The news that the Trump Administration no longer views Israeli settlements in the West Bank as “illegal” was not shocking, any more than the feigned outrage expressed by the very nations who continue to empower Israel no matter what it does. This prelude to the Israeli annexation of the West Bank is certain to further Palestinian misery by emboldened settlers and Occupation soldiers.
But that annexation in reality occurred decades ago. There is a reason why Israel has never simply said so.
On November 29 of 1947, the UN voted to recommend the partitioning of Palestine (UNGA Resolution 181), defeating a minority recommendation for a democratic binational state. Negotiators for the Palestinian cause took advantage of a 24-hour reprieve to propose another binational plan, with a constitution similar to that of the United States. The proposal was ignored, but the seventy-two years since have been a bumpy but unstoppable slow-motion return to the essential concept of a single democratic state.
Ironically, the Trump genie that grants Zionism its every wish, brings that liberation — and the end of Zionism — all the closer.
If Israel is accused of having annexed the West Bank, and thus of running it as an apartheid state, it would hold up "proof" to the contrary: the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians, the hasbara (Zionist propaganda), vote for their own "government". But shingles of PA office doors in Ramallah not withstanding, the on-the ground reality is that the Palestinian Authority has no true "authority" at all oveer what happens to Palestine or its people. Certain functions associated with governance are assigned to it in name, but it carries these out only at Israel's interest and pleasure. Its political repression of its own "citizens", for example, simply spares Israel the chore; and international aid to Palestine is in truth further aid to Israel, because it merely subsidizes its occupation and crippling of the Palestinian economy.
The Palestinian Authority, in other words, can be seen as merely a subcontractor and fig-leaf for Israeli’s ultimate sovereignty over the entire area — irrespective of the Oslo Accords’ theoretical division of the West Bank into areas A (Palestinian), B (Palestinian-Israeli), and C (Israeli). Israel began violating the laws regulating an occupying power immediately upon its 1967 conquest, and has ruled the entire West Bank (which includes East Jerusalem) and Gaza (whether directly or by siege) ever since.
Clearing away the smoke and mirrors, what’s left is this: Israel treats “Judea and Samaria” as its sovereign territory, but only its Jews (i.e., settlers) can vote, while non-Jews, by virtue of ethnicity, are denied even the most rudimentary human rights
This mirage can not last indefinitely, but Trump’s latest gift can only hasten its day of reckoning. Its implicit invitation to the complete theft of the West Bank and ultimately all Palestine, Zionism’s goal for over a century, now looms tantalizingly close. Netanyahu needs do little more than “make it so” in a way that will assure the “international community” continues to behave as it did upon Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem four decades ago: protest, Resolutions, and total appeasement. Israel’s increased Trump-inspired repression could itself precipitate a new Palestinian backlash that would provide Israel the pretext for annexation.
But this Temptation promises a sobering morning after. Israel will suddenly “own” the West Bank. There will be no PA fig-leaf to cover it up. How will Israel explain that non-Jews cannot vote and remain subjugated in what it claims to be its sovereign land? What had always been the reality will be on full display for the world to see: Israel is an apartheid state.
It would face three options.
• One, it could ethnically cleanse a couple of million more Palestinians. But this is not 1948, and it is not 1967. Although Israel continues to enforce the ethnic containment of Palestinians by bantustan within the Palestinian side of the Armistice Line, its ongoing ethnic cleansing out of Palestine needs to remain discreet. In today’s world, not even Israel’s ever-shocking impunity would shield it from loading two or three million people onto trucks and shipping them to new refugee camps in surrounding countries.
• Two, it could allow West Bank non-Jews the same citizenship as non-Jews already “enjoy” in Israel other than East Jerusalem — second-tier citizenship to be sure, but they nonetheless can vote in national elections, and so the system could be passed off as a nominal democracy. It happens that we’ve a test case for such a scenario — East Jerusalem — and it demonstrates that citizenship for non-Jews would not result from annexation. Although Israel considers East Jerusalem to be fully part of Israel, its non-Jews are tenuous “residents”, not citizens, and have no voice in Israel’s national elections. This is all the more remarkable in that the non-Jewish population of East Jerusalem, unlike the West Bank’s, is far too small to threaten Israel’s demographic concerns.
