Trump declares unquestioning support for Israel

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The new Republican administration has clearly taken unquestioning support for apartheid Israel to a new level. The selection of David M. Friedman as U.S. Ambassador to Israel is a “green light” for Is­ rael to accelerate land-theft from Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jewish settlements there have long been declared illegal under interna­ tional law.

Friedman, who refers to the West Bank by its Bibli­ cal name, Judea and Samaria, does not recognize the rights of Palestinians to any part of these territories or to East Jerusalem, which are currently occupied by Israel. Friedman plans to work “from the U.S. Em­ bassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem,” rather than Tel Aviv, where the American Embassy has re­ sided for many years.

4 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2017 Palestinians have long sought Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, and moving the embassy to Jerusalem will be considered an outrage throughout the Arab world. Friedman is connected to ultra-religious Jewish settlement groups and rais­ es money for them. He was also a major contributor to the Trump election campaign.

Despite minor differences on settlements, the Democrats and Republicans agree on the most criti­ cal questions. Both see Israel as the bastion of U.S. imperialist interests in the Middle East and a criti­ cal ally, justifying huge sums in military aid from the U.S. each year; both fully support Israel as a Jew­ ish exclusive state, in which non-Jewish residents are relegated to second-class status, without equal rights; both fully support imposing a Bantustan-like state on the Palestinian people without real political or military sovereignty; and both also reject grant­ ing all Palestinians and non-Jewish residents equal rights, including the right of all Palestinians current­ ly living outside historic Palestine to return to their homeland.

The creation of the state of Israel was an act of colonial domination based on Jewish religious su­ premacy over the Palestinians, who are persecuted, deprived of basic rights, and relegated to secondclass status. This master-slave relationship must end before a truly just society can be built—a dem­ ocratic and secular state throughout all of historic Palestine, which recognizes full and equal rights to all regardless of religion, race, or national origin.

— MARK UGOLINI

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(continued from page 1: “Trump takes White House, Working people under fire”) ness Insider his true feelings about workers and automation: The good thing about machines is that “they are always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

Trump promotes “law and order” and giv­ ing police departments a free hand to act with limited constraints. His comments target Black and Latino communities victimized by a spate of highly publicized racist police murders over the last few years. Trump believes that local police departments are not strong enough.

Trump selected Jeff Sessions, an Alabama rac­ ist with a sordid history, for Attorney General, and retired General John Kelly for Director of Homeland Security. They will team up to imple­ ment this “law and order” policy. Both back po­ lice against opponents of police violence. They also support the War on Drugs, militarization of the police, mass incarceration of Black youth, and the growing private prison industry that sustains itself on slave prison labor.

New attacks will be directed against immi­ grants, with stepped-up deportations and harass­ ment. Trump will continue and likely expand Obama’s aggressive deportation of over 2 million immigrants. Trump agrees with Obama’s method of targeting “un­ desirables” or “non-deserving” immigrants who may have been arrested or jailed in the U.S. Using this dis­ tinction, the incoming administration will first target the approximately 3 million immigrants in the “bad immigrant” category.

The idea that a certain category of immigrant in some way deserves deportation is unacceptable and will only divide the immigrant rights movement, which stands opposed to all deportations. It also pro­ vides political cover for politicians to unjustly label large sections of the immigrant population as “crimi­ nals.” Nothing can be farther from the truth.

Trump wants to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade Su­ preme Court ruling that affirmed the legal right of women to abortions, and stated that any candidate for Supreme Court justice must share his view. Since a new nominee will be selected by Trump early in his first term, it’s clear that the on-going fight for abortion rights will be near center stage.

Foreign policy As the preeminent world power, the United States under Republican-majority rule will continue to as­ sert its dominance throughout the world. U.S. foreign policy is designed to pave the way for the insatiable drive of powerful corporate giants to dominate mar­ kets anywhere in the world.

The capitalist crisis is global, as no nation on earth can boast of a “recovery” or an economy free from stagnation or decline. Along with widespread impo­ sition of austerity measures worldwide, imperialist wars of domination and plunder continue unabated throughout the world.

As Obama leaves office, the U.S. is engaged in at least seven wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia), either by direct military intervention or through client states and mercenary armies. In many, drone warfare prevails, and the CIA provides leadership utilizing covert methods. In oth­ ers, U.S. military Special Forces provide training and support for local troops or intervene directly on their own. Meanwhile, regular U.S. imperialist troops re­ main stationed at some 1100 military bases around the world, from which drone attacks and deadly co­ vert actions are regularly planned and executed.

Foreign policy will be led by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, one of the most powerful multi-national corporations. Tillerson has strong ties to Russian government officials and oil magnates from years of partnership managing their shared oil inter­ ests. Tillerson and Exxon are sure to prosper mightily.

