The General’s Son—Journey of an Israeli in Palestine

By Miko Peled

Published by Just World Books 2016

By Steve Halpern

Over the past 16 months the world witnessed the unimaginable genocide organized by the Israeli government. This was made possible by massive support from the United States. I happen to be Jewish. Clearly there are growing numbers of Jews who find this genocide to be repugnant. However, large numbers of Jews, especially the ones who live in Israel support the genocide. 

Miko Peled’s book The General’s Son—Journey of an Israeli in Palestine gives a unique perspective to the cause of Palestinian liberation. Miko Peled’s father was Matti Peled. His father was a leader in the Jewish terrorist organization known as the Hagenah. 

Ilon Pappe’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine gives a comprehensive history of how the Hagenah along with the Irgun and Lehi coerced about 750,000 Palestinians to leave their homes in 1948. At that time Palestinians were the clear majority of the population in the nation now known as Israel. However, the Hagenah wasn’t able to absorb the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Israel at that time.

General Matti Peled

With the establishment of the state of Israel, Matti Peled became a General in the so-called Israeli Defense Force. The IDF replaced the Hagenah and the other Jewish terrorist organizations. 

Then in 1956 Israel briefly took control of the Gaza Strip. Matti Peled became the military commander of that area. To better understand the problems of the Palestinians living in Gaza, Matti Peled learned the Arabic Language. He would eventually become a professor of Arabic literature. 

In his conversations with Palestinians, Peled was surprised by what they had to say. He expected that they would want revenge for being forced from their homes. However, his overall impression was that the main priority of the Palestinians was to live in peace.

After Israel gave up the Gaza Strip, they went to war again in 1967 and took control of the occupied territories that also included the West Bank and Golan Heights. After the 1967 war, something happened that would begin to change the course of the life of General Matti Peled.

The IDF forced about 30 Palestinian men above the age of thirteen from their homes. The IDF then executed those Palestinians and ran over their bodies with a bulldozer.

General Peled could not reconcile this mass execution with the army he was a leader of. Miko Peled gave the following summary of his father’s thinking after the 1967 war.

“Immediately after the war, while still in uniform, my father said that Israel must recognize the rights of the Palestinian people. He said that if we don’t do this, the Israeli army would become an occupation army and would resort to brutal means to enforce the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian people. He said this while still in uniform, and he never stopped saying it and advocating for Palestinian rights till he died.”

One of General Peled’s initiatives in attempting to advocate for peace was to establish relations and become a personal friend with Dr. Issam Sartawi. Sartawi was a confidant of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. General Peled was alone within the Israeli establishment for initiating this overture. This is how Miko Peled summarized his father’s thinking.

“Will we be allowed to live our lives in peace and security…and be masters of our own destiny? Anyone who allows us to do this is a friend. Is the man with whom I am speaking willing to be our friend?”…” “Can reality be transformed?” “Anyone who does not believe it can is depriving himself of the great powers that nature has bestowed on mankind.”

Miko Peled

The life experience of Miko Peled was different from his father’s. While Miko became critical of the Israeli government, initially he wasn’t an activist. He studied Karate and spent two years in Japan developing his skills. Eventually he wound up in the San Diego area of California and opened a dojo. 

While he was away from Israel, he continued to have an interest in finding a way of promoting the beliefs he gained from his father. So, he joined a discussion club of Jews and Palestinians in California. 

There Miko began to learn that the fundamental ideas he was raised with in support of Israel were all fabrications. The Jewish armed forces didn’t carry out a heroic struggle in 1948 to establish the state of Israel. No, in fact the Jewish forces outnumbered the Arabic armies and had more arms than their adversaries. The war of 1948 wasn’t a heroic battle by Jews, but a genocidal campaign to steal the homes of the majority of the population of Palestine. 

This new knowledge, as well as his background convinced Miko to become more active. He worked with the Rotary Club to import wheelchairs for Israelis and Palestinians. This effort had no problem with sending the wheelchairs to Israelis. However, the attempt to send wheelchairs to Palestinians proved to be an arduous campaign. 

Then, Miko visited Palestinians in the occupied territories. He wrote about his gripping fear of entering an area where Arabic people lived. This was due to his upbringing where people with power instilled in him the idea that the number one priority of Arabic people was to murder Jews. This myth, as well as many others gradually evaporated with his discussions with Palestinians, as well as his exposure to their world.

An interesting aspect to this book was Miko Peled’s description of Palestinians who served time in Israeli jails. Most Palestinians living in the occupied territories have served time or have family members who served time in Israeli jails. The IDF is the organization that brought charges against those prisoners. Since the IDF doesn’t pretend to represent Palestinians, all those charges are bogus. 

