INDEPENDENT JEWISH VOICES

This declaration was published in The Times on 5 February 2007 and in the Jewish Chronicle on 9 February 2007.

We are a group of Jews in Britain from diverse backgrounds, occupations and affiliations who have in common a strong commitment to social justice and universal human rights. We come together in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole. We further believe that individuals and groups within all communities should feel free to express their views on any issue of public concern without incurring accusations of disloyalty.

We have therefore resolved to promote the expression of alternative Jewish voices, particularly in respect of the grave situation in the Middle East, which threatens the future of both Israelis and Palestinians as well as the stability of the whole region. We are guided by the following principles:

Human rights are universal and indivisible and should be upheld without exception. This is as applicable in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as it is elsewhere. Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peaceful and secure lives. Peace and stability require the willingness of all parties to the conflict to comply with international law. There is no justification for any form of racism, including anti-semitism, anti-Arab racism or Islamophobia, in any circumstance. The battle against anti-semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-semitic.

These principles are contradicted when those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain and other countries consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power above the human rights of an occupied people. The Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip face appalling living conditions with desperately little hope for the future. We declare our support for a properly negotiated peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people and oppose any attempt by the Israeli government to impose its own solutions on the Palestinians. It is imperative and urgent that independent Jewish voices find a coherent and consistent way of asserting themselves on these and other issues of concern. We hereby reclaim the tradition of Jewish support for universal freedoms, human rights and social justice. The lessons we have learned from our own history compel us to speak out. We therefore commit ourselves to make public our views on a continuing basis and invite other concerned Jews to join and support us.

10 MILLION A YEAR

I am obviously not thinking of those success stories of my glorious civilization, those shining exemplars of ingenuity and enterprise, for whom salesmanship lies at the heart of human relations, those precious and superior beings to whom we are all beholden and for whom we hold such veneration, because for these immortal souls 10 million a year is probably not a sufficient remuneration. No, I am thinking of persons somewhat regrettably at the other end of life's wonderful spectrum, persons so unsuccessful as to be almost correctly described as non-persons, who doubtless have only themselves to blame.


10 million children die a year. 10 million. Apparently it corresponds to an aircraft full of them falling out of the sky every 15 minutes. Is it bird flu, or swine flu, or Aids? Why is it not on national television every night? Where are the mobilizing forces of righteous international corporate action? No need to worry, it is just plain old-fashioned starvation and the comfortable cannot catch it.

Indeed the comfortable contribute considerably to starving 10 million a year by protecting and subsidising their own products while subjecting those of the uncomfortable to tariff and exploitation. In the name of free market globalisation - which does not apply to the United States or the European Union - the comfortable insist upon flooding the uncomfortable with the surplus goods of their own comfort, destroying the indigenous production of goods. Having played a significant part in creating poverty the comfortable send in the United Nations to assist the economies of the uncomfortable while having no intention of buying anything from them that is subsequently produced unless completely on their own terms. The uncomfortable are not allowed to compete against the comfortable in any genuine free market.

These sick values are exemplified in the capitalistic horror that is the United States. It goes right back to the founding of that peculiar nation. Reading those wonderful stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneering family to my six children in succession, even then we read of proud Pa who is independent, who does not need anyone's help and who does not need to help anyone else unless he chooses. (This does not stop Pa taking off when they are starving and forcing wheat from someone else who was not choosing to share it). This phoney philosophy of choice was mysteriously laid down from the start. The ultimate logical end of this attitude is that the final 'choice' may just have to be starvation and death. In the current United States debate on health care reform one conditioned pawn in the game stated proudly that he would rather die poor and free - presumably in preference to living in a civilized nation which looked after those who for whatever reason were unable to do so themselves.

This is one way I can rationalise why the United States can carry on the way it does with a supposedly clear conscience. Then I get some understanding of copycats, for example, how the United States and its little buddy Israel can behave toward Gaza without a blush. How the United States and its despicable crony the European Union has behaved toward Iraq the way they have with economic sanctions and military war.

In my idle luxury, living in the eye of empire, I used to wonder how the world kept going, why it did not come to a grinding halt and fall apart. The people in charge did not seem to have a complete picture. Now I know that for the families of 10 million different children every year, and for hundreds of millions more like them, the world is not working, it is falling apart. But here in a country like New Zealand we can sleep on. What will wake us up will be that time when the centre of empire decides to really take over New Zealand. Warships in the harbours and helicoptors in the skies will be the time when we discover the implacable ruthlessness of the United States, the time when the false mask of benignity begins to slip off. Then we will begin to know what the vulnerable in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are now experiencing.

PRINS, NOMI. IT TAKES A PILLAGE

The author has been a managing director at Goldman Sachs and gives an insider view of the bailouts, bonuses and backroom deals from Washington to Wall Street. One chapter is headed 'Government Sachs' to underline the network of interaction between the U.S. top financiers and government agencies and elected officials. Criminal financiers were rescued by the public purse because of this interaction and Obama has a more integral relation to this network than Bush. He is now presiding over the largest transfer of public money to private pockets in U.S. history. There is no sense of responsibility to the public and no inclination to reform the financial system.

