What one can say with certainty about the Zionist rulers of Israel is that they have followed a systematic and consistent policy that was aimed at ethnically cleansing and marginalizing the Palestinians. That was their way to establish a colonial power in the Middle East that would expand its power and influence to other parts of the world. Their biggest prize was to control the political establishment of the United States. Other Western powers bowed to them and have dutifully followed their lead.
Have they failed or succeeded in their goals? If the success of a policy is to be judged from what it achieved, then the Zionist rulers of Israel have succeeded superbly well. No Zionist ruler of Israel has deviated from the original goals. Internal political struggles between the parties have been only for gaining power; otherwise, they all have followed the same course of gradual colonization, expansion and consolidation of their power.
This piece I wrote in 2019. Some people may find it useful to understand the background to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and killings and terror against the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank.
— Nasir Khan
What do we mean by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine? What do we mean by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine? In my understanding, the notion of ethnic cleansing of Palestine covers all those major historic events and the policies that were used to take possession of the land of other people. What happened and how it happened at the hands of Zionists is part of the story historians call the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (e.g. Ilan Pappe, Richard Falk, etc.).
The Palestinians who opted to become the citizens of Israel had no choice but to accept that a foreign power had taken over their land. If they didnโt like it, then they could follow others who were forcibly driven out of historic Palestine and had become refugees in the neighbouring countries.
However, ethnic cleansing here does not imply that all Palestinians were physically eliminated. Some were killed. This is still going on in the occupied territories, as we saw in Gaza in the summer of 2014 and many times after. But this is part of the Israeli strategy to suppress any voice that stands for the restitution of the political rights of these people to their land, by expropriating and confiscating more land that is still in the hands of Palestinians. This is an incremental Israeli expansion in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and keeping Gaza under siege. All this has been happening because of the Western rulers’ support of Israel and its expansionist policy, chiefly by the United States, Britain and their global allies.
Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator. Her novel ุงูุฃูุณุฌูู ููุณ ููู ูุชู (Oxygen is Not for the Dead) won second place in the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. She was killed in her home in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023. She was 32.
Hiba Abu Nada was a poet, novelist, and educator. You can also read her poem โRefugeโ at Protean in Huda Fakhreddineโs translation.
Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a writer, a translator, and the author of several scholarly books.
Chaim Weizmann and Lord Montagu of the Zionist Commission, 1917. Anglo-Jewish statesman Lord Edwin Samuel Montagu (1879-1924), was British Minister of Munitions in 1916, and Secretary of State for India from 1917 until 1922. Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), pictured here at the head of the table, was president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), and in 1949 became the first President of the State of Israel.
(Photo by Jewish Chronicle/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
The American Jewish Committee, going back to 1917 in the United States, expressed grave warnings that a Jewish state could oppress non-Jews in Palestine.
Jewish organizations that now are staunch supporters of the Israeli state were concerned with the same issues that Palestinians protest now.
At the November 1917 issuance of the Balfour Declaration of the British government in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, many American Jewish Committee members and officers had observed that, if successful, the goal of a Jewish state to rule the multi-ethnic land of Palestine would lead to oppression of non-Jews.
In an April 1918 executive committee meeting considering the declaration, a member noted the goal of the AJC to protect civil and religious rights of Jews living as minorities around the world, and worried that a Jewish state could oppress non-Jews:
If a national home in Palestine be established, it may be that there too the good offices of this Committee may become necessary to protect a minority against an arrogant majority.
In 1919, AJC President Louis Marshall asserted an AJC statement on the Balfour declaration had been definitive in rejecting political Zionism:
In April last the American Jewish Committee defined its position in terms which could not be misunderstood, which indicated that, while it hailed with satisfaction the Balfour Declaration, it did so because of the two conditions annexed, namely, that it would not affect the rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine and that it was not to be regarded as in any way affecting the status of Jews who lived in other lands.
In September 1946, when the organization reluctantly adopted a pro-partition position and began lobbying the UN and US government, AJC President Joseph Proskauer told his board, โThe so-called Jewish State is not to be called by that name but will bear some appropriate geographical designation. It will be Jewish only in the sense that the Jews will form a majority of the population.โ
Mainstream Jewish organizations knew endless violence and oppression would result from imposing a Jewish state in Palestine against the stated wishes of its non-Jewish inhabitants.
