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The Israelization of America
by James Brooks
US officials recently announced
the somewhat jarring news that Israeli security forces will be
training American soldiers in the techniques of urban warfare.
Apparently Israel's illegal thirty-five year occupation of
Palestine has enabled it to perfect tactics that our troops
will need in a 'possible' war on Iraq.
Most informed Americans will
receive this news with a sense of both foreboding and
dislocation. The brutal tactics of the Israeli 'Defense'
Forces have been denounced for decades by human rights groups,
the United Nations, and scores of foreign governments. Is this
how we want our own troops to fight? Our sense of dislocation
(even 'topsy-turvy') in greeting this news traces to something
else; the fact that Israel has always been our client, not the
other way around. Why are the Israelis now teaching us?
Is this really something new,
or is it merely an unusually explicit lesson in the continuing
education of American power by the Israeli vanguard? Who has
been learning from whom in this "special relationship"?
From Covert Crimes to
Points of Pride
Over the past half century,
Israel's organized terror against Palestinian civilians has
moved from the relatively secret operations of special Israeli
army and paramilitary units to globally televised depredations
wrought with helicopter gunships, state-of-the-art tanks, and
F-16 fighters. In the process, massacres like those
perpetrated in the old days by Israeli army units at Deir
Yassin and Qibya have been dwarfed, in terms of casualties,
scope, and property damage, by today's daily and
indiscriminate destruction in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. Crimes that Israel once felt compelled to hide
from the world are now on full display, vigorously defended by
the Israeli government.
Fifty years ago, America also
felt the need to conduct most of its international crimes far
from public view. Interventions in the affairs of
uncooperative nations (invariably conducted to "fight
communism") were mostly secretive, CIA-led actions that made
surreptitious use of special military units, typically called
"American advisors" (Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, and Cuba
provide a few relevant examples).
Now, emboldened by the demise
of its only global counterweight, the Soviet Union, and
encouraged by Israel's success in using conventional military
forces in a public and illegal campaign against civilians, the
US is increasingly eschewing the old "secret war" model in
favor of direct and open military intervention with American
troops. Witness Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan
during the past ten years.
Pre-emptive Action
Israel has long been
criticized for taking pre-emptive military action against its
perceived enemies. Two well-known examples are its surprise
attack against a nearly-completed Iraqi nuclear power plant
and its protracted, illegal and bloody occupation of southern
Lebanon. Despite worldwide criticism of these and many other
blatant violations of international law, Israel continued, and
continues, undaunted.
The Clinton administration
was noted for its fawning support of Israel's occupation, and
for abandoning a long-standing US commitment (on paper only,
of course) to return Palestine to its pre-1967 borders.
Clinton also took a big page out Israel's book on
international relations, when he insisted, against strenuous
objections from the United Nations, that the US has the right
to launch pre-emptive strikes, and that NATO had the right to
wage war on Yugoslavia without UN approval. This year, the
Bush administration dropped all pretense of maintaining
security with deterrence and adopted the illegal Israeli
standard of pre-emptive strikes as official US policy.
Militarization of
Politics
Our politicians have also
learned much by example from our close and "special"
relationship with the government of Israel. For decades, our
pols have used cant, dissimulation and fraud to excuse
Israel's most egregious crimes. In the process, much has been
learned about how to turn acts of wanton destruction into a
noble defense of freedom. Israel's willingness to keep
'pushing the envelope' of state terror has been invaluable in
this process, training both American polls and media in the
arts of propaganda required to justify ever-larger crimes.
Meanwhile, the American
populace has been steadily learning to accept Israel's gross
violations of human rights, international law, and common
decency as 'necessary for peace and security', justified by
'Israel's right to defend herself'. This lesson in moral decay
and desensitization is proving handy indeed, as the current US
administration seeks to extend American hegemony in the Middle
East by a new war of occupation.
The Terror Card
Following the tragedy of
9/11, Israel immediately recast its thirty-five-year
occupation of Palestine as an essential front in the "war on
terror". To extract maximum political advantage from our loss
and grief, Israeli politicians like Ariel Sharon suggested,
with typical touches of arrogance and self-satisfaction, that,
finally, Americans know how Israelis have felt for years. We
face a common and implacable enemy, they lectured us, leaving
unspoken the message that we Americans had better develop some
backbone and put our shoulder to the anti-terror wheel.
Of course, our politicians
did not really require Israel's instruction to convert our
tragedy into their political windfall. However, they quickly
employed several rhetorical devices that, before 9/11, were
most often found in Israel's political toolbox (domestic and
foreign). Suddenly, all kinds of international and domestic
issues were redefined as being part of the "war on terror",
requiring new and drastic solutions that were, of course,
necessary for "security", and often highly profitable for
favored corporate interests.
No doubt our leaders saw
major advantages to this radical simplification of world
affairs. First, they could dispense with even the pretense of
negotiation, because "you cannot negotiate with terrorists".
