US to Islamists: Elections are for chumps. Go get your AK-47.

Here's a not too bad article from Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast.  Titled Obama's Greatest Failure, it's a criticism of Obama for not calling the Egyptian coup a coup and thereby encouraging what the Egyptian military is now doing.  Obviously by contrasting any aspect of Obama's foreign policy with any other indicates support for Obama but it does have some interesting insights and useful turns of phrase.  An example is that in the heading above.  Here it is again:

To anyone in the Muslim world who needed convincing, it now looks unmistakably clear that the United States favors democracy in the Middle East when, and only when, our side wins. If you’re an Islamist who has now watched the United States wink at coups against democratically elected Islamist governments in Algeria and Egypt, and sought to foment one among the Palestinians after Hamas’ democratic election in 2006, the message is clear: Elections are for chumps. Go get your AK-47.

He then spoils the whole thing by making out that Obama is basically wellmeaning and that he has presidential antecedents for that wellmeaningness:

By historical standards, the Obama administration has presided over few genuine foreign-policy disasters. That’s no accident. Its self-consciously Hippocratic approach—modeled on world-weary pragmatists like Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush—is designed to avoid them.

Hippocratic?  Hmm, bit of a typo that.

I think Mr Beinart is missing the point here that there is nothing happening in Egypt that's hurting the USA in standard foreign policy terms.  Earlier in the piece we have this:

There’s a reasonable argument that nothing Obama did would have mattered. The Persian Gulf states, which adored the coup, quickly offered Egypt far more money than the U.S. could have withheld.

Ah, there's a possible error by Obama. The coup he wants could have happened and remained in place and the US could have even saved itself some money. Beinart obviously doesn't see it that way.
And there's more:  

it’s not as if the administration remained passive. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns worked hard to bring the Brotherhood and the military together. The White House even sent two of its domestic tormenters, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to Cairo to try to hatch a deal.

So they could have saved money and still looked like they were making nice.

Obviously Obama is not quite my cup of tea.  He's had lots of people killed and he still keeps lots of people in Guantanamo and yet he claims his biggest moral failing was smoking a joint as a teenager or some such. I also don't like the way phony liberals make him out to be somehow to the left of George W. Bush.  Anyway, Peter Beinart here is noting, possibly inadvertently, that there are bigger moral failings than taking drugs as a youngster. Give the man a prize!

Blair's Hypocrisy and the Riddle of the Sphinx

From Private Eye magazine number 1344:

The same page (5) has a brief summary of Blair's love affair with democracy in Egypt:

Who better to offer a hopeful sermon to strife-torn Egypt than roving Middle East vicar, Tony Blair?

"I am a strong supporter of democracy," the great peacemaker wrote in Sunday's Observer.  "This struggle matters to us.  The good news is that there are millions of modern and open-minded people out there.   They need to know we are on their side, their allies, prepared to pay the price to be there with them."

The former PM knows Egypt well, of course.  As we pointed out after the 2011 revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak, Blair was happy to take his Christmas hols in the country no fewer than five times between 2000 and 2005 when the Egyptian dictator's regime was at its zenith.  At the first of those visits, Blair was "a guest of the Egyptian government at two private government villas at Sharm-el-Sheikh", according to his entry in the register of MPs' interests, while on at least one subsequent trip Mubarak paid for the flights.  Can this be what the vicar means about showing pro-democracy Egyptians that "we are on their side" and, er, "prepared to pay the price to be there"?

Of course as neoconservatism's ambassador at large, indeed, the man who puts the Con in NeoCon, Blair can excuse anything that doesn't quite tally with his professed commitment to democracy.  And here's a little nugget reported in The Observer (Guardian online)  that the Eye missed out:

"I am a strong supporter of democracy. But democratic government doesn't on its own mean effective government. Today efficacy is the challenge." 

Leaving it to The Observer to note:

Having taken this country to war in Iraq in 2003 despite huge public opposition, including a march by more than a million people through London, Blair now argues that shows of public unrest such as that in Egypt – fuelled and organised through social media – cannot be ignored.

I don't know, maybe there is a certain consistency there.  Lots of people on the streets in Egypt, send in the army.  Lots of people on the streets of the UK, send in the army...to Iraq.

PS: I was looking on google for a quote about Blair from former Tory MP, Matthew Parris.  I couldn't find it but here's Parris on Blair from Wikipedia:

I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he ever believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention — himself — has been his only interesting role.

What I find interesting about this quote in the Matthew Parris Wikipedia entry is that the quote itself says nothing specific about Parris though it does sum up Blair.  It would be more appropriate for Blair's own entry.  It appears that hatred of Blair is so widespread some people will use any outlet to vent it.

Palestine's Pinochet hails Egypt's Pinochet

In all the tumult I hadn't noticed that Mahmud Abbas had hailed the overthrow of the elected government of Egypt by the Egyptian army.  I first noticed this tweet from the UK Israel lobby group, BICOM:

Abbas welcomes removal of Morsi from power in Egypt, http://t.co/G8d7U052ph #Egypt
— BICOM (@BritainIsrael) July 5, 2013

I read the article and checked elsewhere and sure enough, Abbas said:

 “In the name of the Palestinian people and its leaders, I am honoured to congratulate you on assuming the leadership of the Arab Republic of Egypt in this transitory phase in its history.” Abbas went on to praise “the role played by the Egyptian armed forces… in preserving the security of Egypt and stopping it from sliding towards an unknown fate.”

 It didn't surprise me that Abbas supported the coup but it did surprise me that he could so brazenly speak "In the name of the Palestinian people and its leaders".

The whole thing reminded me of an article in al Ahram by Joseph Massad titled, Pinochet in Palestine:

Before the United States government subcontracted the Chilean military to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, it carried out a number of important missions in the country in preparation for the coup of 11 September. These included major strikes, especially by truck owners, which crippled the economy, massive demonstrations that included middle-class housewives and children carrying pots and pans demanding food, purging the Chilean military of officers who would oppose the suspension of democracy and the introduction of US-supported fascist rule, and a major media campaign against the regime with the CIA planting stories in newspapers like El Mercurio and others. This was in a context where also the Communist Party and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR) criticised and sometimes attacked the Allende regime from varying leftist positions.

