How #OccupyWallStreet Is Evolving and Gaining Power

October 5, 2011 / Mark Engler

#OccupyWallStreet is evolving. Now in its third week, the protest movement not only continues to grow—it is maturing and becoming stronger in impressive ways.

What started as a few hundred independent activists gathering for a protest on Wall Street, and a few dozen having the resolve to extend their demonstration by camping out in Manhattan’s financial district, has become something much bigger. It has become the embodiment of longstanding progressive hopes that Americans who have been hit hard by the economic crisis—those left jobless, in debt, underemployed, foreclosed, or insecure—would finally get mad enough to publicly vent their outrage at the oligarchs who have for too long perverted our democratic politics and created gross inequality in our country.

The movement is rapidly spreading to cities around the country—to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC., among many others. And it has progressed in some very promising respects. Here are three:

1. The Demand Problem Has Been Solved

Throughout the first couple weeks of the action, the question of whether #OccupyWallStreet had clear enough demands was constantly raised, both by progressive commentators and in the mainstream media coverage the mobilization was receiving. This issue has ceased to be a serious problem because, as the protests have grown, their central focus has become significantly more defined.

During the first week, there was a real problem: When you had just a few dozen people at occupied Liberty Plaza, individual idiosyncrasies stood out. If several of the protesters were Ron Paul libertarians or were obsessed with eliminating the Federal Reserve, another few were 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and several others, when asked by reporters, responded by saying, “We don’t believe in demands,” you ended up with a bona fide messaging crisis.

But that is no longer the situation. The mobilization has now drawn thousands of people who have rallied behind the call of “We Are the 99 Percent.” MoveOn.org summed it up this way: “What do the protesters want? A solution to the jobs crisis, corporate money out of politics, fairer tax rates, and policies that work for 99% of Americans instead of the 1% at the top.”

But you don’t have to take one organization’s word for it. Go to the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr. Read the incredibly moving personal testimonials presented there. Then tell me this protest does not have a message.

For observers who want more specific grievances or detailed policy proposals, declarations now abound, ranging from bold and inclusive statements issued by Wall Street protesters themselves via their general assembly to more modest reform manifestos offered, with only a wee bit of condescension, by figures such as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

Critics who remain preoccupied with the demand issue are missing the point. As Betsy Reed has smartly noted in the Nation, well-formulated lists of proposals do not guarantee that your actions will be taken seriously. (Anyone remember “The May 12 Coalition” or “One Nation Working Together”? Not too many people do, despite strong organization and tight messaging.) Conversely, actions such as #OccupyWallStreet that effectively capture the public imagination and inspire participation despite vague demands can contain great promise—and should be celebrated for the potential they offer.

Ultimately, the movement’s outcry against corporate power is no more diffuse than the Tea Party’s denunciation of “big government.” Protesters do not need to hash out exactly what percentage the capital gains tax rate should be, or precisely how many millions of dollars in student debt should be forgiven, in order for them to have an impact. Like the Tea Party, a broad social movement uprising can do much to alter the climate of public opinion, something that can benefit many different progressive campaigns in the medium to long term. Indeed, many who are running more targeted campaigns (with more narrow and winnable goals) are productively linking up with the mobilization. Which is a second promising development:

2. The Occupation Has Drawn Together an Amazing Coalition

When it started, #OccupyWallStreet was made up of students and independent activists who responded to a call to action that was initially put out by Adbusters but that enjoyed very limited institutional backing. The major organized constituencies of the left—unions, community groups, environmentalists, faith based organizations, and the like—were not part of the mobilization. This was a problem, suggesting that the protests might not have significant reach and would have limited resources at their disposal.

Yet as the actions have gained momentum, the institutional groups have come. Nationally, all sorts have flocked to support #OccupyWallStreet, including but not limited to MoveOn.org and other major organizations associated with the American Dream Movement. [Red Flag alert: The “American Dream Movement” is essentially an appendage of the Democratic party. Its ranks are filled with a lot of Obamabots and people who, while disenchanted with Obama and the Dems, in tne name of the “Lesser Evil” will loyally vote for the party in 2012. This group is far from capable of offering the kind of radical visions and solutions required by the world crisis. The coalition of course included unions, and they, too, especially the leadership, are tied to the Democratic party’s ultimately plutocratic project. In sum, careful with this formation.—Eds] In New York City, major unions have declared their support for #OccupyWallStreet, and a veritable who’s who of labor and community organizations are marching to the financial district to show their solidarity.

