Herem, Amalek: Zionists mark dissident Jews for unrestricted warfare

Part 2 of a series on how Zionism is an anti-Jewish, racist ideology

[On the very last page of Siegebreakers I wrote: “If this book has sparked a further interest in Israel/Palestine or in Gaza in particular, the reader might find fiction from young Gaza writers to be of particular interest. Atef Abu Saif’s edited collection The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, and Refaat Alareer’s collection Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, are full of beautiful short stories. The Israelis just murdered Refaat and his family in their home. He never knew me but I knew him. This was his course on poetry And his last poem: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale”. I can’t be worthy of Refaat but like him my only weapons are words. So we carry on.]

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Zionists revoke anti-genocide Jewish membership and declare them “un-Jews” and herem

A month into Israel’s genocidal campaign, after nearly 10,000 had been killed including around 4,000 children, Zionist writer Avi Mayer, wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post in November announcing the expulsion of non-Zionist Jews from the community. 

Meyer in turn quotes his former employer Dan Elbaum of the Jewish Agency for Israel in North America, advocating the same: “As much as I would not like to give up on a single Jew, I have given up on them. For me, they are deserving of herem (formal exclusion from the Jewish people).” Meyer mentions another column by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, which argues that anti-Zionism is incompatible with being Jewish: 

“The anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish peoplehood, while undoing decades of identity-building.”

“We call these critics ‘un-Jews’ because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness,” Sharansky and Troy wrote. “They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent… For many of these un-Jews, the public and communal staging of their anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist beliefs appears to be the badge of a superior form of Judaism, stripped of its unsavory and unethical ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘colonialist’ baggage.”

And to Sharansky and Troy, the quintessential “un-Jew” was of course a leftist, Rosa Luxemberg. They quote Red Rosa saying: “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” she raged. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

Meyer’s column ends with a call to action: 

“The time has come to regard these individuals and groups as having separated themselves from the Jewish community and the Jewish people. As we at the Post wrote in an editorial on the subject this week, “anti-Zionist Jews are not representative of the Jewish community and they don’t speak in its name. They are as Jewish as the Westboro Baptist Church is Christian.” While they may still technically be Jewish due to their parentage or conversion, while they may lead superficially Jewish lives, we can no longer consider them part of Klal Yisrael.”

For those Jewish people targeted by the Jerusalem Post column, the cry of “Not in Our Name!” is no longer the point. They aren’t doing it in the name of these Jewish people: Zionists have declared that anti-Zionists have not merely deviated – they are no longer Jews at all.

Being declared “un-Jews” has consequences. In the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, protesting orthodox Jews were beaten by police in dramatic scenes on November 1.

Scenes of Jews protesting in New York’s Grand Central Station and in Oakland, among other places – the kinds of acts that have led to their apparent expulsion from Jewishness by Zionists – have also led to scenes of mass arrests of Jews by police:

Oakland

New York

The other Abrahamic religions have been through sectarian splits: Sunni and Shia in Islam; Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant in Christianity; if, as some tongue-in-cheek socialist writers have argued, that communism too is a form of Abrahamic religion, then Trotskyism and Stalinism could also be considered sects, products of doctrinal split or schism. 

With the rise of the Islamic State (“ISIS”) after 2015, Middle Eastern analysts labeled as “takfiri” the ISIS declaration that Shia, Alawi and other sects to be non-Muslim. The outcome of this analogous “herem” effort by Zionists to expel anti-Zionists will not likely be a successful expulsion, but it could lead to a split, with both sides laying claim to the Jewish identity. 

Herem. Recall that Elbaum, quoted by Meyer, suggested that anti-Zionists were worthy of herem. The concept of herem has connotations well beyond “formal exclusion from the Jewish people”. Baylor University religion professor Philip Jenkins writes about “herem warfare” in the 2014 book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore The Bible’s Violent Verses.

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From Chapter 1:

“Herem, usually interpreted as “utter destruction,” is the single most frightening term in the whole Bible…The noun herem represents a “ban,” but translators use different forms when describing how a city is given this status: it is “devoted” or “accursed” to God, or “set apart for YHWH under a ban.” Few Bible translations accurately give the full connotations of the language, generally using a phrase such as “destroy utterly,” but the meaning is clear. Every living thing in the doomed city must be destroyed wholly. Any valuables, any gold or silver, must be consecrated to God and given to the priestly caste, to be reserved for ritual use…”

“…In practical terms, this kind of warfare is unconditional, in that defeated inhabitants have literally no chance, no way out, no option to surrender. Once banned, once devoted to God, they cannot win their lives by offering to convert to the faith of the conquerors, to raise an altar to YHWH. They cannot agree to hand over all their possessions, to abandon the land forever. They can’t even voluntarily accept the most degrading form of slavery or sexual submission. They are pledged to death. As the story of King Saul demonstrates, God left no room for waverers or fainthearts. Far from being marginal or incidental to the biblical tradition, this type of genocidal warfare was associated with some of Israel’s greatest heroes, including Moses, Samuel, and Joshua.”

