Antony Loewenstein

The Resist project has “asked many writers and political thinkers about their views on power structures, resistance and the future“.

View interviews with Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Wikileaks.

Naomi Klein, recently speaking out against Israeli crimes in Palestine, goes back to her roots as a leading voice against rampant capitalism and here explains on Democracy Now! that it’s the duty of global citizens to challenge the supposedly accepted concepts of climate change:

[There is a] growing demand for the repayment of climate debt. This is really a relatively new framing for the climate crisis and is becoming predominantly from the developing world, led by the government of Bolivia and other Latin American governments, and it has been joined by the coalition of least developed countries which are primarily in Africa. And essentially what they’re saying is that the climate crisis as we know was created in the industrialized world. There is a direct correlation between industrialization (what we call development) and carbon emissions. In fact, 75% of the historical carbon emissions have been produced by only 20% of the world’s population. Then we have this cruel geographical irony, which is that the effects of climate change our felt overwhelmingly in the developing world, and the parts of the world that are least responsible for creating the crisis. According to the World Bank, 75-80 of the effects of climate change are being felt in the developing world. So, you have this inverse relationship between cause and effect.

It is in this context that we see a growing movement from the developing countries that really are on the front lines of climate change, saying that the rich world that created the climate crisis owes them a debt, owes them a tangible reparations for the creation of this crisis. And those reparations should be paid in three forms. First through deep emissions cuts in the developed world, in the rich world. At least 40% below 1990 levels- this is a figure we have heard a lot. In addition to this, they are saying the rich world, the G-8 countries, the industrialized countries, should pay for the costs, the huge costs, that poor countries face in adapting to climate change. In addition to that, they’re also saying that they would like to leapfrog over the dirty energies, the fossil fuels that are fueling the climate crisis. But they point out that this is expensive and more expensive to shift to cleaner green technology than it is to develop with cheap, dirty fuels, which is the way we did in the rich world. So, they are saying we will change, but we don’t think we should have to pay this additional cost because of our problem that is not of our creation. Essentially the climate debt arguments is the “polluter pays” argument, which is a familiar argument to people in the United States, its a basic principle of jurisprudence. Another way of putting this is “you broke it, you bought it”.

Naomi Klein on her support for the campaign against the Toronto International Film Festival:

When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was holding a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv, I felt ashamed of Toronto, the city where I live. I thought immediately of Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist I met on a recent trip to Gaza. “We had more hope during the attacks,” she told me. “At least then we believed things would change.”

Al Shawa explained that while Israeli bombs rained down last December and January, Gazans were glued to their TVs. What they saw, in addition to the carnage, was a world rising up in outrage: global protests, as many as 100,000 on the streets of London, a group of Jewish women in Toronto occupying the Israeli Consulate. “People called it war crimes,” Al Shawa recalled. “We felt we were not alone in the world.” If Gazans could just survive, it seemed that their suffering could be the catalyst for change.

But today, Al Shawa said, that hope is a bitter memory. The international outrage has evaporated. Gaza has vanished from the news. And it seems that all those deaths–as many as 1,400–were not enough to bring justice. Indeed, Israel is refusing to cooperate even with a UN fact-finding mission headed by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone.

Last spring, while Goldstone’s mission was in Gaza gathering devastating testimony, the Toronto International Film Festival was making the final selections for its Tel Aviv spotlight, timed for the Israeli city’s hundredth birthday. There are many who would have us believe that there is no connection between Israel’s desire to avoid scrutiny for its actions in the occupied territories and the glittering Toronto premieres. I am sure that Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s co-director, believes that himself. He is wrong.

For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel’s defiance of international law. It’s no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant topics: film, arts, gay rights–things that underline commonalities between Israel and places like Paris, New York and Toronto. After the Gaza attack, as the protests rose, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told the New York Times. “This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” And hip, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, which has been celebrating its centennial with Israeli-sponsored “beach parties” in New York, Vienna and Copenhagen all summer long, is the best ambassador of all.

Toronto got an early taste of this new cultural mission. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that the “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Gissin pledged, “I’m confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has.

