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Here's the scenario:
A well-armed western power, citing past and likely future attacks by far weaker but diabolically clever opponents, launches
a massive offensive within another sovereign nation for the stated purpose of rooting out these enemies. The western nation's
leaders, fiery with righteous rage and flush with their overwhelming military superiority, promise their citizens back home
a quick and inspiring victory in which awesome air power will crush the enemy and make cleanup on the ground easy. But things
prove far less easy than planned. Civilian deaths mount dramatically and erode what little international support existed for
the attack. The enemy proves to be elusive, organized and popular with the citizenry, who view the western attackers with
growing rage. The promised quick victory fails to materialize. Back at home, as the western nation's leaders offer excuses
and calls for perseverance, its citizens begin to get a sinking feeling about the bill of goods they have been sold.
Sound familiar? It should. I'm talking about Israel, and its present folly in Lebanon.
To be sure, the parallel to the Bush Iraq fiasco is far from exact. Israel's position as a state with hostile neighbors
differs greatly from that of the United States and its neocon-led wild goose chase in Iraq. Israel's issues of security are
several levels of magnitude higher than the Bush Administration's devious hyping of America's "War On Terror." The
Israelis understand that war is war, as opposed to the giddy political warmongering of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other
draft-evaders who now use the American military as their own private board game.
But the parallel that remains is damning enough: An armed-to-the-teeth state hyping its own vulnerability as rationale
for a brutal and bullying militarism that savages civilian populations and helps to assure a condition of perpetual war.
The similarities, in both attitude and approach, between the Bush and Sharon (now Olmert) regimes are both abhorrent and
self-defeating. Both have staked their political capital on a sort of defensiveness-on-steroids wherein wielding anything
short of absurdly disproportionate military advantage equals weakness. Both are milking blind patriotism in their constituencies
for everything it's worth. Both allow the real losses and suffering on their side -- including, in the case of Israel, the
Jews' historic displacement and the horrific cataclysm of the Holocaust and its aftermath -- to propel them into a frenzy
of perceived self-defense that rationalizes their own acts of massive atrocity and ignores their own position of vast military
superiority. And both will, ultimately, fail in a world in which sheer forceful dominance of other masses of human beings
can never permanently prevail.
It is high time that more of we progressives -- folks who call ourselves committed to principles rather than to governments
-- stood up in public and proclaimed the crucial distinction between Israel's current ruling regime on the one hand and the
actual long-term identity and interests of the nation of Israel on the other. The two are not the same, and lefties need to
take a chain saw to the tottering premise that condemnation of Israel's contemporary ruling regime equals anti-Semitism. If
I hear one more fervent defender of the Israeli occupation slandering Noam Chomsky or the late Edward Said as anti-Semitic
for objecting to Israeli expansionism and appropriation, I'm going to start handing out Joe McCarthy For President buttons.
This scarlet-lettering of honest and upright dissent, in an attempt to silence legitimate critics of Israel's recent behavior,
is a shameful perversion of the meaning of prejudice, and we on the left ought not put up with it. There is too large a political
opposition within the Israeli body politic, and there are too many Israeli citizens morally outraged by their government's
wholesale killing, abuse and displacement of Palestinian civilians (remember that Palestinian civilian casualties dwarf those
of Israelis) for we on the western side of the Atlantic to let ourselves be cowed into tolerant silence.
Every argument that I have yet heard in support of Israel's disproportionately ruthless and preemptive stance toward its
neighbors -- and I have heard several, some in heated conversations with well-informed friends and colleagues -- falls into
tatters when measured against basic standards of logic and decency.
The argument that Israel's very existence is threatened by its hostile neighbors, for instance, is a flat-out falsehood.
The fact that Hamas says it wants to see the end of Israel does not make this an even remotely feasible outcome. My cat wants
a footbridge from the living room window to the bird feeder, but he won't get it. In truth, no hostile power in the region,
not even Iran or Syria, has anywhere near the military or munitions might possessed by Israel, and none of the other players
has nuclear weapons. With Israel's buildup of its spectacular arsenal, and with the backing of the United States as added
insurance -- a strategic symbiosis that will not change anytime soon -- Israel is in danger of being eliminated by any of
its rivals in the same way that a Hummer is in danger of being totaled in a collision with a bicycle. To misuse "Never
Again" as a rationale for Palestinian bantustans and lopsided casualties is the worst, and most tragic, of historical
hypocrisies.
Moreover, the notion that Israel's survival depends on its having such exponential superiority over all other military
rivals -- an argument I often hear -- ignores the basic facts of nationhood. Arms alone will never suffice to maintain borders,
to weaken enemies, or to assure a country's future. At some point in a nation's life, if it is to survive, it learns -- as
do you and I in our everyday doings -- to sustain equilibrium through relationships of proximity. In the Middle East, some
of this regional equilibrium, no doubt, will emanate from the threatening barrels of strategically-aimed guns. But any assured
future for Israel will have to involve negotiations (instead of appropriations) regarding land, and agreements for workable
political and economic interchange that all of the affected states can live with. Israel's brute force advantage cannot alter
the fact that at least one, and perhaps more, of its neighbors will eventually develop nuclear weapons; it is as unstoppable
as the wind. If anything, Israel's stockpiling of armaments is an incentive for proliferation. An Israel that lives only by
the superiority of force is an Israel that will ultimately die by it.
And as for resolving the quarrels of ownership of the disputed territories -- who lived there first, who has put down
the deepest roots, who deserves compensation for what -- the Bush and Sharon doctrines offer exactly nothing. If there is
one truth that well-armed heads of state seem to perpetually forget through the ages, it is this: overwhelming military superiority
on the part of an invading or controlling power will never, ever, stamp out a grass-roots resistance whose members are willing
to die for goals they perceive as just. Call them what you like: terrorists, guerillas, militias. Crush them, and they will
reappear. You cannot wipe out such resistance movements solely with guns; it is imbalanced relations of power and land and
resources that create such movements, and only new and more balanced relations will cause them to disappear. Ask Winston Churchill
(if you can reach him) about India. Ask Robert McNamara about Vietnam. Ask the career military planners who, behind the scenes,
are now resisting the Bush Administration's push to invade Iran.
In practical and moral terms, the Bush/Sharon approach to international conflict is a disaster and a disgrace. Many of
us who genuinely wish for a secure Israel to take its place alongside a strong Palestinian state in a stable Middle East are,
and should be, frightened and revolted by what now passes for Israeli foreign policy. And we need to say so, loudly and insistently.
This isn't about the Israeli nation being bad. This is about a bad Israeli government. To condemn the Sharon-era Israeli regime
for its brutality and its hypocritical, self-justifying rationalizations for occupation is no more anti-Israeli than condemning
the Bush regime is anti-American.
For my money, the true patriots are those who try to stop their leaders from hurting their country.
So maybe we need to start asking the pro-Sharon folks why they hate Israel.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 7/30/06)
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