The Segal Report, the Aftermath, Politics and Post-Politics; plus, alleged humour and less-than-stellar behaviour

Labor's double-play worked - which tells us a lot about where we are

The Segal Report, the Aftermath, Politics and Post-Politics

Toto, we’re not in the πόλις anymore

The Segal aftermath. It’s shame that the great comic actor George Segal is no longer with us, because he would have been perfect casting for the hapless Jillian Segal, the zionist activist appointed as ‘Envoy for Antisemitism’. Two years ago, Segal was a respected commercial lawyer whose zionist activist sympathies were well known and perfectly legitimate. Now her reputation has been destroyed in two weeks, thrice over. First by creating a proposal on limiting anti-semitism immediately seen to be repressive and contrary to anglosphere traditions of free speech and free inquiry (which Israel, among others, has continued; is there any doubt that Gideon Levy and most of Haaretz would be found to be anti-semitic under the Segal proposals?). Second, by being revealed as a zionist activist - President of ECAJ - under the usual ‘soft disguise’ of being head of an Australian-Jewish ‘community’ peak body that has simply been repurposed as a zionist lobbying outfit. Third by having her husband exposed as a donor to the right-wing ‘Advance’ lobby/activism group. And fourth by her incompetent defence of her own proposals in the meeja, a corporate lawyer accustomed to corporatist instrumental procedure, utterly impatient with debate. ‘Look there’ll always be critics’ she said irritatedly, and hilariously, several times, when presented with well-reasoned arguments against her proposals.

There can be no real denying that the whole two weeks of this has been a disaster for the zionist push to fuse zionist interests with Australian governance, in an analogue to the process that has occurred over several decades in the US. Though they will get some sort of win eventually as cowardly university administrators, media editors and producers, toe the line, and censor content and activity as precaution. Because that will be done silently and by preclusion - you wont see what isn’t published, or even written or produced, because it was headed off - that will be harder to fight.

Rusted-on Labor types have wailed that Albanese has made a terrible mistake in appointing Segal etc etc. But they are in error in this. My belief, expressed previously, is only affirmed by recent events: Labor knew something like this would happen, and it was a way of dealing with the squeeze from both sides, in a way that would put the damage elsewhere.

Yes, it’s usually better to attribute something like this to incompetence and panic. But my belief is that there’s a new tactic around, which arises from the ever-greater separation between the media/politics ‘class’, and the much greater majority. The strategy is, in media/political class obsessive stoushes like this, to give your opponents everything they want, hoping they will over-reach, and destroy themselves, while you retain only a few scratches. This is surely what has occurred. The zionists have vastly over-estimated the interest, moral investment or basic knowledge of the Gaza ‘event’ in the broad Australian public. Led by ancient warriors, often second generation, such as Mark Liebler, they mistakenly believe that the public still have the old 70s Cold War narrative in their head. This narrative was that Israel was legitimate, defending itself, and that the Palestinians were lethal terrorist mad dogs, a perception enhanced by Fatah and other groups’ waging their war on a global scale. But this perception was maintained by several conditions. First, Labour-led Israel didn’t over-react to terrorist attacks, confining themselves - until the 1982 invasion of Lebanon - to covert attacks and reprisals. That denied Palestinian armed groups exactly what they wanted, an escalation. Second, there is no global waging of the war. Hamas has explicitly renounced attacks outside of the ‘Green line’ area of Israel, partly to separate themselves from Fatah etc’s Marxist construction of the issue, and secondly because Qatar and other supporters have made it clear to them that they don’t want firefights in airports, somewhere between the Godiva chocolates and Victoria’s Secret outlets near Gates 1-500. The world has changed.

So, while the October 7 attack may have revived the notion that Palestinians are animals, it has done so in a context without political narrative, the condition of our post Cold War age, as Zaki Laidi’s very important book A World Without Meaning spells out. That has robbed the Palestinians of political solidarity; but it has also deprived the Israelis of the same. They have exacerbated this by using the October 7 attack as a pretext for general destruction. The Zionists try and present this as rationally, morally conducted, and that all civilian casualties are the product of the pursuit of Hamas - so that even if 100 are killed in pursuing a (possible) single Hamas fighter, it’s justified. This is Nazi logic, as applied to the European resistance; its official indifference to casualty numbers approaches the morality of execution-reprisals of World War II (and of earlier colonialism, it should be said).

That logic is barely holding, which is one reason why earlier Israeli regimes did not apply it. But more than that, it is simply not registering. Out of the corner of their eye, many millions of people are seeing in the news, a hi-tech army relentlessly pounding a starving people, crouching in rubble. People are simply seeing an attack that is both futile and pitiless. There is no genuine ‘big other’ that Israel is fighting: no pan-Arab movement, no USSR-backed armed movements. Zionists have tried to summon up the spectre of the Holocaust, in a world where no-one under sixty remembers a time before there was a Jewish state, with one of the world’s few nuclear arsenals; no-one under ninety remembers a time when there wasn’t a Jewish state. The swaggering youth of the IDF conscription forces are twenty years old; they are three generations away from direct Holocaust survivors; their parents, even their grandparents, were born after 1973. The fascistic strand of zionism - the Nordau-Jabotinsky-Irgun-Likud strand - has entered them without restraint. It is the political equivalent of the coelacanth, an ancient entity survived in deep waters; armed zionism, in this respect has the same swagger of high colonialism, of pith helmet rifle-butt and rattan.

