Who’s Afraid of Iran’s Big Bad Bomb?

URI AVNERY

I must start with a shocking confession: I am not afraid of the Iranian nuclear bomb.

I know that this makes me an abnormal person, almost a freak.

But what can I do? I am unable to work up fear, like a real Israeli. Try as I may, the Iranian bomb does not make me hysterical.

My father once taught me how to withstand blackmail: imagine that the awful threat of the blackmailer has already come about. Then you can tell him: Go to hell.

I have tried many times to follow this advice and found it sound. So now I apply it to the Iranian bomb: I imagine that the worst has already happened: the awful ayatollahs have got the bombs that can eradicate little Israel in a minute.

So what?

According to foreign experts, Israel has several hundred nuclear bombs (assessments vary between 80-400. If Iran sends its bombs and obliterates most of Israel (myself included), Israeli submarines will obliterate Iran. Whatever I might think about Binyamin Netanyahu, I rely on him and our security chiefs to keep our “second strike” capability intact. Just last week we were informed that Germany had delivered another state-of-the-art submarine to our navy for this purpose.

Israeli idiots – and there are some around – respond: “Yes, but the Iranian leaders are not normal people. They are madmen. Religious fanatics. They will risk the total destruction of Iran just to destroy the Zionist state. Like exchanging queens in chess.”

Such convictions are the outcome of decades of demonizing. Iranians – or at least their leaders – are seen as subhuman miscreants.

Reality shows us that the leaders of Iran are very sober, very calculating politicians. Cautious merchants in the Iranian bazaar style. They don’t take unnecessary risks. The revolutionary fervor of the early Khomeini days is long past, and even Khomeini would not have dreamt of doing anything so close to national suicide.

According to the Bible, the great Persian king Cyrus allowed the captive Jews of Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. At that time, Persia was already an ancient civilization – both cultural and political.

After the “return from Babylon”, the Jewish commonwealth around Jerusalem lived for 200 years under Persian suzerainty. I was taught in school that these were happy years for the Jews.

Since then, Persian culture and history has lived through another two and a half millennia. Persian civilization is one of the oldest in the world. It has created a great religion and influenced many others, including Judaism. Iranians are fiercely proud of that civilization.

To imagine that the present leaders of Iran would even contemplate risking the very existence of Persia out of hatred of Israel is both ridiculous and megalomaniac.

Moreover, throughout history, relations between Jews and Persians have almost always been excellent. When Israel was founded, Iran was considered a natural ally, part of David Ben-Gurion’s “strategy of the periphery” – an alliance with all the countries surrounding the Arab world.

The Shah, who was re-installed by the American and British secret services, was a very close ally. Teheran was full of Israeli businessmen and military advisers. It served as a base for the Israeli agents working with the rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq who were fighting against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

After the Islamic revolution, Israel still supported Iran against Iraq in their cruel 8-year war. The notorious Irangate affair, in which my friend Amiram Nir and Oliver North played such an important role, would not have been possible without the old Iranian-Israeli ties.

Even now, Iran and Israel are conducting amiable arbitration proceedings about an old venture: the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline built jointly by the two countries.

If the worst comes to the worst, nuclear Israel and nuclear Iran will live in a Balance of Terror.

Highly unpleasant, indeed. But not an existential menace.

However, for those who live in terror of the Iranian nuclear capabilities, I have a piece of advice: use the time we still have.

Under the American-Iranian deal, we have at least 10 years before Iran could start the final phase of producing the bomb.

Please use this time for making peace.

The Iranian hatred of the “Zionist Regime” – the State of Israel – derives from the fate of the Palestinian people. The feeling of solidarity for the helpless Palestinians is deeply ingrained in all Islamic peoples. It is part of the popular culture in all of them. It is quite real, even if the political regimes misuse, manipulate or ignore it.

Since there is no ground for a specific Iranian hatred of Israel, it is solely based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No conflict, no enmity.

Logic tells us: if we have several years before we have to live in the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, let’s use this time to eliminate the conflict. Once the Palestinians themselves declare that they consider the historic conflict with Israel settled, no Iranian leadership will be able to rouse its people against us.

For several weeks now, Netanyahu has been priding himself publicly on a huge, indeed historic, achievement.

For the first time ever, Israel is practically part of an Arab alliance.

Throughout the region, the conflict between Muslim Sunnis and Muslim Shiites is raging. The Shiite camp, headed by Iran, includes the Shiites in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. (Netanyahu falsely – or out of ignorance – includes the Sunni Hamas in this camp.)

The opposite Sunni camp includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states. Netanyahu hints that Israel is now secretly accepted by them as a member.

It is a very untidy picture. Iran is fighting against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which is a mortal enemy of Israel. Iran is supporting the Assad regime in Damascus, which is also supported by Hezbollah, which fights against the lslamic State, while the Saudis support other extreme Sunni Syrians who fight against Assad and the Islamic State. Turkey supports Iran and the Saudis while fighting against Assad. And so on.

I am not enamored with Arab military dictatorships and corrupt monarchies. Frankly, I detest them. But if Israel succeeds in becoming an official member of any Arab coalition, it would be a historic breakthrough, the first in 130 years of Zionist-Arab conflict.

However, all Israeli relations with Arab countries are secret, except those with Egypt and Jordan, and even with these two the contacts are cold and distant, relations between the regimes rather than between the peoples.

Let’s face facts: no Arab state will engage in open and close cooperation with Israel before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ended. Even kings and dictators cannot afford to do so. The solidarity of their peoples with the oppressed Palestinians is far too profound.

Real peace with the Arab countries is impossible without peace with the Palestinian people, as peace with the Palestinian people is impossible without peace with the Arab countries.

So if there is now a chance to establish official peace with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and to turn the cold peace with Egypt into a real one, Netanyahu should jump at it. The terms of an agreement are already lying on the table: the Saudi peace plan, also called the Arab Initiative, which was adopted many years ago by the entire Arab League. It is based on the two-state solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Netanyahu could amaze the whole world by “doing a de Gaulle” – making peace with the Sunni Arab world (as de Gaulle did with Algeria) which would compel the Shiites to follow suit.

Do I believe in this? I do not. But if God wills it, even a broomstick can shoot.

And on the day of the Jewish Pesach feast, commemorating the (imaginary) exodus from Egypt, we are reminding ourselves that miracles do happen.

