zionist council of victoria: not the most intelligent organisation

From The Age online, just a little while ago:

A Melbourne Jewish group has cancelled an invitation to an Israeli academic to speak in Melbourne because she heads an organisation that aided a United Nations report critical of the country’s conduct during last year’s war in Gaza.

Professor Naomi Chazan, who was a member of the Israeli parliament from 1992 to 2003, was to address a fund-raiser at the Beth Weizmann Community Centre next weekend.

But her invitation by the Union of Progressive Judaism was withdrawn after it emerged that the New Israel Fund, of which she is president, had given millions of dollars in grants to Israeli non-government organisations that had spoken to a UN investigation team, led by Justice Richard Goldstone. The Goldstone report said there was strong evidence that Israel had committed war crimes.

The President of the Zionist Council of Victoria, Dr Danny Lamm, told The Age that the invitation to Professor Chazan had been extended by an affiliate member of his organisation.

But he said her association with the New Israel Fund was “intolerable”.

“When I became aware of the New Israel Fund’s activities with regard to the Goldstone report, I withdrew our participation,” he said.

“Organisations that they have funded have done damage to Israel and as a consequence we don’t want to have anything to with the New Israel Fund.”

Let’s pretend for a moment that the accusations were true – that NIF was ‘behind’ the Goldstone Report. Why is that evidence of damaging Israel? Why must members of the ZIonist community here in Melbourne keep on insisting that the Goldstone Report is anti-Israel? It is increasingly frustrating that they do, rather than seeing the Report as an opportunity to make a damaged society better.

But, as it turns out, the accusations against Naomi Chazan and NIF are false. From the NIF website:

When a right-wing group with a destructive agenda and a lot of money taps into the Israeli public’s anger, the results are usually not pretty.

That’s what happened last week when a new organization made a big splash in Israel by accusing the New Israel Fund and its grantees of being behind the Goldstone Report. Timed to capitalize on the anger many Israelis feel about the Goldstone conclusions, and personalized with a particularly despicable attack on NIF President Naomi Chazan, the attack was the latest salvo in a coordinated attempt to de-legitimize civil society, repress the activities of the human rights community and weaken Israeli democracy. It comes as no surprise to discover that this new group is funded by the same abundant money that flows to extremist settlers’ organizations, including a sizable contribution from John Hagee’s “Christians United for Israel” – a group that once stated that “Hitler was carrying out God’s will.”

To our many friends and supporters who have already leapt to our defense, thank you. To those of you who know the New Israel Fund as the leading organization advancing democracy and equality in Israel, with a thirty-year record of serious accomplishment, we ask you to support us as we combat the increasingly authoritarian and extremist ideology taking hold in Israel.

This is the latest in a series of attacks on the social justice community in Israel.

Several weeks ago Anat Hoffman, Executive Director of longtime NIF grantee the Israel Religious Action Center, the legal advocacy arm of the Reform movement, was hauled into a police station, fingerprinted and interrogated for her prayer sessions at the Kotel with Women of the Wall. A week later, it was the arrest of Hagai El-Ad, the CEO of NIF’s flagship grantee the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), during a peaceful demonstration in East Jerusalem that ACRI was monitoring to protect freedom of speech.

Now it is us.

A number of the civil and human rights organizations that are funded and supported by NIF have written challenging, thoughtful criticisms of how the Israeli military behaved during Gaza Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9. The most recent attacks on NIF claim that if only we didn’t exist, if only we didn’t support these organizations in their work, Goldstone would not have had the evidence needed to come to the conclusions presented in his report.

The ugly language and personal threats against NIF and our President are all too reminiscent of the atmosphere of incitement and hatred that preceded the Rabin assassination. Sadly, these vicious attacks are being launched against the very organizations that protect Israel and its international reputation as a vibrant democracy.

The human rights organizations that examined and reported on human rights concerns during and after the Gaza operation were the first to declare that the Israeli government must launch an independent inquiry into the events of Gaza. They were acting out of a profound sense of patriotism and love of Israel. They are not monolithic and differ on many issues, including the conclusions of the Goldstone report.

[...]

NIF has been attacked before for our role as the lead funder of social justice and human rights in Israel. We continue to be a lightning rod for those who insist that Israel is always right. But as our board member and former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said at last Sunday’s Town Hall Meeting, perhaps many years ago the existential threats to Israel’s continued existence warranted disregard for its flaws for the sake of survival, but no longer. Today, the question is not whether Israel survives, but what kind of Israel survives. As Professor Chazan said that day, the question is not whether Israel is always right or always wrong but what we will do to solve the very real problems Israel has.

NIF stands for the efforts of thousands of Israelis and Diaspora Jews who are dedicated to working towards the Israel they know to be possible; one which upholds the dignity of all of its people.

You can read more about the recent smear campaign here, more about the New Israel Fund here, can see the kinda antisemitic poster made about Naomi Chazan here, read the statement from the Union of Progressive Judaism here (and their statement makes it seem as though it was a mutual decision between them and Chazan to cancel her speaking tour, although Lamm still holds that he wouldn’t support her speaking), and can use this link to find the email address for Dr Danny Lamm, and write him a letter telling him how embarrassed you are by his statement.

a great jewish historian dies

Howard Zinn, one of my favourite historians, died overnight. He was 87, and he died from a heart attack. There will be many great eulogies for Zinn over the coming days I expect, but, for now, here is his obituary from the Boston Globe, the newspaper from his hometown…

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped, however.

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

[...]

