"Forward", Backward, It's All the Same. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Shatila who has devoted decades to slaughtering Palestinians in pursuit of a Greater Israel, is now posing as peacemaker, only because he sees that the Palestinians have not been decimated but, quite the contrary, their burgeoning population threatens to flood Israel out of existence unless he can somehow pacify them.
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(This is a long entry, so if the topic doesn't particularly interest you, do not trouble to read on.)
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Abandoned by large parts of his traditional hardline, imperialist constituency when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip this past summer and forced the Greater Israel settlers out, Sharon has decided he must break with the Likud Party to create a new movement he hopes will finally make Israel secure within defensible borders. So Sharon has just founded a new party, called "Forward" ("Kadima" in Hebrew). Ah, but what is "forward" in a country that writes backward (right to left) and thinks progress is to go back 2,000 years?
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Sharon is forced to accommodate the Palestinians at a time when the United States, Israel's only ally on all of planet Earth, is wearying of the Middle East entirely, an unfortunate consequence (from Israelis' point of view) of the war that Zionists forced upon us and which has turned sour in American public opinion.
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Saddam's Iraq was the only credible threat to Israel's "survival" — an inflammatory word that Zionists like to use because it suggests not only that Israel as a political entity apart from Palestine is threatened but also that triumphant Arab armies would slaughter the Jews wholesale in genocidal fury that produces a second "Holocaust". In actuality, only a tiny minority of Arabs, many of them people who have had family members or friends slaughtered by Israelis, want the Jews all dead. Most Arabs want only (1) that the "State of Israel" be dissolved and its territories merged back into a united Palestine and (2) that any Israeli Jew who will not consent to becoming a responsible Jewish citizen of United Palestine leave the area forever, not necessarily in a coffin or body bag, but on the next available plane, train, ship, bus, truck, car — or camel for that matter.
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The Jews' own scriptures gave the world the term "handwriting on the wall", a reference to a supposed finger of God that wrote on the walls of a palace in ancient Babylon "Mene mene tekel upharsin", interpreted as meaning, loosely 'You have been weighed in the balance. Your days are numbered.' The future is looking grim for Israel.
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Jews, observant or not, are always aware of the thought that God is watching and judging, holding them in particular, the people of his Covenant (special deal) to a higher standard of conduct. Some Jews suspect, even if they won't admit it aloud, that their behavior in Palestine is not righteous, and that for that reason the tide is turning against Zionism. They were given 50 years to prove themselves worthy of receiving the 'Promised Land' a second time, and realize that they've blown it. The dream has turned into a nitemare, and far from expanding opportunities for the Jewish people, Zionism threatens to close in on them and turn the world to furious retribution, doing God's will in destroying Israel once again for the sins of the Jews themselves. The numbers (mene) being counted (mene) this time are the sins of Zionism and the children of Palestinians. God has found the behavior of the Jews wanting (tekel), and they will be divided once again, forced out of the Promised Land and scattered to the ends of the Earth (upharsin) a second time. Works for me.
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Among the sins of Zionism is compelling Zionism's slaves in Washington to start a war of aggression against Israel's only credible threat at the time, Saddam's Iraq. That war is turning out very badly in at least two ways.
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First, the justification given to the American people for a "pre-emptive strike" — war of aggression, not of retaliation — has been shown false, and people are now asking who was behind the lies, particularly the lies (a) that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was even working on the ultimate Weapon of Mass destruction, a nuclear bomb; and (b) that Saddam was involved in the attack upon the World Trade Center. If those lies are traced back to Radical Zionists (with names like Wolfowitz and Perle) who manipulated intelligence for the express purpose of inducing the United States to attack Israel's worst enemy, we can expect a powerful, indignant backlash against Zionism on the part of all but the most slavish apologists for Zionism among American Jews and fundamentalist Christians.
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Second, and perhaps even worse from the Zionist perspective, is that Americans have established a connection with an Arab country that has made scores of millions identify with and feel sorry for Arabs, something Israelis never wanted to happen. American guilt for the terrible things we have done to that poor country, which never attacked us, are starting to be felt. And ordinary Americans have made very personal emotional connections to Iraqi kids, activists, fellow soldiers, government workers, and ordinary people in the streets whom they see blown up and killed by violence that our war has unleashed against them in removing a government that very effectively for decades suppressed such terrorism.
