An Occupier's Peace or a Just Peace - Shir Hever on RAI

The decades-old conflict in Middle East, between Israel & Palestine, won't end so easily, as the Global West perceives it to be, because a "just peace" have to be brought in for everyone living there. In a society, where there's "just peace," people need to have equal rights & obligations.

The current conflict will continue on until the occupying force, Israel, only wants peace on its terms, & of course, the conflict itself is helping to line the pockets of influential people in Israel & around the world. Political & military elites, & esp. the conservatives in North America & Europe want this conflict to continue on because they are profiting from it immensely. Of course, the average joe in Israel & the occupied territories of Palestine merely wants peace where everyone has equal rights.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWYeWeoQ-uQ

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So if you're going to talk about what the future might look like, what a peace, if possible, might look like, you've first got to talk about, well, who actually wants peace, and on what basis do they want peace? ... There are a few people in Israel who are doing extremely well out of the current situation. There's a stratum of multimillionaires and billionaires, a political stratum. I mean, why would they want anything other than what they got?

SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: I think the vast majority of the Israeli public wants peace. But a famous German military thinker, Clausewitz, has once said the occupier always wants peace. Peace means the status quo. That's why Palestinians don't call for peace, they call for a just peace. And that's also why the Israeli peace movement has collapsed because the peace movement had this kind of idea that if Palestinians would be offered peace, they would just accept that the current situation will continue. And, of course, that's a completely false premise.

But there are, of course, people in Israel who do have an incentive to end the occupation and to end the injustice. A lot of Israelis are suffering because of the massive cost of security that is needed to repress the Palestinians. I would say the majority of Israelis are losing in their standard of living because of this continued repression of Palestinians, because of the continued conflict. So they have a real interest even in a just peace, but their voices are not heard and they cannot be heard within this kind of colonial system, which is dominated by those elites who are actually profiting.

JAY: So talk a bit about the elites because it's a very small group that own the dominating, commanding heights of the Israeli economy.

HEVER: Yeah. And I would say the major forces that push Israel in this direction of continued conflict and continued occupation are actually outside of Israel. These are the forces--the U.S. government and right-wing groups within the U.S.--that fund the most extremist and violent political movements inside Israel. Sheldon Adelson in the U.S. has opened up a free newspaper in Israel in order to make sure that Netanyahu keeps winning the elections with a massive investment that no one on the other side can match. So that sort of support makes sure that the hawks continue to dominate the political structure.

Sure, there are also Israeli security companies and military companies that are very powerful and very influential. In fact, there was a meeting in 2011 of 80 of Israel's biggest capitalists but not from the security sector, which said, if Israel will continue on this path, we're going to get to the situation of South Africa, we're going to be boycotted by the world, we have to do something. They had this emergency meeting. But they couldn't actually do something. It shows that even capital has its limits. They couldn't find a way to convince the government to act differently because there's just no historical precedent for that. There is no historical precedent of a colonial power which just stops in its tracks and says, this is wrong, we should allow these people freedom and equality.

JAY: Would you say if outside of the security-military-industrial complex, if you will, the rest of the majority of big capital would actually like to see a resolution of this?

HEVER: Yes, yes. And they've tried a couple times to fund their own candidates for prime minister and spent a lot of money on that. The public didn't vote for these candidates. The public wants a strong leader that can say--a sort of security person who can say--I will be a representative of your national pride, I will make sure Israel is safe, I will fight Iran, and so on. And when somebody says, if we end the occupation it's actually good for the economy, this sort of argument doesn't get--.

JAY: But if their heart was really in it--and they being these other big capitalists--I mean, they could match Sheldon Adleson and they could have their own TV stations and their own newspapers. I mean, they could really go at it. Is their heart really in it? They're doing so well the way things are.

HEVER: I think they estimate that if they do that, people will not see that, won't watch that television or will not read the newspaper. And they're right because people don't like to read that they're in the wrong, and that things have to change, and that political power has to be shared. They don't want to read that.

JAY: Alright. ... what is a model that if you could even think ten, twenty, thirty years out, if you were going to try to create a model that would be, one, sellable, not just just. I mean, you can imagine a just model, which is pretty straightforward. It's a Democratic, single secular state and everybody gets to vote and it's a modern country. But right now that's not a sellable proposition. So some people have talked a possible federated state, where you have a province or a state within a Federation which is primarily Jewish. Hebrew would be the language. You would have another one, another state, which is primarily--Arabic is the primary language, and so on, or some configuration. You must have thought about this. What might be possible?

HEVER: It's not only that I've thought about it, that this is also almost an obsession, but not just for me, but for political activists, for leftists for years.

But I want to answer you in two parts. The first part, I have to say, again I have to be very sensitive to my own position of privilege. Being an Israeli Jew and saying well, this is the solution is not going to work, and it shouldn't be, it shouldn't work. Palestinians should not get their solution from some Israeli. They have to come up with their own platform for political change. And therefore, I have to be very careful in how I answer that sort of question.