Miko Peled reported that Palestinians organized a sophisticated educational system within the walls of the prison. There they learned Palestinian history, as well as the Hebrew and English languages. Palestinian leaders formed an alliance with imprisoned Israeli gangsters. So, even when leading Palestinians were held in solitary confinement, messages would be sent to other Palestinian prisoners by way of the Israeli gangsters.

Miko Peled’s life changed when he learned that two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in Jerusalem in 1997. Killed with that explosion was Miko Peled’s niece Smadar, who was almost 14 years old. 

Ehud Barak, who became Prime Minister of Israel came to the Peled home to pay his respects for their loss. Barak was running for office and said he couldn’t declare he was working for peace because he felt that would mean losing votes.

Barak’s statement made Miko Peled erupt in anger with the words: “Why not tell people that this and other similar tragedies are taking place because we are occupying another nation and that in order to save lives the right thing to do is to end the occupation and negotiate a just peace with our Palestinian partners?” After 28 years, the Israeli government has yet to give a rational answer to that question. 

Miko Peled differed from his father and other members of his family when he argued for one democratic-secular Palestine. This disagreement centered on the idea of whether Palestinians and Israelis were capable of living in one state with equal rights for all. 

Clearly the people of South Africa managed to live in one nation after the government abandoned its apartheid laws. Clearly people in the United States managed to live in one nation after the government abandoned the Jim Crow laws. 

However, the Zionist movement has argued that the only way to fight anti-Semitism in the world is with an exclusively Jewish nation. That argument ignores the fact that Jews and non-Jews lived in Palestine in relative peace for centuries before Israel became a nation. That argument also ignores the fact that the seven million Jews living in the United States live in a safer environment than Jews who live in Israel.  

The Israeli organized genocide the world witnessed over the past 17 month is teaching millions of people the true nature of Israeli apartheid. Miko Peled’s book The General’s Son gives us a unique perspective in support of unconditional Palestinian liberation.

The Billionaire Boys Club Forgot Our History

 

The Billionaire Boys Club Forgot Our History

They eliminated thousands of jobs.

They want to deport millions

They are attempting to deport Mahmoud Khalil

because he organized to stop the murder of babies 

They forgot that the United States was born 

because of a violent political revolution.

They forgot that Malcolm X quoted Patrick Henry when he said,

“Give me liberty or give me death.”

Frederick Douglass was born a slave

He witnessed beatings, rape, and murder

because human beings were owned

to make money for enslavers.

He said,

“For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, 

America reins without a rival.”  

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.

It never did and it never will.

Find out what any people will quietly submit to

and you have found out the exact measure 

of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them,

And these will continue till they are resisted 

with either words or blows or with both.”

“It is not light that we need, but fire; 

it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. 

We need the storm, 

the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

Then 350,000 Union soldiers died 

in the Civil War 

and chattel slavery was no more.

Mother Jones was horrified at the sight 

of ten- and twelve-year-old children 

disfigured because they worked long hours in a textile factory. 

She organized the 125-mile March of the Children.

Alice Paul organized so women might have the right to vote.

President Wilson ordered her arrested.

In jail she went on a hunger strike.

They inserted a tube in her throat to forced-fed her.

President Wilson had Eugene Debs arrested

for giving a speech protesting the First World War.

After serving three years in prison, President Harding pardoned Debs 

and honored him with a visit to the White House.

Los macheteros, the sugarcane workers

did the seemingly unbearable work of cutting 

the cane under the scorching hot sun 

on the island of Puerto Rico, or Boriqua.

The Harvard University graduate Pedro Albizu Campos

led the macheteros in a strike that won significant benefits.

Also in 1934, strikes erupted in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco.

Workers then created the Congress of Industrial Organizations or C.I.O. 

And James Baldwin said:  

“Power, then, which can have no morality itself, 

is yet dependent on human energy, 

on the wills and desires of human beings.  

When power translates itself into tyranny,

 

it means that the principles on which that power depended, 

and which were its justification, are bankrupt.  

When this happens, and it is happening now, 

power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities––and seas of blood.  

The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, 

and dread looking into the eyes of their young; 

while the excluded begin to realize, 

having endured everything, that they can endure everything.  

They do not know the precise shape of the future, 

but they know that the future belongs to them.  

They realize this––paradoxically––

by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin, 

almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, 

to create the principals on which a new world will be built.”

The President Needs To Get a Real Job, and Find Out What It Means To Earn a Living

By Steve Halpern

The President of the United States

likes to tell people what we need to do.

This is important since he is only 

supposed to be doing the job of a public servant.

Oh, how difficult it must be

sitting in the oval office,

listening to all those problems,

having to make those hard decisions. 

Deciding to murder people in other countries,

so that their interests might be protected.

Deciding to cut back on a family receiving $250 per month,

so that affluent people receive dividends on their bonds.

But how can he make these decisions,

never knowing what it means to work for a living?

