The Farce Of UN Statehood For Palestine

There are a host of legitimate, substantive reasons to censure the recent Palestinian Authority (PA) application for statehood at the United Nations. Some observers have accused PA President Mahmoud Abbas of using the statehood bid as a cynical ploy to bolster his moribund popularity. Legal experts have asserted that the ramifications of the application could lead to a situation where diaspora Palestinians lose their internationally recognized right of return, codified in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194.

But perhaps the most trenchant criticism is the most simple: so what? Even if the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution, what change would it impact on the ground?

There is reason to laud the PA for this enterprise—without the approval or sanction of the United States—and asserting their own agency in the peace process. Although there are risible claims being regurgitated by the Israel for-right-or-for-wrong crowd that this is a “unilateral” maneuver, this is a very meaningful effort at internationalizing the conflict. In effect, the PA is attempting to move the conflict and the negotiations outside the penumbra of United States and Israeli control. Moreover, even if the Palestinians were to simply receive “observer status” through General Assembly ratification, they would have access to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. If anything, this could at least begin to bridge the massive differential power dyad between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The diplomatic and media brouhaha over the application demonstrates two points: 1) The two-state solution paradigm is obsolete; and 2) the United States will support nothing but a Israeli controlled and dictated Palestinian state. As I have written previously, Palestinian self-determination, following in the footsteps of their Arab brethren, will only truly be achieved through mass nonviolent civil resistance. Unfortunately, the PA is either unwilling or incapable of coordinating the already manifold efforts of nonviolent resisters. In early September, I heard a panel of PA representatives exhorting the participants of the discussion to accept and promote the statehood bid. When asked “what if it fails? What type of collaborative efforts is the PA engaged in with civil society?”, their answers were couched as though they were talking to US or Israeli officials. “We have informed demonstrators to remain within certain boundaries and not provoke,” they quickly retorted.

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We’re Still Here

Oakland police use rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, and concussion grenades on Occupy Wall Street protests in Oakland, California.

The Karl Rove Of Russia

The Article: Putin’s Rasputin by Peter Pomerantsev at the London Review of Books.

The Text: The next act of Russian history is about to begin: Putin and Medvedev will pop off-stage into the Moscow green room, switch costumes, and re-emerge to play each other’s roles. Putin as president, again, Medvedev as PM. It’s the apotheosis of what has become known as ‘managed democracy’, and the ultimate triumph of the show’s writer-director, Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal, Vladislav Surkov, the ‘Kremlin demiurge’. Known also as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’, Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.

There is something cherubic in Surkov’s soft, smooth face, something demonic in his stare. He trained as a theatre director then became a PR man; now his official role is ‘vice-head of the presidential administration’, but his influence over Russian politics is unsurpassed. He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square. But this is only half the story.

In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture of Tupac on his desk, next to the picture of Putin. And he is the alleged author of a bestselling novel, Almost Zero. ‘Alleged’ because the novel was published (in 2009) under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky – Surkov’s wife is called Natalya Dubovitskaya. Officially Surkov is the author of the preface, where he denies being the author of the novel, then makes a point of contradicting himself: ‘The author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it.

The novel is a satire of contemporary Russia whose hero, Egor, is a corrupt PR man happy to serve anyone who’ll pay the rent. A former publisher of avant-garde poetry, he now buys texts from impoverished underground writers, then sells the rights to rich bureaucrats and gangsters with artistic ambitions who publish them under their own names. The world of PR and publishing as portrayed in the novel is extremely dangerous. Publishing houses have their own gangs, whose members shoot each other over the rights to Nabokov and Pushkin, and the secret services infiltrate them for their own murky ends. It’s exactly the sort of book Surkov’s youth groups burn on Red Square.

Born in provincial Russia to a single mother, Egor grows up as a bookish hipster disenchanted with the late Soviet Union’s sham ideology. In the 1980s he moves to Moscow to hang out on the fringes of the bohemian set; in the 1990s he becomes a PR guru. It’s a background that has a lot in common with Surkov’s, the details of which were barely known until an article in Novoye Vremya earlier this year set the record straight. He was born in 1964, the son of a Russian mother and a Chechen father who left when Surkov was still a young child. Former schoolmates remember him as someone who made fun of the teacher’s pets in the Komsomol, wore velvet trousers, had long hair like Pink Floyd, wrote poetry, was a hit with the girls. He was a straight-A student whose essays on literature were read aloud by teachers in the staff room: it wasn’t only in his own eyes that he was too smart to believe in the social and political set-up around him.

In the 1980s and early 1990s Russia was experimenting with different modes at a dizzying rate: Soviet stagnation led to perestroika, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal euphoria, then economic disaster. How to believe in anything when everything around you is changing so fast? Surkov abandoned a range of university careers from metallurgy to theatre directing, put in a spell in the army, went to bohemian parties, had regular violent altercations (he was expelled from drama school for fighting). Surkov, it said (or allegedly said) in one of the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, had always thought of himself as an unrecognised genius, but it took him a while to find his metier.

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