Plus ça change huh?

Advice on democracy from the only democracy in the Middle East

Here's a bizarre piece in The Times of Israel.  A former Israeli minister under Ehud Olmert and an adviser to the nearly but not quite late, Ariel Sharon, Rafi Eitan, has said that the USA should never have allowed Mohammed Morsi to become president of Egypt.

“The military unequivocally decided that [Ahmed] Shafiq will be president, not [Mohammed] Morsi,” Eitan told The Times of Israel. “But the Americans put all the pressure on. The announcement [of the president] was delayed by three or four days because of this struggle.”

Immediately after Egypt’s presidential elections in June 2012, Eitan spoke to unnamed local officials, who told him that with a mere 5,000-vote advantage for Islamist candidate Morsi, the military was prepared to announce the victory of his adversary Shafiq, a secular military man closely associated with the Mubarak regime.

But secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Eitan said, decided to favor democracy at all costs and disallow any falsification of the vote.

“This is idiocy. An act of stupidity that will resonate for generations,” Eitan said. “I also thought Mubarak should be replaced, but I believed the Americans would be smart enough to replace him with the next figure. Mubarak would have agreed to that, but the Americans didn’t want that; they wanted democracy. But there is no real democracy in the Arab world at the moment. It will take a few generations to develop.

I don't think the US approach to the Arab world is any less racist than Israel's.  I'm guessing they just don't like to be as obvious as Israel when it comes to throwing their weight around.

Meet the new Egypt....

Same as the old Egypt.

Here's The Guardian:

Egypt spent the equivalent of £1.7m on 140,000 US-sourced teargas canisters last month, despite the Egyptian government nearing bankruptcy – and amid a wave of police brutality that 21 human rights groups this week labelled a return to Mubarak-era state repression.

Well perhaps they didn't know the cost in money terms of Mubarak-era state repression. That's progress.

Finkelstein on Israel's recent defeat by Hamas and the Arab Spring

Many of us have felt let down by Norman Finkelstein recently what with his statements about BDS which didn't quite tally with the reality but he does seem to hit the spot with this piece on the New Left Project website titled Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza - What Really Happened:

The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defence on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had “every right to defend itself.”

In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.

The facts, however, suggest otherwise.

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes.   The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks.  Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.   

Hamas occasionally turned a blind eye, or joined in to prevent an escalation, when Israeli provocations resulted in retaliatory strikes by Hamas’s more militant Islamist rivals.  It recoiled at being cast as Israel’s collaborator in the image of the Palestinian Authority.

It has been speculated that Hamas was itching for a confrontation with Israel. 

But this past year Hamas has been on a roll.   Its ideological soulmate, the Muslim Brotherhood, ascended to power in Egypt.  The emir of Qatar journeyed to Gaza carrying the promise of $400 million in aid, while Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to visit Gaza soon thereafter.   In the West Bank many Palestinians envied (rightly or wrongly) that Gazans fared better economically.  Meanwhile, Gaza’s Islamic University even managed to pull off an academic conference attended by renowned linguist Noam Chomsky.

Hamas’s star was slowly but surely rising, at the expense of the hapless Palestinian Authority.   The very last thing it needed at that moment was an inevitably destructive confrontation with Israel that could jeopardise these hard-won, steadily accreting gains. 

On the other side, many cynical Israelis speculated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the operation in order to boost his election prospects in January 2013.  

As a general rule, however, Israeli leaders do not unleash major military operations for electoral gain where significant State interests are at stake.   The fact that Defence Minister Ehud Barak dropped out of politics soon after the latest operation ended and his popular standing improved suggests that the forthcoming election was not a prime consideration for him.[1]

Why, then, did Israel attack?

In one sense, Israel was straightforward about its motive.  It kept saying, credibly, that it wanted to restore its “deterrence capacity”—i.e., the Arab/Muslim world’s fear of it.

The real question, however, is the nature of the threat it wanted to deter.

The latest assault on Gaza unfolded in the broader context of successive Israeli foreign policy failures.  

Netanyahu sought to rally the international community for an attack on Iran, but ended up looking the fool as he held up an Iranian nuclear device “smuggled” into the United Nations.   Hezbollah boasted that a drone launched by it had penetrated Israeli airspace, and then reserved the right to enter Israeli air space at its whim.  Now, its “terrorist” twin upstart in Gaza was gaining respectability as the Arab/Muslim world thumbed its collective nose at Israel on its doorstep.

The natives were getting restless.  It was time to take out the big club again and remind the locals who was in charge.

“At the heart of Operation Pillar of Defence,” the respected Crisis Group observed, “lay an effort to demonstrate that Hamas’s newfound confidence was altogether premature and that, the Islamist awakening notwithstanding, changes in the Middle East would not change much at all.”

Still, Israel needed a suitable pretext.  So, just as it knew that breaking the ceasefire in November 2008 by killing six Hamas militants would evoke a massive response, so it must have known that killing Jaabari would evoke a comparable response.

The actual Israeli assault, however, differed significantly from Operation Cast Lead (OCL) in 2008-9: it was qualitatively less murderous and destructive.  Many commentators have therefrom inferred that Israel used more precise weapons this time and, concomitantly, that Israel had “learnt the lessons” from OCL on how to avoid civilian casualties.

In fact, 99 percent of Israeli Air Force attacks during OCL hit targets accurately, while the goal of OCL was—in the words of the Goldstone Report, which was supported by scores of other human rights reports—to “punish, humiliate and terrorise” the Gazan civilian population.

If Israel’s latest rampage proved less lethal by comparison, it was because of unprecedented political constraints imposed on it:

• Turkey and Egypt made abundantly clear that they would not sit idly by if Israel launched a repeat performance of OCL.   From early on, both drew a red line at an Israeli ground assault.  Although now officially denied, it was reliably reported at the time that Obama, no doubt prodded by these key regional actors, counselled Israel not to invade.

