Stanley L. Cohen
Across the Arab
world, ordinary citizens stand and watch the United States sliding into the
abyss and wonder, what can the Americans be thinking there? Their institutions,
packaged once as the envy of the world with a free society and values of
compassion and tolerance … all blowing
away in the winds of history, over the edge and gone. The true Semites, of the
Middle East, and not of Europe, gape at this catastrophe of so-called “liberal”
Western-style democracy, as it is casually sucked into the moral black hole of
a tedious television entertainer, a Wrestlemania con-man, with his billionaire
henchmen and techno- Utopianists, who now plunder the richest, most powerful
nation in the world as its own elites sit back in comfort, waiting to carve up
the spoils. It is like watching Leviathan washed up on the beach, being
dismantled by efficient, busy sand crabs. As everyone knows, fish rots first
from the head.
To watch an
American president openly say, while dutifully standing in the White House
before the flag of an Israeli occupier, “I do see a long-term ownership
position” for the United States in the Gaza Strip, as if he were showing a
triplex condo on Central Park to a lesser Saudi prince, strips away the last
veil in this long, sordid dance, this burlesque of empire pretending to moral
superiority, while waiting for the right moment to deploy the Art of the Deal.
“The Riviera of the Middle East,” he robotically intones, ever the salesman, as
a grinning, indicted and fugitive Prime Minister looks on, scarcely able to
believe what he is hearing, “The U.S. will take over,” and “we’ll own it.” Of
course, everyone from the Achaemenids to Rome to Napoleon has liked Arab
beaches, but Palestinians stand with the people of Greenland when they say,
“Our land is not for sale;” nor do we yield to conquest, it should be clear to
everyone by now. Any U.S. position in Gaza would have well-deserved
consequences Americans are not prepared to own.
The American
President—like so many before him—has a strange habit of talking about
Palestinians as if they have no agency in what befalls them, no choice in the
matter. And he talks too, as if what has happened to Palestinians and their
land is just random political weather: “The Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol
of death and destruction for so many decades,” he drones on, “it’s been very
unlucky, an unlucky place for a long time.” In this, he is not so different
from each of his predecessors, pretending in his rhetoric that the U.S. and its
citizens have not, in fact, been the subsidizing engineers of Palestinian “bad
luck”, the architects of their misfortune, but rather that it just happened to
them, and the reasons why are simply lost in the mists of time. In fact, the
118th Congress of the American people, under a Democratic president, delivered
85,000 tons of explosives to Israel, which it dropped on the Gazans—all of this
paid for by each and every U.S. taxpayer, red state or blue: over 4000 Hellfire
missiles; 14,000 MK-84 2000-lb. bombs, which blast a crater fifty feet wide and
three stories deep; many thousands of 1000- and 500-pounders; over 17,000
bomber or drone or missile sorties flown. The total tonnage and complete
destruction surpasses that of the Allied bombing of major European cities in
the Second World War, or the massive “carpet bombing” dumps over Vietnam. By
some estimates, 40% of this destruction came by means of ordinary “dumb bombs,”
with unexploded munitions now littering Gaza’s rubble-scape. All this
industrial-scale murder, made in the USA, directed at a people without
airplanes or ships or tanks or air defenses, or even water and food now—one has
to ask, has any military force in modern memory ever acted as cowardly and
cruelly as Israel has done?
This moral
atrocity had bi-partisan support—Democrats and Republicans, hand-in-hand—in
case anyone thinks U.S. politicians are no longer capable of cooperating. It
will take an estimated fifteen years to clear the debris alone—that is, unless
American troops are so foolish as to land bulldozers, dig in, and attempt to
make it their forward operating base, earning the scorn of the free world, and
generations of resistance. Imperial over-reach is never far from the American
mind, which now prattles from the mouth of its criminal leader, plotting crimes
in public, with no one to stop him, as his “efficiency” squads dissolve
government agencies in the middle of the night.
All the US tax
dollars have only bought it well-deserved contempt and hatred on the Arab
street, and around the world. No free-thinking human will ever again entertain
the fairy-tale of American liberty and justice, the myth of “Pax Americana.”
The meaning of the Holocaust has forever been changed. The shape of Zionist
intent was visible all along, and ethnic cleansing now has its sales pitch and
its salesman, promising, there will be jobs for everyone!
The mass-murder
of over 60,000 innocent, mostly women and children; the maiming and terrorizing
of almost two million more; the unrelenting destruction of every standing
structure in Gaza; the deliberate starvation of its people and intended spread
of disease —all of these activities are the lawless acts of war criminals, led
by a delusional, convicted criminal, and paid for by Americans who are now in
the eighth decade of a fantasy: that the Palestinians should cease to exist.
