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December 28, 2009

Dennis Brutus (1924-2009): South African Poet and Activist Dies in Cape Town

GO HERE TO VIEW DENNIS BRUTUS INTERVIEW

Renowned South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus died in his sleep Saturday in Cape Town. He was eighty-five years old. Brutus was a leading opponent of the apartheid state and was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. We hear highlights of an interview with Brutus on Democracy Now! and speak with his close friend and colleague, Patrick Bond. [includes rush transcript]

Filed under Dennis Brutus, Art & Politics

Rush Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: The renowned South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus died in his sleep Saturday in Cape Town. He was eighty-five years old.

 

Brutus was a leading opponent of the apartheid state. He helped secure South Africa’s suspension from the Olympics, eventually forcing the country to be expelled from the Games in 1970. He was arrested in 1963—excuse me—sentenced to eighteen months in hard labor on Robben Island.

 

We’re going to turn now to an interview I did with him in 2005.

•  

  When we marched,
  Slithered
  Through slimy mud past riot-shielded cops in Alexander
  (This is the ghetto.)
  While children peered wild-eyed from dark windows,
  For some of us these were re-runs of earlier apartheid-burdened days.
  But, then, it was defiant resolution that drove our hearts and braced our feet.
  Now, sadness at betrayal sat sadly on our hearts.
  Our shouted slogans hung heavy over us in grimy air.
  We winced at familiar oft-repeated lies
  Oft-repeated lies.

AMY GOODMAN: Talking about reparations, talking about apartheid, you, Dennis Brutus, spent time with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. You were imprisoned, broke rocks together?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: That’s right.

 

AMY GOODMAN: You have seen the latest news of President Mandela coming to the United States, the former president of South Africa. He met with President Bush. Your thoughts on this? I know there was some concern among activist groups to give President Bush that kind of seal of approval.

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Well, there’s a very striking difference between the Mandela who was quite blunt in his criticism, not only of the US entry into Iraq, but also the election itself; so, we had some very frank speaking at that time. And surprisingly, now we find Mandela visiting with President Bush and saying, “Oh, well, friends have this way of criticizing each other.” So, in a sense, he’s climbing down from his previous criticism, and I suppose the explanation is that when he came to the United States, it was mainly in order to raise funds for one of the Mandela foundations. So, it seems to me, being very polite, I would say excessively polite. And indeed, for people who knew him as someone who spoke out bluntly, this is not only a surprise, it’s also a disappointment. We think he should have maintained his position.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about Mandela’s power today and President Bush’s relationship with him and the current president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Generally, Mandela has chosen to take the role of an elder statesman and to be fairly soft-spoken. On the other hand, as we know, that George Bush has been very cordial towards Thabo Mbeki, the new president, and indeed has called Mbeki his “point man in Africa” when it comes to questions like Zimbabwe. So there’s a much warmer relationship between Thabo Mbeki and President Bush.

Mandela was rather more distant, so it’s a little surprising that he’s now being more cordial. And as I say, the explanation is probably that he came on an enormous fundraising venture, met with some of the big corporations, especially the arms industry, and that explains the change, I suppose.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Dennis Brutus. He has a latest book, a collection of his poems called Leafdrift. Some of these poems were written under a pseudonym, some when you were in prison. Can you talk about them and share one with us?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Well, yes. You’re right, some of them were written when it was a crime for me to publish.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Why a crime?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Others were smuggled while I was on Robben Island, smuggled out of the prison. But in fact, most of this is new and deals, in fact, with a new South African situation where, surprisingly, we come out of apartheid into global apartheid. We’re in a world now where, in fact, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; the mass of the people are still poor. According to the World Bank itself, there are literally millions now below the poverty line, so that the situation is actually deteriorating.

And this is quite striking in South Africa. As water is privatized, as electricity is privatized, as people are evicted even from their shacks because they can’t afford to pay the rent of the shacks, the situation becomes worse. And it seems to me at the heart of the matter is the fact that the South African government, under the ANC and Mbeki, have chosen to adopt a corporate solution. They say, “Oh, globalization is inevitable.” And we think there’s—that’s not true. You can have a globalizing process, which takes care of the people’s interests, or you can have—

 

AMY GOODMAN: How?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: —a globalizing process which instead focuses on the corporations. You give tax reductions to the rich. You increase the tax on bread and sugar and coffee and tea and petrol, gas for cars, because these things affect the poor. On the other hand, you are actually cutting the taxes on luxury goods, so that, in fact, your whole society is geared to keep the corporations happy and allow them actually to go offshore so they don’t even have to pay tax. They can pay tax in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas or somewhere. But a society which is geared to protect the rich and the corporations and actually is hammering the poor, increasing their burden, this is the reverse of what we thought was going to happen under the ANC government.

 

AMY GOODMAN: A poem from Leafdrift, could you share with us?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Right, I think it would be appropriate to read a poem which is actually about our current protest. You may know, and I think you covered it on Democracy Now!, when we were marching against Kofi Annan and Colin Powell and the World Summit on Sustainable Development, people were marching from the ghettos, from the townships, to this expensive suburb called Santon, where you had this enormous expense, you know, lavish expenditure and talk about making the world a better place, when in fact the world was becoming a worse place. So, we have a poem about it, and I’m going to read that, which is just about the march.

 

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: Dennis Brutus, reading from his latest collection of poetry called Leafdrift. Why Leafdrift?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Well, I know people have been a little puzzled, and my own sense is that I was unable to find a single unifying theme. So, the image that came to me was more of leaves blowing around in the wind and then accumulating in a corner, kind of drifting together. So it’s a random collection. Some of it is personal, some of it is political. But I think “leafdrift” is a good word which gathers that sense of things together.

 

AMY GOODMAN: As you look back over your eighty years, your own personal, as well as the state of the world, and you look ahead, do you feel like society, civilization, is advancing?

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: Advancing, I’m not sure. But I have a sense of gathering energy and a kind of will for change, almost as if people are saying, “This is intolerable. We’ve allowed it to go on for too long.” When I’m in Porto Alegre at the World Social Forum or I’m in Lusaka at the African Social Forum or meeting in Mpumalanga and Soweto, the ghettos of South Africa, such an impatience, particularly among young people, that the world must change. There really ought to be a more—greater emphasis on humane values. This nonsense about hanging around in the shopping malls, you know, and competing for Nike or whatever, this is nonsense. We have to get over it. Humanity is about more than material things. And we really must shake off this kind of almost mystification, the way we’ve been—we’ve been caught up in a set of lies and deceptions, and we must try and recover our own humanity. So I’m very hopeful.

AMY GOODMAN: South African poet and anti-apartheid and global justice activist Dennis Brutus. He died of prostate cancer in Cape Town, South Africa on Saturday. We did that interview in 2005.

Well, for more on the life and legacy of the great South African poet and activist, I’m joined now from San Francisco by Patrick Bond. Patrick directs the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, where Dennis Brutus worked.

Patrick, welcome to Democracy Now! As you listened to Dennis Brutus, and, of course, as you spent the years with him that you did, talk more about his significance, this man who crushed rocks side by side with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.

 

PATRICK BOND: Thanks, Amy. Great to be with you.

And I think the role that Dennis Brutus played, especially upon returning to South Africa after democracy in 1994 and living there full-time for the last five years, a really formidable, inspiring role for new a generation of people concerned about inequality and environmental degradation—his last campaigns, for example, against the Copenhagen deal, the very inadequate and unfair relationships of North to South around the climate debt. And, you know, even in his last days, he had just been meeting with the Archbishop, former Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, about the reparations movement.

So he had this amazing ability to look backward, and he was fighting the big corporations that profited from apartheid, hoping that the process now going through the courts in the United States will become a very, very important marker for corporations to learn not to profit from a crime against humanity, at the same time looking forward and saying to the North and to indeed the South African government that the greenhouse gas emissions have to—have to halt. So he had this extraordinary ability to do the whole spectrum of social struggle’s history and future, and to do it with such grace, eloquence and culture.

