[Marxism] A Declaration of Independence from Israel - Chris Hedges Jul 2, 2007

[Ralph Johansen]

>>
>> Truth Dig - Jul 2, 2007
>> http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20070702_a_declaration_of_independence_from_israel/ 
>>
>>
>> A Declaration of Independence from Israel
>>
>> By Chris Hedges
>>
>> Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist.  The
>> country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war
>> when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez
>> and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights.  Huge American
>> military transport planes came to the rescue.  They began landing every
>> half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which had lost most of
>> its heavy armor.  By the time the war was over, the United States had
>> given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.
>>
>> The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil
>> embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies.  This was
>> perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system
>> the United States has provided to the Jewish state.
>>
>> Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948.  The U.S. recognized the new
>> state 11 minutes later.  The two countries have been locked in a deadly
>> embrace ever since.
>>
>> Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a
>> moderating influence.  An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and got
>> Israel's withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956.  During
>> the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty.  The
>> ship, flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli
>> coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both
>> sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The
>> deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington's enthusiasm for
>> Israel.  But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon
>> smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel
>> lobby that set out to merge Israel and American foreign policy in the
>> Middle East.
>>
>> Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance.  It has been
>> given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic and military
>> assistance.  It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance
>> annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. foreign aid budget.  Although
>> most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military
>> purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to
>> use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and
>> profitable defense industry.  It is exempt, unlike other nations, from
>> accounting for how it spends the aid money.  And funds are routinely
>> siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the Israeli
>> occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security
>> barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.
>>
>> The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated
>> pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos.  By the time
>> the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40
>> percent of Palestinian land.  This is the largest land grab by Israel
>> since the 1967 war.  And although the United States officially opposes
>> settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.
>>
>> The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons
>> systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items
>> in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and
>> F-16 fighter jets.  The United States also gives Israel access to
>> intelligence it denies to its NATO allies.  And when Israel refused to
>> sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by
>> without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region's first
>> nuclear weapons program.
>>
>> U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration,
>> has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy.
>> The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions
>> critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all
>> the other Security Council members.  It refuses to enforce the Security
>> Council resolutions it claims to support.  These resolutions call on
>> Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
>>
>> There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant
>> favoritism.  Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli
>> and American policies, nor should they.  And when the Islamic radicals
>> speak of U.S. support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of
>> the United States, we should listen.  The consequences of this
>> one-sided relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in
>> Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and political
>> crisis in Gaza.  It is being played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is
>> gearing up for another war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts
>> say is inevitable.  The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is
>> unraveling.  And it is doing so because of this special relationship.
>> The eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of
>> catastrophic proportions.
>>
>> There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and State
>> Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw our lot
>> in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one with
>> an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman's
>> secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall.  They warned there would be a
>> backlash.  They knew the cost the United States would pay in the
>> oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would be one of
>> the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era.  And they were
>> right.  The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and
>> created the kindling for a regional conflagration.
>>
>> The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes
>> sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics.  The Israel
>> lobby has become a potent force in the American political system.  No
>> major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it.  The
>> lobby successfully purged the State Department of Arab experts who
>> challenged the notion that Israeli and American interests were
>> identical.  Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of
>> dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to
>> Israel.  They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the
>> first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his
>> defense of Israeli interests.  This was a lesson the next Bush White
>> House did not forget.  George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term
>> president like his father.
>>
>> Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently
>> advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.
>> Direct Israeli involvement in American military operations in the
>> Middle East is impossible.  It would reignite a war between Arab states
>> and Israel.  The United States, which during the Cold War avoided
>> direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding
>> of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines.  During the 1991
>> Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.
>>
>> President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly
>> holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become.
>> Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel
>> as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of
>> liberation.
>>
>> "In Israel," Bush said recently, "terrorists have taken innocent human
>> life for years in suicide attacks.  The difference is that Israel is a
>> functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its
>> responsibilities.  And that's a good indicator of success that we're
>> looking for in Iraq."
>>
>> Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world.  They
>> remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this
>> isolation.  U.S. "spin" paints the rest of the world as unreasonable,
>> but Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.
