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Alarum Bells

I seem to remember some years back, ACT leader, David Seymour Dancing with the Stars, which was not a pretty sight. Now he seems to be venturing into the stand up comic business, in which he has greater ability. The routine is that of a pompous little prat who can’t organise a school lunch programme trying to change our constitution and transform the regulatory routine against all advice. From a perfectly sensible framework of local food for local kids made by local providers he is now having to bring in packed lunches from Aussie. Perhaps he’d like to import a tiriti relationship as well?  Mmmm.The sight of our David as Deputy Primie Minister is sure to have the audience in stitches.

More generally ACT ministers are proving a disaster, from a Minister for Children with a personal grudge dismembering social service provision, to a Minister of Workplace relations who won’t meet with the unions, to a culturally illiterate Minister of the Arts – this from a party which preached good management. 

Like all neo-liberals (I think we have to call them neo neo-liberals by now) they are brain dead zombies chanting slogans, Unfortunately they seem to have led National into the same abyss of idiocy.

And then catching by accident, Winston Peters’ address to the nation, I was reminded of the words of the 20th century philosopher and analyst of fascism, Hannah Arendt: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.

The Palestinian Solidarity movement, very concerned and ashamed by Foreign Minister, Peters’refusal to make a stand against the genocide in Gaza, were protesting outside the venue where theNZ First faithful had come to listen to their leader’s State of the Nation address. Winston has of course recently been to Washington and met with some of the Trump cabal and being the opportunist that he has always been, has immediately picked up on their jargon. The people outside were ‘ignorant, left wing fascists’, ‘long haired bludgers who have never done a day’s work’, ‘Communists’, ‘anti democratic’, ‘woke’, ‘Marxist whingers, encouraged by the media’.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. He’s had meetings with the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Indonesia and the President of Turkey and he knows the reality of geopolitics (the Palestinian Authority are collaborators with Israel, Egypt is held over a barrel economically by the US, the President of Turkey is a dictator and Indonesia is a fragile democracy, committing significant human rights abuses in West Papua and cracking down on religious minorities, women, and sexually diverse people). Not a great bunch to take your cue from.

As Winston had trouble with his articulation – he is getting on – there were echoes of Trump. When some protests erupted from the hall, he led cries of ‘shame’, and ‘get them out’. In terms of foreign policy, he has decided there are big changes happening and we should keep our own counsel, not speak out, prepare for what is happening strategically and seize the opportunities to sell our country. Ethically then, he is a barrow boy.

Later in the speech, other than the traditional NZ First’s appeal to the provinces and the need forresource extraction, development and local democracy versus Wellington bureaucrats, he was big on getting rid of diversity, equity and inclusion policies, anti-trans, anti sex education, and in an appeal to the anti-vax people, anti fluoridation, Environmentally, we make no difference anyway, so why be idealistic and wear a hair shirt.

The Labour Party and the unions are both full of university-educated woke people who have never been workers so don’t know what it’s like and have betrayed their roots. Richard Seddon was the man and we need to return to our settler realities and be one people (he forgot to say that a greatdeal of Maori land was alienated under Seddon). He didn’t say the phrase, but it will come, Make New Zealand Great Again, which would be a more emphatic way of saying, NZ First.

The problem is that Winston Peters fits Hannah Arendt’s definition of the ideal subject of totalitarianrule, perfectly. As do his followers. There is no differentiation between fact and fiction, or truth and falsehood.

So, in this coalition, we have one partner who brings the chaos of neo liberal economics and the desire to capture the state for the purposes of the rich, the other who is appealing to populism in its current form, a form which , led by Trump, is very ugly indeed. Both tendencies are essentially undemocratic and potentially totalitarian. Winston is too lazy to be evil, David is too stupid to be a big-time influencer, but together, and with a confused centre-right partner they could nudge NZ down a path of half-arsed fascism.

The election can’t come soon enough.

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The bureaucracy of genocide

Primo Levi’s astonishing account of a year in Auschwitz, If this is a man, reveals a mad bureaucracy at work as the Nazis administered this concentration/death camp: the giving out and tattooing of numbers, the incessant roll calls, the requirement for neat bed making and uniform wearing, the constant selections of those fit enough to work and those for the gas chamber, the detailed hierarchy with standard of food, clothing and accommodation attached to each role. Children were expendable, being useless mouths to feed; ditto pregnant women.  Those seeing out each day as slave labour had to learn complex and dehumanising  skills of survival without any hope in a future. And at the end, as the Russians advanced, the total disintegration into a macabre, corpse-ridden world.

