[A-List] Regime change in Canada

[James P. Devlin]

From: RePorterNoteBook at aol.com 
To: undisclosed-recipients: 
Sent: Saturday, December 07, 2002 8:08 PM
Subject: The Israelization of America


The Israelization of America

by James Brooks

www.antiwar.com

December 7, 2002


US officials recently announced the somewhat jarring news that Israeli 
security forces will be training American soldiers in the techniques of urban 
warfare. Apparently Israel's illegal thirty-five year occupation of Palestine 
has enabled it to perfect tactics that our troops will need in a 'possible' 
war on Iraq.


Most informed Americans will receive this news with a sense of both 
foreboding and dislocation. The brutal tactics of the Israeli "Defense" 
Forces have been denounced for decades by human rights groups, the United 
Nations, and scores of foreign governments. Is this how we want our own 
troops to fight? Our sense of dislocation (even "topsy-turvy") in greeting 
this news traces to something else; the fact that Israel has always been our 
client, not the other way around. Why are the Israelis now teaching us?


Is this really something new, or is it merely an unusually explicit lesson in 
the continuing education of American power by the Israeli vanguard? Who has 
been learning from whom in this "special relationship"?


>From Covert Crimes to Points of Pride

Over the past half century, Israel's organized terror against Palestinian 
civilians has moved from the relatively secret operations of special Israeli 
army and paramilitary units to globally televised depredations wrought with 
helicopter gunships, state-of-the-art tanks, and F-16 fighters. In the 
process, massacres like those perpetrated in the old days by Israeli army 
units at Deir Yassin and Qibya have been dwarfed, in terms of casualties, 
scope, and property damage, by today's daily and indiscriminate destruction 
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Crimes that Israel once felt 
compelled to hide from the world are now on full display, vigorously defended 
by the Israeli government.


Fifty years ago, America also felt the need to conduct most of its 
international crimes far from public view. Interventions in the affairs of 
uncooperative nations (invariably conducted to "fight communism") were mostly 
secretive, CIA-led actions that made surreptitious use of special military 
units, typically called "American advisors" (Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, and 
Cuba provide a few relevant examples).


Now, emboldened by the demise of its only global counterweight, the Soviet 
Union, and encouraged by Israel's success in using conventional military 
forces in a public and illegal campaign against civilians, the US is 
increasingly eschewing the old "secret war" model in favor of direct and open 
military intervention with American troops. Witness Somalia, Haiti, 
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan during the past ten years.


Pre-emptive Action

Israel has long been criticized for taking pre-emptive military action 
against its perceived enemies. Two well-known examples are its surprise 
attack against a nearly-completed Iraqi nuclear power plant and its 
protracted, illegal and bloody occupation of southern Lebanon. Despite 
worldwide criticism of these and many other blatant violations of 
international law, Israel continued, and continues, undaunted.


The Clinton administration was noted for its fawning support of Israel's 
occupation, and for abandoning a long-standing US commitment (on paper only, 
of course) to return Palestine to its pre-1967 borders. Clinton also took a 
big page out of Israel's book on international relations, when he insisted, 
against strenuous objections from the United Nations, that the US has the 
right to launch pre-emptive strikes, and that NATO had the right to wage war 
on Yugoslavia without UN approval. This year, the Bush administration dropped 
all pretense of maintaining security with deterrence and adopted the illegal 
Israeli standard of pre-emptive strikes as official US policy.


Militarization of Politics

Our politicians have also learned much by example from our close and 
"special" relationship with the government of Israel. For decades, our pols 
have used cant, dissimulation and fraud to excuse Israel's most egregious 
crimes. In the process, much has been learned about how to turn acts of 
wanton destruction into a noble defense of freedom. Israel's willingness to 
keep 'pushing the envelope' of state terror has been invaluable in this 
process, training both American pols and media in the arts of propaganda 
required to justify ever-larger crimes.


Meanwhile, the American populace has been steadily learning to accept 
Israel's gross violations of human rights, international law, and common 
decency as 

"necessary for peace and security", justified by "Israel's right to defend 
herself". This lesson in moral decay and desensitization is proving handy 
indeed, as the current US administration seeks to extend American hegemony in 
the Middle East by a new war of occupation.


The Terror Card

Following the tragedy of 9/11, Israel immediately recast its thirty-five-year 
occupation of Palestine as an essential front in the "war on terror". To 
extract maximum political advantage from our loss and grief, Israeli 
politicians like Ariel Sharon suggested, with typical touches of arrogance 
and self-satisfaction, that, finally, Americans know how Israelis have felt 
for years. We face a common and implacable enemy, they lectured us, leaving 
unspoken the message that we Americans had better develop some backbone and 
put our shoulder to the anti-terror wheel.