Having said that, let me tell you what voices I hear from my Palestinian friends about what they're saying. And among these voices, you can hear a lot of those ideas of a federation, a confederation, two separate states, three separate states, one democratic state, joining with Egypt. You can hear a lot of interesting ideas. But the voice that comes out the clearest in the last few years is the voice that says, we don't care about that. All of these ideas are legal demarcations, are some kind of--where you put the border here or there. That's not important. The important thing is to talk about rights, talk about how we have the right to move wherever we want, to say whatever we want, to have a government that represents us, to organize, to practice our religion, to trade freely. That's what it means to be free. And then it doesn't matter so much exactly how many borders you're going to stretch across this territory. If we're practical about it, historically Palestine is a country that was divided by the UN, but in fact there has never been a Palestinian state there. There's always been one powerful force of Israel and some areas that were temporarily held by Egypt and Jordan, and then Israel occupied these parts as well. Now we have a situation in which there's one state under Israeli domination with a population of 12 million: 49% Jews, 49% Palestinians, 2% others. And it's an apartheid state.
...

JAY: What I'm getting at, ... if there's going to be rights, there's going to have to be at some point some kind of buy-in by enough Israeli Jews to go along with this, I mean, unless you think there's going to be some military defeat of the Israeli state, and it's hard to imagine that right now. Even if the American policy was to significantly shift, you still have a mass of Jewish-Israeli public opinion that is where it is. I mean, it's in not a very good place. There's got to be some kind of understanding of how that's going to be dealt with to create a model that's at least the next step.

HEVER: There's this famous British general that once said in Zimbabwe, whatever happens, we have machine guns and they don't. And they lost. So the military defeat is not so unimaginable, but, of course, it'll be further down the road. It's not going to be in the next few years.

I think the fact is that a Jewish state is not sustainable. It's a concept that doesn't fit the 21st century. It barely fits into the 20th century. It's a racist idea.
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JAY: Well, I was about to get to that, 'cause then you get to the campaign for boycotting, disinvestment, and sanctions. It's clearly having some influence. It's hurting the Israeli economy. If it was stronger, it could precipitate more self-interest in some kind of change in Israel. But don't you then still have to have--okay, then what does that look like? 'Cause if you get to a point of real rights the way you're talking about, this can't be a Jewish state anymore.

HEVER: Exactly. Yeah. It cannot be a Jewish state. It's going to be--I mean, even if there will be a separate Palestinian state according to what we call the two-state solution, then the battle will continue. The struggle for equal rights in Israel will continue, because Israel cannot be a Jewish state; it has to be a state for all its citizens, one way or another. And the way that this defeat comes, it comes very suddenly. And, of course, the model is South Africa, where one week before apartheid collapsed, 90% of white people in South Africa supported apartheid. One week after apartheid collapsed, they all say we were always against it. And the Israeli minister of justice, Tzipi Livni, just said a couple of weeks ago, in response to the BDS movement, she said, I went to South Africa and spoke to some Jewish people there about their experiences from this era of the fall of apartheid, and the main thing they told me is it came unexpectedly, it came suddenly. There is a moment in which you lose courage, you lose your faith that you can continue to repress other people forever. And that moment may not be as far as we believe. I'm hopeful.
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Bombs, War Crimes & Our Diminished Sensitivity

A great opinion piece on how bombing & killing innocent civilians, at the push of a button, has become just a video game for the strong & "civilized" nations.

2 Hague Conventions banned the senseless aerial bombing of civilians but the fine print was that these bombings were banned during the wars between "civilized nations." Since, the Global West has always considered itself "civilized," aerial bombing of civilians was never banned during wars when an "uncivilized" country needs to be taught a lesson.

Although, today's world has several different kinds of international institutions, beside the UN, where, countries are supposedly on an equal footing, but when it comes to politics, wars, & the ensuing value of human lives, there is still a huge divide between the strong Global West / North & Global East / South. The Global West / North still consider itself "civilized" & above any international law, whatsoever, whereas, the Global East / South has to be policed & berated like a little naughty baby.

Most of the general public in the Global West has a diminished sensitivity towards illegitimate wars & chaos their countries are creating in other countries. News of innocent civilians being killed for no reason than just being alive either don't make to the Western news media or if they do, the public just brushes it away like some kind of unwanted annoyance. There was a time when huge protests were organized in the streets of American streets against the Vietnam war, but when American drones are easily killing innocent civilians in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc., the public is all fine & dandy with it.

Ironically, as the emir of Afghanistan implied, so-called "civilized" nations have not only mastered the art of killing innocent civilians for no reasons, whatsoever, they have also lost any sensitivity or guilt towards falsely creating wars & then killing people in other countries. In the West, when someone kills someone else without any remorse, he / she is labelled a psychopath. But when hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are killed by a "civilized" nation, it's all in the name of peace & justice. Prosecution of war crimes are never done against them & everyone goes on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Then, the Western public wonders why the people of "uncivilized" nations hate us? They don't hate you. They hate the double standards of international bodies like UN. They hate double sensitivities of the general public. They hate how the value of an Iraqi life is far less than a French one, for instance. The general public cries a river if a few die in the West, but a thousand killed in the East don't even register a small tear.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/10/bombs-war-crimes-diminished-sensitivity-151013101634047.html

On April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso read the front-page headlines in L'Humanite: "One thousand incendiary bombs dropped by Hitler and Mussolini's planes reduce the city of Guernica to ashes. An incalculable number of dead and wounded. For how long can the world tolerate the terrifying exploits of international fascism?"

Though generally not much affected by political events, Picasso was devastated by the aerial bombing of civilians in his native country & immediately began to work on an enormous painting of protest & memorial. Executed in the same black-and-white as the harrowing newspaper pictures, Guernica was immediately adopted as both emblem & fund-raiser for international anti-Franco activism.

