Clinton and Impeachment
What are President Clinton’s real high crimes and misdemeanors? The list is long and heinous. The latest crime was December’s air assault on the people of Iraq-the second under his administration.
This comes on top of the murderous economic sanctions against Iraq, which are denying food and medicine to the people. According to human rights groups in Iraq, the sanctions have resulted in the deaths of over 1.6 million people.
Just a couple of months earlier, Clinton wontonly ordered a cruise missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, as well as on a military training camp in Afghanistan.
And the Clinton administration has backed a host of other acts of terrorism and economic aggression against Cuba and-with its client, the Zionist government of Israel-against Palestine .
Moreover, Clinton is guilty of monstrous crimes against the great majority of the American people, among which are his leading role in the destruction of welfare for those who are denied their right to a job or otherwise disadvantaged in the course of trying to survive in capitalist society.
Yet at the very same time, Clinton and his bipartisan gang systematically hand out billions in welfare to multibillion-dollar corporations.
For these atrocities, foreign and domestic, Clinton deserves impeachment-if not criminal prosecution.
But who are those sitting today in judgment of this murderous arch-criminal? Why, none other than Clinton’s partners in crime, the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, who represent the American capitalist class. The victims of these crimes will have no say in the current impeachment process.
It’s wrong to either support or oppose the bizarre travesty called capitalist “justice” now being played out in Washington. Clinton and his ilk can get the justice they deserve only in a court of public opinion composed of the victims of capitalist social, economic, and political injustice.
The American and international working class and its natural allies-the oppressed and super-exploited victims of the racist and sexist profit system-are the only force in society with the right and duty to act as the judge and jury of Clinton and his class of exploiters and oppressors.
Moreover, the working class, leading all the victims of capitalist injustice, is the only force that can disarm and constrain the criminal ruling class of the United States.
We must continue to organize and mobilize-to march, protest, and educate. Our efforts will not be wasted.
Our demonstrations will accelerate the changing consciousness of the masses of American working people and will contribute to the process leading toward fundamental change. This will ultimately result in the liberation of the entire human race from capitalist barbarism. n
Israeli Politics
The collapse of the Netanyahu government and the splintering of the Israeli right going into the upcoming elections reveals the fundamental inflexibility of Zionism. The Zionist politicians are tying themselves in knots trying to square a circle.
The basis of the Israeli state is removing the Palestinian people from their land. Therefore, it is not possible for Zionists to make any lasting agreement with Palestinians, even when they get the lion’s share of the benefits-as they do from the Oslo Accords.
The U.S. government has considered the Israeli Labor Party more amenable to dealing with the Palestinians. Labor does talk more about negotiating than the right, but it is no less committed to Zionism. This produces some strange contradictions.
Thus, the Jerusalem Post reported Dec. 28 that the Labor candidate for premier, Ehud Barak, accused Netanyahu of being a captive of the Zionist settlers on the West Bank and at the same time said that the public needs a government that will “physically separate us from the Palestinians.”
But how could the Israelis “physically separate” themselves from the Palestinians when large Palestinian communities remain within the pre-1967 borders of the Zionist state? This sounds like “resettle [i.e. expel] the Arabs,” which is the slogan of the Zionist right.
Within Netanyahu’s Likhud party, a right-wing challenger, Uzi Landau, has been saying, according to the Jerusalem Post of Dec. 28, that “he regards the Oslo and Wye agreements as a danger to the state’s security but could not cancel them, only insist that everything is done to minimize their damage.”
But that is exactly what Netanyahu has been doing, in the sense that he been trying to minimize, delay, or vitiate any concession to the Palestinians promised by agreements.
For example, after the trumpeted Wye agreement was signed recently under Clinton’s smiling patronage, Netanyahu refused to abide by it.
The Palestinians have gotten nothing from the peace accords but the apparatus of a mini-state, which has trying to do the job of repressing the Palestinian people that the Zionists demand of it.
In the meantime, the Israelis have been working to further fragment the Palestinian territories that the agreements provide for and thereby have virtually destroyed the meager livelihood of the Palestinian people.
But the Zionists are still not satisfied. They cannot expel the Palestinians without another major war in the Middle East, which they are not strong enough to fight themselves. And they cannot live with the Palestinians either.
That is why Israeli politics are becoming so tortured. There is no solution to the conflict without ending Zionist exclusivism and opening the way for a democratic state in which both peoples could live together.
