United States president Donald Trump appears to enjoy experimenting on human beings a little bit more than Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
First came the separation of young children from their parents. In May 2018, Trump ordered the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to send all adults caught crossing the border to federal jail to await trial, while transferring their children to either foster care or detention centres. Most of these children have been kept in what are essentially cages, and some have even been given psychotropic drugs without parental consent.
The assumption is that pain, agony and suffering alter human behaviour, and that traumatising a large group of children and their parents serve to deter other people, even those fleeing life-threatening conflict zones, from trying to enter the US. The moral perspective is that the end justifies the means, even if the means include cruel and inhuman policies.
Now comes Trump's latest experiment, this time with education, medical care, and famine. Adopting warped rhetoric, this experiment is presented as part of a groundbreaking Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
The idea is to cut all funding to the United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA), which, for the past 70 years, has been providing lifesaving assistance to more than five million Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
UNRWA's spokesperson, Chris Gunness, spelled out the repercussions of such actions: "Let there be no mistake," he said, "this decision is likely to have a devastating impact on the lives of 526,000 children who receive a daily education from UNRWA; 3.5 million sick people who come to our clinics for medical care; 1.7 million food insecure people who receive assistance from us, and tens of thousands of vulnerable women, children and disabled refugees who come to us."
Indeed, if the funding gap is not covered by other countries, Trump's decision will have a devastating impact on the lives of millions of Palestinians.
This experiment seems to have two distinct - if related - goals.
First, Trump apparently wants to see if a policy of destruction and anti-humanitarian intervention can be used as a peacemaking device in this protracted conflict.
This is an inversion of parts of the Oslo paradigm, where the European Union and other international players decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on Palestinian state-building projects. Even though Oslo's goal may never have been the creation of an independent Palestinian state, Palestinian life was still considered to have some value.
As it turns out, the idea informing the 1993 peace accords was to transfer control of a number of institutions and policies - such as education, healthcare, and food security - to the Palestinians in order to free Israel from the responsibility of managing the daily lives of the population it had colonised. And, while Israel abdicated responsibility for the Palestinian people, it continued to retain its hold over most of their land.
Trump's current idea, by contrast, is to simply force a "peace process" by destroying all of the institutions that modern states use to manage their population while bringing the inhabitants to the brink of social death.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that at exactly the same moment that Trump is cutting all funding from UNRWA, he has also decided to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority. The strategy is straightforward: the Palestinians must first be reduced to what Italian political theorist Georgio Agamben has called bare life in order to force them to accept the "great deal" that President Trump intends to offer them.
The experiment's second goal is to erase Palestinian refugeehood.
It is important to remember that UNRWA was set up to assist the 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the creation of Israel in 1948. Whether these Palestinians fled or were forcibly expelled from their towns and villages may be a point of contention, but there is no argument that, after the war had subsided, Israel refused to allow the Palestinians to return to their homes, thus violating article 11 of United Nations Resolution 194. This is how Israel created the refugee problem.
Today, the descendants of these refugees number over five million people and it was always assumed that their status would be resolved through the creation of a Palestinian state. Since it is extremely unlikely that a viable Palestinian state is a component of Trump's "peace deal", the strategy now endeavours to erase the vast majority of Palestinian refugees from the historical and contemporary record.
Parroting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's revisionist accusation of "fictitious" Palestinian refugees who threaten the state of Israel by perpetuating the right of return, Trump is currently claiming that only the people born and who had actually lived in Mandatory Palestine before the 1948 war - people who are now more than 70-years old - can be considered refugees. Their descendants cannot.
The logic here, too, is clear. If the funding to the agency that feeds millions of refugees is stopped, then they will no longer be considered refugees, thus paving the way for a deal on Israel's terms. Stopping US funding, in other words, merely attempts to reinforce the deranged post-truth reality that has become Trump's trademark: in this case, that refugees are not refugees.
While, the notion that property rights can be abrogated after one generation would seem anathema in Trump's business world, actually, viciously attacking the downtrodden fits perfectly with his modus operandi. His world view is perhaps best expressed in a recent tweet posted by his ally Netanyahu: "The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong."
From Cambodia to China and all the way to Europe, the 20th century saw its share of experiments on humans, all of which had horrific consequences. Tragically, Trump is no student of history. He is trying hard to present his introduction of new experiments as the pursuit of a peace deal, but as Gideon Levy recently wrote in Ha'aretz, it is actually a declaration of war against the Palestinian people.
I doubt any actor could have done a better job than Kingsley who steals every scene, something not hard to do in a film that has not much to work with dramatically. Making a film about the abduction of Eichmann is hardly the stuff that would draw Mission Impossible fans to a theater. Even if “Operation Finale” devotes an inordinate amount of time in fleshing out the technical details in an elaborate plot to evade Argentina’s police, there is no suspense in a film that has a preordained conclusion.