• And so, by default, Israel would be stuck with option three: just continue as before, for as long as it lasts. The West Bank would be like East Jerusalem is now — but too big to fudge. West Bank non-Jews would be foreigners in their own land, “residents” with no voice in national affairs, and subject to ethnic cleansing through opaque laws engineered for the purpose. Inertia might bide some time for the apartheid state, but it would not be sustainable. It might last two years, or perhaps as long as ten, but once a critical mass of the world’s political and economic interests see Israel as a liability, the call for simply equality shall be the Zionist state’s ultimate defeat.
PS.
1. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex parts of the occupied West Bank if re-elected in last month’s General Election, eliciting outrage from world leaders. However, that “promise” to usurp not just the West Bank, but all of Palestine, is century-old news, an ongoing promise being kept, and no international outrage has ever really mattered in any case.
A well-worn chapter of Israel’s creation myth explains its conquests thus: When in November 1947, the United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into two states (General Assembly Resolution 181), Israel’s founders embraced the offer with gratitude, whereas the Palestinians scoffed at it and attacked the fledgling “Jewish state”.
The result of this alleged Palestinian intransigence? The “fundamental fact”, as the pro-Israel spin-doctors at Camera put it, is that had the Palestinians accepted partition, there would have been a Palestinian state since 1948, “and there would not have been a single Palestinian refugee”.
This is more than bizarre rationalisation for seven decades of imperialism and ethnic cleansing; it is historical invention. The Zionist movement never had any intention of honouring any agreement that “gave” it less than all of Palestine. Mainstream leaders like the “moderate” Chaim Weizmann and iconic David Ben-Gurion feigned acceptance of partition because it handed them a weapon powerful enough to defeat partition: statehood.
When Britain agreed to become Zionism’s benefactor, codified with the ambiguous 1917 Balfour Declaration, its negotiators knew full well that the Zionists planned to usurp and ethnically cleanse Palestine, and that the Declaration’s assurance to the contrary was a lie. As Lord Curzon complained, Zionism’s propagandists “sang a different tune in public” — a tune that the major media continue to hum today.
By 1919, activists like Weizmann were already exasperated at Britain’s failure to establish a Zionist state from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan— as a start — and so pushed for “a comprehensive emigration scheme” of non-Jews to get the ethnic cleansing over and done with. The public lie remained safeguarded; British Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen assured Weizmann that the true plan is “still withheld from the general public”. Nor was the public informed when the USA’s King-Crane Commission went to the region that year and discovered for themselves that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.” The Commission Report was buried.
It was in 1937 that the turmoil caused by dispossession first led the British to propose partitioning the land. Ben-Gurion saw partition’s hidden potential: “In the wake of the establishment of the state,” he told the Zionist Executive, “we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” He made the same promise to his son Amos.
When Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and others met in London in 1941 to discuss future plans, the cynical disconnect was chilling. Would “Arabs” have equal rights in the “Jewish state”? Of course, but only after there were none left. Would partition be acceptable? Certainly, if the line were the River Jordan (meaning 100 per cent of Palestine for Israel), expandable into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan itself. One attendee challenged the Zionists; the industrialist Robert Waley Cohen accused them of following Nazi ideology. (WATCH: Ex-general likens Israel to Nazi Germany)
By 1944, the British knew that opposition to partition had “hardened throughout all shades of Jewish Zionist opinion,” and new resolutions among the settlers’ leaders placed “special emphasis on the rejection of partition.” But partition’s failure would become the Palestinians’ problem. The British would go home.
