Lieberman’s Modest Gulag Proposal

In order to prevail in his attempt to have the US citizenship of ‘obvious terrorists’ revoked, Sen Joe Lieberman would have to overturn the Fourteenth Amendment, which says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States . . .” Moreover, he would have to overturn a Supreme Court ruling which held that the citizenship of Americans who vote in foreign elections (.e.g in Israel) cannot be revoked by the State Department.

But if AFROYIM v. RUSK were overturned, American Jews who vote in Israel or serve in the Israeli army would risk losing their US citizenship.

Lieberman is most likely proposing his dishonest and unconstitutional law on behalf of the Israeli right wing. Rightwing Zionists have managed to get most organizations opposing Israel’s colonization project in the West Bank declared terrorist organizations. They hope that then anyone who objects to the aggressive expansionary policy of the Israeli government can be branded as giving material support to terrorist organizations and so could be denaturalized and even deported from the US. In other words, Lieberman, a latter-day McCarthyite, would like to do to the American Left and Realists what Israel has already done to the Palestinians, and render them stateless and voiceless.

The proposed law is also unconstitutionally vague, but that is not the worst of its flaws.

Lieberman is among the biggest warmongers in Washington, constantly urging we put American youth in harm’s way for his sectorial projects, something he gets away with because of the remote-control, all-volunteer, virtually invisible character of US warfare out in the world now, as Tom Engelhardt describes it..

The ruthlessness and frankly fascist tactics of these rightwing nationalists (I know Lieberman is a domestic liberal, but then in some ways so was Peron) are astonishing. And likely they would boomerang against the Jewish-American community. Might not proponents of the West Bank settlers be construed by some courts as giving material support to terrorism? But then they are not designed actually to benefit Jews or Israel; they are designed to benefit Greater Israel ideology.