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To justify the unjustifiable, American politicians have had to change the rhetoric from protecting ourselves against imminent threat of destruction (by little bitty Iraq, 7,000 miles away!) to liberating Iraqis and promoting democracy. The first approach allows us to slaughter The Enemy with impunity. The second, however, requires us to identify with Iraqis and protect them, to work for their own best interest, to see them as like us and worthy of our help. That is the real kicker here: the longer we stay in Iraq, the more Americans come to see the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that is extremely dangerous to Israel.
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There are actually returned American soldiers who have come to identify with Iraqis so much that they have established as-yet small organizations to bring Iraqi children to American hospitals to repair war- or terrorism-related injuries, and raise funds for schools and libraries in shattered Iraq. A few Americans after release from the military have returned to Iraq as private citizens, or made plans to return, to help rebuild the country. Such activities must make Zionists shudder.
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And it likely will only get worse for Zionists.
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If the war goes even more badly, and Americans start dying at higher rates — or even at the same rate, which becomes unacceptable to a public that heretofore accepted it on the understanding that things would start getting better soon, because the war wasn't supposed to last very long — there will be a bitter call to withdraw, precipitously — to hell with the consequences! That could leave the region entirely destabilized, and no one can predict the outcome.
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Perhaps once the burr under the saddle that the occupation constitutes is removed, Iraqi society will calm down and make peace, one community with another in a successful and tolerant democracy. In the immortal sardonic words of comic Judy Tenuta, "That could happen."
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Well, actually, it could happen, but probably not without very substantial help from UN or Arab League peacekeepers.
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In the alternative, extremists could seize control of the Iraqi government, by defeating the army thru guerrilla war, thru assassination, thru military coup. And then Iraq, under extremist, even Islamist fanatics, could embark upon a program to destroy Israel. Especially could that happen if the extremists who seize control are Shiites and make common cause with Islamist Iran, their Shia brother. Then instead of Iraq being a bulwark against Shiite Islamism and a buffer between Tehran and Jerusalem, Iraq becomes an active ally of Tehran against Jerusalem. That would serve Israel right.
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Or Iraq could split up into three constituent parts (Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia Arab), peacefully or by civil war. That would produce three governments whose attitudes toward Israel cannot be predicted.
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It has often been the case that societies with internal divisions have attempted to achieve national unity thru foreign wars. There's nothing like a common enemy to unite a people. What is the best common enemy for Iraq, or any of its constituent subparts, to unite against? Hmm. That's tough. Oh, I know! Israel!
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Israel might hope that the three countries into which Iraq splits focus their energies on fiting and hating each other, but that might well not happen. Rather, their leaders might decide that peace with their Moslem neighbors requires them to make common cause with them against a mutual enemy: again, Israel.
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And what happens if the Shiite south of Iraq decides to merge into Iran (culturally unlikely) or at least into a tight, formal alliance against Israel (not at all unlikely)? Iran's present government has announced very pubicly that it looks forward to the destruction of Israel, and the accession of oil-rich southern Iraq to the cause of Islamist Iran would not only strengthen Iran in its preparations for war against Israel but also bring its forces geographically closer to Israel's borders.
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Even a united and democratic Iraq would almost certainly be militantly anti-Zionist. It is almost inconceivable that an Arab people that is adamantly anti-Zionist will elect a government that is pro-Zionist. An authoritarian government could make peace with Israel against the will of its people. A democratic government could not. Isn't that ironic?
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So might the Iraq war turn out to be all for nought, as Zionists see things? They will have overthrown anti-Zionist Saddam only to install a democratically elected anti-Zionist government.
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Further, if the war goes well, U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces turn the tide and establish peace, and democracy flowers, the U.S. will beam with pride at its students' great success, and the U.S. will, by extension, think much better of Arabs in general.
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What happens if a new Iraqi government, however derived, does turn militantly anti-Zionist and makes preparations, at least with Iran and possibly with Syria as well, to destroy Israel? Will the United States intervene in yet another Iraq war? Or will the American public say "Hell no! We won't go!"
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Zionists may have overplayed their hand, and produced the predicate for the United States' not just abandoning them to their own devices but actually turning against Zionism in coming to appreciate the Arab point of view in coming to identify with Iraqis.
