Monopoly capitalism monopolizes all wealth.
It bogarts the air, the land, and the water.
It bogarts our labor and the things we produce.
It bogarts our food.
It bogarts our creativity.
Monopoly capital steals from us.
It steals our kinship and turns us against one another.
It even steals our kinship with the Earth that nourishes us.
Monopoly capitalism is a parasite that is killing its host.
In my last post I made reference to the verbal gymnastics of the Supreme Court in justifying the seizure of Indigenous territories by the United States. And I linked to some things I wrote about an early case, Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810) in a previous post, from January. But that earlier post had a slightly different focus, so I want to revisit that Court decision here. It is an example of what I mean when I say that the Declaration of Independence was, among other things, a license for private land speculators to use the US Army to back them up when they were selling Native land that they decided was theirs to sell: to steal cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings from Native people; to force them, at gunpoint, to move hundreds of miles to land occupied by other Native people - land to which the white speculators also had no right. It is what I mean when I say that the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples for over a hundred years after the American Revolution to get actual (and not just pretended) sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States.
This is as good a place as any to emphasize that phrase: “cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings.” If you, the reader, received a typical education in US history you will have been left with the impression that Native Americans simply roamed freely over their territories. People frequently post maps that unintentionally reinforce that misconception by putting tribal names on ill-defined areas. In contrast, I am including here a map showing the area that is western New York State today, and that people imagine was already New York 250 years ago. It presents the settlements as they were shortly before the American Revolution. Note that every one of those triangles is an Indigenous town, whether Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, or Oneida. The squares represent British forts.
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| from Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Helen Hornbeck Tanner |
Another way of understanding just how developed these Native towns and farms were is by looking at Army records of their destruction. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered General John Sullivan and one-third of the Continental Army to raid that area and destroy the homes and crops. You will notice that I emphasize the number of troops Washington committed at a time when he was fighting the mighty British Army. It shows how difficult he thought the task would be, but also how important. The Continental troops burned forty towns, 160,000 bushels of corn, and an uncounted volume of fruits and vegetables. These were settled, well-developed communities. I’ll quote the US National Parks Service website:
Many of the troops were shocked upon entering these villages. They found not the crude bark huts or longhouses of "Savages," but instead orderly rows of houses built of hewn timbers and frame houses with windows. Well-cultivated vegetable fields extended out from the villages, along with extensive apple, peach, and cherry orchards. Many of these Indian villages rivaled or surpassed the towns that the soldiers had come from.
Again, I hope this changes your understanding of what it meant to steal Native land and why I employ a metaphor about some Russian oligarch seizing your house to build a theme park. And the same things were true about the Native lands seized in the south. Those thefts were not about building settlements in the forest. They were about white people taking Natives' houses, farms, orchards, and businesses. They were even about stealing furniture and utensils.
Back to Fletcher v. Peck. In 1795 the state of Georgia claimed lands west of its modern boundaries that included much of what is now Alabama and Mississippi, what was then called the Yazoo District. I say “claimed” not just because other states had conflicting claims, but also because it was the home of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muskogee Creeks who had never relinquished their own claims to that land, claims that were backed up by the fact that they actually lived there, and had been living there as long as anybody could remember, that their houses and towns and farms were there, that the graves of their ancestors were there. The Georgia State Legislature had no particular way of actually pressing this claim and so they knew they would soon have to cede that territory to the United States government. But before acknowledging it as US - not Georgia - territory the Georgia State Legislature sold that land (land they did not control) to real estate speculation companies for a little over a penny an acre, which was a ridiculously low price even then. The sale wasn’t just fraudulent because Georgia didn’t really own or control the land. It wasn’t just fraudulent because the price suggested a crony deal. It was fraudulent because virtually every member of the legislature who voted for it either were shareholders in the purchasing companies, or received bribes for their votes, or both. The scandal was so notorious that almost every one of them were kicked out by the voters in the next election. The new legislature immediately repudiated the sale, going so far as burning all copies of the original law in public.