 

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go, actually, to a clip, on his eighty-fifth birthday. It was just a few weeks ago. This is a clip of Dennis Brutus calling for the Seattle-ing of Copenhagen, because climate debt is not on the agenda. He was talking about the climate summit and the protests that he expected. This was just before the Copenhagen climate summit.

 

DENNIS BRUTUS: From now on, this is going to be part of our challenge, our part of the challenge to the greedy corporate powers that don’t care what happens to the planet. So we expect them to pay attention. We hope that we, ourselves, will pay attention. And then, most difficult of all, we are going to have to join that struggle. There’s not enough time. We are in serious difficulty all over the planet. We are going to say to the world: there’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor. It must have to stop. The planet must be in action. The people of the planet must be in action.

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: Dennis Brutus on his eighty-fifth birthday. He was in Cape Town, South Africa. He died this weekend, his family around him, died in his sleep. He died of prostate cancer.

Patrick Bond, talk about his political history. After he was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela, he was banned from teaching and writing and publishing in South Africa—his first book of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, actually published in Nigeria. And it was then that Dennis Brutus fled South Africa and came to the United States, ultimately applying for political asylum, a case he finally won, and then ended up teaching here.

 

PATRICK BOND: That’s right. He actually had a stop in Britain along the way. He worked in the ANC office and was a bastion of the sports boycotts movement. He was extraordinarily successful. As mentioned earlier, he was basically single-handedly responsible for pulling a coalition together that forced the Chicago leader of the Olympics, Avery Brundage, to make a U-turn and kick the white South African team off the 1968 Mexico Olympics and then, in 1970, had them banned. So those were markers of an exceptional campaigner, a very persuasive advocate of racial justice.

And I think at that point, when he also turned his hand to professional literary studies and became the chair of African American Studies both at Northwestern and at University of Pittsburgh, retiring in 1995, he then brought all of these capacities—intellectual, strategic and very, very inspiring capacities—to the South Africa struggle in 1996 with the Growth, Employment, Redistribution home-grown structural adjustment, coming back to South Africa, starting the Jubilee movement. He really put an extraordinary marker on post-apartheid struggles for economic justice, and later environment.

And then he was a central figure in Seattle, of the World Social Forum in early 2000. In fact, really, Amy, as you know from being there, at every G-8 and World Bank-IMF annual meeting, WTO protest, you’d find Dennis Brutus, out both in the crowd, in a very humble way, listening and learning, and often on the speakers’ stand providing inspiration.

 

AMY GOODMAN: The way he—his politics continued to evolve, and also critiquing the ANC, the group he was closely affiliated with, with so many years against apartheid in South Africa, Patrick?

 

PATRICK BOND: Yeah, I think in around about ’98, when the Treatment Action Campaign started demanding AIDS medicines, and 1999, when a number of the communities in the big urban areas began to revolt—and we now have about 10,000 protests a year that the police measure, about the highest rate per person in the world—and that really signaled to Dennis Brutus that he was a very welcome figure, as a wise leader of the independent left, of sort of new social movements that emerged. And so, Dennis was critical, really, in providing us the historic time frames of struggles that were timeless and his own principles and commitment and his generosity of spirit, and again these extraordinary poems that kept popping out.

Working with us in Durban at the University of KwaZulu-Natal over the past four years, we were always amazed that, whatever the circumstances, Dennis would have a new poem ready. He wrote several this year that are classics. Probably his best, really, were the poems of incarceration, as you mentioned, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, Letters to Martha. Those will still stand decades from now as seminal works, especially here in the United States with such a high incarceration rate, really focused the word and the spirit of liberation in a form that broke out of the traditions and spoke to ever-expanding generations of fans. And people who’ve had one-on-one contact with him, we’re hearing from them from all over the world, and life-changing experiences, to be touched by Dennis Brutus and to have a sort of sense of his combination of bread and roses.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Bond, we will leave it there, professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, close friend and former colleague of Dennis Brutus. Dennis Brutus is survived by his wife May, his sisters Helen and Dolly, eight children, nine grandchildren, four great-grandchildren in Hong Kong, England, US and Cape Town.

 

The Poetic Justice of Dennis Brutus

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Posted on Dec 29, 2009

By Amy Goodman

Dennis Brutus broke rocks next to Nelson Mandela when they were imprisoned together on notorious Robben Island. His crime, like Mandela’s, was fighting the injustice of racism, challenging South Africa’s apartheid regime. Brutus’ weapons were his words: soaring, searing, poetic. He was banned, he was censored, he was shot. But this poet’s commitment and activism, his advocacy on behalf of the poor, never flagged. Brutus died in his sleep early on Dec. 26 in Cape Town, at the age of 85, but he lived with his eyes wide open. His life encapsulated the 20th century, and even up until his final days, he inspired, guided and rallied people toward the fight for justice in the 21st century.

Oddly, for this elfin poet and intellectual, it was rugby that early on nagged him about the racial injustice of his homeland. Brutus recalled being sarcastically referred to by a white man as a “future Springbok.”

The Springboks were the national rugby team, and Brutus knew that nonwhites could never be on the team. “It stuck with me, until years later, when I began to challenge the whole barrier—questioning why blacks can’t be on the team.” This issue is depicted in Clint Eastwood’s new feature film, “Invictus.” President Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, embraces the Springboks during the 1995 World Cup, admitting that until then blacks always knew whom to root for: any team playing against the Springboks.

In the late 1950s, Brutus was penning a sports column under the pseudonym “A. de Bruin”—meaning “A brown” in Afrikaans. Brutus wrote, “The column ... was ostensibly about sports results, but also about the politics of race and sports.” He was banned, an apartheid practice that imposed restrictions on movement, meeting, publishing and more. In 1963, while attempting to flee police custody, he was shot. He almost died on a Johannesburg street while waiting for an ambulance restricted to blacks.

Brutus spent 18 months in prison, in the same section of Robben Island as Nelson Mandela, where he wrote his first collection of poems, “Sirens, Knuckles, Boots.” His poem “Sharpeville” described the March 21, 1960, massacre in which South African police opened fire, killing 69 civilians, an event which radicalized him:

 

 

Remember Sharpeville

  bullet-in-the-back day

  Because it epitomized oppression

  and the nature of society

  more clearly than anything else;

  it was the classic event

After prison, Brutus began life as a political refugee. He formed the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee to leverage sports into a high-profile, global anti-apartheid campaign. He succeeded in getting South Africa banned from the Olympic Games in 1970. Brutus moved to the United States, where he remained as a university professor and anti-apartheid leader, despite efforts by the Reagan administration to deny him continued status as a political refugee and deport him.

After the fall of apartheid and ascension to power of the African National Congress, Brutus remained true to his calling. He told me, “As water is privatized, as electricity is privatized, as people are evicted even from their shacks because they can’t afford to pay the rent of the shacks, the situation becomes worse. ... The South African government, under the ANC ... has chosen to adopt a corporate solution.”

He went on: “We come out of apartheid into global apartheid. We’re in a world now where, in fact, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; the mass of the people are still poor ... a society which is geared to protect the rich and the corporations and actually is hammering the poor, increasing their burden, this is the reverse of what we thought was going to happen under the ANC government.”

Many young activists know Dennis Brutus not for his anti-apartheid work but as a campaigner for global justice, ever present at mass mobilizations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—and, most recently, although not present, giving inspiration to the protesters at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. He said, on his 85th birthday, days before the climate talks were to commence: “We are in serious difficulty all over the planet. We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor. ... The people of the planet must be in action.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

 

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2009 Amy Goodman

Distributed by King Features Syndicate

_________________________

GO HERE TO VIEW BRUTUS READING 

 Visual: Christopher Lydon interviews Dennis Brutus (South African poet, scholar and activist). The two are sitting among shelves of books. Brutus reads from his work, a poem about repression in South Africa called The Sounds Begin Again. Lydon asks Brutus about how he sees himself, considering his many roles as poet, leader, and activist. Brutus says that he has no trouble reconciling his roles; that he is concerned with human rights and justice all over the world; that he feels a sense of exile from his country. Brutus reads from his work, a poem called Sequence for South Africa.

