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The prime minister’s remarks came hours after Opposition leader Yair Lapid announced a boycott of Independence Day event.
By World Israel News Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday evening called on Israeli officials from the left and right to put aside all disputes ahead of Memorial Day and Independence Day this year and present a show of unity, hours after Opposition leader Yair Lapid announced a boycott of the state event.
“In the past few months, an important debate has been raging between us over our democracy, but during these days, I ask all elected officials — from the right and left — to put the argument to one side, to leave it outside of the cemeteries,” he said by video broadcast.
“To allow the bereaved families, and all of us, to mourn in silence the memory of our loved ones,” he added.
The grieving families “deserve to experience these days with the entire nation of Israel standing in unity, behind our heroes, without any arguments,” Netanyahu said.
Earlier today, Lapid rebuffed the government’s invitation to the traditional torch-lighting ceremony and Independence Day celebration on Mount Herzl next week over his opposition to the plans for judicial reform.
“We won’t pretend that we are celebrating together and that everything is OK while the government is tearing the nation apart and erasing democracy,” he said.
“I love the State of Israel with all my heart but in three months you have divided Israeli society, and no fake fireworks performance will cover that up. If national unity is so important to you, you would not be dismantling our democracy and instead you’d be going to work for Israel’s citizens.”
“We will not sit there to watch another embarrassing show of flattery for the Netanyahu family,” he added.
The post Netanyahu to officials on left and right: Leave disputes ‘outside the cemeteries’ on Memorial Day appeared first on World Israel News.
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Netanyahu hoped to disperse Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s supporters and associates, who include May, within the party.
By World Israel News Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to deploy a controversial lawmaker from his Likud party to replace Asaf Zamir as Israel’s consul general in New York, who was ousted after declaring his intentions to “fight” the government’s plan for judicial reform.
Initially, May Golan had been promised a ministerial appointment over the Advancement of Women’s Status, but the Knesset vote on Wednesday was canceled at the last minute.
Netanyahu’s office confirmed on Thursday Golan had been offered the consul general post, citing “her excellent communication skills in English.”
Israeli media reports said Netanyahu hoped to disperse Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s supporters and associates, who include May, within the party, over fears that he will not be able to meet all of the Levin’s demands regarding the judicial reform legislation, which has been postponed until late May.
The statement from Netanyahu’s office denied the reports. “Contrary to the publication, this has nothing to do with Minister Levin. There is no one the Prime Minister values and trusts more [than Levin].”
Several former diplomats have warned against the proposed appointment, saying that the consul general posting is one of the most influential diplomatic postings and Golan, who is vocally right-wing, could cause major damage to relations between U.S. Jews and Israel.
“The Consul General in NYC must be a top notch diplomat,” tweeted former Israeli ambassador to India Daniel Carmon. “No party politics can justify such a nomination.”
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk wrote that if Golan ends up being consul general “will be seen by the American Jewish community as a sign of utmost disrespect.”
Golan was charged with racism over her campaign to send illegal migrants back to Africa.
She accused former prime minister Naftali Bennett of being under the thumb of “the actual prime minister, [Islamist Raam party head] Mansour Abbas.”
She called herself “the mother of politically incorrect” in an interview with Israel Hayom.
Zamir, who was appointed by then-foreign minister Yair Lapid, last month announced that he was resigning from the consul general post so that he could “fight for Israel’s future,” as he opposed the government’s planned judicial reforms.
Zamir had already been summoned to Jerusalem the week before for speaking against the reforms at a fundraising event in New York.
After Zamir did not immediately step down, Foreign Minister Eli Cohen fired him.
“I decided to fire him immediately [because] a diplomat who takes a political side cannot represent the State of Israel for even one day. Good luck in the future,” Cohen said at the time.
The post Netanyahu offers New York consul post to ‘mother of politically incorrect’ appeared first on World Israel News.
English writer, painter, and socialist William Morris, c. 1875. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
“I will begin by saying that I call myself a Communist,” wrote William Morris in 1889, “and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it.” This isn’t an announcement that seems consistent with Morris’s unappealingly chintzy reputation today.
In the early twenty-first century, he is still probably best known for his densely decorative, highly textured wallpaper designs, helping pioneer the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century. Online, it appears, Morris is often referred to as “the wallpaper guy.”
But Morris’s avowal of communist beliefs was a characteristically plain-speaking one. As an artist, he was sharply attuned to the politics — and the risks — of speaking plainly, not least because he was conscious of his reputation as a fashionable and highly sophisticated designer of fabrics and textiles for the more affluent members of the middle class.
