We’re witnessing another paroxysm of killing in the occupied territories of what was once mandate Palestine, the Israelis using their first-world military capabilities against a captive populations with at best pathetic means of self-defense. Much has been written, broadcast, etc., about the proximate cause of this latest bloodbath. I am somewhat persuaded by the argument that it may be a function of Netanyahu’s inability to form a coalition government for the umpteenth time. The best way to get the religious bigot and neo-fascist blocks on your team is to start blowing Palestinians to bits.
Whatever the specific heinous sequence of events, this is just Israel “mowing the lawn” once again, dropping bombs on one of the most densely populated regions on earth, rampaging through Al Aqsa mosque, beating the living hell out of young Palestinians and killing as many as they can manage. (See my posts on the 2014 edition of this story.) You have no doubt heard endless condemnations of rockets being fired into Israel from the open-air prison that is Gaza, but make no mistake: these are toys compared to what’s being dropped on Gazans every day and every night. The power differential between the two sides is absolute.
Rights to exist.
There is no question but that Israel is legitimately a country. It has a highly problematic origin story and was founded on massive violence and displacement, like every other country, including and especially the United States. So within the pre-1967 borders, it has rights and responsibilities. Beyond those borders, in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in the Golan, it has only responsibilities, no rights. Our international order is less than ideal, but to the extent that there is a law of nations, that principle is at the center of it.
Palestinians have national rights, even though they don’t currently have a nation state. But because of their forced separation from their homeland, they are not seen by our foreign policy establishment as having the right to self-defense, to a decent living, to be free from the hand of oppressors, and so on. It is therefore up to us to ensure that their right to exist as a people is duly recognized.
Cracks in the apartheid wall.
Because of the degree to which the Israeli military relies on direct aid from us, popular opinion on Israel-Palestine in the United States is crucial. Up until recent years, the only voices you would hear on the mainstream media were those of Israeli PR flacks. But as the Intercept has reported, this is changing the same way public perception of police violence in the U.S. is changing – largely due to the fact that smart phone cameras make millions of people amateur photo journalists and documentary filmmakers.
Now raw footage of Israeli troops abusing Palestinians, marauding through their places of worship, their schools, etc., is available to compete with the carefully crafted video being generated by the IDF. Beyond that, a broader range of voices can now be heard on corporate media, such that actual substantive criticism of Israeli policy makes its way onto the airwaves to a greater extent than it did just a few years ago. That’s a remarkable shift that reflects shifting sentiments around the nation.
This is not the first atrocity committed against Palestinians and it won’t be the last. As Americans, we need to do what we can to move our government closer to a reasonable position on this conflict. Right now, their heads are in the 1980s – we need to snap them out of it.
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Bolton appears to have leveraged the fact that our credibility is shot in order to foment this crisis. The world doesn’t need reminding that in Libya, we talked Qaddafi out of his nuclear arsenal, then supported an uprising against him that ended with this murder. They don’t need reminding that both Iraq and Afghanistan, non nuclear states, were both invaded by us and are still under the partial control of our military. So, they know that we are liable to attack if you don’t have nuclear weapons … or if the U.S. manages to talk you into relinquishing your arsenal. What lessons would you draw from this kind of behavior?
Today, the Baghdad government is ripping Fallujah yet another new asshole. It’s worth recalling that the ISIS militants they are fighting in that unfortunate city are mostly disaffected Sunnis, the most senior of which were probably part of Saddam’s army, the younger ones simply kids with no future, like so many Gazans or West Bank Palestinians. Malcolm Nance reminds us that, prior to our 2003 invasion, there were no Al Qaida to speak of in Iraq; after the invasion, they numbered in the low thousands. It wasn’t until the utter failure of the post-invasion regime to incorporate Sunnis into society (and, yes, the arrest and disappearance of many at the hands of the Iraqi security forces) that these young people became fodder for opportunistic Salafi organizations like ISIS.
Mess with Texas. I imagine you’ve heard by now that the great state of Texas is under threat of invasion and the imposition of marshal law by a socialist-slave U.S. military. You’ve heard, that is, if you spend most of your free time on paranoid right-wing nut-job web sites. This fantasy, rooted in the kind of conspiratorial blather that has animated the right since Obama’s election and before (remember Ruby Ridge?), is all the more bizarre because it is taking hold in a state that prides itself as being the home of many, many U.S. military personnel. All that flag-waving, and still Governor Greg Abbott feels it necessary to task his national guard with observing the upcoming special forces exercises. Freakish. Amazingly, these people think climate change is some elaborate conspiracy theory.
What’s ugly about this is that the man who ordered the killing of more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza last year, including many children, and destroyed much of what was left of Gaza’s already distressed infrastructure, that man has been rewarded by the voters in Israel. A government whose Foreign Minister has advocated beheading Israeli Arabs, expelling them, etc. – that government appears to be sailing back into power, triumphant. It’s hard to argue that Israelis, in general, are not fully in favor of what was done last summer – terror bombing UN schools, destroying neighborhoods, hitting hospitals with high explosives, and so on. That’s pretty ugly, and disappointing, as the few Israelis I know are not supporters of blowing people up at random.
Today (Thursday 7/31), it’s been all about the “sophisticated” network of tunnels through which the diabolical Hamas can infiltrate Israel at will and attack the innocent. I heard a bloodless report on NPR in which a correspondent talked about the improved combat capability of Hamas, which they argued, surpassed that of Hezbollah during Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon. “Hezbollah is watching this closely,” we’re told. Cue the fright music.
Indeed, what we are seeing now is collective punishment of the Palestinians, not the Israel vs. Hamas conflict that the U.S. media constantly refers to. Let us be clear: the Israeli government, in the normal course of screwing the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, took the opportunity of the kidnapping and murder of the three yeshiva students to go on a rampage in the West Bank, arresting hundreds of people, including Hamas operatives released under previous ceasefire agreements, and killing about a dozen Palestinians. It should surprise no one that that would result in a response from Gaza in the form of some very ineffective missiles.
Palestine. The IDF ground war has begun. At least “war” is what our media in the U.S. call this, but it’s a very misleading term. This is an attack by one of the most powerful military machines in the world against an impoverished, stateless, poorly armed populace. Our television, radio, and newsprint journalists typically describe it as a conflict between Israel and Hamas, but the attack is on the Palestinian people, and it is they who suffer, with over 200 dead as of this writing. Four boys blown to bits on a beach, and Netanyahu is just getting started.
I’ll be clear, for what it’s worth: firing rockets into southern and central Israel is not only wrong, it’s strategically idiotic. But this nearly uncontrolled act of violence is a response to the ongoing assault against Palestinians, from the massive crackdown in the West Bank on the pretext of the 3 Israelis being kidnapped and murdered, to the continual expansion of settlements and other occupation infrastructure, to the steady incarceration, wounding, and yes, killing of Palestinians, young and old, in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
You don’t have to be a cynic to believe that Netanyahu wanted this flare-up, with elections just weeks away. He is following in a long tradition of Israeli political leaders who know that the iron fist earns votes. Already he has