In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: “Emma,” about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and “Daughter of Venus.”

Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.” The title characters, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”

On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did so.

I came to Zinn’s work in an undergrad American history class, and from the first read I was hooked. His writing was beautiful and the stories he told were the ones I was longing to hear: of the people and ideas which are so often missing from history texts. And he wrote with passion, asking us to defy power when it was necessary. Here is a piece he wrote a couple of years ago on July 4th – I urge you to read it.

liberation

It’s the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz today, an anniversary that it’s important to commemorate. And there are many ways in which we could mark such a date, but, this year, it’s going to be through hiphop. I know we’ve been posting a lot of music stuff recently, but this one seemed an important one. So, what’s the linkage between Auschwitz and hip hop I hear you ask. And the answer… Esther Bejarano.

Bejarano was a member of the Auschwitz Girls Orchestra – which played as trains pulled into Auschwitz – and since the war finished has been a musician, performing with her children. Most recently, she collaborated with Microphone Mafia to produce the song above, which is part of a larger album.

From Spiegel online:

“It is certainly a bit different from what we normally do,” the diminuitive, 85-year-old Bejarano told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to her group Coincidence, which includes her daughter Edna and son Joram and normally plays Jewish and anti-fascist songs. “But I know this hip hop stuff is popular among the youth. I thought if we worked together, then young people could learn more about what happened back then.”

The album, called Per la Vita, includes a number of resistance standbys such as Desateur and Avanti Popolo. But it has been remixed to include rhymes created by Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino of Microphone Mafia, a hip hop duo that has been around since releasing their debut album in 1994.

And it has achieved modest success, with a single from the CD currently number two on a chart designed to promote German-language pop music. The band is now on tour through Germany with several dates scheduled in February including one in Berlin on the 27th.

Mostly, though, the album has drawn exactly the kind of attention the artists were hoping for. The project originated as an answer to a neo-Nazi effort in 2004-2006 to distribute right-wing music on school grounds across Germany. The Confederation of German Trade Unions (DGB) called the Microphone Mafia in 2007 to ask if they would be willing to come up with a CD of their own — rap versions of Jewish songs for teachers to give to their students.

‘Which Mafia?’

The DGB suggested that Yurtseven, a son of Turkish guest workers who came to Germany during the Economic Miracle, get in touch with Bejarano. “So I called,” Yurtseven said on Sunday at a Hamburg event promoting the project. “When I said who I was, there was complete silence on the line. Then she asked, ‘which mafia?’”

“At the beginning it was very weird,” Yurtseven told SPIEGEL ONLINE. A brief clip from the upcoming film (it is to be completed sometime later this year) shows a quizzical-looking Bejarano the first time she heard what Yurtseven had done with her material. “That doesn’t sound anything like my songs,” Bejarano said.

Before long, though, the unlikely group realized that they were on to something. “I really began to see how music is able to bring people together — it really breaks down borders,” Yurtseven says.

The band itself provides plenty of evidence. Yurtseven’s partner from the Microphone Mafia, Rosario Pennino, is from a Catholic Italian family that likewise moved to Germany at a time when the country was importing labor to fuel its rapid post-war economic growth. The two joined forces in the late 1980s, in part to give voice to their experiences of being foreign in Germany.

‘Pure Chicanery’

Indeed, it was the Microphone Mafia’s focus on social dislocation that made them an obvious partner with Bejarano. Nevertheless, there have been cultural differences to overcome.

“They are very nice people, but they are a bit chaotic,” Bejarano said with a laugh of her hip hop partners. “They jump around on the stage a lot. I told them maybe they should tone it down a bit, but people have really received it well. They dance and cheer a lot.”

Bejarano and her family intended to leave Nazi Germany for Palestine at the beginning of World War II, but were then arrested and sent to a forced labor camp not far from Berlin in a town called Fürstenwalde Spree. In 1943, when she was 18 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz. Initially, she said, she was forced to carry heavy stones from one side of a field to another. “The next day, we had to carry them back,” she recalls. “It was pure chicanery.”

But after six weeks, she heard that the SS was looking for women for a new orchestra. “I said I could play the accordion, which I had never played before, but I did know how to play the piano,” she says. The camp guards forced the orchestra to play as the trains unloaded the victims destined for the gas chambers.

‘So Much to Do’

“I saw lots of bad things and experienced horrifying things,” she says. “But the fact that we had to stand there and play when the trains brought people to the gas chambers — and we knew where they were going, and they didn’t know at all. That is something I will never forget. It was terrible.”

So, for this anniversary, we can remember the power of music to bring people together, to challenge us to listen to and try to understand new ways of thinking and interpreting, and to liberate us from the worlds in which we live… in short, to fight the power.

*hat-tip to jewschool

Old Man River, yiddish-stylez

if, like me, you’re at work and looking for amusing ‘yiddish’ distractions…

*hat-tip to Michael W., my regular provider of entertaining youtube clips.

natural disasters have contexts

It’s always easy, when there’s an earthquake, or a hurricane, or a tsunami, to forget that these natural events/disasters occur within historical and political contexts. And these contexts create the conditions which determine how many people will be affected by the disaster, and how the recovery will happen. There has been a great deal written about this in the past, in particular by Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (and her website has a range of articles on the recent earthquake in Haiti).

It’s important that we understand these conditions which create the effects and response to natural disasters, as they are a part of a world-condition of capitalism and colonialism: it’s not a question of politicising what has happened (as Jon Stewart naively labelled it the other day), but rather of understanding the politics behind what has happened. Because this is a context in which we are all implicated.