NATO is Building Up for War

Brian Cloughley

Voutenay sur Cure, France.

The German city of Frankfurt is continental Europe’s largest financial center and host to the country’s Stock Exchange, countless other financial institutions, and the headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) which is responsible for administering the monetary policy of the 18-nation Eurozone. The place is awash with money, as demonstrated by the plush new ECB office building which is costing a fortune.

The original price of the bank’s enormous palace was supposed to be 500 million euros, about 550 million dollars, but the bill has now been admitted as €1.3 billion (£930 m; $1.4 bn).  This absurdly over-expensive fiasco was directed by the people who are supposed to steer the financial courses of 18 nations and their half billion unfortunate citizens. If the ECB displays similar skill sets in looking after Europe’s money as it has in controlling the cost of constructing its huge twin-tower headquarters, then Europe is in for a rocky time.

Intriguingly, the Bank isn’t alone in contributing to Europe’s bureaucratic building boom. There is another Europe-based organization of equal ambition, pomposity and incompetence which is building a majestically expensive and luxurious headquarters with a mammoth cost overrun about which it is keeping very quiet indeed.

The perpetrator of this embarrassing farce is NATO,  the US-Canada-European North Atlantic Treaty Organization which is limping out of Afghanistan licking its wounds, having been fighting a bunch of sandal-wearing rag-clad amateur irregulars who gave the hi-tech forces of the West a very hard time in a war whose outcome was predictable. But the debacle hasn’t dimmed the vision of the zealous leaders of NATO who are confronting Russia in order to justify the existence of their creaking, leaking, defeated dinosaur.  Their problem is not only do they lose wars, but they then look for another one to fight — to be directed from a glittery new and vastly expensive building whose cost has soared above all estimates.

Just like NATO’s wars.

NATO’s operation ‘Unified Protector’ to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi involved a massive aerial blitz of 9,658 airstrikes which ended with the gruesome murder of Gadhafi — and caused collapse of Libya into an omnishambles where fanatics of the barbarous Islamic State are now establishing themselves.

In spite of the horror of NATO’s Libyan catastrophe one does have to have a quiet smile about Ivo H. Daalder and James G Stavridis whose deeply researched analysis in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2012 was titled ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya.’  These sages declared that “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention . . .  NATO’s involvement in Libya demonstrated that the alliance remains an essential source of stability . . .  NATO may not be able to replicate its success in Libya in another decade. NATO members must therefore use the Chicago summit to strengthen the alliance by ensuring that the burden sharing that worked so well in Libya — and continues in Afghanistan today — becomes the rule, not the exception.”

Not much is working well in either Libya or Afghanistan two years after the Daalder-Stavridis advocacy of “burden sharing” and it is obvious that NATO has been the opposite of a “source of stability” in both unfortunate countries.

In October 2005 I wrote that “NATO is to increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan to 15,000 and its secretary-general states that instead of acting as a peacekeeping force it will assume the combat role of U.S. troops, which is insane . . .   The insurgency in Afghanistan will continue until foreign troops leave, whenever that might be. After a while, the government in Kabul will collapse and there will be anarchy until a brutal, ruthless, drug-rich warlord achieves power. He will rule the country as it has always been ruled by Afghans: by threats, religious ferocity, deceit, bribery, and outright savagery when the latter can be practiced without retribution. And the latest foreign occupation will become just another memory.”

The number of US-NATO troops in Afghanistan has been reduced from a high of 130,000 to 13,000, of which some 10,000 are U.S., but NATO’s new headquarters building in Brussels is expanding in both size and cost. The budget for the immense complex was approved at 460 million Euros (500 million US dollars) in 2010 but has now surged to over 1.25 billion Euros,  about 1.4 billion dollars.

Germany’s Der Spiegel reported in January that the scandal of the cost overrun was being kept secret by all governments contributing to this redundant organization. A leaked cable from Germany’s ambassador explained that at a meeting of NATO representatives last December they “pointed to the disastrous effect on the image of the alliance if construction were to stop and if NATO appeared to be incapable of punctually completing a construction project that was decided at the NATO summit of government leaders in April 1999 in Washington. The risk of a further cost increase is already palpable.”

The solution to NATO’s self-imposed image problem was simple :  the people responsible for managing the affairs of a military alliance involving 28 countries, 3.5 million combatants and 5,000 nuclear weapons decided, as asked by the staff of its Secretary General, to deal with the matter “confidentially.”  In other words, the cost overruns and delays in construction are being deliberately concealed from the public in the hope that NATO’s executives will not appear incompetent.

Meantime, while trying to conceal their flaws, faults and failings in management of basic administrative affairs, NATO’s chiefs are squaring up to Russia in an attempt to persuade the world that President Putin is about to mount an invasion from the east.  The focal point of NATO’s contrived alarm is the corrupt and chaotic regime in power in Ukraine, which has serious disagreements with Russia and is therefore energetically supported by the United States to the point of distortion, menace and mendacity.

As reported in the UK’s Daily Telegraph on March 4, the commander of US troops in Europe, General Frederick “Ben” Hodges, has accused Russia of having 12,000 troops inside eastern Ukraine, which was irresponsible nonsense.

Hodges was formerly the army’s Congressional Liaison Officer in Washington where he obviously acquired a taste for political grandstanding, as in a political speech of the sort that generals have no right to make he declared that “We have to raise the cost for Putin. Right now he has 85 per cent domestic support. But when mothers start seeing their sons come home dead, when the price goes up, domestic support goes down,” which was as offensive as it was hostile.

In February the Wall Street Journal reported Hodges as saying “I believe the Russians are mobilizing right now for a war that they think is going to happen in five or six years—not that they’re going to start a war in five or six years, but I think they are anticipating that things are going to happen, and that they will be in a war of some sort, of some scale, with somebody within the next five or six years.” Just what President Putin was supposed to make of that is anyone’s guess — but it is certain that Hodges’ bellicose meanderings did nothing to persuade Moscow that there would be any attempt by the US-NATO coalition to modify its policy of uncompromising enmity.

Other pronouncements by NATO leaders have been equally threatening and intended to convince the public of western Europe that Russia attacked Ukraine.

But even if Russia had indeed invaded Ukraine, it would have had nothing whatever to do with anyone else.

