Sunday, May 29, 2011

Peace? Not with that attitude!

Turn off that Death Cab for Cutie and put your ear to the winds.  Can you hear it?  A lapping sound rolling over the hills descends upon these United States from Washingon DC.  It isn't the puppy parade.  It's our duly elected congressmen and women licking the scum from Bibi Netanyahu's jackboots.

Yes, Bibi, Real Democracy!  Like when members of the Knesset banned Arab parties from running for election, a decision that had to be overturned by the Israeli supreme court.  Or when those same members voted to strip parliamentary priveleges from Haneen Zoabi (including protection from prosecution) for DARING to participate in the Free Gaza Flotilla.  An action during which IDF commandos murdered 9 human rights activists, including a US citizen, which they then proceeded to lie about.  That action less than a year ago discredited Israel thoroughly in the world community, but not in America.  Israel is the plucky little murderous stepchild we can't help but love.  After all, we let Germany rape and kill its parents.  What a wonder that Americans and Israelis can live in Real Democracies, where protest is ignored and the government continues its murderous policies regardless of public opinion.

Netanyahu received 29 standing ovations from our congress, and all this obsequious bootlicking occurred over what our own president said: that Israel must return to the pre-1967 borders with "mutually agreed land swaps."  This has been the policy of every American presidency since Reagan, and an agreed upon point of negotiation for Fatah.  Hamas has also expressed a willingness to  negotiate a truce with Israel.  Of course, by "mutually agreed swaps" what is really meant is the preservation of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the outrageous exploitation of Palestinian water.  This is in fact precisely what Bibi himself said to our legislators:
The status of the settlements will be decided only in negotiations. But we must also be honest. So I am saying today something that should be said publicly by anyone serious about peace. In any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders. The precise delineation of those borders must be negotiated. We will be very generous on the size of a future Palestinian state. But as President Obama said, the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.  Israel will not return to the indefensible lines of 1967. - Netanyahu, transcript of speech to congress
What is so indefensible about those lines?  There are settlements beyond them!  Settlements occupied by human scum.  Mad men and women who view their right to Palestinian land based on 4000 year old religious claims.  The occupation of the West Bank has been a moneysink for Israel since the First Intifada, but the ultra-conservative Likud party will stop at nothing to support the heinous lifestyles of settlers in order to fulfill Israeli possession of Judea and Samaria.  The United States tacitly supports this policy as well, this imposition of ancient tribalism in the 21st century.  Israel is an old-fashioned state, and it won its right to independence the old-fashioned way: by force of arms and ethnic cleansing.

The US would not support such overt tribal land grabs with any other state.  If Alassane Ouattara visited congress he'd be jeered for causing massacres of Christians in the Ivory Coast.  Yet when Netanyahu, a man who is directly responsible for the massacres of Arabs comes to Congress they treat him like the Second Coming (and certainly many believe he's a key to that).  Netanyahu is treated like a man of peace, even though those who have been following the news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are already aware that he's explicitly stated to settlers that he undermined the Oslo Accords, and would do everything in his power to preserve as many settlements as he could.