On The Zeleza Post the other day there was an excellent post about by the editor about the earthquake in Haiti and some of the political, economic and historical context. Here’s an excerpt (it’s long, but worth the read):

Cry, the Beloved Country: The Tragedy of Haiti

The world has been horrified by the images of colossal devastation coming out of Haiti. Its capital, Port-au-Prince brutally devastated by a massive magnitude 7.0 earthquake, lies in ruins, a tomb of corpses, the wounded, and suffering. The ghastly pictures of the dead and dying, the desperate and decrepit, of buildings and infrastructure reduced to rubble, dust-covered and dazzled men and women and children looking for loved ones, shell-shocked survivors wandering the crammed streets or scrounging for the bare necessities of water and food and shelter, are almost incomprehensible in their biblical agony. The state, already severely weakened by years of instability, neo-liberal doctrines of limited government, and external subjugation, has virtually disappeared in the destructive wrath of the earthquake.

The scenes from Haiti present a grisly replay of Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami. This is a gruesome reminder of the lethal combination of natural and social catastrophes, how ravages of nature are socially determined, that is, natural disasters reproduce social disasters as much as social disasters reinforce natural disasters. As one commentator puts it so aptly, it was not simply the geological faultline, the shifting tectonic plates underneath the island that produced the disaster of the earthquake, but the faultline of imperialism and postcolonialism, Haiti’s long history of subjugation to U.S. imperialism and corrupt leadership.

This is simply to note that the earthquake has a social history. As even a conservative columnist from The New York Times reminds us, “On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died. This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.” Unfortunately, if rather predictably, he proceeds to offer simplistic diagnoses of Haiti’s poverty and ending world poverty.

Estimates indicate that 3 million more people have been hurt or are homeless, and Haitian President Preval said as of today 7,000 have already been buried in mass graves. Nobody really knows. Disaster figures can acquire a pornographic quality, as one writer notes wryly with reference to reporting by Wolf Blitzer of CNN who “acts like he’ll be sorely disappointed if it [the figure of the dead] doesn’t exceed 100,000.” As with Katrina, foreign correspondents are beginning to get fixated on shootings and lootings and they carelessly talk of refugees, rather than the internally displaced, and how chaos is hampering well-meaning international relief efforts.The complicity of this same international community in Haiti’s disaster of poverty and misrule is hardly ever raised.

The Haitian government is paralyzed, foreign governments are scrambling to help, and the Haitian diaspora is mobilizing to rescue their much-maligned country. The potential symmetry between Katrina and the Haitian earthquake may not have been lost on President Obama, the first U.S. African diasporan president, who seems anxious to avoid making President Bush’s pitfalls and turn this into his Katrina moment. Many applaud the Obama Administration for rising to the moment by offering Haiti immediate help of $100 million, thousands troops, and promises of more to come as dozens of countries from China to Brazil to South Africa, and international organizations from the World Bank to the United Nations, which has suffered its worst loss of personnel, send money, rescuers, medical equipment, food, shelter, and other supplies.

The real test will come when the appalling images of the earthquake have receded from the television screens and the celebrated social media, which they will as the feckless media goes in chase of another tragedy, terrorist threat, or petty celebrity scandal. The challenge for all those of us watching Haiti’s nightmare from the comfortable distances of space or empathy is not to feel pity for Haiti as bleeding liberals tend to, let alone condemn it for its misfortunes as the rightwing lunatics and racists are doing, led by that notorious duo Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh who blame the earthquake on the pact Haitians made with the devil in freeing themselves from French slavery and accuse President Obama of cynicism in expressing support for Haiti, but to try to understand it. Haiti’s misfortunes are neither natural nor irredeemable. They are products of a very particular history, a history that is at the very heart of the history of the Americas, the cruel and heroic histories of slavery and revolution, underdevelopment and imperialism.

Haiti embodies both the triumphant and tragic story of Africans in the diaspora. It is a sad tribute to the debilitating effects of historical amnesia that Haiti is mostly known for its material poverty, not its heroic revolution two hundred years ago, which altered the history of the Americas. The historical debt the U.S. and Latin America owe Haiti is immeasurable. All too often, Euroamerica forgets its role in Haiti’s plight, in manufacturing Haiti’s misery together with the country’s own crass, corrupt, unimaginative and unpatriotic elites. The intersection of interests between these two internal and external forces, the debilitating neo-colonial webs of dependency and imperialism, are at the heart of Haiti’s long history of impoverishment and disempowerment, its enduring vulnerabilities to political disorder, economic underdevelopment, social violence, and natural disasters.

The immediate challenge is to provide massive relief to the victims of the earthquake and rebuild the devastated infrastructure. The long-term challenge is to put Haiti on a path to true independence, sustainable development, and democracy. History offers both hope and caution. Hope rooted in Haiti’s revolutionary history, and caution from its neo-colonial history. What can hardly be in doubt is that after the cameras have left, the so-called international community and Haiti’s ruling class will not usher a new future for this most traumatized and tenacious of nations of the African diaspora. That power lies in the ordinary people of Haiti reclaiming their progressive history and future.

As I have watched the scenes of destruction in Port-au-Prince, I recognized many of the devastated places from my memorable visit to the island in 2007. I spent three weeks there as part of my global research project on the African diaspora. Below is an entry from my last full day in the country.