• Israel had hanging over its head the Goldstone Report.  It managed to elude, the first time around, prosecution at the International Criminal Court and the exercise by several countries of universal jurisdiction for its war crimes and crimes against humanity.  But the second time it might not be so fortunate.

• Gaza was swarming with foreign reporters.   Before OCL, Israel had sealed Gaza shut from the outside world with the cooperation of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.   In the initial phase of the onslaught, Israel enjoyed a near-total monopoly on media coverage.   But now, journalists could freely enter Gaza and credibly report Israeli atrocities in real-time.

On account of this trio of factors, Israel mostly targeted sites that could be deemed “legitimate.”  True, some 70 Palestinian civilians were killed, but that could be chalked up to “collateral damage.”

The deaths and injuries of civilians during the Israeli assault, although far fewer than in previous rounds of the conflict, received in-depth and graphic news coverage.  When Israel tested the limits of military legitimacy, trouble loomed.  After it flattened civilian governmental structures in Gaza, the headline on the New York Times web site read, “Israel targets civilian buildings.”  A few hours later it metamorphosed into “government buildings” (no doubt after a call from the Israeli consulate).  Still, the writing was on the wall: Israeli conduct was being closely scrutinised by outsiders, so it had better tread carefully.   

The salient exceptions came during the final ceasefire negotiations when Israel resorted to its standard terrorist tactics in order to extract the best possible terms, and also targeted journalists in the event that the negotiations collapsed and it would have to, after all, launch the murderous ground invasion.

The armed resistance Hamas put up during the eight-day Israeli assault was largely symbolic.  Although Israel acclaimed the success of Iron Dome, it almost certainly did not save many and perhaps not any lives.  During OCL some 800 projectiles and mortar shells landing in Israel killed three Israeli civilians, while during the recent Israeli assault some 1,400 projectiles and mortar shells landing in Israel killed four Israeli civilians. 

It is unlikely that, in the main and allowing for the occasional exception, Hamas used much more technically advanced weapons in the latest round.  Through its army of informers and hi-tech aerial surveillance Israel would have been privy to large quantities of sophisticated Hamas weapons and would have destroyed these stashes before or during the first day of the attack.  It is also improbable that Netanyahu would have risked an attack just on the eve of an election if Hamas possessed weapons capable of inflicting significant civilian casualties.  A handful of Hamas projectiles reached deeper inside Israel than before but these lacked explosives; an Israeli official derisively described them as “pipes, basically.” 

If Israel ballyhooed Iron Dome, it was because its purported effectiveness was the only achievement to which Israel could point in the final reckoning. 

The climax of Israel’s assault came when it was unable to break the spirit of the people of Gaza.  On the one hand, it had exhausted all preplanned military targets and, on the other, it couldn’t target the civilian population.  Hamas had successfully adapted Hezbollah’s strategy of continually firing its projectiles, the psychological upshot of which was that Israel couldn’t declare its deterrence capacity had been restored, and thereby forcing on it a ground invasion. 

Israel could not launch such an invasion, however, without suffering significant combatant losses unless the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blasted everyone and everything in and out of sight as it cleared a path into Gaza.   But, because of the novel circumstances—the regional realignment after the Arab Spring, and Turkey under Erdogan; the threat of a “mega-Goldstone,” as a veteran Israeli commentator put it; the presence of a foreign press corps embedded not in the IDF but among the people of Gaza—Israel couldn’t launch an OCL-style ground invasion.  

Israel was thus caught between a rock and a hard place.  It couldn’t subdue Hamas without a ground invasion, but it couldn’t launch a ground invasion without incurring a politically unacceptable price in IDF casualties and global opprobrium.  

It is possible to pinpoint the precise moment when the Israeli assault was over: Hamas leader Khalid Mishal’s taunt to Israel at a 19 November press conference, Go ahead, invade!

Netanyahu panicked.  His bluff was called, and Israel stood exposed, naked, before the whole world.   What happened next was a repeat of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  Unable to stop the Hezbollah rocket attacks but dreading the prospect of a ground invasion that meant tangling with the Party of God, Israel called in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to negotiate a ceasefire.  This time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was summoned to bail Israel out.  Not even the 21 November bus bombing in Tel Aviv—which, ceasefire or no ceasefire, would normally have elicited massive Israeli retaliation—shook Netanyahu from his determination to end the operation immediately, before Hamas resumed its taunting.

The terms of the final agreement marked a stunning defeat for Israel.  It called for a mutualceasefire, not one, as Israel demanded, unilaterally imposed on Hamas.  It also included language that implied the siege of Gaza would be lifted.  Notably, it did not include the condition that Hamas must cease its importation or production of weapons.  The reason why is not hard to find.  Under international law, peoples resisting foreign occupation have the right (or, as some international lawyers more cautiously phrase it, license) to use armed force.  Egypt, which brokered the ceasefire, was not about to accept a stipulation that conceded Hamas’s legal right.[2]

Israel no doubt hoped that the U.S. would use its political leverage to extract better ceasefire terms from Egypt.  But the Obama administration, placing American interests first and consequently wanting to bring the new Egypt under its wing, was not willing (assuming it could) to lord it over Egypt on Israel’s behalf.

If any doubt remained about who won and who lost in the latest round, it was quickly dispelled.  Israel launched the attack to restore Gaza’s fear of it.  But after the ceasefire and its terms were announced, Palestinians flooded the streets of Gaza in a celebratory mood as if at a wedding party.  In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, Hamas’s Mishal cut the figure and exuded the confidence of a world leader.  Meanwhile, at the Israeli press conference announcing the ceasefire, the ruling triumvirate—Netanyahu, Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—resembled grade-schoolers called down to the Principal’s Office, counting the seconds until the humiliation was over.

The ceasefire is likely to hold until and unless Israel can figure out how to militarily prevail given the new political environment.   The days of Cast Lead are over, while a Pillar of Defence-type operation will not bear the fruits of victory.  

It is unlikely, however, that Israel will fulfil the terms of the final agreement to lift the siege of Gaza.  During deliberations on whether to accept the ceasefire, Barak had already cynically dismissed the fine print, saying “A day after the ceasefire, no one will remember what is written in that draft.” 