The pernicious results of insisting on forcing Jewish sovereignty over Palestineโand necessarily disrupting Arab life thereโwas well understood within the Jewish organizations and in the general press.
In November 1939, Louis D. Brandeis objected to a planned visit to the United States by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann: “He (Brandeis) believed the whole thing was a mistake. He was afraid Weizmann would press his plan for political action, based on a future re-shuffling of populations.”
In a February 1940 meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Weizman said that “of course they (Jews) would compensate the Arabs in a reasonable way for anything they got,” creating a Jewish Palestine and incentivizing Arabs to leave.
Historian George Antonius wrote in the widely-read book The Arab Awakening (1939) that โthe logic of facts is inexorable. It shows that no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.โ
Journalist I.F. Stone wrote on a 1945 visit to Palestine, โWithout the Zionist movement, what has been achieved in Palestine would never have come to pass. โฆBut the strength associated with such a movement also has its corresponding defects, and the defects of Zionism are its failure to take into account the feelings and aspirations of the Palestinian Arab.โ
A November 1947 CIA memo noted, “many [American] Zionist organizations, while supporting the objectives of a National Home for Jews, do not advocate an independent Jewish nation in Palestine.”
In a public letter, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others stated that in the years up to statehood, Jewish terrorists “inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”
Commentary monthly magazine (then published by the AJC) reported in March 1948, “The terrorists defeated us,” British officers admit. “We couldn’t track them down. The Jewish population was too frightened of them to help us.”
The AJC knew, from news reports and its on-scene correspondent in Palestine, of the militant fervor that was building for a Jewish state among the Zionist component.
Radical Zionist militias engaged in increasing violence against Arabs, British mandate administrators, and insufficiently-Zionist Jews in Palestine. Zionist terrorism spread to incidents like the 1944 assassination of British administrator Lord Moyne in Cairo, the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and attacks on Arab communities, markets and busses. The terrorism spread abroad to bombing of British facilities in Rome(1946) and Vienna and a British troop train(1947).
In December 1947 AJC analyst Milton Himmelfarb wrote that one reason for the AJC change of position to favor partition of Palestine was that โThe terrorists’ activities in Palestine, and the posterings and mouthings of their supporters here and abroad, led a number of AJC people to wonder whether a Jewish state was the chief enemy. They began to feel that after the state was created, the daily papers in New York at least would no longer carry headlines screaming of King David Hotel explosions and hangings of British sergeants; in short, โbetter an evil end than an endless evil.โโ
On the cusp of the implementation of the partition plan, one AJC analysis of the coming “Zionization” of Jews in the United States warned diaspora Jews would be enlisted to the Zionist cause “beyond any consideration of good or evil.”
Terrorist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir led the September 1948 assassination of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem โ to foil the diplomatโs efforts to encourage compromise on land taken by Israel beyond the partition plan, and return of Arab refugees forced from the new State of Israel.
In a draft section that was removed from a February 15, 1948, speech that chairman (and future AJC president) Jacob Blaustein gave on the subject of Palestine partition, he reported “terrorist groups of Palestinian Jews took the offensive” and that “If Partition fails, it is more than likely that these Jewish extremists will resort to terrorism and violence in spite of efforts to control them.”
In the years since, the AJC and other mainstream Jewish organizations have given up any notion of restraining Jewish nationalist ambitions, abandoned concern they had for the right of return of Palestinians exiled from their homes, and serve in the US as defenders of whatever military power the Israeli government exercises against the non-Jewish people of Palestine.
American Jewish leaders increasingly took their cues from Israel, and by 1953 the AJC set up a program of pro-Israeli propaganda, being fed by the Israeli consul in New York obvious falsehoods such as that Israel was a “feat of colonization unique in history, which was accomplished without displacing anyone.”
Mainstream Jewish organizations knew endless violence and oppression would result from imposing a Jewish state in Palestine against the stated wishes of its non-Jewish inhabitants. This has proved accurate, most recently in Israel’s methodical destruction of the means of life for millions in Gaza, and increasing state and settler terror against residents of the occupied West Bank.
