Among the victims of the Paris criminal attack was an officer of North-African origin, Ahmed Merabet. Soon, there was a new hashtag in circulation, Je suis Ahmed, more politically clear than the “Je suis Charlie” one. Charlie-Hebdo continued an old tradition of satire that struck many as often playing with fire. A family member who practices Islam tells me he was offended by what Charlie-Hebdo did in its mockery of that religion. He adds there are many ways to express disagreement, and that many Muslims now worry about the reactions of the public.

A large demonstration is planned in Paris for Sunday. I hope the demonstrators, speakers, thinkers, and media will be able to show how much they value both freedom and inclusiveness. Perhaps they will avoid the rhetoric of war and exclusion. I hope they will not fall for what may have been the main goal of those who ordered the crimes at Charlie-Hebdo‘s headquarters and at the Hyper-Cacher store, and that is: to radicalize the situation. I hope especially that France will reject the deeply misleading rhetoric of terrorism and the failed all-out-war stance adopted by the US and its allies (including France in Syria). See Edgar Morin’s reaction in Le Monde.

In the middle of the night, BBC reports of the armed attack on Charlie-Hebdo‘s Paris office. Twelve dead, among whom well-known collaborators who were participating in the weekly editorial meeting: Char(bonnier), Wolinski, Cabu, Tignous, Honoré, Maris.

I’m very moved to hear about these deaths in Paris because I grew up reading Pilote with my brothers. Pilote was one of the first steps in being weaned away from the Catholic youth press (Fripounet when I was little, then Cœurs Vaillants) and the discovery of irreverent forms of discourse that had a strong impact on us in the backwaters of my Catholic, left-leaning, Breton-speaking, Brittany: Hara Kiri, later Fluide Glacial, and finally Charlie-Hebdo. Not to mention Le Canard Enchaîné for many years. Among our heroes in the political and artistic sense were Reiser (died in the 80s) and those killed today and whose names bear repeating: Wolinski, Cabu, and later, Char, Tignous, and Maris (“Oncle Bernard”), an economics professor and journalist (commentator on economic matters: “J’ai tout compris à l’économie” on France-Inter radio). Cabu had long been drawing for Le Canard. I always looked forward to his strip.

I am trying to understand why I react so strongly to this planned attack on a satirical, in-your-face newspaper that was in great financial difficulties (not for the first time). Aside from the attachment one forms in youth (my brother and I couldn’t wait for Thursday when we would get Pilote and negotiate the sharing of the reading), there is the sense that the huge catastrophes that have been happening for a very long time in Irak, Iran, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Mali, without forgetting the big problems in France, are intimately tied to this attack on the freedom to think, speak, and draw. There is also the overwhelming feeling of being embarked or dragged along in a much longer story in the making since the sixteenth century, of slow, often monumentally tragic separation of religious and political or rational discourses. A story and history in which the fear triggered by the sound and fury may drive away the brave, hidden, fragile hope that a fuller life lies ahead in the will to share resources and make peace without submission or humiliation. This belief and hope in a broader and deeper use of reason or ratio, including its caustic use, seem exclusive. Indeed, I opt for reason and suspend or reject religious revelation as being a handy, often venerable, and wrong shortcut to authoritarian allocation of goods. Yet I remain confused because I also feel that the deployment of reason is partly a luxury. A splendid power that was hard earned from within the crucible of religious conviction, and that has all too quickly been narrowly turned at the service of self-satisfied conquering greed.

Many demonstrations are planned in French cities. See Charlie-Hebdo @ twitter where maps and times are available.

At its December 9, 2014 meeting, the Santa Cruz city council voted 6 to 1—Micah Posner was the lone brave dissenter—to accept a $251,000 Homeland Security grant to buy an armored vehicle of the type Lenco sells to specialized agencies (one of the variants of the so-called Bearcat). It reflects an increasing militarization of local police. There were heated reactions. The audio and DVD file of this meeting are not yet available on the site. One can read about it in the Sentinel.