Bibi:...The Arabs are currently focusing on a war of terror and they think it will break us. The main thing, first of all, is to hit them. Not just one blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be borne. The price is not too heavy to be borne, now. A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority. To bring them to the point of being afraid that everything is collapsing...
Woman: Wait a moment, but then the world will say "how come you're conquering again?"
Netanyahu: the world won't say a thing. The world will say we're defending.
Woman: Aren't you afraid of the world, Bibi?
Netanyahu: Especially today, with America. I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction.
Child: They say they're for us, but, it's like...
Netanyahu: They won't get in our way. They won't get in our way.
Child: On the other hand, if we do some something, then they...
Netanyahu: So let's say they say something. So they said it! They said it! 80% of the Americans support us. It's absurd. We have that kind of support and we say "what will we do with the..." Look. That administration [Clinton] was extremely pro-Palestinian. I wasn't afraid to maneuver there. I was not afraid to clash with Clinton. I was not afraid to clash with the United Nations. I was paying the price anyway, I preferred to receive the value. Value for the price.
In the following segment, Bibi boasts about how he emptied the Oslo Accords of meaning by an interpretation that made a mockery of them:
Woman: The Oslo Accords are a disaster.
Netanyahu: Yes. You know that and I knew that...The people [nation] has to know...
What were the Oslo Accords? The Oslo Accords, which the Knesset signed, I was asked, before the elections: "Will you act according to them?" and I answered: "yes, subject to mutuality and limiting the retreats." "But how do you intend to limit the retreats?" "I'll give such interpretation to the Accords that will make it possible for me to stop this galloping to the '67 [armistice] lines. How did we do it?
Narrator: The Oslo Accords stated at the time that Israel would gradually hand over territories to the Palestinians in three different pulses, unless the territories in question had settlements or military sites. This is where Netanyahu found a loophole.
Netanyahu: No one said what defined military sites. Defined military sites, I said, were security zones. As far as I'm concerned, the Jordan Valley is a defined military site.  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQTUNHwFA80

The Israeli security state is the most powerful in the region, particularly as they've had nukes since the 1970s, one of the best-kept open secrets in the world.  The IDF possesses unassailable military power.  When more radical elements of Hamas manage to launch a handful of small rockets across the border, the IDF responds by bombing cities.  No reasonable person supports the destruction of Israel as a matter of policy, not even Hamas leaders.  Israel's perpetual occupation and endless state of war benefits far too many parties.  IDF agression in Lebanon gives the Iranians the opportunity to claim the mantle of resistance to Israel and gives legitimacy to Hezbollah.  Israeli atrocities serve as easy scapegoats for the autocratic powers of the Arab region.  Denial of the Right to Return for Palestinian refugees also maintains a key source of Palestinian labor which supports the lazy lifestyles of state-coddled ruling tribes in Jordan and the Arabian peninsula. 
Israel cannot be destroyed.

Yet Israel is in danger!  And according to GOP representative Joe Walsh, it's the Jews who are to blame.
President Obama has effectively abandoned the 50-year-old U.S. alliance with Israel.
So, where is the outrage from the American Jewish community? Don’t they understand that the president is not pro-Israel? Aren’t they troubled by his history of pro-Palestinian writings, speeches, and actions? The short answer is that most American Jews are liberal, and most American liberals side with the Palestinians and vague notions of “peace” instead of with Israel’s wellbeing and security. Like the president, the U.N., and most of Europe, too many American Jews aren’t as pro-Israel as they should be and too many share his belief that the Palestinians are victims of Israeli occupation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If we want peace in the Middle East, we need a paradigm shift. The U.S. can no longer be an honest broker, a “referee” between two opposing sides. That mindset has gotten us nowhere. - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/26/979569/-Crazy-Joe-Walsh:US-Jews-not-pro-Israel-enough
This is the kind of talk that would make Bucky Shvitz drink himself to death.  Not only are American Jews practically race traitors, but there is no occupation!  I would like to see Joe Walsh attempt to explain to the people whose family members were killed by Israel's remote controlled machineguns that they aren't victims of an occupation.  Or maybe he'd rather deal with the people whose water supply was intentionally poisoned with sewage from a nearby Israeli settlement.

So long as the United States continues to support Israel so unconditionally, its leaders will continue to act like a cat that isn't housetrained, and it's America that will constantly clean up after their shit.

Many of you would say that I'm not being fair.  That there has been plenty of aggression on the Arab side, and this is true.  Yet it is Israel who has all the power, it is Israel who holds all the cards, it is Israel who continues to occupy the West Bank and the Golan Heights.  In terms of the physical reality, it is Israel who remains the aggressor.  If a lasting peace is going to come for Israel and Palestine, it must be forced by the Israeli people.  They will have to risk civil war with the settler class, which is what it nearly came to when the settlements were withdrawn from Gaza.

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