In light of this repudiation, did the contested land belong to the speculators or not? The very public nature of the scandal made it hard for them to rely on public sympathy if they sued. But what if a third party brought suit? Somebody who was “innocent” because they purchased Yazoo land from the speculators without knowing about the scandal. In order to make such a case, the speculators arranged a sale to a collaborator, arranged for that purchaser to sue them (the speculators), and even hired an attorney to represent the man suing them!
The first thing you should know is that the attorney for the “defendant” (the speculators) was himself one of those speculators, a member of Congress who left office in order to argue the lawsuit and who was subsequently made a Justice of the Court less than a year later. The second thing you should know is that Chief Justice John Marshall, while not directly involved in the Yazoo lands, was a speculator in other Native lands for which there was also no actual title. You will not be surprised, then, to learn that the Court decided in favor of the speculators, insisting that the new Georgia legislature had no authority to nullify a sale by the previous legislature, regardless of how much bribery and self-dealing there had been in making that sale. But there was no discussion of whether Georgia had a right to sell Native land. That is simply assumed!
What the Court could never do through its decision was make the Yazoo district available to white settlers in the real world. First the US Army had to fight a series of wars against the Native inhabitants. Then Congress had to pass an Indian Removal Act to bar the Indigenous people from their own homes. Then the Army had to go again to actually remove them.
And that is not the end of the federal subsidy to the speculators. They didn’t really want the land themselves, of course. They just wanted to profit on the difference between the penny an acre they paid and the price they could get from the white people who did want to move there. And those people couldn’t possibly afford it without being offered credit by the US government. More on that in another post.
Let us imagine for a moment that some Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) billionaire decided to turn your neighborhood into a truck depot (or exclusive waterpark or luxury high-rise block).
Let’s imagine that this billionaire claimed to have bought the property from someone with some spurious claim to it. When their employees show up and tell you that your home is scheduled for demolition you and your neighbors object. So they turn to the Russian (or Saudi or Singaporean) military to evict all of you. The only reason this scenario feels implausible to a white American is because the US military is stronger than those others. So you’ll have to imagine for a moment that it isn’t.
This is the essence of settler colonialism. One important reason for the American Revolution was that the colonies were issuing warrants for Native lands west of the Appalachians and the British government wouldn’t support those claims. (Let’s note that the reason was not concern for the rights of Indigenous peoples; it was Parliament’s reluctance to fund a new war against the Natives while they were already heavily indebted for the Seven-Years’ War against the French.) George Washington was one of the leading speculators in those Trans-Appalachian grants.
So the Declaration of Independence was, among other things, a license for private land speculators to use the US Army to back them up when they were selling Native land that they decided was theirs to sell. To steal cultivated farms, houses, and community buildings from Native people. To force them, at gunpoint, to move hundreds of miles to land occupied by other Native people - land to which the white speculators also had no right.
This pattern continued all the way to the Pacific. Did you think that when Napoleon sold Jefferson 828,000 square miles of land, including all or part of thirteen states, he actually owned it? Or even controlled it? The basis of France’s claim to what they called Louisiana was just that: they claimed it. The exact same thing was true of the 529,000 square miles, including 7 states, that the United States forced Mexico to sell after occupying their capital city. And the 586,000 square miles of Alaska for which the US gave Russia 2¢ an acre.
All this land was home to a vast population of indigenous people who had been living there always. I won’t begin to discuss here the verbal gymnastics US courts have gone through to pretend it was legal to mount the subsequent military operations to evict the Native occupants and to replace them with white people (and the Black people they enslaved to make this eviction economically productive.) For over a hundred years after the American Revolution the US Army fought against Indigenous peoples to get actual and not just pretended sovereignty over what we now think of as the United States. The maps in your history book showing the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, and the Oregon Treaty obscure all of this by pretending that diplomats in capitals many thousands of miles away had the legal authority to dispose of territory that they never even controlled.
I am more than discomfited by people blocking access to a synagogue. I hate the menacing, macing, cursing, and physically attacking the people entering, or anybody around wearing a kippah. I am sickened by self-styled allies of Palestine who enter a subway car - masked! - and demand that any Zionists present raise their hands. All that shit is simply indefensible.