Unsurprisingly, the police argue the vehicle is purely defensive. A petition about the buying of this vehicle is circulating. It calls for public hearings about the militarization of the Police Department. I’m most concerned about the larger national dynamics. Homeland so-called Security is a PR agent and buyer for a heavily militarized economy. This is happening at the same time real security in jobs, health, pensions, is down. The SC city council caved in to powers that do not have our security at heart. The SC police department and chief do what they think is important in a job that is very hard and dangerous. But the larger issue is the militarization of our society. That is why I signed the petition and invite readers to do the same.

In 1992, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Bill. I didn’t care for Bill’s willingness to sacrifice her to the wolves of the health insurance and medical industry, or his unwillingness to spend some real political capital. But in 2016? The bank and security industry wants her, the defense industry has no objection, the neo-cons are getting ready to work with her, the pro-Israel right thinks she is a new Cyrus the Great. See the Intercept. It’s already done, a fait accompli, unavoidable. Conclusion: no need for me to go and vote for her.

Now that the midterm elections have sent a more reactionary House and Senate to Washington, the Israeli right and its US supporters couldn’t wait to resume their dance with the US representatives. They share a loathing of Obama and his administration, mostly because of his early attempts to take his distances from damaging Middle-East policies of previous US governments that they favor, and his later vain efforts to get real negotiations going between Israeli and Palestinian representatives. So, various openings are quickly being made, for instance in the shape of an opinion in last Friday’s NYT by Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of the economy and leader of the right-wing Ha-bayt ha-Yehudi, The Jewish Home party. He proposes to do away with the idea of a negotiated settlement between the two peoples. No UN, no resolution, no Oslo agreement, no pursuit of a two-state solution, no Palestinian people.

The urgency has deeper reasons than the occurrence of a new political situation in Washington. Here are three main reasons that, in my opinion, guide the intensity of the right wingers’ agenda regarding Palestine and the fate of Palestinians.

1. The major reason is that the core of the zionist religious right’s enthusiasm is the continuation of the classic zionism’s national dream on a re-energized religious basis. It creates difficulties because it blurs the separation of religion and state on which the modern state of Israel was based, though it was not formalized by a constitution. It claims ownership of the whole area on the basis of divine will revealed to Abraham and putative successors. It is a messianism and often a temple-centered messianism (witness Feiglin and Yehuda Glick recently). This messianism has been developing in the recent months, according to Vincent Lemire (see links below). It is the mirror image of the Muslim fervor surrounding the Haram esh-sharif, a fervor that Hamas may also have an interest now in exacerbating and turning into a central piece of its religious politics. Not that this will bother conservative US representatives who wish to do the same blurring here in the US and furthermore share at least superficially the messianic beliefs of the Israeli religious right. It remains to be seen whether our house representatives and senators will be willing to push things along these messianic lines or prudently back off. An incorrigible optimist bets on the latter.
2. Secondly, an international movement of recognition of Palestine is spreading. Sweden has just recognized the state of Palestine and was the 135th country to do so according to today’s Le Monde debate on the topic About twenty countries still refuse to do so, most importantly the remaining superpower, the USA. Various parties in these twenty countries are contemplating a recognition. This international movement of recognition of the state of Palestine is seen as most dangerous by the Israeli right because it moves towards giving the same legal basis to the state of Palestine as the UN gave Israel on 29 November 1947. M. Abbas and the Palestinian authority have long been pursuing a policy of legitimate authority founded on international law. The US refusal to budge on this matter will not remain tenable much longer.
3. Finally, there is the demographic evolution in Israel and Palestinian territories. See the wiki on the demographics of the Palestinian territories.The case of Jerusalem is paradigmatic. The status of Jerusalem and the return of the refugees are two tightly linked issues that need to be negotiated in future final status negotiations.The population within the municipality of Jerusalem is now at circa 800,000: 500,000 Israeli Jews and 300,000 Palestinian Arab inhabitants in East Jerusalem, including 35,000 in the old city. Since 1967, the Arab population of Jerusalem has grown by a factor of 4, that of the Jewish population by a factor of 2.5 (figures given by Vincent Lemire, historian, see his interview in Libération and the Open Jerusalem Project). The distribution of the population of the old city by religious affiliation is: 26,000 Muslims, 6,000 Christians, and 4,000 Jews. Most religious Israeli Jews don’t live in the old city. But many of them in turn (of various obedience), faced with the demographic resistance of the Palestinian population in Jerusalem, increase the pressure on Arab quarters just outside the old city: Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah. The belt of colonies just beyond the city perimeter of Jerusalem expands and thickens: Maalei Adumim, Har Homa, Pizgat Zeev, etc.

