by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon Whether it’s gentrification, privatization, environmental destruction, threatening the planet with nukes or maintaining global empire, differences between the parties of the one percent are often less important than the bipartisan disasters upon which our masters agree. In the first of several installments, we look at the issues elite Republicans and Democrats agree on. This week it’s Israel, the world’s premiere apartheid state.
The Imperial Consensus, Part 1: Hillary and Trump, Republicans and the Congressional Black Caucus Agree on Israeli Apartheid by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon For the two capitalist parties this election year, nothing is more important than controlling the public convertsation. Republicans want you to know that Hillary is a liar and a crook. Democrats need to keep reminding you that Trump is an unrepentant racist and con man. What neither party or candidate, and none of the corporate media news outlets talk about are the places where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are on the same page, the issues on which the entire one-percenter US political establishment is of a single mind. So for the next couple weeks here at Black Agenda Report, we’ll talk about where Hillary and Donald Trump agree.
The first obvious point of agreement in the US political establishment, not just between Hillary and Trump, but between all the corporate media outlets and from the downticket hacks and flacks on the Republican side to the Congressional Black Caucus and the so-called Progressive Caucus there is nearly unanimous and unflinching support for the apartheid state of Israel .
From the moment of its founding in 1948, Israel has been a vicious colonial settler state, a savage ethnocracy bent upon the violent expulsion and dispossession of all the land’s non-Jewish inhabitants. To maintain its high-tech, well-armed, white military outpost in that sea of brown people next to a large fraction of the planet’s most easily accessible oil, the US has made itself Israel’s armorer, financier and diplomatic sugar daddy, an arrangement condoned by the leaders of both imperialist parties.
Both Trump and Hillary showed up at AIPAC’s annual meeting in March. Trump declared Israel “a strategic ally” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Hillary doubled down and denounced the nonviolent global movement to boycott, divest from and sanction the apartheid regime as “alarming,” equating it to antisemitism.
And it’s not just the one percenter presidential candidates. Republicans from John Kasich and John McCain and Democrats from Rahm Emanuel to the Congressional Black Caucus are solid, nearly unanimous backers of re-arming, re-financing and diplomatically reinforcing the apartheid state. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, championed and signed into law a 2016 bill banning individuals and corporations identified as supporting the BDS movement from contracting with the state, and provided for a state-run blacklist of BDS supporters, much like the old Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which furnished information about local Freedom Movement activists of the 1950s and 60s to vigilantes who harassed and sometimes murdered them.
Outside the US, Israel’s pedigree as an apartheid state is almost universally recognized. But the only US presidential candidate to utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence has been the Green Party’s Jill Stein , whom Democrats and Republicans alike desperately need to ban from televised debates, lest she expose not the difference between the two corporate parties, but the distance between them and the American people.
For Black Agenda Report, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com .
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com. Click the mic at left to download or the player below to listen to this Black Agenda Report commentary (about 4 minutes).
Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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