July 24, 2007

This is my last full day in Haiti. It’s been a remarkable three weeks in this most fascinating, complex, and unfulfilled of countries. Lorete* came by around eleven. She looked rested and happy. She is a sweet young woman, always smiling, always trying to help, eager and anxious to do a good job. We began reminiscing about what had been achieved. She talked about how much she had learned about her country from the interviews we had conducted and places we had visited; how grateful she was to me for giving her this rare opportunity and her brother, Pierre*, in Chicago who had introduced me to her.

We had one last interview today with the economist we missed last week. The interview was at 2 p.m. but I had asked Lorete to come early so that we could work on the administrative aspects of the project – payment, transcripts – as well as for her to take me shopping for paintings and maybe gifts. By the time we finished with business, it was already noon. Lorete didn’t feel like eating anything, neither did I since I had taken a heavy breakfast that morning.

Every day on our way to and from the hotel we pass through a post with armed guards who are supposed to protect the Villa Creole, another adjacent hotel called El Rancho, and a high class gym nearby, or so I presumed. Next to the post are rows of paintings hanging off the walls shielding adjacent buildings from the road. That’s where we first stopped. This was street art, tourist art, quite formulaic, depicting predictable scenes – marketing women, men on fishing boats, rural landscapes, idealized faces, nothing terribly original, but vibrant, energetic, inviting, even impressive nonetheless. The paintings came in all sizes and with varied levels of artistic accomplishment. If I could not afford a Tiga or a Doddard, at least I could afford one of these paintings, I joked to Lorete, to remind me of Haiti’s vivacious artistic scene, where paintings light up grim street corners, where creativity lends beauty to the ugliness of subsistence survival.

Two paintings in particular caught my eye, both large canvasses, perhaps 4-5 feet in length and 3 feet wide; one representing contorted, semi-abstract, elongated figures of men and the other of market women. They were striking, loud in a subdued sort of way, and subtly evocative of communal bonds, the conviviality of male and female solidarities among ordinary working folks. The vendor wanted US$300 for both of them. Lorete protested vigorously, but he would not budge. He thinks you are a tourist or with the UN and you have a lot of money, she said. I understood, and we walked away. But the two paintings remained in my mind as we walked round Petion Ville checking out street art. There was no point in going into the numerous art galleries, some of which we had previously visited, for I did not have art gallery money.

The search for paintings had not succeeded by the time we went to meet the economist at his consultancy firm. I could not have wished for a more befitting conclusion to my research visit to Haiti. Jean Phillippe* was simply brilliant. His knowledge of the Haitian economy is encyclopedic, his commitment to the development of his beloved country simultaneously anguishing and uplifting in its passion. He restored my faith in Haiti’s possibilities, that with people like him the future can happen. He reminded me of my friend Madalitso*. They actually looked alike physically, the above average height, the expressive face, the intensity often broken by a mischievous laugh. His hair was graying, but I reckoned he was younger than me.

His presentation, which was entirely in English, had the systematic delivery of a well-researched lecture. He presents a weekly radio program on the Haitian economy. He is committed to raising the levels of financial literacy among ordinary Haitians who tend to be attracted to politics and the public sector while the economy is controlled by the tiny mulatto elite. His consultancy is only one of 3 controlled by black Haitians, he observed ruefully.

He began with a synopsis of the current economic situation in Haiti. The facts are familiar, but he gave them life, indignation: 4 million Haitians lives on less than $1 a day; 7 million out of 8 million people in the country live on less than $2 a day. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. It wasn’t of course always so. Haiti was once, in the days of plantation slavery, the richest island in the Caribbean, the bedrock of the French economy. Then independence came and Haiti was encircled and punished by antagonistic powers fearful of the Haitian example: the French demanded a huge, crippling indemnity, the U.S. imposed an embargo, and the beleaguered new republic was forced to focus its energies on preserving its independence which undermined development, a situation aggravated by the limited vision and capabilities of the country’s quarrelsome and myopic leaders.

A new economic period started with the American occupation during which some modern economic infrastructure and institutions were laid. The 1940s and 1950s marked the best time for the country economically. The US occupation had ended. There was political stability. Investments flowed in. But this did not last.
[...]

The country virtually stagnated between 1985 and 1990. Coups became notoriously frequent and governments changed every few months. Under such circumstances investments dried up. Aristide came to power but within seven months, in October 1991, he was overthrown in a military coup. For the next four years, an international embargo was imposed against Haiti. By the time Aristide was reinstated in 1995, GDP had contracted by 20%, while the population was growing steadily at an annual rate of 2%. The result was growing unemployment and deepening poverty. Inflation and public deficits skyrocketed, while public services deteriorated. Only 30-40% had access to electricity; 50% had access to schools; and 1% of the active population had a university degree.

The gross underdevelopment of human resources was exacerbated by rising brain drain as the middle class educated elites fled rising insecurity and falling living standards. There is a joke in Haiti that there are three types of Haitian emigrants: the boat people who flee on rickety boats, the feet people who walk into the Dominican Republic, and the Boeing people who have visas to enter the developed countries including the US and Canada. The problem facing Haiti during this period was not confined to the incompetences and incapacities of the public sector, the private sector lacked vision and commitment to long-term investment and development.

[...]

The political, private, and social, sectors, local and international forces often work at cross purposes. Domestically, the domination of the economy by the mulattoes – who constitute 1-2% of the population but control 50% of the GDP is both unproductive and unsustainable and one of the reasons for the country’s instability. The black majority need to be more economically involved and more financially literate. As for the international dimension, Haiti is now a member of CAROCOM, but this is little economic benefit, even if it is politically good, for CARICOM is composed of small countries and weak economies.