Given these reasons, there is an internal consistency to what a representative of the religious extreme right suggests in his NYT article. It is a logic that has catastrophic consequences. The article rejects the notion of a state of Palestine and replaces it, unsurprisingly, with the logic of a greater Israel.

What of Gaza under Hamas? Bennett asserts that “It cannot be a party to any agreement.” It can remain the biggest open-air prison in the world. The systematic debilitation and sub-human status of 1.6 million people, almost half of whom are under 15 if I believe the statistics, will continue.

For the West Bank, Bennett uses the security and terror rhetoric that is accepted nowadays by so many people (not only Republicans). Notice that he doesn’t use Biblical names in this article directed to a non-religious readership and calls “West Bank” the Palestinian areas that go also under the post-Oslo letters A, B, and C. His letter advocates a land grab under the general claim of security that he knows has a good chance of getting the US house and senate—including many democrats—on his side, at least for a moment. He writes that “for its security, Israel cannot withdraw from more territory and cannot allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.”

So, he proposes four measures regarding the West Bank that will further demean Palestinians in their aspirations to freedom and self-government and will continue a massive enforcement of the open-air prison characteristics in that area. His suggestions are the following:

1. “We would work to upgrade Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank in the areas already under Palestinian control.” This refers to areas A and B, as was made explicit in the e-version of the article that reads: “First, we would work to upgrade the Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank, in the areas largely under Palestinian control (known as Areas A and B, according to the Oslo Accords)”. These areas were defined by the Oslo II agreement, a process whose viability according to Bennett has been upended by “the new reality in the Middle East.” He relies upon it as a weapon against Palestinian aspirations. Areas A and B happen to have about 90-95% of the West Bank’s Palestinian population. See the maps and details. In terms of territory, however, area A has about 3% of the West Bank—exclusive of East Jerusalem—and area B has 23-25% of the West Bank, with about 440 villages and no Israeli implantations. Together with the other suggestions by Bennett, this would be left to the “Palestinian entity.” No state. No independence. Hardly any territory, but a reservation where the population would have to make do with whatever the Israel government grants it. A subhuman existence not unlike that of Gaza, given the security measures likely to develop in response to any violence.
2. A “huge upgrade of roads and infrastructure, as well as the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the West Bank.” Exactly where? In area C? Will these roads continue to be penetration roads? Will there be strict control of the Palestinian population living in areas A and B, that is, will the roadblocks and checkpoints be moved between area C—annexed by Israel—and areas A-B? I suppose that’s the idea.
3. “economic bridges of peace between Israelis and Palestinians:” that is, more industrial zones in illegal colonies. This idea presumably would concern area C.
4. “Lastly, I propose applying Israeli law in the part of the West Bank controlled by Israel under the Oslo Accords. (Palestinian who live there would be offered full Israeli citizenship).” This is Area C, as made explicit, once more, in the electronic version of this opinion piece: “Lastly, I propose applying Israeli law in Area C, which is the part of the West Bank controlled by Israel under the Oslo agreement.” This assertion of “national sovereignty” is illegal land grabbing. What is Area C? It constitutes at least 61% of Palestinian territories East of the 1967 Green Line as of now (disputed question: actually almost 75% of the West Bank). It conveniently has about 5% of the Palestinian West Bank population only at the moment, for all kinds of reasons (previous land occupation especially). See the map and articles on B’tselem.org site.

Bennett concludes by mouthing platitudes on “new realities” that have “brought an end to the viability of the Oslo peace process.” Obama may have been hated by the right and the not-so-right. Imagine, he had the audacity to visit Arab countries at the beginning of his first mandate. Even worse, he and his government mentioned again, after a long hiatus, the language of just, negotiated settlement on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242, with swaps. Anathema of course, because it is the only basis for some semblance of just settlement.

