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. 

Liberalism: what will be the cost of dropping the masks?

They’ll be terrible, but we don’t have time to let it play out

Israel’s genocide is fully supported by the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany – all mainstream political parties and major media endorse it and have publicly stated there are no red lines, no numbers of dead children, no amount of starvation or dehydration that would stop them from supporting Israel.

Image

Florida State Representative Angie Nixon asked in Congress how many dead children would be enough. Republican Congresswoman Michelle Salzman shouted, “all of them.”

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is publishing editorial cartoons like this:

Combining racist caricature with genocidal incitement in an extraordinarily succinct piece of art. If there is a cartoon that summarizes the Western understanding of the world, this is it.

Tonight’s question is, what have these Western countries in the genocide bloc given up to support this open massacre?

For several centuries prior to the major decolonizations after WW2, the West offered one thing to the Global South: naked colonialism. The 2003 book Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800-1930 shows how Western elites filled their literature with solemn warnings, sometimes sad, sometimes exultant, that Indigenous peoples around the world were destined to go extinct to make way for their white racial superiors.

This was a period when:

  • White people would have picnics and watch lynchings in the US;

  • Canada was using starvation to push the First Nations of what would become the country’s Western provinces on to tiny fractions of their land;

  • Britain and France were conducting scorched-earth “punitive raids” all over Africa and the Middle East.

  • Germany drove the people of Namibia into the desert to die of thirst, got them to surrender by promising them food aid, then shipping them to death camps, a genocide openly declared ahead of time.

When it became clear that the colonized were nonetheless not going to go extinct, were going to win their independence, and likely go communist or socialist, the West revised their offer – from naked colonialism to neocolonialism. The new offer was this:

  1. Economic aid and loans for “development”, to enmesh the new governments into economic dependency on the West while keeping their all-important commodities and the products of their labor flowing to the rich countries. 

  2. Weapons and training programs for the militaries (and police) of these newly independent countries, to ensure that the militaries would have direct, subordinate relationships with Western sponsors (and were not loyal to their own populations). 

  3. A package of international law, human rights, nongovernmental organizations, elections claimed to be free and fair, free speech, and support for nonviolent struggle. 

Unlike the “authoritarian” communist bloc, the West promised peaceful avenues for change. Multiculturalism promised equality under the law regardless of where you were from or what you believed – you could leave your country and become Western, enjoying all the privileges of Westerners. Dissenters would be protected by law from state reprisal. Elections gave the people power over elites: the bastards could be voted out. If the bastards were particularly disrespectful of democracy (if they ignored elections and set up a dictatorship), they could be defeated through nonviolent struggle, with methods and manuals taught by US institutes and later, using US social media corporations to spread the word. There was always the United Nations to appeal to as well – to give succour to the refugees, to pass Security Council resolutions that were binding on all UN members, to “Unite for Peace” in the General Assembly if the Security Council failed. 

If, as a leader of a Global South country, you didn’t like the new Western offer, you could get overthrown in a coup (see, e.g., William Blum’s Killing Hope, or the more scholarly version Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change). 

As for the liberal package of law and rights – it was always an illusion, especially for Palestine But since Oct 7, 2023, the West has abandoned it wholly. Let’s look at each piece in turn.  

International law? It may always have been a fantasy but Israel and the US are explicit that it doesn’t apply. Israelis who kill Palestinians are not charged with crimes. ICJ judgments are ignored; the ICC delays investigation – not that it would be respected if it made any judgments. The US has passed what is sometimes called the Hague Invasion Act, which states that the US would use military force against the court rather than allow its personnel to be judged for war crimes. Israel’s partners like Canada have pressured the International Court of Justice to drop the stances it has taken in the past. Israel had once signed the Rome statute, but then ‘unsigned’ it; the US has never been subject to it. Israel kills UN personnel and then trolls them, official account to official account, on twitter. The US vetoes resolutions at the UN Security Council and the General Assembly resolution is simply ignored. 

Human rights? The mighty human rights organizations merely beg Israel to murder civilians in a way that respects human rights, and receive a contemptuous response for their trouble. 

Elections? All Western political parties are disciplined in their support for Israel. In Ontario and in the US Congress (so far), parliaments have formally censured elected representatives (Sarah Jama in Ontario and Rashida Tlaib in the US) calling for ceasefire (or even short of ceasefire). For her trouble, Jama was also thrown out of her party, the left-wing NDP. Until there are anti-genocide political parties in the West, elections or the threat of elections are meaningless since there are no anti-genocide alternatives to vote for. There is no voting these bastards out. Not in the West.

Protected speech? On wonderful American social media platforms? Using the power of free expression and dissent to change genocidal policy? Besides direct censorship of Palestine and Palestine solidarity groups on the platforms, the pro-genocide bloc scours social media to try to get anti-genocide people fired from their jobs. They routinely lie and libel Palestine supporters, libel tens of thousands of protesters for peace at a time as “supporters of violence”, ignore Jewish pro-Palestine voices, and punish speech wherever they can. 

Pro-genocide media figures have been advocating mass deportation (population transfer) as an answer to the large pro-Palestine rallies – calling for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people for waving Palestine flags and chanting “from the river to the sea”. People in Canada have already been arrested for using the phrase. Germany, France, and the UK banned and criminalized the rallies before they happened; Canadian legislators called them “hate rallies”. More repression is planned, if they can get away with it. 

You can say that these wonderful tenets of liberalism were always honored in the breach, applied with double standards, etc. But no matter how you argue it, we are in a major “mask off” moment and at least two questions follow from the dropping of these masks.  

First, if it was so easy for them to drop these masks, what was the value of these masks in the first place? And second, what consequences are there, if any, to the dropping of these masks?

