Israel is a pretentious, small, vicious, apartheid and nuclear-armed state, and it has done more to promote the discord in the world today than most, although it is not wholly responsible.
The umbrella for Israeli actions since the beginning of the Six Day War in 1967 has been American policy. So when people call for it to wiped off the face of the map they are making a good point, except that the whole map of the Middle East, with few exceptions, are like Israel the products of imperialism. It can be argued that Arab states such as the dictatorship of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are dysfunctional based on overt fear, torture and other forms of intimidation. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are both nominal proxies of the United States – so much for the promotion of democracy from that quarter.
Zionism preceded the Holocaust, and it seems to have been more influential on the Israeli state. There are reports of Jewish and Arab communities living together amicably during the 1930s, which proved susceptible to the wedge politics of the hate merchants as has happened elsewhere. The problem is that the more violence is fed into the mix, the more marginalized those who seek peace become as vengeance takes hold. Killing of innocent people never advances any groups cause within the context of coexistence and mutual respect. A strong reaction from the victims, in this case both the Israelis and Palestinians, is to be expected and is an understandable response. I suspect that this reaction has effectively corrupted Israeli Democracy, which has some admirable features, and led to the present government.
We need to remember we are victims of violence when we win by violence. Violence usually has deeper causes and it has to do with how we think and our conditioning, which is a cultural problem. Violence leaves it legacies to later generations. It is difficult for most people to believe that nonviolence can be effective despite the demonstrations provided by the Indian Independence Movement led by Gandhi and the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, and even personal experience can pass by unnoticed. If nonviolence is to work, it requires personal engagement, whereas violence has to be impersonal, disconnected from fundamental humanity and nature. The proponents of violence, who presumably study the strategies they imagine work, use snipers, drones, and other cruel methods that arise in their imaginations as methods of intimidation and fear. To be effective an nonviolent movement has to be both coordinated and courageous, otherwise it will either fall apart or be taken apart, and for that moment fail to attain its immediate goals. (The Gandhian model proposed both opposing violence with nonviolence – no easy task – and development of positive alternatives of living without violence, equally a challenge, but one that human beings can rise to, as they might have to both.)
Al Jazeera reports that Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell has failed to make a peace breakthrough, possibly to nobody’s surprise:
George Mitchell, the US envoy to the Middle East, has returned to Washington after failing to secure a compromise deal for renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mitchell had hoped to reach a deal on a settlement freeze that would allow the two sides to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York next week.
But Ian Kelly, a US state department, said that “there’s been no agreement to have the trilateral meeting”.
“Of course we were hoping for some kind of breakthrough,” he told reporters on Friday.
Kelly charecterised Mitchell’s talks with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, as “good meetings” and said there would be further opportunities to try and reach a compromise at New York.
Yes that is the presumption that Abbas is the Palestinian president and therefore represents the Palestinian people. Another example of the idiocy of the Obama administration which has to be sheeted home to the President. You have to wonder what sought of schooling Obama received in the rough and smooth of Chicago politics.
Daniel Levy’s article in The Guardian concerned the fallout for Israel of the report on the Gaza massacres produced for the UN by Judge Goldstone. Human rights in Israel have been calling for an independent report. Daniel Levy observes, via War in Context:
Will a UN mission manage to nudge Israel in ways that the reports by human rights NGOs, including Israeli ones, failed to do? The instinctive answer would be no. Israel, if anything, has entered into more of a hunker-down mode with its highly dismissive response and has a track record of deep suspicion towards the UN. Repetitions of the mantra that the IDF is the most moral army in the world are again being heard from Jerusalem. Yet closer examination of these first 48 hours since the report’s publication suggest the picture is more nuanced. One of Israel’s most prominent, uncritical and rightist commentators, Ben Dror Yemini in the daily Maariv suggested that the lesson perhaps was that Israel should have ended the war after the first 48 hours of the strike. Haaretz’s Aluf Benn argued that Israel would not be able to act in such a way again after this report, a comment quite widely echoed.
While official Israel is now focusing on out-manoeuvring the implementation of Goldstone’s recommendations, it is also coming closer to a recognition that there may be consequences and repercussions for what happened during the Gaza operation. Israel’s image was already tarnished but the attention that a report of such magnitude attracts and the unimpeachable credibility and standing of its lead author, Goldstone, may cause many who dismissed previous reports to take a second look. This is likely to be a cause for particular division and concern within Jewish communities. Those groups who unquestioningly attack the report’s veracity find themselves further alienated from significant swaths of Jewish opinion, especially among the younger generation. But it is in the arena of practical judicial consequences and of implications for future behaviour that the Goldstone report could have most impact.
Paul Woodward, at War in Context, after eight months of government and the years of running for office, has the Obama record on tap. He relates:
If the Goldstone report [PDF] is to have some diplomatic teeth, that will depend on the Obama administration’s willingness not to block the UN Security Council’s consideration and implementation of the report’s recommendations — namely, that absent an effective Israeli investigation, the case should be handed over to the International Criminal Court.
Once again, the earliest signs indicate that the United States will retain what has become its standard position: to function as Israel’s lawyer.
American “legal council”, in the form of the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, has already suggested that the report is flawed. “We have very serious concerns about many of the recommendations in the report,” Rice said on Thursday.
In spite of the seriousness of the report’s conclusions — that the Israeli government has committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity — the fact that the Obama administration appears ready to provide Israel with diplomatic and legal cover should come as no surprise.
What was president-elect Obama’s reaction to the onslaught in Gaza while it was happening? Silence.
Where did candidate Obama plant his moral and emotive flag in the wider conflict? Alongside the worried parents of Sderot.
What have Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell’s findings been during his trips to see the war’s aftermath? None. He has never been to Gaza.
What have Secretary of State Clinton’s efforts to help in the reconstruction of Gaza accomplished? Nothing.
With that kind of track record, is the Obama administration now about to take a stand as a stalwart defender of international law?
I don’t think so.
Paul Woodward’s expectation is probably on the money. The question then is why is Israel so important to the world role of the United States? In these cases we might need to look for self reinforcing feedback loops, which I suspect may be related to the military-industrial complex. Defence and defence industries are after all premised on the efficacy of violence, so it might not be surprising that they would generate violence, even if they work best by implicit rather than actual threat power. That would appear to be the American stance in the world, and Obama is not going to change it, rather seeks to reinforce it, any peace initiatives in the Middle East or elsewhere to the contrary.
Of course, do not bother to expect that the Rudd Government might exercise an independent sceptical perception. So we become culpable as well.
Postscript:
I may be wrong, but it occurs to me that imperialism and colonialism is an externalization of the violent class system of the nation state that perpetrates the program. I am far from sure how this proposition could be demonstrated, but if shown to be true, would identify a source of violence often overlooked or unknown.
ELSEWHERE:
Tom Engelhardt recounts the course of the years since the Second World War, the fire bombing of Tokyo and other atrocities, then the thermo-nuclear nightmare, the United States has become the warfare state in which “War is Peace”. So how and why did that happen? Why was the arsenal built, and once built maintained?
David Landau, editor of Ha’aretz, in The New York Times, is not having the conclusion reached by the Judge, since it could not be correct, could it? Can denial work, or is it simply the process that the truth will eventually be accepted? War crimes are necessarily the products of criminal intention and action, or they are not war crimes. The answer is to let the judicial process go forward to its conclusions in accordance with International Law.