Now, with Bennett and other tenors of the religious extreme right, not even a two-state solution is advocated as part of a hypocritical discourse that the present Israeli government has kept up for a while under US pressure. The little pressure there was is gone. Nothing for Palestinians. On the contrary, the measures proposed by Bennett spell a new era of increased repression. The hope of the extreme right wingers: continue the annexation of area C—60-75% of the whole area conquered in June 1967— and “give up” all of areas A and B, while making sure it becomes another Gaza=open air prison.

Do our new representatives and senators want to be part of this injustice and what it spells for the whole area?

In 2013, the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign searched for a new professor. Professor Salaita, who teaches at Virginia Tech and has written a number of books, was hired. The appointment letter was issued, contingent on Board of Trustees’ approval, normally a formality. Professor Salaita resigned his position at Virginia Tech and prepared to move. But a few weeks (two?) before teaching was supposed to start this 2014 academic year, the offer was rescinded, or rather the chancellor of Urbana-Champaign made the decision not to forward the appointment to the Board of Trustees. The board routinely approves hires, sometimes retroactively given its rare meetings (three a year, I believe).

What led to this potential violation of professional academic freedom and constitutional free speech, according to many, is the “concern” over the stridency of S. Salaita’s social media comments on Israel’s military actions in Gaza earlier this summer. See his Twitter site.

Strident alright, but clearly part of political discourse and protected freedom of speech. One may strongly disagree with Salaita’s active support of Boycott-Divestment-Sanction (BDS) and his views on zionism, yet defend his rights to express them and to see his appointment at UI-Urbana-Champaign confirmed. In regard to the latter, my only question regarding the judgment by the hiring powers would be: Does and will Professor Salaita engage viewpoints different from his in his teaching and writing? Will he welcome colleagues and students in this broad manner? The American Indian Studies program thinks so (see link below). Prof. Salaita himself addresses that question in the press conference today, at about the 17′ mark of the youtube recording (last link below). To be pursued….

Links:

1. Description of events in article on blocked appointment in Inside Higher Ed.
2. Vote of no confidence in Chancellor Wise taken by American Indian Studies Program at UI-Urbana-Champaign, with other links.
3. Illinois AAUP section issued a statement asking that Salaita’s appointment be honored.
4. Defense of decision by UI’s administration to rescind the offer by Cary Nelson, ex-president of AAUP, who seems to have had Steven Salaita in his crosshairs for quite a while.
5. Resource guide by UI students. Links to circulating petitions can be found in this guide.
6. Press conference of Sept 9, 2014, with Professor Salaita, Professor Warrior of American Indian Studies Program at UI/Urbana-Champaign, Professor Rothberg reading the MLA statement regarding the abrogation of due process in Prof. Salaita’s case and more grievously the violation of academic freedom and freedom of expression, students’ statements (including Jewish and Palestinian students), and a period of questions and answers.

Two boycotts are presently targeting Israel. One takes aim at companies and organizations having their operations, or some of them, in the settlements and implantations that have been developing on the West Bank since the seventies. The second boycott, started by the BDS movement (= Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), made news recently because of the American Studies Association’s announcement of its support of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Supporters of the anti-Palestinian policies of Israel’s present government are trying hard to confuse the public regarding the first one, the limited boycott of companies operating in the settlements on the West Bank, because it has a sound legal and ethical basis. It can really hurt and accelerate peace negotiations. They use boycott number 2, the BDS one, which they know is problematic for most people in the US, as if it were the basis for boycott number 1, the limited one. See for instance yesterday’s NYT article on countering boycotts by Landler, or today’s opinion piece by the foreign editor of Die Welt.

A few words about boycott one, which targets companies and products in the settlements. I support this boycott because these settlements are illegal and “an obstacle to peace” (footnote: this was the diplomatic language used by US Secretary of States until it was dropped by Reagan’s administration. Obama’s went tentatively back to it, at the beginning of his administration). The implantations prevent a negotiation and resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the basis of UN Resolution 242 and the Oslo Accords of 1993–95. A solution to the conflict on that basis, with land swaps, is possible. But the settlements’ continuous expansion since the Oslo Accords and especially now, in the face of efforts by the Obama administration to put the peace process back on rails, makes an economic and cultural boycott of these settlements necessary. We’ll see how a recently weakened AIPAC frames the discussion in the days to come. Kerry is to address it on Monday, if the situation in Ukraine, Crimea, and Russia, not to mention Syria, does not need his attention.