In the ensuing decades, it became so iconic an image of the horrors of war that a tapestry facsimile was placed in the lobby of the United Nations. In 2003, when Colin Powell went to the UN to present the US' case for military intervention in Iraq, this tapestry was covered with a blue curtain. As the New York Times commented at the time, "Mr Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children …"

Picasso's masterpiece emerged from his epoch's general repugnance towards aerial bombing (in the streets, one million Parisians protested the Guernica bombing while he was painting inside), a now-diminished feeling that we would do well to revive.

Last resort

As HG Wells' 1908 novel, War in the Air, showed, it was not civilian air travel that people envisioned in the wake of the Wright brothers' early successes, but bombs. And, as was immediately recognised, the dominance of the skies by "air navies" would herald a different kind of warfare. Forget those soldierly qualities celebrated since Homer - courage, valour, chivalry & the like; in the future, you could defeat a people without emotion & without danger to yourself. Even generals demurred at a prospect both so brutal & so cowardly, & aerial bombing of civilian targets was banned by both Hague Conventions in 1899 & 1907.

But the Hague Conventions only governed the conduct of war between "civilised nations", which implied that such crude tactics could be used against those deemed neither "civilised" nor "nations". Therefore, naturally, there were experiments in Europe's empires. In 1920, Britain & France used bombs to terrorise civilians rebelling against their newly-installed regimes in Iraq & Syria, respectively. Britain also dropped bombs on civilians in Afghanistan, whose emir articulated the paradox that has obtained ever since: "It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act … while now we see with our own eyes that such operations are ... prevalent among civilised people of the West."

Western assumptions about which populations may be targeted with aerial bombardment have remained intact - & no one should be surprised if those populations have stored up a diabolical picture of the West over the course of the intervening century.

What has not remained intact is the basic repugnance towards aerial bombing which made it, even in the old empires, an unpopular last resort. Today, aerial bombing fails to generate the outrage that Guernica did, despite its inordinately more destructive effects. Of course, this is partly because the West now feels it will not itself be the target, which was not the case in the 1930s. But it is also because the great internationalist enterprise of which the Hague Conventions were a part - which included making war less brutal, &, if possible, ending it - has fallen into cynical disrepair, & one of the results is the diminished sensitivities of our era.

The Palace of Nations in Geneva ... is a relic of that enterprise, which sought a new and better world. Visionaries from every continent were united in the feeling that what must replace Europe's empires was some form of inter-national "society of societies": Just as in modern nations, free citizens freely congregated to resolve social disputes & determine their joint future, so in the "society of societies", free nations would do the same. Arbitration would replace war; the sphere of politics would be the world.

In an era threatened by total war, this vision captivated generations of idealists, including such disparate figures as Andrew Carnegie and HG Wells. It resulted in an impressive furniture of international laws, conventions & institutions, some of which still operate today. But it was severely damaged by the Cold War when both the US & the Soviet Union undermined international bodies so they could transform the world in their own interests. Since then, the US & its allies have pursued aggressive private policies on the global stage whose relationship with any residual idea of the international "community" is well expressed by that blue curtain across Guernica. Russia is now returning to a similarly extralegal role.

The envisioned "society" of societies has become instead a gangland, & one where there is no trace of the "democracy" that is its frequent war cry. The attack on the MSF hospital on October 3 is just another example of how battered the old civilising project, a key part of which was the inviolability of medical personnel in war zones, is.

Prosecuting war crimes

As far back as 1864, when a Swiss millionaire who had earlier witnessed the carnage of the Battle of Solferino established in Geneva an international medical force to care for the victims of war, regardless of their nationality, the red cross on the doctors' flag was a guarantee of immunity from attack. The Geneva Convention, at which the new organisation was announced, stated, "Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognised as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick." This provision was updated & expanded in the Hague Conventions & - during that last burst of internationalism before the Cold War - in the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Despite everything, the legal situation has not been diluted since. Any wartime belligerent knowingly attacking neutral medical staff & facilities without notifying them in advance is guilty of a war crime. ...

Our present world crisis is, in great part, a result of the assault over the last seventy years on the ideals & infrastructure designed between 1850 & 1950 to ensure world peace. It may be too late to rebuild them, but we do not have a better hope. The vision of a consensual internationalism built on parliamentary & judicial process remains the only way to restore to global affairs the kind of legitimacy that might give young people in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a feeling that the world is not entirely lawless & senseless - & it does not need to be burned down. And the starting point of such a "society of societies" must be that the strong - as in any society worth the name - be bound by the same rules as the weak.

An apocryphal story goes like this: Pablo Picasso, living in Nazi-occupied Paris, had his studio searched by the Gestapo. Coming across a reproduction of Guernica, a German officer asked the artist, "Did you do this?" "No," replied Picasso. "You did."

One wonders how such a conversation would go today.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist based in Delhi. He is the author of Capital: The Eruption of Delhi.

Israel, World Capital of Homeland Security Industries - Shir Hever on RAI

Some great insights into how Israeli defence industry are flourishing by exporting high-tech military equipment to developing countries. Israeli economy is becoming increasingly dependent on its defence industry. Since, defence industry is so important for Israeli economy, the elusive peace process between Israel & Palestine will always remain elusive. As Shir Hever says in the end that why would you want peace in the Middle East, when the occupation & war is bringing in cold, hard cash in the country.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0dyHMVMh0s

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... a lot of your work has been about the Israeli security state. I guess one of the things that doesn't get talked about enough ... is how much money gets made out of the security needs of Israel or the perceived security needs of Israel. Talk about how important all that is to the Israeli economy, particularly the Israeli elite.

SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: There was a sort of wave shape in the amount of dependency of Israel on the security economy and the military economy. During the Cold War years, especially in the '80s, there was a peak in massive investment in security and exports, and the Israeli industrial force was over 20% working for the military industry one way or another. Then that collapsed, especially during the '90s. There's a big shift to different sectors. Many of these big companies underwent a very severe crisis.

JAY: Why?

HEVER: Because the end of the Cold War meant lower demands. There was no investment in high-tech industry. There was also a deep social change in Israel with immigrants coming from the former Soviet Union which started to integrate into different sectors of the Israeli economy, mainly the high-tech sector, which was growing very fast. And so that meant that Israel was demilitarizing in many ways. And there was also this kind of hope that because of the Oslo negotiations there would be an end of the occupation. So international corporations started to invest in the Israeli economy in the belief or in the hope that it will become less militarized and the consumer economy would flourish.

All that was actually proven to be false, and starting from the year 2000, with the Second Intifada of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, and even more after September 11, 2001, in the United States, there was a surge of the Israeli military industry again. And it's not the majority of the Israeli economy. It's not the biggest sector in Israel. But, nevertheless, there is no country in the world in which security plays such an important role as it is in Israel.

JAY: Now, before we get into the domestic situation, let's talk about how important security is as an Israeli export, and also the politics, 'cause it's interesting who they export to.

HEVER: Yeah, this is something that--Israel always played a very interesting role in the global arms trade, because there were some attempts by the Israeli military companies to compete with the U.S. military companies, which were crushed in the bud very quickly. And that shows exactly the moment in which U.S. support for Israel stops. Whenever an Israeli military company tries to sell something to China which has some U.S. technology in it or tries to compete with a U.S. company over producing a fighter plane, for example, that's the end of U.S.-Israeli alliance right there.

So Israeli companies evolved into targeting themselves as a sort of complementary to the U.S. military industry. The U.S. is the biggest arms exporter in the world by far, but Israel is the highest per capita arms exporter in the world. And while the U.S. specializes in big combat platforms (fighter planes, bombers, warships, helicopters, and so on, tanks), Israel is selling a lot of components that go with these platforms. So if you already got the F-16 from the U.S., you can buy special missiles, navigation systems, communications systems from Israeli companies that go with your F-16.

JAY: And if you go back historically, sometimes Israel would sell and could sell things to regimes even the Americans couldn't openly sell arms to.

HEVER: Yeah. And whenever you make a sort of comparison of which are the biggest arms exporter in the world, Israel is not very high--well, it's high compared to its size, but it's never in the top five. But when you ask which countries are selling to developing economies or to those tertiary markets, then Israel is quite high on the list.

JAY: And it included the South African apartheid regime, Columbia, Honduras, and it goes on and on.

HEVER: Yeah. So if we're talking about the '60s, '70s, '80s, Israel sold weapons to Rhodesia, which also had an apartheid regime; to South Africa, breaking the embargo very blatantly; to Guatemala during the civil wars; to Chile under Pinochet. Those countries which found it very difficult to convince the more mainstream weapon companies to sell them arms could always go to Israel.

JAY: And why--I mean, Israel's always trying to present itself as a democratic country. They're very interested in making sure that American--American Jews, particularly--support, send money to Israel. They never seem concerned. I mean, most American Jews are left-of-center, progressive in one way or the other, some of which except when it comes to Israel, but certainly when it came to South Africa and Chile and things like that. But they never seem to care about that, the Israeli governments.

HEVER: Well, sometimes it's because they do that in coordination with the U.S. government. Like, for example, in the Iran-Iraq War, where there was weapons being sold to both sides of the same time, then Israel was selling to Iran and the U.S. selling to Iraq, and it was coordinated. So in that case they're working with the U.S.

But also there was a sort of debate within Israel about how the arms industry is a strategic asset and who should they export to. And the question is: can the Israeli military grow stronger by this revenue that comes from exporting those kind of systems that are being developed for the Israeli army? Maybe those systems that are becoming a bit obsolete and outdated, we can sell them, use the money to develop something new.

And there was a worry in Israel after the occupation of 1967, because France, which was the biggest supplier of arms to Israel at the time, said they're going to embargo weapons sales to Israel unless Israel withdraws from the occupied territory.

JAY: What year was that?

HEVER: 1967. And the Israeli government was worried there's going to be an embargo. And at that point they said, we have to develop everything ourselves; we have to have a very strong military industry so that we can make our own tanks, our own cannons, and so on. They didn't know that they were actually going to be rewarded for the occupation and that France, which sold some weapons to Israel, is going to be replaced by a much bigger supplier in 1973, six years after the occupation, the United States. So they already made that strategic decision: they're going to reach out to new markets to try to sell Israeli weapon technology wherever they can.

But I think what we see in the last decade or so, especially after September 11, is that Israel has kind of shifted their target audience. It's not that they're looking for those countries that are under embargo to sell them the Israeli submachine guns. The famous submachine gun the uzi is no longer produced in Israel, actually. It's now made in China. But actually they were going to sell to those areas in which there is extreme inequality, extreme social resentment, to the governments, in order to repress that kind of uprising.