>via: http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:MLA000410

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1. Submit up to 25 industry standard (double-spaced, 12-point font, pages numbered) pages of a novel, novella, short story, or short collection. Entries which use a smaller font or are single-spaced in order to make a longer work appear to be only 25 pages will be trimmed to approximately 25 industry standard pages. Work previously published is eligible and simultaneous submissions are accepted. An excerpt from a larger work is allowed; however, remember that the selection will be judged on its own merit and so should be able to stand on its own.
2. Please submit TWO copies of your submission bound by a paper clip, binder, or single staple. DO NOT USE MULTIPLE STAPLES. The author's name should not appear on the work. All entries will be read anonymously.
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three candles press is pleased to announce the third Three Candles Press Open Book Award for a best book of poems by a poet at any point in his or her career. The contest will be judged by Paul Guest, whose poetry books include The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, Notes for My Body Double, and My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge. He is also the author of a memoir entitled One More Theory About Happiness.

Award: Winner receives $500.00 and 25 copies of the winning book. Deadline Oct. 15th (post-mark date). The winner will be notified at the end of December. Runners up and two alternates will be posted on the website by January 15th, 2011. The book will be available through Small Press Distribution, online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and at fine booksellers in America and Europe. The winner will receive a standard royalty contract.

Guidelines: Manuscripts of 60 - 95 pages should have one cover page containing the poet's name, address, phone number, email address and title of manuscript, and another with only the name of the manuscript. Please include only one acknowledgements page.

How the Contest Works: Publisher Steve Mueske will read all submitted manuscripts and forward the finalists to the judge (around 12 manuscripts). The final round of materials will be judged anonymously (without coversheet or acknowledgements page). To avoid conflicts of interest, the following manuscripts will be ineligible: those from former students of the judge or from family members or friends of the judge; those who have workshopped with Steve Mueske or received comments from any poems contained in the manuscript; and those who have worked with the editor in a business capacity (an exchange of money for goods or services) prior to the opening of the competition.

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BRITTINGHAM AND POLLAK POETRY PRIZE SUBMISSION GUIDE

The University of Wisconsin Press awards the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Each winning poet will receive $2,500 ($1,000 cash prize and $1,500 honorarium to cover expenses of reading in Madison). Prizes are awarded annually to the two best book-length manuscripts of original poetry submitted in an open competition. Each manuscript submitted will be considered for both prizes. There are no restrictions on the kind of poetry or subject matter, although translations are not acceptable. The winners will be announced and the prizes awarded in February of each calendar year, with publishing contracts to follow soon thereafter.

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Manuscripts postmarked September 1 through September 30 each calender year will be considered. Manuscripts postmarked before September 1 or after September 30 will be discarded.

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November 2001  By Stephen Smith, Kate Ellis, and Sasha Aslanian

For much of the 20th Century, African Americans in the South were barred from the voting booth, sent to the back of the bus, and walled off from many of the rights they deserved as American citizens. Until well into the 1960s, segregation was legal. The system was called Jim Crow. In this documentary, Americans—black and white—remember life in the Jim Crow times.

AUDIO Download Remembering Jim Crow. Read personal histories of segregation. Read Stories --> Get the book and CD set RELATED DOCUMENTARY Radio Fights Jim Crow The story of African Americans using the popular new medium to combat racism during World War Two. ALSO HEARD ON NPR's Morning Edition, Part I Part II Remembering Jim Crow is produced in cooperation with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and its Behind the Veil oral history project.

Bitter Times Jim Crow laws robbed African Americans of basic rights. Danger, Violence, Exploitation Blacks in the Jim Crow South faced lynchings, insults and thievery at the hands of whites. Communities "Behind the Veil" African Americans built vital social institutions to fight segregation and uplift the race. Keeping the Past Black families used oral storytelling and photography to pass along their memories of slavery and Reconstruction. Resistance Many African Americans found subtle ways to combat the humiliation and economic hardship imposed by Jim Crow. Whites Remember Jim Crow In the southwestern Louisiana town of New Iberia, older whites say race relations were more peaceful during Jim Crow than they are now.

Hilton Kelly. Race, Remembering, and Jim Crow's Teachers. London: Routledge, 2009. 154 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-80478-3.

Reviewed by Jayne R. Beilke (Department of Educational Studies, Ball State University Tchr Col)
Published on H-Education (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Jonathan D. Anuik

Memory as Mediated Text in Jim Crow’s School

Race, Remembering, and Jim Crow’s Teachers by Hilton Kelly is an entry in the Routledge series Studies in African American History and Culture, edited by Graham Hodges. Kelly interviewed forty-four former classroom teachers in all-black schools. The participant pool included fourteen males and thirty females, aged fifty-nine to eighty-five. Almost all of the participants later taught in integrated schools after court-ordered desegregation. An analytic-inductive process was used to categorize the data collected from the interviews. As common themes and patterns emerged, they were coded and analyzed. In addition to oral interviews, archival data from five Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in North Carolina was utilized.

The book is divided into three sections: 1) “Remembering Teachers and Teaching”; 2) “Hidden Transcripts Revealed”; and 3) “Remembering Jim Crow’s Teachers.” The appendix contains a statement on methodology, interview questions, and a table of demographics and characteristics of participants. In the foreword, educational sociologist George W. Noblit makes a case for oral history “as a corrective to the accounts sponsored by those in dominant positions in power” (p. xiiv). Noblit defends Kelly’s reliance on oral history and suggests that ethnohistories--particularly those that counter the official (or dominant) version--can advance social theory in some new and important ways. Moreover, according to Noblit, Kelly utilizes key theoretical constructs in a way that “pushes the discourse into new domains” (p. xv).

In part 1, the author establishes the body of knowledge for this study. Namely, he cites works by David S. Cecelski, Michele Foster, Linda Perkins, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Adam Fairclough, Noblit, and Van O. Dempsey as well as others who have written historical or sociological works dealing with black schooling in the South during segregation. Some are regional works, but the common denominator is their emphasis on reconstructing, “the good and valued all-black school” (p. 9). The works cited are a canon for researchers such as Kelly who affirm the inherent goodness of the all-black school. The study addresses two broad questions: 1) “What was the quality and character of teachers and teaching in legally segregated schools for blacks?” and 2) “In spite of state-sponsored racism and discrimination, how did teachers prepare black students for skilled jobs, civil rights, and social power” (p. 4)? The author seeks to provide an alternative to the following standard interpretations: 1) that black schools were “inherently inferior”; and 2) that they were remarkably good despite the social strictures (p. 4). By examining the memories of teachers who taught in black schools before and after integration, Kelly strives to evoke a middle ground between these opposing views.

Kelly explains that memory is not only recall but rather a “mediated remembering and reconstructing of the past” (p. 5). Mediation is necessary to avoid the historical fallacy of presentism, whereby the past is dominated and evaluated by present-day attitudes and beliefs. The texts themselves are the memories of the black teachers in Kelly’s study. Groups perceive and interpret events according to a sociocultural context. While a certain event may be powerful and meaningful to one group (e.g., African Americans), it may hold an entirely different meaning to another (e.g., whites). Kelly’s question, then, becomes this: How is the past represented by groups or individuals who experience it differently? Some text, like the language used by Supreme Court justices in the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) cast the black schools as inherently inferior and averred that blacks would benefit from placement in desegregated schools. When it comes to black schools, then, the “goods” have historically been downplayed or rendered silent. But by searching out and listening to unheard voices and accounts--by resurrecting the silence--the “official text” can be not only balanced, but corrected. Kelly also utilizes excerpts from Richard Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch” to analyze the conditions imposed by racial segregation.[1]

Kelly employs the term “geopolitical practice” to justify concentrating on black teachers in three rural communities--Edgecombe, Wilson, and Nash--located on the coastal plain of North Carolina. Taken from the book Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948, geopolitical practice is “social and political actions oriented toward reshaping the spatial conditions of social life” (p. 17).[2] Kelly’s thesis is that black teachers used schooling as a geopolitical space for preparing "black youth for skilled jobs, civil rights, and social power” (p. 18). Although geopolitical practice is an intriguing idea that seems relevant to this study, readers may find that it is not as thoroughly explored (or explained) as it might have been.