The US-NATO coalition willfully ignores the fact that Ukraine is not a member of either the European Union or NATO and has no treaty of any sort with any nation in the world that would require provision of political, economic or military support in the event of a bilateral dispute with any other country.  Yet NATO has seized upon the Ukraine-Russia discord to justify its policy of unrelenting hostility to Moscow.

NATO should have been disbanded at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union because that threat was the sole reason for its existence; but it decided to multiply membership and extend its military presence closer and closer to Russia’s borders. There is little wonder that Russia is apprehensive about NATO’s intentions, as the muscle-flexing coalition lurches towards conflict.

NATO’S Supreme Commander, US General Breedlove, has also contributed greatly to tension and fear in Europe by issuing dire warnings about Russia’s supposed maneuvers.  On March 5 he indulged in fantasy by claiming, without a shred of evidence and no subsequent proof, that Russia had deployed “well over a thousand combat vehicles” along with “combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” within Ukraine.  This pronouncement was similar to his downright lie of November 18, 2014, when he  told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that there were “regular Russian army units in eastern Ukraine.”

The swell of anti-Russian propaganda, confrontation and attempted intimidation by NATO has increased, and if it continues to do so it is likely that Moscow will take action, thereby upping the stakes and the danger even more.  It is time that NATO’s nations came to terms with the reality that Russia is a major international power with legitimate interests in its own region. Moscow is not going to bow the knee in the face of immature threats by sabre-rattling US generals and their swaggering acolytes.  It is time for NATO to forge ties rather than destroy them — and to build bridges rather than glitzy office blocks.

Quebec education minister urges mass expulsions of striking students

Keith Jones

Quebec Education Minister François Blais has urged universities and CEGEPs (pre-university and technical colleges) hit by a student “anti-austerity” strike to expel two or three of the most militant students per day till the strike ends.

Tens of thousands of students joined a protest in downtown Montreal Thursday against the provincial Liberal government’s austerity program

At a meeting Tuesday, Blais told the province’s university rectors to use their disciplinary powers to break the strike, including by systematic exemplary expulsions of strike leaders and others “who go too far.” Later he told a radio station, the rectors “can do this. If they (expel) two or three people per day, it will, I think, cool the ardor of others.”

Blais went on to compare the strikers, who are protesting sweeping austerity measures including massive social spending cuts and user-fee hikes, to children. In expelling some, “we’ll get the others to think,” said Blais. “We do that with children when we want to change their behaviour. … We begin by saying there’ll be a punishment for what you said to your mother, etc. And then we make sure we carry that out.”

The next day, after a public outcry, Blais somewhat tempered his remarks. But there is strong support within Quebec’s elite for the government’s attempts to effectively criminalize the strike.

François Leagult, the head of the third party in the National Assembly, le Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ, defended Blais, while suggesting he hadn’t gone far enough. “I think there needs to be important penalties for students who stop other students from having access to their classes. So, it’s perhaps a poor formulation to target just two or three students.”

Also Wednesday, a Quebec Superior Court Judge issued an injunction at the request of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) forbidding five UQAM student associations and 34 of their members from trying to prevent students from attending their classes.

Police have repeatedly declared student demonstrations illegal and made mass arrests since the “anti-austerity” strike was launched March 23. Quebec City Police arrested 274 demonstrators on the strike’s second day and in a brutal crackdown on a demonstration two days later shot a tear-gas canister point-blank into the face of an 18-year-old CEGEP student. Naomie Trudeau-Tremblay had to be hospitalized after losing consciousness and sustaining severe lacerations to her face. According to experts she is lucky to have escaped permanent injury and could even have been killed.

The Quebec Civil Liberties Union has joined numerous student, union and community groups in denouncing the police violence, which they note has been encouraged by statements from the mayor of Quebec City and City of Montreal authorities demanding “zero tolerance” of protests that do not adhere to anti-democratic bylaws that restrict the right to demonstrate.

Quebec’s political and business elite are determined to stamp out the student “anti-austerity” strike. Their greatest concern and fear is that the student protest could spark a mass mobilization of the working class

On Thursday, tens of thousands of students joined a demonstration in Montreal called by ASSE, the student group that led the 2012 Quebec-wide strike against massive university tuition fee hikes and whose member-associations have been spearheading the current anti-austerity strike.

Despite its radical rhetoric, the ASSE leadership played a major role in the ultimate defeat of the student strike. It limited the strike to a nationalist protest perspective aimed at pressuring the Liberal government, then led by Jean Charest; made no appeal to students and workers outside Quebec; bowed to the authority of the unions when they vehemently opposed its call for a broader protest movement involving limited worker job-action (a “social strike”); and assisted the unions in channeling the opposition to Charest behind the election of a right-wing Parti Québécois (PQ) government.

Underscoring its subservience to the pro-capitalist unions, the ASSE leadership issued a call for a “strategic retreat” earlier this week, urging this weekend’s ASSE Congress to suspend the current strike. The ASSE leaders argue a “retreat” will facilitate the coordination of a student strike with public-sector worker job action in a mass anti-austerity movement in the fall.

In fact, the pro-capitalist unions have no intention of leading any working class challenge to the austerity program of Philippe Couillard’s Liberal government, either now, in the fall, or for that matter in 2016.

Claiming that Quebec must make dramatic changes to avoid a future “Greece-type” scenario, the Couillard government is demanding sweeping concessions from Quebec’s half-million public-sector workers. These include a five-year contract that will slash real wages, cut pensions, and increase the workload.

Everyone knows that the government will quickly illegalize any public-sector strike and impose contracts by decree, as has been done repeatedly by Liberal and PQ government for more than three decades.

Yet when the public-sector unions held a conference Tuesday to plan their strategy, they were quick to proclaim that their aim is “good-faith bargaining” with an extreme right-wing government that is already employing mass repression against striking students. “It’s all good to say that our collective agreements expire today [March 31],” declared Quebec Federation of Labour President Daniel Boyer, “but it’s not true we can launch [a strike] tomorrow morning. … In any event our objective today is not to launch a strike, but to get the government to negotiate in good faith and that’s what everyone at our conference wants.”

Boyer’s comments were seconded by Confederation of National Trade Unions Vice President Francine Lévesque. “We’ll stick above all to the progress at the negotiating table,” said Lévesque. “Our goal is a good collective agreement.”