So, actually, Israel is now the world capital of homeland security industries. They're selling security cameras, surveillance equipments, drones, riot gear. That is the sort of technology that governments need in order to control their citizens. And it comes not just with the actual technology; it comes also with an ideology. It comes with the ideology that, look what Israel is doing, how Israel is controlling Palestinians and every aspect of their lives, and decides who can pass and who gets a permit and so on, and uses this technology to leave Palestinians no option to resist, and why don't we sell that to other governments around the world. For example, Brazil bought a lot of that technology in order to repress the favelas in preparation for the World Cup. We see that in India, not just in the area of Kashmir, but mainly there along the border with Pakistan, and in East Europe. And we also see that with extreme-right governments, like Berlusconi in Italy that was worried about asylum-seekers coming from Africa, and using Israeli drones and Israeli technology to try to block that, but also not just buying the technology, but also buying the legitimacy, saying Israel is a wonderful country. Berlusconi was a big pro-Israeli spokesman. And if Israel is allowed to do it, we can do it too.

JAY: And part of what the Israeli model for their sales, I guess, says to these regimes is you don't have to be worried about an uprising someday; you can repress people for decades and decades. Just look at us.

HEVER: Yeah. It's a very cynical worldview. It brings to mind 1984, that you can just use brute force to repress resistance.

I think there is a limit to how much it can work. And there's also a limit to understanding of how you can use it and where. Now that we're watching what's happening in the Ukraine, it brings to mind what happened in Georgia in 2008, in which a failed Israeli general, Gal Hirsch, who actually did terribly in the war against Lebanon of 2006, formed his own security company, went to Georgia, and talked to the government about selling them Israeli equipment. And the Georgian government believed, because of this prestige of the Israeli army, their equipment would be able to stop the Russian army. Now, we know what happened in the end in 2008. They were immediately defeated. So it actually goes to show that the Israeli army has completely lost its preparation and its technologies that were designed to fight other armies. The Israeli army hasn't engaged in a conventional war for 40 years. They're now completely concentrated on fighting civilians and repressing them.

JAY: And at the cutting edge. You mentioned drones and surveillance equipment. I saw ... Netanyahu was in California and made a deal with Jerry Brown to make deals with Silicon Valley, and cyber security is one of the things they want to work on. There's a lot of integration or interpenetration between American capital and American security, intelligence, and Silicon Valley with Israel's intellectual capacity, money, and security industry. And they have their political representatives, too.

HEVER: Yeah. But I think it's falling apart, because the Israeli high-tech industry has grown, like I said, in the '90s very rapidly. But it grew where many of these companies, their dream was to be bought by a U.S. company and then they can leave. A lot of the very talented Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs found themselves very happily moving to other countries. And then, between 2000 and 2008, there were eight years--so, after the crash of the NASDAQ of 2000 and until 2008, the next economic crisis, the average increase in value of Israeli high-tech companies was zero percent over eight years. During that time--that's because a lot of those companies collapsed and lost everything. And those who survived were mainly tied to the security apparatus, and their biggest customer is the Israeli army.
...

JAY: ...if this is an increasingly big sector of the Israeli economy, ... the interests of this sector certainly are not to have a peace agreement. How much does that influence politics?

HEVER: Well, it's not easy to show how that influences directly. You don't really see how that lobby works. But you can see that Israel's former prime minister and former minister of defense, Ehud Barak, he has done many political mistakes in the last couple of years, and it seemed that he is not going to be able to get into the government again. So he said, I'm now going to do what I actually like to do best: I am going to the private sector. And then it becomes apparent that he has many friends who own these security companies, and he can open doors for them, and he can get a lot of money from them. So, obviously, these security companies' business model is built on the occupation. These are companies that their motto when they go to arms trade shows and show their equipment, they say, this has already been tested by the Israeli army on actual people. You can only have that because of the occupation. So every new weapon is first sold to the Israeli army, shot at Palestinians. Then you can sell it.

JAY: Yeah, and they probably have nice little sales videos showing how this all works.

HEVER: Of course. Yeah. After this invasion of Gaza that we were talking about, there was a trade show that the Israeli army did where they showed how each and every of these new inventions were used in the attack on Gaza, completely shamelessly.

JAY: So the attacks become demos.

HEVER: The attacks become demos, and these companies make a profit out of it, and then these companies are hiring senior Israeli officials. I don't think that means that they want to end the peace process or sabotage the peace process; it means they want to continue it forever, because as long as it continues, they can continue these periodic attacks and they can continue the occupation.

JAY: Yeah, 'cause the peace process is a process of never come to an agreement about peace.

Criminal Minds, S1E19 Quote

Go Home, Yankee

No one has designated US as the world's sheriff / policeman, but it insists to be one. Poverty & economic injustice is rife at home but apparently, over a $100 billion are used every year to keep 150,000 troops stationed abroad in 800 bases in 70 countries around the world. Can there be any other country which is a bigger occupier of foreign lands & become an occupier by force?

Most troops / soldiers in that 150,000 count just joined the military to travel, partying & be with foreign women & men (why would soldiers, stationed in Germany, be not happy with an anti-prostitution charge in the US Military Code of Conduct; after all, it's for protecting the women, which is supposed to be all about "feminism" & curbing sexual degradation of women). After all, what's the point of 38,000 troops in Germany for the past 70 years or so. These young men & women merely want to get out of their small towns, get a free education in the military (essentially, get brainwashed to kill the other guy because the other guy is always a "terrorist") & party. A few unfortunate end up fighting in volatile regions or drummed up wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc.

