The Nakba Continues

BY ALICE ROTHCHILD Counterpunch

As my grief and outrage mount at the predictable escalations of violence in Israel/Palestine, I once again marvel at the chasms of misunderstanding and miscalculations in describing events as they unfold and the script that frames most mainstream media reporting. (Recently, The New York Times is a notable exception.)

The both-sides-have-their reasons-but-Israel-is-the-victim stories follow an expected pattern. Israeli Jews, still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, return to their rightful homes and then fight for every inch of what is justly theirs.  They are repeatedly faced with intractable Arab terrorists who attack innocent civilians and must be crushed with all the might the Israeli military has at its disposal. Never Again! Add “barely human” Hamas and Iranian militants, and armed and aggressive ultra-Orthodox Jews and settlers abetted by Israeli soldiers defending God’s promises and marching defiantly through Jerusalem yelling “Death to the Arabs!” and we have the narrative in place. The United Nations, a host of human rights groups, and the International Court protest, suggesting various crimes against humanity, while Israelis wring their hands and cry foul. Victim again. The US remains remarkably silent given that much of the weaponry is ours. Could both sides just de-escalate, please?

What is different this time?

While there have been uprisings of Palestinian citizens in Israel against land confiscations and other violations, as well as in support of Palestinians suffering in the territories (Land Day in 1976 comes to mind), now Palestinians in Acre, Haifa, Jaffe, Lod, Nazareth, and Ramle are protesting loudly and vigorously. The mayor of Lod may call this “Kristallnacht” but Palestinian citizens have reached a breaking point, unable to tolerate the 72 year history of racist and exclusionary policies by the Israeli government, its most recent attacks in Jerusalem, and ever-increasing rightward, tending toward fascistic, political parties.

The Israeli government may have miscalculated, although it is entirely possible that the wily Netanyahu thinks that a war would rally the fractured Israeli populace and improve his chances of reappearing Houdini-like as a viable candidate and of course staying out of prison. I suspect that most Israeli politicians believe that anything that causes a rift in the dysfunctional Hamas/ Palestinian Authority relationship and provides an excuse to assassinate a few Hamas leaders is also good for Israel. Israel has already thrown a monkey wrench into the now cancelled Palestinian elections by denying East Jerusalemites the right to vote, thus increasing the distress of the already pandemic stressed occupied Palestinian population.

Although Israeli officials claim the usual Hamas-plot-to-destroy-Israel scenario which I would argue is an egregious attempt at distraction, the reasons for the current eruptions of rage are much more understandable as another spike in the ongoing Nakba that started well before 1948.

The families in the Sheikh Jarrar neighborhood in East Jerusalem were expelled by Israeli soldiers from their homes in Haifa and Jaffa in 1948. Twenty-eight families were settled in Sheikh Jarrar in the 1950s by the Jordanian government in coordination with UNRWA. They moved into houses built by wealthy Palestinian families who had escaped the crowded winding streets of the Old City in the early 20th century as well as into newly built homes. The area was named for the personal physician of the Islamic general Saladin, who settled there when Muslim armies captured the city from Christian crusaders in 1187.

In the 1960s, the families made a deal with Jordan (who controlled the area until 1967) to become owners of their homes; they received official land deeds in return for renouncing their refugee status with its international protections. The Jordanian government has repeatedly provided documents proving Palestinian ownership of their properties. After the ’67 War, the Israeli government developed a settlement plan for the area, called the Holy Basin, which involves building a string of settler units and parks around the Old City and the removal of Palestinian homes using outright confiscation and endless tortured legal battles. Employing Israeli laws that allow Jews to reclaim ownership of land lost in 1948 as well as a host of forged documents, settlers have challenged Palestinian ownership and repeatedly won in Israeli courts. For the Israeli government to call this merely a “real-estate dispute” is unfathomably dishonest. Needless to say, Palestinians who have lost homes and property in West Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel for that matter have no such legal remedy. Twenty-thousand Palestinian homes are currently at risk for demolition in the city.