Instead of being a roller-coaster ride with car chases and gunplay, it is much more of a two-character play between Malkin and Eichmann to determine whether the Mossad agent would be able to get him to sign an extradition document that was necessary to transport him to Israel for the trial. Malkin convinces his associates that the best way to get him to sign the paper was to treat him kindly rather than to torture him. The main body of the film consists of Malkin discussing Eichmann’s past with him calmly and even warmly despite his flashbacks of a sister and her children being murdered by the Nazis.
Since the film is narrowly focused on the technical details of the kidnapping and the “soft cop” tactics of Peter Malkin, you’d have to look elsewhere to put these events into historical and political context. Since my main motivation in talking about the film is to provide that context, let me share it with you.
David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel in 1960 and who appears briefly as a character (Simon Russell Beale) sending off the abductors to Argentina, gave the green light to this patently illegal violation of Argentina’s sovereignty to stave off a domestic crisis in Israel rather than to render justice for what the historian Arno Mayer called the Judeocide.
In the chapter on Eichmann in Tim Holt’s aptly titled 2017 book “Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold”, you can find an analysis that gets beneath the Zionist rhetoric. Holt begins by describing the Judeocide as something the Zionist establishment considered a problem for the Diaspora. The creation of the state of Israel meant the creation of a new kind of Jew, the muscular Sabra who was in control of his destiny and prepared to defend the land he had stolen fearlessly unlike the Jews of Eastern Europe who had gone meekly to the death camps.
To the extent that during the trial, prosecutor Gideon Hausner emphasized the rare acts of resistance to the Nazis rather than submission, singling out Zionists rather than socialists in these desperate skirmishes. In doing so, he hoped to bridge the gap between the Sabras (the invaders and conquerors of Palestine) and the Diaspora Jews. For the Judeocide to serve effectively as a rallying cry for unity between the Sabras and the survivors, it was crucial for the trial to be held in Jerusalem rather than Germany where Nazi war criminals had customarily been tried. That drove the mission to flout Argentina’s national sovereignty above all.
For General Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the kidnapping undermined the very basis for international law that the Nazi dictatorship had destroyed. In a January 22, 1961 article titled “Large Questions in the Eichmann Case”, he wrote: The victims of the Nazi “final solution of the Jewish problem,” in which Eichmann is implicated, were in the power of the Third Reich then, just as Eichmann is now in the power of Israel. If Israel as a sovereign nation is not “answerable to any external authority” for its handling of Eichmann, neither was the Third Reich (or Eichmann) for its handling of the Jews.
Taylor, who worked in several New Deal agencies in the 1930s, was unlike most members of the military brass. He was a deeply principled man who adhered to a single standard of justice. After the Nuremberg trials, he returned to private life and spoke out against Joe McCarthy in a speech at West Point in 1953, calling him a “dangerous adventurer”, branding his tactics “a vicious weapon of the extreme right against their political opponents” and criticizing president Dwight D. Eisenhower for not stopping McCarthy’s “shameful abuse of Congressional investigatory power.” In other words, he was the polar opposite of the military men Trump has made cabinet members, even if he mostly ignores what they say. Taylor also defended several victims of McCarthyism, including labor leader Harry Bridges and Junius Scales, a CP leader who I interviewed about 20 years ago and wrote about in CounterPunch three years ago.
Taylor eventually became a Columbia University law professor and one who refused to sign a statement issued by the Law School denouncing the 1968 sit-in at Low Library as beyond the “allowable limits” of civil disobedience. He attacked the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, because his superior officers were not included. He denounced the 1972 bombing of Hanoi as “senseless and immoral” and visited the city in December of that year with Joan Baez. A remarkable man in every respect.
Taylor clearly saw the direction Israel was going. Deploying various illegal methods, ranging from abduction to death squads, it has used the same rhetoric it used against its enemies—internal and external—that it used against Eichmann. The irony, of course, is that its victims were challenging the lawlessness of a state that arguably was applying the same tactics Eichmann used against the Jews.
The Palestinians have borne the brunt of Mossad and Shin Bet’s Gestapo like tactics but Israelis have suffered a little from it as well. The same kind of extra-judicial kidnapping that was used to put Eichmann on trial has subsequently been used to crush an “enemy of the state” named Mordecai Vanunu who spent 18 years in an Israeli prison (11 of them in solitary confinement) for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986.
Israel did not want to abduct him in England since that would jeopardize the close ties that had been built with Margaret Thatcher. Instead, a female Mossad agent lured him onto a boat that headed to Italy for a cruise. When he left the boat to go sightseeing in Rome, three Mossad agents overpowered him and injected him with a paralyzing drug similar to the one that made it possible to transport Eichmann from a safe house to the El Al jet awaiting the party at Buenos Aires’s airport. Vanunu was not permitted to speak to the media so instead he wrote the details of his abduction on the palm of his hands and held them up to the windows of a van transporting him to a prison so that journalists could get his story.
