israel would somehow disappear from the map.

This means that ethnic cleansing, the only alternative to the Two-State solution, is impossible. The Main Effort has run into a dead end.

IT HAS often been said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. This will dominate our lives and the lives of generations to come.

Unless we do something that looks almost impossible: to change the Main Effort, the historic direction of our state. Substitute for it a new national aim: peace and coexistence, reconciliation between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine.

URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.