As Palestinians faced new evictions, tensions mounted, Ramadan was coming to a close, and the Israeli government chose this moment to block Palestinians from outside Jerusalem from entering the Al Aqsa Mosque on one of their most sacred religious holidays. Violence erupted further on Jerusalem Day, a raucous nationalistic celebration of the Israeli capture of the city in 1967, pouring acid into the already seething wound. Israeli police stormed Al Aqsa, firing rubber tipped bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas at praying Palestinians and others (not surprisingly) throwing stones, (the weapon of choice for the disenfranchised, enraged, and humiliated). Three hundred thirty Palestinians were injured.

It is not surprising that Hamas felt obligated to respond to these repeated provocations. I have to wonder if the provocations were indeed deliberate. Over the past few days, hundreds of rockets from Hamas have hit several Israeli cities, killing seven, and Israeli forces have repeatedly bombed the Strip, killing over 113, with 530 wounded. More death and destruction will undoubtedly follow as Israeli forces prepare for a land invasion, children will die, the tragic numbers in Israel will be dwarfed by the magnitude of horrifying death in Gaza. Mothers and fathers will weep and young men will vow vengeance. We know this story. The Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz stated “Israel is not preparing for a ceasefire. There is currently no end date for the operation.” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh announced that the rocket attacks would continue until Israel stopped “all scenes of terrorism and aggression in Jerusalem and al-Aqsa mosque”.

Now protests have erupted in the West Bank in Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, and Tulkarem.

The thing to remember is that this is not a battle between two equal parties; this is a struggle between one of the strongest military powers in the world, backed by the US, bent on disinheriting and humiliating a dispossessed people. This is a frightful example of ongoing violent settler colonialism, of the inability of the world to see Palestinians as equally human, traumatized, and deserving as their powerful Jewish Israeli neighbors and occupiers. If the international community does not force Israel to deal with the root causes of this disaster, the tragedy will repeat itself over and over again. The narrative of Jewish liberation and entitlement has been poisoned by decades of racist, unjust policies that have been called by many a slow genocide for Palestine. No one wins.

It is up to the international media, governments, human rights and grassroots organizations, and communities all over the world to make this story different this time.

Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker who has focused her interest in human rights and social justice on the Israel/Palestine conflict since 1997.  She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years. Until her recent retirement she served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Harvard Medical School. She writes and lectures widely, is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, and On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion. She directed a documentary film, Voices Across the Divide and is active in Jewish Voice for Peace.

 

Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis ruled Europe

 
Colonialism applied to Europe

Branko Milanovic

Mark Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis ruled Europe” is a magisterial book.

I read it on vacation, and it is not a book I would suggest you take with you to the beach. Unless you want to spoil your vacation. But once you have made such a choice, you cannot stop reading it and the book will stay with you throughout your stay (and I believe much longer).

This Summer I read, almost back-to-back Adam Tooze’s “The deluge” and Mazower’s book. The first covers the period 1916-31, the second, the Nazi rule of Europe 1936-45. They can be practically read as a continuum, but they are two very different books. Tooze’s is, despite all the carnage of World War I and Russian Civil War, an optimistic book in which sincere or feigned idealism is battling conservatism and militarism.  As I wrote in my review of Tooze’s book, the emphasis on the failed promise of liberal democracy (but a promise still it was) is a thread that runs through most of the book. Mazower’s book, on the other hand, is unfailingly grim and this is not only because the topic he writes about is much more sinister. The tone is bleaker. It is a book about the unremitting evil. It is the steady accumulation of murders, betrayals, massacres, retaliations, burned villages, conquests, and annihilation that makes for a despairing and yet compelling read. Europe was indeed, as another of Mazower’s book is titled, the dark continent.

Here I would like to discuss another aspect of Mazower’s book that is implicit throughout but is mentioned rather discreetly only in the concluding chapter. It concerns the place of the Second World War in global history. The conventional opinion is that the Second War should be regarded as a continuation of the First. While the First was produced by competing imperialisms, the Second was the outcome of the very imperfect settlement imposed at the end of the War, and the difference in interpretations as to how the War really ended (was it an armistice, or was it an unconditional surrender).