There is a similarly mad bureaucracy of genocide beginning to operate in Gaza, with the IDF bureaucrats, having obliterated Northern Gaza and world opinion tut tutting, spending the ceasefire period designing a more intricate map of destruction for Southern Gaza, presumably having realised that not all the world is unconditionally supporting their final solution to the colonial state’s ‘Arab problem’. Accordingly, they will warn a district’s inhabitants before reducing the district to rubble. They will then move to the next district. It’s not painting by numbers, rather destruction by numbers.

 A ridiculous logic is operating. Hamas is hanging out in tunnels, so don’t go into the tunnels to sort it out, bomb that which is above the tunnels. I get the impression of a defence force of cowards, hiding in planes (Hamas have no air force or air defence system), or tanks or drone command centres. Person to person combat is too dangerous.

It seems they’re using AI to generate the list of targets. Presumably data is inputted: name of presumed militant, sympathetic facebook posts, overheard conversations, seen at a demo or two,  address, movement patterns, family connections; the algorithm spits out a target and boom, there goes an apartment block, the bigger the better, for those suffering the collateral damage will be losing sympathy with Hamas.

Further craziness is revealed. The IDF knew of the October 7th Hamas plan a year ago, but dismissed it as aspirational. They were further warned by their ‘spotters’ (those who keep an eye on the strip) during the week leading up to it but told them to be quiet. Did they actually want it to happen so they could then have an excuse to begin the final solution: to expel all the remaining Arabs into tents in the Egyptian desert and that’s been the plan for a while? Nothing is impossible.

The whole world’s watching. This is all over the news. So what? Those who count have given unconditional support. The Israeli intelligence system is intertwined with the CIA and MI5 and the Europeans, as is the Israeli military with the other militaries. And the politicians. The media connections are sound. And always the Israelis have the excuse of being privileged religious/ethnic victims who are eternally deserving of compensation. As for ‘the Arabs’ in the West Bank, they put them in prison for as long as they want, without trial, they torture them, destroy their houses and kill them regularly, the settlers assisting.

There is rumour that before any such operation as the Gaza invasion, a death figure is proposed. Forty thousand seems to be the current figure, mainly women and children. That’ll help  the demographic problem.

It is all obscene and insane, and the worst thing is that Auschwitz was kept secret. This is being universally witnessed and no-one in authority is saying no apart from demonstrators and wimps at the UN and NGOs who don’t really count. This situation is as psychotic as any final solution. And there begin to be the photos now that remind one of the death camps – the texture of hopelessness is the same.

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As Gaza burns

As Gaza burns – once again – an important essay turns up in the New York Book Review. It happens with this conflict: a piece of writing that penetrates the hopeless evil. Last time it was Rachel Corrie’s emails; this time its Nathan Thrall’s One man’s quest to find his son.

Nathan Thrall is a journalist who has been based with a human rights organisation in Jerusalem and who has gradually realised the hopelessness of monitoring abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead he has written this long essay, based around the death of a kindergarten-aged boy on a school bus which suffered a head on collision with a settler-driven vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road. When the news of the accident reaches his father, Abed, a tortuous journey begins involving detours, checkpoints, confusion as to possible hospitals the boy may have been taken to, ID problems of access, until he eventually discovers the charred corpse of his son.

The author uses the incident to unpack the dense bureaucracy of the apartheid regime that Israel has imposed on Palestinians. We can forget that (as in South Africa) the running of an apartheid state requires bureaucracy at every level of society: ID cards, residence permits, travel permits, work permits, building permits, school systems, health systems, policing, tax, roads, walls and borders, checkpoints, judicial and prison systems… it becomes immensely complex, absurd  and oppressive.

But as well as revealing this, the essay articulates the history of the desire behind the system: the desire to rid the land now called Israel of Palestinian Arabs, a desire, in fact, for ethnic cleansing. In 1948, four out of five Palestinian inhabitants were made refugees. In 1967 one in four of those remaining were expelled. Nevertheless, the higher Palestinian birth rate means half the population are Arab. The Israeli dilemma becomes then, ‘ On one hand the inability to erase the Palestinians; on the other, the unwillingness to give them political and civil rights.’ The compromise solution to this dilemma has been  the building of Jewish settlements, walls and roads, in order to fragment the Palestinian population, so that it lives in scattered pieces and cannot organise as a collective. And then to impose various decrees, laws and restrictions onto these Bantustans. And the contrast of wealth and infrastructure between the settlements and the Palestinian fragments is huge. Anger and despair builds. In a final irony, the task of administrating daily life in these areas of extreme oppression is given to a local Palestinian ‘authority’.