Abba A. Solomon is the author of “The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech ‘The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,’ Given to the Baltimore Chapter American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948.”
Supporters and activists of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party shout slogans during a protest demanding the release of PTI leader Imran Khan, in Peshawar on January 28, 2024.
(Photo by Abdul MAJEED / AFP) (Photo by ABDUL MAJEED/AFP via Getty Images)
Covert regime change strikes again. This time in Pakistan.
A principal instrument of U.S. foreign policy is covert regime change, meaning a secret action by the U.S. government to bring down the government of another country. There are strong reasons to believe that U.S. actions led to the removal from power of Pakistanโs Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022, followed by his arrest on trumped-up charges of corruption and espionage, and sentencing this week to 10 years imprisonment on the espionage charge. The political objective is to block Pakistanโs most popular politician from returning to power in the elections on February 8.
The key to covert operations of course is that they are secret and hence deniable by the U.S. government. Even when the evidence comes to light through whistleblowers or leaks, as it very often does, the U.S. government rejects the authenticity of the evidence and the mainstream media generally ignore the story because it contradicts the official narrative. Because editors at these mainstream outlets donโt want to peddle in โconspiracy theories,โ or are simply happy to be the mouthpieces for officialdom, they give the U.S. government a very wide berth for actual regime-change conspiracies.
Covert regime change by the U.S. is shockingly routine. One authoritative study by Boston University professor Lindsay OโRourke counts 64 covert regime change operations by the U.S. during the Cold War (1947 and 1989), and in fact the number was far larger because she chose to count repeated attempts within one country as a single extended episode. Since then, U.S. regime change operations have remained frequent, such as when President Barrack Obama tasked the CIA (Operation Timber Sycamore) with overthrowing Syriaโs President Bashar al-Assad. That covert operation remained secret until several years after the operation, and even then, was hardly covered by the mainstream media.
From the U.S. perspective, โneutralโ is a fighting word.
All of this brings us to Pakistan, another case where evidence points strongly to U.S.-led regime change. In this case, the U.S. desired to bring down the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan, the charismatic, talented, and hugely popular leader in Pakistan, renowned both for his world-leading cricket mastery and for his common touch with the people. His popularity, independence, and enormous talents make him a prime target of the U.S., which frets about popular leaders who donโt fall into line with U.S. policy.
Imran Khanโs โsinโ was to be too cooperative with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, while also seeking normal relations with the United States. The great mantra of U.S. foreign policy, and the activating principle of the CIA, is that a foreign leader is โeither with us or against us.โ Leaders who try to be neutral amongst the great powers are at dire risk of losing their positions, or even their lives, at U.S. instigation, since the U.S. does not accept neutrality. Leaders seeking neutrality dating back to Patrice Lumumba (Zaire), Norodom Sihanouk (Cambodia), Viktor Yanukovych (Ukraine), and many others, have been toppled with the not-so-hidden-hand of the U.S. government.
Like many leaders in the developing world, Khan does not want to break relations with either the U.S. or Russia over the Ukraine War. By sheer coincidence of prior scheduling, Khan happened to be in Moscow to meet Putin on the day that Russia launched the special military operation (February 24, 2022). From the start, Khan advocated that the conflict in Ukraine should be settled at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. The U.S. and E.U. arm-twisted foreign leaders including Khan to fall into line against Putin and to support Western sanctions against Russia, yet Khan resisted.
Khan probably sealed his fate on March 6 when he held a large rally in northern Pakistan. At the rally, he berated the West, and especially 22 EU ambassadors, for pressuring him to condemn Russia at a vote in the United Nations. He also excoriated NATOโs war against terror in next-door Afghanistan as having been utterly devastating to Pakistan, with no acknowledgment, respect, or appreciation for Pakistanโs suffering.
[Khan’s] popularity, independence, and enormous talents make him a prime target of the U.S., which frets about popular leaders who donโt fall into line with U.S. policy.