In an 1881 lecture on “Art and the Beauty of the Earth,” delivered shortly before he first declared himself a socialist, he insisted it would be an insult to stand before an audience and tell it “at great length what I do not think. . . . I will ask your leave and license to speak plainly, as I promise I will not speak lightly.” He did not apologize, he said defiantly, for “my downright meaning, my audacious and rash thought,” only for “my clumsy way of expressing it.”
So Morris spoke plainly, deliberately dealing only in “downright meaning.” But he did not speak lightly. He was uncompromising in his affirmation of communism, whether he was passionately denouncing the crass philistinism of the ruling class in which he had been raised or seeking to distance himself, politely but emphatically, from the anarchist politics of some of his comrades. The principal point of these interventions, and their lasting achievement, was to draw public attention to the desecration of “art and the beauty of the earth” by capitalism.
If the idea of calling himself a communist was especially “audacious” — and appeared to many of his more stiff-necked contemporaries shockingly “rash” — it was in fact the result of careful, thoughtful, and at times, no doubt, tortuous consideration. And, it should be added, of active political involvement in the socialist campaigns of the late nineteenth century.
Certainly, Morris had a reputation for impulsiveness. The English poet Alfred Noyes was typical in characterizing him, after his death in 1896, as an “illogical, impetuous, idealistic, sensuous, and fiery being who walked as if the whole world belonged to him, and carried the head of a Viking on his burly, blue-clad, seamanly, middle-sized figure.”
Yet if this cartoonish portrait captured his passionate temperament and the understated eccentricity of his appearance, it also implicitly and sentimentally dismissed him. For a start, it seems perverse — or perhaps obtuse — to describe someone as walking “as if the whole world belongs to him” when he had become celebrated for his obstinate belief that people needed to fight for a world that belonged to the poor and disenfranchised rather than the rich and privileged.
William Morris was committed to the expropriation of the expropriators, in Marx’s formulation — to social revolution.
Morris might not have thought that the meek would inherit the earth, as Christian socialists of the late nineteenth century did. However, as a communist, he was convinced that those whose labor was brutally expropriated under the conditions of colonial and industrial capitalism would in the end forcibly reclaim the earth and its beauties. Morris was committed to the expropriation of the expropriators, in Marx’s formulation — to social revolution.
How had this scion of the nineteenth-century ruling class come to call himself first a socialist and then a communist — and in his late forties and fifties, at precisely the time of life when middle-class people are supposed to become increasingly reactionary? Born in 1834, Morris was the son of a financier who made a considerable fortune investing in copper and tin mines.
After his father’s death in 1847, Morris’s family continued to live off the profits appropriated from those who, in circumstances that were often unendurable, labored underground in England’s southwest. “Regularly the handsome dividends came in,” the socialist historian E. P. Thompson wrote in his biography of Morris, “bringing with them nothing to indicate the miseries at the bottom of the cramped and ill-ventilated shafts from which they had their source.”
After a childhood in which he felt blissfully free to roam about on horseback in Epping Forest, like one of the knights errant who featured in the fast-paced medieval fantasies that he wrote in middle age, Morris was sent as an adolescent to a boarding school. In this forcing house for the ruling class, he came into collision with the school’s authoritarian regime and with the bullies whose cruel habits it semi-deliberately fostered.
He was homesick and he hated it. Children “who have brains and feelings,” he remarked stoically in retrospect, are not tolerated by “the hard and stupid.” He consoled himself, however, with the thought that, in contrast to pupils who were “content to grow like rotting cabbages,” his sensitivity as a youth opened him up to joys and griefs and at least made him “alive and eager.”
By the time he arrived in Oxford in 1852, Thompson observed, Morris “was certainly inclined towards rebellion.” At this ancient, conservative university, where he was inspired in part by Christian medievalism, in part by romanticism, Morris became more and more opposed to the commercialism and utilitarianism of the mid-nineteenth century. In short, he became an anti-capitalist.
Perhaps the most important influence on him in this environment, where he cultivated his aspirations as a poet and painter, was John Ruskin, the preeminent social and cultural critic of the time. In The Stones of Venice (1851–53), the crucial second volume of which was published when Morris was a student, Ruskin attacked the conditions of industrial production and fulminated in prophetic tones against the “degradation of the operative into a machine.”
If this process alienated the laborer, it also led to the degradation of art. Ruskin argued that art thrived only in societies in which labor was cultivated as a collective and creative process. Morris learned from Ruskin that, under ideal social circumstances, art was effectively unalienated labor and unalienated labor was effectively art.
This premise was the basis of Morris’s aesthetic critique of industrial capitalism, which was increasingly accompanied by an economic and political critique. “It was through him,” he said of Ruskin in “How I Became a Socialist” (1894), “that I learned to give form to my discontent.” He went on to explain: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”
Morris’s desire to produce beautiful things was an attempt to find some sort of utopian alternative to the ugly things that industrial-capitalist society created.