Of course, our politicians did not really require Israel's instruction to 
convert our tragedy into their political windfall. However, they quickly 
employed several rhetorical devices that, before 9/11, were most often found 
in Israel's political toolbox (domestic and foreign). Suddenly, all kinds of 
international and domestic issues were redefined as being part of the "war on 
terror", requiring new and drastic solutions that were, of course, necessary 
for "security", and often highly profitable for favored corporate interests.


No doubt our leaders saw major advantages to this radical simplification of 
world affairs. First, they could dispense with even the pretense of 
negotiation, because "you cannot negotiate with terrorists". They could 
neatly sidestep, or simply dispose of, human rights limitations imposed by 
law and the Constitution, because "terrorists have no respect for the rule of 
law". The "terror card" also enabled them to bulldoze public opposition to 
new and highly intrusive government surveillance, and so on.


Remote Funding

Just as Israel depends on billions of dollars annually from a compliant US 
government to maintain its military occupation and indifference to UN 
resolutions and international law, America's power axis also thrives on a 
steady flow of wealth from a similarly remote and supine source - the 
American people. And just as Israel makes it a point to occasionally disobey 
the orders of its US sponsors, so American politicians at the pinnacle of 
power pointedly disregard the many voices of the people that call for justice 
and peace. During consideration of the recent Congressional resolution 
supporting war on Iraq, Democracy Now reported that citizen messages to 
Congressional offices of both chambers and both sides of the aisle were 
running 10 to 1 against the resolution. Naturally, both the House and Senate 
passed the measure by overwhelming margins. The reply to the American public 
was clear; "We watch our push-polls. Pay your taxes and shut up."


Injustice at Home

Even within its own pre-1967 borders, Israel's human rights record is 
abysmal. Twenty percent of Israel's population is now comprised of non-Jewish 
Arabs who, by law, are systematically rendered second-class citizens in their 
own homeland. Special hells in Israel's complex legal and social caste system 
are reserved for Bedouins and African Jews. Israel's stubborn insistence on 
the primacy of the "Jewish state" and its institutionalized discrimination 
against non-Jews have set poor examples for America, where Israel is 
routinely hailed as a shining example of "Western democracy". We cannot 
quantify the debasing effects of this mass fantasy, but we can see that while 
America's own system of minority repression becomes increasingly severe, the 
public is told that pride in America's "liberty and equality for all" is at 
an all-time high.


Occupation

Israel's long war of attrition against the Palestinians has proven to 
America's power elite that it is possible to indefinitely occupy the land of 
another people, even in the face of nearly global opposition - if you're 
backed by enough raw power. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip constitute a 
kind of open-air laboratory and lecture hall, in which Israel demonstrates 
the advantages of occupation to its dutiful American pupil. These advantages 
include a dirt-cheap labor pool that can be turned on and off at will, the 
ability to emasculate and/or decapitate any effort at self-rule within the 
occupied lands, the utility of occupation as an object lesson and divisive 
thorn-in-the-side of neighboring enemies, and so on. Israel has also 
demonstrated the usefulness of sustained occupation for increasing a nation's 
overall military might. The constant war-footing, and the need for violent 
repression of a restive and disenfranchised people, create never-ending 
opportunities for the purchase and use of the latest military equipment, and 
for the containment of domestic politics.


One Lesson Not Learned?

While American power has in general been a very attentive student of Israeli 
policy and practice, there is one crucial lesson at the back of Israel's 
textbook that remains unlearned: Israel's approach will never create peace or 
achieve a just solution. Of course, that suits its purposes. The point of 
Israeli strategy is to grind the Palestinians into dust until they just blow 
away, and the last shreds of Palestine can be swept up into Greater Israel, 
always the goal of the military Zionists and their Laborite alter egos.


Unless forced to do otherwise, Israel, driven by a tragic and fundamentally 
racist ideology, will fight on for a hundred years to dispose of the 
"Palestinian problem". But American attempts to apply the localized Israeli 
model (designed to acquire land the size of Rhode Island) to a "global war on 
terror" are rewriting the definition of "over-reach". By following Israel's 
lead (which is constitutionally averse to just solutions) in the "war on 
terror", we ensure that the war will never be won and will never end. 
Increasingly, we suspect that our leaders may understand this lesson, too. 
And they're getting ready to send another 14 billion dollars in shiny red 
apples (disguised as new loan guarantees and military aid) to their beloved 
teachers in Jerusalem.

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