Ben-Gurion described statehood as a “tool”, not an “end”, a distinction “especially relevant to the question of boundaries,” which would instead be determined by “seizing control of the country by force of arms.” Scarcely any pretence was made outside the UN’s walls: Zionist Organisation of America President Abba Silver publicly condemned any mention of Partition and demanded an “aggressive and militant line of action” to take all of Palestine. The Jewish Agency’s militias were busy doing precisely that, frenetically establishing strongholds in areas that the UN was expected to allocate to the Palestinians.
2. Regarding the new proposal following the vote on Res 181, see TNA, WO_261-571, Fortnightly Intelligence Newsletter No. 55, Part II, Partition of Palestine, p9, bottom (illustrated here). It is worth pointing out that, according to British documents, the reason the UN opted for partition over the democratic binational state was that it feared increased Zionist terrorism (see TNA, CAB 129/21, page stamped “52”, illustrated here, or the author’s How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, p236). Jewish anti-racists in the settlements, among them Hebrew University president Judah Magnes, also supported a single state.
3. Israel and US militarily negated the results of Palestine’s 2006 election, so the Palestinians did not actually vote in the present government (Fatah), but this is incidental to the present point. That election’s candidates were already limited by Israel through exclusion, imprisonment, and assassination.
4. Non-Jewish East Jerusalemite “residents” can vote in municipal elections. Non-Jews can apply for citizenship, but by doing so they implicitly forfeit East Jerusalem’s status under international law as Palestinian, and yet their citizenship is not equal to that of the city’s Jewish settlers. Non-Jews actually risk expulsion simply by making any application to the Israeli authorities, who may then demand documented proof of family residency back to the nineteenth century, whereas Jews from abroad need no such precedent — hence, for example, Palestinian reluctance to apply for building permits.
"Michael Pompeo – let’s use his real name – was very revealing when he ripped up the latest bit of international law which didn’t favour Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu in the Middle East. Jewish colonies in the West Bank were not against international law. “Calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law hasn’t worked,” he boasted. This was not only egregious. It was a lie.
What Pompeo meant was that this vital adherence to world law – whereby, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, occupying powers cannot plant their own citizens on occupied and stolen land – no longer suited the United States and Israel. Of course it hadn’t “worked”, because the Palestinians rigidly trusted the laws which the world accepted after the Second World War.
Occupation is a very serious matter. But, according to Pompeo, “after studying all sides [sic] of the legal debate [sic], the United States has concluded that the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se [sic yet again], inconsistent with international law”. To say otherwise “hasn’t advanced the cause of peace”.
Did US secretaries of state always lie so brazenly, so frighteningly, so mendaciously, so utterly without conscience?
True, Colin Powell told US embassies that they should delete “occupied territories” from their Middle East vocabulary. Henceforth, this pathetic ex-general announced, they were to be called “disputed territories”. It was a fabrication – he was trying to erase the very fact of the longest military occupation in modern history – and this helped to push open the door for the Pompeos and the Trumps to strip Palestinians of any hope of self-determination, dignity and human rights.
But Pompeo’s vicious argument went a step further. It was clearly not in America’s or Israel’s interest even to respond to the illegal status of the Jewish colonial project in the West Bank. The US did not, as it claimed, “study all sides” of international law – it certainly did not study the juridical side (and certainly not the Palestinian side) – nor is the law a “debate” between two sides.
Laws are not written to be abandoned by those who find them inconvenient, and by those for whom they do not “work”. And international law cannot be applied “per se”, or cease to be applied, to international conflicts when the US or Israel finds it inconvenient.
But thus Pompeo spoke. Just as Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and then declared that Washington accepted Jerusalem – and, by implication, all of Jerusalem – as the capital of Israel. Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank (or so claimed Pompeo) would be decided later. Be sure, though, that the US will go along with any Israeli annexation.
After all, did not Pompeo also inform us that the expansion of Jewish “settlements” would be decided by Israeli courts? As if Israeli courts have any further legitimacy when they decide the fate of the Palestinians, the tearing down of their homes, the theft of yet further property in the West Bank and the endless detention of hundreds of young men without trial.