But I am also deeply shamed by friends who are quick to denounce these things and imply that their adversaries who do not also denounce them are hypocritical when they themselves are silent about the demolition of the Great Omari Mosque, the Khalid bin al Waleed Mosque, the Church of St. Porphyria’s, etc. by the IDF. They are all quick to say that Hamas combatants use the churches and mosques of Gaza without knowing anything whatever in particular about the individual case.
Welcoming real estate pimps who are selling condos on land that has yet to even be transferred by colonial courts may not be as bad as hiding the perpetrators of the atrocities of October 7. But then again, the antisemitic hoods in LA didn’t raze Adas Israel to the ground.
Last month we learned of a committee of billionaires who offered to purchase Mayor Adams’s police action to break up student protest camps at Columbia and NYU. Today Reuters reports on largely-secret influence operations by the government of Israel inside the US Congress and elsewhere. But when people call attention to these things they are accused of employing old antisemitic tropes. This reminds me of the definition of chutzpah: murdering your parents and asking for the mercy of the court as an orphan. We live in a bizarro universe in which Marjorie Taylor Greene(!), who traffics regularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jewish space lasers?) feels free to denounce the “disgusting antisemitism” of the Democratic Party. I am at a loss.
I have been watching with dismay as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which used to pretend that it didn't try to affect elections, has poured $15 million+ into a Democratic Congressional primary - not general - election to defeat my former representative, Jamaal Bowman. Interestingly, most of their flyers and ads and robocalls aren't even focusing on his call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Instead they lie that he opposes President Biden's agenda, which he does not, and which his opponent supports only lukewarmly. But the reason isn't really his call for that ceasefire, nor even his support for the human rights of Palestinian people.
No, AIPAC is moving against Jamaal because he refused to tone down those positions when they advised him to do so. Moreover, they are making an example of him because they think he is vulnerable as representative of a district with a large proportion of Jewish voters. But the money they are spending to overwhelm Representative Bowman's grassroots campaign is not about getting one congressman out of office. It is meant as a message to other politicians who don't follow AIPAC's advice: what we did to him, we can do to you.
This is what happens when people who have money and power choose to act as gangsters. It brought to mind an old story about the US and Nicaragua:
In 1979, the dictatorial dynasty of the Somoza family in Nicaragua was brought down by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. The United States had supported the Somoza dictatorship for decades after installing it with the armed support of the US Marine Corp in 1933. (See the book War is a Racket by two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Medley Butler.) As soon as the Somozas were ousted, the CIA began funding anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua to harass and - they hoped - bring down the new government to replace it with a more friendly one. Even after Congress explicitly barred aid to the Contras, the Reagan Administration found ways to illegally get weapons to them. That was one part of the Iran-Contra Affair for which Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was granted immunity from prosecution. It was complicated, but the gist of it was that the Administration was illegally selling arms to Iran and using some of Iran's payments to fund arms for the Contras, also illegally.
Novelist Salman Rushdie visited Nicaragua during this period and published The Jaguar Smile about his observations. He spoke at great length with the Sandinista's foreign minister, Father Miguel d'Escoto who was attempting to negotiate with the US government to end the CIA's intervention. In his book, Rushdie repeated this story that Father Miguel told him:
D’Escoto described the visit to Managua of a White House emissary - whom I’ll call ‘Rocky. During their talks, he told us, he himself had repeatedly emphasized that, given good will on both sides, he was convinced that the difficulties between the US and Nicaragua could fairly straightforwardly be resolved. ‘’We understand,” I said, “that you have certain security requirements in this region. That’s fin. We can discuss all those. We are pragmatic people, and we want a working deal with the United States.”’
Eventually (d’Escoto continued), Rocky took up the gauntlet. If they were hypothetically to suppose that this hypothetical good will might hypothetically exist, on what basis did the padre think that negotiations might begin?
‘Well,’ d’Escoto said, ‘suppose we both agreed to abide by international law? That would be a fairly objective basis.’