[...]

It was a fascinating interview. He lived up to the advance billing offered by Lucille* and Lorete who listened to him on the radio regularly but had not met him in person until today. Towards the end of the interview, Jean called in a Haitian student studying for an MBA at Columbia, who seemed to provide a living embodiment of Jean’s thesis that Black Haitians needed to develop financial literacy. The student, a young man in his mid-twenties, beamed and nodded as Jean expounded on the Haitian economic situation and ways it might be resolved.

[...]

On the way, we ran into a vendor selling music CDs and we bought a dozen CDs of Konpa music from him. Lorete did the selections, saying she chose old and new Konpa recordings to give me a good sample of this genre of Haitian music. I also decided to indulge myself a little having my shoes polished. I was getting a little anxious about the bundle of Haitian money I was carrying and wanted to spend it as much as possible for it would be hard to change it back into US dollars or take it with me to the US.

Lorete suggested we take a tap tap and resume looking for art works on the road going downtown. I wanted us to try our luck one more time with the art vendor on the way to hotel. I enjoy haggling; it makes shopping a convivial social activity rather than a purely commercial transaction, a cold exchange of cash and commodities. And the vendor was a good haggler. We went back and forth between his original $300 and my offer of half of that amount. In the end, he got $250, but I got four extra paintings in the bargain, in addition to the original two I had selected earlier. It was a slow, playful exchange, which we both seemed to enjoy. We both thought we got a good deal.

[...]

I spent the evening packing and reflecting on the visit while channel surfing the TV. It has been an incredible visit, arousing unusually powerful emotions, both positive and negative, much as I feel and react to Africa. In this sense, Haiti for me does indeed embody Africa, not only in the Africanness of its people, but in the painful trajectory of its modern history, in the triumph of its struggles and tragedies of its sacrifices, in the unfulfilled promises of its independence from the European barbarism of slavery and colonialism, combined with the myopic crassness, corruption and incompetence of its rulers.

In this mood of somber reflection, I did not feel like going to the restaurant and watch the customers made up mostly of UN officials and local Haitian elites, and a sprinkling of white tourists and missionary do-gooders. And so I ordered room service for my last supper in the land of L’ouverture, the great Ibo-descended military and political strategist, perhaps one of the greatest diasporan Africans of all time, whose revolution not only liberated Haiti, but changed the history of the Americas from the United States which acquired Louisiana in the aftermath of the French defeat and began its westward expansion, to Latin America that was to be liberated by Simon Bolivar who was inspired and financed by Haiti’s independence.

But were he to rise from the dead, L’Ouverture would surely be deeply disappointed at the unfulfilled promises of the nation born out the heroic revolution he led, now mired in the depths of underdevelopment, fostered by the incendiary interpenetration of the unproductive interests of a bankrupt ruling elite and the unforgiving imperial vengeance of Euroamerica.

building a wall

so, the more walls, the more secure you are as a democracy? or is it that keeping refugees, and really any foreigners, out makes you a democracy? in any case, Israel is building another wall, this time along the border with Egypt. As The Age states:

Israel will build a security fence along the length of its border with Egypt, stretching across the Sinai desert from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the $500 million fence on Thursday with the aim of thwarting drugs and people-smuggling rackets that operate across the border.

”In the end, there will be no choice but to close off the state of Israel by a fence on all sides,” Mr Netanyahu was quoted as telling his cabinet.

”The state has to be fenced off completely on all sides. Why? Because Israel is the only country in the First World to which people can walk on foot from Third World countries and Africa,” Mr Netanyahu said.

”If we don’t fence ourselves off, Israel will be flooded by hundreds of thousands of foreign workers and illegal residents,” he said.

You can also read about it in Haaretz here.

One of the things that struck me when I was in Israel a couple of years ago, was the vast numbers of migrant workers, mostly from Thailand (I think), who I saw. The women seemed to be predominantly looking after elderly people, or cleaners, and the men were labourers. But, of course, when you’re a settler-colony, you need migrant workers: the foundation of the settler-colony is based on displacing and eradicating the Indigenous population. So you can’t use their labour. Hence, in the US, the Native Americans were displaced and massacred, while people were brought from Africa to be slaves. Or in Australia, people were brought from around the western Pacific to work as indentured labourers; and Indigenous people were displaced and massacred (to put it all a bit crudely). So, Israel relies on migrant workers, because it can’t allow Palestinians to become too needed within Israeli society. (and yes, I know that Palestinians do work for Israelis, but now it’s predominantly in the West Bank only.)

So when Netanyahu says that they want to keep out migrant workers, he’s talking about a very particular idea of who needs to be kept out. Because Israel depends on migrant labour, as does every other western country. But note that he’s imagining a ‘flooding’ of people from Africa, and talking about closing Israel off on all sides: it’s incredibly racialised, and racist. And sounds exactly like what any other western country would say. So, will this wall make Israel more Jewish and democratic (as the Haaretz article quotes Netanyahu as saying is the aim of it)? If this is what a democracy today means, then, I suppose, sadly yes.

how to end the blockade?

You’ve probably heard about the recent protest march, the Gaza Freedom March, that was organised to go from Egypt to Gaza, but was stopped by the Egyptian police. If you haven’t, here is a brief explanation from an article by Uri Avnery:

“About 1,400 activists from all over the world gathered there on their way to the Gaza Strip. On the anniversary of the ‘Cast Lead’ war, they intended to participate in a non-violent demonstration against the ongoing blockade, which makes the life of 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip intolerable.