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That brings us back to Palestinians and the hope of Ariel Sharon and his ilk of making peace with Palestinians without merging "Israel" back into Palestine. Any such hope rests upon the base belief that Palestinians are so utterly defeated emotionally, so utterly hopeless of ever restoring unified Palestine, that they will make genuine peace with Israel, even to the point of normalizing relations, trading with the enemy, and making Israel not just secure within its borders but actually prosperous thru trade and peaceful Arab labor working in Israeli industry. That could happen. Sure it could.
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But do Palestinians feel hopelessly defeated? Or do they see the "Population Time Bomb" as getting ready to explode and thereby destroy Israel once and for all?
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In contemplating whether the Palestinians are ready to accept utter defeat, the Jews should look to their own history. Did they feel utterly defeated after Nazism devastated their community? Or did they bounce back to create a powerful Jewish state? If a calamity worse than the Palestinians have suffered did not utterly dispirit the Jews, why would Jews think that Israel's current overlordship has utterly dispirited the Palestinians? More fundamentally, if the Jews did not give up on returning the land of David and Solomon to Jewish control after almost 2,000 years of exile, why would they believe the Palestinians would give up on recovering Palestine after only 57 years?
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Palestinians have no reason ever to accommodate Israel. Their population growth forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza, lest the number of Palestinians within Israel's asserted territory surpass the number of Jews. And the numbers keep shifting in the Palestinian direction, as immigration to Israel dries up and emigration from Israel increases.
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Moreover, U.S. attitudes toward the Middle East are changing. Many Americans now feel that the Middle East is none of our business, and going into Iraq was a big mistake that has only caused us and Iraqis grief. Once the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, it is not going to want to go back, not to restore lost Iraqi democracy, not for Israel, not for anything. "Let the bastards kill each other if they want. Just leave us out of it" is already the attitude of tens of millions. Once the U.S. pullback from Iraq is completed, that view will be the intractable majority view.
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Moreover, Palestinians must see that American attitudes toward Arabs are undergoing a shift as a consequence of hundreds of thousands of different Americans being rotated in and out of Iraq, a percentage of whom believe the rhetoric that we are there for the Arabs, not against them. This puts Arabs in good position to argue the injustice of what Zionism has done to them.
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They can now argue, persuasively, since most Americans are now willing to listen to the Arab side, that what happened to them is like a bunch of American Indians landing on the shores of the Hudson River and claiming the whole of the United States as Indian land, then, with the help of Communist China and other powerful foreign countries, slaughtering by the millions Americans who did not gladly give up their lands, language, and culture for Indian versions, forcing them into refugee camps in Canada, then bombing those refugee camps, all the while claiming the moral high ground because the Great Spirit gave them this land and European interlopers have no right to be here.
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It is also easy for Palestinians to argue that they have been punished for the crimes of the Germans, and that Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud was right when he told FDR (on board a U.S. warship on Valentine's Day 1945) that if there were to be any state for the Jews, it should be carved out of Germany, not Palestine. Had that been done, they can as well argue, the Jews would have had fertile land in the heart of the advanced West, where they had long been accepted and made a place for themselves. They would not have had to give up Yiddish and sever themselves from the long and brilliant literature of that ancestral language. They would not have disrupted the peace of the Middle East and produced a decades-long, and still ongoing, war of religion and tribalism. No attack upon the World Trade Center would have occurred. No war upon Iraq would have been launched. The hundreds of billions of dollars — some $400 billion so far, and counting — expended on two wars against Iraq and on propping up an uneconomical Jewish ministate in a hostile region could have been redirected to other, productive purposes, like funding universal healthcare in the United States. Etc.
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Americans have been unwilling to hear any of this, and powerful Zionist forces in media, education, and government have suppressed all talk of how much Zionism has cost us financially, militarily, and in death tolls at home (9/11) and abroad. But the longer the Iraq war goes on, the more American minds are opened to how crazy this entire Zionist experiment has been. And Palestinian observers of the American scene know that time is on their side.
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The only way there will — or should — ever be real peace is if (a) the Jews leave or (b) the Jews consent to disestablish Israel and join with their Moslem and Christian Arab neighbors in a single, united Palestine in which no one is special.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,105.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:08 PM