Musical Innerlube: Muse

Land restitution in South Africa: Post-Apartheid property struggle

The South African Restitution Program's primary goal is to return land that was stolen from blacks during white minority rule. Media portrayals of the struggle for land usually focus on the conflict between white farmers and black landless individuals and communities. In the documentary, this standard paradigm is inapplicable because the apartheid government sold land that it confiscated from one black family (the Ndolilas) to other black families (the Bondholders). The pressing question is: what will the ANC do when the problem is no longer black and white?

Brazil's landless movement

also see:

Nuns vs Guns - Brazil

Coelho's Land - Brazil

The plight of the North American bipeds

Impact of automobilus runoverus on homo sapient environment and culture.
Includes music by David Drexler and the Oakwood Chamber Players.

More items of pedestrian concern at http://www.pedestriana.net

Israel's new strategy - "Sabotage" and "attack" the global justice movement

An extraordinary series of articles, reports and presentations by Israel's influential Reut Institute has identified the global movement for justice, equality and peace as an "existential threat" to Israel and called on the Israeli government to direct substantial resources to "attack" and possibly engage in criminal "sabotage" of this movement in what Reut believes are its various international "hubs" in London, Madrid, Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

The Reut Institute's analyses hold that Israel's traditional strategic doctrine -- which views threats to the state's existence in primarily military terms, to be met with a military response -- is badly out of date. Rather, what Israel faces today is a combined threat from a "Resistance Network" and a "Delegitimization Network."

The Resistance Network is comprised of political and armed groups such as Hamas and Hizballah who "rel[y] on military means to sabotage every move directed at affecting separation between Israel and the Palestinians or securing a two-state solution" ("The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall, Reut Institute, 14 February 2010).

Furthermore, the "Resistance Network" allegedly aims to cause Israel's political "implosion" -- a la South Africa, East Germany or the Soviet Union -- rather than bring about military defeat through direct confrontation on the battlefield.

The "Delegitimization Network" -- which Reut Institute president and former Israeli government advisor Gidi Grinstein provocatively claims is in an "unholy alliance" with the Resistance Network -- is made up of the broad, decentralized and informal movement of peace and justice, human rights, and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) activists all over the world. Its manifestations include protests against Israeli officials visiting universities, Israeli Apartheid Week, faith-based and trade union-based activism, and "lawfare" -- the use of universal jurisdiction to bring legal accountability for alleged Israeli war criminals. The Reut Institute even cited my speech to the student conference on BDS held at Hampshire College last November as a guide to how the "delegitimization" strategy supposedly works ("Eroding Israel's Legitimacy in the International Arena," Reut Institute, 28 January 2010).

The combined "attack" from "resisters" and "delegitimizers," Reut says, "possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years." It further warns that a "harbinger of such a threat would be the collapse of the two-state solution as an agreed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the coalescence behind a 'one-state solution' as a new alternative framework."

At a basic level, Reut's analysis represents an advance over the most primitive and hitherto dominant layers of Israeli strategic thinking; it reflects an understanding, as I put it in my speech at Hampshire, that "Zionism simply cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance."

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