The second or BDS boycott is legally and ethically confusing to most people. The three main elements of its platform are: 1) equal rights of citizenship for current inhabitants; 2) the end to the occupation; 3) the rights of unlawfully displaced persons to return to their lands and gain restitution for their losses. Because numbers 2 and 3 could apply to the state of Israel as a home and refuge for many Jews since 1948, I don’t see how it can be supported.

Boycott number one needs to expand if Israel’s government continues to refuse to engage in the peace process.

This is a summary of a paper I gave yesterday on the origins of the apocalyptic mind and literature (Enoch, Daniel, right up to Revelation). It was a standard historical paper, with ethical and political considerations regarding the modern situation not buried too deeply down.

The paper starts by saying that apocalyptic literature—a three-century-something long development initiated in the third century B.C.E.—is the continuation of the sixth-to-fifth century monotheistic reframing of the Yahweh divinity. This reframing and broadening of Yahweh is in great part an explanation of, and resistance to, a succession of three empires. Belief in a single, only divinity was at the same time a listening beyond the fury and chaos of history. This listening to and obeying an inscrutable divine will had been revealed to an interstitial Moses, the story went, not to a king. Listening (in the sense of paying attention as well as a more problematic obeying) remained or became the driving metaphor, rather than seeing and its related political forms. The Mosaic story and law took their present shape together with the new temple in the late sixth-fifth centuries B.C.E.

Apocalyptic takes its cue from the central role played in Judahite society by this new temple and torah. For its own purposes, Achaemenid rule had allowed or encouraged limited, local, non-royal, control for peoples still reeling from the collapse of their monarchy and loss of political center. In this new situation, an original, divinely inspired, constitution had been created—as well as a historical narrative of origins, an explanation of failures, and reasons for hope. And together with the reframing of a catastrophic political history as being the expression of long-revealed divine will, the eventual rebuilding of the divinity’s house proceeded. Both Torah and temple became the sources of renewed strength for a small, beaten, partly dispersed, endangered people.

The lay and soon-dominant priestly elites in Judah, however, were in a paradoxical situation. The authority of both of these groups, in regard to Achaemenid and later Ptolemaic kings, depended on their ability to ensure order and tribute. But from the Judahites’ point of view, it depended on their contiguity or nearness to temple and torah. It was precisely their religious authority (including their eventual creation and placing of the torah at the center), their attached rights to religious tithing, and consequently their local integration and intimate knowledge of economic resources and social situations that enabled them to play an effective role as disguised tax-farmers for the Persian kings. Leaders or protectors of the people and facilitators of a tributary empire at the same time.

This uneasy equilibrium lasted for some time. Two centuries something later, however, two combined pressures came about that could not be managed anymore. One was a particularly oppressive external imperial assault that, in its combination of Hellenistic and eventual Roman competing claims, made overt as well as implicit linguistic, economic, and cultural-religious demands that the people and many among the elites found impossible to meet. The second was a more complicated, local development, marked by the end of the authoritative and uneasy role of the Judahite leadership that was summarized above, of lay elites and priesthood. Part of it was the hardening of the temple as institution, and the torah as canon. The latter was not hermetically closed until long after, but prophetic voices and eschatological thinking were discouraged. The elites’ splits and abandonment of their responsibilities have left traces in some of the later layers of the Hebrew Bible.

This is the situation that apocalyptic responded to and tried to transcend. So, the core of apocalyptic was not otherworldly or devoid of ethical concerns, on the contrary. In the re-mythicized forms it adopted, evil was politically and socially rooted and the writers projected the unseemly and incomprehensible victory of unrighteousness as part of a divine plan revealed to visionaries: the ineluctable and inescapable triumph of an “enthroned glory.” Yet, this enthroned glory was still an absent male patriarch, the absent father of daily life as well as the absent and formidable head of state, the Ancient of Days, a glory before which one could only prostrate oneself.

