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Israel’s recent military assault on the Gaza Strip of occupied Palestine intensifies questions of U.S. complicity in the conflict. While the bombs were falling, congressional Republicans demanded that President Biden “strongly condemn Hamas” for firing missiles at Israel. Conservative Democrats demanded that Biden become more “engaged” in the drama. So-called progressive Democrats voiced a desire to place limits on military aid to Israel. On both sides of the political aisle, demands grew for the United States to become more involved in the crises.
Representatives of both parties were mistaken. The U.S. was firmly engaged in the conflict on the side of Israel. President Biden allowed the brutal assault to continue for 11 days by repeatedly intoning that “Israel is allowed to defend itself.” Essentially, Biden gave Netanyahu a green light to destroy Hamas, condemning himself as an accessory to mass murder. The extended bombing campaign gave Israel an opportunity to pulverize the Gaza Strip slaughtering mostly civilians in a gruesome display of state sponsored terrorism. In the end, Israel’s pathological prime minister failed to degrade the fighting capability of Hamas.
Throughout the conflict, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asked both sides to show “restraint,” as if this was a symmetrical war between countries rather than the 4th most powerful military force in the world bombing a besieged ghetto. Blinken also called for a two-state solution oblivious to the fact that there are now 622,670 Jewish settlers living in permanent settlements in the West Bank. Proposals for a two-state solution are a fiction used to posture for a non-existent peace process that allows Zionist colonization to proceed unimpeded.
On the diplomatic front, U.S. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield blocked UN Security Council resolutions that called for a cease fire and condemned Israel’s military response to the crisis after having delayed a meeting of the Council. A spokeswoman for the Chinese government eviscerated the double standard whereby the U.S. routinely condemns China for treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority while allowing Israel to massacre Muslims in Palestine.
The United States sent an envoy to the region to try to “de-escalate” tensions, to no purposeful avail. Secretary of State Blinken eventually visited Israel in late May. All the typical platitudes about Israel’s right to self-defense and the need for a two-state solution were repeated.
The U.S. offered “aid” to Gaza simultaneously offering to replenish Israel’s weapons and its “Iron Dome” defense batteries. The U.S. has approved $735 million in military aid as part of a yearly $3.8 billion gift to Israel that finances purchases of the F-16 and F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. The advanced fighter aircraft are produced by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Secretary Blinken offered $360 million to rebuild Gaza, but stipulated the money must not help Hamas whose leaders rejected the help. The aid will be funneled to the Palestinian authority in the West Bank to further divide the Palestinian resistance. The U.S. will also coordinate international assistance to Gaza.
There was no condemnation from the Biden administration of the genocidal assault on Gaza or the vigilante violence that took place against Palestinians living in Israeli cities.
Not a word was uttered to denounce the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem or repeated attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Biden claimed he talked to leaders of “both sides” during the conflict, speaking periodically with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas does not represent the Palestinian side in the struggle for self-determination, armed or political. Hamas does. But the U.S. will not talk with “terrorist organizations,” only “terrorist states,” such as Israel and its homicidal prime minister. President Abbas has not stood for elections in 16 years. There have been no Palestinian elections since January 2005 when Abbas was elected to a four-year term as president. He is a puppet of Israel and the United States. The Palestinian people have contempt for the PA government he leads prompting the autocrat to cancel elections scheduled for May and July.
During Blinken’s trip to Israel, he refused to meet with representatives of Hamas. This strategy mirrored U.S. policy in Vietnam, where the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations supported the puppet government in Saigon, refusing to speak with the Hanoi leadership of Ho Chi Minh until Johnson finally agreed to do so in 1968. Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 after leading the national liberation struggle against the French and Americans for 25 years. The Nixon regime was eventually compelled to negotiate with representatives of North Vietnam when it became clear the U.S. could not win the war.
Biden and Blinken could have communicated with leaders of Hamas at the inception of the crisis to bring about an immediate cease fire. The U. S. could have stopped the bombing of Gaza in one second despite Netanyahu’s intransigence by threatening to cut off aid and support U.N. Security Council resolutions condemnatory of Israel. There was precedent.
In 1956, an angry President Eisenhower ordered France, Britain and Israel to cease their attack on Egypt and withdraw their forces from the Sinai desert and Suez Canal. When Israel hesitated, he supported a U.N. General Assembly resolution that deplored Israeli occupation of the Sinai, went on national television to bring his case to the American people and privately threatened Prime Minister David Ben Gurion with sanctions that would have ended all public and private aid to the fledgling state. Israel promptly withdrew.
Biden is no Eisenhower. He fully supports Israel’s reign of terror, rendering persistent claims of U.S. advocacy for human rights a fraud. The U.S. endorses genocide in Gaza. Why?
U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East are tied to Israel. A symbiotic relationship exists between imperialism and Zionism. The interests of the U.S. have merged with the interests of Israel.
A key debate in foreign policy circles is whether Israel functions as a strategic asset or liability of the United States.
With the existence of the Soviet Union in a bipolar world, the U.S. relied on Israel as an attack dog in the Middle East principally aiding its efforts to fight Arab nationalism and counter Soviet influence in the region. In other parts of the world, Israel stood alone with the U.S. to support apartheid South Africa. Israel also provided weapons to right-wing dictatorships supported by the U.S. in Africa and Latin America.
