ZGram - 12/15/2001 - "America's Israel"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

December 15, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A ZGram reader sent me the following with a suggestion:

"I found this article on COUNTERPUNCH.ORG  May I suggest that we each send
it to news publications in our own areas."

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 America's Israel

 By C.G. Estabrook

 The proper way to begin to understand the "Israeli-Palestinian problem" is
to recognize that Israel is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the United States
government. Criticism of its racist and oppressive policies towards
non-Jews and of its brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine is
necessarily criticism of the policies of American governments, Republican
as well as Democrat, that have made these things possible.

 During the Cold War, it was fashionable to sneer at the Cuban economy as
"unviable" because it depended on money from the Soviet Union, principally
in exchange for Cuba's sugar crop (owing to the long-standing US embargo);
but every year for a generation Israel has received much more money per
capita from the United States than Cuba received from the USSR in its best
year. The present Israeli economy is of course unviable -- it survives as a
military outpost of the US, armed to the teeth to prevent the emergence in
the Middle East of any domestic radicalism that would threaten US control
of the world's greatest geopolitical prize, Mideast oil.

To control world  energy resources is to control the world economy, as the
US has done for  generations -- and intends to continue to do. Israel is
vital to its plans,  and therefore successive US governments have been
willing to put up with  Israel's enormities in regard to the Palestinian
people.

 But it has been pointed out that our principal client is a racist state in
the legal -- and not just psychological -- sense of the term. A legally
racist state is one in which privileges for a certain group defined by
descent -- and disabilities for those not so descended -- are enshrined in
law and governmental practice: disregarding anything thought or done, you
belong to the privileged group if your parent(s) did, and if not, not. That
was the case in South Africa from 1948 to 1991 and in many southern states
in the US for the first half of the 20th century. Those states ceased to be
legally racist when those laws were abolished, although psychological
racism remained.

 Israel of course is racist in a legal sense in that one group defined by
descent, Jews, are privileged. (It is not of course a matter of religion,
the majority of Jews in Israel not being religious.) Indeed, Israel is a
uniquely racist state, in that all states, democratic and dictatorial, are
taken to be the states of their inhabitants -- but not Israel: it is by law
the state of one group defined by descent, the "Jewish people world-wide."
It is as if a radical faction of the Irish Republican Army should come to
power in Ireland and declare Ireland the state of the "Irish people
world-wide," so that an Irishman in South Boston (or Urbana) had more
rights in Dublin than an Englishman (or a Jew) whose family had been there
for generations. (There is not to my knowledge any such faction in the
IRA.)

It is surprising in the extreme to see self-styled "supporters of Israel"
write rabid letters to editors in this country whenever the state of Israel
or any of its government's policies are criticized. If they really loved
Israel and its people, as they profess, you'd think they would want to
encourage a situation in which the citizens of Israel could live in peace
with their neighbors and prosper in an open, democratic society that was
not the economic dependence of another state. Instead, they support
Israel's expanding moral corruption as a militarized colony, its prime
ministers including men inspired by a nazi ideology (in the Jabotinsky
tradition) and guilty of war crimes.

Beleaguered and hated by the people  surrounding it (and many in it) and
armed with illegal nuclear weapons,  Israel threatens the world with
massive destruction. The Air Force officer  in charge of nuclear strategy
for the last US administration, Gen. Lee  Butler, said, "It is dangerous in
the extreme that in the cauldron of  animosities that we call the Middle
East, one nation has armed itself,  ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear
weapons, perhaps numbering in the  hundreds, and that inspires other
nations to do so."

 What could Israel do to cease being a pariah state, if its Washington
masters permitted it? First of all, it could end the occupation of
Palestinian territory, declared illegal by the UN Security Council
thirty-four years ago, and not just pretend to do so by maintaining the
proposed Palestinian statelet as a set of Indian reservations, controlled
by the Israeli military. It could withdraw the settlements that cover the
map of the West Bank and Gaza like a rash, settlements illegal under the
Forth Geneva Convention (1949). It could establish the rights of non-Jewish
citizens within Israel and come to an agreement on a "law of return" for
Palestinians and their families driven out of Israel fifty years ago. (The
existing Law of Return applies only to Jews, whose forbears may have left
the area in the time of the Roman Emperor Titus, or before.) And it could
move towards agreements on disarmament and economic cooperation with its
neighbors, with the goal of an economically self-sufficient region, not
dependent on US handouts. (Israel, followed distantly by Egypt, is by far
the largest recipient of US aid.) The route to peace in the Middle East
begins and ends in Washington.

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 CP Carl Estabrook teaches at the University of Illinois and is the host of
News From Neptune, a weekly radio show on politics and the media. He writes
a regular column for CounterPunch

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