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chiseler · 5 years

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Israel and the Far-Right American Left

Presidential elections are, for the most part, psychic events. Chimeras. Deceptions. Or, as Noam Chomsky calls them, “personalized quadrennial extravaganzas.” But Chomskyites are often puzzled to hear their anarchist role model, one election cycle after another, touting the mainstream Democrat.

So why does Chomsky, with a saddened, syllable-dragging and demoralized voice, encourage voters to participate in their own exclusion – i.e., the electoral process? His under-read Goals and Visions holds some answers. The essay, dating back to Dr. Chomsky’s heyday, makes a beautiful (and deeply counter-intuitive) case for anarchists supporting strong centralized government in the near term.

Voting is a provisional bulwark against absolute corporate tyranny, which must, so the argument goes, be defeated first – I’m not persuaded that Chomsky’s theory illuminates his latest White House hopeful, Bernie Sanders. If, as Chomsky argues, our American Democracy is some terrifying variety show, beamed into politically atomized brains, then certainly he's able to see the emperor has no clothes here. That is, Bernie (pardon the image): a butt naked cipher. I recently asked the MIT linguist a simple question.

"What has Bernie Sanders ever done to help Palestine?"

For years, international activists have been putting Palestinian dignity at the center of their program. And Chomsky's laconic response — "Not much" — won't surprise them. No stranger to equivocation where BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is concerned, I hoped to tease out whatever nuances might have created this strange contradiction on the American Left, in essence to answer my own query: "How can otherwise principled boycott supporters drop the ball and say 'oops' as historical Palestine experiences a genocide?"

If that word frightens you, you're in good company: Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, and even Norman Finkelstein refuse it — despite a growing chorus that includes Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who coined “incremental genocide” to define The Holy Land's occupation/annexation/extermination agenda. I'm sitting here in Brooklyn firing off emails in a chair designed by Ray and Charles Eames (so, please, don't call me an "armchair activist") — criticizing figures in my own personal pantheon.

Forgive me for what I do.

Stoop shouldered, he gazes out over his audience like a tortoise, half as old as time, in vain and reflexive search of the shell he left behind somewhere. Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if this self-styled socialist were running for President? Sure, but Senator Bernie Sanders’ deportment and general appearance constitute a sadly instructive, big old honkin’ “tell” – only chumps and chuckleheads could possibly miss it. Outward displays of Hard Leftism fall away whenever Bernie aids and abets the Democratic Party in strange, stentorian Brooklynese.

Remember that solemn promise he made at the outset of his 2016 campaign not to run as an independent? And another obvious tip-off: pledging support for the Party’s foreknown nominee — i.e., the Monsanto shillaber with whom Sanders was so nauseatingly flirtatious. I keep these facts firmly in mind as I await honest responses to my pestering missives. Critical of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, Noam Chomsky also fails to advance any feasible alternatives.

Nor, by his own admission, has Bernie lifted a finger: "He’s moved towards support for Palestinian rights, more so than any other candidate, but he’s focusing on domestic policy." To wit, Bernie "knows very well that any word on the topic will let loose the familiar and cynical litany of ‘anti-Semitism’." But isn't it even more "cynical" to suggest, as Chomsky does, that ordinary citizens be held to a higher standard than his pick for US President? Some of us risk opprobrium, and worse, every day because party politics are obtuse to suffering in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders exploits disaffected voters by herding them back into the Democratic Party fold, under a primary assumption about their malleability, laziness and glib call for “revolution.” Though he claims to be a serious socialist, he actively supports a murderous wingnut Zionism. Take his resounding stamp of approval on “Operation Protective Edge,” which killed over 550 Palestinian children in 2014, serving Israel’s long-term agenda of land grabs, water theft, indefinite detention... a nigh endless atrocities list which includes the systematic torture of little kids (see UNICEF's Children in Israeli Military Detention, available as a PDF online).

I next decided to bother Chomsky’s old friend and political ally Dr. Norman Finkelstein, son of two Holocaust survivors and decades-long champion of the Palestinian cause. In recent years, Finkelstein has become something of a pariah on the Left thanks to his anti-BDS stance: "I think Bernie should be let alone in the primary to focus on his domestic agenda." This was getting monotonous.