Whatever Elbaum was signaling by using the word, the full implications of herem are terrifying. The influence of the concept on US and Israeli conduct of war is clearly revealed in John Grenier’s book The First Way of War, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s an Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and Israel’s current warfare on Gaza. Jenkins elaborates on its influence:

“While mainstream thinkers constructed well-thought-out ideas of “just war,” placing appropriate limitations on military conduct, extremists sought to restore the ruthless practices of herem and biblical holy war, war without mercy… Christians put their beliefs into practice, basing their actions explicitly on scripture. The resulting violence was at its peak in Europe during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when each faction labeled its (Christian) opponents as Amalekites fit only for slaughter. To take just one example of many, after Scottish Protestants defeated an Irish Royalist army in 1646, their clergy advisers ordered a complete massacre of prisoners. Scots soldiers drowned eighty women and children, while “again and again were the conquerors told that the curses which befell those who spared the enemies of God would fall upon him who suffered one Amalekite [Catholic] to escape.” Everyone is an Amalekite or a Canaanite to somebody.”

In her book The Joshua Generation: Israeli Occupation and the Bible, scholar Rachel Havrelock talks about herem as well.

Havrelock writes that “The specific tactic of Joshua’s holy war is the ḥērem, the ban on goods confiscated from the enemy that also implies total destruction of life (Josh 6:17–19).”

What this boils down to is that leading Zionist intellectuals in important journals are willing to cast out those Jews who have a different political standpoint – cast them out into the status of herem, worthy of ‘unconditional warfare’ of the type that Israel is currently waging on Gaza. The Zionist stance on dissenting Jews is notably not “right or wrong, these are our people”; it is not Voltaire’s “I despise what you say but I will defend your right to say it”; it is “you are hereby declared herem.” The declaration offers another moment to reflect on the anti-Jewish nature of Zionist ideology.

Zionists have taken the phrase “anti-Semitism” from antiracists. We will not get it back.

On House Resolution 894: Part 1 of a series on Zionism as an anti-Jewish, racist ideology

[Sorry it has been a while. I have been compiling a document on all the ways in which Zionism is specifically anti-Jewish racism. While anti-Palestinian racism is inherent in Zionism, Zionist ideology’s anti-Jewish history is less well known. When the document crossed the 11,000 word mark, I realized it would be better to send it out in readable pieces. So here’s the first. I’ll compile the whole thing into a resource at podur.org once it’s all out there.]

US Congress has completed the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in House Resolution 894, passed 311-14 two months and tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths into the Gaza genocide on December 5, 2023. In it, the House “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” 

House Resolution 894 should be taken as a signal that it is time for anti-racists to retire the phrase, anti-Semitism. 

It was coined by Austrian orientalist and Zionist Moritz Steinschneider during the rise of biological race theory. The phrase was a critique of French biological racist philosopher Ernest Renan’s theories of Aryan superiority over Semitic races and first written in print in 1860. By 1879, German racist journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet arguing that the Jewish Spirit had triumphed over the German Spirit and Marr organized the Anti-Semitic League to combat the “Jewish Spirit” and expel Jews from Germany. The German Nazi leader Goebbels declared in 1938 after Kristallnacht that “the German people is anti-Semitic.” A few years later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union to enslave the Slavs, who they viewed as an inferior race, and to exterminate the Jews, who the Nazis believed were the real power behind the USSR: to the Nazis, the Soviet Union was ruled not by Bolshevism, but by “Judeo-Bolshevism”, as elaborated in, e.g., Paul Hanebrink’s 2018 book A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. 

In the age of colonialism, anti-Semitism was based in biological racism at a time when its proponents like Marr and Goebbels and its opponents like Steinschneider and even Antenor Firmin accepted the division of humanity into races (a biologically indefensible position – Firmin accepted that there were races but argued that the races were equal, but biological science today is very clear that there is only a single human species and that race is a social, not a biological construct). 

Open anti-Semitism of the Wilhelm Marr/Joseph Goebbels type was discredited with the general discrediting of race science (really pseudoscience) after the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Closet” anti-Semitism continues to exist and be adhered to by adherents of biological racism generally. Without laws supporting it, it remains covert and its overt manifestations are (correctly) punished according to the law. 