In just one amazing display of unity among many, the city’s Transit Workers Union (TWU) issued a blistering condemnation of the NYPD this past weekend after police, in the process of arresting some 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge, commandeered three public buses and forced TWU members to transport their captives. “TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest—and shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” the union president said.

3. The Movement Is Becoming an Umbrella for Economic Justice Causes Nationwide

As the movement spreads nationwide, #OccupyWallStreet is becoming a unifying umbrella under which people outraged about corporate greed can get involved in supporting any number of ongoing efforts to create living-wage jobs, end foreclosures and predatory lending practices, hold banks accountable, get corporate money out of politics, and otherwise promote economic justice and genuine democracy. Much as the Tea Party has served as an overarching brand for conservative discontent, #OccupyWallStreet is giving people the opportunity to identify with a national struggle while advancing causes relevant to their local communities.

In Boston, community groups doing anti-foreclosure actions at Bank of America were able to merge their efforts with #OccupyBoston demands. Likewise, #OccupyLA joined with the United Teachers of Los Angeles in a bank protest during one of its first days in existence. Organizers who have been working on anti-corporate campaigns for months or years now are starting to benefit from the new energy—and new media attention—afforded by a movement that is now seen as a national phenomenon. #OccupyWallStreet, in turn, benefits whenever greater numbers of local drives identify with their overarching effort, when their coalition is broadened, and their credibility as a national force is reinforced by the local buy-in.

The potential for expanding this type of solidarity is great, and it is likely that more groups will be linking up their campaigns in the days and weeks to come. Fortunately, #OccupyWallStreet, which has already made some remarkable strides, is evolving still.

Mark Engler is a freelance journalist and a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, a network of foreign policy experts. He is author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. He can be reached via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com. Follow him on Facebook here. 

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Saudi Arabia cracks down on protesters

By Niall Green, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Live and learn: tactics and methods of repression 


Given the tyrannical and often brutal rule of the Saudi monarchy, protests are extremely rare. 

Saudi Arabian security forces cracked down on demonstrators in the country’s Eastern Province Tuesday. The protest, near the coastal city of Qatif, appears to have been in response to a raid by Saudi security forces on Monday, in which two local men were abducted from their homes.

The men, both in their seventies, were seized by police in the Qatif suburb of Al-Awamiya. There are reports that they are being held in an effort to force their sons, who are accused of taking part in earlier anti-government protests, to give themselves up to the authorities.

Human rights groups and journalists reported that scores of masked protesters clashed with police in Al-Awamiya in the hours after the arrest of the elderly men.

A video posted on YouTube shows a large group of masked demonstrators in Al-Awamiya chanting, “Down with Mohammed bin Fahd,” the governor of the Eastern Province and a nephew of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah.

Eleven policemen and three demonstrators were reportedly injured in Tuesday’s clashes.

Saudi state media quickly sought to demonize the protesters and whip up sectarian divisions, claiming that those involved in “rioting” were guilty of treason.

The official SPA news agency quoted the Saudi interior ministry, which said that “a group of outlaws” in Al-Awamiya had tried to create “insecurity with incitement from a foreign country that aims to undermine the nation’s security and stability.”

The claim of foreign involvement is directed against Iran. The Saudi monarchy, which promotes a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, views the Iranian Shiite clerical regime as its major rival in the Persian Gulf region.

Eastern Province is home to Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority, some 2 million people, which has faced decades of religious persecution and social discrimination. Most of the country’s vast oil reserves are located in the province.

The Saudi government also blamed protests by Shiites around Qatif earlier this year on Iranian influence. The Eastern Province has been subjected to harsh security measures since the outbreak of the outbreak of revolutionary struggles in Tunisia and Egypt this spring, with police checkpoints and raids deployed in an attempt by Saudi Arabia’s rulers to intimidate all opposition.