It is equally improbable that Egypt will pressure the U.S. to enforce the ceasefire terms on Israel.  The respective interests of the new Egypt and Hamas mostly diverge, not converge.  Egypt desperately needs American subventions, and is currently negotiating a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, where Washington’s vote is decisive.  The popularity of President Mohammed Morsi’s government will ultimately hinge on what it delivers to Egyptians, not Gazans.   

In the meantime, U.S. political elites are lauding Morsi to high heaven, stroking his ego, and speculating on the “special relationship” he has cultivated with Obama.  Those familiar with the psychological manipulations of the U.S. when it comes to Arab leaders—in particular, contemptibly mediocre ones such as Anwar Sadat—will not be surprised by the current U.S. romancing of Morsi.

It is also unlikely that Turkey will exert itself on Hamas’s behalf.  Right now it is smarting from Obama’s rebuff of designating Egypt as prime interlocutor in brokering the ceasefire.  Turkey was reportedly disqualified because it labelled Israel a “terrorist state” during the assault, whereas Egypt “only” accused Israel of “acts of aggression, murder and bloodletting.”   

Still, aspiring to be the U.S.’s chief regional partner, and calculating that the road to Washington passes through Tel Aviv, Turkey has resumed negotiations with Israel to end the diplomatic impasse after Israel killed eight Turks aboard a humanitarian vessel headed for Gaza in 2010.   On the other hand, its recent operation has brought home to Israel that alienating both its historic allies in the region, Egypt and Turkey, is not prudent policy, so a face-saving reconciliation between Ankara and Tel Aviv (the Turkish government is formally demanding an apology, monetary compensation, and an end to the Gaza siege) is probably in the offing.

The long and the short of it is that, even in the new era that has opened up, definite limits exist on how much regional support the Palestinians can realistically hope to garner.

It appears that many Palestinians have concluded from the resounding defeat inflicted on Israel that only armed resistance can and will end the Israeli occupation.  In fact, however, Hamas’s armed resistance operated for the most part only at the level of perceptions—the projectiles heading towards Tel Aviv did unsettle the city’s residents—and it is unlikely that Palestinians can ever muster sufficient military might to compel an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. 

But Gaza’s steadfastness until the final hour of the Israeli assault did demonstrate the indomitablewill of the people of Palestine.  If this potential force can be harnessed in a campaign of mass civil resistance, and if the supporters of Palestinian rights worldwide do their job of mobilizing public opinion and changing government policy, then Israel can be forced to withdraw, and with fewer Palestinian lives lost than in an armed resistance.

This article benefited from many conversations with Palestinian political analyst Mouin Rabbani and from Jamie Stern-Weiner playing the devil’s advocate.

Norman Finkelstein is the author of many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, most recently,Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End, and is currently working on a book with Mouin Rabbani on how to resolve the conflict.

---

[1] It has also been speculated that the governing coalition had to do something to placate popular indignation at the Hamas attacks.  But in fact, these attacks have barely registered on Israel’s political radar the past year, the focus being mostly on Iran and domestic issues.

[2] In a diplomatic side note to Netanyahu, Obama vaguely promised to “help Israel address its security needs, especially the issue of smuggling of weapons and explosives into Gaza.”

The man's obviously a tormented moody genius.

So where was the Reverend Tony Blair?

Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister and Israel's envoy to the so-called Peace Quartet, at first came out in favour of Israel's operation against Gaza.  See this from The Daily Telegraph a few days ago:

The former prime minister and current Middle East Peace Envoy says that Hamas militants in Gaza must stop firing rockets, to put an end to Israel's retaliation and prevent the conflict from escalating.

Note the assumption that Israel, not Hamas, is retaliating.

See some more, this is from 15 November 2012, by the way

Tony Blair told ITV News: "If rockets are fired out of Gaza by Hamas or other militants in Gaza and aimed at Israeli towns and villages with the express purpose of killing Israeli civilians, the government of Israel is going to retaliate and the Israeli people will expect them to do so.

"So the most important thing is we stop the rockets from coming out, the retaliation can then stop, we get some ceasefire or calm into the situation and then work out a better way forward,

Now let's look at the Reverend's website on 19 November 2012:

Commenting on the conflict in the Middle East, on his 92nd visit to the region, Quartet Representative Tony Blair said:

"The suffering of innocent civilians, Palestinian and Israeli, makes a complete cessation the urgent objective. Israeli families need to be free from fear of rocket attacks and Gazan families relieved of the pain of the air strikes, so a ceasefire should be brought into being as soon as possible. We can then work on an agenda that ensures long-term the security of Israel and the return to normal life for Gaza, which has been absent for too long.

“We also continue to work on a credible political horizon for the two state solution that is, and remains, the only viable solution."

Note four days after openly siding with the racist war criminals of the State of Israel he now makes a pretence of even-handedness.

Now that Hamas appears to have won this latest round of Israel's Palestinian cull let's see The Guardian report on the cessation:

Announcing the ceasefire in Cairo, Clinton commended Egypt's mediation. "This is a critical moment for the region. Egypt's new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone for regional stability and peace."

She also thanked Egypt's Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, for his mediation efforts and pledged to work with partners in the region "to consolidate this progress, improve conditions for the people of Gaza, and provide security for the people of Israel".

Despite securing support from western governments for its initial military operation against Hamas, Israel had failed to win US and European backing for a ground invasion as a series of key US allies in the region, led by Egypt and Turkey, strongly protested against the Israeli assault.

The agreed truce, mediated by Morsi and his spy chief, Mohamed Shehata, came after days of talks and frantic shuttle diplomacy involving regional leaders, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and Clinton.

So where was the Reverend Tony Blair? Let's go back to His website:

Commenting on today's announcement, Quartet Representative Tony Blair said:

"I very much welcome this ceasefire, and highly commend the central role that Egypt’s government has played in bringing it about – with the helpful efforts of Secretary Clinton and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“We must now act quickly to ensure long-term progress in the region so that the security of Israelis is ensured, and that life returns to normal for Gazans through continual improvements in their infrastructure and economy.

“We firmly believe that a two state solution is the way forward.”