Then came a Pompeo excuse from which even the chap with the moustache whose name I will not mention might have seized upon with delight. “The hard truth is that there will never be a judicial solution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace.” As we know from history – Pompeo and Trump excepted – deciding who is right and who is wrong is the only way of bringing peace, for Israel just as much as the Palestinian people.
But when you throw law out of the window, you create states without law. Hence there wasn’t a whimper out of Pompeo when the Israelis last week claimed another propaganda victory, announcing the death of a prominent Islamic Jihad official in Gaza who was allegedly (do we know?) preparing rocket attacks on Israel. Problem: the guy was not there, but those who were blown to pieces in the tin shacks included eight members of the A-Sawarkah family, including five children aged two, three and 12. Another 12 members of the family were wounded.
Israel’s own redoubtable and brave Ha’aretz correspondent Gideon Levy wrote sarcastically that “they, who serve in the most moral army and the most advanced intelligence services in the world, didn’t know that the flimsy tin shack had long since stopped being part of the ‘Islamic Jihad infrastructure’, and it’s doubtful that it ever was. They didn’t know and they didn’t bother to check – after all, what’s the worst that could happen?”
The Israelis promised the usual inquiry into their “mistake”, but many of the international media who recorded the mythical killing of an Islamic Jihad leader could not find space for the later, truthful account of the slaughter of the innocent. And that, surely, is because, when it comes to the death of Palestinian civilians, international law is forgotten as surely as Pompeo now urges us to forget the international law that forbids building on occupied and stolen land.
This signal moral failure, this deliberate and cynical denial of the law, has now spread across the Middle East region. The CIA has said that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the dismemberment of American resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi – it was, after all, his cronies who chopped Khashoggi up – yet Pompeo warmly hugs the crown prince, encouraging his hatred of Iran and all things Shia, and no longer speaks of the journalist. You can forgive even a murderous regime that includes Khashoggi’s killers if you put the law to one side; and murder – it seems difficult to remember now in the Middle East – is supposed to be a crime.
Was this not, ultimately, why the chief executive of Uber cars, Dara Khosrowshahi, was able, on HBO, to call the murder of Khashoggi a “mistake” and compared this dastardly act to the accidental death of a woman driving a self-driving car? “People make mistakes,” he said – which would certainly match Mohammed bin Salman’s claim that he was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder because he was crown prince, but not responsible because he said he did not know about it.
Apparently irrelevant to the Uber CEO’s vile words was the fact that Saudi Arabia is Uber’s fifth largest shareholder, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the recently named chair of Aramco, happens to sit on the Uber board.
At the end of the day, Khosrowshahi remembered that murder was murder and against the law and – even before his horrible interview was aired – started to bandage the wounds he had inflicted on himself and Khashoggi’s memory. Khashoggi’s murder, he now mused, was “reprehensible” and “should not be excused”. I “said something in the moment”, the Uber CEO added, “that I do not believe”.
But don’t they all? Pompeo; the Israelis who bombed the A-Sawarkah family; the Uber boss. They all forget the law, the power of law, the essentials of law, because they can live without it, can ignore it, can – in the case of the Israeli government – get away with theft or murder, or, like the Uber man, can just claim that someone else’s murder is a mistake.
Mistake: that’s the word which both the Israelis and the Uber boss used this month. And when Pompeo encourages Israel’s colonial free-for-all (free from legal accountability, that is) the result will be more despair and further deaths.
In the endless cowboy films I used to watch as a boy, sheriffs gunned down the “bad guys”, the innocent townsfolk were protected by the law and “peace” was restored to the Wild West. Today, it’s the other way round. For the moment, of course, we’ll have to forget the native Americans who really paid the price, those who refused to hand over their lands to the white men and fought back when their homes were stolen.