Despite Riyadh’s claim that any sign of unrest is a product of Iranian incitement, the numerous protests in Saudi Arabia this year—by people from Sunni and Shiite backgrounds—reflect the growing demand by workers and youth for political freedoms and social rights across the Middle East and North Africa.

Just a few miles off the coast of Qatif, in the small Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, the Saudi-backed Sunni monarchy of King Hamad al-Khalifa has also attempted to blame the mass working class uprising by the majority-Shiite population on Iranian “interference.”

The Saudi armed forces led the crushing of protests in Bahrain in March, with more than 1,500 soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles sent across the causeway between the two countries to shore up al-Khalifa’s security forces.

Secure in the knowledge that Riyadh and Washington are behind it, the Bahraini regime has launched a vicious campaign of reprisals against any sign of dissent. Thousands of people have been kidnapped, arrested, tortured, fired from state jobs and otherwise harassed by the Bahraini security forces.

This week, a special military court in the capital, Manama, sentenced another 14 people to lengthy prison sentences in the latest show trial aimed at intimidating all opponents of the regime.

Accused of killing a police officer during the mass demonstrations that rocked Bahrain in March, the conviction of the 14 men is a travesty of justice. They were denied proper access to legal counsel, tortured in prison, and tried by a specially convened National Safety Court.

They face sentences of 25 years each for killing “with a terrorist aim.” In a separate trial, 15 students were imprisoned by the court for up to 18 years on unfounded charges ranging from attempted murder to kidnap to arson.

This follows the frame-up trial of 20 doctors last week, who were sentenced for “occupying a hospital.”

Many international human rights organizations, the United Nations and several foreign governments have criticized the procedures and sentencing of Bahrain’s National Safety Court. The US-based charity Human Rights Watch has condemned the trials in Bahrain as an attempt by the monarchy to “punish anyone and everyone who criticizes the government.”

Throughout the brutal crackdown in Bahrain and the repression of protests in Saudi Arabia, the reactionary Gulf monarchies have received the full backing of the Obama administration and the US military. The US Congress is expected to approve a new $50 million arms deal with Bahrain, already agreed to by the Department of Defense, to replenish King Hamad’s stock of armored personnel carriers, missiles and night vision equipment.

Washington looks to the Saudi regime in particular as its key ally in the Persian Gulf. Not only is Saudi Arabia a source of oil—it has the largest proven reserves in the world—but it is also a key purchaser of US military hardware and a partner in US imperialism’s efforts to police the working class in the region.

As well as playing the leading role in suppressing the mass uprising in Bahrain, the Saudi government has offered sanctuary to Tunisia’s deposed dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and supports the military junta that has ruled Egypt after the ouster of Hosni Mubabak. It has also backed the NATO-led war for regime change in Libya.

Reflecting the closeness of the alliance between Riyadh and Washington, the most recent US State Department communiqué on Saudi Arabia should come as no surprise. Issued by Hillary Clinton on the occasion of Saudi National Day, September 22, it praises absolute monarch King Abdullah’s “leadership” and promotion of “moderation and tolerance” in the kingdom and the region.

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#OccupyWS issues a historical document

 Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

Posted on September 30, 2011 by  

THIS DOCUMENT WAS ACCEPTED BY THE NYC GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

AS WE GATHER TOGETHER IN SOLIDARITY to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

  • They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
  • They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
  • They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
  • They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
  • They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
  • They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
  • They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
  • They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
  • They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
  • They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
  • They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
  • They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
  • They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
  • They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
  • They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
  • They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
  • They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
  • They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
  • They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
  • They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

    • To the people of the world,

    We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

    To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

    Join us and make your voices heard!

    *These grievances are not all-inclusive.

    Update 10/1/11 – Minor updates to some wording in the facts.

     



    Putting Pundits to Shame: Protesters Know Exactly What They’re Fighting For

    By Joshua Holland,  AlterNet 

    The stupid oligarchy and their henchmen at all levels finally pushed the people too far, and now they may have awakened it past their usual containment  walls.  The message as Jim Hightower explains it, is that “the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans possess more net worth today than the bottom 90 percent of us combined. Worse, these privileged few and their political henchmen have structured a new economic ‘normal’ of long-term joblessness, low wages, no benefits or worker rights, miserly public services, and a steadily widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us.”  We must restore sanity to this nation.—Eds

    It should come as a surprise to nobody that the corporate media’s early coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has featured an abundance of hippie-punching but very little about the substantive issues driving thousands of Americans to take over the streets of cities across the country.