After the creation of Israel, a new concept called the “new anti-Semitism” was declared. This “new anti-Semitism” always had a relationship to the criticism of Israel. The notion was that there was some line between the criticism of Israel and the new anti-Semitism, and that it was on critics of Israel to demonstrate that they hadn’t crossed that line and that they were not, in fact, new anti-Semites. Pamphlets about “Anti-Semitism on the Left”, “How to criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic”, etc., are propagated especially intensely during periods of Israeli atrocities and wars. This has culminated in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism (criticized by, e.g., Independent Jewish Voices) and the aforementioned House Resolution 894. 

The re-definition of the word “anti-Semitism” to mean “criticism of Israel” or of Zionism has been successful. It is not worth fighting over the word. If Zionists wish to take over the use of the word “anti-Semitism” so that it means “any critique of Israel” or “anti-Zionism”, let them have it. 

It is a legacy of a time when the scientific establishment was so racist that it believed that there were different human races – that constant callback to scientific racism alone (implicit reference to “Semitic” race and implied reference to other “races” like Aryan, etc.) is enough for antiracists to phase it out. But another reason is that the terms of discussion have been so stacked that there is no way anti-Zionists can prove that they are not “anti-Semitic” by the Zionist definition of the word.

Anti-racists should abandon the word altogether. 

We call it “anti-Jewish racism” because “Semitic” is an orientalist category invented by race scientists.

Antiracism necessarily implies being against anti-Jewish racism. 

Antiracism, Zionism, and Anti-Zionism

Antiracist theory, adopted in universities and other institutions in North America as official policy, holds that people must not be discriminated against for, among other things, religion. Public events are often preceded by an anti-discrimination statement stating that “the organizers of this event stand against all forms of discrimination, whether by sex, gender, race, ethnicity, or religion, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.” A previous Anti-Empire Project pamphlet argued that these anti-discrimination statements need to be updated to include anti-Palestinian racism as a separate category of discrimination (For the most part, they have not been). 

It follows from anti-discrimination principles that discrimination against Jewish people is unacceptable and sanctionable. Jewish people are minorities in the countries where they live: minority rights must be guaranteed in law and in practice, protected by the majorities. For the majority to respect minority rights is one of the foundations of antiracism. 

Antiracism does not protect any political position, however. Zionism and anti-Zionism are nothing more than political positions – not protected identity categories. 

Whatever their faith or cultural background, Zionists cannot appeal to anti-discrimination law or practice for protection of their ideology. The Zionist desire to erase symbols of Palestinian culture and nationalism from public space is itself anti-Palestinian racism and is not protected by antiracism.

Zionism is not a religion, not a race, and not an ethnicity. 

Anti-Zionism is not discrimination by religion, race, or ethnicity. 

Jewish is an identity, Zionism is a politics and ideology

The question of “who is Jewish” involves not only religion and culture, but also identification, being claimed by a community, history, languages such as Yiddish and Hebrew, racialization by European Nazis, the role of the state of Israel and Zionism, and other factors as well. It is a complex one and will be revisited again and again in this series. 

What can be said is: however “Jewish” is defined, Zionism is anti-Jewish. 

Zionism is a political ideology with roots in 16th-17th century English Protestant Christian religion that states that Palestine should be colonized by Jews.

In the 19th century, Zionism was further developed in Europe into an ideology that Palestine should be colonized by European Jews. The 19th century version absorbed other ideologies including European colonialism and the accompanying racialist concepts. 

Yakov Rabkin, in the book What is Modern Israel? defines Zionism as an “ideology of protestant Christian origin that propounds the assembly of the Jews in Palestine.” We’ll have much more to say about the Christian, Protestant origins of Zionism later in this series.

Zionism is a political position, a colonial claim on Palestinian land, a political allegiance held by millions of people, a plurality of whom are Jewish but millions of whom are not. 

If Zionism is the political position of support for the European colony in Palestine, the majority of Zionists are not Jewish. 

A substantial number, though not the majority, of people opposing Zionism are of Jewish faith, Jewish culture, or have Jewish identity and communal roots. The number of Jews opposed to Zionism is probably in the millions. 

It was stated above that antiracist theory is of no use protecting Zionists from anti-Zionists because these are political ideologies. It is useful, however, to investigate the political ideology of Zionism from an anti-racist perspective. Can the core tenet of Zionism, the prescription that European Jews should colonize Palestine, withstand antiracist scrutiny? 

Political adjudication and Zionist safety

Zionist attacks on campus and other Palestine solidarity or pro-Palestine expression is framed in terms of “feelings of safety”, sometimes “feelings of Jewish safety”. A judge struck down a pro-Palestine resolution by a student union at McGill University in Montreal citing such concerns. Columbia University banned not only Students for Justice in Palestine, but also Jewish Voice for Peace, oblivious to the absurdity of banning a Jewish student group out of concern for Jewish safety. 