The US cavalry, like Michael Pompeo, didn’t care much for the law when they were busy dispossessing a native people." Robert Fisk
SYRIA :
Yesterday, Wikileaks published an e-mail, sent by a member of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to his superiors, in which he accuses his management of doctoriung Syrian chemical weapons report.
Just like I said at the time and nobody wanted to listen.
PALESTINA
THE LISTENING POST: Distract, deflect, disinform: Israel politics in spin cycle
In response, Palestinian fighters fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, injuring tens of people, forcing the closure of roads and damaging civilian property. Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu launched a transparently politically motivated attack on Gaza, which killed 34 Palestinians in two days, including eight members of the same family.
On November 18, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the US now considers Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) to be legal, in contrast to international law and consensus.
These events constitute the latest episode of assaults on the Palestinian people by the settler colonialist dynamic duo - Israel and the United States.
Statements on Twitter by Democratic candidates for president, Joe Biden and Pete Buttegieg were in line with the traditional Zionist, pro-Israel bias of their party, essentially victim-blaming Palestinians, while ignoring the true timing of events, relevant international law and basic human decency.
The responses from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were somewhat more nuanced, acknowledging Palestinian suffering, yet presenting the events within typical liberal Zionist false equivalency between the Israeli occupiers and the besieged, disenfranchised and occupied Palestinians. Warren's tweet came only 14 minutes after Sanders' and with identical talking points, suggesting the former is taking cues from the latter. Further, Warren's response was consistent with her blatantly hawkish foreign policy agenda, which has included the usual Zionist racist-expansionist narrative.
Bernie Sanders has received considerable support from prominent Palestinians. In fact, within a bi-partisan, imperialist, pro-Israel consensus, Sanders demonstrates the most favourable views on Palestine and other foreign policy issues, though his record generally conforms to interests of the American empire.
Remarkably, the Jewish American Senator from Vermont suggested US military aid should be leveraged to end abuses of Palestinians within the OPT. Further, he voiced opposition to Pompeo's recent reversal of US policy with respect to settlements in the OPT. Nevertheless, Sanders' unsustainable liberal Zionist positions are riddled with reactionary historical revisionism, as laid out in his most recent editorial, constituting a dangerous and potentially losing strategy approaching the 2020 elections.
In his op-ed and various speaking engagements, Sanders fails to acknowledge the Christian, white supremacist and settler colonialist roots of Zionism, as detailed by anti-Zionist Jews, among others. Instead, he promotes the revisionist notion that Israel was founded on progressive values and embodies Jewish "self-determination", with the Netanyahu government constituting a racist, right-wing aberration, instead of another chapter in the ongoing collaboration between Zionists and anti-Semites.
In fact, Zionists benefit from anti-Semitism to promote immigration as a means of battling the Palestinian "demographic threat", and use it to justify Israel's continued militarism, expansionism and oppression of Palestinians. Nowadays, Israel coddles up to fascistic regimes in Brazil, the US, the Philippines and Hungary while neo-Nazis find inspiration in genocidal Israeli policies and use the term "white Zionism" to describe the "alt-right" neo-fascistic movement.
Sanders echoes the Zionist propaganda fallacy which equates Zionism with Judaism and presents Jewish and Palestinian narratives of victimhood as comparable, thus directly promoting the false equivalency between the occupier and the occupied and maintaining the disgraceful unjust status quo where further settler-colonial theft and genocide by Israel is enabled. In addition, Sanders propagates the idea that Israeli occupation began in 1967, not 1948, thus erasing the continuing discrimination against Palestinians within the "Green Line" and the rights of millions of refugees who were evicted during the Nakba. Finally, he champions the apartheid-entrenching, unfeasible two-state solution instead of a moral, equal and just state for all its citizens, and does not support the non-violent, anti-racist, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, though he believes in its legitimacy as a resistance tactic.
Thus, Sanders' notions regarding the US's role as an impartial arbiter ring hollow when he adopts the very positions and rhetoric (eg "Israeli-Palestinian conflict", "Palestinian terror") of the brutal military occupier.
