John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO A BOOK REVIEW BY AS’AD ABUKHALIL IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The Trouble With ‘Preventing Palestine’
“Seth Anziska’s new book on the Arab-Israeli “peace process” is a useful primer on the conflict, but it does not fully examine the paradox of the Carter administration’s solution that we are still living with, argues As’ad AbuKhalil”
An excellent, thoughtful criticism of the book.
The points made are valid and important.
I'll just mention another consideration, often overlooked, but I believe it is at the heart of the problem.
Israel really is an American colony, a pied-a-terre, in the Middle East.
Its history has nothing to do, for successive American governments, with sympathy for the Jews or the horrors of the Holocaust.
America's establishment was always quite biased against Jews at home, and it didn't lift a finger to help the situation in 1930s Germany. It even turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees Hitler allowed to leave.
Men like Henry Ford were admired by Hitler, his picture was on the wall near Hitler’s Chancellery desk. As he admired America’s laws supporting sterilizing “the unfit,” under which tens of thousands were involuntarily sterilized before Germany ever did the same.
The great journalist and chronicler of the Nazis, William Shire, remarked in the 1930s that he believed it quite possible America might be the first nation to go fascist voluntarily, such were the realities he observed.
But once Washington establishment interests, bent after WWII on world domination, were sold on the notion of Israel providing a great American wedge into the Middle East, the picture changed remarkably.
Now, we have hypocritical scenes of American politicians - the very kinds of people, in many cases, who would have embraced restrictions on Jews in the 1930s - wearing yarmulkes and pretending to reverently touch the Wailing Wall. Irreligious men, brutal men, ruthless men – such reverence.
All for the sake of the raw drives of imperial power, and absolutely nothing else.
American politicians even get to pat themselves on the back today for supposedly having done something worthwhile and humane for Jews so hurt in Europe.
And there's an extra bonus, besides having that colony in a strategic and economically important place, under America's "money is free speech" notion of democracy, a major money-distributing and influence-distributing lobby has grown up, almost into a major industry in America.
America's hypocritical politicians, supporting Israel invariably and without question no matter what abuses it is guilty of, get not only get to feel good about what they do for Jews abroad but to assure themselves of comfortable support from the country's best-organized lobby. It's a good day's work.
But the intractable and shameful problem of millions of Palestinians living in oppression and with no rights and no future and receiving endless abuse cannot be solved ever under such a basic political structure.
I don’t even understand how anyone can look at images of Gaza today and not think of a vast concentration camp, for that is what it really is. And anyone should understand why about a million and half people might horribly resent being forcefully kept in that way for generations.
But politicians generally, both in America and Israel, are not empathetic characters. Most of them are narcissists, and fair numbers of them are sociopaths. The profession just draws such people. And world empire is hardly a charitable or generous activity.
But those millions are not going away, no matter how much brutal killers like Netanyahu and Lieberman try to make them. Israel has greedily created a problem it cannot solve.
America is, under its political structure, totally unfit for solving the world’s greatest suppurating human-rights wound.
Something is going to explode one day. That’s why Israel literally has rows of snipers behind fences shooting people by the thousands, unarmed demonstrators at Gaza, right now. It’s like a savage big-game hunt, one with humans as game, and not one American politician speaks out, except to praise Israel for “restraint.”
You simply cannot go on like that indefinitely.
You might think that Israelis, of all people, would appreciate that injustice and brutality have terrible consequences.