We cannot separate the constructive and destructive impulses here. Morris’s desire to produce beautiful things was an attempt to find some sort of utopian alternative to the ugly things that industrial-capitalist society created, for the simple reason that it was predicated on ugly, exploitative social relations. So was his desire to preserve the beautiful things of the past, as exemplified in the organization he founded in 1877, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Capitalism, Morris came to see, transformed art, like every other product of human labor, into a commodity defined not by its aesthetic value but its exchange value in an exploitative economic system. He battered his bearded Viking’s head against this stubborn fact not only as an artisan and artist — producing exquisite books, chairs, and tapestries for their own sake, for their use value — but as the owner of a company.
This company, Morris and Co., catered almost exclusively to the upper-middle-class marketplace, despite his democratic hopes for its products. Morris thus lived the dialectic described by Walter Benjamin in his famous claim that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He realized that, in capitalist society, even beautiful things were uglified because they ignored or obscured the exploitative system that made it possible for a small number of especially privileged people to enjoy them when the mass of people could not.
By the second half of the 1870s, Morris had become actively involved in the Eastern Question Association, an organization in which he campaigned against the complicity of the British in Ottoman imperialism. However, we might still argue that it was aesthetics that drove him into politics above all.
Morris himself stressed that he had gone through “no transitional period” in becoming a socialist and was suddenly converted to the cause in the early 1880s. As soon as he understood the scale of social transformation that would be necessary to institute a society in which all men and women “would be living in equality of condition,” he realized in a flash that he had to join a political party if there was to be the slightest prospect of realizing this ideal.
The member card for the Democratic Federation, designed by William Morris. (William Morris Society)
Yet this political autobiography leaves out a key fact about Morris: his entire career as an artist before this moment of conversion, reflecting on Ruskin’s insights and attempting to put them into practice, had comprised a “transitional period.”
In 1883, Morris joined the Democratic Federation, which was renamed the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884, when it became a more openly socialist organization. The SDF’s factionalism and the authoritarianism of its leader, H. M. Hyndman, almost immediately drove Morris to look for an alternative. He left the group, in December 1884, along with Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, and several other activists to form the Socialist League.
As a member of both organizations, Morris relentlessly attacked imperialism — “a domination compounded of fraud, injustice and violence” — as well as capitalism. But he most tirelessly pursued his efforts in the League, an openly revolutionary party that was itself eventually split by sectarian struggles.
Morris’s activism in the second half of the 1880s involved delivering innumerable speeches on picket lines and demonstrations and dispatching countless articles for the League’s paper, Commonweal. It served as a laboratory for his idiosyncratic and brilliantly creative contribution to the Marxist tradition.
What did that contribution consist of? Probably no socialist before the 1960s was so committed not only to ruthlessly critiquing capitalism as a system of economic and social relations but also to patiently understanding its distortive, destructive effects on what he called “Art and the Beauty of the Earth.” He remains almost peerless in his grasp of the sheer scope of human alienation as a lived, acutely felt experience under capitalism.
Morris relentlessly attacked imperialism — ‘a domination compounded of fraud, injustice and violence’ — as well as capitalism.
Morris certainly offers an inspiring example in the twenty-first century as someone who fought, at considerable personal cost to his health and reputation alike, for an emancipated, unalienated society in which human beings would no longer instrumentalize and exploit nature. Morris struggled for what he called an “undegraded existence on Earth.” His communism was avowedly ecological.
Pages from William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere.
Furthermore, there was probably no other socialist before the 1960s who sought so assiduously and imaginatively to assert the importance of utopian thinking for the practical task of abolishing capitalism. This was precisely the point of declaring himself a communist as well as a socialist.
In doing so, Morris certainly wanted to align himself with the political principles set out by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto and with the historical achievements of the 1871 Paris Commune. Yet his identification as a communist also signaled that, unlike the reformists of his time, he was fighting without qualification for “the complete equality of condition for all people; and anything in a Socialist direction which stops short of this is merely a compromise with the present condition of society.”
“In speculating on the future of society we should try to shake ourselves clear of mere phrase,” Morris wrote in the open letter in which he announced himself a communist. Morris’s finest literary testament to his communism, the utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890–91), asserted the pressing political importance of speculating about the future of society and of freeing this task from “mere phrase.”
In the book, Morris pictured a postcapitalist community in England that had evolved over more than a century after a violent revolution, which he vividly reconstructed. Here, in stirring, often moving prose, was the vision of a communist society in which art and unalienated labor had become indistinguishable, and in which the beauty of the earth was preserved because nature’s resources were nurtured for the sake of the entire community and its future rather than being plundered for the profits of the ruling class in the present.
