Another Look at Israel Table

Overview

To support Israel was an expiation, and many of us gave our hearts to the cause. To question the wisdom of displacing the native Arabs with foreign Jews was to play the game of the wicked Grand Mufti. To feel sympathy with the million or so Arabs refugees was to turn one’s back on the Six Million who had died in Hitler’s fearful extermination pits. As war followed war, and Israel waxed ever stronger, it was always the Arabs’ fault and their sufferings were of their own making.

Yet, despite their fatal genius for putting themselves in the wrong, the Arabs have a far more powerful case than most American liberals care to admit. They have suffered wrongs that, under ordinary circumstances would be considered cruel beyond belief. In order for a Jewish state to be establish in Palestine, a thousand year old Arab Palestine community was wiped out and most of its residents scattered into squalid shanty towns of hate and hopelessness. Because of the crimes of a Christian nation in Europe, the people of the Near East had a catastrophe visited upon them, and they have been repeatedly punished in wars that they cannot seem to avoid precipitating. Another Look

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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 Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East. . . .

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. Chris Hedges A Declaration of Independence From Israel  Truthdig

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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.  Chris Hedges A Declaration of Independence From Israel  Truthdig  

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