The unions have emphasized that they will follow to the letter all the legal obstacles Liberal and PQ governments have erected to any effective worker job action, including a lengthy mandatory conciliation process and draconian essential services legislation.

ASSE’s call to suspend the current strike has been criticized by the anarchist-influenced Spring 2015 Committee, a faction of the student protest movement. But like the ASSE leadership, it is entirely wedded to a nationalist protest perspective. It opposes any fight for the independent political mobilization of the working class and an orientation toward workers in the rest of North America, claiming that if students and their supporters “howl” and “bite,” the elite will abandon its austerity program—no matter that the dismantling of public services and the destruction of workers’ social rights is the class strategy of the bourgeoisie across Canada and around the world.

As the Socialist Equality Party (Canada) explained in a statement last month, “the critical issue is the mobilization of the working class as an independent political force to impose its own socialist solution to the capitalist crisis.”

“Youth and workers,” declared the statement, “should champion not a ‘social strike’—a protest movement aimed at appealing to the Quebec elite. Rather they should fight to prepare a political general strike of the entire working class, in defiance of the anti-union laws, and with the aim of bringing down the Couillard government and making the struggle against austerity in Quebec the spearhead of a movement of the working class across Canada, and throughout North America, for workers’ governments and the socialist reorganization of society.

“The main obstacle to this path is the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy. The central task posed to the tens of thousands of students who will be on strike from March 23 is to support the workers in breaking out of the organizational and political straightjacket of the unions and taking the road of political struggle against capitalism.”

German carmakers withdraw from Russia

Jan Peters

A year ago, Russia was still regarded by German car manufacturers as a market with a great future. Speaking on behalf of all companies at the end of November 2013, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn said, “For the Volkswagen Group, Russia is the number one strategic growth market in Europe.” He wanted to invest a further €1.2 billion in Russia by the end of 2018.

The opposite is now happening. The value of the Russian currency, the rouble, has plummeted due to the economic sanctions against Russia imposed in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. The cost of imports has increased massively, which has also hit the Russian auto industry. The combination of wage cuts and price increases has sharply reduced the sales of new cars. This was already apparent last year.

According to the Association of European Businesses (AEB), sales in Russia plummeted by nearly 38 percent in February. The German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) estimates that less than 1.5 million cars were sold in the entire year in Russia. The year before, it had been just under 2.5 million.

Sales of the Volkswagen Group in Russia fell by 12 percent last year. The carmaker now intends to limit production at its plant in Kaluga, Russia, and reduce staffing there, reported the broadcaster Norddeutsche Rundfunk. The contracts of around 150 temporary workers at the VW plant in Kaluga will not be extended when they expire.

GM-Opel recently announced its complete withdrawal from Russia. The General Motors subsidiary will cease production in St. Petersburg in the middle of this year. Some 1,000 employees still working there will receive severance packages. The closure will also affect 300 employees at its headquarters in Moscow. Furthermore, the contract for manufacturing Chevrolet vehicles by Russian car manufacturer GAZ will be ended. Opel expects its withdrawal to bring additional costs of around €550 million.

In September last year, production was already reduced as a result of the sanctions. Of the then almost 2,000 employees in St. Petersburg, only a quarter of the workers received a redundancy payment when they lost their jobs.

GM-Opel planned to sell about 80,000 cars in Russia this year. However, in February the brand sold just 912 cars, a monthly decrease of almost 90 percent.

Opel CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann told the business daily Handelsblatt, “We have come to the conclusion that the prospects for the Russian market were not good, not only in the short term, but in the medium and long term.” He cited the massive collapse in sales, the decline of the Russian rouble and the low degree of localization of the brand as the reasons.

Although Opel produces almost all the cars sold in Russia, this is of little use if two-thirds of the parts have to be imported; the decline in the rouble has increased production costs. This means Opel has experienced a loss on each car sold in the last months.

Experts believe that the withdrawal of Opel from Russia could be the start of a veritable exodus by international car manufacturers. They do not think the Russian car market will recover in the near future, given the Ukraine crisis, the decline in the rouble and low order books in the factories. For example, Spanish VW subsidiary SEAT announced last November it would stop selling in Russia at the beginning of this year.

Bernd Hones of the state-owned economic development corporation Germany Trade & Invest said, “The Russian car market is in free fall. The car companies must be prepared; it won’t be any better here for the next two years.”

The head of the Centre of Automotive Management, Stefan Bratzel, estimates that other carmakers, such as Peugeot and Ford, will soon follow Opel. “I can imagine that Ford will take a very close look at how long to continue”, he said.

In a study on the impact of Russian sanctions, Ferdinand Dudenhöfer, director of the CAR Institute at the University of Duisburg-Essen, writes that the sanctions mean the drop in sales in Russia up to 2017 will lead to a loss of more than €15 billion and a fall in profits of over €600 million. According to Dudenhöfer, this is a conservative estimate. Furthermore, one can assume that each job that goes due to the policy of sanctions against Russia will never return to Germany, he said.

With the sanctions also increasingly hitting the German economy, Eckhard Cordes, chairman of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, has warned of the consequences. “If it is assumed that around 300,000 jobs in Germany depend upon the export trade with Russian partners alone, a lasting 20 percent decline could lead to the loss of 60,000 jobs in the worst case.” This would especially hit the mechanical engineering and auto industries.

According to the latest data from the Federal Statistical Office, exports to Russia collapsed in January, compared to the previous year, by more than 35 percent. In January this year, exports totalled nearly €1.44 billion; the previous month it had been nearly a billion euros more. A larger fall in exports last occurred in October 2009, when the global financial crisis slowed exports, writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Imports also fell in January by one third, to nearly €2.5 billion.

According to Swedish economist Anders Åslund, the entire economy of Russia is “in free fall”. He considers the forecasts of the Russian Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Central Bank, for a contraction of the economy of between three and six percent, to be too optimistic.

Åslund’s forecast assumes that the gross domestic product will contract this year by 10 percent, according to an analysis of the economic situation in Russia by the Ostinstitut Wismar. It is now clear that it is the working class that is paying in Russia and in Europe for the Western sanctions policy.

Somali militants massacre Kenyan university students

Thomas Gaist

Somali militants reportedly linked with the Islamic fundamentalist group al Shabaab killed at least 147 and wounded at least 79 during an attack against Kenya’s Garissa University Thursday.