Morris set the events of News from Nowhere two centuries ahead of his own time, dating the socialist revolution in England to the early 1950s. His optimism about the lifespan of the capitalist system proved to be mistaken, of course. But confronted with the overlapping crises that global capitalism is generating — social, ecological, geopolitical — we need the imaginative vision of Morris now.
A cattle car replicating those used by the Nazis used to transport Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust was set up in New York City’s Times Square on Tuesday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The exhibit, which was spearheaded by the Orthodox Union’s Southern NCSY youth group together with Holocaust-education organization, Shadowlight, aims at countering growing ignorance about the Holocaust among Americans as well as record levels of antisemitism.
According to the organizers, many of the passersby who stopped at the cattle car had no knowledge of the Holocaust.
According to a 2020 survey, a majority of New Yorkers could not name a single concentration camp and did not know six million Jews died.
A video simulating the Jews’ journey is broadcast on the inside walls of the cattle car. It also features survivors’ testimonies.
The post WATCH: Replica Holocaust cattle car in Times Square fights ignorance, antisemitism appeared first on World Israel News.
A US F-35 fighter jet is pictured during an event of the US Air Force at the Danish Airbase Fighter Wing Skrydstrup in Jutland, Denmark, on March 10, 2023. (Bo Amstrup / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images)
Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, will have its shareholder meeting on April 27. There, shareholders are slated to vote on a resolution to require a company report “disclosing how the Company intends to reduce its full value chain greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C degree goal requiring Net Zero emissions by 2050.” The board at Lockheed advised all their shareholders to vote against this resolution, making it clear that in addition to promoting conflict and violence around the world, Lockheed Martin is also uninterested in scaling back its significant contribution to climate change.
In the board’s reasoning, shareholders should vote no on the resolution because it is “premature and not in the best interest of our Company or our stockholders.” To suggest that acting on the unfolding climate catastrophe is “premature” speaks volumes about the lack of urgency Lockheed executives see around the climate crisis. According to a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the threshold for critical changes in the climate will likely happen within this decade. The report emphasizes that we must make an immediate shift away from fossil fuels to prevent climate collapse. The idea that any action on climate change is premature is a blatant falsehood at worst or willfully ignorant at best.
As we face the stark reality of looming climate disaster, the board’s statement is a candid admission of Lockheed executives’ values. From this, one can truly determine that they value profit over everything else — in case that weren’t clear from, say, the slaughter of forty Yemeni schoolchildren with a Lockheed Martin–manufactured bomb, or countless other horrific acts of violence routinely committed with the company’s profitable products.
Lockheed Martin plays a real role in the climate crisis. The company is the largest contractor with the US Department of Defense, which is in turn is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world. Between 2001 and 2017, the years for which data is available since the US invasion of Afghanistan, the US military emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gasses. More than 400 million metric tons are directly due to war-related fuel consumption. The largest portion of this is for military jets. When it comes to military jets, there is one that brings this level of climate emission to dizzying new heights of risk, and that is the F-35 fighter jet program.
Lockheed Martin’s cash cow, the F-35 fighter jet costs the US taxpayer $1.7 trillion. The F-35 uses a significant amount of fuel — about 2.37 gallons of fuel for every mile and around 1,340 gallons of fuel per hour. (By comparison, the F-35’s predecessor, the F-16, uses at least 415 gallons per hour less.) One F-35 tank of gas produces the equivalent of twenty-eight metric tons of carbon dioxide. These emissions heavily pollute air and water sources in locations in the United States and abroad. Most often, thanks to base locations, this disproportionately adversely affects low-income communities, communities of color, and indigenous communities.
F-35 training flights in Burlington, Vermont, burn between 4.7 and 9.4 million gallons of jet fuel per year. They emit 100 to 200 million pounds of CO2 yearly. To put it in perspective, that would be the equivalent of South Burlington adding ten to twenty thousand more passenger cars to its small population. Lockheed, then, is no minor participant in the process of climate change.
In addition to being a mega-polluter, the F-35 project is an unfathomably expensive boondoggle that continues to drain public resources. But Lockheed Martin executives don’t see it that way. When they look at the F-35, they see a profit-making machine. They sell these jets not only to the US Air Force, Navy, and Marines, but to thirteen other countries around the world. (That means you can add in the environmental pollution and climate emissions of those thirteen buyers to the US figures above.)
Even if Lockheed Martin were environmentally friendly, it would still be accountable for a variety of offenses, chief among them flooding the world with weapons. That said, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is necessary as we stare down the barrel of climate disaster. Shareholders breaking with the board and voting yes would be a good start. Given the enormity of the crisis we face, anything less would be criminal.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
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