Israel's
Superiority Isn't Moral
By Jeff Berg
29 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
In
comments to James Laxer blog posting of July 27, 2006, ‘The Globe
& Mail is a Rag’ http://tinyurl.com/s47sa someone going by
the unlikely pseudonym of 'Lord Kitchener' wrote that ..."given
that one side is a democracy surrounded by enemies and the other is
a terrorist organization, I'd say the media (the Globe and Mail included)
have been REMARKABLY balanced." & “I'm becoming infuriated
at people who think that it's passing strange that anyone would suggest
that perhaps democratic Israel might be morally superior to the terrorist
group on their border that is bent on destroying them utterly and completely,
and feel that perhaps we're being too hard on Hezbollah."
The reason that I bring up
this utterly obscure commentary is that both of these statements are
very much in keeping with what the punditocracy in Canada tries very
hard to pass off as received opinion and the majority view. The following
analysis will attempt to show that the facts argue that these views
are neither balanced nor the majority view. And why instead these statements
and their like mark LK and the pundits who share his sensibility as
clearly as Stephen Harper’s, Canada’s Prime Minister, "measured
response" comment marked him.
The claim of Israel's moral
superiority to her neighbours is as common as America’s claim
to being freedom’s global champion and bears about as much relation
to the "facts on the ground". (see Thomas Carothers on America’s
‘democracy enhancement projects’.) That LK views this superiority
as incontestable fact goes a long way to explaining why he finds the
Globe & Mail balanced. The irony for those of us who are actually
interested in a non-partisan analysis of the Middle East that includes
the historical context and Israel’s difficult position there is
of course that it is the very reasons that damn Israel morally that
are the principal reasons for so many conflicts in the region. today
and why she feels herself perpetually embattled.
Simply put Israel is an occupying
force and until it ceases to be an occupying force it has no superior
moral standing no matter how superior to its neighbours she may be in
certain social justice areas. It is also not immaterial to note that
over the last three decades Israel has militarized its economy to such
an extent that she now qualifies in a very real sense as a modern day
Sparta. During that time she has made a litany of very profound right
turns and pro-corporate militarism and business decisions that have
seriously eroded social justice within the country. The Israel of today
bares less than a passing resemblance to the nation state that she was
in the first three decades of her existence.
And as to balance on this
issue it surely cannot be immaterial to anyone with an understanding
of the history of the region that it was Israel that invaded Lebanon
in 1982 and occupied it for 18 years not vice versa. Imagine if you
can that the Americans had invaded Ontario because, oh I don’t
know there was an Al Qaeda cell here that was responsible for 9/11 and
was planning other attacks, and the American response was to smash Toronto,
Pearson airport, our major highways, bridges, power station, fuel depots,
and then occupy Southern Ontario for 18 years in order to create a “buffer
for the purpose of defense”. Add to this that this military smashing
of precious infrastructure was difficult for us to replace because well
with the war and all we just didn’t seem to get as much tourism
as we used to for one thing. And for another a whole lot of international
capital that we used to be able to access no longer seems to find us
such a safe haven for investment anymore. And then of course we would
have to cope with the fact that a whole lot of our best and brightest
and richest would decide that discretion is in fact the better part
of valour and that “Vancouver isn’t really as rainy as they
say it is you know.” And finally to make the analogy complete
add to this that the U.S. was occupying the land of our brother’s
in Quebec. She had sent her tanks in with Trudeau’s during the
FLQ crisis in order to help us “restore stability” and to
guarantee U.S. security and they had not only never left but had instead
installed hundred’s of thousands of settlers on much of the best
land available.
How would our citizenry react?
Would perhaps some of us become radicalized to the point of committing
irrational and likely, given the balance of forces, counterproductive
acts? Would the grinding poverty that resulted from the massive destabilization
of our society and economy not create a substantial minority of young
and radicalized martial men? And what if you add to this equation that
the Americans had also decided to take control of the vast majority
of our water resources because well they very much needed them and this
did irreparable harm to our economic fortunes and our ecosphere.
“Prior to the Six Day
War, Israeli land encompassed only three percent of the Jordan River
Basin, though in 1964, the enterprising state had already constructed
an elaborate conveyance network of canals, pumping stations, reservoirs
and pipelines, integrating them into a national water system which diverted
75 percent of the Jordan's flow for Israel's use. After the 1967 War,
Israel claimed full control of the Jordan's headwaters. While Israel
shares some of the flow with Jordan and Syria, the Palestinians are
forbidden any water from the river, forcing them to rely on groundwater
pumped from aquifers and springs or delivered, often sporadically, by
truck.”-Richard Harth ‘Squeezing the last drops from Palestine’
How do you think our young
males would react to our much reduced circumstance? How would the thinking
be changed within our military? How would it change our political culture
and the kind of people that could get elected? How would it tilt the
platforms of every party including the NDP? (the Green’s would
disappear overnight. Long term rationalism being the very first casualty
of every war even ahead of truth.)
Is this difficult to see?