But that interpretation is (perhaps) faulty because it cannot account for the most distinctive character of the World War II, namely that it was the war of extermination in the East (including the Shoah).  That is  where Mazower’s placing of the War in a much longer European imperial context makes sense.

The key features of Nazi policies of “racial” superiority, colonization of land and conscious destruction of ethnic groups cannot be understood but as an extreme, or even extravagant, form of European colonialism, as it existed from the 15th century onward. If one thinks of the Soviet Russia as of Africa or indigenous American continent (as it seemed to the Nazis), then Nazi policy of mass extermination and (more liberally) enslavement of the Slavic population that would provide forced labor for the German aristocracy living in agro-towns dotted across the plains of Russia does not look much different from what happened for several centuries in the mines of Potasi, in the Congo, in the ante-bellum South of the United States, in the Dutch Java or indeed in German-ruled Namibia.

The creation of two ethically and racially distinct social classes, with no interaction and with one openly exploiting another is exactly how European colonialism presented itself to the rest of the world. As Aimė Cėsaire, quoted at the end of the book, wrote (I paraphrase) “Nazism was the application of colonialism to Europe”.

There were, however, some differences that made the realization of this dream of conquest and domination unrealizable for the Nazis.

The technological and military gap between the “master” class and the Untermenschen was much smaller, and at the end it got even overturned in the military sphere. By 1942, the Soviet Union was producing more airplanes and tanks than Germany with all her factories in conquered Europe. The technological gap was indeed much smaller than it seemed to the Germans, and than it objectively was between the European conquerors and the peoples of Africa or the Americas. Tiny forces of Spaniards or English could conquer huge spaces and rule many people because of enormous superiority of their military power. But this was not the case in Europe. In other words, when the technological (military) gap between two groups is small, a complete annihilation of one by another is impossible.

The Nazis were blinded to this, not only by their misjudgment about the technological development of Russia, but also by their belief in rigid racial hierarchy where the very fact that such hierarchy existed (as they believed) made it impossible to entertain the possibility that the lower classes might rise sufficiently to challenge the “masters”. The rigidity of self-created racial hierarchy blinded them to reality.

The second difference between the Nazis and classical European imperialism was that racial hierarchy, pushed to its extreme, and leading to the attempted annihilation of the entire ethnic groups (Holocaust) was not motivated by economic interests of the elite but took place, as it were, outside it. Mazower makes very clear the tension that existed throughout the Nazi rule between economic needs for more forced labor, both in European factories and in the fields in the conquered territories in Poland, the Ukraine and Belorussia, and the ideologically-motivated drive to exterminate the “inferior races”. The military and civilian administrations tended to prefer the former approach (exploitation to death through labor), the SS the latter (pure destruction). This single-minded pursuit of annihilation, regardless of, or even against, economic benefits, was not something that existed in European colonialism.

The rigidity of racial hierarchy was such that the same Nazi leaders were arguing for forced labor vs. annihilation for one group, and for the opposite for another group. This was the case of Hans Frank, the head of the General Government of rump Poland, who tried to protect Poles from some random killings because he needed them to deliver grain but was eager to kill as many Jews as possible. (Although even he balked at thousands of “new” Jews being pushed to his territories as the “death camps” were already working at capacity.)

It is this macabre and economically and politically irrational drive toward extermination that might have differentiated colonialism as applied to Europe from colonialism applied elsewhere. But establishing racial hierarchy, believing in eugenics, being indifferent to the death of the “lower races”, creating a system of forced labor, shooting or maiming people who do not deliver their quotas of produce was not exactly new. Aimė Cėsaire might have been right.

 

Amazon’s role in American inequality

Amazon’s role in American inequality

ALEX PRESS Prime Mover

FULFILLMENT: WINNING AND LOSING IN ONE-CLICK AMERICA BY ALEC MACGILLIS. NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX. 400 PAGES. $28.

 

GET BIG FAST was an early Amazon motto. The slogan sounds like a fratty refrain tossed around at the gym. Jeff Bezos had it printed on T-shirts. More than twenty-five years after leaving his position as a Wall Street hedge-fund executive to found Amazon, Bezos’s size anxiety is long gone. (At least as it pertains to his company; the CEO’s Washington, DC, house has eleven bedrooms and twenty-five bathrooms, a bedroom-to-bathroom ratio that raises both architectural and scatological questions.) Bezos is now worth $180 billion. Amazon, were it a country, would have a larger GDP than Australia.