At the same time, protest demonstrations were to take place in many countries. In Tel-Aviv, too, a big protest was planned. The ‘monitoring committee’ of the Arab citizens of Israel was to organise an event on the Gaza border.

When the international activists arrived in Egypt, a surprise awaited them. The Egyptian government forbade their trip to Gaza. Their buses were held up at the outskirts of Cairo and turned back. Individual protesters who succeeded in reaching the Sinai in regular buses were taken off them. The Egyptian security forces conducted a regular hunt for the activists.

The angry activists besieged their embassies in Cairo. On the street in front of the French embassy, a tent camp sprang up which was soon surrounded by the Egyptian police. American protesters gathered in front of their embassy and demanded to see the ambassador. Several protesters who are over 70 years old started a hunger strike. Everywhere, the protesters were held up by Egyptian elite units in full riot gear, while red water cannon trucks were lurking in the background. Protesters who tried to assemble in Cairo’s central Tahrir (liberation) Square were mishandled.

In the end, after a meeting with the wife of the president, a typical Egyptian solution was found: 100 activists were allowed to reach Gaza. The rest remained in Cairo, bewildered and frustrated.”

More information can be found in writings by Antony Lowenstein, who participated in the march, here, and here. You can read a poignant story about the build-up to, and happening of, the final protest on December 31 in Cairo by Philip Weiss here.

The declaration which they signed, named the Cairo Declaration, reads in part:

We, international delegates meeting in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March 2009 in collective response to an initiative from the South African delegation, state:

In view of:

o Israel’s ongoing collective punishment of Palestinians through the illegal occupation and siege of Gaza;
o the illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the continued construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements;
o the new Wall under construction by Egypt and the US which will tighten even further the siege of Gaza;
o the contempt for Palestinian democracy shown by Israel, the US, Canada, the EU and others after the Palestinian elections of 2006;
o the war crimes committed by Israel during the invasion of Gaza one year ago;
o the continuing discrimination and repression faced by Palestinians within Israel;
o and the continuing exile of millions of Palestinian refugees;
o all of which oppressive acts are based ultimately on the Zionist ideology which underpins Israel;
o in the knowledge that our own governments have given Israel direct economic, financial, military and diplomatic support and allowed it to behave with impunity;
o and mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (2007)

We reaffirm our commitment to:

Palestinian Self-Determination
Ending the Occupation
Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine
The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees

The piece mentioned above, by Uri Avnery, explores the reasons behind Egypt’s involvement and support of the blockade of Gaza, for the blockade wouldn’t work if Egypt wasn’t helping out – their latest ‘helpful’ endeavour being to build an iron wall along the border between Gaza and Egypt in order to stop the smuggling through the tunnels which brings much needed goods and people into Gaza. Avnery writes:

Why are they doing it?

There are several explanations. Cynics point out that the Egyptian government receives a huge American subsidy every year – almost US$2 billion – by courtesy of Israel. It started as a reward for the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty. The pro-Israel lobby in the US Congress can stop it any time.

Others believe that Mubarak is afraid of Hamas. The organisation started out as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, still the main opposition to his autocratic regime. The Cairo–Riyadh–Amman–Ramallah axis is poised against the Damascus–Gaza axis that is allied with the Tehran–Hizbullah axis. Many people believe that Mahmoud Abbas is interested in the tightening of the Gaza blockade in order to hurt Hamas.

Mubarak is angry with Hamas, which refuses to dance to his tune. Like his predecessors, he demands that the Palestinians obey his orders. President Abd-al-Nasser was angry with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO – an organisation created by him to ensure Egyptian control of the Palestinians, but which escaped him when Yasser Arafat took over). President Anwar Sadat was angry with the PLO for rejecting the Camp David agreement, which promised Palestinians only ‘autonomy’. How dare the Palestinians, a small, oppressed people, refuse the ‘advice’ of big brother?

All these explanations make sense, yet the Egyptian government’s attitude is still astonishing. The Egyptian blockade of Gaza destroys the lives of 1.5 million human beings, men and women, old people and children, most of whom are not Hamas activists. It is done publicly, before the eyes of hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion and a quarter Muslims. In Egypt itself, too, millions of people are ashamed of the participation of their country in the starving of fellow Arabs.

It is a very dangerous policy. Why does Mubarak follow it?

The real answer is, probably, that he has no choice.

Whether or not he has no choice, we can, surely, all agree that supporting the blockade is wrong, and that pressure must be placed on the Egyptian Government, as well as the Israeli Government, to open the borders.

And finally, an email from B’tselem landed in my inbox today. In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead they gave video cameras to 15 young Gazans to record what life was like in Gaza, as no journalists have been allowed inside Gaza since the ensd of the onslaught. B’tselem explains that “As the Gaza Strip is largely cut off from the outside world, the Internet played a crucial role in the project, and the training was conducted mostly through Skype video conferencing and telephone calls.

The result is a series of short films depicting various aspect of life in Gaza, reflecting each volunteer’s viewpoint. The films show a rarely-seen side of life in Gaza, capturing moments of joy, creativity, absurdity and prosaic routine along with familiar images of suffering and despair. In an unusual move, Israel’s premier news site – Ynet – devoted a special feature to these films. The importance of putting a human face on the siege on Gaza cannot be underestimated.”

The films are about hiphop, girls playing soccer, life in the smuggling tunnels, how children stave off the boredom, and the damage wrought on young bodies, minds, and lives.