U.S. capitalism finds its ultimate achievement in the vicious competitiveness of its financial institutions which create clever and complex methods of making something out of nothing. Who gets the biggest bonuses is part of the competition. The most successful institution is Goldman Sachs whose personnel infiltrate and direct government. The author does not ascribe any planned conspiracy to this running of the country, but believes it to be a matter of backroom deals between extreme opportunists.

Nor does the author make any reference to the ethnic backgrounds of the top dogs. Although I have never read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although I simply accept the document is a fake, although I presume it is about controlling the world by controlling its finance, I now realise after reading this book that regardless of ethnicity the document may well speak truth. We now live in a world controlled by the financiers, making so-called democracy and political parties irrelevant. The author quotes Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the House of Rothschild: "Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes the laws".

There is much useful information in this work: the similarity of cause for the Great Depression and this 'recession'; the value of the New Deal; the unacceptability of merging commercial and investment banks; the lack of responsible oversight from the Federal Reserve and from Congress. An example of some good and clear information: "The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it's hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we're all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 per cent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.... There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market's fault, $1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right? Yet the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC forked out more than $13 trillion to fix the 'housing correction', as Hank Paulson steadfastly referred to the Second Great Bank Depression as late as November 20, 2008, while he was treasury secretary. With that money, the government could have bought up every residential morgage in the country - there were about $11.9 trillion worth at the end of December 2008 - and still have had a trillion left over to buy homes for every single American who couldn't afford them, and pay their health care to boot. But there was much more to it than that: Wall Street was engaged in a very dangerous practice called leverage. Leverage is when you borrow a lot of money in order to place a big bet.... Leverage included, we're looking at a possible $140 trillion problem. That's right - $140 trillion!......but leverage would not have had a platform without the help of a wondrous financial feat called securitization......" etc.

The overall impression left with me is that after a century or so of mass education and non-participatory democracy all that we have produced in the name of progress is the most sophisticated and powerful criminal gang in the history of mankind.

Rating: Very good

RIGHT OF RETURN

On 8 August 2002, in a letter to the Guardian, a group of British Jews renounce their 'right of return'.

We are Jews, born and raised outside Israel, who, under Israel's 'law of return', have a legal right to Israeli residence and citizenship. We wish to renounce this unsought 'right' because:

We regard it as morally wrong that this legal entitlement should be bestowed on us while
the very people who should have most right to a genuine 'return', having been forced or
terrorised into fleeing, are excluded.

Israel's policies towards the Palestinians are barbaric - we do not wish to identify ourselves
in any way with what Israel is doing.

We disagree with the notion that Zionist emigration to Israel is any kind of 'solution' for
Diaspora Jews, anti-semitism or racism - no matter to what extent Jews have been or are
victims of racism, they have no right to make anyone else victims.

We wish to express our solidarity with all those who are working for a time when Israel,
the West Bank and Gaza Strip can be lived in by people without restrictions based on
so-called racial, cultural, or ethnic origins.

We look forward to the day when all peoples of the area are enabled to live in peace with each other on this basis of non-discrimination and mutual respect. Perhaps some of us would even wish to live there, but only if the rights of the Palestinians are respected. To those who consider Israel a 'safe haven' for Jews in the face of anti-semitism, we say that there can be no safety in taking on the role of occupier and oppressor.

ROTH, PHILIP. EXIT GHOST

I do not think that I have read Philip Roth since his first two novels. This 2007 novel has a theme with which I can self-indulgently identify: how does the older person live? The 71 year old protagonist since the age of 60 has eschewed the hectic life of New York and been living in isolation in a rural cabin, reading and writing and listening to music, without television or newspapers. He relinquishes political emotion and "the abiding wish to find out". He quite easily came "to feel completely at home knowing nothing of what was going on". When he temporarily returns to New York for health reasons he meets up with people for whom the outcome of the next election is almost a matter of life or death. He is sympathetic but uninvolved.

A second theme involves the writer who writes the creative work in isolation, free from the demands and negativity of the parasitic world of literary criticism. This too breaks in upon him again in New York in the form of an aggressive young academic who wants to launch his career by writing a literary biography of a neglected author based upon discovered scandal. Our protagonist knew and admired this author and refuses to cooperate or be involved.

Although it sounds suspect and uncomfortable, if not unintentionally funny, there is also a good depiction of being old and afflicted, he with the after-effects of prostate cancer surgery and an elderly female friend with a brain tumour.

Then there are a couple of tiresome aspects. There is the protagonist's obsession with a young woman, a somewhat pathetic self-indulgence given his sexual status, which does not assist the credibility of his other decisions on how to live his life unless we are meant to admire the resilience of human lust. The second aspect is that American style of writing, having escaped the immobile pomposity of Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville, the tumultuous onward-rushing narrative, not without its own pomposity, something I first discovered in Thomas Wolfe and Kerouac, not to mention Whitman, a style which continues to this day. There can be high moments, but also a gathering sense of chaos and weariness.

Like this review not a great work of art.

Rating: Good/Fair