I concluded the paper with a discussion of Jesus. Was he an apocalyptic thinker (dreamer?) or an anti-Roman peasant revolutionary? I tried to show there is no either/or. Jesus folded the apocalyptic worldview unto the here and now. That is, the grandiose cosmic waiting and near-coming featured in apocalyptic, he took to be the waiting and expectation of the paralytic, the hungry, the woman with a blood flow, disciples, hearers, or those waiting (in the parables) for the master, the landowner, the king, the groom. This announcement that the waiting was over (is permanently over?), however, went directly against the notion of a structured absence we see at the center of the Temple and Torah as well as in much of the apocalyptic literature. Directly against the Roman and Judaean managerial politics surrounding this convenient absence. Jesus continued something long at work in his society since the transformation of the Maccabean revolution into another kingdom yet. He radicalized the logic of those large movements (especially the Pharisees but also the Essenes) and claimed a life in which real bodies and souls could live here and now the promises and hopes of a decentered or dislocated temple and torah.

I did not play a coda that could have gone as follows. The story of this collapse of a cosmic wait onto the mundane here-and-now led to a refocussing of history, on a much larger scale than before, around the vanishing point of a returning Christic figure. It lasted aeons, right up to our seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and it lives in large groups still around us). Then it transmogrified into the steely and brave-new-worldly dream of the advent of reason, and that too, at the hands of national entities, liberal and/or fascistic, became apocalyptic. Exhausted, we look over our shoulders, deconstruct all of that, and find ourselves at the mercy again of managerial politics, with floating chunks of rationality here and there, though thankfully without mediation of any kind: no temple, church, state, vectorized Hegelian history. The ethics and rationalizations of our managers seem very thin and narrow. Greed and sheer stupidity are well matched. So, here and now we are, pilgrims and explorers again and again.

From TS Eliot, Four quartets, end of East Coker:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Israel’s present government is not interested in compromises.

According to unnamed sources quoted in Israeli newspapers since last week, Israel Defense Minister Ya`alon repeatedly attacked Secretary of State Kerry in conversations with Israelis and Americans. Among other things, he reportedly said that Kerry was “obsessive and messianic” and that he (Ya`alon) hoped that “Kerry would obtain the Nobel Prize and leave us alone.” The US government considered these words to be personal attacks that, if true, needed to be disavowed by Israel’s government. See NYT’s article. The rift comes from differences about the security arrangements in the Jordan valley being discussed as part of the peace process. Last month, Likud cabinet ministers formally urged Israel, via a non-binding resolution, to annex the west side of Jordan River Valley. No give.

So excuses were made. A weaker statement by Israel’s Minister of Defense Ya`alon was completely rejected earlier today by the US administration. Israel’s government was asked to dissociate itself from the comments by its Defense Minister. The strength of the US statement was unusual and a surprise to me. There is good reason to think the White House has not forgotten Netanyahu’s ill-advised meddling in the months leading to the presidential elections of 2012.

Now, after a two-hour meeting with Netanyahu, Haaretz reports, a somewhat stronger apology was issued by the Defense Minister’s office and coordinated with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office: “The Defense Minister didn’t mean to offend the Secretary of State, and he apologizes if the Secretary of State was offended by the words attributed to the Minister.” Passive voice and floating words: the office is apologizing, not quite the man in the office. Netanyahu and NJ’s governor Christie seem to be in a similar situation: encouraging stalling and retribution and working hard at dissociating themselves from the actual results.

The announcement, published in Hebrew and English, also made clear that “Israel and the USA are partners in the effort to move along the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, under the leadership of Secretary of State Kerry. We value the Secretary of State’s many efforts towards that goal.” It does not speak about Kerry’s commitment to Israel’s security, however.

Interesting, clear, historical overview and pressing conclusions on the subject, especially the need to move away from the recent religious hardening, by Reuben Firestone in Arches, vol. 4, edition 7, Winter 2010. Arches is published by the Cordoba foundation, founded and presided by Anas Altikriti, close to Muslim Brotherhood according to that link. The article was made available on Academia.edu.