Scientists were able to glean from Vanunu’s data that Israel had enough plutonium to produce 150 nuclear weapons, enough to create a nuclear holocaust. If the Nazis had been capable of the industrial-scale murder of six million Jews, imagine the effect of unleashing such an arsenal.
Given Netanyahu’s threats of using a preemptive strike against Iran, conceivably using a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, the stakes are much higher than they were in the 1930s. A global WWIII using nuclear weapons could have the effect of creating a thousand Auschwitzes. In light of that, the need for international law of the kind that Telford Taylor called for is more urgent than ever. Limited wars can become unlimited very rapidly in an epoch of insane authoritarian rulers like Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu. One can understand why so many on the left worry about their resemblance to Adolf Hitler when the real worry should be about both men being supported by many people that would not flinch at the idea of them using weapons that Hitler could only dream of. Just like they Don't care about them exterminating the Palestinians.
Concluindo, a banalidade do mal que apavorava Hannah Arendt me apavora no dia a dia dos israelenses e dos palestinos. É a da pessoa "normal" que apoia ou tolera ou cala-se diante de projetos de limpeza étnica tais como de lançar bomba atômica no Iran e de exterminar os palestinos em uma agonia dolorosa e constante.
Arendt tinha razão em sua teoria provada no cotidiano de milhões de cidadãos indiferentes ao sofrimento alheio e prontos para dar um empurrãozinho em seu semelhante para que caia no precipício achando que assim livra-se da queda. Só não sabe que mais cedo ou mais tarde, o próximo será ela, ele.
O mal banal está em toda parte. Brota no egoísmo e na indiferença. O combate desta praga é difícil, mas há-se pelo menos de tentar dar consciência que defender os direitos e liberdades de outrem é defender si mesmo.
Instead of being a roller-coaster ride with car chases and gunplay, it is much more of a two-character play between Malkin and Eichmann to determine whether the Mossad agent would be able to get him to sign an extradition document that was necessary to transport him to Israel for the trial. Malkin convinces his associates that the best way to get him to sign the paper was to treat him kindly rather than to torture him. The main body of the film consists of Malkin discussing Eichmann’s past with him calmly and even warmly despite his flashbacks of a sister and her children being murdered by the Nazis.
Since the film is narrowly focused on the technical details of the kidnapping and the “soft cop” tactics of Peter Malkin, you’d have to look elsewhere to put these events into historical and political context. Since my main motivation in talking about the film is to provide that context, let me share it with you.
David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel in 1960 and who appears briefly as a character (Simon Russell Beale) sending off the abductors to Argentina, gave the green light to this patently illegal violation of Argentina’s sovereignty to stave off a domestic crisis in Israel rather than to render justice for what the historian Arno Mayer called the Judeocide.
In the chapter on Eichmann in Tim Holt’s aptly titled 2017 book “Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold”, you can find an analysis that gets beneath the Zionist rhetoric. Holt begins by describing the Judeocide as something the Zionist establishment considered a problem for the Diaspora. The creation of the state of Israel meant the creation of a new kind of Jew, the muscular Sabra who was in control of his destiny and prepared to defend the land he had stolen fearlessly unlike the Jews of Eastern Europe who had gone meekly to the death camps.
To the extent that during the trial, prosecutor Gideon Hausner emphasized the rare acts of resistance to the Nazis rather than submission, singling out Zionists rather than socialists in these desperate skirmishes. In doing so, he hoped to bridge the gap between the Sabras (the invaders and conquerors of Palestine) and the Diaspora Jews. For the Judeocide to serve effectively as a rallying cry for unity between the Sabras and the survivors, it was crucial for the trial to be held in Jerusalem rather than Germany where Nazi war criminals had customarily been tried. That drove the mission to flout Argentina’s national sovereignty above all.
For General Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the kidnapping undermined the very basis for international law that the Nazi dictatorship had destroyed. In a January 22, 1961 article titled “Large Questions in the Eichmann Case”, he wrote: The victims of the Nazi “final solution of the Jewish problem,” in which Eichmann is implicated, were in the power of the Third Reich then, just as Eichmann is now in the power of Israel. If Israel as a sovereign nation is not “answerable to any external authority” for its handling of Eichmann, neither was the Third Reich (or Eichmann) for its handling of the Jews.