Finkelstein unintentionally loops back to his mentor's essay, Goals and Visions, torpedoing its thesis as our half-assed interview progresses — acknowledging, for instance, that if Bernie couldn’t tax Jeff Bezos, and instead funded New Deal economics with attempted military cuts: “It could literally trigger a coup plot.” Responding to that same question, Chomsky answers with a devastating blow to his own theory: "Even if he were elected — a long shot — he would not be able to do much without a supportive Congress — an even longer shot.”

In plain language, Sanders and the rest of Congress are tied to the defense industry. So what about Uncle Noam’s (imagined) boundary line — the one supposedly separating captains of industry from democratically elected representatives? It’s a sham, though possibly a well-meaning one, like some avuncular bedtime story offered in lieu of reality-based hope.

Genocide kind of rubs me the wrong way.

I’m not sure there’s anything particularly “revolutionary” about pulling a bloodstained lever for state-sponsored carnage in slow motion. But, hell, that’s just my opinion. So let’s listen to Bernie himself — the old Bernie, who spoke a modicum of truth about our so-called electoral options. "Essentially, it's my view that the leadership of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are tied to big-money interests and that neither of these parties will ever represent the people in this country that are demanding the real changes that have to take place."

It’s axiomatic that we don’t launch revolutions in the ballot box. And yet, here we have Sanders fans, crowding around a Smurf with dyspepsia as if he were Big Bill Haywood. To his followers, I’d say: If you’re counting on some latter-day Dem to save you from capitalism’s war-mongering and general rapaciousness, then listen to Bernie’s earlier, slightly less dishonest incarnation. “You don’t change the system from within the Democratic Party.” Now there’s a sentiment I can agree with.

Bernie’s sheep-dogging dovetails with his oft-stated support for pugnacious Israel, since both positions coincidentally strengthen Monsanto. The agribusiness colossus, known mainly for genetically modified crops, produced Agent Orange during America’s illegal assault on Vietnam, and now makes white phosphorous doted on by the Holy Land and that (surprise!) melts human flesh. Israel routinely and, yes, illegally drops the stuff on civilians in Gaza, since... well, a bunch of Arabs live there... Go ahead and Google the images – if you can stomach them – of civilian “collateral damage” roasted by Bernie and his newfound Democrat pals.

Who needs an American Left that parses us into a hopeless corner of complicity with the ghouls over at Monsanto; or into an equally occult alliance with Bernie Sanders’ favorite arms manufacturers at Lockheed Martin: death-peddlers spanning generations which, to the surprise of no one, have their own rollicking relationship to The Holy Land’s psychopathic ethno-nationalism. The same corporations profiting on Israel’s crimes are destroying the biosphere. So what's an impressionable, idealistic soul to do? It's either make common cause with an artlessly compromised left, or enter a nihilistic hellscape populated by the likes of Ben Shapiro, or Dr. Jordan Peterson. Some choice.

Israeli talking points, a species of American PR industry-calibrated blather and Labor Day Telethon sanctimony, relentlessly fuse democracy and religious statehood – two distinct conditions which will never mesh -- into grotesque synonyms. But as of this writing, 97% of the water in Gaza is contaminated; electricity has been cut to 4 hours per day; Israeli courts convict 99.74% of Palestinian defendants (not that many people are guilty); 85% of Israel’s “security fence” (The Apartheid Wall) is on land rightfully and legally belonging to the people of Palestine.

Standing opposed to it all -- and indeed ridiculed by America's preeminent professional anti-Zionist, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose sole income these days derives from working the college lecture circuit where he finds himself harangued night after night by 20 year old corn-fed Methodist William Henry Harrison High School Irgun-wannabes, for daring to suggest that the state of Israel might possibly have its own problem with mass-murder -- the amateurs in BDS, wielding the kind of principled Internationalist vision which helped bring down Apartheid in South Africa, chase one last hope.

It is a movement which has become beautifully amorphous, internalized by artists who refuse to perform in Tel Aviv, or inspiring students to tell the truth. Again. Finally. Without fear. Meanwhile, courageous young people within Israel are choosing prison and the death of their social lives over a collusion so easily embraced, and even sought, throughout the rest of the industrialized world. In a Land of Soldiers and unceasing bloodshed, this requires the kind of backbone and resolve that once inspired folk tales.

Ahed Tamimi, to whom this editorial is dedicated

by Daniel Riccuito

Special thanks to R.J. Lambert

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