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As the university encampments and other protests against support for Israel continue, and the crackdown intensifies, is it becoming apparent that US policy towards its own citizens is much more like Israeli treatment of Palestinians than is often admitted?
As Max Blumenthal said recently on Judge Napolitano’s show, we are “kind of living in Netanyahu’s America.” He was talking more about Israel interference in US politics and the crackdown on the First Amendment in order to silence criticism of Israel.
Much of this discussion revolves around the massive amounts of money that groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee throw around and whatever other leverage Israel uses over the US politicians.
But is there more to it than that? Is there ideological overlap that also helps explain why the US uniparty backs Israel so strongly?
The economic components that have served as the dehumanizing foundation to Israel’s current “plausible” genocide share many similarities with poor Americans and migrant laborers who are treated as disposable in the US. Before we get to the US, the following are three brief points about Israel-Palestine power dynamics beyond religion or ethnicity. That’s not to say those factors don’t play a role, but for this exercise we’ll set them aside and focus on economic components.
- The occupation of Palestine is an exploitative endeavor. That plan was summarized by Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister during the June 1967 war, which resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, describing the territories as:
“…a supplementary market for Israeli goods and services on the one hand, and a source of factors of production, especially unskilled labor, for the Israeli economy on the other.”
There are more than 200,000 Palestinian laborers, including those without permits, who work inside Israel and the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu’s government has resolved to replace them with other laborers who can be exploited – a massive proposed influx from countries like India and Sri Lanka.
There was a dispute about this plan within the Israeli government with those opposed arguing that leaving so many Palestinians unemployed would only worsen Israel’s security, and experts say that the turn to migrant laborers is unlikely to last given the benefits Israel derives from a disenfranchised Palestinian workforce. As Jewish Currents point out, “the economic advantages of exploiting Palestinians have usually pushed Israel” to keep using their labor.
According to Dr. Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset from the Hadash Party, which supports Jewish-Arab cooperation and workers’ rights, this is at the heart of the problem and replacing the exploitation of Palestinians with the exploitation of other laborers brought from places more afar will not solve the issue. Cassif draws on Lenin’s idea that Israel’s “plausible” genocide is a product of late-stage capitalism:
Here, it is a class issue. It is between the oppressed and the oppressor, between the exploiter and the exploited. This distinction is much more important. We in Hadash, for instance, Palestinians and Jews together and some others, we see ourselves as part of those who oppose the oppression. It doesn’t matter to us if we are Jews or Palestinians or Argentinean Christians, just hypothetically. For us, it’s important to refer to the situation as one that distinguishes not between the peoples, but between the exploited and the exploited, the oppressor and the oppressed…
National hostility serves the economic and political interests of the ruling classes because that way they can divert the rage, the frustration, the alienation from a class-based one to a national-based one. This is exactly what I think we should pay attention to. Those who actually benefit from the ongoing occupation on top of using cheap labor, Palestinian cheap labor, or in the north of Qatar, for instance, there are apparently some resources like gas, etc., beyond that, the hostility serves them because as long as the occupation goes on, the Palestinian proletarian, and even peasants will see the Israelis, generally speaking, of course, I have to simplify the picture; obviously it’s much more complicated. For our conversation, for analytical purposes, if I may say so, the ruled classes, Palestinian-ruled classes, are going to see not their own Palestinian exploiters as the so-called rival or enemy but the Israelis and vice versa. They are exploited within Israel. The exploited Israelis, especially the proletarians, will not see their own employers as their exploiters and class enemies but as the Palestinians. Who benefits from that? Who’s going to benefit from that? The exploiters. So, ending the occupation, besides being an end in itself because it involves direct oppression and exploitation, will also reduce, using the language of Lenin, the hostility between the peoples. In that sense, it will not only give us a better future to live as good neighbors but will also allow us to make it easier for us to divert our rage against our so-called domestic exploiters.