Since the dissolution of the USSR, Israel has become a strategic liability of the U. S. generating fanatical hatred of America throughout the Arab and Muslim world for prosecuting a destructive “war on terrorism” whose architects were neoconservatives closely associated with the right-wing Likud party in Israel.
The neoconservatives advance policies that facilitate U.S. global domination while labeling enemies of Israel as foes of America in a ‘war of terror’ that serves as pretext for interventionism. By rationalizing aggressive designs of U.S. imperialism, the neoconservatives wish to use U.S. power to dominate the Middle East on behalf of Israel.
The evolution of the neoconservative movement that began in the Republican Party during the presidencies of Bush Senior and Bush Junior, has morphed into the Democrat party under Obama and Biden.
Neoconservatives now dominate the foreign policy establishment so thoroughly, that any aversion to U.S. hegemony is considered treason. Critics of the U.S. relationship with Russia or Syria are quickly targeted as apologists for Putin and Assad, respectively. Pragmatic alternatives to the exercise of assertive power are nonexistent in official circles. The Wolfowitz Doctrine failed to prevent the emergence of competitors to U.S. power, but animates the New Cold war against Russia, the Pivot to Asia, sequential wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and coups in Honduras and Ukraine.
The ascendancy of neoconservative political ideology that equates the interests of imperialism with those of Zionism in the corridors of power and prominence of an Israel Lobby that advances this perspective, explains America’s unconditional support for Israel despite the liabilities.
The Zionist power structure comprising the Israel Lobby led by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CoP) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI); pro-Israel think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Center for Security Policy (CSP), Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and the Saban Center at Brookings (SCB); political donors; supporters in government, media and myriad national organizations work tirelessly to equate U.S. interests with the interests of Israel. The power configuration also labels any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.
The Lobby can be defied on a particular issue such as Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran that was vehemently opposed by the organized Zionist movement in the U.S. and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu. But it cannot be defied on essential policies involving U.S. financial, military, diplomatic and political support for Israel. Obama, despite his intense dislike of Netanyahu, gave Israel $38 Billion to be distributed over a ten-year period.
Trump was fanatically pro-Israel in part because of his friendship with Netanyahu, business connections with the Kushner family in the real estate industry and massive campaign contributions by the late ultra-Zionist casino magnet Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and other pro-Zionist Republican mega-donors.
Trump named his personal bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel and appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner as point-man in the Middle East. Both Friedman and Kushner are donors to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Friedman also gave money to the Jerusalem Reclamation Project that buys property for Jews in Muslim East Jerusalem to Judaize the city. Kushner’s father is a lifelong friend of Netanyahu.
Trump’s rabidly pro-Israel agenda resulted in the U.S. embassy being moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, official recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” that failed to resolve conflict with Palestinians and the Abraham Accords of 2020 that normalized relations between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Taken together, the Deal of the Century and Abraham Accords intended to subjugate the Palestinian struggle and eliminate isolation of Israel in the Muslim world.
Resistance continues with Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The strategic goal of the U.S. and Israel is to smash the “Arc of Resistance.” Obama launched a dirty war in Syria to topple the Assad government and break a link in the chain connecting Iran with Hezbollah and Hamas. The U.S. supported Islamic jihadists, including ISIS fighters, in the covert war. Trump tore up the nuclear agreement with Iran and imposed killer sanctions on the country, cheered on by U.S. media propagandists.
Biden, a consummate supporter of Israel, supports the hostile agenda.
Passage of the Jewish Nation-State Law in 2018 codified apartheid in Israel. In June 2021, Benjamin Netanyahu was forced out and Naftali Bennett, a right-wing ultra-nationalist more hawkish than his predecessor, was moved in as prime minister. Bennet is doctrinaire. No Palestinian statehood, no two-state solution, no removal of settlements, no ending the occupation, no right of return, no peace. For Bennet, Israel is a Jewish state not a state for all its citizens.
By providing unconditional support for racists in Israel, the U.S. openly promotes apartheid, nurtures barbarism and condones savagery. The U.S. is fully complicit in the crimes of the settler state. As Israel continues to consolidate what B’Tselem describes as a regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, an irresistible force continues to meet an immovable object. Israel cannot expel seven million Arabs living among seven million Jews in historic Palestine. Torture, abuse, oppress and kill, yes. Eliminate or exterminate, no.
The Zionist war on the Palestinian people is relentless. Zionist demands for a supremacist Jewish state and Palestinian demands for self-determination are irreconcilable. Occupied Palestine is the epicenter of resistance to settler colonization and the struggle in Jerusalem is its core. By fighting a ‘war of terror’ against the resistance, the U.S. and Israel have unleashed a torrent of anger, hatred and violence that breeds a whirlwind of incessant and ever worsening strife.
When rationalizing Israel’s “right to defend itself” from Hamas rockets, the racketeer and war criminal Hillary Clinton recently claimed the U.S. shares similar values with Israel. It does. It shares the values of a racist colonial settler state, not the values of democracy hypocrites like Clinton and the murderous Netanyahu pretend to extol.
Ending U.S. criminality in Occupied Palestine means ending the American empire. As long as the empire persists, it will support the apartheid state. Liberation in Jerusalem begins with liberation in Washington.
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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com
Featured image: The Israeli and American flags displayed on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem (Photo: Yonatan Sindel)