Khan told the cheering crowds, โEU ambassadors wrote a letter to us asking us to condemn and vote against Russiaโฆ What do you think of us? Are we your slaves … that whatever you say, we will do?” He added, โWe are friends with Russia, and we are also friends with America; we are friends with China and with Europe; we are not in any camp. Pakistan would remain neutral and work with those trying to end the war in Ukraine.โ
From the U.S. perspective, โneutralโ is a fighting word. The grim follow-up for Khan was revealed in August 2023 by investigative reporters at The Intercept. Just one day after Khanโs rally, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu met in Washington with Pakistanโs Ambassador to the U.S., Asad Majeed Khan. Following the meeting, Ambassador Khan sent a secret cable (a โcypherโ) back to Islamabad, which was then leaked to The Intercept by a Pakistani military official.
The cable recounts how Assistant Secretary Lu berated Prime Minister Khan for his neutral stance. The cable quotes Lu as saying that โpeople here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.โ
Lu then conveyed the bottom line to Ambassador Khan. โI think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.โ
Five weeks later on April 10, with the U.S. blunt threat hanging over the powerful Pakistani military, and with the militaryโs hold over the Pakistani parliament, the Parliament ousted Khan in a no-confidence vote. Within weeks, the new government followed with brazenly manufactured charges of corruption against Khan, to put him under arrest and prevent his return to power. In utterly Orwellian turn, when Khan made known the existence of the diplomatic cable that revealed Americaโs role in his ouster, the new government charged Khan with espionage. He has now been convicted on these charges to an unconscionable 10 years, with the U.S. government remaining silent on this outrage.
When asked about Khanโs conviction, the State Department had the following to say: “Itโs a matter for the Pakistani courts.” Such an answer is a vivid example of how U.S.-led regime change works. The State Department supports Khanโs imprisonment over Khanโs public revelation of U.S. actions.
Pakistan will therefore hold elections on February 8 with its most popular democratic leader in prison and with Khanโs party the subject of relentless attacks, political murders, media blackouts, and other heavy-handed repression. In all of this, the U.S. government is utterly complicit. So much for Americaโs โdemocraticโ values. The U.S. government has gotten its way for nowโand has deeply destabilized a nuclear-armed nation of 240 million people. Only Khanโs release from prison and his participation in the upcoming election could restore stability.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
This text I wrote on January 28, 2022, which I am publishing for the first time.
—Nasir Khan
For most people, the Holocaust under the Nazis means only the killing of Jews. As a result, for the rulers of Israel, it has been the only thing that matters and is still used as a defence to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their land.
The Israeli arguments and response run along such lines: If we have got rid of the Palestinians, then donโt forget, we are the victims of the Holocaust! But why did you destroy Gaza in 2014? Oh, to ask this question is anti-Semitism! Don’t forget what happened to us under the Germans. Thus, the Holocaust is a catch-all defence to every crime Israel has committed and is committing against the Palestinians.
Why are you still illegally expanding in the occupied areas? We can expand wherever we want because this is ‘our land’ that God gave us. But why did the same God create thousands of years ago a people who have lived in Palestine for thousands of years and are called Palestinians? You see, you are anti-Semitic to say a thing like that. You hate us. Why don’t you shut up and mind your own business? Go away, you bloody anti-Semitic scoundrel!
The Holocaust narrative by Israeli Zionists barely mentions what the Nazis did to the Roma, the Poles, and the millions of Soviet citizens during the Second World War.
Antonio Negri argues that The State and Revolution by Lenin is the best introduction to Marxism as it places bodies within the daily revolutionary struggle.
When asked which book offers the best introduction to Marxism, I answer: The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Why? Because, if Marx is the brains of Marxism, Lenin is its body; and, for materialists, the brain too is located in the body. Marxism is not an economic theory, but a critique of political economy, where critique, first of all, signifies oneโs capacity for analysis by immersion in a chaotic, conflict-ridden world, materially dominated by bosses who exploit you and a sovereign who commands you.
These relations โ โexploits youโ, โcommands youโ โ mean that such control involves your body: that is, the bodies, energy, passions and values of those who live and work on our planet. With The State and Revolution, Lenin places bodies within the daily struggle where economic demands and political passion, emancipatory effort and emancipatory power, are conjoined. In this initial approach, The State and Revolution signifies bodies in struggle against the materiality of capitalist control.