Arriving before dawn, the militants launched an attack lasting more than 15 hours, throwing grenades and shooting at students and staff with automatic rifles. Four gunmen were involved in the assault. All four militants killed themselves in the late evening by detonating suicide bombs while exchanging fire with government forces, local officials said.

The attack was organized by Kenyan national Mohamed Dulyadeyn, close associate of al Shabaab chief Ahmed Omar Abu Ubeyd, according to media reports. Dulyadeyn helped construct al Shabaab’s network by recruiting members out of the massive refugee camp at Dadaab, and was involved in planning the 2013 Westgate mall attack in Nairobi, according to sources cited by the Guardian.

The Kenyan government has declared a new state of emergency in regions bordering Somalia, in response to the attacks.

As with Boko Haram in Nigeria, Shabaab’s terrorist attacks will undoubtedly serve as the pretext for escalated American military intervention, as recent comments from US military leaders and pundits have made clear.

“Basically, we are witnessing the birth of a Kenyan Boko Haram,” an unnamed top Western diplomat said in comments cited by the Financial Times.

In Senate testimony this week, General David Rodriguez, head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), warned that al Shabaab “remains a persistent threat to US and regional interests,” in remarks calling for expanded US interventions in Libya, Nigeria and Somalia. 

Familiar efforts are underway to limit analysis of the Garissa massacre to discussion of “terrorism” in the service of Islamist ideology. Western media have played up reports that the al Shabaab fighters intentionally targeted Christian students, while sparing some Muslim students, and have brandished tenuous claims of links to al Qaeda and other Islamist formations.

The leaders of al Shabaab and other Islamist militias represent dissident factions of their respective national bourgeois elites. Their anti-imperialist appeals are cynical and calculated attempts to exploit popular hatred of the US and European governments. But the horrific murder of innocents only serves the interests of imperialism, which is ultimately responsible for the emergence of such groups in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The US and European powers have sought to strengthen their military and political grip in these regions and reestablish direct colonial rule through endless military interventions and proxy wars since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. During this period, the US has fomented nearly two decades of civil war in Somalia, waged unrelenting drone and commando wars, and exploited the chaos to impose an indefinite military occupation of the country by the US-sponsored African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) force.

Prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US supported Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre as part of its strategy to counter Soviet influence in neighboring Ethiopia. Washington responded to the 1992 overthrow of Barre by tribal-based militants by deploying US ground troops to invade Somalia.

Forced to withdraw in 1994, the US has since utilized local militaries and warlord factions to maintain its political domination over the Horn of Africa.

When the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist network that developed in Somalia’s political vacuum from the 1990s onward, temporarily wrested control over the capital at Mogadishu from the US-installed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in 2006, Washington responded by organizing a new invasion of the country, led by Ethiopian forces, which displaced the ICU and returned the TFG to power in the capital.

Al Shabaab subsequently developed out of the breakup of the ICU in the wake of the 2006 invasion. Al Shabaab claims that the recent series of attacks against Kenyan targets are retribution for Kenya’s invasion and occupation of Somalia, which began in October 2011 and continues to the present under the umbrella of the US-backed AMISOM occupation force defending the TFG.

For well over a decade the US has maintained Special Forces deployments on both the Yemeni and Somali sides of the Gulf of Aden and pummeled both side of the Gulf with drone strikes in an effort to maintain control over some of the most heavily trafficked commercial sea routes worldwide. The US is now backing the Saudi-led bombing campaign and preparations for a ground assault and occupation of Yemen.

Al Shabaab is a product of the murderous intervention of US imperialism in the Horn of Africa, unfolding over two decades. Responsiblity for Garissa lies ultimately with the war planners in Washington and the numerous fake-left parties that have justified US wars in Africa under the banner of "democracy and human rights."

US faces another debacle on Pacific economic treaty

Mike Head

Having suffered a decisive defeat on its efforts to block other countries from joining the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the US government faces mounting difficulties with its most far-reaching move to dominate the Asia-Pacific region: the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In Hawaii last month, the latest round of five-year-long TPP talks between the 12 governments involved broke up without any further agreement. For the third year in a row, the White House’s deadline for a final deal looks set to be breached in 2015.

Significantly, the main reported stumbling block this time was not ongoing differences between the US and Japan over auto and agricultural markets, but doubts over President Barack Obama’s capacity to get congressional approval to sign off on the pact.

Falsely presented as a “free trade” deal, the TPP is the opposite. It is aimed at creating a vast US-controlled economic bloc. In return for favoured access to the US market, which is still the largest in the world, the TPP requires its members to scrap all legal, regulatory and government impediments to American investment and corporate operations.

The TPP is an essential component of Washington’s military and strategic “pivot” to Asia to establish unchallenged hegemony over the region, including China, which has thus far been excluded from the treaty. The “partnership” seeks to restructure every aspect of economic and social life across the Asia-Pacific in the interests of Wall Street finance capital and the largest US corporations, particularly the IT, pharmaceutical and media conglomerates.

A similar drive is underway to incorporate the European Union into a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) bloc. Like the TPP, the European treaty is being negotiated amid tight secrecy, with hundreds of the world’s largest corporations taking part, behind the backs of the international working class.

Obama has resorted to blatant anti-Chinese rhetoric in a bid to overcome opposition to aspects of the TPP from sections of the Democratic and Republican congressional leaderships. In one recent interview, the US president declared:

“If we don’t write the rules out there, China’s going to write the rules and the geopolitical implications of China writing the rules for trade almost inevitably means that we will be cut out or we will be deeply disadvantaged. Our businesses will be disadvantaged, our workers will be disadvantaged.”

Washington is concerned that other imperialist powers, such as Germany, Britain and Japan, could strengthen their positions in China, at the expense of the US, unless America “writes the rules” for world trade in the 21st century.

Global financial commentators are drawing attention to what is at stake. Under the headline, “Round two in America’s battle for Asian influence,” David Pilling wrote in the London-based Financial Times on April 1: “Washington’s attempt to lead a boycott of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank ended in farce after Britain broke ranks and other nations from Germany to South Korea fell over themselves to join. If round one was a defeat for America, round two hangs in the balance.”