Actually, unless this is the calm before an even bigger Israeli storm then what appears to have happened here is that resistance from Gaza together with support for the Palestinians from Egypt and Turkey has had the US ordering Israel not to persist in its Palestinian cull for the time being. There are many lessons which can be drawn from this, I'm sure, but Blair seems to have played no role in this whatever, except to side with Israel, pretend not to side with anyone and then report a ceasefire deal on his blog as if all the main players were working for him. So that's where he was.  Same as me, he was at home updating his blog.  So former UK PM, Israel's envoy to the Peace Quartet, Very (excruciatingly) Reverend, Tony Blair, can now tack on to the end of his CV (resumé for Americans), blogger. Yes, it's Blogger Blair!

Message from within the largest concentration camp in history: "Gaza is Dying"

Since June, 2007 Israel has adopted a continuous series of measures harming the civilian population. In September,2007 Gaza was declared "an enemy entity," and imports were restricted to 9 basic materials. Prohibited have been such items as certain medicines, furniture, electrical appliances, cows and cigarettes, and decreased amounts of such basic foods as fruits, milk and dairy products. Fuel and electricity supplies have also been cut. Gaza used to depend 100% on Israel for its fuels and close to 60% for its electricity. Gazans, however, resorted to digging tunnels on the Egyptian borders with Palestine in order to get fuel, medicine and other necessities. The Mubarak regime took every possible step to tighten the siege and destroy the tunnels. The ousting of Mubarak should have meant the end of the deadly siege imposed on Gaza. This has not happened yet, one year after the great Egyptian revolution! The Rafah crossing is still “partially” open; supply of fuel through tunnels has completely stopped, and the electricity ration is only for 6 hours a day! Hospital generators have stopped!

Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into the largest concentration camp with the largest population of prisoners in the world. The international conspiracy of silence towards the slow genocide taking place against the 1.5 million civilians in Gaza indicates complicity in these war crimes.

According to UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control

We, therefore, call upon the international community to demand that the rogue State of Israel end its siege and compensate for the destruction of life and infrastructure that it has visited upon the Palestinian people. We also call upon all Palestine solidarity groups and all international civil society organizations to demand:

• An end to the siege that has been imposed on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
• The protection of civilian lives and property, as stipulated in International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law such as The Fourth Geneva Convention (to which Israel itself is a signatory.)
• Immediate opening of the Rafah Crossing (24/7) and the flow of goods, fuel and medicine.
• That Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip be provided with financial and material support to cope with the immense hardship that they are experiencing
• An end to occupation, Apartheid and other war crimes.
• Immediate reparations and compensation for all destruction carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the Gaza Strip.

Besieged Gaza, Occupied Palestine

One Democratic State Group
Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel
University Teachers’ Association in Palestine
Israel Apartheid Week Organizing Committee-Gaza

http://www.odsg.org/co/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2517%3Apress-release-gaza-is-dying&catid=39%3AStatements&Itemid=62

People move to cut Jordan's ties to Israel

Here's a remarkable piece on the MSNBC news site.

Israel was evacuating its embassy in Jordan on Wednesday in advance of a demonstration promoted on Facebook under a banner "No Zionist embassy on Jordanian territory," The Jerusalem Post reported without citing sources.


Security forces in Jordan were preparing for the protest, which was scheduled to take place Thursday at the embassy in Amman, Israel's Ynet news reported. Armored vehicles and security officers were stationed at the building, according to the website.


The move comes days after the Israeli Embassy in Cairo was ransacked by hundreds of protesters, forcing the the ambassador to flee the country.


Story: Israeli PM condemns embassy attack in Cairo


Elsewhere in Amman, demonstrators demanded the closing of the U.S. Embassy in Jordan over WikiLeaks cables suggesting covert U.S. plans to turn Jordan into a home for Palestinians.

It was a rare anti-American demonstration in Jordan, a close ally of the U.S.

The 70 activists burned American and Israeli flags in a noisy protest opposite the embassy in Amman on Wednesday.

They chanted, "The people want the Americans out."

Roughly half of the country's 6 million population is of Palestinian origin. With Palestinian-Israeli peace talks stalled, some Jordanians fear Israel may try to deport Palestinians to Jordan.

This week Jordan's King Abdullah II spoke out strongly against using Jordan as a substitute for a Palestinian state, a concept favored by a tiny extremist minority among Israelis.

This is fascinating. Could King Abdullah really be so poorly informed as to speak out against another ethnic cleansing campaign if only a "tiny extremist minority among Israelis" supports the idea?

It's good news that ordinary people in the front line states are severing diplomatic relations with Israel but the fears expressed at the end of this article go to the heart of Israel's existence. Ethnic cleansing is certainly extreme when it happens in most places but in Israel it is considered the norm.

Call to Egypt: Open the Rafah Crossing!

Egyptian Embassies Contact information London Tel: 020 7235 9777 Fax:020 7235 5684 consulate@egyptianconsulate.co.uk Madrid  Tel: 34-91-5776308/9/10 Fax:34-91-5781732 info@ecros.org Montreal  Tel: 514-8668455/6/7 Fax: 514-8660835 Ottawa  Tel: 613-2344931/5 Fax: 613-2349347/4398 egyptemb@sympatico.ca Paris  Tel: 33-1-536-78830/2 Fax: 33-1-472-30643 Paris_emb@mfa.gov.eg Washington DC Tel: (202) 966-6342 Fax: (202) 244-4319 Consulate@egyptembassy.net	September 2, 2011 Click to view this email in a browser TAKE ACTION Open the Rafah Crossing Permanently and Unconditionally  A deadly siege on 1.6 million people living in Gaza has been imposed by Israel since 2006.  It was partially and momentarily lifted when the revolutionary Egyptian movement ousted Hosni Mubarak and made clear that emancipation and the freedom of Palestine were joint and connected goals. Yet today, and daily, approximately 35,000 people wait to cross the border. Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes last week on ‘the largest open air prison on earth’ killed at least 15 people, including 2 children, and injured at least 50 more. The denial of freedom of movement for Palestinian people is also an offense to the immense ongoing struggles of the Egyptian people in pursuit of human rights and dignity. Join the growing calls from Egypt for: recalling the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv, expelling the Israeli ambassador from Egypt, opening the Rafah Crossing unconditionally, halting all moves for normalization with Israel and halting trade of natural gas between the two countries. CALL TO ACTION On Friday, August 26, South Africans will deliver the petition to their Egyptian embassy. Starting on August 26 and for the next four Fridays, until September 30, join in international actions in solidarity with Gaza and in support of the on-going Egyptian people's movement:   Request that the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces  honor the human dignity and freedom of its own people and the people of Gaza, and OPEN THE RAFAH CROSSING PERMANENTLY AND UNCONDITIONALLY. Take action 1.    Organize a delegation to deliver the petition to your Egyptian embassy, consulate or representative office on a Friday. 2.   Contact your Egyptian embassy. 3.   Sign and circulate the petition. 4.   "Like" and "Share" the Facebook page with your friends and organizations. Send an email about your activities to: rafahcrossingcampaign@gmail.com Post your activities on the campaign Facebook page.   For more information, contact us at:  rafahcrossingcampaign@gmail.com