Such numbers are nonsensically large—there’s no way to make them stick. But in 2017, Bezos demonstrated what they mean. That was the year the company conducted a nationwide sweepstakes to choose a location for its second headquarters, or HQ2, as it was called. Seattle was already a company town: Amazon had more than 40,000 employees there, and as much of the city’s office space as the next forty largest employers combined. It was time to take over a new city.

Local and state governments raced to undercut each other. It wasn’t only tax credits that in some locations amounted to over $1 billion; the subsidies offered to Amazon were a display of abject creativity. Bezos is a Trekkie, so Chicago had Star Trek star William Shatner narrate the city’s pitch video. Tucson, Arizona, sent a giant saguaro cactus to Amazon headquarters. Sly James, Kansas City’s mayor at the time, bought and reviewed one thousand Amazon products, giving every item five stars. But the locations Bezos selected—New York City and Northern Virginia—were always going to win. Together, the chosen bids gave the company over $3 billion in tax incentives and grants.

The spectacle was about more than financial benefits; the company sought to flex its power over elected officials. Amazon had engaged in these displays before, such as when it threatened to move jobs out of Seattle after the city council passed a law that would’ve taxed large employers for each employee earning over $150,000 to fund homelessness-outreach services. Indeed, New York had its winning status revoked after a coalition of working-class organizations, left-leaning politicians, and pissed-off residents made too much noise about the downsides of hosting HQ2. The point is to beg on one’s knees; ingratitude is disqualifying.

But the contest was also about Amazon’s life-blood: data. The company learned exactly what each location was willing to give up. It received a precise picture of the strengths, weaknesses, and points of resistance in each corner of the nation. How many NDAs would Alabama officials sign? What did Boston’s elected officials think the region’s future looks like? How many young people in Columbus were entering the workforce each year? How low would Orlando go? The HQ2 affair was a national demonstration of fealty to a private corporation by publicly elected officials. Sure, everyone already knew Amazon was powerful, but this was different: a corporate entity told politicians to jump, and they asked “How high?” How did this happen?

Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America goes a long way toward answering that question. MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, investigates the country left in Amazon’s wake, crisscrossing the United States from what he calls the winning cities to those regions on the losing side. His contention is that corporate concentration creates geographic bifurcation. Places like Boston, New York, Washington, DC, the Bay Area, and Seattle win the lottery, attracting an influx of well-heeled residents. Capital divests from other areas—midsize cities in the Midwest, much of the Rust Belt—leaving them hollowed out. Low-wage jobs and drug addictions replace union benefits. But the division is internal to the winning regions too. Poor residents within the lucky cities suffer. Desperation reigns, expectations are lowered, and elected officials become increasingly willing to give Amazon anything in exchange for the promise of jobs.

Using the tech giant as a focal point allows MacGillis to show that this state of affairs was a choice, not an inevitability. It’s not that “good jobs left”; the transformation of work was engineered. Fulfillment meticulously documents how that process plays out, with the fate of millions haggled over by a handful of people in tucked-away conference rooms.

When Amazon wanted to build two new warehouses in 2015, it reached out to JobsOhio, a private nonprofit created by then-governor John Kasich to oversee negotiations over tax incentives with companies. “Every month,” writes MacGillis, “a board called the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved the incentives negotiated by Jobs-Ohio.” On July 27, 2015, it was Amazon’s turn to meet with the tax board. The company promised two thousand full-time jobs. In exchange, it wanted a fifteen-year tax credit worth $17 million in addition to a $1.5 million cash grant from the state liquor-monopoly profits controlled by JobsOhio. The result? “The board approved the credit 4-0.”