Pilling noted that the TPP’s exclusion of China, on the grounds that its economy was state-owned and centrally planned, was obviously concocted. “In a peculiar display of diplomatic contortion,” he wrote, “Vietnam—a country whose economy is as centrally planned and as rigged as the best of them—is somehow considered fit for entry.”

The Financial Times Asia editor pointedly added that the TPP was “just as likely to annoy America’s allies in region as reassure them,” because of its intrusive demands, which include the dismantling of state-owned enterprises, tendering restrictions, financial regulations, data protection rules and intellectual property laws.

Washington’s aggressive drive to establish the TPP and TTIP economic blocs marks a reversal of its post-World War II role, when the ascendancy of American industry permitted it to champion the reconstruction of its Japanese and European rivals, albeit always for its own benefit, including via the expansion of markets for its exports.

Today, amid the ongoing decline of US industry, its ruling elite depends increasingly on the parasitic activities of Wall Street, the exploitation of patents by Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the drug companies, and contracts for the supply of military hardware. These rapacious interests will most directly benefit from the TPP.

Many details remain secret, but pro-TPP lobbying efforts highlight the anticipated profit bonanzas. Mireya Solis of the Brookings Institution think tank stressed advantages such as “internationalisation of financial services, protection of intellectual property and governance of the Internet economy.”

US technology firms would benefit from a ban on requiring companies to house customers’ data within a specific country. “If we’re going to serve the customer of Malaysia from, say, a data center in Singapore, the data has to be able to move back and forth between those two countries,” Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel, told the Wall Street Journal .

Central to the treaty are punitive Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) clauses, which permit transnationals to sue governments for losses allegedly caused by official policy decisions. WikiLeaks last month published a chapter of the TPP treaty showing that firms could bypass a country’s courts to obtain damages for changes in “environmental, health or other regulatory objectives.”

Apart from the US and Japan—the two biggest partners by far—the other TPP participants are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

The willingness of many of these countries to make the required concessions to the US has been undermined by Obama’s failure to secure support for a Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill, so that he can sign the TPP and then have it ratified by Congress with a single “yes” or “no” vote. Without TPA, Congress could force amendments to the negotiated pact, effectively rendering the agreement void.

According to a Japan Times report: “Several negotiating partners, including Canada and Japan, have publicly stated they will not put their final negotiating positions on the table until Congress grants TPA for the Obama administration. With a presidential election looming in the United States, further delay creates a real risk of TPP being delayed until 2017.”

Much of the US congressional resistance is bound up with protectionist lobbies, based on national-based industries and their trade unions. In response, the Obama administration is ramping up a campaign that explicitly spells out the expected benefits to corporate America.

On March 30, the White House published letters from former senior economic officials, including 10 ex-commerce secretaries representing every administration, Democratic and Republican, since 1973, urging congressional leaders to give Obama TPA authority.

The commerce secretaries stated: “Once completed, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) will give the United States free trade arrangements with 65 percent of global GDP and give our businesses preferential access to a large base of new potential customers.”

This demand for “preferential access” by US imperialism threatens to fundamentally break up the world economy into the kind of rival blocs that preceded World Wars I and II.

March US jobs growth slowest since 2013

Andre Damon

Jobs growth in the United States slackened in March, the Labor Department said Friday, adding to a growing body of data indicating that the US has economy slowed significantly in the past six months.

The US added only 126,000 jobs last month, less than the number needed to keep up with population growth. This was almost half as many new jobs as had been predicted by a Bloomberg survey of economists, and marked the lowest monthly job growth since December 2013.

The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.5 percent, after hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the labor force.

Job losses were concentrated in core export and production industries, which were hit hard by the recent fall in oil prices and the rise of the dollar. The manufacturing and construction sectors lost 1,000 jobs each, while the mining sector, which includes oil production, lost 11,000 workers.

The Labor Department’s figures tracked a surge of recent mass layoffs in these sectors. On Tuesday, US Steel announced 680 layoffs with the idling of part of its plant in Mt. Iron, Minnesota. The week before, the steelmaker announced plans to lay off 2,080 workers at its Granite City Works plant in Illinois.

Also Tuesday, Houston-based oilfield services company Franks International announced 600 layoffs, amounting to 13 percent of its nationwide workforce. In recent months the four largest oilfield services companies—Weatherford International, Baker Hughes, Halliburton and Schlumberger—announced more than 30,000 layoffs.

Sections of the US retail sector were hit as a wave of mergers and consolidations continued to hemorrhage jobs. This week a bankruptcy judge approved a deal between RadioShack and hedge fund Standard General that would keep open only 1,700 of the electronics retail chain’s more than 4,000 stores. The deal will mean the elimination of some 20,000 positions.

While the unemployment rate has fallen significantly over the past year, even mainstream economists have been forced to admit that the official unemployment rate, currently at 5.5 percent, has only the most tangential relationship to the true state of the labor market.

According to the Labor Department, 277,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month, twice as many as the number of jobs that were added. As a result, the labor force participation rate fell to 62.7 percent, matching its lowest level in nearly four decades.

New jobs, meanwhile, have been mostly low-wage and disproportionately part-time. Compared to December 2007, the US economy has added more than two million part-time jobs, while the number of full-time jobs in the US is actually lower today than it was eight years ago, before the start of the recession.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, there are some 3.3 million “missing workers” who have given up looking for work because it is not available. If they were included in the official unemployment rate, it would be at 7.4 percent, as opposed to the nominal rate of 5.5 percent.

Workers’ wages, having stagnated and declined for years, grew by only 2.1 percent over the past twelve months. While hourly earnings ticked up slightly last month, average weekly earnings actually fell as employers cut back on hours.

The lackluster jobs figures came amid a slew of other indicators showing a slowdown at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.

On March 27, the Commerce Department confirmed that the US economy grew at a rate of 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, down from an earlier estimate of 2.6 percent and half the growth rate of the previous quarter. On March 25, the Commerce Department said that durable goods orders fell by 1.4 percent in February.

These figures led analysts to slash their predictions for growth in the first quarter of this year, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta cutting its estimate to just 0.2 percent.

In the short term, the slowdown is partially a result of the continuing slump in oil prices and the run-up in the price of the dollar. Oil prices have fallen by 50 percent over the past year, prompting tens of thousands of layoffs in the US, particularly in high-cost hydraulic fracturing operations that have become unprofitable amid low oil prices.