Another point in the article which astonished me was that brothels were deliberately set up for American troops & remained legal in Okinawa, Japan until 1972, 14 years after they were banned in the rest of Japan. That's the value American military & soldiers, who are supposed to be carrying the flags of liberty, equality, feminism, democracy etc to other countries, place on women's dignity. As long as it's American, British, Canadian women, equal rights & justice become the word du jour. But as soon as its Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Iraqi, Egyptian, or woman of any other nation, all that talk of equal rights for women & their dignity merely become words without any substance or meaning.

As usual, the Americans are best in teaching the world one thing & one thing only; how to be the greatest manipulator, liar, & hypocrite in the world. Say one thing & do another !!!

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http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21704817-presence-american-troops-foreign-soil-growing-more-controversial-go-home

At the end of July the United States army announced plans to hand back 15 square miles (40 square km) of land on Okinawa to the Japanese government. This will be the biggest land return in the island, home to almost 30,000 American troops, since the United States’ formal occupation ended in 1972. The decision follows the rape & murder of a local woman & big anti-American protests in June.

Opposition to American bases has increased recently in Turkey, too. In the wake of July’s failed military coup, many Turks have accused American soldiers on the Incirlik air base of being among the plotters. Three days after the coup Yusuf Kaplan, a pro-government journalist, tweeted: “USA, You know you are the biggest terrorist! We Know All the Coups are your work! We are not stupid! #procoupUSAgohome.”

America has more overseas military bases than any other nation: nearly 800 spread through more than 70 countries. Of the roughly 150,000 troops stationed abroad, 49,000 are in Japan, 28,000 in South Korea & 38,000 in Germany; the total cost to the American government, with war zones excluded, is up to $100 billion a year. For much of the 20th century, overseas military facilities were justified as a bulwark against the Soviet threat; as that faded, other reasons to stay soon emerged. Since the 1990s, wars in the Middle East have meant that countries such as Bahrain & Turkey have gained strategic importance. (American strikes on Islamic State (IS) are launched from the Incirlik base.) More recently, China’s growing naval power has prompted America to reinforce its presence in the Pacific.

Home support for foreign bases peaked a year after the September 11th attacks, when 48% of Americans thought projecting military might was the best way to reduce the terrorist threat. Today, although about the same number still believe that, 47% think it creates hatred & leads to more terrorism. (The divide falls along partisan lines, with 70% of Republicans supporting military force, & 65% of Democrats opposing.) When it comes to overseas bases themselves, though, Americans, for the most part, are “completely unaware” of them, says David Vine, associate professor of anthropology at the American University & author of “Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World”. If they consider them at all, he says, “most people would think the US military is good so US bases, wherever they are, must be a good thing”. During the presidential primaries Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, questioned the need for, & the expense of, so many overseas bases. No other candidate did.

False assumptions about the costs of funding America’s overseas military presence could, in part, explain the public’s ambivalence. According to Mr Vine, even “so-called experts within the military” believe the bases do not cost America much because foreign governments foot a large part of the bill.
In reality, he explains (& according to an estimate by the RAND Corporation in 2013), keeping members of the armed forces overseas, rather than within the United States, costs between $10,000 & $40,000 extra for every man & woman involved.

Within the armed forces, an overseas posting is still seen by many as a perk of the job & one of the main reasons to sign up in the first place. “For maybe 75% of the people I talk to, travelling is the biggest thing that gets them,” says Staff Sergeant Marco Lopez, a recruiter based in Los Angeles. Another recruiter, Staff Sergeant Andrew Murray, based in Tennessee, explains that a lot of new recruits “are looking to get out of small-town Tennessee; when I tell them about my experience in Europe, they just light up.” Europe, particularly Germany, seems to be one of the most popular destinations for army recruits. The sergeants found Germans particularly friendly & welcoming; Europe’s rich history attracts some, while Sergeant Murray enjoyed being able to visit “a different city every weekend, partying and sightseeing”.

Before going overseas, American troops are given a detailed briefing on what to expect & how to behave. Sergeant Murray says he was warned that Germans are not good at queuing, & that it was a good idea “to tone down the patriotism”; Sergeant Lopez, when stationed in Seoul, was told to avoid areas known for prostitution. Not all those enlisted take the briefings on board, as the recent events in Okinawa have made clear. Uncle Sam’s pay-cheques feed the economies of areas with army bases, but mostly through the soldiers’ patronage of night clubs & bars—which can lead to trouble.

In the past 15-20 years the Pentagon has taken steps to improve relations between its overseas outposts & local communities. Most of these have involved trying to rein in wayward soldiers. In 2006 an anti-prostitution charge was added to the United States Military Code of Justice (to the outrage of some American troops stationed in Germany, where prostitution is legal). The Department of Defence also reported an increase in the number of sexual-assault cases taken to courts martial, from 42% in 2009 to 68% in 2012. But Japan remains an outlier: within navy & marine-corps units stationed there, only 24% of those charged with sexual offences were court-martialled in 2012, the latest date for which data are available.