On North American campuses, Zionist organizations doxx pro-Palestine students, often targeting Black students and other students of color in a display of racial bias, but also targeting Jewish students whose politics are deemed by them to be anti-Zionist. 

Noah Zatz, law professor at UCLA, has argued that employers could legally require a political, Zionist loyalty oath to employers (as Germany will be requiring for immigrants), but in fact they have (so far) not: 

“Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (proscribing race, gender, national origin, and religious discrimination in employment) would raise no bar to the nation’s leading law firms simply demanding that their employees pledge adherence to a U.S. foreign policy of unconditional support for Israeli war efforts. But, unsurprisingly, the law firms are not taking that tack.”

Instead, they argue that expressions for Palestine make Jewish employees feel unsafe – an argument that conflates being Jewish with being Zionist. Zatz argues that the feeling of non-safety is legally insufficient: 

“… employers cannot shield themselves from liability through such arguments. An employer’s obligation to prevent what’s known as “hostile work environment” harassment extends only to such environments that in fact are created on a discriminatory basis (here, antisemitically). Moreover, subjective experience, however genuine, is insufficient; liability attaches only when workers “objectively,” that is, “reasonably,” experience the environment as hostile or abusive.”

What is really occurring in these workplaces is not adjudication according to discrimination law or policy, but political adjudication based on Zionism, a political ideology. And if the topic is Palestine, those who feel unsafe by the topic are Zionists, not Jews. 

As a matter of logic, Jewish people have a diversity of opinion and feeling about any flag and slogan, including the Palestinian one. There is no such diversity for Zionists, because Zionism has a specific position about expressions of Palestinian identity (succinctly expressed by Golda Meier: “There are no Palestinians. They don’t exist.”) .

“Jews feel unsafe when they see a Palestine flag” is false. What is true is that “Zionists [who may or may not be Jewish] do not want to see expressions of national identity from the Indigenous group they believe should be erased.”

Anti-Jewish racism is a European ideology of the 19th and 20th centuries, the most extreme form of which is Nazism. The anti-Jewish racist ideologies of Nazism and Fascism have been undergoing a resurgence in recent years: the entire Canadian parliament recently rose to give a standing ovation to Nazi Yaroslav Hunka. Notably, they did so in the presence of the Zionist president of Ukraine, Volydymyr Zelensky.

Palestine solidarity has nothing to do with it.

AER 133: Tankie Group Therapy #5 Gaza War resumes after pause

Nora, Matteo, Rania, and Alex are gathered to talk about what we’re seeing and trying to make sense of on Israel’s War on Gaza after 8 weeks, a couple of days after the end of the “humanitarian pause”. We open with a discussion of the five premature babies left to die in Al-Nasr hospital when doctors and parents were forced out of the hospital at gunpoint by the Israeli military. We conclude with a discussion of what wars of resistance and guerrilla wars have looked like in history.

World War Civ 27: Western front 1914 from Belgium to the Marne

Germany brings the big guns to Belgium, sacks Louvain and follows the doctrine of terrorizing civilians. The British Expeditionary Force whose commander’s name is French, joins France for some battles. A war of maneuver ends with a non-breakthrough on the Marne and the race to the coast. 1914 ends with no winner, and no one’s home by Christmas after all.

Corporate Canada and Israel’s flagship Elbit Systems

Canada, the US, the UK, and Israel’s military industrial complexes are fully integrated

In my last article I looked at the material flows of the military-industrial complex with a focus on aluminum and Canada’s status as a major aluminum exporter for the Western military industrial complex despite Canada not having bauxite.

Since then, I spoke to activists from Palestine Action who explained that, while they understood the importance of diverse actions and of understanding all the connections between military industry and Western politics, that a number of activists in an affinity network under the banner of “Palestine Action US”, following the example of the UK-based network, argued that a focus on Elbit Systems, the flagship company of Israel’s military-industrial complex, could have a bigger impact on stopping the current genocide than dispersing efforts across the vast number of corporations and elected politicians who participate and profit from it.

In the words of Palestine Action UK:

Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms company, with their broad range of activities generating a broad influence in Israel’s militarised, securitised occupation of Palestine. Elbit supplies the Israeli military with 85% of their drones and 85% of their land-based equipment. The company’s surveillance equipment monitors Palestinians through drone operations, at border points, and across Israel’s apartheid wall. Elbit supplies the IDF with all of its small calibre munitions through subsidiary IMI Systems, while its armed remote-control boats which have attacked Palestinian fishermen. Their Hermes drones have been used for extrajudical killings in foreign countries such as Sudan and operations in Egypt, while enabling the slaughter of Palestinians inside Gaza. They were used extensively in the 2008 and 2014 assaults on Gaza, in which Israel killed 1,417 and 2,202 Palestinians respectively, including four boys killed by a Hermes attack while playing on a beach in Gaza in 2014.