Citing archival sources, Kelly refutes the common criticism that black teachers were unlicensed or underprepared. Although that was true during Reconstruction, during the 1940s, there was actually a surplus of black teachers who had gone on to complete graduate degrees. By 1947-48, a higher number of black rural teachers held teacher certification than white rural teachers. 

However, many of the participants in this study did not choose teaching as a first choice but only after other venues were closed to them due to racial segregation. All of the teachers had attended all-black schools, but some had earned graduate degrees from traditionally white institutions. Although Kelly wants to focus on the “goods” of black schools, the teachers also remember inferior resources such as second-hand textbooks, outdoor toilets, and broken-down buses (if any). All of them spoke of having to purchase their own school supplies: in fact, some were actually required to do so by their principal through a “teacher tax” (p. 52).

In part 2, the author introduces the element of “respectability.” Black teachers thought that moral responsibility, industry, and education would distance them from racial stereotypes and uplift the race out of their formerly enslaved status. This attitude not only led to an embrace of the self-help philosophy but also created a class differentiation amongst blacks. Although Kelly does not refer to schooling as socialization, he does suggest that respectability was taught by black teachers. In addition, the pedagogy of black teachers included culturally relevant teaching in their classrooms. Some characteristics of that pedagogy emerge from the oral interviews: for example, the use of grouping students, teaching children according to their ability, visiting the parents, and encouraging the students to be prepared for the workforce.

Within the black community, teachers were perceived as having “made it”--in other words, they had become members of a growing black middle class. Furthermore, Kelly suggests that the black teachers “promoted the acquisition of educational capital in the form of generating materials and supplies, situated curriculum and instruction, mobilizing human resources, and forging a double consciousness with students” (p. 7). Based on the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, Kelly defines “educational capital” as the “qualifications (academic credentials or certifications) that can be used for social mobility regardless of social origin or family background” (p. 67).  Educational capital, then, gave African Americans the “hope that formal academic standards or qualifications would be the ‘great equalizer’ despite its limitations in an oppressive society" (p. 70). Within this milieu, educational capital could be utilized to obtain jobs and achieve social power. Kelly does not go into detail about what skills the students might have obtained, however. Instead, he leaves it up to future researchers to “explore the specific skills, knowledge, and credentials that black students obtained and map out outcomes before and after integration” (p. 67). He admits that, while black teachers had the task of uplifting the race beyond the acquisition of cultural capital (dominant speech, dress, and behavior), poor and working-class black parents could not give their students the tools with which to bridge the gap between themselves and the dominant white society.

In part 3, Kelly concludes with an evaluation of the beliefs and actions of black teachers as interpreted from the oral interviews. He returns to Richard Wright’s autobiography to illustrate the limits of educational capital. In Wright’s account, the protagonist acquires skills that would enable him to be employed in the office of a white-owned optical company. However, the application of his skills was thwarted by racial prejudice and, hence, his skills could not be used. Kelly suggests that the actions and beliefs of teachers in all-black schools were counter-hegemonic and that schools were places of resistance. Teachers viewed their work as a geopolitical act that could ultimately change the racial order. The reader is not given examples of a geopolitical pedagogy, however. And despite the risk of presentism, Kelly suggests that a reexamination of teachers’ oral histories might inform today’s teacher on how to deal with schools that are segregated by social class.

Kelly has written a provocative book that privileges memory, when mediated, as a text and a means of reconstructing the condition of teaching in an all-black school prior to integration. As Kelly notes, the literature about black schools falls into two opposing categories: black schools were either remarkably good or inherently inferior. The voices in Kelly’s book suggest that there was a middle ground, however. There seems to be no debate that black schools were inferior when it came to resources and supplies. The teachers, however, were dedicated, well prepared, and creative. They seem to have enjoyed community support, even if they had to initiate contact with parents and caregivers themselves. In addition, the teachers functioned as role models who not only represented the middle class but also possessed the tools of resistance to Jim Crow society. One wonders, however, if the teachers’ descriptions of their experiences are not indicative of the shared ordeal as described by Dan C. Lortie, whereby the difficulties of a situation are muted by the camaraderie that develops under stressful circumstances.[3]

Despite the fact that teaching was not always their first choice of profession, the teachers worked in schools without adequate resources in an oppressive society. One teacher summed it up: “We are survivors! The black race is [full of] survivors”  (p. 75). It is possible that the painful memories have been overridden by the “good” memories of collegiality, bonding, and a shared purpose of going up against “the system.” The shared ordeal forges an identity, but it is uncertain what role it played in the lives of these teachers or how it was mediated in this study. As Kelly notes, he has raised (deliberately or perhaps unintentionally) questions that future researchers will need to investigate before holistic answers to the two broad questions posed at the beginning emerge.

Notes

[1]. Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, ed. P. S. Rothenberg, 5^th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2001), 21-30.

[2]. David Delany, Race, Place, and the Law, 1838-1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press 1998).

[3]. Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Jayne R. Beilke. Review of Kelly, Hilton, Race, Remembering, and Jim Crow's Teachers. H-Education, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30364

ISRAEL; ASSET OR LIABILITY?

Chas Freeman – prepared remarks

Nixon Center debate, “Israel; Asset or Liability?”

 July 20, 2010

 

 

Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the United States?   Interesting question.  We must thank the Nixon Center for asking it.  In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state well.  Under current circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there would be no doubt about the answer.

 

 

American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget (depending on how you calculate this).  Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products.  Uniquely, Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S. defense procurement.  Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when – as in the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles -- the technology being developed

is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements.  In short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel’s military industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies.  Meanwhile, Israel gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons systems, and we pick up the tab.

 

 

Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest recipient of American giveaways since World War II.  The total would be much higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in refugee camps and the occupied territories were included.  These programs have complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state.

 

 

Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 -- on a par with the UK.  Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it.  Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren’t available to any other foreign country.

 

 

These military and economic benefits are not the end of the story.  The American government also works hard to shield Israel from the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or – most recently – on the high seas.  The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in the UN Security Council are the tip of iceberg.   We have blocked a vastly larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the

international community.  The political costs to the United States internationally of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.

Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S. diplomats routinely make its case for it.   As I know from personal experience (having been thanked by the then Government of Israel for my successful efforts on Israel’s behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of cooperation with other countries.  It matters also that America – along with a very few other countries – has remained morally committed to the Jewish experiment with a

state in the Middle East.  Many more Jews live in America than in Israel.  Resolute

American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.

 

 

Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us.  Yet it’s pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what’s in it for Americans.   I can’t imagine why. Still, the question I’ve been asked to address today is just that: what’s in it -- and not in it -- for us to do all these things for Israel.

 

 

We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning.  It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency.  We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater.   In 1973, for reasons

peculiar to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt.  The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly.   And then there’s all the time we’ve put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct “peace process.”

 

 

 

Still the US-Israel relationship has had strategic consequences.  There is no reason to doubt the consistent testimony of the architects of major acts of anti-American terrorism about what motivates them to attack us.   In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus "the American people  ... on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people …." As Osama Bin Laden, purporting to speak for the world’s Muslims, has said again and again: "we have . . .  stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of ourdisagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine ...."  Some substantial portion of the many lives and the trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship

with Israel.

 

 

It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us.  In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders.  They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations.  They help recruit others to our coalitions.  They coordinate their foreign aid with ours.   Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory.  They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use.  They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.