Let’s be clear: no one is claiming the Israeli government is secretly running TIFF’s Tel Aviv spotlight, whispering in Bailey’s ear about which films to program. The point is that the festival’s decision to give Israel pride of place, holding up Tel Aviv as a “young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity,” matches Israel’s stated propaganda goals to a T. Gal Uchovsky, one of the directors in the spotlight, is quoted in the festival catalog saying that Tel Aviv is “a haven [Israelis] can run away to when they want to forget about wars and the burdens of daily life.”

A message from Jewish Voice for Peace:

Join Naomi Klein, Neve Gordon, Noam Chomsky and thousands of others and tell Israel not to jail Ezra Nawi, one of Israel’s most courageous human rights activists.

Nawi, a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent, is a threat to the settlers and the Israeli government because he has brought international attention to efforts to illegally remove Palestinians from the Hebron region. He will be sentenced in July.

The Zionist establishment is fearful of the ever-growing campaign against Israeli human rights abuses:

…The facts on the Middle East ground have put Israel’s advocates in a nearly untenable position. As Yossi Klein Halevi has often pointed out, both the settlement enterprise and the Oslo effort failed to achieve their fantastic goals. Now Hamas has succeeded in undermining the last realistic hope for partition: unilateral separation. In the wake of the recent Israeli elections, the formation of a right-wing coalition with the polarizing Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister cannot help but frustrate many American Zionists in their desire to plead Israel’s cause.

The two-state solution, to the degree it has any salience, now qualifies as the conservative position. The liberal stance is the vision of a unitary state. No longer the property of river-to-sea settlers, it has returned after 60 years to its leftist parentage, now intermingled with Islamists.

And when it comes to the rhetoric about a unitary state, American Zionists (and perhaps Israelis, as well) do not fully grasp the potency of the South African analogy. They spend a lot of energy and verbiage making the case that Israel does not practice apartheid, but they haven’t come up with nearly as effective an answer for why the South African model of peaceful transformation, full enfranchisement and majority rule shouldn’t be applied to Israel and the Palestinian territories as well. It is easier to answer to the cynicism of the apartheid analogy than the optimism of the Mandela-DeKlerk compromise.

So consider the current divestment activity at such colleges as Hampshire, Haverford, NYU, Macalaster, and Columbia as just the start of a new phase of struggle. Pay close attention when someone like the author Naomi Klein, a rock star to young activists, endorses divestment, because she matters a lot more on campus than alter kockers like Noam Chomsky. And don’t assume, this time, that our side is destined to win.

Noami Klein on The Colbert Report:

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, US economist and former senior vice-president of the World Bank asks Naomi Klein, author, a question at the recent Hay literary festival:

Q In The Shock Doctrine, you talk about how free-market fundamentalists use economic crises to impose policies they would not normally be able to put into place. What do you see happening as a result of the current problems in the US? Could this be an exception to your rule? If not, what nefarious policies will result from the current shock to the system we are now facing?

A The Bear Sterns bailout is a pretty classic example of using an economic shock to pass on a significant economic risk to the public while the assets go straight to JP Morgan. We have seen this same pattern – protecting private profits while nationalising debts – many times during other crises. Then there are the bailouts for developers and homebuilders, especially striking in contrast with the laissez-faire attitude towards the more than 2 million Americans who face foreclosure. Meanwhile, Congress’s economic stimulus package contained an estimated $50bn in tax cuts and bonuses for business, roughly one-third of the total.

Yet in the history of shock exploitation, this is all pretty smalltime. What is much more striking to me is how the Bush administration failed in its attempt to use the economic crisis to lock in even more ambitious pro-corporate policies. First, it tried to argue that making the Bush tax cuts permanent was a form of economic stimulus, and that simply didn’t fly. Now treasury secretary Henry Paulson is trying to use this anxious economic moment to whip up panic about the coming crisis in social security – but he still can’t get any traction on the “private accounts” idea.

So I am hopeful that Americans, after seven years of a government that has exploited every crisis for political advantage, are getting wise to the ways of the shock doctors. The real disappointment, though hardly a surprise, is that the Democrats have utterly failed to use the market turmoil to put the logic of market fundamentalism on trial, and demand New Deal-style life-saving measures for those being thrown out of homes and work.