The Palestine Action UK site continues – discussing how Elbit markets its systems as “battle tested” (probably better to call them “genocide tested”):

Elbit’s business model is then to sell these technologies on to fuel imperialism elsewhere. Its drones have not only been deployed by British military and border operations, but are employed by the EU’s militarised border agency Frontex. The same technologies outfitting Israel’s apartheid wall run along the US’ border wall with Mexico, and are used for monitoring of indigenous lands. Elbit drones have been puchased in major volumes by India, in turn deploying them in violent military campaigns perpetuating the repression of Kashmiri populations.

The issue of Modi-India’s relationship with Israel will definitely be explored in a later post. First let’s talk about Canada.

Scotiabank and Elbit

The issue of Canada’s many relationships with Elbit Systems has arisen before. It turns out that Scotiabank’s investment arm is one of Elbit’s largest foreign investors, with some $500M ownership, 5% of the publicly traded company. Back in 2022, a shareholder, Angus Wong, at Scotiabank’s Annual Shareholders Meeting asked bank executives about the investment:

ANGUS WONG: …in 2022, Bloomberg reported that the investment arm of Scotia, 1832 is the largest foreign shareholder of an infamous weapons company, Elbit Systems , owning roughly 5% of the shares, valuing roughly at $500 million. For reference, RBC and TD Bank combined has 3 million worth of shares in the Elbit Systems. So making Scotia’s and 1832 investment pretty big for a bank in size.

Elbit Systems for background has been responsible for countless deaths around the world with its tanks and drones, help build the Trump border wall. The weapons — its weapons has been found in the hands of military junta in Myanmar and until last year, according to MSCI tied to controversial weapons.

Since October, 12,000 members of the organization, I represent (inaudible), formerly some of us signed a petition calling for Scotiabank to divest from Elbit Systems. I delivered the names of the 12,000 people that signed the petition, some of which are customers and shareholders to Julie Walsh earlier today. And I’ve had — I’ve been engaging in dialogue with her and some of the senior team for the past couple of months, and it’s going pretty well. The big question remains from our 12,000 members who signed a petition, why does the third or fourth biggest bank in Canada own so many shares in this weapons company?

I think this week, I started figuring out why, a journalist contacted me, and he believes that one fund manager at Scotia own — at Dynamic Funds — sorry, like Scotia owns Dynamic Funds, has been using middle-class families investments to invest in these companies based on his political views. The full story will come up later this week.

So we believe this type of investment with customers’ money erodes customers trust and has a reputational risk to Scotia shareholders. So my question is ahead of next year’s AGM, will you develop policies to address this reputational risks?

Scotiabank’s Group Head of Global Wealth Management, Glen B. Gowland, responded with the predictable word salad – that the investment in Elbit was simply a matter of getting the best return for customers (let’s return to that in a minute) and anyway Scotiabank was independent of its asset management arm (which means, basically, no one is responsible!)

GLEN B. GOWLAND, GROUP HEAD OF GLOBAL WEALTH MANAGEMENT, THE BANK OF NOVA SCOTIA: Sure. Thanks very much. I appreciate the question. Scotia Global Asset Management is the second largest investment fund company in Canada. We have over $200 billion of investable assets that we manage on behalf of millions of Canadians in over 200 investment mandates. 14 of those investment mandates own Elbit Systems, it’s actually about 0.3% of the overall assets. One thing that’s very important to note is that we,, at Scotia Global Asset Management, have a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interest of the owners of those investment funds. And we take that obligation very, very seriously. Elbit Systems is included in many of the well-known indices around the world.

Elbit’s stock price on the NASDAQ seemed to drop for a while after October 7, but then started to climb again after the ground invasion of October 27.

Elbit stock tracks Israel’s military action

Angus Wong was quoted in a media article later as the campaign manager for the advocacy group SumOfUs, now known as Eko, identifying the principal complaint at that time against Elbit being its production of cluster munitions. Scotiabank spokesperson Heather Armstrong repeated Elbit’s claim that they don’t do cluster munitions any more: “1832 Asset Management does not knowingly invest in companies that directly manufacture cluster munitions”. Perhaps someone will ask Armstrong, if still in that role, whether 1832 Asset Management knowingly invests in companies that commit genocide. Australia’s A Future Fund and Norway’s KLP excluded Elbit because the firm didn’t meet their human rights criteria. Alas, if only Scotiabank had such criteria!