Donald Trump has proven remarkably resilient to attacks coming from the centrist neoliberal Democratic Party establishment and mainstream media, in spite of his relatively low popularity in the eyes of the public. His strategy, which carried him to victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, has been to demonstrate the often very real corruption and hypocrisies of his critics as a means of dispelling his own, claiming he is a victim of a "witch-hunt". Trump's fascistic narrative has served to fortify his white base while further fragmenting and scapegoating those opposed to his racist, hyper-capitalist agenda, including women, black and brown people, immigrants, Indigenous groups, Muslims, Jews, disabled people, LGBTQI, and more.
Evangelical-Christians and Jewish Zionists in the US and Israel have served as major Trump allies with two main functions. First, Republicans and their cronies have been some of Trump's strongest supporters, providing him with crucial vindication against accusations of anti-Semitic incitement, while deploying false allegations of "anti-Semitism" as reactionary political tools. Second, liberal Zionists, although claiming to be opposed to Trump's grotesque nativism, have spearheaded racist attacks on progressive critics of Israel who also constitute some of Trump's fiercest opposition, such as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. What began as a deceptive liberal Zionist campaign against her, galvanised opportunistic American Liberals to demean the progressive camp, which pressured Omar to needlessly apologise. Smelling blood, Republicans targeted Omar in an effort to further splinter their opposition.
Liberal Zionist-led smear campaigns are dependent on the equation of Zionism and Judaism, conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish sentiments. Thus, Sanders' acceptance of Israel as a "Jewish state" renders him vulnerable.
Many Americans have understandably chosen to refrain from participation in the quadra-annual election circus, which is dominated by ultra-rich and corporate interests. Former President Obama contributed to the epidemic of apathy in America, as he rode a wave of "hope and change" into the Oval Office, only to betray his promises by ingraining unchecked corporate greed, racism and war.
The increased corruption of the Democratic party, as exemplified by both Obama and Hillary Clinton, paved the way for a Trump presidency. In fact, Trump accurately predicted an "anti-establishment" rhetoric with a twist of racism would serve to inspire both reactionaries and cynics, also on Palestine.
A Sanders path to victory is dependent on inspiring disillusioned non-voters by setting himself apart from corporate-serving Democratic party candidates, and their continued support of Israel. Sanders has indeed differentiated himself by refusing to bow down to corporate interests and persisting on the left of the contemporary political spectrum. In direct opposition to Trump's strategy, which aims to demonstrate the hypocrisy and corruption of his opposition and himself as the only honest politician who can "drain the DC swamp", Sanders would be wise to continue veering left and unifying the very groups Trump has alienated, instead of staring towards the centre in an attempt to flip Republicans, a tactic that plays into Trump's hands.
Sanders wisely supported Representatives Omar (Minnesota), Tlaib (Michigan) and Ocasio-Cortez (New York) against Republican and Zionist detractors, firmly stating that criticism of Israel does not constitute anti-Semitism. However, his liberal Zionist rhetoric alienates important progressive constituencies and renders him susceptible to attacks from Zionists on the right, including Trump, who correctly identify his hypocrisy and inconsistency on this issue.
Sanders has a unique opportunity to powerfully inspire a real grassroots "political revolution" by confronting his own complicity with Zionist criminality and the bi-partisan consensus on Israel/Palestine. The courage to recognise Israel's crimes and support Palestinians in their struggle for freedom are morally consistent, left-wing, anti-establishment, anti-imperialist positions, which do not come at the expense of Israelis or Jews. Opposition to ongoing apartheid and genocide in Israel/Palestine and support for peaceful tactics such as BDS are key galvanising themes, which would set Sanders apart from other candidates.
Sanders must understand that there is no Zionism without anti-Semitism, no American exceptionalism without gross inequality and massive subjugation of the "other", no Jewish homeland without white privilege and genocide of native Palestinians, and no "political revolution" without full rights for all Palestinians.
