THE SICKLY SMELL OF LIES AND DEATH
John Chuckman
Only the other day, Benjamin Netanyahu earned a small note
of immortality when he said the peace talks were ended by the new arrangements
between the Palestine Authority and Hamas: Netanyahu’s announcement bundled a
record number of lies into one mouthful of words. There, of course, never was anything properly
called peace talks with Israel. There has been only a long series of
closed-door personal, and security-scrambled telephonic, exchanges with
America’s superbly ineffectual John Kerry, exchanges in which the Palestinians
played virtually no role and in which Mr. Netanyahu had absolutely no interest,
Netanyahu always setting an impossible set of conditions as prerequisites to
anything happening precisely because he does not want anything to happen, while
undoubtedly periodically raging with one of his mind-numbing harangues which
are impossible to answer rationally for the simple reason they are not rational.
Netanyahu’s announcement is larded with layers of lies much
like layers of rock in stratigraphic formations. Perhaps the chief of these being
that Hamas – that democratically elected party led by middle-class
professionals whose only concerns have been to obtain a fair deal for Palestinians
and to provide clean government after the long-term corruption of Fatah – is a
dreadful terrorist organization. Of course, you do have to say something along
those lines to excuse your warring on civilians, blockading their needs (starting
with a viciously-calculated minimal calorie allowance per person), cutting off
services, piracy on the high seas, denying fishing rights, kidnapping and
murdering politicians, and constant menaces. You wouldn’t do all that to people
just trying to run a democratic, clean government, now would you? You might if you
viewed the Palestinians in Gaza as a nightmare (a past Israeli prime minister’s
actual word), as a source of constant fear, resembling fears in the Old South of
revolt in the slave quarters some dark night, something which caused uneasy
sleep for plantation families with pistols and knives tucked under their
pillows.
Israel, despite the meaningless outpourings and rages of
Netanyahu, is not looking for clean government and it certainly isn’t looking
for democracy in any of its neighbors’ arrangements. Israel loved thirty years
of corrupt and completely undemocratic government in Egypt, and it is Israel’s
silent influence with the United States that has returned Egypt’s eighty
million people, after one year of democratic government, to tyranny and openly
corrupt arrangements. Israel also likes the absolute government of Saudi Arabia
because it makes many secret deals with the Saudi princes, eager themselves to
suppress democratic tendencies in the region. Saudi Arabia, with its Islamic
fundamentalism, once was viewed as an implacable enemy of Israel, but the
less-than-idealistic gritty interests of both states have nicely, quietly
meshed in recent years with the fabulously wealthy aristocracy of Saudi Arabia viewing
democracy and clean government through the same lens as the Middle East’s Crusader
garrison state.
Israel is not even looking for peace, peace as any
thoughtful, disinterested person in the world would define it. I believe
Netanyahu has given new ferocity to an old strategy towards what every past leader
of Israel regarded as the problem of the Palestinians, and that involves the
goal either of making them so miserable that they will leave en masse or become
so compliant they will agree to arrangements which assure their perpetual isolation,
inferiority, and servitude. Either or any combination of those two outcomes is
what Netanyahu understands as peace. I don’t see any other way of interpreting
years of appallingly abusive behavior and law-breaking and injustice on a scale
affecting millions. And there is no other way to interpret the American
government’s tolerance for the abuse and law-breaking and injustice beyond its
secretly sharing the same hopes as Israel’s malevolent leaders, being sick and
tired of having to hear about and deal with a grotesque situation involving a
few million people in a world where it tries to direct the destinies of
billions.
Israel’s limited dealings with the Palestinian Authority – a
kind of quasi-government formed out of the Oslo Accords of 1993 for the purpose
of managing basic local services and negotiating with Israel – are themselves built
on lies. The existing head of that quasi-government, Mahmoud Abbas, was last
elected to serve as president until 2009, but with the connivance of the United
States and Israel he regularly extends his term, never receiving the least
recrimination for doing so, another demonstration of Israel’s love for
democracy and clean government. His democratic credentials are further enhanced
by the fact that he “governs” only in the West Bank – at least in those
portions not yet seized by Israel - having been driven out of Gaza. Yet he is
the only one of the Palestinians even admitted to symbolic membership in the
“peace talks.” The reason for this is simple: up until very recently, Abbas has
been a passive figure who offers Israel no open challenge to the huge
injustices of the status quo, very much in contrast to the late Yasser Arafat,
who is believed by many to have been assassinated by Israel after an extended
period of abuse and threats including the shelling of his house and denying his
even attending religious services. Netanyahu, by the way, is on record as
having vigorously denounced as unworkable the now pretty much failed Oslo
Accords, a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Analyzing “the peace talks,” discovering their rotten
construction and the dishonest motives of those involved, yields unpleasant
surprises much like those from stumbling accidentally upon a rotten timber and
seeing a myriad of critters scrambling and flying off in all directions. John
Kerry carries on his charade in the Middle East while at the same time lying
about Russian news sources and threatening a red line for Russia to make it pay
dearly for its “transgressions” in Ukraine. And there is still the hypocritical
pretence about the induced horrors of Syria for which Mr. Kerry along with his boss
bear direct responsibility.
Russia Today, the newspaper Kerry recently publicly criticized,
can have nothing to its shame to compare with The New York Times which one day
published images supposedly proving Russian soldiers were active in Eastern
Ukraine and shortly after retracted when the lie was hurled in its face. The
same New York Times, it was revealed, passes its reportage on Israel through
Israeli censors before publication, providing a standard of journalistic
integrity it would be hard to match. What Kerry and Company are actually upset
about is Russia’s new, sophisticated use of the press and broadcasting. Gone
are the not-believable voices of the Soviet era, words by apparatchiks
featuring such colorful expressions as “running dogs.” Instead we find
thoughtful reportage and analysis reaching out to people in the West,
correcting misrepresentations imposed by their own leaders through outlets like
The New York Times and America’s major networks. America’s Cold War era
monopoly on “credible press” is gone (in fact, it never was that credible, only
seeming so by contrast to the old Soviet efforts). With the monopoly’s disappearance,
America’s unrestricted ability to “get a story out there,” as someone from the
CIA might say, also has suffered, and Mr. Kerry clearly isn’t happy about the
fact.
As for Kerry’s comments about red lines and making Russia
pay, it would be difficult to come up with a poorer example of diplomacy from
America’s supposed chief of diplomacy. Of course, the last time we heard the
expression “red line” concerned the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s
government, something that never happened, but the American official words about
a red line served as a kind of segue to the actual, totally-immoral use of such
chemicals by some of the fanatics America secretly supports. And just a short
while before that use of “red line,” we had the world’s most predictable liar
talking about red lines for Iran, a country he threatened and continues to
threaten but which has never threatened him.
Kerry’s public face on the situation in Ukraine is just as
rankly dishonest as his “peace talks” in the Middle East and his words about
Syria. The fact is that Ukrainian groups America has supported secretly for
years with almost unlimited amounts of CIA-infiltrated money overthrew an
elected government, and they did so before previously-agreed arrangements for
new elections which were intended to appease the divided factions in Ukraine.
Part of the way these groups seized power was through the dirty work of
right-wing thugs, who, among other acts, served as snipers shooting many hundreds
of people dead in the streets of Kiev. Now, we see this self-proclaimed
government receiving visits by America’s CIA Director and Vice President for
unexplained reasons. Was there ever a less honest effort at pretending
democratic forces are at work in a crisis? Please, Mr. Kerry, who is it that
you think you are convincing of anything, beyond your own dishonesty and remarkably
limited diplomatic skills?