Israeli Labourite offered Mubarak asylum

It was the least Israel could do for its man in Cairo and just typical that an offer of asylum under Israeli protection would come from a Labour member of Israel's parliament.  Here's the JTA:

As the trial of Hosni Mubarak began in Egypt, an Israeli lawmaker said he had offered political asylum in Israel to the longtime Egyptian president.

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a Knesset member from the Labor Party, told Israel’s Army Radio on Wednesday that he had made the offer to an ailing Mubarak several months ago in Sharm el-Sheikh, a Red Sea resort city in Egypt.

"I met [Mubarak] in Sharm el-Sheikh and I told him that it was a short distance and that it might be a good chance to heal himself," Ben-Eliezer said, according to Haaretz. "I am convinced that the Israel government would have accepted him, but he declined [the offer] because he was a patriot."

I'm sure many Arab patriots would be honoured to end out their days in Palestine but maybe the blessing for Mubarak's presence was a humiliation too far:

According to The Jerusalem Post, Ben-Eliezer said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a party to the offer.

Clearly comrade Hosni Mubarak is a man of the highest integrity.

The reactionary Egyptian government DID NOT open the Rafah crossing

While most gush over the public relation stunt pulled by the lousy, reactionary, zionist, neoliberal, comprador government of post Mubarak Egypt, it is worth noting the Rafah passage remains tightly controlled in coordination with Israel.

Egypt on Saturday reopened the Rafah crossing into the Gaza Strip to people but not goods after keeping it closed for more than four years.

It will be open to people for eight hours daily except Fridays and public holidays People under 18 or older than 40 will require only a visa to pass, but those between 18 and 40 will still need security clearance, crossing officials say.

Commercial traffic will continue to have to pass through border points with Israel, which controls all other access points to the area.(RFI)

The most important outcome of the "new" Egyptian policy is that Israel continues to decide how many calories people in Gaza ought to consume. Goods cannot pass through Rafah.

The second most important outcome is that Israel's policy of singling out young men, which has been in force for years in Jerusalem (men between 18 and 45 cannot visit the holy sites of Islam in Jerusalem), is now exported to Gaza. What has happened is that the "new" Egypt is becoming even more like the "old" Israel in relation to Palestinian liberty. 

Finally, there is the issue of the security clearances. The file of every Palestinian man from Gaza who wants to travel will be sent by the Egyptian security services to their supervisors in Israel, to be approved or rejected.

What did change is that the new Egyptian government, unlike the Mubarak government, is afraid of its people. It therefore must use the technology of the spectacle, which Western governments are so well trained in, to confuse the people. Thus, we had a public relation stunt, consisting of "the opening of the Rafah border crossing," playing in newspapers and networks, with dramatic music and pomp. And Israel, playing its role in the spectacle, reacted with anger and fear (which is directed at Israeli Jews, who need to be scared out of their wits by the mere thought that people in Gaza would enjoy anything.) But Israel has nothing to fear from the "new" Egyptian government. That government is still Israel's best ally in the region. 

Then there is the Egyptian people. The people, as an upper-class Englishman once said, is "a many headed monster" that causes folks like Netanyahu, Obama and Tantawi to wet their beds at night. Whether the people will be fooled remains to be seen.

The Egyptian Revolution and Palestine

SOAS Palestine Society Presents:

The Egyptian Revolution and Palestine:

 A Panel of Youth Organisers from Tahrir Square

With  

Nariman Youssef, Mostafa Henawy

5.30pm Monday 14^th  March 2011

SOAS Main Building, Junior Common Room (JCR), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London, WC1H 0XG

 Nariman Youssef is active in the Egyptian protests and was in Tahrir Square on a regular basis from January 25th until a few days ago. She is a translator and researcher, currently studying for a PhD at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, University of Manchester.

Mostafa Henaway is an Egyptian-Canadian youth organiser and independent journalist. He travelled to Occupied Palestine at the height of the Second Intifada, becoming active with the International Solidarity Movement in Jenin. He is a member of Tadamon, the Montreal-based solidarity group with Palestine. 

Who learned what from whom?

I got a text yesterday telling me that I'd had a letter published in The Independent so I bought a copy. Here's what I was responding to:

Ian McEwan was absolutely right to criticise Jewish settlements on the West Bank (News, 21 February) when receiving his literary prize in Jerusalem. Hopefully the emerging democracies in the Arab world will soon be able to emulate Israel's openness.

Stan Labovitch

Windsor

Here's what I wrote:

Stan Labovitch seems not to have noticed that across the Arab world people have already found something to emulate in Palestine.  From where else did this generation learn the art of intifada?

And here's what they published:

Art of intifada is catching

Stan Labovitch hopes that Arabs will soon be able to emulate Israeli democracy (letter, 23 February). He seems not to have noticed that across the Arab world people have already found something to emulate in Palestine. From where else did this generation learn the art of intifada?