BRASIL
BOLIVIA
In 2009 and 2010 Republicans were in a partisan tizzy over everything Barack Obama and Democratic Party, from health insurance reform to economic stimulus, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, and climate policy. The “Tea Party” rebellion arose, replete with a heavy dose of white herrenvolk racism.
But the Teapublicans offered no complaint when Obama’s Secretary of State Hilary Clinton aided and abetted a right-wing business and military coup that overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected left-populist president Manuel Zelaya in the spring of 2009. Washington’s two major parties were united in opposition to Zelaya’s alignment of Honduras with Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia in attacking poverty and inequality and redirecting Latin American regional development away from U.S. control. Democrats and Republicans agreed that the independent and egalitarian Latin American trend needed to be checked.
The Honduran coup and the Obama administration’s critical role in supporting it was just peachy keen as the GOP was concerned. Never mind that the regime-change in Honduras produced bloody repression and increased misery in that desperately poor country.
Flash forward ten years. The Obama-backed right-wing coup in Honduras helped fuel Central American migrant streams that the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump railed against during his successful and Nativist presidential campaign. “Donito Assolini” has been mired in partisan turmoil since the beginning of his cancerous, white-nationalist presidency. The two major parties and their constituents disagree sharply over whether the tiny-fingered, tangerine-tinted, Twitter-tantruming tyrant Trump should be impeached and removed for trying to trade arms to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt on the ludicrous right-wing Democratic-presidential clown-car candidate Joe Biden. Washington and the U.S. electorate are torn by fanatical partisan polarization. Nine in ten Democrats think Trump committed an impeachable offense regarding Ukraine but just 18.5% of Republicans, less than one in five, agree.
Impeachment is nearly certain in the U.S. House of Representatives since the House is controlled by Democrats. Removal is unlikely in the U.S. Senate because the upper chamber of Congress is run by Republicans, who will argue that Trump’s abuse of power does not rise to the level required for defenestration. The neofascistic “heartland” Trumpenvolk is ready to respond to removal and perhaps even to impeachment with armed attacks, encouraged by a malignantly narcissistic and authoritarian president who has “warned” of (threatened to spark) “Civil War….If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office.”
Trump’s well-documented and ham-fisted attempt to bribe and extort political assistance from Ukraine is worthy of impeachment and removal. But by focusing narrowly on Biden-Burisma-Gate, the Democrats are essentially exonerating Trump on numerous other graver, impeachment- and removal-worthy offenses including the separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border, the detention of tens of thousands of migrant children and families in for profit concentration camps, the instruction for the U.S. Border Patrol to violate the law, the breach of international asylum law, the declaration of a fake national emergency to criminally divert taxpayer funds to the building of a widely hated Nativist Wall, the acceleration of Ecocide (the biggest issue of our or any time), and – of special relevance to this essay and current events in Bolivia (see below) – the eager support Trump granted an attempted right-wing coup to overthrow the democratically elected left-populist (Chavista-socialist) Maduro government in Venezuela last Winter. Regarding the last transgression, here is a thoroughly reasonable Article of Impeachment, one of many drafted by the activist group Roots Action: “In his conduct while President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States …On the evening of January 22, 2019, following years of damaging U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, which followed an unsuccessful 2002 U.S.-supported coup attempt, Vice President Pence called Juan Guaidó and told him that the United States would support him if he were to seize power in Venezuela. The next day, January 23, Guaidó attempted to do so. That same day, President Trump issued a statement recognizing Guaidó as the President of Venezuela, despite the fact that Venezuela had an elected president and that Guaidó had no legitimate claim to the presidency. On January 24, 2019, the Trump-Pence administration attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the Organization of American States to recognize Guaidó as president…In the above and related actions and decisions, President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Michael Richard Pence…are guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.”
Sadly, it is unthinkable that the Democratic Party establishment would give a second thought to impeaching Trump for his support of a criminal right-wing putsch in Venezuela. That’s because top Democrats are on board with Republicans in believing that independent and socialist-leaning governments representing the interests of poor and working-class Latin Americans need to make way for regimes more compliant to the commands of Washington and Western financial institutions and corporations.