This connection reveals an initial meaning of Marxism as critique: it signifies being within political economy, remaining inside the complex of acts of exploitation and means of power (of capitalism and sovereignty), inside the indissoluble bond that makes of them a state. The state is the exploitation of the bodies of labourers and command over the brains of subjects. Revolution is the critique exercised by bodies against this exploitation and sovereign power.
Emerging from the inside, critique, at the same time, induces the power of the against. โAgainstโ signifies understanding how bodies can proceed against capital; hence it invites translating Capital โ the inexhaustible book of Marxist critique โ into the materialist experiment of a possible revolution. Because the โwithin-againstโ conjugation follows, and determines, the materialist mutation of the set of bodies into classes and thus constitutes the red thread of subjectivation into class struggle. The pedagogy of Marxism, which is only science qua critique and only critique qua subjectivation, is planted on this peak of Leninโs discourse. It is not possible to be Marxist other than within the Leninist paradox of the totality and the partial viewpoint. And notice then how Capital comes, so to speak, to be subjectivated โ which does
not mean abandoned to the pleasures of a philology that is invariably curious and sometimes dissolute, or to the ceremonies of a rebellious dogmatism. Rather, it means re-articulated in its historical relationship with struggles, in the different technical and political compositions of the two classes. As Roman Rosdolsky noted, the initial plan of Capital envisaged a chapter on the state. Marx was unable to write it as the continuation of the great chapters of economic critique he had already composed. But, in his historical writings and interventions in the International, the people and parties it comprised, he sketched a theoretical framework.
There Lenin adopted it, and imparted to it a musculature, with the experience of a victorious class struggle taking the place of unclear incidents and occasional volcanic party polemics. Here, โsubjectivationโ assumes its true meaning, as pedagogy and also as the apex of the operative synthesis of the โwithin and againstโ we have registered in the pages of The State and Revolution.
Within and against possibly suffice to put both Capital and Marxโs historical writings into prose. But The State and Revolution goes much further. The revolution, Lenin says, has begun. Where are we going? What is the beyond we are striving towards? And, here, Leninโs subjective action twists towards reality, from utopia to science, from science to the concreteness of revolutionary force.
It seems that we have returned to the beginning, and that enthusiasm for being located within and struggling against capital has matured as such in a perpetual motion. Such is not the case: here subjectivation makes it possible positively to itemize the transitions that โrevolutionary deedsโ must accomplish in order to construct the beyond, in order to go beyond the beyond, from socialism to communism. And the road is mapped out with the intelligence and power of constituent praxis.
Utopia is connected with reality and takes shape in conjunction with the attack on current class domination. Thus, the utopian โwithering away of the state โ is understood in materialist terms as a constituent process. And we see this process completed, because it is no longer an ideal but a test for the subjectivity that transforms the real: Marx and Lenin are definitively recomposed โ and with what force! Destroying the state and reconstructing the set of institutions that make a free existence possible become tasks accomplished in common. When we finish reading The State and Revolution, our bodies are engaged in that task.
Prof. John Mearsheimer provides his perspectives in this video regarding the Israeli war in Gaza and its broader implications for Israel and occupied Palestinians. He also discusses the role of the United States in its resolute support for Israel, regardless of the actions of Israeli rulers in the present and the future.
This is a must-watch video by one of America’s leading political scientists.
An astonishing thing has happened in America that has never occurred in the lifetime of anyone now living. No, itโs not the crushing win of Trump in Iowa, nor the absurd determination of Democrats to run the senile ninny who has made a joke of our Presidency for another term. These, in their way astonishing, are mere trivialities in this time of universal lunacy and deceit.
I mean an honest to god paradigm shift everyone can see that official wise men with public platforms and megaphones have not announced, or perhaps even noticed. Iโm talking about the first clear, undeniable instance of the failure of the American Empireโs Propaganda Machine.
It has been clear for decades, generations, that the American political elite has no regard for, and no sense of responsibility to, the actual needs and desires of the ignorant, disorganized public. It has always dealt with their inchoate hopes by indoctrination, by arousing and enlisting their imbecile enthusiasms in a mythology of tawdry, tribal patriotism based on the premise that they are a glorious, superior people whose leaders courageously embody and implement their magnificence all over the world.