They could neatly sidestep, or simply dispose of, human rights
limitations imposed by law and the Constitution, because
"terrorists have no respect for the rule of law". The "terror
card" also enabled them to bulldoze public opposition to new
and highly intrusive government surveillance, and so on.
Remote Funding
Just as Israel depends on
billions of dollars annually from a compliant US government to
maintain its military occupation and indifference to UN
resolutions and international law, America's power axis also
thrives on a steady flow of wealth from a similarly remote and
supine source - the American people. And just as Israel makes
it a point to occasionally disobey the orders of its US
sponsors, so American politicians at the pinnacle of power
pointedly disregard the many voices of the people that call
for justice and peace. During consideration of the recent
Congressional resolution supporting war on Iraq, Democracy
Now reported that citizen messages to Congressional
offices of both chambers and both sides of the aisle were
running 10 to 1 against the resolution. Naturally, both the
House and Senate passed the measure by overwhelming margins.
The reply to the American public was clear; "We watch our
push-polls. Pay your taxes and shut up."
Injustice at Home
Even within its own pre-1967
borders, Israel's human rights record is abysmal. Twenty
percent of Israel's population is now comprised of non-Jewish
Arabs who, by law, are systematically rendered second-class
citizens in their own homeland. Special hells in Israel's
complex legal and social caste system are reserved for
Bedouins and African Jews. Israel's stubborn insistence on the
primacy of the "Jewish state" and its institutionalized
discrimination against non-Jews have set poor examples for
America, where Israel is routinely hailed as a shining example
of "Western democracy". We cannot quantify the debasing
effects of this mass fantasy, but we can see that while
America's own system of minority repression becomes
increasingly severe, the public is told that pride in
America's "liberty and equality for all" is at an all-time
high.
Something like Israel's
state-heavy and racist system of state capitalism could
plausibly be the goal of a nation that resegregates
its cities and public schools, enforces draconian drug laws
sentencing statutes, dramatically increases its prison
population, systematically profiles people of color at all
levels of law enforcement, institutes military tribunals and
denies due process to those it declares 'enemies of the
state', and corrupts its legal system so thoroughly that the
poor and colored have little hope of obtaining justice.
Meanwhile, both countries continue to set new records in the
gap between rich and poor, and in both nations the proportion
of the poor and lower middle class has been steadily growing
for over twenty years. An Israeli might argue, however, that
in the classroom of social inequality, Israel is the student
and America the teacher. A committee of the Israeli Knesset
has just reported that Israel is now "rated second in the
Western world.. in terms of social gaps in income, property,
capital, education and spending, as well as in the extent of
poverty".(1) The United States was number one.
Occupation
Israel's long war of
attrition against the Palestinians has proven to America's
power elite that it is possible to indefinitely occupy the
land of another people, even in the face of nearly global
opposition--if you're backed by enough raw power. The West
Bank and the Gaza Strip constitute a kind of open-air
laboratory and lecture hall, in which Israel demonstrates the
advantages of occupation to its dutiful American pupil. These
advantages include a dirt-cheap labor pool that can be turned
on and off at will, the ability to emasculate and/or
decapitate any effort at self-rule within the occupied lands,
the utility of occupation as an object lesson and divisive
thorn-in-the-side of neighboring enemies, and so on. Israel
has also demonstrated the usefulness of sustained occupation
for increasing a nation's overall military might. The constant
war-footing, and the need for violent repression of a restive
and disenfranchised people, create never-ending opportunities
for the purchase and use of the latest military equipment, and
for the containment of domestic politics.
One Lesson Not
Learned?
While American power has in
general been a very attentive student of Israeli policy and
practice, there is one crucial lesson at the back of Israel's
textbook that remains unlearned: Israel's approach will never
create peace or achieve a just solution. Of course, that suits
its purposes. The point of Israeli strategy is to grind the
Palestinians into dust until they just blow away, and the last
shreds of Palestine can be swept up into Eretz (Greater)
Israel, always the goal of the military Zionists and their
Laborite alter egos.
Unless forced to do
otherwise, Israel, driven by a tragic and fundamentally racist
ideology, will fight on for a hundred years to dispose of the
"Palestinian problem". But American attempts to apply the
localized Israeli model (designed to acquire land the size of
Rhode Island) to a "global war on terror" are rewriting the
definition of "over-reach". By following Israel's lead (which
is constitutionally averse to just solutions) in the "war on
terror", we ensure that the war will never be won and will
never end. Increasingly, we suspect that our leaders may
understand this lesson, too. And they're getting ready to send
another 14 billion dollars in shiny red apples (disguised as
new loan guarantees and military aid) to their beloved
teachers in Jerusalem.
James Brooks of Worcester,
Vermont is former marketing director of Vita-Flex Nutrition and
was founding vice-president of the National Association of Equine
Supplement Manufacturers. Currently Mr.
Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in
Palestine/Israel (www.vtjp.org)
and publishes News Links, a daily e-mail digest of Middle East
news and commentary. Brooks is also a member of the national Al-Awda
coordinating Committee.
by the same author:
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