 

 

Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them.  Perhaps it can’t.  It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it.  Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection.  It has no allies other than us.  It has developed no friends.  Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others.  Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole.  The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel’s behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.

 

 

Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts.  But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform.  All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf.  Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.

 

 

Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air.  It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses.  There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that.  Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat.  Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study.  Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart.  Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan.  Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns.  These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious.  Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not.   I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.

 

 

It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own.  Leave aside the question of whether Israel’s battles are or should also be America’s.  It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it.   The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does

not, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure.  But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.  Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the Government of Israel.  No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this.

 

 

Finally, the need to protect Israel from mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave damage to our global and regional standing.  It has severely impaired our ties with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.  These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship.

 

 

Against this background, it’s remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States.   Perhaps it’s just that as someone once said: “people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”  Be that as it may, the United States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship.  Basing our cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is dangerous.  It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in the United States.  These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere.  They also place federally-funded programs in Israel in direct competition with similar programs here at home.  To flourish over the long term, Israel’s relations with the United States need to be grounded in reality, not myth, and in peace, not war.

Click here to read Dr. Satloff's remarks

___________________________________

 

Robert Satloff – Prepared Remarks

Nixon Center debate, “Israel; Asset or Liability?”

July 20, 2010

 

 

Israel: Not Just a Strategic Asset, But a Strategic Bonanza

 

 

Thank you for the invitation to participate in today’s event. I have known Chas Freeman, a fellow native of Rhode Island, for many years. I believe we first met when I interviewed with him for a deputy assistant secretary’s job when he served in the Pentagon in the early days of the Clinton administration. I then hosted him several years later as a speaker at a Washington Institute conference, in spring of 2002. He was then, as I assume he will be today, his provocative self.

 

I did have some reluctance in agreeing to speak at this event. After all, I asked myself, why should I lend legitimacy to a question—“Israel: asset or liability?”—on which the overwhelming majority of Americans agree; on which the vast majority of strategists of both major parties agree; and on which the vast majority of military leaders and national security specialists agree, across the political spectrum? Today’s question bounces around a lot on the blogosphere, but, I am authoritatively told, not in the Situation Room. Still, it’s out there—perhaps on the fringes, but perhaps not only there—and it sometimes rears its head in ugly and even anti-Semitic ways. So, I thought—why not? A case as strong as this one deserves the light of day.

 

And there is a certain appropriateness in having it heard at the Nixon Center. Richard Nixon, as this room surely knows, was no romantic. And he was certainly no philo-Semite. But he was the first American president to recognize the strategic value of Israel to U.S. national interests. As President Nixon once said, “I am supporting Israel because it is in the interest of the U.S. to do so.” Even Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, who you won’t hear me quote approvingly very often, cite Israel as a U.S. strategic asset during those Nixon years: ^“By serving as America’s proxy after the Six Day War, Israel helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. Israel occasionally helped protect other U.S. allies (like Jordan’s King Hussein), and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more backing its losing clients. Israel also gave the United States useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.” All of that is an understatement, of course, but it underscores why this place—more than most other institutions—should have a natural inclination to recognize the strategic value of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

 

My task today is to make the case why Israel—and the U.S.-Israel relationship—is a strategic asset to the United States. In fact, I will go even further. I will argue that Israel, and the U.S.-Israel relationship, is—both in objective terms and compared to any other Middle Eastern relationship we have—a strategic bonanza to the United States. Not just an asset, but a bargain.

 

Let me make these points:

 

·        It is to America’s advantage to have a nation of friends, whose people and government are firm supporters of and advocates for American interests in the broader Middle East. I don’t think there is anyone in this room who would disagree with the contention that there is no country in the Middle East whose people and government are so closely aligned with the United States; in some countries, the people are pro-American, in others, the government, but in Israel, it is unabashedly both. Our two countries share ways of governing, ways of ordering society, ways of viewing the role of liberty and individual rights, and ways to defend those ideals. Some realists tend to dismiss this soft stuff as having no strategic value; I disagree. This commonality of culture and values is at the heart of national interest; it manifests itself in many ways, from how Israel votes at the United Nations to how its people view their role as being on the front line against many of the same threats we face.

 

·        It is to America’s advantage to have in Israel an economy that is so closely associated with ours and that is such an innovator in the IT field, in high-tech medicine, and in green technologies, like the electric car. The Obama administration made the economic health and well-being of the U.S. the pillar of its National Security Strategy. Our partnership with Israel is a clear asset in this regard—not only does Israel’s fiscal responsibility (a situation that contrasts with otherU.S. allies in Europe) mean that Israel is not part of this problem, but with its high-tech economy, Israel is actually part of the solution. Indeed, the strength of our relationship helped turn Israel from an economic basket case into an economic powerhouse—and our economic partner. Just ask Warren Buffett and all the other American investors who view Israel as a destination worthy of their capital.

 

·        It is to America’s advantage to have had a close working partnership with Israel for the last thirty-plus years in the pursuit of Middle East peace. Some bemoan the peace process as “all process, no peace” and critique the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship as an impediment to progress, not an ingredient of it. I disagree. First, I would argue that a strong Israel, with a strong U.S.-Israel relationship at its core, has been central to what we know as the peace process. And second, in historical terms, the Middle East peace process has been one of the most successful U.S. diplomatic initiatives of the last half-century.

 

In the words of one knowledgeable observer: “The peace process has been a vehicle for American influence throughout the broad Middle Eastern region. It has provided an excuse for Arab declarations of friendship with the United States, even if Americans remain devoted to Israel. In other words, it has helped to eliminate what otherwise might be seen as a zero-sum game.”

 

That sort of praiseworthy peace process was born out of the 1973 war, when two interlocking developments began to take shape —the growth of the bilateral U.S.-Israel strategic relationship, which took off in economic and military terms, and the emergence of a peace process in its current, American-led form. Since then, the Arab-Israeli arena has changed dramatically in favor of U.S. interests. Over the past thirty years, we have seen peace agreements between Israeland the most powerful Arab state (Egypt) and the state with the longest border with Israel (Jordan). We have also seen thirty-seven years of quiet on the Syrian border and seventeen years of diplomacy between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. That is also a huge and positive difference.

 

Indeed, the first twenty-five years after the establishment of Israel, the regional situation could be described as continuous war with periodic outbursts of diplomacy. The second thirty-five years—the period since 1973, the period since the take-off in U.S.-Israel strategic relations—can be described as continuous diplomacy with periodic outbursts of war. Since 1973, there has not been a regional war or a state-to-state conflict in the Arab-Israeli area. We have had limited wars—Israel versus Hizballah, for example—but nothing that engulfed the region. That’s a huge and positive difference.

 

I say all this because we tend to forget the context—the fear of regional war—that dominated the Arab-Israeli arena for years. For more than thirty-six years, it hasn’t happened. Of course, it may happen again—there is always that fear—and the circumstances onIsrael’s northern border may be leading in that direction. But let’s look at what we know: The peace process over the last thirty-five years has essentially evolved into a process to resolve issues between Israel and the Palestinians. These issues are difficult, complex, and highly emotional. The failure to resolve them can lead to bloodshed and violence between Israelis and Palestinians, as we saw in the second intifada. But despite all those ups and downs, it has never reverted into regional war. Indeed, one of the great achievements of U.S.-Israel cooperation, manifested through their partnership in the peace process, is to have reduced the Arab-Israeli conflict to an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Look at the experience of the second intifada, for example: approximately 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis dead in the worst outburst of intercommunal violence since 1948. Despite this, the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordansurvived and not one Arab state intervened to provide military support to the Palestinians; in fact, the only state to lend military support to the Palestinians was Iran.

 

I forgot to mention that the observer I referred to earlier as praising the peace process for eliminating the zero-sum game of Middle East politics—a peace process whose oxygen is the strength and vitality of the U.S.-Israel relationship—was Chas Freeman.