‘That’s your problem, Father,’ Rocky told him. ‘You’re a philosopher. You won’t concentrate on the facts.’
And what were the facts? D’Escoto, an excellent raconteur, performed Rocky’s reply. ‘These contras on your frontier, Padre. They give you lots of trouble, don’t they?’ Yes, d’Escoto had replied, but they wouldn’t if you stopped funding them. ‘There you go again,’ Rocky said. ‘More philosophy. You’re hopeless, Father. The reality is that these people have been funded, are being funded and will continue to be funded. And they give you trouble. Those are facts.’ He then said he thought Father Miguel looked pretty intelligent. ‘And intelligent men don’t want trouble. And you’ve got trouble.’
So what did he suggest, d’Escoto asked. ‘It’s easy, came the reply. ‘Just do as we say. Just do as we say, and you’ll see how this trouble you’ve got will disappear. Overnight. As if by magic. It just won’t be there anymore. You’ll be astonished. Just do as we say.’
This is what AIPAC is telling the other members of Congress who call for ceasefire, who call for an end to illegal occupation, who call for human rights for Palestinians. They are not asking for a particular position, a specific vote, a one-time compromise. They are saying: "Just do as we say."
We were taught:
“Three signs mark this people: their capacity for mercy, for shame, and for kindness.”
“What is hateful to you; do not to another. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”
“You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you; only to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk in humility with your God”
And we were taught the consequences of our failure:
“When you lift up your hands I will turn my eyes away from you. Though you pray at length I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime; wash yourselves clean. Put your evil doings away from My sight.”
If the beating heart of our identity devolves into stoking the memory of the fires of the Shoah, then we are worshipping Moloch. Centering Jewish victimhood to the exclusion of all else is a threat to our survival as a people.
If we worship the power of the IDF - its Merkava tanks, its intelligence services, its Jericho ballistic missiles - then that, too, is a threat to our survival as a people. Weapons are false idols; they are sacrifices to Baal.
If we come to believe that our existence as a people requires the obliteration of our neighbors, then we have discarded what it means to be a Jew. We will have transformed ourselves into Laban the Aramean: a moral and physical threat to the legacy that 1500 generations of our grandparents and great-grandparents gifted us.
Who are the Nazis?
I don’t want to minimize either the hatefulness or the ignorance of Israeli cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu’s call to erase the holy month of Ramadan. The fact that a grandstander like him can garner attention with bizarre Islamophobia says very bad things about Israeli society.
For the same reason I won’t just wave away his November statement that nuclear weapons are an option in Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that Eliyahu was suspended from his cabinet for that outrage, but he was not.
And there is no reason to single out Eliyahu for his opposition to food and medical aid to Gaza. The entire Israeli government has actively pursued a policy of starving Gazans, then murdering them when they come to retrieve the trickle of arriving food… along with bombing them and their homes from air, land, and sea.
No, it is Eliyahu’s rationale for denying humanitarian aid that got my attention and that is because his reasoning is exactly the same as too many American Jews, people who I thought I knew.
Eliyahu asks, rhetorically, whether we would give humanitarian aid to Nazis. Who are the Nazis?
The Nazis held Jews in concentration camps and walled ghettos, like Israel holds Palestinians in Gaza.
The Nazis starved the Jews in the camps and ghettos, like Israel starves Palestinians in Gaza.
The Nazis killed the Jews in the camps and ghettos, like Israel kills Palestinians in Gaza.
Perhaps Amichai Eliyahu represents a small, extreme political party. Perhaps he makes outrageous statements because he wants attention. But if you are willfully blinding yourself to the parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the Israeli assault on the Palestinian people, you make yourself an ally to Nazis.
And let us not forget, we the American people are providing military aid to Israel, aid that is absolutely essential to their continuing Holocaust against the people of Gaza. We are providing aid to Nazis.
Today is Day 133 of Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza. I have no voice against it other than private conversation and Facebook posts. Two weeks ago, a friend challenged me, asking why I have been so vocal in condemning Israel, yet remain silent about Hamas’s October 7 raid. I guess the short answer is the same one that Yeshayahu Leibowitz used to give: “I am a Jew.” But that has so many meanings. Here is a first pass at explaining what Israel means to me.