    As I approached the 30 or so activists who have been camped out for weeks in front of the Federal Reserve Building as part of OccupySF – a protest smaller than those in New York, Boston or Los Angeles – I’d been primed by news stories heaping scorn on these ostensibly confused, foul-smelling rebels-without-a-cause, but what I encountered was very different.

    I discovered that while their style may not have been as mainstream as that of the retirees attending a Glenn Beck rally, they knew precisely what they were there for. They had specific demands and even a simple-to-understand “bumper-sticker” message. “We stand for the 99 percent who don’t have much of a voice in this system,” a young woman named Melissa told me. A recent graduate with “not much in the way of job prospects,” she said she’d never been involved in a protest before.

    Genuine grassroots movements don’t begin with poll-tested messages or slick media operations and aren’t fronted by polished spokespeople. In any group of ordinary citizens, be it a Shriner’s convention or an uprising against the Wall Street hucksters who took down the global economy, there will be some number who are in fact confused or clueless. A visiting reporter can shape whatever narrative he or she chooses by simply selecting whom to interview and which parts of those interviews make the cut.

    At OccupySF on Saturday morning, I too could have crafted a story of hapless, unfocused hipsters had I chosen to focus on the 20-year-old kid serenading confused tourists with a bullhorn rendition of “You Are So Beautiful.” But it wouldn’t have been honest. A minute after he began crooning, several other activists told him that he wasn’t doing much good for the cause.

    Instead, I decided to speak with a man named John, who I found collating and stapling a box of leaflets fresh from the copy store. A 30-something dressed in a tie-dyed shirt who had been “out of work for about two years,” John was noticably uncomfortable being interviewed. He asked me several times if he could start an answer over. “You’ll edit that part out?” he asked me more than once. “I’m really not good at public speaking,” he said, awkwardly.

    Then, in stops and starts, John proceeded to lay out a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of our economic straits, and offered a series of very specific prescriptions for making the economy work for everyone, rather than just those at the top. It was a breakdown that made most of the pundits looking down their noses at the Occupy Wall Street movement look like superficial dilettantes obsessed with trivia.

    “We know what we’re against,” he told me, “but what do we stand for?” John had a 12-point agenda, which he acknowledged would “probably need to be condensed.” “We need to bring back Glass-Steagal,” he said, referring to the Depression-era law that created a firewall between investment- and commercial-banking. “It’s really ironic that a law whose purpose was to prevent another Great Depression was repealed and now we have an economy that is worse than at any time since the Depression,” he said. “That’s strange.”

    “We need a massive investment in infrastructure, in green technology, high-speed rail, things like that,” he said. “We need to abandon or significantly modify these free-trade agreements like NAFTA… these weren’t the result of some democratic groundswell. They were written by lobbyists,” he told me. “You know, to oversimplify things, they’re intended to maximize corporate profits.”

    John talked of a shorter work week to bring down unemployment, like the successful work-sharing programs in Germany; an idea economists like Dean Baker have espoused since the crash. He said we needed lobbying reform, and to mitigate the damage wrought by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. He advocated a Medicare buy-in be open to all citizens.

    Was he a regular activist? “I protested in the past off and on, but I didn’t always think there was much of a purpose for it,” he said.

    What did he think the overarching message of the movement should be? “We don’t have a government for ‘we the people’ anymore,” he said, “and I do believe we’re going to have to have ongoing, non-stop protests for months to fix it.”

    I asked him if he thought Americans had reached a tipping point. “It really seems like there’s something happening here,” he told me. “I don’t know if we’ve reached that point yet, but I think we probably will in the next few months. I think the movement is going to grow. And it’s not a matter of voting in the right amount of Democrats, or Tea Partiers or whatever. The whole system is broken. You know, where were the Democrats when they were outsourcing our jobs for the last 30 years?”

    As I wrapped up the interview, I added an unsolicited word of advice: “I’d consider just calling them trade agreements, instead of free-trade agreements,” I offered. Gesturing to the shuttered Federal Reserve building behind us, I added: “That’s what they want you to call them.”