 

And then there is the long list of military-related advantages that Israel brings to the United States directly, by its own actions and through the bilateral relationship. I will cite just a few:

 

·        Since 1983, American and Israeli militaries have engaged in contingency planning, and Israeli facilities can be made available to the United States if needed. American forces have practiced the use of many Israeli facilities, ranging from Ben Gurion Airport to pre-positioning sites. All four U.S. armed services routinely conduct training at Israel Defense Forces facilities.

·        The U.S. has deployed an X-band early warning radar for missile defense on Israeli soil. This facility supplements other American missile defense assets and is available for both America’s regional missile defense architecture and our own reconfigured missile defense concept for protecting Europe from longer-range Iranian missiles. 

·        America began stocking war reserves in Israel fifteen years ago. Those stockpiles are hardly “minimal”—the total value is approaching $1 billion. They’re U.S. property and the Pentagon can draw upon them at any time. America has shown it is able to move military supplies from Israel to the Gulf; for example, it sent Israeli mine-plows and bulldozers to Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991.

·        Israel can be an extremely useful location for strategic logistics or power projection in the eastern Mediterranean, and in fact the United States Navy has conducted countless port visits in Haifa in support ofU.S. operations.

·        Israel has proven to be a prime source of effective counterterrorism/counterinsurgency tactics, techniques, and procedures, which have played a significant role in U.S. success (thus far) in Iraq

·        Israel has also been an outstanding innovator in the technology, tactics, techniques, and procedures of unmanned aerial vehicles, which the U.S. now relies upon so extensively in Afghanistan.

 

Add all this up: Israel—through its intelligence, its technology, and the lessons learned from its own experience in counterterrorism and asymmetric warfare—has saved American lives. And when you add to this Israel’s unique counterproliferation efforts – destroying nuclear reactors in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007) – Israel’s contribution to our security is even greater.

 

Bottom line: do a cost-benefit analysis of the U.S. relationship with Israel over the past thirty-plus years and the U.S. relationship with its Arab friends in the Gulf. What do you find? To secure its interests in the Arab-Israeli arena, theUnited States has spent about $100 billion in military and economic assistance to Israel, plus another $30 billion to Egypt and relatively small change to others. Our losses: a total of 258 Americans in the Beirut embassy and barracks bombings and a few other American victims of terrorism in that part of theMiddle East. On a state-to-state basis, as I have argued, that investment has paid off handsomely in terms of regional stability. Compare that with the Gulf. Look at the massive costs we have endured to ensure our interests there, the principal one being to secure access to the region’s energy resources at reasonable prices. The United States has spent more than $1 trillion—$700 billion on the Iraq war alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office—lost more than 4,400 U.S. servicemen, fought two wars, endured thirty years of conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran and a global al-Qaeda insurgency fed originally by our deployment of troops in Saudi Arabia. After all that, the Gulf region is still anything but secure. It’s when you boil it down to this very simple arithmetic that I can say that our relationship with Israel helped produce a strategic bonanza for the United States at bargain prices.

 

Is it a fairytale marriage? Of course not. Do the two sides have differences, even profound ones, on some critical issues? Absolutely. Do certain Israeli actions run against the tactical advice and preference of various U.S. administrations? To be sure. But their common recognition of the strategic benefits they derive from this relationship has given the United States andIsrael strong incentive to manage these differences fairly amicably over the years.

 

What about the argument that all this has come at a huge strategic price? Well, I can only say that I am glad we are at the Nixon Center because, at least here, true realists will see through the haze and see the world as it really is. Specifically:

 

• I look forward to discussing all the examples of cases where cooperation with an Arab country in the realm of counterterrorism, missile defense,Iran, Iraq, maritime security, or nonproliferation was significantly hindered by our relationship with Israel. Hint: the answer is at or close to zero.

 

• I look forward to discussing all the examples of cases where U.S. ties toIsrael were a factor either in politics in Iraq and Afghanistan or in our ability to operate in those two countries. Hint: a senior U.S. diplomat resident in Baghdad explained to me recently how many times the issue of Israel even came up in the Iraqi election campaign this year, namely, zero.

 

• I look forward to discussing all the examples of cases where America’s relationship with Israel has proven an obstacle to Arab government cooperation with the United States on measures to prevent Iran from achieving a military nuclear capability—in other words, all those substantive measures that Arab states tell the United States they would do to tighten the noose on Iran’s nuclear weapons program but refuse to do because of the U.S. relationship with Israel. Hint: the real answer is less than zero. Arab states are aching for early and effective U.S. action against the Iranian nuclear program at least as much as Israel is.

 

• And, of course, I look forward to discussing all the examples of cases of Arab boycott of sale of oil to America or America’s allies as a result ofU.S. friendship toward Israel. After all, isn’t that the usual critique, that our friendship with Israel threatens our access to the free flow of oil at reasonable prices? The fact of history is that ever since the U.S. began to build a strategic relationship with Israel—the past thirty-five years—there have been no such boycotts.

 

So, given the long list of advantages we derive from our relationship with Israel, to make the liability case, I expect to hear an even longer and much more specific and detailed list of items where that relationship has impeded our ability to advance our interests on all these issues.

 

I know it is de rigueur to cite Gen. David Petraeus on this issue. But please look closely at what General Petraeus actually said in his fifty-six-page prepared testimony to the Armed Services Committee. In the section of his remarks titled “Cross-Cutting Challenges to Security and Stability,” he cited eleven different items. The entire list bears mention: militant Islamic networks; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; ungoverned spaces; terrorist finance and facilitation; piracy; ethnic, tribal, and sectarian rivalries; disputed territories and access to vital resources; criminal activity; uneven economic development and unemployment; lack of regional and global economic integration; and, of course, insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. Would U.S. interests be advanced if there were comprehensive peace? Of course. Who argues to the contrary? But General Petraeus blamed neitherIsrael nor the U.S.-Israel relationship for the lack of such progress; nor did he even hint that this issue is somehow the key to overcome the other ten major obstacles that he outlined.

 

So that we can save ourselves precious time, I am perfectly willing to stipulate the following: Arab leaders like to harangue to U.S. presidents, U.S.ambassadors, U.S. special envoys, and even U.S. generals about Israel. I don’t think we need to have a debate about that. The point in contention is whether their harangues have much strategic import. In other words, does Arab action match Arab talk. Instinctively, we all know that it doesn’t; until recently, we just lacked the data to support it. Thanks to outstanding research by my Institute colleague David Pollock, who crunched the numbers on a half-dozen indicators of U.S.-Arab relations for twenty Arab states over a ten-year period, we now have the data. And the results are crystal clear—the key principle is “watch what we do, not what we say.” And, importantly, this applies both to Arab governments and to Arab publics. Except for episodic and passing moments, like the period around the spring 2003 U.S. attack on Saddam’s Iraq, and notwithstanding public opinion poll data to the contrary, the actual, measurable trajectory of U.S.-Arab relations—travel, education, trade, security relations, etc.—has been consistently up.

 

And then there’s the argument about the U.S. paying for Islamist recruitment because of its relationship with Israel. Again, in an echo of the long list of factors that Petraeus said pose challenges to security and stability, radical Islamists also have a long list of complaints against America, of which U.S.-Israel relations is only one among many and not nearly the most important. In the early days of this conflict, when Usama bin Laden was first declaring war on “Crusaders and Jews,” the main target was U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia; more recently, as attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad declared in court, the major complaint was U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.Palestine is usually mentioned, but hardly ever as the headline; and, as my colleague Matt Levitt has pointed out, al-Qaeda rarely places such a high priority on fighting Israel that it actually targets Israel or Israelis. Remember—to both Salafists and Shiite radicals alike, America is the “Great Satan”; Israel is only the “Lesser Satan.” They hate us, our values, our pluralism, our culture.Israel is just a small part of that story. This isn’t just Rob Satloff’s view. Read the 9-11 Commission Report. That’s their view, too.

 

If you think bin Laden is all about Israel, and not about America, let me quote a very learned fellow: “Mr. bin Laden’s principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.” That very smart fellow was Chas Freeman.