Mark Elf, Dagenham, Essex

Nice headline of its own but I rarely call the zionist occupation of Palestine "Israeli democracy".  Still there is one good thing.  You see how I italicised the word intifada? Well The Independent didn't see fit to do that. That means that for them the word "intifada" has now passed into the English language and that is good news.

This year in Egypt, Next year in Palestine

Although not fully aware of the rosy glasses he wears, the runaway Israeli ambassador in Egypt is a hopeful man, about whose prophesies one can only say, "may they come true sooner in our times." This is from his rambling commentary on the downfall of his dear friend:

As long as we had Mubarak, there was no void in our relations with the region. Now we're in big trouble...From a strategic point of view, Israel is now facing a hostile situation. It's over, there is no one left to lead the pragmatic, moderate state. ...The next stage is disbanding parliament, as the people won't accept a parliament based on fraud, and holding new elections. Naturally, the opposition will also want to run in these elections and will ask for a longer period of time to gain recognition. The Muslim Brotherhood will take action as well, of course...(Tantawi) is okay, but the strategic situation comprises forces we are unfamiliar with. The army will likely maintain the peace agreement, but there will be developments we cannot foresee at this time." (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4027283,00.html)

Oh Tel Aviv, don't cry! Dictators come and go. The Empire giveth and the people taketh away. It is unwise to get too emotionally attached. If you allow me to paraphrase an old Midrash:

The colonialist arrives to the new land with a closed fist, as if to say, "this is all mine," but will leave with an open palm, as if to say "I took nothing with me," not even wisdom.

Mubarak resigns

No real surprise there but it is exciting that the Egyptian people have risen against and overcome a stooge for the USA and the State of Israel.  There's news all over the web.  Here's the Beeb:

Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down as president of Egypt.

In an announcement on state TV, Vice-President Omar Suleiman said Mr Mubarak had handed power to the military.

It came as thousands massed in Cairo and other Egyptian cities for an 18th day of protest to demand Mr Mubarak's resignation.

Protesters responded by cheering, waving flags, embracing and sounding car horns. "The people have brought down the regime," they chanted.

But of course, it ain't over:

Mr Suleiman said Mr Mubarak had handed power to the high command of the armed forces.

Hmmm....

The Snake Oil of Unsustainability

As the Egyptian popular revolt rages on, and may, thanks to the ingenuity and perseverance of the people and the mistakes of the regime, engender a revolution, commentary abounds. One of the oft repeated tropes is that of the unsustainability of oppression. It is echoed both by the most radical commentators and by the White House itself. It is a truism. Here is an example articulation by Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel on Mondoweiss:

…a system based on oppression and privilege has a limited shelf-life. Even the most stoic of peoples will eventually rise up and demand their rights and dignity. To ignore this truth in the name of stability and security is like putting out a fire with gasoline. (http://mondoweiss.net/2011/02/israels-egyptian-teachers.html )

To be clear, I’m not picking on Sermoneta-Gertel for criticism. Not only is what he says true, but many of us have said and wrote similar things. It is common knowledge. The US Empire is doomed; it will disintegrate as all previous empires did. Israel is doomed; it will be as short lived as the crusaders’ kingdom. Capitalism is doomed; its logic on a collision course with the survival of the planet, etc. etc.

But taking a larger perspective, is oppression unsustainable? Consider. Over five hundred years after Christopher Columbus started chopping off the hands of natives to impress on them how much he valued gold, over two hundred years after the colony of Honduras, one of the countries engendered by Spanish greed, gained independence, two hundred years after the Monroe Doctrine put Honduras under US imperial rule, fifty years after the "extrajudicial" execution of Che Guevara, Obama’s White House stage-managed a counter revolution in Honduras that, murdering countless activists, re-established the power of its local imperial stooges.

Take another example: four hundred years after the first African slaves landed in Virginia, one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery, fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and two years after a black man was elected to lead the US empire, the average white US citizen is still ten times wealthier than the descendants of those African slaves, and the most important institution that “deals” with the grievances of the latter is the Prison-Industrial-Complex. Fifty years after Rosa Parks crossed the line of segregation in the Bus of Montgomery, Alabama, Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African American mother, was jailed because she crossed the racially segregated school district line in Akron, Ohio (http://www.ohio.com/news/top_stories/114692469.html )

Is oppression sustainable? You bet! Whether a state called Israel exists or not, will the descendants of today’s Palestinians still pay tribute to the descendants of today’s Israeli Jews four hundred years from now? Will Egyptians still groan under an imperial yoke three hundred years from now, be it the US or any other successor? It is not that these questions do not have an answer, but that we deceive ourselves when we ask them as positive questions. Rather than questions that we can legitimately pose, these are in fact questions that we must answer.

To get to the bottom of the idea of sustainability we need to spend some time understanding the way those in power think about it. By that I do not mean necessarily getting into the mind of a Mubarak, a Netanyahu or a Clinton. The halls of power are often staffed with those to whom the ascription of thought can only be done metaphorically. Rather, there is a body of writing that is as old as writing itself, about time, politics, and sustainability, produced by intellectuals doing what intellectuals are best at, endowing power with the dignity of thought. Allowing for the bowdlerizing that considerations of space impose, the gist of it can be summarized thusly:

The fundamental ideologically conservative political distinction is the distinction between order and chaos. You can find it seeping through Mubarak’s “worry” that his leaving will produce chaos, and you can trace it back through Hobbes’s “state of nature,” all the way to the first chapter of Genesis, in which God introduces order into the chaos by distinguishing between night and day, and between the water above and the water below. Order, however, is not merely the mundane regularity that people need in order to live. The metaphysical distinction between order and chaos rhymes with two other fundamental philosophical dichotomies. The imposition of order on chaos is also the victory of form over matter and that of mind over body (and since in philosophy we are never far from patriarchy, let us not forget that it is also the victory of the masculine over the feminine).

That is, within the political sphere, the human being as a unit of humanity is an element of nature, matter, a brute, chaotic, animal force, destructive, overwhelming, stupid or malevolent, driven by uncontrollable passions and insatiable appetites. Such is the human being of conservative ideology. This is the human condition that St. Augustine, for example, the decisive Christian (conservative) political thinker, associated with the consequences of the original sin.