People can see that, when they see anything at all, that is not disjointed pictures, or stories of starving people being killed under fire while queuing for food at facilities run by subcontracted private US-Israeli companies, which have displaced the UN. In a world where world-understanding is now less through geopolitics than personal politics, people are seeing Israel’s actions not through the lens of global conflict, but of abuse. Israel is sadistic and masculine, hurting people who are clearly not, cannot, fight back or match them. The stated logic - ‘October 7 did this to you!’ - is strikingly similar to the male abusers’ victimhood cry: ‘see what you made me do!’. This is something people see now not as the outrage of war, but as coercive control elevated to a general level. But, as increasingly despairing leaders of the pro-Palestine movement have noted, seeing all this has not been enough to stir Western publics to action. Indeed the reaction is probably analogous to the general demobilisation of social action by the increasing reliance on the state for moral enforcement.

But, as I say, that’s when they see it at all, or give any framing narrative to it. Both the zionists and pro-Palestinian sides are, in the court of public opinion, making old arguments, which people have difficulty responding to or even recognising. The wonks in Labor, the effective ones, understand that better than those in the outer circles of political/media action and commentary. The general public is post-political to a degree that political people find very hard to repeatedly remind themselves of. They get it; then they forget it again. Who could not be engaged in this, we think? Who could not care, we ask ourselves? And, if we are honest, who could not find this exciting, involving, engaging (in the case of Gaza, side-by-side with the most appalling, disgusting and horrifying act rubber-stamped by the West in my politically active lifetime)?

But they do not. So Labor can make the double play. Give the political zionists everything they want, all of it, keys to the kingdom. Put an ex-Prez of ECAJ at the head of an inquiry into what was and wasn’t anti-semitism? Sure! When the politically engaged squawk that this is a sick parody of a real anti-racist procedure, the inner wonks know they’re on the right track. Indeed it’s a twofer: getting the Left to yell at a Labor government is a bonus. If the pink-haired men in dresses, and the bearded swarthy types are yelling at Labor, they must be doing something right. Then let the zionists over-reach, as the wonks know they will, and the zionists will carry the can. The insiders will squawk about how this has damaged Labor’s credibility, and it really hasn’t, because people won’t tie one thing to the other. All most people will see, if they see anything at all, is some bossy lady on TV making a fool of herself, by being gotcha-ed. Meanwhile, Albo is in China. People will barely notice that either, but they will notice it a bit more, that our prime minister is strengthening and securing our relationship with our number one export markets.

But what of the damage to the Middle-Eastern - Australian vote? Well, the truth is, they community blew that one, in the election. Probably couldnt be helped, but having bared their teeth and gone grrrrr, we’ll vote you out, they couldn’t get the vote together, and enough of it went back to Labor, for Labor to know they wouldn’t have to worry about that non-threat indefinitely. It was a step backwards for the pro-Palestine movement, but there was probably no way to avoid it. Which is a measure of the predicament that those of us trying to do politics are in, in a post-political period. Labor’s wonks have got the trick, and they use it incessantly now. You want a treaty? Sure! Have eighty treaties, and when we need to rubber-stamp something we’ll negotiate with the most corrupt and pliable group among those eighty, to get what we want. So they can carry the can when it screws up. Violence against women? Sure! We made inquiries and have found that it doesn’t respond to government policy. So let the NGOs have all the inquiries and statements of ‘this must end’ they want. Whose fault will it be when there’s no movement? Repeat for each area of social policy which has inherited a political social movement from the ‘social movement’ era - mid 70s into 2000s - when more responsive change was possible. Usually it’s the left/progressives etc that walk into the punch. This time the zionists got it. All good Fun With Dick and Jane (George Segal and Jane Fonda - a great movie; really the genuine Patty Hearst story. Avoid the remake) Enjoy the moment, because it’s our turn next, again. And again and again and again….

Erewhon

National curriculum revised to include learning, by heart, ‘Riptide’.

Education secretary Jason Clare announced today, that as, precaution against civilisational technological collapse, all Australian school students from K to year 12, will learn by heart ‘Riptide’, the 2013 hit by Vince Joy that has since lodged in the nation’s brain. ‘Here’s a move that I’ll think you’ll like’ Clare announced, setting the catchy, irrepressible song running afresh in a million heads again, just so good, so, so good. All students will be tested annually on their ability to recite and then play the ditty ‘you’re not going to sing the words wrong’ Clare joked. The move is not without controversy, chiefly from the Australian Dentists Association. A First Nations spokesperson said the move was colonialist ‘For 50,000 years our people have been runnin down to the riptide, taking away to the dark side ah that goddam thing…’. Research has established that the only person unable to fully forget the song is Vince Joy himself, who is currently in an induced coma, at his own request.

Taking a leaf from Hollywood, Gen X couple in their fifties hire Lack of Intimacy co-ordinator.

Horse-breeder Mark Latham finally gets a share of Black Caviar

Poem of the week

By Kim Serca

Literary prize afterparty

Well I made my play, a little pissed

'Not if you were the last man in the world!'

Girl, for that award, I have to say

You wouldn’t make the longlist