But the traditional task remains: Jews must take over the land and while that task is being achieved, international efforts to resolve the conflict must be ‘parried and delayed’. As Thrall relates, there is now a historical narrative to the attempts to realise this desire, expressed by the 19th century Zionists as follows: To take possession in due course of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence of which they have been deprived for two thousand years.  This entailed firstly an infiltration of settlers and then the lobbying for a state. But how to justify a small number of Jews, mainly from the Russian Empire, taking over Palestine against the will of the majority?  Jews may have deserved a safe haven , but that does not give a right to dispossess, and even so, the original Zionist agenda was not a response to persecution but rather a resisting of the assimilation of Jewish identity.

Partition was accepted as a step toward obtaining the whole of Palestine and after the establishing of Israel the project of colonisation really began. Land and houses were confiscated, curfews imposed, political parties banned and Palestinians constantly humiliated. Because it had become an absurd contradiction, there was a change from a secular, semi- socialist vision of ‘Jewish redemption within the salvation of humanity’, to a religious nationalism based on the bible.  And this vision had to be fundamentalist for it would be undermined by any acceptance of a Palestinian right to self determination, which would also mean the acceptance of the refugees’ right to return and that a minority has not the right to impose on a majority.

The basically fantastic claim that the bible constitutes a land deed and that a group has the right to reclaim a territory after a two thousand year absence has to be maintained at all costs. All the secular ethical arguments have to be rejected. Accordingly, the state of Israel has never recognised the existence of an Israeli nationality. Israel is, instead, the state of the Jewish people, viewed as a single nation and spread throughout the world. The children of a non Jewish mother and a Jewish father are not Jewish, are not citizens, and whoever disconnects Jewish nationality from its religious foundations is a traitor. Israel cannot therefore entertain a liberal, secular, democratic agenda. It is necessarily an apartheid state, financed by the US government

And Abed mourns for his son.

The essay can be read at: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/03/19/a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/

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Flabbergasted

It’s not often I’m flabbergasted, but the fining of two New Zealand women, one Jewish, the other Palestinian, by an Israeli court for causing distress to three Israeli teenagers because they were instrumental in Lorde’s cancelling of her Tel Aviv concert is truly extraordinary. Instrumental because they wrote an open letter to Lorde suggesting she not play Tel Aviv because it would give moral support to Israel’s continuing oppression of the Palestinians.

It’s truly extraordinary because there exist in Gaza a million teenagers living in extreme distress, unable to move freely, reliant on food aid, homes bombed to rubble, unable to access education, subjected to extreme surveillance, sniped at, aware that drones flying overhead might, at the slightest provocation, release a missile, lacking water and electricity, without employment or hope, condemned to living in the largest prison on the planet, bereft of access to justice from a state forged from the theft of their land and possessing the third largest military in the world, a military heavily subsidised by the US, who has recently cut its aid programme to Gaza.

gaza 2

Israel prioritising the three teenagers distress at missing a concert over the situation in Gaza is an act of extraordinary arrogance, an arrogance that exposes their belief that the Palestinians are subhuman, something akin to feral cats and able to be killed with impunity. This impunity is justified by the past suffering of Jewish people, mainly at the hands of Europeans, which culminated in the Holocaust, a dreadful event for which the Palestinians bear no responsibility. But this event becomes an excuse for any Israeli action, no matter how vicious.

It is like the bully justifying murder, rape and theft because he suffered a traumatic childhood, in fact,  by now, because his parents or grandparents suffered a traumatic childhood. The boycott and divest movement threatens the bully’s excuses: his supposed keeping of order in the playground, it questions his right to exist in his current form, and It questions his right to beat up and steal from his victims. The bully is used to inspiring respect and fear, but like all bullies, Israel suffers from a deep insecurity and a corrupt psyche. It is a society in a state of moral decay. No wonder its leaders admire Trump.

Of course there are many Israeli citizens who are equally disturbed by this decay and this corruption. Unfortunately they remain a minority.

And the real threat to the two admirable Kiwi women, is not this puerile fine, but the possibility of the Israeli special forces clandestinely turning up on their doorstep. It has happened before. This is a bully that will stop at nothing.

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