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Overview
To support Israel was an
expiation, and many of us gave our hearts to the cause.
To question the wisdom of displacing the native Arabs
with foreign Jews was to play the game of the wicked
Grand Mufti. To feel sympathy with the million or so
Arabs refugees was to turn one’s back on the Six Million
who had died in Hitler’s fearful extermination pits. As
war followed war, and Israel waxed ever stronger, it was
always the Arabs’ fault and their sufferings were of
their own making.
Yet,
despite their fatal genius for putting themselves in the wrong,
the Arabs have a far more powerful case than most American
liberals care to admit. They have suffered wrongs that, under
ordinary circumstances would be considered cruel beyond belief.
In order for a Jewish state to be establish in Palestine, a
thousand year old Arab Palestine community was wiped out and
most of its residents scattered into squalid shanty towns of
hate and hopelessness. Because of the crimes of a Christian
nation in Europe, the people of the Near East had a catastrophe
visited upon them, and they have been repeatedly punished in
wars that they cannot seem to avoid precipitating.
Another Look
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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. . . .
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. Chris
Hedges
A Declaration of Independence From Israel Truthdig
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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.
Chris
Hedges
A Declaration of Independence From Israel
Truthdig
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