Surveying Amazon’s operations in the state, MacGillis writes that “the company had, in a sense, segmented its workforce into classes and spread them across the map: there were its engineering and software-developer towns, there were the data-center towns, and there were the warehouse towns.” Amazon chose the Columbus area as its location for Amazon Web Services US East, and picked three towns north of the city for its centers. Hilliard, Dublin, and New Albany were “the right sort of exurban communities to target: wealthy enough to support good schools for employees’ kids, but also sufficiently insecure in their civic infrastructure and identity to be easy marks.” The company secured its standard extractions: a fifteen-year exemption from property taxes—worth around $5 million for each data center—accelerated building permits, and waived fees. It required the community to sign NDAs before negotiations could even begin. Dublin threw in sixty-eight acres of farmland for free, and a guarantee that the company did not have to contract with union labor.

The warehouses, by contrast, are south and east of the city, areas poorer than those in the north. The sites in Obetz and Etna are near I-270 and “close enough to the struggling towns of southern and eastern Ohio to be in plausible reach of a long commute for those desperate enough to undertake it.” Amazon’s warehouses come with the standard suite of exemptions—even though ambulances and fire trucks are often called to the locations, which one investigation showed have twice the rate of serious injuries as other warehouses, the company does its best to avoid paying taxes for emergency services.

Tax avoidance is foundational to the company’s empire. MacGillis enumerates a long, damning list of the company’s schemes:

There was the initial decision to settle in Seattle to avoid assessing sales tax in big states such as California. There was the decision to hold off as long as possible on opening warehouses in many large states to avoid the sales taxes there. Amazon employees scattered around the country often carried misleading business cards, so that the company couldn’t be accused of operating in a given state and thus forced to pay taxes there. In 2010, the company went so far as to close its only warehouse in Texas and drop plans for additional ones when state officials pushed Amazon to pay nearly $270 million in back sales taxes there, forcing the state to waive the back taxes. By 2017, the company had even created a secret internal goal of securing $1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.

This is predictable behavior for a company run by a man whose focus has always been on getting as rich as possible. But the government’s support for this cause testifies to its class character. A capitalist state takes its cues from executives. When a region has mostly low-paying work and little in the way of a social-welfare net, it’ll beg employers for jobs with a higher wage (even if that wage is below the industry average, as is true of Amazon’s warehouses). There is no neutrality, only officials groveling at Bezos’s feet, deferring to his fake-business-card-carrying minions. Working-class immiseration is the direct result.

The influence never ends. There is Amazon’s unparalleled lobbying: against the regulation of drones, which it hopes to use for delivery; for government procurement, as the company bulks up its relationship with federal agencies; against antitrust investigations. There is the trickle-down even to enforcement agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. When fifty-nine-year-old Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death by a forklift in a Plainfield, Indiana, Amazon warehouse in 2017, the state’s OSHA director told the company how to blame Terry for his own death and negotiate down the fines. Not long after issuing citations and a $28,000 fine, the agency quietly deleted these penalties from the books. Indiana, after all, was hoping to get HQ2.

The past year has been a godsend for the company. “COVID-19, in our view, has injected Amazon with a growth hormone,” noted an analyst at Wall Street firm D.A. Davidson last summer. What was good for Amazon was never good for America, and now the evidence was irrefutable. In one four-month period, Bezos’s net worth rose by $24 billion. Amazon was already one of the largest employers in the United States, but in 2020, the company added more than 425,000 jobs around the world. It increased its workforce by more than 50 percent from the previous year; the New York Times compared the surge to the shipbuilders’ hiring spree at the start of World War II. By November, 1.2 million people worldwide were on Amazon’s payroll—a number that doesn’t include an estimated 500,000 delivery drivers. That workforce is contracted with a third party, saving the company from liability for accidents; most of their drivers, unlike those at other corporations, get their training by watching instructional videos on their phones.

Get Big Fast, indeed. As a motto, it’s reminiscent of the one used by Eugene Grace: Always More Production. Grace was the president of Bethlehem Steel Corporation for thirty years, overseeing the company’s stratospheric growth. By the middle of the twentieth century, its steel mill at Sparrows Point, near Baltimore, Maryland, was the largest in the world. Today, Sparrows Point is Tradepoint Atlantic, a logistics hub. Amazon opened its second warehouse there last year.

Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine. She lives in Pittsburgh.