There’s also the possibility that the ever-increasing racial and religious supremacy in Israel over the years has arisen from this plunder. Cassif paraphrases French philosopher, Albert Memmi:
In one of his famous books, he said, in other words, that the occupier doesn’t like to see a monster when he looks in the mirror. In order to justify the crimes that an occupier does, occupiers always, eventually, deteriorate into crimes because, eventually, occupation leads to resistance. In order to refrain from seeing yourself or recognizing yourself as a monster, you have to justify the crimes that you do. You do that by demonizing the occupied. It’s the same everywhere. It’s not something that was born under the Israeli occupation. The slave orders in the United States of America did so. The Germans did so, too, with the Jews. The Apartheid regime in South Africa did that with the non-whites, especially with the blacks; of course, there was a hierarchy of different so-called races. It is the same here, a language of occupation.
- Along with exploiting Palestinian labor, Israel tests out surveillance, population control, and military technology on the captive population. It has been reported that the Israeli Defense Forces’ use of artificial intelligence has aided in the current brutal war against Palestinians. Israel testing out new technologies to surveil and kill Palestinians is unfortunately nothing new, as described by Antony Loewenstein in his book, “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.”
“The Palestine Laboratory,” which was published in May 2023, details how Israel sells its technology and weapons all over the world (about 130 countries in 2021) in order to support its economy and curry favor from other nations that will help it continue to deflect criticism from its treatment of Palestinians. Israel benefits from having a captive population on whom to constantly test its weapons and surveillance technology.
- There are economic goals to Israel’s current policy in Gaza. If we’re talking about plunder, we cannot forget that there’s a modern colonial twist of beachfront condos to consider.
An Israeli real estate company stirred up controversy at the end of last year when it released ads for “presale” lots in Gaza. The post featured building plans for villas drawn onto a picture of the destruction in Gaza, with text reading “A home on the beach is no dream!”Zeev Epshtein, the company’s CEO, said the posts were meant to be “a joke.” Haha.
The idea certainly isn’t a joke for some. As the BBC reports:
Who wouldn’t want a house on the beach? For some on Israel’s far-right, desirable beachfront now includes the sands of Gaza. Just ask Daniella Weiss, 78, the grandmother of Israel’s settler movement, who says she already has a list of 500 families ready to move to Gaza immediately.
“I have friends in Tel Aviv,” she says, “so they say, ‘Don’t forget to keep for me a plot near the coast in Gaza,’ because it’s a beautiful, beautiful coast, beautiful golden sand”.
She tells them the plots on the coast are already booked. Mrs Weiss heads a radical settler organisation called Nachala, or homeland. For decades, she has been kickstarting Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, on Palestinian land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior foreign policy adviser and property dealer, Jared Kushner, couldn’t help himself from salivating over the potential for Gaza’s waterfront land – so long as it’s “cleaned up” by Israel.
“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” Kushner said. “And I’m looking at the situation and I’m thinking: what would I do if I was there?”
For Kushner, the solution is simple: “I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
These economic components are central to the colonialist endeavor in Palestine – and were possibly a necessary precursor to the current “plausible” genocide – as well as its support outside of Israel-Palestine.
***
According to Netanyahu, the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism. Call it that or apartheid or colonialism, or neoliberal fascism; either way, it is alive and well at the heart of empire: in the US. And the repressive tactics to silence any criticism of Western support for Israel (or neo Nazis in Ukraine) is helping to drive that point home.
This isn’t meant to diminish what Palestinians are going through, but to ask if the permanent underclass here in the US that is constantly exploited and considered disposable is part of the same struggle. What do we see in rust belt towns, West Virginia sacrifice zones, in the agriculture fields where migrant workers toil as our elites pass laws banning mandatory water breaks, or one of California’s hundreds of Hoovervilles, or a plasma harvesting center or Cancer Alley along the lower Mississippi and countless others?