And now the American president proposes further war crimes openly, to a roomful
of applause, musing out loud on what a “world class” development will replace
Palestinian towns and cities, as if Gaza were one of his failed casino projects
in New Jersey, or his sham on-line university. And the captive “free” press,
now quaking in fear before its mighty Potentate, blandly airs without comment
his psychotic nihilism, as if concepts of international law no longer exist.
For this is what America’s willing dispossession of the Palestinians will mean:
that law no longer exists.
It is a dark
road to go down, disappearing into a forest of un-broken nightmares. Somewhere
in that forest, as the path winds on, are familiar, dark American horrors:
black citizens lynched from trees; atomic bombs flashing shadow-people on
stone; napalm burning a child running down a road; the Capitol swarmed by a
deadly mob of angry men and women desperate to safeguard the privilege of
skin-tone that they ache for, but do not have and never will. A nation born from the genocide of five
million Native Americans once again chooses genocide, its original sin,
inescapable and mutating through time. There can no longer be any ignorance in
the American people about Palestine’s tragedy, or the nature of its fight:
Israel’s crimes against Palestinians indict America’s failure to act lawfully
as a nation, to stand for what is basic and right. The slow-motion eradication
since well before 1948 of Palestinian national rights, sovereign lands and now
their people themselves has unfolded in plain view for all to see, and none to
deny. The “international community” which once “committed” itself to protect
the very rights and lives of all Palestinians, now eagerly awaits real estate
brochures for beach-front condos—as if its resistance movements would let that
happen. But Palestinians wonder, what will the American people do?
As a dear friend
and client of 30 plus years … a
Palestinian resistance leader recently said to me in speaking of the American
body politic … “If we might give a word of advice to them: beware of the rot of
lawlessness that spreads down from the top, from your elites, your oligarchs.
Like a cancer, it will devour your rights sooner than it will defeat ours.”
David
Schultz
US
President Donald Trump’s declaration to remove the Palestinians from Gaza
reveals the two truths. First, history repeats itself, but in doing so, it does
in farcical ways. Second, whatever shred of rules-based order that was imposed
by the United States on international politics is effectively dead.
In
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Karl Marx elegantly opens by
stating” “Hegel remarked somewhere that all great world historic facts in
person just appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce.” In the case of Trump’s desire to expel the
Palestinians from Gaza, his declaration is the culmination of a nearly
eighty-year assault on the Palestinians.
Israel
was forged out of the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. In
1947 the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas.
Israel was formed out of the Jewish territory. But between the partition and
the 1948 war, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes.
Over time, and especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli settlements into
Palestinian lands continue to expel Palestinians from their homeland.
Over
the last year or so, as Israel has devastated Gaza, it has used the pretext of
retaliation and national security to continue what the UN started in 1947. Joe
Biden’s tacit support or indifference to the plight of the Palestinians and
failure to apply pressure to Israel to halt its military action have culminated
in Trump’s declaration. All this is tantamount to a Trump’s and Netanyahu’s
decision to use force and relocation to permanently and address and bring
finality to the Israeli security needs and the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
But
such an action violates numerous principles of international law. Already the
International Count of Justice has indicated that Israel’s actions may
constitute genocide and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest
warrant for Netanyahu.
Going
back to the original Nuremberg trials in 1946 and the creation of the
International Military Tribunal, war crimes under international law were
construed to include the forced removal of people from their lands.
Article
II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide makes it illegal to undertake acts with the “intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The
Geneva Convention of 1949 declares that mass forcible transfers of civilian
populations is a violation of international law,
Article
17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights declares “no one
shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy,
family, home or correspondence.”
Article
7.1 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court includes as a crime
the displacement of civilian populations or deportation or forcible transfer of
a population as a form of a war crime.
There
are many other provisions of international law that also make forced relocation
a war crime, and they are a form of ethnic cleansing. All these rules are
supposedly part of the post-WWII rules-based order to bring peace to the world.
These were rules put in place by the United States and the victorious Allies.
Yet since WWII many accused the United States of hypocritically disregarding
these rules as a prerogative of superpower status.
Now
with Trump’s call for the relocation and effective ethnic cleansing of Gaza,
what has been stripped naked is US respect and adherence to international law.
It makes it harder, if not impossible, for the US to oppose Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine, as well as a possible Chinese invasion and takeover of Taiwan. It
suggests also that what the Us and Israel are doing is not just tragic but a
farce. It is a farce on the fiction of Israel’s latest war, and a farce on US
support for human rights, international law, and an effort to find a just
solution for the Palestinian-Israel conflict that started nearly eighty years
ago.
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