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UK: Starmer is ‘Pro-Business and Pro-Worker’?

Ms Blakeley admits she is writes as a Marxist. It is astonishing that she and the Tribune encourage the fragmentation of social thought . Complicity in crime (with Israel) besides hypocrisy, double standard, war on refugees and descrimination, obscene inequality … are not topics to be included in what is missing in Starmer’s manifesto.   At the time of publishing, I have not yet received a reply by Tribune to my comment.
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Arundhati Roy

Note the distortion by the BBC: “Admirers see her as a leading voice for liberal values and a champion of the marginalised.” Roy is liberal? Celebrated writer faces prosecution
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Israel’s Impunity, France’s Complicity

“Let there be no mistake:  French officialdom is complicit with what is going on in Gaza. Justifying the ongoing genocide, it has given credence, along with the MPs of the ruling majority and often those of the right-wing opposition and the far right too – but also at times the left – all the arguments used to vindicate Benyamin Netanyahu’s government. Economic sanctions, symbolic measures to remove the offending flag from the public eye, athletic boycott in view of the coming Olympics, a weapons embargo, all of these is only used against Russia. When 35% of the country’s exports come to Europe, the use of that economic lever is not even threatened; no more than the suspension of arms deliveries, or their components (the exact value of France’s exports of these is not known) or munitions; nor the slightest attempt to make them obey international law by sanctioning the French firms present in the occupied territories, like Carrefour or Alstom.” Yet the writers could repeat the clich...
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Quote of the Week: The Exceptionalization of the Suffering of the Jews

The exceptionalization of the suffering of the Jews was not a Jewish discursive project but a Western one, part of the exceptionalization of the genocidal violence of the Nazis. In the grand narrative of Western triumph over this ultimate force of evil, the State of Israel became an emblem of Western fortitude and marked the endurance of the Euro-American imperial project. Within this grand narrative, Jews were forced to transform from traumatized survivors into perpetrators. Jews from all over the world were sent to win a demographic battle, without which the Israeli regime could not last. The second and third generations born to this project were born with no histories or memories of their anti-Zionist or non-Zionist ancestors, let alone memories of the other worlds of which their ancestors were part. What’s more, they were totally dissociated from the history of what Palestine used to be and from its destruction. Thus, they were easy prey for a nation-state marketed by the Zionists ...
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Eqbal Ahmad and the Liberation of Palestine

“The more precise comparison, Ahmed argued, was to European settler colonialism in the Americas. With both, there were ‘the myths of the empty land, of swamps reclaimed and deserts blooming … messianic complexes of manifest destinies and promised lands … a paranoid strain in the colonising culture, an instrumental attitude towards violence and a tendency to expand.’ He noted that settler colonies of this kind tend to pursue three goals: some level of independence from their western state sponsors; a normalisation of their relations with neighbouring countries; and a solution to what they consider the ‘native problem’, through the elimination, expulsion or containment of the Indigenous populations. The US could claim it had achieved these goals in the nineteenth century, though Indigenous resistance has never ceased. Israel was still pursuing them in the 1980s and continues to do so today.” Out-organise the enemy!
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Quote of the Week: When Crimes Begin to Pile up They Become Invisible

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.    When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.   – Bertolt Brecht,  Selected Poems
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Israel’s Permanent ‘War Economy’

It is a good summary and a well-researched article . I think it needs more elaboration on Israel’s shift to ‘a neoliberal economy’.  The Israeli’s economy is not just a ‘war economy’. It is 1. a capitalist political economy with its internal dynamics and 2. a global political economy. Class is absent in the analysis as if Israel is a unique case where ‘nationalism’ (and religion or both) decide rather than a ruling class or a coalition that represents different classes. Falling rate of profit or as Nitzan and Bichler put it in a seminal work that serves as a background and a starting point of Israel economy today “the profit margins of dominant capital started to feel the pinch.” This is a major factor in the form of capitalism Israel shifted to in order to maintain or increase the regime of capital accumulation.  Related After the economic crisis that hit a few countries in the 1990s then the 11 of September attacks on the US, the crisis reached Western countries. “The i...
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