These are all places where people are used and abused, imprisoned by economic precarity, frequently literally imprisoned where they are exploited as a form of cheap (or free) labor for some of the country’s largest corporations, and often legally robbed by the state police forces through civil forfeiture. Americans are increasingly surveilled using the very same technologies that Israel uses on Palestinians as Silicon Valley tech billionaires dream of a world where democracy is stamped out.
Americans can also be killed with impunity as long as the killer is from the right caste. Heck, the Sacklers can off a few thousand and write it off as the cost of doing business. Reading Matt Bivens recent piece on the opioid crisis at Racket News left me wondering if the difference is that while Israel resorts to killing with bombs, the US sticks with neoliberal despair :
At the turn of the century, about 20,000 people each year would take an opioid — as a pill, or as a snorted or injected powder — and then stop breathing and die. Those of us working on ambulances or in emergency departments could not save them.
But for every death, there are about 20 non-fatal overdoses. So, with bag mask ventilation and opioid reversal agents, we have dragged millions of people back to life. How many suffered anoxic brain injuries, and today are mentally a half-step slower? Unknown.
Overdoses at this scale were a new development, and they were occurring hand-in-hand with the aggressive new marketing and prescribing of opioids. This is the era chronicled so well by popular miniseries — “Dopesick” on Hulu, “Painkiller” on Netflix. In the midst of it, the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma pled guilty to a deception campaign meticulously designed to bring about recklessly liberal opioid prescribing. As punishment, the company had to shell out $600 million, and three top executives got multi-million-dollar fines and 400 hours of community service.
That should have been peak “Opioid Crisis.” But it was only 2007. Heck, George W. Bush was still president. The Sacklers were never contrite. They’d been raking in about $1 billion a year for more than a decade. The $600 million fine sounded impressive — but the Sacklers shrugged, cut the government in to the tune of less than 5% of the cash rolling in, and got right back to slinging opioids. And in the 17 years since, everything has gotten terribly worse.
Did it feel like a catastrophe back in 2007, when 20,000 people a year would die, and people were enraged at Purdue?Or a decade later, in 2017, when President Donald Trump declared it a national emergency, and 50,000 people a year would die? That’s nothing. For the past three years, we’ve reliably seen 80,000 people each year take an opioid, stop breathing and die.
***
The university encampments and ensuing crackdown on them has been instructive in many ways.
The police, as always, are used as a force on behalf of the powerful to quell dissent. But we also have counter protestors working almost in tandem with the state to beat up protestors:
The fact this latter incident occurred at UCLA was fitting, as it was reminiscent of another chapter in US history when the state and its oligarchic owners used right wing paramilitary allies to crack down on protest. Back in the 1920s, Southern California police frequently teamed with the KKK to fight the waterfront union, and the Wobblies were jailed and beaten into submission.
We can see who that the supporters of the counter protestors are supporters of plunder at home and abroad:
It’s also come to light that Jessica Seinfeld, cookbook author and wife to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, helped fund the pro-Israel counterprotest at UCLA. Billionaire hedge-funder Bill Ackman is also helping to bankroll at least one other counterprotest.
There’s been a lot of media talk about who is funding the original anti-genocide protests, but so far this seems to be a classic case of projection in which those motivated solely by profit are incapable of understanding that others might oppose US-supported “plausible” genocide simply because they think it is morally wrong. A POLITICO story attempting to connect the protests to George Soros and Bill Gates, for example, begins to fall apart upon closer examination.
The encampments are also helping to reveal just how strong the embrace is between the neoliberal universities and the national security state.
What are these institutions other than valuable real estate holdings and investment vehicles that hold some classes? Well, maybe there are other purposes:
The response to the campus encampments are a fine example of how the exploitation supported by the US abroad goes hand in hand with exploitation at home. Is it any surprise that the corporatization of higher education has led to the current militarization of campuses and suppression of speech?
US militarism abroad is done in defense of American capital. Let’s not forget Washington’s support of a neo nazi regime in Kiev in the failed effort to break up and plunder Russia.
We see these efforts to spread this American brand of freedom for capital being pushed back abroad by Russia, Iran, and the Houthis who have helped exposed the paper tiger.