Heather Armstrong repeated Elbit’s claim that they don’t do cluster munitions any more: “1832 Asset Management does not knowingly invest in companies that directly manufacture cluster munitions”. Perhaps someone will ask Armstrong, if still in that role, whether 1832 Asset Management knowingly invests in companies that commit genocide.

Canadian government contracts directly with Elbit

It isn’t just banks. The Canadian government contracts directly with Elbit. From a December 21, 2020 public announcement:

Today, the Honourable Anita Anand, Minister of Public Services and Procurement, and the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Marc Garneau, announced the Government of Canada has awarded a $36.16‑million contract to Elbit Systems Ltd. for the acquisition of a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) or drone.

Another initiative was called the Airspace Coordination Centre Modernization (ASCCM): “In December 2021, Canada signed an $8.6 million(USD) acquisition and in-service support contract with Elbit Systems UK. The contract will deliver the last software required for the complete modernization of CAF’s Airspace Coordination Centres (ASCC). Delivery of these remaining software components is expect by June 2022.” The software in question is called the TORCH-X Battle Management Application (BMA), which apparently provides “situational awareness by constantly displaying a local or recognized air picture, thus enabling effective co-ordination of air assets into complex land and joint battlespace. The system will be operated utilising Elbit Systems’ E-CIXTM open architecture framework that will enable connectivity to the Canadian Armed Forces’ legacy applications and tactical datalinks while also allowing future integration of new applications in support of the Canadian Armed Forces digital transformation plan.”

German subsidiary Rheinmetall in Ottawa and Elbit

Canadian institutions connected to Elbit are as dispersed as Internet nodes. Ottawa-based Rheinmetall Canada (a subsidiary of a German military company) boasts that its “400 employees put their expertise to work in order to deliver solutions that you can trust.” Two such solutions are joint ventures with Elbit, according to the company’s press release for the Canadian Arms Bazaar event (CANSEC, a focus of the World Beyond War campaign) 2022:

  • Night Vision System Modernization (NVSM) project: Rheinmetall is again teaming up with Elbit Systems for the NVSM project, which will address upcoming capability gaps in the current Army’s night vision equipment fleet. As a solution of choice for the Laser Range Finder – Hand Held Imager – Long Range’ program, Rheinmetall will be presenting Elbit’s advanced target locator and intelligence system named AION-C.

  • Joint Fire Modernization (JFM) project: Rheinmetall and Elbit Systems join forces in pursuit of Canada’s Joint Fires Modernization (JFM) project – an initiative that will enable the near real-time sharing of tactical, operational, and strategic fires and effects information through a digital network, delivering an immediate common operating picture.

Newfoundland based Kraken Robotics and Elbit

Last year a breathless press release (Sept 29/22) from Kraken Robotics outlined a new sonar system they developed in partnership with Elbit.

With live demos and sea trials, the Royal Navy are better able to understand the demonstrated technology including software, sensors, and effectors necessary to implement a highly reliable Mine Hunting Capability (MHC).

For these trials, Kraken teamed with Elbit Systems UK to demonstrate the KATFISH High Speed Towed Synthetic Aperture Sonar System integrated to their Seagull 12-meter Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV).

Beyond the Royal Navy, the KATFISH system has customers in Denmark and Poland.

Montreal’s Top Aces and Elbit

In February 2022, defence contractor Top Aces tested a new system modernizing the F-16. Aviation News reported on Feb 17/22:

Montreal, Quebec-based defence contractor Top Aces undertook the maiden flight of its first Lockheed Martin F-16 Advanced Aggressor Fighter (AAF) – N854TA – outfitted with an Advanced Aggressor Mission System (AAMS) from Arizona’s Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport on January 19.

Retrofitted to the former Israeli Air Force jet at the firm’s Mesa F-16 Center of Excellence by M7 Aerospace and Elbit Systems of America, the F-16AAF will be able to replicate the most advanced capabilities of contemporary air-to-air combat opponents.

It certainly looks like Israel’s F-16 inventory of 175 combat aircraft were engaged in some “advanced aggression” in Gaza over the past 7 weeks, killing more 14,000 people, 5,000 of whom were children. The Advanced Aggressor Mission System would appear to be working successfully.

Perhaps you might feel a certain way about your deposits going to a bank, however independent, whose investment arm is the largest foreign investor in the flagship company of Israel’s military-industrial complex.

Completely unrelated, have you ever thought about how hard it is to change banks in Canada? With all the direct deposits and automatic bills, closing fees and transfer fees that have to be paid. The banks make it so difficult because losing depositors hurts them too. It’s probably better to make all the arrangements and transfer the money first, and then close the account once everything is already in place at the new bank. While it’s probably ideal to change to a Credit Union that doesn’t even have an investment arm, it’s still inconvenient. Hard to compare the inconvenience of changing banks with the inconvenience of suffering a genocide.

