JOHN CHUCKMAN
WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO GIVE UNQUALIFIED SUPPORT TO ISRAEL?
It means supporting a man who has never once been directly elected by people. A man with a perpetual minority who rules through deals with other smaller minority parties, most of which are about as prejudiced and anti-democratic as you will find anywhere on the planet.
Only recently, there were reports of Netanyahu’s trying to strike a deal for some restrictions on women being on streets in return for the support of an ultra-orthodox party whose enlightenment values are zero. He didn’t succeed, but not for lack of trying, so he has called another election.
This is also a man whose entire record is fanatical, stained many times over with the blood of thousands and thousands of people, people in Gaza, on the Mediterranean Sea, in the West Bank, in Southern Lebanon, and it is overwhelmingly the case that his victims have been civilians, a great many of them women and children.
A man not interested in peace as most people understand it but with the “peace” that comes in dominating others. He also has always shown an inclination to steal yet more of the property of others than he already has. His desire to dominate is why he has such a shared spirit with Donald Trump, why they admire each other. Of course, It would not be so if these two political scorpions had to share the same political arena.
Netanyahu’s years-long aggressive struggles for dominance and expansion may not have been anything on a scale with the world wars in Europe, but they have been unceasing, persistent, and bloody. And they all have been concerned with similar goals as the brutal wars in Europe, suppressing people you don’t like and taking their property. In philosophical and ethical terms, Netanyahu represents the same values as the jackboot crowd.
But you cannot look at this man’s drives and efforts only inside the geography of Israel and Palestine.
Here is a keen supporter of the bloodiest tyrant we have seen in a while, the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. A man who slaughters women and children in Yemen, who slaughters women and children in Syria, a man who openly has opponents brutally murdered, who oppresses the Shia Muslim minority in his own country, and a man supporting record numbers of bloody executions, including the executions of some teen-agers.
Netanyahu is also a keen supporter of President (Generalissimo) el-Sisi in Egypt, a man who holds Egypt’s only former elected president, Mohammed Morsi, in prison under death sentence. A man who regularly imprisons and tortures opponents by the hundreds and sometimes shoots people in the streets. Countless people rot in jails, forgotten. He is a man who was secretly sponsored to become leader of Egypt by Netanyahu. Indeed, it is known that a good deal of pressure was applied to Obama to help topple Egypt’s only democratically-elected government, that of Morsi, because Netanyahu simply loathed it.
Netanyahu is a man who has supported America’s long series of bloody, offensive wars in the Middle East, the so-called Neo-con Wars, whose purpose, through massive amounts of killing, has been to create “a rebirth of the Middle East,” one along lines acceptable to Israel and its imperial protector, the United States. He has been deeply involved in supporting such terrorists as al-Nusra and ISIS in Syria, both directly and through support of the efforts of Saudi Arabia, a country which has secretly paid much of the costs of the dirty work of these terrorists.
Over the years, many caches of Israeli-made weapons have been uncovered by Syria’s army. And Netanyahu openly has served wounded terrorists in Northern Israeli hospitals as well as at times having hundreds of them shifted around from one location to another by helicopter. His objectives in Syria have always been to make permanent Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights, to expand that holding even further, with, if possible, another slice of Syria, and to see the reasonable leader of the religiously-pluralistic society, Syria, eliminated and replaced by someone more along the lines of the Arab leaders he so fervently embraces.
Now, he has underway one of his biggest projects, either the toppling of Iran or the start of a war against it, a war led by the United States with Israel just enjoying the show from the sidelines. He has, inside Israel, vociferously taken credit for guiding Donald Trump on the destructive course he has taken.
This is an extremely dangerous project, a threat to all the people of the region, but Netanyahu is able, as is so often the case with various dirty projects, to keep his head down and let others assume center stage. The United States endorses such behavior because it knows how much antipathetic feeling there would be against Israel were it obvious to everyone who really leads the charge. And a Donald Trump is just the kind of warped personality only too happy to take credit for anything, no matter how destructive, which casts him in the light of someone who gets things done.