The US dollar, meanwhile, has risen significantly against other currencies, shrinking demand for US manufacturing exports overseas.

These contingencies have weighed down US corporate profits, which the Commerce Department said fell by 0.8 percent over the past year—the first annual fall in US corporate profits since 2008.

US corporations in recent weeks stepped up their demands for the US Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at zero in order to lower the value of the dollar and prop up their profits through cheap credit.

The Federal Reserve has responded to these demands by hinting that it would likely delay raising the federal funds rate, which has been at zero for six years, while slowing the increase in the rate when it is raised.

Speaking in San Francisco earlier this month, US Fed Chair Janet Yellen stressed the need to be “patient” in raising rates, while Fed officials lowered their estimate for where the federal funds rate will be at the end of this year to 0.625 percent, compared to their December estimate of 1.125 percent.

Six years of near-zero interest rates, together with the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” money-printing policies, have fueled a massive run-up in stock prices, in the process enormously enriching the financial oligarchy, even as workers’ wages have stagnated or declined.

The response by the Federal Reserve to the latest series of negative economic figures, together with continued mass layoffs throughout the economy, make clear that the US financial elite plans to respond to the continued economic stagnation by intensifying the policies it has pursued since the 2008 crash: unlimited cash for the banks and corporations, combined with austerity and mass layoffs.

“Religious freedom” and the assault on democratic rights in America

Eric London

The two statutes passed in recent days by the legislatures of Indiana and Arkansas are milestones in an anti-democratic effort to legalize discrimination in the US under the false banner of religious freedom.

The laws in the original form passed by the state legislatures overtly establish a special legal privilege for business owners to invoke their religious beliefs in court as justification for discriminating against clients or employees. Though media coverage has focused exclusively on the impact of the statutes on same-sex couples, the laws have far broader implications for the population as a whole.

At the urging of Republican Governor Mike Pence, the Republican-dominated Indiana legislature met Thursday to approve an amendment to its Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), including language stating that the law “bars discrimination based on factors that include race, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or United States military service.”

Pence had signed the original version of the bill into law on March 26, but was forced to backtrack after he came under pressure from corporations and business organizations demanding that modifications be made.

In Arkansas, an initial bill passed this week was held up by Republican Governor Asa Hutchison, who, having received his marching orders from Arkansas-based Walmart, announced he would veto the legislation unless it was modified. The Arkansas legislature subsequently added a clause prohibiting businesses from using the statute as a legal defense when sued by individuals for discrimination. The amended Arkansas bill does not include specific anti-discrimination language.

The supposed “fixes” being incorporated into the new versions of the bills do not address the more fundamental assault on democratic principles involved in the legislation. At bottom, the statutes rely on a legal principle that was rejected by the Supreme Court in decisions such as Heart of Atlanta Hotel v. US (1964) and Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), which banned racially segregated businesses in the South.

Relying on the same basic argument as the proponents of segregation, the Indiana and Arkansas statutes implicitly revive the claim that private property rights allow business owners to refuse to provide service to people on the basis of their race, religion or sexual orientation. The underlying premise and logic of these bills, even in their amended form, constitute a fundamental attack on democratic rights.

The thinly veiled use of “religious beliefs” by the framers of the Indiana and Arkansas statutes to justify discrimination not only contradicts the Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s, it flies in the face of the legal secularism on the basis of which the American Republic was founded. The separation of church and state enunciated in the first sentence of the First Amendment proscribes legislatures from establishing two-tiered legal systems, where special rights and privileges are made available to the religious. The attack on anti-discrimination laws is part of a broader attack on the gains made through the social struggles of the 1950s and 1960s against segregation. When the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—passed to ensure that the rights of African American voters in formerly segregated states were protected—the Democratic Party made no serious attempt to pass legislation restoring the critical provisions of the act.

In fact, the political soil out of which the Indiana and Arkansas statutes grew was cultivated by the Democratic Party. It was President Bill Clinton who sought the passage of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and signed it into law in 1993. The federal RFRA was sponsored by Democrats Edward Kennedy and Charles Schumer and supported by a conglomerate of religious groups, including the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Legal Society, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the National Association of Evangelicals. President Obama’s term in office has been marked by repeated concessions to religious organizations. In 2011 and again in 2013, the administration waged a campaign to prevent young women from accessing emergency contraceptives.

In 2012, Obama exempted churches from the requirement that employers provide contraceptives as part of their health insurance plans under Obamacare, and in 2013 he extended the exemption to all religious non-profit entities. It was, in part, based on the administration’s repeated extension of the contraception exemption that the Supreme Court, in its 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. ruling, broadened the exemption further to include closely held for-profit corporations.

The Indiana and Arkansas statutes are the direct products of the Hobby Lobby decision. By opening the doors to for-profit corporations to assert “religious liberties” claims, the decision paved the way for corporations to drastically expand their powers over consumers and employees.

The opposition of corporations such as Walmart, Apple, Microsoft and others to the original Indiana and Arkansas laws was not motivated by a commitment to democratic rights. These corporations, along with sections of the media and Democratic politicians, opposed certain elements of the RFRA statutes solely on the limited grounds that they targeted gay marriage and same-sex couples. The laws are certainly a reactionary attack on the democratic right to marry whomever one chooses, but the nearly exclusive focus on the issue of gay marriage obscures the broader and more fundamental assault on democratic principles contained in the laws.

The corporate opposition on this question reflects the degree to which gender and identity politics have been incorporated into the ideology and modus operandi of capitalist rule, and are used to cover over the more fundamental class divisions in society—as well as providing a political cover for the corporate and government assault on the social conditions and democratic rights of the working class.

Much of the corporate and political establishment is fixated on issues such as gay marriage that affect a very small and generally more privileged social layer, but they fail to bat an eye over the effective suspension of habeas corpus, the indefinite detention of prisoners without trial, the state assassination of US citizens, the attacks on journalists and on free speech and assembly, the massive spying conducted by the National Security Agency, the jailing and persecution of whistleblowers, the de facto legal immunity granted government officials guilty of torture, the transformation of cities into militarized zones, and the impunity with which police brutalize and murder workers and youth

The fundamental lesson that must be drawn is that no democratic right is secure in a society as riven by social inequality as the United States. This essential fact of political and social life is underscored by another event that recently took place in Indiana. On Monday, a judge sentenced a 33-year-old woman, Purvi Patel, to a 20-year prison sentence for feticide. Patel, who had a miscarriage in 2013, was arrested after her doctor informed police that she may have procured abortifacient medication to terminate her pregnancy. She was hauled out of the courtroom in chains to begin her prison term.