>>
>> Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its
>> lock-down apartheid state.  In the "gated community" market it has
>> begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with
>> terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense
>> products-well over a billion dollars more than it received in American
>> military aid.  Israel has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in
>> the world.  Most of this growth has come in the so-called homeland
>> security sector.
>>
>> "The key products and services," as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation,
>> "are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio
>> surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation
>> systems-precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in
>> the occupied territories.  And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the
>> rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and
>> may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a
>> brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the
>> Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the 'global war on
>> terror.' "
>>
>> The United States, at least officially, does not support the occupation
>> and calls for a viable Palestinian state.  It is a global player, with
>> interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the Middle East,
>> and the equation that Israel's enemies are our enemies is not that
>> simple.
>>
>> "Terrorism is not a single adversary," John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
>> wrote in The London Review of Books, "but a tactic employed by a wide
>> array of political groups.  The terrorist organizations that threaten
>> Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes
>> against them (as in Lebanon in 1982).  Moreover, Palestinian terrorism
>> is not random violence directed against Israel or 'the West'; it is
>> largely a response to Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the West
>> Bank and Gaza Strip.  More important, saying that Israel and the US are
>> united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship
>> backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so
>> closely allied with Israel, not the other way around."
>>
>> Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very
>> close ties to the Israel lobby.  Those who attempt to counter the
>> virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin
>> Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down.  This alliance was true also
>> during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israeli-first
>> Middle East experts, including special Middle East coordinator Dennis
>> Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of the American
>> Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel
>> lobbying groups in Washington.  But at least people like Indyk and Ross
>> are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as
>> long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to
>> the far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of
>> compassion for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel.
>> These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton,
>> Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard Perle,
>> Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.
>>
>> Washington was once willing to stay Israel's hand.  It intervened to
>> thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights.  This
>> administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli
>> blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to
>> sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous
>> invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.
>>
>> The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli
>> actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of
>> Israeli pressure.  When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002
>> reoccupied the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister
>> Ariel Sharon to "halt the incursions and begin withdrawal." It never
>> happened.  After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and
>> Israel's allies in Congress, meaning just about everyone in Congress,
>> the president gave up, calling Sharon "a man of peace." It was a
>> humiliating moment for the United Sates, a clear sign of who pulled the
>> strings.
>>
>> There were several reasons for the war in Iraq.  The desire for American
>> control of oil, the belief that Washington could build puppet states in
>> the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a
>> part in the current disaster.  But it was also strongly shaped by the
>> notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States.
>> Israel wanted Iraq neutralized.  Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up
>> to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq's alleged
>> arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.  And when Baghdad was taken in
>> April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an
>> attack on Syria.  The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part
>> because the Americans don't have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much
>> less launch a new occupation.
>>
>> Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes
>> on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon.  Israel's iron determination to
>> forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end
>> of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place.  The
>> efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have
>> failed.  It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United
>> States.  It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to
>> Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal.  It
>> matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the
>> Middle East.
>>
>> The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after
>> 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  This
>> involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a
>> geopolitical nightmare.  American soldiers and Marines are dying in
>> droves in a useless war.  The impotence of the United States in the
>> face of Israeli pressure is complete.  The White House and the Congress
>> have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli
>> interests.  There is no longer any debate within the United States.
>> This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current
>> presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich.  The
>> political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.
>>
>> This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the
>> Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  It means the incidents of Islamic
>> terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow.  It means that
>> American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline.  And
>> I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the
>> Middle East.
>>
>> The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is
>> giving rise to new centers of power.  The U.S. economy, mismanaged and
>> drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade
>> imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities.  China
>> holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion.  If Beijing decides to
>> abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall
>> by the dollar.  It would lead to the collapse of the $7-trillion U.S.
>> real estate market.  There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures and
>> huge unemployment.  The growing dependence on China has been
>> accompanied by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with
>> many of the world's major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria,
>> Sudan and Venezuela.  The Chinese are preparing for the looming
>> worldwide clash over dwindling resources.
>>
>> The future is ominous.  Not only do Israel's foreign policy objectives
>> not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt them.  The
>> growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an attack
>> against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq have all
>> given an opening, where there was none before, to America's rivals.  It
>> is not in Israel's interests to ignite a regional conflict.  It is not
>> in ours.  But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined,
>> in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of
>> state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.
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