May 14, 2021
Israel is not exercising "the right to defend itself" in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising "the right to defend itself." It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made it
clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014.
Israel's defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during
the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas "does not
stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that
of 2014." The current attacks have already targeted several residential high
rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international
press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural
lands, two schools and a mosque.
The failure of the United States to stand up
for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless,
even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment
of the vulnerable within our own society
I spent seven years
in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times
Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time
in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison where over two million
Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and
endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with
Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing
in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the
crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the
stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the
near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants,
the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I
have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened
from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel's
indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of
innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless
is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the
indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose
suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge
disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against
innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged
by groups such as Hamas.
The false
equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war
I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were
pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding
Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and
wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light
mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties
caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well
over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is
also true regarding Israel.
The second and
perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the
principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30
U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population
as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied
Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians
when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East
Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its
annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates
international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank
that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General
Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian "refugees wishing to
return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be
permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date."
This is the truth.
Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between
Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
Israel's once
vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested
against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The
right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism,
has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also
views Iran as an enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of
the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most
prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting
Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the
Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra
Front.
Saudi Arabia and
Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by
General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected
government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics,
including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated
charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common
border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one
of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel's cynicism and hypocrisy,
especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and
fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.
Those who are not
Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military
occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the
Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish
colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of
Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews
in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an
honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel's crimes
against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel
is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.
That the lie of
Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight
between statements in defense of Israeli war crime by Nancy Pelosi and Ted
Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to
the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the
bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its
autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example
of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always
carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and
historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has
shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de
facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel
lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under
threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support
the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our
Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State
Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the
Three Ds: the making of statements that "demonize" Israel; statements
that apply "double standards" for Israel; statements that
"delegitimize" the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism
is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college
campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction
of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights
of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of
Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N.
Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and
university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for
Justice in Palestine.
The Israel lobby has
spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond
anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other
country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American
political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together
hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S.
congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the
Al-Jazeera four-part series "The Lobby." Israel managed to block "The
Lobby" from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available
on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are
repeatedly captured on a reporter's hidden camera explaining how they, backed
by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics
and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by
then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce
President Barack Obama's Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu's open
defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop
Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to
Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli
interests.
The investment by
Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S.
has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars
that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the
greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the
American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and
mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve
Israel's interests, not ours.
The longer the
mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the
racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and
outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered
an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are
anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of
anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did
against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden
the real anti-Semites.
Racism, including
anti-Semitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for
everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the
extremes. Netanyahu's racist government has built alliances with far-right
leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald
Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former
Yugoslavia, feed off of each other. They divide societies into polarized,
antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical
jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the
radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological
twins.
This polarization
fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel,
as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national
security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from
the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone
industry, competing against China and the United States.
It oversees hundreds
of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the
Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad "to locate and detain
human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens
critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against
Islam in Muslim countries that don't maintain formal relations with
Israel."
Israel, like the
United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million
Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the
country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and
journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance,
arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and
vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu,
physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African
immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted
Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They
are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit
Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava
movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied
territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia,
far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means "flame" and is the
acronym for "Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land." Mobs of
these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in
occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the
Palestinians who live there "Death to the Arabs," which is also a
popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.
Israel has pushed
through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist
Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities
Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively Jewish towns
planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject applicants for
residency on the grounds of 'suitability to the community's fundamental
outlook." Israel's educational system, starting in primary school, uses
the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an
indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious
chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.
There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.
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