An Uncomfortable Stone

On March 7^th, 1965 around 600 people began to march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery. A few weeks before during a separate nonviolent demonstration about voting rights Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young black man, was shot by a state trooper while defending his mother and subsequently died. At Jackson’s funeral Martin Luther King, Jr. declared him “a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.” The march from Selma to Montgomery, in-part organized by King, was as much about remembering Jackson’s sacrifice, his martyrdom, as it was about continuing his crusade.

Called “Bloody Sunday,” the march was blocked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that leads out of Selma by Alabama’s State Troopers. The procession of marchers, unarmed, was assaulted by state security forces. Their throats filled with tear gas, their bones broken with batons and nightsticks, the marchers were literally beaten back into Selma.

It would be two weeks later before 3,200 protesters began the successful march from Selma, walking approximately twelve miles a day and sleeping in fields before they successfully reached Montgomery. When they arrived on March 25, their numbers had swelled to 25,000.

In Montgomery, Alabama, that same day King spoke:

Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now. The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now… Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.
 

Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.

…I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" Somebody’s asking, "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?"…How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?"

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because "truth crushed to earth will rise again."

How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."

How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow."

…How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In August of the same year, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Over twenty years later, on the opposite side of the earth, there was yet another uprising taking place. Called the first intifada, in December1987 the Palestinian people rose up to resist Israel’s military occupation. The resistance of the first intifada, as opposed to the second, was characterized almost exclusively by acts of nonviolence and civil disobedience.

Israel’s Defense Minister at the time was Yitzhak Rabin, he famously told commanders of the military regime in the West Bank to crush the uprising, to “break their bones” in order to “re-instill fear” into the protesters. Rabin denied that he meant the words literally, though one wonders how bones might be broken figuratively. Israel’s Attorney General, Yosef Harish, ordered Rabin to instruct troops to use more restraint in the wake of “numerous complaints of cruel treatment to the inhabitants” of the occupied territories. By March of 1988, four months after the intifada began and twenty three years after the march from Selma to Montgomery was concluded, 111 Palestinians were dead.

By 1993, the intifada had been called off by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), now in negotiations with Israel about the creation of what they believed would be a proto-Palestinian state. Rabin, the bone-breaker, was now Israel’s Prime Minister and thus a primary character in the negotiating drama. The Oslo Accords, as the results of negotiations were called, ostensibly represented an interim period of Palestinian autonomy. For the Palestinians, this implicitly meant that statehood and self-determination, so long out of reach, was finally at hand.

For Rabin, this meant something else entirely. For Rabin, the Oslo accords and the creation of Palestinian autonomy structures represented the further consolidation—not the retreat—of Israeli power. “The Palestinians will be better at [“enforcing order”] than we were,” explained Rabin,

because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the [Israeli] Association for Civil Rights from criticizing conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli army from having to do what they will do.[1]

Beyond the duties of the indigenous police service, was the structure of the Oslo itself. Rabin championed the concept of the separation of Israeli and Palestinian peoples. First, the West Bank was trifurcated into three different areas. Area A was under full Palestinian control (3% of the West Bank’s surface area); Area B was to under Palestinian administrative authority and Israel controlling security (25%); Area C was under the strict purview of Israel (72%). For Palestinians the divisions were concrete, though Israeli forces would stage numerous incursions in to Area A. Israel instituted a rigorous permit regime over these divisions; Israeli citizens with Israeli permits were (and still are) given numerous privileges (access to roads, to subsidized housing in illegal settlements, immunity from prosecution in Palestinian courts), while permits for Palestinians served to arbitrarily grant and deprive them of access to employment, education, healthcare and freedom of movement.