 

Bottom line: a disinterested, professional net assessment of the impact of Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship on U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East would show that the 63 percent of Americans who told the most recent Gallup poll that they sympathize with Israel—more than four times the percentage who sympathize with what the poll presented as the other side, Palestinians (I didn’t like the wording, but it’s their poll, not mine)—that those 63 percent are pretty good strategists. They know that our relationship with Israel is not just good for Israel, it’s good for America.

 

In fact, I am tempted to say that what we really need in the Middle East are more “Israels”—not more Jewish states, of course, but more strong, reliable, democratic, pro-American allies. It would certainly be nice to have one or two in the Gulf. The absence of those sorts of allies is precisely what has gotten us into such deep trouble over the past thirty years. We’ve had allies who we have sold weapons worth billions and billions of dollars but who can’t patrol their own borders; who can’t secure the free flow of oil; who can’t take care of themselves without relying on the U.S. cavalry to come to the rescue. In a room of realists, this lesson should be clear: what we should really want as allies are countries that, with a strong America behind them, can take care of themselves and project our basic values in the process. In other words, we could use a couple more countries like Israel.

Click here to read Ambassador Freeman's remarks

 

 

 

 

 

What Happens Next?

Blog entry posted by Dahr Jamail, July 23rd, 2010

Story by Dahr Jamail
Photography by Erika Blumenfeld

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Recently we met with Captain Louis Skrmetta who runs Ship Island Excursions out of Gulfport, Mississippi. His father Pete came to the US from Croatia in 1904, and began working as an oyster fisherman, now an endangered endeavor. From that background arose the family business of ferrying people out to West Ship Island, which is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, about an hours boat ride south of Gulfport.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

“Normally you see a couple of hundred boats out here,” Captain Louis tells us as we take in the beautiful view from the wheelhouse of his ship. “But now you can’t fish. You can get a ticket now just for having fishing gear on your boat.”

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

The Gulf Islands are considered a Gulf Coast treasure. These sparkling blue waters, white sand beaches, and fertile coastal marshes were designated a National Seashore in 1971 to protect the wildlife, barrier islands, and archeological sites along the Gulf of Mexico. They are home to fiddler crab, shrimp, flounder, oysters, blue crab, brown pelicans, osprey, great blue heron, raccoon, loggerhead sea turtle, Florida Pompano, shark, and hundreds of species of birds and fish. And now they are being oiled. All this life, along with the humans like Captain Louis who love this area and are deeply rooted to it, are in jeopardy.

“Normally we take out full boats this time of year,” Captain Louis explains while steering us southwards, “That means 500 people per load.” He shows the days totals, which are 93 from this morning’s load, and 128 on the boat right now. If it weren’t for several fraternity groups on board, he says, “We’d be looking at 20-30 people.”

Like all the other businesses that rely on the Gulf for their livelihood, Captain Louis is fixated on the oil disaster. He points south and says, “There’s a huge vortex of oil swirling around out there just off the shelf in the deeper water, and each storm will keep pushing the oil up here, so we’ll have a never ending supply.”

He points to clean-up boats that are buzzing around nearby Cat Island, and tells us how that island has been hit by oil, as has his beloved Ship Island. He has been hired by the US Environmental Services, who chartered one of his boats to transport clean-up crews to Ship Island where they walk around digging tar balls out of the beaches. “That’s helping us some,” he says, trying to explain how, for now, his business is staying afloat. He, like other Gulf-dependent businesses, has no idea what will happen when that contract ends, or when the oil will stop gushing from the Macondo well.

As we near the island, Captain Louis tells us of how when a couple of weeks ago when the islands were hit with a particularly heavy load of oil, they found an oiled pelican. “We called BP’s number, both me and a park ranger, to report it. The next day I was out with passengers and the bird was still there.” Fortunately, a local reporter was on his ship that day and filmed the bird. “The next day we had 20 rangers out here. But the thing is, we here in Mississippi had 70 days to prepare for this thing, because it took longer to arrive here than over in Louisiana. But our illustrious governor, Haley Barbour, keeps downplaying this thing. But we know how Haley works, “If you want it, you pay Haley, and you get it.”

A little about Barbour from sourcewatch:

“Barbour is the Republican Governor of Mississippi. He was formerly a tobacco industry lobbyist based in Washington, D.C. His lobbying firm made $17,150/month plus expenses from R.J. Reynolds in 2000. Barbour won the Mississippi gubernatorial election on November 4, 2003, in part on a pledge to keep Mississippi’s state flag design intact, which contains a miniature representation of the Confederate battle flag. While campaigning, he also appeared at a fund-raiser sponsored by the Conservative Citizen’s Council. The CCC is a modern-day version of the White Citizen’s Councils that fought racial integration throughout the South in the 1950s and 60s.”

Barbour, an errand-boy for the oil and gas industry, said this when the first giant rafts of oil began washing ashore on the coast of Mississippi and the Gulf Islands: “We have had a few tar balls but we have had tar balls every year, as a natural product of the Gulf of Mexico. 250,000 to 750,000 barrels of oil seep into the Gulf of Mexico through the floor every year. So, tar balls are no big deal.”

Captain Louis later explained to me how their “illustrious governor” had tried to drill for oil and gas all around the Gulf Islands National Seashore by sneaking legislation into a Tsunami Relief bill.

As we travel further east along the Gulf coast, I am seeing that it is common knowledge that the so-called Vessels of Opportunity program set up by BP where they hire local fishermen and workers to use their boats for oil recovery, is a bit of a joke, as well as about as effective as a train wreck.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

“BP is leasing 15’ boats with 50 horsepower motors, and paying them $1600 a day to run around in circles,” Captain Louis says while pointing to a few off our bow that appear to be doing just that. Last week Erika and I saw some of this down south of Venice, Louisiana on a boat trip – a few guys hanging out in their airboat, wearing the bright orange vests required by BP, and their hard hats, lounging in the shade, drifting about.

As we near the dock of Ship Island, Captain Louis concludes his discussion about Big Oil with this: “I want to see us get completely off oil and transition into something else. Something safe. Something renewable. But the oil companies don’t want change. The Mississippi Sound used to be one of the most fertile fishing areas anywhere. And now look what we are having to deal with. We’re worried how long this will last. 300 million liters of oil in the water column. Where will it go? What happens now? The ecology of the Mississippi Sound…it’s an estuary for shrimp, mullet, crab, flounder, and all these things are part of our culture and youth. And now it’s never going to be the same again.”

Captain Louis expertly guides the ship towards the pier, where we are tied off. His family has had the concession with the National Park Service here since 1971, to be the ferry, long after his father, who began the business, began taking people out to this island in 1926. Captain Louis is carrying on a family legacy.

He walks with us along the boardwalk onto the island. I’m taken by the beauty – a bull shark chases mullet near the pier, seagulls call overhead, green marsh grass rises out of white sand, and in other places out of shallow pools to sway in the winds.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

“I’m worried about hurricanes,” Captain Louis says when he sees us taking in the beautiful marsh in the middle of the small island, “What’s the action plan for when a hurricane dumps oil all over this marsh?”

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

He goes on to explain his deep concern about how his very livelihood is threatened. “This is a family operation, and how we’ve survived all these years. It’s a tough way to make a living, and we’ve survived hurricanes, but this is gonna be a tough one. Who’s going to want to come out here? We’ve never had to deal with this, it’s a whole new experience. The charter boats are all wiped out. What’s going to happen? It’s scary. Everybody is working for BP now, so what happens next?”