Few Democrats beyond a handful of progressive outliers like Bernie Sanders have had the basic human and democratic decency to denounce the vicious racist and neofascist coup that removed Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist and Indigenous president Evo Morales from power eleven days ago. Anyone with Internet access can see graphic footage of a massacre in which peaceful Indigenous protesters in Cochabamba were murdered by snipers in military helicopters defending a “transitional government” headed by an evangelical neofascist who has tweeted the following: “I dream of a Bolivia free of indigenous satanic rituals, the city is not for the Indians send them to the high plains or to the Chaco!”
True to his own racist, neofascistic, and oligarchic colors, Trump grotesquely hailed the gruesome Bolivian coup for bringing the world “one step closer to a completely free, prosperous, and democratic Western hemisphere.”
Where have the Ukraine-Russia- and impeachment-obsessed Democrats been on the Trump-backed fascist-racist Bolivian coup? Missing in action, for the most part, beyond the progressive margins occupied by Sanders et al. “Since Morales’ forced resignation,” the left commentator Jacob Sugerman notes, “the response of leading Democrats and presidential hopefuls has been one of almost total silence, even among the party’s putative progressives. Liberal Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT) chillingly tweeted that “the U.S. needs to support a civilian-led transition of power at a perilous moment. We can’t botch this like we did Venezuela.’’ A hideous statement given the fact that the United States recently backed yet another failed right-wing coup in Venezuela, as it did in 2002!
The “liberal media” hasn’t been much better. “For all the supposed threat Trump represents and the enthusiasm sparked by his possible impeachment,” Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) reports. “Western media continue to march lockstep behind his administration’s coups in Latin America. Bolivia has a new US-backed puppet leader,” FAIR notes after surveying the “liberal” U.S. and European press, “and the Western media can hardly conceal their adulation” (emphasis added). The New York Times, the Guardian, and other leading Western papers portray to the coup regime as merely “conservative,” downplaying its fascist essence and the horrific violence it is employing while purveying the coup regime’s false claim that Morales corruptly stole his re-election last October 25th.
While the major television networks have kept millions of U.S. eyeballs glued to the House Democrats’ often compelling Biden-Burisma impeachment drama (“Insane in the Ukraine”), a U.S.- backed fascist coup regime in the Americas – in Bolivia – is massacring people in plain sight with bipartisan U.S. approval. What percentage of US-Americans know about this atrocity? (probably less than 0.3%). Like so many other hideous crimes at home and abroad, the neofascist coup and repression are not considered newsworthy on US television. The Indigenous Bolivians being shot through the skull by fascist forces in military helicopters are classic examples of what Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman called “officially unworthy victims” in U.S. mass media. They are insidiously invisible to all but a few U.S.-Americans.
It is all so very neo-Cold War. While the “liberal” U.S. media and political class claims to care passionately about liberty and democracy in Eastern Europe (though never explains what right Washington has to meddle in the political and military affairs of Eastern Europe, on the historically explosive western border of nuclear-armed Russia), it couldn’t care less about freedom, democracy and social justice in its own hemisphere, where Latin Americans are expected to take direction for Washington and its allies among the most reactionary sections of the Latin American ruling class — or face bloody repression.
This is not merely a matter of bad information and oversight or distraction by impeachment. It’s about the imperialist Democratic Party’s longstanding opposition to true national independence, social justice, and democracy in Latin America (and in other “Third World” locations) since the Woodrow Wilson presidency and before. As far as Latin American independence and social justice fighters have long been concerned have long been concerned, the Democrats and Republicans are very much as Upton Sinclair described them in the original Appeal to Reason version of The Jungle: “two wings of the same bird of prey.” For all their partisan tumult in the imperial “homeland” today, Sinclair’s metaphor still fits U.S. policy towards Latin America and indeed the rest of the world – Ukraine included.
