The Fanonite

The following from Saree Makdisi in the Los Angeles Times (thanks Ann).

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon’s stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that — after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war — Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

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A stained-glass window at Yale University by Louis Comfort Tiffany imagines science and religion in harmony.

I just received my copy of I Don’t Believe in Atheists, the new book by Chris Hedges. I am look forward to reading it over the weekend. Here’s his latest: ‘The New Atheist writers from Richard Dawkins to E.O. Wilson to Sam Harris have become the high priests not of science but the cult of science.’

The German chemist August Kekulé fell asleep in his study after a fruitless struggle to identify the chemical structure of benzene. He dreamed of a snake eating its own tail and awoke instantly. The dream gave him, through the ancient language of symbolism, the circular structure of the benzene ring that had eluded his conscious mind. The dream may have had its basis in Kekulé’s experiments, but it was the nonrational that brought him his discovery.

Many physicists see “string theory”—in which the structure of the universe is made up of resonating, one-dimensional submicroscopic strings—as plausible. Yet no scientist has ever seen a string. No direct experimentation has established a firm ground for strings. Cosmology routinely bases arguments on things that cannot be seen in order to explain things that can, as in the case of “dark matter,” whose effects can be seen. Quantum physics demolished the assumption that physical elements are governed by fixed laws.

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A decent documentary from the best television news channel out there — Al Jazeera International. However, it is mostly an Israeli perspective featuring Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Uri Avnery, Shulamit Aloni et al.

(thanks Shahbaz)

A special series examining the origins, violent creation, and modern-day reality of the state of Israel through the stories of individual Israelis.

Episode two, Conflict, looks at how the still small Jewish population succeeded in defeating a far larger Palestinian population and asks if a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing was employed.

[I'll post the second episode when it is made available]

First there was the RAND report on US soldiers nearly one-third of who return from Afghanistan and Iraq suffering brain injuries or stress disorders or both. Only 43 percent of them ever get to see a doctor. Now comes this exclusive in the Independent: ‘Soldiers need loans to eat, report reveals‘. Following is the Independent investigation followed by Alexander Cockburn’s analysis of the RAND report.

Senior figures react angrily to damning indictment of life inside the Army. Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady investigate

A highly sensitive internal report into the state of the British Army has revealed that many soldiers are living in poverty. Some are so poor that they are unable to eat and are forced to rely on emergency food voucher schemes set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Some of Britain’s most senior military figures reacted angrily yesterday to the revelations in the report, criticising the Government’s treatment of its fighting forces.

The disturbing findings outlined in the briefing team report written for Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, include an admission that many junior officers are being forced to leave the Army because they simply cannot afford to stay on.

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The left really needs to embrace free culture and the new means of spreading ideas on the internet. For example, if you are publishing a book are you doing it to make money or spread your idea? If you want to spread your idea then follow the intellectual pioneers publishing a paper copy and releasing a digital copy too, under creative commons license, for free download and distribution. This allows wider readership and may ultimately end in greater sales (I know many of the free books I and my friends have read we’ve later bought). The following article covers this a little but is primarily looking at how “the internet has revolutionised economics.” Persnally I find it inspiring that all human knowledge and culture could be made availalbe to everyone for free, what a global victory for education and emancipation that would be, I disagree that it will somehow corrupt society or that we will have to plaster knowledge with advertising to make it feasible.

A few years ago, Ryanair’s founder Michael O’Leary told an interviewer that he had a dream. He had already democratised air travel: “For years flying has been the preserve of rich fuckers. Now everyone can afford to fly.” His new ambition, he told the Financial Times in 2004, was to give customers free tickets, perhaps even to pay them to fly. He predicted: “In a decade or so, airlines will pay travellers to distribute people around Europe.”

But how could he make his dream of free air travel a profitable reality? It’s a question that takes us to the heart of a new philosophy called freeconomics that turns traditional capitalist business models on their heads. O’Leary argued that the airline industry would have to learn from commercial TV, which allows viewers to watch for free while advertisers pay for access to them. It would also have learn from the internet, where websites make money for delivering click-through traffic to other sites.

As you may have noticed, O’Leary isn’t yet paying you to fly, not even to from Birmingham to Bratislava (which currently costs £10 one way), but he has a few years to deliver on his prediction. If he manages it, Ryanair will become an exponent of a revolutionary idea being developed by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine.

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Rashid Khalidi: ‘A just resolution of the Palestine question depends on the Palestinians themselves’. Let me point out that Khalidi is an old PLO hand and the Vice-President of the Dahlan lobby in Washington, the American Task Force on Palestine (more to do with American, less with Palestine). And as a result his view on internal Palestinian politics lacks the moral clarity of his historical scholarship. He also repeats the tired and discredited arguments on the two-state solution. In a forum organized by the London Review of Books on the Israel Lobby, he also took a curious position undermining his own side of the argument. It is only the first part of the article that is worth the time.

The “Palestine Question” has been with us for sixty years. During this time it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more distant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question solved the previously perennial “Jewish Question” is once again open to debate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of Zionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued that what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an entirely different one.

It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and indeed even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events sixty years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy. Commemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their national catastrophe, al-Nakba–the expulsion, flight and loss of their homes by a majority of their people sixty years ago–is thus considered not in terms of this seminal event’s meaning to at least 8 million Palestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only because it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating Zionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel also created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the US occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must therefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact that it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land nearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of ethnic cleansing.

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Gore Vidal on the decline of the US empire. Terrible interviewer.

Interviewed with Robert Scheer from 2006

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‘Simplistic and crude: it’s time central bankers recognised inflation targeting for the misguided fashion it really is,’ writes Joseph Stiglitz.

The world’s central bankers are a close-knit club, given to fads and fashions. In the early 1980s, they fell under the spell of monetarism, a simplistic economic theory promoted by Milton Friedman. After monetarism was discredited — at great cost to those countries that succumbed to it — the quest began for a new mantra.

The answer came in the form of “inflation targeting“, which says that whenever price growth exceeds a target level, interest rates should be raised. This crude recipe is based on little economic theory or empirical evidence; there is no reason to expect that regardless of the source of inflation, the best response is to increase interest rates.

One hopes that most countries will have the good sense not to implement inflation targeting. My sympathies go to the unfortunate citizens of those that do. (Among the list of those who have officially adopted inflation targeting in one form or another are Israel, the Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, South Africa, Thailand, Korea, Mexico, Hungary, Peru, the Philippines, Slovakia, Indonesia, Romania, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Iceland, and Norway.)

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Parts one and two of Eric Margolis on the Real News discussing US Elections.

Clinton vows to continue campaign

Obama and the World

(part three to follow)