The techniques of propaganda are refined, but their effect is entirely due to grotesque pandering to the worst susceptibilities of the human ego: the desire to assert oneโs superlative worth as a member of a powerful, violent, conquering nation. The force of that tactic, endlessly repeated, rendered American citizenry, with rare exceptions, one solid, deluded, unthinking mass, devoted to whatever vicious, imperial ends the political elite intended.
Their trained mass response, sure as that of performing seals, has, for the first time ever, failed in regard to the Gaza genocide.
Both parties in Congress are solidly behind their putative leaders in full support of whatever violence Nazi Zionist Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people. This is true across the spectrum, from the pathetic halfwits and defectives in the MAGA sump to mock-noble, self-declared moral poseurs such as Bernie and AOL. Tlaib is the one outcast who has dared to affirm the humanity of Palestinians, while the rest join solemnly to prevent a ceasefire, which would, they say, balk the Zionistโs โright of self-defenceโ.
With this level of unanimity, solid from the addled, babbling, derelict President down, presented forcefully, continually, to the nation from every organ in the Propaganda Machine, the certain positive response was confidently awaited. It has not come.
In spite of all our corrupt, Zionist-owned government has done to enlist its support for the wholesale murder of a people, the American public has not bought it, and is not coming around. By an overwhelming majority Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the Israeli genocide.
Try to recall a single moment when the diktat of the Machine was not ingested and regurgitated by the whole American public. It took years and thousands of body bags to sour them on the Viet Nam horror. The whole country was galvanized behind the lies that led to wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and its nonexistent WMDs, and it embraced the obscene โWar on Terrorโ with all its follies.
Recall the wildly dishonest demonization of Qaddafi, Assad and Iran that Americans swallowed. When Putin was Hitlerized for exposing U.S. treachery in expanding NATO to Russiaโs borders, and defending ethnic Russian Ukrainians from attacks by rabid Ukronazi Banderites, Americans ate it up and roared approval.
Xi of China is the next candidate for diabolization, but this first failure of the Machine will create doubt as to the ability of our rotten government to manage its victim people. The question now is whether The Empireโs iron grip on their minds has been permanently impaired by its total, and totally despicable, support for the criminal brutality of an evil and illegitimate state.
It will be a delicious irony if the billionaire Zionists who bought our Congress find that the felon state it has supported against American interests has destroyed itself, and broken the death grip its money has exerted in subverting and betraying us all.
Depending on the endgame of the Zionist genocideโchiefly, on whether their murderous barbarity results in a deadly regional warโthe effect on The Empire will be either crippling international infamy, or perilous, punishing engagement in a war that has the potential to utterly destroy many nations, including ours.
The American Empire has not represented the interests of its people for decades, if it ever did, and has only kept them in a kind of mental and emotional lockdown through controlling their perception of reality. Nothing has been done for the generality of Americans since the last great threat to Capitalism in the Great Depression, which resulted in Social Security and Medicare.
It is intriguing to wonder what grand advancements might come for The People if the state were to be run for their benefit. That, of course, will never happen under Imperial Capitalism which will fight to the end for its absolute rule by any means possible until it self destructs from massive and insoluble financial fraud, or is hammered and obliterated in an intentionally provoked war.
T.S. Elliot predicted long ago that the world would not end โin a bang, but a whimperโ. This seems unlikely now when the likely ends are implosion or explosion. How profoundly sad it will be if the American people have thrown off the terrible strait jacket of imperial mind control just when it doesnโt matter any more.
Three months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the atrocities the IDF has committed against Palestinians are too numerous to name. Israel is staging a prolonged assault on the Palestinian people’s very means of existenceโdestroying homes, hospitals, sanitation infrastructure, food and water sources, schools, and more. To understand the genocidal campaign unfolding before our eyes, we must examine the roots of Israeli society. Israel is a settler colonial state whose existence depends on the elimination of Palestinians. Accordingly, Israel is a deeply militarized society whose citizens are raised in an environment of historical revisionism and indoctrination that whitewashes Israel’s crimes while cultivating deep-seated racism against Palestinians.
Miko Peled, former IDF Special Forces and author of The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a frank conversation on the distortions of history and reality at the foundations of Israeli identity.
Peace and Justice Post 
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