Palestinians and Israelis are expected to at all times be readily distinguishable. Israeli fuel tanks were meant to be one color, Palestinian fuel tanks another. Roads were constructed specially for Israelis while Palestinians were forced to use roads that wound around Israel’s illegal settlements; journeys of just a few miles could take hours navigating through checkpoints and around roadblocks and closures—if of course a Palestinian had the appropriate permission. Meanwhile, new Israeli settlements were constructed and old settlements were expanded at a previously unheard of pace. Rabin’s plan for peace through all of this was boiled down to an easily packaged slogan: “Them over there; us over here.” Those familiar with South Africa’s history will readily recognize the similarity with the system of apartheid; those familiar with the history of America’s south will immediately recognize similarities as well.

On March 21 2013—forty-eight years to the day after King’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery—President Barack Obama laid from a stone from King’s memorial on Rabin’s grave.

One can only guess at what Obama may have meant by such a gesture. What could it possibly mean to bring the memory of a man who struggled against the forces of segregation and racism, who was imprisoned by and bled under the scourge of state power, to Israel and rest it on the final resting place of Yitzhak Rabin, a champion of “separation” that fought with truncheon and tear gas to crush a nonviolent uprising, that oversaw the defense of military occupation, killing hundreds and imprisoning thousands? There is no rational answer to be gleamed. The only thing the two men had in common was that they were both gunned down by assassins before their visions could be realized.

Whatever analogy that Obama hoped to make between the two men must logically end there. The visions that they strived for were intrinsically, irreconcilably different.

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[1] Massad, Joseph. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question. 2006. Pg. 98.

Interest > Values, Part 1: HOW America’s Foreign Policy Continues to Fail its People and its Victims

The New America Foundation recently hosted a debate between Douglas Ollivant and Joel Raybun entitled “Can we call Iraq a Success?” However, it quickly became clear that the definition of success had only one criterion: did the adventure serve America’s “national interest?”

At one point Peter Bergen, the moderator, asked the participants to give their perspective on how safe the country was—likely the most way an Iraqi might define such “success.” Ollivant declared that three rules ought to be followed for anyone that wants to stay safe in Iraq:

1. Don’t go to a Shia Mosque on Fridays or join in Shia religious processions (Bad news for a majority of the population)  
2. Don’t be a “moderate Sunni” (So… be an extremist?) 
3. Don’t stand near any member of Iraq’s security services (Ideally, the people paid to keep Iraqis safe.)

These rules would ordinarily indicate a sever failure, however Ollivant was the debater arguing that Iraq was indeed a success. The failure of the Iraqi state to create a decent, safe environment for its people isn't as critical to Iraq’s overall success  as defined by its return to the global market and its ability to frustrate Iran’s schemes. His opponent, Rayburn, was more explicit about how American interests are in danger in Iraq, rousing the specter of Iraq nationalizing its oil. One would think that as a matter of respecting a nation’s sovereignty and right to self-determination, this type of rhetoric would be a little more muted given the United States fractious history with opposition and resistance to nationalization efforts.

The issue of Iran loomed in the background of this debate, but it deserves to be brought to the fore here. In 1953 the CIA, collaborating with British intelligence and the Iranian Shah, annihilated the constitutional part of Iran’s constitutional monarchy. Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq was ousted after he nationalized Iran’s oil. Once the Shah was restored as an absolute monarch he began ruling as an absolute thug without the frustrations of popular leadership to frustrate him. Meanwhile British corporations were free to resume exploiting Iran’s natural resources, sharing the profits with the Shah and the Americans while cutting the Iranian people out of the deal as much as possible. After over two decades of authoritarian rule, the Iranian people overthrew the Shah in 1979 after which a fanatical regime came to power that was far more dangerous than the democratically elected, populist Mossadeq.

Assuming that in the short term depriving the Iranian people of democracy served America’s short-term national interest (dubious, at best), I don’t know of anyone serious who would say that this is true in the long-term.