Is it unbalanced to bring up that Lebanon has absolutely no, that is
right none, zero, nada, zilch, possibility of being an existential threat
to Israel but that the reverse is very much not true. A fact that is
very precisely being borne out by the difference in damage being sustained
by the two countries in the current conflict, just as it was in the
last. I must say that I am also very much less sanguine than Mr. Laxer
about Israel’s incapacity for eradicating Palestine. From what
I can tell, in terms of viability at least, this has already been accomplished
and there is now a strong probability that Palestinian society will
never recover from the devastation that has been wreaked upon them by
Israel’s occupation. What this will ultimately mean politically
speaking twenty years down the line much less a hundred is unknowable.
What is knowable is that for the children of Palestine, and now quite
likely the children born to southern Lebanon, like the children of Iraq
and Nicaragua, irreparable neurological damage for a great many is guaranteed.
Israel has spent countless
billions of dollars to create a military superpower so vastly superior
to her neighbours that no politician of any stripe in the region has
even the slightest glimmer of a hope of support by his ruling elites
if he does not campaign on the basis of doing something about this tremendously
destabilizing imbalance. Israel’s leaders and apologists constantly
bray about the existential threats that surround her but it was Iran
not Israel that had her burgeoning secular and economic nationalism
movement ground into dust under the jackboot heel of a military kleptocracy.
This brought to her and her people “thanks” to Kermit Roosevelt’s
CIA/MI5 engineering of the installation of the military thug that was
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his terror police the SAVAK.
The ensuing 26 years of relentless
repression, cruelty and inequality leading directly, just as it would
here, to a radicalization of the youth of the country who as a result
of the being blocked from every other avenue towards social justice
took to religious zealotry as a way to galvanize opposition to the vicious
injustices being perpetrated daily.. (It’s much easier to get
people to throw away their lives if you first convince them A) there
is a next one and B) throwing this one which is pretty lousy anyway
will lead the next one to being vastly superior.) It is hard to say
what form our youth’s rebellion would take here. Sufficed to say
it wouldn’t likely end at leafleting. It also not inconsequential
when talking about Iran and her ‘paranoia’ that it was she
and not Israel that saw herself under attack for eight years by one
of her neighbours the result being the suffering of massive casualties:
the Iraq-Iran war cost over 1 million lives. Would we as a people have
forgotten that the rest of the world not only failed to end this war
of aggression but condoned and was complicit in the murder and destruction
of the things that make life worth living? (damage estimated at $1.19
trillion) Would we have forgotten that many of them supplied arms to
both sides so as to augment both profit and mayhem? Would we have forgotten
that this was a war encouraged by America’s leadership because
we had finally overthrown the dictator that she had imposed on us? Are
we to be so ahistorical that we discount “the longest conventional
war of the 20th Century” from our understanding of this region
and its people? This war after all ended less than twenty years ago.
Few among those that are alive in Iran today would not have the memory
or association of a lost a blood relation or friend.
Israel is the state that
brought nuclear proliferation to the region and possesses somewhere
on the order of 200 nuclear warheads mounted on missiles with a range
sufficient to taking out any of the capitals of any of her neighbours.
How can anyone, even those with only the tiniest tincture of balance
on this issue, not see that this bit of martial planning on the part
of the Israeli state guarantees that their will in perpetuity be at
the very least cliques within the military of all of her neighbours
who will do anything they possibly can to “balance” this
equation. One second’s worth of thought about what Israel would
do if the position was reversed is enough to confirm this obvious verity.
And again balance demands
that one take note that there is one fact that has pierced straight
to the heart of the region through the fog of this U.S. and now Israeli
war. There is one thing and one thing only that can guarantee that the
U.S. Marines or the IDF and the Coalition Provisional Whatever will
not be setting up shop in your main palace: Nuclear Weaponry. If the
invasion of Iraq was not enough to get this message across I am sure
all concerned found it highly instructive how Pakistan has been treated
even after it was found that the father of her nuclear arms industry
has been spreading the technology for same into highly dubious hands.
Not exactly the object lesson that Wolfowitz and Perle claimed would
be raised along with a statue of GWB in the public square of Baghdad.(Perle
said he “would not be surprised” if there a GWB statue raised
within a year of ‘liberation’.)
Quite frankly there is very
little high ground left morally speaking when it comes to the problems
of the Middle East and the endless rounds of violence and repression
that seem to be the tragic daily staple for its people. What is left
if just barely is international law. And while America is able to shield
Israel and herself from Security Council resolution after Security Council
resolution, and both America and Israel routinely ignore both the Security
Council and the International Court of Justice with seeming impunity,
the facts and international judgement remain.
It is Israel and America
that are the occupiers not Lebanon, not Syria, not Iran. It is Israel
and America that are by far leading the arms race in the region and
in the world and the only ones that present an existential threat to
the countries of the region. It is Israel and America that are the ones
that are using military might to gain access to extremely valuable resources
and classifying the theft as “national interest”. It is
Israel and America that are the rogue states in terms of international
law and in terms of international opinion.
It is truly said that today
there are only two superpowers in the world the U.S. and public opinion.
And until Israel and America cease their occupations and rejoin the
international community, until they decide to side with the angel’s
wing instead of the Pentagon’s wings, both America and Israel
no more have a right to claim moral superiority over Hamas or Hizbollah
than the British had a right to consider themselves morally superior
to Michael Collins and the Sinn Fein or George Washington and the Continentalist
Army.