One can find this idea of the mass of humanity lurking in almost every mainstream commentary of the events in Tahrir square. The leaderless, confused mass, angry, desiring, hysterical, but ”without clear goals”, not really knowing what it is that it wants, a force that can destroy but cannot create. It is true, without a doubt, that colonial racism is fundamental to this depiction. But that shouldn’t obscure the presence of an even more fundamental ideological layer. Colonialism did not invent this idea of the human mass. Rather, what colonialism did, was to transcribe this older distinction between the brute masses and the creators of order in a way that allows the masses of the West to imagine themselves on the other side of the divide, on the side of form, mind, and order. This crossing, however, has always been provisional, relative, and dependent on their continuous docility. It takes little more than some healthy disregard for propriety, or worse, solidarity, to be cast back into the role of the brute.

This conservative metaphysics creates a role and an attitude for the statesman that is psychologically quite rewarding. The statesman is a tragic hero, and his proper attitude is one of rueful pessimism (for not too mysterious reasons, gendered language is appropriate here, even if quite a few women have and do assume this role).

The statesman, like an artist, brings form, intelligence and beauty to dull matter (that dull matter is us!). One needs only reflect on the terms of the cult of the “framers of the constitution” in the US to see the strength of this idea of the statesman; what with the careful, ingenious balancing of everything against everything, the construction of resplendent “checks and balances,” the lassoing of the democratic passions, etc. etc.

Matter, however, never fully surrenders to Form. It resists with countless imperfections that separate anything down here from its eternal and perfect Platonic Idea. This is where we get to the heart of the question of sustainability. For Time is what separates the platonic world of the mind from the world of brute matter. Time destroys. Chronos devours his children. A moralized version of what would later be known as the second law of thermodynamics has been at the center of the oldest philosophical traditions. Everything that is material must decay. Just as the body eventually succumbs to illness, so the Body Politic succumbs to the endlessly chaotic pressure of the popular passions, which slowly corrupt it until it disintegrates. Listen to the famous quip of Benjamin Franklin, talking, with the appropriate condescension, to a representative of the realm of the passions, a woman: we gave you “a Republic if you can keep it.” But of course, he knew already that we won't be able to keep it.

The statesman is the tragic hero of political drama: a hero, because his work is the noblest that is, to impose an Idea, a Form, that is, a political order, on the brute matter of humanity. He is tragic because the effort is doomed. Order will eventually descend into chaos. Therefore, the image conservative ideology makes of statesmanship is one of a rearguard battle against chaos, a battle against the inevitable where there is no final victory yet every day that the battle continues is itself a victory. Raymond Aron, in one of the deepest one-liners of political thought, defined the goal of politics as “making things last”. And here is how Tzipi Livni, no doubt driven to philosophizing by the unfolding of Tahrir square, applies this insight at the latest Herzlyia Security Conference: “every day that Israel exists is a victory.” (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/adrianmichaels/100074993/is-israel-facing-an-existential-threat/ )

There is a further particularity about Capitalism with regards to this understanding of time and politics that is worth pondering. Capitalism seeks to survive by progressively including its exterior. Whereas for traditional political thought matter and time stand outside the Idea, being the source of decay, capitalism brings decay itself into its heart. Thus we get the notion of “the time value of money,” which is also the money value of time. A dollar in the far future has a “present value,” one that is specific and calculable, and that is only a fraction of a dollar. Decay in capitalism becomes a quantifiable property of value. Conversely, “making things last” becomes a measurable stream of future profits with a tradable present value. This quantification of decay is thus also a quantification of the “tragic” role of the statesman in maintaining order.

What do we do then when we accuse a political order of being “unsustainable”? To put it simply, we bargain; and we do it in two different senses. To the capitalists that make a nice living out of that order we propose a choice between two streams of profits, one long and shallow, one short and deep. We claim that the first one, earn little for a long time, is better than the other, earn a lot for a short time. But what for us is an imprecise moralism is for the other side a precise calculus. The two propositions can be entered in a spreadsheet, expanded to include risk and other factors, reduced to a single number and compared dollar for dollar. Most of the time, the bargain we claim to offer is intuitively unattractive. Not only does the time value of money reduce the present value of the “long and shallow” stream so much faster that it loses out, but we forget that the end of a revenue stream is not the end of the world. Once that short stream reaches its end, other streams will most likely materialize. A concession, on the other hand, is only a door to further concessions. The Capitalist, after all, is also a tragic hero, always struggling against the inevitable erosion of his revenue stream. Furthermore, the strength of the bargain is in our resolve, that is, in our ability to cut the short revenue stream short. Unfortunately, the bargain itself undermines that resolve.

For we also bargain with ourselves. That a political order is “unsustainable” is a source of solace. It makes it easier to endure it now, (and even easier to let others endure it), knowing that it is doomed. It reduces the urgency of ending it. It reduces the value of the personal sacrifice that would be needed in order to end it. This is completely acceptable to the other side, because the statesmen have no qualms with the knowledge that their order is doomed. Those in power readily accept it. It ennobles them. Here, the bargain often succeeds, for both sides are in fact in agreement. The side of power is happy to live, tragically, another day in a “doomed” order, while the side of unsustainability accepts as solace an unspecified reward in an unspecified time. That bargain is ultimately not that different from the promise of divine justice in the afterlife, the sort of religious palliative, “opium for the people,” that the secular among us love to mock.

The deepest chant often heard in demonstration is the one that goes “we want < insert your word here > and we want it now!” We rarely mean these words when we chant them. We hold in the back of our mind the knowledge that we are willing to go to our homes once more in a premeditated defeat. We can call ourselves hypocrites, or we can charitably say that we are rehearsing; or both. The rare days when people join together on the basis of that phrase unreservedly are the days that open to revolutions. It is only then that not only is the oppressive present rejected, but also the structure of time that upholds it is punctured. On those days without a tomorrow, when the Now doesn’t wait for the future to come but levels and communes with all other likeminded Nows, those that have been and those that will be, chaos IS order, and “the voice of the people is the voice of God”. Then the hard work begins.