The events that proceeded from the coup and the subsequent revolution tell of the shortcomings of American power beyond “blowback.”  Saddam Hussein immediately recognized that his old Persian rivals were weakened and saw the opportunity to not just oppress more Shiites, but also—of course—acquire Iran’s oil. Hussein was certainly power hungry, but the Iranians weren't wholly innocent either. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fresh off of a successful revolution, began encouraging Shiites to rise up elsewhere in the region. Obviously this would make Hussein’s regime nervous, as a Sunni minority ruling over a Shiite majority, but it also made most of the other odious regimes in the region nervous. As it turns out it wasn't just Shiites in Iraq and Iran who were cursed with the rotten luck of having oil under their feet. Shiites in the Eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula were in the same boat; Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Yemen, and Iraq were countries with oil based economies, ruled by authoritarian Sunni regimes—and all were to some extent allied with the United States. To this day, the Gulf States typically oppress every member of their citizenry, but special, brutal attention is paid to their Shiite populations.

When Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, these Gulf States—while weary of Hussein’s ambitions—were wholly supportive of quelling these Shiite upstarts. The United States was as well.

Not only was the US still dealing with the hostage crisis, but Iran’s open support of an international Shiite uprising was making America’s oil-powered friends nervous. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war the United States materially supported both Iraq and Iran. The US considered Iran an obvious enemy and it was fully aware of Hussein’s broader, regional ambitions. Seeing the two states go to war was a foreign policy gift as the they would both likely end up distracted in the short term and weaker in the long run. US supported Iraq with detailed intelligence about Iranian troop positions, and had its allies in the region supply Iraq with American made weapons. The support to Iran was covert at the time, but the details are well known at this point, dramatized in the scandalous Iran-Contra affair where the profits from arms sales to Iran were used to fund the notorious contras in Nicaragua

The export of American made arms is directly related to the defense industry in America. When politicians talk about defense spending, they’re really talking about a specific type of jobs program or stimulus package. There’s no question that these transfers of arms serve to bolster America’s economy, particularly manufacturing jobs that in most every sector besides defense have been shipped overseas for the past few decades.

It’s not difficult to find out where these arms eventually end up.

Periods of conflict are lucrative boom seasons for war profiteers. The Iran-Iraq war was one such boom; the most terrible war the Middle East has ever seen, it lasted eight years and claimed over a million lives. Even when it became known that Iraq was using chemical weapons on civilian populations, the arms kept flowing. US politicians may have reeled at this revelation, but stopping the conflict wasn't explicitly in line with American interests.

But these boom seasons come and go. The regular recipients of America’s military hardware don’t use them on their neighbors; they typically use them on unruly populations under their sovereignty. This is especially true of the aforementioned Gulf States; barring North Korea, these regimes represent the most repressive regimes on the planet. The biggest recipient of US aid in the Middle East for the past few decades has been Israel, which has maintained a strict military occupation over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, not to mention recurring wars and occupations in Lebanon. Even with the advent of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel’s military aid has only gone up. Additionally the creation of the PA was essentially the creation of a new customer, receiving aid monies in the millions per annum. Stepping into the small spaces that Israel retreated from, the PA has picked up the same mantle of population control.

All of these ‘interests’—be they access to natural resources, arms sales, corporate interests, the interests of America’s allies—run absolutely counter to America’s mythology that it serves as a ‘force for good’ in the world. The notion that American power is a moral force that stands for democracy and peace directly contradicts the reality that the ‘national interest’ mentality has at times created.

American power is a force that deserves to be treated with respect and responsibility. The use, misuse, or disuse of that power can determine whether people live or whether they die, whether they live free or in bondage, in peace or in fear, in poverty or in prosperity. Americans cannot delude themselves by thinking that their own self-interest directly coincides with what might be good for the millions of people whose lives are at stake when American power manifests around the world. At best the concept of America’s national interest represents a naiveté of the purest form, one demonstrated by the most recent adventure into Iraq. At worst the concept represents a myopic worldview characterized by xenophobia, selfishness and neotribalism. In either case, the “national interest” ought to be critically reexamined, if not dismantled altogether.