To watch some of the films, something you should definitely do, you can go to ynet, and watch them here. There was also an article about the project published in the New York Times.

I could editorialise – express my outrage, anger, sadness, desperation and burning need to fight against what is happening – but I feel like all of these pieces, separately and together – convey so much more than I have the capacity to say.

*hat-tip to Ben for the Uri Avnery article

some thoughts on wild things

I meant to post a link to this article a month or so back after seeing “Where the Wild Things Are” at the cinema. But with holidays, heatwaves, new years, etc, I’ve been a bit slack with my blogging… sorry! My friend Liam showed me this before we saw the film, and it really affected me and made me see the film in a different way. It quotes the original author of the book, Maurice Sendak, who explains that the monsters in the book are based on his European Jewish relatives who came to the US from “the old country”.

Those relatives would grab you and twist your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do,” Sendak continues. “And children can be so cruel. My brother, sister and I would laugh at those people, who we, of course, grew up to love very much. But that’s who the wild things are. Foreigners, lost in America without a language.

Walking out of the cinema, my friend and I were talking about whether The Wild Things could be critiqued by a post-colonial approach- whether the monsters could be read as the wild/savage Others whose only purpose seems to be to provide the young white boy with a kind of self-realisation. But, after reading this article, and talking about the film, we decided that this kind of critique didn’t really fit the movie, or the book. I felt that the Wild Things, rather, are fictitious creatures who are part of Max, a sensitive, imaginative boy who creates them from the images, people and things he is surrounded with in his world, which he uses to work through his complex thoughts and emotions.

Another aspect to this article about Sendak also moved me is that Sendak is a gay man who never came out to his parents, despite living with his partner for 50 years. The article quotes an interview he gave with the New York Times in 2008, where he said

“All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

I think this says so much about the experience of queer Jews who are descendents of Holocaust survivors. There is so much guilt tied to the obligation to marry and procreate (to make up for the lives of your cousins/aunts/great aunts who were lost and to live the lives that they were never able to, etc) in the Jewish community which seems to stem from this trauma. And Sendak talks about the guilt that he grew up with, knowing that so many of his family in Europe died in the Holocaust.

“If I was staying out late and dinner was on the table and I’d been called three times, my mother’s voice would tell me that I’d better go up now,” recalls Sendak, who grew up in Brooklyn. “So I’d go up. And she’d say: ‘Your cousins, you know they’re your age. They don’t play ball. They’re dead. They’re in a concentration camp. You have the privilege of being here. And you don’t come up and eat.’”

I think this explains a lot too, about how the Wild Things, which are so loveable on the one hand, also have a menacing quality that is potentially dangerous to Max. I just love how that line- “Oh please don’t go — we’ll eat you up — we love you so!” – has so many layers and resonance when you think about these influences on the book.

Wondering if that imaginary animal you’re about to eat is kosher?

About 18 months ago I came across this blog post on Jeff Vandermeer’s website which presents us with answers to some serious kashrut questions that many of us have faced: which imaginary animals are kosher?

As they explain…

In honor of upcoming holidays like Passover, I thought I would ask Jeff’s better half, Ann VanderMeer, editor of Weird Tales , co-editor of New Weird and Steampunk, and a practicing Jew who teaches bat/bar mitzvah students, to give us an idea of which fantastical animals and beings would be kosher and which would not be kosher, in terms of gnawin’ off a bit o’ that. Answers below… – Evil Monkey

Abumi-Guchi (furry creatures formed from the stirrup of a mounted military commander) – Ann [with look of disbelief]: “Do they chew their prey?” EM: “I think so.” A: “Then no. Besides, the provenance is suspect.”

Aigi Kampoi (fish-tailed goat) – A: “Yes, that would be kosher because it has cloven hoofs, chews its cud, and has fins and scales. Although, it would still be considered a meat meal, even though it’s partially fish. So you can’t eat dairy with it.”

Amikiri (snake-bird-lobster) – A: “No. Absolutely not. The snake and lobster parts make it treyf.”

Arkan Sonney (fairy hedgehog) – A: “No, because hedgehogs aren’t kosher, so a fairy hedgehog wouldn’t be any different, monkey.” EM: “But they’re delicious!” A: “Even so.”

Baku (dream-devouring tapir) – A: “That’s considered a swine. It doesn’t chew its cud.” EM: “What if it was a dream-devouring cow? Would the dream-devouring disqualify it?” A: “No. As long as you don’t consider that scavenging.”

Brag (malevolent water horse) – A: “Horses are not kosher, no matter how aquatic.”

Bugbear (bearlike goblin) – A: “Bears have paws. Things with paws are not kosher. And they eat meat.” EM: “If it was a bear with hooves that chewed cud and the goblin part was just in its stomach, would it be kosher?” A: “Then it wouldn’t be a bear, idiot.”

Chupacabra – A: “It’s definitely a carnivore.” EM: “What if it’s just for show and they don’t eat their prey?” A: “Well I’m sure they don’t chew their cud and have cloven hooves unless the chupacabra turns out to be some kind of mutant cow.”

Cornish Owl-Man – A: “Unfortunately an owl is not kosher because it is a bird of prey–Lev. 11:17, and obviously you cannot eat a man because that is cannibalism.” EM: “Again, though–delicious!”

Dragon – A: “No reptiles or amphibians.” EM: “No exceptions? What about if it chews its cud?” A: “Shut up.”

