John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP WEISS IN MONDOWEISS
"Cook [Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations] says the U.S.’s “core interest” in the Middle East was always Israel’s “security,” so the peace process needed to spin its wheels forever."
There can be no doubt of that claim. I don't find it even mildly surprising.
Otherwise how did the US allow Israel to engage in the 1967 War in the first place, clearly a war of conquest?
Even to accepting Israel’s savage attack at the time on an American intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, without the least adverse consequences?
How did it allow those conquered lands and millions of people to remain under harsh Israeli control for half a century?
How did it undermine all fair-minded initiatives from international organizations such as the UN?
This idea takes us back to a concept I've frequently touched on, the concept of Israel being an American imperial, privileged colony in the Middle East, more so than its being a genuinely independent country. And that I believe is the real basis of America’s concern for the “security” of Israel.
Independent countries aren't floated on tidal waves of public and private foreign subsidies as Israel is, just immense amounts when all accounted for. Plus, ready access to powerful American figures and technology plus goodies like free trade, intelligence information, and many huge, lucrative American government contracts. It represents a bonanza unlike anything experienced even by America’s oldest and most important allies, as in Europe.
The notion of an independent nation with ancient roots in the region - that's ancient roots for Israel's mainly Ashkenazi people whose ethnic roots are in fact in central and eastern Europe for centuries, although they share the religion of the ancient Hebrews - gave powerful impetus for millions of intensely-motivated colonists after the horrors of WWII.
You simply cannot obtain better security for your imperial properties than such motivation provides. It’s a little like the way imperial Britain employed groups like the fierce Gurkhas to help hold its interests.
America's power establishment is not sentimental about such matters as ancient Israel or a people’s suffering in Europe, not in the least, as it is easy to demonstrate from history. Indeed, the American establishment long was among the most openly anti-Semitic groups in the country. The power establishment cares about empire and control in the world, and the existence of Israel as an imperial colony was a tool towards those ends for much of the Middle East.
It is in many ways no more a sentimental story than the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War, at least not for the real powers at work in the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, and the Oval Office.
And almost every step along the way, such as the “peace process,” represents the same kind of disinformation and misdirection efforts we see all over the empire, from NATO to OAS.
The “peace process” has been as authentic as American democracy or justice, which is to say, not at all.