Taylor, who worked in several New Deal agencies in the 1930s, was unlike most members of the military brass. He was a deeply principled man who adhered to a single standard of justice. After the Nuremberg trials, he returned to private life and spoke out against Joe McCarthy in a speech at West Point in 1953, calling him a “dangerous adventurer”, branding his tactics “a vicious weapon of the extreme right against their political opponents” and criticizing president Dwight D. Eisenhower for not stopping McCarthy’s “shameful abuse of Congressional investigatory power.” In other words, he was the polar opposite of the military men Trump has made cabinet members, even if he mostly ignores what they say. Taylor also defended several victims of McCarthyism, including labor leader Harry Bridges and Junius Scales, a CP leader who I interviewed about 20 years ago and wrote about in CounterPunch three years ago.
Taylor eventually became a Columbia University law professor and one who refused to sign a statement issued by the Law School denouncing the 1968 sit-in at Low Library as beyond the “allowable limits” of civil disobedience. He attacked the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, because his superior officers were not included. He denounced the 1972 bombing of Hanoi as “senseless and immoral” and visited the city in December of that year with Joan Baez. A remarkable man in every respect.
Taylor clearly saw the direction Israel was going. Deploying various illegal methods, ranging from abduction to death squads, it has used the same rhetoric it used against its enemies—internal and external—that it used against Eichmann. The irony, of course, is that its victims were challenging the lawlessness of a state that arguably was applying the same tactics Eichmann used against the Jews.
The Palestinians have borne the brunt of Mossad and Shin Bet’s Gestapo like tactics but Israelis have suffered a little from it as well. The same kind of extra-judicial kidnapping that was used to put Eichmann on trial has subsequently been used to crush an “enemy of the state” named Mordecai Vanunu who spent 18 years in an Israeli prison (11 of them in solitary confinement) for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986.
Israel did not want to abduct him in England since that would jeopardize the close ties that had been built with Margaret Thatcher. Instead, a female Mossad agent lured him onto a boat that headed to Italy for a cruise. When he left the boat to go sightseeing in Rome, three Mossad agents overpowered him and injected him with a paralyzing drug similar to the one that made it possible to transport Eichmann from a safe house to the El Al jet awaiting the party at Buenos Aires’s airport. Vanunu was not permitted to speak to the media so instead he wrote the details of his abduction on the palm of his hands and held them up to the windows of a van transporting him to a prison so that journalists could get his story.
Scientists were able to glean from Vanunu’s data that Israel had enough plutonium to produce 150 nuclear weapons, enough to create a nuclear holocaust. If the Nazis had been capable of the industrial-scale murder of six million Jews, imagine the effect of unleashing such an arsenal.
Given Netanyahu’s threats of using a preemptive strike against Iran, conceivably using a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, the stakes are much higher than they were in the 1930s. A global WWIII using nuclear weapons could have the effect of creating a thousand Auschwitzes. In light of that, the need for international law of the kind that Telford Taylor called for is more urgent than ever. Limited wars can become unlimited very rapidly in an epoch of insane authoritarian rulers like Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu. One can understand why so many on the left worry about their resemblance to Adolf Hitler when the real worry should be about both men being supported by many people that would not flinch at the idea of them using weapons that Hitler could only dream of. Just like they Don't care about them exterminating the Palestinians.
Arendt tinha razão em sua teoria provada no cotidiano de milhões de cidadãos indiferentes ao sofrimento alheio e prontos para dar um empurrãozinho em seu semelhante para que caia no precipício achando que assim livra-se da queda. Só não sabe que mais cedo ou mais tarde, o próximo será ela, ele.
O mal banal está em toda parte. Brota no egoísmo e na indiferença. O combate desta praga é difícil, mas há-se pelo menos de tentar dar consciência que defender os direitos e liberdades de outrem é defender si mesmo.
PALESTINA
Renowned scientists urge cientific Community to consider the facts before engaging in activities with Israeli colonial-based Ariel University, and not engage any attemps to use science to normalise Israel(s occupation of the Palestinian territory. Check it out here.
Apartheid Adventures
#StopTheWar is a hashtag coming from many activists in #Gaza who urge the international community to hinder Israel’s attempts to launch another large-scale aggression against the occupied, blockaded, unlivable, and exhausted Gaza Strip. #GazaUnderAttack
The people of Gaza have been subjected to decades of expulsion, occupation, siege and massacre. They have now seized control of their Fate. They are risking life and limb as they protest nonviolently to reclaim their basic rights. It takes just one minute to send a video showing your support for Gaza in its moment of truth. Do it now! Send your videos to METOOGAZA.COM
Labor Party Inside Story: Does anti-Israel mean anti-Semitism?
Just to set the records straight: Zionism is by nature racism; its foundation is the idea that one ethnica group is more deserving of what belongs to (other) people of another.
Zionism is also antisemitic, in proposing that all Jews share the same mindset, ideology, and politics, while benefitting from anti-Jew hate.
Zionism is also antisemitic, in proposing that all Jews share the same mindset, ideology, and politics, while benefitting from anti-Jew hate.
BRASIL
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