Democracy is incompatible with a society dominated by an unaccountable financial aristocracy and characterized by massive and ever widening levels of social inequality.

The fight to defend democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the very corporations and political parties responsible for transforming the United States into a militarized wasteland of poverty and inequality. Such a struggle can be waged only by the working class, in direct opposition to the entire political establishment, through the struggle for socialism.

Israel As The Crashed Germanwings Airbus A320

Alan Hart

Though it is provocative and contentious I think my headline is appropriate for an article about an Israel in the process of committing suicide. I'd also like readers to know that the inspiration for my headline was an observation made by Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement. In a post which called for the formation of an Israeli Salvation Front, he wrote: "The country is in existential danger. Not from the outside, but from the inside." (That's the way it was for the passengers and crew on Germanwings Flight 9525).

Another widely respected (Jewish) Israeli writer I want to quote is Akiva Eldar. He opened a recent article for Al-Monitor with one of the most witty and illuminating sentences ever written by anybody since the beginning of Zionism's ethnic cleansing of Palestine 68 years ago. Here it is. "It seems that for the first time in a long while, US President Barack Obama believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

Eldar was commenting on Obama's response to Netanyahu's pre-election admission that an independent Palestinian state would not be established on his watch.

In the course of an interview he gave to The Huffington Post Obama ignored Netanyahu's disingenuous. post-election back-tracking and said he believes that Netanyahu is opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state. He, Obama, put it this way:

“We take him at his word that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region."

Eldar's main point was that Israel also has to evaluate its options. If it continues the occupation, he wrote, "the demographic balance will force it to choose between becoming a BI-NATIONAL STATE or an APARTHEID REGIME."

Israel's problem, entirely of its own making, is that it has to continue the occupation. Why?

Any Israeli government that attempted to withdraw from the occupied West Bank to make the space for a viable Palestinian state would trigger a Jewish civil war - a certainty that was described to me way back in 1980 by Shimon Peres. (At the time he was the leader of the opposition to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's ruling Likud and I was acting as the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between him and Arafat.).

As I reveal in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Peres said he feared it was "already too late" for peace based on two states. When I asked him why, he replied: "Begin knows exactly what he's doing. He's stuffing the West Bank with settlers to create the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot large numbers of Jews" (to get them out of the West Bank dead or alive).

At the time Peres spoke those words to me there were only about 70,000 illegal Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank and in and around occupied East Jerusalem. Today there are about 600,000. If it was too late in 1980 because of the numbers, how much more too late is it today?

It's possible that if an American president read the riot act to Israel and said that it would be subjected to boycott and sanctions if it did not end its defiance of international law, perhaps as many as half the total number of illegal Jewish settlers would be prepared to abandon the West Bank in exchange for generous financial compensation; but that would still leave very many who would fight.

As I also reveal in my book, Israel's Defense Minister of the time, Ezer Weizman, told me that Sharon had convened a meeting of senior military personnel at which a blood oath was signed. Those who signed it committed themselves to making common cause with the settlers to "fight to the death any Israeli government which sought to withdraw from the West Bank".

The background outlined briefly above explains why the two-state solution has long been dead (was it ever really alive?) and, more to the point, why Akiva Eldar is right when he says that Israel remaining in occupation has a choice of only two options - bi-national state or apartheid regime.

Israel as a fully exposed (totally naked) apartheid state would at some point be boycotted and sanctioned by the international community, governments and all. At some point, as was eventually the case with South Africa, even an American president and a British prime minister would have to tell apartheid Israel that enough was enough.

My speculation about what would then happen is the following.

Some and perhaps many Israeli Jews would pack their bags and leave to make new lives in Europe, North America and elsewhere. India would be a first choice for some. And those who did not abandon the walled-in, nuclear-armed fortress would tell the whole world to go to hell.

In that context what Prime Minister Golda Meir said to me in one of my interviews with her for the BBC's Panorama programme bears repeating, over and over and over again. In answer to one of my questions she said that in a doomsday situation Israel"would be prepared to take the region and the world down with it." About an hour after that was broadcast The Times of London, then a seriously good newspaper, not the Murdoch product it is today, changed its lead editorial to quote what Golda had said to me. It then added its own opinion. "We had better believe her." I did then and I still do.

Because the time is approaching when the Arabs of Israel-Palestine will outnumber the Jews unless Zionism resorts to a final round of ethnic cleansing, a bi-national state, one in which all of its citizens enjoyed equal political and human rights of every kind, would lead to the de-Zionization of Palestine. But the security and wellbeing of those Jews who opted to remain in the bi-national state would be assured provided the Palestinians were not subjected to a Zionist terrorist campaign.

In my analysis the transformation of Israel-Palestine into a bi-national state with equal rights of every kind for all of its citizens offers the only hope for stopping the countdown to catastrophe for the occupied and oppressed Palestinians and, ultimately, the Jews of the world. I say that because if Zionism did resort to a final ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the Jews of the world would be judged by many to be complicit by default, and the transformation of anti-Israelism into ant-Semitism would be completed and that monster would go on the rampage again.

Question: Is there a possibility, even a very remote one, that a majority of Israel's Jews could have their brainwashed and closed minds opened to the idea that the creation of a bi-national state with equal rights for all is in their own best interests?

I fear the answer is probably "No" but much could depend on how the case for a bi-national state with equal rights for all was presented.

In my view the greatest need is for activist groups of all faiths and none everywhere which campaign for justice for the Palestinians to put their act together and concentrate on making the case for a one state solution. In other words I am calling on them to start speaking with one voice.

I would also urge them to be positive and promote what I believe to be a liberating truth. It is that the Jews are the intellectual elite of the Western civilization and the Palestinians are the intellectual elite of the Arab world. As I have previously written and said, together in peace and partnership they could change the region for the better and give new hope and inspiration to the whole world.

That, in my view, is the best sales pitch for one state.

So much for what could be.

At the time of writing, and as my headline indicates. I see an Israel piloted by Netanyahu on the same course as Germanwings Flight 9525.