Monday, November 19, 2012

Making the Middle East Safe for Israel

It’s disheartening to watch/hear the cream of American political commentators defending Israel’s nth insult to international law and decency.

What can be behind the seeming suicidal behavior of a small country that is surrounded by more or less hostile neighbors?  (A country as big and powerful as Russia fears encirclement, as its opposition to the European defense shield shows.)  Is Israel living a self-fulfilling prophecy (the world hates us, we must defend ourselves, and the best defense, as our tragic history has shown, is offense)?

Or could there be a grand capitalist plan behind all this?  Get rid of pesky left-wing governments in the Middle East in order to grab the oil, taming the peoples’ desire for equity so that Israel can continue to flourish?

Here is a statement by Noam Chomsky that reached me from my Italian publisher (sic):

The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace.

The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically-cleanse Palestinians.

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army… and calls it a war. It is not a war, it is murder.

When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying someone else's land. 

 

 

9 comments:

  1. What would Chomsky do to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel, to civilian areas with homes, schools, kindergartens but no military? Would he ask them please to stop? That worked well for the european jews before they went to the ovens, didn't it? Even self hating jews. When you have idealogues who want to conquer the state of Israel and kill all the jews, how do you change their minds. They put their sophistocated long range missles in between their homes and schools to protect them from soft hearted israelis. And if civilians die as a result, well that makes great propaganda, great recruiting slogans for arab youth who are kept impoverished to swell their desparate ranks.

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  2. There certainly are two ways of looking at things. How did the Irgun do it?

    You seem to be imagining aa sitution of two sovereign entities. That is not the case.

    Israel doesn't have to ask Hamas to stop. They just have to realize the Palestinians are people,too, and stop
    trying to take over the whole of Palestine by hook or by crook.

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  3. Mr. Brooks, if you want to bring the WWII analogy: Gaza is the Warsaw ghetto now. Should Palestinians ask Israel to please stop?

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  4. Oh, if only the ghetto fighters had had the thousands of rockets and support of Iran, the warsaw uprising might have turned out differently. No, hamas is not the victim and Israel the Nazi. Non militant Gazans are caught between the survivors of WWII and those who want to finish Hitler's plan.

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  5. To me this looks more like 'the whole world is wrong and I am right'.

    To support Israel's actions you would also have to support their building of homes for Israelis on
    occupied land and the other actions taken to not make peace.

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  6. Your "whole world" once stood by while your relatives and mine were worked and starved to death and put into the ovens. And no, the world does not agree with daily rocket fire into wholly civilian areas. Civilized people also don't agree with building munitions for another try at eradicating a people (us) and placing their children at risk to deter us from stopping them.
    The settlements were mostly built on hilltops unsuitable for farming or grazing, traditionally held by the British and before them the Turkish governments. Just because the settlers were not muslems shouldn't disqualify them anymore than European Americans were from settling "Indian Lands" here.

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  7. Howard,
    I can hardly believe you're saying this. What difference does it make what the land is good for?

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  8. "It is not a war, it is murder." Thank you for quoting Noam Chomsky who is really telling it like it is.

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  9. Thank you Adelena, how did you happen to get to my website?

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