The United States has 85 military facilities scattered across Japan—a legacy of American occupation after the second world war. Three-quarters of the territory occupied is on the string of islands making up Okinawa, along with more than half of the 49,000 military personnel. Okinawans resent the heavy burden they have shouldered, as well as the American presence itself—particularly the brothels. These were deliberately set up for United States troops & remained legal on the island until 1972, 14 years after they were banned in the rest of the country. The protests in June over the most recent rape victim were the latest in a long line of anti-American demonstrations. The largest came in 1995, when 85,000 Okinawans took to the streets following the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American soldiers.

In the past, the presence of American troops has also sparked more general protests. During the cold war West Germany played host to more American military facilities than any other country, up to 900 by some definitions, incorporating schools & hospitals as well as sports complexes & shopping centres. Local communities protested against the noise & disruption from constant military manoeuvres. Opposition reached its peak at the end of the 1980s, fuelled further by growing anti-nuclear sentiment. Leftist groups, the Red Army Faction & the Revolutionary Cells also launched violent attacks against American army headquarters & kidnapped military personnel, objecting to the mere physical presence of America in their country.

Miss you, miss you not

Almost 30 years later, the withdrawal of American troops from Germany is well under way: in 2010 the army announced it was handing over 23 sites to the German government. “We don’t miss them, but we weren’t wanting them to leave either,” says Hans Schnabel, a business-development manager in charge of converting old army bases in the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt, where up to 12,000 soldiers & their families were stationed before it closed in September 2014. After the cold war resentment in Germany towards the bases, & American forces in general, became more subdued; recent protests, such as one in June outside the Ramstein base against alleged support for drone operations, are fewer & quieter. At Schweinfurt, says Mr Schnabel, local people even think of the base with nostalgia: they are building an “American house” to remember those stationed there, & the streets around the new housing development (once the barracks) will be given names such as California Strasse and Ohio Strasse.

In contrast, America’s military presence in Turkey, as in Okinawa, is still a focus of thriving anti-Americanism today. The relationship began well enough: in 1946, when the USS Missouri sailed into Istanbul, the show of American might was warmly welcomed. It foreshadowed Turkey’s accession to NATO six years later & the stationing of American troops across the country. American enclaves in Ankara, & sailors’ weekend jollies in Izmir & Istanbul, contributed to a change in public opinion. By the end of the 1960s “Go home Yankee” signs greeted disembarking American sailors & soldiers. In the 1970s, as in Germany, leftist revolutionary groups resorted to increasingly extreme tactics in their attempts to “liberate” Turkey from American imperialism: the Turkish Revolutionary Army abducted 4 American airmen in March 1971 & 3 NATO engineers the next year.

Since then, America’s military presence in Turkey—though far less substantial than in Japan—has been seen by many as an unwanted encroachment on Turkey’s independence. In 2003 Turks protested against the war in Iraq & proposals for America to station military personnel at the Mersin naval base. When the USS Stout docked in Bodrum in 2011, members of the Turkish Communist Party stood on the shore chanting anti-American slogans. 3 years later, in two separate events, members of the Turkish Youth Union targeted American sailors & NATO soldiers in Istanbul, putting white sacks over their heads & throwing red paint over them. A similar incident occurred at Incirlik air base in April this year. Even a visit by President Barack Obama, during his trip to Turkey in 2009, drew crowds of angry protesters shouting “Yankee go home” & “Get out of our country.”

The latest attacks against America’s military presence in Turkey, however, mark a shift. Since the Syrian war broke out, the United States has increasingly used the Incirlik base to support the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), implying that it might also support an autonomous Kurdish state carved out of Turkey. America & its armed forces have long featured in conspiracy theories, too, particularly those involving Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric living in self-imposed exile in the United States. The recent attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is proof to many Turks of a Gulenist-American alliance, & of the subversive influence of American armed forces in the country. The closure of Incirlik air base for a short time immediately after the coup added fuel to the conspiracy theories. Mr Erdogan himself seems to be using America as a scapegoat, intentionally ramping up hostility towards the personnel stationed there.

The strategic importance of Incirlik for America’s campaign against IS means that keeping American combat boots on Turkish soil is more in America’s interests than Turkey’s. But given that anti-Americanism in Turkey is one of the few sentiments uniting an increasingly undemocratic & destabilised country, American troops will have to tread carefully: they are likely to become bigger, not smaller, targets as internal tensions mount.

In many other countries both sides, despite sporadic differences, have an equal interest in Americans staying. After the protests in 1995 in Okinawa, America & Japan agreed to close Futenma, the marine air base in the overcrowded city of Ginowan, & to build a new facility in Henoko, a fishing village. The plan failed to appease locals—who re-elected anti-base politicians such as Takeshi Onaga, Okinawa’s governor, in June’s local elections—but Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, is pressing ahead with it anyway.

He has particular reason to try to smooth tensions between the two sides. North Korea’s flaunting of its nuclear weapons & China’s aggression in the South China Sea mean his plans for strengthening Japan’s military defences must go ahead, & the United States’ armed forces are an essential part of this. Some 47% of Americans would agree with Mr Abe: they are in favour of extending America’s military presence in Asia to counter Chinese power. But 43% are opposed. America, despite what its enemies sometimes suppose, is never really thrilled to be the world’s policeman—especially if the world proves ungrateful.

Destroy Their Economic Livelihoods, and They Will Come

As we all heard Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric during the American election drama that "illegal" & "undocumented" immigrants are destroying US. Whether they are indeed "destroying" American economy & the country itself, that's up for debate, but what nobody ever talks about is why there are so many people pouring across the border from Latin & Central America.

