Israel and the U.S.:
Time for a Change
by Bob Wing
The dead children wrenched from the bombed-out apartment building in the Lebanese town of Qana on July 30 are grim symbols of Israel’s war on Lebanon.
Amnesty International has documented “a pattern of Israeli war crimes” that killed more than 1,000 civilians, displaced more than a million people and reduced the country to rubble.
Washington played a major role in the destruction.
It rushed delivery to Israel of jet fuel and high-tech missiles. It armed Israel with cluster bombs, which spew hundreds of munitions across a wide swath of territory. And it blocked all attempts to negotiate a cease-fire until Israel gave it the green light.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the Israeli attack on Lebanon was planned far in advance in conjunction with the White House. Washington considered it a dress rehearsal for a possible U.S. attack on Iran and as part of their joint strategy in the oil-rich Middle East.
Israel was hit with thousands of missiles, causing about 40 civilian deaths and great disarray. Israelis have besieged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for their country’s dismal war performance.
Lebanese economist Nadim Shehadi, writing for the mainstream Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reflected Arab anger: “If Israel can exist only by destroying the neighborhood, then it’s time to declare it a failed state. The prospects are for more destruction, fanaticism and hatred. No unilateral separation can isolate Israel from this, nor can the region or the world live with its consequences.”
AN UNJUST ALLIANCE
Since 1967 the U.S. has granted Israel an average of $14 million per day, almost as much as it has given to the rest of the world combined. The U.S. guarantees Israel’s existence, even allowing it to build an illegal nuclear arsenal. Israel acts as the U.S.’s spearhead in the region.
This alliance has caused decades of war and occupation. There are religious and ethnic differences between Jews and Arabs. But at root it is a conflict between occupied and occupier: Israel is founded on the seizure and occupation of Palestinian land, as well as some of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
The famed first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, privately admitted: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We came from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
In addition Israel is an explicitly Jewish state that legally inscribes inequality of rights, jobs and housing between Jews and Palestinians.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has become more aggressive under President Bush’s “war on terrorism.”
Israeli antiwar activist Michel Warshawski explains that in the “wars on terrorism” not only are the lives of civilians “of very limited value” but civilians are considered “as a legitimate target, as actively or passively guilty of supporting terrorism . . . . Fear is the starting point of the new era, hatred is its finality.”
Josh Ruebner of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation says: “It’s up to the people of the United States to challenge U.S.-Israeli policy. We need an entirely new premise for our foreign policy toward the region, one that is based on human rights, international law, equality and self-determination. This is the only way forward toward peace and justice.”
Bob Wing is managing editor of War Times.
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