To the first question: the masks were very valuable and the cost of dropping them is still unknown – it will play out over years. The liberal package of ideas from free expression, to international law and the UN through to elections and nonviolent struggle as legitimate forms of popular struggle, was very important in several ways:

  • Winning a portion of the Global South and its elite to the Western agenda. Multiculturalism and equality under the law (getting rid of apartheid in the US and in South Africa, settlers leaving Kenya, etc.) were instrumental in the West being able to get people from the Global South to work for them (including in Western countries).

  • Dissipating rebellious energy. Appeals to international justice dissipate rebellious energies internationally just as appeals to electoralism dissipate them within the West. 

Can the medical profession in a country work properly if doctors are petitioning for hospitals to be bombed? Can social media companies claim everyone’s attention if they are hunting grounds for libelers, doxxers, and people trying to get you fired? Can politicians displaying such public heartlessness expect the ear of those they wish to lead? Can schools and universities claim to educate students for the world if they punish them for speaking against genocide? Maybe this is just how the West works. The US seems to be able to run without a universal health care system and with frequent mass shootings, but other Western countries may not be so resilient. There may be lasting damage to the social order being done here.

Dropping these pretences could have major repercussions for the whole world order and for the functioning of these democracies.

But perhaps not. At the moment, Global South countries that are subordinate to the US are so far unyielding to the pressure of their own anti-genocide majorities. Some regimes have made rhetorical anti-genocide gestures while helping the US and Israel militarily. Egypt could unilaterally open Rafah crossing and end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza at any time, but does not. Jordan snubbed Blinken in a meeting but helps the occupation. Turkey accuses Israel of genocide but ships tomatoes and says interrupting business is infeasible. Saudi Arabia said they hold Israel responsible but shield Israel from Yemen’s missiles using US missile defense platforms operating from Arabian soil. India declared support for Netanyahu immediately and is apparently going to send 100,000 workers to replace the Palestinian labour force Israel had been exploiting (and is now murdering). The West is betting that this genocide won’t cause a crisis in the Global South. 

And in the Global North? Western political parties have maintained solid pro-genocide discipline. Even if the rallies have shown that Western majorities are anti-genocide, they have nowhere, electorally speaking, to go. They mostly watch unreality and inverted reality on their screens, and are made to feel afraid of repression. Some tactical firings, suspensions of Muslim students, arrests of organizers, a bit of Islamophobic violence here and there – perhaps it need not reach crisis levels. The bet is that the genocide won’t cause a crisis in the Global North either. 

Which raises the next question. If the Bidens and Trudeaus and von der Leyens are betting that everyone is going to go back to their normal lives after this genocide, was it really necessary to drop the masks? Why not let people demonstrate in London and Toronto and Berlin and Paris and ignore their demands like Western elites did in 2003, when the millions of demonstrators around the world were praised as a “second superpower” by the New York Times and then casually ignored by the US, who invaded Iraq anyway? Why label them as “hate rallies” and threaten mass deportation? 

What is it about Palestine that moves them to such hatred to take bigger risks?

The simplest answer is that Israel is the West. It is Canada, it is the US, it is Australia and New Zealand. It is a settler colony. Western elites’ identification with it is total; for them to contemplate abandoning stolen lands to Indigenous people is inconceivable.

Aggressive wars like the ones in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have led to humiliating defeats – but for a settler colony to take even one step back is impossible to contemplate. A prisoner exchange, letting Gaza have an airport, letting people come and go from Gaza freely… and now even utterances about freedom or the colors of the Palestine flag have become intolerable to the Western mind. In Israel this brain freeze has led to the adoption of a pseudo-strategy of saturation bombing followed by an open-ended ground invasion with no achievable political goal besides genocide. Among Israel’s supporters, it has led to the maniacal repetition of phrases like “Israel has the right to defend itself” even as Israeli officials talk about dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza or exterminating them all, and are killing, now, 1500 people a day, 140 children a day, and climbing. 

This graphic shows Gaza being bulldozed into the sea by the Israeli army

But, like I said in my last piece, we can’t affect what is happening on the ground in Gaza or the air above it and we can’t wait for the ripple effects of the abandonment of liberalism. There are, however, things that the anti-genocide majority can do even against such a committed elite consensus. 

The most successful actions have been:

If these continue to grow, so will repression and violence in the West. 

The next step would be preparing to survive that and grow in spite of it. 

In 1915, when Lenin lamented the fragmentation of the socialist movement in the face of World War I, he argued that antiwar work had to be done in spite of the difficulties posed by what appeared to be the unstoppable march to war. 

He said such work “is not easy, to be sure. It will demand arduous preparatory activities and heavy sacrifices. This is a new form of organisation and struggle that also has to be learnt, and knowledge is not acquired without errors and setbacks.” As examples of what had to be done, he suggested “setting up an international apparatus for the purpose of carrying on propaganda… organise the publication of illegal literature on the necessity of starting revolutionary activities, etc.”

He continued: “We cannot tell whether a powerful revolutionary movement will develop immediately after this war, or during it, etc., but at all events, it is only work in this direction that deserves the name of socialist work.”

So as to not end yet another piece with Lenin, I’ll mention Michael Albert’s book The Trajectory of Change. Michael was an antiwar student activist during the US war on Vietnam in the 1960s. The trajectory he describes in the title is one where demonstrations are not only building in numbers but also in commitment, radicalism, militancy. To roughly paraphrase him, a weekly rally with 250,000 people each week for a series of weeks is less likely to get elites to back off of a genocide than rallies that grow in number each week and where small but growing numbers are, instead of calling for, e.g., “ceasefire now”, are abandoning electoral lesser evilism altogether, calling for the end of apartheid, taking direct actions against the military industrial complex, etc.

Western elites have announced a willingness to transform their societies to make them more genocide-friendly. Dangerous times are ahead.