Another common thread of my experience here is being amidst so much raw natural beauty and wonderfully warm people whilst simultaneously processing this growing catastrophe. The island is so beautiful I am taken aback.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Yet as we near the southern shore, the unnaturalness of the oil response effort jolts me back into the catastrophe end of the spectrum of this experience. An oil clean up crew is shoveling tar balls into bags just down the beach, their foremen drive past us in their little motorized carts, and a newly erected platform stands offshore – as a staging area for oil response vessels.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

A sign is posted by the National Park Service warns visitors: “Leave the area if you experience difficulty breathing or any other symptoms. If needed, contact your doctor.” If residents of the Gulf Coast region were really given this warning, en masse, by the federal government, most of the population of southeast Louisiana would already be evacuated.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Captain Louis takes Erika further down the beach where she photographs tar balls that are contrasted with the purity of the white sands they contaminate.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

I talk with one of the National Park Service lifeguard’s of the area, Matt Fields. He points to a tugboat anchored off shore. “That’s a spray down boat,” he informs, “It sprays off skimmers coming back in. So where’s that oil go?”

He looks at me and holds up his hands, and we both shake our heads. “The oil disaster has killed the numbers of people that come here,” he adds, “We used to have well over 1,000 every day, now we count in the dozens.”

We don’t stay too long on the island before we’re back in the wheelhouse with Captain Louis heading back for Gulfport. He talks more about the oil industry, corruption, politics, and Haley Barbour. “We must end our dependence on oil, but the oil industry is literally fighting change,” he says, “There is no question this type of oil disaster will happen again. But isn’t it enough incentive to introduce change when the entire regional seafood industry has been destroyed? As oil keeps coming in here in this shallow water and mixing with the sediment, this’ll be a disaster area. What happens then with these fish and shrimp nurseries?”

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

As we pull back into dock, Captain Louis calls over his friend Tony Smith. Tony, 66-years-old, is a fisherman who has been making the trip to Ship Island with Captain Louis on a near-daily basis. “I used to come out here 4-5 days a week to fish,” he explains, “I’d feed my family, and Captain Louis’ family, and a lot of these other folks.”

Nobody is allowed to fish now, as oil is dominant and has, of course, already contaminated the food chain. “This is unbelievable and the worst is yet to come,” says Tony as we are being tied up to the dock, “I’ve gone all over Mississippi looking for a place to fish, but haven’t found it.”

Tony is worried that all the rainwater is contaminated, he’s worried about the fish, and all the sheen that he keeps seeing come into his area. Like most everyone we meet, he is, of course, angry at those who caused his life to crumble. “The worse this gets,” he says, “The worse it seems people with a little power seem to mess it up even worse.”

He tells me he isn’t going to give up, that he’s going to keep fighting, because, “It’s what we do. Hell, we still have people down here still fighting the Civil War.”

I watch him look out into the Mississippi Sound, to the barrier islands, at our boat, then at me, before he says, “I haven’t fished since they shut these waters down. I’ve got a freezer full of fish, but once that’s gone, I’m afraid that’s it.”

BP Cleanup Workers Gone Wild

— By Mac McClelland

| Thu Jul. 22, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

— Brian Van/jellowrestle.com

I hear about the race riot at Daddy's Money almost as soon as I arrive on Grand Isle, Louisiana. My friend and I are going to the bar tonight to catch the "female oil wrestling" oil-spill cleanup workers have been packing in to see on Saturday nights. When we stop by the office of the island's biggest seafood distributor, he tells us that two days ago a bunch of black guys and a bunch of white guys got into a big fight at the bar. It spilled out all over the street and had to be broken up by a ton of cops.

According to the Census, 1,541 people live in this slow Southern resort town. An estimated 2.9 of them are black. That was before the spill. The seafood guy gestures in the direction of the floating barracks being built on barges in the bay to house the lower-skilled cleanup workers, and says that people think the barracks will keep those workers—who are mostly black—from "jumping off" onto dry land and causing trouble.

That night, dozens of men in race-segregated packs crowd around to watch strippers dance around and then tussle inside the bouncy inflatable ring set up inside Daddy's Money. Female oil wrestlers need, obviously, to be oiled. Plastic cups full of baby oil are being auctioned off, along with the right to rub their contents all over one of the thong-bikinied gals. "I hope there's no dispersant in that oil!" someone quips. The bidding before the first match starts at $10; it ends pretty quickly when some kid offers $100.

"He outbid me!" the guy next to me yells. His name is Cortez. He bid $80. He has dollar bills tucked all the way around under the brim of his hat, and piles of them in his fist. He has spent $200 of his $1,000 paycheck already tonight. "I am coming here every Saturday from now on," he says. He gestures expansively at the scene—writhing women; hollering, money-throwing men. "Sponsored by BP!" he yells, laughing, then throws his arms around me and grabs my ass.

Upstairs, on the open-air deck, the supervisors and professional contractors drink. One comes over to talk; he calls me a Yankee when I don't get that when he says "animals" he means black guys. Another tells us about the crime-prone "monkeys." I have already stopped counting how many times I've heard the n-word on Grand Isle today.

Back downstairs, the testosterone is still spewing. It's not just the men screaming at the now-topless girls rolling around trying to pin each other to the floor. An ex-Army Ranger so drunk he can hardly stand asks me if I have a boyfriend. When I lie and say that I do and he's right over there somewhere, the Ranger scowls and pushes me. I move to the other side of the ring, where some guy wraps a tight grip around my waist.

"You can have some of BP's money too if you let me make love to you," he says.

"I'm not a prostitute," I inform him, backing up to create some space between our pelvises, but he presses an insistent forearm harder into the small of my back.

"I'm not trying to play you like a prostitute," he says. "I'm just saying: Whatever it takes."

I extract myself with a firm fist to his chest. Two Grand Isle girls who are the only other non-strippers in the bar are trying to inch away from a teetering drunk who won't take his hands off them and is encouraging them to get in the ring. I turn around to see if an Interior Department firefighter I talked to earlier, who seems like a nice guy in that he offered to buy me dinner rather than offering money to have sex with him, is still behind me. Just in case. Because he's a hero he steps in and tells the teetering guy to back off.

"That's my wife," he says, towering over the drunk and pointing at one of the girls.

"I don't care," the teetering guy says. That's where it ends. The fireman has a thick four-inch-long scar behind his ear where he was once hit with a bottle; he doesn't start bar fights anymore. Which is a lucky thing for his coworkers, because he's a very buff Pawnee, and he's sick of them calling him "Tonto," "Chief," and "Indian Joe."

The near-desperate levels of racial and sexual aggression in this horde aren't what you usually get at a strip show in a bar. It feels more like a strip show in a prison yard. My friend says he's leaving because he can't bear to be here with all the stupidity and "stale testosterone" anymore. He returns from the bar across the street within 10 minutes. He walked in and walked right back out; it was the same scene. Last week, someone was stabbed there.

Upstairs, one of the cleanup supervisors announces that a nearby Canadian engineer hasn't had any pussy in 10 days, and could die. The guys say there's an old Vietnamese lady with a notebook full of available hookers' ages and races who wanders the cleanup workers' haunts, but she's not here right now. Anyway, the workers are forbidden from bringing hookers into the houses and hotel rooms their employers are putting them up in, under threat of being fired.

"How long are you going to be here?" I ask the contractor who's worried about the sexless Canadian.

"We aren't leaving till this is all clean," he answers, "we" being M-I SWACO, a cleanup contractor that just built a giant orange-pipe-jumble sand-washing machine on the beach (and which is not to be confused with the contractors who are doing only "window dressing" operations, as one of the other supervisors at the bar describes his job). M-I SWACO is not just going to polish the destruction off the surface. They're going to have oiled sand from all over the island brought in by the truckload, then dig out the contaminated layers, wash it, and put it back, at least 40 tons of sand an hour. They're going to save this place. 

"We'll be here as long as oil keeps washing up," the contractor says.

"So..." I laugh sort of helplessly. "A year?"

"Three years..." he says. "Five years..."

"Hopefully forever," the guy next to him says. "I need this job if I can't work offshore anymore." Last week, the emcee that accompanies the oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, "Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!" The workers—part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots—the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered.

Mac McClelland is Mother Jones' human rights reporter, writer of The Rights Stuff, and the author of For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story From Burma's Never-Ending War. Read more of her stories and follow her on Twitter.