    I returned late Sunday night to drop off some books and see what the “camp” looked like bedded down for the evening, after the usual mobs of tourists had left the area. I was surprised to see that the number of people had grown since the previous day. About 40 or 50 were gathered on Market Street, in sleeping bags and tents. Some brought their dogs; others played guitars. They had a first-aid station, a kitchen, a sanitation system. A nearby Starbucks had been “good about letting us use their bathrooms,” one protester told me. They appeared to be in it for the long-haul.

    No, they didn’t have poll-tested messaging or polished spokespeople like the Tea Partiers, another grassroots movement with an abundance of top-down messaging courtesy of GOP front groups like FreedomWorks and the Republican PR firm of Russo Marsh and Rogers. But they had something that’s become increasingly rare in our political culture: a sense of community, of shared purpose.

    As I left them, I couldn’t help thinking, “Yes, there’s definitely something happening here.”

    Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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    URI AVNERY: Mutiny on the Titanic

    The Crucial Question

    By URI AVNERY

    Here is a story that has never been told before:

    When the Titanic was well out into the Atlantic, its crew mutinied.  They demanded higher wages, less cramped quarters, better food. They assembled on the lower decks and refused to budge from there.  A few old hands from the engine room tried to extend the scope of the protest. They claimed that the captain was grossly incompetent, that the officers were nincompoops and that the voyage was bound to end in disaster.

    But the leaders of the protest resisted. “Let’s not go beyond our practical demands,” they said. “The course of the ship is none of our business. Whatever some of us may think about the captain and the officers on the bridge, we must not mix matters. That would only split the protest.”

    The passengers did not interfere. Many of them sympathized with the protest, but did not want to get involved.

    It is said that one drunken English lady was standing on deck, a glass of whisky in her hand, when she saw the huge iceberg looming. “I asked for some ice,” she murmured, “but this is ridiculous!”

    * * *

    FOR A WEEK, or so, all the Israeli media were riveted to the goings on at the UN.

    Ehud Barak had warned of a “tsunami”. Avigdor Lieberman foresaw a “bloodbath”.  The army was prepared for huge demonstrations that were certain to end in unprecedented violence. No one could think of anything else.

    And then, overnight, the bloody tsunami faded like a mirage, and the social protest reappeared. State of war Out, welfare state In.

    Why? The commission appointed by Binyamin Netanyahu to examine the roots of the protest and propose reforms had finished its work in record time and laid a thick volume of proposals on the table. All very good ones. Free education from the age of 3, higher taxes for the very rich, more money for housing, and so on.

    All very nice, but far short of what the protesters had demanded. The almost half a million demonstrators some weeks ago did not go out into the streets for that. Economics professors attacked, other economics professors defended. A lively debate ensued.

    This can go on for a few days. But then something is bound to happen – perhaps a border incident, or a settlers’ pogrom against a Palestinian village, or a pro-Palestinian resolution at the UN – and the whole media pack will veer around, forget about the reforms and return to the good old scares.

    In the meantime, the military budget will serve as a bone of contention. The government commission has proposed reducing this budget by 3 billion shekels – less than a billion dollars – in order to finance its modest reforms. Netanyahu has voiced agreement.

    No one took this very seriously. The slightest incident will enable the army to demand a special budget, and instead of the suggested tiny reduction, there will be another big increase.

    But the army has already raised hell – quite literally – describing the disasters that will surely befall us if the diabolical reduction is not choked in its cradle. We face defeat in the next war, many soldiers will be killed, the future investigation committee will blame the present ministers. They are already shaking in their shoes.

    * * *

    ALL THIS goes to show how quickly national attention can swing from “protest mode” to “security mode”. One day we are shaking our fists in the street, the next we are manning the national ramparts, resolved to sell our lives dearly.

    This could lead to the idea that the two problems are really one, and can only be solved together. But this conclusion meets with resolute resistance.

    The young leaders of the protest insist that the demand for reform unites all Israelis – male and female, young and old, leftist and rightist, religious and secular, Jew and Arab, Ashkenazi and Oriental. Therein lies its power. The moment the question of national policy comes up, the movement will break apart. End of protest.