When I was a teenager I was certain that there had to be more to being Jewish than what I saw around me. We celebrated different holidays than my Christian classmates. We ate only kosher food. We attended synagogue services Friday nights, Saturday mornings, and on festivals. I could describe our rabbi as aloof and distant, but I don’t think that does him justice. I think “utterly uninterested in any of us” might be a more accurate description.
The summer before my bar mitzvah I attended Camp Ramah and I had a glimpse of something more. My counselor, Byron, was a student at Jewish Theological Seminary and an assistant to the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who brought emotion and awe to what was then an overly-rational branch of Judaism. Heschel was a towering scholar of Jewish religious thought, and especially of the Prophets. That summer of 1964 he was already a close friend of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and only a few months away from marching with him in Selma, Alabama.
Byron taught us that our daily prayers were to be done with kavanah, which signifies both devotion and intention. He explained that the spirit we should bring to everything we did was an awareness of the transcendent all around us. We studied Tanach (Bible) everyday, specifically Joshua and Judges. Our counselors encouraged us to treat them as difficult: texts. not to master, but to question. That was especially true of our discussion of herem, the instructions to utterly wipe out certain towns in Canaan. This feels especially apropos today in light of the daily reports of new Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank.
Those experiences at camp made me want to add to my daily Jewish practice and to do it with devotion and intention. I began wearing the tallit katan, a garment with tzitzit, the fringes that are commanded in the Torah, on its corners. I began the daily practice of bentsching tefillin, the leather boxes containing words of Torah and straps that the Bible instructs us to put on our heads and arms for morning prayer. I knew nobody in Livingston who did either of these things. Neither my father nor my grandfather did. My friends viewed me as some kind of religious fanatic when they got wind of it. I also read and reread Nine Gates to the Hassidic Mysteries by the Czech scholar Jiri Langer because its stories of rabbis and miracle workers contained the kind of extraordinary transcendence that our synagogue was missing.
Our synagogue teen group was USY. At various gatherings around the region I always saw the high school seniors who returned from spending a summer in Israel with USY. You could recognize the guys at a distance during Shabbat service at any Conservative synagogue by their large prayer shawl, the tallit gadol, which was definitely not the style among the suburban dads and was not the narrow tallit we received as a gift from our parents when we became bar mitzvah. They had a sense of seriousness and purpose and of having experienced something significant and transformational. (A side note: A few years later I noticed the same thing with people in the radical movement who visited Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades! Not the tallit gadol, though.)
I was really excited the summer after junior year when it was finally my turn. My photos of those two months are long gone. So are my letters home. But the little journal I kept is still with me. As I type these words I have pulled it down from my shelf. It is a record of some of what I was thinking. It helps me distinguish between thoughts I actually had then, at 17, and the conclusions I came to later about those experiences. My experience must be understood in the context of the time. It was 1969, just two years after the Six-Day War in which Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Teen-aged me still thought of this as a modern-day miracle, something like Gideon defeating a host of 130,000 with an army of 300 in the Book of Judges. I didn’t know that the Israeli armed forces had been utterly confident that they could do this in three days, or that US military intelligence agreed with Israel’s optimism but thought it would take seven. Nevertheless, certain myths about Israel and the “greening of a desert” that began to reveal themselves to me.
I’ll share a passage from July 14 when we made a quick trip to the Golan Heights:
After crossing the border we were shown how one could pick it out with the naked eye. Brown on Syrian side, green on Israel. Proof positive of Arab laziness. It looked like grazing land . Five minutes later I noticed some really nice fields and orchards and sure enough it belonged to a village of lazy Arabs. Another five minutes and there was a group of lazy Arabs threshing wheat.
I can only hope that the sarcasm of my tone is clear to my reader, that I was blown away by how much like a garden that whole village appeared to me and how awestruck I was by the amount of work that must have gone into cultivating and maintaining it. There were so many times that summer when our leaders and guides went just too far with their “proofs” that Israel was the result of an encounter between “a people without land and a land without people.” That was 55 years ago, but the sheer idyllic beauty of that Syrian village has stayed with me and I think of it every time some willfully ignorant defender of Israel starts bloviating about what we Jews have done with a “barren” land.
