Wednesday, April 10, 2019

But That's Not How It Turned Out, We Can Stop Pretending

There is no reason to lie about it,  Israel has chosen an apartheid government that will steal the occupied territories in an Israeli Lebensraum program and become that kind of racist, fascist state, a potential that a number of Jewish intellectuals warned against in 1948 as Israel had just formed.  Their fears are fulfilled in the election, that was the case even if the overtly fascist Netanyahu didn't win, his main opposition, the Blue and White party had a platform not much different from the fascists'.  If those small differences were enough would seem to be a moot point.

Reading about the results of this election, I thought about a piece I wrote almost thirteen years ago during one of the many brutal military campaigns that Israel was conducting with the support of the Bush II regime, especially this section:

Today the United States has no credibility as an honest broker in the Middle East. Some past presidents had more. After Iraq and now the Bush regime’s role this past month in Lebanon it has none. It has none because it clearly and solidly has favored one side, Israel and the Bush regime appears increasingly likely to have done so for ends not necessarily in Israel’s interest. There is little rational reason for Israelis or Arabs to trust Bush.


I am beyond caring if there was a reason for supporting one side or the other in any particular action in the past. If someone can tell us a way to go back and change what happened in the past it might be worth thinking about, but there isn’t one. Bringing it up is a stalling tactic, a way for cheap politicians and others to curry favor by appealing to grievances and the desire for revenge. It’s the present we can deal with and the invasion of Lebanon was dumb assed and I believe, as one of my regular readers put it so well, the Olmert government didn’t have a clue it was going to go like this. The facts now are what will have to be dealt with, not what was believed a month ago.


As we began, no one side is going to disappear but many individual people are being killed as you read this. My entire interest in this is to have as many Israelis, Palestinians, and others in the area, live to be old and to die in bed of natural causes surrounded by their intact families and their friends. It is in that spirit that I am going to say the unspeakable and voice some, though far from all, of my deepest fears.


As the generation of the Second World War and it’s children pass on there is a strong danger that the Holocaust will fade from consciousness and it’s lessons will fade from peoples’ thoughts. Huge numbers of dead when viewed in the inverted telescope of history look smaller than they were close up. Our claim on the attention of the future will compete with the entire past and will be, I’m afraid, far less compelling than their present. We will not be there to press the case. The best we can do is leave a written record of what we have known. We can’t guarantee that the future won’t repeat the evils of the past.


As time goes on, as more recent piles of bodies and other horrors block them from view, even the Holocaust will fade in its meaning to those who are not part of the groups that were murdered. The relatively forgotten Armenian genocide is one example of this and the mass graves of those murdered in Central America by terrorists funded by the Reagan administration are entirely faded from the collective, active memory of the United States. The innocent Druz, slaughtered by the USS. New Jersey in retaliation for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon never got into Americans minds having been effectively blocked out. Even where distance is not a factor, the memory of the thousands lynched here, in the United States itself, is always in danger of slipping from the attention of white people.


I am posting a anxious warning based on what I am hearing. Israelis should dump the neo-cons who are bringing them to disaster. Those idiots, from their comfortable perches in the American establishment are going to get a lot more Israelis and others killed. Let’s face another reality, a lot of them, Gentiles and Jews alike, are pretty unsavory characters who market themselves as “supporters of Israel”. Some seem to have made a very nice living for themselves based on this. Would peace be as profitable for them?


Their alliance with fundamentalist “christians” should be all the evidence you need of their stupidity if not duplicity. End timers have only two uses for Jews, especially Israelis. Jews are either to be converted to “christianity”, perhaps by force eventually, or they are extras waiting to die in their pre-enactment battle fantasies based on the Book of Revelations. As the events around Lebanon this month show, the fundamentalist ghouls can hardly wait for the real slaughter to begin. Their script calls for Israelis to die in the millions.


Failing the fundamentalists’ favorite wish, Americans of future times will grow weary of supporting Israel if it is engaged in endless wars, endless conflicts and, especially, if idiocy on the level of this war in Lebanon continues. A constantly attacked Israel will become increasingly militarized and isolated and paranoid. With that will come the destruction of democracy. A nationalistic, perhaps theocratic and despotic Israel is certainly nothing that the vast, vast majority of Israelis or Americans want to see. If someone can convince me that isn’t where it is headed I’d really really like to believe otherwise.


I would say almost all of those things today, I believed that a majority of Israelis then didn't want to see what has undeniably developed, headed into my worst fears.   Also, under Trump, with his idiot and corrupt son-in-law officially in charge of a campaign of theft and grift they slapped the label "Middle-East-Peace" onto , the United States has absolutely no credibility, even less than the Bush II regime had.  Palestinians have absolutely no reason to believe the Israeli government and a majority of its population support apartheid and occupation.   I read somewhere that only 18 seats were won by those who favor a two-state solution in yesterday's election.  No one has any reason to pretend Israel is anything like what it claims to be anymore than they had a reason to believe the United States was an egalitarian democracy before 1965 or after the Supreme Court destroyed that brief interval of at least legal equality.

The Middle East, Israel, Palestine, etc. are headed for disaster, soon.  Israel will, I predict, soon give up any pretense of being a liberal democracy, the kind of thing that it was sold for all of my youth in the PR campaign as voiced in the sweetly reasoning, accented words of Abba Eban.  I don't know, maybe Eban really believed in what he was saying,  I always thought he did.  I know lots of people in the United States and elsewhere wanted to believe it.  I certainly wanted to believe it, you can still hear echos of that fervent hope in what I wrote thirteen years ago.  But it isn't how things turned out, is it.  It's what the group of Jewish intellectuals who warned about the previous generation of Israeli fascists, it's what they feared that has come true.

The United States should not support any apartheid, fascist country.  Though, under its renewed and developing apartheid fascism, it will.  Lots of people will die.

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