Encantado (dolphin-human shapeshifter) – EM: “Surely it’s kosher when it’s a dolphin.” A: “A dolphin is a mammal just like you. It has no scales, even though it has fins. Besides, what if it starts changing while you’re eating it?”

ET – A: “…..?” EM: “It had cloven hooves.” A: “It’s a humanoid.” EM: “It looked like a pile of dung. It seemed to chew cud. Would any alien be automatically un-kosher?” A: “I guess it really depends on the alien–like a plant?” EM: “An alien that comes down to Earth.” A: “No, because they wouldn’t be considered an animal.” EM: “What if they looked just like a cow, but with a brain?” A: “Cows have brains.” EM: “Arggh!” A: “But cows don’t travel to other planets using their brains.” EM: “My point exactly!” A: “Anything intelligent is not kosher.”

Headless Mule (fire-spewing, headless, spectral mule) – A: “No, because the mule itself, even if it weren’t fire-breathing, isn’t kosher. The fire doesn’t cleanse it.” EM: “But it’s self-cooking!”

Hippocamp (horse-fish) – A: “Unfortunately, the horse part makes it treyf, and a little bit of treyf makes everything treyf. So if you had 99 percent fish and one percent horse it would still be treyf.” EM: “And a really fucked up looking hippocamp!”

Hobbits – A: “Not kosher at all. They are sentient beings.” EM: “That brings up a point. They’re actually not sentient because they’re not real, so aren’t they just as kosher as air.” Ann: “No comment.”

Hoopoe (rooster-swallow-chicken-snake-goose-lobster-stag-fish hybrid) – A: “The snake and the lobster make it unkosher–see Hippocamp above for percentages.”

Jackalope – A: “No, rabbits are not kosher.” EM: “Not even rabbits?!! Why not?” A: “Because although it chews the cud, it does not have hooves.”

Jaud (vampirized premature baby) – A: “Oh. Do I even have to tell you?” EM: “I guess not.” A: “Number one, a vampire drinks blood. Blood ingesting is a no-no. Number 2–baby?!?!”

Jotai (animated folding screen cloth) – A: “Sure, why not? It’s not a food item. Scarf it down to your heart’s delight. So long as it’s made from plant fibers, not a treyf animal. And only one type of fiber–no mixing of wool and linen.” EM: “Doesn’t sound too good…”

Man-Eating Tree – A: “Tree part yes, man-eating no, therefore treyf.”

Mermaid – A: “No, for the obvious reasons.” EM: “What if you marry one? Is that kosher? Will a rabbi marry you?” A: “Kosher is a term about eating, not about sex.” EM: “I’m not talking about sex–I’m talking about marriage!” A: “If the mermaid is Jewish, the rabbi will probably marry you. But only if you’re Jewish too. But you’ll definitely have to find the right rabbi…”

Mongolian Death Worm – A: “No, because you cannot eat anything that crawls on its belly.” EM: “Does that mean an injured kosher animal that is crawling along isn’t kosher any more?” A: “Yes, because you can’t eat an animal that’s been injured or is sick.” EM: “It’s a wonder you haven’t all starved to death.”

Pollo Maligno (cannibalistic chicken spirit) – A: “When you say cannibalistic, do you mean a chicken that eats other chickens or a chicken that eats humans?” EM: “When I say Pollo Maligno, I have no idea what I mean except I sound fierce.” A: “Well, chickens are kosher, but if it’s eating meat, probably not…” EM: “POLLO MALIGNO! POLLO MALIGNO!”

Pope Lick Monster – A: “I don’t know what that is.” EM: “I think it’s a monster that licks the Pope.” A: “If it’s licking the Pope, it’s probably treyf.”

Sasquatch – A: “What is sasquatch like?” EM: “I’d imagine kind of stringy.” A: “No, that’s not what I mean.” EM: “Kind of ape-like I guess.” A: “If it’s still undetermined, it might be kosher, but maybe not.”

Sea Monkeys – A: “Only if they have fins and scales. Wait a minute–aren’t they actually brine shrimp? Then no.” EM: “I don’t think so. The package shows these cute little things with human faces.” A: “Well, in that case…NO!”

Shedim (chicken-legged demon) – A: “If you have to eat a demon, you really ought to just go off and die somewhere.” EM: “Good point.”

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary – A: “Oh, absolutely kosher! Vegetables are kosher and lambs are kosher! Nice combination. How about some mint with that meal!”

Now, according to Jewcy, a book by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer entitled The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals: The Evil Monkey Dialogues exploring this subject in more depth is soon to be published. You can find explorations of more animals here. It’s sure to be the addition to our kosher guides that we’ve been desperately missing…

musica yiddishist…

a couple of friends of mine in new york are part of a band called ‘Yiddish Princess’. Their description? “Double guitar onslaught. Drums beating you into submission. Precious analog synths beckoning. And a voice that can shatter ice and coo you into mellifluous bliss. Oyf Yiddish. Looking to reconcile your love of power pop and hard rock with your love of Yiddish music? Your search is over. Behold, Yiddish Princess. With Sarah Gordon – vocals. Michael Winograd – synth. Yoshie Fruchter – rhythm guitar. Avi Fox-Rosen – lead guitar. Ari Folman-Cohen – bass. Chris Berry – drums.”

and their sound is all kinds of amazing. you must have a listen to them on their newly updated myspace page, to be found here. and if you’re interested in new things happening in yiddish/jewish music in new york, you should follow all these individuals in their various music projects.

sigh. one of the many reasons why i wish i was in new york…