That summer was also only two years since Israel had occupied the West Bank and Gaza and it was entirely unclear to me that the occupation was a crime, nor that it would still be going on in 2024. Our group spent the better part of a week staying at Gush Etzion and taking long hikes in the Judean Hills with guides from that community. They shared their stories - alternately joyous and frightening - about having to evacuate their homes in 1948 and then returning in 1967. I didn’t know that over the next years they would become the center of the violent settler movement. I imagined that the submachine guns they carried were for our protection, not to intimidate the Palestinian farmers whose lands we were tramping through. But I had what I guess I can describe as hints, or maybe premonitions.
My journal for July 31 describes a hike along the course of an ancient aqueduct that provided water to Jerusalem. Here is one of those hints I got:
At one point we stopped at a mulberry tree. They were delicious. My hands became stained red. I stretched out by the aqueduct to clean them. Most came off and the remainder turned blue. I caught a tadpole, then threw him back in. The scene by the mulberry tree seemed to be becoming ugly to me. There were just too many people to have discovered one poor fruit tree.
We walked on quite a way. The aqueduct went underground, so we had to cross a field, a hill field with terracing. We had to jump from a stone wall at one point. Rather than jumping, most kids were pushing off from a sitting position - not much good for the wall. As one girl went off she brought a section of underpinnings with her. I then took the task of standing there, directing people away from the damaged section, making them jump from a standing position, giving them a hand coming down.
Then one big kid came along and just barged over the damaged section, completely destroying it. The Arab farmer who owned the field came running up angry. Why couldn’t we walk through someone else’s field? He’d been there for years. I started to repair the wall. The guy said he appreciated it but we should go on. Lee said alright. I felt and still feel incomplete not having repaired it.
I have never forgotten that experience, even for a minute. I can still see it in my memory. I have come to realize that I had no particular skill at dry stone wall repair and so there was no reason for this man to accept my offer of help. I have come to realize that he just wanted us to leave. But my awareness of the arrogance and entitlement that allowed us to traipse across that manicured and terraced hillside has only grown and it fills me with shame. The fact that we were accompanied by an armed West Bank settler and that I failed to see him as that farmer saw him fills me with shame, even though the category of “violent West Bank settler” was not yet a trope.
What strikes me, too, is the way I could walk through that terraced hillside having a little Edenic fantasy while the ugliness of our mere presence in that place should have been clearly visible to me.
I returned home without a dramatically changed view of the State of Israel or of Zionism. I simply saw that there were some serious problems. Some I associated with a kind of over-zealous marketing on the part of either our leaders or the directors of some of the educational sites we visited. Some I attributed to racist individuals. But it took me decades to recognize that these problems were essential to, and embedded in, the very idea of an ethnoreligious state, and particularly one where roughly half the residents were not members of that ethnic or religious group.
There is so much more to say about my experiences and my feelings. I haven’t touched on chanting Eicha for our group at the Kotel in Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av, 1969. I haven’t touched on my ambivalence about setting foot on Har Ha’Bayit. I haven’t gotten near the night I suddenly found myself at a Gramercy Park hotel running security for a public speech by the PLO’s representative to the UN. Over the decades I have separated myself almost entirely from Jewish communal life, in large part over the question of Israel, but there are other reasons, too. Nevertheless, being Jewish remains an essential part of how I understand myself as a person.
It is Day 133 of Israel’s latest and most genocidal invasion of Gaza. I see the Israel acting as an outlaw state. I see the IDF acting as Nazis. And I see American Jews acting as though we, not the Palestinians, are in mortal danger. I cannot pretend that somebody else is doing this, as if it has nothing to do with me. I have written my Congressman, but he is Ritchie Torres and he gleefully fronts for the Israel lobby in Washington. I try to communicate my horror with everybody I know, but they seem either to already agree or to be unmoved. I only wish I had a louder voice.
