Views in brief

Spelling out Israel's apartheid

LICHI D'AMELIO'S "A slander on our movement" deserves high praise for its unapologetic reiteration of the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state from a revolutionary socialist viewpoint.

D'Amelio's rejoinder to Paul Pederson is particularly timely. Recently, I heard a member of the Socialist Workers Party, which publishes The Militant, make an argument very similar to Pederson's at the Northeast Conference of the Campus Antiwar Network.

While D'Amelio's argument is sharp and politically effective, I believe it cedes too much ground on one point, namely her statement that, no doubt, no sane person would try to argue that Israel and apartheid South Africa "are exactly the same. Of course, they are not. But the similarities are simply more overwhelming than the differences, and they certainly merit a discussion."

As Hazem Jamjoum argues in "Not an analogy: Israel and the crime of apartheid," there is a simpler way to make the case. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which entered into force in 1976, specified that the crime of apartheid is not limited to the borders of South Africa. As Jamjoum observes, "The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002--long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa--attests to the universality of the crime."

The substance of the crime of apartheid, Jamjoum writes, is the same in both legal instruments: "a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one 'racial' group over another." Like genocide or slavery, "apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commits it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court."

I do not mean to suggest that activists should concentrate their work on securing legal indictments against the criminals against humanity who run the apartheid state of Israel, although all involved in any such projects certainly have my best wishes. Rather, I think focusing on apartheid as a crime strengthens the case for boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) from Israel. Since supporting the commission of apartheid is also a crime against humanity, activists can link the BDS campaign to the demand for an end to U.S. aid to Israel.

Articulating Israeli apartheid as a crime, in short, gives revolutionary socialists an opening to inject anti-imperialist politics into both the Palestinian rights and antiwar movements while working to link those movements to each other more explicitly.
Mark Clinton, Holyoke, Mass.

The SWP's twisted path

REGARDING "A slander on our movement": This is an excellent article. I have only one small criticism: the characterization of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as a "left-wing" group.

The SWP has followed a strange path over the last 20-30 years, losing most of its members in the process. If one looks closely at their newspaper in recent years you'll find that they often take rather conservative or even right-wing positions. This would seem to be out of an excessive haste to distance themselves from the "middle-class liberals and radicals" who they view as their principal enemy.

This helps explain the newspaper's bizarre attack on the International Socialist Organization and on the Palestinian solidarity movement: better to line up with right-wingers and ultra-Zionists, in the SWP's sectarian view, than to find yourself in league with "middle-class radicals." (They've also argued against global warming, and taken other strange positions, because of this impulse.)

So, at any rate, it's hard to see the SWP as a left-wing or socialist organization; they barely resemble the SWP that many of us worked with in the '70s or '80s.
Anna Fierling, from the Internet

Fighting for our schools

THE STATE'S budget cut of $8 billion now puts California schools 50th in school funding. We just passed Louisiana and Mississippi in the race to the bottom.

Savings from cuts in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) bureaucracy should have been part of the settlement demanded by United Teachers Los Angeles and by all of us. It's workers' kids who are deprived of first-class education, and the labor movement should lead the attack on LAUSD waste.

My role has been to help organize parents and students to demolish the Ambassador--that wreck of a hotel--and to build new schools for the 4,000 mostly Latino/as and some Koreans. We have won a funding disaster.

The children have been suffering shorter school years, forced busing and overcrowded schools. We have been guaranteed a social justice curriculum as the living memorial to the social justice work of Robert Kennedy.

How can students learn and act on social justice issues if we have the unjust state of California and the unjust LAUSD?

We must make demands on the governor, the legislators and the mayor--not just the LAUSD. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wanted full responsibility for the schools. Now is his chance to lead and win for the children.

Organizing and peaceful direct action by parents, students, teachers and staff, and organized workers is our best and only answer. We must try.
Paul Schrade, Los Angeles

A talent for swindling

REGARDING "TEACHERS for CEO merit pay": I thought the article summed up our predicament in this country precisely.

The huge salaries and bonuses that the CEOs received for wrecking our economy are just wrong. Our government--whose job it is to make this country a good place to live for everybody, with opportunities for everyone to earn a decent living--should have realized the inequities going on at the top and done something to stop it.

We are all so busy working longer hours and some of us have to drive long hours to get to work, therefore we trust the government to do what we pay them to do; and that is to keep this country running smoothly, to ensure we have good schools, health care and jobs.

Someone needs to be accountable for letting the CEO's earn these outrageous incomes to the detriment of our infrastructure and our future generation.

The only talent the CEO's have that I can see, is a talent for swindling.
Vivian Sip, Strongsville, Ohio