I have explored this topic earlier, in my blogs, that one of the many reasons so-called "developing" countries of the world are stuck in "developing" mode for decades, & even centuries, is that the wealthy & developed Global North (i.e. US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia etc.) are actively destroying & deliberately keeping the "developing" countries in the "developing" mode. There are several ways of doing this through economic (subsidies on industries etc.), financial (aid with exorbitant interest rates & conditions), & military (sell weapons) means. Several times, all these are intertwined. For instance, financial aid is provided to a country, which then turns around & buy military equipment from the same countries that gave the aid in the first place. So, the aid is never got used to service the public or improve the country.

In this Real News analysis, Mr. Faux is essentially saying the same thing that the average person from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, or El Salvador is running away from its country & trying to enter US because US made those countries a hell for that average person. The average American is hating that "illegal" Honduran or Guatemalan or El Salvadoran taking away his/her job or whatnot but the fact of the matter is that that average American racist person is the cause for that "illegal" to run away from his/her home in the first place.

If that average American would not have elected or at least protested against its own government's illegal intervention in the internal governmental matters of those Central American countries, then there would be far less, if not none, "illegals" in the US.

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                                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTvjSam5yyE

JEFF FAUX, AUTHOR, THE SERVANT ECONOMY: For the last few months, the last 6, 8 months, ... tens of thousands of children have been pushing across the U.S. border between Mexico and Texas in a desperate effort to flee poverty and violence and hopelessness in their countries.

They're overwhelming facilities down there. The detention centers are overcrowded. The immigration service doesn't know what to do with these kids. Some of them get put on buses to be sent to families someplace. It's a mess.

And it's quickly deteriorated into politics, of course. The Democrats and Republicans blame the president. The president says it's a humanitarian crisis, so we have to act, and so we do. But lost in this debate is the question of U.S. responsibility for the basic causes of this tragic immigration to the United States. Immigration politics in the U.S. focuses on the U.S. But ... the question of what to do with people who are arriving here misses the point of how they arrived and why they arrived.
People come from somewhere, and in this case 95% of these children are coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Now, this just happens to be three countries, along with much of the rest of Central America, that the U.S. has dominated and controlled for the last hundred years.

ANTON WORONCZUK, TRNN PRODUCER: Well, exactly what role has U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and Central America played in driving this immigration?

FAUX: ... to answer that question, start with another question. If the United States is skilled in nation building, which it says it is, why are these economies such social and economic disasters? The answer is we have not run these economies for the people there. We have run them for U.S. investors who want cheap labor and their oligarch cronies who provide the cheap labor.

The enforcer of this system--and this is a system that goes back decades--... is the U.S. military. Whenever people there have challenged the rule of these oligarchs and these repressive governments, the United States has run to the rescue of the oligarchs.

In 1954, famously, Guatemala elected, finally, a left-leaning reformer. The first thing that happened was that the United States organized the Guatemalan military for a coup and an attack, and they drove the president out. It was followed by 40 years of savage repression, 150,000 people murdered in that little country over that period of time. Today, the same rich families and the same military control Guatemala.

I was in Guatemala recently, and people told me they were afraid to take a bus, because what happened is that every once in a while, ... armed thugs, would come aboard the bus, shoot the driver, and rob the passengers. A few days later, I was talking to a young man who said no one can get a real job in this country unless they're connected to one of the five or six ruling families, so everyone wants to immigrate to the United States. But it costs $10,000 to hire a coyote take him here. Where are you going to get the $10,000? They borrow it from the criminal gangs. Most of the time, people never make it and they find themselves back in Guatemala owing $10,000 to some pretty bad people. And those criminals, gangs, say, give us the money (this is in his words) or we'll kill your mother, or come work for us. And your first job is to put a mask on, take a gun, go board a bus, shoot the driver, and rob the passengers.

Guatemala is a basket case under the regimes that we have supported.

Same thing in Honduras. 1963, a reformer got elected. We supported a coup to get rid of him. 2009, another reformer gets elected. We support another coup. Now, 2009, the Obama administration publicly said, oh, that's terrible and ... they denounced it, but privately, they paved the way for the military-run government to stay, and the oligarchs once again triumphed.

In 2011--this is only the latest budget numbers that we've been able to uncover--we exported $1.3 billion in military electronic equipment to Honduras. Now ask yourself: what is Honduras--who is Honduras defending itself against? Who is invading Honduras? The answer, of course, is nobody. Now, their rationale is this great war on drugs. In the last 30, 40 years, billions of U.S. dollars have gone to the military in Central America, ostensibly because of the war on drugs. Now, after 30 or 40 years, it's quite clear that the war on drugs is a failure. And the reason it's a failure is because the military that gets all this aid is knee-deep in narcotrafficking. And what's happened now is the combination of drugs, weapons, and poverty is destroying this country to the point where the children are fleeing. The war on drugs in Central America is a failure, but the war of the elite oligarchs on their own people has been a success. And the result are these poor children being driven across the border.

Now, whatever comes of the immigration battle between the Democrats and Republicans, whatever happens to the president's bill, the waves of desperate immigrants from Central America, from other parts of the Caribbean that we have essentially dominated over the last hundred years will not diminish and is never going to diminish unless the United States government and the United States people face the reality that the basic cause of this immigration is rooted in the corrupt regimes that we have supported all these years.