What about at home? Can the protestors make strong connections between the US support of “plausible” genocide in Gaza and Israel’s colonial system with the US system of plunder at home?
Even if students and faculty are not explicitly drawing this line, the protests still represent opposition to the merging of neoliberalism and militarism and higher education’s role in that system.
Can these protests continue and/or morph into something more? Can they extract concessions, forge alliances and gain consensus among a wider swath of the population? Or will they simply end if a ceasefire deal is reached and/or the universities promise to consider divestment?
As for support, recent polling shows that on the issue of “college campuses limiting students’ rights and abilities to protest Israel’s military operations” 40 percent approve while 46 percent disapprove. Interesting that, while the poll doesn’t break down results by class if you use college as a marker, there is actually more support for campus protests among those that didn’t attend college. Those without a college degree were less likely to support (37 percent) the crackdown on students compared to respondents with a college degree where 43 percent backed silencing the protests.
Those without a college degree were also less likely to support spending more money to send weapons to Israel and less likely to support fighting alongside Israel against Iran. It doesn’t appear to just be a fiscally conservative issue, either, as those without a college degree were more likely to support sending humanitarian aid to Gaza (56 percent to 49 percent).
Overall, the survey revealed that 70 percent of voters support a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza.That’s really quite incredible considering how much propaganda the media has been churning out – from the New York Times Pulitzer-winning coverage of Gaza that includes bogus weaponized sexual violence propaganda to the recent coverage of campus encampments that take ridiculous police allegations as fact with no pushback.
It will be worth watching what happens this coming week with the union of 48,000 academic workers in the University of California system who are holding a strike authorization vote May 13-15 in response to violence against protestors by Zionist groups and the police and the universities refusal to hear the demands of protestors.
UAW workers have already established a “union village” as part of the encampment at UC Berkeley. From the Daily Cal:
While union members have been at the encampment for the last few weeks in an individual capacity, UAW 4811 did not have an explicit presence until Tuesday, according to UC Berkeley ASE Unit Chair Iris Rosenblum-Sellers.
UC Berkeley’s is the first “Union Village” to be established at any UC encampment, Rosenblum-Sellers added. As of Tuesday afternoon, there were around half a dozen tents in the “Union Village,” but both Chowdhury and Rosenblum-Sellers said union members anticipate filling the remaining space soon.
“It’s peaceful here and I hope it stays that way, but we also want to see progress on our demands,” Chowdhury said.
In the hour before the village was established, speakers and participants at the rally chanted “World leaders, grow a spine; Rafah is our red line” and “Free free free Palestine,” among other phrases. Community members and protesters also gave speeches throughout the event to loud cheers and drums from the crowd.
Both speakers and protesters acknowledged the solidarity between students and workers in the Free Palestine movement. Many raised signs and banners with phrases such as “Students & Workers of the World: United for Palestine” and “UAW Student Workers for a Free Palestine.”
Could this be the start of something? If it is, the rank and file will likely need to overcome the opposition of union leadership.Payday Report has been all over this, and here’s the most recent:
On Tuesday, Payday broke the story of how UAW President Shawn Fain vetoed attempts within the UAW to divest from Israel. UAW represents over 100,000 academic workers and many, who have been involved in campus occupations, were upset by Fain’s veto of the union’s divestment from Israel. (See our story here)
While the UAW along with other unions endorsed a ceasefire in December, the union has been loath to take more aggressive action to protest Israel’s attack on Gaza.
When several UAW members attempted to protest the UAW’s endorsement of Biden at its convention in January, they were literally dragged from the convention by UAW staff as union members began chanting “U-S-A. U-S-A” to drown out their anti-war chants. (Check out Prem Thakker’s story at the Intercept from January)
Maybe Fain doesn’t want to distract from unionization efforts or lose focus on the goal of a mass strike scheduled for May Day 2028, detailed by Fain here at In These Times – a worthwhile goal, but 2028 is a long ways away.
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