Law, Power, and Justice

Trump

Several states are considering whether Trump is going to be on the 2024 ballot.  Most of them are arguing that the issue should be left to “the people.”  If Trump was 22, these Secretaries of State would not be leaving the issue to the people, they would be disqualifying him.

The Corporate Media

The corporate media which collectively has the memory and attention span of a flea, has moved on from the war in Israel.  It’s way too expansive to send two (MSNBC) or three (CNN) reporters to stay in Israel, and besides Trump gossip is more interesting and requires less research.

A lot of the Trump coverage is discussion of what might happen.  There’s enough happening to pontificate endlessly with every “expert” in the known universe about what king of witness, for example, Donald Trump (drug addict) Jr. will be.

Anyway, enough of that…

Israel  (MSNBC)

• Some of the wounded are being allowed to go through the Rafah border crossing to Egypt.
• A refugee camp has been bombed twice in two days.
• Jordan’s ambassador was recalled from Israel.
• Foreign nationals have been told to go to the border crossing previously and the border was not then opened.

The Gaza-ification of the West Bank by Isaad Chotiner

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-gaza-ification-of-the-west-bank

• There is increased violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank.  Sometimes with support of the Israeli Army.
• Chotiner’s discussion with El-Ad, as Israeli activist.
• El-Ad: Jewish settlements in the West Bank are in Area C.  Israel’s goal is cleansing Area C of Palestinian communities.  It is not a new goal.
• The legal phrase that describes the process is creatin a “coercive environment” so Palestinians will leave.
• “The Israeli state, through its settlers, is trying to take advantage of the fact that all eyes are on Gaza and is intensifying dramatically the pressure on Palestinian communities. I would assume from the Israeli perspective this has been a success. Thirteen Palestinian communities have basically fled in horror in the three weeks since October 7th.”
• Israel denies Palestinians living in these areas “running water, from being connected to the grid, from being connected to electricity and basic services.”
• These measures are backed by the Israeli courts.  “…this is part of an ongoing Israeli state project…”
• “They refuse to give building permits for Palestinians there. And you should think of what is making the headlines recently—settler violence—as one of those tools that has been used by the state when other tools, again, from their perspective, haven’t proved effective enough.”
• “try to imagine a reality in which already, for years, you are living in this situation in which you can’t get a building permit because Israel just doesn’t give many to Palestinian communities. So you’re under constant threat of home demolition, and sometimes not only the threat. Sometimes the bulldozers show up. You’re not allowed to have running water or electricity; maybe you have electricity from solar panels that were donated to you by a European humanitarian agency. And even those solar panels sometimes get confiscated by the Army with the excuse that they’re not legal. Sometimes the Army comes and trains on your field. Sometimes settlers show up and rough up some people, beat them, threaten them. Sometimes soldiers come and do that.”
• “You asked me specifically about the involvement of soldiers, if anyone is now shocked that Israeli soldiers are involved in this. You should have been shocked five years ago. You should have been shocked twenty years ago. Because the involvement of soldiers has been also documented for years, not only with testimonies but also with video footage.”
• Question: “Is this the Israeli government, the Israeli military, pursuing an active policy of helping settlers uproot Palestinian communities? Or is it your sense that there’s vigilantism among Israeli soldiers and the Israeli government is fine with that going on?”
• “Some readers might think that there is a distinction between potentially “bad settlers” and the Israeli state. The question is to what extent is the state effective in handling these “bad settlers”? This is the wrong way of thinking about it. The uprooting of Palestinian communities all over the West Bank is not a project of the settlers, the bad ones, the good ones, or the other ones. It is a state project. All of these policies have been in place in a variety of ways. There are legal mechanisms that the state has been using to take land from Palestinians and settle Jewish communities on it instead. It’s so cynical, it’s really unbelievable. But that is the way things have been unfolding in the West Bank for more than half a century already. There are announcements of new state land. Who’s the state in the West Bank? It’s the Israeli state. So land that’s announced as state land is public land, and then cannot be used for the benefit of the Palestinian population. It’s used by the state for the purpose it wants to advance, which is Jewish settlement, right? And the regime issues building permits for Jewish settlements and issues demolition orders for Palestinian communities.
•  
• All of these things that I’ve been describing are official bureaucratic mechanisms backed by government ministries, the Army, the Israeli courts, all of these entities working jointly to achieve the same goal, pushing out Palestinians, taking over their land.”
• “But a coercive environment rather than forcible transfer is more beneficial for the Israeli state. All of those boring, bureaucratic, complicated mechanisms that I’ve described, the balance there is that, on the one hand, you need patience because you’re making the lives of people a nightmare for a long duration of time. But the upside is that maybe after five years, maybe after ten years, they will just give up. And, if they give up, then you don’t end up with sensational TV footage that might create alarm internationally.”
• “What we’ve been seeing since October 7th, after all these years of suffering and orchestrated bureaucratic violence, are direct threats and direct actions against these communities. It happens very quickly, but it does create international friction, and that is the balance that Israel has been playing with, trying to accomplish as much displacement of Palestinians as possible while paying the minimal international price.”