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A Declaration of Independence From Israel | |
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A Declaration of Independence From Israel– by Chris Hedges
Israel, without the United States, would probably not
exist. The country came perilously close to extinction
during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed
by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians
poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American military
transport planes came to the rescue. They began landing
every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which
had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war was
over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in
emergency military aid.
The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered
the OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on
Western economies. This was perhaps the most dramatic
example of the sustained life-support system the United
States has provided to the Jewish state.
Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S.
recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two
countries have been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.
Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able
to be a moderating influence. An incensed President
Eisenhower demanded and got Israel's withdrawal after the
Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in
1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty. The ship,
flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli
coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic
communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed
34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack
froze, for a while, Washington's enthusiasm for Israel.
But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon
smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-
financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israeli and
American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance.
It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct
economic and military assistance. It receives about $3
billion in direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth
of the U.S. foreign aid budget. Although most American
foreign aid packages stipulate that related military
purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel
is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to
subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry.
It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for
how it spends the aid money. And funds are routinely
siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the
Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and
construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated
$1 million a mile.
The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating
isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed
ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will
probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian
land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the
1967 war. And although the United States officially
opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also
funds them.
The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to
develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some
of the most sophisticated items in its own military
arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16
fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access
to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies. And when
Israel refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation
treaty, the United States stood by without a word of
protest as the Israelis built the region's first nuclear
weapons program.
U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush
administration, has become little more than an extension
of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since 1982
has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of
Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all
the other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce
the Security Council resolutions it claims to support.
These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from the
occupied territories.
There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this
blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any
distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor
should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S.
support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the
United States, we should listen. The consequences of this
one-sided relationship are being played out in the
disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the
humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being
played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for
another war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts say
is inevitable. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East
is unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special
relationship. The eruption of a regional conflict would
usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.
There were many in the American foreign policy establish-
ment and State Department who saw this situation coming.
The decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle
East was not initially a popular one with an array of
foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman's
secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned
there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the United
States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision,
which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic
blunders of the postwar era. And they were right. The
decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and
created the kindling for a regional conflagration.
The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms,
does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic
politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force in
the American political system. No major candidate,
Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. The lobby
successfully purged the State Department of Arab experts
who challenged the notion that Israeli and American
interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled
out hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S.
political candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They
have brutally punished those who strayed, including the
first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous
enough in his defense of Israeli interests. This was a
lesson the next Bush White House did not forget. George
W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his
father.
Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and
currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from
acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli involvement
in American military operations in the Middle East is
impossible. It would reignite a war between Arab states
and Israel. The United States, which during the Cold War
avoided direct military involvement in the region, now
does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches
from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was
a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.
President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in
Iraq, publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would
like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on
the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed
the French colonizers during the war of liberation.
"In Israel," Bush said recently, "terrorists have taken
innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The
difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and
it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities.
And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking
for in Iraq."
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Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the
world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own
culpability for this isolation. U.S. "spin" paints the
rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans
are assured, will always be on our side.
Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards
from its lock-down apartheid state. In the "gated
community" market it has begun to sell systems and
techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism.
Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products—
well over a billion dollars more than it received in
American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth
largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has
come in the so-called homeland security sector.
"The key products and services," as Naomi Klein wrote in
The Nation, “are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric
IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger
profiling and prisoner interrogation systems—precisely the
tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the
occupied territories. And that is why the chaos in Gaza
and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom
line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has
learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching
its uprooting, occupation and containment of the
Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the
'global war on terror'."
The United States, at least officially, does not support
the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state.
It is a global player, with interests that stretch well
beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation
that Israel's enemies are our enemies is not that simple.
"Terrorism is not a single adversary," John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books,
"but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups.
The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not
threaten the United States, except when it intervenes
against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover,
Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed
against Israel or 'the West'; it is largely a response to
Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US
are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal
relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in
good part because it is so closely allied with Israel,
not the other way around."
Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by
those with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those
who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position,
such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are
ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also
during the Clinton administration, with its array of
Israel-first Middle East experts, including special Middle
East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former
deputy director of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel lobbying
groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk and
Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state,
however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel.
The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of
the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion
for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel.
These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John
Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.
Washington was once willing to stay Israel's hand. It
intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations
of human rights. This administration, however, has signed
on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the
security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and
triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion
and saturation bombing of Lebanon.
The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize
Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating
retreats in the face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel
Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the West Bank,
President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
to "halt the incursions and begin withdrawal." It never
happened. After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel
lobby and Israel's allies in Congress, meaning just about
everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon
"a man of peace." It was a humiliating moment for the
United States, a clear sign of who pulled the strings.
There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire
for American control of oil, the belief that Washington
could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if
misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a part in the
current disaster. But it was also strongly shaped by the
notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United
States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli
intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty
information to the U.S. about Iraq's alleged arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken
in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began
to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack
has waned, in no small part because the Americans don't
have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a
new occupation.
Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch
aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon.
Israel's iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear
Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush
administration an attack on Iran will take place. The
efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic
means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses
no threat to the United States. It does not matter that
it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has
several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It
matters only that Israel demands total military domination
of the Middle East.
The alliance between Israel and the United States has
culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involve-
ment in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not
furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical
nightmare. American soldiers and Marines are dying in
droves in a useless war. The impotence of the United
States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The
White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the
first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There
is no longer any debate within the United States. This is
evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the
current presidential candidates with the exception of
Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those who
challenge Israel is too high.
This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of
Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow.
It means that American power and prestige are on a steep,
irreversible decline. And I fear it also means the
ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.
The weakening of the United States, economically and
militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The
U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is
increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on
Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds
dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If Beijing decides to
abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause
a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the collapse
of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would
be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment.
The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by
aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with
many of the world's major exporters of oil, such as Iran,
Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are preparing
for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.
The future is ominous. Not only do Israel's foreign policy
objectives not coincide with American interests, they
actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in the Middle
East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of
the imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening,
where there was none before, to America's rivals. It is
not in Israel's interests to ignite a regional conflict.
It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on
the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and
democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at
breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.
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