Anyway I found this guide on a site called moneysense.ca

How to Switch Banks

Step 1: Open an account with the new financial institution

Step 2: Transfer money to your new account – piecemeal or all at once

Step 3: Set up direct deposits and bill payments

Step 4: Close your bank account. There may be closing fees and transfer fees. If you have a credit card, switch it to a no-fee card and keep it dormant. 

Step 5: Send your old bank a message saying why you closed your account.

AER 132: The Gaza War as settler-Indigenous warfare & as people’s warfare – CAUKUSZIANS reunite

The CAUKUSZIANS unite once again, this time to look at the Gaza war through a couple of different lenses: Arama through the lens of settler-Indigenous warfare in the wars fought by the Maori to defend their land from Anglo settlers, and Carl through the lens of protracted people’s war and the Chinese experience of fighting the Japanese occupation.

AER 131: Tankie Group Therapy #4: Gaza War Week 6

The alliance between the East is a Podcast, the Brief, and the Anti-Empire Project continues as we discuss the Gaza War six weeks in (since October 7 2023). Structured as group therapy (the fourth in the series) we cover some of the news, the dynamic of aggression and resistance, military analysis of guerrilla war, the painful search for historical analogies to help us understand the moment, and more.

Anti Empire Radio 130: Palestine Action and the focus on Elbit Systems

A discussion with Calla and Fergie from Palestine Action US about the theory of direct action and how activists have tried stop the flow of Western weapons that are being deployed against Palestinians in Gaza, instead of, e.g., moral suasion on Western politicians. The Palestine Action UK precedent and the reason for Palestine Action’s focus on Elbit Systems, the flagship corporation of Israel’s military industrial complex.

The intertwined western military-industrial complex

From mining the metal to using it to kill people, a logistical spiderweb

Who is winning the propaganda war? Billionaires are planning to pump some serious money into the narrative battle. Good luck to them, I guess, but perhaps the US – and satellites in UK, Canada, France & Germany – overemphasize narrative and information and underemphasize the material world. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that “recently fashionable claims about the dematerialization of modern economies dominated by services and miniaturized electronic devices” are misleading. The global food system and the entire industrial economy depends on fossil fuels. In his book How the World Really Works, Smil identifies the “four pillars of modern civilization”. They aren’t facebook, twitter, google, and amazon: they are ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics. 

This isn’t the main point of what I want to talk about tonight so I will give you this long quote about why these four pillars and move on:

“…only an impossibly complete recycling of all wastes voided by grazing animals could, together with near-perfect recycling of all other sources of organic nitrogen, provide the amount of nitrogen annually applied to crops in ammonia-based fertilizers. Meanwhile, there are no other materials that can rival the combination of malleability, durability, and light weight offered by many kinds of plastics. Similarly, even if we were able to produce identical masses of construction lumber or quarried stone, they could not equal the strength, versatility, and durability of reinforced concrete. We would be able to build pyramids and cathedrals but not elegant long spans of arched bridges, giant hydroelectric dams, multilane roads, or long airport runways. And steel has become so ubiquitous that its irreplaceable deployment determines our ability to extract energies, produce food, and shelter populations, as well as ensuring the extent and quality of all essential infrastructures: no metal could, even remotely, become its substitute.”

The material world also cannot be neglected in the question of war. States (or armed groups) go to war to try to change a status quo. They apply military pressure on their enemy to try to get that enemy to comply with something. I’ve talked about the different strategies at play in a previous post.

Israel has destroyed most of Gaza’s hospitals and is trying to close in and destroy the big hospital in Gaza City. They claim (a claim no one but diehard pro-Israel people believe) that the hospital is the “Hamas command center”. Since everybody knows the hospital isn’t a command center, we have to look for Israel’s real objective in applying so much military pressure to hospitals and gathering sites specifically, targeting the already wounded and children sheltering for safety. The idea is probably to try to show that Israel (and its western backers) have no limits (as Israelis have declared many times – see this compilation by Norman Finkelstein) in the hope that this will create enough terror to psychologically break the Palestinian Resistance (which Westerners call “Hamas”). If the Palestinians aren’t broken psychologically, the strategy fails.

This is a dynamic of warfare between settler states and Indigenous populations, guerrilla warfare, politics and strategy – topics we have covered before, including in the book Siegebreakers, and will cover again. 

Tonight though I want to talk about another aspect of modern warfare, which is that it involves the production of composite objects of plastic and metal run on fossil fuels (missiles, shells, bullets) and then blasted into people from other machines (planes, artillery pieces, various kinds of guns) to kill them. The production of these objects is a global effort of Western states and corporations that involves exploiting and destroying Indigenous lands, employing workers from many countries, passing through many logistical bottlenecks. 