Foreign policy will also be shaped by two retired generals, Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mat­ tis and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Mat­ tis was a central leader of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which destroyed those countries and killed hun­ dreds of thousands in the process. Flynn, an Islamo­ phobe who believes fear of Muslims is “justified,” sup­ ports targeting Muslim organizations and mosques with surveillance and spying. Both will be instrumen­ tal in executing and possibly expanding involvement in U.S. wars. ‘America First’

The foreign policy theme of the new administration will be “America First.” Trump raised this slogan dur­ ing his campaign largely as a false prom­ ise to U.S. workers that his administra­ tion would remedy stagnant job growth by means of a system of tariffs and other protectionist devices aimed at increas­ ing the volume of products that are “Made in America.”

But “America First” also has a military connotation. Large doses of anti-Muslim rhetoric are used to project a strong im­ age of U.S. military strength and domi­ nance worldwide. This posture demands subservience from less powerful nations. It will be a foreign policy that “respects” authoritarian figures such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump also seeks closer ties with Philippine dicta­ tor President Rodrigo Duterte, whose government has overseen extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers. In accepting a congratulatory call from Duterte following Trump’s vic­ tory, the president-elect communicated approval for these police actions.

Democratic Party administrations also have a long history of supporting tyrants and dicta­ tors. The Obama administration provided full-throat­ ed support for dictatorial regimes like the Saudi mon­ archy, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Persian Gulf states including Qatar and Bahrain, and Idriss Deby in Chad. Obama greatly expanded funding for apartheid Isra­ el—which has 1.8 million Palestinians under siege in Gaza, rules by military occupation, regularly tortures Palestinian political prisoners, and has a long history of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial mur­ ders (for more on Israel, see articles on page 4).

Trump’s “America First” approach is at odds with Obama’s foreign policy posture, which uses different methods but is designed to achieve the same result. Obama’s program ostensibly focused on “building trust” with other countries. The Dec. 29 Washington Post described it as a “collaborative approach and emphasis on international norms [to] convince oth­ er countries to partner with the United States to do things that were not always popular.”

Clearly, these differences are purely tactical. The goal is to force compliance with U.S. interests, and the differences concern how best to posture on the world stage to achieve that result.

There is little doubt Trump plans a massive buildup in military spending, exceeding spending during the Obama years. He has called for 90,000 more Army sol­ diers, dozens of new Navy ships and hundreds of war­ planes, and bolstering nuclear and missile defense. As expected, justification for this massive buildup is the “heightened threat of terrorism.”

Forbes cited an expert analysts on the cost: “[a] good ballpark estimate … is about $800-900B higher over ten years than the most recent president’s budget requests. Foreign Policy Magazine estimates about “$100 billion more than the Pentagon has currently budgeted for Trump’s first term.”

Trump is proud to admit that a big chunk of military spending will go to upgrading the military nuclear ar­ senal, continuing and expanding Obama’s work in this area. In fact, Trump is calling for “a new nuclear arms race.” He wants the U.S. to “expand its nuclear capabil­ ity until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” The U.S. currently has 4500 nuclear warheads, including 1800 deployed strategic nuclear weapons, far surpassing all other countries that have them.

The new administration will build on the work of their predecessors. Despite Obama’s carefully crafted statements posing as an opponent of nuclear weap­ ons, he has taken major steps to strengthen the U.S. nuclear military capability with an extensive “mod­ ernization” program, which the Dec. 22 New York Times reported “may cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. It features new factories, refurbished nucle­ ar arms and a new generation of weapon carriers, in­ cluding bombers, missiles and submarines…”

This “modernization” means replacing older and outdated missile systems with smaller more stream­ lined versions equipped with new technology that makes them much more accurate in hitting targets and more difficult to shoot down.

Staunch bipartisan military support for Israel, the only military nuclear power in the Middle East, has further heightened the risk of nuclear war. Former President Jimmy Carter estimated in 2014 that Isra­ el’s nuclear arsenal totaled somewhere near 300 war­ heads, with ample delivery systems to deploy them.

Obama’s award to Israel of a record $38 billion in military aid over the next 10 years will greatly strengthen its nuclear capability and poses a grave risk of nuclear war in the region. To this day, Israel de­ nies it has a nuclear program and it refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Republican electoral victory reflected the ab­ sence of class-conscious political leadership within the organizations of the U.S. working class and the op­ pressed. That’s why revolutionary socialists raise the pressing need for a Labor Party in the United States, based on a fighting and re-energized labor movement.

Such a party, fully independent and opposed to capi­ talist parties, could have filled this void and presented a political program that fights for working-class is­ sues, demands an immediate end to U.S. wars around the world, opposes all forms of racism and sexism, and champions the struggles of all those oppressed under capitalism—a program that relies solely on the independent power of working people and their allies organized in mass struggle. n SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2017 5