    Difficult to argue with that.

    True, even so the rightists accuse the protesters of being leftists in disguise. Very few national-religious people appear at the demonstrations, and no orthodox at all. Oriental Jews, traditional voters for the Likud, are underrepresented, though not altogether absent. People speak of a movement of the “White Tribe” – Jews of European descent.

    Still, the movement has succeeded in avoiding an open split. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have not been called upon to identify themselves with any particular political party or creed. The leaders can rightly claim that their tactic – if it is a tactic – has worked up to now.

    * * *

    THIS CONVICTION has been reinforced by recent events in the Labor Party.

    This moribund congregation, down in the polls to a mere 7% of the votes, has suddenly sprung to new life. A lively primary election for the party leadership has restored some color to its cheeks. In a surprise victory, Shelly Yacimovich has been elected party chairwoman.

    Shelly (I dislike these  long foreign surnames) was in the past an assertive, abrasive radio journalist with very pronounced feminist and social-democratic views. Six years ago she joined Labor and was elected to the Knesset under the wing of Amir Peretz, the then leader, who she has now soundly beaten.

    In the Knesset, Shelly has distinguished herself as a diligent and relentless militant on social issues. She is a girlish-looking 51, a lone she-wolf, disliked by her colleagues, devoid of charisma, not at all the hail-fellow-well-met type. Yet the party rank and file, perhaps out of sheer desperation, preferred her to the members of the bankrupt old guard. The atmosphere in the country produced by the social protest movement certainly contributed to her success.

    In all her years in the Knesset, she has not mentioned any of the national problems – war and peace, occupation, settlements. She has concentrated exclusively on social issues. On the eve of the primary, she shocked many members of her party by publicly embracing the settlers. “The settlements are no sins or crimes,” she asserted, they were put there by Labor Party governments and are a part of the national consensus.

    Shelly may really believe this or she may consider it good tactics – the fact is that she has adopted the same line as the protest movement: that social affairs should be separated from “national” affairs. Seems you can be rightist on the occupation and leftist on taxing the rich.

    * * *

    BUT CAN YOU?

    On the morrow of the Labor primaries, something amazing happened. In a respected opinion poll, Labor rose from 8 to 22 Knesset seats, overtaking Tzipi Livni’s Kadima, which sank from 28 to 18.

    A revolution? Not quite. All the new Labor votes came from Kadima. But a move from Kadima to Labor, while interesting in itself”, is not important. The Knesset is divided into two blocs – the nationalist-religious and the center-left-Arab. As long as the rightist bloc has a 5% edge, there will be no change. To effect change, enough voters must jump from one side of the scales to the other.

    Shelly believes that by shunning national issues and concentrating on social matters, voters can be moved to make the jump. Some say: that’s all that counts. What’s the use of putting forward a program of peace, if you can’t change the government? Let’s first come to power, by whatever means, and than see to peace.

    Against this logical argument, there is the contrary contention: that if you start to embrace the settlers and ignore the occupation, you will end up as a minor partner in a right-wing government, as has happened before. Ask Shimon Peres. Ask Ehud Barak.

    And then there is the moral question: can you really chant “the People Demand Social Justice” and ignore the daily oppression of four million Palestinians in the occupied territories? When you abandon your principles on the way to power, what are you likely to do with that power?

    * * *

    THE JEWISH High Holidays, which started the day before yesterday, provide a pause for reflection. Politics are at a standstill. The protest leaders promise another huge demonstration, restricted to the social demands, in a month’s time.

    In the meantime, the Titanic, this beautiful masterpiece of naval architecture, is riding the waves.

    Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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    IF YOU THINK THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA ARE A DISGRACE AND A HUGE OBSTACLE
    to real change in America why haven’t you sent at least a few dollars to The Greanville Post (or a similar anti-corporate citizen’s media?). Think about it.  Without educating and organizing our ranks our cause is DOA. That’s why our new citizens’ media need your support. Send your badly needed check to “TGP, P.O. Box 1028, Brewster, NY 10509-1028.” Make checks out to “P. Greanville/ TGP”.  (A contribution of any amount can also be made via Paypal and MC or VISA.)

    THANK YOU.
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