Consider a metal, well below the four pillars in overall importance, but of central importance to warfare: aluminum. In their 2010 book Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, Felix Padel and Samarendra Das reveal the entire web of connections from the destruction of the means of Indigenous survival at the point of extraction to the physical destruction of Indigenous people when the bombs are dropped. They cite Dewey Anderson’s 1951 pamphlet Aluminum for Defence and Prosperity, published by the US Public Affairs Institute. Anderson wrote that “Aluminum has become the most important single bulk material of modern warfare. No fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum.” Aluminum “makes fighter and transport planes possible”, it is “needed in atomic weapons”… “yet aluminum is a scarce metal… government steps in for prolonged periods of time, determines how much aluminum there should be, expands production at government expense, and decides what part of the supply will be available for civilians.” 

Aluminum is an interesting metal because its production requires the raw material bauxite and copious amounts of electricity. Out of this Earth describes it in terms analogous to a mathematical equation: aluminum = bauxite + electricity. Bauxite is generally found in the Global South and on aboriginal lands: the biggest bauxite deposits in 2001 were 1 – Guinea, 2 -Australia, 3 – Brazil, 4 – India, 5 – Jamaica, 6 – China and in tonnage mined per year in 2007 the top 5 were Australia, China, Brazil, Guinea, India, and Jamaica.

But that’s bauxite – just one of the two inputs. When you look at production of aluminum, it’s a different story: the top 5 in 2008 were China, Russia, the US, Canada, and Australia. By 2022 it was China, India, Russia, Canada and the UAE (the US was 9th). Canadian production was once owned by Alcan, which was the Canadian subsidiary of the US Alcoa. Alcan was purchased by the British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto in 2007. Of course, the bauxite-producing countries get fleeced, with their bauxite selling at a fraction of the price of the finished aluminum – that’s the first increment of imperialist value transfer at work.

Why is Canada in the top 5 at all, if it doesn’t have bauxite? Canada found its way into this crucial network of the Western military-industrial complex because of its hydroelectric capacity (you guessed it – located on Indigenous land, “hydroelectric capacity” being another word for life-giving river ecosystems where First Nations civilizations thrived for centuries). 

BC and Quebec’s hydroelectricity is supplied cheaply to Rio Tinto and to Alcoa, one of numerous subsidies to the mining and military industries that keeps them profitable and that enables them to beautify the environment like this:

The electricity subsidy is another increment of value transfer, this time from Indigenous land to Global North corporations. 

The final increment is when the shiny aluminum is used to make warplanes and missiles. At that final step, we see another huge increment in private profits and an equally complete integration between Canada and US military industries. 

A 2016 article on Open Canada interviewing the peace institute Project Ploughshares described the “murky world of Canada’s arms manufacturing” and the Defence Production Sharing Agreement between Canada and the US, which “set up a special arrangement where military goods shipped between the U.S. and Canada are not required to go through the same system as everything else exported by the U.S. and do not require export permits by the Canadian government.” That’s why many of the top military producers in Canada on the Canadian Defence Review site are the same big US names: Lockheed Martin [Canada], Raytheon, General Dynamics [Canada], why you’ll see the same names on the Invest Ontario website. 

Industry Ontario: 

In the past month, organized by groups like World Beyond War, activists have done direct actions at companies like INKAS and L3 Harris. The organization has created a map of companies and their locations.

Once the global logistical chains of these murderous objects are revealed, it becomes almost overwhelming to decide on where to campaign. The above analysis for aluminum could be repeated for other basic materials, like white phosphorus – a particularly nasty chemical Israel’s army uses to burn kids in Gaza. Some quick research suggests that most of the phosphate used by the US is mined in Florida:

The environmental implications of phosphate mining are problematic, at least so the Washington Post found in 2021. 

Mines, manufacturing facilities, and administrative offices are spread all over the West. The materials are trucked, railed, and shipped all over the place before they reach their final sites of death and destruction. 

When majorities are organized, the whole murderous machinery could be halted by people simply putting their tools down in a general strike. Short of that, though, the leaders of direct actions in the West, Palestine Action, have argued for a sharp focus – theirs has been on Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons supplier.

I’ll leave it there, but just with a little step back to the idea of building toward strike actions – let me quote Boots Riley, who apparently has a show called I’m a Virgo. 

If stopping the genocide were entirely up to us, we would have to build up to this kind of people power. A movement that could take labor action and mass direct action to stop a genocide and then direct our labor to helping Palestinians rebuild every hospital, mosque, school, and house in Gaza more beautiful than before. 

To stop a genocide it’s worth being a voice in the wilderness, but with large and growing numbers come greater opportunities.