How can he expect others to sacrifice,

when he is terrified of holding down a real job?

The President needs to get a minimum wage job,

and experience the humiliation of what that means.

He needs to understand what it means to provide 

for a family with that income.

The President needs to do production work in a factory,

laboring every minute at a dangerous job,

so that someone else might have

more money than they could ever use.

The President needs to work as a farm laborer,

breaking his back under the hot sun,

so that others might have food to eat,

while he barely receives enough to sustain life.

The President needs to see 

what it means when his child is hungry.

Maybe then he would think twice about saying 

that this is the bastion of democracy in the world.

The President needs to look for a real job,

then get rejected time after time,

and return home to think about

how he will pay his bills.

Yes, the President needs to get a real job,

to see how the people live who he supposedly represents.

I think that if he did this, it is possible, 

that he would have a change of heart.

Instead of doing everything in his power

to insure that the wealthy have more than they can use,

he might think about working so that 

the majority might have better lives.

Today, the President will not do this,

instead, he wants to build a “bridge to the future.”

This is why he needs to get a real job

and learn what it means to work for a living. 

Trump and Musk need to get useful jobs, so they will learn how to do meaningful work

Sketch by Kathe Kollwitz

 

By Steve Halpern

Recently Elon Musk sent letters to employees of the federal government. Musk, who heads the miss-named Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), asked those employees to report on what they accomplished in the past week. Musk, threatened workers with termination if they failed to reply to his note.    

Many liberal commentators have argued that this action, as well as many actions of the Administration of President Donald Trump are unprecedented. While we haven't seen Presidential Administrations enact many of Trump's initiatives, the political course of Trump's politics goes back to the government that took power after the so-called American Revolution. 

The United States has its own peculiar history of the capitalist system. Capitalism is different from the feudal system where royal families ruled. With capitalism manufacturing enterprises work with banks and merchant capitalists, who all work with the government. 

Banks only invest money when they feel they can gouge out profits on those investments. This means continual capitalist growth is necessary. However, since capitalists rarely, if ever, actually produce wealth, all wealth must come from the working class. 

So, because there is a continual need for economic growth, capitalists routinely coerce workers to produce more while wages stagnate or deteriorate. This explains why about 70% of the world's population lives on $10 per day or less. This explains why wages have stagnated for workers in this country over the past fifty years. Yet the billionaires of the world have seen their fortunes increase dramatically. So, while politicians promise to make America great again, tens of millions of people in this country do not have enough food to eat.

I used to work in the automotive parts industry. In those days, we were working as fast as we could to meet production goals. Then a corporate officer came to the plant and demanded that we increase the production speed.

I raised my hand and said that one worker had nervous breakdowns and another needed to go home because his blood pressure was 165. However, we did increase the production speed. After about two years, the plant closed and about 2,500 workers saw jobs we worked eliminated. In all, tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were eliminated due to automation or outsourcing. Recently, when I've asked young people if they know anyone who works in a factory, the answer is usually, no.

In his book Half Has Never Been Told—Slavery and the making of American capitalism, Edward E. Baptist documented how slave owners coerced slaves to continually increase the amount of cotton they collected every day. The punishment for failing to meet production quotas consisted of various means of physical torture. Yet, while the slave owners did no work, they argued that the slaves, who did everything, were "lazy and shiftless." 

This profound contradiction was one of the reasons for the Civil War. In all, about 600,000 soldiers died in that war. Then the United States government adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These Amendments abolished slavery, established "equal protection under the law," as well as the right to vote for all men in this country. Women didn't get the right to vote until 1920.

However, up until the 1960s, all branches of the U.S. government routinely violated these three Amendments. This meant that it took the civil rights movement of the 1960s to get the government to give Black people the same rights they were supposed to be granted by the Constitution.

Today, the Trump Administration is attempting to reverse many of the gains of the civil rights movement. Trump wants to deny students the right to learn the history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. 

However, the history of this country has been a continuous struggle to advance the interests of the working class. We saw this in the labor, civil rights, women's, anti-war, and immigrant rights movements.

Clearly Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both indifferent to this history. They believe that they have a right to spend their lives living off of the labor of the working class, while they do no productive work. 

Then, they have the audacity to claim that they know something about what it means to be efficient. One way to advance efficiency would be to confiscate the wealth of billionaires and use that money to do away with poverty.

Several years ago I wrote a poem titled The President needs to get a real job and learn what it means to earn a living. This poem was about President Clinton, but could also apply to every President in the history of this country. 

As I've argued in this blog, the government in this country has always been about serving the interests of the most affluent. This capitalist class lives of of the labor of working people all over the world. Mass movements and even wars for liberation have been the means for advancing the interests of the working class. In my opinion, these are the lessons working people can learn from to deal with the uncertain and insidious reality we face today.